Time Waits for Winthrop Read Free Page A

means a cozy five-room apartment in the Bronx, she’d spent almost every minute of her two weeks in the future here, and for all of its peculiar furniture and oddly colored walls, she hated to leave it. At least here nothing rippled along the floor, nothing reached out from the walls: here was as much sanity as you could find in the twenty-fifth century.
    Then she swallowed hard and closed the door behind her. She walked hurriedly along the corridor, being careful to stay in the exact middle, the greatest distance possible from the bumpy writhing walls on either side.
    At a point in the corridor where one purple wall flowed restlessly around a stable yellow square, she stopped. She put her mouth, fixed in distaste, to the square. “Mr. Winthrop?”
    “Well, well, if it isn’t Mrs. Brucks!” the square boomed back at her. “Long time no see. Come right in, Mrs. Brucks.”
    The patch of yellow showed a tiny hole in the center which dilated rapidly into a doorway. She stepped through gingerly, as if there might be a drop of several stories on the other side.
    The room was shaped like a long, narrow isosceles triangle. There was no furniture in it, and no other exits, except for what an occasional yellow square suggested. Streaks of color chased themselves fluently along the walls and ceilings and floors, shifting up and down the spectrum, from pinkish gray to a thick, dark ultramarine. And odors came and went with the colors, some of them unpleasant, some intriguing, but all of them touched with the unfamiliar and alien.
    From somewhere behind the walls and above the ceiling there was music, its tones softly echoing, gently reinforcing the colors and the odors. The music, too, was strange to twentieth-century ears: strings of dissonances would be followed by long or short silences, in the midst of which an almost inaudible melody might be heard like a harmonic island in an ocean of sonic strangeness.
    At the sharp apex of the triangle, an aged little man lay on a raised portion of the floor. Periodically, this would raise or lower part of itself, very much like a cow trying to find a comfortable position on the grass.
    The single garment that Winthrop wore similarly kept adjusting itself upon him. At one moment, it would be a striped red and white tunic, covering everything from his shoulders to his thighs; then it would slowly elongate into a green gown that trickled over his outstretched toes; and abruptly, it would contract into a pair of light brown shorts decorated with a complete pattern of brilliant blue seashells.
    M rs. Brucks observed all this with disapproval. A man was meant, she felt, to be dressed approximately the same way from one minute to the next.
    The shorts she didn’t mind, though her modest soul considered them a bit too skimpy for receiving lady callers. The green gown—well, if he wanted to wear what was essentially a dress, it was his business. Even the red and white tunic which reminded her nostalgically of her granddaughter Debbie’s sunsuit was something she was willing to be generous about. But at least stick to one of them!
    Winthrop put the enormous egg he was holding on the floor. “Have a seat, Mrs. Brucks. Take the load off your feet,” he said jovially.
    Shuddering at the hillock of floor which came into being at her host’s gesture, Mrs. Brucks finally bent her knees and uneasily sat. “How—how are you, Mr. Winthrop?”
    “Couldn’t be better, Mrs. Brucks. Say, have you seen my new teeth? Just got them this morning. Look.”
    He opened his jaws and pulled his lips back with his fingers.
    Mrs. Brucks, really interested, inspected the mouthful of white, shining teeth. “A good job,” she pronounced at last. “The dentists here made them for you so fast?”
    “Dentists!” He spread his bony arms in a vast and merry gesture. “They don’t have
dentists in
2458 A.D. They
grew
these teeth for me, Mrs. Brucks.”
    “
Grew?
How
grew?
”
    “How should I know how they did it?