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CHAPTER V


SODA ON THE SIDE: It has not always been just this way. He seems to recall an earlier, less difficult time when he lived within rather than without the sanctions of his culture and found them acceptable. “It could be that way again,” he says, a little more loudly than he had intended and the bartender in the working class place looks at him curiously over the ridges of the counter, his left hand splayed out at an awkward angle, his right a fist tightly on the cloth which he uses to mop widening circles into the dull finish. “Another one,” he says, “and soda on the side,” and the bartender shrugs, slams the cloth down, walks to the scotch bottle and taking Scop’s glass inverts the bottle, pours clumsily but without haste half-full, puts it down, reaches underneath for a tap glass of soda. The bar is empty at this hour of the day ten-thirty in the morning but later on the workers from the district will come in and stand three deep drinking beer and curs­ing circumstance. By that time Scop hopes that he will be long gone although he is not sure just where. The bartender gives him the soda, takes some more money over the counter and slams it into the cash register, then walks with a brisk limp down to the rag which has now furled open and continues his slow wiping, looking at Scop now and then with curious, tilted, shy glances as if his manner were mockery and what he really desired was a closer relationship, some perilous intimacy. Scop looks down at his drink, tilts it up, drinks heavily. Alcohol does not agree with him but it is necessary at this time that he keep on drinking for maximum assimilation, the Masters are very strict on this point, and the soda manages to wash away the feeling that he is drown­ing in the fumes although not the nausea. “Are you all right?” the bartender says for no reason, looking up from his ragging and Scop says that he is all right. “That’s good,” the bartender says, “I thought for a moment that you were going to be sick. You don’t come from around here, do you?”

“Not really.”

“I figured that out right away,” the bartender says, “I know every face that comes in here and furthermore I can tell the out­siders right off too, those who come nowhere from the section. What brings you here?”

“Nothing much.”

“You don’t have to talk,” the bartender says. “I’m not forcing conversation on you.” He considers the counter sullenly, reduces the rag to a knot on his index finger and begins to work in brisk strokes at one limited area. “I just heard you talking to yourself a minute ago I figured you might be better off if you had someone listening to you.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” Scop says, “I don’t mind at all.”

He does mind, of course and if it were not absolutely necessary for him to be at this place at this time he would leave im­mediately. His one vocal slip was unfortunate; he is under no circumstances to attract attention to himself nor interact with these people. That he intends to break this most stringent rule of the Temporals within the next hour in the case of a man who is about to come into this bar does not give him excuse to flout it: to the contrary it imposes upon him the absolute necessity to follow the rule in all other circumstances . . . at heart and for all of his bravado Scop is a congruent personality, a conformist: he accepts and enacts the codes of his society to a degree which even he would not wish to consider closely and all of the time that he is committing most serious violations of temporality he is in cra­ven fear. For these reasons he dreads involvement of any sort with the bartender. He would leave the place immediately, sacrifice everything, return at once . . . but he cannot, in fifty-two minutes, give or take twelve seconds Leonard Peters will enter this bar and it is vital that this contact be made. Furthermore Scop is almost compulsive about the need to arrive early, the temporal charts have been known to be in error; the coefficient of correlation for fifty-two minutes plus or minus five is no more than point ninety-three and this is not sufficient at least for the high-risk situation in which Scop has placed himself. After all the fate of the uni­verse, nothing more nor less is at stake. So he must stay in the bar, pace out the time, wait for Leonard Peters . . . “What could be that way again I asked you,” the bartender is saying. “Don’t you ever answer questions?”

“I was thinking,” Scop says, “thinking about something.

“All I wanted to know is what you were saying over there. You don’t want to talk about it you could at least say that. I don’t like your goddamned manners,” the bartender says. He seems to be slightly drunk himself which in this working-class district is not unusual even at this hour of the morning. “Maybe I’ll ask you to get the hell out of here.”

“That isn’t necessary. Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t get bought off that easy.”

Scop shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, hoping that he has a correct grasp on the vernacular of the district. “Anything you want to do.”

“The hell with it,” the bartender says. He seems to have reached an obscure but exciting sense of resolution, he begins to make circles with the rag on the surfaces again. “Whatever you do is all right with me. I don’t give a damn.”

The doors slam, someone else walks in. Scop scans him eagerly but the man is not Leonard Peters, that is clear. The life-studies and holographs of the man are exquisite; there is no possibility of mistake. The man gives a long, uncertain stare and then seats himself at the bar, asks the bartender for a beer. The bartender does not seem to know him either. He brings the beer and the newcomer gives him a bill from a sidepocket, then seems confused when the bartender comes back with change. For a mo­ment total dislocation seems to penetrate the crevices of his face, then clumsily he has taken the change from the bartender’s hand and puts it in his pocket. He leans forward in great absorption, holding the glass with both hands, drinking in tentative little sips. The bartender mumbles something and returns to his position. The grating sound of the rag against the boards is very loud now.

