Up the Line

  “Never mind figuring out the paradoxes,” Sam said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Relieve me at quarter to four,” said Jud B, and shunted.

  Metaxas and Sam and I coordinated our timers. “We go up the line,” said Metaxas, “by exactly one hour. To finish the comedy.” We shunted.

  60.

  And with great precision and no little relief, we finished the comedy.

  In this fashion:

  We shunted to noon, exactly, on that hot summer day of the year 1100, and took up positions along the wall of Constantinople. And waited, trying hard to ignore the other versions of ourselves who passed briefly through our time level on snooping missions of their own.

  The pretty little girl and the watchful duenna came into view.

  My heart ached with love for young Pulcheria, and I ached in other places as well, out of lust for the Pulcheria who would be, the Pulcheria whom I had known.

  The pretty little girl and the unsuspecting duenna, keeping close together, strolled past us.

  Conrad Sauerabend/Heracles Photis appeared. Discordant sounds in the orchestra; twirling of mustaches; hisses. He studied the girl and the woman. He patted his bulging belly. He drew forth a snubby little floater and checked its snout. Leering enthusiastically, he came forward, planning to thrust the floater against the duenna’s arm and, by giving her an hour of the giggling highs, to gain unimpeded access to the little girl.

  Metaxas nodded to Sam.

  Sam nodded to me.

  We approached Sauerabend on a slanting path of approach.

  “Now!” said Metaxas, and we went into action.

  Huge black Sam lunged forward and clasped his right forearm across Sauerabend’s throat. Metaxas seized Sauerabend’s left wrist and bent his entire arm backward, far from the controls of the timer that could whiz him from our grasp. Simultaneously, I caught Sauerabend’s right arm, jerking it up and back and forcing him to drop the floater. This entire maneuver occupied perhaps an eighth of a second and resulted in the effective immobilization of Sauerabend. The duenna, meanwhile, had wisely fled with Pulcheria at the sight of this unseemly struggle.

  Sam now reached under Sauerabend’s clothing and deprived him of his gimmicked timer.

  Then we released him. Sauerabend, who undoubtedly thought that he had been set upon by bandits, saw me and grunted a couple of shocked monosyllables.

  I said, “You thought you were pretty clever, didn’t you?”

  He grunted some more.

  I said, “Gimmicking your timer, slipping away, thinking you could set up in business for yourself as a smuggler. Eh? You didn’t believe we’d catch you?”

  I didn’t tell him of the weeks of hard work that we had put in. I didn’t tell him of the timecrimes we ourselves had committed for the sake of detecting him—the paradoxes we had left strewn all up and down the line, the needless duplications of ourselves. I didn’t tell him that we had just pinched six years of his life as a Byzantine tavernkeeper into a pocket universe that, so far as he was concerned, had no existence whatever. Nor did I tell him of the chain of events that had made him the husband of Pulcheria Botaniates in that pinched-off universe, depriving me of my proper ancestry. All of those things had now unhappened. There now would be no tavernkeeper named Heracles Photis selling meat and drink to the Byzantines of the years 1100–1105.

  Metaxas produced a spare timer, ungimmicked, that he had carried for the purpose.

  “Put it on,” he said.

  Sullenly, Sauerabend donned it.

  I said, “We’re going back to 1204, more or less to the time you set out from. And then we’re going to finish our tour and go back down the line to 2059. And God help you if you cause any more trouble for me, Sauerabend. I won’t report you for timecrime, because I’m a merciful man, even though an unauthorized shunt like yours is very definitely a criminal act; but if you do anything whatever that displeases me in the slightest between now and the moment I’m rid of you, I’ll make you roast for it. Clear?”

  He nodded bleakly.

  To Sam and Metaxas I said, “I can handle this from here on. Thanks for everything. I can’t possibly tell you—”

  “Don’t try,” said Metaxas, and together they shunted down the line.

  I set Sauerabend’s new timer and my own, and drew forth my pitch-pipe. “Here we go,” I said, and we shunted into 1204.

