Free Millennium by John Varley

froze on her face.
    It was a weird moment. It couldn’t have lasted more than half a second, yet it felt like an hour. So many emotions played over her face in that little bit of time that at first I thought I must be imagining it. Later, I wasn’t so sure.
    She was a beautiful woman. She’d looked younger from behind. When she turned and I saw her eyes, for a moment I thought she was a hundred years old. But that was ridiculous. Thirty, maybe; no more than that. She had the kind of striking, hurting beauty that makes it hard to breathe if you’re fifteen or sixteen and never been kissed. I was a hell of a lot older than that, but I felt it just the same.
    Then she turned and started to walk away.
    “Hey,” I yelled after her. “What about that coffee?”
    She just walked faster. By the time she reached the hangar doors she was running.
    “You always have that effect on women?”
    I turned, and saw it was Tom.
    “Did you see that?”
    “Yeah. What’s your secret? Oil of polecat? Is your fly open?”
    He was laughing, so I did, too, but I didn’t feel anything was funny.
    It went beyond any feelings of rejection; I honestly wasn’t bothered by that. Her reaction was so overdrawn, so ludicrous. I mean, I ain’t Robert Redford but I don’t have a face to frighten little girls, and I don’t smell any worse than anybody else who’d been tramping through the mud all night.
    What bothered me was the feeling that, far from being lost, she was looking for something lost.
    And she’d found it.

(4)
The Time Machine
    Testimony of Louise Baltimore
    I had been putting off going to the Post Office to take a look at my time capsule, but I knew if I waited much longer the BC was going to remind me. So I finished the pack of Luckies and took the tube to the “Federal Building.”
    The Fed is the oldest building in the city. It’s a relic of the forty-fifth century, and has stood up to more nuclear explosions than the Honduras Canal. Civilizations rise and fall, wars swirl around its ugly perimeters and choke the air above it, and the Fed just sits there, massive and dour. It’s shaped like a pyramid, pretty much like the one Cheops built, but you could have used the Pharaoh’s tomb as one brick if you were building the Fed.
    Not that anybody could, these days. It’s made out of something nobody knows how to fabricate anymore. We’re not even sure it’s a human artifact.
    We use the Fed to house the vault somebody nicknamed the “Post Office” many years ago, no doubt because the vault is clogged with packages that are not delivered for years or centuries.
    The Post Office is one of those weird side effects of time travel. It proves once more that paradoxes are possible, thoughonly strictly limited ones. A woman had died today because it was necessary to avert most types of paradoxes, but the ones the universe permits are literally handed to us.
    On the day I was born, my mother knew there were three messages waiting for me in the Post Office. It must have been a comfort to her: she knew I’d live to open them. At least I hope it helped. She died bringing me into the world.
    I know it was a comfort to me. The date on the first one was better than a life-insurance policy. I would live long enough to open that one, and the second one as well. They were all found about three hundred years ago, quite close together.
    A time capsule is a block of very tough metal about the size of a brick. If you shake it, it rattles. That’s because there’s another piece of metal in a hollow inside the brick. The second piece is thin and flat. On the outside of the brick is a name and a date: “For ___________. Do not open until ___________.”
    We find these capsules from time to time. Usually they are dredged up from the ocean depths. Dating techniques establish just how long they’ve been there—usually around a hundred thousand years. When we find them, we store them away in the vault at the Fed, under safeguards as stringent