Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [31]
“What do you want to see?”
There was a baseball romance, Rounding Third, that he’d have liked. “No. Let’s go see Thurgood. That’s fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
FOR Shel, discretion was even more difficult. Helen had swept him off his feet. On that first date, the same day he’d taken Dave to 1931, they’d gone to dinner at Fayette’s, his favorite luxury nightspot. There they ate by candlelight, while a pianist played “It Had to Be You.” They talked about trivia. She was commenting on how enticing the atmosphere was, and he said something about work or maybe about a movie he’d seen recently. Like Dave, he was aching to talk about how he’d been walking the streets of Depression-era New York, that he could take her there now. That he could take her anywhere. To any time. She liked George Bernard Shaw, and he could take her back to London at the beginning of the twentieth century to watch the opening of Man and Superman. You want the date of a lifetime, sweetheart?
“So what exactly do you do, Shel?” she asked. And managed to look interested.
What did he do? “I do public relations for Carbolite. Basically, we sell engineering systems. To individuals or to manufacturers. Anybody who wants to build a better house, we can show him how.”
Yawn.
“Really?” she said. “How does that work?”
Well, the truth is, love, I travel in time. The other night I rescued Winston Churchill. Tomorrow, I’m going to pop by and say hello to Cicero. He explained about making presentations to engineers and how people had better washing machines because of Carbolite technology. It took only a few minutes before her eyes began to glaze.
“But enough about me,” he said. “How’s life in medicine these days?”
She was too smart to take the bait. She asked whether he really enjoyed the theater or actually used the Disciples as a way of meeting women. What did he do when he wasn’t selling better washing machines? (She didn’t phrase it that way, but he understood what she meant.) Where did he want to be ten years down the road?
That one stopped him cold. Where indeed? He had no ambitions, really, beyond the moment. A decade from now, he’d like to be making a substantial amount of money. And he’d like to be happily married, maybe with one or two kids. But suddenly that all sounded mundane. And it occurred to him he could take his time device and go look. Find out what he’d be doing. Find out what they’d both be doing.
And he wondered, while he talked in a circle about ambitions he really didn’t have, how it would affect them if he did take her forward so they could find out.
Let’s go look.
“I’d like to be with a larger corporation,” he said, finally. “One of the blue chips, maybe GE, running their PR office.”
“Well.” She sipped her rum and Coke and looked at him across the rim of her glass with those spectacular blue-green eyes. “Good luck with it, Shel.” She almost sounded as if it all had some significance.
There was a time when he had seriously believed in the transformative power of public relations. Image is everything. If you believe it’s a better world, it is a better world. But somehow selling a more efficient computer system to the Wall Street Journal no longer galvanized his sense of worth. The existence he had imagined for himself, creative, appreciated, a guy who walked into the room and everybody automatically got quiet—it had happened. But he couldn’t see that it mattered.
He wondered if Helen would be interested in talking baseball.
GALILEO had been born in February 1564, in Pisa. It was a time when Aristotelian astronomy was held in high regard, when the assumption that the sun and planets rotated around the Earth was dogma, and when any who disagreed risked more than their reputations. (Although it was possible to venture an opposing opinion, so long as you did so, as Coper nicus had, in Latin. And were careful not to be too loud