Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  And so it was done—apparently without mishap. Abercrombie stood in the machine, looking out over the familiar scene of the workshop. He had the contacts file with him, which was what he had gone to get, along with the original master notebook as a bonus. He’d had thoughts of maybe returning that to its proper place in the private-office safe before returning, but time had run out on him and that had proved impossible. Now, for what it was worth, backups of both were secure in their hiding place from the past.

  There were still loose ends of unanswered questions dangling in his mind, but all in all everything seemed to be working itself out. He didn’t pretend yet to understand precisely how.

  Zaltzer had hoped to be waiting for him when he got back, but in view of the imprecision still bedeviling the process, his absence was understandable. Abercrombie climbed down from the machine and drew in several deep breaths of relief. He hadn’t realized how tense the undertaking had made him. He let himself out the rear door of the workshop, went back to his private office, locked the door, and stowed the two sets of documents in the safe. That essential task accomplished, he sank down into the chair at the desk to unwind. A vague feeling of something not being quite right had been nagging from somewhere below consciousness since he came out of the machine, but just at this moment he was too exhausted to give it much attention. His mind drifted; he might even have dozed . . .

  Until the muffled sound of something being moved along the corridor outside brought him back to wakefulness. By the time he had sat up and let his head clear, the noise had gone. He rose from the chair and was about go to the door and check, when his gaze traveled across to the window and he caught the view outside. He stared in confusion for a moment, then crossed to the window to be sure. The old customs building along the waterfront was intact . . . Yet it was supposed to have burned down three months ago. And then he realized what was wrong that he had noticed but not registered: There weren’t any security people around the lab. This was no minor error. He hadn’t returned to anywhere near the time he was supposed to be in. So when, exactly, was this?

  Infuriatingly, nothing in his office would tell him. He came out into the corridor and headed for the front of the building, either to seek some sign in his other office or find out from Mrs. Crawford, but stopped dead the moment he entered the workshop area. The time machine, in which he had arrived only a short while ago, was gone. His mind reeled, unable to deal with what seemed an insurmountable hurdle. But as he forced himself to think, the pieces of what it had to mean came together. If the customs building was still there, this had to be before it was demolished—pretty obviously. Then this could only be the day that he had been in the public office, heard the strange noise, come back to investigate, found the machine unattended, and stolen it. The noise that aroused him had been himself moving it to the freight elevator.

  He thought back rapidly, trying to recreate the sequence of events. Knowing what he did, if he moved quickly enough, there would be time yet to intercede.

  He ran back through to the rear stairs, started down, and then halted as a cautionary note sounded in his head. After all he had been through to get them, would it be wise to leave the notebook and contacts file here? No. Until he was a lot clearer about this whole business, he wasn’t going to let them out of his sight.

  He ran back to the office and removed them from the safe. Then, deciding it was too late to intercept himself in the loading bay—and in any case, he didn’t want a scene involving two of him in front of the service people there—and knowing that he still had his keys, he raced instead to the front lot, where he parked his car.

  He screeched out onto the waterfront boulevard without stopping and saw the truck carrying the tarp-covered time machine exiting from the rear gate a few car lengths in front of him . . . a split second before a horn blared, brakes squealed, and something hit him in the rear. And that was when the police cruiser that just had to be there turned on its siren and pulled him over. He remembered it too late, while he sat through the ritual of insurance information being exchanged, radio check of his license number and record, and the ponderous writing out of the ticket. By the time he got moving again, the truck had long since disappeared.

  Nervous about the time now, instead of going around the long route to the side entrance that the truck had taken, he drove straight up to the front of the building, leaped out, and ran inside, in the process knocking over a pile of steel drums just inside the door and causing enough noise to make any thought now at concealing his presence a joke. But by this time he didn’t care. All that mattered was getting to the machine.

  “Wait!” Brady, interrupted, sounding alarmed. “There’s more of ‘em breaking in upstairs.”

  “It’s a bust,” Yellow One told him. “Get yourself out!”

  Brady looked around at the boxes of gelignite, HMX, PETN, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives, along with the cases of detonator caps and fuses. “But the stuff . . . It’s taken months,” he protested.

  “It’s all lost anyway. What we don’t need is them getting you to talk too. Get yourself out!”

  Brady nodded, snapped off the phone, and pulled himself together. The fastest exit was up a service ladder to the front entrance. He emerged without encountering anyone and found a car right there with the keys left in. There was no arguing with a gift from Providence like that. He jumped in and accelerated out onto the boulevard, failing, in his haste, to wonder why, if the place had been busted, there were no other vehicles in the vicinity.

  While down in the cellars, surrounded by explosives, incendiaries, and sensitive detonating devices, Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie started up the time machine that emitted varichron radiation. .

