Free Points of Departure by Pat Murphy

forward over the coffee table, watching herclosely. “You might be able to change all this.” He gestured to indicate the city, the smog, the garbage, the world in general. “Just by doing some small things. Stop Ford from inventing the car by …”
    “No, I couldn’t.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “If I didn’t accept the world as it is, I couldn’t travel.”
    “You won’t change things,” he said.
    “I can’t. It doesn’t work thatway.” She squeezed his hand and said, “I’m sorry, Michael. That’s the way it is.”
    They played chess and drank wine and he tried to teach her some of the strategy of the game. But she claimed she could not learn to look ahead any further than the next move. She shook her head when he explained traps that a good player could lay for his opponent—thinking several moves ahead.
    She did not go homethat night. She stayed—and when he learned she was a virgin, he was surprised. She laughed.
    “Who would I have slept with?” she asked him. “I started time-hopping when I was in high school. And back in time …” she hesitated. “I’m like a ghost back there. People look past me or through me. They don’t really notice me at all.” She shrugged. “And I’ve never told anyone else about time-hopping. Idon’t know why I told you, really.”
    He made love to her gently. Afterward, as they lay in bed together, he asked, “How old are you, anyway?”
    “I was a sophomore in high school three years back according to your time. But I’ve been traveling around quite a bit in those years. I’d figure I’m about twenty-three.”
    “Your parents?”
    “Killed in a gas line riot.” She fell silent. “I wasn’t close tothem anyway. I was different.”
    Michael lay still, one arm around her shoulders. The lady who lay beside him could run away whenever she wanted. Run away from shortages, from smog, from plague.
    “Can you take me with you?” he asked suddenly.
    For a long moment, she lay silent and he almost thought that she had not heard him. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “You would want to make changes. Youwould try to mess with the laws of the Universe.”
    “You could try to take me.”
    “I’ll try.” She pressed close to him in the narrow bed.
    “Hold me. And try to come with me.” He hugged her tightly, willing himself to stay with her, wherever or whenever she went.
    She vanished from his arms.
    He lay alone in bed, listening to the man who lived in the apartment below coughing. The air that blew inthe apartment window carried the scents of the dying city.
    She met him at the door with a handful of wild strawberries when he returned from his job at the bookstore.
    “I’m sorry it didn’t work,” she said. “I didn’t think it would. You want to change the past and you can’t do that.”
    “Yeah.” He felt dirty and tired. He had seen a mugger attack an old woman just a few blocks from the apartment.

    Michael had arrived just as the young man had run away.
    The old woman had been crying and clutching her arm where she had been slashed with his knife.
    Michael had helped her to her house and called the police from her phone. The entry hall to her apartment had smelled of stale air and grease, and while he was on the phone he could hear the old woman whimpering to herself and coughing—a dry,hacking sound that ripped at her throat and lungs and made her double over in pain.
    He had waited with the old woman until the ambulance arrived.
    Karen relaxed on his couch, leaning back and looking tanned and healthy. Michael’s throat felt scratchy and sore and his eyes ached from the smog.
    “Where have you been?” he asked abruptly.
    “Back to when Indians lived here,” she said. “Interestingpeople. I tried to pick up a few words of their language while. I was watching the women grind acorns. I learned to grind acorns instead.” She grinned and pretended to be grinding acorns. “Every day, they get