"Thus ever to tyrants!" Someone shouted in the distance. The words were followed by a sound as of cloth ripping, and then a crashing fall. Jerry realized that Booth, almost on schedule, had gone over the railing onto the stage.
"The President has been shot!" Someone was crying out the words.
Jerry could do nothing but sit slumped against the wall. People were trying to break in through the blocked door. There was an uproar of pounding and shouting all around him, but it seemed to have less and less to do with him, with each beat of his failing heart. He looked down at the watch he had been forced to drop. Still held to him by its chain, it lay on his bloodied waistcoat. He tried to reach for the stem of the device, but could not move his hands. He felt himself trying, failing, falling, dying—
—and then he was sitting alert and unbloodied in his wicker chair in the dress circle as Mrs. Mountchessington declaimed loudly to Asa Trenchard. Jerry's breathing and pulse were normal. He was not even sweating, much less drenched in his own gore, but as he sat he could feel his pulse begin to race. The watch, ticking methodically, stem still unactivated, was resting in his left hand in his lap, and when he looked down at the familiar painted face of the timepiece he saw that the hands stood at ten minutes after ten.
…will you be able to do it three times? I don't know. I expect you can do it once or twice, and that will be your limit.
He had failed, had wasted the one chance afforded him by Pilgrim; but his own special power of backing away from death had evidently given him another.
Ten minutes after ten, the watch said. Jerry raised his eyes sharply and turned his head.
John Wilkes Booth, plainly dressed in dark clothing, booted and spurred for riding, had just come into sight at the top of the little set of steps. The actor hesitated there for just a moment, as if he were surprised to find the Presidential box unguarded.
Automatically Jerry's hands moved, opening the glass face of Pilgrim's little device. Jerry's right forefinger set—or re-set—the hands to twelve exactly. Next his forefinger and thumb pulled the stem out to the first position.
And as before, time changed for him, relative to time in the auditorium around him.
Once again the houselights appeared to dim around him, sounds deepened, and all movements but his own slowed down. But this time he got to his feet at once, not waiting for Booth to pass his chair. This time he got out into the aisle ahead of Booth. As before, no one in any of the surrounding seats seemed to be aware of Jerry's passage.
Nor did Booth. The actor, approaching, paused for just an instant in the aisle, to stare at the chair Jerry had just vacated—as if a moment ago Booth had been aware of someone sitting there, and that now there was no one.
This time Jerry, unseen and unheard by his opponent, was waiting, flattened against the wall beside the white door when Booth reached for its knob and swung it open. And this time Jerry got in first.
Still undetected, he retreated speedily to the far end of the narrow vestibule. From there, only a few feet away, he watched while Booth, moving in slow motion, blockaded the white door with the wooden bar, and then put his hand on the knob of the door of Box 7. Jerry could hear the breathing of the assassin, who was unaware of anyone near him in the confined space.
As soon as Booth reached for the knob of the door in front of him, Jerry opened the other door to the box, the one farthest from the auditorium—Box 8.
The solid contact of his hand with the doorknob was not a collision. But the instant he moved the door, Jerry was jarred out of his accelerated state again, and back into the time-frame shared by everyone around him. Lights, sound, normal voices and motion, all flooded back.
Now he was standing in the Presidential box itself, and saw the four people there, seated more or less in a row with their backs to him—Major Rathbone's dark wavy hair, on Jerry's far right as he stood behind them; next young Clara Harris, daughter of a Senator; then Mrs. Lincoln, who had just let go of her husband's hand; and finally Lincoln himself, sitting relaxed in a rocking chair, enjoying the play.
Lincoln's head turned to the right, not with alarm, not yet, but curiosity. He had seen Jerry enter, though the President was not at first aware of the entry of Booth, who had come in a second or two after Jerry, to stand immediately behind the President.
But Mrs. Lincoln saw her husband's head turn to the right. Turning her own head to see what Abraham was looking at, she did see Booth, and let out a loud scream at the sight of the weapon in his hand.
