by John Barnes
The funny thing was that even coming from a world of jet planes and rapid transit, it all seemed like a kind of a miracle to me. Once you’ve walked for even a few days, your sense of distance is very different. For Joseph Warren, who had grown up with horses and sailing ships, I supposed it might have seemed like a miracle.
There were more miracles on board; the Locke was a luxury ship, and it had a small “tour of wonders” which included going to the ship’s radio shack to meet the radioman, and to watch him try to catch one of the daily radio broadcasts from London—so far there was just one station on the air for twenty minutes every day, but in just the right conditions you could get it anywhere in the world. Home crystal sets were already down to the price of a printed book (which unfortunately was still about $45 if you were converting it in gold to dollars from my timeline). More than anything else, I figured, radio—or the Franklinphone, as it was called, was going to make a difference.
There was also a small casino of sorts; Puritan New England did not allow gambling but once they were out of Providence Harbor they could open up the tables. I’m not much of a gambler—when I’ve visited casinos I’ve stuck to blackjack or to the crap table pretty much—but Warren wanted to get in a few hands of whist, there were hot sausages, bread, and coffee there, and I could amuse myself with the newspaper or with idle conversation.
Warren and I had noticed already that his medical bag, and the bag that contained my change of clothes and specialty weapons, were pretty similar, so I piled both bags under my legs to make a sort of footstool, sat down on one of the hard-backed chairs, and began to absorb the local Dispatch-Intelligencer; as was common at the time, the first few pages were advertisements, which mostly told me that the changes Luc had made in the economy had really taken hold—there were ads for electric-generator windmills, crystal sets, toy “electric carriages” for children, the dirigible line from New York to Philadelphia (actually they just hooked onto the traction-engine line, and the dirigible’s Sterling-cycle engine was used only for maneuvering in takeoff and landing), and a variety of crude lightbulbs, though to judge from the fact that nearly everyone seemed to be using candles or gas, the new technology was more a novelty than anything else.
The other thing, though, that the ads told me was that a depression was settling over the colonies. There were many, many auctions of farms and factories, and because Luc had introduced credit buying to get the economy stimulated, many more ads looking for people to assume payments. There were many ads that began “position sought” or “land for sale,” and none at all looking for workers.
It took me a couple of hours to figure all of this out because the ads weren’t classified, as in our newspapers, but just fit in any old way the printer could get them to go. That was fine with me—I needed to kill time, after all, and was sort of hoping that counting ads would be dull enough to send me to sleep even in that uncomfortable chair.
The news of London was unimpressive as well; many people were sitting for the new photographic portraits, there had been many parties in the past season, and a remarkable number of rich people were marrying each other and were expected to foster happy lineages of many children of breeding and distinction. A traction engine had been built in India, and a line would shortly be opening from New Delhi to the coast.
I had just about decided that stern duty wasn’t going to keep me at this any longer, and even the dullest news wasn’t going to send me to sleep, as the clock struck midnight. I turned a few pages, and was about to start reading Dr. Samuel Johnson’s column from London, when something across the room caught my eye.
I looked up and saw myself, leaning over the crap table. Apparently both of us had had enough skill to get out of Boston. I glanced toward Warren, but he was deep in his game of whist, and there wasn’t much hope of getting him out of it without stirring up a fuss. Keeping my eye on the other Mark Strang, and doing my best to keep the newspaper well up in front of my face, I quickly scribbled a note to Warren, flagged a server, and sent the note. Then I quietly leaned forward, setting my paper to the side, and grabbed the bag with the SHARK and NIF from under my feet.
I was about to get the NIF into my coat sleeve—this seemed like the kind of job I wanted to do without making noise—when my target abruptly collected his winnings and went out the saloon door onto the deck. Grabbing the bag, I followed him.
Fog had blown in since we had entered Long Island Sound, and it was hard to see even to the end of the deck. Had he seen me? If so, then he was undoubtedly in the shadows somewhere close by, waiting to take a shot at me; if not, then I very much doubted he was out here for any good purpose. If he was being met by a boat from shore, he might show a light, but otherwise I didn’t think there was much reason for him to give himself away.
I looked both ways, again, and checked behind me, and still there was nothing. I stood and listened for a long time, but between the chugging of the engine, the splashing of the paddle wheel, the light slap of the waves on the side of the Locke, and the wind in the radio aerial, there was far too much sound out here for me to make out anyone quietly walking across the deck or climbing steps. He had had plenty of time, and he could be anywhere on the ship by now.
The moon came out up above, but it only helped a little; the fog was still on the sea, and though it was bright now, visibility was not much extended. I crept along the side of the main cabin, back past the saloon and toward the stern, because one direction was as good as another. I tried setting a couple of ambushes by crossing in places where my back seemed exposed but the shadows in the murky moonlight fell in front of me; either he wasn’t buying it (would I? I wasn’t sure) or else he wasn’t behind me. I started a slow search of both decks, outside.
Of course by now he might very well have gone in the other door. At least if Warren was still in there, he had been alerted to what was going on and might be able to take some action.
