by Allen Steele
Strange. Maybe he was a hitchhiker who had lost his way. Yet all the roads leading to this area had been blocked by state police; even then, the nearest highway was several miles away. Murphy studied the man at the phone as he walked toward the porch. Perhaps he was from one of the lakeside houses; Ogilvy had told them that they were summer homes, but maybe one of them was occupied year-round. Yet if that was the case, why would a permanent resident be using a pay phone to . . . ?
“Thank you . . . yes, that would be most helpful.”
In the stillness of the night, Murphy heard the stranger’s voice clearly. It held an odd accent that he couldn’t quite place: British-American, yet with an faint Asian inflection.
“Yes, operator, would you be so kind as to tell me the exact date? Yes, ma’am . . . today’s date. And the year, please.”
The date? The year? What, he didn’t have a calendar?
The porch steps creaked when Murphy put his weight on them. Startled by his sudden appearance, the stranger looked up sharply, all but dropping the receiver from his hand.
“Sorry,” Murphy said automatically. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
The man at the phone looked vaguely Eurasian. He stared at Murphy through wire-rim glasses, then seemed to remember what he had been doing a moment earlier. He raised the receiver again. “I’m sorry, ma’am . . . could you repeat that, please?”
Murphy walked over to the Coke machine, dug into his trouser pockets for change. He felt the stranger’s eyes upon him as he found a couple of quarters and fed them into the slot. He had to be a vagrant; his clothes were so old-fashioned, they had to have come from the Salvation Army. Yet even the most destitute homeless men he had seen huddled on steam grates in downtown D.C. wore cast-off down coats or old baseball jackets. The last time Murphy had seen men’s clothing of this style was in old photos of his grandfather as a young man.
“Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been very helpful.” The stranger prodded the rim of his glasses as if adjusting them, then hung up the phone. He blew into his hands, cast a furtive glance at Murphy, then started to walk toward the steps.
“Cold night,” Murphy said.
The stranger hesitated. “Pardon me?”
“Cold night.” Murphy pushed the Dr Pepper button; there was a heavy clunk deep within the vending machine, then a can rattled down the chute. “At least twenty.”
“Twenty what?”
“Twenty degrees. The temperature.”
“Oh . . . well . . .” Drawing his coat lapels more closely around him, the man nodded in the general direction of the road behind him. “It doesn’t bother me. I don’t live far away. Just down the road. Came down to use the road . . . the phone, I mean.”
Was it his imagination, or did his voice sound a bit different now? Murphy bent to pick up the can of soda, and the stranger hurried past him. “I didn’t know anyone lived here year-round,” Murphy added. “I thought all these places belonged to summer people.”
“A few of us stay through the winter.” The other man took off his glasses, carefully folded them, placed them into his coat pocket. “Excuse me, but I . . .”
“Want to get home. Sure.” Murphy slipped the unopened soda into a pocket of his parka. “Take it easy.”
“Yes . . . uh, yeah.” He trotted down the porch steps. “I’ll take it easy. You take it easy, too.”
Murphy watched the stranger huddle into himself and quickly walk away, moving out of the faint glow of the porch light as he began marching up the road leading to the top of the nearest hill. Poor bastard probably lives in a trailer, he mused. Can’t afford a phone of his own, so he has to hike down here when he wants to make a call. Hope he’s got a good space heater or something to keep him warm. . . .
But why would anyone call an operator to find out today’s date?
Crazy people. Crazy people in Washington, crazy people in Tennessee. Crazy people still working for OPS even though they knew better. Murphy shrugged, then went down the steps. He’d better get back to camp before Ogilvy or Sanchez or someone else missed him. The sergeant minding the checkpoint was probably thirsty for his Dr Pepper.
He had only walked a short distance before he realized that he could use a soda himself. No sense in going back with only one soft drink; it was going to be a long night. Might as well grab another one for the road. So he turned around and jogged back to the lonesome Coke machine.
