Time Travel Omnibus, page 1037
“I think I understand,” she humored him. “So what now? What happens next?”
“You’re the murder expert. What do you think?” He leered at her. “You’re doing me a favor, actually. I had run out of Ripper victims. To be honest, I’m seriously considering putting in for a transfer to the 1960s and starting over as the Zodiac Killer. You can be my swan song as the Ripper.”
Celeste gulped. “But I’m not a prostitute.”
“No, you’re a money-grubbing writer who cashes in on murder and bloodshed.” He stepped forward, backing her up against the blood-soaked bed. “Close enough.”
“Wait!” Celeste appealed frantically to his vanity. “You don’t want to kill me. I can make you famous, reveal your identity to the world.” She nodded at the door. “You can just disappear into the nineteenth century, knowing that someday the entire world will remember your name.”
He laughed in her face. “Nice try, but no dice. You reveal my identity and I’m just another boring slasher to be psychoanalyzed and dissected by hack writers like you. Don’t you see? It’s the mystery of Jack the Ripper that will keep people fascinated for generations to come. That what’s make him a legend. What makes me a legend.”
She tried another tack. “But you can’t kill me. You’d be changing history. Mary Jane Kelly died alone!”
“Not anymore.” He shrugged. “So there’s one more body found at Miller’s Court, a mystery woman for people to puzzle over for the next hundred years or so. It just adds a new wrinkle to the story.” His knife gleamed in the firelight. “By the time I’m done with you, not even the future will recognize you . . .”
He raised the knife.
A loud sneeze, coming from under the bed, startled them both.
“What the hell?” Ramsey faltered, looking away from Celeste just for a moment.
She saw her opportunity and took it. A spinning kick knocked the blade from his grip. The knife skidded across the floor several feet away.
“Hey!” His befuddled expression was a joy to behold. “You can’t do that!”
Celeste followed up the kick with a roundhouse punch to his jaw. “Here’s the thing, dummy. You’re not facing a tipsy nineteenth-century whore this time. I’ve studied kickboxing, Krav Maga, and taken way too many self-defense courses!”
“Nosy bitch!” Ramsey dived for the knife, but Celeste was faster. She leaped past him and snatched up the fireplace poker. He lunged for her only to get smacked in the arm by the swinging poker. Bone shattered audibly and he dropped to his knees, whimpering in pain. A second blow across the back of his head left him sprawled face down on the floor. Not taking any chances, she prodded him with the poker to make sure he wasn’t going to be getting up again anytime soon.
“That’s for Mary Jane Kelly,” she gasped. “And Polly Nichols, Liz Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Annie Chapman!”
Ramsey seemed to be out cold, but she held onto the poker just in case. She had seen too many horror movies to turn her back on the downed monster. Crouching beside the prone Ripper, she claimed his locator button. A second sneeze reminded her that they were not alone. She peered curiously at the bed. “Hello?”
“I-is it safe?” a feeble voice stammered.
Celeste stood up. “I think so. Who is that?”
To her surprise, Bernard Moskowitz crawled out from beneath the flimsy wooden bedstead. His Sherlock Holmes outfit was a study in scarlet. His scrawny face was white as a sheet.
“You?” she blurted in surprise. The other tourist was supposed to be safely tucked away at the Carlton. Just like me.
“I . . . I couldn’t resist,” he confessed. “I just had to find out who Jack the Ripper was.” His shell-shocked gaze fell upon the morsels of flesh laid out atop the table. He looked away from the carved-up carcass upon the bed. “Oh God . . .”
Celeste realized that the poor kid had been under the bed the whole time. Guess we both had the same idea.
Thank heaven.
A pocket watch informed her that it was nearly five-thirty. In approximately five hours, one Thomas Bowyer would be dropping by to hit Mary up for thirty-five shillings of overdue rent money. He was in for the shock of his life, but Celeste wasn’t inclined to stick around to see.
“You ready to get out of here?” she asked Moskowitz.
