by Paul McAuley
‘It ends here,’ Linda said.
She slowed the van and turned off the highway into the weed-strewn parking lot of an abandoned diner with boards over its windows and a half-collapsed roof. She switched off the engine and told her father that she wanted to talk to him and climbed out. When Tom turned to open the passenger door, Stone put his pistol in his side and said, ‘Hand it over.’
‘What are you going to do, shoot me in front of my daughter?’
‘I’ll shoot you in the heart. She won’t know about it until it’s over, and you won’t know about it at all.’
‘It’s in my jacket pocket.’
Stone scooted back on the bench seat, told Tom to put his pistol in the footwell, then told him take off his jacket.
‘You’re taking a risk, Adam. If I happened to switch it on, it would fuck you up.’
‘It probably would, but I reckon I could still shoot you. Do it, Tom.’
Tom shrugged out of his jacket and folded it up and laid it on the seat between them. He said, ‘This doesn’t mean anything. I was going to give it you anyway.’
‘I’m taking you in,’ Stone said. He was sure now that Tom was planning to go back and start things over again, the whole weary cycle from Pottersville to White Sands, in another attempt to save himself. ‘I can’t let you start killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels or do whatever else it is you’re planning.’
‘You know why I killed them? I’ll let you into a secret. That woman back in the Real, she wasn’t the real Eileen Barrie. The original, the Real version, died in a lab accident while she was trying to figure out how the time key worked. Knightly had already groomed one of her doppels as a replacement. He brought her in, and she picked up where her predecessor had left off.’
‘This is another of your stories,’ Stone said.
But he was remembering something David Welch had told him. That in almost every sheaf where she was alive, Eileen Barrie was a mathematician working on some aspect of quantum theory. That she was more stable than Elvis.
‘I was the guy who brought her through the mirror into the Real,’ Tom said. ‘I was the poor sap who fell in love with her. She was a real piece of work, Adam. Brilliant and beautiful and venal, like one of those man-eaters from the old black-and-white crime movies. I know about her doppels because Knightly built up files on possible replacements, and most of them are involved in stuff that’s either at the edge of the law or on the wrong side of it. The doppel in this sheaf, for instance, was a university professor - is a university professor, right now, but in a few years she’ll be working for a big Wall Street company. She came to work for us later on because she was about to go to jail over a scam involving junk bonds.’
‘She was an outlaw, like you. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘That’s why I loved her. It was kind of like being the male partner of a mantis, or a black widow spider. Or, you know the story of the frog and the scorpion, caught in the flood? She was like that scorpion, couldn’t help stinging the people trying to help her, even if it meant that she got hurt too. But man, was she irresistible. Now, can I have a moment with my daughter, or are you intent on taking me straight to jail?’
‘I guess a couple of minutes won’t matter.’
‘You have all the time in the world now, Adam. Think about it.’
Stone watched through the windshield as, in white T-shirt and blue jeans, Tom walked up to where his daughter stood. He spread his arms to embrace her, saying, ‘Sweetheart—’
Linda slapped him in the face, the sound loud as a gunshot. She reared back and tried to slap him again, and he grabbed her wrists and pulled her close, whispering in her ear. She fought in his grip and he held her, still whispering, and she went suddenly limp.
Stone pulled the keys out of the ignition and climbed out of the van with Tom’s denim jacket tucked under his arm. Tom looked at him over the top of Linda’s head.
‘We have less than three hours before the gate opens,’ Stone said, and walked away to the edge of the parking lot to give them a little privacy.
Traffic went past on the highway. Cars, trucks, tractor-trailers. Tons of metal battering past in a slipstream wind. Stone saw the blank faces of drivers and passengers behind glass, saw a little girl turn in the back seat of a car to stare at him. Saw himself as she might see him, raggedy and exhausted and smoke-smudged, his shirt pulled out of his trousers, a bundle under his arm. A drifter lost and forlorn amongst the dried wreckage of summer’s weeds, a long way from the home he’d lost.
