MICHAEL A. MARTIN

SPELUNKING AT THE CAVERN

When Michael Martin wrote "Spelunking at the Cavern," he was living in San
Francisco, traveling up and down the West Coast selling Marvel Comics to the
direct-market comic book specialty stores. He was hired away by Dark Horse
Comics in Portland, Oregon -- and during the transition (quite literally), he
learned of his first short fiction sale. He notes that he owes Harlan Ellison a
great debt of appreciation for all of his support.

It isn't every day that you run into yourself. The first time it happened to me,
I was standing outside, a noisy dive on Mathew Street in the gray heart of the
dockside warehouse district m Liverpool. I'd been inside the club only once and
already did not particularly want to go back. The din was frightening, and the
place lacked even the most rudimentary air conditioning. The sweat of the
leather-clad multitudes packed inside ran in dank rivulets down the walls. I
hadn't come all the way back to 1958 merely to subject myself to this sort of
thing. Unfortunately, the nature of my mission made visiting this place a sorry
necessity.

The Critical Incident, the event that would change my subject's life forever,
wasn't due to happen until next Tuesday evening and it was now Saturday
afternoon. I decided to use the time to reconnoiter, maybe do a little research
and reading at the local library, maybe take some photos. But the first priority
was to take in a meal.

Across Mathew Street from the Cavern Club lay an old-fashioned British
fish-and-chips and beer pub of the sort that had flourished nearly two centuries
ago, which is to say now. The light was dim in the comers of the tiny place, and
the upholstery was old. The place stank of stale grease, but none of the other
dozen or so patrons seemed to notice. I took a booth near the back and had just
picked up a menu when I locked eyes with the man I least expected to see. He saw
me, too, and came over to my booth.

"Have a seat," I said, regarding the face that stared back at me each morning
from the shaving mirror. He did, and thanked me.

"What brings you to mid-twencen?" he asked.

"Same thing as you, I guess," I said. "Temporal trails. Evidence of
time-tampering. You're here, after all. Maybe that's reason enough."

"And I thought I was drawn here by all that stomping they're doing right now
over at the Cavern Club," my doppelganger said with a chuckle. "Are you here
from Alternitech, too?"

I nodded. "Publishing Division."

A buxom sandy-haired barmaid laid two pints of Guinness before us. I didn't
remember ordering anything. He took a long quaff while I regarded my mug more
reticently. I suppose on some of the time-lines of the multiverse, I'm quite a
tippler.

Wiping the foam from his lips, he said, "I work on the Entertainment side.
Specifically, rock 'n' roll. A & R."

I must have looked stupid, because he added, after a moment, "that means
'Artists and Repertoire.'"

I frowned at the condescension. Sometimes I could really piss me off. "You don't
suppose," I said, "that we could both have been sent here from our respective
timelines to safeguard the same subject?"

"I don't know," he said. "Let's compare notes."

I reached into the valise I always carried on my time-jaunts and withdrew
several paperback books. Old, familiar childhood classics, really. Novels of
imaginative fiction with titles like The Walrus Men, The Sun Kings, and All
Shine On and anthologies with titles like Walls and Bridges of the Imagination
and War Is Over (with Jerry pournelle, with a reprint of the original Stuart
Sutcliffe cover). My counterpart picked up a book, casually at first, until he
recognized the name on the spine. His face registered surprise for a moment, but
he swiftly recovered himself. He flipped through all of them, pausing here and
there to actually read some of the prose. An attitude of seeming reverence
crossed his features as he read.

"I'll be damned," he finally said. "I didn't know he had this in him. I mean, on
my timeline he wrote a couple of books of Lewis Carroll-inspired nonsense, but
never a coherent, sustained narrative like this!"

"What did he do on your timeline instead?" I asked, finally pausing for a moment
to pay proper attention to my beer. "The Altemitech you work for must have
valued it as much as my Alternitech values his contributions to the science
fiction field."

My alter ego drained his mug and gazed into the uneven rafters as he composed
his answer. "In the word of Dr. Winston O'Boogie, 'you shoulda been there.'"

"Meaning what?" I asked, leaving some money on the table.

"Meaning," he said, "follow me into the little club across the street and I'll
show you."

The Cavern Club was just as noisy, sweaty, crowded and close as it had been
during my first cursory reconnaissance visit. The place was stuffed with
gum-chewing teenagers, leather-clad teddy boys and natty suit-and-tie
lunch-crowd types. The stage had just been vacated by what the locals called a
"skiffle" band (guitar, bass, and tea chest) as we made our way to a
conveniently vacant table near the front. To get a table so near the stage in
this crowd, my counterpart must have had some pull with somebody. The band, a
scruffy, antisocial-looking lot, was swiftly replaced by another just as we took
our rickety/wooden seats.

