Up The Line

43.

Capistrano appeared at the inn just before midnight. Under his cloak he carried a lopsided bottle, which he uncorked and handed to me. “Cognac,” he said. “From 1825, bottled in 1775. I just brought it up the line.”

I tasted it. He slumped down in front of me. He looked worse than ever: old, drained, hollow. He took the cognac from me and gulped it greedily.

“Before you say anything,” I told him, “I want to know what your now-time basis is. Discontinuities scare me.”

“There’s no discontinuity.”

“There isn’t?”

“My basis is December, 2059. The same as yours.”

“Impossible!”

“Impossible?” he repeated. “How can you say that?”

“Last time I saw you, you weren’t even forty. Now you’re easily past fifty. Don’t fool me, Capistrano. Your basis is somewhere in 2070, isn’t it? And if it is, for God’s sake don’t tell me anything about the years still ahead for me!”

“My basis is 2059,” said Capistrano in a ragged voice. I realized from the thickness of his tone that this bottle of cognac was not the first for him tonight. “I am no older now than I ought to be, for you,” he said. “The trouble is that I’m a dead man.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Last month I told you of my great-grandmother, the Turk?”

“Yes.”

“This morning I went down the line to Istanbul of 1955. My great-grandmother was then seventeen years old and unmarried. In a moment of wild despair I choked her and threw her into the Bosphorus. It was at night, in the rain; no one saw us. I am dead, Elliott. Dead.”

“No, Capistrano!”

“I told you, long ago, that when the time came, I would make my exit that way. A Turkish slut — she who beguiled my great-grandfather into a shameful marriage — gone now. And so am I. Once I return to now-time, I have never existed. What shall I do, Elliott? You decide. Shall I jump down the line now and end the comedy?”

Sweating, I said, after a deep pull of the cognac, “Give me the exact date of your stopoff in 1955. I’ll go down the line right now and keep you from harming her.”

“You will not.”

“Then you do it. Arrive in the nick of time and save her, Capistrano!”

He looked at me sadly. “What’s the point? Sooner or later I’ll kill her again. I have to. It’s my destiny. I’m going to shunt down now. Will you look after my people?”

“I’ve got a tour of my own,” I reminded him.

“Of course. Of course. You can’t handle more. Just see that mine aren’t stranded. I have to go — have to—”

His hand was on his timer.

“Capis—”

He took the cognac with him when he jumped.

Gone. Extinct. A victim of suicide by timecrime. Blotted out of history’s pages. I didn’t know how to handle the situation. Suppose I went down to 1955 and prevented him from murdering his great-grandmother. He was already a nonperson in now-time; could I retroactively restore him to existence? How did the Paradox of Transit Displacement function in reverse? This was a case I had not studied. I wanted to do whatever was best for Capistrano; I also had his stranded tourists to think about.

I brooded over it for an hour. Finally I came to a sane if not romantic conclusion: this is none of my business, I decided, and I’d better call in the Time Patrol. Reluctantly I touched the alarm stud on my timer, the signal which is supposed to summon a Patrolman at once.

Instantly a Patrolman materialized. Dave Van Dam, the belching blond boor I had met on my first day in Istanbul.

“So?” he said.

“Timecrime suicide,” I told him. “Capistrano just murdered his great-grandmother and jumped back to now-time.”

“Son of a goddam bitch. Why do we have to put up with these unstable motherfuckers?”

I didn’t bother to tell him that his choice of obscenity was inappropriate. I said, “He also left a party of tourists marooned here. That’s why I called you in.”

Van Dam spat elaborately. “Son of a goddam bitch,” he said again. “Okay, I’m with it.” He timed out of my room.

I was sick with grief over the stupid waste of a valuable life. I thought of Capistrano’s charm, his grace, his sensitivity, all squandered because in a drunken moment of misery he had to timecrime himself. I didn’t weep, but I felt like kicking furniture around, and I did. The noise woke up Miss Pistil, who gasped and murmured, “Are we being attacked?”

“You are,” I said, and to ease my rage and anguish I dropped down on her bed and rammed myself into her. She was a little startled, but began to cooperate once she realized what was up. I came in half a minute and left her, throbbing, to be finished off by Bilbo Gostaman. Still in a black mood, I awakened the innkeeper and demanded his best wine, and drank myself into a foggy stupor.

Much later I learned that my dramatics had all been pointless. That slippery bastard Capistrano had had a change of heart at the last minute. Instead of shunting to 2059 and obliterating himself, he clung to his Transit Displacement invulnerability and stayed up the line in 1600, marrying a Turkish pasha’s daughter and fathering three kids on her. The Time Patrol didn’t succeed in tracing him until 1607, at which point they picked him up for multiple timecrime, hoisted him down to 2060, and sentenced him to obliteration. So he got his exit anyway, but not in a very heroic way. The Patrol also had to unmurder Capistrano’s great-grandmother, unmarry him from the pasha’s daughter in 1600, and uncreate those three kids, as well as find and rescue his stranded tourists, so all in all he was a great deal of trouble for everybody. “If a man wants to commit suicide,” said Dave Van Dam, “why in hell can’t he just drink carniphage in nowtime and make it easier on the rest of us?” I had to agree. It was the only time in my life when the Time Patrol and I saw things the same way.