The Technicolor Time Machine

“To next spring, yes, you’re right. Do you know what a paradox is, Dallas?”

“The Spanish barber who shaves every guy in town who doesn’t shave himself—so who shaves the barber?”

“That’s the idea—only worse.” Then Barney suddenly remembered the bandaged hand and he held up his right hand and examined it carefully on both sides. “What happened to my hand?”

“It looks great to me,” Dallas said. “You want a drink?”

“It wouldn’t help. I just met myself with a bloody, bandaged hand and I wouldn’t even tell myself how it happened or how bad it was. Do you realize what that means?”

“Yeah, You need maybe two drinks.”

“No matter what you and your Iron Age buddies think, alcohol is not the answer to all problems. It means that I am something unique in the universe. I am a sadomasochist. Everyone else, poor slobs, is limited to being masochistic to themselves or sadistic to others. But I can get a masochistic kick by being sadistic to myself. No other neurotic can make this statement.” He shivered. “I think I can use that drink.”

“I got it right here.”

The drink turned out to be a bargain brand of cheap rye that tasted like formic acid, and it etched such a burning track down Barney’s throat that it did take his mind oft the paradoxes of time and his own sado-compensatory inclinations. “Go take a look, will you Dallas?” he said. “Jump forward to March and find out if any Indians have been sighted yet. If Ottar says no, keep moving forward, a week at a time, until they have been seen, then report back.”

Barney stood clear while the time platform flickered and settled down a few feet from its original position. Dallas climbed down from it and walked over, rasping his palm across his black growth of beard.

“The Prof figures we were away about ten hours in all,” Dallas said. “That will be overtime after eight—”

“Save it! What did you find out?”

“They got a wall put up, all logs like one of those forts in an Indian movie. Everything’s quiet in the beginning of March, but on the last stop, the twenty-first, they spotted a couple of those skin boats.”

“Good enough. Let’s move. Tell the Prof to start shuttling the whole company through to the twenty-second. Is everything and everybody here?”

“Betty checked the invoices and she says okay to that part. Me and Tex called the roll and everyone’s present and accounted for and in the trailers, except for the drivers that is.”

“How’s the March weather?”

“Sunny, but still with a nip in the air.”

“Pass the word about that, to dress up warmly. I don’t want the whole company down with colds.”

Barney walked back to his trailer and found his overcoat and gloves. By the time he returned to the head of the convoy the shuttle was in operation. He rode through into the spring of the year 1006, and a good northern spring it was, too. Watery sunshine did not do much to take the chill out of the air, and there was snow in the hollows and against the north side of the log palisade in the valley below. It did look like a Western fort. Barney signaled to the driver of the pickup that had just arrived on the time platform.

“Take me down there, will you?” he said.

“Next stop Fort Apache,” the driver told him.

Some of the northmen were beginning to straggle up the hill toward the arriving movie company, and the pickup drove past them and pulled up before a narrow opening where a loose log had been pulled aside to make an entrance into the stockade. Ottar was squeezing out through it when they arrived.

“We’re going to have to cut a gate here,” Barney told him. “A big double gate with a sliding bar inside to lock it.”

“No good, too big, too easy to break through. This is the way to do it.”

“You haven’t been going to the right films…”

Barney’s voice ran down into silence as Slithey squeezed through the opening behind Ottar. She was wearing a none too clean dress with a caribou-skin robe pinned over her shoulders. She didn’t have on any makeup and she was carrying a baby on her hip.

“What are you doing here?” he asked querulously, feeling very put upon, that he had had more than enough shocks for one day.

“I been here awhile,” she said, and put her finger into the baby’s mouth and he sucked on it loudly.

“Look, we just came, what’s with the kid?”

“It’s funny, really,” she said, and giggled to prove it. “After we were ready to go last summer, it was so long waiting in the trailer that I went out for a walk, fresh air, you know.”

“I don’t know, and I have a feeling I don’t want to. Are you telling me that you spent the whole time here instead of making the jump with the rest of us?”

“That’s just what happened, I was so surprised. I went for this walk and I met Ottar, and one thing led to another, you know…”

“This time I do know.”

“And before I realized it everyone was gone. I was frightened, I tell you. I must have cried for weeks and weeks, and going accidental like that I didn’t take my pills with me.”

“That’s yours then?” Barney said, poindng.