Time Scout

by Robert Asprin

  The mouth of the Limpopo was nearly a hundred miles up the coast from Delagoa Bay and the gate. A hundred miles on a raft on the open sea with no real way to steer and no food or water?

  "Kynan! We have to get to the bank!"

  Kynan puzzled out her meaning, then nodded and began to paddle. Margo dug her paddle into the current until her shoulders and back were on fire. They moved slowly nearer the bank-but not fast enough. The current was sweeping them inexorably out to sea. Maybe they could swim for it ....

  Koot couldn't swim. And when she looked closely, Margo saw the gleam of crocodile eyes in the water. Terror choked her breath off. We'll drift into the Indian. Ocean. My God, we could end up anywhere ... At the last moment, she thought to fill water cans with river water. Then they were wallowing in rolling swells. The current carried them farther from land.

  "A sail," Margo muttered, "we need a sail..." Malcolm had taught her how to sail. But not how to build a sailboat out of a PVC and Filmar raft. "Doesn't matter. Gotta have a sail."

  Margo dug for the remains of their flying wing. Not much was left. It would have to do. Margo loosened one of the broken PVC pipes and rigged a mast, using cables to tie it in place, then tied the remaining Filmar in place as a rude sail. Wind bellied it out. The raft still wallowed-but in a new direction. For a time, they made little headway. Then they left behind the influence of the Limpopo's strong current and eddied slowly down the coastline, blown slightly shoreward by the wind hitting their sail.

  Kynan poured river water through their filtration equipment and used the coleman stove to boil it. Margo was so thirsty she would cheerfully have drunk the ocean dry. He poured a cup and handed it to her. Margo sipped the hot water

  And spat involuntarily.

  Salty ...

  She stared in rising horror at the cup. She'd scooped up river water ... . But she'd waited until they were almost in the mouth of the river to do it. The water she'd retrieved was brackish. And that water was all they had aboard.

  She shut her eyes, wishing she could blot out the terrors closing in on her as easily as she did sight of the accusatory cup in her hand. Koot was dying, they were adrift at sea with no water and no food ...

  "Margo?"

  She opened her eyes. Kynan's brow had furrowed in the starlight "Water not good," she said shakily. "Salt"

  He frowned and tasted it, then spat. The furrows in his brow deepened. Between them, Koot moaned. Margo checked him and bit her lips. He was extremely weak. When she tried to move him, he vomited over the side, then soiled himself with uncontrollable diarrhea. His skin burned under her hand. Margo poured sea water over him in an effort to bring down his temperature. He moaned and shivered, then subsided into delirium.

  Gotta get him back to the gate. HOW?

  The raft wallowed in the swells, ungainly as a beached whale. Kynan vomited over the side, too, then wiped his lips and looked embarrassed Margo dug out another scopolamine patch and stuck it behind his ear, then dosed herself against seasickness for good measure. She wasn't sure she ought to risk dosing Koot, then decided he was so close to death she might as well chance it. If she could keep him from vomiting, maybe he'd survive?

  The coastline was a great deal more rugged from the ocean than it had looked from the air. Margo and Kynan took turns at the sail, steering their craft as best they could They hardly moved in relation to the coast. At Margo's best guess, it would take them days to make the gate. Then, icing on a ruined cake, a line of thunderclouds rolled in from the Madagascar Straits, blotting out moon and stars. Lightning flared wildly from clouds to sea and back again.

  "oh, God, no, not now..."

  The storm swept down on them.

  The only silver lining visible in the clouds was their increased speed as the storm drove the little raft southward. Then it began to rain.

  "Kynan! Fresh water!"

  He'd tilted his head back, letting rain enter his mouth.

  "KYNAN!"

  He glanced around. Margo tried to explain what she wanted, mimicking the shape of a funnel, then simply tore up part of the flooring and used the plastic to rig a funnel over one of the cans. Kynan did the same, with a bigger sheet of plastic. They filled three cans before the sea grew so rough they had to hang onto the raft to keep from being thrown off the platform. They wallowed and spun around in the swells. Rain pelted down, a wall of solid water that left them blind and drenched. Margo clung to the raft, unable to let go long enough to steer.

