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You asked me about our passenger, the girl with the dog? Try some of this Aurigaean vodka, that grass in the bottle makes it smooth. Like dubrovka, you can drink it all night.
That's right, she's on her way home to join her husband, she and the dog. Happy? I don't know. Joining this particular husband is something special. Women . .. And the dog. We took them to Shodar.
You know Shodar? That's right, big pink and green shrimps. Run their feelers all over your face to talk. Resonance, that's their specialty. The line has started to use them to process gyros. Nobody gets on with them too well, of course, because of that feeler act. But they're all right. You just have to pick who you send there. That's the cause of the Mitchell girl's trouble, really. My fault. I should never have taken a green kid like her husband to Shodar.
It was before I came with this line, three, four years back. I had a light freighter. We picked up a load of resonite, and I knew Shodar paid top price for resonite. Didn't know much else, nobody did. I should have kept Mitch on the deck. He's a nice kid—still is—but wild. You know the type, something out of an old space opera. Big, curly red beard, great smile, fast boy with his fist. Impulse boy—still is, I guess.
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Anyway, we were in a hurry, and he was down unloading. Between lifts he got to mimicking some of the Shodars standing around. You know they emit super-sonics? Gets you feeling uneasy and kind of sick-mad when you're around them. Mitch was kidding at one of the little fellows, and out came these feelers and started over his face.
Well, Mitch stood it for a minute and then he grabbed a handful and yanked. The Shodar keeled over, and before I knew what had happened they had Mitch. We couldn't do a thing while they carted him away, the supersonics were damn near turning us inside out.
Next time we saw Mitch he was in court, in a cage.
I took the portable voder, and we got the main outlines. It seems the little Shodar was somebody's mate, and what Mitch had done was equivalent to blinding it, plus castrating it, plus a dozen other things—all permanent. I gathered that Mitch was getting something less than the maximum—they had given him a kind of lawyer—but I couldn't make out exactly what the sentence was. Something about slipped: When it was over they rolled him away in the cage, still giving us the grin.
We had to wait a day for htm, they said. By morning I was expecting a stretcher with a piece of hamburger on it. Instead, here comes Mitch, striding along like a million credits, cap on the back of his head. Even his suit had been pressed.
"Never touched me!" he says. "Jiggled me up some, shined some lights on me. Whatever it is doesn't work on humans, see?"
A big Shodar who had come humping along after him was looking at me. I took the voder down to him—I was the only one who could stand that face-patting.
"What have you done to him?"
"He is-------." That word again.
The Shodar pointed at a little cluster of dwellings by themselves across the port. Maybe you noticed it? We'd wondered about that village; the Shodars there never
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looked at us or responded, although they seemed okay as far as I could see. I figured it for some kind of monastary. Right then, they were over by the fence, staring at the sky.
"Is that a prison?"
"What is that concept?"
"A place for offenders where they are not permitted to leave."
"No. They go there by choice. Our government gives them that place to be together."
Well, you can guess what I thought. A pest-house.
"You have given our man a sickness?"
"No! No! Not a sickness. He is ... I see no understanding. You have no-------on your planet." The Sho-
dar stared at me and I thought I detected some emotion, but you can't tell.
"On your home, he will be alone? He has a mate?"
"Yes."
"To stay with the mate. To be very quiet, not to travel. That is longest."
Well, we expressed some more apologies and took off for home fast. Mitch swore that he had had no injections, no gas, never been unconscious, but I threw him into quarantine as well as I could on that tub, and turned the whole shipload in to E.T.D. as soon as we hit orbit.
They took us into custody and went over us with everything they had. Nothing wrong. Mitch was in perfect shape so far as anyone could see. The only symptom I thought I noticed was a slight sluggishness. Their tests didn't pick it up, because they had no base-line on him for comparison.
At the end of a month they turned us loose, all except Mitch, and we took off. Maggie—that's the girl you've seen—stayed with him at the E.T.D. station while they observed some more.
