Downtiming the Night Side

by Jack L. Chalker

  It was that constant level of near-panic among the brotherhood, all of whom were looking to successful careers, that convinced him that he was wasting his time with that sort of academic pursuit. He simply could not live with the fear that he would lose a professorship or judgeship or some other high post in one moment of loose guard. Still, all of the German states were to one degree or another police states, which tolerated this sort of behavior only on the lowest of levels. That, in fact, was why he was now thinking of moving on. Austria was no Paris, but it was far looser and more tolerant—perhaps because, as it was often said, it was less competently run—than anywhere else he’d been.

  He awakened in the small hotel room, dressed, and went down first to the communal toilet in the rear, then across the street for breakfast. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day.

  Time is a creative bastard, he thought while eating a pastry and drinking some strong Turkish coffeee. First a thirteen-year-old dying orphan, now a gay man forced by his time and place to be a wastrel.

  Ron Moosic wondered who and what Roberto Sandoval was now.

  On a hunch, he spent the morning doing some surreptitious checking, and found the name of Marx with ease. In fact, he remembered the family now, although only vaguely. He’d never had much use for Jews, even if the family were all converts. Jews might fake conversions to make life easier for them, but they were still born with the blood.

  Moosic was shocked to find “himself thinking those thoughts, but he understood that this was common thinking at the time. If only they knew where it would finally lead, he reflected sourly.

  Still, it was rather easy then to find the Marx household, and just as easy, through casual conversation with locals he knew from his youth, to discover that their son Karl, now Herr Doktor Marx, was home for a while. There was gossip that he and his mother did not get along, though, and he was thinking of moving to either Bonn or Cologne, depending on how easily he could establish himself in either city. He was hoping to obtain some sort of position before marrying his fiancee, a local girl, Jenny Westphalen.

  Things worked out so well he almost swore it was planned that way. At least, he couldn’t have planned it better himself. In the town bookstore, where he was drawn partly out of curiosity and partly out of boredom, he met a man looking through the magazines and papers. He was originally attracted to him because he was a young, somewhat handsome fellow with a short-cropped brown beard. Moosic thought he looked the very image of the young, thin Orson Welles of Citizen Kane. But when the man looked up and he saw those eyes, he knew who this man had to be.

  Karl Marx was not the Moses-like patriarch of 1875, but he had those penetrating, electrifying eyes. They introduced themselves, and soon Marx and Neumann, not Moosic, were talking away about socialism, Hegelism, communism, and revolutionary movements in Europe. Marx seemed even more oppressed by the small town of his birth than was Neumann, and was delighted to find a kindred outsider, a native who hated the place but had more than a bit of education. Neumann’s ingrained distaste for Jews in general and the Marxes in particular faded under the direct contact, particularly when Marx unexpectedly cracked a very anti-Semitic joke.

  Karl Marx was absolutely fascinating, a riveting speaker who seemed to know very much about almost every subject imaginable. His brilliance was enhanced, rather than tempered, by his unsuppressed emotionalism. Neither his Neumann nor Moosic self could resist the energy and intellect; both were in fast agreement that this was indeed the most brilliant and electrifying intellect they had ever met. It was for Moosic to additionally understand that the old man he’d seen so very briefly still had much of this power. It made him feel a great deal of regret he couldn’t have known him longer, and it added to his guilt as to having shortened that man’s life.

  Neumann, quite naturally, was instantly madly infatuated with Marx, but frustratingly so. He knew, even without Moosic, that Marx was solidly conservative in his sex life and totally in love with and devoted to a single woman. It didn’t maner in the end; Neumann could fantasize and not act or reveal himself because he feared that if Marx knew, he would never see the younger man again. Just to be talking to him, around him, near him, was enough for now.

  Moosic watched the flow of Neumann-thoughts and saw where it would lead. This sort of futile passion could easily end in suicide—which might well be time’s easy out all along.

  In the course of the afternoon, Marx also talked a bit about himself and some of his plans. He was writing for an anti-government newspaper in Cologne, as well as other essays and critical articles for a variety of places. He was thinking of a university career and was shortly going to Bonn to see his closest friend and contact, a professor at the university there. In the meantime, he was staying not with his family but with the Westphalens, the family of the woman he intended to marry.

  Moosic wondered if Sandoval knew that. The mysterious woman had said that the radical had landed far from Trier and had to make his way here. The setting for a quick panic jump would not be easy to do without a computer. He remembered his own problem in reading any sense into location on the time suit’s readout.

  Over the next few days he contrived to meet with Marx here and there, and also was introduced to Jenny, a really pretty young woman. It was very hard to repress the cold, sheer hatred Neumann felt for her. Although he was cautious enough not to be a leech, this shortened considerably his stakeout time, divided as it had to be between various key points in the city. The most important of those, however, was the hotel itself. If Sandoval was to be a stranger, he would need a place to stay while here.

  Late on the second night, he retrieved the time suit from its hiding place near the ancient Roman gate to the city and managed, with the aid of a very large laundry bag he’d purchased earlier, to get it up to his hotel room. There he sat down with it, opened the pouch, and was surprised to see some more material in it. Then he remembered that his mysterious savior had told him that things of interest would be there.

