Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  His life now was luxury compared to that asylum. Up at six, some cruddy mess they called porridge for breakfast, then off to the woolen factory promptly at seven. Twelve hours a day, and if you made your quota, the asylum got the two quid a week the company paid. If you didn’t, you got beaten real bad. All by stern men who seemed to really think they were doing their best for the “poor, unfortunate children.”

  Well, he’d foxed them. Lit out one Sunday in the middle of church, when they couldn’t do very much. Back up to where things never changed much from when he played here as a kid. He wasn’t no kid anymore. He was past thirteen.

  Finished with his drink and wash-up, he relieved himself in a corner and then scrambled back out again. Breakfast was first on his mind, thanks to old Mrs. Carter paying him a few shillings to clean up the pub from the previous night’s rowdiness. He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Carter suspected his existence or just filled in the blanks to suit herself, but he didn’t mind. They didn’t ask no questions in this area.

  It was a very routine morning for Alfie Jenkins in every respect but one. Instead of the usual hustling over by the market, he had to go down to the river.

  Ron Moosic could waste no time in finding that time suit. It had a lot of period money—and a pistol.

  MAIN LINE 351.1 LONDON, ENGLAND

  There was a strangeness about this temporal existence he now lived. For one thing, he knew intellectually that, until this morning, there had never been such a person as Alfie Jenkins, at least not the one he now was. Time had adjusted to accommodate his alien presence by creating the boy by some process not understood.

  There were natural laws, Silverberg had explained, that we knew nothing about, and this appeared to be in the arcane field of probability mathematics. He had created a ripple in the time stream by appearing where he should not be, but in this case it was a backward ripple, flowing the shortest possible rearward distance to find the point where Alfie Jenkins might have been conceived or, perhaps, had been stillborn. A minor probability had been changed, and he now existed and, in fact, had now and forever afterwards always existed. But time had not been indiscriminate in its creation; it had created the first individual to fit all the time and place criteria who had the least possibility of interacting to cause a forward ripple.

  There were millions of Alfie Jenkinses in the past and present and, probably, the future as well. The legions of those who might as well have never lived. But now Jenkins did live, and he was subject to the same randomness in his subsequent existence as anyone else born into this time and place and situation. There were no guarantees now, any more than Ron Moosic had had in his own life and time.

  The experience, the dual personality, was odd but nonetheless clear to both parties. Alfie was Alfie, and would act and react as Alfie, but Ron Moosic was there as well, sharing Alfie’s body and his memories and sensations, although it was by no means clear that the reverse was true. Still, Alfie knew he was there and regarded him as a distinct and separate individual, one whose important and romantic mission appealed to the boy. Moosic made suggestions, but mostly he remained along for the ride, letting Alfie be himself. He knew, though, that he could take control, if he wished, simply by willing it.

  The sunlight burned off some of the industrial smog, but it was still thick and ugly even in the full light of day. It was almost ten o’clock by the time Alfie had finished his chores, gotten his shilling and breakfast, and was able to be on his way. It didn’t take very long, though, to find the path and the bridge. Apparently, location was specific in this time business—the bridge was very near Alfie’s lair. Much more difficult was getting down there and doing the business unobserved. The streets, deserted in the early morning darkness, were now alive with traffic and pedestrians.

  Ron Moosic took it all in with a feeling of awe. The hansom cabs clattered across the bridge, and peddlers with horse-drawn carts went this way and that. The dress styles seemed archaic, but really not that much different in the details than his own time, at least insofar as men were concerned. Women were extremely well covered from neck to ground, with most of the dresses appearing to have been made to hide almost any physical attributes.

  The atmosphere was certainly big-city cosmopolitan, with lots of people of all sorts going this way and that on countless unknown errands, while the physical atmosphere was a mixture of garbage-like smells and foul industrial odors. To most, perhaps all, of the people, the sights and sounds and smells were normal and taken for granted. To Moosic, it was not at all that romantic or pleasant, despite his awe and excitement.

  This was, after all, the London of Sherlock Holmes, of Disraeli and Gladstone, Victoria and the British Empire near the height of its glory. Holmes might not really be here, but Doyle was, somewhere, and probably Wilde, perhaps Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Robert Browning. Winston Churchill was a year old; Albert Einstein, whose work would eventually lead to Moosic being where he was, hadn’t even been born yet.

  And in nine days, up in the northwest part of the city, at 41 Maitland Park Crescent, Karl Marx would be returning home from the continent.

  There was simply no way to gain access to the bridge in broad daylight, so he abandoned it for now and allowed Alfie to have his own way. The boy was a streetwise thief, panhandler, and hustler of the first order. He was well known to a number of people of all ages from the docks up to Whitechapel, and he wasn’t the only young boy working the streets. Moosic watched with growing admiration as the boy hustled anyone who looked like a soft touch, slickly grabbing an apple from a fruit stand almost in full view of the suspicious and nasty-looking proprietor, and getting a few pennies for helping a vegetable merchant bring out more stock.

