The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  The mob was almost upon them. An actual angry mob with pitchforks and hoes and scythes in their hands, and murder in their eyes. Her fingers were frozen and deadened. Whether by the chill wind and drizzle or by animal terror, it hardly mattered. She fumbled with the watch as Smith fired one last time before drawing his Bowie knife.

  Nothing good ever came of that.

  There was no way Cady was getting the tightly wrapped wire coil free from the larger crown on Chumley’s watch. She concentrated on the smaller winding mechanism, picking at the wire they’d used to secure it from a chance activation with her numb, shaking fingers. She was crying. They were going to die here.

  A dark blur flew over the fence, directly at Smith just as she worked loose the end of the wire loop. It punctured the tip of her thumb, but she barely felt the sting. She gritted her teeth, pushed hard and the wire slid even further into her flesh, but it did free enough length to suddenly unpeel the rest, which came away with a lot of torn skin and blood.

  She looked up.

  Smith had freed himself from an… Indian?

  An honest to goddamned Indian? In filthy buckskin pants, and not much else besides ceremonial scars and tattoos. Smith raced toward her. He’d lost his rifle and handgun, but he had the Bowie knife. It was slick with blood. He sheathed the blade as he ran for her, his arms outstretched.

  Cady held out the watch.

  They needed to be together, holding each other, when she pressed the crown.

  More of the angry villagers and hunters and another goddamned Indian had cleared the fence. Cady was having real trouble reconciling her PC feelings about the dispossession of the First Peoples of America with their apparent collective woody for dispossessing her of life and limb.

  The mob was almost within reach when Smith scooped her up, lifting her heart and spirit into the very skies with the promise of deliverance. Their hands closed around the watch together and Cady pressed once, knowing it was going to work, and they were going to escape, and discovering in the mad tumble of surprise and salvation that she truly, madly, deeply loved the shit out of this ridiculous cliché of a man.

  The second Indian rammed into her, hitting like a runaway freight train, tearing her free of Smith’s embrace just as they pressed the crown for a second time.

  Chumley’s watch worked.

  Smith winked out of existence, his face a dread white mask of horror and shock as he disappeared and Cady crashed back to the wet, bloody earth of Massachusetts, outside the village of Salem, on September 17 in the year of our Lord 1692.

  4

  Smith howled like a wounded wolf.

  He stumbled from the impact of the Indian brave slamming into Cady, losing his footing as the muddy pasture in New England became the hard and level pavement of…

  He knew not where… but folk hereabouts seemed disinclined to tolerate the mad howling of a feller deranged by sudden grief and outrage at the fates. They pointed at him, and looked around in a fashion that suggested the authorities would soon be summoned.

  How many had witnessed him suddenly appear before their eyes?

  In Smith’s experience, unless he popped like a giant Jack-in-a-box directly in front of someone—and that were indeed an occurrence to scare the terwilligers out of even the most phlegmatic of sorts—unless that happened though, most folk, especially in a crowded city, would assume you’d ‘come outta nowhere’ in the more conventional sense.

  And there was plenty of folk hereabouts, which usually meant plenty of strong men to police them. As he cast around for some hard point on which he might anchor comprehension of his changed circumstances, Smith noted that there were indeed a goodly number of fellers in what looked like uniforms. They did not look like soldiers, which likely made them officers of the police, or a gang of nattily outfitted trolley bus conductors.

  Without a trolley bus between them, he would wager the former.

  He had landed in some great city, years after his own time to judge by the motorized wagons on the carriageways, but not so far along the calendar as Cady’s day, given the familiar smell of horse dung and the clip clop of ironshod hooves. Smith spotted a wagon, pulled by draft horses, a mercantile cart belonging to the family firm of ‘Rickard and Sons, Linen and Tablewares’. He saw other wagons, and trolley cars and omnibuses. He quickly gained the impression of having landed deep inside a very great city indeed.