He nodded weakly. “Please.”
She pressed the locator button.
“My sincere apologies for this unfortunate business.” Rolf Jacobsen, founder and president of Timeshares, sat across from her. “But I’m sure you understand how we would like to keep this embarrassing incident our little secret.” He slid a notarized document across the top of his antique mahogany desk, which had once belonged to Thomas Alva Edison. “Mr. Moskowitz has already signed this confidentiality agreement in exchange for a free pass to the time and location of his choosing.” He flashed Celeste an oily smile. “I believe he’s requested a tryst with Mata Hari . . .”
“Uh-uh.” Celeste didn’t even look at the proffered document. “You’re not going to buy me off so easily. That maniac could have killed me!”
“Again, my apologies.” He handed her a fountain pen. “Clearly, we need to do a more thorough psychological screening of our employees, both before and after their trips to the past.” He shrugged. “It’s possible we underestimated the long-term cognitive effects of regular temporal dislocation, but I assure you that we are already putting new procedures in place to ensure that such an aberration never happens again.”
“An ‘aberration,’ is that what you call it?” Celeste was offended by the blandly corporate euphemism. “At least five women were killed and mutilated.”
“Those tragedies are a matter of historical record,” he pointed out. “We couldn’t have prevented them if we wanted to.”
“Even though one of your tour guides was responsible?” A horrible suspicion gripped her. “You knew, didn’t you? You suspected that Ramsey was the Ripper, but you kept on sending him back to 1888!”
Jacobsen was unruffled by her accusation. “History is history, Ms. Jordan. What happened happens.” He pressed the confidentiality agreement on her again. “Now then, how can we convince you to leave this unpleasantness where it belongs—in the past?”
“Don’t even try.” She got up to go. “I already have everything I need. I know the true identity of Jack the Ripper. That’s a gold mine.”
“More like a single nugget.” Jacobsen gestured for her to sit down again. “Don’t be too hasty, Ms. Jordan. You’re obviously a shrewd woman . . . and a fine author.” He called up one of her books on the monitor of his computer. “Perhaps we can come to a different sort of arrangement.”
She eyed him warily. “Like what?”
He tore up the confidentiality agreement. “Suppose you forgo the Ripper in exchange for unlimited access to a host of equally famous mysteries: D. B. Cooper, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia, the Princes in the Tower . . .”
“Lizzie Borden?”
“Of course. That’s a perfect example.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “As a matter of fact, we’ve been thinking of licensing a line of publishing spin-offs under the Timeshares umbrella. You seem like exactly the kind of ambitious, enterprising author we’ve been looking for, one who can take full advantage of everything we can offer. Think about it. You would have all of history at your disposal. The possibilities are endless.”
“Except Jack the Ripper.”
He nodded. “That particular mystery is probably best left unsolved. Do we understand each other?”
Celeste’s mind boggled at the prospect. Jacobsen was offering her not just a single bestseller, but a franchise. Countless millennia of unsolved histories, from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the heat death of the universe.
“Mr. Jacobsen,” she replied, “I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.”
THE WORLD OF NULL-T
Gene DeWeese
Function without appropriate form is inefficient, but form without appropriate function is not only useless but an insult to the customer.
—Anonymous know-it-all
In the Timeshares Era, there’s no such thing as a middle ground position when it comes to being a ChronoCop. It’s either the most important or the most useless job on Earth. Any ChronoCop will tell you we’re unsung heroes whose battered fingers are figuratively plugging endless holes in the leaky dykes of Time. The ChronoCorps, they say, is all that stands between Earth and a ChronoTsunami. Just don’t press us too hard for precise definitions of terms, which are slippery at best even when Time is a constant, let alone the variable to end all variables.
On the other hand, if you ask one of the Timeshares people (we’re assuming they’re people) you’ll be told with a wink or a sneer that the ChronoCorps is nothing but a collection of feather-bedding Chicken Littles no better than those despicable but imaginative twentieth-century scammers who managed to sell “gravity insurance” to some gullible flat-earthers (is there any other kind?) when the early artificial satellite photos began suggesting, even to them, that the world just might really be round after all.
