Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [143]
Dear Dave,
Shel and I are having a wonderful time. We have a penthouse on the Parkway near the end of the 21st century. He’s talking about going on a grand tour. Maybe we will live near the Parthenon for a while, or possibly Paris during the 1920s. I have never been so happy. And I wanted to thank you for making it possible.
I will never forget you, Dave.
Love, Helen
P.S. We left something for you. In the wardrobe.
They’d left the Hermes. They had positioned it carefully under the light, to achieve maximum effect. It looked good.
He stood a long time admiring the piece. But it wasn’t Helen. The house filled with echoes and the sound of the wind. He hadn’t realized how much he’d miss her.
DAVE suspected that his friendship with Shel largely grew out of the fact they’d been opposites in so many ways. Where Shel was cautious, Dave could be reckless. Dave was not the guy, he’d once said, who would keep his mouth shut while Hitler was speaking. The difference in their sizes was striking. When they traveled together, Helen had once commented, they looked like a comedy team. While Dave got emotionally connected with every woman in his life, Shel was an all-or-nothing guy. The woman on his arm was either simply someone to keep him company or the love of his life.
Dave fell in love with everybody.
Another area in which they differed: Shel was perfectly content using the converter and traveling alone across the centuries. Dave had been along because of his language skills, and because a second person served as a safety factor. Shel had never said that, of course, but there was certainly some truth to it. Dave, on the other hand, could have been talking with Marcus Aurelius, but he wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much had Shel, or someone, not been there to share the experience. Consequently, with Shel and Helen both gone, he decided his time-traveling days were over.
He hadn’t been satisfied simply carrying a conversation with Hem ingway. He’d wanted to ride in the ambulance with him, to go chasing German submarines with him at the outbreak of World War II. But he didn’t want it badly enough to actually do it. At heart, Dave was shy. He would never have gone to say hello to Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and Molly Pitcher and the rest of those people.
He got bored with his career as an art dealer and started looking for a new line of work. The State Department was interested in employing him as a translator, and the CIA contacted him about coming on board. They wouldn’t tell him what they wanted him to do, other than that they would put his language skills to good use. He never found out how they knew he was available.
He discovered he couldn’t just sit on the front porch. But none of the jobs appealed to him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life parked in an office. It was hardly an appropriate career for a man who had talked with Voltaire and challenged Cesare Borgia.
In the end, he told Katie. Told her everything. And he needed to take her somewhere to provide proof.
So Katie showed up, and he took her to Ambrose, Ohio, as he had Helen. At eleven o’clock on a beautiful September morning in 1906. She loved the place. They hung out there much of the day, watching the trains roll through, drinking coffee at Sadie’s café, and sitting in the town square.
“Where would you like to go next?” he asked. “What would you like to see?”
At first, she was reluctant to move out of the twentieth century. They watched Abbott and Costello perform in a vaudeville show, took in a Fred MacMurray comedy during World War II in downtown Philadelphia, and hit some of the pubs during the Jazz Age. Katie came immediately to love the experience. “Oh, Dave, look at the trolley car.” “Dave, if we’re going to come here, I’m going to have to expand my wardrobe.” “Dave, I love Benny Goodman.”
Their first trip outside the safety zone was to Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, where Dave got lucky and ran