Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  She wasn’t really strong, she knew, no matter what she’d just gone through. She’d done it because she had to, but she did have to have it forced on her. She survived through others, and that wasn’t all that bad. She survived to be a companion, a lover, to Ron. She survived for the sake of the children. She wanted to keep surviving.

  Now Ron was gone, and the children were being lost to her. She couldn’t do anything more for them. When Alfie escaped, then they would try to prevent it from happening at all. Supposedly, they had a better chance of doing that because of what they were doing now, but she really didn’t try to understand it anymore.

  Win or lose, the next few days would be the end of what purpose she still had, what need she could fill. No matter what happened, she would be alone then, and she couldn’t stand to be alone…

  Rescuing Alfie was not as simple as it had first appeared. To start with, she had to get down to that bridge where the time suit was anchored and haul it up, and she had to do it all herself. Not one of the squad could afford to travel in this particular time frame, which was one reason why Eric had chosen it for his test.

  The suit was incredibly heavy, and large even for her. Still, she remembered all the instructions, first removing the huge, bulky power pack from the rear backpack and carrying it back and letting it drop into the Thames. Time was crucial now, for once the suit’s residual power was exhausted, a matter of only a few minutes, it would cease to exist.

  Quickly she snapped in the new power pack, a small and light plant similar to the ones used on the belts with framing and contacts made so that it would fit into the power pack bracket in the suit and provide the necessary juice.

  It worked fine, and, as a side effect, it made the suit far lighter, although no less bulky. She wondered how she could both be somebody entirely different yet recognized as the same person by the suit, but while she’d had many explanations, she knew she’d never get it straight.

  Because she was not in phase, she was not subject to assimilation and its limitations. First she reset the suit controls the way they’d instructed her, then carefully drew it to her, using an extender device to wrap around the suit, connected on both sides to her time belt. In a sense, it was an extra belt just for the suit, but controlled and managed by her belt’s microprocessor.

  She activated the belt, and almost instantaneously was inside a grim and drab little room. There were bars on the windows and on the heavy oak door, which was locked from the outside. A single gas lamp, turned down to dim, lit the room, which smelled of death and dying. In a corner was a small bed, and in it a very battered and bruised figure, so tiny and helpless.

  Alfie was asleep.

  Quietly she detached the suit, fearful of alerting the hall wardens not far away, and brought it over to the still figure. Although feeling pressed for time, her heart went out to the kid, and she laid everything out, ready to go, before awakening him. Almost as an afterthought, she pushed the goggles up, so that he wouldn’t be faced with some strange-looking monster. She’d been blind so long it didn’t really matter, and it was simple from here on out.

  “Wake up,” she said in a hushed tone, shaking him gently. He stirred, moaned a little, then said, “ ’Ho’re you? Some kind of prison nurse?”

  “No,” she whispered, “and keep your voice down. Time is very short, and the amount of power required to allow me to be here without assimilation is enormous.”

  He was in great pain, but much of the morphia had worn off, allowing the Moosic personality a little latitude. He mustered all his will to force himself forward, reminding himself that Sandoval had done it. “You—you are from the future.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “In a way, yes. I’ve brought you something you need desperately, but you’ll have to move fast. Can you make it out of bed?”

  “Oi… think so.” He tried and, with her help, got to a shaky standing position. It was then that he saw it, there on the floor. “The toime suit!” he breathed.

  He sat back on the bed and she helped him into it. It was enormous for the body of Alfie Jenkins, far too large to be practical, and he said so.

  “Don’t worry. Once you punch out, it’ll be O.K., and both Alfie and Ron will live. Understand?”

  He nodded dully.

  “The power pack is on full-charge now—I did it before coming here. And I’ve set it for the correct time and place. There is still a chance of catching Sandoval.”

  “But ’istory—it’s already changed.”

  “Very little. Marx would have died in a few years anyway, and all his important work was done. He was killed by a boy in the pay of anti-Communists, a boy who then escaped from gaol. That’s all the change. Now—helmet on. Check the pouch when you arrive. And remember—Sandoval’s power is nearly gone. He’s landed a hundred miles from his goal. You can beat him there. Now—seal and go!”

  “But wait! Just ’ho are you?”

  But the seal snapped in place and he was in silence, although nearly swimming in the suit. If he stood up, he knew he’d sink below and out of the helmet, so he didn’t try. The mysterious woman reached out and touched the suit activation switches.

  Tiny Alfie, almost smothered in the enormous suit, faded out. Almost immediately her hands went to her own belt, and she pressed the “Home” key.

  Now there was only one thing left to do.

  THE TWISTED CIRCLE

  “In many ways, this is the most important operation of this team,” said Chung Lind, looking over maps and diagrams on a huge table. “It may also be nothing at all. Still, a chance at Eric, perhaps at their whole operation, is worth the risk.”

  A number of them had studied all the material and made suggestions one way or the other, but the truth was, they were severely handicapped, as they were in almost any operation directly against the other side.

