Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  “The pleasure was mine,” Robert smiled. “Let’s meet again, when you have more time.”

  They shook hands, then the foreman took his leave and disappeared into the crowds thronging Frontier Town. Robert said, “Riyad’s a good man. This trouble’s really got him upset.”

  “Believe me, I’ll take it up with Bull. If we don’t stop this trouble, there won’t be a station left for Riyad to finish working on.”

  Robert nodded, expression grim, then waved over a barmaid. “Name your poison, Kit. You look like you could use a dose. I know I could.”

  “Firewater,” Kit told the barmaid. “A double, would you?”

  “Sure, Kit.” She winked. “One double firewater, coming right up. And another scotch?” she added, glancing at Robert’s half-empty glass.

  “No, make mine a firewater, too.”

  Distilled on station from God alone knew what, firewater was a favorite with residents. Tourists who’d made the mistake of indulging had occasionally been known to need resuscitation in the station infirmary. As they waited for their drinks to arrive, a slender young man in black, sporting a badly stained, red silk bandana, reeled toward them in what appeared to be the terminal stages of inebriation. His deeply roweled silver spurs jangled unevenly as he staggered along and his Mexican sombrero lay canted crookedly down over his face, adding to his air of disconsolate drunkenness.

  “I’d say that kid’s been tippling a little too much firewater, himself,” Li chuckled.

  The kid in question promptly staggered against their table. Robert’s drink toppled and sloshed across the table. A lit candle dumped melted wax into Robert’s plate and silverware scattered all over the concrete floor. The caballero rebounded in a reeling jig-step that barely kept him on his feet, and kept going, trailing a stench of whiskey and garlic that set both Kit and Robert Li coughing. A baggage porter, bent nearly double under a load of luggage, trailed gamely after him, trying to keep his own course reasonably straight despite his employer’s drunken meanderings through the crowd.

  “Good God,” Kit muttered, picking up scattered silverware as Robert mopped up the spill on the table, “is that idiot still drunk?”

  “Still?” Robert Li asked as the waitress brought their drinks and whisked away the mess on the table.

  “Yeah,” Kit said, sipping gingerly at his firewater, “we saw him yesterday. Kid was bragging about winning some shooting competition down the Wild West Gate.”

  “Oh, that.” Robert nodded as the drunken tourist attempted to navigate thick crowds around the Denver Gate’s departures lounge. He stumbled into more people than he avoided, leaving a trail of profanity in his wake and more than a few ladies who made gagging noises when he passed too close. “Yes, there’s a group of black-powder enthusiasts from up time going through this trip, mostly college kids, some veteran shooters. Plan to spend several weeks at one of the old mined-out ghost towns. They’re running a horseback, black-powder competition, one that’s not bound by Single Action Shooting Society rules and regulations. Paula Booker, of all people, came in the other day, told me all about it. She’s taking a vacation, believe it or not, plans to compete for the trophy. Bax told the tour organizers they had to take a surgeon with ‘em, in case of accidents, so Paula made a deal to trade her skills in exchange for the entry fee and a free gate ticket.”

  Kit chuckled. “Paula always was a smart lady. Good for her. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years.”

  “She was all excited about the competiton. They can’t use anything but single-action pistols in up-time sanctioned competitions any more, which kind of takes the variety out of a shooting match that’s supposed to be based on actual historical fact.”

  Kit snorted. “I’d say it would. Well, if that idiot,” he nodded toward the wake of destruction the drunken tourist was leaving behind him, “would sober up, maybe he’d have a chance of hitting something. Like, say, the side of a building. But he’s going to waste a ton of money if he keeps pouring down the whiskey.”

  Li chuckled. “If he wants to waste his money, I guess it’s his business. I feel sorry for his porter, though. Poor guy. His boss already needs a bath and they haven’t even left yet.”

  “Maybe,” Kit said drily, “they’ll dump him in the ghost town’s gold-mining flume and scrub him off?”

  Robert Li lifted his glass in a salute. “Here’s to a good dunking, which I’d say he deserves if any tourist ever did.”

  Kit clinked his glass against his friend’s and sipped, realizing as he did that he felt less lonely and out of sorts already. “Amen to that.”

