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    Crosstime Traffic
    Crosstime Traffic
    Crosstime Traffic
    Ebook370 pages5 hours

    Crosstime Traffic

    By Lawrence Watt-Evans

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    About this ebook

    Twenty stories by Hugo-winning author Lawrence Watt-Evans, exploring the infinite possibilities of traveling not just forward or backward in time, but sideways into the multiverse. Includes the award-winning "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers."

    Stories herein:
    Paranoid Fantasy #1
    Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers
    A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates
    An Infinity of Karen
    The Drifter
    Storm Trooper
    One-Shot
    Truth, Justice, and the American Way
    Real Time
    New Worlds
    One Night At A Local Bar
    Science Fiction
    Watching New York Melt [collaboration with Julie Evans]
    Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist's Command!
    Windwagon Smith and the Martians
    The Rune and the Dragon
    The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan
    The Final Folly of Captain Dancy
    The Man Who Loved Dragons
    After the Dragon is Dead

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMisenchanted Press
    Release dateMar 4, 2023
    ISBN9781619910539
    Crosstime Traffic
    Author

    Lawrence Watt-Evans

    Born and raised in Massachusetts, Lawrence Watt-Evans has been a full-time writer and editor for more than twenty years. The author of more than thirty novels, over one hundred short stories, and more than one hundred and fifty published articles, Watt-Evans writes primarily in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic books. His short fiction has won the Hugo Award as well as twice winning the Asimov's Readers Award. His fiction has been published in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Poland, France, Hungary, and Russia He served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1994 to 1996 and after leaving that office was the recipient of HWA's first service award ever. He is also a member of Novelists Inc., and the Science Fiction Writers of America. Married with two children, he and his wife Julie live in Maryland.

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      Book preview

      Crosstime Traffic - Lawrence Watt-Evans

      Crosstime

      Traffic

      Crosstime Traffic

      Twenty stories of fantasy & science fiction

      by

      Lawrence Watt-Evans

      Misenchanted Press

      Bainbridge Island

      These stories are works of fiction. None of the characters and events portrayed herein are intended to represent actual person living or dead.

      Crosstime Traffic

      Copyright ©1992, 2000, 2013, 2023 by Lawrence Watt Evans

      All rights reserved

      Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers, Real Time, Windwagon Smith and the Martians, One-Shot, A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates, Storm Trooper, and New Worlds originally appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, copyright by Davis Publications, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991.

      An Infinity of Karen and The Drifter originally appeared in Amazing Stories, copyright by TSR Inc., 1988, 1991.

      The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan and After the Dragon is Dead originally appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, copyright by Marion Zimmer Bradley Ltd. 1989, 1990.

      The Rune and the Dragon originally appeared in Dragon Magazine, copyright by TSR Inc. 1984.

      Paranoid Fantasy #1 originally appeared in American Atheist in slightly different form. Copyright 1975 by The American Atheist. Reprinted by permission of the author.

      One Night At A local Bar originally appeared under the title Minus Two Reaction, in The Space Gamer, copyright 1980.

      Science Fiction originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, copyright by Davis Publications 1991.

      Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist’s Command originally appeared in Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.

      Truth, Justice, and the American Way originally appeared in Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.

      Watching New York Melt originally appeared in Newer York, edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Copyright 1990 by Lawrence Watt Evans.

      The Final Folly of Captain Dancy originally appeared in The Rebirth of Wonder, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Copyright 1992 by Lawrence Watt Evans.

      Cover art by Luca Oleastri – www.rotwangstudio.com

      Cover design by Lawrence Watt-Evans

      Published by Misenchanted Press

      www.misenchantedpress.com

      Dedicated to

      Barbara Conroy,

      as explained elsewhere.

      Contents

      Foreword (2023)

      Introduction (1992)

      Paranoid Fantasy #1

      Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers

      A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates

      An Infinity of Karen

      The Drifter

      Storm Trooper

      One-Shot

      Truth, Justice, and the American Way

      Real Time

      New Worlds

      One Night At A Local Bar

      Science Fiction

      Watching New York Melt

      Monster Kidnaps Girl At Mad Scientist’s Command!

