Somewhere in Time (22 page)

I stared at the key in shocked bewilderment. It was for Room 420. Suddenly, I felt disoriented again, the sight of that key stripping me, in an instant, of all the mental adaptation I'd thought I had. "Uh ... are you sure?" I finally mumbled. "Sir?"

I don't know why that moment was so terrifying to me. I was there, in 1896. I was going to meet Elise at one o'clock and, although there was still a good deal to be accomplished, our relationship was as established as I could expect it to be. Nonetheless, the implications of that different room number were so staggering to me that I felt numbed by fear. "Are you sure this is the right one?" I asked. My tone was shaky and I know I spoke too loudly.

"Right one, sir?" The clerk regarded me as though I had taken leave of my senses.

God knows what I -would have said or done if another clerk had not walked by at that moment, glanced at the key, and casually picked it up. "Oh; sorry, Mr. Beals," he said. "That room is reserved. Forgot to put a notice in the slot."

A very audible sigh of relief escaped me. The clerk glanced at his associate with irritation, then, with a glance at me which made me tense, turned to get another key. I realized, in that moment, just how vulnerable I am to any occurrence which has to do with my journey through time. I don't know when that sense of vulnerability will pass but it is certainly a constant-and potentially deadly-companion to me now.

The clerk turned back, the expression of suspicious curiosity still on his face. If this one's different too, I thought, I'll go through the floor.

I couldn't restrain another sigh-with accompanying involuntary grin-as I saw the number of the key. Bingo, I thought. My tension drained as the clerk picked up the pen again and held it out.

Taking it, I looked down at the page before me. Emotion filled me once again, similar to that which I'd experienced in shaking Babcock's hand. One day, I knew, this freshly printed register would sit, cracked and covered with thick, gray dust, in that ovenlike cellar room and I would look at it.

I put the notion from my head and read the last name on the page: Chancellor L. Jenks and wife, San Francisco. My hand began to tremble as I realized that, if I didn't sign immediately, I could still miss the time. The thought was eerie. All I had to do was stand there, doing nothing, and everything would be altered. The troubling of a star, I thought, not knowing where I'd read the words.

Then I was watching my hand as it signed R. C. Collier, Los Angeles. The implications of that, too, were unsettling. I might have signed Richard Collier. Ordinarily, it is exactly what I would have signed. That I had, in 1971, seen my name written so untypically, then returned to the time of signing, and copied what I had seen seventy-five years after the signing was such a linked and interlinked riddle that it made my mind whirl.

"Thank you, sir," the clerk said. He turned the book and I saw him write Room 350 and the time. Double-bingo, I thought, shivering.

"What room is your luggage in, sir?" the clerk asked. "I'll have it picked up."

I stared at him as he waited for my answer. Then I smiled; it must have been a dreadfully artificial smile. "That's all right," said R. C. Collier. "I'll get it myself later. There isn't that much." Like nothing, came the thought.

"Very good, sir." The clerk was suspicious again but now I was a houseguest and one did not convey suspicion to a houseguest. He snapped his fingers, causing me to wince, and a bellboy appeared. Mr. Beals handed him the key and the bellboy nodded to me. "This way, sir," he said.

He led me to the elevator and we got in. The door rolled shut with stately, creaking slowness and we started up. As we ascended, the bellboy and the operator chatted about the electric lights recently installed in the elevator. I paid little attention, thinking about the hazardous state I was still in; a state I had thought was diminishing in effect but now knew was as perilous as ever. Mentally, I was walking a tightrope. At any moment, something might occur-a word, an incident, a thought, even-which could topple me again. Such a fall could only result in one, terrible landing-back in 1971. I knew that clearly and it terrified me. We got off the elevator at the third floor and the bellboy (I forgot to mention that he, like the first one, was no more a boy than a buffalo) led me outside and around the veranda toward the ocean side of the hotel. I saw two fantail pigeons walking up the outside staircase toward the fourth floor, leaving tiny prints along the steps, and recall the bellboy saying something about them belonging to the housekeeper and Mr. Babcock being "tyrannic" about the mess they made.

