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C:\Users\John\Downloads\J\Joe Haldeman - No Future In It.pdb
PDB Name: Joe Haldeman - No Future In It
Creator ID: REAd
PDB Type: TEXt
Version: 0
Unique ID Seed: 0
Creation Date: 30/12/2007
Modification Date: 30/12/2007
Last Backup Date: 01/01/1970
Modification Number: 0
NO FUTURE IN I T
It's not easy to keep exactly one-eighth inch of beard on your face. For a
writer, though, it's good protective coloration. With a suit and tie, you look
like a gentleman who's decided to grow a beard. With rumpled old Salvation
Army clothes, you look like a down-and-out rummy. It depends on the class of
people you want to listen to, study.
I was in the rummy outfit when I met Bill Caddis and heard his incredible
story. At first I
thought Bill was on the same scam I was; he talked too well to be in the dreg
business. He was for real, though.
There's this wonderful sleaze bar in downtown Tampa. No name, just a bunch of
beer signs in the window. The one for Pearl has a busted laser that flutters
stroboscopically. You don't want to sit too near the window. It's a good bar
for private conversations because it's right under the twelve-laner that
sweeps out over the bay, and there's a constant moan of traffic, all day and
all night. There's a fine gritty layer of plaster dust everywhere, and not too
much light. The bartender is missing an eye and ten front teeth, and smiles
frequently. The booze is cheap; they make most of their money upstairs, and
like to have lots of customers in the bar, for camouflage.
I sat down at the bar and the bartender polished glasses while one of the
whores, a pretty boy-girl, sidled in for the kill. When I said no she pleaded
mechanically, saying she was saving for a real pair of tits and the Operation.
I hesitated I string for the Bad News wire service sometimes, and they like
sexy pathos but turned her down more finally. Bad News doesn't pay that well.
When she left the bartender came over and I ordered a Myers's with a beer
chaser, suitable hard-core combination. I'd taken two Flame-outs before I
came, though, so I could drink a dozen or so without too ill effect. Until
morning.
"Little early in the day for that, isn't it?" The man next to me chuckled
hoarsely. "Not to criticize." He was nursing a double bourbon or scotch, neat.
"Dusty," I said. The man was dressed a little more neatly than I, in faded
work clothes. He looked too old to be a laborer, shock of white hair with a
yellowish cast. But he did have the deep tan and permanent squint of one who's
spent decades in the Florida sun. I tossed back the jigger of rum and sipped
the beer. "Come here often?"
"Pretty often," he said. "When my check comes in I put a few bucks on a
number.
Otherwise . . ." He shrugged. "Cheap whiskey and pretty women. To look at."
"How many of them do you think are women?"
"Just looking, who cares?" He squinted even more, examining me. "Could I see
your palms?"
Oh, boy, I thought, a fortuneteller. Might be a story if he actually believes
in it. I held out my hands.
He glanced at them and stared at my face. "Yeah, I could tell by the eyes," he
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said softly.
"You're no alcoholic. You're not as old as you look, either. Cop?"
"No. Used to be a teacher." Which was true. "Every now and then I go on these
binges."
He nodded slowly. "Used to be a teacher, too. Until '83. Then I worked the
sponge boats twenty years." When he picked up his glass, his hand had the
regular slow shake of a confirmed alky. "It was good work."
I reached in my pocket and turned on the tape recorder. "Why was it you
stopped teaching? Booze?"
"No . . . who drank in the eighties?" I didn't, but I wasn't old enough. "It's
an interesting sort of pancake. You want to hear a story?"
"Sure." I signaled the bartender for two drinks.
"Now, you don't have to buy me anything. You won't believe the story, anyhow."
"Try me."
"You a social worker? Undercover social worker?" He smiled wryly.
"Is there such a thing?"
"Should be. I know. You're a writer."
"When I get work, yeah. How could you tell, Sherlock?"
"You've got two pens in your pocket and you want to hear a story." He smiled.
"Steal a story, maybe. But you'll never get it published. It's too fantastic."
