TS01 Time Station London

by David Evans

  Taking a bold step forward, the visitor insolently patted Sgt. Parkhurst on one cheek. “And who might he be, sweet face?”

  “I am he,” Brian stepped into the exchange to announce.

  Quickly the burly tradesman sized up Brian. A bit under six feet, not bulked up whatever, a sissy, upper-class face. No problem here. Snarl a bit and the little twit will scurry out of here in a wink. He extended a big splayed hand and gave Brian a one-finger shove to the middle of the chest.

  “Buzz off, Jock-o. This bird an’ me’s just getting friendly. She’s gonna let me in to see the boss, an’ after I’m gonna fix her plumbing for her.”

  Brian kept his voice low, unnaturally calm under the circumstances. “Do not touch me again.”

  “Or what? You’ll cry and run off to Mummy?” He emphasized his insult with a sneer and another shove.

  Suddenly the impudent tradesman found how seriously flawed had been his earlier estimation. He no sooner had touched the poof’s chest than he went flying across the room.

  Extreme pain exploded in the area of his elbow and he realized, in a terrifying moment before he hit the wall headfirst, that his arm was broken. Daylight rapidly receded, along with the pain ... for the time being.

  Brian made a quick search of the unconscious man. He carried no identification, though Brian found a suppressed Walther PP. He turned back to Parkhurst. “It appears we have a Nazi assassin on our hands. Have Wigglesby come up and dispose of that garbage,” he instructed.

  Sally Parkhurst wore an expression of awe and unease. “Lor’ love a duck, Colonel. I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

  Brian shrugged it off. “Some commando muck-up they taught us at the RAF flight school.”

  Actually, it had been one of the more basic moves in Guai Gee Do, a highly proficient, advanced martial art of the far future. Brian tapped the empty file trays on Parkhurst’s desk.

  “We’ve nothing on for this morning. Why don’t you close up shop and take some time for lunch with that Tank Corps friend of yours?”

  Sally Parkhurst blushed furiously. “Y-you mean, you know about him, Colonel? I—I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be. I understand he’s quite dashing in those high boots and leather tank helmet.”

  “You—you’ve quite undone me, Colonel. Though I am grateful. Yes, I think I will. Are Tony and Hank coming in?”

  “Later today, yes.”

  “Good, then. I’ll not worry about them showing up and not finding me here.”

  They parted with a friendly wave. Downstairs, Brian raised his brolly imperiously to summon a cab. Not a soul passing on the street would have considered him other than an upper-class barrister or some lesser nobleman. Certainly not from his dark, expensive, three-piece pin-striped suit; snowy shirt; celluloid collar; and regimental tie. He would have to stop at his flat and change before going on to the London Time Station. His present garb would attract far too much—and unwanted—attention.

  Time: 0820, Warden Central Time

  Place: Temporal Warden Central

  Brian Moore stepped through the shimmering curtain into a room that, except for the bulk of the Beamer, looked entirely different from the London Time Station from which he had departed. Ranks of electronic equipment lined walls painted a soft green. Indirect light gave a soft though bright illumination from above. The hum and click of equipment weighted the air. He greeted Isai Takamoto, the Temporal Technician on duty, and crossed the laboratory-like, immaculately clean area to a door that automatically irised open at his approach.

  Down the hall, he went through a routine security check. Retinal pattern, DNA match, and voice print were all evaluated before giving him access to the office of his boss, Deputy Director of the Temporal Warden Corps, Arkady Grigorovich Gallubin. As always, Brian could not avoid being impressed by the spectacular view of the delicate, gleaming white spires and towers of this Future Culture city, seen through the large Omega window behind Gallubin’s desk.

  Opposite it, at the far end, was the Alpha window, which looked out on a far more mundane vista—the military-like barracks of the Temporal Wardens, and beyond that, the wide, square hover pads of the space port that served the orbiting shuttles. The monthly Mars shuttle was on final approach as Brian entered. Gallubin smiled expansively and shoved a forkful of blini into his mouth, then greeted Brian.

