Time Waits for Winthrop Read Online Free PDF Page B

stomach returned to its proper place and squirmed irritatedly back into position.
    “—changed my mind. I’ll walk after all,” he said, and threw up.
    S torku, a tall, genial, yellow-haired young man, was standing in front of him when the spasms had subsided. “It’s such a simple thing, really, Mr. Mead. Just a matter of being intently placid during the jump.”
    “Easy—easy to say,” Mr. Mead gasped. What was the reason Storku always exuded such patronizing contempt toward him? “Why don’t you people—why don’t you people find another way to travel? In my time, comfort in transportation is the keystone, the very
keystone
of the industry. Any railroad, busline or airline which doesn’t see to it that their passengers enjoy maximum comfort is out of business before you can bat an eye. Either that or they have a new board of directors.”
    “I sn’t he
intriguing?
” a girl near him said to her escort. “He talks just like one of those historical romances.”
    Mr. Mead glanced at her sourly, then gulped. She was nude. For that matter, so was everyone else around him, including Mr. Storku. Who, he wondered nervously, knew what went on at these Shriek Field affairs? After all, he had only seen them before from a distance in the grandstand. And now he was right in the middle of these deliberate lunatics.
    “Surely you’re being a bit unjust,” Mr. Storku suggested. “If an Elizabethan Englishman or a man from the Classic Greek period were to go for a ride in one of your horseless carriages or iron horses—to use your vernacular—he would exhibit much more discomfort than you have. It’s purely a matter of adjustment to the unfamiliar. Some adjust, like your contemporary Winthrop; some don’t, like yourself.”
    “Speaking of Winthrop—” Mr. Mead began hurriedly, glad of the opening.
    “Everybody here?” an athletic young man burst in as he bounded up. “I’m your leader for this shriek. On your feet, everybody, come on, let’s get those kinks out of our muscles. We’re going to have a real fine shriek—all it takes is teamwork!”
    “Take your clothes off,” the government man told Mr. Mead. “You can’t run a shriek dressed. Especially dressed like that.”
    Mr. Mead shrank back. “I just came here to talk to you. I’ll watch.”
    A rich, roaring laugh from Storku. “You can’t watch from the middle of Shriek Field! And besides, the moment you joined us, you were automatically registered for the shriek. If you withdraw now, you’ll throw everything off.”
    “I will?”
    “Of course. A different quantity of stimuli has to be applied to any different quantity of people, if you want to develop a specific shriek-intensity in each one of them. Take your clothes off, man, and get into the thing. It will tone up your psyche magnificently.”
    M r. Mead thought it over, then began to undress. He was embarrassed, miserable and more than a little frightened at the prospect, but he had an urgent job of public relations to do on the yellow-haired young man.
    In his time, he had gurgled pleasurably over ropelike cigars given him by politicians, gotten drunk in ghastly little bars with important newspapermen, and suffered the slings and the arrows of outrageous television quiz shows—all in the interests of Sweetbottom Septic Tanks, Inc. The motto of the Public Relations Man was strictly
When in Rome…
    And obviously the crowd he had made this trip with from 1958 was composed of bunglers. They’d never get themselves and him back to their own time, back to a world where there was a supply-and-demand system that made sense. A world where an important business executive was treated like
somebody
, where the walls didn’t ripple around you, the furniture didn’t adjust constantly under you, where the very clothes on a person’s back didn’t change from moment to moment as if being revolved in a kaleidoscope.
    No, it was up to him to get everybody back to that world and his only channel