  Please, let us get out of this alive and I swear I'll do whatever Kit says, study anything Kit tells me ... .

  They ran before the storm, helpless in its grip for hours. Margo couldn't get to her chronometer, nestled safely in the ATLS bag looped around her torso, but given the changes in the light she guessed the storm drove them down the curving coast for more than twenty hours. She tried to remember what the curve of the coast looked like, wondered if the storm would slam them into the beach or just sweep them on southward past the Cape of Good Hope several hundred miles farther south.

  Cape of Good Hope. Hah! Cape of Disasters is more like it ....

  She and Kynan drank water sparingly, giving Koot a little when he roused, but there was still no food. Maybe I could rig something to use for a fishing line and hook? When the storm breaks ....

  They ran aground without warning in pitch blackness.

  Margo was thrown violently clear of the raft. She screamed and landed in stinging salt water. Breakers slammed her into the beach. The force of her landing knocked her breath away and left her floundering in a savage backwash. She crawled forward like a crab scuttling away from the sea, blinded by rain and deafened by the crash of thunder and maddened surf. She finally collapsed above the high water line, drenched to the skin by pounding rain.

  Koot ... Kynan ...

  Malcolm ...

  The last thing to impinge on her awareness was the knowledge that she was an utter failure.

  She woke slowly, in pain. Margo heard male voices she didn't recognize, speaking loudly and angrily somewhere above her. She stirred and moaned. Everything hurt. Someone slapped her, shocking her more fully awake. Margo gasped and focused on dark-haired men with light, olive-toned skin. They were dressed outlandishly in dirty clothes that reminded her of paintings of Christopher Columbus. Many of them wore slashed velvet breeches and leather armor. One wore metal chest and backplates and carried a fancy wheel-lock handgun. Margo's heart began to pound. She'd been found by sixteenth-century Portuguese from that little settlement on Delagoa Bay.

  What about Kynan? And Koot? Had they survived the break-up of the raft? Or had Margo alone failed to drown in the stormy surf? One of the Portuguese, the man in the metal armor, spoke roughly to her. Margo had no idea what he'd said. The man stooped over her, spoke again, then backhanded her. She tried to get away and felt a tremendous blow connect. She didn't feel anything at all for a long time after that. When Margo regained her senses, someone had stripped her naked. The traders had clustered around her, leering. They'd started to unfasten their clothes.

  Margo whimpered.

  When the first one shoved her knees apart, Margo squeezed shut her eyes.

  Malcolm ...

  It took the bastards a long time to finish.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE WITHERED-SEA landscape garden of sand and stones in the corner of Kit's office had lost its ability to soothe. He slumped in his chair and shoved aside the mountain of government forms to be filled out, then stared at the raked sand and dry boulders. Eight weeks. It had felt more like eight years. Kit hadn't believed it possible to miss someone so keenly after such a short time much of it spent arguing, at that. His apartment felt empty. The Down Time had lost its appeal. The Commons would have been utterly dead-flat boring if not for the occasional excitement of a crow-sized pterodactyl raiding lunch from shocked hands or momentarily unguarded plates.

  After a while, even the giggle of watching tourists dive under lunch tables had worn off. All that was
left was the intolerable weight of government paperwork and the long hours wondering where she'd gone. He'd gone up-time long enough to hire an investigative agency to locate her birthplace in Minnesota and discover her real name, as well as search other time terminals to see if she might have gone scouting at one of them. So far, the agency had drawn an absolute blank. As far as anyone could tell, Margo had dropped off the face of the earth.

  Which she might have, for all practical purposes, if she'd gone scouting from another terminal.

  Whatever the solution to the mystery of Margo's whereabouts, TT-86 no longer felt quite so much like home.

  Kit ran a hand through his hair and sighed. "Maybe I ought to retire up time." To do that, he'd have to close his accounts, find a buyer for the Neo Edo, locate a place to live in the real world, which had changed a lot and not for the better, so far as he could tell during the years he'd been down time.

  Kit grunted. "I'm too tired to leave and too bored to stay."

  So he picked up a stack of bills and started scanning them for errors, just to avoid government forms. He was halfway through an itemized bill from the library when an entry caught his attention. He hadn't done any research on fuel-consumption and lift-capacity for Floating Wedge ultralight airships.

