AFTER THE FACT

by Fred Saberhagen

  And now, just over there, a few yards away beyond that high iron fence, Mr. Lincoln was at home. Gradually the impact of that simple statement grew on the visitor. Jerry shuffled forward with the crowd. For the moment his problems were forgotten.

  The sun was down now, and the evening cool and misty, like the last part of the day that had gone before. Far down Pennsylvania Avenue to the southeast, the new-looking dome of the Capitol was somehow being illuminated as dusk faded into night. They must, Jerry supposed, be using some kind of gaslights.

  Earlier he had been able to catch an occasional glimpse of the unmistakable White House. And now as he drew closer he could see, just ahead, what must be part of the grounds behind an iron fence. For the moment the building itself remained out of sight behind a gray bulk of stone; when Jerry got close enough to read the sign in the faint gaslight of the street lamps this stone mass turned out to be the Treasury Department. Jerry couldn't remember whether the Treasury building had been standing here or not when he had visited this city as a schoolboy in the nineteen-seventies.

  And now the President's House itself was coming into view, considerably smaller than Jerry's twentieth-century memories proclaimed it, and more isolated in its park-like grounds. The crowd was flowing slowly and spontaneously toward it. Some of the people walking toward their President's house were carrying lighted candles, Jerry saw now, as if this were some vigil of protest organized in the late twentieth-century. But the mood tonight was not protest, it was one of quiet rejoicing. Gates in the iron fence stood open, and guards, both military and civilian, stood by, letting the people in. A crowd was gathering freely on the north lawn; and the nonchalant ease with which this was allowed sent something like a shock of horror through Jerry.

  A number of people around him were singing now, singing softly and joyfully, groups of them working away on different songs, none of which he could recognize. Only now did he gradually become aware of how high a proportion of black people there were in this particular crowd. In a way the blacks were difficult to see, making only a shadowy part of the throng, ever ready to move aside, to disappear when jostled. But they were there, ineluctably.

  Lighted candles had been placed in many of the windows of the White House too, as if this gathering on the lawn had been anticipated or invited. And now there was a murmuring in the crowd. Directly over the north entrance—Jerry was sure the entryway he saw now was a simpler construction than the one he remembered seeing in his own century—a light of extra brightness appeared in a window, the exactly central window on the upper floor. The glow of a lamp held there illuminated the faces of the crowd below.

  And now the window was being swung open to the nation and the night. There were people standing just inside, in what appeared to be a hallway. Someone's arm held the kerosene lamp up higher, and now a murmur of applause ascended through the night from the crowd below.

  Abraham Lincoln, holding some papers in his hand, was standing in the window, in the bright lamplight. There could be no mistake about who he was.

  Jerry, aware presently of a strange sensation in his lungs and ears, realized presently that he had suspended breathing. It needed almost a conscious effort to start the process up again. Meanwhile across the surface of his mind there flowed the memory of how as a child, visiting Disneyland, he had sat between his parents watching the robot Lincoln there. That robot was a thing of plastic and metal and electronics that stood up from a chair, facing the tourist audience, and with occasional lifelike movements of arms and head, a natural-seeming shifting of its weight, delivered a speech of Lincoln's words in a recorded voice—whose voice? Yes, that of the actor Royal Dano.

  At moments this evening's experience was eerily similar. "We meet this evening," the tall man in the window began—and then he had to pause for a moment while the arm beside him adjusted the position of the lamp, so he could read his speech. Lincoln was wearing reading glasses, whereas the robot had not. Dano's voice in the character of Lincoln, Jerry decided now, had been very much like the real thing, high and clear, with a kind of rustic accent. Lincoln continued: "Not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart."

  Another murmur, almost the start of a cheer, ran through the crowd, there was some jostling for position, and Jerry missed the next words. For a short time the President's voice dropped below audibility.

  The next words that Jerry was able to hear clearly were: "Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has the authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of Reconstruction."

  Jerry was trying to work his way forward through the crowd, in an effort to hear better; it wasn't easy, for a lot of other people were doing the same thing, and the bodies toward the front, almost under the overhanging portico, were closely packed.

  Around him there were murmurings: not of approval of what the President was saying, nor of disagreement either. Actually it sounded rather like the beginning of inattention. So far the President was not giving these people what they wanted tonight; what they had come here this evening to get, whatever that was.

  Now he was talking about Louisiana. "Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the state, held elections, organized a state government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the Constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things, the nation wants—and they ask the nation's recognition and its assistance to make good their committal."

  Lincoln's audience this evening approved of him in general, and they wished him well. But he was losing them as an audience, paragraph by reasoned paragraph of his speech. It was dull business that he had written out to read to them tonight, not words of triumph or inspiration. Urgent business, doubtless, but dull. Tonight it was enough for almost everyone but him to savor victory. The war at last was over.

