The Probability Broach
She crossed the room; I enjoyed watching her do it. “Here’s your explanation.” Two plastic-covered masses, overflowing with shredded fiber. “That’s why there was enough of you left for me to work on.” I recognized the tattered remains of my Kevlar body armor. Someone had driven a tank over it while something red and squishy was inside. “Whatever this contraption is, it saved your life.”
“That’s what it’s for. Sort of forgot I had it on. But it wasn’t designed for machine guns. How many times was I hit?”
She frowned. “I removed—you really want to hear this?—okay, perhaps a dozen bullets, mostly fragments. And fiber. This vest was practically stitched into you. We had trouble cutting it off.”
“That’s a relief!” I risked a peek under the covers. “I thought you’d cut off something a little more valuable—at least to me.”
She indicated the cast on my left arm. “You have a shattered wrist and fractured humerus. The shoulder blade itself and the collarbone are in bad shape, but they’ll heal. Your right arm, I don’t see how they managed to miss. You should see Ed’s garage door!”
“And his mother’s windows?”
“His what? No, Lucy—Lucy Kropotkin—is Ed’s next-door neighbor. She’d be flattered, though. She thinks a lot of Ed.”
“And so do you, apparently. I’m hurt to the quick.”
I won’t say she actually blushed. She’s one of those naturally pink types you don’t dare take home to Father. “Yes, I do. He’s the real reason you’re still alive. He drove off your attackers.”
“I was elsewhere at the time. You want to tell me about it?”
“Well,” she answered, “just about the time the shooting started, Ed was on the Telecom. He’d been at it all morning, clearing things for his first real vacation in years …”
ONE FREEMAN K. BERTRAM of Paratronics, Ltd, had a problem: someone had gotten away from a company warehouse, laden with a half-ton of valuable parts and equipment, despite a dozen of Securitech’s best plus an alarm system worth thousands of ounces.
Ed might not be the best-known consulting detective in the land, nor the most highly paid, but he was clearly headed in that direction at an age most North Americans considered young. There were more clients than he really had time for, and although he’d worked for Paratronics, Ltd. before, and this sounded interesting, plenty of schedule-juggling had gone into shaking three vacation weeks loose. With several hundred ounces already to his credit at Mulligan’s Bank and Grill and a brand-new Neova convertible waiting in the garage, come law or high water, Ed was heading for Leadville’s summer sun and man-made snow, business be hanged.
Could he recommend another operative, suggest security-tightening measures? Ordinarily, even this advice would cost plenty. Bertram’s stereo image sulked until his lower lip threatened to fall right out of the screen. He wasn’t used to taking no for an answer or having his gold turned down, but what could he do? Bertram made notes and promised to call back at the end of the month.
Connection finally broken, Ed started toward the garage, following his suitcases. Locking his skis on the squat little hull, he levered himself into the cockpit. The garage door ground slowly upward: for the twentieth time that week he—
Abruptly there was a hair-raising metallic chatter. Something else wrong with the door? Or the sportscraft? A glance at the instruments: no, wheels were down and locked under the flaring skirt, fans idling gently; thrusters waited silently in their nacelles for a take-off ramp somewhere along the Greenway.
He killed the engine and climbed out. Beneath the half-open door, a baggily clad form ran toward him then slammed violently into the slowly rising panel. Spots of sunlight pierced the door as a brilliant dotted line raced toward Ed. The Neova’s windows disintegrated as he dived, flinging back his sportcloak for the .375 on his hip. The shadow, faceless against outdoor light, slumped and fell in a pool of splattered blood.
A huge Frontenac steamer crabslipped up the driveway, bullets streaming. Ed pulled the trigger. Heavy slugs spat toward the steamer—five! six!—and silenced its machine gun. He thumbed the selector and ripped through the rest of his magazine, fountaining metal and glass from the black machine in three-shot bursts. It fishtailed clumsily across the lawn and limped away.
