Friday Fiction: The Past is a Different Country (An Unfinished Short Story)

 

THE PAST IS A DIFFERENT COUNTRY.

 

There are things we leave behind

And things that leave us;

And in the swells of passing time

Which are most grievous? 

 

     "Come on, Mickey, get the lead out!"

     Instead of encouraging him, the sudden distracting yell made Mickey Martin lose his uncertain footing on the slippery hill's surface. His backpack went flying as his flabby arms whirled uselessly trying to catch himself. He went sprawling forward, flat onto his chin. His teeth rattled in his skull, black stars blazing before his eyes. He could hear his pack burst open, sending its contents caroming across the rocky slope. The short man lay stunned, breathless, tasting blood in his mouth.

     Footsteps came scrunching hurriedly back to where he lay; one set of footsteps. Even with eyes shut Mickey could tell that it was only Tom Churchill, the head of the expedition, who was bounding athletically back to check on his fallen team member. He felt strong arms roll him over as if he were an oversized teddy bear, then sit him up. Mickey's head started to clear, along with his sight, and he found himself looking into the amused, chiseled face of the mission commander.

     "Hang on there, Mickey," he said, smiling. "No need to do the Creech's work for it." Churchill looked up the slope. "Hey! Rottmeullar! Come give us a hand."

     With a sigh that could be heard twenty yards away, the third member of the party turned, grinding the gravel, and began stomping back towards them with grudging deliberation.

     "Sorry, sir," Mickey said. He shook his head and looked up with blinking eyes. To cover his embarrassment he stammered out the first thing to come to his mind. "So ... so you think that this thing is a Creech?" he asked, using the departmental slang term for an unknown biological entity.

     "Dunno," said Churchill. "But if it is, from the counts of the disappearances in the case, it's a nasty one." He looked around the area automatically. "We have to be on our toes."

     "And not flat on our asses," growled Rottmueller, drawing up next to the pair. He glared down at Mickey from his lanky, self-composed height. "What do you want me to do, give him a piggy-back?"

     "Just help get his stuff together," said Churchill. "Don't be such a bitch, Red."

     Rottmueller stiffened.

     "And just what do you mean by that, sir?" he asked through clenched jaws. His sparse, pencil-thin beard bristled theateningly over tightening muscles.

     "Just what I say," said Churchill. He stood up from his crouch and stared the bearded man in the face. "Men can be bitches too, Red."

     Rottmeullar glared at the team leader silently, then began jerkily gathering the contents of the pack from where they lay scattered on the hillside. Churchill helped the shaky Mickey to his feet, then when he was up, securely leaning on his climbing baton, let him go and went to help Rottmueller.

     Mickey watched in shame as they combed the hillside for his belongings, as if he were a clumsy child and they his watchful parents. It was like that with the team: they were always Churchill and Rottmeullar, but he was never Martin, always Mickey. He carried almost three times as much as they did, and it was mostly things to cater to his weaknesses: extra covers for the cold, extra food for his blood sugar, a host of pharmaceuticals to cater to his health, and a variety of what he called his "security blankets" that had no other purpose than to soothe his anxieties.

     Rottmueller came up and started unloading the pile he had been gathering at Mickey's feet.

     "Here," he said. "Take your crap. Get packing. I don't want to be here on the hillside all night."

     Mickey slumped to the ground next to his stuff and started sorting. Rottmeuller almost dumped the rest down on him. One item seemed to particularly fill him with disgust.

     "It's no wonder you can hardly move, if you lug worthless rubbish like this around with you. Ugh! It must weigh a ton." He held the hardback book out by one cover, the dangling pages flopping like a fish in his hand.

     "Hey! Careful!" Mickey cried, grabbing it away from the other with care. He shut the book and ran a worried hand over the spine. He wanted to explain it was a copy from the last official printed run of a paper book ever, in fact a volume of his favorite fantasy author, but he knew that would mean little to Rottmeuller. "I haven't had a chance to read it yet."

     The lanky man smirked and pulled a slim e-Reader from his pocket.

     "Look," he said. "Holds a hundred thousand volumes and weighs a fraction of what that pulpy brick does. A whole library, available at my fingertips."

