Not only the furnishings but the layout were more like those of a house than a railroad coach. In the rear, where the three had climbed aboard the car, was a kitchen-utility room, complete with cookstove, ice-box, woodpile and pantry. A narrow door standing open on a small closet revealed inside a primitive flush toilet, with overhead water tank. There was a scuttle of coal beside the cookstove, in whose iron belly a small fire was burning.
From this room Sam conducted his guests through a narrow passage leading forward along the left side of the car. At its front end the passage opened into a single large parlor, luxuriously furnished, with two softly upholstered sofas, matching chairs, and a few tables. Kerosene lamps secured near the corners of the ceiling provided lighting, and elegant curtains had been drawn on all the windows, making this a private world.
Colleen paused for just a moment, as if the place were somehow not what she had been expecting, but she was determined not to show it. Then she carried on. "Sam, can you fix us something to eat? I saw a pantry back there."
"Yas'm. I got a fire goin'. Supper comin' right up.
Jerry and Colleen sat on soft furniture in the parlor of the millionaires' train, looking at each other.
"Lord," she said with feeling, "some folks know how to live. Don't they, though?" Continuing a running commentary, she jumped up to investigate an unopened door, that must lead to the central room or rooms, bypassed by the narrow hallway.
"… I just hope that one day I—" She opened the door and fell silent. Jerry looked over her shoulder. Here was another cold stove, bolted down and vented through the roof like the others. The room also contained a wide, curtained four-poster bed—as well as a chamber pot, barely visible underneath, a washstand, another sofa, and a small table and chair. Some railway car, Jerry thought.
Somewhere outside the curtained windows, one of the switch engines was slowly rumbling its way closer; men's voices were calling just outside the private car. Presently there came the jolt and jar of coupling. Jerry had ridden twentieth-century trains a couple of times, but those had been electric powered commuter specials, plying smoothly on short trips between Chicago and the suburbs. This, he expected, was going to be another new experience.
Colleen, still struggling not to be overly impressed, stood in the bedroom doorway. "This is very fancy indeed."
"Just so's it's fast."
"I expect it'll be that too."
With another jolt, the string of cars that now included theirs got slowly into motion.
Colleen moved to one of the parlor windows and parted a fringed curtain slightly to peer out. "We're coming almost to the station… there's the train we're joining… they're putting us right behind the tender. That's good, most of the smoke will blow past us." There now began a slow deliberate lurching forward and back, a grinding and banging, as more cars were coupled and uncoupled.
"This is the sixth of April," said Jerry, hanging on to the heavy parlor table for support during this lengthy procedure. "I must be in Washington before the fourteenth."
She looked at him. "I'm sure we will be, barring a train wreck. Or something worse. But what happens on the fourteenth?" When he did not answer she looked at him and added: "All right, I shouldn't ask."
Presently Sam returned, bearing waiter-style on one raised hand a tray of covered dishes, linen napkins, fine china, and crystal glasses. His two clients had seated themselves at the parlor table and were just beginning to enjoy their dinner when the train got under way. Sam had provided hot soup, fried oysters, fresh bread and cheese, red wine and hot coffee.
"Thank you for providing such elegant transportation, Mrs. James," Jerry toasted his companion with a gesture of his wineglass. During recent minutes he had noticed that she was indeed wearing a plain gold ring on the third finger of her left hand; he wondered if it was the real thing, or part of her costume for this assignment. But that was none of his business.
"It's my job," she answered modestly, having glanced around to make sure that Sam was out of sight before she spoke. With the steady volume of noise that the cars made in motion, anyone who tried eavesdropping from around a corner was going to be out of luck.
"So," said Jerry pleasantly. "I think that safe-deposit box was a good idea."
"Yes indeed," his companion agreed calmly.
Jerry hesitated, considering. He wanted to probe for more information, about Stanton, and in particular about the mysterious Lafe Baker, who was evidently hoping to arrange Jim Lockwood's death. And about the testimony Jim Lockwood would be expected to provide, if and when he reached Washington alive. Yet he was afraid to ask questions, fearing to give himself away.
"How's Stanton?" he asked at last.
"Him? How is he ever? Sickly little muck of a man with his gold-rimmed glasses and his great gray beard. Bullies and blusters those folk who are afraid to stand up to him. But he gets his job done, and two or three other men's work beside, I'll be thinkin'. When he finds corruption hell not put up with it, in Baker or anyone else."
"And where is Baker now?"
"Ha, wish I knew. But we're here, locked in on a moving train, and it's not about to keep me awake tonight worryin' about it." Colleen looked again toward the corner of the passageway where Sam had vanished. "I wonder if our friend would bring us a tot of something to keep out the chill." She looked at Jerry with sudden suspicion. "You're not a drinkin' man, now are you? I mean heavy?"
"No. Not so it becomes a problem. Almost never. I remember one occasion when wine got me into trouble—but right now I could use a tot of something too."
