Time Travel Omnibus, page 857
And so it was done—apparently without mishap. Abercrombie stood in the machine, looking out over the familiar scene of the workshop. He had the contacts file with him, which was what he had gone to get, along with the original master notebook as a bonus. He’d had thoughts of maybe returning that to its proper place in the private-office safe before returning, but time had run out on him and that had proved impossible. Now, for what it was worth, backups of both were secure in their hiding place from the past. There were still loose ends of unanswered questions dangling in his mind, but all in all everything seemed to be working itself out. He didn’t pretend yet to understand precisely how.
Zaltzer had hoped to be waiting for him when he got back, but in view of the imprecision still bedeviling the process, his absence was understandable. Abercrombie climbed down from the machine and drew in several deep breaths of relief. He hadn’t realized how tense the undertaking had made him. He let himself out the rear door of the workshop, went back to his private office, locked the door, and stowed the two sets of documents in the safe. That essential task accomplished, he sank down into the chair at the desk to unwind. A vague feeling of something not being quite right had been nagging from somewhere below consciousness since he came out of the machine, but just at this moment he was too exhausted to give it much attention. His mind drifted; he might even have dozed. . . .
Until the muffled sound of something being moved along the corridor outside brought him back to wakefulness. By the time he had sat up and let his head clear, the noise had gone. He rose from the chair and was about go to the door and check, when his gaze traveled across to the window and he caught the view outside. He stared in confusion for a moment, then crossed to the window to be sure. The old customs building along the waterfront was intact. . . . Yet it was supposed to have burned down three months ago. And then he realized what was wrong that he had noticed but not registered: There weren’t any security people around the lab. This was no minor error. He hadn’t returned to anywhere near the time he was supposed to be in. So when, exactly, was this?
Infuriatingly, nothing in his office would tell him. He came out into the corridor and headed for the front of the building, either to seek some sign in his other office or find out from Mrs. Crawford, but stopped dead the moment he entered the workshop area. The time machine, in which he had arrived only a short while ago, was gone. His mind reeled, unable to deal with what seemed an insurmountable hurdle. But as he forced himself to think, the pieces of what it had to mean came together. If the customs building was still there, this had to be before it was demolished—pretty obviously. Then this could only be the day that he had been in the public office, heard the strange noise, come back to investigate, found the machine unattended, and stolen it. The noise that aroused him had been himself moving it to the freight elevator.
He thought back rapidly, trying to recreate the sequence of events. Knowing what he did, if he moved quickly enough, there would be time yet to intercede.
He ran back through to the rear stairs, started down, and then halted as a cautionary note sounded in his head. After all he had been through to get them, would it be wise to leave the notebook and contacts file here? No. Until he was a lot clearer about this whole business, he wasn’t going to let them out of his sight. He ran back to the office and removed them from the safe. Then, deciding it was too late to intercept himself in the loading bay—and in any case, he didn’t want a scene involving two of him in front of the service people there—and knowing that he still had his keys, he raced instead to the front lot, where he parked his car.
He screeched out onto the waterfront boulevard without stopping and saw the truck carrying the tarp-covered time machine exiting from the rear gate a few car lengths in front of him . . . a split second before a horn blared, brakes squealed, and something hit him in the rear. And that was when the police cruiser that just had to be there turned on its siren and pulled him over. He remembered it too late, while he sat through the ritual of insurance information being exchanged, radio check of his license number and record, and the ponderous writing out of the ticket. By the time he got moving again, the truck had long since disappeared.
Nervous about the time now, instead of going around the long route to the side entrance that the truck had taken, he drove straight up to the front of the building, leaped out, and ran inside, in the process knocking over a pile of steel drums just inside the door and causing enough noise to make any thought now at concealing his presence a joke. But by this time he didn’t care. All that mattered was getting to the machine.
“Wait!” Brady, interrupted, sounding alarmed. “There’s more of ’em breaking in upstairs.”
