A Matter of Time

by Glen Cook

  Just then he spied Railsback backing from his office while arguing vehemently with someone inside. Beth made violent signals indicating they should use the door. “Time to make a break, old buddy. Hank’s going to have somebody’s ass on toast in a minute.”

  Harald made it, but by the time Cash had gone down to his personal automobile, discovered he had left his keys in his desk, and had returned for them, Railsback was a thunder-head on a course to intercept him at the door.

  “What the hell kind of clown’s festival did you and the kid put on today?” he thundered, startling every eye into looking their way. “I thought I told you to keep it quiet.”

  Cash put on his puzzled-but-curious face and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “I got some bozo from the Argus, of all goddamned things, in there bugging me for an old-fashioned scoop, and I don’t even know what the hell he’s talking about. He’s got more imagination than you and the kid combined.”

  The Argus was a small but highly respected newspaper, the oldest black business in the city. The source of the leak was obvious. The morgue attendant. Equally obvious was the fact that the major dailies and electronic media would be on it by tomorrow.

  Cash shrugged. “We just took the old lady in for a look at the stiff. She claimed we were working a frame. Where’s the hassle?”

  “There was this attendant, see? And he listened to everything, see? Maybe he didn’t hear so good, but there was this spooky old lady, this hysterical nun, and these two weird cops claiming the stiff was a guy that got croaked fifty years ago.... I got to say more? Can you see it when it hits the Post? They’ll go the ‘Cops roust little old granny lady over science-fiction theory’ route. And that bleeding heart jackoff McCauley could turn it into the biggest show around here since the World’s Fair.”

  Over the past ten years, the Post’s editorial stance had become ever more left-radical, and Railsback’s opinion of it had declined proportionally. There were times when he mumbled about driving a stake through the heart of Jason McCauley, especially when that worthy did one of his columns bemoaning the plight of some prisoner it had taken city and state years to put inside. Cash suspected that his superior lived in terror of being discovered by the newspaper. It had ruined careers before. Cash had his own differences with the Post, but remained amused by Railsback’s pointed fingers and endless cries of “Anti-Christ!”

  “They wouldn’t go that far.”

  “The hell they wouldn’t. Stay away from them, Norm. Don’t give them anything. Let them dig it out without any help from us. Maybe they will come up with a rational explanation. Now get the hell home before I blow a fuse. Best to Annie.”

  “Yeah. ‘Lo to Marylin, too.” Cash made himself scarce.

  “Honey,” he said as he pushed through the door, “you started supper yet?”

  “Got some hamburger thawing.”

  “Put it back in. I’m taking you out. Movie, too.”

  “What brought this on?” Being taken out to dinner was an event so rare it called for some questioning.

  “I just need to get out. Away.” He described the encounter with Hank.

  “What if Nancy calls? The kids might need something....”

  “She should be able to cope for one night. Come on, get your purse. Don’t even bother fixing up.”

  She went with great reluctance, and dinner was no success.

  “What’s worrying you?” Cash finally demanded, after his second and third choices of movies elicited flat refusals.

  “I just think we should be home in case....”

  “Christ! How come you’re so all-fired sure....”

  “I ran into Martha Schnieder at Kroger yesterday. She told me her daughter has been baby-sitting for Nancy.”

  “Huh? So?”

  “So lately it’s been three or four nights a week. Nancy has been hanging out at the Red Carpet Lounge in Cahokia. Sometimes she doesn’t come home till three or four in the morning....”

  It finally sank in. And for a minute his emotions rushed this way and that. Finally, he took her hands in his. “Honey, there’s a fact that we’ve all got to face. Michael’s been gone for eight years. And Nancy’s still young.”

  “Norman, that’s enough. I know it all by heart. Every damned argument: ‘It’s time we accepted the fact that Michael’s dead’; ‘Nancy has the right to a sex life’; ‘She has the right to find a new husband.’ And on and on. Anything you can think of, I’ve thought of already. And it’s all true. But dammit, Norm, it hurts. She and the kids are all that’s left.”

  He knew she was describing a battle he still had to fight. Not yet engaged, he could observe, “I don’t think she’d cut us out. She’s still family. The most she’d want is for us to mind our own business. It is her life.”

  “What if she married somebody who had to move somewhere else?”

  “We’d just have to live with it.”

  “I don’t want to live with it!”

  She was getting loud enough to draw curious glances. “We’d better go. Come on, I’ll take you to Baskin-Robbins.” She loved ice cream. A cone had smoothed over many a rough spot.

  They spent the rest of the evening in front of the TV. As Cash had predicted, the phone didn’t ring once. Instead of watching Carson, he turned in early.

  He didn’t sleep well. Michael’s ghost hovered over his bed whispering about time machines.

  The media did get hold of the story next day, but didn’t play it up. Cash supposed it was because they could get nothing to sink their teeth into, though Railsback offered the opinion that reportorial imaginations bogged down when wandering outside the traditional bounds of business, politics, and crime. Harald claimed it was because the department itself was for a time diverted.

