Crisis! Page 7

  “Oh, I can be kind,” Webster said. He grinned, and his face was warm and likable.

  Johnson got slowly to his knees in the dust of the clearing and then to his feet.

  “It's a matter of knowing what kindness is,” Webster said.

  “If you're fixed in the present,” Ellen said. “I suppose that would be a problem."

  Johnson took Shelly's hand and began moving out of the clearing.

  “Now, now,” Webster cautioned, “let's not be unkind. We are put here on this earth to be kind to one another. And we have come together now to be kind to one another as we were not kind before."

  Johnson and Shelly had reached the protection of the trees and moved among them. The odor of green growing things rose around them.

  “The problem,” Ellen said, “is that we don't know what the other one means by kindness. What is kindness to you may be unkindness to me, and the other way around."

  As Johnson and Shelly moved down the path, they could hear the voices behind them.

  “Don't start with me again,” Webster said.

  “I'm not,” she said. “Believe me, I'm not. But it's all over, Steve. I didn't come here alone, you know."

  “You mean you brought police,” he said. His voice was rising.

  “I couldn't find you by myself,” she said. “But I didn't bring them. You brought them. By what you did. Don't make it worse, Steve. Give yourself up.” The rest was indistinguishable. But the sound of voices, louder, shouting, came to them until hands reached out of bushes beside the path to grab them both.

  A man's voice said, “You're not Webster."

  Another man's voice, on the other side of the path, said, “That's all right, little girl, we're police officers."

  A shot came from the clearing some two hundred yards away. For a moment the world seemed frozen—the leaves were still, the birds stopped singing, even the distant sea ceased its restless motion. And then everything burst into sound and activity again, bodies pounded past Johnson toward the clearing, dust hung in the air, and Shelly was crying.

  “Where's my mommy?” she said. “Where's my daddy?"

  Johnson held her tightly in his arms and tried to comfort her, but there was nothing he could say that would not leave her poorer than she had been a few moments ago.

  Then he heard footsteps approaching on the path.

  “Hello, Shelly,” Ellen said heavily.

  “Mommy!” the little girl said, and Johnson let her go to her mother.

  After a moment, Ellen said over the child's head, “You knew what was going to happen, didn't you?"

  “Only if certain things occurred."

  “If I had not come here Steve might still be alive,” she said, “and if you hadn't been here both Shelly and I might be dead."

  “People do what they must—like active chemicals, participating in every reaction. Some persons serve their life purposes by striding purposefully toward their destinations; others, by flailing out wildly in all directions."

  “What about you?"

  “Others slide through life without being noticed and affect events through their presence rather than their actions,” Johnson said. “I am—a catalyst. A substance that assists a reaction without participating in it."

  “I don't know what you are,” Ellen said. “But I've got a lot to thank you for."

  “What are you going to do now?"

  “I'm going to sit down and think for a long time. Maybe Steve was right. Maybe I was neglecting Shelly."

  “Children can be smothered as well as neglected,” Johnson said. “They must be loved enough to be let go by people who love themselves enough to do what they must do to be people."

  “You think I should go back to my project."

  “For Shelly's sake."

  “And yours?"

  “And everyone's. But that's just a guess."

  “You're a strange man, Bill Johnson, and I should ask you questions, but I have the feeling that whatever answers you gave or didn't give, it wouldn't matter. So—let me ask you just one.” She hesitated. “Will you come to see me again when all this is over. I—I'd like you to see me as something other than a suspicious, harried mother."

  An expression like pain passed across Johnson's face and was gone. “I can't,” he said.

  “I understand."

  “No, you don't,” he said. “Just understand—I would like to know you better. But I can't."

  And he stood on the hillside, dappled by the light that came through the leaves and was reflected up from the ocean, and he watched them walk down the path toward the road that would take them back to the boat, back to the mainland.

  In the distance a frigate bird sailed alone in the sky, circling a spot in the ocean, turning and circling and finding nothing.

  * * * *

  The rented room was lit only by the flickering of an old neon sign outside the window. Johnson sat at a wooden table, pressed down a key on the cassette recorder in front of him, and after a moment began to speak.

  “Your name is Bill Johnson,” he said. “You have just returned to her mother the little girl who will grow up to perfect the thermonuclear power generator, and you don't remember. You may find a small item in the newspaper about it, but you will find no mention of the part you played in recovering the girl.

  “For this there are several possible explanations....” After he had finished, he sat silently for several minutes while the cassette continued to hiss, until he remembered to reach forward and press the lever marked “Stop."

  Episode Three

  Man of the Hour

  The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the audio cassette dangling by a string from the remains of a metal light fixture surrounding a naked bulb in the ceiling. The bulb was dark but the room was partially illuminated by the sunlight streaming through rips in the blind that tried to shade the window to his right. One stray sunbeam fell across the old wrought-iron bed in which he was lying on his back, the white chenille bedspread with its pattern worn down to random tufts and a thin, pink cotton blanket bunched at the foot of the bed, and under him a mattress in which the springs had long since chosen anarchy.

