Time Scout

by Robert Asprin

  "Well ...he's not exactly the kind of person it's easy to call that."

  Malcolm drew his own conclusions. "He scares you."

  She glanced up swiftly. The little-girl vulnerability in her eyes shocked Malcolm nearly speechless. Then the moment passed and the flippant "who cares" look was back. "Nothing scares me."

  Malcolm stopped several feet short of the elevator, causing Margo to stop short as well.

  "What?" she wailed. "What'd I do now?"

  "Margo," he said gently, "if nothing scares you, then I may not have very long to get to know you. And that's sad. Sadder than you can know."

  A tiny vertical line appeared between manicured brows the color of bright new flames. She studied him with frank curiosity, head tip-tilted to one side like a canary faced with an unknown beast beyond its wire cage. It occurred to Malcolm that she was very, very young and trying desperately to hide it. Hard on the heels of that thought was another: She's been roughed up by life already. Dammit, she's too young to look like that. What the hell happened to this kid before she found Kit? The interest he felt turned suddenly protective.

  Margo sighed, which prevented him from saying anything he might have later regretted. "You're odd, Malcolm," she said slowly.

  "Am I?"

  "Yes. You..." She didn't finish.

  "I don't hit on you like the other boys? Is that it?"

  Or maybe, considering the wary tension in her body, it wasn't just boys her own age who...

  Malcolm forced his thoughts into less private realms of speculation. "How about some lunch? I have sandwich fixings in my fridge. We could meet somewhere for a picnic on the Commons. Unless you have another lesson?"

  Margo relaxed fractionally. "Not that I know of," she said a trifle ruefully. "A picnic on the Commons sounds nice. I ..." She broke off abruptly.

  "What?"

  She mumbled something that sounded like "Never mind" and avoided his gaze.

  Malcolm touched her shoulder very gently. "Hey. It's me, remember? The guy you wiped up the mat with?"

  Almost as though disobeying a stern command to stay down, turned, a corner of her lips quirked upward. She sniffed once. "Huh. I gotta beat up a guy before he'll ask me out?"

  Malcolm laughed. . "No, but it ought to give you a little peace of mind, knowing you can."

  She gave him an odd look, then both corners of her lips twitched upwards.

  "That's better," he smiled. "Why don't you find a nice spot somewhere in Castletown, maybe by one of the garden pools. We'll have a quiet lunch."

  Her smile brightened. All right. You know, that sounds wonderful. Thanks, Malcolm."

  "My pleasure."

  He held the elevator door with a courtly flourish that brought sparkling laughter to her eyes. That brought a sense of dismay to Malcolm's determination to remain an utter gentleman. He could fall for this kid – hard -without much trouble at all. Margo got off at the Commons level with a cheery smile and headed toward Castletown. Malcolm watched her go, then punched the button for his floor. Whatever that little girl was hiding inside, it was hurting her. He'd started out the week feeling sorry for Kit. Now he felt sorry for them both.

  "Well," he told himself philosophically as the elevator rose with an efficient whir, "looks like another job for Mr. Fix-It." He just hoped Kit's granddaughter didn't get them all into a jam they couldn't untangle. Given what he'd seen so far, she could wreak havoc just by breathing.

  She could also break Kit's heart without even trying.

  The insight left him with a chill chasing itself down his back. Malcolm made himself a promise, then and there: I'll do whatever I can–whatever Margo and Kit will let me to keep that from happening.

  Where that promise might lead him, Malcolm didn't even want to consider.

  Chapter Eight

  KIT WAS LOOKING for ways to avoid finishing a stack of bills when he spotted Margo on one of the real-time screens on his office video wall. She was sitting beside a pebbled fishpond in Edo Castletown, staring into the water and looking so vulnerable and alone, Kit felt his heart thump.

  He shoved back his chair and headed downstairs, pausing only long enough to slip on shoes. He didn't even change out of the vintage kimono he habitually wore while working. Kit wasn't sure what he'd say to her, but maybe the excuse of just getting to know her better would suffice. She was trailing one fingertip in the clear water when he arrived.

  "Hi."

  She glanced up. Her eyes widened slightly. "Good Lord. You're wearing a kimono?"