When he searched his pockets, though, he discovered that he only had a quarter. Tough luck . . . then he glanced at the adjacent pay phone, and realized that the guy he just met had been talking to an operator.
Why would anyone walk all this way just to . . . ?
Never mind. Point was, he hadn’t retrieved his change from the return slot. Probably too cold to remember that he had money coming back to him. And since the phone took twenty-five cents, there might be enough left in there for Murphy to buy himself a Sprite.
Murphy stepped over to the phone and poked an inquisitive finger into its tiny drawer. Sure enough, two dimes and a nickel. He dug them out, jingled them in his fist, then walked over to the Coke machine. He slipped his quarter into the slot and was about to slide home one of the dimes when he did a double take.
It was a Mercury dime.
He hadn’t seen a Mercury dime since he was in grade school.
Then he opened his palm and saw another Mercury dime and a buffalo nickel.
What were the chances of this occurring by accident? So far beyond the odds of probability that Murphy instantly rejected it as an explanation. And these coins looked good as new.
Okay, so maybe the stranger was a rare coin collector. Yeah, right. A rare coin collector who couldn’t afford decent winter clothes, but drops spotless Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels into pay phones. Well, maybe he was an absentminded collector who used rare coins to call operators on pay phones to ask them what time . . .
And just then, something Harry Cummisky said last night at the Bullfinch came back to him.
Friday, January 16, 1997: 6:48 P.M.
Careful not to switch it off, Franc folded the compad and thrust it into his pocket, then pulled the jacket more tightly around himself. The wind at the top of the hill was fierce and bone-chilling; his legs shook involuntarily, and he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He stamped his feet against the blacktop in a vain effort to warm his frozen toes.
“Hurry up,” he whispered, glancing up at the opaque sky. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up . . .”
It wasn’t only the cold that made him impatient. The chance encounter with the local had unnerved him to the point that he had almost forgotten his errand; it had taken a conscious effort to store the exact date and time in the memory of his faux spectacles. The man who had come to use the vending machine had been more than casually interested in his presence at the pay phone, and it wasn’t merely late-twentieth-century snoopiness. He might have been from one of the nearby homes, but Franc suspected otherwise.
Well, it didn’t matter much now. Metz was probably lifting off even now; once aloft, he’d find Franc by homing in on the signal from his still-active compad. He looked up again, although he knew Metz had probably reactivated the chameleon and that he wouldn’t be able to see the timeship until it was . . .
“Okay . . . who are you . . . anyway?”
The voice from the darkness was strained and out of breath, but familiar nonetheless. Franc whirled around, searching the road behind him.
“I said . . . who are you?”
The man from the store.
Franc finally made him out. Only a few meters away, struggling up the hill toward him.
“Nobody you would know, sir,” he replied. “I just live around here.”
“I . . . kinda doubt that.” The stranger stopped; he bent over and rested his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He must have run all this way. “Nobody . . . lives around here . . . in winter. If they did, they’d . . . they’d . . . have their own phone.”
“I don’t.” Franc’s mind raced. The Oberon would be here any minute; he couldn’t allow his departure to be witnessed by a local. “I just use the pay phone to save money.”
“Yeah . . . right.” A soft jingle of loose change. “Money like this?”
Franc’s blood froze. Just the sort of anachronistic mistake the CRC trained its researchers to avoid committing; he had left 1937 currency in a 1998 pay phone.
“I think I forgot that, yes,” he said cautiously. “Thanks for bringing it back.” He held out his hand. “If you’ll let me have it, I’ll . . .”
“Go home . . . sure. That’s what you said. ” The stranger didn’t come any closer. “Which gets back to . . . to my question. Who are you?”
“John Pannes.” The reply came automatically, as if he was again being queried by the Nazi brown-shirt on the street in Frankfurt.
“Okay . . . and where are you from, Mr. Pannes?”
“Sir, I don’t believe that’s any of your business.” Aware that the stranger’s night vision was probably as good as his own, Franc fought an impulse to glance up at the sky. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . . ?”