All five of the musicians in the new band were clad in black leather pants and
western shirts with string ties. The drummer was a brooding James Dean type, his
hair thrown up into a huge pompadour, his expression a narcissistic, brooding
pout. Agawky, incredibly young guitar player stood to the right side of him.
Beside him stood a slight, intense young man in shades, a bass guitar nearly as
massive as himself slung across his slight shoulders. At the opposite side of
the stage stood a young man with a backward-strung guitar, an Elvis haircut, and
the big puppy eyes of a Japanese cartoon character. And center stage, right
before the stage's single microphone stood the man whose life I was here to
guide, the man whose career and eventual literary output I was here to
safeguard.

My Subject, a man I'd only seen in holos and book-jacket photographs, stood
staring down the crowd, arrogantly myopic. I knew he couldn't see anything
without his glasses. I also knew that he was renowned for hating crowds. Maybe
not being able to see them made them easier to face. My Subject lifted a black
and white Rickenbacker guitar and slung it onto his body, holding it low,
looking dangerous.

He counted fast to four and the band began a loud, discordant rendition of an
old rhythm-and-blues composition I vaguely remembered from somewhere (remember,
I never followed such stuff, at least not on my timeline). He sang or screamed
rather, about twisting and shouting and shaking it on out, to an ebullient
chorus of du-wops from the too-young guitarist and the big-eyed kid. The
audience drank and stomped and danced and hooted and fought. They repeated this
response even more vehemently during the second number, whose lyrics consisted
largely of a greed-soaked litany of "Money, that's what I want."

I was confused. Sure, my Subject had dabbled in this stuff, this "rock 'n'
roll", nonsense, during his art school period, but not for very long. This
certainly wasn't what history would one day immortalize him for. Rock 'n' roll
would be a mere footnote in his career, really. A curiosity. At least that's the
way it would play on my timeline.

I had to find out more. I noticed that my counterpart had lost himself in the
deep basso pounding and the shrill screaming from the little Fender amplifiers,
but there were questions I needed answered. I grabbed him by the arm and put my
face next to his ear.

"I can't hear myself think m here!"

I dragged him through to the door, weaving like a bee dancing the location of a
cache of pollen, and maneuvered us through the spastic crowds. In the street,
and around the corner, I spun my counterpart about to face me.

"Your John Lennon is a rock star?" I asked incredulously.

Dusk lay over the English seaport town like a thin, cold blanket. My Other and I
found ourselves in a small booth in yet another dockside pub. Two live pints of
Guinness, amid several dead soldiers, lay on the table between us. By now we'd
decided to trust each other enough to exchange our palmtop computers as we
exchanged stories and agendas. After fifteen minutes or so of this, I handed his
palmtop back to him and he returned mine.

"So you're saying," I slurred, "that after Lennon's mother dies he becomes
embittered and devotes himself entirely to this . . . music."

"That's right," he said, lighting a cigarette. I wished he'd quit that. "He was
never the same after Julia Stanley was taken from him."

"On my timeline," I said, "she nearly outlived him. And Lennon himself lived to
a ripe old age. How long does he live on your timeline?"

"He'll be shot to death just after turning forty," he said sadly. "A crazed
fan."

I shook my head. "He'd be a lot better off on my timeline."

He sloshed his mug absently, the cigarette dangling from his lip. "So we not
only have the same Subject to protect, but the same Critical Incident to
oversee."

"Then we have a huge problem," I said. "Julia Stanley must survive whatever you
think is supposed to happen to her on Tuesday, July 15, 1958. Otherwise, my
Subject will never have the opportunity to write all the books he's responsible
for back on my timeline."

"On Tuesday night a drunken off-duty cop is going to drive down her street just
a little too fast," he said deliberately, meeting my eyes and holding my gaze as
though trying to make his sincerity absolutely convincing. "She's going to be
walking home that night from her sister's house. The cop won't see her, and
she'll be killed. If you change that, Lennon's adolescence will cascade into
completely different and unrecognizable channels."

"I recognize them," I said belligerently.

"The world will never hear about a rock band called the Beatles."

