No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Welcome back, Johnny. I was beginning to think you were going to sleep the rest of your life away.”

At first he did not recognize the face outlined above him against a window of robin’s-egg blue. The face was a gentle caricature of one he remembered from another time. Most disconcerting, its skin was pale, with hints of applied color in the cheeks and lavender crescents on the eyelids. His tongue would not move.

“Don’t try to talk yet, Johnny. You’ve been sedated for several days. I’ve… well, I’ve watched you sleep for the last three. Off and on, that is. They’ve given me a room in the Visiting Officers’ Quarters. First time I’ve ever had officers’ quarters in my life. Hugo would have scoffed at me for even accepting them—but noncoms’ widows don’t rate an on-base hostelry all their own and it’s better than trying to commute out here every morning from Marakoi.

“God, Johnny, they did everything they could to keep me out of this country, everything but charge me with a federal crime and lock me up in Leavenworth. Suddenly, though, just a few days ago, their resistance collapsed, and here I am…. I don’t think I’ve ever watched you sleep so many straight hours without your eyeballs disappearing up into your forehead. Maybe you’re over that now. Maybe that justifies what they’ve done to you. Maybe that absolves them of using you for a guinea pig in some sort of temporal I-don’t-know-what…. Woody Kaprow tried to explain it. He was the one who insisted on their letting me into the country once you got back from wherever the hell you supposedly were. I owe him for that, I know I do, but the rest of it—the secrecy, the deceptions, the bullyings, the run-arounds—God knows when I’ll be able to forgive them for that. God knows.”

The face was coming into focus, taking on a recognizable human aspect. It was an older face than he remembered, but he had not seen it for—well, for what?—eight years? ten years? more than two million?

It belonged to the woman who had raised him, an aging woman against whom he had perpetrated a terrible wrong, believing himself, at her hands, the victim of an unforgivable treachery. He had forestalled any future treachery by cutting all ties with her.

Now—whenever Now was—here she was again. He did not resent this torrent of words from her or even the implicit assumption underlying them, that they could resume their lives without agonizing over or even referring to the cause of their break. That was a false assumption, however. He had a good deal to answer for. He knew it, and he tried unsuccessfully to make his tongue work.

“No, really. You don’t have to say anything, Johnny. They said you might have trouble. Apparently you’ve awakened briefly twice before. Kaprow and a couple of Air Force doctors were with you, but you couldn’t talk. Not a word. They wanted a kind of deposition from you, I think. A debriefing document. You weren’t ready to give it. Flustered Kaprow lots, I’m afraid, even if at bottom he’s a reasonably decent fellow, one of the few people I’ve met who won’t duck the implications of his own responsibility for a fiasco like this one. He acknowledges his part in involving you, for instance. Blames himself for losing contact with you while you were gone, for the injuries you’ve sustained. Everyone else—Air Force brass, the local interior ministry, Defense Department officials back home—everyone else seems to be working on a C.Y.A. basis. They wanted a deposition attesting to the complete success and worthiness of this project…. You don’t even remember Kaprow and the others coming in here, do you? You ought to see your face—it’s an acting-class paradigm of Total Bewilderment.”

His mother gave a nervous laugh, wiped his forehead with a wet cloth, and leaned aside so that the African sky in the window overwhelmed him with its raw immensity. A jet fighter flashed by from left to right, as if it had just taken off from a nearby runway, but the sound of its engines was muted by the hum of the air-conditioning and the thickness of the walls in the cavelike hospital room.

C.Y.A. meant “cover your ass,” an old and deservedly hallowed Air Force abbreviation. He had not smiled at his mother’s use of the term because what she was telling him was vaguely troubling. The last image in his mind, prior to the appearance of her face, was of the coppery blur of the rotors in the omnibus. That blur had seemed to enfold and annihilate him. When could Kaprow, or anyone else, have tried to talk to him since the dream of his deliverance?

“Lie back, Johnny, just lie back. They lost you for a month, were afraid they wouldn’t be able to retrieve you at all. I think Kaprow finally brought pressure to bear on the authorities to let me come see you when you failed to respond to either the doctors or him. You were like a zombie, he said. Thought the sight of a familiar face might jolt you back to reality. Here I am, then. A shot of Old Jolt, Johnny. Am I working?