      Windwagon Smith and the Martians

      The Rune and the Dragon

      The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan

      The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

      The Man Who Loved Dragons

      After the Dragon is Dead

      Afterword: Ten (or Twenty, or Thirty) Years Later

      About the Author

      Foreword

      (2023)

      Starting on the next page you’ll find a long, self-indulgent autobiographical introduction explaining how I became a writer and where the nineteen stories in the original 1992 edition of this book came from.

      I definitely wouldn’t include all that stuff if I was assembling this as a new book, and certainly I wouldn’t put it at the front. I’m mildly surprised Del Rey let me do it in the original.

      Feel free to skip it.

      Introduction

      (1992)

      Welcome to my book!

      Maybe you’re here because you’ve enjoyed my novels, or because you’ve seen some of these stories in magazines or anthologies and liked them. Or maybe the title piqued your interest, or the cover caught your eye. Whatever the reason, I hope you’ll be pleased by the stories; I think there are some good ones.

      I always wanted to see my name on a collection of short stories; I’ve always wanted to be a writer, always loved short stories. My novels have been appearing for over a decade, and much of the thrill has worn off, but short stories are still special for me, and a single-author collection like this—well, it’s been something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember, and I’ve finally made it.

      It’s taken a long time for it to happen, and I want to use this introduction to tell you how it came about. Let me start off with an explanation of how I wound up as a writer of fantasy and science fiction. After that I’ll explain where the stories in this collection came from. It’s going to be largely a shameless display of egotism, so nobody will be offended if you get bored and skip ahead to the stories.

      Here’s the beginning: I started reading science fiction when I was five. Honest. And I decided to write it when I was seven.

      Both my parents read science fiction, you see. That meant my three older siblings read it, as well. I don’t remember ever not knowing what science fiction was; the concept had percolated into my consciousness by the time I was four, definitely.

      It was about that age that I noticed my sibs reading comic books, and I saw the nifty pictures of dinosaurs and spaceships and stuff and I wanted to read comic books, too.

      And when I was five, I learned the letters of the alphabet in kindergarten, and the sounds each one made. I still remember the flash of insight when the teacher wrote a song called K-K-Katy on the blackboard and taught us to sing it, and the connection between those three Ks and the sound at the beginning of the song clicked into place somewhere in my head, and I began sounding out words.

      I didn’t know I was actually reading; I assumed that there was some trick to it I hadn’t learned yet, but what I was doing seemed to work, so I tried it out.

      I tried it not on Dr. Seuss or any of the kid stuff I was supposed to read, but on a coverless comic book, identified twenty years later as Adventures into the Unknown #105, that my sister Marian had picked up somewhere and left lying around the house. The lead story, Last of the Tree People, involved a botanist who goes to the Moon and finds intelligent trees and carnivorous dinosaurs. Another story was called The Martian Mirage, and had this nifty domed city that appeared and disappeared. A third was Born to Be A Grocer, about these weird disembodied intelligences that live among us—and who are about to take over the world.

      I was hooked.

      Not on science fiction, per se—on comic books.

      Tarzan, Turok, Superboy, all of those. It was 1959. I’d missed the Golden Age of Comics; the gruesome horror and crime of the early 1950s had been stamped out; the great superhero revival hadn’t really started yet. All the same, there were plenty of exciting comic books out there to read, and I loved them all. I had no money, but I had two older sisters who bought them, and that was just as good.

      I had an older brother, too, but I don’t remember him ever having any money or buying any comic books. Fortunately, Marian and Jody weren’t the stereotypical 1950s sissy-type girls—they didn’t bring home romance comics, they brought home westerns and science fiction and superhero stuff. Also Little Lulu and Donald Duck, but those were great, too.

      And there was a whole big box that had accumulated before I’d learned to read.

