FOREVER TO A HUDSON BAY BLANKET

Dov Rapelle was a nice person, personally. He was so nice you didn’t notice that he wasn’t overpoweringly bright in a survival sense. He also owned a long skier’s body and a lonesome dreamy Canuck face that he got from his fifth grandfather who came out to Calgary, Alberta as a dowser. By the time the face came down to Dov a solid chunk of Alberta Hydroelectric came with it. But the Rapelles lived plain; Calgary, Alberta was one of the few places in the twenty-first century where a young man could be like Dov and not be spoiled silly.

Calgary has the tallest water-tower on the continent, you know, and all that tetra-wheat and snow-sports money. And it’s a long way from the Boswash and San Frangeles style of life. People from Calgary still do things like going home to see their folks over winter vacation. And in Calgary you aren’t used to being phoned up by strange girls in Callao, Peru at 0200 Christmas morning.

The girl was quite emotional. Dov kept asking her name and she kept crying and sobbing, “Say something, Dovy, Dovy, please!” She had a breathy squeak that sounded young and expensive.

“What should I say?” asked Dov reasonably.

“Your voice, oh, Dovy!” she wept, “I’m so far away! Please, please talk to me, Dovy!”

“Well, look,” Dov began, and the phone went dead.

When his folks asked him what that was he shrugged and grinned his nice grin. He didn’t get it.

Christmas was on Monday. Wednesday night the phone rang again. This time the operator was French, but it was clearly the same girli

“Dovy? Dovy Rapelle?” She was breathing hard.

“Yeah, speaking. Who’s this?”

“Oh, Dovy. Dovy! Is that really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Look, did you call before?”

“Did I?” she said vaguely. And then she started crying “Oh Dovy, oh Dovy,” and it was the same dialogue all over again until the line quit.

He did not get it.

By Friday Dov was beginning to feel hemmed in, so he decided to go check on their cabin on Split Mountain. The Rapelles were not jetbuggy types; they liked peace and quiet. Dov took his plain old four-wheeler out behind Bragg Creek into the pass as far as the plows had been and then he put on his pack and skis and started breaking trail. The snow was perfect, dry and fast. In no time he was up past the bare aspens and larches and into the high spruce woods.

He came out on the moraine by the lake at sundown. The snow was heavily wind-drifted here. He cut across bare ice and found the front of the cabin buried under a six-foot overhang of snow. It was about dark by the time he’d shoveled in and got a fire going from the big woodpile in back. He was bringing in his second bucket of snow to melt when he heard the chunka-chunka of a copter coming through the pass.

It zoomed over the clearing and hovered. Dov could see two heads bobbing around inside. Then it settled down twenty yards away sending a wave of white all over and somebody tumbled out.

The first thing Dov thought of was trouble at home. The next thing was his fire. He had just turned to go put it out when he realized the chopper was lifting back up.

It went up like a yak in a feather factory. Through the blizzard Dov saw a small pale body floundering toward him.

“Dovy! Dovy! Is that you?”

It was the girl, or at least her voice.

She was stumbling like crazy, up to her crotch in the snow in the fading light. Just as Dov reached her she went down on all fours and all he could see was her little stark-bare pink ass sticking up with a glittery-green thing on one cheek. And about a yard of silver hair.

“Yo ho,” he said involuntarily, which is a Stonie Indian phrase meaning “Behold!”

She turned up a pretty baby face with a green jewelbug on the forehead.

“It’s you!” she sneezed. Her teeth were chattering.

“You’re really not dressed for snow,” Dov observed. “Here.” He reached down and scooped her up and toted her indoors, snow and green butterflies and rosy ass and all. His frosty pink Christmas cake with a razorblade inside.

When he got the lamp going she turned out to be as naked in front as she was in back, and about sixteen at the oldest. A kid, he decided, on some kind of spinout. While he wrapped her in his Hudson Bay blanket he tried to recall where he could have met her. No success. He plonked her on the snowshoe chair and built up the fire. She kept sniffling and chattering, but it wasn’t very informational.

“Oh, Dovy, Dovy, it’s you! D-Dovy! Speak to me. Say something, please, Dovy!”