  The entire department became embroiled in a series of crash priority cases, a hectic mishmash of murder probably due, in part, to the torrid weather. There was the killing of an off-duty patrolman during the holdup of an evening church service, then the rape-murder of a ten-year-old girl, followed by the molestation-immolation of two young boys by a gang of teenagers, and a homosexual jealousy homicide involving the scion of a prominent family. Next came a flare-up in the ongoing struggle for control of heroin traffic in the heavily black central and north wards. There, every time a big fish got sent up, the medium fishes shot it out for the top spot.

  It was busy busy busy. If not hunting down a convicted murderer who simply bolted from the courtroom as the verdict was delivered, or beating the bushes in a panicky search for two teenage girls who had run away from the School for the Blind, Cash and Harald were continually in court. Their cases seemed to be coming to trial all at once. Most were disappointing in result. The fifteen-year-old who had gunned down a retired lieutenant, in the course of a robbery witnessed by the forty-three passengers aboard the bus from which the victim had just descended, was found guilty of assault and robbery, but the jury couldn’t agree on the murder charge. Cash, being an officer, had never done jury duty. He couldn’t begin to fathom the workings of the juror’s mind. He sometimes wondered how anyone got put away.

  But they both managed a nickel-dime investigation in spare moments. Harald continued doing the donkey work, discovering that the Groloch house had started construction early in 1869, and that the carriage house had been demolished in 1939. He actually located one of the workmen, but the man barely remembered the job, and had seen nothing out of the ordinary. No one remembered Miss Groloch ever having possessed either car or carriage.

  And Harald discovered that large quantities of sand, gravel, cement, and building stone had been delivered to the house in July 1914. Presumably these were the materials used to pour the basement floor and wall off part. Cash went back to Carstairs’s report several times, but there was nothing in it to indicate that he had thought the basement unusual.

  And again he returned to the report. He had copies run off and took one home with the notion of musing over it while watching TV, and of letting A
nnie worry it instead of why they hadn’t heard from the Relocation Board. Somewhere in the report, he thought, overlooked by everyone, was the key.

  He had to keep reminding himself that he and Carstairs weren’t working the same case, only cases with a coincidental connection spanning fifty-four years.

  Cash passed another birthday. Each seemed more miserable than the last. Somewhere around twenty you began the downhill slide, he reflected, though you didn’t realize it till years later. Around thirty you tried to stop looking forward. There was one bad ambush up there that you got more and more reluctant to approach. No matter what you had accomplished, you felt like a failure because there was so much more you should have done. By forty you were moving along looking backward, engrossed in might-have-beens. You remembered the girls who were willing when you were too chicken, opportunities that went begging because you dithered when you should have dashed in, alternate branches of the road you didn’t even recognize at the time. You cried a lot inside, and died a little more each day. Maybe you fought the hook a little that decade, but by fifty you had surrendered.

  Sitting at his desk, before going home to a “surprise” party put on by Annie, Nancy, and his grandchildren, he did his silent dying and penned a fragment of a poem:

  Time wanders into oblivion, gentle as a rose

  A traitor only too late revealing, had I but known,

  The perfect moment.

  There were times when, even more than immortality, he wanted a time machine with which he could go back and adjust.... Or, at least, use to send an admonitory message to his younger self.

  XII

  On the X Axis;

  3-6 July 1866;

  Travels

  “You know the crudest jest?” Fian asked. They were walking eastward, tending a little south, toward the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. “This little cosmic joke rips a vital organ right out of the corpus of State philosophy.” It was his first remark in hours.

  The roads were awash with refugees and stunned imperial troops. No one paid any heed to three odd peasants.

  “How so?” Fial responded.

  They had decided they would be less conspicuous using the names of the bodies they wore. Neither the people of Today nor Tomorrow would pick them out as easily.

  And, of course, Neulist was a consideration.

  Who could guess when, or where, the colonel was?

  Father was so damned calm about everything, Fiala thought. “Yes. That bears explanation.”

  She remained balanced precariously on the knife-edge of a scream. The Other wouldn’t die. Temporarily defeated, it lay back in the deep shadows, wounded, hating, a savage thing waiting with reptilian patience.

  “Souls. I’m talking souls. Or something so much like them that it makes no difference.”

  He and Fial, immediately, became hounds on the scent of the connections between souls, tachyons, and Dialectical Materialism.

  Fiala (Fial was her twin in this incarnation) remained intellectually numb. She just couldn’t surrender to belief in the evidence surrounding her. She tried ignoring it all, even her companions, who strode through this alien time as though they were on foreign sabbatical and going home was a matter of traveling kilometers, not years.

  She coped with the impossible by concentrating on the one thing with a reality too unrelenting to be denied.

  The soul-eater waiting in the dungeons of her mind.

  Father and Fial had decided that they had to remove themselves as far from their own pasts as possible. Who, more than a Zumsteg, could imperil the future? Who knew but what the State might never be born because of a chance remark by a peasant from a village on the outskirts of Prague?

  It was ludicrous. Loyalty to something not yet dreamed?

  But there was Neulist.

  Fiala understood Neulist.

