The Man Who Folded Himself Read online

  I’ve suspected it for a long time.

  A thousand dollars a week “spending money” (—like what else are you going to do with it?—) gives you a lot of freedom to do whatever you want. Within limits, of course—but those limits are wide enough to be not very restricting. Increase them to two thousand dollars a week and you don’t feel them at all. The difference isn’t that much. Not really.

  Okay, so I bought some new clothes and compact discs and a couple of other fancy toys I’d had my eye on—but I’d already gotten used to having as much money as I’d needed (or wanted), so having that much more in my pocket didn’t make that much more difference.

  I just had to start wearing bigger pockets, that’s all.

  Well—

  I like to travel too. Usually, about once or twice a month I’d fly up to San Francisco for the weekend, or something like that. Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, Newport, San Diego. Follow the sun, that’s me.

  Since Uncle Jim increased my allowance, I’ve been to Acapulco, New York, and the Grand Bahamas. And I’m thinking about Europe. But it’s not all that fun to travel alone—and nobody I know can afford to come along with me.

  So I’m staying home almost as much as before.

  I could buy things if I wanted—but I’ve never cared much about owning things. They need to be dusted. Besides, I have what I need.

  Hell, I have what I want—and that’s a lot more than what I need. I have everything I want now.

  Big deal.

  I think it’s a bore.

  So that’s what Uncle Jim wanted to teach me. Money isn’t everything. In fact, it isn’t anything. It’s just paper and metal that we trade for other things.

  I knew that already, but it’s one thing to know it theoretically; it’s another thing to know it from experience.

  Okay. So, if money isn’t anything, what is?

  I didn’t exactly drop out of the university—I just sort of faded away.

  It was a bore.

  I found I had less and less to say to my classmates. I call them my classmates because I’m not sure they were ever my friends. We weren’t talking on the same levels.

  Typical conversation: “—can I borrow twenty bucks, she is so hot, gotta find a job, everybody hates that instructor, you wanna get high, I couldn’t get my car running, my ten o’clock class is a bitch, you wanna hang, lend me ten willya, what’re you gonna do this weekend—”

  They couldn’t sympathize with my problems either. “Problems? With two thousand dollars a week, who’s got problems?”

  Me.

  I think.

  I know something is wrong—I’m not happy. I wish I knew why.

  I wish the other shoe would drop. Okay, Uncle Jim. I got it about the money. Where’s the rest of the lesson?

  I think I will tell this exactly as it happened and try to do it without crying. If I can.

  Uncle Jim is dead.

  I got the phone call at eleven this morning. It was one of the lawyers from his company, Biggs or Briggs or something like that. He said, “Daniel Eakins?”

  I said, “Yes?”

  He said, “This is Jonathan Biggs-or-Briggs-or-something-like-that and I have some bad news for you about your uncle.”

  “My—uncle—” I must have wavered. Everything seemed made of ice.

  The man was trying to be gentle. And not doing a very good job of it. He said, “He was found this morning by his maid—”

  “He’s . . . dead?”

  “I’m sorry. Yes.”

  Dead? Uncle Jim?

  “How—? I mean—”

  “He just didn’t wake up. He was a very old man.”

  Old?

  No. It couldn’t be. I wouldn’t accept it. Uncle Jim was immortal.

  “We thought that you, as next of kin, would like to supervise the funeral arrangements—”

  Funeral arrangements?

  “—on the other hand, we realize your distress at a time like this, so we’ve taken the liberty of—”

  Dead? Uncle Jim?

  The telephone was still making noises. I hung it up.

  The funeral was a horror. Some idiot had decided on an opencasket ceremony, “so the deceased’s family and friends might see him one more time.”

  Family and friends. Meaning me. And the lawyers.

  No one else.

  I was surprised at that. And a little disappointed. I’d thought Uncle Jim was well known and popular. But there was nobody there—apparently I was the only one who cared.