  Bronco Billy’s cafe was popular during a cycling of the Wild West Gate because its “outdoor” tables stood close enough to the departures lounge, they commanded a grand view of any and all shenanigans at the gate. Which was why Robert Li had commandeered this particular table, the best of the lot available. They spotted Paula in the departures lounge and waved, then Kit noticed Skeeter Jackson working the crowd. “Now, there’s a kid I feel for.”

  Robert followed his gaze curiously. “Skeeter? For God’s sake, why? Looks like he’s up to his old tricks is all.”

  Kit shook his head. “Look again. He’s hunting, all right. For Ianira and Marcus and their kids.”

  Robert glanced sidelong at Kit for a moment. “You may just be right about that.”

  Skeeter was studying arrivals intently, peering from face to face, even the baggage handlers. The expression of intense concentration, of waning hope, of fear and determination, were visible even from this distance. Kit understood how Skeeter felt. He’d had friends go missing without a trace, before. Scouts, mostly, with whom the odds had finally caught up, who’d stepped through a gate and failed to return, or had failed to reach the other side, Shadowing themselves by inadvertently entering a time where they already existed. It must be worse for Skeeter, since no one expected resident down-timers to go missing in the middle of a crowded station.

  Kit sat back, wondering how long Skeeter would push himself, like this, before giving up. Station security already had. The wannabe gunslinger approached the ticket counter to present his ticket and identification. He had to fish through several pockets to find it.

  “Joey Tyrolin!” he bellowed at a volume loud enough to carry clear across the babble of voices to their table. “Sharpshooter! Gonna win me tha’ shootin’ match. Git me that gold medal!”

  The unfortunate ticket agent flinched back, doubtless at the blast of garlic and whiskey fired point-blank into her face. Kit, who’d been able to read lips for several decades, made out the pained reply, spoken rapidly and to all appearances on one held breath: “Good-evening-Mr.-Tyrolin-let-me-check-you-in-sir-yes-this-seems-to-be-in-perfect-order-go-right-on-through-sir . . .”

  Kit had never seen any Time Tours employee check any tourist through any gate with such speed and efficiency, not in the history of Shangri-La Station. Across the table, Robert Li was sputtering with laughter. The infamous Mr. Tyrolin, weaving on his cowboy-booted feet, turned unsteadily and peered out from under his cockeyed sombrero. He hollered full blast at the unfortunate porter right behind him. “Hey! Henry or Sam or whoever y’are! Get m’luggage over here! Li’l gal here’s gotta tag it or somethin’ . . .”

  The poor baggage handler, dressed in a working man’s dungarees and faded check shirt, staggered back under the blast, then ducked his head, coughing. His own hat had already slid down his brow, from walking bent double. The brim banged his nose, completely hiding his face as the unlucky porter staggered up to the counter and fumbled through pockets for his own identification. He presented it to the ticket agent along with Mr. Tyrolin’s baggage tags and managed, in the process, to drop half his heavy load. Cases and leather bags scattered in a rain of destruction. Tourists in line behind him leaped out of the way, swearing loudly. The woman directly behind the hapless porter howled in outrage and hopped awkwardly on one foot.

  “You idiot! You nearly broke my foot!” She hiked up a calico skirt and pe
ered at her shoe, a high-topped, multi-buttoned affair with a scuff visible across the top where a case had crashed down on top of it. Tears were visible on her face beneath the brim of her calico sunbonnet. “Watch what you’re doing, you fumble-fingered moron!”

  The porter, mouthing abject apologies, was scrambling for the luggage while the ticket clerk, visibly appalled, was rushing around the counter to assist the injured tourist.

  “Ma’am, I’m so dreadfully sorry—“

  “You ought to be! For God’s sake, can’t you get him out of the way?” The unfortunate porter had lost his balance again and nearly crashed into her a second time. “I paid six thousand dollars for this ticket! And that clumsy jackass just dropped a trunk on my foot!”

  The harried ticket agent was thrusting the porter’s validated ticket into the nearest pocket she could reach on his dungarees, while waving frantically for baggage assistance and apologizing profusely. “I’m terribly sorry, we’ll get this taken care of immediately, ma’am, would you like for me to call a doctor to the gate to see your foot?”

