Up the Line Page 5

  Assassinations are usually over in a hurry, and nobody goes up the line just to watch a quick burst of gunfire. What the Time Service was really offering these people was a five-day tour of Louisiana in the early twentieth century, with the gunning down of the Kingfish as its climax. We had six fellow travelers: three well-to-do Louisiana couples in their late fifties and early sixties. One of the men was a lawyer, one a doctor, one a big executive of Louisiana Power & Light Company. Our Time Courier was the right sort to shepherd these pillars of the establishment around: a sleek, bland character named Madison Jefferson Monroe. “Call me Jeff,” he invited.

  We had several orientation meetings before we went anywhere.

  “These are your timers,” said Jeff Monroe. “You keep them next to your skin at all times. Once you put them on in Time Service headquarters, you don’t remove them again until you come back down the line. You bathe with them, sleep with them, perform—ah—all intimate functions while wearing them. The reason for this should be obvious. It would be highly disruptive to history if a timer were to fall into the hands of a twentieth-century person; therefore we don’t allow the devices out of your physical possession even for an instant.”

  (“He’s lying,” Sam told me when I repeated this to him. “Somebody up the line wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a timer. The real reason is that sometimes the tourists have to get out of an area in a hurry, maybe to avoid being lynched, and the Courier can’t take the risk that some of his people may have left their timers in the hotel room. But he doesn’t dare tell them that.”

  The timers that Jeff Monroe distributed were a little different from the one I had worn the night Sam and I went jumping up the line. The controls were sealed, and functioned only when the Courier sounded a master frequency. Sensible enough: the Time Service doesn’t want tourists slipping away for time-jaunts on their own.

  Our Courier spelled out at great length the consequences of changing the past, and begged us repetitiously not to rock any boats. “Don’t speak unless spoken to,” he said, “and even then confine any conversations with strangers to a minimum of words. Don’t use slang; it won’t be comprehensible. You may recognize other time-tourists; under no condition are you to speak to them or greet them in any way, and you should ignore any attention you may get from them. Anyone who breaks these regulations, no matter how innocently, may have his shunting permit revoked on the spot and may be returned at once to now-time. Understood?”

  We nodded solemnly.

  Jeff Monroe added, “Think of yourselves as Christians in disguise who have been smuggled into the holy Moslem city of Mecca. You’re in no danger so long as you’re not discovered; but if those about you find out what you are, you’re in big trouble. Therefore it’s to your advantage to keep your mouths shut while you’re up the line, to do a lot of seeing and a minimum of saying. You’ll be all right as long as you don’t call attention to yourselves.”

  (I learned from Sam that time-tourists very frequently get themselves into muddles with people living up the line, no matter how hard their Couriers try to avoid such incidents. Sometimes the trouble can be patched up with a few diplomatic words, often when the Courier explains apologetically to the offended party that the stranger is really a mental case. Sometimes it’s not so easy, and the Courier has to order a quick evacuation of all the tourists; the Courier must remain behind until he has sent all his people safely down the line, and there have been several fatalities to Couriers in the line of duty as a result. In extreme cases of tourist bungling, the Time Patrol steps in and cancels the jump retroactively, plucking the careless traveler from the tour and thereby undoing the damage. Sam said, “It can really get one of these rich bastards furious when a Patrolman shows up at the last minute and tells him that he can’t make the shunt, because if he does he’ll commit some ferocious faux pas up the line. They just can’t understand it. They promise to be good, and won’t believe that their promise is worthless because their conduct is already a matter of record. The trouble with most of the dumb tourists is that they can’t think four-dimensionally.” “Neither can I, Sam,” I said, baffled. “You will. You’d better,” said Sam.)

  Before we set out for 1935 we were given a quick hypnocourse in the social background of the era. Pumped into us were data on the Depression, the New Deal, the Long family of Louisiana, Huey Long’s rise to fame, his “Share Our Wealth” program of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his feud with President Franklin Roosevelt, his dream of taking the Presidency himself in 1936, his flamboyant disregard for traditions, his demagogic appeal to the masses. We also got enough incidental details on life in 1935—celebrities, sports developments, the stock market—so we wouldn’t feel hopelessly out of context there.

