Up The Line

22.

Two weeks later we all returned down the line to 2059. I was dizzied, intoxicated, my soul full of Byzantium.

I had seen the highlights of a thousand years of greatness. The city of my dreams had come to life for me. The meat and wine of Byzantium had passed through my bowels.

From a Courier’s professional point of view, the trip had been a good one, that is, uneventful. Our tourists had not entangled themselves in trouble, nor had any paradoxes been created, as far as we could tell. There had been a little friction only one night, when Capistrano, very drunk, tried to seduce Clotilde; he wasn’t subtle about it, letting seduction shade into rape when she resisted, but I managed to separate them before her nails got into his eyes. In the morning he wouldn’t believe it. “The blonde lesbian?” he asked. “I would stoop so low? You must dream it!” And then he insisted on going eight hours up the line to see if it had really happened. I had visions of a sober Capistrano taking his earlier sozzled self to task, and it scared me. I had to argue him out of it in a blunt and direct way, reminding him of the Time Patrol’s regulation prohibiting anyone from engaging in conversation with himself of a different now-time basis, and threatening to report him if he tried it. Capistrano looked wounded, but he let the matter drop. And when we came down the line and he filed a report of his own, upon request, concerning my behavior as a Courier, he gave me the highest rating. Protopopolos told me that afterward.

“Your next trip,” said Protopopolos, “will be as assistant to Metaxas, on the one-week tour.”

“When do I leave?”

“In two weeks,” he said. “Your layoff comes first, remember? And after you return from the trip with Metaxas, you begin soloing. Where will you spend your layoff?”

“I think I’ll go down to Crete or Mykonos,” I said, “and get a little rest on the beach.”

The Time Service insists that Couriers take two-week vacations between trips. The Time Service doesn’t believe in pushing its Couriers too hard. During layoffs, Couriers are completely at liberty. They can spend the whole time relaxing in now-time, as I proposed to do, or they can sign up with a time tour, or they can simply go hopping by themselves to any era that may interest them.

There’s no charge for timer use when a Courier makes jumps up the line in his layoff periods. The Time Service wants to encourage its employees to feel at home in all periods of the past, and what better way than to allow unlimited free shunting?

Protopopolos looked a little disappointed when I said I’d spend my vacation sunning myself in the islands. “Don’t you want to do some jumping?” he asked.

The idea of making time-jumps on my own at this stage of my career scared me, frankly. But I couldn’t tell Protopopolos that. I also considered the point that in another month he’d be handing me the responsibility for the lives of an entire tour group. Maybe this conversation was part of the test of my qualifications. Were they trying to see if I had the guts to go jumping on my own?

Protopopolos seemed to be fishing for an answer.

I said, “On second thought, why waste a chance to do some jumping? I’ll have a peek at post-Byzantine Istanbul.”

“With a tour group?”

“On my own,” I said.