Up The Line

49.

Calm. Calm. Stay calm. He went out to the pissoir, is all. He’ll be right back.

Item One, a Courier must remain aware of the location of all of the tourists in his care at all times. The penalty—

I kindled a torch at the smoldering hearth and rushed out into the hall.

Sauerabend? Sauerabend?

Not pissing. Not downstairs rummaging in the kitchen. Not prowling in the wine cellar.

Sauerabend?

Where the devil are you, you pig?

The taste of Pulcheria’s lips was still on my own. Her sweat mingled with mine. Her juices still crisped my short hairs. All the delicious forbidden joys of transtemporal incest continued to tingle in my soul.

The Time Patrol will make a nonperson out of me for this, I thought. I’ll say, “I’ve lost a tourist,” and they’ll say, “How did it happen?” and I’ll say, “I stepped out of the room for three minutes and he vanished,” and they’ll say, “Three minutes, eh? You aren’t supposed to—” and I’ll say, “It was only three minutes. Christ, you can’t expect me to watch them twenty-four hours a day!” And they’ll be sympathetic, but nevertheless they’ll have to check the scene, and in the replay they’ll discover me wantonly shunting out for some other point on the line, and they’ll track me to 1105 and find me with Pulcheria, and see that not only am I guilty of negligence as a Courier, but also that I’ve committed incest with my great-great-multi-great—

Calm. Calm.

Into the street now. Flash the torch around. Sauerabend? Sauerabend? No Sauerabend.

If I were a Sauerabend, where would I sneak off to?

To the home of some twelve-year-old Byzantine girl? How would he know where to find one? How to get in? No. No. He couldn’t have done that. Where is he, though? Strolling through the town? Out for fresh air? He should be asleep. Snoring. No. I realized that when I left he hadn’t been asleep, hadn’t been snoring; he’d been bothering Palmyra Gostaman. I hurried back to the inn. There wasn’t any point in roaming Constantinople at random for him.

In mounting panic I woke up Palmyra. She rubbed her eyes, complained a little, blinked. Torchlight glittered off her flat bare chest.

“Where did Sauerabend go?” I whispered harshly.

“I told him to leave me alone. I told him if he didn’t stop bothering me I’d bite his thing off. He had his hand right here, and he—”

“Yes, but where did he go?”

“I don’t know. He just got up and went away. It was dark in here. I fell asleep maybe two minutes ago. Why’d you have to wake me up?”

“Some help you are,” I muttered. “Go back to sleep.”

Calm, Judson, calm. There’s an easy solution to this. If you weren’t in such a flutter, you’d have thought about it long ago. All you have to do is edit Sauerabend back into the room, the way you edited Marge Hefferin back to life.

It’s illegal, of course. Couriers are not supposed to engage in time corrections. That’s for the Patrol to do. But this will be such a small correction. You can handle it quickly and no one will be the wiser. You got away with the Hefferin revision, didn’t you? Yes. Yes. It’s your only chance, Jud.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and tried to plan my actions properly. My night with Pulcheria had dulled the edge of my intellect. Think, Jud. Think as you never thought before.

I put great effort into my thinking.

What time was it when you shunted up to 1105?

Fourteen minutes to midnight.

What time was it when you came back down the line to 1204?

Eleven minutes to midnight.

What time is it now?

One minute to midnight.

When did Sauerabend slip out of the room, then?

Somewhere between fourteen to and eleven to.

Therefore, how far up the line must you shunt to intercept him?

About thirteen minutes.

You realize that if you jump back more than thirteen minutes, you’ll encounter your prior self, who will be getting ready to depart for 1105? That’s the Paradox of Duplication.

I’ve got to risk it. I’m in worse trouble than that already.

You’d better shunt, then, and get things fixed up.

Here I go.

I timed my shunt perfectly, going up the line thirteen minutes less a few seconds. I noticed with satisfaction that my earlier self had already departed, and that Sauerabend had not. The ugly fat bastard was still in the room, sitting up in his bed with his back to me.

It would be simplicity itself to stop him now. I simply forbid him to leave the room, and keep him here for the next three minutes, thus canceling his departure. The instant my prior self gets back — at eleven minutes to midnight — I shunt ten minutes down the line, resuming my proper place in the stream of time. Sauerabend thus will have been continuously guarded by his Courier (in one incarnation or another) throughout the whole dangerous period from fourteen minutes to midnight onward. There will be a very slight moment of duplication for me when I overlap my returning self, but I’ll clear out of his time level so fast that he probably won’t notice. And all will be as it should have been.

Yes. Very good.

I started across the room toward Sauerabend, meaning to block his path when he tried to leave. He pivoted, still sitting on his bed, and saw me.

“You’re back?” he said.

“You bet. And I don’t—”

He put his hand to his timer and vanished.

