AFTER THE FACT

by Fred Saberhagen

  Colleen was looking at him. Not steadily, but he was sure that she was studying him, a bit and a moment at a time, out of the corner of her eye. And her pretense of interest in the play was fading. A professional agent, she could not fail to be aware of the ongoing tension in the man beside her. And it must be striking her as odd that he was not offering explanations, that he was so intent on—something else—that he had almost completely ignored her.

  Now it was nine-ten by Pilgrim's faithful watch, and Booth had not yet appeared. That would seem to argue against collusion by the guard. Maybe the guard had only gone out for a smoke, or a quick drink in the saloon next door. Maybe he would soon be back, to complicate Jerry's situation further.

  But the shabbily dressed man who had been posted to sit by the white door did not come back. Jerry waited, staring past Colleen at the empty chair.

  There was applause around them. With a start he looked back toward the stage and realized that the curtain was going down and the houselights were brightening. Was the play over? Had Lincoln been saved only because Jerry had introduced some distraction that kept Booth from ever coming to the theater? Might such a result possibly be good enough for Pilgrim, or did it mean that history had been mangled, and the helpless time-traveler trapped after all?

  Then belatedly Jerry realized that this could be, must be, only a between-acts intermission. Colleen was looking at him. The tiny triumphant smile she had worn on her arrival had faded, had to be replaced by a look of wary concern.

  Around them people were standing up and stretching, chatting about the play. They moved in the aisles, but not with the purposeful attitude of a crowd starting out for home. Many of the audience were looking toward the Presidential box, though with the draperies in place it was impossible for anyone elsewhere in the theater to get more than the tiniest glimpse of its august occupant.

  Jerry stood on tired, quivering legs, and Colleen got up to stand beside him. "Well, Mr. Lockwood. Will you escort me to the lobby? I believe there might be some refreshment available there." When he hesitated, she added in the same voice: "Or would you prefer to end this now?"

  He didn't know exactly what she meant, but he was afraid she would blow a whistle and bring plainclothesmen swarming from God knew where. Anyway, Lincoln wasn't shot during intermission; Jan Chen, Pilgrim, or someone had told Jerry that the play was in process when the crime occurred.

  He nodded and offered her his arm. Numbly he descended to the lobby, Colleen beside him on the stair holding his arm lightly, as a hundred other ladies in sight were walking with their men. The hum of voices was genteel; in the lobby itself were mostly ladies, while the gentlemen appeared to have moved outside en masse. Wisps of blue cigar and pipe smoke wafted in through the open doors leading to the street. It had been a long time since Jerry had seen an expanse of carpeted floor the size of the lobby without spittoons.

  "Would it be too much trouble, Mr. Lockwood, to get me a lemonade?"

  "Not at all."

  He visited the genteel bar on one side of the lobby, and was back with her drink a moment later.

  "And for yourself? Nothing to drink? I won't be offended if you choose something stronger. For that you'll have to go to the tavern next door." Colleen's voice was brittle and strained; the more she spoke, the more unnatural she sounded.

  Jerry started to reply, then simply nodded. Now was not the time for him to take a drink; but he could certainly use a moment to himself, away from Colleen at least, to try to regroup.

  The intermission was evidently going to be a long one, for the men outside in front of the theater, and in Taltavul's next door, gave no sign of drifting back to the theater.

  On entering the bar, Jerry recognized among the crowd the guard who had been sitting outside of Lincoln's box. Was the man really in on the conspiracy, then?

  While Jerry was wondering if he should take a short beer after all, a couple of gulps just to heal the dryness in his throat, a name was called nearby in a familiar voice. Turning, responding more to the voice than to the name—which had been Smith—Jerry with relief saw John Wilkes Booth, dressed in dark gray, standing at the bar with a bottle of whiskey and a glass in front of him.

  Booths dark eyes were almost twinkling, as if with a great secret. "Mr. Smith—will you have a drink with me?"

  Jerry, filled with a vast relief, accepted. "Gladly, Mr. Booth, gladly."