  Now the President's voice was coming through clearly again. He was saying something about very intelligent blacks, including the former slaves who had fought in the Union ranks, being allowed to vote.

  There was grumbling in the crowd at that. "Damned radical after all!" was one of the comments Jerry heard near him. "Democrats were right. He'll have the niggers voting in the next election. Voting straight Republican."

  ELEVEN

  On the morning of Wednesday, April twelfth, Jerry awoke from a confused dream in a state of disoriented terror. He lay for an indeterminate time staring at the white plastered ceiling above him before he could recognize it as that of his room in Willard's, and remember how he had come to be here lying under it.

  Next he tried to gather his thoughts, to sort out the dream he had just experienced from the hardly Jess probable reality of the last few days. In his dream he had been somehow forced to play the part of a gate-guard at the White House. He knew he was only playing the part, because the job was not properly his and at any moment his false position was likely to be discovered. Worse than that, he could see that the assassins were already approaching, a horde of them on horseback, moving in a compact mass like the Union cavalry he had seen in the streets.

  Jerry ran forward, trying his best to block the killers' entry, but there was no gate in the iron fence for him to close, only a great gaping gap with broken hinges hanging at the sides. The mounted men ignored Jerry's feeble efforts to hinder them and charged on past, raising sabers and carbines as they swept on to kill Lincoln, who wa
s standing in the White House window holding an anachronistic flashlight.

  Now, as Jerry lay in bed regarding one of Willard's plastered ceilings, and listening to the rumble of wagon-traffic in the street outside, the dream-terror gradually faded into a very conscious horror at the truth. In this earlier and in some ways so much more innocent version of America, the President appeared to be readily accessible to any enemy. It was unbelievable to Jerry, raised on the idea of celebrities as casual targets, that the man had already survived more than four years in office in this bitterly divided country.

  Someone in the restaurant last night had been talking about Lincoln's customary bodyguard, a fanatically devoted friend of his from Illinois named Ward Lamon, who was apparently of gigantic strength and went armed to the teeth day and night. Jerry supposed such a watchdog might have had a great deal to do with Lincoln's survival up till now. But another of the people in the restaurant had commented that Lamon had just been dispatched by Lincoln on some confidential mission. That, Jerry supposed, was going to make things easier for John Wilkes Booth on Friday night. And perhaps the absence of such a protector would make things simpler for Jerry too. At least he could hope.

  And at least he had the name of the assassin—John Wilkes Booth. He could have remembered that even if Pilgrim had not reminded him. He could remember too that Booth had been—or was—an actor.

  The trouble was that last night almost anyone, with only a minimum of luck, would have been able to work his way to within a few feet of a well-lighted and helpless Presidential target. Jerry had no idea where Booth was at this moment on Wednesday morning. But if the murderous actor had been in town last night, he had missed a great opportunity.

  And Jerry had to stop him Friday, or else… but the old doubts arose again. Why should he, Jerry, trust Pilgrim's assessment of the situation? Pilgrim had already tricked him at least once, and rather viciously.

  Easy enough to say that he ought not to trust Pilgrim, but what was he going to do instead? Walk into a police station and tell them he'd been kidnapped from the twentieth century? Or settle down here to spend his life—probably a short, unhealthy one—as a petroleum salesman?

  The bottom line for Jerry at the moment was that he was following Pilgrim's orders because he really had very little choice. He would at least pretend to go along with Pilgrim's plan, until some reason to do otherwise, some better chance of getting home, presented itself.

  Thoughtfully Jerry got up, dressed himself in clean clothes—his laundry had been returned on schedule—and descended to the lobby. The ground level of the hotel was as crowded as it had been yesterday, and no one appeared to be ready to take time out from his own affairs to pay any attention to an out-of-town businessman named Paul Pilgrim, of blessedly nondescript appearance.

  Looking at the throngs milling before him, he could see that there might be many others who would be considered more interesting than himself. For a moment he wondered if there might be any other time travelers on the scene. There were uniforms in plenty, of course, but still civilian clothes predominated. According to the jokes Jerry had overheard yesterday in the barbershop and the bar, seekers of political office were continually swarming into Washington from all across the nation, the eternal bane of the President in particular, and of everyone else in government who had in some degree the power to hand out patronage. The federal government of 1865 might be small and primitive by the standards of Jerry's time, but no doubt it was huge and bloated by the prewar standards that these people around him could remember. Jerry suspected that civil service examinations did not exist in this world, and that the opportunities for enrichment at public expense were tremendous.

  Over breakfast—it was huge, and very good; there seemed to be no lesser kind of meal obtainable at Willard's—Jerry turned his mind to practical matters. As he visualized the situation, getting into the theater Friday evening was only the start of what he had to do. He would have to be as close to Lincoln as possible, preferably standing or sitting right beside him when the assassin approached. Obviously there were considerable difficulties. And the more Jerry thought about them, the larger those difficulties loomed.

