Free A Handful of Time by Rosel George Brown Page A

the wherewithal in a cabinet under the washstand.
    “No, thank you, sir,” the tall one said.
    “Not allowed to,” the short one said. “Try us after six o’clock in the morning.”
    “I’m afraid that would try me …”I confessed.
    I got in bed and tried to sleep. Finally I got up and opened the door again.
    “If you’re hungry,” I offered, “you can go get a sandwich or something and say I sent you for one.”
    “Thanks, anyway,” the tall one said.
    “I can’t eat when I’m on a top security job like this,” the short one said. “Nervous.”
    “It’s worth our necks to take our eyes off your door,” the tall one said.
    “Well, I guess you’re used to it,” I said, wondering if I’d ever get used to it.
    I closed the door and dug my head into the pillow to dull the soft, regular tread of their feet on the rubber tile. The late traffic noises of the night came dimly and sporadically through the walls. I finally gave myself up to the dark comfort of my blankets and a vast silence.
    A vast silence!
    I sat up and switched on the light. I don’t know how much time had passed. The room was cold as a vault and the forgotten alienness of a strange room in the night came back to me from some distant memory.
    “Guard!” I called, hearing my word fall blank on the wall. There was no sound of their feet on the tile.
     
    I leapt out of bed and swung the door open, half afraid it would be locked.
    There were no guards. Just beyond the door, on the dark tiles, was the ultimate message.
    “Dr. Thane!” I called, running down the hall, to his office.
    A light penciled under the door. He opened it, rumpled and looking almost childlike in a pair of over-sized white pajamas.
    “Dr. Thane, I…” I wasn’t sure I could tell him, “You’ve gotten a new message,” he guessed.
    I nodded. “I don’t know that there’s any use telling you. Now there won’t be time.”
    “Tell me anyhow.”
    I told him.
    He was silent for a moment, calculating the movements of the future.
    “No,” he said, “not time. And soon, perhaps, not even world enough.”
    The message grins up at me from every street corner.
    SAVE FOR THE FUTURE.
     

 
     
     
     
    OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS
     
    I STIRRED in my colloidal suspension. I could feel the transverse waves I had created bound through my little universe and rebound against me again. I was waking up. I was nearing the planet, then. Algol II, was it? My thinking would be fuzzy for a while.
    I began the exercises, slowly and carefully, uncoiling from the foetal position you assume naturally in suspension. I wondered if the child in utero had any such premonition of the bright, violent world to come.
    First one leg. Then the other. Slowly, but still the colloid shook. I did not want to wake up too fast. It is easy to panic. To thrash about wildly and be buffeted by your own struggling waves. It is too much like a nightmare of suffocation. Or claustrophobia. And if you fight too hard, your metabolism rises to normal before it’s time to get out and then you just die. Nobody wants to die.
    I lay still again until I felt the waves subside and the slight nausea recede. I would be well within sight of Algol. It would be blazing along one hemisphere of my windowless monad.
    At least, that’s what I call it. Ever since I read Leibnitz the phrase has stuck in my mind like a label for which there was no carton. When I saw the one-man spacers, I pasted my label on them immediately.
    What I should have done was read more Leibnitz. Or less. Or refrained from mixing his ideas up with Bishop Berkeley’s and my own.
    Because when I saw the one-man spacers they were so perfect a symbol that I had an irresistible impulse to get in one. If anyone asks me why I travel about the galaxy, I say it is because I am an anthropologist and explorer. If anyone should say, No, really why do you do it? I would say, Because it is a quick way to be Somebody in the eyes of my fellow man and to make