Bob Shaw - Who Goes Here?

“Beats me,” Norman said in a distant voice. “They just seemed to know I’d done something bad—personally I think they can read minds. It was the weirdest thing ever, because it was dark when I first ran into them, and they just seemed to look right inside me with those awful eyes they’ve got.”

“You say this happened in ‘83?” Peace frowned as he did some mental juggling with dates.

“But this is 2386—you don’t look like you’ve been on the run for three years.”

“I haven’t.” Norman gave Peace an enigmatic smile. “But the explanation is so fantastic you’ll never believe it.”

“I will. I’ll believe anything! Tell it to me, Norman.”

“Well, I’d stayed in my room all day—because usually I only went out at night—and I’d developed quite an appetite, so I decided to have a real blow-out at a sort of restaurant-cum-nightclub called the Blue Toad. It’s very expensive, but the food is quite good. Except for the seafood, that is. You’ll probably never be there, but if you are, don’t order the lobster.”

“I won’t,” Peace assured him. “Was this the night you saw the Oscars?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Norman reproved. “I paid for my meal, was given a nasty little souvenir, came out of the restaurant, and as I’d been cooped up in my room all day I decided not to go straight back to it. There was a movie house nearby—one of those multiple projection places—so I went to see what was showing. I had a look at the posters outside, but lost interest when I saw the sort of programme it was. Blatant pornography! Women in the nude!

“Naturally I didn’t want to see anything like that, and was just about to go somewhere else when—you’ll hardly believe this—a boy of about ten approached me and offered me money if I would take him inside and swap strobe-glasses with him. You know, let him see the so-called adult movies.”

“What did you do?” Peace said apprehensively, recalling earlier qualms about his sexual preferences.

“What do you think? I grabbed the brat by the ear and told him I was taking him straight home to his parents.”

“Good for you!” Peace felt a load lift from his mind. “You did the right thing.”

“That’s what I thought, but the evil little swine kicked up a fuss.” A shocked expression appeared on Norman’s face as he thought about the incident. “Would you believe that he told people I’d made certain suggestions to him?”

“My God!”

“It’s quite true. He knew exactly what to say— probably makes a habit of hanging around there. Then some manageress woman came out and started shouting at me and blew a whistle.

I tell you, it was a ghastly experience. Under the circumstances, being a wanted man and so forth, I decided to get out of there in a hurry, so I made a run for it—and that’s when the damned Oscars showed up. I don’t know how they managed to appear on the scene so quickly, but two of them made a grab for me, and I only escaped by running up an alley.”

Tingling waves were sweeping over Peace’s brain. “How did you get away from them?”

“This is the really fantastic bit. I thought I could move pretty fast, but the Oscars would have run me into the ground in no time. They’d have caught me if I hadn’t noticed a door leading into an old factory building. I shot through it, ran upstairs in the darkness—not knowing where I was— blundered into a toilet, fell over the seat, and … you’ll never guess what happened next.”

“You went backwards in ti…” Peace, who had become carried away with the narrative, cut the fateful word short.

Norman looked at him curiously. “What were you saying?”

“You went backwards. Into the wall.”

“That wasn’t what happened at all,” Norman said, annoyed at having his story interrupted at a crucial point. “Look, do you want to hear this, or don’t you?”

“I’m sorry. Please go on.”

“All right—but no more interruptions.”

“I promise.”

“Now, as I was saying—you’ll never be able to guess what happened next.”

“I’ll never be able to guess,” Peace said dutifully. “That wasn’t an interruption—I was just agreeing with you that I’ll never be able to guess.”

“I know you’ll never,” Norman said animatedly, “because the toilet was actually a time machine—an extroverter—and I went backwards in time!”

“My God!”

“It’s true! I went right back to the year 2290. The place had just ceased operating as a raincoat factory at that time, but there was a mad character called Legge there who rented an upstairs apartment in it. Funny little man, he was … all round and red and rubbery … looked like he was constructed from inner tubes. Kept repeating words at the ends of sentences, too, as if there was a ratchet slipping. I didn’t take to him much as a person, but I was fascinated by the fact that he was trying to earn a living as an inventor in the electronics field.

“That’s the sort of thing I’d always wanted to do, you see. I’ve got a natural gift for theoretical and applied science, and I can read circuit diagrams the way other people read comic strips, but my family had always made me concentrate on military skills like flying and marksmanship. As far as I could see, Legge had absolutely no talent as an inventor—he was wasting his time trying to build a contraption for making people tell the truth—but he was quick to see that I had some ideas that were worth exploiting, and we formed a kind of partnership. I was almost happy there for a while. I suppose I would actually have been happy if it hadn’t been for my guilt feelings, and for the presence of Cissy.”

“Was that his daughter?”

“Yes.” Norman looked puzzled again. “How did you know?”

“Ah … mad scientists always have daughters,” Peace said, cursing himself for the verbal slip.

“Pretty little thing, was she?”

“You wouldn’t ask that if you’d seen her,” Norman replied fervently, a haunted look appearing in his eyes. “She kept making advances to me, and I kept fighting her off, and the worst of it was that old Legge had the wrong idea about the whole thing. He was convinced I was some kind of rabid sex maniac who was trying to steal his daughter’s virtue right out from under his nose.”

“Funny place to keep it,” Peace said absently.

“Don’t be vulgar.” Norman gave him a reproachful glance. “I hope that service as a ranker won’t coarsen me the way it has coarsened you, my friend.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Peace said, making a final vow to keep his mouth shut. “Go on with the story.”

“As I was saying—I was tortured by memories of my guilt, and it was the same guilt which gave me what I thought was a wonderful idea. I see now that it was a terrible sacrilege, because remorse is a divine scourge. But in my blind arrogance I went ahead and built the infernal machine.”

Peace gripped the edge of the table as instinct and half-formed memory warned him of awful revelations to come. Dark chasms, previously unsuspected, were opening in his mind.

“It took me less than a week to build the prototype of the memory eraser,” Norman continued in a hollow voice.

“My plan was to use it on myself, to cleanse my soul of guilt, and then destroy it—but Legge had plans of his own. I had hardly finished soldering the last connection when he came into the room with one of the pork pies he was always eating and offered me a section. I should have guessed he was up to something, because he was a greedy little brute, and had never given me so much as a crumb before. Ate them straight off a newspaper, he did. Revolting habit! I was always telling him at least to use a plate, but he…”