As we were walking along the inside corridor again, I saw a newspaper lying on the floor outside a room. It looked as though it had already been read and discarded, so I picked it up, pretending not to notice how the bellboy glanced at me when I did. Deja vu again (in reverse, of course). The paper was the San Diego Union.

The doorknob to Room 350 was made of dark metal with flowers carved on it. I looked at it as the bellboy unlocked the door with its skeleton key and opened it. I thought, for a moment, about the room I had slashed my way out of yesterday afternoon and wondered if the mystery was still being muddled over.

The bellboy handed me the reddish-brown, oval key tag and asked, "Will there be anything else, sir?"

"No, thank you." I handed him a quarter, presuming it would be enough. Perhaps it was too much. His eyes did seem to bug a trifle as he turned away with a murmured "Thank you, sir."

"Wait, there is something," I told him as the idea came to me. He stopped and turned. "Would you wait here a moment?" I asked. "Yes, sir."

Closing the door, I hastily stripped off my coat and trousers, forced to pull off my boots before I could slip the trousers over my feet. Reaching around the door, I handed them to the bellboy. "Will you have these pressed and bring them back to me in about an hour?" I asked.

"Yes, sir," his voice floated in from the hallway. I wondered what he thought. A guest at the Hotel del Coronado with only one suit? Saints preserve us.

After he'd gone, I turned around and looked at the room. It's small, no more than twelve by fourteen feet, I'd estimate. The furnishings are minimal: a dark, wooden bed, its adjacent table rectangular, with two drawers, standing on a heavy, four-footed pedestal; a large, dark bureau standing on feet that look like animal claws; a wicker chair and a mirror in a rococo frame hanging on a wall above the bureau. No lamps, illumination being provided by an overhead fixure which looks like the one in the room I woke up in yesterday. The fireplace in the far right-hand corner as you enter the room. Have I forgotten anything? Oh, yes; a porcelain spittoon poised and waiting by the wicker chair, the epitome of fin de siecle graciousness. I must cultivate a spit.

Before I'd taken off my suit, I'd tossed the package with my purchases onto the bed. Now I picked it up and carried it to the bureau, removed the items one by one, and set them on the bureau top, then walked over to the windows as I became more conscious of the surf noise.

Once more, I was struck by the hotel's proximity to the ocean. The surf was high, whitecaps crashing onto the sand with a constant roar. Out on a breakwater of rocks, I saw a man; a hotel guest, I assumed. He was wearing a top hat and a long coat and smoking a ubiquitous cigar as he looked out to sea; need I add he was heavy-set? There appeared to be some sort of naval vessel anchored far out on the bay.

I turned my gaze to the right and looked toward the beach where Elise and I had first met. I stared at that a long time, thinking of her. What was she doing? Rehearsal was on the verge of beginning. Was she thinking of me? I felt a betraying rise of hunger for her and did what I could to repress it. There were still three and a half hours to be survived. I could never survive them if I brooded about my need for her.

Turning, I located some stationery in the top drawer of the bureau and used it to continue my record of what's been happening.

I am sitting on the bed now in my brand-new underwear-which is not what I would describe as particularly fetching- looking through the Union, reading the news of the day which, yesterday (my yesterday), was a part of the distant past.

Beyond that stimulation, however, I must say that the news itself is not so thrilling. Details of life in 1896 are dismally familiar. Here, for instance, is a headline: admitted his GUILT / A PASTOR CONFESSES / ATTEMPTING TO KILL HIS wife / by giving poison. Subhead: The Wretched Sentenced to Six Years in Prison. There's what I call objective journalism. The other headlines are equally indicative that 1896 and 1971 may be far apart in chronology but not in daily import: A politician's end / Death of a Denver Man in New York, a terrible fall / Collapse of a Platform on Which Were Thirty People. And my favorite: eaten by cannibals.

One small item I find disturbing if not literally chilling. In its entirety, it reads: "Krupp, the Prussian gun manufacturer, reports an income of $1,700,000 a year. That would furnish a nest egg for a large Krupption fund in some countries."