  Lastly, they fitted us out in 1935 wardrobes. We strutted around giggling and quipping at the sight of ourselves in those quaint rigs. Jeff Monroe, checking us out, reminded the men about zipper flies and how to use them, reminded the women that it was sternly prohibited to reveal the breasts from the nipple down, and urged us strenuously to keep in mind at all times that we were entering a staunchly puritanical era where neurotic repression was regarded as a virtue and our normal freedoms of behavior were looked upon as sinful and shameless.

  Finally, we were ready.

  They took us uplevel to Old New Orleans, since it wouldn’t have been healthy to make our jump from one of the underlevels. They had set up a room in a boarding-house on North Rampart Street for shunting to the twentieth century.

  “Here we go up the line,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe, and gave the signal that activated our timers.

  14.

  Suddenly, it was 1935.

  We didn’t notice any changes in the dingy room we were in, but yet we knew we were up the line.

  We wore tight shoes and funny clothes, and we carried real cash money, United States dollars, because our thumbprints weren’t legal tender here. The advance man of the tour had booked us into a big New Orleans hotel on Canal just at the edge of the old French quarter, for the first part of our stay, and after Jeff Monroe had given us a final warning to be circumspect, we went out and walked around the corner to it.

  The automobile traffic was fantastic for this supposedly “depressed” year. So was the din. We strolled along, two by two, Jeff leading the way. We stared at things a lot, but no one would get suspicious about that. The locals would simply guess that we were tourists just down from Indiana. Nothing about our curiosity marked us particularly as tourists just down from 2059.

  Thibodeaux, the power company man, couldn’t get over the sight of power lines right out in the open, dangling from post to post. “I’ve read about such things,” he said several times, “but I never really believed them!”

  The womenfolk clucked a lot about the fashions. It was a hot, sticky September day and yet everybody was all covered up. They couldn’t understand that.

  The weather gave us trouble. We had never been exposed to real humidity before; there isn’t any in the undercities, of course, and only a lunatic goes up to surface level when the climate is sour. So we sweated and labored.

  There wasn’t any air-conditioning in the hotel, either. I think it may not have been invented yet.

  Jeff checked us all in at the hotel. When he was through signing the register, the desk clerk, who of course was human and not a computer terminal, banged a bell and yelled, “Front!” and a platoon of friendly black bellhops came over to get our luggage.

  I overheard Mrs. Bienvenu, the lawyer’s wife, whisper to her husband, “Do you think they’re slaves?”

  “Not here!” he said fiercely. “The slaves were freed seventy years ago!”

  The desk clerk must have overheard that. I wonder what he made of it.

  The Courier had booked Flora Chambers and me into one room. He explained that he had registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, because it wasn’t permissible to let an unmarried couple share the same hotel room even if they were part of the same tour
party. Flora gave me a pale but hopeful smile and said, “We’ll pretend we’re on a temporary.”

  Monroe glared at her. “We don’t talk about down-the-line customs here!”

  “They don’t have temporary liaisons in 1935?”

  “Shut up!” he hissed.

  We unpacked and bathed and went out to see the town. We did Basin Street and heard some respectable primitive jazz. Then we walked a few blocks over to Bourbon Street for drinks and a strip-tease. The place was full; and it amazed us all that grown men and women would sit around for a full hour, enduring a lot of indifferent music and polluted atmosphere, simply to wait for a girl to come out and take off some of her clothes.

  When she got undressed, finally, she kept little shiny caps on her nipples and a triangular patch of cloth over her pubic region, too. Anybody who has a serious interest in nudity can see more than that any day at a public bathhouse. But of course this was a repressive, sexually strangled era, we reminded ourselves.

