Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Downslope, the two cruisers were wallowing up the track toward the shack, a cloud of dust boiling behind them.

  Tom Waverly used the walkie-talkie again. ‘Take a look downhill, why don’t you? I bet you can see that the local cops have come to check things out. You’re in big trouble, pal. My advice is you pull out before they get hold of you.’ He paused while the walkie-talkie squawked, then said, ‘Maybe you can kill ’em all, but then what? You gonna be able to wait around here until the gate opens tomorrow? You’ll have to make a run for it, and we’re waiting right outside. As soon as you put your head out we’ll shoot it off.’

  Deputies were moving around the shack. Stone saw two of them run to one of the cruisers, saw it dig out in a cloud of dust and accelerate up the slope toward them. ‘We’ve got about a minute here,’ he said.

  Tom Waverly checked his watch, said into the walkie-talkie, ‘The gate just now opened, didn’t it? Here’s your choice. You can go through, or you can stay and hope to convince the local law of your innocence. But if you choose to stay here, you should know we’re gonna surrender to the cops and tell them everything we know.’

  Stone saw two quick flashes in the darkness beyond the gap in the rocks, heard the hard noise of the shots echoing off the rocks. Tom stepped from the cover of the pickup and fired his pistol toward the gap, yelling, ‘You want some? Get some! Get some right here!’

  He fired until the pistol’s clip was empty, ducked behind the pickup again. A few hundred yards downslope, the cruiser swerved to a halt and the two deputies scrambled out on either side, crouching behind the notional cover of its splayed doors.

  Tom jammed a fresh clip into his pistol and thumbed the walkie-talkie. ‘You got six minutes before the gate goes down and you got yourself a siege with us and the local law. Yeah? We’ll see about that.’

  He tossed the walkie-talkie away and said, ‘He’s going through. Says he’ll be waiting for us on the other side. If only he knew.’

  The two deputies were coming up the slope toward them, making broken runs from bush to rock to bush.

  Stone said, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Through the mirror,’ Tom said, and pulled the envelope from his denim jacket and took out the pale green oblong of the time key.

  Even though the thing wasn’t switched on, Stone took a step backward. Downslope, one of the deputies shouted a warning. Tom and Linda took off, and Stone ran after them. He had a bad moment when they ducked into the notch, thinking that the man guarding the gate could have been bluffing when he’d said he was going through, but the narrow cleft was empty, lit by the silver light of the gate, a circular mirror eight feet across that blocked the far end.

  Tom Waverly took out a scrap of paper and handed it to Linda. She read out a string of letters and numbers and he poked at the face of the time key with his forefinger, the tip of his tongue caught between his lips. Stone watched this charade with mounting impatience, but he wasn’t about to step through the gate on his own. The man who’d been guarding it would be waiting on the other side, and besides, he had to see where Tom was going with this.

  ‘We’ve got about two minutes,’ Linda said.

  ‘I have to get this right,’ Tom said, and green light suddenly struck up from the time key, turning his face into a jack o’lantern.

  Stone felt as if a nail had been hammered into his forehead. A nail driven in right between his eyes, whacking through bone, jolting inch by inch into his brain.

  From a great distance, Tom said, ‘Oh man. It really has it in for you.’

  The nail went in with hard sharp jolts, no end to it. With each blow, Stone’s pulse pumped blood into his skull like air into a beach ball. His sight went black and he fell to his knees.

  Tom pulled him up. They took a step together, and another. Stone saw through fluttering shadows their reflections stumbling toward him in the gate’s mirror. Tom was aiming the time key at the gate with his free hand. A flat rock formed a step in front of the gate. Stone lost his balance as Tom hauled him onto it. He tumbled forward and the black flash of transition drove the nail clean through him.

  PART THREE

  A HIGHWAY BACK TO YOU

  1

  Half-blind, punch-drunk, Stone managed to stagger halfway down the metal ramp on the other side of the mirror before his feet tangled with each other and he fell to his hands and knees. His pistol skittered away, fresh pain exploded inside his head, and his stomach twisted inside out and he threw up.

