Time Travel Omnibus, page 1149
Maizie was a little slow on the uptake, her having only Agency augments and all. “What—?” she seymoured. “Who—?”
Then she saw the rictused face of the other me bleedin’ all over the carpet. “Say, Vince, honey. He looks like you!” She peered closer. “He is a you!”
“Naw,” I said, holstering my gat. “Just some loser wearing my face. I ain’t never been a loser, have I?” I kicked the nearest foot of the dead carcass. “An’ in answer to your previous question, I still ain’t never met another me, present corpse included.”
That’s when Maize saw her father. “Oh, Daddy,” she scolded, “You got beaten up and captured again!” She wet the tip of her hanky with her tongue and started dabbing at his bruises.
She gave me the fish eye. “Vince, honey, it don’t seem right you letting daddy take your Chief lumps all the time. He don’t know nuttin’ about being no Chief. He needs to be down in Florida playing bingo and the ponies.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled like I was listenin’ to her yammerings.
I kicked the expensive Italian shoe on my double again, stared at it for a minute, then started to laugh.
Maizie looked up from fussing with her father and glared. “Something funny wit’ the way I talk or something?”
“Naw, Maizie,” I said, smiling. “Just suddenly waxin’ philosophical on the job. Think it’s time to maybe start getting the pepto about who’s president and such like.”
It was my forty-fourth collar this month, and my last.
My last ever, I mean.
I had eased the Chief into retirement. It wasn’t right to keep using him as a clay duck, and besides, I had to give up field work. Things were too busy with our new business model for me to play agent anymore. Only reason I was on this last collar was to run this trainee through an easy case to show him how it’s done.
That other me had been right, the sonuvagun. I’d been chasing chicken feed with my agency instead of following the money.
The big money.
Maizie wasn’t doing field work, neither. She was busy, too, knitting little booties for Vincent Junior and the stork. She yammers at home as much as I thought she would, but since a) being the Chief now, I can do something about that if I want to, and b) I kinda realized I’d gotten used to it. Go figure.
Anyways that’s beside the point. It’s my last collar, see, and I’m sitting in the Oval Office and the chump I got sitting tranked is behind the Resolute Desk—only here it’s the Redoubtable Desk—and he’s giving me the pepto.
He was doing the same drowning fish act as Seymour. At least this chump wasn’t so beige.
New presidents just sworn in, see, they’re easy collars on accounts of them always having the pepto up about Their Place In The History Books. Plus, this particular chump was from Chicago, so he oughta know how the rules go down.
Instead, he was arguing like a professor and trying to welch out on forking over his Initial Membership Fee—and him with the confetti from his inauguration still in his hair yet.
“—but I can’t just hand over one-point-six trillion dollars to you. The public—”
“The public don’t signify,” I said. “ ‘Specially not if they get their own cut of the action. Like I showed you, we got it all worked out for you.”
I hooked a thumb at the holographic display I’d showed him of dozens of other timelines under our new business model.
He didn’t doubt what I’d showed him was real, not with every Secret Service agent in the joint floating midair, time-froze in a glittery glob of chronoflux. He just didn’t like being on the receiving end of the Chicago Way was all.
I sighed and went through it again, tryin’ to remember them elocution lessons Maizie made me take so I sounded more Chief-like. “Look, you dress it up as a ‘Stimulus Package.’ Dribs and drabs here, dribs and drabs there. Make it hard to track down where it all went: like pork for non-existent Congressional Districts; overseas loans ta China maybe; phoney-baloney companies that don’t actually make nothin’—solar power maybe. Nobody knows nuthin’, nobody can trace nuthin’, nobody squawks nuthin’. Just follow the script like we wrote down for you.”
“But fifteen percent of federal outlays on top of that—!”
“Who cares? Not like it’s your money, right? Don’t go waxin’ philosophical on the job. It ain’t healthy.”
I don’t know from philosophical, but he started to wax all petulant and glowery.
I don’t let chumps give me the fish eye, so I lowered the boom. Showed him with the holo what we could really do if he didn’t play ball, showed him how we could easily change things up if we was a mind to so that what’s-her-name wins his election instead.
That did the trick, you betchum. The Baked Alaska look on his face was priceless.
He reached for the pen.
“After all, Mr. President,” I said, as my trainee scooped up the signed contract. “Nice presidency youse got here. Be a real shame if anythin’ wuz to happen to it . . .”
THIS TIME, I RETURN FOR GOOD
Michael Robert Thomas
Dearest Ned,
You are in your aunt’s study, hiding behind the leather chair near the fire, remembering the grand adventure stories we read to each other there, me to you, you to me. The hidden alcove behind the chair is an escape for you now, a refuge from the crowd in the house and their well intended, but thoroughly misplaced, expressions of sympathy.
Your unusual vantage point allows you to see an envelope, with your name on it, taped to the back of the chair.
You tear the letter open and read it with joy in your heart, for you know it is from me. Yet what you read puzzles you. Eagerness turns to suspicion. You wonder how anyone can know what is on these pages, because knowing what this letter knows is impossible. You fear the letter is a joke, a malicious prank, an attempt to mock what you so firmly believe. How dare they, you think. Part of you is tempted to hurl the letter into the fire, to watch its words, its instructions, shrivel to ash.
