2 comments/ 25549 views/ 1 favorites Bootstrapped By: MarciaR As the author, I claim all rights under international copyright laws. This work is not intended for sale, but please feel free to post this story to other archives or newsgroups, keeping the header and text intact. Any commercial use of this work is expressly forbidden without the written permission of the author. This is a work of fiction and is not meant to portray any person living or dead, nor any known situation. It is meant for adults only and is not to be read by person's under the age of 18, or the legal age in the county/state/country in which the reader resides. Note: This story is adapted from the short story, "BY HIS BOOTSTRAPS" by Anson Macdonald (Robert A. Heinlein). It was originally published in October1941 in a science fiction magazine. About a year ago, my husband handed me a book of short stories called: Before the Golden Age, by Isaac Asimov and dared me to try and make any of them modern enough to read. I laughed, thinking who would ever want to read something written 70 years ago, and science fiction to boot. I was wrong. Two of the stories I really liked: "The Accursed Galaxy" by Edmond Hamilton, and "He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse. I rewrote both as "Big Bang Theory" and "The Girl Who Came Shrink Wrapped. A couple of months later I found another old anthology from back in the forties called Great Science Fiction Stories, Adventures in Time and Space that had "He Who Shrank" in it and I rewrote the following story. It is about a college student who gets sucked up into the mind-twisting world of time-travel. Although I disliked the ending of the story, I more or less stuck with it. The character in the original story was male but mine is female. Also, this story has almost no sex, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. See how frustrated you'd get after 30,000 years without sex. Trish falls through a doorway into the future and that's only the beginning of her troubles. Join her in this 24 page misadventure in time. Bootstrapped "Cloe?" The older woman stopped. "I know no one named Cloe." "You don't? She seemed to know you. Maybe you aren't the person I was supposed to see." I looked around, hesitantly. "But I am. I have been expecting you for a long time, Trish." She tapped her lips lightly with the tip of a finger. "Cloe . . . Cloe--Oh! Cloe, of course! It had slipped my mind completely. She told you to call her that, didn't she?" "Isn't that her name?" Leda smiled. "It's as good a name as any, I suppose. Here we are." She ushered me into a small, but cheerfully bright room. It contained no furniture of any sort, but the floor was as soft and warm as human flesh. It made me want to enter on tiptoe--or back away. "Sit down. I'll be back in a moment." I looked around for something to sit on, then turned to ask Leda for a chair. But Leda was gone. The door through which we had entered was gone. More worried now than ever, I was about to start groping the wall for a hidden entrance when suddenly a portion of the wall's surface directly before me dilated like a camera shutter opening; Leda reentered, carrying a carafe of pleasantly bubbling clear liquid, and a cup. She filled the cup and handed it over. "Aren't you drinking?" I asked, suspiciously. "Presently. I want to attend your wounds first." "Okay," I said, although it wasn't okay at all. Nothing here was okay. Putting the glass to my lips, I sipped at the bubbling liquid and then held the glass away. It tasted good. It tasted almost indecently good. "What is this?" I asked, sniffing cautiously at the surface. "Wine?" "No dear, it's water." I frowned. "Not any water that I've ever tasted," I said, sniffing again. "What is it, really?" Leda laughed. "I assure you, Trish, no ill will befall you drinking that liquid. Now go ahead." I drank, but slowly. The liquid felt almost solid in its texture, like fine silk gliding across the tongue. I found it quite refreshing. "May I have another?" I asked, holding out the glass. "Help yourself." While I did, Leda worked deftly with a salve that smarted at first, then soothed gently. "Thank you," I said as the woman applied the salve to my throbbing lips. "You don't know how good that feels." Leda never got to answer because, suddenly bone-weary, yawning deeply, I tried to set the glass on the floor. It slipped from my relaxing fingers and fell the final two inches to the surface, spilling liquid over the top. The woman held me by the shoulders as I fell sideways, helping me to the floor. I smiled at her as the mist swallowed her up. "Nite, nite," a voice said from very far off. "Sweet dreams, my dear. You have such a day ahead of you." Darkness came and wrapped me in its blanket of sleep. * * * I was in my dorm room. It was late afternoon and there was cheerful music drifting in through the open window from the quad below, some 70's blue-eyed soul tune I recognized but couldn't put a name to. I was stretched back in my swivel chair, legs flung far apart and one heel defiantly up on the corner of the desk. There was a bottle of Starbucks French Vanilla Latte in my right hand. I relaxed, eyes closed, letting the happiness snuggle deep into my body. This was such a fine end to the day. I had finished my damned thesis. Gregory was coming over to