  If the colonel had come back, he would haunt them. He had the soul of a demented terrier. He never let go. And, should he locate them, he might wound the future far more in achieving his sick satisfaction than ever they could by shifting three supremely unimportant peasants out of Europe.

  Fial had argued for Brazil. Armies, even nations, could vanish into that vast South American wilderness.

  But that nation would not be tamed, really, till the end of the twentieth century.

  Fian had decided they should lose themselves, instead, in the witch’s cauldron of post-Civil War United States. The nineteenth century was primitive enough. No need to overdo the pioneer thing. America offered an opportunity to wait out the future with some prospect of comfort, and little chance to alter the destiny of the State.

  So why were they traveling eastward?

  The day after tomorrow, on July 6, an Austrian official, fearing capture by Prussian cavalry, would bury nearly a hundred thousand florins in gold and silver near a tortoise-shaped granite boulder at the edge of a meadow on the western slopes of the Bohemian-Moravian heights. It would remain a lost treasure till workmen unearthed it the spring of the year before the outbreak of the Uprising.

  Fian planned to borrow that treasure long enough to establish his family in America. With a little capital and Fial’s historical knowledge, waiting in style shouldn’t be difficult.

  “Marx is in England now, isn’t he?” Fial mused. “I wonder....”

  “I have a feeling that the most important thing we can do here is shun our shrines and saints.” Fian had always been irreverent of political holies, but his dedication was beyond question. Two centuries out of his own time, and still he was sacrificing for the good of the State. “The disappointment could be too much to handle.”

  Fial chuckled. “For us or him?”

  “Both, probably.”

  Fian was also a realist. The State wasn’t the workers’ paradise Marx had envisioned. Nor, he was sure, would Marx be the ivory tower Messiah created by generations of State information officers.

  “Father,” Fiala asked, “do you really think Neulist is here?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. We’ve seen no proof that he isn’t. For our own welfare we’ve got to act as if he is. Still, I don’t think it’s likely. He was quite a ways from the focus. But nothing about this seems likely. Anticipate the worst, hope for the best, survive, take the warning back the only way we can. That’s what we have to do.”

  “That lieutenant. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Yes. Dead or blown back, he’s better off. Seldom has a man been in a tighter spot. We’d better speak Czech for a while.”

  They had been forcing themselves to use German. It was a minority language in Bohemia, but the official language. It would be decades yet before Masaryk could elevate Czech to equal status. Even then, Czech would not take over completely till the fall of the Third Reich and the evacuation of the German minority.

  Now, coming to a crossroad where an endless column of Austrians were moving south, they had to take care lest they were overhead.

  The battered, dispirited vanquished of Könniggratz wouldn’t give three ragged Bohemians anything but a hard time. Ordered to wait, they spent hours reviewing that parade of defeat. Fial and Fian debated the possible courses of history had the Empire beaten the Prussians.

  For at least the twentieth time Fiala relived the final scene in the hovel at Lidice.

  What had gone wrong?

  The woman had returned with a priest, the pair chattering at one another crazily. The cleric hadn’t believed a word — till he entered the hut.

  Whatever it was about them, he had sensed it without a word having been spoken.

  Mama!... the Other had screamed.... And had slammed into her, out of mental nebulae, coming within a micron of shattering her control, of betraying all three of them.

  The creature would babble the last gram of truth if ever she got the opportunity.

  She knew, then, that there never would be peace between them. They were too alien.

  The priest’s eyes had widened startlingly. He had thrust the woman behind him, shielding
her with his body, and had compelled her retreat while brandishing his crucifix. He had stammered something about bringing in the bishop and an exorcist.

  Fian had grimly chuckled and said they had best depart before villagers gathered with torches and wooden stakes.

  They had grabbed a few things and had gotten out immediately, before the villagers could react. Fial they had had to support between them till he recovered. Only after they were a half-dozen kilometers from the village did they begin planning, once Fial, with his historical background, had recovered enough to make them fully aware of when they were.

  Where was no problem. Fial explained that Lidice had at one time been a national shrine. Later, the Central Committee had chosen it as the site of the headquarters, Agency for State Security.

  There had been no spatial displacement.

  Fial and Fian would invest man-months trying to develop a mathematical model of a chronon field capable of linearly linking a site despite all the motion of a planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe over two centuries.

  Fiala concentrated on medicine. It would be critical if they were to survive this medically primitive era. At least they hadn’t come in their own bodies, to a world where all the viruses and most of the bacteria would be alien, deadly, able to overwhelm their bodily defenses in no time.

  XIII

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  The drug war flowed into the West End for one violent evening and, while in the area following up a lead linking the activity to a case in his own district, Cash stole an hour to drop in on a physicist at Washington University,

  Dr. Charles DeKeersgeiter seemed awfully young for the high-powered reputation his secretary imputed, though he was sneaking up on forty.

  Cash had never heard of him.

  The age thing had always bothered him. Even now, though a grandparent, he unconsciously expected successful, powerful men to be much older than himself. During his early thirties he had gone through a bad crisis in which he had suffered deep depression and self-doubt each time he had heard of, or read about, someone who had become a substantial success at an age younger than he was then.