And on hearing this Lincoln took alarm and turned his whole body in his seat.
Rathbone had already risen. Moving faster than Jerry had expected, the major had thrown himself on Booth, so that the pistol discharging sent its ball harmlessly into the wall at the rear of the box.
But the dagger in Booth's left hand sliced into the major's chest and sent him sagging backward.
Jerry was fumbling with his watch, his fingers trying to hold the stem. It was all he could do to keep from dropping the device again as one of the combatants bumped into him.
The pounding on the outer door, the blocked door, begun only moments ago, had already grown to the proportions of a real assault.
Now Booth turned on the President and raised the knife again.
Abraham Lincoln had had time to turn fully around and gain his feet, kicking the encumbering rocking chair away. His huge left hand enfolded the wrist that held the knife. The other hand had seized Booth somewhere by his dark gray coat. The frontier wrestler's body turned, the long arms of the railsplitter levered. The knife fell from Booth's grip. The smaller body of the actor rose in an arc that would have graced a twentieth-century judo dojo, and went soaring over the railing, launched head first toward the stage twelve feet below.
Jerry never heard the ignominious crash of the landing. Far on the other side of the stage, deep in the shadows of the left-hand upper box, an orange flash appeared. He never heard the sound of the shot, but he felt the staggering, numbing impact of the bullet, somewhere around the inner end of his right collarbone—
—and he was sitting in the dress circle, uninjured, breathing calmly, his body still physiologically unaroused, listening to Mrs. Mountchessington declaim. One more try, at least, was to be granted him. One more, or an infinity of hopeless tries, perhaps.
—it is possible to get caught up in something like a closed programming loop—
Who had told him that?
And where was Booth?
—Booth had already passed Jerry's seat in the dress circle, was going on into the white door—
Jerry loped after the actor, got through the door into the vestibule before it closed and locked. This time Jerry waited, invisible, until Booth had peered through the bored hole at his victim, then stood up and opened the door behind the seated President.
Then Jerry followed Booth through the same door into the Lincoln box.
This time by touching nothing but the floor, coming into hard contact with nothing movable in his environment, Jerry preserved his invisibility for a relatively long time. Holding his watch ready, fingers on the stem, Jerry saw—and felt that he had seen it a thousand times before—Booth's derringer raised in the pale tattooed hand, the little hammer of the pistol drawn back. The hammer drawn back, and then falling, endlessly falling.
Jerry pulled the stem of the time-watch, activating the beacon.
And now, he watched the dull-bright curve of the leaden ball as it emerged from the truncated barrel of the little pistol. A fine spray of gas and unburnt powder, at first almost invisible, came escaping past the bullet, preceding it across the few inches between the muzzle and the target.
But in the last moment before that impact, two new figures had instantaneously become visible to him. They hung in midair, apparently unsupported, one of them on each side of Lincoln's rocking chair. Even with the blurring of the world Jerry could recognize, or thought he could, the figure on his left as that of Pilgrim. The figure on the right was some stunted alien
presence, much smaller than Pilgrim, and utterly grotesque.
He felt no worry about that now. The leaden ball had emerged completely from the muzzle of the derringer now, with a gout of flame and thicker smoke bursting forth behind it, continuing to force the missile forward on its deadly path.
But the two figures flanking the President were now moving even more quickly than the pistol ball. During the long subjective second during which Jerry was able to watch the bullet's passage, they lifted Lincoln up out of his rocking chair between them. Then it appeared to Jerry that the President's long body had slipped from their grasp—or else that they were abandoning their effort, as if in the realization that it was useless. It seemed that between them, Pilgrim and the monster pushed Lincoln down into his chair again. Then the two mysterious presences were gone.
Jerry saw the head of Abraham Lincoln jerk forward violently under the impact of Booth's bullet, the shaggy dark hair rising and falling in a momentary flutter.
And with that event, time came back to normal with a rush. This time he got to his feet at once, not waiting for Booth to pass his chair.