  Smith staggered a little, not yet believing that only moments ago he’d been holding Cady and now she was…

  Gone.

  She was gone.

  It were a mouthful of poison bitterweed to chew on, but no less true for the harsh, unpalatable taste of it.

  Deputy US Marshal John Titanic Smith squeezed his eyes shut and ground his teeth so fiercely against the need to cry out in angry self-reproach that it was possible his hind molars might just shatter. He silently seethed and secretly raged, even as he attempted to slow his racing heart and with it his runaway fears.

  He would get back to her.

  He had to get back to her.

  He had the means clenched in his white-knuckled, gore-splattered fist.

  The second watch, the one they had taken from Chumley. Smith still held it.

  But with a terrible sinking of the soul he also realized he had Mr. Wu’s timepiece too; the accursed chronometer which had got him into all this trouble, and which might have doomed Cadence to the most wretched and lonesome death.

  A shiver grew into a convulsion and ran through Smith, emerging from his very core and growing as it spread to his extremities where the deep body tremens turned into a shameful, cowardly shaking at the calamity he had wrought. Cadence was trapped many hundreds of years in the past. She had no way of escape, for he had both watches.

  She. Was. Dead.

  The hard truth of it struck him like a physical blow and he staggered again. He had landed somewhere in the 1900s. He was sure of that, if nothing else. The longer he stood here, gaping like a damn trout landed in the bottom of the rowboat, the more familiar this place seemed. He was definitely somewhere in the twentieth century, and probably in Europe.

  The same group of men—some in uniform and some not, he saw now—regarded him from across the street with what felt like mild suspicion, verging on hostility. By the way some of their number were weaving and swaying, Smith also figured them to be drunk. By the light of day! He tried to control himself and to ignore them. But however it shook out, wherever he was, he had abandoned Cadence to the perdition of a dark age, with no hope of flight. It weren’t even that she would die alone there.

  She had already died. Many hundreds of years ago. At the hands of that mob, at the end of a rope. Possibly even burned for a witch.

  “Calm yourself,” he muttered under his breath, as wary pedestrians moved to keep a safe distance between themselves and the crazy man who had appeared within their midst. The uniformed fellers were pointing at him. One of them with a bottle.

  Smith first steadied his breathing, then all of his runaway sentiments.

  He noted the time on both Wu’s and Chumley’s timepieces.

  11:53 in the morning.

  Call it an 11:52 arrival, since he’d been staggering around like a poleaxed steer for at least a minute.

  The wristwatch Cady had gifted him, a regular model with a leather strap, was still showing the time in Seattle, somewhere aways up in the future. He’d not yet had an opportunity to reset the dial as she had shown him.

  A direful ache of the heart afflicted Smith as he contemplated Cady’s disposition. Hot shame at having lost her, at having possibly killed her, hit him like a flash flood roaring through a box canyon. With a great effort of the will, akin to lifting a dead horse off of his own chest, Smith steeled himself against self-pity, and against any sense of hopelessness.

  He was not bound by the mortal conception of time.

  Cady had shown that with Miss Georgia. She had tried to explain that they were not so much advancing back and forth along an immo
vable track of years, something like a fast steam train ‘on the rails’ as she put it to him; an ‘on-the-rails-shooter’ she had called it, occasioning the faintest smile of fond recall for Smith. Instead it were her philosophy that something even stranger was afoot. As they passed from one time to another, they traveled not just between years but among and betwixt whole worlds! Alternate realities, Cady termed them.

  ‘Complications’, in the parlance of Chumley and his gang.

  As Smith understood it, which was not entirely well, the 1692 in which he had just lost—

  [ABANDONED! FORSAKEN!]

  —Ms Cady remained as close and immediate a reality as the granite flagstones under the heels of his boots. She was alive there, if not here, and she was depending on him.

  He hardened his wits against confusion and despair. He searched for the nearest street sign. He must fix this exact location in his memory, for he would return to it in a shade less than twenty-four hours, resolved to return to that field and to his companion. He would save her from whatever peril presented itself. And by God he would kill any man who stood in his way.