“Well, for starters—”

“Do you like me? I’m attractive, amn’t I?” She opened the blanket to look at herself. “I mean, am I attractive to you? Oh, Dovy, s-say something! I’ve come so far, I chartered three jets, I, I—oh, Dovy d-darling!”

And she exploded out of the blanket into his arms like a monkey trying to climb him, whimpering “Please, Dovy, love me,” nuzzling, squirming her little body, shivering and throbbing and pushing cold little fingers into his snowsuit, under his belt. “Please, Dovy, please, there isn’t much time. Love me.”

To which Dov didn’t respond quite as you’d expect. Because it so happened that this cabin had been the prime scene of Dov’s early fantasy life. Especially the winter fantasy, the one where Dovy was snuggled in the blankets watching the fire gutter out and listening to the storm howl… and there comes a feeble scratching at the door… and it turns out to be a beautiful lost girl, and he has to take off all her clothes and warm her up all over and wrap her up in the Hudson Bay blanket… and he’s very tender and respectful but she knows what’s going to happen, and later he does all kinds of things to her on the blanket. (When Dov was fourteen he could only say the words Hudson Bay blanket in a peculiar hoarse whisper.) The girl in one version was a redhead named Georgiana Ochs, and later on he actually did get Georgiana up to the cabin where they spent a weekend catching terrible colds. Since then the cabin had been the site of several other erotic enactments, but somehow it never came up to the original script.

So now here he was with the original script unrolling around him but it still wasn’t quite right. In the script Dov undressed the girl, Dov’s hands did the feeling-out. The girl’s part called for trembling appreciation, all right. But it didn’t call for shinnying up him like a maniac or grabbing his dick in ice-cold paws.

So he stood for a minute with his hands squeezing her baby buttocks, deliberately holding her away from his crotch until something communicated and she looked up, panting.

“Wait, oh,” she gasped, and frowned crossly, apparently at herself. “Please ,.. I’m not crazy, Dovy, I—I—”

He walked stiffly across the hearth with her, trying to keep his snowsuit from falling down, and dumped her on the bunk, where she lay flopped like a puppy with her knees open and her little flat belly going in and out, in and out. There was an emerald butterfly on her ash-blond muff.

“All right,” he said firmly (but nicely). “Now look. Who are you?”

Her mouth worked silently and her eyes sent Love you, love you, love you up to him. Her eyes didn’t seem wild or druggy, but they had a funny deep-down spark, like something lived in there.

“Your name, kid. What’s your name?”

“L-Loolie,” she whispered.

“Loolie who?” He said patiently.

“Loolie Aerovulpa.” Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect.

“Why did you come here, Loolie?”

Her eyes glistened, brimmed over. “Oh, no,” she sobbed, gulped. “It’s been so long, such a terribly long, long, way—” her head rolled from side to side, hurtfully. “Oh, Dovy, please, there’ll be time for all this later, I know you don’t remember me—-just please let me touch you, please—it hurt so—”

Soft arms pleading up for him, little breasts pleading with their puckered noses. This was getting more like the script. When Dov didn’t move she suddenly wailed and curled up into a fetal ball.

“I’ve sp-spoiled everything,” she wept, burrowing wetly in the Hudson Bay blanket.

That did it, for a nice person like Dov. One of his hands went down and patted little Tarbaby’s back, and then his other hand joined the first and his snowsuit fell down. Her back somehow turned into her front and curled up around him, and his knees were feeling the bunk boards while two downy thighs locked around his hips and sucked him in.

And he got a shock.

The shock came a bit late, the shock was wrapped around him and thrusting at him so that he had no choice but to ram on past her squeal—and after that he didn’t have time to worry about anything except letting the sun burst in.

But it is a fact that even in Calgary you don’t meet many maidenheads. It says something for Dov that he knew the way.

Now, a twenty-first-century maidenhead isn’t a big thing, socio-psychologicalwise. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly nothing, especially for a nice person like Dov. What it did was to move the episode one step out of the fantasy class—or rather, one step into another fantasy. Particularly when Loolie said what girls often do, afterward. Looking at him anxious-humble, stroking his stomach. “Do you mind? I mean, my being a virgin?”