     "Yeah," said Churchill coming up to them, his hands full of gathered articles. "Now if you only read any of it, it might really come in handy. Oh, wait." He sat the stuff down next to Mickey. "You have gone through quite a run of 'Bigfoot Billionaire Boyfriend,' haven't you? Enthralling bathroom reading!"

     Rottmeuller went red and Mickey ducked his head to hide his smile.

     "Besides," their leader went on, "If we run out of toilet paper we can only use the Reader once, but Mickey's book could last for days!"

     Now it was Rottmeuller's turn to grin, if only with the twisted grimace that was the closest thing to a smile he ever allowed himself, and Mickey to color at the thought of the desecration of his volume. There was not much he held sacred in the world, but the increasingly vanishing presence of books was something that pressed all his buttons. He finished reloading the pack and got up on his wobbling legs, fueled by the anger and dismay of the idea.

     "All set? Then let's move on!" Churchill gestured forward, and once more they started up the stony hillside in formation. It wasn't long before Mickey was lagging again, far in the rear.

     It really wasn't fair, he thought. He was, in point of fact, the most senior and experienced member of the team, the most widely educated across the skill-sets of the Bureau, in Psychic Sensitivity, in Historical Knowledge, in Response Analysis. But he was used to applying his expertise in far more civilized surroundings. This field trip into the wilds took him way out of his comfort zone. Churchill, with his Field Action prowess, and Rottmeuller, in his cold indifferent Procedural expertise, moved masterfully through the terrain that seemed to Mickey to have a personal grudge against him.

     They reached the brow of the hill before the sun set; a mild gradual sunset that left the air almost as bright when it had left as when it had been going down. Mickey was surprised when they finally stopped and he looked around and found the stars and a nearly full moon in the sky. Churchill began scouting the hilltop layout and Rottmeuller pulled out his Level Scanner and started methodically sweeping the area. Mickey collapsed into a cross-legged squat and tried to calm his breathing.

     By the time the others drew near him again he looked almost asleep, eyes drooping and chest moving regularly in and out.

     "I think maybe our best place to set up base is right in the middle there," Churchill said pointing. "Sure, those rocks might give more shelter, but in the open nothing can get close to us without our seeing it. What you got, Red?"

     "Readings nominal, for the time of the year," said Rottmeuller. "A little more heavy activity in the Overside, but not beyond usual fluctuations."

     "Pizeo?"

     "About what one would expect. No indications of a charge release of any kind. Stable." He looked down at Mickey in disdain, then back at the team leader. He raised an eyebrow.

     Churchill prodded him gently.

     "Hey, Mickey, wake up," he said. "Report."

     Mickey looked up at him, eyes clearing, frowning.

     "I wasn't sleeping. I was trying to Feel."

     Rottmeullar rolled his eyes.

     "And what did you feel, Mickey?" Churchill asked.

     "Not a whole lot," the little man admitted ruefully. "This is the right place, I think, not any lower on any side; there are a lot of echoes. Fear, surprise, confusion, and ... and something I can't quite pin down. A memory ... But not a human memory, somehow. As if something lit up, wide awake, then flashed away almost instantly. I thought I was getting close ..." He shook his head. "It's gone."

     Rottmeuller looked down at him, one eyebrow raised.

     "Great. Thanks, Mickey; that was totally useless. A stage magician doing a cold reading could have told us as much. Useless."

     "Hang on," said Churchill. "Early days yet." He turned to Mickey. "Do you think you can get anything else?"

     Mickey settled back and tried to relax back into receptivity, but it soon became obvious to him that under Churchill's expectant gaze and Rottmeuller's disdain that it was impossible at the moment to get his ego out of the way. He looked up.

     "Sorry, Tom," he said. "Nothing right now."

     "Well. Let's set up camp." Churchill's voice was carefully neutral, but to Mickey's raw nerves it seemed obvious that at that moment he shared Rottmeuller's assessment of his utility. He got heavily to his feet and followed them to the proposed site.