  Our drinks and other nightclub charges were all put on one bill, which Jeff Monroe always paid. The Time Service didn’t want us ignorant tourists handling unfamiliar currencies except when absolutely necessary. The Courier also deftly fended off drunks who kept invading our group, beggars, soliciting prostitutes, and other challenges to our ability to handle the social situations 1935 presented.

  “It’s hard work,” Flora Chambers observed, “being a Courier.”

  “But think of all the free traveling you get to do,” I said.

  We were profoundly awed by the ugliness of the people up the line. We realized that there were no helix parlors here, that cosmetic microsurgery was unknown, and that esthetic genetics, if it had been heard of at all in 1935, would have been regarded as a Fascist or Communist conspiracy against the right of free men to have ugly children. Nevertheless, we couldn’t help registering surprise and dismay at the mismatched ears, the pockmarked skins, the distorted teeth, the bulging noses, of these unprogrammed and unedited people. The plainest member of our group was a theatrical beauty, compared to the 1935 norm.

  We pitied them for having to live in their cramped, dark little era.

  When we got back to our hotel room, Flora took all her clothing off, and sprawled out wildly on the bed with legs spread. “Do me!” she shrieked. “I’m drunk!”

  I was a little drunk too, so I did her.

  Madison Jefferson Monroe had carefully allotted each of us one alcoholic drink during the whole evening. Despite all temptations, we weren’t allowed a second, and had to stick to soft drinks the rest of the time. He couldn’t take the risk that we might say something dangerous under the influence of alcohol, a substance we weren’t really accustomed to. As it is, even that one drink was enough to loosen some tongues and melt some brains, and a few remarks slipped out which, if they had been overheard, could have caused trouble.

  It astounded me to see the twentieth-century people drink so much without collapsing.

  (“Get used to alcohol,” Sam had urged me. “It’s the favorite mind-poison in most places up the line. Develop a tolerance for it or you may have problems.” “No drugs?” I asked. “Well, you’ll find some weed here and there, but nothing really psychedelic. No sniffer palaces anywhere. Learn to drink, Jud. Learn to drink.”)

  Later that night Jeff Monroe came to our room. Flora lay in an exhausted heap, unconscious; Jeff and I talked for a long while about the problems of being a Courier. I rather got to like him for all his slickness and blandness.

  He seemed to enjoy his work. His specialty was twentieth-century United States, and the only thing he regretted was the wearying routine of covering the assassinations. “Nobody wants to see anything else,” he complained. “Dallas, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, over and over again. I can’t tell you how sick I am of muscling into the crowd by that overpass, and pointing out that window on the sixth floor, and watching that poor woman crawling onto the back of that car. At least the Huey Long thing is reasonably untouched. But there are twenty of me in Dallas by now. Don’t people want to see the happy parts of the twentieth century?”

  “Were there any?” I asked.

  15.

  We had breakfast at Brennan’s and dinner at Antoine’s, and had a tour of the Garden District, and came back to the old town to visit the cathedral in Jackson Square, and then we walked down to have a look at the Mississippi. We also went to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust at a movie house, visited the post office and the public library, bought a lot of newspapers (which are permissible souvenirs), and spent a few hours listening to the radio. We rode the Streetcar Named Desire, and Jeff took us motoring in a hired automobile. He offered to let us drive, but we were all terrified of taking the wheel after watching him going through the intricate routines of changing gears. And we did a lot of other twentieth-century things. We really soaked up the flavor of the era.

  Then we went up to Baton Rouge to watch Senator Long get killed.

  We got there on Saturday, September 7, and took rooms in what Jeff swore was the finest hotel in the city. The legislature was in session, and Senator Huey had come down from Washington to run things. We hovered around town aimlessly until late Sunday afternoon. Then Jeff got us ready to see the show.