  “Eto dobro, Whitefeather, right on time.” Then he laughed at his badly shopworn joke. His complexion, usually ruddy from too much vodka, had a pale, waxen quality today, “Come, sit down. You would like some blini? Yes? No?”

  “I would prefer a blood-rare bison steak, about two inches thick, if possible.”

  Arkady made a shocked face, the twinkle deserting his ice-blue eyes. “Real meat? No one is that barbarian. You come close to making me ill.”

  Brian suppressed a smirk. “They still do in the North American area. The Old Ones were right, the buffalo have come back. There are thousands of acres devoted to feeding bison for market. Bison has the most protein per gram and is the most easily metabolized.”

  Arkady looked genuinely ill. He raised a thick-fingered hand to ward off any further such talk. “No. Please. Stop this. Eating meat is ... is obscene, and it’s illegal.”

  Smiling, Whitefeather corrected his boss. “It is here in the Euro-Republic. North America rejected that regulation centuries go. Actually, bison’s quite tasty. It makes you strong. Maybe that’s why there are so many Americans in the Corps? And remember,” he added with a droll expression, “I ate bison almost exclusively for the first thirteen years of my life. Now, seriously, you didn’t send for me to discuss vegetarianism. What is the problem?”

  When Arkady had recovered himself from the stark recollection of the thin, amber-skinned, big-eyed little boy who stood before him fifteen years ago, dressed in moccasins, loincloth, skin shirt and elk hide robe, he quickly explained. “You are to have a new assignment; no, not quite right. Another assignment, in addition to your usual duties.” Brian lifted a quizzical eyebrow. Arkady enlightened him. “You are to look into the illegal activities of certain rogue time travelers. They have gotten their hands on a bootleg Beamer and are using it to loot valuables from businesses, churches, and museums in wartime England, France, and other countries, before they can be bombed out.”

  Brian frowned into Arkady’s pause. “A Beamer consumes enormous amounts of energy. Haven’t you been able to trace it from this end?”

  “No. It probably came from the Trans-Amazonia Free State, where so much bootleg equipment originated.”

  Personal irritation at the intransigences of the mostly Native South American citizens of the old Trans-Amazonia Free State flared up in Steve Whitefeather/Brian Moore. Damn it, his people could have had it that way, instead of being the Province of Trans-Mississippi, of the North American Republic, only one subordinate entity of nine Regional provinces of that autonomous state. Yes, the Crow, the Cheyenne, his own Sioux, not to mention the Navajo, Hopi, and what remained of the Five Civilized Tribes, could have had it all, from coast to coast in what had been the contiguous forty-eight states of the old United States. Trans-Amazonia had been a power unto itself, as they could have been. His displeasure took an odd form.

  “What good was the planetary government that allowed freebooters to set up their own nation and run it by their rules?” The anger fairly buzzed in his words.

  Conscious of an explosive humor in his prize agent, Arkady adopted a prim composure. “It worked excellently for Mars. And for Luna.”

  “Yes, but they were colonized a hundred years after the World Federation of Republics government ceased to exist.” Brian took a deep breath, regained control as he let it out in a long hiss. “All right. You were telling me about my new assignment?”

  “Yes. These rogue travelers are highly organized and utterly voracious in their hunger for the price
less artifacts and works of art lost in the Battle of Britain. Some of them are also selling British ‘secrets’ to the Germans,” Arkady continued.

  “One of them in particular. A young woman whose identity we have not yet pinned down in the present or the past. She is involved in something that could create a very damaging Paradox. You are to work on her in particular. For the others, knowing, as they do, what the future holds for Hitler and his mad-dog Nazis, they apparently feel they can peddle their military secrets without any pang of conscience, and at enormous profit.”

  Whitefeather considered a moment. “I can understand the art objects. Collectors will pay anything, in any time, for ‘antiquities,’ but with what of value, that’s easily portable, could the Germans pay for information?”

  Arkady’s expression became grave. “The medium of exchange between the Nazis and the time rogues is germanium, which has grown incredibly scarce in our Home Culture.”

  “What makes it so important, and how expensive can it really be?”