  “And have them put me in a cast and miss the gate? My God, what a lot of idiots you are! I ought to hire a lawyer! I’m sorry I ever signed that stupid hold harmless waiver. Well don’t just stand there, here’s my ticket! I want to sit down and get off my poor foot! It’s swelling up and hurts like hell!”

  Time Tours baggage handlers scrambled to the porter’s assistance, hauling scattered luggage out of the way so the irate, foot-sore tourist could complete her check-in procedure and hobble over to the nearest chair. She sent endless black and glowering glares at the drunken Joey Tyrolin and his porter, who was now holding his employer’s head while that worthy was thoroughly sick into a decorative planter. Another Time Tours employee, visibly horrified, was fetching a wet cloth and basin. Paula Booker and the other Denver-bound tourists crowded as far as possible from Joey Tyrolin’s corner of the departures lounge. Even Skeeter Jackson was steering clear of the mess and its accompanying stench.

  “Oh, Kit,” Robert Li was wiping tears, he was laughing so hard. “I feel sorry for Joey Tyrolin when he sobers up! That lady is gonna make his life one miserable, living nightmare for the next two weeks!”

  Kit chuckled. “Serves him right. But I feel sorrier for the porter, poor sap. He’s going to catch it from both of ‘em.”

  “Too true. I hope he’s being well paid, whoever he is. Say, Kit, I haven’t had a chance to ask, who do you think the Ripper’s going to turn out to be?”

  “Oh, God, Robert, not you, too?” Kit rolled his eyes and downed another gulp of firewater.

  “C’mon, Kit, ‘fess up. Bets are running hot and heavy it turns out to be some up-timer. But I know you. I’m betting you won’t fall for that. Who is it? A deranged American actor appearing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Mary Kelly’s lesbian lover? Francis Tumblety, that American doctor who kept women’s wombs pickled in jars? Aaron Kosminski or Michael Ostrog, the petty thief and con artist? Maybe Frederick Bailey Deeming, or Thomas Neil Cream, the doctor whose last words on the gallows were ‘I am Jack—‘? Or maybe a member of a Satanic cult, sacrificing victims to his Dark Lord? Like Robert Donston Stephenson or Aleister Crowley?”

  Kit held up a hand, begging for mercy. “Please, enough! I’ve heard all the theories! I’d as soon believe it was Lewis Carroll or the queen’s personal physician. The evidence is no better for them than for anybody else you’ve just named. Personally? If it wasn’t James Maybrick, and the case against him is a pretty good one, if you don’t discount the diary as a forgery—and the forensic and psychological evidence in favor of the diary are pretty strong—then I think it was a complete stranger, someone none of our Ripperologists has identified or even suspected.”

  “Or the Ripperoons who think they’re Ripperologists,” Li added with a mischievous glint in his eye. Every resident on station had already had a bellyful of the self-annointed “experts” who arrived on station to endlessly argue the merits of their own pet theories. “Well,” Robert drawled, a smile hovering around the corners of his mouth, “you may just be right, Kit. Guess we’ll find out next week, won’t we?”

  “Maybe,” Kit chuckled. “I’d like to see the faces of the Ripper Watch Team if it does turn out to be somebody they’ve never heard of.”

  Robert laughed. “Lucky Margo. Maybe she’ll take pictures?”

  Kit gave his friend a scowl. “She’d better do more than take a few snapshots!”

  “Relax, Grandpa, Margo’s a bright girl. She’ll do you proud.”

  “That,” Kit sighed, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  Robert Li’s chuckle was as unsympathetic as the wicked twinkle in his eyes.

  When, Kit wondered forlornly, did he get to start enjoying the role of grandpa? The day she gives up the notion of scouting, his inner voice said sourly. Trouble was, the day Margo gave up the dream of scouting, both their hearts would break. Sometimes—and Kit Carson was more aware of the fact than most people—life was no fair at all. And, deep down, he knew he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Neither would Margo. And that, Kit sighed, was one reason he loved her so much.

  She was too much like him.

  God help them both.