I know this because you tell me. You tell me this in four days.
I know this confuses you, my son. I ask for your patience, until I explain.
This is what you do. Tomorrow, when the clock in the hall strikes noon, you take this letter to your aunt. She is preparing to leave for an appointment, adjusting her hair in the mirror near the front door. You tell her she must read this letter right away. She looks at you with compassion and concern—oh, she loves you so!—but says she must meet the lawyer to review final arrangements for the estate, and will return as quickly as she can.
But she does not leave. She stays. She stays because you show her this letter.
Remember, my son, when the clock strikes noon.
With all my love,
Your father
My dearest Susan,
You are worried about being late for the appointment, and vexed at Mr. Lapham for insisting on meeting so soon after the funeral. You do not want to be away from Ned, for he worries you terribly. His refusal to grieve is unbalanced, you fear, and his insistence I am alive, unhealthy. You fear his stubborn denial of my passing will only cause greater pain when, as it must, the truth can no longer be ignored.
This letter concerns you deeply. You do not trust it and do not understand it. But Ned is so insistent, so firm, so very desperate for your support, that you, despite your doubts, place a call to Mr. Lapham. You tell him you will have to meet him tomorrow instead.
Much to your surprise, he is angry and alarmed, unusually so, given how thoughtfully and respectfully he’s handled his relations with you until now. But today he is demanding and short. He says the details are essential. He insists the meeting must be right away.
You tell him no, and hang up the telephone. You tremble for a moment. You usually take pains to be agreeable. Your firmness of manner seems out of character. You attribute that to your own grief, and to your fears for Ned’s state of mind.
I know this because you tell me. You tell me this in three days.
Please know that I explain everything.
This is what you do. You walk into the kitchen and tell the cook and the cleaning girl to take the night off. In the basement, you open the hidden door to the storm cellar where you and I once played. Inside the storm cellar, you move the new shelf and reveal the door to the secret safe room I built without your knowledge. You cut the cord of the telephone, turn off the lights throughout the house, and ignore the knocks at the door. Shortly before ten o’clock, you take Ned into the safe room. You do not use candles or lanterns of any kind. Instead, you guide yourselves by touch. You pull the shelf tight until it fully covers the safe room door. You hear the men break in and move through the house. You and Ned remain silent. The men search the basement, but they do not find the door behind the shelf. Shortly after midnight, angry and frustrated, the men leave.
In the morning, you go upstairs and, with Ned, restore the house to its normal state of affairs.
At the stroke of noon, you take this letter to Mr. Lapham.
With all my love,
Your adoring younger brother,
Benjamin
Eric,
As my sister hands you this letter, you are painfully aware of the curiosity and caution at war on my sister’s face. You understand she no longer fully trusts you.
You turn away because she must not see your anger. She must not see you calculating whether she, this woman you secretly love, can be manipulated, used, to get to me.
You do not know if you still have the will, the fortitude, to use her. You worry you have found your reason to stop flowing.
You fear what happens if you stop flowing. You know that only one person—you—has even the barest chance of finding me. You know you must find me, because what happens if, against all odds, consequences be damned, I succeed? Already I’ve betrayed you—sacrificed our partnership to plunge recklessly, dangerously, into my impossible quest. It is easy to imagine that I am capable of much worse.
I know the pity you feel, tinged with contempt, for your former comrade-in-arms, your former best friend, who stood with you, time and again, to fight the good fights, but who fell, hollowed by tragedy, into a haunted husk of his better self, consumed by visions of a time, a flow, that cannot be. I feel your sadness, my friend.
You see us that cold January morning in the American capital, quietly removing the gun from the pocket of that misguided man’s coat. You hear the young president, his wife and two young daughters at his side, lifting us with his stirring speech. We linger to hear all of it, every word, though of course we shouldn’t. You see the would-be assassin, thwarted by a pickpocket in his moment of infamy, raging to the heavens. You also see, in the days that follow, the man’s hatred melt away. You see him, much to his surprise, sobbing with relief.
You see us retrieve the piece of paper in Alan Turing’s study, after the wind blew it from his desk to the floor. You see us return it to the desk in the precise position needed for him, with his once-in-a-generation mind, to see it and make the critical leap—to create the code-breaking machine that saves England from the Germans. A single piece of paper, my friend. A piece of paper!
You see us assist an old woman across the street, helping her move just two seconds more quickly, preventing the bus from swerving into the railroad tracks to avoid her, preventing the bus from hitting the commuter train, preventing the deaths of so many, including a young girl named Emily Wu who, as every child is taught in school, grows up to cure diabetes.
Ours is a noble profession, Eric, an essential one. Dangerous, too, with the criminals, politicians, corporations, and foolhardy amateur explorers vying to harness the flows for their generally nefarious ends.
But we are not our profession. The time comes (oh, how that phrase charms and confounds) when we step out of the flows.
All of this goes through your mind as my sister Susan stares at you. Without warning, your face flushes red, but not because you realize you’re ready to leave the flows, that you’re ready to be with her.
