AFTER THE FACT

by Fred Saberhagen

  "One of these towns here?" He was reasonably sure that they were still in Indiana.

  "No, no. Far to the south."

  She mentioned a brother, and Jerry asked: "Is he in the army now?"

  "He died at Vicksburg."

  "Uh… sorry to hear it," Jerry replied awkwardly.

  She acknowledged his sympathy with a slight nod. "I have another brother with General Sherman in Georgia."

  "Older or younger?"

  "Oh, younger. I'm the oldest in the family. Twenty-four. What about yourself?"

  "Twenty-five."

  "I meant, about your family." She blushed just slightly.

  "No brothers or sisters," he said shortly. Jerry suspected that as an only child he had missed out on a lot of happiness.

  "You meant there never were? Ah, that's too bad. It must have been a lonely way to grow up."

  "I had a lot of cousins around when I was small," he said truthfully. "That helped."

  She hesitated very briefly before she added: "And no wife now, I suppose?"

  "No wife."

  "That's just as well in our line of work. You'll leave no widow."

  "Is that why you let yourself get into it—I mean, did becoming a widow—"

  Colleen nodded, and before he could very well express his sympathy again she had turned to the window, as if to keep him from seeing her face. Jerry wanted to ask her more questions about herself, but, not being ready to answer the same sort of questions, he forebore.

  As he served the evening meal's first course, Sam announced that the train would reach its final stop, Detroit, early the next morning. He suggested that reservations for Mr. and Mrs. James for the next train east be made by telegraph from the next stop. Jerry thought that a good idea and gave Sam money for the telegram.

  During the night Colleen tossed in her bed, crying out with nightmares. Jerry, awakened on his sofa, went to comfort her.

  He took her by the arm, wanting to wake her gently. But she pulled free and rolled away across the wide bed, whimpering. In the midst of her broken murmers, Jerry thought he made out a name: Steven.

  Suddenly Colleen rolled back toward Jerry, clutched his wrist, and pulled him onto the bed. He lay there, atop the covers, with an arm over her covered shoulder, comforting her as best he could.

  Slowly Colleen came fully awake, the moans of her dream-struggle turning into a soft and hopeless weeping.

  "Hey, it's ok, it's all right." Jerry kept reassuring her gently as he lay there with no urge to do anything but soothe her. Gently he stroked her hair.

  Presently she ceased weeping, and soon after that she said: "You're a good man, Mr. James. Perhaps the best I've met in this business. Now go back to the sofa."

  She was patting his arm gently, but her voice, though it still trembled, had an edge to it.

  "Yes ma'am," said Jerry, and went back.

  Their train carried them into Detroit right on schedule, early on the morning of Saturday, April eighth. In the railroad depot of that city they said goodbye to their millionaires' quarters, and to Sam, who had fixed them a sizable hamper of food to take along when they boarded their next train.

  Switching trains was accomplished without any special difficulty, but the loss of their private car meant goodbye to any chance for open conversation, and though it eased the problem of how to keep his background obscured, Jerry had mixed feelings about that. It meant, as well, goodbye to other privacy, and that he did not like at all.

  On the plus side, he now began to overhear a lot of interesting conversation, conveying useful information to the visiting alien. The other passengers on this train were all white—Jerry gathered that blacks rode in the baggage car when they rode at all—but otherwise quite a mixed bag. This train was vastly inferior to their private accommodations, but luxurious compared to the local that Jerry had ridden out of Springfield. Their coach boasted a water closet at each end, as well as sinks. There was even a cooler for drinking water, tin cup attached by a slender chain.

  Here, as in the private car, the layout was somewhat compartmentalized. The rear compartment, about a fourth of the car, was for ladies only, but Colleen, like most of the other women, chose to stay with her male companion as much as possible. Seemingly there were no unaccompanied women aboard.

  She rode beside Jerry in a double seat, while around them children wept, shouted, laughed, and otherwise made a racket, and adults dozed, chatted, or endured the trip in silence. The roaring train surrounded them oppressively, raining considerably more soot and sound upon them than they had been exposed to in the private car.