Swaying to his feet with the motion of the train. Jerry made his way halfway across the parlor to an elegant little cupboard he had noticed earlier. The doors of the cupboard were unlocked, and when they were opened they revealed not only the bottles he had been hoping for, but a good selection of fine glassware as well. With a little gesture Jerry pulled out one bottle labeled brandy. There was no ice, of course, but what the hell, sometimes you had to rough it.
When he and his charming companion—really, she wasn't at all bad looking—had toasted each other, he remarked: "I see there's a sofa in the bedroom. Perhaps I'd better sleep in there. It might look a little strange to Sam if he found me out here on one of these." And with his free hand Jerry patted the cushions beside him.
"I think perhaps you're right. The sofa in the bedroom it should be for you." The emphasis upon the second word in the last sentence was not all that heavy, but it was definitely there. "And now, if you don't mind, Mr. James, I'm very tired." Colleen looked uncertainly for a moment at her empty brandy glass, then smiled briefly and put it down—Sam would take care of it—and swayed to her feet against the motion of the train.
A few minutes later, going back to the kitchen-utility room to take his turn with the water closet, Jerry observed Sam, who was bedded down wrapped in a blanket on the floor beside the cookstove. The supper dishes had already been washed and stacked in a rack to dry. To all appearances their attendant was dead to the world.
Jerry paused for a moment, studying the sleeping man. A slave? No, surely not, here in the north. But had Sam perhaps been a slave at some point in his life, his living human body bought and sold? Almost certainly. The thought gave Jerry an eerie feeling.
Coming forward in the car again a few minutes later, Jerry once more passed the sleeping Sam, who did not appear to have moved a muscle. Moments later he entered the parlor and came to a dead stop.
Here in the parlor only one of the high-hung kerosene lanterns was still burning, the light somehow turned down to dim nightlight intensity. The door leading to the bedroom was closed. Seated in an armchair directly beneath the lantern, Pilgrim was waiting, his strong, compact body swaying lightly with the motion of the train. He frowned at Jerry but at first said nothing, as if he were waiting to hear what Jerry had to say.
Recovering from his initial surprise, Jerry at last moved forward again, to lean with both fists on the parlor table.
"Well?" he
demanded. "Is the joke over? Had enough fun?"
The dark man in the chair sat with folded arms, shaking his head slowly. His face remained saturnine. "Would that it were all a joke, my friend. Would that it were."
"I think you better tell me just what the hell is going on."
"I shall do my best." Pilgrim drew a deep breath and expelled it. Not far ahead, another train's engine whistled sharply. "You have been drafted to carry out a rescue operation. At the moment it is not going well."
The train swayed, rounding a curve, and the flame in the dim lantern swayed lightly with it. "Whatever it is you drafted me for, since you're here now, I suggest you take over the operational details yourself, and send me home."
"I should be delighted to take over, as you put it, and myself do everything that needs to be done. In fact nothing would please me more. But that is, I regret, not possible."
"Really."
"Yes."
"Let me see if I can begin to understand this. Your message on the talking watch indicated that the object of the rescue operation is Abraham Lincoln. And that if he can be saved from assassination, then there's some chance of my resuming a normal life."
"That is roughly correct."
"Good. Meanwhile, your aide, little Jan, spent most of an evening back in Springfield feeding me drugs and telling me how important Lincoln was to history, how different everything would be if he hadn't been shot. Which means that if I save him, I'll be resuming my life in a different twentieth century. Or are you telling me there would then be two different futures?"
Pilgrim was shaking his head with a slow emphasis. "Understand this from the start. There is only one future. There is only one world.'
"Then how can we expect to save Lincoln, and not change—"
"Trust me. It can be done."
"Trust you!"
"Jeremiah, my time for answering questions is severely limited; I advise you to seek information that will be of practical benefit. As for my taking over, as you put it, I repeat that is impossible. A tangle of potential paradoxes prevent it. I can help you, advise you—up to a point—but that is all. If it were possible for me to do the job you have been assigned, I should not have gone to all the trouble of finding and recruiting you."
"You're saying I'd better trust you because you're not going to give me any choice."
"At this point I cannot. Not if you want to return home."
Jerry fumed in silence for a moment. Then he demanded: "Who's this Lafe Baker that Colleen Monahan is telling me about? Why does he want to kill Lockwood, and why did you set me up here as someone who's likely to be killed?"
"Colonel Lafayette C. Baker is head of the War Department's Secret Service. He is becoming, even in this corrupt and brutal era, something of a legend in the realms of corruption and brutality. Now that the war is effectively over, his employer, Secretary Edwin McMasters Stanton, is ready to be rid of him.
"As for why you now bear the identity of James Lockwood, you must realize that we were severely limited in our choices of a persona in which to clothe you. Lockwood himself is dead now, as you have probably suspected. You do not look very much like him, and Stanton of course will know on sight that you are a fraud. So you must avoid meeting Stanton. '
"Thanks. Thanks a lot. He'll be waiting for me at the station in Washington, I suppose."
"That is possible."
"Wonderful. Now what is all this crap about my having a three-second window of opportunity in which to act?"
