Showdown

by Deborah Chester

  He drew in a sharp breath. “Maybe it’s not the Time Institute looking for us. Me, I mean. Maybe the anarchists who damaged you in the first place have taken over. Now they’re trying to sabotage all of time. Can you verify that, LOC?”

  “Negative. Origin point only.”

  “Damn.” He gnawed on his bottom lip a while. Rescue or destruction? Gambling had never been something he enjoyed. And fifty-fifty odds were lousy.

  “Can you block it?” he asked, knowing even as he posed the question that the LOC might cut them off and trap them here forever.

  The LOC pulsed. “Affirmative. Scan can be blocked.”

  “Then—”

  “Danger. Time stream is wider. Inversion close to—”

  “Stop,” said Noel. “Can you scan all the way to origin point?”

  “Affirmative. Already in—”

  “Stop. Can you open communications line?”

  “Negative. That function is damaged.”

  “I know. I thought maybe you’d repaired yourself while you weren’t doing anything else.”

  “Self-repair in that mode is not possible.”

  “That’s what you always say. Can you scan all the way to origin point?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Noel considered it. The Institute’s equipment would register if it was scanned. They could trace the scan to its origin, in this case his LOC, and pinpoint his time and location. During the twentieth-century submarine warfare, boat commanders sometimes communicated with sonar pings. The scan would be his ping, telling the Institute he was alive.

  Excitement built inside him. He tried to remind himself that if the anarchists had succeeded in taking over the Institute, there would be no rescue ever.

  However, anything was better than remaining in this helpless limbo of a closed time loop.

  He drew a deep breath. “Scan to origin point.”

  “Working.”

  The LOC hummed a moment, then flashed violently. “Scan blocked. Danger. Scan blocked. Danger. Scan—”

  “Stop,” said Noel hastily before it could burn itself out. “Analyze. What is blocking the scan?”

  “Duplicate in time stream. Inversion widening. Danger.”

  Again Noel was aware of the coldness inside him, the coldness that was like the void between dimensions. Was he, too, going to slip into nowhere just when rescue might finally be about to happen?

  “Damn him,” said Noel savagely. “Cut the link.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Then how do we get him out of the way?”

  While the LOC analyzed the problem, Noel rammed his fingers through his hair. He needed a shave. He was hungry. He felt like hell. If Leon had ruined their chance to get back, he’d…

  It did no good to finish the threat in his mind. There was nothing he could imagine that would be harsh enough for what Leon deserved.

  “Come on, LOC. Come on!”

  “Affirmative,” said the LOC.

  That was not the expected reply. Noel frowned, afraid the LOC was starting to overheat or perhaps malfunction. “Reply to specific questions,” he said. “How do we get him back?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “LOC! Reset response mode. Reply directly to specific question as follows: How do we get duplicate out of inverted time stream?”

  The lights within the LOC flickered, then resumed their steady pulsing. “Response: Enter inverted time stream and relink.”

  “What?”

  “Response: Enter inverted—”

  “Stop,” said Noel. He lay sweating on his pillows and closed his eyes. The prospect scared him. Going into the time stream without a destination code locked in was like walking outside a space shuttle without a tether.

  Resentment choked his throat. Why did Leon always cause trouble?

  But dwelling on how exasperating his duplicate was brought Noel no closer to a solution. He forced open his weary eyes. The decision had to be made.

  “Let me state the situation,” he said. “I can remain here and do nothing. There will be no contact made, no rescue back to my own time. I will probably lose Leon forever if he remains trapped in the time stream. Or, I can attempt to drag Leon back to this reality and then scan to origin point in hopes of eventual rescue.”

  “Affirmative,” said the LOC. “Note additional possibility to be factored into choice A: probability of duplicate pulling you into time stream is eighty-nine point five percent. Link may not be broken.”

  “Yeah,” said Noel dryly. “I’d better remember that. If I decide to enter the inversion, can it be done? Can you take me there?”

  “Destination code?”