“Wait!” I yelled, waking everybody up. “You can’t do that! It’s impossible! A tourist’s timer doesn’t—”

My voice trailed away into a foolish-sounding gargle. Sauerabend was gone, time-shunting before my eyes. Yelling at the place where he had been wouldn’t bring him back. The wiliness of the loathsome slob! Fooling with his timer, boasting that he could gimmick it into working for him, somehow shorting the seal and getting access to the control—

Now I was in a terrible mess of messes. One of my own tourists on the loose with an activated timer, jumping all over anywhen — what a monstrous botch! I was desperate. The Time Patrol was bound to pick him up, of course, before he could commit too many serious timecrimes, but beyond any doubt I’d be censured for letting him get away.

Unless I could catch him before he left.

Fifty-six seconds had elapsed since I had jumped here to keep Sauerabend from leaving.

Without hesitating further, I set my timer back sixty seconds, and shunted. There was Sauerabend again, sitting on his bed. There was my other self, starting across the room toward him. There were the other sleeping tourists, not yet awakened by my shout.

Okay now. We outnumber him. We’ve got him.

I launched myself at Sauerabend, meaning to grab his arms and keep him from shunting.

He turned as soon as I moved. With devilish swiftness he reached down to his timer.

He shunted. He was gone. I sprawled on his empty bed, numb with shock.

The other Jud glared at me and said, “Where in hell did you come from?”

“I’m fifty-six seconds ahead of you. I missed my first chance at collaring him, and jumped back to try a second time.”

“And missed again, I see.”

“So I did.”

“And duplicated us, besides.”

“At least that part can be fixed,” I said. I checked the time. “In another thirty seconds, you jump back sixty seconds and get yourself into the time-flow.”

“Like crap I will,” said Jud B.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the point of it? Sauerabend’s going to be gone, or at least on his way. I won’t be able to grab him, will I?”

“But you’ve got to go,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I did at that point in the flow.”

“You had a reason for it,” he said. “You had just missed Sauerabend, and you wanted to jump back a minute and try catching him then. But I haven’t had a chance even to miss him. Besides, why worry about the time-flow? It’s already been changed.”

He was right. We had run out the fifty-six seconds. Now we were at the point when I had made my first try at blocking Sauerabend’s exit; but Jud B, who presumably was living through the minute I had lived through just prior to Sauerabend’s first disappearance, had lived through that minute in an altogether different way from me. Everything was messed up. I had spawned a duplicate who wouldn’t go away and who had nowhere to go. It was now thirteen minutes to midnight. In another two minutes we’d have a third Jud here — the one who shunted down straight from Pulcheria’s arms to find Sauerabend missing in the first place. He had a destiny of his own: to spend ten minutes in panicky dithering, and then to jump back from one-minute-to-midnight to fourteen-minutes-to-midnight, kicking off the whole process of confusions that culminated in the two of us.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Jud B said.

“Before he comes in.”

“Right. Because if he sees us, he may never get around to making his shunt back to fourteen minutes to midnight, and that—”

“—might eliminate you and me from existing.”

“But where do we go?” he asked.

“We could jump back to three or four minutes ago, and try to grab Sauerabend together.”

“No good. We’ll overlap another of us — the one who’s on his way to Pulcheria.”

“So what? We’ll make him get on his way as soon as we’ve nailed down Sauerabend.”

“Still no good. Because if we miss Sauerabend again, we’ll induce still another change in the time-flow, and maybe bring on a third one of us. And set up a hall of mirrors effect, banging back and forth until there are a million of us in the room. He’s too quick for us with that timer.”

“You’re right,” I said, wishing Jud B had gone back when he belonged before it was too late.

It was now twelve minutes to midnight.

“We’ve got sixty seconds to clear out. Where do we go?”

“We don’t go back and try to grab Sauerabend again. That’s definite.”

“Yes.”

“But we must locate him.”

“Yes.”

“And he could be anywhen at all.”

“Yes.”

“Then two of us aren’t enough. We’ve got to get help.”

“Metaxas.”

“Yes. And maybe Sam.”

“Yes. And how about Capistrano?”

“Is he available?”

“Who knows? We’ll try. And Buonocore. And Jeff Monroe. This is a crisis! ”

“Yes,” I said. “Listen, we’ve only got ten seconds now. Come on with me!”

We rushed out of the room and down the back way, missing the arrival of the eleven-minutes-to-midnight Jud by a few seconds. We crouched in a dark alcove under the stairs, thinking about the Jud who was two flights up discovering the absence of Sauerabend. I said, “This is going to call for teamwork. You shunt up the line to 1105, find Metaxas, and explain what’s happened. Then call in reinforcements and get everybody busy tracing the time-line for Sauerabend.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to stay right here,” I said. “Until one minute to midnight. At that point the fellow upstairs is going to shunt back a little less than thirteen minutes to look for Sauerabend—”

“—leaving his people unguarded—”

“—yes, and somebody’s got to stay with them, so I’ll go back upstairs as soon as he leaves, and slip back into the main Jud Elliott identity as their Courier. And I’ll stay there, proceeding on a normal basis, until I hear from you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Get going, then.”

He got going. I huddled down in a little heap, shaking with fright. It all hit me in one mighty reaction. Sauerabend was gone, and I had spawned an alter ego by the Paradox of Duplication, and in the space of one evening I had committed more timecrimes than I could name, and—

I felt like crying.

I didn’t realize it, but the mess was only beginning.