     They bivouacked on the site within the chalked circle that the nervous Mickey had insisted Churchill draw up, which he did with professional precision but little anxiety. It was decided, to make as low an impact as possible, that no lanterns or fires be set. They ate their cold rations while the night over them deepened into ever darker shades of blue and the stars became noticeable sources of light as the moon set. Afterward, while Churchill made his log entries and Rottmueller tapped in calculations on their softly glowing screens, Mickey tried to relax enough to get into the zone, but his fear of the dark kept clouding his intentions. He was too used to navigating the night by the terrestrial constellations of his own devices at home; the brightness of the sky and the gloom of the earth left him at sea.

     They decided to take watch in three shifts, first Mickey, then Rottmeuller, then Churchill. Although he had felt he could never relax in the night wild, Mickey was surprised when felt himself being shaken out of a kind of light trance by Rottmeuller and sent off to lie down. He almost immediately fell into a deep slumber, exhaustion from the climb trumping his irrational fear of rolling off the cliffside. He knew nothing until he felt Churchill poking him silently in the ribs, prodding him awake.

     He tried opening his eyes, and immediately squinted them shut. Light beat redly against the closed lids.

     "What? What is it?" he stammered. "Is it morning already?"

     "Get up, Mickey!" Churchill hissed. "This is it! This is it!"

     Mickey scrambled, flipping clumsily up onto hands and knees, looking groggily around.

     The other two were already on their feet, crouched in readiness. Churchill had one of the Bureau's special guns held stiffly in front of him, one hand on the trigger settings, the other pointed at a rapidly approaching radiance. Rottmueller was fiercely twisting the dials of his E-scanner, looking up and down, trying to get a read on the light. Mickey rose heavily and stood blinking at the approaching thing.

     It was a moving wall, a long ribbon of radiance, stretching from one side of the hilltop to the other, moving east to west, very bright and fierce where it touched to rock, thinning out at about ten feet from the ground, where it seemed to mingle with the moonlit night air. Mickey felt rather than heard the hum of power as it advanced on them, moving like a curtain sweeping over the rockface in eerie silence.

     "Report!" snapped Churchill. His hand trembled on the weapon's setting. He glanced aside at his team, frozen in the oncoming beam. "Report! What kind of thing is this? What'll stop it?"

     Rottmueller shook his head, saying nothing, looking up and down from his instrument to the advancing blazing brilliance with desperate eyes, trying to interpret the incomprehensible readings, his mouth grinning in a rictus of fear. He looked impaled to the spot, mind pinioned by danger, while his body, well-trained, went through the futile motions of analysis.

     They would have run if they could have, but the wall stood between them and the one safe path off the towering hill. A sheer drop waited at their backs.

     Suddenly, in a lateral movement out of the night, a flock of bats veered along the advancing wall, attracted, perhaps, by the line of insects drawn helplessly towards its moving light. There was a sizzling sound -- the only sound besides the men's scuffling feet -- and the bats disappeared as if they had been unmade in the flash-fire of the unfaltering sheet of coruscation.

     Two things happened simultaneously.

     Churchill started firing into the phenomenon, discharging the pistol, hardly waiting to see when it had no effect, then switching the setting and firing, again and again.

     Mickey snapped past all his doubts and fears and threw his mind out at the burning wall. It was a reflexive act that was at the same time both protecting and aggressive, a shielding attack springing out of sheer instinct. For one astonishing moment his thoughts touched it.

     It was not a mind as he knew it, but it was not a soul-less thing either. It was like a single gigantic synapse, lit up suddenly by a random connection, one fragment of an ancient complex memory igniting into momentary life. And Mickey felt ... confusion from it. Was it dreaming, trying to wake up? There was coming from it the same tumbling surge of emotion, multiplied many times, that the little agent himself had often felt when on the verge of waking, of time and place sorting themselves out before his eyes could open.

     Mickey opened his eyes and saw that in the moment it had taken him to know these things, the wall was almost upon them. The others were ineffectively trying to pull him away, and in that sudden awareness of himself and the danger they faced he totally collapsed, pulling them down with him.

     There was a sizzle, and the curtain of light traveled on to the edge of the cliffside, where it immediately extinguished itself, as if some connection had been broken. On the hilltop, all was bare and still, except for their scattered gear and the pages of Mickey's book, riffling forlornly in the rising early morning wind.

