TIME OUT FOR TOMORROW, by Richard Wilson

Originally published in Science Fantasy, December 1957.

Darius Dale banged on the speaker’s table with his empty highball glass in an attempt to bring the Omega Club to order. He didn’t have instant success because many of the members and guests had some holiday cheer in their glasses and others were at the bar getting refills. It was the Omega’s Club annual Christmas party and Darius, the chairman of the entertainment committee, was having his usual trouble getting people to sit down and pay attention.

Any other responsible scientist who had been visited by a man from the future probably would not have asked his visitor to become, in effect, a vaudeville performer. But Darius at the age of thirty was not yet altogether responsible. He had been a science fiction writer long before he became an electronics engineer and had never lost the prankishness which was reflected in some of his best stories.

And the Omega Club—that amorphous collection of science fiction writers, editors, illustrators, agents and just plain readers—was Darius’ first love.

Besides, it was the Christmas season, which meant a skit for the Christmas party. Darius Dale, perennial chairman in charge of the skit, had been procrastinating this year and had prepared nothing. His big worry had been a rush rewrite of the last two chapters of his new magazine serial—the first installment of which had already been published. It just happened to be a time travel yarn. So, when the time traveler made his appearance in Darius’ writing room one evening in late November, the nimble Dale mind quickly worked out several ways in which the visitor might be helpful.

* * * *

The hubbub of the Christmas party showed no signs of abating.

Darius shrugged and put his glass down. He buttoned his double-breasted coat and around his generous middle and killed time by telling his story about the old maid and the Martian. Groans and cries of protest came from those already seated but Darius only leered at them and went on with the story, varying it here and there from last year’s version and dragging in the names of prominent club members as incidental characters.

Darius finally reached the punch line—”‘By Deimos and Phobos,’ The Martian said, rubbing his eyes in the morning light, ‘two more!’”—and was rewarded with boos and jeers, as was customary.

By now the last straggler had seated himself. The straggler was James Overholt Edison, the science fiction editor who signed his editorials “—joe,” but who instead had come to be known to his readers as Old Overholt. He was pushing thirty-five, at most, and generally was sober.

“I missed your story, Darius,” Edison said pleasantly, stirring his fresh drink with a forefinger. “Would you mind repeating it?”

“Gladly, Joe,” said Darius, baring his teeth in a simulated smile. “I’ll have it on your desk next week, at my usual three and a half cents a word.”

“Frankly,” said Edison, “I’d be happier to see the re-do of the time-travel yarn. The printer’s having an ulcer. Just like mine.”

“I didn’t think this was a business meeting,” said Walter Crown, the agent, “but if it is I want my ten percent, Darius.”

“My right arm up to the elbow you’ve already got, Walter,” said Darius. “How much more?”

“As much more as it takes to make the next payment on his Cadillac,” said Edison. “That’s how much.”

“It’s only a Buick,” Walter Crown protested good-naturedly, “and I’m its sole support.”

“Buick-schmuick,” cried Darius Dale banging on the table again. “The meeting will come to order and be entertained. The feature of the evening, ladies and gentlemen, an act guaranteed to thrill and astound—not to mention astonish and amaze—has been obtained for your delectation at great trouble and expense.”

“How much expense?” demanded Jennie Rhine, the glamour-girl secretary-treasurer of the Omega Club.

“At ease!” cried Darius. “Hardly as much as you get for one of your illustrations, Jennie. Fifty dollars. I say it at the risk of embarrassing our guest, whose name…”

“Fifty dollars!” Jennie shrieked theatrically. She shook her dark head in dismay. “And just when I thought the books might balance.”

“A little dignity, please!” bellowed Darius. “Let’s not drag the good name of the Omega Club through these sordid financial gutters. Our many distinguished guests,” he said, looking around the large room through his thick horn-rims, “include, I have been told, a Life photographer and, for better or worse, one of the brighter young men from The New Yorker.”

“Gosh-wow-boyoboy!” quoted a thirsty member who was on his way to the bar.