Linda was coming across the parking lot toward him. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were wet, but there was a flinty determination in her gaze and an angry flush in her cheeks. ‘You know, don’t you? You know he’s dying, just like the last time.’
‘He went into the core of the reactor of GYPSY’s facility,’ Stone said. ‘He manually reinserted the control rods, stopped the runaway chain reaction and shut down the power source to the gates. He was trying to stop Knightly escaping, and he also saved a lot of lives, including mine.’
Linda’s gaze searched his face. She looked like she was a moment away from either tears or some serious violence. ‘He didn’t tell you—’
‘Back in Pottersville? No. Whatever else he is, Linda, whatever else he’s done, there’s no denying he’s a brave man. A lesser man would have used it to justify himself. He didn’t say a word.’
‘There’s a lot he didn’t tell us. Things he should have told us from the start. The Company would have gone after Knightly and his merry crew and put a stop to this without having to involve us. None of this would have happened.’
‘He wanted to save himself. You can’t blame him for trying.’
Linda kicked at dead weeds while she thought about this. She looked at Stone and said, ‘Do you think we’ve done what we’re supposed to have done?’
‘We have to make sure he doesn’t end up in Pottersville.’
Linda kicked at the weeds some more. She said, ‘Just now, he asked me to help him. He told me where the bomb is—’
‘He told you?’
‘He said it was to show he trusted me to do the right thing. I had to tell him I couldn’t.’
Stone realised that Tom Waverly was willing to give up the location of the bomb because he knew it didn’t matter now. But he couldn’t tell Linda that her father had tried to buy her trust with worthless coin.
‘I thought my father died three years ago,’ Linda said. ‘I mourned for him and tried to get on with my life. And then I find he isn’t dead after all, and the next moment he commits suicide. And then he turns up again . . .’
She turned away. Stone waited while she sniffed and gulped.
When she had regained her composure, she said, ‘He wasn’t there a lot of the time when I was a little kid. But when he was around, he was everything a father could be. It was like the circus had come to town. You never knew what he might do next. He was funny, charming, mysterious, exciting . . . He’d say, out of nowhere, let’s go for a ride. And we’d end up eating lunch in some fabulous backwoods barbecue place two hundred miles from home. Now, well, maybe I’ve grown up and I can see through his bullshit. I still love him for what he was, Mr Stone, but I hate him for what he’s become. Knightly has his principles, however twisted they are, but my father was only after the money. And I hate myself too,’ Linda said, ‘because I know I have to turn him in. Because I can’t do anything to help him.’
‘You did all you could, Linda. You did all right.’
She turned, gave Stone a raw look. ‘Did I?’
‘We have to get back to the Real and tell the Company about Knightly and what’s left of his crew, make sure they’re brought in before they can do any more damage. If it’s any consolation, your father will probably come out of this a hero.’
‘There’s a problem,’ Linda said. ‘Knightly has the components for a gate.’
‘What kind of gate?’
‘The same kind he used to get here.’
<
br /> ‘A gate that allows time travel?’
‘We came through the mirror in four vans. Three were full of crates. We rode in convoy all the way across country to New Jersey. I’ve been here three weeks while they finished assembling their nuclear bomb and talked to their local contacts. I heard all kinds of things, and I think I’ve made some kind of sense out of it. What they brought with them is the equivalent of the time key, only a whole lot bigger, and not as versatile. Once they’ve bolted it onto a gate, they can travel back in time to any point after that gate was opened. But they can’t travel forward, to 1984. For that they need the time key.’
Stone thought about that for a moment and said, trying to get it straight in his head, ‘If they want to use this gizmo, they have to get back to the Real. They have to get back to where the gate mechanisms are. But even if they do that, they can’t use the gizmo to get back to 1984. It doesn’t sound like much of a threat.’
‘If they get back to the Real, they can go into hiding and start over. Build up GYPSY again. Work out some other way of changing history.’
‘So we find a way of warning the DCI’s office about them, right here in 1977.’
