Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  It wasn’t as easy to shrug off the feeling that he was in deep trouble with Adams, who had reappeared with his typewriter-sized tape recorder within minutes of being called. By then Wallace had had a chance to rerun the transit in his head. He reached the same conclusion this time as he had before—he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But Adams was snapping and snarling from the first word, as he had been downstairs even before Wallace began his report. It was as though he’d brought some standing grievance into the room with him, one he could only work out by nailing Wallace to the wall.

  Every question was an accusation. Wallace had violated transit rules. When Wallace pointed out there were no rules covering the situation he had found, Adams declared he had violated “accepted procedure.” When Wallace argued that he had followed accepted procedure, Adams pronounced that he had failed to use “commonsense good judgment.”

  He could not win. Adams was not debriefing him—he was building a case against him, before he’d even heard the whole story. Bat the tenor got worse, not better, after the whole story was told. When Adams heard about O’Brien, he raged over losing one of three folly softened drops in the city. When he heard about Chambers, it became almost impossible to talk to him.

  After an hour of it, it dawned on Wallace that Adams wasn’t really talking to him at all. He was performing for the tape recorder, doing everything possible to color in his favor the impression anyone who reviewed a transcript would form.

  That made a little more sense, but not enough. Finally Wallace reached out and switched off the recorder. “What’s with you, Charlie? I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “I’ve never had a runner do this to me before.”

  “Come off it. The only sweetheart runs are the ones that don’t leave the gate house,” he said, thinking of the work of the low-status ferrymen, who backpacked documents forty pounds at a time between the outstations and home. “What’s really going on here? Are you up for review or something?”

  Adams stared coldly at Wallace. “For your information, Ops is thinking about closing down Red Section.”

  “Because of my run?”

  “No,” Adams said, relaxing fractionally. “I was told two days ago. They’ve sent a proposal upstairs to the director. They don’t think they’re getting enough out of Red for the trouble and manpower. There’s a lot of talk about it being too dangerous.”

  “So that’s why Hastings was there. Well, I know a lot of people who wouldn’t cry if they did close Red.”

  “Including yourself, I take it.”

  “It is a mess over there.”

  “So you can be proud when it happens. We’ll get you a T-shirt that says ‘I killed Red Section.’ ”

  “Charlie, are you worried about your job?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “Well, hell, Charlie, don’t take it out on me. Anyway, they’ll find a place for you.”

  “A place at the bottom of somebody else’s pecking order.”

  Wallace sighed. “You know, if you’d just said something up front, I could have helped. I don’t suppose you want to spin those reels backward and start over?”

  “No,” Adams said, reaching for the machine. “Next time stay put and let us handle the problem.”

  Ruthann Wallace surveyed the living room in dismay. It was impossible to impose order on a house containing a three-year-old. Eventually she would believe that firmly enough to stop trying.

  At least there was some point to cleaning here in the Block, she thought as she started gathering up Katie’s detritus. She had lived in more than one home where all you could accomplish by keeping the contents tidy was reveal the fundamental shabbiness of the surroundings.

  She remembered all too vividly the last place she and Rayne had lived—a second-floor apartment over a family laundry in Bentonville, Indiana. The rickety wooden stairs out back. The canted, weatherworn balcony that scared guests back inside. The humpback ridge down the middle of the kitchen floor where one stalwart beam had resisted sagging.

  There had been a hot spot in the middle of the living room floor from a dryer duct somewhere below, usually marked by the curled-up yellow form of Rayne’s cat, Rufus. When they came home each night, they had to throw the windows open to rid the apartment of the smell of bleach, soap, and solvents.

  Medford Federal Housing Center—better known as North Block—was a different story. Just five years old, it contained three floors of neat, well-maintained apartments. True, the apartments were small, and the Wallaces occupied one of the smallest—they actually had less space here than above the laundry.

  But the layout was intelligent enough that Ruthann barely noticed. And there were amenities. Three rooms had carpeted floors, there was a recirculating air system almost as good as air-conditioning, and they rarely heard their neighbors on either side or above.

  None of those features accounted for a waiting list which was, in light of the rate that vacancies were appearing, three years long. For the building was in fact a shelter, the topmost floor fifteen feet underground. The central access core with the community rooms, clinic, and food caches was topped by a six-foot-thick cap of reinforced concrete, angled and sculpted to deflect and diffuse the shock waves of a nuclear air burst as near as a quarter-mile away.

  It was a good place to live, friendly, safe. Security was good enough upstairs that most people left their doors unlocked, or even open. The children in a given nexus treated the whole corridor as their playground, and Ruthann had made friends among the mothers in hers.

  But sometimes she wished for a window—just a little window, to catch a fresh breeze from, to let in the warmth of the afternoon sun. A window to stand at when Rayne was late and she was bustling about the apartment after Katie could no longer occupy her mind—

  In the morning, Wallace was obliged to repeat parts of his story for an audience consisting of Charlie Adams, Ron Hastings and the Red Section chief, an old-line CIA man named Gradison. The place was a Red Section conference room, and this time it was Gradison who led the questioning.