  Kit grinned. "I'm running away from paperwork. I, uh, usually try and wear the most comfortable thing I own when I have to tackle stacks of bills or government forms. Mind if I join you?"

  "Oh. Sure."

  "Such enthusiasm," he tut-tutted, settling down beside her.

  She tucked knees under chin and stared at the colorful fish. "I'm tired," she admitted, "and hungry. Malcolm thought it might be nice to eat a couple of sandwiches on the Commons. So I picked a spot."

  "Malcolm?"

  She grimaced. "He watched my lessons today."

  Ahh...

  They fell silent for a few moments, just watching the fish make lazy circles above artistically arranged slate blue pebbles. Finally Margo glanced up sidewise. "You don't like paperwork much?"

  Kit rubbed his nose. "No. Tops a whole list of things I loathe."

  She smiled. "I guess everybody's got their own list, huh?"

  "What's on yours?"

  She rested chin on knees again. "Oh, stuff "

  "Like for instance?"

  "I dunno. Snow, for one. Minnesota winters suck. Snow gets old real fast. Especially when you're too old to make snow angels in it. All that's left is cussing because the roads are closed and you're late to wherever it is you need to be."

  Kit smiled. "You sound eighteen going on forty-two." She stuck out her tongue, prompting a chuckle. "I was twenty, you know, before I saw more than a quarter inch all at one time.

  "You're from Georgia. Doesn't snow much."

  "Just what do you know about me? I mean, besides what's in all the tabloids?"

  Margo grinned. "They're awful, aren't they? I think my favorite was the one where you were abducted by mad scientists from way, way up time and they altered your sex and you got pregnant and then they changed your sex back and sent you home after you had the baby."

  "Oh, good God, you're kidding?"

  Her eyes twinkled. "Nope. They even had a picture, you were out to here," She indicated a very pregnant stomach. "I love what they can do with computer graphics programs, don't you? The little old ladies that buy those things in the grocery stores actually believed it."

  Kit just groaned. "I knew there was a reason I didn't go up time much these days."

  Margo chuckled.

  Kit decided the time was right, but he hesitated anyway, reluctant to destroy their fragile rapport. "Margo ..."

  She looked up again. "Yeah?"

  "Would you tell me about my ...I don't even know if I have a son or a daughter."

  The sparkle vanished from Margo's green eyes. She swallowed and turned her face away. "Daughter. You had a daughter."

  "Had?"

  Margo wouldn't look at him. "Mom died. A few years ago."

  The ache of losing something he'd never had a chance to cherish left Kit struggeling against sudden tightness in his chest. He blinked rapidly several times, fighting a salty sting behind his eyelids. How had Kit's only child died. His daughter ...She couldn't have been very old, if she'd died several years ago. An auto accident? Catastrophic illness?

  "What was her name?" Kit whispered, trying to keep his voice steady. "What did she look like?"

  Margo didn't answer for a moment. Then, in a low voice, "Mom's name was Kitty."

  Quicksilver pain flashed through him. Sarah had actually named their child Kitty

  "She had hazel eyes. Kind of sandy-colored hair. When I was a little girl she laughed a lot. Look, I know ...I know you want to hear abou
t this and I want to tell you, but–" She blinked rapidly. Kit realized quite abruptly his grandchild, too, was on the verge of tears.

  "Margo?"

  She turned away again. "I was the one who found her. Can we talk about something else? Please?"

  How old had Margo been when her mother died?

  Kit wanted to ask a thousand questions, but Margo wasn't ready to answer them.

  "What about your grandmother?" Kit tried, remembering with cutting clarity the last time he'd seen Sarah.

  Margo sniffed. "I've never seen her. Mom ran away with Dad when she was seventeen. I'm not sure Grandma van Wyyck even knew where Mom was or that we existed. I ...I had a picture. But everything I had was stolen. In New York. I even had to buy new shoes."

  Kit, too, mourned that photograph's loss. "What was the picture like? How did she look? Did she seem happy?"

  Margo seemed to come back from someplace even farther away than Kit had been. She studied him for a long moment. "You're still in love with her. Aren't you?"

  Kit managed a pained smile. "Does it show?"

  "Well, you're crying..."

