Mendoza in Hollywood (Company) Page 14

  “Well, that’s just the right thing to say to Houdini—or the wrong thing, depending on your point of view. His mother died a few years previous, and he has this strong attachment to her, kind of a Freudian thing, you know? He’s been positive she’ll send him a message from the beyond, only years have gone by now and she hasn’t, though he’s paid plenty of bucks to spiritualists and mediums. Not that they don’t claim she’s trying to talk to him, but the messages are all obvious fakes.

  “Finally he decides it’s all a lot of bull and becomes an obsessive debunker. Inside, though, he wants to believe. So he flies back from Catalina with this guy, and they go to Laurel Canyon. They meet Dr. Sherrinford. What happens next?

  “Nobody ever gives complete testimony; but again, if you know where to look, you can piece it together, what happens down in the crystal chamber. Houdini goes there, all right, with Dr. Sherrinford and his disciples, and they hold a big ceremony with chanting and pull out all the stops, they’re levitating and speaking in tongues. It sets off the crystal. And when it discharges, apparently a lot of dead guys want to speak with Houdini. Only problem is, some of them are ordinary dead and some of them claim to be dead guys from the future, from a time when there isn’t time. And they aren’t all agreed on the usual spirit patter about being happy on the other side and telling everyone that it’s all niceness and harmony over there. In fact, they start to fight.

  “They fight so violently, they cause something like a small earthquake. The tunnel collapses, or becomes blocked. What happens to Dr. Sherrinford and his gang is never known, but Houdini manages to escape by getting to the jammed elevator and worming his way through an air vent, after which he climbs the cable. He takes off down the canyon into the night.

  “Why doesn’t he call the cops? Why doesn’t he make any attempt to rescue Dr. Sherrinford’s people? We’ll never know. Whatever took place, it scares Houdini half to death. He opens negotiations to buy that property, though, which shows that something about it has a hold on him. History’s a little vague about whether he ever closes the deal, but there’s an account that he’s visited in his hotel room by one of the disciples, who may or may not be a survivor of the crystal chamber. Houdini leaves on the train for New York the same day, and never stays in Los Angeles again. In fact he leaves America a month later and goes on an extended tour abroad. Spends the rest of his life trying to prove that there is no other side and that the dead can’t talk.”

  “So there’ll be an earthquake,” I said, shrugging. “It buries the cultists, and Houdini gets out because of his special abilities. Afterward somebody blackmails him about running off and leaving the others to die. Creepy, but not inexplicable.”

  “I’d agree,” Einar said, grinning at me, “except for the fact that in 2072 a bunch of people in white robes come wading out of the surf off Bermuda claiming to be Montgomery Sherrinford and his disciples. They disappear into an asylum and out of the historical record pretty fast, though.”

  “Hoaxers,” I said firmly, shaking my head. I caught sight of a weird-looking thing poking through the dead leaves at the base of a Rhus laurina. A kind of fungus? Root parasite? Um-shaped flowers bright green—some member of the heath family? At this elevation? And what were those curling scales? I accessed at top speed and found not a single identification. If it were possible for my immortal heart to skip a beat, it would have done so then. Visions of Favorable Mutation bonuses for Sarcodes mendozai danced before my eyes.

  “I’m going to dismount now,” I informed Einar. “I think there’s something really remarkable here.”

  “You can say that again,” said Einar, taking firm hold of the cord that connected us. He watched as I slid down—and I could feel something through the soles of my boots, a pulsing. There was a cracking sound and a flash of bluest light. I grabbed at my saddle in panic, but that was no good either, the horse just swayed away from me. Einar seemed a long distance off. And where was the damned plant?

  I looked around, expecting to see a landscape festooned with melting clocks. What I saw was no less strange. Immediately beside me, and stretching up and down the canyon, was a long river of gleaming rounded things, inching slowly forward in a stinking miasma of chemical smoke like so many mechanical turtles. They weren’t blue. They weren’t transparent. Behind smoked glass, open-mouthed faces stared at me.

  “Einar.” I felt blindly for the cord. “There are unborn here.”