Your face flushes because you realize something else. You see that this time, something is different. You look closely at the letter, the yellowed paper, the faint handwriting, now fading. This time, at the edge of your vision, you see the words materializing on the parchment as you read them. You realize I have found the flow. Yes, old friend, the flow. The single flow I left everything behind to chase, including you.
You take a step back, staggered. Even as your mind races, it refuses to accept the evidence. No one has ever done what I, apparently, have managed to do. But if I have, then others can as well. Fear surges forward, fresh and urgent, the terrible possibilities playing out.
But with the fear, too, comes hope. Yes, my friend,hope. Hope that I have not, in my zealotry, enabled the organized rape of time. Hope that you and Susan have a chance. Hope, even, that I, your friend who abandoned you, can rejoin the lives of his best friend, his sister, his son, and, yes, even his long-lost wife.
Yes, even Jane. I can almost hear the gasp escape your lips.
I know you have hope because you tell me. You tell me in two days.
This time, my friend, all flows as it should. This time, I return for good.
This is what you do. You flow to the Directorate and complete a task so inconceivable that, of all the agents of any and every time, only you ever pull it off: You steal all traces of you and me and our grand history and bury that history in the molten core of Krakatoa as it explodes. Simultaneously, you inform the Directorate that I am back but mad as a hatter and believe, apparently, that I can raise the dead.
At noon tomorrow, when you are summoned to meet with the Director, you place this letter in his hands.
With great love and respect,
Your friend and once-wayward partner,
Benjamin
Director,
You are surprised when Eric hands you this letter. You turn to your staff and order them out of the flow.
You ask Eric what he makes of this. You are furious, and fearful, when he says you have to read it and decide for yourself.
You prefer not to decide for yourself. Deciding for yourself is dangerous for a man in your position.
In moments like this, you fear you are not in charge. You fear control is merely an illusion. You fear this letter, which is tracking your fears with uncomfortable accuracy, will take you even deeper into your subconscious.
Your anger erupts. You ask Eric what kind of fool nonsense this is. Eric tells you the letter is from Benjamin, and to keep reading.
You frown, but you keep reading. You are taken aback when you read that I am asking you to choose between two flows.
You scoff. You say no man can isolate, let alone control, an individual flow. No man can identify, let alone control, the infinite intersections linking an individual flow with others.
Eric tells you to look at the words you are reading, as you read them, and to read them slowly. You are shocked to see, at the edge of your vision, the words being written on the page.
The same shock, the same horror felt by Eric, now courses through you. You tell Eric this must be a trick. He shakes his head.
You examine the yellowed pages, crinkled with age, and the black, faded ink, written two centuries ago, yet as new and fresh as the morning snow.
You know there is only one explanation: You know I have control of the flow.
In a panic, you rush to the window and look out upon the great city below. But you see nothing different. You rush to a mirror and see the same worn, aging face. You call your wife and ask if your daughter is coming home for Christmas. Your wife says she doubts it, given how rude you were to her new boyfriend at Thanksgiving.
You turn to Eric. Is everything the same, you ask. He nods and says yes. He tells you he’s analyzed fourteen billion trillion flows and found no new anomalies.
You say to him, you’re telling me the bastard did it.
You hear Eric say, I’m telling you the bastard did it.
You wonder what I want. You begin to think like a Director. You begin to consider how my discovery might be harnessed. The various ways it might be used.
You see me cut off that line of thinking. You see the letter explain that my discovery lives and dies with me. You read that only I know how to control, isolate, and edit an individual flow. You know, deep in your bones, that I will never reveal that secret, that I have safeguards in place to ensure that.
You know I am five steps ahead of you, as I always am. You resent and hate me for that, never more so than at this moment.
You suspect the choice I am about to force on you will be painful for you. You know I loathe you. You know, if I had the option, I would smash you like the worthless bug you are. Drop you in the Amazon into a school of piranhas. Roast you alive, slowly, over an open fire. Strip away your position, your family, your reputation—anything and everything you hold dear. I have imagined countless punishments, all of them just, all of them richly deserved.
But understand, as you read this sentence, that I cannot exact my vengeance. Understand that my exquisite, and fragile, control of this flow requires you to be able to make a decision, of your own free will.
It is ironic that my fate, my eternal happiness, lies with you, the man who ruined the happiness I once found and lost. Perhaps it is because the universe decrees balance—requires that in exchange for my happiness, your weakness and cowardice and greed and craven indifference go unpunished. If so, lucky you.
Your decision is between two flows, nearly identical, buffed and shined and polished to perfection. One flow survives, the other dies.
The first flow is the one you experience now. In this flow, I am a renegade, a criminal, an unhinged terrorist, threatening the safety of the universe in pursuit of a mad dream. The traps you have set for me, in London and elsewhere, are cunning and may very well succeed in capturing me, someday, sometime.
In this flow, you are the Director, head of the most powerful secret organization ever to exist. You rose to the top through merit—I grant you that willingly, given your ambition, work ethic and political savvy—but also through treachery. You feel an urge to deny the treachery, but you don’t. Neither of us is a fool. We both know the terrible things you do.
