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Four

I WOKE AS soon as the room began to lighten up. Dawn, through two panes of warped glass and three layers of thick plastic, gives a room a surreal misty glow, like a photograph in Penthouse. She certainly looked right for the part.

Externally, at least. Penthouse models are always either looking you square in the eye while doing something unspeakably naughty, or else looking away in a scornful indifference which you both know is faked. My time traveling nude was out cold. (Not literally cold; I checked. Even though the room and I were.) She didn't budge as I got up and exercised out the kinks, the floorboards cracking like .22 fire, and she didn't budge as I pried up the heavy stove lid and stirred up the coals, enough for a restart thank God, and she didn't budge as I split some sticks down to starting size with the hatchet, even though as usual I got the blade stuck in a chunk of birch and had to hammer it free—she didn't even budge when a flying chip struck her blanket-covered hip. I checked her over very carefully for any sign that this might be other than healthful sleep. Pupils normal. Pulse very strong but not enough to alarm. Breathing free and rhythmic as hell. I visualized myself calling old Doc Hatherly, explaining how I had come into custody of this unconscious naked bald woman. ("Well you see, Doc, I had gone out into a blizzard at night to get Mucus the Moose, when suddenly there was a ball of fire, and this time traveler—what? Why yes, I do have long hair and a beard, what has that—eh? No, I've never taken any of that . . . anyway, not since the Solstice Dance at Louis's barn—Doc? Doc?)

The hell with it. She would wake up when she was ready. Or perhaps she would suddenly and quietly die, from causes I would never understand. Grim logic gleaned from a thousand sf stories suggested that this was perhaps one of the best things that could happen to a time traveler. Up behind the house were about ninety-five acres of woods; I knew places where the ground might be thawed enough to dig, with some effort, near the spot where she had appeared. Meanwhile, I wanted coffee and a piss, in that order.

But of course I had to have them the other way around. Peeing was simply a matter of reaching the chamberpot. For coffee, I had to:

—fill the kitchen firebox with wood, shut off the Kemac when the wood had caught, adjust dampers—

—put back on all of last night's stove-dried clothing, including outdoor gear, all of it smelling of ancient and tedious sin—

—carry two big white plastic buckets and the splitting axe down to the stream, a trifling two or three hundred meters without the slightest cover from the wind whipping in off the Bay—

—hack through the ice with the axe, without cutting off my feet—

—dig up two fullish buckets and seal them with lids that fit so snug they must be hammered, without wetting my gloves or other garments—

—carry both full buckets (heavy) and axe (awkward) back to the house—

—refill the kettle and assemble the Melitta rig—

—wait five or ten minutes for the kettle to boil—

—and start the coffee dripping. All of this in the zombie trance of Before Coffee. I seldom had the strength to imagine, much less undertake, a second trip, even though two buckets of water is (at best) precisely enough to carry you through to bedtime. Today I made the second trip. I had company. By the time I was back with the extra two buckets, water was ready to be poured over the coffee. (Every country home has at least a dozen spare white plastic buckets around. They coalesce out of air, like my guest. When they're old enough, they transmute themselves into Mason jars full of unidentifiable grains and beans.)

I toasted a slab of bread on the stove and reheated some of yesterday's porridge while the coffee was dripping. It is important to be done with breakfast by the time you have finished your coffee. Another of those habits I mentioned, which come from living in the cold winter woods. Twenty seconds after I finished the coffee, I was sprinting for the outhouse. Maybe it was as much as two and a half minutes before I was back indoors again, considerably lighter and much refreshed, ready to lick my weight in, say, baby rabbits.

I had fetched along four fresh eggs from the chicken coop; like the extra water, that turned out to be a happy thought. (Thirteen chickens, four eggs: a good day. I'm told they developed a strain of chicken that would reliably lay an egg a day. One unfortunate side effect; it was too dumb to eat.)