  “I know.” His voice was faint. I looked over at him, and he was staring at me in horror, just as solidly there as I was, as the vehicles were. “So much for the cord, huh? I guess it just pulled me after you.”

  “These are late-twentieth-century automobiles.”

  “Yes.”

  I found myself hyperventilating. It was a mistake among the gasoline fumes. I looked around wildly. Everywhere were strange Japanese names in chrome. To hell with Sarcodes mendozai. I scrambled back up on my horse. The cars didn’t go away. People were pointing at us.

  “They’re pointing at us,” I said. “What do we do, for God’s sake? Will they shoot at us, will they start rioting?”

  “Let’s stay calm,” Einar said, though his knuckles were white where he gripped the reins. “Let’s ride straight up that ridge and out of here. Maybe we’ll, like, snap back to 1862 painlessly. Okay?”

  We didn’t. From the ridge above, we looked out on a clutter of houses. And what was the matter with the distant plain? Had the sea level risen? No; that roaring, gleaming gridwork was a city, stretching away to the horizon. We stared at it in shock. It was a city in the future, which I had always thought would be beautiful, but it wasn’t beautiful at all. The air was brown. The sunlight looked red through it, sunset color at midday.

  “Now . . . this isn’t possible,” I said to Einar. “Right? You can’t go forward past your own time. Everybody knows that.”

  He nodded mutely.

  “So it’s just an illusion. No transcendence field, no stasis gas, so we can’t even have gone back in time, let alone forward.”

  He nodded again. “Except,” he said reluctantly, “that there are some recorded instances of people doing it. People in old-fashioned clothes suddenly turning up in future traffic and getting hit by cars, for instance.”

  “And of course those have to be unsubstantiated fictions, because it can’t really happen. Dr. Zeus says so.” I drew in a lungful of the acrid air and coughed. “Is this smog? How can people live like this?”

  “Come on.” Einar turned his horse’s head. “There’s supposed to be a relay station in Hollywood in this time period. Jumping ahead through time may be impossible for Dr. Zeus, but it obviously ain’t impossible for Lookout Mountain Drive.”

  We rode down the ridge, accessing coordinates as we went. Immediately to the south of us rose a gated wall topped by what would have been Ionic columns if they were ten times bigger. As it was, they looked cheesy. Beyond them was a sprawling community of flat-topped mansions in ghastly mid-twentieth-century style, roofs covered with white gravel, walls faced with Hawaiian lava, everything deliberately off-center and out of balance, from the winding front walks to the kidney-shaped pools in each backyard. Black letters on the wall told us this was MOUNT OLYMPUS.

  We found our way in, past the corner of Vulcan Drive, and proceeded down Olympus Drive. “Oh, they didn’t.” I said. “Did they?”

  Einar smiled wryly and pointed at a little cul-de-sac with the grand name of Zeus Drive. The architecture there was just as crappy, even on the house that was obviously our relay station, the one with the Dr. Zeus logo picked out in green pebbles on the red-pebble tessellation of the front walk. There wasn’t a living soul in sight, which was a good thing, under the circumstances.

  We rode up the concrete driveway and sat there looking uncertainly at the very ugly house. There were no stables anywhere that I could see, though there was a sensor array on the roof, disguised to look like satellite television equipment.

  Uh . . .Operatives Einar and Mendoza r
eporting. Please provide codes, transmitted Einar. As we watched, the broad garage door swung open of its own accord to reveal a couple of frightened-looking techs in coveralls.

  “Come inside. Hurry!” hissed one of them. We urged our horses forward, and as soon as we were inside, the garage door clanked down after us. Our horses, who had been patient and unflappable until then, spooked; I just scrambled off mine and dodged its panicky dance, but Einar controlled his with an iron hand and caught my mount’s reins. The techs cowered in a corner.

  “Whoa, whoa,” said Einar. He dismounted and caught his horse’s head, stroking its muzzle and looking into its eyes. “You don’t want to step on anybody, do you? Of course you don’t. That’s a good boy. And how about you, sweetie, you want to calm down too? Pretty girl. Good girl.”