      So I went on to first grade and discovered that I was reading the right way after all, and then I went on to second grade, where several very important events in my life happened.

      First, I ran out of comic books. I’d worked my way through the box, and I was reading them faster than my sisters bought them, and my weekly allowance was only a dime, and even at the used book store in those pre-inflation days that only bought two second-hand comics—or four, if I got coverless ones.

      I could go through four in an afternoon; what about the other six days each week?

      My parents had been complaining all along that I should read something better than comic books, so, in desperation, I took them up on it. I’d had my fill of Dick and Jane and their kin in school—books, I am convinced, that were designed to teach kids that reading is excruciatingly dull. I wanted something good.

      Well, my parents read books for fun, so I swiped two of those, and snuck ’em up to my room, and even into school. The idea of reading an entire grown-up novel was too daunting to contemplate, so I picked two that were collections of short stories.

      The first one was The Green Hills of Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein. The second one was The October Country, by Ray Bradbury.

      That got me hooked on science fiction. And fantasy. And horror. I was thoroughly caught, even though I couldn’t follow a lot of what the heck was going on in those stories—when I was seven, most of Delilah and the Space Rigger or The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse went right over my head.

      The next important event was my first in-class writing assignment. The teacher, Miss Conroy, gave us a title, and told us to write something to go with it—a story, an essay, anything. The title was Little Bird.

      Most of the kids did stuff like, See the bird. It is a little bird. See the bird fly away. Fly, bird, fly. Dick and Jane strike again. Bleah.

      A few got some rudimentary plot in there; I remember there were about three that I thought were okay.

      Mine was a love story about two chickadees—it just about covered both sides of the sheet of paper we were given. When the teacher read it it sounded pretty dumb—but not as bad as the other kids, and Miss Conroy praised it and said something about maybe someday I’d be a writer.

      I liked that idea. Writing it had been fun. Not much of what I did in school was fun, at that point. So I went home and showed my paper with the gold star on it to my mother and said, I want to be a writer when I grow up.

      Seven is an age when the subject of what you’ll be when you grow up is a popular one. I’d previously talked about being in real estate (a house seller) or urban planning (a city builder) or the sciences (an atom bomb builder), and my parents had always encouraged me.

      But when I said I wanted to be a writer, my mother said, Are you sure? That’s a very hard way to make a living; you might not be able to do it.

      I was astonished and baffled. I could be a rocket scientist, or a nuclear physicist, but not a writer?

      So I tried it out on my father, and got about the same reaction.

      I’m still not quite sure why, even after thirty years. It wasn’t just a bad day, or anything; from then on, right up until I sold my first novel, my parents encouraged me to write, if I wanted to, but as a hobby—making a career of it they seemed to consider impractical or downright impossible.

      I took it as a challenge, though.

      I read my third grown-up book not long after that—an anthology called Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin. The stories in there were a lot of fun, but not so spectacularly well-written as Heinlein and Bradbury, and they were short, too. I could imagine writing as long and as well as some of these other guys—I did imagine writing as long and as well as some of these other guys.

      So when I was eight I wrote my first science fiction story, and hid it from my parents. I still have it. It’s terrible, of course, but not bad for a third grader. It’s in first person, told by a mutant lab mouse—I stole the idea of a super-intelligent rodent from Barney, by Will Stanton, but making him the narrator was original with me.

      From then on, I wrote stories off and on, and unless they were for school assignments, I never showed them to anybody. They weren’t all science fiction, by any means; for one thing, in high school I discovered the distinction between science fiction and fantasy, and encountered the fantasy subgenre known as sword-and-sorcery, which I fell in love with for a time.

      In 1972 I burned most of those old stories. Also in 1972 I first submitted one, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

      It got rejected, of course. But it was a form rejection—there wasn’t any letter telling me that if I ever again polluted their slushpile they’d track me down and smash my typewriter.

      I found this moderately encouraging.