But this time, before the acceleration could progress very far, the whole scene before him jerked to a stop, like the last freeze-frame of a motion picture. There was Lincoln, slumped already. Beside him, his wife, still unaware, her own nerves and brain not yet reacting to the pistol's bark. There were the other two legitimate occupants of the box, seated with their attention still on the figure of Asa Trenchard who at the moment occupied the stage alone. There was Booth, death looking out of his wide dark eyes fixed upon his victim. The smoke from the derringer was still only beginning to fill the space inside the box.
And then the freeze-frame faded. And with the fading of the last light to darkness, silence descended also, and Jerry knew the quiet and the blackness of the grave.
TWENTY-ONE
Light came reaching into darkness, sure-footed as death, pushing aside even the gloom of death itself. Strange that after what had happened to him Jerry, with the light growing outside his eyelids, could hear the song of robins, and inhale the scent of lilacs. Once—it must have been a hundred years ago, on a quiet night in Springfield—Jan Chen had quoted a line of Walt Whitman to him: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed—
Then full memory returned in a rush of what had happened in Ford's Theater, the fighting and dying and living there, as accurate and immediate as if intervening sleep or unconsciousness had never wiped it away.
"We failed," he moaned aloud, and opened his eyes wide at the same moment. He spoke before he knew where he was, or whether or not he was alone.
Then he saw that he was alone. This time he was lying on no corn-husk pallet. Nor was this the fine but too-soft mattress he had enjoyed at Willard's Hotel. This bed was clean and firm and rather institutional. Something about the subtle coloration of the walls, the light, perhaps the air said twentieth century to him even before he turned his head. The curtains on the window were partially drawn back, and Jerry could look out the window of the converted farmhouse to see electric wires fastened to a pole outside.
He recognized this room, right enough. Jerry turned over in the brass bed with its white modern sheets, and discovered that he was still wearing his nineteenth-century underwear, and nothing else. The outer garments of Jim Lockwood—and the coat of John Wilkes Booth—all looking considerably the worse for wear, were scattered in various places around the room, some on a floor, some on one article of furniture or another. There were dried brownish bloodstains on the torn sleeve of a dirty shirt.
Jerry's beard was coming along nicely, three days' worth of it at least, he thought. On his left forearm he could feel the tug of modern bandages. Someone had done a neat job there with tape and gauze. Had Booth's dagger nicked him again at the end of that last rewrite of reality?
Only the small wounds require bandaging. Perhaps death can safely be ignored. It needs no healing attention, whether it comes in the form of a knife-wound from a crazy actor, or in the form of a gunshot from—
The door leading to the hallway opened without any preliminary knock, and Jan Chen came through it. She was wearing white and khaki, looking rather like what Jerry supposed a nurse in a field hospital ought to look like.
"No," she said, positively and without preamble, shaking her head at him. Obviously she had heard his outcry upon awaking. "No, Jerry, we did not fail. Most specifically, you did not. You managed to activate the beacon perfectly on your third try.
Pilgrim, wearing a white lab coat open over his usual hiker's clothing, had come into the bedroom right after her, and now he raised a hand in a kind of benediction. "Well done, Jeremiah."
Jerry sat up in bed and found that his sense of outrage and thoughts of revenge had been left behind somewhere. "I think I got killed at least twice," he said.
"You did. You died by blade and bullet, ultimately to very good effect."
"You mean that the last time, it worked?"
"It worked indeed. Lincoln is safe and history as you know it is intact."
"The last thing I remember seeing is Lincoln getting shot."
"You could not see everything that happened. And I trust the other members of Ford's audience saw much less than you did."
Jerry sank back on his good elbow. "Then tell me what I missed. Was it you who shot me from across the way?"
Pilgrim raised an eyebrow. "I thought you understood that I could take no such direct part in those affairs of eighteen sixty-five. Instead it was I who pulled you off stage, as it were, and bandaged your most recent wound. When you had completed your most difficult role, successfully."
