The Victim

For more years than I am beginning to want to remember I have been a reader and aspiring writer of science fiction. I have travelled to the farthest reaches of the farthest galaxy while reading and to even greater distances in my own mind-grown spacecraft. I have been most fascinated though, by the time travel, other dimension story, the general concept summed up in the title of Groff Conklin’s 1960's collection, Elsewhere and Elsewhen. Maybe it’s because spacecraft are now real, while these other concepts are still in the realm of speculation. Or so I thought until the day my wife disappeared.

We came home from church one Sunday in 1970 and all dispersed to our own corners of our roomy house. As usual I was in my shop in the basement with music playing so I would not hear the request to come up and help with lunch. A heavy glass beer mug was full of my dark, strong, home-made beer. I was ready for a relaxing afternoon tinkering with a Hieronymus machine I had read about in Analog Science Fiction a couple of years back.

After a while the beer disappeared and hunger appeared in its place. I realized that a long time had passed and there was no sign of lunch. It was quiet upstairs. Too quiet.

I went up the back stairs calling my wife’s name as I came in through the back porch. No answer. The kitchen was empty. I called louder down the hallway. Nothing.

I left the beer mug on the counter and walked swiftly through the bedroom and out the front door, a slight feeling of panic beginning to rise from the pit of my stomach. Both of the kids were playing on the front lawn.

"Where’s you mother?" I asked our eight-year-old daughter.

"What do you mean?" puzzled. My three-year old son just looked up and smiled.

"She’s not in the house, I just came from there." I explained, checking my anger: it wasn’t her fault that I was a nut.

I went back inside, tried to collect myself and came up with two - no, three - alternatives. First, she was hiding, which was stupid: my wife simply didn’t do that sort of thing. I was the one who would stand patiently behind an open door, my size 13 feet spread flat against the molding to reduce my profile, just to be able to jump out and say, ‘Boo!’

The second alternative was that she was hurt someplace and I missed seeing her the first time through the house. Finally there was the chance that she had fallen victim to one of the weird things that happen to people in those elsewhenish stories.

I came to my senses temporarily and began a systematic search of the whole house. I even looked in my own shop and other corners of the basement where she would never venture for fear of falling over one of my strange experiments. Out in the yard I looked behind the hedges and even checked that cramped little compartment behind the Karmann Ghia’s rear seat.

As I eliminated possibilities one and two, number three began to grab me by the scruff of the neck. She was not in the house, no one saw her leave, therefore she had left in some inexplicable fashion - what had been her fate?

Had she come to the end of her time line in this particular one of an infinity of universes? Maybe the Hieronymus machine was amplifying random bursts of eloptic radiation and had zapped her! Maybe a time traveller had dropped in and taken her along .... maybe even the future me! Did this mean that I had invented a time machine and this was my way of sending myself a message?

Then she came back.

All my theories down the tubes, I thought, joyfully, as I asked, "Where in the hell have you been?" I kissed her cheek.

"To the store," she said in a what’s-wrong-with-him-now tone.

"What store?" I demanded, re-filling my beer mug. She hated to walk anyplace.

"The one on the corner," she went about getting lunch ready. I began to slice off thick chunks of French bread for the sandwiches.

"But you never go there, and why didn’t you say something?" I was wearing this out but I am persistent.

"Maybe I felt like it. I also needed parsley," she snapped, tiring of the interrogation. Then she raised her voice, "Julie, wash your brother’s hands for lunch," and, "Don’t you want wine with the mortadella or are you going to finish that beer?" to me in a normal voice.

"Sure. But you should have told me you were going," as I started back to my shop, losing ungraciously.

"Don’t stay down there, it’s all ready."

"I’m just going to shut off the lights." I also finished the beer. Zinfandel would go better with mortadella. I also looked at the Hieronymus machine sitting innocuously on the bench and wondered if I wanted to go on building it.

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