  One thing that Yellow One did want from the ruins, however, if it could be retrieved, was the group cell leader’s book of codes, contacts, command structure, and other information that could prove disastrous if the law-enforcement agencies got their hands on it. The next night, after the fire crews and demolition teams had left, Brady went back down to the place where the documents had been concealed. He found a package in one of the recesses beneath some old pipes as described, but then he was forced to hide when he heard someone else coming. From behind cover he watched as the same figure whom he had observed wheeling the strange machine down from the truck the previous day entered and extracted another package from one of the other recesses. The contents didn’t seem to be what he wanted when he examined them with a flashlight, and he became agitated until he located yet another package, checked it, and then left taking both of them. Brady followed him back up and looked out in time to see him depart in the same car that Brady had “borrowed” the day before, just before the building went up. Brady reported all the details when he handed over the package that he had recovered.

  But it turned out to be the wrong one, containing lists of names and details of media people, scientists, political figures, and others who were of no interest to the group. The stranger, therefore, must have taken the group’s code and organization book. With the help of a friend in the police department, they traced the car’s number from the records of stolen vehicles. It turned out to belong to a professor who worked in the university Annexe nearby.

  The organization sent a couple of its bagmen into the premises to see if they might be able to uncover something further, one posing as a repairman, the other under cover of an arranged power outage, but the security arrangements they came up against were astonishingly strict for a university environment.

  Eventually, the leaders gave it up as a lost cause.

  All of it very odd. It turned out that there hadn’t been a police bust at the old warehouse that day, after all. Brady often puzzled about the professor, because he had assumed him to be the body that was found in the ruins. In his own mind he was sure there had been nobody else there. Yet there the professor was, still coming and going for months afterward. Brady decided he probably never would figure it out.

  BESPOKE />
  Genevieve Valentine

  Disease Control had sprayed while Petra was asleep, and her boots kicked up little puffs of pigment as she crunched across the butterfly wings to the shop.

  Chronomode (Fine Bespoke Clothing of the Past, the sign read underneath) was the most exclusive Vagabonder boutique in the northern hemisphere. The floors were real dateverified oak, the velvet curtains shipped from Paris in a Chinese junk during the six weeks in ‘58 when one of the Vagabonder boys slept with a Wright brother and planes hadn’t been invented.

  Simone was already behind the counter arranging buttons by era of origin. Petra hadn’t figured out until her fourth year working there that Simone didn’t live upstairs, and Petra still wasn’t convinced.

  As Petra crossed the floor, an oak beam creaked.

  Simone looked up and sighed. “Petra, wipe your feet on the mat. That’s what it’s for.”

  Petra glanced over her shoulder; behind her was a line of her footprints, mottled purple and blue and gold.

  The first client of the day was the heiress to the O’Rourke fortune. Chronomode had a history with the family; the first one was the boy, James, who’d slept with Orville Wright and ruined Simone’s drape delivery par avion. The O’Rourkes had generously paid for shipment by junk, and one of the plugs they sent back with James was able to fix things so that the historic flight was only two weeks late. Some stamps became very collectible, and the O’Rourkes became loyal clients of Simone’s.

  They gave a Vagabonding to each of their children as twenty-firstbirthday presents. Of course, you had to be twenty-five before you were allowed to Bore back in time, but somehow exceptions were always made for O’Rourkes, who had to fit a lot of living into notoriously short life spans.

  Simone escorted Fantasy O’Rourke personally to the center of the shop, a low dais with a three-frame mirror. The curtains in the windows were already closed by request; the O’Rourkes liked to maintain an alluring air of secrecy they could pass off as discretion.

  “Ms. O’Rourke, it’s a pleasure to have you with us,” said Simone. Her hands, clasped behind her back, just skimmed the hem of her black jacket.

  Never cut a jacket too long, Simone told Petra her first day. It’s the first sign of an amateur.

  “Of course,” said Ms. O’Rourke. “I haven’t decided on a destination, you know. I thought maybe Victorian England.”

  From behind the counter, Petra rolled her eyes. Everyone wanted Victorian England.

  Simone said, “Excellent choice, Ms. O’Rourke.”

  “On the other hand, I saw a historian the other day in the listings who specializes in eighteenth-century Japan. He was delicious.” She smiled. “A little temporary surgery, a trip to Kyoto’s geisha district. What would I look like then?”

  “A vision,” said Simone through closed teeth.

  Petra had apprenticed at a tailor downtown, and stayed there for three years afterward. She couldn’t manage better, and had no hopes.

  Simone came in two days after a calf-length black pencil skirt had gone out (some pleats under the knee needed mending).

  Her gloves were black wool embroidered with black silk thread. Petra couldn’t see anything but the gloves around the vast and smoky sewing machine that filled the tiny closet where she worked, but she knew at once it was the woman who belonged to the trim black skirt.

  “You should be working in my shop,” said Simone. “I offer superior conditions.”

  Petra looked over the top of the rattling machine. “You think?”

  “You can leave the attitude here,” said Simone, and went to the front of the shop to wait.

  Simone showed Petra her back office (nothing but space and light and chrome), the image library, the labeled bolts of cloth—1300, 1570, China, Flanders, Rome.

  “What’s the shop name?” Petra asked finally.

  “Chronomode,” Simone said, and waited for Petra’s exclamation of awe. When none came, she frowned. “I have a job for you,” she continued, and walked to the table, tapping the wood with one finger. “See what’s left to do. I want it by morning, so there’s time to fix any mistakes.”