  The room was small, no more than twelve feet wide and fifteen feet long, and it was dirty in ways that no sweeping and scrubbing could eradicate. Dirt was ground into the pitted plastic of the floor and pounded into cracks in the walls and the ceiling. The room even smelled dirty, of ancient hamburgers and pizzas and tacos smuggled into the room in paper sacks and their crumbs and drips left where they had fallen, of the sweet and sweaty stink of poverty. And the room was hot. The window was half raised, and occasionally a gust of humid air would flap the shade and roll the dust kitties across the floor and rattle the heap of insect carcasses on the scarred wooden table under the light.

  The man on the bed who did not know his name rolled onto his side and then sat up, his feet flat on the sticky floor. He was a pleasant-looking young man with curly brown hair and dark eyes and a well shaped but not heavily muscled body whose skin had a brown cast to it. He was about five feet ten, not tall enough nor short enough to be noticeable. Nothing about him was remarkable. His chest was hairless. He had been sleeping in his boxer shorts.

  He stood up, testing his balance as if he had to think about it, wiggling his fingers, his arms extended, as if to check the messages his nerves sent up his arms to his brain, rotating his shoulders experimentally. He reached the table in the center of the floor with two short steps, and reached out for the dangling cassette. He pulled it free with one hand, breaking the string that held it to the ceiling fixture, and turned it over. Something was printed in neat small letters on the sticker attached to it. “IMPORTANT INFORMATION,” it said.

  The man looked around the room, at the two rung-backed wooden chairs next to the table, at the ruined upholstered chair in the corner with the old reading lamp on a flexible metal arm rising over the back like a frozen cobra, at the three battered wooden doors set into adjacent wa
lls. One of them was narrower than the others and occupied a sill six inches off the floor. Behind it was a bathroom tiled in black and white plastic squares; nearly half the tiles were missing. When the man came out he put on the clothing he found hanging in a closet behind one of the doors. The clothing was neater and newer than the room: a light-blue dress shirt, a pair of gray slacks, a gray tweed jacket, a pair of black shoes, relatively unscuffed, recently shined. An old suitcase stood in the back of the closet.

  On the table was a small heap of belongings: a few coins, a hotel key with the number “506” incised into it, a black pocket comb, and a billfold. In the billfold were three dollar bills, a pawnshop ticket, a Visa credit card, and a plastic-encased social security card. The credit card and the social security card carried the name “Bill Johnson.” The credit card had a note attached to it with a paper clip. The note was printed on yellow, ruled paper and said, “This card is overdrawn. If you try to use it, you may be arrested.” The man removed the note and put it into his jacket pocket along with the paper clip, put the cards into his billfold with the dollar bills, picked up the cassette and put it in the other pocket.

  Behind the third door was a dim hallway lighted only by a gray window at the far end. A thin, dusty runner was tacked to the center of the wooden floor. Halfway down the hall the man came upon the dejected black metal doors of an elevator. When he pushed the button beside the doors, he heard no movement, no response, distant or near, and he turned and walked to a nearby stairwell. Five dark flights of stairs down, the staircase emerged into a dusty lobby. A few overstuffed chairs, in scarcely better shape than the one in the man's room, sagged in the corners. Between two of them was an oak library table from which the veneer was peeling in places. On it was an imitation Tiffany lamp. Beside the lamp was a torn envelope and an old Time magazine.

  The man looked at the magazine as if he wanted to pick it up, but behind the desk to the left a thin, sour voice said, “Mr. Johnson. I hope you have the money to pay your overdue bill. Otherwise...."

  “I'll get it today,” the man said. “Tomorrow at the latest. Is there a store near here where I can play a cassette?"

  “If I were you,” said the man behind the desk, who had risen to his feet and leaned bony elbows on the counter, “I'd worry about getting a job and not about no music."

  “It will help me get a job."

  The man behind the desk jerked his head toward his left shoulder. “Just down the street there's a music store,” he said. “Least there was. Maybe they're still in business.” His voice was skeptical but a bit less strident.

  “Thanks,” the man said.

  “How come you don't say ‘may the future be kind,'” the desk clerk asked in a tone that was almost friendly, “like you always do?"

  “May the future be kind,” the man said.

  * * * *

  A hot merciless wind blew down the nearly deserted street carrying dust and bits of paper. No cars were parked along the curb, but here and there a stripped hulk appeared like the bones of a dinosaur unearthed from strata of garbage and old newspapers. No cars disturbed the potholed streets. Here and there solitary figures skulked along the boarded store-and building-fronts, but they no longer had the spirit to be dangerous. One approached the better-dressed man and held out its hand in ritual but hopeless appeal. He put a dollar in it. As if by magic, ragged children appeared with their hands out, and the man gave away his other dollar bills and the coins in his pocket before he demonstrated that his billfold and his pockets were empty and the beggars disappeared as quickly as they had assembled.