It was about a year and a half before I got back. Some more vodka? ... E.T.D. called me in. A little blond guy named Bruno, not an M.D.
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"Before we talk, Captain, do you mind if we check you over again, briefly?"
"What's the matter with Mitch?"
"We don't quite know yet. But since you had most contact with him coming back, we'd like to run one more check for contagious effects."
"As long as it's briefly, this time."
It was mostly reflexes they wanted, and I got back to Bruno that night.
"Not contagious. Now we'll go to Mr. Mitchell."
Mitch was fully dressed, reading on his bunk. Bruno stopped me in the doorway. Mitch didn't look up. I had just breathed once when he looked around, then bounced out of bed and grabbed my hand. For a minute we both talked at once, Mitch radiating health and normalcy. Then there was an instant's silence.
"We're sending you home today, as promised, Mr. Mitchell," said Bruno.
Again the tiny silence.
"Great! Well, great!" Mitch exclaimed bouyantly. "John, why don't you come along? Maggie'd love to see you, you know."
"That's exactly what I was going to suggest," said Bruno. "As far as our medics can see, you're absolutely healthy. But I would like Captain James to go with you if he could, just to play it safe."
Later he told me, "I just don't know. He's healthy, all right. It isn't pathological. But it's something. I'm not a doctor, you know, I'm a physicist. If I told you my guess, you'd laugh. All I can go on is what my think-ink would be if he were a piece of matter brought to me for, say, harmonic analysis. Tell me one point in detail, about that village near the port: They were looking at the sky, you said, and these was nothing there? When did they start that?"
Well, we hashed it out in what detail I could recall, which wasn't much. As I said, those Shodars were acting like people on a street when some joker starts staring up at nothing and a crowd joins in. They never had looked at us so far as I knew. What were their ages?
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Who knew. And so on. One thing he wanted to know—the ground level.
"Completely flat, I think ... Yes. No, no new construction. No vehicles ... Rain? It doesn't rain there. Climate's about 30°C all the time."
He blew, and sniffed, and polished his big old specs, and then he warned me.
"Now, the trip home. No planes! No monorail, either. A car, I think, and very slowly. Not over fifty kilometers, in fact."
"What??
"Yes, I mean it. You could damage him gravely ... or maybe I'm all wrong. But humour me if you care for your man. Start very slowly, too—in fact, make all changes very slowly. Treat him—well, treat him like a viscous liquid, if you understand what I mean."
I didn't, but I promised. Mitch certainly didn't look anything like a viscous liquid, and those fifty-kilometer hours really bugged him. He was the same old Mitch, except for this odd little jerkiness. It took him a second to look at you, and then it took another to look away from you, and there were these brief silences. And he was slow getting in and out of the car. His walk was odd, too. He moved as fast as ever, seemingly, but somehow he lagged. I took to slowing up, and he looked at me as if puzzled.
"You too," he said. We were coming out of a diner.
"How do you mean?"
"People over there were spooky. Always interrupting me. Jerky. Even you're doing it."
There was one bad moment when we pulled up in front of Mitch's place. Maggie flew out and pulled the car door open. Mitch wasn't ready for her. She half-fell into his lap and pulled his head around, and at the same time Mitch wheeled himself around, almost spilling her. She grabbed his arm and seemed to slip right down it, landing on the drive.
Her eyes were wide, and she stared at her hands for a moment, but there was no harm done. Only, I knew
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what was bothering her. I had taken Mitch's arm once to hustle him through a door, and it was, well—oily, somehow. But there was no oil, only a rough jacket.
That's about all I noticed then. It was a good visit, even with Mitch going in fits and starts and looking around me. Both Maggie and I knew something wasn't right, but I hoped time would fix it, and I guess she did too. Time! .. . More vodka?
I got back two years later. Found a letter waiting from Maggie. Also an official signal from Bruno, who was now chief of something, with a new big lab. I went there first.
"No examinations this time, Captain." He goggled up at me pixie-like. "We want to engage your professional services for a trip to Shodar. For me and my staff, one way. And for Mrs. Mitchell, to return. I am sorry to say that we now believe we know what is wrong with your friend."