I must forgo that kind of thinking, though; dwelling on the darker aspects of what is, now, the future to me. That could be dangerous. I must try to blank my mind to all of it. That way, I will know no more about this period than anyone else. It's the only answer; I'm sure of it. Prescience would be a torment. Unless-the thought occurs-I might "invent" something and become incredibly wealthy. Like the safety pin, for instance.

No. Let that go too. I must not intrude on history any more than I already have. Put down the paper, Collier. Think about Elise.

I must remember this: My life, at this point, is extremely simplified. All the complications of my "past" are gone. I have only one need: to win her. What else I may do in days to come is not even part of my thinking yet.

It is different with her. My appearance in her life may have disturbed her but, that aside, she is still involved in the totality of her life. For twenty-nine years, she has charted- and had charted-a specific course. I may be a random breeze as of this moment but the main current still presses at her ship, the force of life's winds still billows her sails. A rotten simile but let it pass. What I'm trying to say is that the details of her existence have not been stripped away as mine have. She must continue to deal with them even as she deals with me.

Accordingly, I must apply no undue pressures to her.

� � �

When the porter returned the pressed suit, I pulled on the trousers and boots, took my shaving gear, toothbrush, and powder, and went to the bathroom down the corridor.

There, I proceeded to hack myself to bloody shreds. Despite my desire to turn my back on 1971, I do lament: My kingdom for a Norelco!

At one point in the gory proceedings, with blood oozing from eleven separate nicks while the straight razor was doing a job on the twelfth, I seriously wondered which circumstance would arise first: the completion of my shaving orgy or the need for a major transfusion. If my stubble hadn't been so obvious-I knew the sight of it had disturbed Elise even though she'd been too polite to mention it-I would have given up the attempt as a total loss.

A thought. Perhaps, eventually, I'll grow a beard. It is certainly appropriate to this time and would help me to create a different image-in my own eyes as well as those of others.

At any rate, I muttered many a curse at myself for not having had the foresight to practice shaving with a straight razor. It is not the easiest knack to acquire, although I'm sure I can master it in time if it turns out that Elise would prefer me clean-shaven.

The image of my whittled features reflected in the mirror ultimately reduced me to hysterics. At last, I had to stop altogether or risk cutting my throat. I imagined myself walking up to Room 527 and asking whoever was in there for some of that stickum for my cuts. The visualization of how he might react to that request, then to my informing him that I'd been the one who'd ruined his straight razor on the door-jamb only made my laughing spasm worse. I suppose it was a form of release. Still, it was suicidal, to say the least, standing there with that murder weapon jiggling in my palsied hand. By the time I'd restrained my laughter, then finished with my bungling efforts, trickles of blood were running from my butchered face. I washed them off.

A man was waiting in the corridor when I came out; I'd forgotten it was not a private bathroom. He was probably in a grumpy mood from having had to wait so long. Probably, he'd heard my laughing too, for as 1 exited he regarded me as a zoo-keeper might some particularly obnoxious specimen. I managed to keep a straight face, but no sooner was I past him than a snort escaped my nostrils and I stumbled to my room, followed, doubtless, by his glares.

Back in the room, I donned the clean shirt, put the tie back on, polished my boots with the soiled shirt, and combed my hair; it was easier with a comb. I checked myself in the mirror. Not too prepossessing, R.C., I thought, regarding the dried blood crusts which trailed across my skin like mountain ranges on a topographical map. "I did it for you, Elise," I told the crusty vision and he grinned at me like the lovesick fool he was.

I didn't know what time it was when I left the room but felt certain it was nowhere near one; probably not even noon. I walked to the outside door and stepped onto the open veranda.

There, I stood for a long time, looking down at the lushly overgrown Court below, trying hard to let the atmosphere of 1896 seep into me and take effect. More and more, I am becoming convinced that the secret of successful time travel is to pay the price of eventual loss of time identity. I plan to lose, as soon as possible, all knowledge of "that other year." My longing for Elise was now becoming so intense that it started overcoming every thought and feeling. I went downstairs and, entering the Rotunda, walked to the Ballroom door and stood there, listening. Inside, a voice flared in that artificial manner of acted dialogue and I knew that they were still in rehearsal. I wanted to sneak in, sit in back, and watch her but I forced myself to resist the urge. She had asked me not to and I must abide by her wishes.