  “You’re talking to the horses,” said one of the techs in disbelief.

  “Yeah,” he said, and I don’t think he noticed that they found it distasteful. I noticed, though. I knew who they were at once: operatives from the future, doing time on a mission in what was their past, though their past was more than a hundred years ahead of us. I’ve worked with that kind before. They’re stuck-up.

  “I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing here,” Einar said, but the tech who had more buttons on his coveralls than the other snapped:

  “No, we’re not. There was a distortion in the temporal field. We monitored it. You’re an anomaly. You’ll have to report immediately to the temporal transference chamber for return to your point of origin. This way!” He pointed, and the other one opened a door in the wall beside what appeared to be late-twentieth-century laundry appliances.

  “What about the horses?” I said.

  The tech got a look of horror on his face. He wrung his hands. At last he replied, “They’ll have to come too. Just hurry!”

  They scuttled ahead of us through the door. Einar and I exchanged bemused glances, but led our respective mounts through the doorway.

  Horses look big in houses. Ours clopped after us through what was apparently a kitchen, across a smooth substance that must have been linoleum tile—I didn’t think it looked all that bad—but the sound of their hooves was muffled when we emerged into a much larger room, because it was carpeted in synthetic fiber of a sickly beige color.

  I was disoriented at once. The floor was on a couple of different levels, for no reason I could understand, and one whole wall slanted inward. Across the room was another rise to the floor, and there was a fireplace with no mantelpiece, only flagstones set around it, flush into the wall instead of on the floor, where flagstones belonged. In front of the hearth, where the flagstones should have been, the beige carpet went right up to the andirons. Stranger still, the entire west wall of the room was made of glass: four enormous panes gave a breathtaking view of the roofs of other houses across the canyon but robbed the room of any warmth or privacy.

  The horses were disoriented too. Einar’s gave its opinion of the decor with one good lift of its tail.

  The tech leader jumped three feet, clapping his hands over his nose and mouth. “Aaagh! You filthy—oh, you filthy—”

  Someone in the room burst out laughing. An immortal rose from a shapeless piece of furniture and surveyed the mess. She wore the unisex clothing of that era, ordinary jeans like Einar’s and a plain white cotton shirt. She turned to us.

  “You must be the two unfortunates who surfed the temporal wave. How do you feel?” she said pleasantly, as though what had happened was no big deal.

  “There is excrement on the floor. The carpet will have to be disinfected,” said the tech.

  “Oh, shut up and go get a shovel. If we’ve got one around here. You’d have to be Zoologist Einar and, let’s see, Botanist Mendoza, wasn’t it? Maire, regional facilitator.” The immortal shook our hands, for some reason pausing with me, but only a fraction of a second. “Don’t worry. We can deal with the Lookout Mountain anomaly a lot better in this era; we’ve been studying it from this station for years now. You’ll be all right. I’d love to let you stay a couple of days and show you around, but—”

  “Those things have got to get out of here,” said the tech. “What if one of them does number one?”

  “—as you see, we have a crisis on our hands,” Maire said, indicating the tech with a grimace. “So if you don’t mind, we’ll just whisk you back to 1962. Sorry we couldn’t be more hospitable.” With a wave she directed us into a space beyond the room—there wasn’t exactly a doorway, and I couldn’t quite figure the geometry of the house, but it seemed to be an entry hall. One wall was covered with beige drapery. She pulled a cord, and the draperies drew to one side, revealing not a window but a glass chamber, smooth and featureless inside. It looked like one of those streamlined aluminum travel trailers mortals will tow around behind their automobiles in that century, but it seemed to have been built into the house.

  Maire pressed a series of buttons, and a door slid open. She gestured for us to enter. The horses didn’t want to go, but Einar managed to sweet-talk them over the silver threshold. As he was doing so, I heard the roar of an automobile outside approaching the house, stopping abruptly as it pulled into the driveway. Once the horses were in with us, the door slid shut, and we felt the cabin pressurizing.

  “Nobody seems very surprised to see us,” I murmured to Einar.

