Amazing Stories – May 1956
(1956)*
Randall Garrett
(as by Ivar Jorgensen)
Want to see the hanging gardens of Babylon? Care to spend an afternoon at the Roman games in the Colosseum? Or perhaps a jaunt hack into the pre-Cro-Magnon days where you could watch Man discover fire? Okay? Fine, but one thing—you'll have to wait until Time of Your Life Tours is organized. It won't be long now.
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The sign on the door, in gold-bordered black letters on pebbled glass, said:
TIME OF YOUR LIFE
TOURS, INC.
The office was on the twenty-second floor of a first-rate office building in midtown Manhattan, and in my business I don't get to see too many first-rate office buildings. I'm a private dick—not exactly giving old man Pinkerton gray hair, but it's a living.
I opened the door and waded across a carpet deep enough to hide mice in. There were murals on the wall and right away I began to figure it was some kind of history club. I'm not a bug on history or archaeology, but when I see pictures of Egyptian pyramids and Doric Grecian temples and Sancta Sophia and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, I recognize them.
Sitting surrounded by all this history and holding down a circular desk was the kind of girl that belongs in a first-rate office building. She had hair which once would have been called strawberry blonde but now the name if not the color is out of fashion. These days they call it copper. She had the deepest blue eyes I have ever seen. She was beautiful and while the high round desk hid her figure from the ribs down, what you could see of her body in a shimmering blue dress as tight as a corn husk fits an ear of corn was every bit as breath-taking as the face.
I handed her my calling card and studied her while she studied it. "Mr. Elgin," I said. "I have an appointment with him."
Her eyes met mine and she said, "You're supposed to look at the pictures, not the receptionist."
"I've seen pyramids and things before."
"But not actual photographs of what they looked like in their heyday."
"Are you trying to tell me—"
She gave me back the card and said, "I'm not trying to tell you anything. If your eyes are retractable please pull them in while I tell Mr. Elgin you are here, Mr. Cabot."
She had taken the round on points, so I retreated to my corner and waited for the bell. After a while she said, "Down the hall and through the first door on your left, Mr. Cabot."
I was halfway down the hall before I realized something was funny. The office. It was a large suite of rooms and it must have cost them plenty, but there wasn't a customer or a client in the large waiting room and the place looked so neat it didn't seem there had ever been one. Except for the gorgeous receptionist there didn't seem to be another employee of TIME OF YOUR LIFE TOURS, INC., either, except for Mr. Elgin, who I was going to see. There had to be a catch somewhere.
Otherwise, this whole layout was for my benefit.
I knocked on Mr. Elgin's door and a deep voice told me to come in. The office was completely devoid of furniture. It was big and bare and my footsteps echoed as I walked across it. Mr. Elgin sat, yogi-fashion, in the middle of the floor. He was smoking a cigar and incredibly the cigar smelled exactly like roast chicken.
"Mind if I finish my lunch?" he asked politely between puffs.
I looked at the cigar. It was a little yellowish for a cigar, but it looked more like a cigar than it did like roast chicken. The smell was still there, though. Every time Elgin exhaled, I got a whiff of it. Roast chicken. And no tobacco smell at all.
"Hearty appetite," I said, going along with the gag.
Elgin appraised me and said, "You're cool, Cabot. I guess in your line of work you have to be."
"In my line of work you have to be whatever the client wants. You might say my line of work is trouble. Other people's trouble."
"Well, I have plenty of it, Cabot."
"Shoot," I said, and gave the prospective client a good looking over. He was a big fellow who could have filled a man of distinction and to perfection. He had close-cropped salt and pepper hair and a hard handsome face. I put him somewhere between forty-five and fifty. He had enormous shoulders and a thick chest, but he wasn't dressed right. On the receptionist I had called the garment a dress. But it wasn't a dress. He was wearing one too and on him it was simply a close-fitting sheath which bisected itself to slacks on either leg.
"Masquerade?" I said before he could begin his story.
"It would be a masquerade," Elgin assured me, "if I were wearing what you're wearing."
"Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
"I hope it does before we're finished here."
"Go ahead, Mr. Elgin."
"TIME OF YOUR LIFE, INC. has lost one of its cruise ships." Elgin began. "We want you, to find it."
"Where do you cruise to?"
"Oh, just about all over. Thebes in Egypt, Periclean Athens, Chichen Itza under the Mayans, Sumer and Akkad, Ur of the Chaldees, the Battle of Waterloo, the Signing of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Hastings, the Assassination of Caesar, the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Building of the Tower of Babel, the Dropping of the First A Bomb on Hiroshima, the Battle of Heartbreak Fridge, the Death of Hitler. Just about anywhen."
"Any what?" I said.
"Any when," he repeated, making two words out of it this time. "TIME OF YOUR LIFE means exactly that, Mr. Cabot. We take guided tours through time."
