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Daily 1000-word science-fiction shorts, sketches, and starts for future expansion--or not. |
| "The name I used in those days was Westerlake, Norris Westerlake, middle initial T, born June 17th, 1901 in Cleveland. That's a small city in Ohio." He stopped abruptly and looked around nervously. "Are you getting all this?" Soren's puzzlement at this strange little man was growing by the second. "Sure. Everybody knows where Cleveland is," he said. Westerlake's expression changed to shock for a moment, then he recovered to ordinary amazement. "No kidding. I never thought--" He picked up his coffee cup, seemed uncertain about what exactly to do with it, and put it down again. "Anyway, that wasn't my name and--" Soren interrupted him. "What is your name, then?" "My name?" The man snorted. "I can't tell you that! Jesus, I can't--" he cast his gaze around again and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I can't," he said firmly. "Just call me Norris, for God's sake." "Norris." "Yeah." Soren picked up his own cup and took a sip; Norris watch with more attention and interest than the ordinary little action deserved, then he mimicked it--and seemed surprised that the coffee was scalding hot. "Jesus!" he sputtered. "Why so damn hot?" Soren shrugged. "Something to do with the release of oils from the bean, I understand. Listen just who the hell are you?" "I'm an ordinary guy." Now it was Soren's turn to snort. "I me talked to you for ten minutes, Mr. Wester-whatever. There's nothing ordinary about you." "Really?" he asked, his face scrunched up like a child's might be. "Really." Norris looked disturbed for a moment--then he visibly changed: his facial expression went blank, his body seemed to relax, his gaze unfocused, his eyes moved jerkily. The effect lasted just a moment, perhaps half a second, just long enough for a quick-witted observer to notice, then he seemed to come to himself. "We have to hurry," he said. "This photograph," Soren turned it around on the tabletop between them. "It was taken at a very specific event in 1971, in October of that year. Forty-four years ago. And yet, is that not you?" he pointed, and Norris peered at it. "Where did you get this?" "Is that you?" Soren pressed. It was clear to him that the man whose image was captured 44 years prior and which appeared in this photograph--a high quality copy of a print that was itself made from an original slide--was, impossibly and yet in fact, sitting before him at Table 28 in the Mon Ami Gabi restaurant in the Paris Las Vegas Resort and Casino looking none the worse for the passage of those 44 years. He was wearing the same clothes, for crying out loud--or at least the same checkered shirt. The photo showed him only from the waist up, his lower half obscured by the roulette table against which he, along with a tight row of fellow gamblers, was pressed. "This was taken at the Sands," Norris said. "I know where it was taken. And when." "It was taken this morning." Soren had thought there was nothing the man could say that would throw him. Criminals, in Soren's experience, were surprisingly obtuse when it came to inventing plausible cover stories. Soren had no reason to believe the man was engaged in illegal activities, but he had acted peculiar in the casino that day, when Soren first noticed him. Had he not pretended to look at his watch? Had he not sat down at the slot machine before digging out a coin? And now he appeared to have taken the first step down the road of criminal confusion by claiming something that Soren knew could not be true. "This morning? How's that?" "I was on the Strip, the old Strip, the real one, you know. And there was laughing, a girl. I turned and looked through the open door and there was a girl standing there, a pretty girl. So I found myself moving in that direction, and then I was inside," he said. There was a poster, Sonny and Cher, and she was standing next to it." "Yeah?" "She moved away, toward where there were people with cameras, reporters, I think, and I slipped around t he corner of a roulette table, that table," he pointed at the photo. "There was a flash and a click, and someone said 'Thank you,' He almost yelled it." "It was the opening of a new wing of room, quite an innovation at the time." "Really? I didn't stay the night," Norris said. "For me, it was just this morning." "How is that possible?" Soren asked. "Haven't you guessed? I'm a time traveler," Norris answered. |
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