  "Am I?" He swiped at his cheeks. "Damn..."

  Margo dug in a pocket and held out his hanky. She'd laundered it somewhere. "Here."

  Kit managed a shaky laugh. "Thanks, imp. You've rescued my reputation as an unflappable time scout."

  She started to say something, then stopped.

  "What? Whatever it is, say it. Or ask it."

  Margo frowned. "It's nothing much. just... Everything I ever heard or read ...Mom used to say you grew up a dirt-poor Georgia boy, had to scrap and fight for everything you had I used to think about that, sometimes. It made me proud, knowing you'd made it, but ...I always thought..."

  "You thought I ran out on Sarah van Wyyck? Because she stood in the way of my plans?"

  She flushed, but her silence answered the question.

  "I loved your grandmother very much, Margo. But sometimes even when people love one another, they have different dreams, different goals. Your grandmother's life and mine...it didn't work. Probably never would have worked. But I still loved her, even when she left me."

  Margo's eyes widened. "She left you?"

  Kit cleared his throat. "At the risk of sounding like my granddaughter, mind if we talk about something else?"

  Margo blinked. Then she said, "I guess we all have stuff it hurts too much to talk about, huh?"

  "Yeah. I guess we do."

  She gave him a funny little smile. "Did you ever go back to Georgia?"

  "No. I didn't really see much point. You plan on going back someday? To Minnesota?"

  Her face hardened. "Yeah. I do. But not for very long."

  "Unfinished business?"

  She sniffed. "Something like that." She shook herself slightly. "Anyway, that's about it for my life's history. I had a twin brother, but he was killed in the big quakes caused by The Accident. That's when my folks left California and moved to Minnesota. I don't really remember it. I was just a baby." She shrugged. "I grew up, left home, came here. The rest isn't worth telling."

  Kit thought it would have been, but didn't want to press the issue. He'd already learned more than he'd dared hope. A daughter, a grandson both lost to him and a granddaughter who didn't like snow and thought tabloids were stupid and was the kind of person who'd go back and settle old scores. Or maybe debts. Just what sort of unfinished business did she have and with whom? She was hardly old enough to have made the kind of enemies Kit had occasionally made. An affair of the heart, maybe, despite her protestations that she hadn't been jilted. A man didn't have to jilt a girl to make her want to come back and settle affairs. Sometimes all he had to do was fail to notice. Or fail to act. Or maybe it was simply that she needed to repay someone who'd helped her buy that ticket to New York. Or...

  Maybe someday she'd trust him enough to tell the rest.

  Kit spotted Malcolm heading their way from Residential, an honest-to-goodness picnic basket slung over one arm, and decided to let his granddaughter have her picnic without Grandpa hanging around. "Well, here comes your lunch date. I guess I'd better tackle that paperwork. Just do the fish a favor and don't flip Malcolm into the pond between the sandwiches and the desserts?"

  The sparkle came back to Margo's eyes. "Okay. Although after what Sven did to me, I don't think I could flip a soda straw into the fish pond,"

  Kit rumpled her hair affectionately. "Good. Proves you're doing it right. See you at dinner, imp."

  Her smile brightened his whole mood. "Okay."

  Kit returned Malcolm's wave, then headed back up to his office. Very deliberately, Kit switched the camera view on one particular video screen, leaving his grandkid her privacy. Besides, with Malcolm Moore as chaperon he didn't really have anything to worry about. Kit chuckled, recalling the full-blown panic in Skeeter Jackson's eyes when he'd cornered that worthy and made matters crystal clear, then settled down to the bills in a better frame of mind than he'd enjoyed in days.

  Two days into Margo's weapons training, Kit started getting bad news. First came the altercation on Commons when a drunken tourist accosted her. She flipped him straight into a fishpond, almost as though deliberately recalling his advice not to toss Malcolm into one. Bull Morgan had not been amused when the drunken idiot turned out to be a billionaire who threatened to sue. Fortunately, Margo had plenty of witnesses for Kit to counter-threaten with sexual assault charges. The billionaire had slunk away down time on his tour, muttering into his expensively manicured beard.