As for what we ChronoCops thought of the Timeshares people, suffice it to say that the recruiting requirements include a firm belief in Murphy’s Law, which means whenever anyone tells us “nothing can possibly go wrong,” we assume they’re either lying or are so arrogantly overconfident they shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects, let alone the ability to time-hop pretty much at will.
And then there’s the Matiolin Society.
Maybe.
No one knows what to think of them. For all the hard evidence we have (zero), we can’t even prove they exist, and the “name” is nothing more than what our computers tell us are the most-often-produced set of sounds in the one and only static-filled “message” they sent. No one’s ever even seen a society member, only their building, which “appeared” not long after—or maybe just before—the Timeshares people’s flickering convoy parked in a twenty-four-hour orbit and began beaming down everything we’d need to get started in the time-travel business. A sort of time-travel kit, some assembly required.
Anyway, somewhere in there, the Matiolin Society building appeared, not in orbit but hovering a few feet off the ground right next to the ChronoCorps HQ.
And that was it. They/It didn’t offer an opinion either way on ChronoCops. Or the Timeshares people. It just hovered, looking sort of like a gigantic misplaced crystalline Christmas tree ornament, and waited.
Or watched. Or reviewed their notes from their last stop.
Or took long naps. Like I said, nobody had a clue.
Those of us in the ChronoCorps hoped there was some significance to the fact that the Matiolins had parked next to our HQ, not the other guys’. We could only hope it was for the right reason—they’d be close enough to help or save us if/when the Murphy’s Law poster boys did something both stupid and dangerous. And believe me, under the Timeshares “rules” that were included in every kit they shipped down, there was room for way more than enough trouble to go around.
See, the official and happy-making line touted by the Timeshares people goes like this: Time is the ultimate elastic, and nothing a traveler can do will keep the timeline—the real, core timeline—from being dragged, perhaps with a little figurative kicking and screaming, back to where it belongs before any “real” damage can be done. Therefore, say the experts in charge of soothing analogies, you don’t have to worry about the infamous butterfly that flaps its dusty wings in China and causes a hurricane somewhere around Cuba, half a world and a couple centuries away. What you have instead is more like an elephant jumping on an industrial strength trampoline in your backyard. He bounces a few times, maybe rattles a couple teacups in the upper reaches of your china cabinet before getting bored and wandering off, leaving Time to heal itself, which it does by repositioning the rattled teacups a millimeter or so from their original place, which takes it a couple microseconds and is never even noticed.
But, say the few remaining scientists not on the Timeshares payroll, if the changes are large enough and complicated enough, then all bets are off.
Anything can happen.
Like Time Knots.
“Anecdotal and unproven,” say the Timeshares people. “They’re the Timeshares Era equivalent of UFOs, and you know how real they turned out to be.”
“Anecdotal but inevitable,” say the ChronoCorps theorists. With the Timeshares people’s No-Fault-No-Limits approach to time travel, you don’t need Murphy’s Law to know there are going to be tangles in the timelines, and some will get so bad they can’t be untangled.
Which is usually when one side or the other will cite the so-called Hitler episode, when everybody and his third cousin twice removed suddenly decided it would be a great idea to go back and kill Hitler, only to discover that a similar number of skinheads were already back there providing him with a lifetime supply of disposable bodyguards. In the resulting tornado of successful, unsuccessful, and semi-successful assassinations, every assassin and every bodyguard was killed at least once, Hitler hundreds of times, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Each incident, no matter the outcome, generated its own little time thread that added to the tangle.