I think I am, I can tell by your eyes…. This reminds me of when you were little. Didn’t speak a word until you were almost two. Said ‘cao’ in Richardson’s pasture on the outskirts of that new housing area in Van Luna. You had the most expressive eyes, though. You could talk with them as well as some people can with words. You haven’t lost any of that ability, either. I can see by your eyes that this shot of Old Jolt has gone right to your head.”

“Right,” he echoed her, smiling.

“And that’s the prettiest word I’ve heard you say since your first really emphatic ‘cao,’ I swear to God it is, John-John.” She turned her head away, refused to look at him. “Yesterday was my birthday. I told them you’d wake up for my birthday. You’re only a day late, and it’s a fine, fine present.” She looked at him again. “I’m fifty, can you believe that? Half a goddamn century. I feel like Methuselah’s mother.”

He worked to get the words out: “I’m Methuselah, then.”

“You all right?”

“Think so.”

“Don’t talk. Don’t try to get up. You’re going to have a raft of visitors once they know you’re conscious and able to talk.”

He lay back in the stiff sheets and found that he was clad in a hospital gown, a gray sheath like a wraparound bib. His leg ached dully, and the antiseptic tang of the room offended his nostrils, worked its way into his throat like a hook. When he was very small, Jeannette had once let him take a whiff from an ammonia bottle and he had screamed as if she had gassed him. The smell in this room, he realized, was equally offensive. Water came to his eyes, flushed from his tear ducts by the stinging smell of disinfectants, rubbing alcohol, arcane medicines.

“Helen,” he said. “Helen.”

The woman beside his bed looked at him peculiarly but did not question him. He felt a tremendous surge of affection for her simply because she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.

“I can’t wear this. It hurts.”

Before she could summon help, he swung his feet to the opposite side of the bed, tore the hospital gown off his back, and tottered a few steps toward the corridor. The linoleum under his feet was exactly the color of bleu cheese dressing, with chives. This comparison came to his mind unbidden as he struggled toward the door, outside which stood a sentinel with a weapon. Rick, looked like. The air policeman who had been assigned to White Sphinx not long after his own arrival in Zarakal. The kid should have rotated home by now. Why was he still playing soldier for Kaprow? He had always pooh-poohed the idea of reenlisting.

“Johnny!” his mother called.

The bleu-cheese floor was treacherous. His legs were not going to negotiate the crossing.

“Where’s my daughter?” he cried. “Where’s the Grub?”

When he fell, his mother and the air policeman helped him from the floor. He was scarcely conscious of being assisted. The sting in his nostrils, the weakness of his legs, the salty film in his eyes—these things bespoke a deeper discomfort, a more compelling hurt.

“What the hell have you people done with my baby?”

He was virtually a prisoner in the hospital, the only patient in an otherwise deserted ward on the third floor. After they had sedated him again, and his mother had returned to the VOQ, and he had slept another six to eight hours, Woody Kaprow visited him. The blue African sky in his window had been displaced by sunset, a conflagration of interthreading pastels. Stars were also visible, high and sparse.

Although he was shivering in the chilly room, he liked the starched hospital gown no more than he would have a straitjacket.

As his mother had done earlier, Kaprow engaged in a lengthy monologue. He stared across the bed at the door, scrupulously avoiding Joshua’s eyes. Even though he never moved his head, his pale eyes flickered excitedly as he explained that they had almost given Joshua up for dead; that the entire White Sphinx Project was under a cloud because of their inability to monitor his activities in the past; that Blair expected and ought to receive a series of extensive reports on the mission as soon as Joshua felt well enough to face the Great Man; and that he, Kaprow, had approved Jeannette Monegal’s visit to help Joshua ease himself back into the turbid waters of the late twentieth century.

“In a sense, Joshua, you’ve been reborn. You’re going to have to take a little time to grow back into your old world. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“I want to see my daughter.”

“Joshua, that isn’t your daughter.”

“I want to see the child I brought back with me.” Joshua pulled himself to a sitting position and looked piercingly at the physicist, who shifted his gaze to a photograph of President Tharaka that some wag had hung on the door to the water closet. The old man was wearing his hominid skull and a plush leopard-skin cloak. “Just tell me if I brought a child back with me, Dr. Kaprow. Was that a dream or did it really happen?”