“That was Time, George,” Darius said. “And why don’t you come back and sit down quietly before they reprint that precious little slander. George! If you insist on going out there, bring me one, too—Scotch and water.”

George Granger, the novelist, nodded and kept going barwards.

* * * *

“Let’s get the show on the road, Darius,” Edison said and began to stamp his feet. Others joined in, beating out the slow rhythm of an impatient audience.

A portly figure stood up and went “Ahem” and “If you please” until the stomping ceased.

“Not now, Zorry,” said Darius hopefully.

“I insist,” said Zoroaster Ramm, the critic and anthologist. “I feel I must, under the circumstances, acquaint our new friends here tonight with the true aim of the Omega Club, lest they wrongly conclude that it is merely the gathering of juvenile science fictionists and—and—”

“Drunken crackpots.” George Granger supplied the description as he ambled back from the bar and handed Darius his drink. “Or maybe cracken drunkpots, Zorry. You admonish ’em, keed.”

Zoroaster Ramm smiled with what he imagined to be indulgence and waited for the laughter to die down. “It was not my intention to admonish anyone. I’ll leave that to the distinguished editor of Admonishing Stories.” He waited for a laugh of his own, but the only response was a polite smile from Edison, the editor of Astonishing Science Fiction. “However, at the risk of boring you—”

“Hear! Hear!” cried a voice from behind him.

“—at the risk of restating something already known to many here,” Zoroaster Ramm plowed on, “science fiction is not an adolescent hobby, but a finger pointing the way to the future, the harbinger of the stars, so to speak; the first faltering step—”

“Thank you very much, Zorry,” Darius said quickly, looking at his watch. “I’m sure we all agree. And now for the feature presentation of the evening, which happens to be not the finger to the future, as Mr. Ramm so putly apt it—aptly put it—what’s in this drink, George?—but the finger from the future, together with all the rest of him…Mr. Future himself!”

Darius Dale gestured with a flourish to the emptiness beside him on the speaker’s platform.

Nothing happened, except that Zoroaster Ramm sat down regretfully, looking hurt.

Darius looked at his watch again, held it up to his ear, shrugged and asked: “Who’s got the right time?”

He got a dozen different answers, mingled with catcalls. “Well, anyhow,” he said, “at ten-thirty, whenever that is, Mr. Future will make his appearance from the year 2017.”

Even as he spoke there was a shimmering in the air next to him and a whining hum. The shimmering became the outline of a man—a tall man wearing silvery shorts and some sort of metallic hardness over his bronzed skin, with a heavy cloak thrown back from his shoulders.

Then everything coalesced in an instant and the man stood there, solid, but blinking and looking a bit pale in the forehead. Handsome, too, Jennie Rhine observed, and not too young.

Mr. Future’s cloak was the last thing to stop shimmering and even after it did the whining hum continued in an undertone as it gradually faded away.

* * * *

The applause was thunderous—certainly more than Darius had hoped for. Of course they thought it was a trick, but it was gratifying to know they considered it a good one.

The man with the cloak blinked around in the direction of Darius Dale and said, “Hello, Papa.”

“I’m not your father, Dare,” Darius said. “I’m your great-grandfather.”

“I know,” the other said. “Too long. Call you Papa.”

“Okay,” said Darius. “Let’s make the introductions. Ladies and gentlemen—and George—I want you to meet Darius Dale IV, born March third, 1993, and therefore now twenty-four years old.

“He’s travelled backwards through time from the year 2017, where he’s attending Harvard business school prior to retiring. I’ll explain that in a moment. His cloak—I guess you heard it hum—is the secret of it all. I’ll explain that, too, as far as I can. But in the meantime there might be a question or two among you. Yes, Joe?”

James Overhold Edison stood up and straightened his grin into a serious expression.

“Astonishing Science Fiction, in the spirit of the evening,” he said, “will gladly pay one thousand dollars for an exclusive five thousand word ASF fact article by Mr. Future, with options.”

