A Matter of Time

by Glen Cook

  That old man sees and hears a lot, Cash thought. And it’s hard to tell what he knows. He just sits there like he’s sleeping, and never says anything.

  “You said that before. And you told me about the girl, too. And she ain’t got nothing to do with it. You heard Norm talking to her.”

  “Maybe. And maybe she lied.”

  Cash took a savage bite from a cheeseburger. Suddenly, everybody seemed to know everything about everybody else’s business. What do they have on me? he wondered.

  Just thinking about it made him feel naked.

  “Look,” Railsback continued, “I ride these guys like a bronc-buster. And they put up with it because we get results. That makes me feel like I’ve got obligations to them. I’ve got responsibilities.”

  His father chuckled. “And that’s why the captain calls you The Prussian. You think these are the Middle Ages? Noblesse oblige, and all that? One of your tenants is in trouble, so you drop the king’s business while you save his ass? John’s past saving, Henry. He’s just another piece of the king’s business now.”

  “Who taught me?”

  “Touché. But I’m just a burned-out old has-been. You ought to know better.”

  “Pop, I can’t call it off now. We’ve come to the narrow passage. We can’t turn back.”

  “I know. And I’m proud of you. But somebody has to play Jiminy Cricket around here.”

  “And somebody has to do the tilting at windmills. Norm can’t carry that load by himself anymore.”

  “I just want you shouldn’t forget what happened when Pandora opened that box.”

  “Sure. There’s going to be a stink. Bleeding hearts up the yang-yang. The inspector’s office on us like a snake on shit. Well, I’ll give them something to sink their teeth into. I just hope those guys who make careers out of handcuffing us get an idea how hard they make it for us to protect them.”

  “They won’t even see it.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Poor Hank, Cash thought. His city, his empire, is under siege. He’s just like poor old Belisarius, rushing hither and yon in a frenetic, foredoomed effort to beat off the barbarians. And he doesn’t doubt for a minute that his Justinian, the public, will reward him as kindly for his faithful service.

  The Emperor had had Belisarius’s eyes put out and had left him to beg at Constantinople’s gates.

  And John and I, his centurions, have been wasting ourselves for months, chasing Miss Groloch. What harm could one little old lady have done the general welfare? If we had left her alone, John would be here now....

  We just had to keep on till it caught up with us, didn’t we?

  “What do you think really happened to the Kid, Pop?”

  “The truth? I think he’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wasn’t the first. Otherwise, I’d put my chips on the girl friend.”

  The phone rang. A moment later Beth announced, “Sergeant Kurland says there’s a man from the government on his way up here.”

  “What kind? “Hank asked.

  “He didn’t say. Except he wants to talk about Dr. Smiley. And he doesn’t look like he’s from the FBI.”

  “Shit, what’re we into now?”

  “No imagination, that man,” Harald had said of his boss. But he had been wrong. Dead wrong.

  Henry Railsback’s problem, in Cash’s opinion, was a surfeit, not a paucity, of imagination. Norm had been acquainted with the man since high school, when Hank had come in with one of the police public relations teams. Norm had expressed an interest in getting into police work. Hank had taken him around on a few of his patrols.

  Cash knew things he had never told John.

  Hank’s hadn’t been a happy youth. His mother had been a violent alcoholic. His father, so much like the man he himself had become, had been too timid to spend much time in the bitter trenches of the home front.

  It had taken the death of Abigail Railsback, in a wrong-way auto crash, to bring father and son together, watering a grave with tears, raising a late-blooming relationship.

  The boy Henry, even as a young officer, had hidden in the worlds of comic books, pulp magazines, serial movies, and daydreams. He had gone adventuring across landscapes of illusion because, for him, reality was a colorless desert. By taking to wife the first woman willing he had firmly established a marriage that soon had become a Sahara of misery.

  He had dreamed great dreams then, had Henry Railsback, and within his mind he still conquered nations and continents, pitched no-hitters, outdrew the fastest guns.... Though now he now longer possessed a shred of hope that such things could come to be. Time pulled down hopes and optimisms like wolves coursing round the flanks of the herd.

  And in real life he seldom risked his precious self by testing the limits of his competence. He feared it would not measure up even to his low expectations.

  Cash knew, and understood. Because Hank’s story was not much different from his own. Just longer and a little more up and down.

  In externals Hank had learned to cope by becoming an arch-conservative, a champion of null-change, a messiah of don’t-rock-the-boat.

  He didn’t want challenges. He was afraid he couldn’t handle them.

  But he could face them when he had to, or when he became angry enough.

  He was angry enough now. Harald’s disappearance had set him to flailing out in every conceivable direction, to calling in favors due, to pursuing every theory, no matter how much it might pain his prejudices and preconceptions.

  It was, in great part, an overresponse to years of frustration.

  The “government man” arrived, after having wandered half the station in search of the Homicide office.

  XXIV

  On the X Axis;

  1975

  Dr. Smiley fit his name that chill March evening. He hummed as he pottered around his basement, hunting that last overlooked detail. It was the little thing that always proved critical.