  Uncle Jim looked like hell. They had rouged his cheeks in a sickly effort to make him look like he was only asleep. It didn’t work; it didn’t disguise the fact that he was a shriveled and tired old hulk. I must have stared in horror. If he had seemed shrunken the last time I had seen him, today he looked absolutely emaciated. Used up.

  No. Uncle Jim wasn’t in that casket. That was just a piece of dead meat. Whatever it was that had made it Uncle Jim, that was gone—this empty old husk was nothing.

  I bawled like a baby anyway.

  The lawyers drove me home. I was moving like a zombie.

  Everything seemed so damnably the same—it had all happened too fast, I hadn’t had time to realize what it might mean, and now here was some dark-suited stranger sitting in my living room and trying to tell me that things were going to be different.

  Different—? Without Uncle Jim, how could they be the same?

  Biggs-or-Briggs-or-something-like-that shuffled some papers and managed to look both embarrassed and sorrowful.

  I said, “I think I have some idea. I spoke with Uncle Jim a few weeks ago.”

  “Ah, good,” he said. “Then we can settle this a lot easier.” He hesitated. “Dan—Daniel, your uncle died indigent.” I must have looked puzzled. He added, “That means poor.”

  “What?” I blurted. “Now, wait a minute—that’s not what he told me—”

  “Eh? What did he tell you?”

  I thought back. No, the lawyer was right. Uncle Jim hadn’t said a word about his own money. Carefully, I explained, “Uncle Jim said that I had a bit of money . . . and he was supposed to administer it. So naturally, I assumed that he had some of his own—or that he was taking a fee—”

  Biggs-or-Briggs shook his head. “Your uncle was taking a fee,” he said, “but it was only a token. You haven’t got that much yourself.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “A little less than six thousand.”

  “Huh?”

  “Actually, it’s about five thousand nine hundred and something. I don’t remember the exact amount.” He shuffled papers in his briefcase.

  I stared at him. “What happened to the hundred and forty-three million?”

  He blinked. “I beg your pardon—?”

  I felt like a fool, but repeated. “A hundred and forty-three million dollars. Uncle Jim said that I had a hundred and forty-three million dollars. What happened to that?”

  “A hundred and forty-three mill—” He pushed his glasses back onto his nose. “Uh, Mr. Eakins, you have six thousand dollars. That’s all. I don’t know where you got the idea that you had anything like—”

  I explained patiently, “My Uncle Jim sat there, right where you’re sitting now, and told me that I was worth one hundred and forty-three million dollars and that I could have it any time I wanted.” I fixed him with what I hoped was my fiercest look. “Now, where is it?”

  It didn’t faze him at all. Instead he put on his I’d-better-humorhim expression. “Now, Daniel—Dan, I think you can understand that when a person gets old, his mind starts to get a little—well, funny. Your Uncle Jim may have told you that you were rich—he may even have believed it himself, but—”

  “My Uncle Jim was not senile,” I said. My voice was cold. “He may have been sick, but when I saw him, his mind was as clear as—as mine.”

  Biggs-or-Briggs looked like he wanted to reply to that, but didn’t. Probably he was reminding himself that we’d just come from a fune
ral and I couldn’t be expected to be entirely rational. “Well,” he said. “The fact remains that all you have in the accounts that we’re administering is six thousand dollars. To tell the truth, we were a little concerned with the way you’ve been spending these past few weeks—but your explanation clears that up. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding—”

  “Yes, there has. I want to see your books. When my parents died, their money was put in trust for me. It couldn’t all be gone by now.”

  “Mr. Eakins—” he said. I could see that he was forcing himself to be gentle. “I don’t know anything about your parents. It was your Uncle Jim who set up your trust fund, twenty-one years ago. He hasn’t added to it since; that hasn’t been necessary. His intention was to provide you with enough money to see you through college.” He cleared his throat apologetically. “We almost made it. If he hadn’t instructed us to increase your allowance two months ago, we probably could have made it stretch—”

  I was feeling a little ill. This lawyer was making too much sense. When I thought of the spending I’d been doing—ouch! I didn’t want to think about it.