"But true."
"It's true, all right. Thank you kindly." He touched his new drink to see
whether it was real, then drained off the old one in one gulp and sighed.
"My name's Bill Caddis. Doctor William Caddis, it used to be."
"Medical doctor?"
"I detect a note of reproof. As if no medico ever well. No, I was an academic,
newly tenured at Florida State. History department. Modern American history."
"Hard to get a job then as it is now?"
"Just about. I was a real whiz."
"But you got fired in '83."
"That's right. And it's not easy to fire a tenured professor."
"What, boffing the little girls?"
That was the only time he laughed that day, a kind of wheeze. "Undergraduates
were made for boffing. No, I was dismissed on grounds of mental instability;
with my wife's help, my then wife, they almost had me institutionalized."
"Strong stuff."
"Strong." He stared into his drink and swirled it around. "I never know how to
start this.
I've told dozens of people and they all think I'm crazy before I get halfway
into it. You'll think I'm crazy too.
"
"Just jump in feet first. Like you say, I'm a writer. I can believe in six
impossible things before my first drink in the morning.
"
"All right. I'm not from ... here."
A loony, I thought; there goes the price of a double. "Another planet," I said
seriously.
"See? Now you want me to say something about UFOs and how I'm bringing the
secret of eternal peace to mankind." He raised the glass to me. "Thanks for
the drink."
I caught his arm before he could slug it down. "Wait. I'm sorry. Go on."
"Am I wrong?"
"You're right, but go on. You don't act crazy."
He set the drink down. "Layman's error. Some of the most reasonable people you
meet are strictly Almond Joy."
"If you're not from `here,' where are you from?"
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"Miami." He smiled and took a sip. "I'm a time traveler. I'm from a future."
I just nodded.
"That usually takes some explaining. There's no `the' future. There's a myriad
of futures radiating from every instant. If I were to drop this glass on the
floor, and it broke, we would shift into a future where this bar owned one
less glass."
"And the futures where the glass wasn't broken ..."
"They would be. And we would be in them; we are now."
"Doesn't it get sort of crowded up there? Billions of new futures every
second?"
"You can't crowd infinity."
I was trying to think of an angle, a goofball feature. "How does this time
travel work?"
"How the hell should I know? I'm just a tourist. It has something to do with
chronons.
Temporal Uncertainty Principle. Conservation of coincidence. I'm no engineer."
"Are there lots of these tourists?"
"Probably not, here and now. You get quite a crowd clustered around
historically important events. You can't see them, of course.
"
"I can see you."
He shrugged. "Something went wrong. Power failure or something; someone
tripped over a cable. Happens."
"They didn't try to come back and rescue you?"
"How could they? There are lots of futures but only one past. Once I
materialized here, I
wasn't in my own past anymore. See?" "So you can kill your own grandfather," I
said.
"Why would I want to do that? He's a nice old bird."
"No, I mean, there's no paradox involved? If you killed him before you were
born, you wouldn't cease to exist?"
"Of course not. I'd have to be there to kill him." He sipped. "For that
matter, I could go
back and kill myself, as a boy. If I could afford it. Travel gets more
expensive, the closer you get to the present. Like compressing an infinitely
tough spring.
"
"Hold it." I had him. "I'll buy another round if you can talk your way out of
this one. The
Earth is moving all the time, spinning around, going around the Sun; the Suns
moving
'
through space. How the hell do you aim this time machine?"
He bleared at me. "Don't they teach you anything about relativity? Look, if
you get up
from the bar, go to the john, and come back in a couple of minutes the bar's
moved thousands of miles. But it's still here. You're on the same track,
that's all."
"But I'm talking about time and you're talking about space!"
"There's a difference?" He drained his glass and slid it toward me with one
finger.
I decided I'd stay long enough to find out what his con was. Maybe do a
one-pager for a crime magazine. I ordered him another double. "You folks from
the future can sure hold your liquor.