“It’s a bust,” Yellow One told him. “Get yourself out!”
Brady looked around at the boxes of gelignite, HMX, PETN, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives, along with the cases of detonator caps and fuses. “But the stuff . . . It’s taken months,” he protested.
“It’s all lost anyway. What we don’t need is them getting you to talk too. Get yourself out!”
Brady nodded, snapped off the phone, and pulled himself together. The fastest exit was up a service ladder to the front entrance. He emerged without encountering anyone and found a car right there with the keys left in. There was no arguing with a gift from Providence like that. He jumped in and accelerated out onto the boulevard, failing, in his haste, to wonder why, if the place had been busted, there were no other vehicles in the vicinity.
While down in the cellars, surrounded by explosives, incendiaries, and sensitive detonating devices, Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie started up the time machine that emitted varichron radiation.
One thing that Yellow One did want from the ruins, however, if it could be retrieved, was the group cell leader’s book of codes, contacts, command structure, and other information that could prove disastrous if the law-enforcement agencies got their hands on it. The next night, after the fire crews and demolition teams had left, Brady went back down to the place where the documents had been concealed. He found a package in one of the recesses beneath some old pipes as described, but then he was forced to hide when he heard someone else coming. From behind cover he watched as the same figure whom he had observed wheeling the strange machine down from the truck the previous day entered and extracted another package from one of the other recesses. The contents didn’t seem to be what he wanted when he examined them with a flashlight, and he became agitated until he located yet another package, checked it, and then left taking both of them. Brady followed him back up and looked out in time to see him depart in the same car that Brady had “borrowed” the day before, just before the building went up. Brady reported all the details when he handed over the package that he had recovered.
But it turned out to be the wrong one, containing lists of names and details of media people, scientists, political figures, and others who were of no interest to the group. The stranger, therefore, must have taken the group’s code and organization book. With the help of a friend in the police department, they traced the car’s number from the records of stolen vehicles. It turned out to belong to a professor who worked in the university Annexe nearby.
The organization sent a couple of its bagmen into the premises to see if they might be able to uncover something further, one posing as a repairman, the other under cover of an arranged power outage, but the security arrangements they came up against were astonishingly strict for a university environment. Eventually, the leaders gave it up as a lost cause.
All of it very odd. It turned out that there hadn’t been a police bust at the old warehouse that day, after all. Brady often puzzled about the professor, because he had assumed him to be the body that was found in the ruins. In his own mind he was sure there had been nobody else there. Yet there the professor was, still coming and going for months afterward. Brady decided he probably never would figure it out.
THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW MY FATHER KNEW
Peter Crowther
If there is an afterlife, let it be a small town
gentle as this spot at just this instant.
—Dana Gioia, In Cheever Country
“Something was different.
Bennett Differing opened his eyes and listened, and tried to pinpoint what was wrong. Then he realized. He couldn’t hear his wife’s breathing.
He shuffled over, pulling the bedclothes with him, and stared at the empty space beside him on the bed. Shelley wasn’t there. He looked across at the clock and frowned. It was too early for her to get up. She always stayed in bed until he was out of the shower. Why would she be getting up at this time?
Then he remembered. She was meeting her sister, going to the mall for their annual shop-till-you-drop spree.
As if on cue, Shelley’s voice rang out. “Honey?”
“Yeah, I’m up,” Bennett shouted to the ceiling.
“Well, I’m on my way. Lisa gets in at 8:15.”
Bennett nodded to the empty room. Around a yawn, he said, “Have fun.”
“Will do,” she shouted.
“Take care.”
He could hear her feet on the polished wooden floor of the hallway downstairs, going first one way and then another—Shelley suddenly remembering things, like car keys, house keys, purse.
“Will do,” she shouted. “It’s a lovely morning.”
Bennett flopped back onto the bed. “Good.” The word came out as a mutter wrapped up in another yawn.