      Also in 1972 I sold a few feature articles to a local weekly paper—a very bad local weekly, but they paid me actual money. This was encouraging, too. And I published a sort of satirical underground newspaper called Entropy, using borrowed equipment, and sold it in my high school for a dime a copy and actually turned a profit. I wrote about half of each issue myself, including parodies of Conan the Barbarian and the like.

      And it was fun. I’d never enjoyed making money before, when I’d shoveled snow or sold greeting cards or bagged groceries at the local supermarket, but I was getting paid for writing, which was what I did for fun anyway!

      And people liked it!

      I came to the conclusion that writing for money had to be about the best racket there ever was, and I was determined to get into it, sooner or later, somehow. My parents notwithstanding, I was convinced I could do it.

      Not convinced enough to start immediately, though. Instead I went off to college on schedule, majoring in architecture.

      I had a good time in college. Too good a time. Early in 1974 I got kicked out (asked to withdraw) for what I think was officially termed flagrant neglect of studies. Which means I was partying instead of going to class for much of my final semester.

      Now, having been kicked out, I was faced with the problem of what to do next.

      One thing I did not want to do was go home and face my parents— especially my father, who had graduated summa cum laude from the same university that I’d just flunked out of, and had been the class salutatorian, as well. His father had taken his degree there cum laude. That was a lot of family history I preferred to avoid.

      So I went to Pittsburgh and rented a furnished room, using borrowed money. (Why Pittsburgh? Because my girlfriend was there—the one I’m married to now.)

      Another thing I did not want to do was to get a real job. I’ve always hated the very concept of holding down a real job, and I haven’t been impressed with the reality, either, on those occasions when I’ve tried it. And I rather resented having been kicked out. It was my own damn fault, but I still didn’t like it. I wanted back in.

      Fortunately, the university had (and has, I believe) a fairly generous readmission policy. The theory seems to be that if you got in in the first place you can do the work; if you got kicked out, the problem was motivation, not ability, and that’s something that can easily change. So you can be re-admitted up to three times.

      You have to apply for it, though, and prove you’ve been doing something with yourself other than sitting in a basement somewhere listening to Led Zeppelin over headphones for sixteen hours a day. And you are supposedly required to be gone for more than a year, though I knew people who had managed to get around that part.

      That meant that I could apply for readmission in the spring of 1975, and theoretically, if I impressed the relevant bureaucrats, I could return to campus in September of ’75 to take another shot at the semester I’d blown off.

      I wanted something I could put in my readmission application that would make it look like I was doing something interesting with myself, something conducive to personal growth and self-discovery and all that sort of thing. I also wanted something to do with my time that I could use as an excuse for not going full-time flipping burgers somewhere. I had a year and a few months.

      And I’d recently heard a story—I still don’t know if it’s true—about Larry Niven that I took as an inspiration.

      According to the story, when Niven decided to be a writer he gave himself a year. He holed up somewhere and wrote, and did nothing much except write, for a year. He collected lots of rejection slips, and then, toward the end of the year, started selling short stories.

      Sounded good to me. If I wrote for a year, I would collect lots of rejection slips that I could then enclose with my application for readmission. That should look sufficiently interesting to the people considering my case. It would be an excuse not to get a real job. And what the heck, the stuff might start selling.

      So I started writing.

      I didn’t just write, in the event; I did a stint as a cook at Arby’s, among other things. Mostly, though, I pounded away at the typewriter. I turned out reams of stuff, including fragments that are still in my to be finished someday pile; I actually finished about two dozen short stories and a couple of novelets, and submitted them to every market I could think of. Most of them were fantasy, some were science fiction, a few were mysteries, humor, or unclassifiable.

      And in the spring of 1975, just a few days apart, two important pieces of mail arrived.

      I’d been readmitted.

      And I’d sold my first story.

      The sale was for all of ten dollars, to a market I’d found in Writer’s Market and submitted to almost as a joke; I went back to college.

