Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  He did remember the conversation now. He had asked her, Why weren’t we aware of the rigid class structure in New York at that time?

  It’s not class structure that we’re running into per se, sir, Wilhelmina had told him. It’s nepotism. To get hired in the House of Morgan, you need to have some kind of relationship with someone who does work there. And in 1920, we’re at the height of the corruption that became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. Everyone inside the New York Police Department who could hire our man won’t now, because he has no ties to Tammany Hall. We—

  He’d cut her off. He had no idea what Teapot Dome was, and didn’t want to find out. The same with Tammany Hall. He had some historical expertise, but it wasn’t New York in the 1920s. When he accepted the President’s appointment as Head of the Time Division in the Attorney General’s Office, Lane had hoped to use this job to deal with interesting things, like people traveling back in time to murder someone else’s grandmother who just happened to be a federal judge or something.

  Instead, he was dealing with protected time periods that hadn’t been protected by the proper authorities, and hints and allegations of alleged time abuse. Half his staff was somewhen else at the moment, investigating, prodding, poking, seeing there was a case. Or, as his boss, the Attorney General, liked to say when he brought potential cases to her, the staff was seeing if this was something that would “benefit us in the next election, or is it something that we can leave on the scrapheap of history for the next administration?”

  Maybe he should quit, before the cynicism took him out of the game entirely.

  “Sir?” Wilhelmina asked.

  He’d checked out again. He wondered if he could pretend it was because he didn’t understand the time paradoxes.

  “No one looked at young women in that period,” Wilhelmina said through gritted teeth. She was clearly repeating herself. “If they had jobs, they were clearly from the wrong class and being women, they were considered stupid.”

  He had no idea how anyone could find women stupid. There had to have been women like Wilhelmina in that day and age. How had anyone believed they were inferior?

  “Philippa is one of our best operatives,” Wilhelmina said. “She studied the bombing for three months before we sent her back. She’s spent a month In Time.”

  Lane hated that phrase. It came from In Country, military slang for foreign territory, particularly a war zone. But its use here often confused him, because the rest of the world always wanted him to do things “in time” as well, and it meant something completely different. Like “just in the nick of time,” which was the only way he’d make that dinner date now.

  “Philippa couldn’t have been killed in the bombing. She knew where she should stand, what she should do, where the most victims were, the greatest danger. She knew it all. She also knew she could return to us at 12:01, and give us her information. She would have come back, sir. I know it.”

  Wilhelmina’s voice shook as she said that last, not with anger, but with sorrow. Or was it fear? Either way, he’d never heard those two emotions in her voice. Now she had his full attention.

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked.

  Wilhelmina was authorized to do a lot on her own. The fact that she had come here, with a request that she hadn’t yet articulated, meant something was very different.

  “I want to send in an investigator, sir,” Wilhelmina said.

  He frowned. “We already sent in three, not counting Philippa. At a certain point, we have to decide that we have done what we can on this investigation. We only have so many resources.”

  “We don’t leave people in the field,” one of the men snapped. Everyone looked at him. He paled. “Sir. Sorry, sir. I mean, after all. She could be in trouble.”

  Could have been in trouble, Lane mentally corrected. But he didn’t say it. He continued to address his questions to Wilhelmina. “Do we have information on her after September 16?”

  “In a cursory search of the historical record, her alias, which is Philippa Darcy, does not show up. But it doesn’t mean anything. Thirty-eight people died that day, and one hundred forty-three were seriously wounded. But that was according to the statistics released long after the fact. No one put up flyers or tracked everyone who had been on the street that day. Even if they had the resources, they didn’t have the will. The newspaper reports, for godssake, only listed names and addresses of the lower-class victims, and that was only if they were identified. The authorities didn’t even know for certain if the body parts they found matched up to the—”

  “I’m aware of the vagaries of the pre-technological age of investigation,” Lane said. “I’m asking if Philippa Darcy married or showed up in the public records. Maybe she had done her best to leave a message . . . ?”

  The investigators were supposed to send their recall device back if, for some odd reason, they decided to stay in the past. Only a handful of people had ever stayed, and all of those had traveled back just a few years, not more than a century.

  “No message, sir,” Wilhelmina said. “We checked. But Philippa is in the payroll roster in the House of Morgan for the week before. There is no payroll roster for the week of the 16th, and she isn’t on it the following week.”

  Lane placed his hands on his knees and slid back. “Clearly there’s a problem with the time-guard around that time period. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, so I don’t think sending another investigator into that time-guarded period is the best answer. I think you’ll need to come up with a new plan to figure out how this bubble got placed, and who placed it.”

  One of her assistants slumped, but Wilhelmina’s back straightened.

  “I’m not asking for someone new to investigate the bombing or that timeguard, sir,” she said in a how-dumb-are-you voice. “I’m asking to send an investigator to locate Philippa. I have to believe that she knows something, that she discovered something, and that someone is preventing her return. None of our failsafes have worked, and at least one of them should have. We should have some knowledge of what happened to her, and we have none.”