 

     Ben Creed leaned back in the chair of his temporary office and sighed, trying to stretch his long, lanky body into some configuration he could relax in. He missed his old chair in the Bureau in Washington, chosen specifically for his size. He hated the roasting dry air of Hollywood, California; hated its buildings, so many of which were so new and already decaying, bleaching like bones under the desert sun; hated the kind of quick, lizard-like people who seemed to thrive in this place, darting here and there from shady spot to rocky shadow.

     This struggle with Hitler was putting everything at sixes and sevens. All resources were at a premium for the war effort. Creed had been more or less stranded on the West Coast after that thing had started up the volcano over the border in Paracutin and it was deemed necessary that he be closer, at least for a while; it could be years before they finally got it under control. Meanwhile he was stuck in this "contingent command center," which translated into an abandoned room in an animation studio, volunteered by a producer whose studio was now mainly given over to making propaganda and training films. Half of the staff was in the armed forces or other support industries, and the boss had lent the room to show his patriotism.

     Not that the man wasn't friendly enough in his own way, thought Creed, slumping forward over the tilted drawing desk and kinking his long legs under the swivel chair, trying to get comfortable. He dropped in regular as clockwork, more often as not with some kind of treat, to hang out and see how he was settling in and if he needed anything. He even engaged him with talk about Bureau business. It seemed the man had the inkling of an idea for a cartoon or a ride or something about haunted houses. But even while he was at his chummiest, Ben had the idea that behind his thin Clark Gable style mustache that so many Hollywood types wore these days, behind even his down home aw-shucksery, what he was really angling for was another friend in the government, no matter how rarified his influence might be.

     Creed pulled a stuffed folder over to himself and opened it, sighing. Thank God, Eddy was still in Washington, holding down the fort. Edna Yorke had joined the Bureau in its salad days between the wars, during a period which he now realized was just one of those lulls of activity that happened unpredictably (as yet). As the days drew darker, they had revealed unexpected strengths in the woman, organizational skills and tireless energy and a kind of hope that went beyond optimism into a species of stark courage. He thought guiltily of his own weaknesses, of his predilection to an almost aristocratic hedonism, of how he sometimes wished the war would end solely so he could go back to his comfortable regimen, and he would wonder if the right person was in charge of the Bureau. But he was caught, inextricably bound to his office by ties not always obvious to even the highest of his agents. He sighed again and bent down dutifully to the reports.

     As he went over the paperwork he wondered, not for the first time, if Eddy loved him, and even if he loved Eddy, instead of merely just admiring her. In a certain mood her loyalty to the Department seemed like a devotion to him, and he would start thinking about her in a kind of abstract way and fall a-dreaming. Then the thought of her thyroidal eyes, her somewhat squat figure, and her drawling if pointed voice would interpose on his imagination, and poured cold water, again not for the first time, on any romantic notions that may have arisen. Besides, he really was past the point of all that. It wouldn't be fair to her, he told himself judiciously, and redoubled his attentions to the daily reports.

     The beginning of the war had been quite thrilling and had shaken him out of his complacency. It was exciting, investigating the reported Nazi occult connections, but when it became clear that most of their activity had more to do with the psychological rather than the psychical (causing fear to their enemies and cauterizing their consciences to inhuman deeds to be done), the Bureau had settled back into its more ordinary domestic duties. These never slacked off, although more and more resources were claimed for the war and fewer and fewer agents were available, making the business at the same time grindingly monotonous and highly nerve-wracking. He turned over a routine account of poltergeist energy on a Pennsylvania farm (must be the Germans, he thought wryly), and was brought up short by the new document before him.

     Clipped to the report was a black-and-white photograph of three men. One was looking stoic, one angry, and one just distracted as hell, but all seemed equally bewildered. Creed examined the photo's details with growing wonder for several minutes.

     Then he briskly picked up the phone and dialed for an outside line. After a moment an operator responded and asked how to direct his call.

     "This is Benjamin Creed, Director of the Department of Extranatural Affairs in Washington. Yes, I am in Las Vegas now. Look, I need to get in contact with Fort McDowell in San Francisco. As quickly as possible please. My clearance?"

     He rambled off a quick code, and after a pause he heard the connection being made and the bell ringing on the other end. A stern but professional voice answered; Creed glanced up and saw it was almost midnight and bit his lip, but bulled on.