"
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"Couple of centuries of medicine," he said. "I'm ninety-two years old." He
looked about seventy.
Looked like I was going to have to push him for the gaff. "Seems to me you
could be a
millionaire. Knowing where to invest . . ."
"It's not that easy. I tried. I should have left well enough alone." His drink
came and he stuck his fingertip in it; flicked a drop away. "I'm sort of a
Moslem," he said. "Not supposed
to drink a drop of liquor.
"People try it all the time; there's no law against it. But put yourself in
this position: you're going to deliberately strand yourself two hundred years
in the past. What do you do for capital? Buy old money from collectors?"
"You could take gold and diamonds."
"Sure. But if you can afford that and time travel isn't cheap either why not
invest it in your own present? Remember, once you materialize, you aren't in
your own past anymore.
You can never tell what might have changed. People do try it, though. Usually
they take gadgets."
"Does it work?"
"Who knows? They can't come back to tell about it."
"Couldn't they build their own time machine, go back to the future?"
"Aren't you hearing me? There's no such thing as the future. Even if you could
travel forward, there's no way you could find the right one."
Somebody came into the bar; I waited until the door eased shut, muting the
traffic noise.
"So what happened to you? You made some bad investments?"
"In spades. Seemed like a sure thing.
"Let me explain. Where I come from, almost nobody lives on Earth, just
caretakers and the time travel people. It's like a big park, a big museum.
Most of us live in orbital settlements, some on other planets.
"I really was a history professor, specializing in the history of technology.
I saved up my money to go back and see the first flight to the Moon."
"That was in '70?"
"No, '69. It was during the launch when the accident happened. Nobody noticed
me materializing; I didn't even notice until I tried to walk through someone
afterward.
"Fortunately, that was a time when everybody dressed as they damn well
pleased, so my clothes didn't look especially outrageous. I bummed my way down
to Homestead and picked
up some work sorting tomatoes, that kind of thing. Saved up enough to get fake
IDs made up, eventually went back to school and wound up teaching again.
Married along the way."
"The one who tried to put you in the peanut jar."
"That's right. Here's what happened. If there was one sure thing to invest in,
it was space.
My wife didn't agree, but there was no way I could tell her why I was so sure.
"I went ahead and invested heavily in space industries really heavily, buying
on margin, wheeling, dealing but my wife thought it was all going into a
conservative portfolio of municipals. I even snitched some stationery from our
accountant and wrote up annual reports to show her."
"I think I see what's coming." Not a bad story.
"Yeah. The Soviet-American Orbital Nonproliferation Treaty, the goddamned
Proxmire
Bill."
"Well, killer satellites ..."
"That's the kicker. That's really the kicker. In my future's past, it was the
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killer satellites that ended the possibility of nuclear war forever! They
finally scrapped the missiles and settled down to shouting across tables."
"Well, you can't think we're in any danger of nuclear war now. Not
realistically."
"Yeah. I liked our way better. Anyway, the bottom dropped out. I had to tell
my wife that we were broke and in debt; I had to tell her everything. I
thought I knew her. I thought she would believe. The rest is pretty obvious."
"Sponge boats."
"Right." He took a long drink and stared moodily into the cloudy mirror behind
the bar.
"That's it?" No scam?
"That's it. Write it up. You'll never sell it."
I checked my watch. Could just make the 1:35 to Atlanta, get in a half day at
the typewriter. "Well, I gotta run. Thanks for the story, Bill."
I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder. "Take it easy on the sauce, okay?
You're no spring chicken anymore." "Sure." He never looked at me.
On the way to the subway terminal it occurred to me that I shouldn't try to
sell the thing as a human-interest feature. Just write it up as fiction and I
could hawk it to
Planet Stories or one of those rags.
The ticket machine gave me an argument about changing a hundred-ruble note and
I had to go find a conductor. Then there were repairs going on and it took us
twenty minutes to get to Atlanta; I had to sprint to make my Seattle
connection.
Space settlements. Time travel. Nobody would swallow that kind of bull, not in
1924.
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