  Kit told Margo, "Next time, try not to dislocate shoulders or drown importunate perverts. Nothing excuses his behavior, but there's such a thing as overreaction.."

  She had sulked for hours. He supposed he couldn't blame her. Frankly, if he'd been there, the jerk might've suffered more than a wrenched shoulder and a publicly humiliating dunking into a goldfish pond. But as a scout in training, she had to learn self-control and alternative methods of extricating herself from sticky situations.

  Then he checked in with Ann and Sven.

  "She has the attention span of a two-year-old," Ann Vinh Mulhaney complained. "Either she doesn't want to learn or she's afraid of the guns."

  "She wants to learn, all right," Kit said grimly. "But she wouldn't admit to fear of a live cobra in her shower stall if she thought I'd halt her training over it."

  Ann frowned. "That's not good."

  "I know."

  Kit ran a hand through his hair. After their heart-to-heart by the fishpond, Kit knew it would be doubly-triply-difficult if he had to tell Margo her dreams weren't going to come true. His heart was still in his throat just thinking about letting her scout. He didn't know what he'd do if he lost her, too. But he wanted as much as any other grandfather on the planet to make his grandchild happy. If he had to tell her two days into training that it was hopeless ...

  "Is there any hope?"

  The tiny firearms instructor hesitated. "Well ...maybe. Her hand is, very steady and she has a good eye. When she's actually shooting, she scores well. But she won't apply herself to the learning. Has she been doing her homework?"

  Kit frowned. "Homework? Not unless she's doing it in the library. She drags in like a half-dead cat, gulps supper, then collapses for the night. I didn't think it was possible to wear out an eighteen-year-old."

  Ann didn't smile. "She needs to study. She keeps forgetting basics, like working the pump on the pump shotgun. Then she gets angry with herself when it won't function like a semiautomatic. The double-action revolver isn't a problem, but the self-loading pistols ..." Ann just shuddered. "I haven't even tried historical firearms yet. I don't dare."

  "Great. I'll start working her on basic firearms mechanical actions while she eats."

  "Good She needs it."

  The story was much the same from Sven. The stocky martial arts instructor saw him coming from across the weapons range, clearly considered ducking out the nearest exit, then visibly braced himself.

  "That
bad?" Kit asked without preamble.

  "Kit," Sven growled, "you got a big problem in that kid."

  "You don't need to tell me that. All I get these days is trouble. Let me guess. She won't apply herself to the learning."

  "Oh, no," Sven shook his shaggy head "She's nuts to absorb the stuff, fast as I can teach her. And she's good, for a novice. Problem is, her attitude stinks."

  "What about her attitude?" Kit asked tiredly. "In a thousand words or less."

  Sven's evil grin came and went. "Rough, is it? Teenagers. If they weren't so cute, we'd drown 'em."

  "The cuter they are, the bigger the occasional desire to hold their heads underwater. So what is Margo's problem?"

  "No patience, no feel for Aikido. She just wants to make the moves like an automaton and hurry on to something else. Kit, that kid is in one damned big hurry to do something and I'm not sure it'll be healthy once she does it."

  Great. Sven was waxing philosophical about his only grandkid, who was in a tearing hurry to die. He wondered if her impatience were part of her general personality, part of that mysterious unfinished business she'd mentioned, or just eagerness to get past the lessons and into something she could consider an adventure?

  "Maybe she just wants to get down time," Kit sighed. "In her place, I would. Here she is on TT-86 watching the tourists go places she can't and all I let her do is read books and take lumps from you and Ann."

  Sven pursed his lips, looking faintly like a thoughtful bulldog. "Could be, I guess. She's young, wants an adventure. Maybe you should give it to her. Settle her down."

  "Give her an adventure?" Kit echoed. "You mean send her down time? Before she's ready?"

  Sven shrugged. "Sure. Why not? I'm not talking about a scouting trip. Send her on a tour. Britannia Gate's due to open soon. Outfit her for a tourist jaunt and send the kid to London for a few days. Might take the itch out of her trousers, give her a taste of what it is she's letting herself in for."

  "I can't go with her," Kit pointed out unhappily.

  Sven's sympathetic glance didn't help much. Stinks," he agreed. "So send Malcolm. He owes her a guided tour, anyway."