  "What the ..."

  He checked the access code assigned to the bill. It was Margo's. He grunted. So she had been using the library, after all. Then he noticed the date. Kit swivelled in his chair, punching up gate departures for the past two months. There was the day Porta Romae had cycled, the day his granddaughter had walked back out of his life. The library entry on the bill was dated seven days afterward.

  "Oh, hell, she couldn't even keep her goddamned password a secret. How many other charges did this thief run up against my account?" He found several additional entries, neatly itemized by subject matter and data source as well as computer time logged onto the mainframe. Each one post-dated Margo's precipitous departure through Primary.

  Kit slid the bill angrily to one side of his desk. Unless he could locate the access-code pirate, he'd be stuck for one helluva research bill. He switched computer screens, typing out a simple monitoring program to set off an alarm the next time Margo's access code was entered into the system, then e-mailed messages to Brian Hendrickson and Mike Benson, alerting them to the fact that data piracy was occurring.

  Then he called Bull Morgan.

  "What's up, Kit?"

  "We've got a data pirate loose on the station. Someone's used Margo's access code to bill research to my account."

  "I'll make a note of it. You're sure it's an account pirate?"

  "Margo left a week before the first incident. Went up Primary to God alone knows where. Or when."

  Bull sympathized. "I'll do some checking, put Mike Benson on it."

  "I've already e-mailed him about it and Brian Hendrickson, too. Thanks, Bull."

  He hung up and glared at everything in sight. Then sighed, resigned himself to a long day, and settled resolutely to work again. When the phone rang less than a quarter of an hour later, he cradled the receiver between shoulder and ear.

  "Yeah, Kit here."

  "Kit, it's Bull."

  He sat back in his chair, faintly surprised. "Damn, I knew you were efficient, but I didn't expect you to catch the rat this fast."

  Bull chuckled. "We haven't. But I did turn up something odd. I thought you'd want to know."

  "Yeah?"

  "Margo passed through Primary, all right. Then she came back about a week later."

  He sat straight up. "What?"

  "She came back, but hasn't logged out again. Medical hasn't out-processed her records, the ATF has no trace of her leaving a second time through Customs..."

  "But!" He closed his mouth again. "What about other gates?"

  "Mike's working on it. Hang on a sec."

  Kit waited in a sweat. Then Bull came back on. "No, she didn't log out through any of the other gates, either. Not the tourist ones, anyway, and nobody's filed paperwork to scout the unknown gates off Commons."

  "Bull, she has to be somewhere. La-La Land's a closed environment."

  A brief silence greeted him. "Kit, there are unstable gates."

  He shut his eyes. "No. Not even Margo's that stupid. She was scared spitless of the Nexus Gate and after Orleans ..."

  "Well, she's still here somewhere, then, avoiding you."

  "For seven weeks? La-La Land isn't that big. Besides, Margo couldn't stay out of trouble for seven minutes, never mind seven weeks. If she were here, somebody would've seen her. She's not on the station." He thought hard. "Do me a favor, would you? See if anyone else is missing? I'll start asking around on my own, see what I can scare up. Maybe a small gate opened up somewhere we don't know about. Or maybe somebody went through one of the unexplored gates without permission." It'd be just like that little idiot to pull a stunt like that.

  "Sure thing, Kit. I'll run some checks and let you know."

  "Thanks."

  Kit hung up and said several biting things to the withered-sea landscape garden, then started placing phone calls.

  Kit didn't have much luck. Nobody he talked to had heard a whisper about an unknown gate. A couple of down timers who worked as Time Tours baggage handlers recalled seeing Margo return through Primary, but they had no idea where she'd gone afterward. Kit's granddaughter had managed to vanish without a trace from the heart of one of the most gossip-riddled communities in the world.

  Then, when he least expected it, Malcolm Moore showed up.

  The younger man had avoided Kit's company for eight full weeks. If Kit arrived someplace and Malcolm was already there, he made excuses to leave within moments. He turned down casual invitations to the Down Time for dinner and had become in general a hard-working recluse. Kit felt sorry for him. Clearly, Malcolm had taken Margo's rebellion and defection deeply to heart, blaming himself entirely. Kit had tried to apologize, to tell him it wasn't his fault, but Malcolm wasn't returning Kit's e-mail or phone calls, either.

