The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Arnie won’t know the difference. You’ll never have married him in the first place.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well, in 1979. You know what I mean.” He headed for the door.

“Hold on,” she said. “You’re like the guy who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t come back for thirty years.”

“What guy?”

“Never mind. I wanna make sure you don’t turn up anywhere else. Bring the machine in here.”

“Is that it?” she said one minute later.

“That’s it.”

“But it looks like a goddamn bicycle.”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

She led him upstairs. “Here,” she said. Alan unfolded the bike next to the bed. “I don’t want you getting away from me next time,” she told him.

“I don’t have to get away from you now.”

“You do. I’m married and I’m at least fifteen years older than you.”

“Your age doesn’t matter to me,” Alan told her. “When I first fell in love with you, you’d been dead three hundred years.”

“You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you? Anyway, don’t aim for ’79. I don’t understand paradoxes, but I know I don’t like them. If we’re ever gonna get this thing straightened out, you must arrive before 1973, when the story is meant to be published. Try for ’71 or ’72. Now that I think about it, those were a strange couple of years for me. Nothing seemed real to me then. Nothing seemed worth bothering about, nothing mattered; I always felt like I was waiting for something. Day after day I waited, though I never knew what for.”

She stepped back and watched him slowly turn a dial until he vanished. Then she remembered something.

How could she ever have forgotten such a thing? She was eleven and she was combing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror. She screamed. When both her parents burst into the room and demanded to know what was wrong, she told them she’d seen a man on a bicycle. They nearly sent her to a child psychiatrist.

Damn that Alan, she thought. He’s screwed up again.

*   *   *

The same room, different decor, different time of day. Alan blinked several times; his eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. He could barely make out the shape on the bed, but he could see all he needed to. The shape was alone, and it was adult size. He leaned close to her ear. “Cecily,” he whispered. “It’s me.” He touched her shoulder and shook her slightly. He felt for a pulse.

He switched on the bedside lamp. He gazed down at a withered face framed by silver hair, and sighed. “Sorry, love,” he said. He covered her head with a sheet, and sighed again.

He sat down on the bike and unfolded the printout. He’d get it right eventually.

IF EVER I SHOULD LEAVE YOU

Pamela Sargent

Pamela Sargent is an American writer who has won the Nebula and Locus awards, been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and Sidewise Award, and was honored in 2012 with the Pilgrim Award, given for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy scholarship by the Science Fiction Research Association. She has written many novels including Cloned Lives, Eye of the Comet, Homesmind, Alien Child, and The Shore of Women. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, New Worlds, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Universe, and Nature, among others. “If Ever I Should Leave You” was first published in a much different form in Worlds of If, February 1974, and in this preferred text in Afterlives, edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson, Vintage, 1986.

When Yuri walked away from the Time Station for the last time, his face was pale marble, his body only bones barely held together by skin and the weak muscles he had left. I hurried to him and grasped his arm, oblivious to the people who passed us in the street. He resisted my touch at first, embarrassed in front of the others; then he gave in and leaned against me as we began to walk home.

I knew that he was too weak to go to the Time Station again. His body, resting against mine, seemed almost weightless. I guided him through the park toward our home. Halfway there, he tugged at my arm and we rested against one of the crystalline trees surrounding the small lake in the center of the park.

Yuri had aged rapidly in the last six months, transformed from a young man into an aged creature hardly able to walk by himself. I had expected it. One cannot hold off old age indefinitely, even now. But I could not accept it. I knew that his death could be no more than days away.

You can’t leave me now, not after all this time, I wanted to scream. Instead, I helped him sit on the ground next to the tree, then sat at his side.