“There’s an infant in the maternity ward downstairs, Joshua, an infant you were clutching in your arms when we retrieved you from the Backstep Scaffold. She’s a strange little creature but perfectly healthy.

They treated her for jaundice right after we brought the two of you in. Put her under sun lamps with cotton batting over her eyes. She’s well now, though.”

“I fathered her, Dr. Kaprow.”

“Joshua, you were away from us only a little over a month. It’s natural you should be disoriented, though.

There’s no need to worry. Things’ll straighten out for you soon enough.”

“A little over a month?”

“Thirty-three days. I insisted that we drop the scaffold at least four times a day, for two hours each go—but our transcordions were apparently out of synch, and if you hadn’t returned when you did, well, pretty soon I would’ve had to buckle under to an order to depressurize The Machine and cut our losses.”

“Namely, me.”

“You and a sizable amount of time and money.”

“I was gone at least two years. I fell in love with a habiline, I fathered a child, I watched my wife die in childbirth. What you’re telling me doesn’t correspond to what I know about what happened, and I was the one who was there. I know what happened to me, Dr. Kaprow!”

“Look, here’s a calendar on your bedside table—”

“I don’t give a damn about any goddamn calendars,” Joshua said levelly. “I brought a child back with me, and I’m her father.”

Kaprow finally looked directly at Joshua. As colorless as glass, his irises danced in their whites. “All right. Maybe because of the distance you went into the past you experienced a kind of time dilation—the opposite of what a passenger aboard a faster-than-light vessel would experience subjectively, when those remaining at home age dozens of years to the spacefarer’s one or two. A time dilation would—”

“I want to see the Grub!”

“The Grub?”

“My baby.”

Kaprow’s eyes cut away to the door again. “Okay, Joshua. I’ll go with you. Maybe you’d appreciate a pair of pajama bottoms.”

“Suit yourself.”

The physicist smiled. “I’m suited. You’re not.” But he sent an orderly after both the pajama pants and a pair of slippers, with which the man quickly returned. Although Joshua had to turn up six or seven inches of the pajama legs into lumpy cuffs, the slippers fit almost perfectly.

Not speaking, he and the physicist rode an elevator to the carpeted maternity ward on the first floor, where they paused outside the bright little aquarium given over to the showcasing of newborns. A nurse was pushing one of the movable bassinets into a farther room, but the bassinet contained no baby. Joshua searched for the Grub.

There she was. Her head was the same—disproportionately large, a kaleidoscope of grimaces—but the color of her skin had deepened from blancmange to beige, probably as a result of the sun-lamp treatments that Kaprow had mentioned.

“At least you didn’t hand her over to a veterinary clinic.”

“She’s human, Joshua. Nobody doubts that.”

“Then how do you explain my bringing her back from a period when human beings weren’t supposed to look like she does?”

Kaprow said, “Why don’t you explain that, Joshua?”

“I want to hold her.”

“Hold her?” The question conveyed the physicist’s helpless distaste for this idea; also the hint that, even if he wanted to, he could not persuade the nurses to honor Joshua’s request.

“I’m her father. I want to hold her.”

Joshua did not wait for permission. He trotted around the corner of the display room, skipped down a narrow corridor immediately behind it, and pushed his way through a swinging door into the off-limits inner sanctum. The nurse who had just removed a bassinet from the aquarium looked up from an instrument counter as if Joshua had surprised her filching penicillin suppositories. No words came out of her open mouth. Before she could sputter even a semi-intelligible objection, Joshua was cradling the Grub in his arms. Then Woody Kaprow burst into the display room’s antechamber, and he and the nurse collided trying to get to Joshua.

“She’s developing,” he said, smiling at his daughter as they confronted him amid a small fleet of bassinets.

“Of course she’s developing,” the nurse angrily responded. “That’s what they do at this age, and for a good many years after.” She adjusted her uniform. “What do you think you’re doing in here, anyway?”

“Not developing, damn it! Developing!”

Nonplused by the small figure in rolled pajama bottoms, the nurse merely gaped. What kind of madness did the little man represent?

Kaprow said, “As in photography, I think he means.”

“Right. She’s getting darker. All it took was bringing her out of the film pack and into the dark room.”

Joshua rocked the Grub. She grinned prettily at him, and he marveled at the way her skin was ripening toward a delicate duskiness. His daughter, developing…