I slipped farther along the side of the steamer; the chugging was driving me crazy. In the dark you depend on your ears, and I couldn’t hear a thing. Moreover I had gotten to a point just back of amidships and was now near the bearings of the paddle wheels, which were screeching softly—petroleum and silicon lubricants were going to be a great thing when they came in!
“Please, sir, do not do that,” a soft voice said ahead of me. It sounded like a woman.
There was an unintelligible mutter.
You know how hard it is to recognize your own voice? I couldn’t be sure.
“Oh, please, sir, stop, sir, please,” the voice said again, softly.
I slipped under a staircase leading up to the bridge and peered into the darkness.
“Oh, god, sir,” the voice said. Something was writhing in the darkness.
I pressed closer and listened; the male voice suddenly groaned.
“That’s good, sir,” the voice said. “If you’re in town, I can be louder there—”
The male voice muttered something, and the woman then gave her address and said, “Eight shillings, as we agreed, sir. And I did indeed make a show of resistance, but you recall, sir, we agreed I was not to make too much noise.”
The muttering got surly, and there was the clink of coins.
I crept away. In any century, more people than spies are sneaking around in the dark. It occurred to me that if I had thought that poor guy sounded a lot like me, unpleasant things might have happened. At the least, we’d all have had some explaining to do.
I descended to the lower, crowded deck, which was largely open, loaded with barrels of cargo and stacks of finished wood from the New England sawmills, plus all the people they could cram aboard her. It took a lot of crawling around, and it must have been an hour, before I gave up and admitted that if my doppelganger was there under a blanket, I could have stepped on him three times without knowing it.
I headed back up. I had seen him, I knew I had seen him …
Someone was crouched on the deck in front of me. As the moon had risen higher in t
he sky, the light had gotten better, but the fog had thickened, and now I could see only a dark outline, like a badly developed black-and-white photo. Staying in the shadows, I went nearer; I was almost on top of the figure before I saw that it was a man, stretched out at full length on the deck, peering over the side toward the lower deck. In his hand there was a pistol.
Something about the hat made me suspect, and I crept forward; when I was a bare three feet away I saw enough of the face to be sure. “Warren,” I whispered. “Did you see him, where is he?”
There was no response; his concentration on the deck below was absolute. I crawled closer.
“Warren. It’s Strang. Are you—”
There was no response. Knowing what I would find, and shuddering from much more than the icy spray-covered deck on which I lay now, too, I reached out and touched his face.
The unseeing eyes never blinked. He was cool to the touch, not yet cold, but that would come soon enough, and already the flesh was beginning to stiffen.
-8-
I crawled back slowly and carefully, though if my counterpart was watching the body, he surely would have fired by now.
Damn, and I had liked Warren, liked him quite a bit. I had this idea of myself as being tough, an ice man, bent only on revenge and slaughtering Closers … and it wasn’t entirely true. I felt like bursting into tears; I’d just lost a friend.
But if I had normal feelings after all, I also seemed to have my full complement of desire for vengeance. We were going to settle accounts soon, I decided, and with that my brief wave of mourning was done. My heart was cold as the fog and as dark as the night, and I crawled forward, determined either to find my man or eventually have a shot at him as he disembarked.
He was nowhere on the upper deck. I even went back inside the saloon to check, with no better luck. By now a few determined gamblers were still playing in the casino, but he wasn’t among them, or among the disorderly heap of men in coats and knee breeches piled together and trying to sleep in the armchairs.
I had been around the upper deck several times, as well, and the more I thought, the more I doubted he had been there at any time that I had; one of us would have seen the other, there would have been a shot, and that would have been the end of it. That left the lower deck, where he could hide forever, and with a moderately good disguise probably get off the boat … or just slip over the side and swim to shore, as long as he waited until the very last minute and had someone waiting with a change of clothes and a hot fire … I knew in these waters in early spring you could the in minutes from exposure, but how many minutes? And would he know? When would I have to start waiting for the splash?
I shifted the small black bag in my hands a couple of times. It, too, had slowed me down, but I had no better way to carry the weapons I needed. The hand that clutched the handle tended to get raw and numb, so I’d been using my left hand, trying to keep my shooting hand in decent shape.
There’s an old Sherlock Holmes line about “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” There’s also an old joke about a drunk looking for a lost quarter under a streetlamp, even though he lost it in the alley, because the light was better where he was looking.
If that other Mark Strang were hiding out on the lower deck, I wouldn’t find him until he tried to get off, and quite possibly not then. He wasn’t on the upper deck. I doubted he would have been admitted to the bridge or stayed there so long if he’d come up with some pretext, and I didn’t think he was likely to know any more than me about how to steer one of these things. And there was nowhere to hijack it to.
That left one significant space I hadn’t investigated—the engine room and fuel hold. What he’d be doing down there, I didn’t know, but if I could find him there, I could do something about it, and I couldn’t find him anywhere else.