  So many years of work finally coming to culmination. So much patient investigation. So much money. He admitted it: he had had a lot of luck: the discovery of the woman’s letter when he was a boy; the chance encounter with Fian in Prague, and the equally unexpected discovery of Dunajcik. And now, despite the crudity of his equipment, his first clone had come to term perfectly. It had been out of the amniotic bath only a week, yet was taking baby food already. It was a strong, healthy beast.

  Smiley peeped through a curtain.

  Snow for sure. Maybe there was a God after all. If so, he must be a security man at heart. He was certainly bringing everything together perfectly.

  Smiley had feared he would have to put up with an adult-sized infant till next winter.

  This was going to be sweet. Much more subtle than that clumsy business at Lidice. Definitely worth the wait.

  He stared at his creation. It was a work of genius. Sheer genius considering the quality of the available hardware. The years and changes hadn’t robbed him of his talent.

  He applauded himself almost constantly. By damned, he was going to pull it off! A plot so delicate and complex that he was constantly awed by his own temerity.

  Finding the man’s nearest living relative. What a hunt that had been. Then he had had to become a respected member of her church. Finally, the time had been right to offer his medical services to the convent.... He lacked a license, but there hadn’t been many questions. It was a poor parish.

  Such joy he had known the day he had brought home the blood-stained paper towel she had used to stop a nosebleed. Cells enough for a thousand clones. With a little ingenious gene sculpture using a half-million dollars worth of equipment, he had produced a male embryo.

  Ah, the fortunes he had had to spend. But it was worth it. Definitely worth it.

  The corpse would cause an uproar so mighty that she would have to run to Fial.

  It had come to that. He had gotten nowhere in his search for the last Groloch. If only he could have gotten to Fian’s thing
s at Lidice.... But the security police would have cut him up for fish bait.

  Spooking Fiala was the only way left. She would know where to find the man — if he were alive at all.

  Smiley could not accept the possibility that one of his enemies might have escaped him through death. No. There was order and justice in this universe. The man was hiding. When the fire got intense enough, Fiala would bolt for the same cover.

  Smiley was enjoying himself hugely. For the first time since the Uprising, he was having fun.

  He heaved the clone into the power wheelchair. The other four... well, he would have to do something. After he saw how this worked out. He wouldn’t need them if it clicked. He began whistling while he dressed his homemade stalking horse.

  The wheelchair could climb steps. It was the fanciest available. He had practiced leaving the basement with a sandbag as passenger, but never with a human body. He anticipated snags.

  There were none. The chair climbed slowly but perfectly.

  He opened his garage and dragged the uninflated mini-blimp into the alley. The clone sat silently, motionlessly, the only sign of life an occasional shiver.

  Smiley had come to the tricky part. It was still early. If anyone spotted him, or his airship, before the snowfall cut visibility and stopped traffic... If he erred during his two block flight and crashed the damned blimp... If there were lightning in the storm...

  He shouldn’t have used hydrogen. Too dangerous.

  But he wouldn’t have gotten enough lift from helium. The airship was too small.

  It would work out. It had to. He had invested too much time and money and energy, had taken too many risks, to have it sour now.

  It hummed along smoothly. The gas bag filled. He manhandled his unnatural child into the gondola, clambered in himself. Everything was in place. The little single stroke engine began purring first try. The breeze fell off to nothing as the snowfall grew heavier.

  He took the ship up. It responded as perfectly as it had during test flights on the small farm he owned a hundred miles south of the city. There was one minor mishap, when the ship nudged the sky-clawing fingers of a gigantic sycamore, but the incident scarcely slowed him. He navigated by the lights of the houses, clearing their rooftops by a scant ten feet.

  Soon he was over the alley, anchored to an elm. He lowered the clone. The snow was so dense he could hardly discern the ground, though a streetlight stood fifty feet to the west.

  Excellent.

  The clone tried to walk, as its muscles had been taught. But when the breakaway harness cut loose, it collapsed.

  Smiley aimed his crude sonic weapon. The clone twitched, squirmed, died.

  They would think it had been shock.

  He flew home to await developments.

  But it didn’t work out the way he hoped. After momentary excitement, everyone lost interest. Even Fiala misinterpreted the message he had thought implicit in the body’s appearance.

  Maybe he was being too subtle.

  Well, he still had four soldiers sleeping in the womb. He would put them in one by one till the police had to lean on somebody. An apparently endless column of O’Briens had to break things open.

  Meanwhile, his detective agency watched the woman around the clock.

  The break came only after months of waiting. The warning that something unusual was in the wind came when she left her home to make a phone call by daylight. Smiley fired up his cranky old ’53 Dodge and listened on CB channel nineteen.

  His detectives did the tailing. He allowed them to guide him in.

  A funeral. For the clone.

  He acted on impulse, allowed himself to be seen.

  He hadn’t wanted to do it that way. But she just hadn’t gotten the message of the time-traveler corpse.

  He felt the electricity. She had recognized him as surely as he had recognized Dunajcik. Maybe there was some sort of personality field which grew more intense with time....