All of which turned out to be a remarkable piece of good luck according to the pseudomemories that soon began surfacing in the minds of the not-quite assassins—the ones who had changed their minds at the last minute and decided to stay home. Each time Hitler was successfully disposed of, these pseudomemories said, he was invariably replaced by a more pragmatic, less wacked out version who got rid of Von Braun and redirected the scientist’s rocket money to the Luftwaffe, which prolonged the war by several years and left the postwar U.S. Von Braunless and without a space program. The pseudomemories themselves continued to surface, albeit with rapidly decreasing intensity, until it seemed that everyone who had so much as dreamed about participating in the assassination had their own little packet of pseudomemories that quickly and seamlessly merged with their “real” memories until the two were virtually indistinguishable.
The Timeshares people and ChronoCops of course put their own separate spins on the incident. We kill-joy ChronoCops insisted that the important lesson to be learned was that Time Knots were not only real but would, if limits weren’t imposed, become both frequent and inevitable. Some of our theorists even went so far as to say that if a knot grew big enough, it could reach some sort of critical mass, at which point it would start expanding on its own, like a nuclear chain reaction. It could, they warned, become unstoppable and, for want of a better term, freeze time itself into one huge, universe-size Time Knot.
The Timeshares people, on the other hand, only scoffed at this “unfounded Chicken Little thinking” and reminded everyone that while the United States had been developing the first atomic bomb, one of the program’s Nervous Nelly scientists had gone completely off the rails and ran around warning that the bomb might trigger a chain reaction in the atmosphere and wipe out life on Earth. Luckily no one had paid him any attention, and the Timeshares people, never inclined to pass up an opportunity, soon began claiming loudly that the whole Hitler episode was, in fact, incontrovertible proof of what they’d been saying all along: Time could and did repair itself spontaneously no matter how much travelers changed things.
The pseudomemories, they cheerfully explained/improvised, were in fact real memories of what had happened in the depths of the time knot, and they were now being released as the so-called Time Knot itself unraveled (decayed?) and vanished, leaving the timeline unchanged except for the presence of a bunch of memories of things that hadn’t really happened and therefore weren’t even relevant to the real world.
You shouldn’t have any trouble guessing which side won the propaganda war. Suffice it to say that within a few weeks, historical event markers everywhere began being papered over with suggestions as to how your average ChronoTourist could change the outcomes of those events. Ever wonder what kind of president Custer would’ve made? Head for Little Big Horn and give him a little extra firepower and find out. Or if you wondered how many terms FDR might’ve had if he’d been Time-napped from, say, January 1945 and taken to a twenty-second-century surgical center for umpteen bypasses and as many other repairs as they might find were possible?
Then, when all the changes were made, you could hire a camera crew and record the results of your changes. FDR, for instance, got two more terms and turned down a slam dunk for a third, and Custer became the first and only president to not only be impeached but also convicted. The video of his trial, especially the Crazy Horse testimony, easily beat OJ’s long-ago adjusted-for-media-inflation ratings numbers, and the rest was history, of a sort. You think reality shows were popular back in the olden/golden days? Try alternate reality shows.
At one time there were fifteen networks devoted to cranking out nothing else. Even the sporadic wink-and-a-nod oversight the Timeshares people had once provided vanished, as did larger and larger chunks of the ChronoCorps budget. If it weren’t for private donations of all sorts from all sources, legal and illegal, we would’ve gone entirely out of existence.
And no one would’ve noticed.
I even began hoping that the Timeshares people were right after all when they claimed that Time was virtually indestructible. If it wasn’t, something was bound to seriously bite us on the ass sooner or later. A runaway Time Knot that ate the universe, maybe—or at least a galaxy or two.
Or something no theorist had thought of, like the ChronoEquivalent of metal fatigue. After the millionth or billionth Stretch and Snap Back excursion, the superelastic fabric of Time itself would get fed up and rebel. “Screw it!” it would shout. “I wasn’t designed for the sort of aggravation you morons are putting me through!”
And Time would let go and turn to powder. Or molasses.
How’d you like that? Or maybe it would reset into another, slightly less grandiloquent Big Bang and tweak a few of the emerging natural laws in hopes of getting some less goofy life-forms next time around.