     "DEA Director Ben Creed here," he said. "First of all, congrats to you for sending us the case. The three displaceds. You did the exact right thing. Now, I'd like you to send them over as quick as you can to my temporary office here so they can be interrogated. We're at ..." He said the address.

     He sighed.

     "Yes, the cartoon place," he said wearily. "Look, don't laugh; it's no worse than building bombs in car factories. Just send me those three, okay? All their effects too, you understand? And try not to let them come in contact with too many others until we can examine them. No, I don't think they're spies, either. Security? I wouldn't imagine it would have to be much, just enough to keep them isolated, but use your discretion."

     They exchanged a few more codes and confirmations, and Creed concluded.

     "Very well, I'll expect them at ten hundred hours tomorrow, and we'll take them off your hands. Thank you, commander."

     He put the phone down in its cradle and sat back, picking up the photo and rubbing his neck, mind whirling. At last he dropped the picture on the desk and stretched his legs, pushing him back. He looked blearily around the darkened room until his eyes lighted on the colored caricature one of the artists had presented him with. It showed Ben as a worried Ichabod Crane facing a monstrous black shadow, mounted on a bony old nag and armed only with an umbrella.

     "Hiegh-yo, the Bureau of Shadows," he murmured.

 

     The jeep had bounced and jolted with military efficiency much of the three hundred and forty-odd miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles, despite the mostly straight shot between the cities. The canvas canopy that shrouded the passengers like a tent flapped and fluttered in their passage. The nervous Mickey finally put out a hand to secure it, but the grim soldier who accompanied them cleared his throat, shook his head, and gripped his rifle in a tight, ominous movement. Mickey shrank back and folded his hands in his lap quickly.

 

Notes

Notes For Time Travelling Tale

"The Past IS a Different Country" [“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – The Go-Between, (1953) by L. P. Hartley.]

 

 

All of their high-falutin' devices don't work without the platform supporting them to back them up.

The WW2 past is surrounded with a constant fug of cigarette smoke.

Mr. Micky Martin is a small, worried man in his mid-thirties, a philosopher more than a man of action, but not a scientist, as such. Just came to me he's sort of the Dr. McCoy of this team; perhaps the other two can be an equivalent but not exact Kirk (man of action) and Spock-type (analyzer, but in this case maybe what passes for a thinker in the future).

So, Creed, the Head of the Bureau in the Forties, is our voice of reason, the down-to-earth critic of what the future is headed for. Because of the nature of our handling of knowledge [relying on our devices], he is unable to find out anything of much use from the travelers. Edna is of course around at this time, but perhaps best not to feature her too much if at all (though I love her) so that Creed can shine a bit. I'm feeling the urge to have Bob appear (incognito) to give some perspective on living in another age.

The Bureau does not have any strictures, regulations, or prohibitions about time travel and changing the past in the Forties, as "until now, such a possibility has been the sheerest of fictions." Between them, Creed and Martin try to mug up a few rules from dimly remembered sci-fi.

Tom Churchill, our "Kirk." His fate is to go sex-mad in this pre-AIDS era, and because he's had a vasectomy he won't leave a trail of timeline destroying bastards. But he perishes within three years through carelessness, writhen with a dozen other diseases he's picked up along the way.

Martin, because of faulty memory (his specialty being the past and therefore not helpful for future inventions or events; he knows more about the past than his present, i.e., our future) and worrying scruples, settles down more or less contentedly and quietly. He becomes the Bureau's expert on time theory, a niche that so far hasn't had much action. He dies in 1989, not long after visiting the hospital where his father has just been born.

So this puts Martin's own birth in 2010, and the date of his journey as about 2042-45, our own future, twenty-ish years hence. Puts Creed at 80 at time of story, but a vigorous (thanks to the Water of Life) 80. He doesn't want to know details about his future fate because he feels that everyone knows their ultimate future [death] and it would not help anyone psychologically to know it in too great detail.

"What sort of advice do you think you could give -- I mean good, solid, day-to-day, campaign by campaign advice -- to George Washington about fighting the Revolutionary War? I mean, right off the top of your head without having a chance to look things up. And how could you feel sure the advice you gave wouldn't somehow muddle-up the long-term outcome?"