“Don’t think . . . I don’t think you’re telling the truth.” The other man stood up straight, took a deep breath. “Not from around here, and don’t think you’re . . .”
He coughed hard, bringing up phlegm. “Not from this time,” he said finally. “Are you, Mister Pannes?”
Franc felt blood rush from his face. Whoever this person was—although it was almost certain that he was with the soldiers camped nearby—he had surmised far too much. Whatever happened, he couldn’t be allowed to witness the Oberon’s touchdown. Yet he was out of wind from running all the way up the hill, and Franc had darkness on his side. If he was quick enough . . .
“You could be right,” Franc carefully replied. “Of course, it’s a little difficult for me to answer, considering that I don’t know you.”
“Name’s Murphy . . . Dr. Zack Murphy.” The stranger seemed to relax a bit. “Astrophysicist. Office of Paranormal Sciences, United States government.”
A scientist. However, despite his extensive research of the twentieth century, Franc had never heard of the Office of Paranormal Sciences. A manifestation of this new worldline? No time to wonder about that now.
“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy,” he said, taking a cautious step forward as he held out his hand. “I assume you’ve been looking for me?”
“Well, not really, but . . .” Murphy raised a hand, started toward him. “You still haven’t told me . . .”
He hesitated just then, and for an instant Franc wondered if Murphy had a glimmer of his intentions. Then he audibly gasped, and even in the darkness Franc could tell that he was staring upward at something in the sky above.
“What the hell is . . . ?”
That was the break he needed. Ducking his head, thrusting his arms and shoulders forward, Franc rushed Murphy.
He cleared the distance in a few quick steps. Distracted, the astrophysicist was caught entirely off guard. Two fast, hard blows to the stomach, and he doubled over. Franc heard the breath whuff painfully from his lungs, then Murphy stumbled against him; his hands clawed at Franc’s clothes, either in a feeble effort to fight back or simply to keep from falling.
Franc wasn’t about to let him do either; he slammed a fist straight into Murphy’s jaw. There was the angry sound of tearing fabric as the other man toppled backward, and he felt cold air against his chest. Then the scientist hit the asphalt and lay still.
Now the limbs of the surrounding trees were whipping back and forth as if caught in a supernatural gale. A loud hum surrounded him, then Franc was pinned by a bright shaft of light. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Murphy’s face—he didn’t seem much older than Franc himself—then he turned to see a broad, black oval hovering only a few meters above the ground.
Metz was in a hurry; he hadn’t lowered the landing flanges, and he hadn’t switched off the chameleon again. The light was from the open airlock hatch; Lea knelt in the hatch, extending her arm downward.
“Move it! We’ve got to get out of there!”
The wind whipped at his ripped coat; Murphy had managed to tear it when he went down. In a panic, he felt at coat pockets; the glasses still there. But he wasn’t done here yet. . .
“Hold on!” he shouted, then he stole a moment to kneel beside Murphy. Not completely unconscious, the scientist groaned softly as Franc rolled him over, but he was too groggy to offer any resistance. Franc pawed at his parka until he felt coins and heard the soft jingle of loose change. He reached into a pocket, retrieved the two dimes and one nickel that he had thoughtlessly left in the pay phone. Now the scientist had no tangible proof that he had ever encountered a chrononaut.
He started to stand up when he heard Murphy whisper something to him:
“Does . . . it . . . get any better?”
Franc knew what he meant.
“Depends what you do, my friend,” he murmured. Then he leaped up and dashed toward the waiting timeship.
7:02 P.M.
Headlights were already racing up the hill when Metz took the Oberon back into the sky. Minutes later, the timeship pierced the dense cloud layer above the Tennessee countryside. This time, there were no hostile aircraft in the sky, only the thinnest reaches of the stratosphere and, far above, the twinkling stars.
By then, Lea had taken Franc’s glasses to the library pedestal, where she downloaded the chronological figures gathered by its nanochip into the AI. She and Franc hurried into the control room and held their breath until Metz informed them that the parameters for a successful crosstime jaunt had been established. Oberon was still wounded, but it was healing rapidly; a few orbits, and it would be capable of opening a tunnel.
