David E. Fisher

“ Every one of your presidents, every general, every field-marshal, every scientist, manufacturer, tennis star, and juvenile delinquent has written a book, or at least a serial for the Post. No reason at all for any historian to come back to this particular age. No other age in all history, I might add, has been so fond of itself or so cognizant of the need for preserving itself and its records for posterity as has yours. ”

“ Victor belched.
"For God's sake," said Donald. "There's a time and a place for everything."
Victor crossed to the door. "Mimi," he called. "Mimi, it's me, Victor."
The lock clicked, the door opened, and Mimi walked out and folded herself into his arms. He held her until she stopped shaking, then until he himself stopped shaking and until his breath came more easily. He kept all the while his back toward Donald and the gun, and his arms folded around her so that she was safe from him. Then he turned and calmly as he could, he asked what in the holy hell was going on. ”

“ Donald was determined to make Mimi go back to their world—dead or alive!
The receptionist is a young woman, half-heartedly pretty but certainly chic in the manner of New York's women in general and of its working women in particular, perhaps in her middle twenties, with a paucity of golden hair which is kept clinging rather back on her skull by an intricate network of tortoise-shell combs and invisible pins. She is engaged to a man who is in turn engaged in a position for an advertising firm just thirty-seven stories directly below her. Her name is Margaret. ”

“ So it is necessary that you realize that sex is entirely foreign to us."
"Then," said Dr. Quink, "if what you say is true, your physical, let us say, equipment, must have degenerated. And so a simple physical examination—"
"Evolution is slow, my doctor, slow, slow, slow. No, I'm physically indistinguishable from you. Assuming normalcy on your part, of course. To continue along this train of thought, though, it is the mental process that provides the difference. There is no desire in me or mine, Doctor, no urge, no depravity, no sexual hunger. ”

“ You get to see the seamy side of a civilization, you know, when you live there yourself. Incidentally, would you be interested to know how your age has been classified by posterity? Of course you would, silly of me to ask. Well, to get on with it, you know how historians are always naming periods, and groups, and whatever. The Age of Darkness, you remember, then the Age of Awakening, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, et cetera? As it turns out, you've come down to us as the Age of Verbiage. ”

“ Mimi agreed. "Why on earth should a cigarette taste good? Who says it should? If one wants to taste something good, why then one takes a bite of cake, or a smidgin of candy, or a plate of cold borscht. If one cares for borscht. But you certainly don't smoke a cigarette to taste something good, they all taste horrible. Horribly? Oh damn, look what you started, Donald. Now I can't think straight. Anyhow, people smoke because of the phallic symbolism, right, Victor?"
Donald looked with distaste from Mimi to the big black cigar he was holding in his right hand, and thence to Victor for a denial. ”

“ It could upset the whole pattern of the future!"
"The future will just have to take care of itself," Mimi answered. "I love him, and you can't argue with that. There's nothing you can say that can argue with that. I don't care poof for the future."
Victor sat down quietly on the edge of the bed, he felt a bit weak around the general vicinity of the knees. Mimi stood up and strode over to the window, her back to the conversation. "Mimi," Donald pleaded, "just think of what you're doing. You'll lose your immortality, for one thing. ”

“ Mimi replied. "It's very simple. You just take the squash and then pour in the applesauce and cinnamon."
"There must be more to it than that," Victor insisted, smiling around a mouthful.
"Of course there is," she said. "But I'm not telling you all my secrets. You'll have to come back if you want it again."
"Damn it," said Donald, "stop jibber-jabbering! We know why we're here, so let's talk about it. Can you cure my crazy wife?"
"Donald!" Mimi spluttered.
"Now, Mr. Fairfield," Victor said, "let's not be unfair. Your wife has amnesia, but she's not crazy. ”

“ You'll never find him, you'll never see him again. He'll be lost in the crowd. One more screwball in New York, they'll never notice him. He'll fit right in. He may even become President some day, or at least Dean of Students at some small New England College. You just take my word for it, darling, and relax a moment. I'll rush downstairs and bring you up a martini. We deserve one. He'll be all right now. As long as he's made up his mind that he can leave me here, he'll trot off somewhere and dig up another neurosis, or psychosis, or whatever. He's not dangerous anymore. ”