“Well, now,” said Dov, trying to think decisively while peeling a squashed green butterfly out of his neck. “Truly, honestly, did you mind?” “Honestly, no.” He balanced the butterfly on her head. “It did hurt a little… oh, ooh,” she cried distractedly, “your blanket—”

They were deciding the blanket didn’t matter when Loolie looked at her little fingernail and started kissing his stomach.

“Dovy dear, don’t you think, couldn’t we,” she mumbled, “I mean, it’s only the first time I ever—try again?” Dov found himself agreeing.

The second time was infinitely better. The second time was something to challenge fantasy. It was so good that the scrap of Dov’s mind that wasn’t occupied with the electric baby eeling under and over and around him… began to wonder. Virginal fucks did not, in his experience, achieve such lorn-bursting poetry, such fitting, such flowing surge to velocities sustained beyond escape, such thrust and burn and build with the first-time fuckee sobbing rhythmically, “Love you, Dovy, Do-o-ovy,” giving everything to it in the best position of all until all the stages went nova together—

“… Don’t sleep yet, Dovy, please wake up a minute?”

He opened one eye and rolled off; he was a very nice person.

Loolie leaned on his chest, worshipping him through her pale damp hair.

“I almost forgot.” She grinned, suddenly naughty. He felt her hair, her breasts move down his belly, down his thighs and shins to his feet. Sleepily he noted a warm wetness closing over his big toe. Her mouth? Some kind of toe joy, he thought—and then the signal made it six feet back to his brain.

“Hey-y-y!” He smacked her butt. “That hurt! You bit me!”

Her face came around laughing. She was really neat-looking.

“I bit your big toe.” She nodded solemnly. “That’s very important. It means you’re my true love.” Her eyes suddenly got wet again. “I love you so, Dovy. Will you remember, I bit your toe?”

“Well, sure I’ll remember,” he grinned uneasily. The neurones that had twitched sometime back, boosted by stimulation from his toe, finally made connection.

“Hey, Loolie. What you said… is your name Aerovulpa?”

She nodded, yes.

“The Aerovulpa?”

Another nod, her eyes glowing at him.

“Oh God.” He tried to remember what he’d seen about it. Aerovulpa… The Family… Mr. Aerovulpa, he gathered, was not in tune with the twenty-first century— maybe not the twentieth, even. And this was an Aerovulpa virgin all over his legs. Ex-virgin..

“By any chance is your father sending a private army up here after you, Loolie?”

“Poor daddy,” she smiled. “He’s dead.” The far beacon in her eyes was coming closer. “Dovy. You didn’t ask me my whole name.”

“Your what?”

“I’m Loolie Aerovulpa… Rapelle.”

He stared. He didn’t get it at all.

“I don’t—are you some kind of relative?”

She nodded, her eyes enormous, weird.

“A very close relative.” Her lips feathered his cheek.

“I never met you. I swear.”

He felt her swallow. Loolie drew back and looked at him for a couple of long breaths and then glanced down at her little finger. He saw she had a tiny timer implanted in the nail.

“You haven’t asked me how old I am either,” she said

quietly.

“So?”

“I’m seventy-five.”

“Huh?” Dov stared. No geriatrics imaginable could…

“Seventy-five years old. I am. Inside, I mean, me, now.”

Then he got it.

“You—you—”

“Yes. I’m tune-jumping.”

“Time-jumper…!” He’d heard about it, but he didn’t believe it. Now he looked and saw… seventy-five years looking out of her baby eyes. Old. The spark in there was old.

Loolie checked the nail again. “I have to tell you something, Dovy.” She took hold of his face solemnly. “I have to warn you. It’s very important. Darling, don’t ever ig-g-g—eugh-gh—”

Her jaws jabbered, her head flopped—and her whole body slumped on him, dead girl.

He scrambled out and had just got his ear on her heartbeat when Loolie’s mouth gulped air. He turned his head and saw her eyes open, widen, wander to his body, her body, and back to Ms.

“Who’re you?” she asked interestedly. Asking for information.

He drew back.

“Uh. Dov Rapelle.” He saw her face, her eyes were different. She sat up. A strange teenager was sitting in his bunk, studying him so clinically he reached for the blanket.