  Smith made sure of his footing and took a few careful steps towards the nearest cross street. The sign post there revealed that he had arrived near the intersection of Ebert Street and...

  No, he thought, catching himself.

  The sign post of the smaller street read Ebertstraße.

  Thanks to the watch he’d translated it to ‘Ebert Street’ without discernible effort or intent.

  Smith felt himself finally touch down for real in this place, as though he’d jumped into the city from an invisible platform floating just a few inches above it. Both his feet and his mind found solid ground at last.

  Then the ground wobbled under his feet.

  A manhole cover. He stood atop an imperfectly seated manhole cover on the sidewalk in front of a store selling wallpaper and paint. Smith committed the scene to memory, before he took inventory.

  He had the possibles bag Cady had insisted he pack in accordance to her instructions. He’d lost his rifle and pistol in the struggle with that first Indian brave who came at him over the fence, but he still had his knife, safely hidden in its scabbard, concealed beneath the long hem of his outer coat. His hands, unfortunately, were smeared with blood.

  He would need to clean them off as soon as practicable. This did not look the sort of frontier shambletown a feller could get about with another feller’s innards decorating his mitts. Not without fear of consequence. The city was huge. Not in the way that Cady’s Seattle, or New York or one a them bizarre and unsettling places in the far future were huge, reaching miles into the heavens themselves. No, this place was built low to the ground, but it felt heavy and vast. The clamor of millions of souls going about their various industries and undertakings was a perpetual uproar. Even without the crash and rumble of manufacturies and the drone of automobiles, simply having so many people all piled on top of each other, yammering and shouting to have their way, gave rise to a ceaseless hubbub and general growl that Smith did not much care for. He sorely preferred the quietude of the open range.

  He did wonder how Cadence would go without a translator, but that thought opened the way to a host of doubts and questions and myriad fears for her safety swooping down on him like giant black bats. He willed the phantoms of his fear to be gone. This was no time for over-thinking the heretofores and whereupons and all of their dependent terminations. Only swift and resolute action now could carry him on to fortune.

  John Titanic Smith shucked the pack a little higher on his shoulder, hiding his bloodstained hands in his coat pockets. It was a hot day, and he was overdressed. He would need to find somewhere to circle his personal wagon train.

  Following the merest trace of a hunch, he walked a-ways toward the end of Ebertstraße. The smaller street gave out onto the larger and much busier thoroughfare of Königgrätzer Straße.

  He nodded.

  He knew where he was, to whence he had returned.

  He was in Berlin and it was almost certainly the summer of 1934.

  He would need money. Not much, but it had to be local currency that he could spend on food and a night’s lodgings. For a wonder it was at least half of some relief to assume himself to be back in Berlin. He recalled an uneventful, even pleasant sojourn in this place not more than a week or so back. It had been the penultimate stop before arriving in Seattle and encountering Ms Cady.

  After some fruitless moments of patting and searching the inside of his dungaree pockets, he came up with the small stainless steel fire-lighter he’d acquired on that previous visitation. He’d thought the gas-filled lighter with its ever reliable flame a marvel then. Now it held the promise of redemption, or leastways a reasonable facsimile.

  Smith turned the tiny artifact over in his hand, reading the words etched into the casing.

  * * *

  The Wild West Bar.

  Haus Vaterland.

  Potsdamer Platz.

  * * *

  This grand square before him was probably Potsdamer Platz. He hadn’t bothered to learn the name when last he was here, but he had moseyed on through it to this Wild West Bar in some colossal pleasure palace known locally as Haus Vaterland, or Fatherland House.

