Time Waits for Winthrop Read Free Page B

They’re smart, that’s all. A lot smarter than us, every way. I just heard about the regeneration clinic. It’s a place where you lose an arm, you go down there, they grow it right back on the stump. Free, like everything else. I went down there, I said ‘I want new teeth’ to the machine that they’ve got. The machine tells me to take a seat, it goes one, two, three and bingo, there I am, throwing my plates away. You want to try it?”
    She shifted uncomfortably on her hillock. “Maybe—but I better wait until it’s perfected.”
    Winthrop laughed again. “You’re like the others, scared of the twenty-fifth century. Anything new, anything different, you want to run for a hole like a rabbit. I’m the oldest, but that doesn’t make any difference—I’m the only one with guts.”
    Mrs. Brucks smiled tremulously at him. “But you’re also the only one without no one to go back to. I got a family, Mr. Mead has a family, Mr. Pollock’s just married, a newlywed, and Miss Carthington is engaged. We’d all like to go back, Mr. Winthrop.”
    “Mary Ann is engaged? I’d never have guessed it from the way she was playing up to that temporal supervisor fellow.”
    “Still and all, Mr. Winthrop, she’s engaged. To a bookkeeper in her office, a fine, hard-working boy. And she wants to go back to him.”
    T he old man pulled up his back and the floor-couch hunched up between his shoulder-blades and scratched him gently. “Let her go back then. Who gives a damn?”
    Mrs. Brucks turned her hands palm up in front of her. “Remember what they told us when we arrived? We all have to be sitting in our chairs in the Time Machine Building at six o’clock on the dot. If we aren’t
all
there on time, they can’t make the transfer, they said. So if one of us, if you, for an instance, don’t show up—”
    “Don’t tell me your troubles!” His face was flushed and his lips came back and exposed the brand-new teeth. There was a sharp acrid smell in the room and blotches of crimson on its walls as the place adjusted to its owner’s mood. The music changed to a vicious rumble. “Everybody wants Winthrop to do a favor for them. What did they ever do for Winthrop?”
    “I don’t understand you.”
    “You’re damn tooting you don’t understand me! When I was a kid, my old man used to come home drunk every night and beat the hell out of me. I was a small kid, so every other kid on the block took turns beating the hell out of me, too. When I grew up, I got a lousy job and a lousy life. Remember the depression? Who do you think was on those breadlines? Me, that’s who! And then, when the good times came back, I was too old for a decent job. Night-watchman, berry-picker, dishwasher. Cheap flophouses, cheap furnished rooms. Everybody gets the gravy, Winthrop got the garbage.”
    He picked up the large egg-shaped object he had been examining when she entered and studied it moodily. “Yeah. And like you said, everybody has someone to go back to, everybody but me. You’re damn tooting I don’t have anyone to go back to.
Damn
tooting. I never had a friend, never had a wife, never even had a girl that stayed around longer than it took her to use up the loose change in my pocket. So why should I go back? I’m happy here. I get everything I want and I don’t have to pay for it. You people want to go back because you feel different—uncomfortable, out of place. I’m used to being out of place: I’m right at home and I’m having a good time.
    I’m
staying.”
    “L isten, Mr. Winthrop.” Mrs. Brucks leaned forward anxiously, then jumped as the seat under her slunk forward. “Mr. Winthrop, everybody has troubles in their life. With my daughter Annie, I had a time that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And with my Julius—But because I have troubles, you think I should take it out on other people? I should prevent them from going home when they’re sick and tired of jumper machines and food machines and—I don’t