  “All right,” Gradison said finally, nearly three hours after they had begun. “I think we have the picture. Wait here, would you, Rayne?”

  They left him alone in the room for several minutes, and when the door opened again it was Gradison alone who reappeared.

  “Rayne, I’m afraid I’m going to have to lift your Red certification,” Gradison said. “But I want you to know this is not punitive. I’m trying to protect you and our operation there. We don’t know how aware the Philadelphia police are about what happened or how hard they’re going to be looking for you. If it turns out you’re right, that you covered your exposure, then maybe a month from now I’ll be able to bring you back.”

  A month from now there may not be a Red Section, Wallace thought glumly. “Do I stay Grade 3, sir?”

  “Worried about your checks?”

  “My wife will be.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll suspend your papers instead of lifting them. That’ll keep you at G3, at least until we review your case a month from now,” Gradison said, resting his folded hands across his round belly. “But you might want to use that time to work on your certification for one of the other alternities, just in case.”

  Sure, Wallace thought. All I have to do is get a tan and learn Arabic for White, or lose five inches and turn slope-eye for Green. “Thank you, sir.”

  Gradison grunted. “Just trying to be fair. What happened to you wasn’t your fault.”

  It was a grudging vindication, little more than politeness, but Wallace seized on it gladly. “That’s how I see it. I was beginning to wonder if I’d get anyone to agree.”

  Gradison grunted again, reaching for the doorknob with sausagelike fingers. “Anyway, you’re released. Call me in a month and I’ll tell you where you stand.”

  The Guard’s training and administration center occupied more than half of the Tower’s base sec
tion, including all of floors three through ten. With more than three hundred runners, sixty crackers, and twenty instructors on the roster, they needed that much space and more. Compared to the tranquillity which ruled above the fifteenth floor, the hallways in Guard country bustled like downtown sidewalks.

  Which meant that there was no way for Wallace to get from the Red Section offices to the runners’ change-out room without crossing paths with any number of fellow Guardsmen. Not eager to talk to anyone, Wallace fended off greetings with nods and the lifted hand.

  But in the change-out room, he encountered a face for which different rules applied. “Hey, Jason.”

  Jet-haired and lithe, Jason March was unembarrassedly sitting naked on the bench by his gray steel lockerlike wardrobe, polishing a wing-tip shoe. March was the first friend Wallace had made in the Guard. He had been a G2 when Wallace was a trainee. Thrown together by the soon-to-be-abandoned mentor system, they found themselves united by their love of combo music and dark beer and their virulent hatred for the Boston Celtics.

  March was G5 now, and his growing command of Russian and Arabic kept his schedule full with Black and White Section assignments. That meant that Wallace crossed paths with him less often, mostly in the change-out room, and one or the other of them seemed to miss their Thursday night Notes Club “date” about half the time. But friends they still were.

  “Hey, Rayne,” March called back, looking up from his labors. “I heard you came back from your run in several pieces.”

  “I came back in one piece,” Wallace said, spinning the dial on his closet. “But I felt a bit subdivided when Adams got done with me.”

  March chuckled. “My informant must have confused the two.”

  “You inbound or out?”

  “Out.”

  “I guess I can’t interest you in a beer at Reggie’s.”

  Shaking his head, March said, “Too early, anyway.”

  Wallace checked the watch he had just retrieved from the smallest of the three compartments inside his locker. “A little, maybe. Where to?”

  “Yellow. Domestic drop.”

  While he slipped his wedding ring back on his finger, Wallace took a second look at the clothes hanging from March’s valet. Jacket and tie, pale blue dress shirt—that almost always meant a Yellow puddle-jump.

  The Alternity Yellow gate house was abandoned Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, on the North Sea. For obvious reasons of logistics the field station had to be elsewhere. For less obvious reasons it was in lower Manhattan, though the Guard did operate a small substation in London.

  To get from the gate house to the field station meant a five-hour flight on one of the needle-nose Lockheed screamers, and a runner had to look the part of someone who could afford the trip. March wouldn’t even have to wear a pouch on this run—Yellow Section would have a leather briefcase waiting for him.

  “I guess that means scratch Thursday.”

  “ ’Fraid so. I left a message for you upstairs. But let’s do something this weekend, huh? How about Saturday?”

  “Sure,” Wallace said, closing his wardrobe. “I’ll look at the papers. Somebody worth hearing ought to be playing.” He edged away, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. “Have a good run.”

  He took the long way out, past the door to the chute and the oak-backed brass plaque that hung on beside it. The plaque called him back, and he paused in front of it to scan the single column of names.

  There could be no monuments to fallen Guardsmen outside the walls of the Tower, so they remembered their own inside them. The Guard had neither seal nor motto, and so the plaque carried a legend only: “In Memory Always With Us.” Mawkish and uninspired, and yet somehow enough to stab straight through to the place where disquieting emotions lived.

  Thirty-one names, but room enough left for twice that number. Which made the plaque not only a memorial, but also a warning. It was the last thing the runners saw before starting down the chute, the direct corridor to gate control. Even those who chose not to look at it saw it in their mind’s eye in the process.