  What there was was a very modern-looking pistol with one full clip and a note saying, “Peter’s Fountain, 2 A.M., the 22nd,” and nothing more. The note was written in a terse and unfamiliar female hand.

  It was now Saturday the nineteenth. He replaced the pistol in the pouch and put the whole thing back in the suit, which would at least give it the energy protection from time’s ravages. He would not like to need it and find it turned into a flintlock.

  He’d prefer to stick Sandoval with one of those and take his chances. With this gun, he couldn’t miss.

  MORE PLAYERS IN THE GAME

  He didn’t see Marx during the weekend; this was a time for personal matters, although he knew, too, that Marx had fallen behind in his writings and wanted a little bit of time alone to catch up.

  He was most interested in the Monday morning coach from Cologne, which brought three newcomers to town. One was a middle-aged man who apparently sold barber and surgical equipment. Moosic tentatively dismissed him, although one could never be sure. If Sandoval had undergone assimilation a hundred miles or more from Trier, he was not likely to have a profession that would normally take him here. The other two, however, were equally improbable—a man in his early twenties in Prussian military uniform accompanied by a pleasant-looking young woman who could not have been out of her teens and was introduced at the desk as the military man’s wife. It didn’t seem to fit the pattern—both young and attractive-looking, and newly married. He began to wonder if Sandoval had yet to arrive.

  He had a quick lunch with Marx, who was effusive about finally being exempted from the obligatory year of compulsory military duty. He’d been fighting the battle for some time with the bureaucracy, and he’d finally won. “The first and only time these sickly lungs of mine ever did me any service,” he told Neumann.

  To avoid problems, Marx had most of his mail sent to the post office for pickup, and they walked over to it, Marx hopeful that a couple of articles he’d submitted long ago to two journals had finally seen
publication. He was disappointed, though; there was, in fact, only a single letter, with no return address. Marx opened it, still talking cheerily, and glanced at it, then stopped talking and just stared at the pages.

  “Something wrong?” Neumann asked him, concerned. “Bad news?”

  “No, no. But someone, somewhere, is playing tricks with my privacy and I will have to get to the bottom of this.” He frowned and handed a page of the letter’s contents to Neumann. “What do you make of this? It appears to be handwritten, yet it has something of the appearance of a photograph of some kind.”

  He looked at the page, which seemed to be a fragment of a letter. Moosic realized with a sudden thrill what had disconcerted Marx so much.

  It was unquestionably a photocopy. And the copier would not be invented for almost a hundred and twenty years.

  He handed the sheet back to Marx. “Very odd. I see what you mean about the photographic quality, but I can’t imagine how such a thing is possible to do. Is the text of any importance?”

  “It is a personal letter of mine to my father from some years back,” Marx responded angrily. “A letter I am certain I personally destroyed.”

  “Even given the means as possible, which it must be, for there it is, who could have gotten their hands on such a thing, and why? The police?”

  That was the obvious first thought, since Prussia was in most senses of the word a well-controlled police state.

  “It is possible, for some of my writings have already made me less than popular with the authorities. But, somehow, I think not.” He seemed to be mulling over whether to go further, and finally made his decision. “What do you think of this?”

  Neumann took it and glanced at it, and the effect was to heighten his already overbearing sense of excitement still further. It was a small, handwritten note which said, “I have the power but not the mind to change the history of the world. If you would be that mind, come to Peter’s Fountain, alone, at 2 A.M. on the 22nd.” It was unsigned.

  He handed it back to Marx. “This sounds like the rantings of a maniac. You are not going, of course?”

  “I am thinking about it. Otherwise, I shall never know how this letter was acquired, and I shall spend my life wondering if my most private moments are someone’s public business.”

  Neumann frowned. “Let me go instead. If this person is truly insane, he will betray it to me, not you, and we will know. If he is not insane, then a subsequent meeting could be arranged.”

  “I have never put much faith in dueling, my new friend, but if I were to have a duel, I would never permit my second to stand in my place. No, I must think on this some more, but whatever I do, I must do alone. I thank you for your counsel and your kind offer, but if you value our friendship, you must forget that you ever saw or heard this.”

  “I will come with you, then. …”

  “No! You will get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow I promise you I shall describe the results in glorious detail. But you must swear to me that you will forget it now, on your honor.”

  “I… value this friendship above all things,” Neumann waffled, hoping Marx would not press further.

  The younger man considered it sufficient, and they parted soon after.

  A Xerox copy had lasted at least a day, perhaps more, out of this time frame. That, at least, was to the good. It meant his pistol would probably work as advertised.

  The central square of Trier looked eerie and threatening in the early morning hours, lit only by a few huge candles in the street lights, their flickering casting ever-changing and monstrous shadows on the cobblestones and the sides of the now-dark buildings.