“Noted,” said Darius. “You’ll have a chance to back down later, but you’d be getting a bargain if Dare were interested. Walter?”

“He’ll need an agent,” said Walter Crown. “And seeing how he’s a relative of yours I’ll take him on without reading fees.”

“Very generous,” said Darius. “George?”

“I’ll buy him a drink, if he drinks.”

“Thanks,” said Darius Dale IV before his great-grandfather could speak for him. “I’ll take it.”

“Time travelling must be dry work,” George Granger said. “Come on to the bar, son. Let’s get away from the shop talk.”

“Can’t now. Papa.”

“Papa be damned,” said George. “Where you come from, Papa Darius is a moldering corpse.”

“Corpse my time machine!” protested Darius. “In the year 2017 I’m only ninety-four. Dare told me. Stout as an oak, too, I might add.”

“This presupposes that Darius the Fourth has visited you before,” said Jennie Rhine. “As long as we’re pretending to be gullibilized you might as well give us the story from the beginning.”

* * * *

While Darius launched into an account of how Darius IV had discovered the time warp and learned to take advantage of it, the young man from the future sidled off and joined George Granger at the bar. After a while, as Darius the elder began to get cute and repetitious, Jennie went to join them.

“Hi, Jen,” George welcomed her. “Old Darius still spellbinding ’em?”

“Well, he does have a way with him,” she said. “Ergo, it’s obvious that they think he’s the show and young Dare here is just a prop.”

Dare, his cloak slung over his arm, smiled shyly and signaled the bartender to make a drink for Jennie. The bartender was taking Dare and his futuristic costume in stride. As an old-timer at Omega Club parties, he’d also seen Men from Mars, head-bandaged and goggled Invisible Men and Bug-Eyed Monsters.

George said: “The way you talk, Jen, a person would think you had some doubt about it all being a hoax.”

“I keep an open mind,” Jennie Rhine said. “What’s yours like?”

“I’m on Dare’s side,” George said. “A man ought to know where he’s from. Besides, he talks different and has a different viewpoint on things. Alien, sort of; the same way I imagine I’d be if I barged in on my great-grandfather’s time. Forgive me for talking about you as if you were the lamppost, Dare.”

“Nyun,” said Dare.

“That’s one of the things, Jen, that ‘nyun.’ Obviously it means ‘Don’t mention it,’ or ‘That’s okay,’ but it’s a word we don’t have—just the way great-grandpa didn’t have ‘take off’ for ‘leave.’ That’s a characteristic of his conversation, generally. All of his phrases are clipped. Laconic is the word for Darius the Fourth.”

The bartender handed Jennie her drink and she flashed a smile at him and let it continue to glow as she turned to Dare.

“That’s pretty slim proof,” she said, “—meaning no disrespect to 2017.”

“Oh, there’s lots more,” George said. “For instance, I know who’s going to win the Kentucky Derby next year, and the Rose Bowl game, and how the heavyweight championship is going to go, and how long it’ll be before the other party gets the Presidency again—things like that. Very useful stuff, moneywise.”

“Hmm,” Jennie mused. “But nothing you can check up right away. And even then it could be no more than good guess-work.”

“That’s true,” George said. “But somehow it’s not what Dare says, it’s the odd ways he says it that has me more than half convinced he’s one of Darius’ science-fiction yarns come true. Now you take his accent—”

“Love to,” she said. “Except that at the rate you’re using yours, his never gets a chance. Maybe Dare and I should go sit at one of the tables and talk while you go in and heckle Darius. Come on, Mr. Future, and tell me what my great-granddaughter has been doing with herself lately.”

George took the hint and exited, first warning the young man: “Beware this glamourpuss. Face-of-an-angel but heart-of-ice type.”

“Nyun,” said Dare, smiling.

“Meaning,” Jennie Rhine called after George, “I don’t believe a word of it.”

Darius Dale was still going strong. George took a seat in the back row and listened.