  61.

  At quarter to four on that very familiar night in 1204 I went once more up the stairs of the inn, this time with Sauerabend. Jud B paced restlessly just within the door of the room. He brightened at the sight of my captive. Sauerabend looked puzzled at the presence of two of me, but he didn’t dare say anything.

  “Get inside,” I said to him. “And don’t monkey with your goddam timer or you’ll suffer for it.”

  Sauerabend went in.

  I said to Jud B, “The nightmare’s over. We grabbed him, took away his timer, put a regulation one on him, and here he is. The whole operation took just exactly four hours, right?”

  “Plus who remembers how many weeks of running up and down the line.”

  “No matter now. We got him back. We start from scratch.”

  “And there’s now an extra one of us,” Jud B pointed out. “Do we work that little deal of taking turns?”

  “We do. One of us stays with these clowns, takes them on down to 1453 as scheduled, and back to the twenty-first century. The other one of us goes to Metaxas’ villa. Want to flip a coin?”

  “Why not?” He pulled a bezant of Alexius I from his pouch, and let me inspect it for kosherness. It was okay: a standing figure of Alexius on the obverse, an image of Christ enthroned on the reverse. We stipulated that Alexius was heads and Jesus was tails. Then I flipped the coin high, caught it with a quick snap of my hand, and clapped it down on the back of my other hand. I knew, from the feel of the concave coin’s edge against my skin, that it had landed heads up.

  “Tails,” said the other Jud.

  “Tough luck, amigo.” I showed him the coin. He grimaced and took it back from me.

  Gloomily he said, “I’ve got three or four days left with this tour, right? Then two weeks of layoff, which I can’t spend in 1105. That means you can expect to see me showing up at Metaxas’ place in seventeen, eighteen days absolute.”

  “Something like that,” I agreed.

  “During which time you’ll make it like crazy with Pulcheria.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Give her one for me,” he said, and went into the room.

  Downstairs, I slouched against a pillar and spent half an hour rechecking all of my comings and goings of this hectic night, to make sure I’d land in 1105 at a non-discontinuous point. The last thing I needed now was to miscalculate and show up there at a time prior to the whole Sauerabend caper, thereby finding a Metaxas to whom the entire thing was, well, Greek.

  I did my calculations.

  I shunted.

  I wended my way once more to the lovely villa.

  Everything had worked out perfectly. Metaxas embraced me in joy.

  “The time-flow is intact again,” he said. “I’ve been back from 1100 only a couple of hours, but that was enough to check up on things. Leo Ducas’ wife is named Pulcheria. Someone named Angelus runs the tavern Sauerabend owned. Nobody here remembers a thing about anything. You’re safe.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I—”

  “Skip it, will you?”

  “I suppose. Where’s Sam?”

  “Down the line. He had to go back to work. And I’m about to do the same,” Metaxas said. “My layoff’s over, and there’s a tour waiting for me in the middle of December, 2059. So I’ll be gone about two weeks, and then I’ll be back here on—” He considered it. “—on October 18, 1105. What about you?”

  “I stay here until October 22.” I said. “Then my alter ego will be finished with his post-tour layoff and will replace me here, while I go down the line to take out my next tour.”


  “Is that how you’re going to work it? Turns?”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Metaxas, but I wasn’t.

  62.

  Metaxas took his leave, and I took a bath. And then, really relaxed for the first time in what seemed like several geological epochs, I contemplated my immediate future.

  First, a nap. Then a meal. And then a journey into town to call on Pulcheria, who would be restored to her rightful place in the Ducas household, and unaware of the strange metamorphosis that had temporarily come over her destinies.

  We’d make love, and I’d come back to the villa, and in the morning I’d go into town again, and afterward—

  Then I stopped hatching further plans, because Sam appeared unexpectedly and smashed everything.

  He was wearing a Byzantine cloak, but it was just a hasty prop, for I could see his ordinary down-the-line clothes on underneath. He looked harried and upset.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “A favor to you,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “I said I’m here as a favor to you. And I’m not going to stay long, because I don’t want the Time Patrol after me too.”

