Timemaster Page 7

  "The wedding is in two days," said Rose sternly.

  "Rose, honey," Randy said, "this Silverhair breakthrough is so important and has so many ramifications that I've got to stay on top of it! Let's postpone the wedding for a few weeks. Wait ... it'll take at least a month to get things under control. Make it a month. OK?"

  A number of seconds later, Randy saw Rose's visage become even sterner as his words finally got to her. "I am leaving my apartment to go to the home of my parents in California," she said. "If you want me back, you must come and get me. And if you're not at the church by two o'clock on Saturday ... don't bother coming. I'll be gone." The screen went blank.

  ROSE TURNED from the communicator screen and stared blankly at the rain pouring down on the Princeton countryside.

  Randy could be the most exasperating person ... Was she doing the right thing by marrying him?

  She thought back to the time she had first met him. It was at his eighteenth birthday party, six years ago ...

  THERE WAS a good crowd in the living room as Randy entered. Along one long wall was a banner saying "Happy 18th Birthday, Randy!" while along the other was a banner with the date "29 February 2030", although the party was really being held on Randy's "unbirthday"—Friday, March first—for there was no 29th of February in 2030.

  Randy had looked magnificent in his new formal black tuxedo with a bright-red cummerbund, his wavy chestnut-brown hair tied back into a Paul Revere with a matching bright-red ribbon. A graded set of large rubies climbed up his right ear; the left ear was naked. Immediately, an impromptu rendition of "Happy Birthday to You" started up. Randy beamed, then turned to welcome some new guests the butler had escorted in.

  When the song was through, someone started in on the almost-obligatory sequel. It was Oscar Barkham, who had lived "next door" to Randy since he was born. Of course, in the Princeton Enclave, next-door mansions could be anywhere from a tenth of a mile to ten miles apart, depending upon where they were placed on the large lots.

  "Happy birthday we will say ..." continued Oscar in a loud, carrying voice from his position next to the roaring fireplace in the long living room. "For you're four-and-a-half years old today ..."

  He hollered over at Randy across the room. "How does it feel being just a little four-year-old kid, Randy?"

  "When you are a hundred years old and tottering off to your grave, I'll just be reaching my prime!" retorted Randy, having coped with leap-year-baby jokes all his life.

  When the new arrivals had slowed to a trickle, Randy came over to the champagne waterfall and got himself a glass of champagne from the android maid. As he turned away he almost bumped into Rose. She remembered that she had been wearing a provocative red party dress with a deeply scooped neck and a peekaboo overlapping flounce cut up one side that showed a lot of net-stockinged thigh when she moved.

  "Hi, beautiful," Randy said with a smile. "I won't say that corny old line, 'Haven't I met you somewhere before?' because I haven't. I wouldn't have forgotten a lovely thing like you."

  "Hi," she replied. "I'm Rose. Rosita Carmelita Cortez."

  "Buenas tardes, Señorita Cortez," said Randy. "I am most honored you have graced my home with your most beautiful presence," he continued in well-accented Spanish.

  She was impressed. This young man was apparently more than just a rich playboy. She began to take an interest in him.

  "Your fluency in Spanish is most impressive, Señor Hunter," she replied. "You must have taken many years of classes to be able to speak so well."

  "I picked up a number of languages when I was very young," said Randy. "My mother was setting up a number of subsidiaries in Europe and the newly formed Socialist Economic Bloc, and we spent almost all our time overseas. We would live two or three months in one country, then move to the next. In each place I would pick up the accent and basic vocabulary like a sponge. It helped that Mom could speak German and Dad knew Russian. Later, in school, I took some classes to polish up on the more important languages. But enough about me. Let's talk about you ..."

  "I came with Oscar Barkham," she replied. "We take Chem 102 together over at Princeton University."

  "Say ... Oscar has finally developed good taste," said Randy, looking her over discreetly.

  "You have a very nice place here," she said, trying to change the subject by making polite conversation.