“Hey, look!” She pointed at the window. “Snow! Oh, great! Where am I? Where is this?”

“It’s my cabin. Calgary, Alberta. Listen, are you all right? You were time-jumping, I think.”

“Yeah,” said Loolie absently, smiling at the snow. “I don’t remember anything, you never do.” She squirmed, looking around and then suddenly squirmed again and said “Oh, my,” and stopped looking around. She put her hand under herself and her eyes locked on his.

“Uh… hey—what happened?”

“Well,” Dov began, “You, I mean we—” He was too nice to blame it all on her.

She bugged her eyes, still feeling herself.

“But that’s impossible!”

Dov shook his head, no. Then he changed it to yes.

“No,” she insisted bewilderedly. “I mean, I’ve been hyped. Daddy had me fixed so I couldn’t. I mean, men are repulsive to me.” She nodded. “Girls too. Sex, it’s a nothing. All I do, all I do is sailing races. Star class, yick. I’m so bored!”

Dov couldn’t find a thing to say, he just sat there on the bunk holding the blanket. Loolie put out her hand and touched his shoulder tentatively.

“Hey.” She frowned. “That’s funny. You don’t feel repulsive.” She put her other hand on him. “You feel all right. Maybe nice. Hey this is weird. You mean, we did it?”

He nodded.

“Did I, like, enjoy it?”

“You seemed to, yes.”

She shook her head wonderingly, grinning. “Oh, ho, ho. Hey, daddy will be wild!”

“Your father?” said Dov. “Isn’t he—you said he was dead.”

“Daddy? Of course he’s not dead.” She stared at him. “I don’t remember a thing about it. All I remember is being in some big old house, being seventy-five. It was awful.” She shuddered. “All stringy and creepy. I felt, bleeah. And those weird old people. I just said I was sick and went and lay down and watched the shows. And slept. For two days, I guess. Hey, when is this? I’m hungry!”

“December twenty-ninth,” Dov told her dazedly. “Do you do this a lot, time-jumping?”

“Oh no.” She pushed her hair back, “lust a few times, I mean, daddy just installed it. I was so bored, I thought, well, it would be nice to give myself a treat. I mean, when I’m old, I’ll enjoy being sixteen again for a little while, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know, we don’t have anything like that here. In fact, I never believed they existed.”

“Oh, they exist.” She nodded importantly, frowning at him. “Of course they’re very expensive. There’s only a few in the world I guess. Hey, you know, I saw your picture there. By the mirror. I am so hungry. There has to be food here. Sex is supposed to make you hungry, right?”

She scrambled off the bunk, trailing blanket. “I’m starved! Can I help you cook? Oh, my glitterbugs. Oh dear. Is that the moon? We’re up in real mountains?” She ran around to the windows. “Daddy never lets me go anywhere. Oh, mountains are fantastic! Hey, you really do look nice. I mean, being a man isn’t so hideous.” She spun back to him, nose to nose. “Look, you have to tell me all about it.” Her eyes slid around, suddenly shy. “I mean, everything, God, I’m hungry. Listen, since we, I mean, I don’t remember, you know. Can’t we sort of try it over again? Hey, I forgot your name, I’m sorry—”

“Loolie.” Dov closed his eyes. “Will you please just shut up one minute? I have to think.”

But all he could think was that she had a good idea: food.

So he fried up some corned beef hash, with Loolie all over the cabin like a mongoose, opening the door, smooshing snow on her face, admiring the moon and the mountains, running over to poke him with a spruce icicle. When she turned her attention to the fire he was pleased to see that she put the wood on right. They sat down to eat. Dov wanted very much to ask about her father. But he couldn’t—being Dov—break through Loolie’s excitement about him, and the mountains, and him, and the cabin, and him, and…

It began to dawn on Dov that this little Aerovulpa had a pretty sad locked-up sliver of the twenty-first century.

“You ought to see this place when the ice goes out,” he told her. “The big melt. And the avalanches.”

“Ohj Dovy, I’m so bitched with people-places. I mean, nobody cares about anything real. Like this is beautiful. Dovy, will you, when I—”

That was when her father’s private army came chunga-chunga out of the night sky.