  “Is the Time Patrol after me?”

  “You bet your white ass it is!” he yelled. “Get your things together and clear out of here, fast! You’ve got to hide, maybe three, four thousand years back, somewhere. Hurry it up!”

  He began collecting a few stray possessions of mine scattered about the room. I caught hold of him and said, “Will you tell me what’s going on? Sit down and stop acting like a maniac. You come in here at a million kilometers an hour and—”

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll spell it all out for you, and if I get arrested too, so be it. I’m stained with sin. I deserve to be arrested. And—”

  “Sam—”

  “All right,” he said again. He closed his eyes a moment. “My now-time basis,” he said hollowly, “is December 25, 2059. Merry Christmas. Several days ago on my time-level, your other self brought your current tour back from Byzantium. Including Sauerabend and all the rest of them. Do you know what happened to your other self the instant he arrived in 2059?”

  “The Time Patrol arrested him?”

  “Worse.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “He vanished, Jud. He became a nonperson. He ceased ever to have existed.”

  I had to laugh. “The cocksure bastard! I told him that I was the real one and that he was just some kind of phantom, but he wouldn’t listen! Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry to see—”

  “No, Jud,” Sam said sadly. “He was every bit as real as you, when he was back here up the line. And you’re every bit as unreal as he is now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re a nonperson, Jud, same as he is. You have retroactively ceased to exist. I’m sorry. You never happened. And it’s our fault as much as yours. We moved so fast that we slipped up on one small detail.”

  He looked frighteningly somber. But how else are you supposed to look, when you come to tell somebody that he’s not only dead but never was born?

  “What happened, Sam? What detail?”

  “It’s like this, Jud. You know, when we took Sauerabend’s gimmicked timer away, we got him another one. Metaxas keeps a few smuggled spares around—that tricky bastard has everything.”

  “So?”

  “Its serial number, naturally, was different from the number of the timer Sauerabend started his tour with. Normally, nobody notices something like that, but when this tour checked back in, it just happened that the check-in man was a stickler for the rules, and he examined serial numbers. And saw there was a substitution, and yelled for the Patrol.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly.

  “They questioned Sauerabend,” Sam said, “and of course he was cagey, more to protect himself than you. And since he couldn’t give any explanation of the switch, the Patrol got authorization to run a recheck on the entire tour he had just taken.”

  “Oh-oh.”

  “They monitored it from every angle. They saw you leave your group, they saw Sauerabend skip out the moment you were gone, they saw you and me and Metaxas catch him and bring him back to that night in 1204.”

  “So all three of us are in trouble?”

  Sam shook his head. “Metaxas has pull. So have I. We wiggled out of it on a sympathy line, that we were just trying to help a buddy in trouble. It took all the strings we could pull. But we couldn’t do a thing for you, Jud. The Patrol is out for your head. They looked in on that little routine in 1204 by which you duplicated yourself, and they began to realize that you were guilty not only of negligence in letting Sauerabend get away from you in the first place, but also of various paradoxes caused in your unlawful attempts to correct the situation. The charges against you were so serious that we couldn’t get them dropped, and we tried, man, we tried. The Patrol thereupon took action against you.”

  “What kind of action?” I asked in a dead man’s voice.

  “You were removed from your tour on that evening in 1204 two hours prior to your original shunt to 1105 for your tryst with Pulcheria. Another Courier replaced you in 1204; you were plucked from the time-flow and brought down the line to stand trial in 2059 for assorted timecrimes.”