  Randy took a quick look at Oscar. Oscar was still occupied over at the fireplace, his football-player bulk blocking the view of the large grandfather clock that had been an antique before Randy's grandfather was born.

  "Would you like me to show you around?" Randy asked, taking her arm possessively.

  "All right," she answered, then looked around at all the people. "But don't you have to take care of your guests?"

  "That's what the butler and house staff are for," said Randy, leading her to the wide stairway that led upstairs from the large entry hallway. "Come on."

  Upstairs Randy began the tour. "Now ... this is the older part of the house. It was built before Granddad Reinhold died and left Reinhold Company to Mom to run." He opened a door and walked into a small room. They interrupted a small household robot in the process of cleaning the floor. It stopped and, skittering around them, went out the door and down the hallway.

  "This was my room when I was a baby. It's still the way my mother left it when I was moved to a bigger room. I guess she was thinking that maybe I might have a younger brother or sister. But being president of a major company kept her too busy for that ... or perhaps it was the difficulty she had with me."

  "Difficulty?" Rose asked.

  "I was born five weeks prematurely," said Randy. "I only weighed three pounds. It was a struggle keeping me alive. The doctors realized that with my mother's genes and the premature birth, I wouldn't grow very tall. They recommended growth-hormone therapy, but when Mom heard there was some cancer risk associated with the therapy, she vetoed the idea.

  " 'Everybody has to have something wrong with them,' she said. 'So let him be short. He'll learn to live with it—like I did.' So I'm short, and I've learned to live with it ... but it doesn't mean I like it."

  Randy walked over to the ancient wooden-slatted crib and rubbed his hand over the teeth marks at the end.

  "This was my crib. Dad told me it was handed down through his side of the family. It's over a hundred years old." He laughed. "It almost didn't make it past me!"

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I nearly wrecked it," explained Randy. "As a kid, I always wanted to explore. Still do, as a matter of fact. I became quite an escape artist from this crib. First thing I learned to do was to unscrew the nuts and bolts, and get out to go exploring. Then my dad wired the nuts to the bolts. So I chewed my way out through the wooden slats."

  He pulled up the far edge of the mattress and showed her a chewed slat, now repaired with a splint of hardwood and twisted wire.

  "I pushed aside the upper part of the slat and crawled right out over the sharp spike at the bottom," Randy went on. He pulled down the red cummerbund and pulled up the front of his dress-suit dickey so she could see the long, jagged, ancient scar on his stomach. "They didn't know I'd escaped until they heard me crying from the front lawn. I'd fallen there from the veranda roof. They found a fresh-picked apple lying next to me."

  "You could have been killed!" she said, looking out from the low dormer window at the apple-tree branch hanging over the veranda roof.

  "Takes more than a fifteen-foot fall to faze me," said Randy proudly. He tucked in his shirtfront and, taking her by the arm, led her from the room. "Now, let me show you my latest crib—no bars on this one—and three meters in diameter ..."

  "Maybe we had better go back to the party," she said.

  OSCAR and Randy soon got into a petty argument about Randy's taking Oscar's date upstairs to look around. According to what she had been told previously by some of the others at the party, the two had been bickering ever since they were kids. Oscar was two years older
than Randy, and had dominated the younger and smaller man most of his life. The two disliked each other intensely, but had managed to stay civil most of the time, since their parents had been good friends.

  Because of the argument, she and Oscar left the party early. The instant Oscar's chauffeur had closed the door on them, she turned to Oscar.

  "I hope you realize that absolutely nothing happened between me and Randy," she said firmly. "All he was doing was showing me around the older sections of the mansion. We never even went anywhere near his bedroom—"

  "I know that," said Oscar with a wave of his hand. "It's just that the cocky little twerp makes me jealous."

  "You? Jealous?" she asked incredulously. "From what some people have told me, you're worth ten times what he is."

  "The Barkhams are worth tens of billions," said Oscar superciliously. "While the Reinhalds are in the penny-ante hundred-million-dollar class. What irks me is that my parents control the Barkham billions and all I get is an allowance, while that immature midget now controls all his."