  Relief was short lived. Jerry wondered if Booth might now have given up his murderous plan, and decided to spend the evening getting sloshed instead.

  Would that, could that, possibly satisfy Pilgrim? Jerry didn't know, but he felt grave doubts. Pilgrim had, after all, specifically enjoined him against merely warning Lincoln.

  "Are you enjoying the show?" Booth asked. Having obtained a glass for Jerry by gestures, he was pouring delicately to fill it.

  "Oh yes." Jerry couldn't think of anything better to say. He lifted his glass and sipped at it as delicately as it had been poured.

  "Be sure to see the rest," Booth was gazing now into the mirror behind the bar. "There is going to be some rare fine acting."

  Someone down the bar, six or eight customers distant, was calling the actor's name, trying to get his attention. Booth and Jerry looked, to see a man evidently trying to drink a toast.

  "—to the late Junius Booth. Wilkes, you are a good actor, yes. But you'll never be the man your father was."

  Booth drank to his father without hesitation. But for a moment a small smile seemed to play under his mustache. He shook his head in disagreement: "When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America."

  A few moments later, Jerry took his leave of the people in the bar. Colleen appeared actually surprised when he came back into the lobby. She said: "This one time I expected you to disappear—and you did not."

  "No, I did not. Shall we go back to our seats? The play will be starting soon."

  Silently she took his arm. Her face was turned toward him, her eyes studying his face, as they climbed the stairs from the lobby.

  Soon they were back in the dress circle. She was not smiling now, nor pretending. When she spoke her voice was still so low that the people around them would have trouble hearing it; but it was no longer the voice of a lady who had come to watch a play.

  "Damn you. Damn you, man. Do you still think you can brazen this out, whatever it is? Do you know how far I've stuck out my neck for you already? I had convinced myself that—what happened between us on the train was… is it that you're ready to die to be rid of me, or what?"

  "Colleen." He could feel and hear the sheer hopelessness in his own voice. "It meant something to me, what happened between us. But I can't argue about it… not now. How did you know that I was here?"

  Her voice sank further. "One of the girls in the brothel reports to me too. She went through your pockets while you were there." She stared at him in anger a moment longer; then she walked briskly away, not looking back.

  The gaslights had brightened again when the intermission began. When Colleen left Jerry got out of his seat again to pace back and forth in the aisle, stretching and soothing muscles that cried for either rest or action. He kept watching the white door. Would the President feel the urge to stretch his long legs too, and emerge from seclusion?

  Almost ten o'clock, and the play had not yet resumed. And now a man, a middle-aged well-dressed civilian Jerry had never seen before, was coming along the aisle in front of Jerry, approaching the white door with a piece of paper folded in his hand.

  This visitor certainly was not Booth. Who was he, then? A possible confederate? Certainly not one of the group from Surrat's boarding house. Jerry stared, holding his breath, on the verge of pulling the trigger of his watch and charging forward, yet knowing that he must not, until he knew that Booth himself had begun to make his move.

  The man with the paper in his hand conferred briefly with two military officers in uniform who happened to be the members of the audience who nearest to the post aband
oned by the guard. Then with a nod he opened the door and walked in calmly.

  Within a minute the messenger, for such he seemed to be, had emerged again, without his paper. Looking rather well satisfied with himself and his importance, the man retreated in the direction of the stairs.

  Almost as soon as he had disappeared, the house-lights dimmed again, warning patrons to return to their seats. Jerry crouched in his chair again. Shortly the play resumed.

  Jerry had just looked at his watch for the hundredth time, and had somehow managed to retain the information it provided, and so he knew that it was ten minutes after ten when Booth at last appeared in the auditorium. When Jerry saw him first the actor, well dressed in dark, inconspicuous clothing, was standing at the top of the short series of steps leading down from the main exit to the aisle that ran across the front of the dress circle. Jerry could see Booth hesitate there for a moment, looking in the direction of the Presidential box, as if he were surprised to discover that his victim was essentially unguarded.