"He's worse?"
"Yes. Oh, he's perfectly healthy. But the condition is progressive."
"Will you tell me what's wrong with Mitch? Where is he?"
"He's here. They're both here. You'll see him in a minute. To explain . .. You gave me the clue, Captain, with the word slipped. That's what he was, slipped. That and the natives looking up.
"Slipped—r
"When a thing slips, it is because of a lack of friction holding on to some matrix. The Shodars took away, somehow, some of your friend's friction. Not friction as you think of it—friction in space. No. They modified his friction in time. They have apparently the ability to modify the temporal rate of a living organism, to cut it loose from its binding in the general temporal matrix, by a tiny decrement. Without full friction it slips. Drifts further and further behind, in time."
"But Mitch—he's here, isn't he?"
"Here, yes, but behind. The event that takes place
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now, for you and me, takes place later for Mr. Mitchell. And the gap is widening."
"How much?"
"I estimate that today it is slightly over twenty hours. We don't yet know the form of the curve; hopefully, linear. But the point, Captain, is that there is danger. The intersection of events in normal time with him can be physically dangerous. That was why I warned you about fast movement, quick changes. The man you see before you is, in some sense, not there . . . And yet, he is. He seems to be present only at points which he will occupy. Very sensitive. No changes. We have made a special static environment."
But the point was not, of course, the danger.
I saw the point when they took me to Mitch. The same old Mitch, with a new haggard face. He was facing us, reading a handwritten letter.
Bruno held me back. I followed his gaze and saw Maggie sitting like a statue in one corner.
Mitch never gave us a glance. He finished his letter, crumpled it, walked over to Maggie and seized her shoulder. She looked up at him. I guess you could call it smiling.
For a minute nothing happened, and then he burst out roughly.
"It's no good, I've got to talk to you! Maggie—Maggie—don't leave me! Where are you? Maggie?"
He was pawing her shoulder, dragging at her. She tried to rise, to go into his arms, but he went on pawing. One of his arms seemed to slide almost through her head. Then he quieted, as if listening. Presently he sighed and moved away, and she continued to sit leaden, looking at him. Then she seized a piece of note-paper and started to write as we drew back.
"Twenty hours and—let me see, seven point six minutes ago, Mrs. Mitchell attempted to enact her part of that scene. But as you can see, she did not gauge his movements quite accurately .. . She tries. It's astonishing, really, her persistence. The notes, you see, she tries to explain it first. You realize of course that he did not
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perceive her at all as she was just then, he perceived as she was in her past? ... Extraordinary. She has been very helpful."
The scientific mind. Not that they're all like that. But Mitch was drowning, you might say, in time. Utterly cut off. And she trying to follow him down.
Bruno asked me if I wanted to greet him.
"You mean, go in and talk and shake hands with empty air?"
Well, we compromised on a taped message and I left. They joined me at take-off. Several government research groups had combined on the charter. Bruno's there on the planet now, learning all about Shodar resonance theory. The old face-patters didn't seem to bother him a bit.
Mrs. Mitchell? Well, of course they hoped the thing could be reversed. Mitch could no longer be moved at all, but there was money to bring Shodar technicians and equipment back if something could be done. The Shodars were willing, even the one Mitch had mutilated.
I think no one had realized Mitch would be alone. But there's no use. They can't hook you back in again, once you've been slipped. They're working. Maybe they can at least hold him where he is. About three days now, more by the time they get something. Notes and tapes .. . and shadows that don't see him, that's his world . . . Here's still some vodka left—or how about drambuie to finish off with?
She had it done to her, you know. Figures she can follow him. It'll work if they can stabilize them. If not, at least she'll be only three days behind him. And the dog, they thought the dog would make them both feel better. Hard to see how a dog could last long, though. How can you control a dog?
The village? Oh, that's simple enough. They were watching a ship land. Our ship. We'd been there two weeks. Sharp man, Bruno.