Linda shook her head. ‘We can’t do that. Because if we do, we’ll change history, and things might work out worse than they already are. And besides, this is long before the Church Committee. Right now, in the Real, Knightly’s younger self is in charge of Special Operations. He’s a power in the Company, and the government thinks just like he does. Even if we do manage to warn the DCI’s office, they’ll probably stick us in jail.’
‘I’m not good at thinking like this,’ Stone said.
‘I’ve had plenty of time to work it out,’ Linda said. ‘We have to stop Knightly and his crew here, before he gets back to the Real.’ She looked across the parking lot at Tom Waverly, looked at the sky, looked at Stone, took a breath. ‘But first of all,’ she said, ‘we have to take care of my father.’
They drove toward New York. Tom was quiet, sombrely ruminative. Stone hoped that he was facing up to his fate, that he was beginning to accept that he had nowhere left to run and wouldn’t be able to start things over. When they neared the intersection that led to the George Washington Bridge, Tom broke his silence and told Linda to take the 95 south, and a few miles later they turned off onto the service road where he and Stone had waited for Knightly’s men.
He’d stashed the nuclear bomb in the yard of an abandoned factory building, under a tent of rusty iron sheeting.
‘I didn’t have time to find a better hiding place,’ he told Stone as they lugged the case back to the van. ‘I was in a righteous hurry to come rescue you and Linda.’
‘And I’d thank you for it,’ Stone said, ‘if it wasn’t for the fact that you put me in danger in the first place.’
They put the case in the back of the van and drove on to New York.
‘You don’t trust me, Adam, but do you trust Linda?’ Tom said, after a little while. ‘Would you put your life in her hands?’
‘I put my life in your hands more than once, Tom. It isn’t something you think about. It’s something you have to decide when the moment comes.’
‘The moment’s fast approaching. And you’re going to have to trust Linda, Adam, because you can’t use the time key. It’s fucked you up pretty bad three times now, and it’ll probably fuck you up again. What I was thinking, maybe Linda could use it to send you back to 1984, and she could stay here, take care of what needs to be done.’
‘Stay here with you and a nuclear warhead? I don’t think so.’
Linda said, ‘I’m sitting right here. Why don’t you two old men ask me what I want to do?’
Tom said, ‘Adam has the upper hand, honey, that’s why I’m asking him. But you’re right. In the end it’s your decision. If he agreed to it, would you help me out?’
‘You ran away because you wouldn’t face up to the consequences of what you did,’ Linda said. ‘Now you want me to work for you. I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t have to listen to me. But if you don’t, I can’t promise you that it’ll come out right,’ Tom said, and sat with his arms folded, staring out at the stony prow of Manhattan as they headed toward the Lincoln Tunnel.
18
They left the van in a parking lot on Third Avenue. It was five o’clock. The Turing gate would open in an hour. As they walked toward the subway station at 51st Street, Tom said, ‘If someone thinks to take a good look inside the van, or if some punk steals it, the history of this sheaf is going to take a giant fucking leap into the unknown.’
‘We’ll be back for it in a New York minute,’ Stone said.
He was scanning the faces of passers-by and watching the traffic, alert for anything out of the ordinary, certain that Knightly had sent people after them.
‘No, we won’t,’ Tom said. ‘As soon as we step into the Real we’ll be arrested. And I’ll get to spend what’s left of my life in some windowless room being questioned by civil servants.’
‘We can’t let you go,’ Linda said.
‘If I walked away from you right now, what would you do? Shoot me? Well, go ahead. It would be a mercy.’
‘We’re making things right,’ Stone said.
‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘I’m going home,’ Stone said. ‘We’re all going home.’
He held his pistol inside his jacket pocket as the three of them went down the steps of the subway entrance into a hot tunnel full of strangers hurrying past each other. Linda bought tokens at the booth and they passed through the turnstiles and walked toward the end of the crowded platform and the door that led to the electrical service shaft.
