Downtiming the Night Side

MAIN LINE 351.1 LONDON, ENGLAND

There was a strangeness about this temporal existence he now lived. For one thing, he knew intellectually that, until this morning, there had never been such a person as Alfie Jenkins, at least not the one he now was. Time had adjusted to accommodate his alien presence by creating the boy by some process not understood.

There were natural laws, Silverberg had explained, that we knew nothing about, and this appeared to be in the arcane field of probability mathematics. He had created a ripple in the time stream by appearing where he should not be, but in this case it was a backward ripple, flowing the shortest possible rearward distance to find the point where Alfie Jenkins might have been conceived or, perhaps, had been stillborn. A minor probability had been changed, and he now existed and, in fact, had now and forever afterwards always existed. But time had not been indiscriminate in its creation; it had created the first individual to fit all the time and place criteria who had the least possibility of interacting to cause a forward ripple.

There were millions of Alfie Jenkinses in the past and present and, probably, the future as well. The legions of those who might as well have never lived. But now Jenkins did live, and he was subject to the same randomness in his subsequent existence as anyone else born into this time and place and situation. There were no guarantees now, any more than Ron Moosic had had in his own life and time.

The experience, the dual personality, was odd but nonetheless clear to both parties. Alfie was Alfie, and would act and react as Alfie, but Ron Moosic was there as well, sharing Alfie’s body and his memories and sensations, although it was by no means clear that the reverse was true. Still, Alfie knew he was there and regarded him as a distinct and separate individual, one whose important and romantic mission appealed to the boy. Moosic made suggestions, but mostly he remained along for the ride, letting Alfie be himself. He knew, though, that he could take control, if he wished, simply by willing it.

The sunlight burned off some of the industrial smog, but it was still thick and ugly even in the full light of day. It was almost ten o’clock by the time Alfie had finished his chores, gotten his shilling and breakfast, and was able to be on his way. It didn’t take very long, though, to find the path and the bridge. Apparently, location was specific in this time business—the bridge was very near Alfie’s lair. Much more difficult was getting down there and doing the business unobserved. The streets, deserted in the early morning darkness, were now alive with traffic and pedestrians.

Ron Moosic took it all in with a feeling of awe. The hansom cabs clattered across the bridge, and peddlers with horse-drawn carts went this way and that. The dress styles seemed archaic, but really not that much different in the details than his own time, at least insofar as men were concerned. Women were extremely well covered from neck to ground, with most of the dresses appearing to have been made to hide almost any physical attributes.

The atmosphere was certainly big-city cosmopolitan, with lots of people of all sorts going this way and that on countless unknown errands, while the physical atmosphere was a mixture of garbage-like smells and foul industrial odors. To most, perhaps all, of the people, the sights and sounds and smells were normal and taken for granted. To Moosic, it was not at all that romantic or pleasant, despite his awe and excitement.

This was, after all, the London of Sherlock Holmes, of Disraeli and Gladstone, Victoria and the British Empire near the height of its glory. Holmes might not really be here, but Doyle was, somewhere, and probably Wilde, perhaps Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Robert Browning. Winston Churchill was a year old; Albert Einstein, whose work would eventually lead to Moosic being where he was, hadn’t even been born yet.

And in nine days, up in the northwest part of the city, at 41 Maitland Park Crescent, Karl Marx would be returning home from the continent.

There was simply no way to gain access to the bridge in broad daylight, so he abandoned it for now and allowed Alfie to have his own way. The boy was a streetwise thief, panhandler, and hustler of the first order. He was well known to a number of people of all ages from the docks up to Whitechapel, and he wasn’t the only young boy working the streets. Moosic watched with growing admiration as the boy hustled anyone who looked like a soft touch, slickly grabbing an apple from a fruit stand almost in full view of the suspicious and nasty-looking proprietor, and getting a few pennies for helping a vegetable merchant bring out more stock.

It was an active, and educational, day for the time traveler, a day that would normally not have ended with darkness but did this time. Alfie went back to his “digs” to catch a catnap, knowing that he had to get down to that bridge when things quieted down once more.

It was not, in fact, until the bells chimed two that he risked going back down there. The fog had closed in even more, making sight almost totally useless, which was fine for Moosic and all right with Alfie, too. He didn’t need to see much in this neighborhood. Only the boy’s occasional coughing spasms caused any problems at all.

Getting down to the right spot was no problem, and even though occasional boat whistles could be heard as the commerce of a big city continued, there was no chance anyone could see him down there in this fog. The river helped, of course, to make it so dense. Away from here, in the better neighborhoods, it was probably rather pleasant.

Alfie, however, was not Ron Moosic. The suit was extremely heavy, and it seemed as if he was never going to be able to haul it up and close. Going into the water was out of the question; Alfie couldn’t swim, and Moosic was not all that certain he could manage the boy’s unfamiliar frame. Still, he was almost willing to take the chance after repeated tries to pull the suit in had failed.

Finally, though, with one last mighty effort, the boy managed a mighty heave and the helmet broke the surface. It still took some tying-off of the rope and a lot of breathers before it was within his grasp.