      That first story, though, has been reprinted a couple of times, earning several times the original ten bucks, and I rather like it. For historical reasons, I chose it to start off the present collection, so there it is: Paranoid Fantasy #1.

      (It was originally entitled, Paranoid Fantasy #1, or, A Day in Whose Life?, but that was mercifully shortened the first time it was reprinted. The full-length version of the title hasn’t been used since its original appearance in August, 1975.)

      (And yes, there were other paranoid fantasies; I got up to #4, at least. The others never sold, and deservedly so.)

      It’s worth noting that there is a standard piece of advice to beginning writers, one that I hand out myself, that says you should never start off a story with, The alarm clock rang... It’s a boring opening, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s the wrong place to begin the story.

      I got away with it, though.

      So I went back to college, and having actually sold a story, even so trivial a one as that, I was thought of as a Writer, by my classmates and myself. I’d learned a lot from all those rejections—about seventy of them, mostly form letters, but some more personal and detailed—and from reading Writer’s Market, and from other books and magazines, and simply from the practice of writing that much.

      One thing I’d learned—I’m not sure just where—was what the supposed odds were of selling a story through the slushpile. SF magazines, at that point, reportedly bought about one story out of every four hundred unsolicited submissions.

      SF book publishers reportedly bought about one novel out of every forty unsolicited submissions.

      One in forty is lousy odds, but it’s a lot better than one in four hundred.

      I therefore decided that my basic mistake had been writing short stories, instead of a novel. When the summer of 1976 rolled around, and I was faced with the prospect of getting a summer job, I came up with a dodge—I’d write a novel, instead.

      I did, too. I made the mistake of finishing it in a mere ten weeks, though, so that I wound up with a job cleaning laboratory glassware for the last few weeks of summer.

      The novel was called Slant, and it was terrible. It didn’t sell.

      In May of 1977 I gave up on college, dropped out, and moved to Kentucky, where my fiancée (we were married three months later, and we’re still married) had just gotten a good steady job. I continued to try to write, rather than getting a real job—it was a habit by this time. I took one of those unsold novelets, one that had gotten favorable comments from an editor (though it had still been rejected), and expanded it, rewrote it into a novel. This time I took fourteen months.

      And this time, after a delay so long I’d given up and started looking for another line of work, it sold.

      So I was a real writer, finally.

      From then on, selling novels wasn’t much of a problem. I wrote three sequels to that first one, rewrote Slant into the drastically-improved The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, and forged steadily onward, with book after book.

      Short stuff, though—I still didn’t have the hang of that. I tried a few more stories, got a few more rejections.

      A magazine called The Space Gamer contacted me early in 1980—the editor had read The Lure of the Basilisk and wanted to do an article on using overmen, creatures I’d described in the book, in role-playing games. I agreed, and asked if they might be interested in buying fiction.

      They were. I sold them two stories, an old one from my files, and a new one that had come to me in a dream.

      Honest. It did. I woke up one morning and there it was in my head. There’s one description in it that I wrote only because it was important in the dream, and I still haven’t figured out why it was important. The Space Gamer published it under the unintelligible-to-non-gamers title Minus Two Reaction; I’ve included it here under its correct title, One Night At A Local Bar.

      Since the story came from a dream, I can’t tell you much about it beyond the simple fact of its existence. It does have a point, but a good many readers seem to miss it.

      I’ve spared you the other story that ran in The Space Gamer—the older one.

      After those two The Space Gamer seems to have become disenchanted with me; they rejected a couple of stories, and I quit submitting to them. I was doing well enough with novels that I didn’t care all that much.

      Short fiction still happened occasionally, though—something would demand to be written, and I would write it, and it would go out gathering rejections. And every so often one would sell.

      For example: I was living in Lexington, Kentucky. There was a shop in town called The Rusty Scabbard that sold games and gaming supplies, and some friends of mine were regular patrons there.

      One day my wife said something about the place, and got the name wrong—she couldn’t remember the real name, so she made one up that sounded right, and called it The Rune and the Dragon.