The weather had, with characteristic perversity, turned rather pleasant. Snow gone. Temperature creeping up to within hailing distance of Centigrade zero (well above zero in the scale I had grown up with). Wind moderate, and from the north—snow wind came from the south. Sky clear except for some scudding ribbons of cloud hastening over from New Brunswick. Sunrise beautiful as always, lacking the stunning colours of the pollution-refracted sunrises of my New York youth, but with a clarity and crispness that more than compensated. I was whistling Good Day Sunshine as I came in with the eggs.

I checked my guest. Other than shifted position (a good sign, I felt), there was no change. My kitchen was sunny and undrafty. I sat with my chair tipped back and my boots up on the stove and thought.

If she woke, we were going to talk—even if it took time for us to agree on language. If we did talk there was, it seemed to me, great risk of altering the past, thereby stressing the fabric of reality, perhaps destroying it altogether. I examined my curiosity, and found that it didn't care if it killed the cat—or even all cats. As I said, the logical thing to do was cut her throat. Of course I had no such intention. Perhaps it's a character defect: I don't have whatever it takes to murder a pretty naked woman on the basis of logical deductions concerning something which logic said couldn't be happening in the first place.

But suppose she had no such deficiency of character? Risky interaction between us could be avoided equally as well by my death. This intuition had caused me to hide her golden headband—but that might not be sufficient precaution. She looked well muscled; even asleep she looked like she had a lot of quick. I don't know even Twentieth Century karate.

I wanted leverage.

So I called Sunrise Hill.

"Hi, Malachi—is the Snaker up?"

"Ha, ha. Now I've got one for you."

"Would you wake him, man? It's kind of important."

"There's enough suffering in the cosmos, Sam—"

"Please, Malachi."

"I'll get Ruby to wake him up. Hang on."

Long pause. One advantage of commune life: there's always someone else to start the morning fires. One of the disadvantages of a spiritual commune: no coffee.

"Hazzit. Whiss?"

"Good morning, Snaker. Wake up, man, all the way up."

"S'na fucking wibbis?"

"Really, man, I got news—"

"Garf norble."

"What I tell you is true, brother. There's a time traveler in my living room."

"—from what year?—"

"I don't know. Unconscious since arrival."

"And you're sure it's a—" He lowered his voice drastically. "—what you said?"

"That, or an alien who arrives in a ball of fire in the woods, doesn't mind being naked in the snow, and has fabulous tits."

"Sam, you haven't by any chance—"

"Not since the dance at Louis's barn. I'm straight, Snaker."

"I've already left, but don't pour the coffee till you hear me coming over the horizon. Shit, wait—who else knows?"

"You, me, and God, if He's monitoring this sector at the moment." "If He is, He's holding His breath. Damn, why does everything always have to happen in the middle of the night?"

"Snake—don't even tell Ruby, okay? Uh—" I cast about for a cover story that would account for what he'd said so far. "What you tell people there is, I've got a possible Beatles bootleg, reputed to date from 1962, and I've asked you to come over and help me decide if it's legit. Get it?"

Even half-awake, the Snaker has a quick uptake. "It's the drumming that'll tell the tale. If it's Ringo, it can't be '62."

"Good man, Snake."

"Look, it's hard to run full tilt like this and talk on the phone. See you sooner." He hung up.

The only other habitual science fiction reader on the Mountain. I had known he would come through.

I used the morning chores to calm myself down. Bank fires, replenish woodbox, feed chickens, stare at Bay. The last-named seldom fails to repair a fractured mood; I went back indoors feeling pretty good. Started to resume work on my half-finished dulcimer, and realized I had left Mucus up on the mountainside the night before. No time to get him now. I went back outside and looked at the Bay some more.

While I was wishing for the thousandth time that I shared old Bert Manchette's ability to forecast the weather by the color of the water in the Bay, I heard the thunder of an armored column approaching. It was Blue Meanie, The Surprise Hill Gang's ancient pickup truck, with the Snaker at the wheel. There was a mechanical roar of outrage as the Meanie went through the Haskell Hollow, a few klicks away, and minutes later the wretched thing came into view around the bend, bellowing in agony and trailing dark smoke like a squid under attack. When he shut it off at the foot of my driveway it seemed to slump.