“ Do you indulge in sex? I mean you, personally, of course, not as a representative of your species."
Victor Quink laid down his pad in his lap. "I'm not married, Mr. Fairfield," he said. "Do you often ask such questions of people you've recently met?"
"The sun came up this morning, Dr. Quink," Fairfield answered jovially, "the sun came up. You'll pardon my answer, of course, I was merely trying to top your own non sequitur. Many of your people do indulge, you know. ”

“ Donald was forced into a short lecture, barely remembered from second year biology, but it seemed to satisfy them. "We don't have lower forms of life at home, you know," Donald apologized.
On days when he didn't come to their home for supper, Mimi would have the last appointment of the day with him, and after her hour they would leave together, waking up Margaret before they left the office, stop off for cocktails before Mimi had to catch her train, miss the train, have dinner, miss the next train, catch a show or walk in the park, drive Mimi home, and finally part. ”

“ But please don't worry, don't worry about a thing, darling. You'll see, it will all work out."
"It can't work out, Mimi, there's absolutely no way on earth for it to work out. There's no solution at all."
"Please don't worry, darling," she said, picking up her gloves. "I can't bear to see you looking so tragic. Life isn't so serious, especially as you're loved." She walked out and closed the door behind her. Victor sat quite still. He could barely hear her saying "Margaret, wake up, Margaret, it's time to go home," through the thick wooden door. ”

“ Do you know you were the first psychiatrist ever to win the award, and then you won it twice? Oh, I can tell you, I was terribly impressed! And when I saw your picture, you know the one, the portrait by Videl in the Museum of Ancient—oh, but of course, it hasn't been done yet. You have gray sideburns then, and there's not a touch of gray in your hair now. Anyway, you look absolutely distinguished with gray, it's certainly your color. And I thought you were just the handsomest Nobel winner I had ever seen, and darling, you are, not the slightest doubt about it. Don't you think so, Donald? ”

“ Quink," Fairfield said. "It's too complicated to explain, but time's run out on us. We've got to go tonight, and I'm taking her with me dead or alive, I don't give a damn which way anymore, she's coming with me dead or alive."
Victor let go of Mimi and took a step toward him, but the hand with the gun came up and gun was pointed straight at him, and the voice was flat and tired and desperate, "I can't leave her here, you can see what it would mean. They're very strict about time traveling, they have to be, and she can't stay here. ”

“ So I made up this story about forgetting everything and I pretended I thought he was nuts or something and he went and got you and suddenly there you were in my living room and it all came back, darling, it came back so fast and strong I thought I'd die on the spot. And I love you now, darling, I love you now and forever, and I won't go back alive, I swear that."
"Mimi," Donald begged, "think of the future. If you don't go back it'll be all upset. We can't have people just popping up in the past from the future, there has to be discipline. ”

“ No offense meant, sir, but you must certainly realize that between my time and this there have been a great many discoveries in the manifold fields embraced by science, so that people who in your own time were famous to schoolchildren are now, then, that is,—oh, I hope you know what I mean—known only to scholars of the period involved. In the time to which I belong the schoolchildren may know of Newton, Einstein and Fisher, but of such lesser luminaries as Edison, or even Avogadro or Galdeen, they are quite ignorant. ”

“ Rather clever of you, applying the term to sex that way. My estimation of your capabilities shoots up a notch or two, Dr. Quink."
"You mean to say," Dr. Quink kept up, "that you do not participate in the physical ramifications?"
"Oh, you do have a turn for words, Doctor. No, of course not. None of us do."
"By us you mean your cohorts in the future?"
"Exactly. You have an analytical mind, keen, keen. We do not die, we do not give birth. And I never would have brought the whole morbid subject up except that it has a direct bearing on Mimi's trouble. ”

“ She often, in periods when the immediate consummation of the work on her desk is not of paramount importance, as is often the case, gazes somnolently at the floor beside her large walnut desk, hoping to catch a lurking image of her beloved only thirty-seven stories away. She rarely succeeds in viewing him through the intervening spaces, but she does not tire of trying ”

