Martian Time Slip

"St. Louis."

"It is much different here. A new, freer life. Where one can cast off the shackles and be oneself; do you agree? The old mores and customs, an antiquated Old World, best forgotten in its own dust. Here--" He glanced about the living room, with its commonplace furnishings; he had seen such chairs, carpeting, bric-a-brac hundreds of times, in similar homes. "Here we see the clash of the extraordinary, the pulse, Mrs. Bohlen, of opportunity which strikes the brave person only once--once--in his lifetime."

"What else do you have beside kangaroo-tail soup?"

"Well," he said, frowning inwardly, "quail eggs; very good. Real cow butter. Sour cream. Smoked oysters. Here--you please bring forth ordinary soda crackers and I will supply the butter and caviar, as a treat." He smiled at her, and was rewarded by a spontaneous, beaming smile in return; her eyes sparkled with anticipation and she hopped impulsively to her feet to go scampering, like a little child, to the kitchen.

Presently they sat together, huddled over the table, scraping the black, oily fish eggs from the tiny jar onto crackers.

"There's nothing like genuine caviar," Silvia said, sighing. "I only had it once before in my life, at a restaurant in San Francisco."

"Observe what else I have." From his suitcase he produced a bottle. "Green Hungarian, from the Buena Vista Winery in California; the oldest winery in that state!"

They sipped wine from long-stemmed glasses. (He had brought the glasses, too.) Silvia lay back against the couch, her eyes half-closed. "Oh, dear. This is like a fantasy. It can't really be happening."

"But it is." Otto set his glass down and leaned over her. She breathed slowly, regularly, as if asleep; but she was watching him fixedly. She knew exactly what was going on. And as he bent nearer and nearer she did not stir; she did not try to slide away.

The food and wine, he reckoned as he took hold of her, had set him back--in retail value--almost a hundred UN dollars. It was well worth it, to him, at least.

His old story, repeating itself. Again, it was not union scale. It was much more, Otto thought a little later on, when they had moved from the living room to the bedroom with its window shades pulled down, the room in unstirring gloom, silent and receptive to them, made, as he well knew, for just such happenings as this.

"Nothing like this," Silvia murmured, "has ever happened before in my entire life." Her voice was full of contentment and acquiescence, as if emerging from far away. "Am I drunk, is that it? Oh, my Lord."

For a long time, then, she was silent.

"Am I out of my niind?" she murmured, later on. "I must be insane. I just can't believe it, I know it isn't real. So how can it matter, how can what you do in a dream be wrong?"

After that, she said nothing at all.

She was exactly the kind he liked: the kind that didn't talk a lot.

What is insanity? Jack Bohlen thought. It was, for him, the fact that somewhere he had lost Manf red Steiner and did not remember how or when. He remembered almost nothing of the night before, at Arnie Kott's place; piece by piece, from what Doreen told him, he had managed to patch together an image of what had taken place. Insanity--to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

But the lapse in memory was a symptom of a deeper disturbance. It indicated that his psyche had taken an abrupt leap ahead in time. And this had taken place after a period in which he had lived through, several times, on some unconscious level, that very section which was now missing.

He had sat, he realized, in Arnie Kott's living room again and again, experiencing that evening before it arrived; and then, when at last it had taken place in actuality, he had bypassed it. The fundamental disturbance in time-sense, which Dr. Glaub believed was the basis of schizophrenia, was now harassing him.

That evening at Arnie's had taken place, and had existed for him... but out of sequence.

In any case, there was no way that it could be restored. For it now lay in the past. And a disturbance of the sense of past time was not symptomatic of schizophrenia but of compulsive-obsessive neurosis. His problem--as a schizophrenic--lay entirely with the future.

And his future, as he now saw it, consisted mostly of Arnie Kott and Arnie's instinctive drive for revenge.

What chance do we have against Arnie? he asked himself.

Almost none.

Turning from the window of Doreen's living room, he walked slowly into the bedroom and gazed down at her as she lay, still asleep, in the big, rumpled double bed.