Dov scrambled into his suit and discovered that the army consisted of one small hysterical man and one large hairless man.

“Uncle Vic!” cried Loolie. She ran up and patted the small man while the large man showed Dov several embossed badges.

“Your father, your father!” Uncle Vic spluttered, thrusting Loolie away and glaring around the cabin. His eyes focused on the bank. The big man stood stolidly by the door.

“Angry, yes!” moaned Uncle Vic. He took off his hat and put it on again and grabbed Dov’s snowsuit.

“Do you know who this girl is?” he hissed.

“She says she’s Loolie Aerovulpa. She was time-jumping,” Dov said, being reasonable.

“I know, I know! Terrible!” The little man’s eyes rolled. “Louis—Mr. Aerovulpa—turned it off. How could you do this to him, girl?”

“I haven’t done a thing to daddy, Uncle Vic.”

Her uncle marched over to the bunk, grabbed up the blanket, hissed, and threw it on the floor.

“You—you—”

“Daddy had no right to do that!” Loolie cried. “It’s my life. It didn’t work, anyway. I—I love it here, I mean, I think I—”

“No!” the little man shrieked. He scuttled back to Loolie and started shaking her. “Your father!” he yelled. “He will have you psyched, he will have you deleted! Puta! Pffah! And as for you, you—” He whirled on Dov and began to_spray old-world discourtesies.

At which point, Dov, although a nice person, was starting to get considerably browned. He recalled coming up here for some peace and quiet. Now he looked at the little man, and the big man, and Loolie, and finished lacing up his boots.

“Get up! Move!” the little man screamed. “You come with us!”

“My folks will wonder where I am,” Dov objected reasonably, thinking the two men looked like urban types. “On your feet, felo!” Uncle Vic flapped his hands at the big man, who came away from the door and jerked his head at Dov.

“Get moving, -boy.” He had one hand in his pocket like an old movie.

Dov got up.

“O.K., but you need some clothes for Miss Aerovulpa, don’t you think? Maybe her father won’t be so wild if you bring her back dressed.”

Uncle Vic glared distractedly at Loolie, who was sticking out of her blanket.

“I’ll get a snowsuit in the closet,” Dov said. He moved carefully toward the woodshed door by the fireplace, wondering if urban types would buy the idea of a closet in a mountain cabin. The big man took his hand out of his pocket with something in it pointed at Dov’s back, but he didn’t move.

Just as Dov’s hand reached the latch he heard Loolie’s mouth pop open and held his breath. She didn’t say anything.

Then he was twisting through the door and yanking out the main brace of the woodpile. Cordwood crashed down against the door while Dov assisted matters by leaping up the pile, grabbing the axe as he went. He scrambled around the eaves onto the lean-to and whipped around the chimney, hearing hangings from below.

From the chimney he launched himself up to the roof-ridge. The big front drift was still there. He rode a snow-slide down over the front door, slamming the bar-latch as he landed, grabbed up his skis and was galloping through the drifts to the far side of the helicopter.

The first shots came through the cabin window as he swung his axe at the main rotor bearings. His body was behind the copter and the cabin windows were too small for the big man. When his axe achieved an unhealthy effect on the rotors Dov gave the gas tank a couple of whacks, decided not to bother igniting it, buried the axe in the tail vane and scuttled down the morraine into a private ravine. Glass was crashing, voices bellowing behind him.

The ravine became a long narrow tunnel under the snowbowed spruces. Dov frog-crawled down it until the noise was faint, like coyote pups. Presently the ravine widened and debouched into a steep snowfield. Dov buckled on his skis. The moon rode out of a cloudrack. Dov straightened up and took off down the flittering white. As he flew along gulping in the peace and quiet, he hoped Loolie would be all right. Vic was her uncle, it had to be o.k.

In an hour he had reached the parked snowcat and was headed back to Calgary where his uncle, Ben Rapelle, was chief of. the RCM mountain patrol.

He felt free.

But he wasn’t.

Because Loolie—Loolie Number One, that is—had said her last name was Rapelle. And his toe swelled Up.

That turned out to be, as she’d also said, very important.

