Up The Line

Our Courier spelled out at great length the consequences of changing the past, and begged us repetitiously not to rock any boats. “Don’t speak unless spoken to,” he said, “and even then confine any conversations with strangers to a minimum of words. Don’t use slang; it won’t be comprehensible. You may recognize other time-tourists; under no condition are you to speak to them or greet them in any way, and you should ignore any attention you may get from them. Anyone who breaks these regulations, no matter how i

We nodded solemnly.

Jeff Monroe added, “Think of yourselves as Christians in disguise who have been smuggled into the holy Moslem city of Mecca. You’re in no danger so long as you’re not discovered; but if those about you find out what you are, you’re in big trouble. Therefore it’s to your advantage to keep your mouths shut while you’re up the line, to do a lot of seeing and a minimum of saying. You’ll be all right as long as you don’t call attention to yourselves.”

(I learned from Sam that time-tourists very frequently get themselves into muddles with people living up the line, no matter how hard their Couriers try to avoid such incidents. Sometimes the trouble can be patched up with a few diplomatic words, often when the Courier explains apologetically to the offended party that the stranger is really a mental case. Sometimes it’s not so easy, and the Courier has to order a quick evacuation of all the tourists; the Courier must remain behind until he has sent all his people safely down the line, and there have been several fatalities to Couriers in the line of duty as a result. In extreme cases of tourist bungling, the Time Patrol steps in and cancels the jump retroactively, plucking the careless traveler from the tour and thereby undoing the damage. Sam said, “It can really get one of these rich bastards furious when a Patrolman shows up at the last minute and tells him that he can’t make the shunt, because if he does he’ll commit some ferocious faux pas up the line. They just can’t understand it. They promise to be good, and won’t believe that their promise is worthless because their conduct is already a matter of record. The trouble with most of the dumb tourists is that they can’t think four-dimensionally.” “Neither can I, Sam,” I said, baffled. “You will. You’d better,” said Sam.)

Before we set out for 1935 we were given a quick hypnocourse in the social background of the era. Pumped into us were data on the Depression, the New Deal, the Long family of Louisiana, Huey Long’s rise to fame, his “Share Our Wealth” program of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his feud with President Franklin Roosevelt, his dream of taking the Presidency himself in 1936, his flamboyant disregard for traditions, his demagogic appeal to the masses. We also got enough incidental details on life in 1935 — celebrities, sports developments, the stock market — so we wouldn’t feel hopelessly out of context there.

Lastly, they fitted us out in 1935 wardrobes. We strutted around giggling and quipping at the sight of ourselves in those quaint rigs. Jeff Monroe, checking us out, reminded the men about zipper flies and how to use them, reminded the women that it was sternly prohibited to reveal the breasts from the nipple down, and urged us strenuously to keep in mind at all times that we were entering a staunchly puritanical era where neurotic repression was regarded as a virtue and our normal freedoms of behavior were looked upon as sinful and shameless.

Finally, we were ready.

They took us uplevel to Old New Orleans, since it wouldn’t have been healthy to make our jump from one of the underlevels. They had set up a room in a boarding-house on North Rampart Street for shunting to the twentieth century.

“Here we go up the line,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe, and gave the signal that activated our timers.

14.

Suddenly, it was 1935.

We didn’t notice any changes in the dingy room we were in, but yet we knew we were up the line.

We wore tight shoes and fu

The automobile traffic was fantastic for this supposedly “depressed” year. So was the din. We strolled along, two by two, Jeff leading the way. We stared at things a lot, but no one would get suspicious about that. The locals would simply guess that we were tourists just down from Indiana. Nothing about our curiosity marked us particularly as tourists just down from 2059.

Thibodeaux, the power company man, couldn’t get over the sight of power lines right out in the open, dangling from post to post. “I’ve read about such things,” he said several times, “but I never really believed them!”

The womenfolk clucked a lot about the fashions. It was a hot, sticky September day and yet everybody was all covered up. They couldn’t understand that.

The weather gave us trouble. We had never been exposed to real humidity before; there isn’t any in the undercities, of course, and only a lunatic goes up to surface level when the climate is sour. So we sweated and labored.

There wasn’t any air-conditioning in the hotel, either. I think it may not have been invented yet.

Jeff checked us all in at the hotel. When he was through signing the register, the desk clerk, who of course was human and not a computer terminal, banged a bell and yelled, “Front!” and a platoon of friendly black bellhops came over to get our luggage.

I overheard Mrs. Bienvenu, the lawyer’s wife, whisper to her husband, “Do you think they’re slaves?”

“Not here!” he said fiercely. “The slaves were freed seventy years ago!”

The desk clerk must have overheard that. I wonder what he made of it.

The Courier had booked Flora Chambers and me into one room. He explained that he had registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, because it wasn’t permissible to let an unmarried couple share the same hotel room even if they were part of the same tour party. Flora gave me a pale but hopeful smile and said, “We’ll pretend we’re on a temporary.”

Monroe glared at her. “We don’t talk about down-the-line customs here!”

“They don’t have temporary liaisons in 1935?”

“Shut up! ” he hissed.

We unpacked and bathed and went out to see the town. We did Basin Street and heard some respectable primitive jazz. Then we walked a few blocks over to Bourbon Street for drinks and a strip-tease. The place was full; and it amazed us all that grown men and women would sit around for a full hour, enduring a lot of indifferent music and polluted atmosphere, simply to wait for a girl to come out and take off some of her clothes.

When she got undressed, finally, she kept little shiny caps on her nipples and a triangular patch of cloth over her pubic region, too. Anybody who has a serious interest in nudity can see more than that any day at a public bath-house. But of course this was a repressive, sexually strangled era, we reminded ourselves.

Our drinks and other nightclub charges were all put on one bill, which Jeff Monroe always paid. The Time Service didn’t want us ignorant tourists handling unfamiliar currencies except when absolutely necessary. The Courier also deftly fended off drunks who kept invading our group, beggars, soliciting prostitutes, and other challenges to our ability to handle the social situations 1935 presented.

“It’s hard work,” Flora Chambers observed, “being a Courier.”