The best way was probably back through the saloon and down the opposite stairs, so I went forward again. I was almost at the saloon doors, and just passing around a little wind barrier they had to protect the deck chairs in nice weather, when something moved in front of me. I stepped sideways silently.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the voice said softly. It didn’t sound like the working girl it had been before; I thought it was probably the steward, and who else—other than us agents?—would have been out on deck at this hour?
“The key,” a voice said. It sounded like my own voice on the answering machine.
“Yes, yes, sir, but there’s nothing down there, the passenger valuables aren’t locked in the engine room sir—”
“The key,” it said again, and I knew the voice for my own. In the dark I could not make out which shape was whose, but sooner or later they would separate, and if need be I could stun them both, and then revive the steward—after I made sure my counterpart would never wake up.
Doing my best to keep it silent, I turned the catch on the black bag and reached inside, feeling for the NIF, which should be lying on the right, with the SHARK on the left. Something hard and the right size for a handgrip met my hand. I began to draw it out slowly, but something felt wrong.
With great care I set the bag down on the deck and braced, but it took a hard pull that was nearly impossible to keep silent.
Neither of the figures noticed; there was a jingle as one handed a key to the other, but the hands were hidden behind the nearer one, and I still didn’t know who was who in the dark.
I felt with my left hand, and then bit my lip in pain. Something had seared into my left hand …
I forced the case open wider and felt more carefully, looking out for blades, to confirm they were there, not to cut myself on them again—
And I found them. There were bone saws, scalpels, and now that I felt more, bottles of medicine in there. I had taken Warren’s doctor bag by mistake, and god only knew where my SHARK and NIF were now.
I wanted to scream and throw the thing around in a rage, but I bit my lip, closed the bag, and set it down on the deck. Time enough to pick on myself later.
My left hand wasn’t cut badly, but it was slick with blood; I wrapped it in a corner of my coat and squeezed down hard to stop the bleeding.
The two figures finally parted. I drew my Colt from its shoulder holster; this wasn’t so finely discriminating a weapon as the NIF, and I would want to be right about who I shot. Unfortunately, the builds were similar, the light bad, the fog thick—
Abruptly the more distant of the two figures brought up a pistol and shot the other in the back. The steward fell with a scream, wounded and probably dying—when you’re hit in mid-back like that, in a world without antibiotics or blood transfusions, you’re a goner.
My alter turned and ran. I shot at him twice, unable to hit him even at the close range because I could barely see him, and I couldn’t seem to adjust for the roll of the deck—
And he shouted, “Help! Murder! Murderer on the deck!”
My real position was instantly clear. There was one fresh corpse and one dying man on that deck; the dying man, if he could talk, would describe me. And I was standing here holding a smoking pistol.
I turned, darted into the shadows, and fled down the stairs, jamming the gun back into the shoulder holster as I went. Nobody was going to be listening to me if I tried to explain.
There were screams and shouts from above, and I realized they had found the dying steward and Warren’s body. That would at least slow most of them for a moment; I needed to get under wraps here somehow or other.
The problem, of course, in this chilly April night, was that every blanket that could possibly be found on that deck was in use. Moreover, my clothes were too nice and too clean—a leg with stocking showing anywhere, or my relatively new and decent shoes, almost anything of the kind, could easily betray me as not belonging where I was. And this was the kind of America where if they bothered to take me into New York for trial—the captain no doubt had the authority to hang me right there—the trial would be next morning
and the sentence carried out ten minutes later.
I squatted as deep into one shadow as I could get, between two bundles of blankets that seemed to be a sleeping couple, probably a farmer and his wife taking some choice part of the crop into the big city … lucky bastards, I thought, be content where you are, it’s a big nasty universe—in fact it’s millions of big nasty universes—and if you can find love in just one place and time, stay there.
That made me think of Chrysamen, which was distracting if I thought about her as a person and discouraging if I thought about whether it was time to call for a rescue yet. The mission wasn’t quite in danger, just me … and if I died, the signal would go off automatically. I still had the button in my pocket, but I didn’t yet have a good excuse to push it.
There were lanterns being lit all over the place above, a lot of people were beginning to order each other around, and some of the sleeping bodies were beginning to stir on the deck where I was, not yet very aware, but their consciousness sort of crawling to the surface to see what the noise was about. I couldn’t stay where I was, and there was no diversion readily available, at least none I could think of—best to get moving before they came down here with the lanterns.
I had known my counterpart had come down here with the key to the engine room, and you couldn’t miss your way to that—the deafening racket as you got closer to the stern was unmistakable. As swiftly as I could move without making noise, I headed for the stern, stepping over bodies, pistol already drawn because it was too late to worry about looking suspicious, and I wanted it handy.
The noise grew louder, and now there were no bodies on the deck—no one could have slept there.
In the moonlit shadows, there was something on the deck, something too small to be a person, and yet it had what looked like two human arms flung out from it. For one horrible instant I thought it was a human torso, that my counterpart had dismembered one of his victims for some obscure reason, but then I saw that it was too flat to be a body.