  He had donned a thermoplastic disguise. His pink, regular face was now pocked and sallow, he had a mustache, and he wore dark glasses that he might have borrowed from Dajani. “This is the third time I’ve conducted this tour,” he explained to us. “I think it might look bad if somebody noticed identical triplets standing in the corridor when Huey gets shot.” He warned us to pay no attention to any of the other Jeff Monroes we might see at the assassination; he, pockmarks and mustache and glasses, was our authentic Courier and the other two were not to be approached.

  Toward evening we strolled over to the colossal 34-story state capitol building and casually wandered in—sightseers, here to admire Huey’s $5,000,000 edifice. Unobtrusively we entered. Jeff checked the time every few seconds.

  He positioned us where we’d have a good view while still keeping out of range of the bullets.

  We couldn’t help noticing other groups of sightseers slouching into positions nearby. I saw a man who was unmistakably Jeff Monroe standing with one group; another group was clustered around a man of the same size and physique who, however, wore metal-rimmed glasses and had a plum-colored birthmark on one cheek. We made an elaborate show of not looking at these other people. They worked hard at not looking at us.

  I worried about the Cumulative Paradox. It seemed to me that everybody who would ever come up the line to witness Huey Long’s assassination should be right here now—thousands of people, maybe, all crowding round, jostling for a view. Yet there were only a few dozen, representing those who had set out from 2059 and earlier. Why weren’t the others here? Was time so fluid that the same event could be played off infinitely often, for a larger audience each time?

  “Here he comes,” Jeff whispered.

  The Kingfish hurried toward us, his bodyguard close behind. He was short and chubby, with a florid face, a snub nose, orange hair, heavy lips, a deeply cleft chin. I told myself that I could sense the power of the man, and wondered if I might be deluding myself. As he approached he scratched his left buttock, said something to a man to his left, and coughed. His suit was slightly rumpled; his hair was unruly.

  Since we had been coached by our Courier, we knew where to look for the assassin. On a murmured signal from Jeff—not before!—we turned our heads and saw Dr. Carl Austin Weiss detach himself from the crowd, step up to the Senator, and push a .22 automatic pistol into his stomach. He fired one shot. Huey, surprised, fell back, mortally wounded. His bodyguards instantly drew their guns and killed the assassin. Gleaming puddles of blood began to form; people screamed; the red-faced bodyguards pushed at us, hammered at us, told us to get back, get back, get back!

  That was it. The event we had come to see was over.

  It had seeme
d unreal, a playback of ancient history, a clever but not quite convincing tridim. We were impressed with the ingenuity of the process, but we were not awed by the impact of the event.

  Even while the bullets had been flying, none of it had seemed completely true to us.

  Yet those bullets had been real bullets, and if they had hit us, we would have died real deaths.

  And for the two men lying on the capitol’s polished floor, it had been an extremely real event.

  16.

  I went on four more training missions before they certified me as a Time Courier. All my jumps were made in the New Orleans area. I got to know the history of that area a lot better than I ever thought I would.

  The third of these trips was to 1803, the Louisiana Purchase run. I was the only trainee. There were seven tourists. Our Courier was a hard-faced little man named Sid Buonocore. When I mentioned his name to Sam, Sam guffawed and said, “That shady character!”

  “What’s shady about him?”

  “They used to have him on the Renaissance run. Then the Time Patrol caught him pimping lady tourists to Cesare Borgia. The tourist gals paid him nicely, and so did Cesare. Buonocore claimed he was just doing his job—letting his girls get a deeper experience of the Renaissance, you know. But they pulled him back here and stuck him on Louisiana Purchase.”

  “Is a Courier supposed to supervise the sex life of his tourists?” I asked.

  “No, but he isn’t supposed to encourage transtemporal fornication, either.”

  I found the encourager of transtemporal fornication to be an engaging rakish sort. Buonocore was a long way from handsome, but he had an aura of omnivorous sexuality about him that I had to admire. And his high regard for his own welfare was so obvious that it had a certain rapacious charm. You can’t applaud a skulking pick-pocket, but you can cheer an out-and-out brigand. That was what Sid Buonocore was.