  Linda and Tom Waverly stepped around him, aiming their weapons at shadows. As Stone coughed and spat and blinked back tears, Tom scooped up his pistol and said, ‘Like it or not, you’re a bona fide time traveller now, Adam. When this is over, I’ll write you out a certificate. You too, honey.’

  ‘Are you sure it worked?’ Linda said.

  ‘Take a look at the gate and tell me it didn’t.’

  Something appalling was happening to the Turing gate. Instead of simply blinking out, its silver disk was receding down a dimension at right angles to everything else, falling away into a great distance, dwindling into a star, a spark, a speck, a mote . . .

  The hammering pain in Stone’s head diminished to no more than an ordinary headache. He managed to get to his feet. It hurt a lot and his stomach performed an ominous backflip, but he managed it. He was standing in front of the black maw of the dead gate, at one end of a low-ceilinged bunker lit by a string of dim bulbs. There were two desks of quiescent electronics and a row of metal lockers, but no sign of the man who had fled through the gate ahead of them. Maybe he’d figured that three on one were bad odds, and had run off, Stone thought. But where were the gate technicians?

  Linda was asking him if he was okay.

  ‘I’ve had better days. Are you okay?’

  She gave a tight little nod and said, ‘This is where we’re supposed to be. What we have to do now is find out if it’s when we’re supposed to be.’

  ‘Three weeks in the past, you better believe it,’ Tom Waverly called out.

  He was doing something to the key-operated switch box to one side of the bunker’s big steel door. After a moment, the motor engaged and the door rolled back. Stone followed Linda across the bunker. He had to stop and lean against one of the control desks for a moment, and knocked a coffee mug and a slew of pens and pencils to the floor when he pushed away.

  Out through the square doorway, into simmering desert night.

  The bunker was one of more than a dozen dug into the top of a low ridge. Beyond the edge of the service road, the lights of the White Sands interchange stretched for miles across the desert basin. It contained the largest concentration of Turing gates on the planet, more than two hundred, serviced by three railroad marshalling yards and a dozen freight depots and passenger stations. There was an airport, two solar power plants, three nuclear power stations, and six wind farms. There were hotels and military barracks, hangars and factories. Water was supplied through a dozen pipeway gates that accessed lakes in wild sheaves where the climate was warmer and wetter. There were eight hospitals, with a combined capacity of six thousand beds. Canteens with a total floor area of two square miles served more than a hundred thousand meals each day to troops and support and aid-agency personnel passing through the gates, as well as feeding the technicians, railroad workers, and ancillary staff who operated the interchange, and the soldiers responsible for its security.

  All of this was laid out in nets and chains and deltas of lights beneath a sodium-orange sky where attack helicopters constantly shuttled back and forth as they monitored the trains passing in and out of the gates. Traffic flowed in opposing streams of red taillights and white headlights along broad highways that linked the marshalling yards and their service areas.

  Stone was having trouble thinking around the steady pulse of his headache, but he knew that his sense of time was out of joint. Every sheaf shared the same clock time, but although the sun had been setting when he’d stepped out of the Nixon sheaf, it was long
past sunset here, in the Real. Maybe I passed out, he thought, as he followed Linda and Tom Waverly past shuttered bunkers and a reef of shipping containers. I passed out, and Tom shot the guy who went through ahead of us, chased off the gate technicians, hid the guy’s body . . .

  Tom said, ‘How are you holding up, Adam? Don’t you go dying on me.’

  ‘I don’t plan to,’ Stone said.

  ‘Good man. You believe me now?’

  ‘Go easy, Dad,’ Linda said. ‘That thing really hurt him.’

  ‘He has to get with the programme,’ Tom said.

  ‘Maybe you should tell me what the programme is,’ Stone said.

  ‘I already told you. I’m going to put a stop to everything before it has a chance to begin. I’m going to take down GYPSY and make sure no one involved in it escapes justice. I’m going to avenge my own death by making sure it doesn’t happen.’