pick me up. There was the promise of good food and maybe good sex in my immediate future, and-- I sat bolt upright. The sight of the strange room brought me back into reality if not into self-possession. I had time to look around and time for panic to constrict my throat to the size of a pencil shaft when the door shuttered open and Leda stepped through. "Feeling better?" she asked. I coughed in my confusion. "Yes, but what is this?" I demanded. "We'll get to that. How about a little breakfast first?" On Trish Wilson's scale of requirements that morning, breakfast rated just above being run over by a Mack truck. "Fuck food! I want to know what's going on!" Leda graced me with a tolerant smile, folded her hands before her and stepped without speaking through the open door. Grumbling, I followed. We walked a short distance down the passageway to another room, half the size, but possessing a balcony hanging high over a green countryside. A soft, warm, summer breeze wafted through. There was a peculiar, octagonal table with five chairs clustered loosely around it near the balcony door. Each side of the table was a different length, and each chair was made in a different style and upholstered in a uniquely different pattern. We sat down and immediately maidservants entered to serve the meal. I tried not to stare. "Thank you dear," Leda said as the first girl stopped beside her, genuflected to one knee and removed a great tray of fruit from atop her head. The fruit was gorgeous and so was the girl. In fact, she was possibly the most beautiful young girl I had ever seen. Leda took a bite from an apple and observed my wide-eyed amazement with some humor. She waved the girl away, then bade me to eat. "This complex, the country now know as Arcadia, possibly the entire Earth," she said, "was the domain--the empire--of the High Ones. It is not certain where the High Ones came from nor where they went when they left. I am inclined to think they went away into time somewhere. In any case they ruled more than twenty thousand years and completely obliterated human culture as you know it. What is more important to you--and to me--is the effect they had on the human race. Are you listening?" I started. My eyes were glued to an even more lovely maidservant that had just come in through the open door. Blue-eyed, with lustrous, golden hair in a series of complicated braids down her back, the girl was perhaps sixteen years old and blessed with a complexion that neither myself nor any friend I had ever had could have claimed at sixteen. She wore a simple crimson tunic that swept the floor as she walked and with sleeves that hid her long-fingered, flawless hands when she stood erect. Realizing that my mouth stood open, I snapped it shut and blushed deeply. "I'm sorry," I said in a low croak. "I'm just not used to seeing women of such startling beauty." Leda smiled benevolently at me. "She's not exceptionally beautiful as women around here go, Trish." "That's hard to believe. I feel like I've dropped into in ancient Rome, in the time of the Ceasar's." "She's yours if you'd like her." "Excuse me?" "She's a slave. They are all slaves by nature. If you like her, I'll make you a present of her." I blushed even harder. "Uh, no. I'm not . . . that's all right, thank you." Leda spoke to the girl in a soft, sing-song language. "Her name is Arma," she said as the girl giggled shyly. Lowering her head in deference, the girl moved in short, quick steps to where I sat, dropped on both knees to the floor beside me and lowered her face into her cupped hands. She waited. "Touch her forehead," Leda instructed. I did so. Arma arose and stood waiting diffidently by my side, her face a bright red, chest rising and falling with labored breaths. When it became clear that I had no idea what to do next, Leda spoke to the girl, then dismissed her with a flick of the wrist. The girl looked puzzled, but moved out of the room. "I told her that, notwithstanding her new status, you wished her to continue serving breakfast." "Thank you," I said, eying the doorway peripherally. Leda resumed her explanations while the service of the meal continued. "It is necessary that you go back through the Time Gate at once. Your first task is to find and bring back a particular woman to me. Once your second task is complete, we'll be sitting pretty. After that, it is share and share alike for you and I. And there is plenty to share, Trish, believe me." I fingered my swollen eye thoughtfully. "All right," I said. "When do we start?" I had made up my mind some time ago--just shortly after Arma had become my "slave," in fact--that I would agree to anything to get back to my own time and out of this nightmare. If co-operation with this woman was the only means to that end, so be it. Besides, if all Leda wanted was for me to go back to some earlier time and persuade another woman to step through the Gate, I'd whack the silly bitch over the head if necessary. What could I lose? Leda stood up. "Let's do it then," she said enthusiastically, "before you change your mind. Follow me." She set off at a brisk pace with me again hurrying to keep up. "All you have to do," Leda said as we reached the Hall of the Gate, "is to step through the portal. You will find yourself back in your own time. Persuade the woman you find there to go through