"I regret," said Pilgrim, "it is all too regrettably true that—"
The train swayed again, the lamp-flame swaying and dimming too. Jerry leaned backward from the table, needing a momentary effort to maintain his balance. When he looked for Pilgrim again, the chair was empty and the man was gone.
EIGHT
Jerry spent some time walking about looking for Pilgrim. He covered the interior of the car from one end to the other, without result. Sam in his nest of blanket on the floor had shifted position at last, but he was still asleep. And when Jerry entered the bedroom, Colleen was snugly asleep in the big bed, covered to the chin and snoring gently. He wondered if Pilgrim was still watching him from some other dimension or something. Well, tonight it wasn't going to matter to Jerry a whole lot. He was dead tired; having someone watch him sleep wasn't going to bother him.
Silently he fastened the small bolt on the inside of the bedroom door. One lamp in the bedroom was still burning dimly, and Jerry went to it and fiddled with a little wheel on the side, as he had observed other people doing with lamps. The little wheel had something to do with adjusting the length of the burning wick, but he couldn't get it right. At last he gave up and simply blew out the flame; afterward, in nearly total darkness, he could still smell the hot metal and the kerosene.
The speeding train roared and swayed hypnotically through darkness. Groping his way around, he removed his coat and boots, making sure he had his revolver within easy reach. Then he stretched out on the sofa, which was comfortably soft but a little short for even Jerry's modest height. His last waking thought was that he was a taller man in this world than he had been in his own.
Jerry awakened to bright daylight outside the bedroom's curtained windows; he could feel and hear that the train was just stopping somewhere. A glance toward the bed showed him that his roommate was still asleep. He supposed Thursday had been a tiring day for her as well.
Cautiously Jerry arose from the sofa and moved to a window, where he parted the curtains and squinted out. They had reached some kind of a city or town, and baggage was being unloaded from the train. A few passengers appeared to be waiting to get aboard. Two clocks were visible, one in a brick tower in the middle distance, the other through the window of the nearby depot—both said one minute after eight.
The timepieces reminded Jerry of the device Pilgrim had so craftily arranged for him to possess, and so earnestly warned him not to lose. He pulled it out of his watch pocket and looked at it now. The watch was ticking as steadily as before, but now it said seven-fifty. That meant that either the two clocks outside were wrong in unison, or…
Could something be wrong with the hardware Pilgrim had provided for the mad attempt to rescue Lincoln? Jerry, the student of science and engineering, didn't see any reason why not. If anything could go wrong, it would. That was all he needed, one more complication on top of—
There was a slight sound from the direction of the bed, and Jerry turned to see Colleen sitting up halfway, propped with pillows, and looking at him. She was holding the blanket up as high as her shoulders, which, he was just able to see, were demurely covered by what looked like a flannel nightgown.
"Good morning," he offered.
"And a good morning to you." She freed one hand, without letting the blanket slip more than an inch, and used the fingers to rub her eyes. "Where are we?"
"I don't know. Stopped at a station. I was just wondering if we're still in the central time zone."
The puzzled look Colleen gave him in response warned him to let that question drop for now.
She was ready to change the subject anyway. "If you would turn your back," she requested.
Silently he went back to the window, hearing her get out of bed behind him. That sound was followed by the rustle of voluminous layers of clothing, most of it being put on, he presumed. His mind returned to the latest oddities of time. How likely was it that both of these town clocks would be wrong together?
"You can turn back now," Colleen's voice announced. He turned to behold his roommate with yesterday's dress on, and pins in her mouth, busy in front of a wall mirror doing something with her hair. At that moment there came a tapping at the bedroom door, and Sam's voice sang out announcing that breakfast was ready in the parlor.
That at least was cheerful news. "We're getting the royal treatment," Jerry remarked.
"I told you, we're supposed to be great friends of the president of the railroad. In a way we shall be, if we give a good report of him to St
anton."
Breakfast was good. Excellent, in fact. Jerry was now firmly convinced that everyone in this century who could afford to eat at all took the business seriously.
Sam, in and out of the parlor with serving dishes, gave up his first cheerful attempts at making, or provoking, conversation when he sensed that the reigning mood was one of reserved silence. Jerry had begun to develop the unreasonable feeling that the man was putting them on, acting the part of a black servant out of some old movie.
Before breakfast was over, the train had lurched into motion again—only to grind to a halt a few minutes later at the next town.
Today was April seventh. Most of the remainder of the day passed very slowly. Armed with a timetable and Pilgrim's watch, Jerry charted the crooked progress of the railroad across Indiana and part of Michigan. There were many more stops than he had hoped, more, even, than he had expected. A number of the towns boasted steeple clocks visible from the train, no two of which were in agreement with each other. The watch in Jerry's waistcoat pocket ticked on steadily—he had remembered to wind it on retiring—but on the average its time grew farther and farther divorced from that displayed in the cities through which they passed.
Colleen sat most of the morning knitting quietly, but after Sam served lunch, she put her needlework aside restlessly and began speaking about the small town in Indiana where she had grown up. One of her brightest memories was how exciting it was when the railroad first came through.
AFTER THE FACT Page 8