  * * *

  Ianira Cassondra did not know where she was.

  Her mind was strangely lethargic, her thoughts slow and disjointed. She lay still, head aching, and knew only cold fear and a sickening sense of dislocation behind her eyelids. The smells and distant sounds coming through the fog in her mind were strange, unfamiliar. A harsh, acrid stink, like black dust in the back of her throat . . . a rhythmic ticking that might have been an old-fashioned clock like the ones in Connie Logan’s shop or perhaps the patter of rain against a roof . . . That wasn’t possible, of course, they couldn’t hear rain in the station.

  Memory stirred, sharp and terrible despite the lassitude holding her captive, whispered that she might not be in the station. She’d been smuggled out of TT-86 in Jenna Caddrick’s steamer trunk. And something had gone terribly wrong at the hotel, men had come after them with silenced, up-time guns, forcing them to flee through the window and down the streets. She was in London, then. But where in London? Who had brought her to this place? One of the men trying to kill them? And why did she feel so very strange, unable to move or think clearly? Other memories came sluggishly through the murk. The attack in the street. Running toward the stranger in a top hat and coat, begging his help. The belch of flame and shattering roar of his pistol, shooting the assassin. The touch of his hand against her wrist—

  Ianira stiffened as shock poured through her, weak and disoriented as she was. Goddess! The images slammed again through her mind, stark and terrible, filled with blood and destruction. And with that memory came another, far more terrible: their benefactor’s pistol raised straight at Jenna’s face, the nightmare of the gun’s discharge, Jenna’s long and terrible fall to the pavement, blood gushing from her skull . . .

  Ianira was alone in London with a madman.

  She began to tremble and struggled to open her eyes, at least.

  Light confused her for a moment, soft and dim and strange. She cleared her vision slowly. He had brought her to an unknown house. A fire burned brightly in a polished grate across from the bed where she lay. The room spoke of wealth, at least, with tasteful furniture and expensive paper on the walls, ornate decorations carved into the woodwork in the corners of the open, arched doorway leading to another room, she had no idea what, beyond the foot of her bed. Gaslight burned low in a frosted glass globe set into a wall bracket of polished, gleaming brass. The covers pulled up across her were thick and warm, quilted and expensive with embroidery.

  The man who had brought her to this place, Ianira recalled slowly, had been dressed exceedingly well. A gentleman, then, of some means, even if a total madman. She shuddered beneath the expensive covers and struggled to sit up, discovering with the effort that she could not move her head without the room spinning dizzily. Drugged
. . . she realized dimly. I’ve been drugged. . . . Fear tightened down another degree.

  Voices came to her, distantly, male voices, speaking somewhere below her prettily decorated prison. What does he want of me? She struggled to recall those last, horrifying moments on the street with Jenna, recalled him snarling out something in her own native language, the ancient Greek of her childhood, realized it had been a curse of shock and rage. How did a British gentleman come to know the language of ancient Athens and Ephesus? Her mind was too slow and confused to remember what she had learned on station of Londoners beyond the Britannia Gate.

  The voices were closer, she realized with a start of terror. Climbing toward her. And heavy footfalls thudded hollowly against the sound of stairs. Then a low, grating, metallic sound came to her ears and the door swung slowly open. “—see to Mr. Maybrick, Charles. The medication I gave him will keep him quiet for the next several hours. I’ll come down and tend to him again in a bit, after I’ve finished here.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Their voices sounded like the Time Tours Britannia guides, like the movies she and Marcus had watched about London. About—and her mind whirled, recalling the name this man had spoken, the name of Maybrick, a name she recognized with a chill of terror—about Jack the Ripper . . .

  Then the door finished opening and he was there in the doorway, the man who had shot Jenna Caddrick and brought Ianira to this place. He stood unsmiling in the doorway for a long moment, just looking down into her open eyes, then entered her bedroom quietly and closed the door with a soft click. He turned an iron key in the lock and pocketed it. She watched him come with a welling sense of slow horror, could see the terrible blackness which hovered about him like a bottomless hunger . . .

  “Well, then, my dear,” he spoke softly, and pulled a chair close to sit down at her side. “I really didn’t expect you to awaken so soon.”