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.

The Hall of the Gate was empty of other occupants. I looked around for my hat, but did not see it anywhere it. Stepping around back of the raised platform, seeking the exit I remembered was there, I nearly bumped into Leda.

"Ah, there you are!" the older woman greeted. "Perfect! Just perfect, my dear! Now there is just one more thing to take care of, and we'll be all squared away. I must say, I am pleased with you, Trish, very pleased indeed."

I faced her truculently. "You are, huh? It's too bad I can't say the same about you, Leda. I'm not a bit pleased with you! How could you send me back into that . . . that daisy chain without warning me first? I could just kill you!"

"Easy," the older woman said, "don't get excited. Tell me the truth now--if I had told you that you were going back to meet yourself face to face, would you have believed me?"

I admitted that I would not.

"Well, then," Leda continued with a shrug, "there was no point in my telling you then, was there? Is it not better to be in ignorance than to believe falsely?"

I grumped, "I suppose so, but--"

"Better for you to learn the truth with your own eyes. Otherwise--"

"Wait a minute!" I cut in. "You're getting me all tangled up here. Why did you send me back at all?"

"That should be obvious, dear," Leda said patiently. "I did it in order that you might come through the Gate in the first place."

"But I had already come through the Gate."

Leda shook her head. "Think about it a moment. When you got back into your own time you found your earlier self there, didn't you?"

"Well, yes."

"She--your earlier self--had not yet been through the Gate yet, had she?"

"Well, no. I--"

"How could you have been through the Gate, unless you persuaded her to go through first?"

My head was beginning to spin. I was beginning to wonder who had done what to whom. It all kept coming back to effect preceding cause, direction without choice. "You're telling me that I did something because I was predestined to do it?"

"Well, you did, didn't you? You were there."

"No, I didn't--no . . . well, maybe I did, but it didn't feel like it."

"Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience."

"Yes . . . but . . ." I took a deep breath and got control of myself. Then I reached back into my academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion I had been struggling to express. "It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You'd have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That's silly."

"Well, didn't you?"

I was too brain-bound to answer. Leda continued with, "Don't let it trouble you too much, Trish. Causation as you have been accustomed to it is valid enough in its own frame of reference, but it is simply a special case under the general rule. Like quantum effects, causation is often counter-intuitive. Causation in a plenum need not be and is not limited by a person's perception of duration."

I wanted to bury my head in a bucket of sand. It sounded nice, but there was something evasive about it. "I'd like to hear what the mathematicians have to say about that," I said. "Someone like Stephen Hawking."

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," Leda protested, "Mathematicians once proved that airplanes--and bumblebees--couldn't fly." She turned and started out the door. "Now come on. There's work to be done."

I hurried after her. "Dammit, you still haven't answered my questions. And what happened to the other two?"

"The other two what?"

"The other two of me!" I cried. "Where are they? How am I ever going to get unsnarled?"

"You aren't snarled now. You feel like more than one person, do you?"

"No, but--"

"Then don't worry about it."

"I've got to worry about it! What happened to Trish Number One?"

"You don't remember? It wasn't all that long ago, dear." Leda stopped halfway down the passageway and dilated a door. "Take a look inside," she directed.

I did so. I found myself looking into a small, windowless, unfurnished room, a room that I certainly recognized. Sitting alone in the middle of the room, looking somehow lost and forlorn, were the carafe and the glass from which I had drank. "Oh, for God's sakes," I muttered.

"When you first came through the Gate," said Leda at my elbow, "I brought you in here, attended to your wounds, and gave you a drink. The drink contained a soporific which caused you to sleep about thirty-six hours, sleep that you badly needed. When you woke up, I gave you breakfast and explained to you what needed to be done."

My head started to ache again. "Don't do that," I pleaded. "Don't refer to her as if she were me. This isme, standing here, now."

"Whatever you wish," said Leda. "That is the woman you were. You remember the things that are about to happen to her, don't you?"

"Of course I do, but it makes me dizzy. Close the door, please."