  For one thing, other people might be approaching this accessible President all the time, and how was Jerry supposed to recognize Booth when he saw him? At this moment he had not the faintest idea of what the man looked like. Other questions popped up in bewildering numbers, as soon as he began to consider the situation seriously. Was Lincoln going to be accompanied to the theater by any bodyguard at all? Evidently not by the formidable Lamon, and probably not by any competent substitute. But there might be someone on the job, someone who would interfere with Jerry's effort to get close to the President, even while failing to stop Booth.

  Presumably there would be other people in the President's theater party too. His wife, doubtless. What was the old sick joke? Oh yes: Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

  But who else would be there? And what was the general layout of the theater? And where was the President going to sit? Hadn't Pilgrim's recorded briefing mentioned a box seat?

  This was Wednesday morning, which when Jerry thought about it was none too soon to start finding out the answers. Maybe he would get another briefing from Pilgrim before he was expected to go into action, but maybe he wouldn't.

  Immediately after finishing his breakfast, Jerry stopped at the desk for directions to Ford's Theater. Relieved to find how near it was, he started out on foot, picking his way across muddy intersections where no one had yet thought to install traffic signals. Turning off Pennsylvania, he walked five blocks east on E Street to Tenth, then half a block north. The theater was there, on the east side of the street.

  There was no marquee or other sign projecting over the sidewalk, only a tall, wide front of red brick containing five arched doorways at ground level. There were also five windows in each of the next two stories above. Smaller buildings crowded up close against Ford's on either side, and none of the structures looked more than a few years old.

  Jerry approached the theater more closely. On the front wall posters advertised the current show, OUR AMERICAN COUSIN, starring Laura Keene. A additional strip of pasted paper reminded passers-by that the performance of Friday, April fourteenth, would be the last.

  There was nothing to be gained by waiting around out here on the sidewalk. Jerry squared his shoulders, ran through once more in his mind the story he had decided on, and started testing the five front doors of the theater to see if any of them were open.

  The second door from the right proved to be unlocked. He walked through it into a dim lobby. No lamps were lit, and, after he had closed the front door behind him, the only daylight entered here indirectly, from a window inside a small office at one side. Men's voices, low-key and faint, were coming from the direction of that office. Jerry had opened and closed the street door quietly, and he thought it probable that no one in the office had heard him come in.

  Ahead of him a dark stairway led up into heavy gloom. He badly wanted to see the layout of the theater, and decided to take a chance. If he should be discovered wandering about inside, he had his story ready.

  From the top of the broad, carpeted stairs he emerged into the relatively lighter gloom of a large auditorium. He was standing now in a large, curving balcony, looking at a stage directly ahead of him where two small gaslights flamed, providing the only illumination in all the great space of the theater's interior. Jerry moved forward slowly, until he could lean his hands on the railing at the front of the balcony. Now, where in all this vast space was Lincoln going to sit?

  Probably in a box seat, for greater privacy. From where Jerry stood he could see eight box seats, four right and four left, four high and four low, all of them directly overlooking the half of the stage nearest the audience.

  On Jerry's left as he faced the stage, a man's head and shoulder suddenly appeared, leaning out over the railing of the highest and farthest box on that side. In a moment
the head and shoulder were joined by a beckoning arm. The man, who obviously wanted Jerry to come to him, bore a strong resemblance to—

  Anger, relief, and hope rising in him together, Jerry pushed off from the railing and strode rapidly to his left along the curving front of the balcony. He was headed toward a door—when he looked for it he could see it—that must give access to the upper boxes on that side. In a moment he had pulled the door open and was groping his way forward through a darkened little vestibule.

  "Shut the door behind you," whispered Pilgrim's voice from somewhere very close ahead. Then Jerry could see the man standing in a small doorway that led directly into the box seat closest to the rear of the stage, the same one he had been waving from. The two gas lamps set above the stage shone in past heavy red curtain to half-illuminate the compartment. Jerry moved forward silently.

  "Have a seat," Pilgrim, wearing a twentieth-century shirt and khaki pants, pushed a small chair toward Jerry with his foot. Then, sighing as if he were tired, he retreated to let himself down again in the chair from which he had waved to Jerry. He added: "I had hopes that you would show up here, at some time before the big event. We need to talk. And here, at this hour, is an ideal spot."

  Jerry considered several swear words, and then rejected all of them as a waste of breath. He kept his own voice low. "We need more than that. We need for you to get me out of here and back where I belong. I didn't ask to be—"

  Pilgrim raised a thick hand, gently gesturing. "In good time, in good time, you may register your complaints about my conduct. You have a legitimate grievance; but others involved in this situation have more reason than you to complain of being treated unfairly."

  "Including you, I suppose?"