  Tom Waverly was pumped up, manically exuberant; Stone knew that there was no point arguing with him when he got like this. Look at him now, swaggering down the middle of the road, making extravagant gestures as he told Linda that they were definitely off the map, that they had freed themselves from the inevitable, that anything was possible. It was as if he really believed his bullshit story.

  The road switchbacked down the flank of the ridge and passed through a small chemical depot: a cluster of silvery tanks with insulated pipelines running between them, a skinny aluminium chimney pumping white vapour high into floodlit air, a prefabricated office building with a Jeep parked to one side.

  Tom took the shotgun from Linda, saying that he didn’t want to have to explain it to perimeter security, and tossed it in a Dumpster and dropped Stone’s Colt in after it.

  ‘What about your pistol?’ Stone said. He didn’t like the way that Tom had more or less bushwhacked him and taken charge of the situation.

  ‘We need some insurance. Think you can hot-wire that Jeep, honey?’

  Linda didn’t need to; the keys were in the ignition. As they drove away downhill, Tom rapped the dashboard clock with his knuckles, told Stone with a sly grin that everything was looking good.

  According to the clock, it was twenty after eleven. Stone had lost five hours somewhere.

  They drove past a railroad yard where long rakes of passenger cars stood side by side, and took an on-ramp onto a busy eight-lane highway. Tom fiddled with the Jeep’s radio, surfing through civilian and military stations, through snatches of rock, country and gospel music, then switched it off and told Linda to take the next exit. The off-ramp looped under the highway to a road that ran between trenches and fields of concertina wire and tank traps, past spotlit billboards that warned of minefields and the use of terminal force against intruders, to a plaza where soldiers with lightsticks directed traffic toward a dozen brilliantly lit checkpoints. Snipers were posted in watchtowers above each checkpoint and armed soldiers patrolled the lines of vehicles waiting to go through. Atop a hundred-foot flagpole, a big Stars and Stripes fluttered in the electric glow of crossing spotlights.

  Tom told Linda to stay calm, it was only a routine security check. ‘It’s three weeks before you and Adam were brought into this, and I have good cover - a security adviser who passes through here all the time. But just to be on the safe side, you two should use those fake army IDs Walter Lipscombe gave you,’ he said, and turned to look at Stone, asked him if he was going to behave.

  ‘I want to see where you’re going with this,’ Stone said.

  ‘I expect you do,’ Tom Waverly said, and tucked his pistol under his thigh.

  When they reached the checkpoint, a sergeant in combat fatigues downloaded data from their ID cards to his palmtop while another soldier used a mirror mounted on a pole to scrutinise the underside of the Jeep.

  Tom said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could move us right through. I need to get these two debriefed, and my friend in back is in need of some medical attention.’

  ‘You might want to turn around,’ the sergeant said. ‘There’s a clinic a couple of miles along the east perimeter highway where the colonel can get himself fixed up.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice, but I prefer to use my own people.’

  For a moment, the sergeant looked as if he might say something else, but then he handed over the IDs and the steel barrier dropped into its slot. Linda drove the Jeep through the checkpoint, and Tom told her to take the highway toward downtown Alamogordo.

  ‘Where exactly are we going?’

  ‘To see a friend of mine. Everything will become clear when we get there. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to trust your father. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you.’

  ‘We’re almost there, honey. I promise. How about you, Adam? Tell me that you’re not going to give me any trouble. Tell me that you’re going to trust me to do the right thing.’

  Stone was feeling a lot better now - his nausea had passed and the rush of warm dry air was blowing away his headache - but he figured that it wouldn’t hurt to let Tom think that he was still woozy, and said that as far as he was concerned finding a doctor wasn’t a bad idea.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘You’ll just have to hang in there, old buddy.’

  ‘You could at least stop some place and get me a bottle of painkillers, ’ Stone said. ‘I lost all my stuff when the station wagon went up.’