  “Well, but they had to have known we were coming. The Temporal Concordance would have told them.” Einar soothed and stroked my mount, which was more panicked than his.

  “But if what we just did is impossible, you’d think they’d want to study us—” I broke off as Maire stepped forward to the control console.

  She tapped in a combination on the buttons and stood back, looking at us through the window. She took a small cylinder from her pocket and spoke into it. Her voice came hollowly from the air above our heads. “It’s warming up. Transcendence in approximately thirty seconds. Brace yourselves.”

  Yellow vapor began to curl into the air from no source I could see. I inhaled deeply; stasis gas is a lot easier on the lungs than smog. Beyond our window, the door opened, and a man entered the house, setting down a leather case and tossing his keys on the hall table. He was an immortal, in an expensive-looking twentieth-century suit that must have been tailored but somehow seemed too big on him. He looked familiar. As he turned his head to stare at us, I recognized him: Lewis, with whom I’d been stationed at New World One for years and years. Strange, I thought, two old friends in a matter of months. Lewis had been the last person I hugged back in 1700, when I said good-bye at the transport lounge before I came to California. Hadn’t he been going to England? But that was three hundred years ago by this time. I smiled and waved. I could see Maire smiling too, pointing at us and explaining something to him, but of course I couldn’t hear behind the glass.

  He didn’t hear her either, I don’t think. He was staring at me with the most incredulous expression on his face, which had gone perfectly white. Suddenly he flung himself at the window, pounding on it, shouting silently at me. What on earth? And why the urgency? The air in the room grew suddenly icy, the yellow gas boiled around me and obscured his desperate face. I was growing numb with the transcendence, but I managed to read his lips.

  Mendoza, for God’s sake! Don’t go with him!

  I turned my head slowly to Einar. He was looking confused. He met my eyes and shrugged. I looked back at Lewis, shaking my head and holding out my hands. Were those tears in his eyes? He was mouthing no over and over, both palms pressed flat against the glass as if trying to push it in. The yellow gas was almost opaque now. I reached out my hand in slow motion and set it on the window, palm to palm with him through the glass, though I could no longer see his face. Then the transcendence came, and it was a lovely thing, pleasurable even with the feeling of infinite violence being done to one, as if you were picked up and thrown into the void forever, or flying . . .

  Then there was a strong wind blowing the fog away, and I stumbled and fell to m
y knees, choking. I was groping in red sand, trying to rise in a thicket of sagebrush and spurge laurel. There were the horses, flailing and struggling, and there was Einar, doubled up on hands and knees, gasping out yellow smoke.

  I scanned blearily. No houses, no deadly city on the plain. We were on the ridge above Laurel Canyon, in the same space we’d occupied 134 years earlier. Later? Whatever. I sank down as Einar was doing and panted, clearing my lungs. Neither one of us said anything for a few minutes. Even the horses gave up and lay still while their mortal nervous systems recovered.

  Finally Einar turned over and sat up, resting his head in his hands.

  “What was up with that guy?” he asked. “Why didn’t he want you to go with me?”

  “No idea.” I shook my head. “We used to be good friends, back before I came to California. I haven’t seen him in ages.”

  I couldn’t remember ever having seen Lewis that upset, even when his lady friends dumped him, as sometimes happened. He was one of those genuinely nice guys who somehow always wind up alone. I was always alone, myself. It had been what made us friends.

  Einar and I both shrugged.

  Once the horses were able to get up, we left that place, walking and leading them, because the trail down from the ridge was steep and tricky. Halfway back, my horse began to cough and shudder, then abruptly fell. Blood gushed from its wide nostrils as it gave one last convulsive twitch. The stress of the time journey, I guess. Einar sank down on his knees and cried.

  It was hours before we stumbled into our own canyon, to the welcome smell of beef being grilled over a mesquite fire. There was blessed silence: no cars, no phantoms, only the oak trees and chaparral and one or two stars winking in the twilight sky. Porfirio was crouched over the fire, turning the steaks. He looked up as we approached.

  “There you are. What happened to the mare?”