  Moosic gave the square a professional going-over between midnight and one, noting the rounds of the local policeman. He wanted no repetition of the debacle in London. This time there would be one target and one target only, and that target would be taken out as soon as positively identified. That should not be too difficult, he thought, if he could shoot straight. He already knew the policeman, and he knew Marx, so anyone else likely to be here at two almost had to be his quarry.

  It was an eerie wait, back in the shadows of an alleyway looking on the square. All was silence, and there was no movement except for those shadows and the noise of the multiple fountains pouring into the catch basin. In the stillness they sounded like huge waterfalls, the noise caught by the buildings and echoed back again and again.

  It was a short wait compared to London, but it seemed forever in the stillness. When the church clock struck the three-quarter hour, he tensed, checked his pistol for the hundredth time, and began to look for signs of another, either Sandoval or Marx. At approximately 1:50 the policeman patrolling the area walked into the square, panicking him for a moment. The cop checked all the doors facing the square, looked around, and finally made his way from the square and down a side street, but not before the clock chimed two. The minutes now crept back as the patrolman’s footsteps receded and finally died away in the distance, but there was still no sign of anyone else in the square.

  Then, quite suddenly, he heard the clicking of shoes on cobblestone. Someone was coming down the same street the policeman had used to leave, coming towards the square. He tensed, praying that Marx had decided not to come after all, and waited until the oncoming figure strode into the square. He strained to catch a glimpse of the newcomer, and saw him at last, in the glow of a street lamp.

  It was certainly no one he’d ever seen before. He was tall, thin, and at least in middle age, with a long and unkempt black beard and a broad-brimmed hat that concealed much of the rest of his features. He was dressed in the seedy clothes of one who was used to sleeping in his only suit. He didn’t seem armed, and he certainly didn’t have the time suit with him, if indeed he were Sandoval and not just some bum avoiding the policeman.

  Moosic stood up and was about ready to go out and confront the man, when there was a sudden noise behind him. He felt a pistol at the back of his head, and quietly a man’s voice whispered, “I think you better remain where you are and not make a sound. Put the gun down, nice and quiet, on the ground. No false moves, my friend! At this range I could hardly miss.”

  He did as instructed, then slowly got up as the pistol was pulled away. He turned, and saw his captor. The man was dressed entirely in black, in a uniform rather similar to the one his mysterious woman in London had been wearing. But this was no ordinary-looking chubby woman; this man was tall, lean, and extremely muscular, with a strong face like a Nordic god’s, his pure blond hair neatly cut in a military trim. Behind him lurked two large black shapes that looked somehow inhuman, but whose features were impossible to determine in the near total darkness of the alley. One thing was clear, though—from the blinking little lights—all three wore belts similar to the one the woman had worn. This, then, was the true enemy.

  Knowing it was hopeless, he turned again to watch the scene in the square. More footsteps now, and the seedy-looking man leaning on the lamppost stiffened, then stepped back into a doorway for a moment. In another minute, Moosic saw Marx walk nervously into the square from his right and look around. He appeared alone and unarmed.

  The twin personalities inside the Neumann body converged in an emotional rage. He glanced back briefly at the mysterious blond man, and noted with the professional’s eye that his captor was looking less at him than at the scene in the square. The time agent was larger and more powerful than Neumann, but if he could just idly get one step back, just one step, that might not mean a thing. Pretending to watch what was going on in the square, he measured the distance and moves out of the corner of his eye.

  Quickly he lunged around, his knee coming up and hitting the blond man squarely in the balls. The man in black cursed in pain and doubled over, dropping his strange-looking pistol. Quickly Moosic rolled, picked up his own pistol, and was out of the alley and to his right.

  “Herr Marx! It’s a trap! Drop to the ground!” he shouted.

  Marx was about ten feet from Sandoval, and at
the noise and yell he froze and turned to look back in utter confusion. Sandoval reached into his pants and pulled out a gun, while behind Moosic, in the alley, two strange figures ran out into the light. Two figures out of nightmare.

  They seemed to be almost like living statues, black all over, although they seemed to wear nothing except the time belts, their skin or whatever it was that was glistening like polished black metal. Their features were gargoyle-like, the stuff of nightmares in any age. Both had automatic rifles in their hands.

  They had, however, overrun Moosic, who unhesitatingly brought up the pistol and fired at them. The strange pistol seemed to chirp rather than explode, but a tiny ball of light leaped from it and struck one of the creatures in the back. There was a scream, and the thing collapsed in pain.

  Sandoval panicked, raising his own pistol and firing continuously at Moosic, the bullets or whatever they were coming out like tracers. But Moosic was no longer there. He’d rolled back towards the alley and found cover. There was no sign of the blond man, but in the square there were two bodies sprawled out, one of them bleeding into the cobblestones.

  With a shock, Moosic realized that Sandoval’s panicked fire at him had hit Marx instead. There was no way to really aim such rapid fire, and he had been in the way.

  The other creature roared, and Sandoval, nervous, nevertheless approached it, seeming to know just who or what it was. With a snarl, the creature’s rifle came up; there was a quick burst, and Roberto Sandoval was pushed back several feet by the force of whatever was striking him.