Could I show him his beloved London obliterated by fusion bombs? Or the entire northern hemisphere of Earth depopulated by man-made plagues? Or a devastated world turned to a savagery that made his Morlocks seem compassionate?
Could I explain to him the energies involved in time travel or the damage they did to the human body? The fact that time travelers were volunteers sent on suicide missions, desperately trying to preserve a time line that saved at least a portion of the human race? The best future I could offer him was a twentieth century tortured by world wars and genocide. That was the best I could do.
So all I did was hint, as gently and subtly as I could, trying to guide him toward that best of all possible futures, horrible though it would seem to him. I could neither control nor coerce anyone; all I could do was to offer a bit of guidance. Until the radiation dose from my trip through time finally killed me.
Wells was happily oblivious to my pain. He did not even notice the perspiration that beaded my brow despite the chilling breeze that heralded nightfall.
«You appear to be telling me,» he said at last, «that my writings will have some sort of positive effect on the world.»
«They already have,» I replied, with a genuine smile.
His brows rose.
«That teenaged lad is reading your story. Your concept of time as a dimension has already started his fertile mind working.»
«That young student?»
«Will change the world,» I said. «For the better.»
«Really?»
«Really,» I said, trying to sound confident. I knew there were still a thousand pitfalls in young Albert’s path. And I would not live long enough to help him past them. Perhaps others would, but there were no guarantees.
I knew that if Albert did not reach his full potential, if he were turned away by the university again or murdered in the coming holocaust, the future I was attempting to preserve would disappear in a global catastrophe that could end the human race forever. My task was to save as much of humanity as I could.
I had accomplished a feeble first step in saving some of humankind, but only a first step. Albert was reading the time-machine tale and starting to think that Kelvin was blind to the real world. But there was so much more to do. So very much more.
We sat there in the deepening shadows of the approaching twilight, Wells and I, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts about the future. Despite his best English self-control, Wells was smiling contentedly. He saw a future in which he would be hailed as a prophet. I hoped it would work out that way. It was an immense task that I had undertaken. I felt tired, gloomy, daunted by the immensity of it all. Worst of all, I would never know if I succeeded or not.
Then the waitress bustled over to our table. «Well, have you finished? Or are you going to stay here all night?»
Even without a translation Wells understood her tone. «Let’s go,» he said, scraping his chair across the flagstones.
I pushed myself to my feet and threw a few coins on the table. The waitress scooped them up immediately and called into the café, «Come here and scrub down this table! At once!»
The six-year-old boy came trudging across the patio, lugging the heavy wooden pail of water. He stumbled and almost dropped it; water sloshed onto his mother’s legs. She grabbed him by the ear and lifted him nearly off his feet. A faint tortured squeak issued from the boy’s gritted teeth.
«Be quiet and you do work properly,» she told her son, her voice murderously low. «If I let your father know how lazy you are …»
The six-year-old’s eyes went wide with terror as his mother let her threat dangle in the air between them.
«Scrub that table good, Adolf,» his mother told him. «Get rid of that damned Jew’s stink.»
I looked down at the boy. His eyes were burning with shame and rage and hatred. Save as much of the human race as you can, I told myself. But it was already too late to save him.
«Are you coming?» Wells called to me.
«Yes,» I said, tears in my eyes. «It’s getting dark, isn’t it?»
VINCE’S DRAGON
One of the little burdens I bear as gracefully as I can manage is the fact that of the six Hugo Awards decorating my office, none of them are for writing. My work as an editor, first at Analog and then at Omni, has greatly overshadowed my work as a writer. Like Orson Welles, who has always maintained that he is an amateur actor and a professional director, I have always considered editing a temporary part of my life. Writing is my life.
I was very flattered, then, to have one of the writers I «discovered» while editing Analog—Orson Scott Card—ask me to contribute an original story to an anthology he was creating. It was a pleasure to publish Scott’s first short stories and novelettes in Analog. But when he asked me to contribute to his planned anthology about dragons I was nonplussed. Dragons? In science fiction? No matter what my dear friend Anne McCaffrey might have said, dragons are the stuff of fantasy, not science fiction. They are aerodynamically impossible and biochemically illogical. A giant flying reptilian that breathes flame? Not science fiction of the kind I write! No sir!
On the other hand, there is more to the world than hard-and-fast literary categories, and I got this niggling idea of how a dragon might be useful to certain kinds of people I used to know when I was growing up in the narrow streets of South Philadelphia.
Writers are always told to write about what they know, so I invented the world’s first—and probably last—Mafia dragon.
The thing that worried Vince about the dragon, of course, was that he was scared that it was out to capture his soul.
Vince was a typical young Family man. He had dropped out of South Philadelphia High School to start his career with the Family. He boosted cars, pilfered suits from local stores, even spent grueling and terrifying hours learning how to drive a big trailer rig so he could help out on hijackings.
But they wouldn’t let him in on the big stuff.
«You can run numbers for me, kid,» said Louie Bananas, the one-armed policy king of South Philly.
«I wanna do somethin’ big,» Vince said, with ill-disguised impatience. «I wanna make somethin’ outta myself.»
Louie shook his bald, bullet-shaped head. «I dunno, kid. You don’t look like you got th’ guts.»
«Try me! Lemme in on th’ sharks.»
So Louie let Vince follow Big Balls Falcone, the loan sharks’ enforcer, for one day. After watching Big Balls systematically break a guy’s fingers, one by one, because he was ten days late with his payment, Vince agreed that loan sharking was not the business for him.
Armed robbery? Vince had never held a gun, much less fired one. Besides, armed robbery was for the heads and zanies, the stupids and desperate ones. Organized crime didn’t go in for armed robbery. There was no need to. And a guy could get hurt.
After months of wheedling and groveling around Louie Bananas’ favorite restaurant, Vince finally got the break he wanted.
«Okay, kid, okay,» Louie said one evening as Vince stood in a corner of the restaurant watching him devour linguine with clams and white sauce. «I got an openin’ for you. Come here.»
Vince could scarcely believe his ears.
«What is it, Padrone? What? I’ll do anything!»
Burping politely into his checkered napkin, Louie leaned back in his chair and grabbed a handful of Vince’s curly dark hair, pulling Vince’s ear close to his mouth.
Vince, who had an unfortunate allergy to garlic, fought hard to suppress a sneeze as he listened to Louie whisper, «You know that ol’ B&O warehouse down aroun’ Front an’ Washington?»