“Death and Taxes! What was that about?” Enter a frail-looking elderly woman, .50 caliber Gabbet Fairfax smoking in her hand. She clutched her bathrobe together, shoving the monstrous weapon into a pocket, where it hung dangerously.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lucy.” Ed swapped magazines and holstered his gun, cautiously approaching the inert figure lying in the doorway. “Give me a hand. This fellow’s badly hurt!” He gently rolled the body over and looked down. At himself.
“YOU WERE IN nasty shape when I arrived,” Clarissa finished, “blood loss, concussion, bruises all over. You also had a hairline fracture of the right large toe.” First chance to show off my Tae Kwon Do, and I’d blown it. All at once, the whole of yesterday came trickling back, half-forgotten in my surprise at being alive.
Funny, you resign yourself to dying and it’s almost annoying when it doesn’t come off on schedule. I’d been through the process three times in the last twenty-four hours, and I knew. A Kevlar vest may keep your ticket from being punched, but it won’t spare you the bullet’s energy—just distributes it. I was lucky.
Which brought me up short. That guy in the laboratory corridor was cold meat. The one I’d pistol-whipped—where was my Smith & Wesson?—would have a broken cheekbone, possibly a punctured lung. Others, who can tell? There wasn’t time for counting coup. One confirmed, uncounted possibles. Not my first time …
I’D RUN OUT of cigarettes about 2 A.M., pulled pants on over pajama bottoms, and strolled over to one of those little twenty-four-hour groceries with inflated prices and lonely teenage clerks. Only this one wasn’t lonely—not with a .25 automatic pressed against her temple. He stood well away, gun arm fully extended, prancing nervously as he watched her shove small bills into a wrinkled paper bag, preparing herself for death.
You’re a cop around the clock. On my own time, I carried a beat-up .45 S & W sawed off to three inches. The door stood open, ten yards away—I didn’t dare get closer. I knelt, braced my hands on the rear corner of his ’57 Chevy, and pulled the trigger. She screamed for thirty minutes. When the coroner cut the stocking mask away, half the bandit’s head came with it. But his gun had never gone off: he’d forgotten to shuck one into the chamber.
Stupidity is a capital offense.
When Evelyn and I were first married, we’d picnic up in the foothills, west of Denver—lushly green in springtime, yellow-gold in the high-country summer, and absolutely brim-full of rattlers. We never went without that old .45. Guess I wasted dozens of nasty things before I got too old and fat for hiking.
Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy. I was surprised how I felt: like shooting those rattlesnakes. The world was cleaner, safer. Not much, but a little. I hadn’t liked doing it any more than, say, washing dishes, but I’d do it again. I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved—except at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.
Rattlesnakes with machine guns. Wish I’d aimed for their goddamned boiler too.
EXPLAINING TO CLARISSA how I’d ended up in her competent hands was difficult. I didn’t really know. I was fairly confident I wasn’t bananas: I could remember the first house I’d ever lived in, the name of my second-grade teacher, what I wore at my wedding—all the nuts and bolts. Somebody was persecuting me, but I had the persecution marks to prove it.
This was northern Colorado. Out my second-floor bedroom window, I could see Horsetooth Mountain, an unmistakable Fort Collins landmark. I could reel off everything that had ha
ppened, from the moment the investigation began at Sixteenth and Gaylord, to the moment the bad-guys done me dirt at the corner of Genet and Tabor. But according to my shapely physician, today was Thursday, July 9, 211 A.L. After reflecting, she added that A.L. stands for Anno Liberatis.
“That’s something, anyway. Mind if I asked what happened two hundred and eleven years ago?”
Clarissa shook her head in bewilderment. “But how can you not know? That’s when the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Britain. Every schoolchild knows—”
“Maybe I need to go back to school. Let’s see … 1987, minus 211 … six, seven, seven, one—You’re right! July Fourth, 1776! Obvious!”
She sadly shook her head again. “No, it was the Second of July—firecrackers, rockets, guns firing into the air … Lee and Adams—”
“July second—rings a bell somehow. Well, set it aside a minute. Now tell me where we are: this city of yours doesn’t amount to a wide spot in the road, where I come from.”
