“Yes?” prompted the Head Compositor.
“Tael. A Chinese silver coin I was supposed to see in the museum. It came out `Teal’ and because a teal is a duck, there was a wild duck fluttering around in an airtight showcase. One of the attendants got in trouble; I hope you’ll fix that.”
The Head Compositor chuckled. “I shall,” he said. “I’d like to have seen that duck. And the next time would have been two forty-five Saturday afternoon. What happened then?”
“Lei instead of lie, sir. My golf ball was stymied behind a tree and it was supposed to be a poor lie-but it was a poor lei instead. Some wilted, mismatched flowers on a purple cord. And the next was the hardest for me to figure out, even when I had the key. I had an appointment at the jewelry store at five fifty-five. But that was the fatal time. I got there at five fifty-five, but the e-matrix fell four characters out of place that time, clear back to the start of the word. Instead of getting there at five fifty-five, I got ether.”
“Tch, tch. That one was unfortunate. And next?”
“The next was just the reverse, sir. In fact, it happened to save my life. I went temporarily insane and tried to kill myself by taking lye. But the bad e fell in lye and it came out ley, which is a small Rumanian copper coin. I’ve still got it, for a souvenir. In fact when I found out the name of the coin, I guessed the answer. It gave me the key to the others.”
The Head Compositor chuckled again. “You’ve shown great resource,” he said. “And your method of getting here to tell us about it—”
“That was easy, sir. If I timed it so I’d be entering Haveen at the right instant, I had a double chance. If either of the two es in that word turned out to be bad one and fell—as it did—too early in the word, I’d be entering Heaven.”
“Decidedly ingenious. You may, incidentally, consider the errors corrected. We’ve taken care of all of them, while you talked; except the last one, of course. Otherwise, you wouldn’t still be here. And the defective mat is removed from the channel.”
“You mean that as far as people down there know, none of those things ever—”
“Exactly. A revised edition is now on the press, and nobody on Earth will have any recollection of any of those events. In a way of speaking, they no longer ever happened. I mean, they did, but now they didn’t for all practical purposes. When we return you to Earth, you’ll find the status there just what it would have been if the typographical errors had not occurred.
“You mean, for instance, that Pete Johnson won’t remember my having told him about the angelworrn, and there won’t be any record at the hospital about my having been there? And—”
“Exactly. The errors are corrected.”
“Whew!” said Charlie. “I’ll be…I mean, well, I was supposed to have been married Wednesday afternoon, two days ago. Uh…will I be? I mean, was I? I mean—”
The Head Compositor consulted another volume, and nodded. “Yes, at two o’clock Wednesday afternoon. To one Jane Pemberton. Now if we return you to Earth as of the time you left there-twelve-fifteen Saturday morning, you’ll have been married two days and ten hours. You’ll find yourself…let’s see…spending your honeymoon in Miami. At that exact moment, you’ll be in a taxicab en route—”
“Yes, but—” Charlie gulped.
“But what?” The Head Compositor looked surprised. “I certainly thought that was what you wanted, Wills. We owe you a big favor for having used such ingenuity in calling those typographical errors to our attention, but I thought that being married to Jane was what you wanted, and if you go back and find yourself—”
“Yes, but—” said Charlie again. “But…I mean—Look, I’ll have been married two days. I’ll miss…I mean, couldn’t I—”
Suddenly the Head Compositor smiled.
“How stupid of me,” he said, “of course. Well, the time doesn’t matter at all. We can drop you anywhere in the continuum. I can just as easily return you as of two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, at the moment of the ceremony. Or Wednesday morning, just before. Any time at all.”
“Well,” said Charlie, hesitantly. “It isn’t exactly that I’d miss the wedding ceremony. I mean, I don’t like receptions and things like that, and I’d have to sit through a long wedding dinner and listen to toasts and speeches and, well, I’d as soon have that part of it over with and… well, I mean. I—”
The Head Compositor laughed. He said, “Are you ready?”
“Am I—Sure!”
Click of train wheels over the rails, and the stars and moon bright above the observation platform of the speeding train.
Jane in his arms. His wife, and it was Wednesday evening. Beautiful, gorgeous, sweet, loving, soft, kissable, lovable Jane—
She snuggled closer to him, and he was whispering, “It’s…it’s eleven o’clock, darling. Shall we—”
Their lips met, clung. Then, hand in hand, they walked through the swaying train. His hand turned the knob of the stateroom door and, as it swung slowly open, he picked her up to carry her across the threshold.
Honeymoon in Hell
CHAPTER ONE
Too Many Females
ON SEPTEMBER 16th in the year 1972, things were going along about the same as usual, only a little worse. The cold war that had been waxing and waning between the United States and the Eastern Alliance-Russia, Cuba, and their lesser satellites-was warmer than it had ever been. War, hot war, seemed not only inevitable but extremely imminent.
The race for the Moon was an immediate cause. Each nation bad landed a few men on it and each claimed it. Each had found that rockets sent from Earth were inadequate to permit establishment of a permanent base upon the Moon, and that only establishment of a permanent base, in force, would determine possession. And so each nation (for convenience we’ll call the Eastern Alliance a nation, although it was not exactly that) was engaged in rushing construction of a space station to be placed in an orbit around Earth.
With such an intermediate step in space, reaching the Moon with large rockets would be practicable and construction of armed bases, heavily garrisoned, would be comparatively simple. Whoever got there first could not only claim possession, but could implement the claim. Military secrecy on both sides kept from the public just how near to completion each space base was, but it was generally-and correctly-believed that the issue would be determined within a year, two years at the outside.
Neither nation could afford to let the other control the Moon. That much had become obvious even to those who were trying desperately to maintain peace.
On September 17th, 1972, a statistician in the birth record department of New York City (his name was Wilbur Evans, but that doesn’t matter) noticed that out of 813 births reported the previous day, 657 had been girls and only 156 boys.
He knew that, statistically, this was practically impossible. In a small city where there are only, say, ten births a day, it is quite possible-and not at all alarming-that on any one given day, 90% or even 100%, of the births may be of the same sex. But out of so large a figure as 813, so high a ratio as 657 to 156 is alarming.
Wilbur Evans went to his department chief and he, too, was interested and alarmed. Checks were made by telephone-first with nearby cities and, as the evidence mounted, with more and more distant ones.