  Like the rest of the world, the music store had seen better days. Actually it was a used music store, with long-playing records in battered cardboard envelopes racked in bins and cassettes, with and without plastic cases, tossed into heaps on tabletops, and a rack of scarred CD-Rom disks. In the air was the lingering odor of an aromatic herb only slightly masked by the smell of incense. An aging young woman with long, black, uncombed hair stood behind a narrow counter toward the front of the dark shop. She wore a shapeless gown printed with blue and yellow flowers; it exposed one white shoulder. She swayed back and forth with her eyes half closed as if hearing some internal melody.

  “May I listen to one of the cassettes?” the man asked after a moment of standing in front of the woman without being noticed.

  With a slow wave of her right hand, the woman motioned toward a dingy, glassed-in booth at the back of the shop. The man made a pretense of sorting through the cassettes on the table near the counter and then picking one. In the glass booth he slipped the cassette from his pocket and placed it in an old machine that seemed fastened to the counter. When he clicked the cover down and pressed a lever marked “Play,” a voice boomed out. Quickly he turned down the volume to where he could barely hear it.

  “...name is Bill Johnson,” the cassette player said imperfectly. “You have just returned to her mother the little girl who will grow up to perfect the thermonuclear power generator, and you don't remember. You may find a small item in the newspaper about it, but you will find no mention of the part you played in recovering the girl.

  “For this there are several possible explanations, including the likelihood that I may be lying or deceived or insane. But the explanation on which you must act is that I have told you the truth: you are a man who was born in a future that has almost used up all hope; you were sent to this time and place to alter the events that created that future.

  “Am I telling the truth? The only evidence you have is your apparently unique ability to foresee consequences—it comes like a vision, not of the future because the future can be changed, but of what will happen if events take their natural course, if someone does not act, if you do not intervene.

  “But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget.

  “I recorded this message last night to tell you what I know, before I had to pawn the recorder for money to make a partial payment on the room, just as I learned about myself a few days ago by listening to a recording like this one, for I am you and we are one, and we have done this many times before...."

  After the voice stopped the tape continued to hiss past the sound head while the man named Johnson stood in the dust-covered, glassed-in booth staring through the darkened store toward the glowing rectangles of the door and the front window. Then he shook his head as if to loosen the cobwebs inside it, stopped the player, retrieved the cassette, and slipped it into his pocket while he picked up the one he had placed beside the machine. He opened the door and walked toward the front of the store and put the cassette in his hand back onto the table.

  “Sorry,” he said, but the woman at the counter wasn't paying attention to anything but the music in her head. “Do you know where I might get a job?” he asked. The woman didn't respond. “Do you have any idea where a man might apply for a job?” Johnson asked again.

  The woman waved her left hand. Johnson opened his mouth as if to ask again when he glanced in the direction the woman had waved. Across the street was a billboard in a vacant lot where a building had been torn down. On the billboard was the picture of a man with white hair but a youthful, tanned, strong face. The face was serious, concerned, sympathetic. Beside the face were the words: “Out of work? I'll hire you.” And below that, in smaller letters: “Apply at:....” Then came an address in slightly different letters, as if the poster had been printed without them and the address inserted afterward. Under the picture was a name in letters as large as the message: “Arthur King."

  Johnson looked at the billboard for a long time, much longer than necessary to read and understand the simple message. His eyes were open and slightly unfocused, as if he were not so much looking at the billboard as beyond it. Then he shook himself like a person trying to rid himself of unwanted thoughts. “Thanks,” he said. He paused at the door and looked back at the woman.
“May the future be kind."

  She did not reply.

  * * * *

  The employment office was in a distant part of the city that Johnson learned was Los Angeles, and it took him more than two hours to walk there. The office was located in a warehouse jury-rigged with portable plastic partitions and fluorescent light fixtures dangling from chains and cords, and cords snaking across the floor. The building was in a district with small factories and other warehouses, but here the atmosphere was different. The wind was still hot, but the streets had been swept, cars and trucks moved along them, the buildings were occupied, and people walked on the sidewalks as if they had a destination and a purpose. Above the warehouse and most of the other buildings was a sign that read: “King International."

  After the street the warehouse was cool and dusky. In a few seconds Johnson's pupils expanded. A large bare room was filled with people. At first they seemed like an unorganized mob, and then order began to appear. They formed a line beginning at an open doorway in a wall forty feet from the entrance and serpentining its way to cover most of the space between the side walls that were almost twice as far apart as from front to back.

  People came through the door behind Johnson and brushed past him to join the near end of the line before he, too, went to stand in it and was, in turn, followed by others who kept coming and coming until he was merely a part of a process. Uniformed men and women with the words “King International” embroidered within an oval on their left breast pocket kept it a human process, however. They moved among the waiting jobseekers with folding chairs, coffee, soft drinks, doughnuts, and words of encouragement. “Please be patient,” they said sympathetically. “Don't worry. There are jobs for everybody. But it will take a little time."

  Behind Johnson someone snorted. “A little time,” a cultivated voice said scornfully. “It's taken five years."

  Johnson turned. The man behind him was lean and middle-aged. He had iron-gray hair and bushy eyebrows and a face that looked as if it had been carved from the side of a mountain, but as he noticed Johnson's gaze the stone turned into a sardonic smile. “Howdy, friend,” he said in an imitation of midwestern neighborliness.