Next morning, after the patrol brought Loolie and Uncle Vic and his enforcer all safe and sound down to Headquarters, Loolie insisted on phoning her psychomed. So when her father, Mr. Aerovulpa, arrived in his private VTOL the psychomed was with him.

Mr. Aerovulpa turned out to be quite unlike Uncle Vic, who was actually, it seemed, only a distant cousin. For too many generations swarthy Aerovulpa sperm had been frisking into blond Scandinavian-type wombs; the current Mr. Aerovulpa was a tall yellow-gray glacier with a worried, lumpy Swedish face. If he were wild he didn’t show it. He appeared only very weary.

“Eulalia,” he sighed depletedly in Ben Rapelle’s office. That was Loolie’s real name and he always called her by it, having no talent for fatherhood. He looked from his only child to the psychomed whom he had employed to ensure a marriageable product.

Now it had all blown up in his face.

“But how… ?” asked Mr. Aerovulpa. “You assured me, Doctor—” His voice was quiet but not warm. “Uncle” Vic shied nervously. They were all standing around the Patrol office, Dov with a socmoc on one foot.

“The time-jump,” shrugged the psychomed. He was plump and slightly walleyed, which gave him an air of manic cheer. “It was the older Loolie who was in this body, Louis. This older persona was no longer conditioned. You really should have been more careful. What on Earth did you want with a thing like that, time-jumping at your age? And the cost, my God.”

Mr. Aerovulpa sighed.

“I acquired it for a particular purpose.” He frowned abstractedly at the Rapelles. “A very small trip, I wished to observe—”

“To see if you had a grandson, eh? Eh, eh?” The psycher chortled. “Of course. WeU, did you?”

For some reason Mr. Aerovulpa chose to continue this intimate topic. “I found myself at my desk,” he said. “On it was a portrait.” His bleak eyes searched his daughter, froze onto Dov.

Dov blinked. It had just occurred to him that a securely hyped and guarded virgin might not be otherwise defended from maternity. Loolie sucked in her lower lip, made a, face.

The psychomed eyed them both, head cocked.

“Tell me, Loolie, when you came back to yourself, did you find this young man, ah, disgusting? Repellent? The situation was traumatic.”

Loolie smiled at him, wider and wider, swinging her head slowly from side to side. “Oh, no. Oh, no! It was fantastic, he’s fantastic, he’s beautiful. Only—”

“Only what?”

Her smile turned to Dov, melted. “Well, we never, I mean, I wish—”

“All right!” The psychomed held up his hand. “I see. Now, tell me, Loolie. Think. Did you by any chance bite his toe?”

“Uncle” Vic made a noise, Loolie looked incredulous. “Bit his toe?” she echoed. “Of course not.”

The psychomed turned to Dov. His gaze sank to the socmoc. “Did she, young man?”

“Why?” asked Dov cautiously. Everybody began looking at the socmoc.

“Did she?”

“I never!” said Loolie indignantly.

“You don’t know,” Dov told her. “You did, before. When you were seventy-five.”

“Bite your toe? What for?”

“Because that was the key cue,” said the psychomed. He pulled his ear. “Oh bother. You remember, Louis. I told you.”

Mr. Aerovulpa’s expression had retreated further into the ice age.

“The idea was not to make you sexless for Hie, my dear,” the psycher told Loolie. “There had to be a cue, a key to undo the conditioning. Something easy but improbable, which couldn’t possibly happen by accident. I considered several possibilities. Yes. All things considered, the toe-bite seemed best.” He nodded benevolently. “You recall, Louis, you wanted no matrimonial scandals.”

Mr. Aerovulpa said nothing.

“A beautiful job of imprinting, if I do say so myself.” The psycher beamed. “Absolutely irreversible, I guarantee it. The man whose toe she bites—” he pointed at Dov, one eye rolling playfully “—or rather, bit, she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives. Guaranteed!”

In the silence Mr. Aerovulpa passed one hand over his Dag Hammarskjold forehead and breathed out carefully. His gaze lingered from Loolie to Dov to Ben Rapelle like a python inspecting inexplicably inedible rabbits.

“It is… possible… that we shall see more of each other,” he observed coldly. “At the moment I trust it is… agreeable to you that my daughter return to her schooling. Victor.”