"You mean that after I saw Lincoln shot I somehow time-walked again and—"
"No, I think you had reached the limit of your resilience. There was danger of a closed loop establishing itself, or—but never mind. The people in the theater believe also that they saw the President shot, and the history books record the dark deed just as before. But the head that took the bullet was not Lincoln's." Pilgrim smiled.
Jerry could only look in confusion from one of his visitors to the other.
Pilgrim made a gesture with both hands, as if unveiling something. "It was the head of a simulacrum. An organic dummy, a duplicate down to the proper location and color of each hair, the last little scar, dressed in replicas of clothing Lincoln wore that night—which is all a matter of historical record. Your job was to signal us the exactly proper time and place of the substitution, which would otherwise have been a disastrous failure."
"A—dummy?"
"Nothing so crude as the image that word must evoke for you. It did the job nicely. Nothing was required of it beyond breathing and bleeding for a few hours with a bullet in its brain. Death was officially announced at a little after seven on Saturday morning, with the victim never having regained consciousness."
"The victim," Jerry said. "An organic dummy?"
Pilgrim was shaking his head, in response to something in Jerry's face. "No, Jeremiah. We sacrificed no human victim. Oh, to the eye of the doctors at the autopsy in the White House the blood and brains looked quite convincing—they are not, but the science of the mid-nineteenth century was incapable of making the distinction. I believe you may have had a brief look at our simulacrum, on the night you left us. It was then resting in the bed in the next room."
Jerry had sat up again, and now he was starting to get out of bed. His left arm was sore and he felt a little weak, but on the whole he was doing well enough. Very well indeed, considering all the things he could remember happening to him. Jan was holding a robe for him and he put his arms into the sleeves, being careful with the injured one. He looked at the clothes of Jim Lockwood, that he was never going to wear again. He looked at the stained coat of John Wilkes Booth, and tried to analyze what he felt. He decided his chief feeling was of relief that he was not still wearing it.
Nor was he ever going to see Colleen Monahan again.
Fastening the belt on the robe, he lo
oked from Jan Chen to Pilgrim, and asked them: "Who did shoot me? On that second try?"
Jan looked at Pilgrim, letting him answer. He said: "Whoever it was really did you a favor, you know."
"Yes, I know. I was wondering whether that was what they had in mind."
"I would doubt it."
"It wasn't you, then, or any of your agents?"
It was not.
"Then I suppose it was Colleen Monahan."
"In fact it was."
"And she was really trying to kill me."
"Oh, undoubtedly. What she had seen, and had heard from you, convinced her that you were involved in a plot to kill the President. You and Booth came bursting into the Presidential box together. She was there in the theater, you see, upon her own initiative—"
"I know about that. I just wish I'd had the chance to try to explain… never mind." He paused. "What happened to her, historically?"
Pilgrim appeared to be trying to remember. "She created only a negligible ripple in the flow of history. After the assassination, she kept quiet about any suspicions she might have had. Married a Union veteran in eighteen sixty-six. Died of yellow fever, as I recall, in eighteen sixty-seven."
"Oh." But Jerry was not, he was not, going to think about that woman now. She had been dead for almost a century before Jerry Flint was born.
Jerry drew a deep breath and changed the subject. Something of his old anger was returning. "On the night I left here, the figure I saw in the next room moved."
"Yes, of course," Pilgrim admitted. "The simulacrum. As a sleeper might move, no more than that. Am I correct?"
"Correct," Jerry admitted.
"The simulacrum had bones and muscles—even nerves, of a sort. No real brain, I assure you. Gray organic boilerplate, lacking the potential for consciousness."
"I thought it—he—was asleep." Jerry shook his head, marveling. "I thought I had seen Abe Lincoln sleeping in the room next to mine. I mean—an absolute dead ringer. I thought I was going crazy. Or you were trying to drive me nuts."
AFTER THE FACT Page 20