  Despite Tom Waverly’s bragging, despite the clock on the Jeep’s dash, Stone didn’t believe that the so-called time key had taken them back three minutes, much less three weeks. He knew that perimeter security at White Sands had a hot link with the Company’s network, knew that the scan of the biometrics encoded in his fake ID would sooner or later ring bells with Ralph Kohler’s people. It was possible that Kohler would order local agents to put a moving tail on them to begin with, to see where they were heading and if they were going to meet up with anyone from GYPSY. But it was also possible that Kohler would have them arrested straight away, and if that happened Stone would lose his chance to track down the people who had ordered Susan’s murder. And besides, he was tired of jumping when Tom Waverly said jump. He was tired of being drip-fed information that was ninety per cent bullshit. It was time to break free of Tom and Linda Waverly’s folie à deux, and make some moves of his own.

  They drove down the Strip, the long six-lane street that ran through the heart of Alamogordo, where different histories and pop cultures collided in a flood of neon signs and the clashing pulses of music pumped from car stereos and the open doors of bars and casinos. Stone counted three places advertising floor shows featuring the genuine Elvis - all of them no doubt doppels, press-ganged into imitating the original. Although it was close to midnight, pedestrians crowded the wide sidewalks. Most of them were in uniform. Half a dozen teenage girls were crammed in the front and back seats of a convertible, hands waving in the air as they yelled along to music booming from the radio. Two bare-chested men stood in the open sunroof of a white Cadillac, taking heroic swigs from cans of beer. In the parking lot of a burger joint shaped like a flying saucer, a pickup with a garish pink paint-job shudderingly jacked itself up on hydraulic shocks. There were bars and fast-food restaurants, strip clubs and dance clubs. An electronics bazaar took up an entire block. Motels advertised rooms for rent by the hour, cable TV, waterbeds, Jacuzzis. A wedding chapel boasted that notaries were available twenty-four hours a day. A bar offered genuine apemen death matches.

  Stone pointed to a convenience store up ahead. ‘A lousy bottle of painkillers. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘You better not be faking,’ Tom said, and told Linda to pull over. When she’d bumped the Jeep into the parking lot beside the store, he asked her to buy a newspaper while she was at it. ‘It won’t hurt to check the date.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Stone said as Linda swung out of the Jeep, but when he grabbed hold of the roll bar and hauled himself up, Tom drew his pistol and advised him to sit right there and take it easy.
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br />   ‘I wouldn’t like to have to shoot you because I thought you were trying to get the jump on me.’

  ‘The way I feel, I couldn’t jump your grandmother,’ Stone said. He fell back heavily on the rear seat and slumped down, shaking his head when Tom Waverly asked him if he was going to barf.

  ‘Next time through, you should follow my example,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘If you get a half-pint of booze inside you, the time key won’t be able to do a number on your head.’

  ‘It didn’t seem to affect Linda.’

  ‘Some people are more sensitive than others. If I’d’ve known how hard it was going to hit you, I would have insisted you share my Jack.’

  ‘Maybe you could share your plans with me instead.’

  Tom laughed. ‘Man, you don’t give up, do you? Trying your lame-o segues even though you’re sick as a dog.’

  ‘You could at least tell me who we’re going to meet.’

  ‘Try to be patient. We’re going to blow GYPSY wide open, but it has to be done my way because I have to make sure I don’t get caught up in what’s going down. That’s why I need your help, partner. Linda’s too.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Stone spoke softly, trying to put a little quaver in his voice, trying to sound sick and at the end of his strength. ‘If you really wanted to give up GYPSY, you would have done it already.’

  Tom shook his head. He was resting his .38 in the crook of his left arm, aiming it at Stone’s midsection, his finger lightly curled around the trigger. ‘I’ve been on the run for too long. No one would believe a word I said. And even if they did, I don’t have time for hearings and trials and the rest of that crap. I have a life to live, and plans that don’t include the faintest possibility of ever going to jail. But you’re an honest broker, Adam. You’re Mr Clean. You stood up in front of the Church Committee and told the truth. Anything you say, they’ll take seriously, especially if you have some hard evidence. You can help me change things around, Adam. You can save my life, and save the life of your woman, too. But you have to trust me. You have to stick with my plan.’