  When the buzzer on his desk lit up and Jimmy told him Malcolm was headed up, Kit actually sagged in his chair.

  "Thank God..."

  He hated to lose friends.

  A hesitant knock at the door signaled Malcolm's arrival.

  "Come in, it's open."

  The door slid back, Japanese style. Malcolm Moore glanced into the spacious office. He looked massively uncomfortable. -Uh ... you busy, Kit?"

  Something in Malcolms eyes told Kit he hoped the answer would be "yes."

  "No. Come on in."

  Malcolm sighed, then slipped off his shoes and entered. His posture told Kit he'd rather have faced the hangman.

  "I, uh ..." He faltered to a halt, staring at the floor, the walls, anywhere but at Kit.

  "Malcolm, it wasn't your fault. She's a headstrong little hellion. It wasn't your fault."

  A deep flush darkened the guide's cheeks. "You don't have to be nice about it, Kit. You weren't there." He shoved hands into his pockets, then paced uneasily toward the withered-sea landscape garden, leaving his back to Kit. There were holes in the toes of his socks and both heels were threadbare.

  "I, uh, heard she came back. Then vanished.

  "Yes," Kit said quietly. "Do you have any ideas at all?"

  Malcolm halted. For just an instant his shoulders drooped. "No." Then he straightened his back again. "But I heard something odd this morning. I thought you ought to know. You know, just in case..."

  "Park 'em. Talk."

  Malcolm hesitated, then took the chair. But he still wouldn't meet Kit's eyes. "I was down in the gym working out. Ripley Sneed came in."

  "Ripley? Where the hell has he been keeping himself? I haven't seen him in months."

  Malcolm grimaced. "Went down an unknown gate and damn near didn't come back. Had some pretty wild stories to tell. Anyway, I mentioned you'd been asking about unknown gates anybody had explored recently. He said he'd gone through one a couple of months back, but it was comple
tely worthless."

  Kit frowned. "What gate? Where?"

  Malcolm rubbed the fingers of one hand. "He said it opened in the back of Phil Jones' store."

  "Phil Jones? Isn't he the nut who goes down time and rescues totem poles?"

  "Yeah, that's the one. His shop gives me the creeps. Phil gives me the creeps. Anyway, Ripley said a small gate opened up in his storeroom. He went through, logged it, came back, told Phil the gate was useless.

  "Why was it worthless? Where and when did it go?"

  Malcolm glanced at his hands, pretending to inspect his fingernails. "He wouldn't say."

  Kit tightened his hands down around the edge of his desk. "Ripley Sneed always was a goddamned bastard How much did he want?"

  Malcolm sighed unhappily and finally met Kit's gaze. "A thousand."

  "A thousand dollars? To tell me where a worthless gate leads?" Kit swore savagely. "Where is that miserly little prick now?"

  "The Down Time. He's telling everyone about his adventures in the sultan's harem."

  Kit rolled his eyes. "Good God. What an idiot. Okay, Malcolm. Thanks. Maybe this'll be worth it. God knows I haven't had any other clues worth following. I'm afraid she's wandered through one of the question gates without filing proper paperwork with Bull and if she's done that..."

  Malcolm nodded. "You may be right." He hesitated. "Margo ... Well, she wasn't in any mood to wait any longer. Something awful happened to that kid before she came here. I'm not sure who she's trying to prove herself to, but it's riding her harder than we ever did."

  Kit didn't answer. He'd spent a lot of sleepless hours doing exactly what Malcolm had been doing: blaming himself.

  "That doesn't matter, does it, if she's wandered down a gate without telling anyone. She shouldn't have shadowed herself already," he said raggedly, drawing a flinch from Malcolm, "but if she's actually gone down a question gate secretly, she might as well have."

  The legal consequences of stepping through an unexplored gate without filing proper forms were minuscule, a mere fine if you actually made it back alive, but the practical consequences ...

  If no one knew which gate you'd gone through, no one could even mount a rescue attempt.