"Look, Jack," I said, getting sore because I thought he was pulling my leg, "if you have a case for me, I'm interested. But if this is someone's idea of a practical joke—"
"Relax, Mr. Cabot. I assure you I would have no reason under the sun to play a joke on you, although, in a way, a sham has been attempted."
"So now it comes out."
"But only in one respect. This is a vacant suite of rooms, Mr. Cabot. You have been hypnotized to accept the furniture in the waiting room as real but you'll notice there's no furniture here in this room. We didn't want to fool you: we merely wanted you to accept us. You see?"
"What about this receptionist?" I asked.
Elgin smiled for the first time. "Real enough, I assure you. Shall we go on?"
I said we should go on.
"Dru is the pilot of the missing time-ship," Mr. Elgin said. "She's the girl outside. She had taken a six-man tour of V.I.P.s in our own age—"
"Which is when?" I asked, although I believed none of it so far.
"Fourteen hundred years in the future, but that isn't important. Anyway, she took the V.I.P.s back here, to the mid-twentieth century. Prometheus Tours, our chief rival, thought this would be a splendid opportunity to discredit us. Accordingly, the time-ship was hijacked with its six V.I.P.s aboard. Dru was left here in your century. She contacted me and I came running in a two man scout-ship."
"What do you need a private detective for?" I said. "I don't know a damn thing about time travel. I don't even know if I really believe you or not."
"Because one of us, either Dru or myself, has got to stay here when the time ship is shuttled back. The other one might need some help."
"So why not recruit it from your own century?"
"Because we're trying to keep this thing quiet. Because I don't even want my own staff to know. Because time travel is under attack by certain anti-progress organizations in our own day and I don't want to give them fuel for their fire, as you would say. Will you help us?"
"My rates are fifty dollars a day plus expenses," I said, although I would have settled for half of that.
"Splendid. I'll have Dru make you some money right away."
"Make it, did you say?"
"Why yes, of course. TIME OF YOUR LIFE can't be expected to have on hand currency for each of a thousand civilizations that might be visited. We make our own money as it is needed."
"No," I said, "thanks."
"We don't counterfeit it. We make it."
"There's a difference?"
"In this case there is. The money we make is perfect money. Your Treasury Department experts couldn't tell it apart from the real thing. Here, I have a few bills in my pocket." He took out two twenties and a ten and gave them to me. I'm no expert but they looked like the real thing.
I returned them to Mr. Elgin and shook my head, saying, "If this is some kind of elaborate stunt to pass out counterfeit money, it sure is a new one on me."
"I already told you the money is as good as real. Do you want the job or don't you, Mr. Cabot? Prometheus Tours is desperate because we've been taking away a good deal of their business. If they can successfully discredit us—"
"Sure. I'll take the job." What the hell, I thought, I wasn't working at the moment. I had nothing to lose. And & private eye is liable to meet almost anything ...
"Splendid. You'll be going after the missing tour ship with Dru. I'll wait here to shuttle you in, if and when."
"Where did the tour ship go? Where was it taken?
"Our tracking devices show it was taken to Southern Europe."
"Southern Europe? Which country?"
"Not in this age, Mr. Cabot. Southern Europe some time ago."
"Well, which country?"
"I'm afraid they had no countries then. Southern Europe twenty thousand years ago."
"Twenty!" I said.
"Miss Dru is waiting for you."
She was waiting but she didn't seem happy about it. "You're joining me?" she said.
"Right."
"But do you believe?"
"Does it matter if I believe or not?"
"Not right away it doesn't."
"If you prove it to me, I'll believe. Hell/' I said, "if I told you I was flying off to the nearest star or something, would you believe me?"
"Yes, of course. That's old stuff. We've had interstellar travel for three hundred years. Nothing to see, though, so we turned our attention to time."
"I guess I should have kept my mouth shut."
"Well, are you all set?"
I patted the Magnum .357 in the shoulder harness I wore. It has a smaller bore than a .45 but it makes a bigger hole. "As all set as I'll ever be," I said.
I expected Dru to get up and lead the way to their time machine. Instead, she beckoned me to the desk. It was a large round desk and she sat in the middle of it in a space big enough for one person easily and big enough for two in a tight squeeze.
"Come on in," Dru said.
I vaulted the desk like a high hurdles man at the 1956 Olympics. My arm got in the way so I had to put it around Dru's shoulder. It was more crowded in there for the two of us than rush hour on the IRT subway. I smiled at Dru but she didn't smile at me.
"Time travel," she said pedantically, "is based upon the principle of a space-time continuum. You're familiar with the term?"
"Yeah," I said, staring at Dru's face which was about two inches from my own. She was a tall girl and although it was hard to focus at this distance, she seemed prettier than ever.
...
allforjesus2001