There was the growing rumble of an approaching train, a breeze moving the hot close air under the low ceiling. People folded their newspapers and got up from the benches along the wall. People moved toward the edge of the platform. Stone checked his watch. In less than forty minutes the gate would open, and they’d step through it and return to the Real, to 1984. He would tell Cramer and Echols that if they wanted to know where the bomb was and where the remnant of Operation GYPSY was hiding out, they’d better get their boss to agree to a few things. He wanted to visit the First Foot sheaf. He wanted to talk to his younger self and tell him what he needed to know, tell him to look after Petey and Susan, ask him if it wasn’t about time he did the right thing by her . . .
The train breasted out of the darkness in a rush of air and a metallic screech. Overlapping splashes and scribbles of hectic colour stretched along the steel flanks of its cars, blinding their windows. Cartoon faces and exclamations, stretched and shaded signatures framed by electric jags. Doors slammed back, people getting off pushed through dense knots of people trying to get on, and someone stepped out from behind one of the red girders that supported the low ceiling, a man in a tweed suit and a yellow waistcoat, Dick Knightly, pointing a rolled-up newspaper at Stone, calling out his name.
Stone threw himself at Linda, knocking her into a shallow embrasure as Knightly fired his concealed weapon. Shotgun pellets smacked dust and fragments from the tiled wall, a couple of feet above their heads. People screamed and flinched away, or stood frozen or knelt down. The driver of the train stared through the window of his cab, then ducked out of sight as Knightly whipped his arm to one side, the burning newspaper flying away to reveal a sawn-off pump-action shotgun.
‘This is the end of the road, Adam,’ he shouted, his voice lifting above the bedlam screams of the passengers. ‘You’ve nowhere left to run.’
Two men showed themselves. One was half-hidden by a girder support and the other was shielded by a stout black woman in a flower-print dress, his arm around her throat, his pistol at her head.
Stone was flattened in the embrasure, pointing his pistol toward Knightly. Beside him, Linda aimed her pistol at the two men, moving it back and forth in quick but steady hitches. Tom knelt behind a steel trash basket fifty feet away.
‘If you wanted to beat us to the gate,
’ Knightly said, ‘you should have taken the George Washington Bridge. But I suppose you had to stop off and pick up the bomb.’
‘Where are the rest of your men?’ Stone said. ‘On their way to New Mexico?’
‘If you throw down your weapons and surrender, I promise that I’ll let Ms Waverly live.’
‘Put down your gun, Mr Knightly, or none of us will get out of this alive.’
‘Do it now,’ Knightly said, and turned and shot a long-haired young man who crouched in one of the open doors of the train, shot him in the chest and knocked him down. People inside the passenger car screamed. At the far end of the platform, people were fighting to escape through the turnstiles.
‘You think I care about these people?’ Knightly said. ‘They’re nothing, Adam. They’re dust in the wind. They’re the walking dead.’
Tom rose to his feet and stepped forward. ‘You want the bomb? I’ll take you to the bomb.’
Stone saw a man wearing a blue sport coat push through the panicky crowd at the turnstiles and cross the platform in three quick strides and disappear into the train.
‘I’ll take you right to the bomb,’ Tom said. ‘After that, you can kill me or you can let me go, I really don’t care. All you have to do is promise you’ll let my daughter live. Let her walk away now. Let her go back through the mirror.’
‘I won’t do it,’ Linda said loudly, right by Stone’s ear.
‘Adam Stone has the device,’ Tom said, ‘and I can show you where the bomb is. Let Linda go - she doesn’t have anything to do with this.’
Stone could see the man in the sport coat moving through one of the cars of the train, appearing and disappearing behind graffiti scrawled across window-glass. He touched Linda’s hand and said quietly, ‘There’s a guy just got on the train. I think he’s our backup. When he makes a move, so do we.’
She gave a tight nod.
‘If you do have the device, Adam, I suggest that you give it up now,’ Knightly said. ‘Or would you rather see more innocent people die? Their lives, such as they are, are in your hands.’
