Big Tom Arden had been missing about four days.  It was hard to be exact; he lived alone, had few friends, and could have been missing several days before anyone noticed.  Just as those few friends were considering filing a missing persons report, Tom reappeared.  He refused to discuss where he had been, but he had with him a 1949 Cleveland Indians, Leaf #8 Leroy “Satchel” Paige, baseball card in mint condition.  As Tom normally paid his rent at least a week late, the valuable card raised a few eyebrows, but, at 6’3”, and 270 pounds, Tom was not a man one would lightly accuse of theft.

            Late that morning, he sold the card to Joker’s Cards and Comics, a local dealer, for $4000.00.  Top dollar would have been considerably more; Tom either didn’t know or didn’t seem to care.

            That afternoon, he went to a coin shop and bought $4000.00 worth of pre-1950 silver dollars.

Although it was not a neighborhood where sane, law-abiding citizens ventured out much after dark, a few minutes before midnight he left his apartment and started walking east.  He was wearing a small backpack.

            Two blocks down, Tom turned north a block, then back west.  The entire block had been condemned-tenements 30 years past their useful life.  He ducked under a staircase, looked both ways, and then slipped in past boards that should have secured the basement apartment door from just such trespassers.  The smell in the place was enough to gag a maggot-certainly enough to keep the homeless from nesting there.

            Holding a handkerchief over his nose, he took a tiny flashlight from a jeans pocket.  Stepping carefully, he picked his way through molded litter to the concrete passage beyond the inside door. 

He climbed the echoey stairs to the first floor, and then entered the second apartment to the left, #2A.  He opened the door to a shallow broom closet, walked through, and vanished.

            The first time he made the journey, he nearly broke his leg-it was a good three-foot drop the ground where contractors had bulldozed the ground level, and staked out the boundaries for a planned affordable housing complex.  At first, he had been confused to the point of panic.  One moment he was rummaging through an abandoned tenement, the next he was sprawled in the dirt at a place that showed every sign of becoming that very building in the near future.  The explanation, if you could call it that, took some inquiry to uncover.  The broom closet led to the year 1950. 

Tom was not a man to worry about things he clearly could not understand, like how the gateway worked.  He was not a man of science.  He knew nothing of Einstein or his theories.  His concept of a wormhole was something that happened to a piece of furniture.  There were physical laws being violated here-he neither new nor cared.

He did determine that whatever it was, it only worked for five minutes each day, starting at midnight.  The gateway kept pace with his “real” world; if it had been 24 hours since he last went back, 24 hours would have elapsed in the 1950 world as well.  Beyond that, it was a mystery he didn’t care to unravel.

It seemed obvious that there was a profit to be made, but making it proved harder than he had anticipated.  He thought about taking money back to buy stocks he knew would do well, but that involved having money.  He didn’t.

He considered taking some piece of technology back and marketing it.  That, to, required money he didn’t have, as well as long exposure to a year in which he didn’t exist.  Taking gold back to 1950 would have landed him in jail.  The baseball card was almost a bit of whimsy.

He’d asked a salesman at Joker’s, the same place that later bought his Satchel Paige, for a list of the most valuable cards of all time.  In the 1950 world, he made a few casual inquiries-there were no dealers in those days.  A grubby-faced 9-year-old produced the newly issued Satchel Paige from a back pocket, still wrapped in cellophane.  He paid the boy a silver dollar.  Both went their way knowing they had robbed the other blind.

When the newspaper opened its offices the next morning, he placed an ad offering to pay 100 silver dollars for a 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates T206 White Border #366 Honus Wagner.  He received two replies.

When the building began accepting applications for renters, he was first in line to rent #2A. 

He now owned the building, and had scheduled its demolition.  The new building would be modern, up to code, and just as affordable.  He figured he owed the neighborhood that much.  IBM and Microsoft had been good to him.

The End

Copyright 2006 David Lee Short

 All rights reserved.

Note: The story goes as follows; Wagner, a Hall of Fame second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, objected to cigarette smoking and demanded his cards be pulled from production. The last recorded auction price for a Wagner T206 was $2.8 million in a private sale in September 2007.