  “No destination code.”

  The LOC hummed. “Destination code?”

  Noel sighed. Safety features were great until you needed to dispense with them and found you couldn’t. “Forget destination codes,” he snapped. “Yours don’t work, remember?”

  “Destination code?”

  “Leon!” he said in exasperation. “Destination is Leon, my duplicate. Can you send me to him?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Can you get us out?”

  “Widening time stream is causing variables in predictions. Calculations state a sixty-six percent possibility of—”

  “Don’t tell me the odds,” said Noel. “Do it,” he said before he could lose his nerve. “Engage travel.”

  The LOC pulsed brightly. It grew uncomfortably warm on his wrist. The room blurred around him, and he felt himself dissolving into the mist of nowhere.

  With an abrupt, wrenching lurch, he snapped back into reality and hit the bed with a thud that brought a cry to his lips. He bit it back just in time, for he didn’t want to arouse the rest of the household and have them coming in here to check on him.

  What the hell had gone wrong? he wondered. He opened his mouth to ask the LOC, but before he could speak blackness engulfed him, a blackness so cold and silent it terrified him. He knew then that he had slipped between dimensions, into that dangerous place of nowhere. In ordinary travel, between lasted only scant seconds, hardly longer than a heartbeat.

  But this was lasting longer. He had ceased to exist corporeally. He lacked sight, hearing, smell, feel. Without some reference point to cling to, he felt the edges of his mind disintegrating. Madness could happen so easily here.

  He forced himself to focus quickly on Leon. Bit by bit he built an image of his duplicate in his mind, assembling that visage so like his own, yet different. He was thankful for every tiny difference, every minute alteration in the bone structure, in the width of the mouth, in the color of the eyes. They were not the same. They were not one.

  “Leon!” he called without a voice.

  Something replied, a voice that was not a voice. It was more a ripple in the void surrounding Noel. He felt a sensation of rushing, as though a wind passed through him. For a split second, he felt complete. He felt Leon’s mind merging with his. He welcomed it, for they were complete again as they should be, two halves of the same entity.

  He relaxed in that sensation, letting them become one. Leon was warmth in the coldness of nothing. Noel delighted in him for the first time. He shared himself eagerly, anxious to make their union permanent, keeping no guard raised now.

  The wind swirled and rushed through him, and then with a jolt the wind left. Noel felt ripped in half again. A terrible agony seized him.

  “Leon!” he cried. “Stay with me!”

  A trace of mocking laughter coiled through his mind. With it came Leon’s voice: “Now you need me.”

  Betrayed yet again, Noel wondered how he could have ever considered them two halves of the same whole. Leon was not part of him. No, he was something else, something twisted and horrifying. And now, knowing how important his return was, he chose instead to destroy them both.

  Fury filled Noel, a throbbing ferocious emotion greater than he could contain. It swelled through him, overwhelmed him. He lost coherent thought. He tried to hurl him
self after the wind, but it was gone, gone forever. He was only a speck spinning in infinity, alone.

  Chapter 11

  Noel jolted back to reality in time to see a hand coming down over his face. Thinking he was about to be smothered in his sleep, he let out a yell and sat up.

  The priest jerked back his hand and hastily crossed himself. “Santa Maria,” he breathed, pale and wide-eyed.

  Blinking, Noel looked around and found he was still in the boxlike bed. Candles burned at the head and foot, making him feel like he was in a funeral parlor. The air was stuffy with the scents of incense and unwashed clothes. On the opposite side of the bed, a tear-streaked Lisa-Marie rose to her feet with her mouth open in astonishment.

  “Noel,” she said.

  “It cannot be,” whispered the priest.

  Noel glared at the priest, who was skinny, young, and nervous. His long black cassock was dust-stained. He wore his green stole about his neck and held a small vial in one shaking hand.

  “What’s going on? What were you doing to me?” demanded Noel.

  “Extreme unction—”

  “The last rites?” broke in Noel. “What for? I’m fine.”