“Right here, Louis!”

“You will remain to provide our… apologies to these gentlemen and to accomplish any necessary, ah, restorations. I am… not pleased. Come, Eulalia.”

“Oh, Dovy!” Loolie cried as she was hustled out. Dov’s uncle Ben grunted warningly. And the Aerovulpas departed.

But not, of course, permanently.

Came springtime in the Rockies and with it a very round-bellied and love-lorn teenager, escorted this time by a matron of unmistakable character and hardihood. Dov got out the ponies and they rode up into the singing forests and rainbow torrents and all the shy, free, super-delights of the wild country Dov loved. And he saw that Loolie truly wanted to live there and share his kind of life in addition to being totally in love with him, and anyone could see that Loolie herself was luscious and warm-hearted and potentially sensible in spots, especially when it came to getting rid of the matron. And Dov really was a nice person, in spite of his distrust of the Aerovulpa ambiance. (The ambiance was now making itself felt in the form of a so-called demographic survey team snooping all over Calgary.)

So when summer ripened Dov journeyed warily to the Aerovulpa island off Pulpit Harbor, where he soon discovered that the ambiance didn’t repel him half as much as Loolie attracted him. Even the nicest young man is not immune to the notion of a beautiful semi-virginal ever-adoring child-bride of great fortune.

“What, ah, career do you plan for yourself?” Mr. Aerovulpa asked Dov on one of his rare appearances on the island.

“Avalanche research,” Dov told him, thus confirming the survey team’s report. Mr. Aerovulpa’s eyelids drooped minutely. The alliances he had contemplated for Loolie had featured interests of a far more seismic type.

“Basically, sir, I’m a geo-ecologist. It’s a great field.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful, Daddy!” sang Loolie. “I’m going to do all his records!”

Mr. Aerovulpa’s eyes drifted from his daughter’s face to her belly. The Lump was now known to be male. Mr. Aerovulpa had not arrived where he was by ignoring facts, and he was really not a twenty-first-century man. “Ah,” he said drearily, and departed.

But the wedding itself was far from dreary. It was magnificently simple, out on the lawn above the sea, with a forcefield keeping off the Maine weather and an acre of imported wildflowers. The guest list was small, dominated by a number of complicated old ladies of exotic title and entourage among whom the Alberta contingent stood out like friendly grain elevators.

And then everybody went away and left Dov and Loolie for a week to themselves in paradise.

“Oh, Dovy,” sighed Loolie on the third day, “I wish I could stay like this the rest of my life!”

This not very remarkable sentiment was uttered as they lay on the sauna solarium glowing like fresh-boiled shrimps.

“You just say that because you bit my toe,” said Dov.

He was thinking about sailing, to which he had recently been introduced.

“I never!” Loolie protested. She turned over. “Hey, you know, I wonder. When did I actually meet you?” “Last Christmas.”

“No, that’s what I mean. I mean, I came there because I already loved you, didn’t I? And that’s where I met you. It’s funny.”

“Yeah.”

“I love you so, Dovy.”

“I love you too. Listen, let’s take your big boat out today, should we?”

And they had a wonderful sail on the dancing trimaran all the way around Acadia Park Island and back to a great clam dinner. That night in bed afterwards Loolie brought it up again.

“Unh,” said Dov sleepily.

She traced his spine with her nose.

“Listen, Dovy. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to live this day over again? I mean like when we’re old.”

“Hunh-unh.”

“Daddy has the juniper right here, you know. I was here over Christmas when I did it. That’s what the big power plant over by the cove is for, I told you.”

“Hunh.”

“Why don’t we do it tomorrow?”

“Unh,” said Dovy. “Hey, what did you say?”

“We could time-jump tomorrow, together,” Loolie smiled dreamily. “Then when we’re old we could be young like we are for a while. Together.”

“Absolutely not,” said Dov. And he told her why it was an insane idea. He told her and told her.

“It’s dangerous. What if one of us turned out to be dead?”

“Oh, if you’re dead nothing happens, I mean, you can only switch places with yourself. The, the persona something symmetry, I mean, if you’re not there nothing happens. You just stay here. The book says so, it’s perfectly safe.”