The Snaker was well over six feet and thin as a farmer's hope. Which made him especially cold-sensitive, which made him wear so many layers of clothes he looked like a normal person. Nobody knew Yassir Arafat back then, so Snaker had the ugliest beard I'd ever seen. His brown hair was narrow gauge, neither straight nor curly, and extremely long even for a North Mountain Hippie. He was that indeterminate age that all of us were, somewhere between eighteen and thirty-five. God had seen fit to give him guitarist's fingers, without a guitarist's talent, and it drove him crazy. He had a good baritone, was named after Snaker Dave Ray, the baritone in the old Koerner-Ray-Glover ensemble. He'd sold a couple of stories to magazines in the States. I taught him licks. He lent me books. We were friends.

This morning he was as excited as I've ever seen him before noon. He leaped from the truck before it had stopped coughing, ran up to me.

"Fabulous tits, huh?"

"Well," I said in a softer voice than his, "you're awake enough to have your priorities straight."

"As good as Ruby's? Never mind, you can't compare tits. Let's see her—"

He started to move past me to the rear of the house. (Nobody keeps a door open to the wind on the Bay side of his house.) I grabbed him by the shoulder, sharply. "Hold it a second. Stand right there and don't move." I went to the living room window, got up on tiptoe and squinted in through the layers of plastic. She was still where I had left her, apparently still asleep.

The Snaker was trying to look over my shoulder. "I'll be—"

"Shh!" I led him back away from the window.

"Come on, man, let's go inside for a better look—"

"No."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Stand there and shut up and I'll tell you why not."

He nodded. I went inside, made two cups of coffee, put a small knock of grog in my own, stuck the golden crown dingus under my coat and went back outside. He was peering in the window again. "Dammit, come here."

I made him drink the coffee all the way down. "Tell me all," he said when he had swallowed the last gulp, "omitting no detail however slight." So I did. It took less time than I had expected.

"It comes clear," he said finally. "Your behavior begins to make sense."

"Right. When she wakes up and realizes her cover's blown, maybe she just pulls my brains out through my eyesockets to cover her tracks. It would be nice to have an ally she's never seen and can't locate, who is prepared to blow the secret skyhigh if I don't report in on time."

"Aren't you overlooking something? What if she's a telepath? Then after she does you she comes and pulls out my brains."

I shook my head. "If she is, we're screwed no matter what we do. Besides, I don't believe in telepathy. What I'm going to do is give you this headband gizmo to hold hostage. You take it down the line somewhere and wait 'til you hear my shotgun go off once. It could take hours, but stay alert. If the crown turns out to be some essential part of her life support or something, I want to be able to get you back here with it in a hurry. But don't tell me where you're going, and don't come back if I fire both barrels."

"What a nasty suspicious mind you have, my son."

"Thank you."

"Look, why didn't you just tell me all this when I first got here?"

"You couldn't have followed the logic-chain before coffee."

"Oh. True. Okay, slip me the headband. And Sam—good luck."

"Thanks, mate."

"And call me back as soon as you're sure it's safe. I'm dying to find out if you're right."

"I know what you mean." I grinned. "It's like getting a tax refund from God. I've always wanted to meet a time traveler."

"Knowing one exists would be a tax refund from God. Meeting one would be gravy. Delicious gravy, but just gravy."

"I don't follow."

"Sam, Sam! If a time traveler exists—then the human race isn't going to annihilate itself in the near future. Not completely, anyway."

"Huh! You're right, by Jesus."

"Of course I am. I've had coffee."

He took the golden headband, studied it and put it away. He got back into the truck, did something that made it scream. "Have a care, son," he called over the clashing of gears. "Never trust a naked time traveler." And he was gone in a spray of gravel.

 

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Framed