A matter of time

• • •

"It's… elegant," Fiala decided. They were viewing the St. Louis house for the first time. "Period. Definitely period." She descended from the carriage. Patrick helped, then ran to open the gate. She had captivated the Irishman completely.

Fian followed with an amused smile. For Patrick's peace of mind he pretended ignorance of what was going on.

"It's remote enough." The nearest house was a quarter mile away, on the Shaw estate. "Come on, Father! Let's see what it looks like inside."

"I'm glad you're making the best of this. I never gave you much happiness before the accident."

"You were all right. For our times. Anyway, it'll all get tiresome. It's a long time to wait."

"Have a good time while you can, then."

Fian's obsessive work on his communicator persisted for a full two decades. He was compelled, to all practical purposes, to create his own technology, and that was a challenge worthy of an Einstein. Patrick made an invaluable, if ignorant, assistant.

Fial, from Rochester, made it all possible.

Patrick's eventual disappearance finally murdered the little joy left in the working vacation.

There was nothing mysterious about it. He had found a woman interested in marrying and raising children. He hadn't the nerve to explain in person, so just left a note.

"And I taught him to read and write!" Fiala spat.

"He was a good Catholic man," her father replied. "His conscience got to bothering him. It had to happen someday. Be glad you got as much as you did."

Fiala would not be consoled. She had loved O'Driscol in the silly, romantic style of the time, and insisted that she was desolate. In a month, though, the hard-headed twenty-first century doctor returned and the decades with Patrick slipped into perspective. An amusing, diverting episode along the long road home. Nothing more.

The absence of the Irishman's perpetual optimism made itself felt in Fian's work immediately. Fian had never realized just how much donkey work there was. But he kept plugging for another two years.

"That's it!" he shouted disgustedly one morning. "There's no way to build the thing using tubes. I can't create a pure enough vacuum. It'll be another seventy years before I can go solid state. Fiala, I'm going home."

"Where?"

"Back to Prague. Just for a year or two. It's time those coins were replaced anyway. Fial can spare the money now."

The new land held no more excitement for Fiala, either. "I'll start packing. Are we going to sell the house?"

"No. I want you to stay. You'll be safe. Neulist could be prowling Europe like some vengeance-mad Wandering Jew. Damn. Wouldn't it have saved a lot of trouble if that bomb had killed him?"

The argument ran for days, but Fiala finally had to accept her fate, to remain behind.

Thus did the lonely years begin.

For one reason or another-his excuses always sounded good-Fian never got around to coming back. Eventually, Fiala resigned herself. He never would.

There was the occasional lover, when she encountered a man who, like Patrick, couldn't sense the difference about her. She tried making friends with the new people building nearby, but few of them were immune to her alienness.

The loneliness became unspeakable for one raised in the crowded communal life of the densely populated State. It was broken only by occasional letters from Fial or her father. And those, ultimately, only depressed her more, for their loneliness leaked through their cheerful words.

The past was indeed a foreign land.

Maybe the Christians were on the right track. There was a hell. And this was it.

Over the first twenty-seven years-as long a time as she had lived in her own era-Fiala gradually forgot the thing in the back of her mind. Fian and Fial had annihilated their predecessors in the flesh within hours of reaching the new age, and she assumed hers had perished as well, though more slowly and quietly.

She was to be unpleasantly surprised.

The first attack came the evening of April 12, 1893, as she was about to retire.

She barely survived.

The thing had lain back all those years, studying, learning, abiding the opportune moment.

After four attacks spanning the next three years, Fiala finally determined the pattern. The assaults came only when she was tired and deeply depressed.

The Other wasn't stupid. It wouldn't attack when she wasn't vulnerable…

So many years to wait and battle for existence.

And Fian just wouldn't come to help.

The woman who had been her mother's body had died. Those who remembered Fian as a peasant had all passed away. Shortly after the turn of the century, he re-established himself at Lidice. He hoped, he explained in his letters, to have more luck contacting the Agency from that site.

He even intended pursuing the obvious in crosstime communications by burying a warning note with the Austrian treasure.

Fial visited occasionally during the decades straddling the century's turn, and Fiala made several journeys to Rochester. These vacations did little but make the loneliness worse after separation. By 1914 they had restricted communication to the occasional letter.

Populations were exploding near both homes. The St. Louis neighborhood, especially, was in the grip of a building boom. It seemed wise to retreat from public view lest too many questions be asked about their apparent agelessness.

Fiala invested that summer in concealing Fian's machine with a wall and beneath a new basement floor. For several months that kept her too busy and too tired to be lonely.

An attack, a week following Fial's final visit, came closer than ever to destroying her. Her haunt did seize control for a few minutes, driving her body into the street, where she shrieked for help in Bohemian German. Her Irish neighbors decided she was insane, but took no action.

The thing, fortunately, had no strategy for maintaining control. Fiala fought her way back.

Now it was she who lived in terror. The next episode, or the one following, might be her last. She was certain she could not destroy her unwanted companion. The thing had made itself invulnerable. She was much less confident of the reverse. Each assault educated the Other a little more, highlighting her weaknesses. She feared that, if it successfully supplanted her, she would suffer the fate of the spirits that once had occupied the bodies now inhabited by Fian and Fial.

Once the Other had been an ignorant peasant girl with severely restricted horizons. Barbarically ignorant. But it was smart, savagely crafty, and making full use of its advantages.

It had complete access to Fiala's memories, thoughts, and emotions-while revealing none of its own. It knew what Fiala knew, could do what Fiala could do. Fiala, on the other hand, had gotten almost nothing from it since leaving Bohemia.

One thing she did know. The need to break out, to reassert control, to extract a revenge, had driven her mind-companion completely mad.

It was like living in the same head with a Colonel Neulist.

And someday, if she didn't make it home first, the Other would win the one victory it needed to reach its goals.

XVII. On the Y Axis;