  It was an active, and educational, day for the time traveler, a day that would normally not have ended with darkness but did this time. Alfie went back to his “digs” to catch a catnap, knowing that he had to get down to that bridge when things quieted down once more.

  It was not, in fact, until the bells chimed two that he risked going back down there. The fog had closed in even more, making sight almost totally useless, which was fine for Moosic and all right with Alfie, too. He didn’t need to see much in this neighborhood. Only the boy’s occasional coughing spasms caused any problems at all.

  Getting down to the right spot was no problem, and even though occasional boat whistles could be heard as the commerce of a big city continued, there was no chance anyone could see him down there in this fog. The river helped, of course, to make it so dense. Away from here, in the better neighborhoods, it was probably rather pleasant.

  Alfie, however, was not Ron Moosic. The suit was extremely heavy, and it seemed as if he was never going to be able to haul it up and close. Going into the water was out of the question; Alfie couldn’t swim, and Moosic was not all that certain he could manage the boy’s unfamiliar frame. Still, he was almost willing to take the chance after repeated tries to pull the suit in had failed.

  Finally, though, with one last mighty effort, the boy managed a mighty heave and the helmet broke the surface. It still took some tying-off of the rope and a lot of breathers before it was within his grasp.

  Quickly the seals were broken and he removed the precious pouch from the outside. The pocket was then reclosed and sealed, and the suit eased back into the water once more, where it sank quickly from sight.

  Alfie hurried now, clutching the precious cache with both hands, and made it back to his hiding place in no time. Although he was nearly done in by the night’s work, both he and Moosic were not about to nod back off without seeing the contents of the pouch.

  “Cor!” Alfie swore as he looked at the most familiar of the contents. “It’s a bloomin’ fortune!”

  Well, it wasn’t that, but it was the amount of pre-1875 notes they could round up on short notice. Fortunately, this period was one of those in which some research project was ongoing, and they had accumulated a small store of such material to help with the work. While very little from the future could
go back and remain unchanged, things could be brought forward, including currency. Then, as now, a little ageless gold or gems could be converted into cash rather easily in London.

  There was, in fact, more than two hundred pounds in the pouch, mostly in small bills. That was a year’s wages to many in this period of time, and men had been killed for far less. Additionally, there was a small map of London of the period and a short dossier on what was known of Marx and his neighborhood and friends. There was also a small .32 caliber pistol of the era, along with a box of twenty-five cartridges.

  Alfie was almost overcome with the sight of all that money, more than he had ever seen in his whole life or expected to see. The pistol provided an almost equal thrill, one that Moosic wasn’t sure he liked. Still, the boy was exhausted from his night’s work and finally succumbed to sleep.

  Moosic abandoned any ideas of tracking down the two fugitives ahead of time. Just being Alfie had convinced him of the futility of that task. He used the time well, though, first making some judicious purchases to get the boy in better clothes. There was really no way for a thirteen-year-old to take a room at a hotel or rooming house without arousing suspicion, and Alfie’s manners and dialect were a dead giveaway that no cover story could be really convincing. There was something to remaining cautious and, particularly, not arousing suspicion at the sight of sudden wealth. In his neighborhood, it would have meant death; in the better ones, it would raise questions as to its source. Still, by using the small bills one at a time and never showing the money in the same place, it was convertible. Far more so, in fact, than if he’d had no money at all to work with.

  Sandoval and his girlfriend had nothing of this sort when they had traveled back to this time and place. That put him a jump ahead.

  There was also the advantage that no one really took much notice of a young cleanly dressed man when he boarded the horse-drawn omnibuses or walked through various neighborhoods by day.

  Forty-one Maitland Park Crescent, N.W., was easy to find with the map and some exploration. It was a nondescript three-story, gray frame house—Moosic thought it Victorian, until he realized the ridiculousness of that term in 1875—that was, nonetheless, a large and comfortable single dwelling in a peaceful, middle-class neighborhood. Moosic was enough of a cynic to think that this was one of the ironies of the founders of Communism. Somewhere in Britain, Engels, the millionaire industrialist, was financing the Communist movement while living what could only be thought of by a twentieth-century mind as the Playboy philosophy. Marx, the middle-class German, descendant of a line of rabbis, college-educated and devoted to intellectual pursuits, lived in a house the London proletariat could only dream about, although it was certainly no mansion and no luxurious abode in any sense of that word, and took frequent trips to Karlsbad to take the mineral bath “cure” far beyond the means of the working man.

  Later, this man’s work would be modified by the upper-middle-class born and bred Russian son of a school superintendent who would call himself Lenin and the upper-middle-class librarian in Hunan, Mao Tse Tung.

  These men all sincerely believed they were revolutionizing the world for the poorest and the most downtrodden of humanity. Marx, who loved children as a group and class of their own, had been horrified by the child labor and the terrible factory conditions. They had all been, at least to some extent, and Marx totally, devoted to removing the mass of the proletariat from these inhuman, near-slavery conditions.