  Smiley began moving the moment he got home. There wasn’t much left to do. He had been at it for months. He boxed the remnants of his stamp collection and sent them out by UPS. He watched the truck leave with a feeling of emptiness. It might be years before he found time to relax again. It could be a long chase, police wolves nipping his heels all the way. And he had had to sell so much to finance his work.

  Those little bits of paper with their quiet story of human communication were the thing he could love, the one thing he could worry about, cherish and preserve. It was an odd sublimation, though not unusual, and even he recognized that strange twist in his character.

  The crisis had come on unexpectedly. Now there would be no time to dispose of the redundant clones, nor to dismantle and disperse the lab. He had planned to bury everything on his farm. But the detectives said the woman was in a panic, shipping out boxes and bags already. He would have to take drastic steps.

  He had the nearby service station deliver a hundred gallons of gasoline in a variety of gas cans purchased from the auto parts shop next door. A big, hot fire should erase the most important clues.

  All he needed was a head start anyway. Two days and there would be no way they could track him. He had been a step ahead for ages.

  He was in a hotel in New York City when his agency informed him that his quarry’s final destination appeared to be Rochester. She had stopped making transfers there. Within the hour he was headed north in his chartered Lear jet, nerve ends tingling.

  The final reckoning was at hand.

  XXV

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  The government man resembled those always seen in the company of presidents. Not the politicos but the hired guns, the bodyguards. Hard. Late thirties to early forties. Conservative suit and haircut. A Teutonic solidity of build, like the man on the SS recruiting poster. A face that might shatter if forced to smile. He had a string of degrees, certainly, and as certainly was more intelligent than ninety percent of the population.

  But there was a cold about him, a permafrost beneath a surface that thawed only to order.

  How come they never pick wimps? Norm wondered. You can spot these guys a mile away. They have that hard, Germanic look even when they’re as black as this clown.

  The visitor’s character, however, didn’t match Cash’s pre-judgments.

  “Lieutenant Railsback?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Here.” Hank raised a hand.

  “Hi. Name’s Tom Malone. Central Intelligence Agency.” He extended his hand.

  Railsback said, “Huh?” as he shook.

  Interestinger and interestinger, Cash thought, changing his attitude. Must be an upfront guy. Pretending a need for another cheeseburger, he moved out to Beth’s desk.

  “FBI says a man we’re interested in, the one called Smiley, is on the move.”

  Hank didn’t seem quite able to get a handle on what was happening.

  “Maybe you could fill us in a little?” Cash suggested, glancing at the letter the man offered as identification. Did it mean anything? Agency people wouldn’t carry membership cards.

  But why on earth would anyone come here pretending to be one? “Like why you’re interested?”

  “There’s been a tag on his file for twenty-five years. Suspicious alien. When you requested the records search, their computer whistled. The word drifted over to Langley that he was up to something. The timing was interesting, so my boss sent me out.”

  “We want him for arson and murder,” Railsback said.” “That’s not spy business.”

  “Could be. I’m here to find out. If I can.”

  “How come you?” Cash asked. “I mean, with all the stink about you people sticking your noses into the public’s business....”

  Malone shrugged. “I don’t make policy. I’m just a gofer. I go where they send me.”

  “Henry,” Old Man Railsback observed, “this looks like the time to play one hand washes the other.” To Malone, “We may be able to help each other.”

 
Cash agreed. “Tell us about Smiley.”

  Malone examined each of them closely. Checking for Russians? “We’ve got a fat file. Mostly speculation. It goes way back.

  “See, he did some work for us in Austria right after the war. It didn’t turn out. There’s a chance he sold us out to the Russians. We do know he did some work for them too.

  “Anyway, when somebody found out he was over here as Smiley, they started a file. It’s grown. It’s interesting, too. Especially if everything’s true.”

  Cash looked expectant. Then Railsback stirred, anticipating.

  “Mostly it’s odds and ends skimmed off the edges of other investigations. For instance, something somebody may have come across while we were backgrounding people in our nets in Eastern Europe. I can’t show you the file, but I’ll hit the high points.

  “We’re pretty sure he was born Michael Hodzâ, a miner’s son, at Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, in the late eighteen eighties. We got that from a Viennese who roomed with him before World War One, and who worked for us during the occupation.”

  “That makes him awful old to play James Bond,” Rails-back grumbled.

  “We’ve got older Czechs, Hank,” Cash reminded.

  “He does seem to age well. Around nineteen ten he turned up in Vienna. The man who knew him said he lied his way into medical school. In nineteen twelve he got defrocked, or whatever they do to med students, for performing an abortion.”

  “Aha!” Hank exploded. “What’d I tell you, Norm?”

  “For a while he bummed around with Hitler. No, really. And during World War One he seems to have deserted from both the German and Austrian armies, and may have been involved in the Czech nationalist movement. There is also a hint of a connection with the Czech Legion, which kicked up dust in Russia during their civil war. Then he turned up as a doctor in Prague. A good one, too. This Dr. Hodzâ is pretty well documented. If he’s the same man. Anyway, he was so respectable he was one of the team doctors with the Czech contingent to the Berlin Olympics.

  “When Germany invaded, though, he reverted.” Malone sketched a tale of a man playing both sides.