  “Germanium is what is used to manufacture microchips. It has always been. Even centuries ago, back in what was called Silicon Valley in your homeland. Whitefeather, let me give you an example. Only fifty years after 1940, germanium will sell for $25,000 a pure ounce. Five times the value of gold, while in our present, it goes for $250,000 per ounce.

  “One can pack forty to sixty grams of pure germanium into one of those pocket lighter devices of the period. So you can see why it is so popular with our thieves. A kilo or two, brought forward, could buy them half the world’s assets: real estate, corporations, goods, and services rolled into one. We can’t let that happen.”

  “I’ll return at once, sir,” a suitably impressed Whitefeather declared, painfully conscious of his added burden. Back at the transport room, his uniform exchanged for the workman’s clothes of 1940, he hailed the technician. “Isai, it’s back to 1940 for me.”

  “You set a TCAF before you left?” the Tech asked.

  Brian gave a casual wave of his hand. “Do I ever forget?”

  Isai looked grave, despite his wry grin. “If you happen to, neither of us will ever know.”

  With that, Brian stepped into the Beamer and walked out into war-torn 1940 England.

  Time: 0911, European Standard Time, June 14, 1940

  Place: Jagdfliegerführer HO, Beauvais, France

  Removed by 150 miles from Brian Moore in London, Colonel Werner Ruperle paced the floor of the pilots’ sheet metal-clad ready room of his Luftslotte. He cursed the exposed studs of the unfinished walls, the coffeepot steaming on the oil-fired stove, and cursed the stove itself. They had been moving across France so rapidly the last two weeks that construction work never caught up with the next advance. Most of all, he cursed the chill rain that swept across the runways, dripped from the wingtips of the parked aircraft, and pattered like wind-driven sand against the small, square panes of the single window in the cold, damp room.

  Abruptly, he stopped in mid-stride and turned to face his executive officer, Capt. Frederich Kleiber. “It is this verdampten weather that is our real enemy. Only one more mission, the one cancelled for this afternoon, and I would have been qualified for two weeks of leave. Oh, how good it would feel to be back in Diessen. To taste Hilda’s cooking and hold her again. To see her and the boys and our dear daughter. And to know they are safe and far removed from this war.”

  For a moment, his pleasant images of homecoming and family soured when he wondered silently if Bruno, his twelve-year-old, had joined the Hitler Jugend as yet. He hoped the boy could avoid it, at least a little longer. Although he passionately loved his country and did not stint in his loyalty to the Luftwaffe high command, to Col. Ruperle, this cultlike adoration that had grown up around the Fuhrer seemed to be a little much.

  Self-consciously he glanced at the framed portrait of Adolf Hitler that hung on the nonexistent interior wall, crudely nailed to a stud. Hell, there was one of these, or another pose, on some wall in every house, business, and office from the French coast at Calais to the borders of Germany and Austria. They had even shown up in hospital rooms. Heil Hitler, he thought irreverently. But he was a soldier and it was his duty to give total obedience to his superiors.

  He had been a soldier, and a pilot, since 1917. As a callow youth he had idolized Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen. His hero worship had not dimmed with the death of the famous Red Baron. Yet he had admired the tall, dashing young officer who had replaced him. Hermann Göring had been a bold, daring, efficient squadron leader and quickly earned the respect of the pilots of the Flying Circus, and many of the other squadrons. Especially those of Schulflotte 1703, to which Werner Ruperle belonged at the time. That had been then, now was an entirely different matter.

  Unlike many of his brother officers, Werner Ruperle had not embraced the National Socialist German Workers’ Party with unbridled enthusiasm. Something seemed not quite right with the party’s leader. Enough so that he regretted the inevitable time when Bruno joined the Hitler Youth. Abruptly, he reined in his musings. Having such convictions could be dangerous to anyone, especially someone in his position.

  Suddenly the door swung open, admitting his orderly and a sheet of raindrops. “Herr Hauptmann, the latest report from those time-serving meteorology people.”

  Ruperle took the message form and read swiftly. “‘There will be a general clearing over the English Channel and the Portsmouth area, beginning at fifteen hours.’ The mission is on after all, Ferdy,” he exclaimed to his executive officer. “Gott sei Dank! I will be getting out of this French mud hole after all.”