She shook her head a third time. It was becoming a habit. “Win, I’ll be what help I can, even it if means playing silly games. Laporte is a very wide spot indeed. One of the largest cities in the North American Confederacy. In—”
“Hold it! Confederacy? Let me think—who won the Civil War?”
“Civil War?” she blinked—at least it was a change from headshaking. “You can’t mean this country, unless you count the Whiskey—”
“I mean the War Between the States—tariffs and slavery, Lee and Grant, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis? 1861 to 1865. Lincoln gets killed at the end—very sad.”
Clarissa looked very sad, systematic delusions written all over her face. “Win, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In the first place, slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., very peaceably, thanks to Thomas Jefferson—”
“Thomas Jefferson?”
“And in the second place, I didn’t recognize those names you rattled off. Except Jefferson Davis. He was President—no, it would have been the Old United States, back then—in, oh, I just can’t remember! He wasn’t very important.”
“Is there a third place? I can’t stand the suspense.”
“Why, yes. There wasn’t any 1865. The date that would have been 1865 was …” She looked up at the ceiling. “89 A.L.”
I wouldn’t give up. “Okay, who was president in 89? Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln—or maybe Andrew Johnson?”
“No, now you’ve asked an easy one: Lysander Spooner, one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. I don’t remember the dates, offhand, but he went on to be president for a long time after that. I guess the only president more important was Gallatin.”
“Gallatin! Albert Gallatin?”
“Why, yes—second President of the United States, and …” I felt dizzy. What had become of John Adams? Where were Andrew Johnson and the Civil War? What had happened to Lincoln, and who in hell’s name was Lysander Spooner?
“Wait a minute, Clarissa, I didn’t catch that last bit.”
She sighed, giving in to the headshaking impulse again. “I said, Albert Gallatin was also the man who killed George Washington.”
VII: The Looking Glass
JEFFERSON, THOMAS, b. 1743 C.E., d.50 A.L., 4th Pres., Old U.S., 44-50 A.L.; auth., Decl. of Ind., Rev. Art. of Confed.; philos., invent., coll. of T. Paine, A. Gallatin; hist. acknowl. respon. for slavery abolition (44 A.L.) which he pursued all his public life; wounded by assassin (35 A.L.) whom he killed, during anti-slavery speech; oppon. of A. Hamilton, Federalist “Constitution”; elected Pres., succ. E. Genêt Notable achiev. during term: Jefferson Doctrine outlining N. Amer. mil. and pol. isolationism while eliminating trade barriers and opposing Eur. imperialism in New World. Died in office, July 2, 50 A.L., succ. by V. Pres. J. Monroe. (SEE: Slavery; Metric System; Coinage; Calendar; Internal Combustion; & Forsyth Pistol.)
—Encyclopedia of North America
TerraNovaCom Channel 485-A
Can time run edgewise? Or can a lifetime of memories turn out to be only a delusion? Those were about the only choices I had. There was a third: that I was hallucinating now. But, delusion though it might be, my life had taught me to trust my own judgment, and each time I questioned it, I’d been disastrously wrong. Every time someone urged me to doubt it for my “own good,” there had been an ulterior motive. I wouldn’t begin doubting myself now.
Which brought me back to the original fork in the road: either my whole life until now had been some kind of dope dream, or somehow history had shifted sideways. Correction: I had been shifted sideways in time.
Hold on, wasn’t there some book … something about Grant’s horse throwing him and—That’s right! If the South Had Won the Civil War, by MacKinlay Kantor. If I’d been dropped into that world—two American States, one United and one Confederate; Cuba a southern state and Alaska still Russian—I’d be almost as confused as I was now! And it had all started with Grant getting killed before he’d won the war. Okay, what was the first difference between this strangely revised history and the one I learned in school? According to Clarissa, there’d never been a Civil War, so something must have resolved the tariff and slavery issues. Whatever it was, there would be, in turn, some previous cause, and so on, right back to the Declaration of Independence. Could it be that the Fourth of July was on July second? Could two measly little days change the face of everything I knew? It didn’t seem possible, but I was here!