  "Your allowance must be pretty generous," she said dryly, sitting back comfortably in the plush seat of the limousine and looking around.

  "More than I can spend," admitted Oscar. "I can have anything I want."

  Just then a small white light blinked above an intercom speaker. Oscar reached forward and pushed a button.

  "What is it, Maxwell?" he asked.

  "We have cleared the Reinhold property," said the chauffeur. "Where do you wish to go, sir? Home?"

  "No," said Oscar. "The night has only just started. Take us to Atlantic City and we'll party the night away there."

  "Yes, sir," came the reply. Shortly after, the large limousine passed through the Enclave guard gate, swung onto the high-speed autopilot lane on the turnpike, and headed toward the ocean.

  "It'll take us about an hour to get there," said Oscar. "But there's no reason we can't start our own httle party now." He turned to look at her as he reached for the door of the refrigerator in front of him. "Would you like some champagne ... or perhaps something stronger?"

  "The night has just started," she replied. "I think I'll stick to a small glass of champagne."

  Oscar pulled down a table between them, loaded it up with crystal goblets from a cabinet and a large plate of hors d'oeuvres from the refrigerator, and started working on the cork of the champagne bottle. The hors d'oeuvres tray was piled with delicacies. In the middle were three small jars of caviar, Beluga, Caspian Imperial, and Sevruga. Next to the caviar were four different kinds of bread and crackers to spread it on, along with three mother-of-pearl caviar dipping spoons and three crystal spreading knives. Surrounding the caviar were assorted canapes with delicious-looking bits of lobster, shrimp, ham, smoked salmon, and turkey peeking out from under slices of olives, partridge eggs, and cheese. At one end of the tray was a large assortment of dried fruit and nuts and at the other an equally large array of intricately cut fresh vegetable sticks and slices, glowingly fresh.

  As she took her first bite of Beluga caviar on a small piece of toast, Rose began to like the idea of being rich. For a third-generation Latino from West L.A., she was keeping pretty good company. Oscar was not only a smart, blond, handsome football player, he was a billionaire. This was only her first date with him, but she was beginning to like him.

  After a few sips of champagne, Oscar pulled out something from the inside breast pocket of his tuxedo. It was an old-fashioned silver cigarette case with the Barkham monogram on the cover.

  "I've got something here to liven up this party," Oscar said.

  She looked at the silver case with interest. It must have been an old family heirloom. For certain, it didn't contain cigarettes—almost no one smoked tobacco anymore. She had a suspicion what was inside, and looked expectantly as he started to open it. A couple of puffs of some high-quality Durango Gold might be just the thing to help while away the miles to Atlantic City.

  Oscar opened the silver case, but instead of the marijuana "styx" that she had expected, the case contained a small plastic eyedrop bottle and a number of square Band-Aid plasters. Oscar tore open one of the plasters, screwed off the lid on the bottle, and squeezed out a few drops of clear liquid on the gauze patch in the center of the plaster. He looked up at her expectantly.

  "Patch of ZED?" he asked.

  She was horrified, but tried not to let it show. "No thanks!" she said in a slightly shaken voice. "I've got classes Monday."

  "It's all over in a few wonderful hours," said Oscar enticingly. "No side effects and no flashbacks ..." He held out the soaked patch to her. "Just put it on the inside of your wrist."

  "No!" she had said more firmly. "Please ... no."

  "OK," said Oscar agreeably. "You don't know what you're missing." He held the patch carefully in his right hand while his left hand lifted his golden-blond ponytail.

  When she saw the shaved bare patch at the base of his skull, she gasped. "You're not going to brainstem it, are you?" she whispered.

  "The only way ..." said Oscar as he pressed the patch onto the bare skin. Within less than a second an ecstatic smile spread over his face. His head and body went into slow motion, while his face and eyes flickered wildly at high speed. He looked her up and down, sniffed the air, and took long savoring bites of hors d'oeuvres and lingering sips of champagne.