  The square was a gigantic open space, impressive even to Smith, who’d spent most of his life under the big skies of the western rangelands. Five great boulevards poured motorized and horse-drawn traffic into the plaza, which was surrounded on all sides by what he took to be noble palaces and lordly mansions. Europe was always full of lords and nobles, and in all eras they were a laydown certainty to have all the nicest digs. The noonday sun was high overhead, and it glinted fiercely from the bright steel trim of the engine-driven carriages. He spied the building he was looking for a-ways to the southwest. A five- or six-level structure of sandstone and masonry, recalling the image of a spearhead aimed at the heart of the square. The building was crowned by a large copper dome, glowing dull red in the summer light.

  Fatherland House.

  Smith had acquired his tiny mechanical fire-lighter from one of the many bars there, a very unusual cowboy sort of place, which he had occasioned upon by mere good fortune when searching for accommodations. He’d simply followed the crowds of people streaming into and out of this Fatherland House at all hours of the day. Cafes and saloons lined the pavement outside where city folk took their leisure, or at this hour their lunch, at hundreds of tables draped with white cotton napery, possibly even supplied by the firm of Rickard and Sons. It had seemed to Smith the sort of place a feller could buy himself a bottle and a few hours of shut-eye in a clean cot. Instead, he’d perched most of the night on a stool in this Wild West Bar, drinking tankards of German ale that he would readily admit stood in superior relation to the beer he’d been raised on, as God’s own communion wine did to old polecat piss strained through the britches of a syphilitic harlot.

  Smith set his course for a return to that bar, aiming to blend in and play the homesick Yankee as he had previously done with quiet and commendable success. He made it only a few steps down the sidewalk before stuttering in his passage, remembering he had no spendable funds. For the want of his drinking money the last time he’d been here, Smith had dickered away some celestial baubles and a hand-printed manuscript he had from the court of the Great Khan, but that particular gambit was no longer open to him. He’d done drunk those baubles already. Nor did he dare attempt barter with any of the doodads or gadgetry with which Ms Cady had outfitted him. No surer way did he know to attract the attention of the damnable Apprentices—or for that matter the secret service operatives of the local potentates—than to go salting the marketplace with inventions and arcana that would mystify and befuddle even the pointiest-headed professors of the contemporary technologic arts. No me-pods for the Khan, or Netflicking for these German fellers.

  Worrying that he still held the attention of the uniformed flunkies across the way, Smith resumed his course to the southwest,
as casual and blameless a wanderer as you might hope to meet. No sense in becoming entangled with the locals beyond the necessity of securing food and shelter. He did not look back over his shoulder, for that was the tell of a man in fear of pursuit. He lengthened his stride but not the pace of his steps. A big man, he could cover a lot of trail in a short time that way. In his rawhide jacket and battered Stetson he was not dressed to blend in, but he did the next best thing; he strode along this Königgrätzer Straße with the air of a feller who had just paid out a mortgage on the whole damn borough and every stick within it. Presently he came to a stone drinking trough where he was able to quickly wash the blood from his hands. All the while Smith’s eyes swept the trail ahead for the sort of merchant he most needed, a dealer in coins or precious metals.

  He still had some of the gold nuggets he’d taken from Mr. Wu after burying the poor Chinaman back in the Territories. But he would prefer not to dip into that stash. Cady had given him to understand he’d wasted a goodly portion of the gold in poor trades already. The strip of small gold and silver ingots hidden in a sock at the bottom of his pack was just as easily exchanged for cash money and Ms Cady had purchased the ingots specifically for this purpose. The difficult part of this would be finding a trader, not effecting the trade. Even before his grand misadventure, Smith had been well used to haggling down for a good price on his comestibles, as often bartering as paying for them. But having no knowledge of Berlin, beyond the location of one good if peculiar bar, he was not sure where to begin. Ms Cady had been the one to seek out a professional jeweler in old London town, and to use the funds they raised from the sale of a gold nugget there to outfit themselves at Bumper Harrison’s colonial supply store. Smith intended to imitate her actions, rather than following his usual course of simply dropping a gold rock on a counter somewhere and asking what goods and services he might have for it.