  Time: 0915, GMT, June 14, 1940

  Place: Hamphill Aerodrome RAF Base,

  Warwickshire, England

  “Two-three-one aircraft, you are pulling ahead in line. Maintain two thousand revolutions if you please.”

  Sergeant Wendall Foxworth winced at the sound of his squadron leader’s voice in his earphones, made even harsher by the sneer of contempt. Hell of a way to start a routine morning patrol. Sgt. Foxworth applied a touch of toe-brake.

  “Righto, Captain Marsh,” Wendell said to himself.

  Damn it all, there was something definitely wrong with his Hurricane this morning. Could it have something to do with this bleedin’ light rain? He couldn’t help it if the engine surged from time to time. He had tried to explain to the maintenance sergeant. The sod wouldn’t hear a word of it. Now it got him in the shorts with his squadron leader.

  Sod them all! To Foxworth, anyone who didn’t fly one of these delicate birds hadn’t any right making decisions regarding airworthiness. Gritting his teeth, he keyed his mike.

  “Righto, Able Leader. The old mill is running a bit rough this morning.”

  “Sure it’s not its driver?” the voice came back, the question full of menace. “You clocked, in a quarter hour past curfew.”

  Keerist! Did he have to let the whole squadron know? “Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”

  “Very well. Line up for takeoff. Vees of three.”

  Foxworth winced at that. Bloody childish. Especially when everyone knew the proper term was Vics, with no mention of the number. With the assistant squadron leader in the first Vic, Wendall Foxworth on the starboard wing, Kip Fallon on port, the first three Hurricanes turned off the taxi strip and took proper station on the Hamphill Aerodrome active runway. A quick instrument check, set the brakes, then full throttle. Run up and back down, check magneto, oil pressure, engine rpms. Now full throttle. Watch for the roll. Here we go!

  The trio of Hawker Hurricanes streaked down the Hamphill runway, striving for that first lift of true flight, the point of rotation. Wendall felt the wings strain to break free and hauled back on the stick. The wheels cleared the ground. Gear up, flaps up, nose to the sky. The Hawker pounded and thundered. Wendall Foxworth felt a surge of elation. True to habit, Sgt. Foxworth looked off his right wing as his c
limb-out continued toward turnout. Below on the ground, he saw a solitary figure. One who stood with arms and legs akimbo, eyes turned to the sky, outside the barrier fence, astride a bicycle. Foxworth blinked. For a moment she appeared to have familiar curly, dark brown hair and a memorable figure. Then at the moment Foxworth dropped his starboard wing to turn out of the pattern he saw the Home Guard helmet dangling from a handlebar and he knew for certain it was Sandy Hammond. Well, he thought. Things were certainly looking up!

  Time: 0940, GMT, June 14, 1940

  Place: Time Station London

  Brian Moore returned to 1940 London twenty minutes after he left. He went straight to the operator’s station where Vito sat relaxed, yet alert.

  “Anything come in while I was gone?”

  “Nope. All is calm on the battlefield,” Vito quipped.

  Brian grimaced. “It won’t be for long. We’ve been assigned to round up an unknown number of rogue travelers. They’re profiteering on valuables ‘destroyed’ during the war.”

  “Oh, how jolly, what?” Vito mimicked the locals of the time. “Any idea where to start?” Brian studied Vito idly. A master Temporal Technician, he was also an expert archivist and researcher. Definitely suited for a Warden’s job. He had also learned that, as a boy in his late teens, Vito had been recovered from a car that had exploded in early 1950’s New York City. The result, so Vito said, of an inter-Family dispute.

  “No. We will have to dig them out on our own.”

  “How do we do that, Brian?”

  Brian shrugged. “Plain old detective work, I imagine. You might begin by checking a list of art treasures lost in the bombing. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.”

  When Brian entered the MI-5 office, half an hour later, he wore the usual conservative suit and tie. He settled in his office and reviewed several reports of suspicious persons in and around London, Portsmouth, Birmingham, and other industrial or port cities. The man with whom he had an appointment arrived ten minutes late.