Time Waits for Winthrop Read Free

mightily with the décor of the twenty-fifth-century room. He was a thin, nervous young man whose hands had a tendency to perspire.
    “He says we should be grateful. But whether we are or aren’t grateful isn’t important to him. He’s staying.”
    “That means we have to stay,” Mrs. Brucks said. “Doesn’t he understand that?”
    Pollock spread his moist palms helplessly. “What difference does it make? He
likes
the twenty-fifth century. I argued with him for two hours and I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I can’t budge him.”
    “Why don’t
you
talk to him, Mrs. Brucks?” Mary Ann Carthington suggested. “He’s been nice to you. Maybe you could make him act sensible.”
    “Hm.” Mrs. Brucks patted her hairdo which, after two weeks in the future, was beginning to get straggly. “You think so? Mr. Mead, you think it’s a good idea?”
    The fourth person in the oval room, a stoutish middle-aged man, considered the matter for a moment. “Can’t do any harm. Might work. And we’ve got to do
something
.”
    “All right. So I’ll try.”
    M rs. Brucks sniffled deep within her grandmotherly soul. To the others, Winthrop and she were the “old folks”—both over fifty. Therefore they should be able to communicate more easily. The fact that Winthrop was ten years her senior meant little to Mr. Mead’s forty-six years, less to Dave Pollock’s thirty-four and in all probability was completely meaningless to Mary Ann Carthington’s twenty. One of the “old folks” should be able to talk sense to the other, they were thinking.
    What could they see, from the bubbling distance of youth, of the chasms that separated Winthrop from Mrs. Brucks even more finally than the others? It was unimportant to them that he was a tight and unemotional old bachelor, while she was the warm and gossipy mother of six children, the grandmother of two, with her silver wedding anniversary proudly behind her. She and Winthrop had barely exchanged a dozen sentences with each other since they’d arrived in the future; they had disliked each other from the moment they had met in Washington at the time-travel finals.
    But—Winthrop was stubborn. That fact remained. Mr. Mead had roared his best executive-type roars at him. Mary Ann Carthington had tried to jog his senility with her lush, young figure and most fluttery voice. Even Dave Pollock, an educated man, a high school science teacher, had talked his heart out to him and been unable to make him budge.
    Someone had to change Winthrop’s mind or they’d all be stuck in the future, here in this horrible twenty-fifth century. Even if she hated it more than anything she’d had to face in a lifetime of troubles, it was up to Mrs. Brucks.
    She rose and shook out the wrinkles in the expensive black dress her proud husband had purchased in Lord & Taylor’s the day before the group had left.
    Try to tell Sam that it was pure luck that she had been chosen, just a matter of fitting the physical specifications in the message from the future! Sam wouldn’t listen: he’d probably boasted all over the shop, to all the other cutters with whom he worked, about his wife—one of five people selected in the whole United States to make a trip five hundred years into the future. Would Sam still be boasting when the six o’clock deadline passed that night and she didn’t return?
    This time the sniffle worked its way through the cushions of her bosom and reached her nose.
    Mary Ann Carthington crooned sympathetically, “Shall I call for the jumper, Mrs. Brucks?”
    “I’m crazy?” Mrs. Brucks shot back angrily. “A little walk down the hall, I need that headache-maker? A little walk I can walk.”
    S he started for the door rapidly, before the girl could summon the upsetting device which exploded you from one place to another and left you with your head swimming and your stomach splashing.
    But she paused and took a last wistful look at the room before leaving it. While it was by no