  The clocks in the passing towns kept getting further and further ahead of Jerry's watch. By now Jerry had begun to wonder whether any regular time zones had yet been established. These people seemed to be setting their watches and clocks by the local sun! Not that he cared much; he had more immediate problems to worry about.

  At a whistlestop just east of Cleveland, Colleen touched Jerry on the arm and pointed unobtrusively out through the grimy window beside her.

  "Some of Lafe's people," she murmured, so softly that no one but Jerry would have had a chance of hearing her.

  Jerry looked out the window with great interest, just in time to observe a couple of tough-looking men in civilian suits and bowler hats stop a young man on the platform. He had put down his carpetbag and they were showing what might be badges—Jerry couldn't really tell from where he sat—and obviously interrogating their victim.

  Colleen added in the same low tone: "Only looking for bounty-jumpers, most likely."

  Now he was really lost. Damn Pilgrim, anyway. He asked: "And how are bounty-jumpers best recognized?"

  "They wont be recognized at all, I'd bet, if it's to be left up to those two," Colleen sniffed. She appeared to regard Lafe's agents and their victim with about equal disdain. The train pulled out before they saw the conclusion of the incident.

  The day wore on, passengers feeding themselves from whatever food and drink they had brought with them. A garrulously extroverted young soldier, recently discharged and radiant with joy as his Pennsylvania home drew ever nearer, went from seat to seat aboard the coach offering to trade some of his hardtack biscuits for a share in more palatable fair. Jerry and Colleen shared some of the contents of their hamper with him, but declined to try his biscuits, which he had been carrying wrapped in a long-unwashed fragment of blanket.

  When darkness had fallen and it was time for berths to be made up, the ladies retired to the female compartment in the rear. Overnight passengers, it appeared, were expected to supply their own bedding, and sure enough, the bottom of the hamper packed by Sam revealed two folded blankets.

  A uniformed porter came around to fold the men's berths down from the wall, causing the daytime seats to disappear as part of the same transformation. The only railroad-supplied bedding was the slightly stained mattress pads that came down with the berths, triple-deck constructions with each shelf jutting independently from the wall.

  The night of April eighth passed uneventfully, and Colleen dutifully rejoined her husband next morning somewhere in Ohio. At the first stop that the train made after sunrise, people in their Sunday best came aboard carrying palm branches. Jerry stared at them uncomprehendingly.

  "Palm Sunday," Colleen beside him commented.

  "Oh." Sunday, the ninth of April, he thought. That leaves five more days. Am I really going to do what Pilgrim tells me? Do I have a choice? If this is Palm Sunday, next Sunday will be Easter. And Friday the fourteenth will be Good Friday, won't it?

  Colleen gazed after the happy Christians moving past them through the car. "Were your folks religious, Jim?"

  "No. Not much."

  "Mine neither. But there are times when I think I'd like to be. Are yours still alive?"

  "My mother is," he said, abstractedly, truthfully. "My father—my original father kind of walked out, I understand, when I was very small."

  "Stepfather bring you up?"

  "Yep. I alwa
ys think of him as my father. He's still around."

  As if unconsciously, two-thirds lost in her own thoughts, Colleen reached to take his hand. No one had ever taken his hand in quite that way before, he thought. Almost—he supposed—the way a loving wife might do it. For some reason Jerry was moved.

  The remainder of Sunday passed as had the days before, in soot and sound and roaring motion. How many such days had he now spent in this alien world? He was starting to lose track.

  The train that bore him was beginning to seem itself like a time machine—or an eternity machine perhaps, a mysterious and inescapable conveyance whose journey never ended. Eventually the lamps were once more lighted, the berths made up again. Men and women retired in their separate compartments.

  Jerry's was a middle berth tonight, with one man snoring below him and another overhead. Bootless, hatless, and coatless, his belongings tucked around him, he dozed off wrapped in Sam's gift of a blanket. His coat, with revolver carefully enclosed, was folded under his head.