"Fine," Leda said, and constricted the door. "We've got to hurry, anyhow. Once a sequence like this is established there is no time to waste. Come on." She led the way back to the Hall of the Gate.

"I want you to return to the twentieth century and obtain certain things for us, things that can't be obtained on this side but which will be very useful to us in, ah, developing--yes, that is the word--developing this timeframe."

"What sort of things?"

"Quite a number of items. I've prepared a list for you--certain reference books, certain items of commerce. Excuse me, please. I must adjust the controls of the Gate." She mounted the raised platform from the rear. I followed her and found that the structure was boxlike, open at the top, and had a raised metal floor. The Gate could be seen by looking over the high sides.

The controls were unique.

Four colored globes the size of grapefruits were mounted upon crystalline rods arranged with respect to one another as the four major axis of a tetrahedron. The three globes which bounded the base of the tetrahedron were red, green, and blue; the fourth at the apex was white.

"Three spatial controls, one time control," explained Leda. "It's very simple. Using this, our present timeframe as zero-reference, displacing the controls away from the center moves the other end of the Gate forward or back, right or left, up or down, farther or closer to the here-and-now--they are all controlled by moving the proper sphere in or out on its rod."

I studied the system. "Yes," I said, "but how do you tell where the other end of the Gate is? Or when? I don't see any graduations or readouts."

"You don't need them. You can see where you are. Look." She touched a point under the control framework on the side toward the Gate. A panel rolled back and I saw there was a small image of the Gate itself. I found that I could see through the image.

I was gazing into my own room, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. I could make out two figures, but the scale was too small for me to see clearly what they were doing, nor could I tell which editions of myself were there--if they were in truth myself. I found it quite upsetting. "Shut it off," I said.

Leda did so and said, "I must not forget to give you your list." She fumbled in her sleeve and produced a slip of paper which she handed over. "Here--take it."

I accepted it mechanically and stuffed it into my pocket. "Look," I began, "everywhere I go I keep running into myself. I don't like it at all. It's disconcerting. I feel like a whole batch of guinea pigs in a cage. I don't understand what this is all about and now you want me to rush off through the Gate again with a bunch of half-baked excuses for reasons. Tell me what it's all about--Please!"

Leda showed temper in her face for the first time. "I've told you all that you are capable of understanding at the present time. This is a period in history entirely beyond your comprehension. It would take weeks before you could even begin to understand it. In the meantime, I'm offering you half a world in return for a few hours co-operation and you stand there arguing about it. Time is growing short, Trish. Now--where shall we set you down?" She reached for the controls.

"I'm not going anywhere!" I rapped out. I was getting the glimmering of an idea. "Who are you, anyhow?"

"Me? I'm Leda."

"That's not what I mean and you know it! How did you learn English?"

She did not answer. Her face became expressionless.

"Come on," I persisted. "You didn't learn it here. These people have less in common with us then aborigines do. You're from the twentieth century, aren't you? The twenty-first, I mean."

Leda smiled sourly. "You're just figuring that out?"

I scowled. "I may not be exceedingly bright, but I'm not as stupid as you think I am. Tell me the rest of the story."

Leda shook her head. "It's immaterial. Besides, we're wasting time."

I laughed. "You've tried that excuse once too often. How can we waste time when we have that?" I pointed to the tetrahedron and to the Gate beyond it. "Unless you lied to me, we can use any slice of time we want to, at any time.You know what I think? I think you want me out of here to get me out of the picture. Either that, or there's something horribly dangerous about the job you want me to do. Either way, I know how to settle it--you're going with me!"

"You don't know what you're saying," Leda answered slowly. "That's impossible. I've got to stay here and manage the controls."

"That's just what you aren't going to do." I advanced on her. "You could send me through and lose me anywhere in time. Ancient Rome for all I know. Or the middle of the fourteenth century. I prefer to keep you in sight."

"I'm sorry," answered Leda. "You'll just have to trust me." She bent over the controls again.

"I'm warning you," I growled. "I've had about as much of you as I can take. See this?" I pointed to my lumpy, swollen face. "These came from my own fists and you don't want me turning them on you."