I shrugged. I could see that this meant a great deal to him. But stacked next to
Lennon's literary output on my timeline the events my counterpart described on
his seemed rather frivolous. After all, I'd never heard of the Beatles, or the
Silver Beetles, or whatever the hell those noisy, posing thugs had called
themselves. On the other hand, my Other had never had the pleasure of reading
The Sun Kings. It made sense that he would be as resolute as I was, given his
experience. And given the fact that the man across the table from me was me.

"Your Alternitech," he said, "must have an Emergency Procedures Manual just like
mine does."

"It does," I said.

He quoted: "'In the event of an encounter with another agent from a parallel
reality or at temporal cross-purposes with your mission, that agent is to be
considered a shoot-on-sight enemy.'"

"I'm supposed to kill you, too," I confessed levelly, studying him, noting that
he carefully kept his hands visible atop the table.

He chuckled. "If the Everettists up in Theoretical are right, then that order I
quoted is pretty paranoid. I mean, I'm supposed to kill you to keep your reality
from wiping out mine. I have to snuff you so the wave-function will collapse in
my favor."

I shook my head. "That's pure Schrodinger. Your Everett-followers should
believe," I said, keeping my hands on top of the table, "that both our realities
lie side-by-side, neither one a threat to the other."

"We're both here from the future, aren't we?"

"Different futures," I said.

"Same present," he said, smiling.

"If Everett was right, there isn't a problem," I said. "If Schrodinger was
right, one of us is going to lose the coin-flip. It's one hell of a gamble to
stake an entire reality on."

"I didn't say I accepted the bet," he said, his smile falling. "I don't need to
know the answer that badly."

"The Everettists didn't write the Emergency Procedures Manual," I said. "The
Schrodingerites did. The wave-function is going to have to collapse one way or
the other."

He was suddenly all business. "Maybe you can shoot some faceless agent from
another timeline. But can you shoot yourself.?"

I stared into my beer and said nothing. I noticed that his hands were still on
top of the table.

"I didn't think so," he said. "But put that issue to one side for a few hours.
Why not explore this timeline a bit more before doing anything irrevocable?

I shook my head slowly. We were at an impasse. So for the fourth time that
afternoon, I drained my mug, throwing my head back to catch all the foam.
Drinking a Guinness was like eating a small loaf of very tart bread. As I put
the mug down, I noticed the figure standing near the door. A man in a hat and
trench coat. Staring. How long had he been there, watching us.:

The man in the trench coat chewed on a toothpick nervously, casting furtive
glances toward our booth. He looked familiar, too, but with the hat obscuring
his features, I couldn't place him. I nodded in the direction of the man in the
coat to point him out to my drinking companion, who abruptly turned to take a
look at him. That must have spooked Trench, since he jerked into motion just
then and strode quickly for the door.

One thing a veteran clandestine time-traveler finds annoying is being noticed.
Being observed and stared at makes me feel positively undressed. Evidently, my
drinking buddy felt the same way and the two of us decided without the need to
exchange any words not to let Trench get very far away from us.

Once outside on the street neither of us could see which way he'd gone. But I
knew he couldn't have gotten far. I pointed to the south end of the grubby
asphalt lane and began to run in the opposite direction. My Other took the hint
and ran in the direction I pointed. Splitting up should make our man easier to
find, I reasoned. My Other and I could settle our differences later.

Turning the corner and running into a trash-strewn alley, I literally ran into
Trench, practically knocking him down. He lurched onto one knee and as he
struggled, to right himself I saw the little black gun in his hand. He leveled
it straight at me and began to rise to both feet. For a single, frozen instant
his eyes locked with mine and once again I had that eerie sensation of staring
into the mirror.

The pistol jerked with a muffled pop and my forehead seared from the heat of the
muzzle flash. At the same time, my trench coated doppelganger took another bad
step, the flap of his coat having somehow gotten underfoot. I seized the wrist
of his gun-hand and with a woosh of deflating lungs we sprawled in a flailing
heap onto the alley's smelly cobbles.

He tried to knee me in the groin, but I swiveled and he encountered hard
hip-bone instead. I wrenched harder on his forearm, trying to get him to open
his hand. Needless to say, we were fairly evenly matched.

Then the gun gave another silenced, jerking report.

Sweaty, scraped, and shaken, I retraced my steps through the alley to the front
of the pub. My slacks were tom at the knee, the pantleg slick with blood.
Several sailors and rough-looking dock-worker types passed-me at the front door,
but nobody favored me with so much as a glance. Street brawls were evidently as
common here as the gum wrappers and bottles and cigarette butts lining the
gutters.

"What the hell happened to you" asked my Beatle-fan alter ego, from behind me. I
spun about to face him. I couldn't stop shaking.