“But we can’t go home.” Metz’s fingers nervously tapped the console beneath a flatscreen image of two parallel closed-time circles. “We’ll get back to our year, no question about that. But we’ll still be in a different continuum.”
“So Chronos Station won’t be there.” Lea’s voice was flat, nearly hopeless.
“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.” The pilot shrugged. “We’ll have no idea until we get there. But we can’t stay here, and don’t even consider returning to 1937 . . .”
“I know,” Franc said. “We can’t change what we’ve already done. Not without creating another paradox, at least.”
“Sorry, but no.” Metz shook his head. “What’s done is done. We’re stuck with the results, whatever they may be.” He looked over his shoulder. “On the other hand, we could always go back to some point before 1937. Find a place to settle down in the past. A little farm in Kansas, circa 1890? A chateau in southern France around 1700? A modest vineyard in ancient Greece . . . ?”
“Not tempting in the very least.” Franc smiled. “It’s a new universe, to be sure, but I don’t think it’ll be all that different.” His smile became a broad grin. “In fact, we may find it surprisingly similar.”
Metz’s face was unapologetically skeptical, but Lea stared at him. “What makes you think that?”
Franc absently played with the torn lining of his coat. “Only a hunch.”
Friday, January 16, 1998: 7:09 P.M.
“And you didn’t see the guy who hit you?”
“Not clearly, no.” Seated on the front bumper of the Hummer, Murphy leaned back against the grill. “I mean, it’s pretty dark. . . .”
“I got that, but I still don’t understand why he’d just attack you.” Illuminated by the headlights, Ogilvy crouched on the road before him. “Neither do I understand what you were doing all the way up here. The sergeant at the checkpoint said you had just gone to the store for a soda. That’s a quarter mile down the road from here.”
Murphy gently touched the bruise on his forehead. It wasn’t very sore, but the motion helped hide his face. “Only wanted to stretch my legs a bit more before heading back to camp, that’s all. I hope I didn’t g
et your man in any trouble.”
“He’ll live.” Ogilvy glanced over his shoulder at the two soldiers searching the roadside with flashlights. “Let’s try it again. You walk all the way up here, just to stretch your legs, and when we find you, you’re beat-up and lying here in the road. You say it’s because some total stranger stepped out of the woods and asked you for some spare change, and when you told him you didn’t have any, he attacked you. Then he vanishes, just like that. Have I got everything?”
“I don’t have an explanation, either.” Murphy looked the colonel straight in the eye. “Maybe he was just . . . I dunno. Some crazy hitchhiker. Things happen like that.”
“Right.” The colonel slowly nodded. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth?”
“That’s all there is. Honest.”
Ogilvy sighed as he stood up. “Well, whatever happened up here, it made you miss all the excitement. The yew-foh vanished. We think it lifted off.”
“Oh, shit! Really?” It was all Murphy could do to feign astonishment. “You mean it’s gone?”
“Happened about ten, fifteen minutes ago. First, it went invisible again, right under the eyes of the guys we left on the island. We heard a loud hum, then all the lights and electronic equipment went dead. Water shot up into the air where the saucer had been resting, and then . . . well, it was gone.”
“And you didn’t see anything?”
“Just a black shape taking off, but it was gone before we could track it.” Ogilvy tucked his hands in the pockets of his parka. “That’s when we discovered you were AWOL. It’ll be sweet bringing you back. When she found out you were missing, Ms. Luna claimed she received a psychic impression that you’d been taken by her aliens.”
Murphy laughed out loud, but not for reasons the colonel probably thought he did. For once, Meredith Cynthia Luna had come close to making the right guess. “I’m sure she’s been wrong before.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Ogilvy looked around again. “Go on, get in the vehicle. It’s warmer in there. I’m going to give my guys a few more minutes to find your mysterious friend, then we’ll go back and start breaking down camp. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything else, do you?”
