He was home before dark. Showered, shaved, dressed, headed over to the Top of the Marina. Tommy Hambleton and Yvonne were in town, and he had agreed to meet them for drinks. Hadn’t seen them for years, not since Tommy had taken over his brother’s villa on the Riviera. Good old Tommy, Mikkelsen thought. Great to see him again. And Yvonne. He recalled her clearly, little snub-nosed blonde, good game of tennis, trim compact body. He’d been pretty hot for her himself, eleven or twelve years ago, back before Adrienne, before Charlene, before Georgiana, before Nedra, before Cindy, Melanie, Elena, Paula. Good to see them both again. He stepped into the skylift and went shooting blithely up the long swivel-stalk to the gilded little cupola high above the lagoon. Hambleton and Yvonne were already there.
Tommy hadn’t changed much—same old smooth, slickly-dressed little guy—but Mikkelsen was astonished at how time and money had altered Yvonne. She was poised, chic, sinuous, all that baby-fat burned away, and when she spoke there was the smallest hint of a French accent in her voice. Mikkelsen embraced them both and let himself be swept off to the bar.
“So glad I was able to find you,” Hambleton said. “It’s been years! Years, Nick!”
“Practically forever.”
“Still going great with the women, are you?”
“More or less,” Mikkelsen said. “And you? Still running back in time to wipe your nose three days ago, Tommy?”
Hambleton chuckled. “Oh, I don’t do much of that any more. Yvonne and I went to the Fall of Troy last winter, but the short-hop stuff doesn’t interest me these days. I—oh. How amazing!”
“What is it?” Mikkelsen asked, seeing Hambleton’s gaze go past him into the darker corners of the room.
“An old friend,” Hambleton said. “I’m sure it’s she! Someone I once knew—briefly, glancingly—” He looked toward Yvonne and said, “I met her a few months after you and I began seeing each other, love. Of course, there was nothing to it, but there could have been—there could have been—” A distant wistful look swiftly crossed Hambleton’s features and was gone. His smile returned. He said, “You should meet her, Nick. If it’s really she, I know she’ll be just your type. How amazing! After all these years! Come with me, man!”
He seized Mikkelsen by the wrist and drew him, astounded, across the room.
“Janine?” Hambleton cried. “Janine Carter?”
She was a dark-haired woman, elegant, perhaps a year or two younger than Mikkelsen, with cool perceptive eyes. She looked up, surprised. “Tommy? Is that you?”
“Of course, of course. That’s my wife, Yvonne, over there. And this—this is one of my oldest and dearest friends, Nick Mikkelsen. Nick—Janine—”
She stared up at him. “This sounds absurd,” she said, “but don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Mikkelsen felt a warm flood of mysterious energy surging through him as their eyes met. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”
TRIPS
During the most active phase of my career in the 1960s and 1970s, I wrote novels with almost obsessive regularity, but after 1972 or so I often needed to be prodded into writing short stories. Every one of the sixteen stories in this volume was written at some editor’s direct request. It was all too easy, in that troubled era, for me not to write at all; but I had to write such novels as The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace, even so, because I was contractually bound to do them, and I have always honored my contracts. But waking up in the morning and saying, “Hi ho, I think I’ll write a short story for somebody today!”—no, I stopped feeling such impulses decades ago. Only when some friend or colleague who was editing an anthology of new fiction asked me to contribute something could I push myself into tackling the job.
I have always responded to a good challenge, though, and the one that came from Barry Malzberg and Ed Ferman in the winter of 1972–73 was a beauty. They were editing a book called Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology, and each story in it was supposed to be the definitive statement of its theme—time travel, immortality, space exploration, robots and androids, the future of sex, etc. Malzberg and Ferman offered a list of themes to a select group of writers and asked them to pick the one that held the greatest personal appeal.
Isaac Asimov, of course, took robots, and who would begrudge that choice to him? Harlan Ellison and Joanna Russ tackled the future of sex from very different viewpoints. I wanted time travel, but I think Philip K. Dick beat me to it, or else I simply opted right away for alternative universes and left the time travel theme free for him; I don’t quite remember. In any case, the alternative universe concept is a kind of time travel, taking the voyager sidewise in time to other possible contemporary worlds. The task I set for myself was to send my protagonist to a dozen alternative Californias in the space of some 12,000 words. And so I did, in March 1973, with a profligacy of invention that would serve to fill a pair of trilogies today. I threw in one twist that might have been too subtle, because no one appears to have noticed it in all the years since the book appeared in the Ferman-Malzberg anthology Final Stage: the place where the protagonist arrives at the end, which I assert is the world from which he departed at the outset, is not exactly the world we ourselves live in. I can demonstrate that by pointing to the evidence, but I will leave that to perceptive readers.
Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere… Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good, if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life.
—The Teachings of Don Juan
1.
THE SECOND PLACE YOU COME to—the first having proved unsatisfactory, for one reason and another—is a city which could almost be San Francisco. Perhaps it is, sitting out there on the peninsula between the ocean and the bay, white buildings clambering over improbably steep hills. It occupies the place in your psychic space that San Francisco has always occupied, although you don’t really know yet what this city calls itself. Perhaps you’ll find out before long.
You go forward. What you feel first is the strangeness of the familiar, and then the utter heartless familiarity of the strange. For example the automobiles, and there are plenty of them, are all halftracks: low, sleek, sexy sedans that have the flashy Detroit styling, the usual chrome, the usual streamlining, the low-raked windows all agleam, but there are only two wheels, both of them in front, with a pair of tread-belts circling endlessly in back. Is this good design for city use? Who knows? Somebody evidently thinks so, here. And then the newspapers: the format is the same, narrow columns, gaudy screaming headlines, miles of black type on coarse grayish-white paper, but the names and the places have been changed. You scan the front page of a newspaper in the window of a curbside vending machine. Big photo of Chairman DeGrasse, serving as host at a reception for