And where, oh, where, was the world I’d been born into, grown up in, loved and hated? Did it still exist? Had it ever existed?
THAT AFTERNOON, ED kept me company while Clarissa was calling on another patient. I caught myself hoping it was some fat old lady. Like every foreign traveler, I was discovering that I could brace myself for big differences like steam-powered hovercraft on grass-covered thoroughfares, but little differences—physicians who make housecalls—seemed almost too much.
Ed stifled a snicker as he came into the room. Everywhere Clarissa thought there was something wrong with me, whether inflicted in the last few hours or not, there were wires, coils, and antennae. She believed firmly I’d had one foot in the grave and the other on a vaudeville cliche for years. Some were connected to oddball hardware she’d left behind, or even to the phone—pardon me, Telecom. Some weren’t connected to anything at all—they just sprouted.
The major features of this ridiculous setup were large plastic pillows full of circuitry, placed as close as possible to every broken bone in my body. A miniature pair had even been attached to my big toe, like oversized Chiclets. Clarissa called them Basset coils—something about calcium ions—and claimed I’d be up and around in days instead of months.
I must have looked miserable, wired up like the Bride of Frankenstein, but a lot of the machinery was responsible for my dramatic lack of pain: somasthesia—some kind of electronic acupuncture.
But something else was on my mind. Once, years ago, I’d started having stomach trouble—heartburn cubed—flares of temper, and depression. Mother had gone that way: cancer. It took a long, long time. Rather than see a doctor and have my final doom pronounced, I put it off and the symptoms got worse and worse. I’d get along perfectly well, five, ten minutes at a time—then suddenly remember the sword hanging over my head. My life would turn to dull, flat pasteboard and I’d brood until something distracted me. Then the process would start all over again.
I finally got an appointment: that must have been one confused sawbones, as I danced him around the office, kissed him on both cheeks, and waltzed out with my brand-new shiny ulcer.
Now I was going through the same thing—suddenly remembering a particularly chilling aspect of the present situation, the world lurching out from under me, that pasteboard feeling again. Only this time I wasn’t worrying about internal medicine but, you might say, metaphysics.
I shared my sideways time-travel notions with Ed, who surprised me by expressing similar conclusions. “I’ll have to admit, if it weren’t
for the physical evidence, I’d have written you off as some kind of lunatic.”
“Evidence?” I was half-sitting now, draped in yards of cable, the cast on my arm beginning to be a nuisance.
Ed tipped his chair against a bookcase, serape trailing to the floor, and interlaced his fingers across his stomach—a gesture I recognized eerily as my own. “Well, besides your remarkably good looks, there are your guns. Manufacturing firearms requires heavy capital. It isn’t exactly a cottage industry.”
I smiled, remembering Eibar in Spain, and American cell-block zip guns. “I don’t know. The Cao Dai used to turn out some beauties.”
“I’ll take your word for it—but any industry implies a lot about the culture behind it.” He turned, picking up my guns from the top of the bookcase. “Now I’d never heard of this Smith & Wesson outfit, but I ’commed around and found out they went broke over a hundred years ago trying to sell a pistol called the Volcanic—appropriate, since it tended to blow itself to Smith-ereens.”
“Turn up the painkillers!” I groaned. “What about the Browning?”
“Quite a different matter: made in Belgium, it says, for an American company headquartered someplace called Morgan, Utah”—he pronounced it “Ootuh”—“and Montreal … P.Q.?”
“Province of Quebec—used to be part of Canada. Utah—‘You-taw’—is, uh, west of here.” I pointed my good arm at the Rockies on the wall-size TV screen.
Ed raised an eyebrow. “That proves my point. Canada’s been part of our Confederacy since 117 A.L.—”
“Um … 1893? It’s separate from the U.S., all right. ‘People’s Republic.’ Go on about the guns.”
“Well, look at mine. It’s a Browning, too.” He hauled a .45-sized pistol from under his poncho, popped the magazine, and shuffled the chamber round onto the bed. It was beautiful, a soft dull gray with slimmer, cleaner lines than an Army Colt.