“…and since I can see you still think it’s an elaborate gag I may as well tell you exactly what my great-grandson plans to do with his fifty-dollar fee. By a few judicious bets on long shots at the race track and by spreading smart money around at the ringside he’ll soon have a tidy little sum to invest legitimately in a family trust. I guess you’re all aware what a few thousand invested in General Motors about the time of World War I would be worth today. Well, Darius IV has made notes from the New York Times over the next half century and his money doesn’t come any smarter.

“Needless to say, I’ll be investing money of my own right along with him. I’ll be living quite comfortably for the rest of my life—but when Dare gets back to his own time he’ll be a millionaire in the flick of an eye.”

Darius had a lot more to say but he had become serious and his audience was getting restless.

He eased back into a lighter vein, told his story about the robot and the girls’ finishing school, then stepped down from the platform. The audience applauded and began to drift out to the bar.

George Granger managed to corner Darius alone after a while and said:

“You’re serious about this thing, aren’t you, Darius?” Darius squinted through his glasses and said:

“What makes you think so, George?”

“This and that. But if you are, you’d better go round up your boy. Our girl Jen has her hooks in him. I don’t know why exactly, aside from the obvious fact that he’s lady bait, but I have a feeling something’s up.”

“Where are they?”

“Out in the bar, at a table.”

Darius, looking concerned, headed that way with George at his heels.

“At what table, where?”

“That’s where they were,” George said, pointing. But Zoroaster Ramm was sitting there now, talking earnestly to a squirming young writer.

The bartender remembered seeing Jennie and the entertainer go down the broad staircase, toward the coat room, he said. It had been a little while ago. The check room attendant said the girl and the entertainer gentleman had picked up her coat, and the doorman remembered putting them into a cab. The trail ended there.

* * * *

Darius’ cab waited while he pounded at the door of Jennie Rhine’s apartment. There was no answer and the door was locked. Darius got back into the cab and gave the driver the address of Jennie’s studio.

The studio was in a loft building in a section of the city that once had been bohemian. As Darius climbed the stairs he saw that there was a light under the door, and when he found the door unlocked he burst in.

The two of them were sitting on pillows on the floor in the glow of a Sears Roebuck space heater. Dare’s cloak was folded neatly beside him. A bottle of wine and two glasses were sitting precariously on the shag rug between them. An easel was holding a bare canvas and there was a palette with fresh gobs of paint on it lying on top of an up-ended crate. Darius regarded the set-up with suspicious—Jennie rarely used oils.

Darius IV had the look of a conspirator on his face, but Jennie’s expression blazed anger.

“Just what are you doing here?” she demanded. “And have you forgotten there’s a custom called knocking at the door?”

Darius ignored her. “Dare,” he said. “You’d better come with me.”

Before the young man could speak, Jennie scrambled to her feet. She began to shove Darius in the direction of the door, whispering to him fiercely.

“Why don’t you leave the kid alone? He’s done his job, making a spectacle of himself for you and your Omegans. Now let him relax a little. It’s Christmastime, you know.”

Darius stood his ground. Darius IV continued to sit cross-legged on the rug. He took a sip of wine and looked fixedly at the big toe sticking out of the end of his sandal.

“I don’t like this little tête-à-tête,” the older Darius said. “Why don’t you pick on someone a little less innocent to relax with, Jen?”

“Dare happens to be fond of me,” she whispered back. “And I’ll thank you to keep your long nose out of my affairs. After all, he’s of age.”

“Not in this century, he isn’t,” said Darius. “Now be a good girl and shoo him out.”

“I’m not a good girl, as you well know, and I won’t shoo him out. It just so happens that he’s—well, he thinks he’s in love with me and he’s going to take me back with him. His cloak is big enough to take the two of us.”

“So that’s the game?” Darius raised his voice. “I guess his fortune will be big enough, too! I always knew you didn’t have many morals, but I didn’t think you were a gold digger.”

Jennie’s flashing palm put a ruby glow on Darius’ cheek. Dare got to his feet, alarmed now.

“Matter, Papa?” he asked. “Matter, Jen?”