  The lithograph was a late nineteenth-century evening gown, nothing but pleats, and Petra pulled the fabrics from the library with shaking hands.

  Simone came in the next day, tore out the hem of the petticoat, and sewed it again by hand before she handed it over to the client.

  Later Petra ventured, “So you’re unhappy with the quality of my work.”

  Simone looked up from a Byzantine dalmatic she was sewing with a bone needle. “Happiness is not the issue,” she said, as though Petra was a simpleton. “Perfection is.”

  That was the year the mice disappeared.

  Martin Spatz, the actor, had gone Vagabonding in 8000 BC and killed a wild dog that was about to attack him. (It was a blatant violation of the rules— you had to be prepared to die in the past, that was the first thing you signed on the contract. He went to jail over it. They trimmed two years off because he used a stick, and not the pistol he’d brought with him.)

  No one could find a direct connection between the dog and the mice, but people speculated. People were still speculating, even though the mice were long dead.

  Everything went, sooner or later; the small animals tended to last longer than the large ones, but eventually all that was left were some particularly hardy plants, and the butterflies. By the next year the butterflies were swarming enough to block out the summer sun, and Disease Control began to intervene.

  The slow, steady disappearance of plants and animals was the only lasting problem from all the Vagabonding. Plugs were more loyal to their mission than the people who employed them, and if someone had to die in the line of work they were usually happy to do it. If they died, glory; if they lived, money.

  Petra measured a plug once (German Renaissance, which seemed a pointless place to visit, but Petra didn’t make the rules). He didn’t say a word for the first hour. Then he said, “The cuffs go two inches past the wrist, not one and a half.”

  The client came back the next year with a yen for Colonial America. He brought two different plugs with him.

  Petra asked, “What happened to the others?”

  “They did their jobs,” the client said, turned to Simone. “Now, Miss Carew, I was thinking I’d like to be a British commander. What do you think of that?”

  “I would recommend civilian life,” Simone said. “You’ll find the Bore committee a little strict as regards impersonating the military.”

  When Petra was very young she’d taken her mother’s sewing machine apart and put it back together. After that it didn’t squeak, and Petra and her long thin fingers were sent to the tailor’s place downtown for apprenticeship.

  “At least you don’t have any bad habits to undo,” Simone had said the first week, dropping The Dressmaker’s Encyclopaedia 1890 on Petra’s worktable. “Though it would behoove you to be a little ashamed of your ignorance. Why—” Simone looked away and blew air through her teeth. “Why do this if you don’t respect it?”

  “Don’t ask me—I liked engines,” Petra said, opening the book with a thump.

  Ms. O’Rourke decided at last on an era (eighteenth-century Kyoto, so the historian must have been really good looking after all), and Simone insisted on several planning sessions before the staff was even brought in for dressing.

  “It makes the ordering process smoother,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m easy to please,” said Ms. O’Rourke.

  Simone looked at Petra. Petra feigned interest in buttons.

  Petra was assigned to the counter, and while Simone kept Ms. O’Rourke in the main room with the curtains discreetly drawn, Petra spent a week rewinding ribbons on their spools and looking at the portfolios of Italian armor-makers. Simone was considering buying a set to be able to gauge the best wadding for the vests beneath.

  Petra looked at the joints, imagined the pivots as the arm moved back and forth
. She wondered if the French hadn’t had a better sense of how the body moved; some of the Italian stuff just looked like an excuse for filigree.

  When the gentleman came up to the counter he had to clear his throat before she noticed him.

  She put on a smile. “Good morning, sir. How can we help you?”

  He turned and presented his back to her—three arrows stuck out from the left shoulder blade, four from the right.

  “Looked sideways during the Crusades,” he said proudly. “Not recommended, but I sort of like them. It’s a souvenir. I’d like to keep them. Doctors said it was fine, nothing important was pierced.”

  Petra blinked. “I see. What can we do for you?”

  “Well, I’d really like to have some shirts altered,” he said, and when he laughed the tips of the arrows quivered like wings.

  “You’d never catch me vagabonding back in time,” Petra said that night.

  Simone seemed surprised by the attempt at conversation (after five years she was still surprised). “It’s lucky you’ll never have the money, then.”

  Petra clipped a thread off the buttonhole she was finishing.

  “I don’t understand it,” Simone said more quietly, as though she were alone.

  Petra didn’t know what she meant.

  Simone turned the page on her costume book, paused to look at one of the hair ornaments.

  “We’ll need to find the ivory one,” Simone said. “It’s the most beautiful.”

  “Will Ms. O’Rourke notice?”

  “I give my clients the best,” Simone said, which wasn’t really an answer.

  “I’ve finished the alterations,” Petra said finally, and held up one of the shirts, sliced open at the shoulder blades to give the arrows room, with buttons down the sides for ease of dressing.

  Petra was surprised the first time she saw a Bore team in the shop—the Vagabond, the Historian, the translator, two plugs, and a “Consultant” whose job was ostensibly to provide a life story for the client, but who spent three hours insisting that Roman women could have worn corsets if the Empire had sailed far enough.