  That was why it was so surprising that Earthside had been able to commit everything to the Trier operation. True, they had the savants, which Ron had called gargoyles, but they needed a smart human boss to do almost anything. Those humans suffered from the same limitations as the ones on the team. When you spent too much time in any period, you gave up some of your freedom of action forever.

  In point of fact, only three Outworlders had any margin of safety in the time frame, and one of those was Dawn.

  When such a situation developed, there was nothing to do but actually hire people in the frame to do most of the work. A cover, some sort of excuse, could always be manufactured, and, of course, the date of the actual action they were trying to prevent, and the specifics of it, were a matter of record.

  And so a team of excellent American detectives had been hired and extremely well financed. Some were tracking down one or another members of the radical party, but the main focus was on the one on the inside, Dr. Karen Cline. At some point she had to make contact either with the radicals or with the Earthsiders directly. If not, they would have to stop it in the parking lot, and that would be pretty damned bloody.

  Cline’s activities had been perfectly normal and almost robotically regular and precise until just six days before the operation. Since then, regular purchases had nearly stopped, and her routine was varied occasionally by trips to a travel agency, a car rental company in Washington, and other such odd behavior. The agents shadowing her had problems keeping out of sight of the government agents regularly assigned to follow and check on her, but those agents didn’t seem unduly alarmed. Apparently, she had a vacation coming in late May, and had indicated she was going to take it.

  Outworlder agents, who already knew something was going on, had the advantage here, and one slick operative noted that Cline’s only charge card was an infrequently used American Express card, but she had not used it either at the rental agency or the travel agency, paying by check instead. Why not?

  She had arranged to rent a small van, but for later pickup. That van, it was realized, could carry the radical team and its equipment. Agents were put on the car rental a
gency to see just who picked up that van and where it went.

  Chung Lind was particularly irritated that he had to go through all this the hard way, but there really was no other way to do it. A monitor by the master computer specifically on Cline, however, had picked up one thing of vital importance.

  Cline, as of six days before the incident, was not totally in phase with the time frame.

  “That explains the last of it,” Doc noted. “The only reason we didn’t see it before was that she was a highly educated woman, a Ph.D., in a very important project.”

  Dawn frowned. “You mean she’s one of them!”

  “Most likely the woman heading the second team in Trier,” Doc replied. “If you get rid of the surface, it fits. She’s a loner, both parents dead, no romantic entanglements and, as far as can be seen, no interest in them. She’s a competent technician, but has no imagination or genius. They managed to fit her into the most perfect slot imaginable.”

  Lind sighed. “So we’re dealing with a smart, extra-competent Earthside agent. She won’t have to get into direct contact with them, though. She’s done all she can to set things up; now all she has to do is settle back and wait for it to happen. Eric probably arranged for the team to be recruited and he’ll bring the elements together, probably in a period identity of his own.”

  The date for the attack was Monday, May 14. On Saturday, May 12, John Bettancourt picked up the van and drove it south to the county seat of Prince Frederick, Maryland, not much of a drive from the plant, and checked into a motel under the name of Donald Hartman. He did not leave it again until the next morning, so tapping his calls was impossible, but, after eating breakfast, he drove a few miles north and turned off onto a road leading to a small summer cottage right on Chesapeake Bay. The cottage, rented by a young couple named Freeman, clearly had other visitors as well.

  “That’s it, then,” Lind sighed. “There is no sign anyone left before dark, so that’s when and where we’ll hit them. It was an ideal location for them, and it makes an ideal location for us. Almost no locals in the area, few cops—quiet. Doc, I hate to ask it of you, but it’s all yours now. Be careful.”

  Kahwalini nodded and turned to Dawn. “Come. Let’s go back and talk this over.” They went back to her office.

  “Dawn,” Doc said carefully, “now is the time to think a little about not only this but what comes next. Louis is already uptime with the agents, as Jerry Brune, a laid-off steelworker. I’ll be going up just before the raid, to handle the stakeout on Cline’s apartment. If she gets spooked, we hope she’ll make for her belt, and that will turn the tables.”

  “You think Eric is in that house, as somebody else?”

  She nodded. “We think so. We’ve accounted for all four radicals, and there is a fifth person in the house, a middle-aged man with one leg who walks on crutches but never comes outside. We think that’s Eric.”

  “So I’m not really needed.”

  “Except as an observer, somebody there at the start who should be there at the end, no. I was thinking, though, that for better or worse this would be an ideal place for you to go trip. No use putting it off, and you’re more use to everyone, including yourself, in one whole piece.”

  There was really no reason not to, but she resisted the idea. “You know what I’ll become there.”

  Doc nodded. “It’s too set a pattern to really change. Why does it bother you now?”

  “Because I was out of it for so long. I’ve been a person now for a long time, and now you want me to go back to being… merchandise.”

  “I don’t want it. But it’s that, over which we have at least some control, or one of the others, or the edge. That’s it. What can it do except give you a new and better body?”

  And a new mind, she thought sourly. “You said you could control it. What do you mean?”

  “I mean we can at least select as optimal a situation as events allow. You can be young and attractive. There will be tradeoffs, but it won’t be Hell.”

  “I guess the Almighty computer has already run it through.”