  Of course, I hadn’t spent it all—I hadn’t been trying. I started going over in my mind how much I might have left in cash and in my checking account. Not that much, after all. Maybe a few hundred.

  And six thousand left in trust. No hundred and forty-three million—

  But Uncle Jim had said—

  I stopped and thought about it. If I’d really been worth a hundred and forty-three million dollars, would I have grown up the way I did? Brought up by a trained governess in Uncle Jim’s comfortable—but not very big—San Fernando Valley home, sent to public schools and the State University? Uh-uh. Not likely.

  If I’d been worth that big a pile, I’d have been fawned over, drooled over, and protected every day of my life. I would have had nurses and private tutors and valets and chauffeurs. I would have had butlers for my butlers. I would have had my own pony, my own yacht, my own set of full-size trains. I would have had my pick of any college in the country. In the world. I would have been spoiled rotten.

  I looked around my nine-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment. There was no evidence here that I was spoiled rotten.

  Well . . . not to the tune of a hundred and forty-three million dollars.

  You can get spoiled on a thousand a week, but that’s a far cry from butlers for your butlers.

  Ouch. And ouch again.

  I’d thought I’d never have to worry about money in my life. Now I was wondering if I would make it to the end of the year.

  “—of course,” Biggs-or-Briggs was mumbling, “if you still feel you want to check our books, by all means—we don’t want there to be any misunderstandings or hard feelings—”

  “Yeah . . . ,” I waved it off. “I’ll call you. There’s no hurry. I believe you, I guess.” Maybe Uncle Jim hadn’t been thinking straight that day. The more I thought about it, the odder his behavior seemed.

  Oh, Uncle Jim! How could you have become so addled? A hundred and forty-three million!

  I wasn’t sure whom I felt sorriest for, him or me.

  The lawyer was still talking. “—Now, of course, you’re not responsible for any of his financial liabilities, and they aren’t that much anyway. The company will probably cover them—”

  “Wasn’t there any insurance?” I blurted suddenly.

  “Eh? No, I’m sorry. Your uncle didn’t believe in it. We tried to talk to him about it many times, but he never paid any attention.”

  I shrugged and let him go on. That was just like my Uncle Jim. Even he believed he was immortal.

  “You’re entitled to his personal effects and—”

  “No, I don’t want them.”

  “—there is one item he specifically requested you to have.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a package. Nobody’s to open it but you.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  “It’s in the trunk of my car. If you’ll just sign this receipt—”

  I waited until after what’s-his-name had left. Whatever it was in the box, Uncle Jim had intended it for me alone. I hefted it carefully. Perhaps this was the hundred forty-three million—

  I wondered—could you put that much money into a box this small?

  Maybe it was in million-dollar bills, one hundred and forty-three of them. (I don’t know—do they even print million-dollar bills?)

  No, that couldn’t be. Could you imagine trying to cash one? I shuddered. Uh-uh, Uncle Jim wouldn’t do that to me. . . . Well, let’s see, maybe it was in ten-thousand-dollar bills. (That would be fourteen thousand, three hundred of them.) No, the box was too light—

  If it was my fortune, it would have to be in some other form than banknotes. Rare postage stamps? Precious gems? Maybe—but I couldn’t imagine a hundred and forty-three million dollars worth of them, at least not in this box. It was too small.

  There was only one way to find out. I ripped away the heavy brown wrapping paper and fumbled off the top.

  It was a belt.

  A black leather belt. With a stainless-steel plate for a buckle. A belt.

  I almost didn’t feel like taking it out of the box. I felt like a kid at Santa Claus’s funeral.

  This was Uncle Jim’s legacy?