“ For some obscure reason my wife has fled reality, and now that our vacation is up she refuses to return with me, stating flatly that she has never, to make a long story short, traveled through time—except, of course, at the normal velocity with which we all progress in the course of things—and that it is I who am out of my head and though, while not actually troublesome, it would be thoughtful of me to see a doctor or at least to shut up about this nonsense before the neighbors hear me. ”

“ Fairfield's effusive greeting. Now he sat in the tilted green armchair in one corner of the room and, closing his eyes, relaxed from the strain of the drive.
"Your wife is very pretty," Dr. Quink said.
"Yes, she's probably the most beautiful woman I know," Fairfield said. "That's probably why I took her along. There's something about a beautiful woman.... It was certainly a mistake."
"Feminine beauty is enjoyable even though you don't indulge in sex?"
"Of course, it is," he replied, with a gesture of annoyance. "You're still bound by that Freed—Freud, is it?—of yours. Damn him. ”

“ Donald mused. "I didn't notice it." He stared intently at Victor Quink while he munched his celery. "It's not hard to see why you've risen to the top of your profession. Calendar on your desk, eh?" He looked at his wife and tapped the side of his head significantly.
"You landed aboard this train some eight months ago," Dr. Quink prompted. "What are you doing here, anyhow? Are you an historian?" ”

“ Do you think limes might help?"
"We have some in the kitchen, but it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Why don't we just throw the mess away and whip up something else? I just wanted you to think I was chic this season to serve martinis."
"What season? Football?"
"Hunting," she said, and the eyes and lips smiled together again.
"Mimi," Victor said a bit pompously, standing up and leaning over her, "I hope you are not flirting with me. You are, remember, a married woman and are, in fact, married to a patient of mine." ”

“ Quink leaned back and had barely time to pass his hand wearily over his eyes in a circular motion that he found soothing when Mrs. Fairfield entered from behind a swinging door bearing a small circular tray on which were balanced the aforementioned martini pitcher and two high-stemmed glasses, properly frosted and rounded with lemon.
"Has he left already?" she asked. "Well, shall we get right down to business? You call me Mimi and I'll call you Victor. ”

“ I should have just said my wife's suffering from amnesia and let it go at that."
"I'm not an engineer either," Victor answered. "I can't just twist a screw and restore the proper functioning of the memory mechanism. I've got to know the whole truth, Mr. Fairfield, the whole truth."
"How come my wife is Mimi and I'm Mr. Fairfield?"
"I'm sorry," Victor stammered, "I—"
"Donald, you're embarrassing him," Mimi interrupted.
"Just joshing, pulling your toe, or leg, or some such," Donald assured him. "We might as well be friends, at least. Make it Donald too. ”

“ Victor, however, shrugged his shoulders, and murmured something to the effect that this consideration might possibly have some bearing on the subject, that it was really a matter of interest more to the applied psychologists and advertising men than to the pure scientist or doctor, and that even so it didn't necessarily follow that—
"You're hedging," Mimi said. "All you have to do is watch a woman smoke and then watch a man and—"
"I thought we were talking about wine," Donald interrupted, crushing out his cigar in the oversize marble, or nearly so, ashtray. ”

“ The room into which the office door, which is of opaque glass, opens, is the smaller of the two and serves to house a receptionist, three not-too-comfortable armchairs, and a disorderly, homogeneous mixture of Life's, Look's and New Yorker's. ”

“ Apart from what the delusion is, and whether or not you choose to believe in it, simply studying the behavior of the people involved, you should be able to tell who is acting normally and who is not."
"I agree with you in every particular," Victor said. "I certainly should. And I think I can, and have. In point of fact—"
"Dinner is ready," Mimi said. "And no shop talk, please. I want you to taste my squash and applesauce piece. And no one, absolutely no one, comes into my dining room with a stinking black cigar."
"Could it be Galilililu?" Donald murmured. "Damn." ”

“ Aren't you at all anxious to see how it will taste? Honestly, men have no curiosity."
Well, as it turned out, it tasted pretty good. At any rate, that was the consensus of opinion, alcoholic as it might have been, as they returned with the pitcher of green martinis to the living room. "The furthest back that I can remember," Mimi said after they had settled themselves on the divan, "the absolutely first thing I can remember is relieving my bladder, if that makes any sense to you."
"As a matter of fact," Victor said, "it makes extremely good sense indeed. ”