Scop begins to shake with apprehension. After his first glance at the new man he has returned to his own self-absorption, but that self-absorption more and more, as he feels awareness begin­ning to sink into him is a cover for a deep and perverse intima­tion: the newcomer may well have come from the temporals. It is possible that the man is an agent; that he comes from the Masters, that indeed he has been pursuing Scop for a long time and that now in this remote and empty bar he has found him. Surely if the temporals have tracked matters carefully they know what Scop does: That Leonard Peters is critical to any sense of mission. Everything devolves upon the finding of that man and the temporals would know that too. Although Scop has always been a cautious and internalized man, a creature who does not allow any of his moods (he believes) to surface past the bland and affect less panels of his face he now feels the edges of his control visibly shrinking, tearing back to expose the raw and sodden wound of self. Little scars burst open; little lacunae of woe of which he has been unaware for years are exposed. The bartender looks at him strangely. The stranger does not. Scop’s hands describe little butterfly patterns on the bar not unreminiscent of the wiping motions which the bartender has made. “Get away from me,” he says to the bartender as he imagines the man coming down the railing, enormous, threatening him. “Get away from me now.”

The bartender who has not moved at all continues to stare at him. Now with that cool objective sense which has gotten him as far as he has come to date—although not one step further—Scop realizes that he has had an acute anxiety attack; that the aspect of this stranger has thrust him from that perilous and equivocal perch of balance from which he has made search and that he is now falling free in the crazed breezes of paranoia, descending. Only his absolute control and discipline can be invoked to prevent the scene from disassembling before him becausehedarenotmissLeonardPeters , whatever happens it is imperative that the meeting not lapse. There will not be another such opportunity on this cy­cle, not for twenty years by which time it will be entirely late and it will have been frozen in Peter’s preconscious that a man he was supposed to see in a bar when he was thirty-one years old was not there. Scop puts both hands on the bar, tries to still their fluttering. The man on his left continues to gulp from the beer glass in short, desperate strokes, his neck moving peculiarly.

Abruptly Scop, staring at that neck, reaches a judgement: the man is indeed from the temporals. He has appeared in disguise and it is cleverly rigged, shows all of that attention to detail and superficial veracity for which the temporals are famous but as is characteristic of their work it lacks conviction, one inch below the surface it is merely that, a costume and if one focuses the tube of one’s attention more deeply it is easy to see, easy to see the lie. “Liar!” Scop shouts and the man turns, looks at him from huge, empty eyes drained of reaction. “Fool! Imposter! Did you think that you could get away with this?”

The man says nothing. He holds his beer glass now like a child might hold a rattle, shaking it slightly, little bubbles of froth steaming and spewing from the rim. Wide, his eyes become wider yet. “You liar!” Scop says. He reaches into his pocket, his hand clings. He feels the weapon hard and smooth within his grasp and tries to remove it but the little lumps and sodden threads of the pocket retain his hand and he finds the weapon half in, half out, its dull gleam visible to the bartender who is suddenly striding toward him rapidly, just as in Scop’s vision. It must have been temporal lag; this is what he had seen. “Give me—” the bartender says and then says no more because Scop has yanked the weapon free in one last surge of effort. He points it at the bartender’s throat, closes his eyes and pulls the trigger.

He does not know whether or not he has made contact with the man until he hears the shatter of bone, the sound of something pulpous hitting board, then he opens his eyes again and watches as the bartender, semi-decapitated, sits slowly behind the bar, first crouching as if seeking a deep knee bend which then comically did not reverse at the end of its arc but instead continued with gravity until at last the bartender sunk out of the line of sight, only vagrant dazzles from his skull giving indication that he had ever been there. Moist sounds from far below. Scop turns then toward the temporal, resolved that he has no alternative, that he will have to kill this man too because the situation has moved past the chance of easy resolution . . . but the temporal has already gone; where he was sitting there is emptiness and the bang of the door gives implication that while Scop was engaged in misdirected fire the real enemy has fled.

It infuriates him. He goes to the door, pulls it open and stares at a dismal street which reminds him of the mockups and model of streets of this era which he has studied in magnification for so many lonely hours in the hall. He cannot take the terrain for real; if anything it reminds him of something on which he will have to take an examination . . . which, of course, at some time in the past he has also done. But beyond the deadening unreality, the sense that he has stumbled into a reconstruction of research ma­terials rather than the consequence he has sought . . . beyond that is the fact that the street is empty. The wide, flat terrain with neither alleys nor parked vehicles is clear. The temporal has es­caped.

Scop gives a bellow of rage and looks back into the bar but the bartender is still dead, then he casts desperate glances through the length of the street hoping at least that Leonard Peters has missed the coefficient and has come plus or minus twenty-five minutes early but Peters too is not there . . . and screaming futility, bellowing once again his failure Scop runs toward the machine that will take him out of there knowing that when Peters staggers in, looks behind the counter sees the dead man he will be hurt in a very personal and meaningful fashion which will only have out-come ten years later when he is called in to assist on the Final Plans . . .Scoptryingtoalterhasmerelyreinforcedthefuture . In pain he runs and knows again the wisdom of the Masters: to seek alteration is merely to tighten the threads of causality.