  She nodded. “It isn’t possible to get specifics, because you’ve had too many wild card jumps, but we do our best. That’ll mean putting you away from the action, to start; so we’ll insert you early. Once you’re inserted, we’ll know who and where you are. One of us, either Louis or I, will get you before it all blows open and bring you down, so keep your belt where you can grab it in a hurry. If we catch anybody, we’ll bring them back here. Even if we don’t, I’ll have to stay around a couple of days to cover up the situation and pay off the agents. You trip at approximately seventeen days, four hours. We’re going to insert to trip you on the fourteenth, so it’ll be over by then. Then we can come back here and talk about what happens next.”

  “I wish I could see the children one last time.”

  “I wish so, too, but it’s not working out. At least, after, you’ll have two good eyes to see them.”

  Yeah, she thought—but will they still be my children?

  Probably not, she knew, even if they were now. She felt suddenly very old, very used up. There was no more use righting, because the decisions really had already been made. “O.K.,” she said, “let’s get the belt and do it.”

  “Now?” Even Doc was surprised by that.

  “Now—or never. If I have to think about it, I’ll go nuts, and if I start dwelling on it, I might commit suicide. Let’s go. Let’s get it over and done with.”

  “All right,” Doc said, went out for a moment and then came back with a belt. She handed it to Dawn, who put it on. “Now, a few things you should know in advance and remember. First, the ‘Home’ key is keyed to the old location, as before. Use plus eighteen hundred for the period, use one hundred eighty for the latitude and three hundred sixty for the longitude. If you forget, I’ll remind you.”

  “I won’t forget. I don’t think so, anyway. Anything else?”

  “You’ll come out in Washington, so don’t panic. As I say, we’ll make sure you’re picked up in time. There are more choices in D.C. than in the southern Maryland sticks. Also, it’s less likely for the enemy to pick you up if you’re outside the area. They’ll be concentrating there, and so we all are coming out elsewhere and getting down the hard way. And don’t worry so much. You have my personal promise—you haven’t run out of choices yet;”

  “O.K., Doc. Here goes.” She pressed the activation button and fell uptime. The circle was becoming completed.

  Her name was Holly Feathers, and she was seventeen years old, but while most girls her age were preparing to graduate from high school and going on heavy dates, Holly was a very experienced seventeen.

  She’d been born last in a three-child family, the first two of which were boys. Her dad used to be a steelworker in Pittsburgh, but he’d lost his job both to the cuts in the industry and to heavy drinking, and after that they just sort of drifted around, with him going from one part of the country to another in search of work, hauling them along because he’d long ago lost the house and run the bank account dry.

  All this was while she was very small, so she had no memory of the better times in the past. All she knew was that they seemed to be constantly moving around, almost living in an antique Chevy, her old man grabbing a job here, a job there, but never the kind you could hold for a while. Her mother just seemed to tune out the world, doing a lot of Bible reading and pretending like nothing else was wrong.

  Often, after she’d grown into womanhood, her father would get drunk and take her off somewhere and undress her and, well, do things. When she didn’t want to, he would often beat her or slap her around. Her brothers were wild, and no protection at all. One of them wound up doing five to twenty in Kansas or somewhere for robbery.

  She had some schooling, but because of the situation and the constant moving around, it hadn’t done much good. Oh, she could write her name in a childish block-print way, and get through a basic menu or maybe Dr. Seuss, but that was about all. She had no rea
l skills, either, and except for helping out on some picking jobs in harvest seasons, she’d never really done much of anything.

  What she was was pretty, almost classically so, even dressed in worn-out sandals, dirty tee shin, and over-patched jeans. At five foot two with big green eyes and long reddish-brown hair, a nearly perfect figure with an almost impossibly narrow waist, olive skin, and a big, wide, but sensuous mouth, she was, as her father said, “something else.”

  When she was fifteen, she got pregnant—and got a bad whipping from her father, as if it was her fault instead of his. Panicky, he’d taken her to a back alley abortionist who almost killed her. When she wound up hemorrhaging and got rushed to an emergency room, they determined that the fetus was gone all right, but it was no longer possible after they repaired the damage for her to have children ever again.

  To her surprise, her mother visited her in the hospital, looking ancient and terrible. She gave her some money, more money than she thought they had. “Take it and go,” her mother told her. “He’s already scarred you, child. Don’t make me bury you.”

  So she found her shirt and jeans and dirty, worn sandals, the first two cleaned by the hospital, and she sneaked out of the place, got down to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Washington, not because it was anyplace she knew but because it was the nearest big city to West Virginia she knew on the destination list.

  Once in the dirty, midtown bus terminal, though, she found she had no place to go and nothing more to do, and money that wouldn’t last long.

  She found no end of young men in and around the bus station willing to help her out, but soft-spoken Johnny Wenzel seemed the nicest and the least frightening. He bought her meals, took her to his very nice apartment, got her some clothes, and never tried to take advantage of her—not then.

  But, eventually, he got around to the subject of her future plans. She had always wanted to be a dancer—not some cheap dancer, but one like on the television specials— but she had no training and no way to get it. That’s when he told her how she could get the money for her future.