  He was awakened in the small hours of the morning, by the sound of heavy gunfire.

  NINE

  Jerry had his revolver in hand and his boots on when his feet hit the narrow aisle between stacks of berths. Most of his bunkmates were already on their feet, milling around and cursing in the near-darkness, and a good proportion of them were also armed. The train had ground to a stop by now. Armed male passengers were looking out of windows.

  This was no train robbery, though. Squeezing himself into position at a window, Jerry could see that huge bonfires had been built along both sides of the track. Men on horses were racing madly by, waving their hats and yelling, whooping up a giant celebration.

  Jerry caught the words shouted by one rider who shot past at top speed: "—Lee's surrendered!—"

  Now the door at the men's end of the car was standing open and someone had thrown a bundle of newspapers aboard. Someone else had got the lanterns burning brightly. Bottles of whisky and flasks of unknown fire were being passed from hand to hand, and Jerry choked down a swig.

  Presently he got to see a newspaper, dated Monday, April tenth. The lead story on the front page read:

  NEWS BY TELEGRAPH

  THE END

  THE OLD FLAG VINDICATED

  LEE AND HIS WHOLE ARMY SURRENDERED YESTERDAY

  The Official Correspondence Between Grant and Lee

  On Thursday, the President paid another visit to Richmond. Accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln, Senators Sumner and Harlan, and others…

  Celebration was spreading aboard the train. Exploding, Jerry decided, would be a better word for it. Amid the noise the women, wrapped in shawls and blankets, were coming forward from their sleeping compartment demanding to know what was going on. Men, some of them utter strangers, shouted victory at them, hugged and kissed them. Women screamed in joy and prayed when they heard the news, thanking Providence for the end of casualty lists.

  The train whistle shrieked again and again, but so far the train remained standing where it had stopped. Jerry could see lights in windows out there, some kind of a town nearby, no one sleeping in it now. Men were leaning out the open windows of the train, firing revolvers into the air, bellowing to add their noise to that of the celebration going on outside.

  Jerry had turned to face the rear in the crowded aisle, wanting to see Colleen as quickly as possible when she appeared from the women's quarters. But so far she hadn't come into sight. He swayed on his feet with the jolt that came as the train at last made an effort at getting into motion again.

  The jolt was repeated, this time with more effect. The movement drew more cheers from those aboard, as if it were another military victory. "Mistah Lockwood?"

  There was a tug on Jerry's sleeve, and he looked down into the face of a small black boy. "What is it?"

  "Youah wife, sah. She want you back in the baggage cah. Two cahs back."

  Baggage car? All Jerry could think at the moment was: She's found out something. Maybe Bakers people are on board. "Lead on," he said, pausing only to grab his coat and hat from inside his berth.

  He followed the boy back through the narrow corridor that bypassed the women's section of the coach, and then outside through its rear door. There was no enclosed vestibule between cars, only one roaring, swaying platform coupled to another, a standing space beaten by the wind of the train's passage and sprinkled with the sparks and soot and cinders of its power.

  "What—?" The boy had disappeared, somewhere, somehow. Jerry wrenched at the handle of the door leading into the next car, but if his guide had gone that way he had locked the door behind him. There were two ladders close at hand, one on the end of each car, each ladder a series of rungs riveted or welded to the body of the coach, leading up to the train's roof. And now at the bottom of the nearer ladder, a few feet away, a dark figure stood, gripping a rung with his left hand, holding a gun in his right, aiming it at Jerry. The gunman was mouthing words of which the train noise would let Jerry hear only a shouted fragment. "—sends his regards—"

  Had Jerry been at all familiar with the reality of firearms, had he ever seen at first hand what they could do, he might have been paralyzed by the threat. As matters stood, he reacted before fear could disable him.

  At the karate dojo they had sometimes, in leisured safety, rehearsed responses to this situation. Rehearsal paid off now. Jerry raised his own empty hands—the first step was to make the attacker think you had surrendered. Then a fraction of a second later he lashed out with a front snap kick, catching both wrist and gunbutt with the toe of his right boot.