  “You automatically leap from this mission didn’t go right to someone has harmed her?” It was Lane’s turn to use the how-dumb-are-you voice. “For all we know, she could have been standing too close to the bomb when it went off, and she got vaporized. She, her device, the failsafes, everything. After all, as you just pointed out, our information from that time period isn’t exactly trustworthy. And I seem to recall that they never did figure out with any certainty what happened that day.”

  The third assistant grimaced. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest—”

  Wilhelmina held up a hand, silencing him. “We do an out-and-back,” she said. “A short mission, looking only on that day. We send in someone new. We give him the right credentials. After all, William J. Flynn took a train in from DC the moment he heard about the bombing. We can have our man take jurisdiction for just a few hours.”

  Lane had no idea who this William J. Flynn was, although he supposed Wilhelmina had once briefed him on that as well. So many cases, so much to remember. Maybe he would resign at the end of the year. Clearly all of these time paradoxes were taking a toll.

  “I thought we already did that,” Lane said. “Wasn’t that our second investigator?”

  She glanced at her assistants. “We had the wrong credentials.”

  “What?” Lane asked. He knew he hadn’t heard this.

  “We had legitimate New York police department credentials, but we had given our man a position too high up in the department. They figured out fairly quickly that he was a fraud. Only they figured he worked for former Commissioner Arthur Woods, not that he had come from the future.”

  Arthur Woods. Another name Lane probably should have remembered. He sighed. He would have to read up on this entire investigation just to refresh his memory. He could either do that, or trust the woman who sat before him.

  “How much will this cost the depart
ment?” Lane asked.

  “It depends,” she said flatly. “You can calculate the loss of a human life and the loss of the training we invested into the investigator, or you can figure the price of one more trip into time.”

  “Possibly losing another investigator,” he said.

  “Possibly,” she said.

  “If we do, we both lose our jobs,” he said.

  “That’s what’s worrying you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t. What worries me is that we’re doing something we don’t entirely understand. We’re throwing more resources at it rather than investigating the best methods and then taking them. There is no hurry, Ms. Rutger, as you’ve often told me. If we send in someone today or next week, it won’t matter. They’ll still go back to the same time period.”

  She raised her chin ever so slightly. He had gotten through.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. “In my concern, I had forgotten that. We will conduct a more thorough investigation, and then I will consult with you again.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Wilhelmina and her assistants left, but he remained seated. Something about this disturbed him greatly. Not Wilhelmina’s hurry or even the assistants’ passion. In fact, he understood the assistants’ passion. They could have been the ones on the front lines. But for the luck of the draw, this conversation could have been about any one of them.

  No, something else bothered Lane.

  New York’s financial district. Three major attacks that he knew of: this one in 1920, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. Plus at least two thwarted attacks, one in 2012 against the Federal Reserve in Lower Manhattan, and another in 2025 against the New York Stock Exchange.

  Were they all time-guarded events? If so, were they time-guarded by Homeland or Justice or the Time Department? Or by someone else? Something else? A multinational? A foreign government?

  Lane stood up slowly. He had to make a choice here. He could remain the ignorant figurehead, disappointed in the job that they had given him, or he could step into his role as the chief investigator of time irregularities for the Federal Government.

  He hated those dinners his wife planned. He used to love investigative work. He’d simply been overwhelmed by his learning curve and, if he were honest, by the fact that he walked through several time bubbles every morning when he came to work. He hated the Bubble, but everywhere he’d worked in DC had a time-guard of one type or another. The problem wasn’t the job; the problem was his attitude.

  He’d allowed others to dictate policy during his first six months here. Time to change that, no pun intended. Or maybe he did intend to pun. Because it was past time. And he couldn’t use the amazing resources at his disposal to start again. So maybe he could use them to solve something huge.

  Or, if this wasn’t huge, just to make the right decision in the Philippa D’Arcy case.

  Whatever that decision might be.

  Manhattan

  September 16, 1920

  Philippa glanced at the clock hanging on the far wall. The incredible clack of typewriters had its own rhythm, a rata-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat bing! that had become familiar to her. At the desk next to her, the new hire sang “Over There” faintly under her breath, a reprieve from the Tin Pan Alley tunes she had started the morning with. The last few hours of Philippa’s last day. She looked at all the girls around her, intent on their typing or fixing their shorthand or stacking already-completed letters in manila folders, and wondered how they would fare.

  They might be all right. The large room had no windows, the grillwork making it seem like a prison. All of the girls who worked there wore white shirtwaists and long skirts, their hair in a neat bun. They seemed interchangeable and probably were, to the men who ran the House of Morgan.

  Philippa straightened her desk, rolled a sheet of House of Morgan letterhead in the platen of her Underwood, and stood up.

  Mrs. Fontaine looked up from her desk. It faced the rows and rows of desks.