  "It's like the whole world has slowed down and brightened up," he finally said in a slow, deep, slurred voice. "It's like I'm living ten times faster than normal and sensing everything a hundred times better. What delicious caviar ... what wonderful wine ... You are so gorgeous ... every hair ... every pore ... And the intoxicating way you smell ..."

  She became concerned as he looked her over lasciviously, but he wasn't making any advances and the table was still between them.

  "You really ought to give that stuff up, Oscar," she said. "Whoever told you that ZED has no side effects is lying—especially if you brainstem it. I've been wondering what's wrong with you during chemistry lectures. Every once in a while your eyes start shifting back and forth and you're gone for the rest of the class."

  He wasn't listening to her. "So delightfully beautiful you are ..." he murmured, his eyes flickering over her body. He was behaving as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  "It's like the whole world has slowed down and brightened up," he said, repeating himself. "It's like I am living ten times faster than normal. Like I controlled time. Yes ... that's it ... ZED makes me the master of time!"

  THE FOLLOWING week, she found that her Chemistry 102 class had a new student—a late enrollee. Normally Randy took his college classes over the Princeton Extension Television Network. He had been too busy with his business and horses and astronomy to be bothered with commuting to classes. That is, until now.

  Randy wasn't a typical student. When he wanted to take a course that interested him, he told the registrar and soon the teacher found the name of Harold Randolph Hunter on the class enrollment list. It helped that his father had been chairman of the Princeton University Physics and Astronomy Department at the time of his death, and the Space Engineering Department was housed in a large building with the name reinhold emblazoned on the frieze above the portico.

  Besides Chem 102, Randy soon found himself in Spanish 422, Drawing 202, and Art Appreciation 102, all of them classes she was taking. She then found that somehow she and Randy were teamed together for the next experimental problem in the Chem 102 laboratory class. She had welcomed Randy's attention, for she had made it clear to Oscar after the Atlantic City ride that she wanted nothing to do with a ZED-head, even if he was a billionaire. It was in Chem 102 lab that Randy had first put his arms around her, right in class ...

  They were doing a solubility experiment. Randy took a tall beaker and filled it with hot water. He held the beaker while she carefully poured in the white chemical she had weighed out. It all dissolved after a little stirring.

  "That's the other thing I could never understand about chemi
stry," she complained. "Look. We put all that sodium carbonate into the water and the water level hardly rose any. How come?"

  "Well," said Randy, "let's suppose that you are a sodium carbonate molecule and I am a water molecule. You are sitting in that chair and I am sitting in this chair. We take up two chairs' worth of volume." He reached out his hand to her. "Now come over here and sit on my lap."

  "What!?!" she said, drawing back and frowning.

  "Come on," said Randy, a little impatiently. "I'm not trying to get fresh. I'm just doing a serious demonstration of an important fact of chemistry. Come on, now," he said, patting his knee. "Sit in my lap."

  She came—not too reluctantly she remembered—and perched on his lap, her feet still on the ground since Randy's small body didn't have much lap.

  "There," he said, putting his arms around her. "Now the sodium carbonate molecule and the water molecule only occupy one chair's worth of volume because they like to snuggle up to each other. You do like to snuggle up, don't you?"

  "I think this lesson is drifting away from chemistry," she retorted, turning to look at him with a wry smile but still sitting in his lap. Then a thought came to her and she looked off into the distance, murmuring, "With a twenty-to-one molar ratio, that means that for every Rose molecule there are twenty Randy molecules to snuggle up with. Sounds like fun ..."

  It obviously didn't sound like fun to Randy, for he leaned forward and tipped her off his lap. He probably didn't like the idea of sharing her with anyone, not even himself.

  "Well," he said in a more serious tone, "I see you now understand the concept of solubility. Shall we get on with the experiment?"

  OVER THE following years, she had grown to like Randy very much. He cared for her too, and tried to show it in many ways, but he was so self-centered, and so devoted to his own pursuits, that he would sometimes neglect her for days, even weeks at a time. Without warning, he had rushed off to the asteroid belt and stayed there for months, only calling occasionally. Now he wanted to delay their wedding for a month!