the Gate. We have need of her. Then come back yourself." I was dumbstruck. Back to my own time? Was the woman mad? Struggling to keep the shock off my face, I said, "No problem," in an even tone. "Consider it done." I started to step through the Gate but Leda took my arm. "I have to set the controls first," she said. She stepped behind the raised dais. Her head appeared above the side a moment later. "Be careful," she cautioned. "You are not used to time travel. You are going to get a bit of a shock when you step through. This other woman--well, you'll recognize her, Trish." "Who is she?" I asked, eying the pencil-thin circle floating before me like like it was the Pearly Gates. "I won't tell you because you wouldn't understand. But you will when you see her. Just remember this-- There are some very strange paradoxes connected with time travel. Don't let anything you see there throw you. Just do what I tell you to and you'll be fine." "Paradoxes don't worry me," I said confidently. "Is that all? I'm ready." Leda nodded and I stepped through the locus known as the Time Gate. Bootstrapped "What?" I did my best to explain persuasively what it was I wanted her to do. Or rather to cajole. Explanations were out of the question, in any honest sense of the word. I would have preferred attempting to explain calculus to an Australian aborigine, even though I didn't understand that esoteric mathematics myself. "You're nuts," my younger self declared. "I know. I said that too." "Huh?" I sighed. "I can't explain it to you right now. But it's very important for you to go through there." Trish reassured me I was nuts. "Please? Just do it, okay?" "Why? Not that I'll go." I practically hollered, "Dammit, if you'd just go through, you'd know already!" The other's face hardened. "I'm not going through." "Come on, Trish. There's somebody there that needs you." "Who?" she insisted. "I can't explain who. I can only say that once we go through, the two of us and this third person are set for life!" I continued with a synopsis of Leda's proposition, realizing with irritation how exceedingly sketchy Leda had been with her explanations. I was forced to hit only the high spots in the logical parts of my argument, and bear down on the emotional appeal. I was on safe ground there--no one knew better than I did how fed up the earlier Trish Wilson had been with the petty drudgery and stuffy atmosphere of an academic career. "This is your chance!" I concluded. "Believe me, Trish, you want to take it!" I watched her narrowly and thought I detected a favorable response. She definitely seemed interested. But she set her glass down carefully, stared out the window a moment, and at last replied: "No. I don't believe you. I don't believe you and I don't believe that thing over there even exists. Now would you please finish your latte and get out of here so I can go to bed!" I grabbed her arm. I was losing my temper. "You can't do that," I growled. The other Trish tried to wrest away. "Leave me alone!" she hollered. "Leave her alone!" I swung around, saw a third woman standing in front of the Gate--recognized her with a sudden sick amazement. I should have anticipated the arrival of a third party all along. But my memory had not prepared me for who the third party would be. The third woman was a carbon copy of myself. I stood silent a moment, eyes closed, trying to assimilate this new fact and force it into some reasonable integration.This was just a little too much. I wanted to have a few hard words with my darling Leda . . . and the sooner the better. "And who are you?" I opened my eyes to find that my other self, the younger one, was addressing the latest edition. The newcomer turned away from her interrogator and looked sharply at me. "She knows me." I took my time in replying. This thing was getting out of hand. "Yes," I admitted, "I suppose I do. But why are you here? Are we throwing the plan? Are you--" My facsimile cut me short. "No time for long-winded explanations," she said. "I know more about it than you do--you'll probably concede that--and my judgment is maybe just a little better than yours. She doesn't go through the Gate." The offhand arrogance of Trish Number Three antagonized me badly. "I don't concede anything of the sort--" I began, and then the telephone rang. "Answer it!" snapped Number Three. Trish Number One looked belligerent but picked up the handset. "Hello. . . . Yes. Who is this? . . . Hello. . . . Hello!" She tapped the the tongue a couple of times, then slammed the receiver back into its cradle. "Who was it?" I asked, somewhat annoyed that I had not had a chance to answer it myself. "I don't know! Some kid with a misplaced sense of humor!" At that instant the telephone rang again and before I could grab it, the original Trish snatched it up. "Look, you butterfly-brain! I'm busy and this is not funny. Someone needs to take you over their knee and spanked the--" Her mouth formed a large, comical "O" and her face reddened. "Gregory? God, I'm so sorry. I--" Her hand went up to her forehead, forming an awning over her eyes. "You don't understand. A woman has been pestering me over the phone and I thought it was you. Her. I don't know!" The person on the other end was, of course, Gregory Dane. I remembered with embarrassment that fractured, lopsided conversation and