Bob's advice: "The present ain't so different from the past. Good and evil haven't really changed either. Give a man a change of underwear and talk to him a while and pretty soon you find out his troubles are the same as your own. We're all travelin' down the Via Dolorosa of time, and all going in the same direction."

“Micky Martin was one of the last persons he knew who still read paper books. He was familiar with most of the devoted coterie of people like him who still haunted the few second-hand stores that carried yellowing volumes on their shrinking shelves. But they were more like rivals than friends, jealously winnowing an ever-narrowing field. The last physical book had rolled off the press in 2031, the final gasp of an obscure fantasy series, desirable only for its peculiar historical position, and the reign of the e-book was complete. Even Bibles are a mostly electronic presence now.”

“Right now, a heavy hardback was weighing down his pack and seemed to be holding him back. It had nothing whatever to do with the mission, but he never went anywhere without a book. It was like a security blanket. He knew that whenever batteries got low or wherever service dropped out, it was always available. It was comforting, even if he never got a chance to read it during the investigation. It was especially comforting here in the wilds of Oregon, where all connections with civilization seemed particularly sketchy.”

Re-write all this to first person, active perspective. Make Martin always agreeing with his ‘superiors’, stuck in the PC nonsense of his time, but show by action and reaction what drivel the past thinks the whole thing is. Martin, by his medical sensitivities, has always had to do things the hard way (glasses, suffer through diseases without the megadoses of vaccines) but this is what makes him hardier than the other two in the past.

Change it so that the baby he sees is himself; helps make the timeline not so squashed? Perhaps time changes that they try to make prove vastly unsuccessful: trying to change something relatively minor (save Pop from being killed in Dallas in 1963 to undo a tragedy in the life of his favorite author - me) ends up with Martin on the grassy knoll inadvertently killing Kennedy as a consequence. After that he is strictly forbidden to interfere, nor does he want to, nor can he, as the domino effect makes what he knows of history after changing it mischancey.

I had woken up, and was thinking about this story, and had entered that musing/meditating state where thinking has an almost dreamlike quality and I had reached a visionary conclusion of thought where Martin has a wavelike experience of history, from Modern to biblical times, when I 'woke up' and realized I had no idea how I had reached that story point.

To Creed, what he hears of the future seems inexplicable. From the tenuous, disposable, amorphic nature of the technology to the sociological, abstract, political notions about gender, it all seems based on an almost whimsically make-believe system with no grounding in reality, no 'flesh and blood' in it, that remains constant no matter who applies their beliefs to it. Make it seem to Mickey that it is Creed that is being unreasonable; after all Mickey has been conditioned by the beliefs of his time. But he slowly begins to understand Creed's position and begins to doubt the credibility of his own. Do we change reality to conform to our ideas, or change our ideas to conform to reality? How far do we go to alleviate conditions before it becomes a grotesque parody?

Rottmeuller's mother prepared for 'his' transitioning from the age of 2, given the perceived 'male' attributes the child was observed to have. Creed points out that this was in itself a form of societal stereotyping that was played into: attributing certain actions exclusively to one sex. Why couldn't he have simply been a mannish woman, or tomboy? Why did these gender stereotypes have to be played into?

The anomaly happens when a charge from the Overside [electronic atmosphere layer] meets a charge from the pizeo [earth energy] layer and a time warp is formed. It leaps and follows any biological form to close the gap. Martin experiences it as a hiccup of thought and memory from the earth itself, somehow a personal memory on a scale too large to comprehend.

The DEA temporary office in an animation studio in 1943 (strong hints of Disney but make it ambiguous). Hollywood California. Ben Creed there temporarily while traveling from Mexico and a volcano eruption in Paricutin, which has a supernatural cause [some eldritch horror – for a while I toyed with the idea of a Balrog]. Walt picks Creed’s brains for Haunted Mansion. Hollywood to Paricutin = 1700 miles, DC to Paricutin = 2447 miles. Fort McDowell, Angel Island; 347 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

[Why did I drop the story? Part of it was that I found the technicalities of the tale were becoming too daunting; partly because I felt the Bureau of Shadows was not really a good vehicle for social commentary.]