  The priest merely stared at him and backed away from the bed. He had grown so pale his eyes looked stark. “A—a miracle,” he whispered.

  Lisa-Marie flung her arms around Noel’s neck and wept. “You’re alive. You’re alive.”

  He pulled free, wincing. “Yes, of course I’m alive. What is all this?”

  But even as he asked he was beginning to figure it out. He sighed, feeling tired and grouchy. The attempt to regain Leon had failed. Now he wasn’t certain he could contact the Institute at all, and he couldn’t try as long as these people were in the room.

  “Oh, Noel, I can’t believe it,” said Lisa-Marie softly. Her blue eyes glowed. “I prayed and prayed, and now you’re all right. I guess faith does work. Oh, I’m so happy! I just knew that if you died I would die, too.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  She gripped his arm. “After all you did, after all you went through to save me…well, I’ve never known anyone could be so brave. Now I’m going to do everything for you, nurse you back to health and—”

  “I don’t need nursing,” said Noel, pulling free of her again.

  He eyed her with growing alarm. She had all the markings of a teenage girl lost to infatuation and hero worship. That was the last kind of problem he needed right now. “Thanks just the same, but I’d like some privacy.”

  She smiled deep into his eyes. “Yes, of course, Noel. Whatever you say. I’ll run and tell the others. They’ll be so glad. And I’ll get you a tray of food. You must be famished. Oh, Noel, I cried and cried over you. And now I’m so happy I think I could fly!”

  She kissed him on the cheek, and blushed rosily before rushing from the room. Meanwhile, the priest seemed to have regained some of his composure.

  “You were dead, senor,” he whispered. “Now you are alive. How can this be?”

  Inwardly Noel groaned. Inversion traveling with his mind had left his body in a deep trance. No wonder he felt like he’d been through a wringer. In a sense he had been. Splitting mind and body was tough work. Men weren’t designed to be wrenched apart and slapped back together that way. But he couldn’t explain anything truthful to the priest, and he wasn’t in the mood to invent an explanation.

  “Look,” he said, knowing he should take the time to reassure this man but not having the patience for it, “I was asleep, not dead. You shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions.”

  “The doctor said you were dead.”

  “The doctor is a quack,” said Noel, shoving his hair back with his fingers. “He doesn’t wash his hands often enough, and I bet he’s never heard of germs or carbolic acid.”

  “Senor?” said the priest in bewilderment.

  “Just go away, will you?” said Noel. He swung his legs off the bed and tried standing up. His knees were as weak as a newborn colt’s. He grabbed the side of the bed for support, wincing as his welts stung.

  The priest muttered something and fled the room. Noel could bear him shouting hysterically. In exasperation, Noel staggered across the room, hitching up his linen underdrawers as he went, and shut the heavy wooden door. By the time he locked it, someone was knocking.

  Afraid it was Lisa-Marie, Noel turned away from the door and activated his LOC. “Make contact with origin point,” he said urgently. “Scan origin point now.”

  “Scanning.”

  Noel grinned to himself with relief. That meant Leon was out of the time stream. Maybe this hadn’t been a complete waste after all. He didn’t know where his duplicate had gone to, and he really didn’t care, as long as he could get home. “Well?” he said impatiently. “Are you making contact?”

  The LOC hummed without replying.

  The knocking grew more insistent. “Noel?” said Lisa-­Marie. “Noel, are you all right? Please unlock the door.”

  Noel ignored her. “LOC, respond! Are you making contact?”

  “Negative.”

  The hope left him like air escaping a pricked balloon. He rubbed his face and almost felt like giving up. “Explain,” he said quietly.

  “Scan into time stream from origin point no longer occurring.”

  “You’re saying they can’t pick up our scan unless they are scanning themselves?”

  “Affirmative. Time stream has narrowed. Inversion is down to twenty-five percent and dropping.”

  “Yippee,” muttered Noel, then decided he needn’t wallow in self-pity. “I guess we succeeded in wiping out that danger. Is Leon out of the time stream?”