  Now Jerry had the watch clutched in his left hand. And the great moment, the one he had rehearsed in a thousand waking and sleeping dreams since his last talk with Pilgrim, had come at last. He snapped open the glass cover—so much he had done before, in resetting the watch to local time at Washington—and moved both hands to twelve o'clock.

  But now he took the stem in the fingers of his right hand, and pulled on it, feeling the click, making the change that was supposed to activate the first stage of the device. He felt and heard one sharp click, small but definite, from the machine.

  Now he had pulled on the stem, seconds were passing, but nothing had really happened. No. He realized that something was happening, though it was a slower and subtler effect than anything he had expected.

  Around Jerry, time was altering.

  TWENTY

  When he saw Booth, poised at the top of the few steps leading down to the dress circle aisle, Jerry opened the face of his watch and set both hands to twelve. Booth had started down those steps before Jerry pulled out the stem to the first stop. Now, many seconds later, the actor was still descending those few steps; in Jerry's eyes, he was moving like a slow-motion instant replay.

  Now Jerry realized that since he pulled out the stem of the watch all sounds in the auditorium had been transformed: the speech of the actor on stage had slowed tremendously, and his voice was lowering from a tenor toward a drawling baritone. The background noise of audience whispers, coughing, breath and movement had taken on a deep, sepulchral timbre.

  Concomitant with these changes the light was fading and taking on a reddish hue, moderate but unequivocal; for a moment Jerry thought that Booth must have found an accomplice to turn down the gas in the theater, dimming all the lights, on stage and off, at the crucial moment. But no one else in the theater appeared to notice anything. In fact, the audience seemed strangely calm—posed and almost motionless.

  On stage, the voice of the actress who played Mrs. Mountchessington, confronting Harry Hawk as Asa Trenchard, was now prolonging each syllable grotesquely as the tone slid down, down and down the scale, descending to an improbable bass. Half-hypnotized, Jerry watched and listened as if his own mental processes had been slowed down by the transformation in the world around him.

  At last Booth reached the bottom of the stairs and was approaching Jerry, following in the footsteps of Lincoln and his party almost two hours earlier. Each of the widely spaced footfalls of the actor was marked by a very faint sound, a fading rumble hard to identify, following the dull subterranean thump of heel impact. When Jerry realized that rumbling sound would have been a jingle were it not so slow and deep, he remembered that Booth was wearing spurs. Of course; there was a getaway horse waiting for him in the alley.

  Paradoxically, despite the enormous elongation of each moment in Jerry's own almost-hypnotized time-frame, Booth's slow and steady walk was already carrying the actor past him. For the briefest of moments Booth's eye caught Jerry's, and a slow change, a kind of half-recognition, began its passage across the actor's face. But Booth had no thought to spare now for anything but his purpose, and he did not pause in his determined progress. His eyes—shifting slowly as Jerry saw them—looked forward again. If anything Booth walked a little faster.

  Jerry got to his feet, realizing as soon as he willed the movement that time for him had not been slowed down. Stepping into the aisle, he felt that he was moving at normal speed in a slow-motion universe. Intent on overtaking Booth, he shot past seated rows of nearly frozen matrons and distinguished gentlemen, their applauding hands suspended before their faces, past army officers with mustached mouths and ladies with rouged lips, all stretched open in distorted laughter at the doings of the actors.

  He realized that Pilgrim's device must have caused more than a mere difference in speed. The thousand eyes that were fixed with anticipation on the stage did not see Jerry. The swiftness of his speeding passage did not stir their feathers or ruffle their gowns. Activating the watch-stem to its first stop had partially disconnected him from the world around him, rendered him somehow out of phase with it. But not out of phase with Booth… could their mutual counter-purposes be somehow linking them? Or had the effect, whatever it was, merely not kicked in yet? In any event, so far as others were concerned, Pilgrim's little device was concealing him as well as giving him a few precious seconds of advantage. If only he could learn how to use that advantage before it was too late!