“It’s insane anyway. What about the Lump?” Loolie giggled. “It would be a great experience for him.”

“What do you mean? What if he finds himself with the mind of a six-month embryo while he’s driving a jet?”

“Oh, he couldn’t! I mean, he’d know it was going to happen, because it did, you know? So when he got that old he’d sit down or something. Like when I get to be seventy-five I’ll know I’ll be jumped back here and go and meet you.”

“No, Loolie. It’s insane. Forget it.”

So she forgot it. For several hours.

“Dovy, I worry so. Isn’t it terrible we have to get old? Think how great it would be, having a day to look forward to. Being young again, just for a day. For half an hour, even. Isn’t it rotten, thinking about getting old?”

Dov opened one eye. He had felt thoughts like that himself.

“I mean, we wouldn’t miss a few hours now. We have so much time. But think when you’re, oh, like sixty, maybe you’ll be sick or degenerating—and you’ll know you’re going to jump back and feel great and, and go sailing and be like we are!”

Crafty little Loolie with that “sailing” Loolie gripped by the primal dream: pay now, play later.

“You can’t be sure it’s safe, Loolie.”

“Well, I did it, didn’t I? Three times. Nothing goes wrong ’cause you know it’s going to happen,” she repeated patiently. “I mean, when you get there you expect it. I found a note I’d written to myself telling me what to do. Like the butler’s name was Johan. And my friends. And to say I was sick.”

“You could see the future?” Dov frowned. “What happened? I mean, the news?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know, I mean I wasn’t very curious. All I saw was some old house. Like it was partly underground, I guess. But Dovy, you know about things, you could see all the news, even in just like half an hour you could find out what was going on. You could even read your own research, maybe!”

“Hmh—”

That wasn’t quite the end of it, of course. It was the evening of the sixth day when Dov and Loolie came in from the moonlight on the shore and went hand in hand into Mr. Aerovulpa’s quiet corridors. (Which were found unlocked, an out-of-character fact unless it is recalled that Mr. Aerovulpa too had glimpsed the future.)

There was a handle set on standby. Loolie threw it and power hummed up beyond a gleaming wall in which was set a kind of airlock. She swung the lockport to reveal a cubicle inside the wall.

“It’s just big enough for all three of us,” she giggled, pulling him in. “What do you suppose we’ll do, I mean, the old usses who came back here? I mean, we aren’t giving them very long.”

“Ask your son,” said Dov fondly, mentally reviewing the exciting things he wanted to find out about THE FUTURE.

So they set the dials that would exchange their young psyches with their older selves forty years ahead, when Dov would be—good God, sixty-two. Loolie let Dov be cautious (this first tune, she told herself secretly) and he selected thirty minutes, no more. They clasped hands. And Loolie tipped the silent tumblers of the activator circuit unleashing the titanic-capacitators waiting to cup the chamber in a temporal anomality, OOOMM!!!

—And by a million-to-one chance shooting young Dov Rapelle uptime into the lethal half-hour when a coronary artery ballooned and ruptured, as he lay alone in a strange city.

So Loolie Aerovulpa Rapelle returned from a meaningless stroll in a shopping arcade in Pernambuco to find herself holding Dov’s dead body on the control room floor. Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive.

Not even—as Loolie later pointed out to the numerous temporal engineers her father had to hire—not even when it involves a paradox. For how could Dov have died at twenty-two if he actually died at sixty-two? Something was terribly wrong. Something that had to be fixed, that must be fixed, if it took the whole Aerovulpa fortune, Loolie insisted. She went right on saying it because the psychomed had been quite right. Dovy was the only man she ever loved and she loved him all her life.

The temporal engineers shrugged, and so did the mathematicians. They told her that paradoxes were accumulating elsewhere in the society by that tune, too, even though only a few supra-legal heavy persons owned jumpers. Alternate time-tracks, perhaps? Time-independent hysteresis maybe? Paradoxes of course were wrong. They shouldn’t happen.

But when one does—who do you complain to?

Which wasn’t much help to a loving little girl facing fifty-nine long gray empty years… twenty-one thousand, five hundred and forty-five blighted days and lonely nights to wait… for her hour in the arms of her man on a Hudson Bay blanket.

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