  “Scanning…affirmative.”

  Noel blinked in surprise. “He is? But I didn’t hold him with me. And we didn’t come back together.”

  “Coexistence not possible.”

  The knocking came again, hard enough to make the key rattle in the keyhole. “Senor!” called a masculine voice. “Senor, are you there?”

  Noel frowned. It was hard to think with all that noise going on. He walked away from the door. “We usually don’t come through the time stream together. I don’t know why I expected it this time. I thought we’d be rejoined or something.”

  “Coexistence not possible.”

  “But aren’t we halves?”

  “Negative. Anomaly in the first time stream created a duplicate. No damage was done to original.”

  “Yeah, me. I’m the original.” Noel sighed. “Still, all this boils down to is I missed my chance to get back.” Something heavy was thudding against the door now, making the hinges groan as though the people outside were trying to break it down.

  Noel pulled himself together. He couldn’t lose hope now. If the Institute had scanned once, they might scan again. “LOC, maintain scan to origin point. If the Institute tries to look for us again, I want you to make contact with them.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Resume disguise mode.”

  The LOC shimmered briefly and took on the shape of the silver and turquoise bracelet. Noel returned to the door, which was creaking and shuddering beneath the onslaught on the other side.

  “All right. All right!” he said in irritation and turned the key. He jumped back hastily in time to avoid being knocked down as the door slammed open and crashed against the plastered wall. The crucifix fell to the floor.

  Don Emilio, the doctor, the priest, and two burly servants in white cotton shirts and trousers stood crowded in the doorway. Lisa-Marie was not in evidence, much to Noel’s relief.

  “You see? You see?” said the priest hysterically. “I did not lie.”

  Don Emilio was the first to recover his composure. Dressed in a short jacket of dark blue velvet and trousers sporting a row of silver buttons down the sides, he stepped forward. His hazel eyes frowned in bewilderment.

  “You appear to be much recovered, my friend. This is bueno.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Noel. “All I know is I went
to sleep and when I woke up this fellow was smearing oil on my face. I’m not Catholic, by the way,” he added.

  The priest’s brows shot up. He looked affronted. “And the medallion of Mary found in your pocket?”

  “Not mine,” said Noel.

  The priest glared at him and jerked off his stole. “If you will please excuse me, Don Emilio, I will collect my bag and depart.”

  Don Emilio stepped aside and let the priest gather the paraphernalia he had left on the bedside table. When he passed Noel, however, the priest suddenly held up the cross he wore on a long chain around his neck and touched Noel’s shoulder with a probing fingertip.

  Noel met his eyes. “I’m not a ghost.”

  “A miracle,” said the priest. Shaking his head, he left the room.

  “May I?” asked the doctor.

  “No,” said Noel sharply before Don Emilio could reply. “I’m fine.”

  “Perhaps a brief coma induced by—”

  “—too much laudanum,” snapped Noel. “Look, I was tired. I needed some sleep. I can’t help it if you thought I was dead. Maybe you should go home and reread your medical textbooks.”

  Flustered, the doctor departed. Don Emilio smiled, although his eyes remained troubled.

  “You are very short of temper this evening.”

  Noel ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry. It’s been a rough day.”

  “My friend, you have been asleep for nearly two days. We could not rouse you. After a period of several hours you stopped breathing. The priest was late in arriving or he would have administered the rites sooner.” Don Emilio hesitated. “If you are not Catholic, why do you carry a medallion?”

  Noel allowed himself to sit down on the edge of the bed. He wondered where his clothes were. “It’s a long story.”

  “We were going to bury you at dawn,” said Don Emilio.

  Startled, Noel looked up at him.

  “Yes,” said Don Emilio softly. “Lucky for you that you awoke in time.”

  Noel thought about coming out of the inverted time stream to find himself trapped in a pine coffin six feet under. Small, dark places had never been his favorite. He shuddered.