  Unchallenged, John Wilkes Booth had reached the white door and opened it. Before Jerry caught up with him he was already three-fourths of the way through the doorway. The actor had turned a sidelong glance at the two army officers seated nearest to the door, but both of them were watching the play, and ignored Booth. Now already the actor was closing the door behind him, and if what Pilgrim had told Jerry was correct, in another moment that door would be blocked solidly from the inside—

  Jerry, his fear rapidly mounting toward panic, sprinted forward so that to himself he seemed to float amid a frozen waxwork audience. At the last moment he shot through the gradually narrowing aperture of the white door, past Booth and into the small blind hallway that ran behind the boxes.

  But his passage was not entirely a clean one. Trying to slide past the door even as Booth was pushing it closed from inside, Jerry caromed at high speed off the actor's shoulder, to go spinning on into the dark little vestibule. There Jerry bounced off a wall and collapsed to the floor.

  At the moment of the physical collision, the time-distortion effect ceased to operate. Once past Booth, Jerry found himself suddenly conscious of his extra burden of momentum. It was more than he ought to have been able to achieve by running, more as if he had jumped from a speeding automobile. First Booth's shoulder and then the wall, with stunning impact, absorbed the burden from him.

  Jerry's sudden materialization also took Booth by surprise, and the grazing collision knocked Booth down; but the actor, having absorbed only a small part of Jerry's momentum, and mentally braced for violent interference at any moment, recovered from the collision while Jerry still sprawled at the end of the little vestibule. Booth picked up a wooden bar that had been lying inconspicuously on the dark floor. Not to use as a weapon; instead Booth jammed the piece of wood into place behind the white door, which he had finally managed to get completely closed. A notch to hold the bar had already been cut into the plaster of the wall.

  Now there could be no further interference from outside the Presidential box; not until it was too late.

  And Booth had no need of any wooden bar to fight with; a long knife appeared in his left hand as he faced Jerry; there was already a small pistol in his right. In the gaze he turned on Jerry was the bitter contempt of a man terribly betrayed.

  "No one shall stop me now," the actor declared. His soft voice, for once out of control turned harsh and broke on the last word.

  Jerry was already sickeningly conscious of total failure as he regained his feet. Already someone was knocking on the b
lockaded door leading to the auditorium. The voices of the people on stage, in Jerry's ears restored to normal pitch and speed, were going on, the speakers still oblivious that the hinges of history were threatening to come loose twelve feet above them.

  A great roar of laughter went up from the audience, at the words of the character Asa Trenchard, now alone on stage. Booth's derringer was still unfired, the President still breathed. History was already running a few seconds late.

  But maybe all was not yet totally lost.

  Jerry faced Booth. "I don't want—" Jerry was beginning, when suddenly the door immediately on Booth's left, leading into the Presidential box, swung open. The face of Major Rathbone appeared there, displaying, even above civilian clothes, the keen look of command.

  "What is going on—" the Major began; then his eyes widened as he saw the knife in Booth's hand. The look of command vanished. Rathbone's lungs filled. "Help!" he bellowed. "Assassins!"

  Booth, evidently determined to save the single bullet in his derringer for Lincoln, at once plunged his knife into Rathbone's chest; the wounded man fell back.

  Now Jerry was moving forward, Pilgrim's timepiece once more gripped in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand reaching for the stem. He had to get within three meters. Because within a very few seconds the fatal shot—

  Booth, inevitably convinced that Jerry meant to stop him, turned on Jerry with the knife, now held in his right hand. Even as Jerry managed to grip the wrist of the hand that drove that weapon toward him, he knew his own damaged left wrist was not going to be able to take the strain.

  In terror of his life now, all other purposes forgotten, Jerry screamed for help. Then he could no longer hold back the arm that held the knife. He saw and felt it come plunging into his chest, cold paralyzing steel that brought the certainty of death…

  He fell. Through a thickening haze of red and gray, Jerry saw Booth re-open the door into the box. Through a cottony fog, Jerry heard the assassin's pistol fire.