  Let them spend more than a week in the body and mind and existence of Alfie Jenkins, Moosic thought sourly. It would make them all more dedicated than ever to their goals, certainly, but perhaps it would also add true understanding of just what it was like to be the lowest of the low in a class-oriented society. That had been the basic problem and the reason for the perversion of the noble ideals of men like Marx, after all. It was an intellectual problem, or a problem dealt with out of guilt in the way many rich men became champions of the poor, but these were human beings in the individual sense as well as the faceless “masses.” How could they know, or really understand, what it was like to be an Alfie Jenkins?

  When you reduced the millions of Alfies of the world to a faceless class, the “masses” or the “proletariat,” you dehumanized them. None of the leaders, the intellectuals and the politicians who acted at or near the top of and in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” had anything really in common with the Alfies, not really. Nor had Ron Moosic, no matter his truly proletarian background and upbringing, although he was certainly far closer to the Alfies than the Marxes and the Lenins.

  Nobody had ever tried a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and nobody ever would. Many, of course, established that in name, but it always turned out to be a “dictatorship for the proletariat,” not of or by it. When the proletariat objected, the proletariat was forced back in its place—for its own good, of course. For the good of the masses, the proletariat, the downtrodden of the world.

  Of course.

  Moosic was reminded of a tour of Versailles he’d taken while posted to NATO during his Air Force years. In back of the magnificent palace had been a peasant village, with peasant houses and small gardens. It was not a true peasant village, but rather an antiseptic recreation of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat’s concept of what a peasant village was like. They used to go there, the guide told them, and put on “peasant garb” and play at being peasants, the better to get the “feel” for the people. The masses. But when Marie Antionette, who used to lead such playing, was faced with the concept of starvation, she had not been able to conceive of it.

  And the leaders of the dictatorship of the proletariat collected fancy cars and lived in lavish apartments and brought their children up in much the same manner as royalty had raised their own. They believed in the ultimate socialist dream; they couldn’t understand why the Alfie Jenkinses of the world could not.

  “Why, let them eat cake, then!”

  Sandoval was here, someplace. Had probably already stood where Alfie Jenkins now stood, looking over the house. He was a true proletarian and a true believer in the dream. In the revolution he’d fight to win, the rulers he would put in power would make sure he was the first to be shot. In the meantime, he was fed at their direction by the guilt money of the Austin-Vennemans of the world, the Engelses of the late twentieth century.

  Who had sent them here, with such perfect intelligence, and on what mission? Did it, in fact, center on that house over there, so innocent and calm? It had to. It just had to.

  Alfie Jenkins had never heard of Karl Marx.

  The assimilation process was so insidious he really was only slightly aware of it. Still, he was beginning to dream Alfie’s dreams, beginning to think more and more Alfie’s way. Slowly, but quite progressively, he was beginning to merge with the mind and soul of the boy.

  It hadn’t hit him at all until, in the late afternoon of September 19, he’d taken out the dossier one last time to look through it and had found considerable trouble in reading it.

  Alfie, of course, was illiterate.

  The problem scared him, and set his mind to wondering. Just how much had he begun to become the street urchin whose body he wore? It was beginning to be very difficult to separate the two of them, and he was still well within his “safety margin,” according to the time project’s formula. The two revolutionaries had a far narrower margin. Austin-Venneman would reach the critical point by the twenty-second; Sandoval on the twenty-fourth. Within a day or so after that point, they would become more the personalities they now were than their old selves; they would not go back of their own free will.

  Both had to know and understand that, all the more because what was happening to him must be happening with even more force to them. He was convinced that they would waste no time once they had their objective where they wanted him. If, in fact, Marx was their objective, they would attempt a visit on the afternoon or evening of the twentieth; of that he was certain. If the old boy was too t
ired and fatigued to see them, well, all the better. Callers late on the twentieth who were turned away and then returned the next day would certainly be prime suspects. Stuffing a leather pouch with sandwiches and a water bottle, he was determined to camp out within sight of 41 Maitland Crescent from early on the twentieth until—well, until as long as it took.

  The waiting was the most difficult thing. Stakeouts were dull, boring work of the worst kind, not the sort of romantic cops-and-robbers business most people thought of when they thought of police work. At the start, he and Alfie had been distinctly separate personalities, but now it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. He chafed with the impatience of a thirteen-year-old and found distraction in small games satisfying only for a brief while.

  The house, however, was not bereft of activity, for it was clear that something was up. Many times he saw the squat, rotund figure of Helene Demuth, the Marx family’s devoted housekeeper who looked the very model of the quintessential German nannie, rushing to and fro, airing out rugs and cleaning up inside and out.

  But the tip-off that they were expecting something important was the occasional appearance of Jenny, Marx’s wife, who was in extreme ill health and had not been seen on any of the earlier forays when he’d “cased” the place. She looked very old and very tired. Seen, too, was the pretty but frail-looking Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, an aspiring actress who usually went with her father to the continent but had not this trip. Unseen was the truly frail and sickly daughter Jenny, but he had no doubt that all were working hard to get things just right for the homecoming.