  “Therefore—”

  “Therefore,” Sam swept on, “you never did slip away to 1105 to pay that call on Pulcheria. Your whole love affair with Pulcheria has become a nonevent, and if you were to visit her now, you’d find that she has no recollection of having slept with you. Next: since you didn’t go to 1105, you obviously didn’t return to 1204 and find Sauerabend missing, and anyway Sauerabend had never been part of your tour group. And thus there was no need for you to make that fifty-six-second shunt up the line which created the duplication. Neither you nor Jud B ever came into being, since the existence of both of you dates from a point later than your visit to Pulcheria, and you never made that visit, having been plucked out of the time-flow before you got a chance to do it. You and Jud B are nonpersons and always have been. You happen to be protected by the Paradox of Transit Displacement, as long as you stay up the line; Jud B ceased to be protected the moment he returned to now-time, and disappeared irretrievably. Got that?”

  Shivering, I said, “Sam, what’s happening to that other Jud, the—the—the real Jud? The one they plucked, the one they’ve got down there in 2059?”

  “He’s in custody, awaiting trial on timecrime charges.”

  “What about me?”

  “If the Patrol ever finds you, you’ll be brought to now-time and thus automatically obliterated. But the Patrol doesn’t know where you are. If I you stay in Byzantium, sooner or later you’ll be discovered, and that’ll be the end for you. When I found all this out, I shot back here to warn you. Hide in prehistory. Get away into some period earlier than the founding of the old Greek Byzantium—earlier than 700 B.C., I guess. You can manage there. We’ll bring you books, tools, whatever you need. There’ll be people of some sort, nomads, maybe—anyway, company. You’ll be like a god to them. They’ll worship you, they’ll bring you a woman a day. It’s your only chance, Jud.”

  “I don’t want to be a prehistoric god! I want to be able to go down the line again! And to see Pulcheria! And—”

  “There’s no chance of any of that,” Sam said, and his words came down like the blade of a guillotine. “You don’t exist. It’s suicide for you ever to try to go down the line. And if you go anywhere near Pulcheria, the Patrol will catch you and take you down the line. Hide or die, Jud. Hide or die.”

  “But I’m real, Sam! I do exist!”

  “Only the Jud Elliott who’s currently in custody in 2059 exists. You’re a residual phenomenon, a paradox product, nothing more. I love you all the same, boy, and that’s why I’ve risked my own black hide to help you, but you aren’t real. Believe me. Believe me. You’re your own ghost. Pack up and clear
out!”

  63.

  I’ve been here for three and a half months now. By the calendar I keep, the date is March 15, 3060 B.P. I’m living a thousand years before Christ, more or less.

  It’s not a bad life. The people here are subsistence farmers, maybe remnants of the old Hittite empire; the Greek colonists won’t be getting here for another three centuries. I’m starting to learn the language; it’s Indo-European and I pick it up fast. As Sam predicted, I’m a god. They wanted to kill me when I showed up, but I did a few tricks with my timer, shunting right before their eyes, and now they don’t dare offend me. I try to be a kindly god, though. Right now I’m helping spring to arrive. I went down to the shore of what will someday be called the Bosphorus and delivered a long prayer, in English, for good weather. The locals loved it.

  They give me all the women I want. The first night they gave me the chief’s daughter, and since then I’ve rotated pretty well through the whole nubile population of the village. I imagine they’ll want me to marry someone eventually, but I want to complete the inspection first. The women don’t smell too good, but some of them are impressively passionate.

  I’m terribly lonely.

  Sam has been here three times, Metaxas twice. The others don’t come. I don’t blame them; the risks are great. My two loyal friends have brought me floaters, books, a laser, a big box of music cubes, and plenty of other things that are going to perplex the tails off some archaeologists eventually.

  I said to Sam, “Bring me Pulcheria, just for a visit.”

  “I can’t,” he said. And he’s right. It would have to be a kidnapping, and there might be repercussions, leading to Time Patrol troubles for Sam and obliteration for me.

  I miss Pulcheria ferociously. You know, I had sex with her only that one night, though it seems as if I knew her much better than that. I wish now that I’d had her in the tavern, while she was Pulcheria Photis, too.

  My beloved. My wicked great-great-multi-great-grandmother. Never to see you again! Never to touch your smooth skin, your—no, I won’t torture myself. I’ll try to forget you. Hah!