“What?”
“I said, good. I’m thrilled for you.”
The feet downstairs clumped back into the kitchen. “I’ll be home around eight. Lisa’s getting her bus at seven.”
“Okay.”
The sound of feet stopped and then he heard them coming quickly up the stairs. “Can’t go without giving you a kiss,” Shelley said as she ran into the bedroom. Now that the door had been opened he could hear the radio downstairs.
She leaned across him and kissed him on the forehead, making a smacking sound. He knew she had made a lipstick mark, could see the mischievous glint in her eyes as she surveyed her work with a satisfied smile.
She ruffled his hair lovingly. “What are you going to be doing today?”
Bennett shrugged, yawned and turned his face away from her. He could taste the staleness of sleep still in his mouth.
“Oh, this and that.”
“Words!” Shelley snapped at him, jabbing a finger in his stomach. “Make sure you do your words before you deal with e-mails.” She smiled and rubbed his stomach—another sign of affection. “Will you be okay?” The question came complete with inflection and frown.
“Sure,” Bennett said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get lots done.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” He raised his clenched fist to his head and tapped two fingers against his temple. “Scouts’ honor, ma’am. I’ll do my words.”
She stood up and picked up her watch from the table by her side of the bed. Strapping it onto her wrist, she said, “Well, have a good day. There’s a sandwich in the refrigerator.”
“Great.”
She stopped at the bedroom door and scrunched herself up excitedly. “You know . . . ,” she said, rubbing her hands together, “. . . you can smell it.”
Bennett shuffled up and rested his head on his hand. “Smell what?”
Shelley frowned. “Christmas, of course.” She straightened her sweater where she had rucked it out of her skirt. “You can smell it everywhere: the cold . . . and the presents, eggnog, warm biscuits. The skies are clear and the air is crisp . . .” Bennett half-imagined he could hear sleigh bells and his wife nodded as though in response to his thoughts. “And I think we’re going to have some snow,” she added with a devilish smile—she knew Bennett hated snow.
Bennett groaned. “Oh goody.”
She waved a hand at him. “You know, you’re turning into Scrooge.”
He flopped his head onto the pillow. “Bah, humbug!”
Shelley smiled. “Okay, I’m on my way. See you tonight.”
“Yeah, see you,” he said to the slowly closing door.
It seemed like no time at all before the front door slammed and he heard the Buick’s engine fire into life. Then three soft pips on the horn as Shelley pulled out of the driveway.
Suddenly the house was quiet, the only sound the sound of the car moving off along the street. Then, around the silence, drifting through it like a boat across a still lake, the sound of the radio gave a sense of life, albeit muffled.
Bennett could hear a funky jingle and the weatherman distantly telling anyone in Forest Plains who was bothering to listen at this time in the morning just what the weather was doing. Rain coming in from the west, heat coming in from the east . . . all elemental life was there: winds, twisters, cold fronts circling, warm fronts sneaking up for the kill, maybe even a tremor or two.
“Maybe even snow!” he said to the pillow.
But there was something else, too. Even he could smell it. Smell it in the air. Was it Christmas? Did Christmas have a smell . . . a smell all of its own, not just the associated things that society had tacked onto it?
Bennett sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was a little before seven, two minutes to his alarm ringing, the clock dancing side to side like on the cartoon shows, demanding attention like a family pet, craving a human touch to let it know its job was done for another night. He leaned over and hit the switch.
The clock seemed to settle on its curlicued haunches and Bennett half-imagined it pouting because he had robbed it of its daily chore.
He yawned, scratched places that itched, and threw back the sheets.
It was cool. Cool but not cold.
Bennett slid his legs out of bed and rested his feet on the floor. It was part of the getting-up process, a kind of airlock sandwiched between sleep and wakefulness. The first ritual of the day.
He sniffed a bear-sized sniff and drew in everything and anything.