      I liked that. It was obviously the title of a story. What’s more, it was obviously the title of a story I had to write. And it should be done in a high-fantasy style.

      I made a couple of false starts, but then the whole thing fell together, and I wrote The Rune and the Dragon, and it got rejected a couple of places, both of which said, This is a fine story, but we’re not doing this sort of straight fantasy adventure right now. The first one suggested sending it to the second one; the second one suggested sending it to Dragon Magazine. Dragon bought it, and published it in their November, 1984 issue.

      And that was the last place it appeared until now. Here it is again.

      Now, for the next part of this account, we need some background.

      In March 1982, Ace Books re-issued Spider Robinson’s short story collection, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, and I saw it displayed in the bookstores. I didn’t read it, didn’t even open it, just saw it. I liked the title. I’d always been fond of parallel world stories, never thought they’d really been done right, and I assumed from the title that the book was about parallel worlds. I also like barroom tales, and the combination sounded like a good idea. That title stuck with me, somewhere in the back of my head.

      In 1983, my wife and I drove from Kentucky to Washington, D.C. and to Baltimore for the World Science Fiction Convention. We stopped for lunch in a place called Sutton, West Virginia, and ate at a diner there that we liked—it’s hard to say just why; there was just something about the atmosphere that appealed to us.

      These two items percolated in my subconscious, tangled themselves up with parallel world theory and certain attitudes, and came out as a story called Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.

      It sold the first place I sent it, which was Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (henceforth Asimov’s, for short). It was my first sale to a real science fiction magazine. It was the first time a short story of mine had sold on the first try.

      It went on to be the first story of mine to win a Hugo, and the first to be nominated for a Nebula, and the first to win the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll Award. It’s been anthologized, translated into Japanese and Polish, and adapted to radio.

      After all that, I decided I’d finally gotten the hang of writing short stories.

      And since then, while I still get rejections, I’ve been able to sell most of my short fiction.

      Naturally, when one has a hit, one tries to follow it up, and the concept of Harry’s obviously still had plenty of potential. Several other related stories have been planned; so far, I’ve only finished one. It’s called A Flying Saucer with Minnesota Plates, and it’s here, right after the original story. It isn’t exactly a sequel; it’s just another story about the same place. It, too, appeared in Asimov’s originally.

      I’d had another idea about parallel worlds that was intended to be a whole series of short stories—the basic concept was that some sort of accident has created a permanent, stable opening connecting an effectively-infinite number of alternate Earths. The series title was to be The Hole Above the Parking Lot.

      So far, though, I’ve only written one of the stories. My title for it was Eurydice, and anyone who has a classical background will recognize the name and understand where the story came from. My agent protested, probably accurately, that 90% of the readers wouldn’t have the necessary background, so it was retitled An Infinity of Karen. It was first published in Amazing in 1988; this is only its second appearance in English.

      Another variant on the parallel world theme occurred to me about ten years ago while I was walking to the supermarket one afternoon, thinking about vectors. No, I don’t generally think about things like vectors when I’m out strolling; I have no idea why I did that day, I just did, and when I got home I wrote a story called The Drifter—but it’s not the one that’s included here. It was only about half as long, and although it had the same central concept I’d approached it entirely differently, and it was a pretty lousy story. I sent it out several places, and eventually it wound up in my agent’s files, gathering dust.

      Then, just recently, he cleaned out his files. He sent me a whole package of old stories he had no particular use for.

      Most of them I didn’t have any use for, either, but when I re-read The Drifter I said to myself, I can fix this! With the additional experience I’d acquired in the intervening years I could see immediately what I’d done wrong.

      I didn’t just fix it, though, I just about wrote an entire new story with the same title and premise, and I did it more or less in a single sitting. I don’t think there’s a single line from the original in the rewritten version, but it all poured right onto the page, as if it had been working itself out in the back of my head all that time.

      And yet another angle on the parallel-world idea—I’ve come up with dozens,

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