Harry Harrison: The Technicolor Time Machine

“Yes. I see nothing to get disturbed about.”

“You don’t. If that is the way it is going to happen, then no one ever drew this diagram. It just travels around in this wallet and I hand it to myself. Explain that one,” he added triumphantly.

“There is no need to, it explains itself. The piece of paper consists of a self-sufficient loop in time. No one ever drew it. It exists because it is, which is adequate explanation. If you wish to understand it I will give you an example. You know that all pieces of paper have two sides—but if you give one end of a strip of paper a 180-degree twist, then join the ends together, the paper becomes a Mobius strip that has only one side. It exists. Saying it doesn’t cannot alter the fact. The same thing is true of your diagram, it exists.”

“But—where did it come from?”

“If you must have a source, you may say that it came from the same place that the missing side of the Mobius strip has gone to.”

Barney’s thoughts tied themselves into a tight knot and the ends flapped loosely. He stared at the diagram until his eyes hurt. Someone had to have drawn it. And every piece of paper had to have two sides… With slightly palsied fingers he put the diagram into his wallet, slid the wallet into his pocket and hoped that he would be able to’ forget about it.

“Ready for the time jump whenever you give the word,” Dallas said.

“What time jump?” Barney asked, blinking at the stunt man, who was standing before him.

“The jump to next spring, 1006, that we were talking about half an hour ago. The food has been turned over to Ottar, and the company is all loaded up and ready to go when you say the word.” He pointed to the waiting rows of trucks and trailers.

“To next spring, yes, you’re right. Do you know what a paradox is, Dallas?”

“The Spanish barber who shaves every guy in town who doesn’t shave himself—so who shaves the barber?”

“That’s the idea—only worse.” Then Barney suddenly remembered the bandaged hand and he held up his right hand and examined it carefully on both sides. “What happened to my hand?”

“It looks great to me,” Dallas said. “You want a drink?”

“It wouldn’t help. I just met myself with a bloody, bandaged hand and I wouldn’t even tell myself how it happened or how bad it was. Do you realize what that means?”

“Yeah, You need maybe two drinks.”

“No matter what you and your Iron Age buddies think, alcohol is not the answer to all problems. It means that I am something unique in the universe. I am a sadomasochist. Everyone else, poor slobs, is limited to being masochistic to themselves or sadistic to others. But I can get a masochistic kick by being sadistic to myself. No other neurotic can make this statement.” He shivered. “I think I can use that drink.”

“I got it right here.”

The drink turned out to be a bargain brand of cheap rye that tasted like formic acid, and it etched such a burning track down Barney’s throat that it did take his mind oft the paradoxes of time and his own sado-compensatory inclinations. “Go take a look, will you Dallas?” he said. “Jump forward to March and find out if any Indians have been sighted yet. If Ottar says no, keep moving forward, a week at a time, until they have been seen, then report back.”

Barney stood clear while the time platform flickered and settled down a few feet from its original position. Dallas climbed down from it and walked over, rasping his palm across his black growth of beard.

“The Prof figures we were away about ten hours in all,” Dallas said. “That will be overtime after eight—”

“Save it! What did you find out?”

“They got a wall put up, all logs like one of those forts in an Indian movie. Everything’s quiet in the beginning of March, but on the last stop, the twenty-first, they spotted a couple of those skin boats.”

“Good enough. Let’s move. Tell the Prof to start shuttling the whole company through to the twenty-second. Is everything and everybody here?”

“Betty checked the invoices and she says okay to that part. Me and Tex called the roll and everyone’s present and accounted for and in the trailers, except for the drivers that is.”

“How’s the March weather?”

“Sunny, but still with a nip in the air.”

“Pass the word about that, to dress up warmly. I don’t want the whole company down with colds.”

Barney walked back to his trailer and found his overcoat and gloves. By the time he returned to the head of the convoy the shuttle was in operation. He rode through into the spring of the year 1006, and a good northern spring it was, too. Watery sunshine did not do much to take the chill out of the air, and there was snow in the hollows and against the north side of the log palisade in the valley below. It did look like a Western fort. Barney signaled to the driver of the pickup that had just arrived on the time platform.

“Take me down there, will you?” he said.

“Next stop Fort Apache,” the driver told him.

Some of the northmen were beginning to straggle up the hill toward the arriving movie company, and the pickup drove past them and pulled up before a narrow opening where a loose log had been pulled aside to make an entrance into the stockade. Ottar was squeezing out through it when they arrived.

“We’re going to have to cut a gate here,” Barney told him. “A big double gate with a sliding bar inside to lock it.”

“No good, too big, too easy to break through. This is the way to do it.”

“You haven’t been going to the right films…”

Barney’s voice ran down into silence as Slithey squeezed through the opening behind Ottar. She was wearing a none too clean dress with a caribou-skin robe pinned over her shoulders. She didn’t have on any makeup and she was carrying a baby on her hip.

“What are you doing here?” he asked querulously, feeling very put upon, that he had had more than enough shocks for one day.

“I been here awhile,” she said, and put her finger into the baby’s mouth and he sucked on it loudly.

“Look, we just came, what’s with the kid?”

“It’s funny, really,” she said, and giggled to prove it. “After we were ready to go last summer, it was so long waiting in the trailer that I went out for a walk, fresh air, you know.”

“I don’t know, and I have a feeling I don’t want to. Are you telling me that you spent the whole time here instead of making the jump with the rest of us?”

“That’s just what happened, I was so surprised. I went for this walk and I met Ottar, and one thing led to another, you know…”

“This time I do know.”

“And before I realized it everyone was gone. I was frightened, I tell you. I must have cried for weeks and weeks, and going accidental like that I didn’t take my pills with me.”

“That’s yours then?” Barney said, poindng.

“Yes, isn’t he sweet? We don’t even have a name for him yet, but I call him Snorey, just like the dwarf in Snow White, because when he’s asleep he snores all the time.”

“There was no dwarf named Snorey,” Barney said, and thought fast. “Look, Slithey, we can’t go back and undo this now, not with the baby and everything, and it was your fault you left the trailer.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming anyone,” she said. “Once I got used to it it wasn’t so bad, and Ottar kept telling me you would be here in the spring, and he was right. Only thing, I could use a real square meal, the way these people eat, gosh! I think I spent most of the winter on nothing but Whiskey and Wheaties.”

“We’ll have a big party tonight, for you and Ottar—and the baby. Steak and wine, the works.”