  I took it out. It wasn’t a bad-looking belt—in fact, it was quite handsome. I wondered what I could wear it with—almost anything actually; it was just a simple black belt. It had a peculiar feel to it though; the leather flexed like an eel, as if it were alive and had an electric backbone running through it. The buckle too; it seemed heavier than it looked, and—well, have you ever tried to move the axis of a gyroscope? The torque resists your pressure. The belt buckle felt like that.

  I looped it around my waist to see what it would look like. Not bad, but I had belts I liked better. I started to put it back in the box when it popped open in my hand. The buckle did.

  I looked at the buckle more closely. What had looked like a single plate of stainless steel was actually two pieces hinged together at the bottom, so that when you were wearing the belt you could open it up and read the display on the inside of the front. It was a luminous panel covered with numbers.

  Great. Just what I needed. A digital belt buckle. Clock, calculator, and portable stereo all in one. And wasn’t that just like Uncle Jim. He loved these kinds of toys.

  But the only thing that looked like a trademark said TIMEBELT. Everything else was display. Two of the rows of numbers kept flickering, changing to keep track of the tenths of seconds, the seconds, and the minutes. Also indicated were the hours, the day, the month, the year—

  Not bad, but I already had a watch, and that was good enough. Besides, this seemed such a silly idea, putting a clock in a belt buckle. You’d feel embarrassed every time you opened it.

  Fine. I had the world’s only belt buckle that told the time. I started to close it up again—

  Wait a minute—not so fast. There were too many numbers on that dial.

  There were four rows of numbers, and a row of lights and some lettering. The whole thing looked like this:

  Odd. What were all those numbers for?

  The date on the bottom, for instance: March 16, 2005—what was so special about that? What had happened at 5: 30 on March 16?

  I frowned. There was something—

  I went looking for my calendar. Yes, there it was.

  March 16: Uncle Jim coming at 5: 30.

  The date on the bottom was the last time I had seen Uncle Jim. March 16. He had knocked on the door at precisely 5: 30.

  Uncle Jim was always punctual when he made appointments. On the phone he had said he would be at my place at 5: 30—sure enough, he was. But why, two months later, was that date so important as to still be on his calendar belt? It didn’t make sense.

  And there was something else I hadn’t noticed. The other part of the buckle—the side facing the clock—was divided into buttons. There were four rows of t
hem, all square and flush with each other. The top row was cut into two; the second row, six; the third row, three; and the bottom row, six again.

  My curiosity was piqued. Now, what were all these for?

  I touched one of the top two. The letter B on the lower right side of the panel began to glow. I touched it again and the letter F above it winked on instead. All right—but what did they mean?

  I put the belt around my waist and fastened it. Actually, it fastened itself; the back of the clasp leaped against the leather part and held. I mean, held. I tugged at it, but it didn’t slip. Yet I could pop it off as easily as separating two magnets. Quite a gimmick that.

  The buckle was still open; I could read the numbers on it easily. Almost automatically my hand moved to the buttons. Yes, that was right—the buttons were a keyboard against my waist, the panel was the readout; the whole thing was a little computer.

  But what in hell was I computing?

  Idly I touched some of the buttons. The panel blinked. One of the dates changed. I pressed another button and the center row of lights flickered. When I pressed the first button again, a different part of the date changed. I didn’t understand it, and there was nothing in the box except some tissue paper.

  Maybe there was something on the belt itself. I took it off.

  On the back of the clasp, it said:

  TIMEBELT Temporal Transport Device

  Temporal Transport Device—? Hah! They had to be kidding. A time machine? In a belt? Ridiculous.

  And then I found the instructions.

  The instructions were on the back of the clasp—when I touched it lightly, the words TIMEBELT, TEMPORAL TRANSPORT DEVICE winked out and the first “page” of directions appeared in their place. Every time I tapped it after that, a new page appeared. They were written in a kind of linguistic shorthand, but they were complete. The table of contents ran on for several pages itself:

  OPERATION OF THE TIMEBELT