Up The Line

13.

When they were finished hammering the rules into our heads, they sent us on trial runs up the line. All of us had already been into the past, of course, before beginning the instruction sessions; they had tested us to see if we had any psychological hangups about time-traveling. Now they wanted us to observe Couriers in actual service, and so they let us go along as hitchhikers with tour groups.

They split us up, so there wouldn’t be more than two of us to each six or eight tourists. To save expense, they assigned us all to visit events right in New Orleans. (In order to shoot us back to the Battle of Hastings, say, they would have had to fly us to London first. Time-travel doesn’t include space travel; you have to be physically present in the place you want to reach, before you jump.)

New Orleans is a fine city, but it hasn’t had all that many important events in its history, and I’m not sure why anybody would want to pay very good money to go up the line there when for about the same fee he could witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the fall of Constantinople, or the assassination of Julius Caesar. But the Time Service is willing to provide transport to any major historical event whatever — within certain limits of taste, I mean — for any group of at least eight tourists who have the stash for tickets, and I suppose the patriotic residents of New Orleans have every right to sightsee their city’s own past, if they prefer.

So Mr. Chudnik and Miss Dalessandro were shipped to 1815 to cheer for Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Mr. Burlingame and Mr. Oliveira were transported to 1877 to watch the last of the carpetbaggers thrown out. Mr. Hotchkiss and Mrs. Notabene went off to 1803 to see the United States take possession of Louisiana after buying it from the French. And Miss Chambers and I went up the line to 1935 to view the assassination of Huey Long.

Assassinations are usually over in a hurry, and nobody goes up the line just to watch a quick burst of gunfire. What the Time Service was really offering these people was a five-day tour of Louisiana in the early twentieth century, with the gunning down of the Kingfish as its climax. We had six fellow travelers: three well-to-do Louisiana couples in their late fifties and early sixties. One of the men was a lawyer, one a doctor, one a big executive of Louisiana Power Light Company. Our Time Courier was the right sort to shepherd these pillars of the establishment around: a sleek, bland character named Madison Jefferson Monroe. “Call me Jeff,” he invited.

We had several orientation meetings before we went anywhere.

“These are your timers,” said Jeff Monroe. “You keep them next to your skin at all times. Once you put them on in Time Service headquarters, you don’t remove them again until you come back down the line. You bathe with them, sleep with them, perform — ah — all intimate functions while wearing them. The reason for this should be obvious. It would be highly disruptive to history if a timer were to fall into the hands of a twentieth-century person; therefore we don’t allow the devices out of your physical possession even for an instant.”

(“He’s lying,” Sam told me when I repeated this to him. “Somebody up the line wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a timer. The real reason is that sometimes the tourists have to get out of an area in a hurry, maybe to avoid being lynched, and the Courier can’t take the risk that some of his people may have left their timers in the hotel room. But he doesn’t dare tell them that.”

The timers that Jeff Monroe distributed were a little different from the one I had worn the night Sam and I went jumping up the line. The controls were sealed, and functioned only when the Courier sounded a master frequency. Sensible enough: the Time Service doesn’t want tourists slipping away for time-jaunts on their own.

Our Courier spelled out at great length the consequences of changing the past, and begged us repetitiously not to rock any boats. “Don’t speak unless spoken to,” he said, “and even then confine any conversations with strangers to a minimum of words. Don’t use slang; it won’t be comprehensible. You may recognize other time-tourists; under no condition are you to speak to them or greet them in any way, and you should ignore any attention you may get from them. Anyone who breaks these regulations, no matter how innocently, may have his shunting permit revoked on the spot and may be returned at once to now-time. Understood?”

We nodded solemnly.

Jeff Monroe added, “Think of yourselves as Christians in disguise who have been smuggled into the holy Moslem city of Mecca. You’re in no danger so long as you’re not discovered; but if those about you find out what you are, you’re in big trouble. Therefore it’s to your advantage to keep your mouths shut while you’re up the line, to do a lot of seeing and a minimum of saying. You’ll be all right as long as you don’t call attention to yourselves.”

(I learned from Sam that time-tourists very frequently get themselves into muddles with people living up the line, no matter how hard their Couriers try to avoid such incidents. Sometimes the trouble can be patched up with a few diplomatic words, often when the Courier explains apologetically to the offended party that the stranger is really a mental case. Sometimes it’s not so easy, and the Courier has to order a quick evacuation of all the tourists; the Courier must remain behind until he has sent all his people safely down the line, and there have been several fatalities to Couriers in the line of duty as a result. In extreme cases of tourist bungling, the Time Patrol steps in and cancels the jump retroactively, plucking the careless traveler from the tour and thereby undoing the damage. Sam said, “It can really get one of these rich bastards furious when a Patrolman shows up at the last minute and tells him that he can’t make the shunt, because if he does he’ll commit some ferocious faux pas up the line. They just can’t understand it. They promise to be good, and won’t believe that their promise is worthless because their conduct is already a matter of record. The trouble with most of the dumb tourists is that they can’t think four-dimensionally.” “Neither can I, Sam,” I said, baffled. “You will. You’d better,” said Sam.)

Before we set out for 1935 we were given a quick hypnocourse in the social background of the era. Pumped into us were data on the Depression, the New Deal, the Long family of Louisiana, Huey Long’s rise to fame, his “Share Our Wealth” program of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his feud with President Franklin Roosevelt, his dream of taking the Presidency himself in 1936, his flamboyant disregard for traditions, his demagogic appeal to the masses. We also got enough incidental details on life in 1935 — celebrities, sports developments, the stock market — so we wouldn’t feel hopelessly out of context there.

Lastly, they fitted us out in 1935 wardrobes. We strutted around giggling and quipping at the sight of ourselves in those quaint rigs. Jeff Monroe, checking us out, reminded the men about zipper flies and how to use them, reminded the women that it was sternly prohibited to reveal the breasts from the nipple down, and urged us strenuously to keep in mind at all times that we were entering a staunchly puritanical era where neurotic repression was regarded as a virtue and our normal freedoms of behavior were looked upon as sinful and shameless.

Finally, we were ready.

They took us uplevel to Old New Orleans, since it wouldn’t have been healthy to make our jump from one of the underlevels. They had set up a room in a boarding-house on North Rampart Street for shunting to the twentieth century.

“Here we go up the line,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe, and gave the signal that activated our timers.