"I very nearly got killed by a not her one of you. Another one of me, I mean.
Where the hell were you just then?" I started to laugh at the absurdity of it.
Could I have counted on help from this Other in the fight? If I'd just now
gotten killed in the alley, wouldn't his mission suddenly have gotten a whole
lot less complicated?

"Did you kill him?" he asked soberly. I nodded.

My Other closed his eyes as though in silent prayer. Was he, too, imagining the
horror of having to kill one's self? "What a thing to have to do," he said at
length.

"I saved you the trouble," I said, maybe a little too harshly. I dug into a
jacket pocket and withdrew the palmtop computer I took from my dead Other's
body.

My living Other seemed to rouse himself all at once, putting aside his horror.
"We still have our original difficulty," he said. "I am here to protect and
preserve the timeline which produced John Winston Oho Lennon, the leader and
founder of the Beatles."

I touched a few keys on the palmtop, watching the screen as the machine booted
up. "And I am here," I said coolly, "on behalf of John Winston Gemsback Lennon,
one of the greatest New Wave science fiction writers who ever lived."

"It's one or the other," he said. "Simple."

Scrolling through a file on the palmtop, my spine recoiled as though charged
with freon. I wondered absurdly if someone were walking across my grave.

"No," I said. "It's not simple."

"What?"

"Who first invented the timefield generator?" I asked.

My Other shrugged. "Who knows? Once it was invented, it must have spread into
everywhere and everywhere. I'm sure there are some good theories, but I'm just a
perceptive A & R man who can push buttons with the best of 'cm. If you need that
kind of information, you'll need to consult a specialist from Paleo-Technical."

"And they wouldn't just tell us something like that. The inventor of the
timefield would be too venerable to time tamperers if just anybody could find
out his or her identity."

"Okay," he said.

"So you don't know how to build a timefield generator from scratch?" I asked my
Other.

He laughed. "Of course not."

"Me neither. We'll just have to hope he's sharp enough to figure it out on his
own."

"What the hell are you talking about?" my Other said, looking perplexed.

The barmaid tried to charge past us, but I stopped her with a piercing whistle.
She looked startled. So did my Other when I ordered six Guinnesses.

"Two for you, two for me, two for John," I explained. Then I handed him the dead
man's palmtop. "Read this. Then we're going to invite a guest to our table."

John Lennon was smashed before he got halfway through the second pint. He didn't
look half as thuggish and threatening as his stage persona, slumped as he was
onto the cracked upholstery. He squinted first at my Other, then at me. His
glasses were nowhere in sight. Nearly knocking his pint over, Lennon once again
picked up the dead man's palmtop unit, turning it this way and that.

"Gear toy,"' he slurred. "Sort of, you know, like magic. Always loved that.
Magic, I mean." He pronounced loved like luvved, very scouse, very working
class, and, I thought, very affected.

I stood up, suddenly conscious of my bladder after the copious drinking. "That's
it, then," I said. "It's yours. If you figure out how it works and what it does,
you'll quite literally change the world."

Lennon smiled disarmingly. "Got that covered already," he said.

"No doubt," said my Other, also rising. looking a bit awed. "One way or
another."

Lennon stared up at him a little curiously, just for a second, before going back
to his new toy. My Other and I backed away.

After a trip to the men's room, we were outside again, watching the bits of
trash blow across the cobbles as afternoon settled into evening. Some of the
dock-worker types were evidently heading off for evening shifts. The nattily
clothed office types had begun drifting away after the Beatles' last set and
were now entirely gone. It was getting quiet.

My Other looked troubled. "Do you think that was the smartest thing we could
have done?"

"How should I know? The Manual doesn't cover this. We had to improvise. All we
know for sure is that our dead friend came here from some other timeline's
version of Alternitech. From the Technology Division."

He nodded.

"And his palmtop told us enough about his mission to make rock 'n' roll and even
literature seem trivial alongside the larger issue."

With reluctance, my Other seemed to finally come to terms with our truce.

I pulled my own palmtop from my coat pocket and held it up before my Other in a
kind of salute. It vibrated pleasingly in my hand as it powered up, the energies
of the timefield washing over me.

"So which timeline survives after we leave the here now?" my Other asked, I
presumed rhetorically.

Does it matted I wondered. Whatever Lennon's destiny as an artist, I hoped my
Other and I had at least preserved the most crucial part of the life of our
mutual Subject: John Winston Ono Wells Lennon: the discoverer of practical time
travel.

"Goo Coo G'Joob," said my Other just before he vanished from sight.