Somewhere in that sniff, alongside the fresh coffee and toasted bread smells that Shelley had left behind in the kitchen and which were now threading their way through the house, were the smells of his bedroom and his clothes, the wood grains and varnish of the furniture, the oily odors imbued by the machines that had stitched the mosaic linen of the curtains and stamped the twists and whorls on the bedside lampshades; old smells, new smells. Unknown smells. Smells from near and faraway . . . smells of other people, other places, other times.
And small-town smells. Plenty of those . . . so different to the smells of the city, New York City, where Bennett had worked as an insurance adjuster for twenty years before turning to writing full-time and hiding himself and Shelley away in Forest Plains . . . a town as close to all the picket-fenced and town-squared small towns as could possibly exist outside the pages of an old well-thumbed Post, particularly in these dog days of the second millennium.
He sniffed again and glanced at the window.
Outside, over the street, gulls were circling. On the wires running across the posts that stood sentry-like alongside the grassy lawns, the neighborhood regulars—sparrows, chaffinches and thrushes—were perched. . .like hick locals lazing on a front porch watching an invasion of bike riders crazy-wheeling and whooping around the square.
Bennett frowned and got to his feet, finding new places to scratch as he staggered to the window. Now he could see what was happening.
“Huh!” was all he could think of to say. Someone had taken the world while he had been dragging himself from his bed. Someone had stolen everything that was familiar and had covered it with gauze. But this was a moving gauze, a diaphanous graveyard mist that, even as he watched, was drifting along Sycamore Street, swirling around the tree trunks, twisting itself like ribbons through the leafless branches, washing up the sidewalks to the polished lawns and onwards, stealthily, reaching, conquering and owning, pausing every now and again to check out a crumpled brown leaf before moving on.
He leaned on the sill and yawned again.
It was the mist he could smell. He wondered why Shelley hadn’t mentioned it. He’d have told her to take special care. In fact, if he had known it was this bad—because it was getting bad . . . thickening by the second, it seemed—he’d have driven her over to the train station at Walton Flats. And anyway, hadn’t she said that the skies were clear? He looked both ways along the street. Maybe it had been clear when she looked out, but that must have been some time ago.
Bennett frowned. Well, whatever it had been . . . it was foggy now.
Now the mist was pooling all around, settling itself onto the trees and the pavement, resting on the sidewalks and the dew-covered lawns, investigating the promise of warmth offered by his partly open window.
The mist had a clean, sharp smell, snaking across the sill and around him into the room, sliding beneath the bed and inside the louvered wardrobe doors, checking out the threads, evaluating the labels. Evaluating him.
Bennett watched it.
Soon it would make its way out of the bedroom door and onto the landing. It would find the spare bedroom—nothing here, boys . . . let’s move on—and then the stairs leading down to the kitchen and the tinny radio sounds.
Bennett stretched and threw the window wide.
A boy appeared out of the mist, dodging the tendrils that grasped for but never quite caught hold of his bicycle wheels. The boy was standing on the pedals, pumping like mad, a cowlick pasted down on his forehead, a brown leather sack crossed across his chest and filled with news and stories, comments, cartoons and quotes. The boy reached into his sack, pulled out a rolled-up paper and made to throw, his arm pulled back like a Major League pitcher. As the paper left his hand, spinning through the milky air, he caught sight of Bennett and smiled.
“Hey, Mist’ Diff’ring!” the boy yelled, a Just Dennis kind of boy, his voice sounding echoey and artificial in the silent, mist-shrouded street.
Forest Plains was full of boys just like this one, all tow-heads, patched denims and checked shirts. But many of them didn’t have names, at least not names that Bennett knew. They were just boys, boys who whispered giggling and mysterious behind your back when you bought something—anything—in the drugstore; boys who viewed any structure as merely something else to climb; boys who propped up the summertime street corners, drinking in the life and the sounds and the energy; boys with secret names . . . names like “Ace” and “Skugs.”