  “You do not have permission to stand,” she said. She was twice the age of the girls and twice their weight. She ran a tight office, but a fair one. She pretended to be an ogre, but the girls loved her, because she understood what it was to be young and employed and a little bit terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” Philippa said. “I’m afraid I need a personal moment.”

  Technically, the girls weren’t to leave their desks until their thirty minute unpaid lunch break. But Mrs. Fontaine understood that women couldn’t always sit that long, particularly at certain times of the month. She claimed she got her girls to do five times the work the girls in other financial houses did, because she allowed them “personal moments.”

  Mrs. Fontaine nodded. “Make it quick.”

  Philippa wouldn’t make it quick. Not that it mattered. After noon today, she would no longer be employed at the House of Morgan.

  She would make one more tour around the building, and try to see if there was something unusual. Then she would return to her desk and prevent some of the girls whom she’d befriended from taking their usual lunch. They would be safe inside their windowless room, but on that street, near the Curb Market, the Sub-Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange annex, and all of the other buildings, people would die, lose limbs, have their lives forever changed.

  Technically, she wasn’t supposed to prevent that. Technically, she was supposed to go about her business. But there was no way of knowing what the girls would have done without her, so trying to play that game didn’t work. She had to live with herself, and even though, in her real life, in her real time, these women were long dead, they were alive now, she’d been their friend, and she owed them.

  She slipped a steno pad into the pocket of her long skirt, and stepped away from her desk. She smiled a thank you to Mrs. Fontaine, then headed in the direction of the women’s necessary. The one great thing about the House of Morgan was that it had bathrooms and they were clean. Not that she needed to use one.

  She waited until she was out of Mrs. Fontaine’s sight, then pulled the steno pad from the pocket of her skirt. She hugged the pad against her chest and then wandered, making certain she looked lost.

  It had worked every time she had done this in the past. Some man would ask her where she needed to go, she would give an answer, and he would point her in the right direction. The younger men would ask her name, and give her a bright smile. The older men would sometimes put their arm around her and guide her to the correct floor.

  She didn’t want either to happen today. She needed to do her last tour unescorted. Then, if she didn’t find anything, she would slip onto the street and run to the Sub-Treasury building.

  She couldn’t get their mission off her mind either. Right now, as she patrolled the inside of the House of Morgan, workers at the Sub-Treasury building were transferring a billion dollars in gold coins and bullion to the federal assay office across the street.

  She had no real idea how they were doing this; her reading told her that the workers were using a wooden chute, and after the bombing, a U.S. Army battalion would arrive to protect the gold.

  Initially the Time Crimes Division believed someone was trying to steal the gold. After the first investigator discovered that no gold got stolen, someone suggested that the time-guard had put into place to prevent the gold from getting stolen, and had been successful.

  But that didn’t make sense either, because the gold would be a lot easier to steal after the bombing than before. Hell, she could figure out how to do it: she could time travel into the Sub-Treasury or next to the chute in the assay office at 12:01 in the chaos. With the right kind of manpower and weaponry, the gold would disappear.

  But it didn’t; it wouldn’t; it never would. It would remain.

  The fact that she was even thinking of heading to the Sub-Treasury building showed just how desperate she was to get some information, any information, before she left 1920 a
t 12:02 p.m. She had already been to Sub-Treasury courtesy of a nice young guard, who had thought her harmless. A different nice young guard had shown her what he could in the assay office, and there, she found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Not that she knew what she was looking for. Something. Something had to be here, besides this bombing.

  Something had to be so important that changing it threatened The Way Things Were.

  She walked up a marble staircase to the private meetings floor. She’d been called into a few of these conference rooms. She’d sat on a wooden chair in the back and taken notes.

  Today, if someone asked where she was going, she had a half-plausible lie based on that previous experience. She knew that Junius Spencer Morgan the younger, the heir to the throne, was having a meeting in one of the rooms facing Wall Street. She’d seen photographs of the aftermath, although she wasn’t sure which room he was in. If someone stopped her, she would tell them she was going to relieve the secretary handling that meeting.

  But no one stopped her. She went up staircase after staircase to floor after floor and she was about to give up, when she noticed one of the doors to the maintenance area stood open.

  She’d tried that door in the past, and it had been locked. This time, she slipped inside.

  Four men were leaning together, gesturing and whispering. They appeared to be arguing. They didn’t notice her.

  They didn’t look like maintenance men. They were too clean for one thing. People who did physical labor in this decade had a layer grime on their clothes and skin that just couldn’t come off in a weekly bath. Their clothes were off too. A little too shiny, a bit too new. And one man wore shoes that had a metal ridge she had never seen before. Or, rather, that she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Or, rather, that no one would see for many many years.

  The men all looked at her at the same time. One man flushed red.

  “Can we help you?” asked the man wearing the odd shoes. He had dark eyes and skin that wasn’t quite white. She wouldn’t have noticed that a month ago, but after living here, in a world where everything was defined by skin color, last name, education, and accent, she noticed.