  There was an explosion almost in Jerry's face. Powder fragments stung his skin, while the flash and the bullet went narrowly over his left shoulder. The gun itself went clattering away in darkness. Immediately after impact Jerry's right leg had come down to support his weight again, so now he had both feet as solidly planted as anyone's feet could be on the rocking, jouncing platform. Jerry was no black belt, and the straight overhand punch he threw at his opponent was not as hard as some he had sent at the wooden makiwara in the practice dojo. But still it landed with considerably more force than the man might have anticipated from someone of Jerry's size and build, even had he seen it coming.

  Hit on the cheekbone by a stunning impact, the disarmed man let out one surprised sound and staggered back, his first inadvertent step carrying him off the platform at the top of the steep iron stairs that led down to the ground. While the train was in motion those stairs were barricaded, but by nothing more than a low-slung length of chain, whose links now caught the tottering man at the back of his thighs. For a moment his arms waved frantically. He tried, and failed, to grab at the handrailing beside the steps. Then he was gone.

  By now the figure of another man had appeared on the platform, and Jerry turned instinctively to meet the new threat. Dimly he could see that the arm that came swinging up at him held a knife. He blocked the blow somehow, but the man's other fist, or something he held in it, clouted Jerry on the side of the head and he went down, momentarily dazed. Now at last he remembered the pistol in his own inside pocket, and managed to pull it out. It was kicked out of his hand before he could fire. He tried to roll over on the narrow platform, but his opponent was crouching over him, knife poised for a downward thrust.

  Another gunshot punctuated the steady roaring of the train. The second enemy sprang away, and in a moment had vanished up the ladder to the roof. One more shot rang out even as the man was climbing, and Jerry thought he heard the ricochet go whining away from heavy steel.

  Colleen, wrapped in a blanket over her nightgown, stood in the open doorway of the forward car, a stubby-barreled pistol in her hand. In a moment she had moved forward to crouch over Jerry. "You hurt?"

  Before he could answer he had to get to his feet and take an inventory. Everything was functioning. Amazingly, he thought, there was no blood, Along his left forearm the sleeve of his coat had been ripped by his attacker's knife, but the blade had not pierced the shirtsleeve or th
e skin beneath.

  "Let's get inside. This's only a two-shot." And Colleen, gesturing with her pistol, tucked it back into the folds of her blanket. "Damn it all, I should have known right away. Little nigger boy came to tell me you wanted me to stay put. I should have known."

  Inside the train again, in the light of the kerosene lamps, he could see the anger in her eyes, and could tell that some of it at least was directed at him, Jim Lockwood, the experienced agent, who had just fallen for what must have been some kind of a crude trick. But she was angry at herself too.

  "What do we do now?" he asked, humbly.

  She looked at him in surprise, then shrugged. "Keep going, get to Washington fast as we can. Got a better idea?"

  "No."

  Inside the coach the celebration was still in progress, and if anyone aboard the train had heard the sounds of gunfire out on the platform, no one would have thought twice about them. But eventually the excitement tapered off, and most of the passengers returned to their berths. A few stayed up, singing patriotic songs in drunken voices. Jerry, back in his berth, dozed fitfully, hand under the pillow of his rolled-up coat, where his gun would be if he had managed to retain it. He had refused Colleen's whispered, reluctant offer to loan him her reloaded "derringer", as she called it. He thought, but did not want to admit aloud, that she could probably use it much more effectively.

  Sleep was difficult to attain. Each time Jerry began to doze off, he woke up with a start, certain that someone had just intruded on his berth to aim a gun at him. But there were no real intruders, and eventually he slept.

  The tenth of April dawned without further serious incident. Berths were turned back into seats, and the day began to drag by, like the other dull days of the trip before it. In Pennsylvania Jerry and Colleen changed trains again, the interior of the new coach being almost indistinguishable from the one they had just left. If anyone on the old train had noticed the loss of one or two passengers during the night, no one so far was making a fuss about it.