Darius whirled on his great-grandson. “Did you promise to take this—this woman back to your time?” he demanded.

“I—yes.” Dare seemed to be holding a discussion with himself and then verbalizing its conclusion: “It’s love.”

“Love! You must be crazy, son. Why, she’s a good ten years older than you are. And you don’t fall in love just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

Dare snapped his own fingers. He grinned. “Old fashioned,” he said.

Darius waited, but that seemed to be Dare’s complete argument.

Jennie smiled a maddening, victorious smile.

“I’m glad that’s settled,” she said. “Now, Papa, will you leave us love-birds alone?”

Darius thought hard, his fictioneering mind seeking a denouement to this plot that was not of his own making.

“All right,” he said finally. “But first I’d like to have a word with my great-grandson alone. Come, Dare.”

* * * *

He led the young man to the back of the studio and there, among a welter of old canvases, stacks of magazines and a plaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David he talked intensely and at some length.

Dare listened, politely at first, then seriously, and in the end he was shooting unhappy glances at Jennie Rhine.

She was nervously kicking the leg of the space heater when the two finished their conversation. Darius was looking unpleasantly smug.

“Well?” she said tentatively.

Young Dare was coming toward her with his arms outstretched. She shot a puzzled look at Darius, but then smiled at Dare and went to him, her face turned up to his.

But Dare didn’t gather her in his arms. He took both her hands, squeezed them gently and kissed her respectfully on the cheek. Then he picked up his cloak and went to the door. He opened it, paused, sighed heavily and said:

“Bye, Mama.”

Then he was gone.

“The taxi’s right in front of the door,” Darius called after him. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Jennie Rhine remained thunderstruck for about ten ticks of a grandfather clock. The slamming of the street door below brought her out of it.

“Mama!” she screamed. “Mama? What did you tell him?”

“Merely,” said Darius smoothly, “that you and I, Jennie dear, had once had a little affair, of which there was issue. I also said that because you showed no interest in the child, I had taken it and was bringing it up in my name, as Darius Dale, Junior.”

Jennie Rhine was having trouble with her larynx.

“I think I might have added,” Darius said complacently, “that therefore if he ran away with you he’d be eloping with his own great-grandmother.”

Jennie got her voice back with a rush.

“You filthy liar!” she yelled. “You deliberately told him a thing like that! Why, it’s unthinkable! And he believed that I—With you? You fat…”

“Of course he believed it,” Darius said. “I’ve had a long career of making the improbable sound convincing. At any rate it quite dampened his ardor.”

* * * *

No one ever saw Dare again.

Darius Dale vanished a few days later—but not before he had placed a large number of parlays on long shots, put all his winnings into a bet on the Rose Bowl game and then taken a suitcase full of cash to an investment broker in Wall Street.

The Missing Persons Bureau later established that the last person to see Darius had been the cab driver who took him from Wall Street to his apartment in East 61st Street.

Astonishing Science Fiction failed to receive the rewrite of the last two chapters of Darius’ time-travel serial. Nor was the magazine able to find the original ending among Darius’ effects.

The editor, after communing with his ulcer, printed the serial unfinished and at the end of it ran a factual note in which all the circumstances of the author’s disappearance were set forth. The note was attested to by Darius’ fellow author, George Granger, Walter Crown, the agent, and the editor,—Joe himself. A notary public witnessed their signatures.

A few readers of Astonishing Science Fiction, when the issue appeared, wrote to say they thought it was a pretty clever way to end a time-travel yarn and that they were looking forward to seeing more of Darius Dale’s work. The majority of those who wrote, however, were outraged at what they considered a cheap editorial trick and demanded that a proper ending be printed in the next issue.

Life and The New Yorker decided it was a publicity stunt unworthy of their attention and the newspapers ignored Darius’ disappearance on the same grounds.

But a surprising number of members of the blasé Omega Club were almost entirely convinced that Darius Dale had left wrapped in his great-grandson’s cloak for the year 2017 so he could be a millionaire at the age of thirty instead of ninety-seven.