“Here comes Martin,” he said feebly.
He was in the middle of a garden. The clipped turf underfoot was springy. Tailored terraces rose on three sides. A fat sun and a billion flowers and several thousand exceptionally handsome people wearing paint jobs and nothing else.
The center arena had some people in it, people fastened to chains as he was, each one held by three blondes. The spectators were all on the terraces. There was a picnic atmosphere.
They went into the middle of the arena. The other captives were being led in an endless circle.
“Yah-hah!” the multitude yelled. “Yah-hah-hah!”
They posed in the center and then began the circling. Martin stared at his fellow captives. Some were men and some were women. One wore animal skins; another wore armor. One was dressed like the pictures of George Washington. Some wore clothing he’d never seen before.
He was led around and around. More performers took their center ring bow. Something was bothering him, some silly small thing. He couldn’t fit his mind over it. Too much was going on in this delirium.
Then he got it — all the captives had red hair.
He turned and looked at the scared woman who walked behind him. She had red hair, one blue eye and one brown eye. She wore gingham and a sunbonnet.
He sneaked looks at the others. One blue eye. One brown eye. Red hair.
Everyone stopped walking. There was a great and final, “Yah-hah.” Three sets of blondes stood in the center ring without captives. Their heads were bowed.
His blondes trotted him over, took off the circlet and flipped him back into the blue room. The slit was closed. He pinched his leg.
“Hell,” he said softly.
The slit opened after what he imagined to be an hour had passed. One of his blondes came back. She had a man with her, a chesty citizen dressed in cerise paint.
“Talkit ya tempo,” she said, pointing at the chesty man.
He beamed at Martin. “Blessings,” he said.
“Blessings yourself.”
“Indebted. Thanking very much.”
“Your welcoming very much, bud.”
“Knowing all?” the man asked with a wide arm sweep.
“Knowing nothing. Not a damned thing! What’s this all about?”
The chesty man beamed some more. He scratched his paint job lightly. He frowned. “Hard to say. You past, I future. Is party. My party. My house. My garden. Having game. Sending ladies your tempo, lot of tempos. All same thing. Bringing only with red on hair, eye brown, eye blue. Hard to find. For game.”
Martin goggled at him. “You mean a scavenger hunt through time?”
“Not knowing. Is only game. Some ladies failing. Too bad.”
“What happens to them?”
The man grinned. “No present for them. Now, present for you. Returning. Any place in tempo yours. To place taken. To other place. Sooner, later. Your choice.”
“Return me to any... moment in my life?”
“All tempo function. You say — how? — resonance.”
“Send me to December 10th, eight P.M.”
Martin Greynor was sitting on the edge of his bed. He had just yanked his shoelaces tight in the left shoe. The tipped laces were still in his hands. He let go of them. He heard a shower pouring. The sound stopped suddenly.
His throat was full of rusty wire. “Ruth?”
She opened the bathroom door. She was wrapped in a big yellow towel.
“What is it now, Marty? My goodness, you’ve been needling me all evening. You’re in a perfectly foul humor. I’m hurrying just as fast as I can.”
“Ruth, I...” He tried to smile. His lips felt split.
She came to him, quick with concern. “Marty! Are you all right, darling? You look so odd.”
“Me? I’ve never been more all right.” He pulled her down beside him.
“Hey, you! I’m soaking wet.”
“Baby, do we have to drive way out there tonight? Do we?”
She stared at him. “Good Lord, it was your idea. I detest both of them. You know that.”
“Let’s stay home. Just the two of us. Bust open that brandy, maybe. Use up some of those birch logs.”
“But we accepted and...”
He held her tightly. He would never let her go.
She whispered, “I like you better this way, instead of all snarly and grouchy.” She giggled. “I think we could phone and tell them you have a fever, darling. It wouldn’t really be a lie.”
She made the call, winking at him as she gave worried noises about his symptoms. She hung up and said, “She was huffy and painfully sweet. Tonight the Greynors are at home. Darling, it would have been a crummy evening.”
“A... disastrous evening.”
“They play kid games all the time. That’s what irks me. Remember in the summer? They had a scavenger hunt. If that isn’t the height of silliness!”
He looked at the fire glow reflected in her hair.
“It isn’t a bad game, baby.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Guess it depends on who’s playing it and what the prize is.”
Labor Supply
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1953.
The good Dr. Vrees, that best-intentioned of psychiatrists, had an unfortunate experience in the nighttime. It was a sad blow to his ego but he could console himself with the surety that he, even more than Dr. Freud, knew precisely the “stuff that dreams are made on.”
“They do what?” Dr. Vrees said, conscious of inanity.
His patient was a large young man. During the thorough physical checkup prior to this psychiatric questioning, Dr. Vrees had decided, with all the dolor of a spindly man, that this Robert Smith was a truly amazing physical specimen. He was muscled like a stereotype picture of a Viking, and with lean cow-hand hips. There were six feet four inches of him, and every inch in a perfect bloom of health.
Robert Smith seemed lost in some dismal private thought.
“They do what?” Dr. Vrees repeated.
“Huh? Oh, they go whoop, whoop, whoop. Sort of.”
“In your dreams do these... uh... whoops convey any meaning?”
“I guess I understand them all right. Or we understand them, you might say, because I... we... keep working. And all the Ruths, too.”
“All the Ruths,” Dr. Vrees repeated mechanically. Just one Ruth was almost too much to contemplate. Dr. Vrees was highly aware of her, out there in the waiting room. Ruth Jones was as dark as Robert Smith was fair, and she was built on the same heroic scale. At least six feet tall, and proud of it, moving like a ship under a full head of sail. Just to look at her tall beauty, sensing the ripeness of her, made Dr. Vrees unhappily aware of his yen for tall women, a yen which was successfully canceled out by his refusal to look ridiculous in public.
Dr. Vrees was also aware that these new patients irritated him. His attitude, he knew, was unprofessional. If their only possession had been their physical beauty, he could have taken refuge in his own sense of intellectual superiority. But Vrees had gone through a series of standard tests and found that both of them were as bright as he was, which was very bright indeed. Smith was a highly successful young civil engineer. Both of them had inherited money. Their marriage was being delayed until this matter of the recurrent dreams could be straightened out. And that, in itself, was an indication of thoughtful emotional stability.
“Recurrent dreams are not unusual,” Dr. Vrees said. “Most of them are the result of some physical disorder. The others, as evidences of emotional turmoil, are most often found in late childhood and early adolescence.”