knowing that Trish Number Three understood it as well it made me want to squirm. Embarrassed by yourself? How gauche! Trish Number One concluded her conversation and hung up the phone with a bang . She was rattled and confused. Throwing her hand theatrically away from her forehead, she exclaimed in a shrill, high voice: "Okay, you two! Out! Vamoose! Blow the popkins!" "No!" I exclaimed, stepping forward. "You can't. I mean, you have to!" Blast it, did I even know what I meant? "She does not!" the new arrival shouted. "And she won't!" "I won't do anything at all!" Trish yelled belligerently. "Except call the cops!" Then she said--and her expression said she couldn't believe this at all: "Or maybe I will!" "Great!" I said with undisguised relief. "Just step through. That's all there is to it." "Oh, no, you don't!" growled Trish Number Three. She stepped between the original Trish and the Gate. Trish Number One faced her. "Listen, you bimbo! You can't come barging in here like you you own the place and tell me what to do! If you don't like it, go jump!" Then she charged the newcomer with a sudden, graceless fury and the two began to struggle. The late arrival looked at me with a desperate Help me! look, and punches began to fly. I stepped in warily, looking for an opening that would enable me to assist Number One without getting myself hurt. A wild swing glanced off my already damaged features and caused me to jump back in pain. My lower lip, cut, puffy, and tender from our original encounter, became an area of pure agony. I stayed out of the fray, knowing what would happen next.. "You hit me!" Trish Number One cried. She stood looking at her right hand, at the blood on the tips of her fingers. Her lower lip was bleeding profusely. The third Trish, looking aghast at her own right hand--still fisted and cut on two of the knuckles--muttered, "I know. I didn't mean--" She got no more out because right then I charged her. We struggled fiercely, me gaining something of an upper hand after Trish Number One suddenly and unexpectedly joined in. I got my adversary into a headlock and was about to yell at Trish Number One to jump through the gate when my ally butted me with an elbow. "What are you doing!" I yelled. Trish the Original backed away, blinking in surprise. She was right before the Gate. She stammered, "I --" and then Trish Number Three sent us staggering sideways and the three of us collided. The last thing I saw before I impacted the floor with my head was a pair of feet disappearing through the Gate. * * * Eventually, I pushed myself off the floor and rubbed my throbbing temple. Number Three was standing by the Gate. "Now you've done it!" she said bitterly, nursing the knuckles of her right hand. The obviously unfair allegation reached me at just the wrong moment. My head felt like an experiment in sadism. "Me?" I said angrily. "You knocked her through. We were doing just fine until you shoved us sideways!" "Yes, but it's your fault. If you hadn't interfered, it wouldn't have happened." "Me interfere? Why, you dumb little hypocrite bimbo--you butted in and tried to stop the whole thing from happening. What would have happened if she hadn't gone through, huh? Which reminds me--you owe me some explanations here. What's the idea of--" "Stow it," she said with a glower. "It's too late now. She's gone on through." "Too late for what?" "Too late to put a stop to this chain of events." "Why should we? I mean if it's already going on--" Number Three said bitterly, "Leda has played me--I mean us--for a fool, for a couple of fools. She told you she was going to set you up for life over there"--she indicated the Gate--"didn't she?" "Yes," I admitted. "Well, that's a lot of crap. All she means to do is to get us so incredibly tangled up in this Time Gate thing that we'll never get straightened out again." I felt the same sense of dread as when when my earlier self had tried to touch the Gate. It could be true. Certainly, there had not been much sense to what had happened so far. After all, why should Leda want my help, want it so badly as to offer a split right down the middle, what was so obviously a great deal? "How do you know?" I demanded. "I don't want to go into it," the other answered wearily. "Just take my word for it, okay?" "Why should I?" My companion fixed me with a look of complete exasperation. "If you can't take my word, Trish, whose word can you take?" Rather than mollifying me, the inescapable logic of the question made me annoyed. I resented this interloper, this third carbon-copy of myself; to be asked to follow her lead blindly irked me to no end. "I'm from Missouri," I said bitterly. "I'll see for myself." I moved toward the Gate. "Where are you going?" "Through! I'm going to hunt down Leda and have a little talk her her." With my fists, if I have to, I thought. "Don't!" the other said. "Maybe we can break this chain right now." I gave her a defiant look. "Go ahead," she surrendered. "Have it your way. I wash my hands of the whole thing." I paused as I was about to step through the Gate. "My funeral, huh? Just remember something, Little Miss Pontius Pilot, if it's my funeral, then it's your funeral too." The other woman looked blank, then an expression of apprehension raced across her face. That was the last I saw of her as I stepped through the Gate.