  Thirty-one names, soon to be thirty-two. He remembered Brenda Hilley as a plumpish girl given to white turtleneck sweaters and silver and turquoise Indian jewelry. Pleasant smile. A screening analyst, he seemed to remember. He wondered if she’d volunteered for the transit or been volunteered by the stationmaster. Wondered if it mattered.

  Thirty-one names. He ran a fingertip across the metal where Brenda’s name would be added, leaving a faint chromatic streak of body oil on the gleaming brass. It seemed a desecration, and he hastily rubbed the streak away with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “In Memory Always With Us,” it said, but that was a lie. No one talked about the lost, even those who’d known them. It was considered bad form, maybe even bad luck. The people whose names appeared on the plaque lived on only as an uncomfortable reminder that the maze killed.

  For, except for the odd mole or two killed in a random traffic accident or caught up in a riot, everyone on the list had disappeared between gates. Crackers lost probing the maze, runners who never completed a routine transit, ferrymen who failed to deliver themselves and their packages to the other side. Gee, R.W., you could have been one of the exceptions—

  Wallace shivered and tore himself away before his imagination put his own name on the plaque. “Ready for the engraver.” That was the Guard’s joking euphemism for death. It was an honor he had come close to earning himself, an honor he could do without.

  For more than twelve hours, the suggestion that he had screwed up had been eating at Wallace. As he left the change-out room, the only way he could think to rid himself of the bilious taste of that thought was to get a good run under his belt, as soon as possible.

  The dispatcher on duty behind the assignment desk was Deborah King, a familiar if not friendly face. More than a year ago Wallace had made the mistake of innocently flirting her up with his wedding ring resting in his locker. The scolding she had given him when she discovered he was married had been hot enough that his ears still burned when he thought about it.

  It had been impossible, then or since, to persuade her that he had not been looking to cheat on his wife. Worse, at a yard party a few weeks later at Jason’s, Deborah had made a point of seeking out and befriending Ruthann. Seeing them sitting together, but not knowing what they were talking about, had made for a miserable afternoon.

  Which was exactly what Deborah intended. “I didn’t tell her anything,” she had said just before leaving. “I just thought you needed to squirm a little.” The only comfort Wallace could take was that her ferocious reaction meant that she might have said yes if the proposition had come. And there was at least some balm for the ego in that.

  “ ’Lo, Deb,” he said, approaching the desk. “21618—Red released me. Mark me clear and tell me what you have.”

  “Some kind of release. Your Red certification’s been suspended.”

  “I know. It’s protective, not punitive. I’m still okay on Blue and Yellow. What’s the rotation look like?”

  “Normal. Eight or ten names ahead of you on each. Not that—”

  Eight or ten names was a two-hour wait, at least. “I can do ferry runs.”

  “Not that it matters,” she repeated. “You also have a three-day medical hold from Dr. Glass.”

  “What?”

  She reached for a clipboard and showed him the order.

  “So what does this mean?” he asked, glancing at the paper and looking up. Nice eyes—

  “It means you’re going home. Did you even call your wife last night?”

  “No,” he admitted, realizing.

  “Figures. Well, you’ve got a couple of days to make it up to her. Give the little one a hug for me.”

  That was the most annoying fallout of all, Deborah King’s self-appointed, proprietary interest in the happiness of the Wallace household. But this time Wallace barely noticed, realizing for the first time how close he had come to never seeing his daughte
r Katie again.

  “Yeah,” he said with a crooked smile. “I’ll try to work an extra one in.”

  ANOMALY REPORT 23

  Transit Log Number: 61

  Transit Date: March 18, 1968

  Transit Agent: Donald Freepace

  Abstracted from Transit Report 061868-8

  Who else was out there? Were you running some sort of test?… I wasn’t alone, that’s what I mean. Yes, on the return. I was right in the channel, looked on the gate, and all of a sudden there was something between me and the gate. I could feel it. I could feel the break. No, I didn’t see anything. A shadow, the most it was was a shadow. How could I describe it anyway? It’s not normal sight. It’s not the kind of seeing we do out hare. Not like you standing between me and the door. I see you instead of the door. This was different. Just—a break. I stopped… I don’t know, five minutes. It felt like five minutes.… Of course I was scared. Every time I go through the gate I get the heebies. It’s so fucking weird, coming out and seeing streets jammed with big cars.… I don’t have any idea what it was if it wasn’t someone from here. Maybe that’s what happens when you put two of us in the same corridor. But if it wasn’t you, then I don’t know. And I don’t want to think about it, either. Maybe we’re not the only ones who know about this… No, I don’t want to think about that. Brian’s been missing for three weeks. How could anybody stand to be in there for three weeks? That’s what scares me the most you know? Getting lost in there, and never being able to find my way out. Bad enough when I think about being alone. I’d be worse if I had to think I wouldn’t be… Just a shadow, a break in the corridor. I wish you could tell me what it was.

  Investigator’s Report

  No corroboration is available. Stress-induced psychosis is inferred. (Possible case study for postulated transit anxiety syndrome.) Nonpunitive transfer to alternative assignment ordered. Psychological division follow-up recommended.

  Eleanor Emerson