Quickly the seals were broken and he removed the precious pouch from the outside. The pocket was then reclosed and sealed, and the suit eased back into the water once more, where it sank quickly from sight.

Alfie hurried now, clutching the precious cache with both hands, and made it back to his hiding place in no time. Although he was nearly done in by the night’s work, both he and Moosic were not about to nod back off without seeing the contents of the pouch.

“Cor!” Alfie swore as he looked at the most familiar of the contents. “It’s a bloomin’ fortune!”

Well, it wasn’t that, but it was the amount of pre-1875 notes they could round up on short notice. Fortunately, this period was one of those in which some research project was ongoing, and they had accumulated a small store of such material to help with the work. While very little from the future could go back and remain unchanged, things could be brought forward, including currency. Then, as now, a little ageless gold or gems could be converted into cash rather easily in London.

There was, in fact, more than two hundred pounds in the pouch, mostly in small bills. That was a year’s wages to many in this period of time, and men had been killed for far less. Additionally, there was a small map of London of the period and a short dossier on what was known of Marx and his neighborhood and friends. There was also a small .32 caliber pistol of the era, along with a box of twenty-five cartridges.

Alfie was almost overcome with the sight of all that money, more than he had ever seen in his whole life or expected to see. The pistol provided an almost equal thrill, one that Moosic wasn’t sure he liked. Still, the boy was exhausted from his night’s work and finally succumbed to sleep.

Moosic abandoned any ideas of tracking down the two fugitives ahead of time. Just being Alfie had convinced him of the futility of that task. He used the time well, though, first making some judicious purchases to get the boy in better clothes. There was really no way for a thirteen-year-old to take a room at a hotel or rooming house without arousing suspicion, and Alfie’s manners and dialect were a dead giveaway that no cover story could be really convincing. There was something to remaining cautious and, particularly, not arousing suspicion at the sight of sudden wealth. In his neighborhood, it would have meant death; in the better ones, it would raise questions as to its source. Still, by using the small bills one at a time and never showing the money in the same place, it was convertible. Far more so, in fact, than if he’d had no money at all to work with.

Sandoval and his girlfriend had nothing of this sort when they had traveled back to this time and place. That put him a jump ahead.

There was also the advantage that no one really took much notice of a young cleanly dressed man when he boarded the horse-drawn omnibuses or walked through various neighborhoods by day.

Forty-one Maitland Park Crescent, N.W., was easy to find with the map and some exploration. It was a nondescript three-story, gray frame house—Moosic thought it Victorian, until he realized the ridiculousness of that term in 1875—that was, nonetheless, a large and comfortable single dwelling in a peaceful, middle-class neighborhood. Moosic was enough of a cynic to think that this was one of the ironies of the founders of Communism. Somewhere in Britain, Engels, the millionaire industrialist, was financing the Communist movement while living what could only be thought of by a twentieth-century mind as the Playboy philosophy. Marx, the middle-class German, descendant of a line of rabbis, college-educated and devoted to intellectual pursuits, lived in a house the London proletariat could only dream about, although it was certainly no mansion and no luxurious abode in any sense of that word, and took frequent trips to Karlsbad to take the mineral bath “cure” far beyond the means of the working man.

Later, this man’s work would be modified by the upper-middle-class born and bred Russian son of a school superintendent who would call himself Lenin and the upper-middle-class librarian in Hunan, Mao Tse Tung.

These men all sincerely believed they were revolutionizing the world for the poorest and the most downtrodden of humanity. Marx, who loved children as a group and class of their own, had been horrified by the child labor and the terrible factory conditions. They had all been, at least to some extent, and Marx totally, devoted to removing the mass of the proletariat from these inhuman, near-slavery conditions.

Let them spend more than a week in the body and mind and existence of Alfie Jenkins, Moosic thought sourly. It would make them all more dedicated than ever to their goals, certainly, but perhaps it would also add true understanding of just what it was like to be the lowest of the low in a class-oriented society. That had been the basic problem and the reason for the perversion of the noble ideals of men like Marx, after all. It was an intellectual problem, or a problem dealt with out of guilt in the way many rich men became champions of the poor, but these were human beings in the individual sense as well as the faceless “masses.” How could they know, or really understand, what it was like to be an Alfie Jenkins?

When you reduced the millions of Alfies of the world to a faceless class, the “masses” or the “proletariat,” you dehumanized them. None of the leaders, the intellectuals and the politicians who acted at or near the top of and in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” had anything really in common with the Alfies, not really. Nor had Ron Moosic, no matter his truly proletarian background and upbringing, although he was certainly far closer to the Alfies than the Marxes and the Lenins.

Nobody had ever tried a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and nobody ever would. Many, of course, established that in name, but it always turned out to be a “dictatorship for the proletariat,” not of or by it. When the proletariat objected, the proletariat was forced back in its place—for its own good, of course. For the good of the masses, the proletariat, the downtrodden of the world.

Of course.

Moosic was reminded of a tour of Versailles he’d taken while posted to NATO during his Air Force years. In back of the magnificent palace had been a peasant village, with peasant houses and small gardens. It was not a true peasant village, but rather an antiseptic recreation of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat’s concept of what a peasant village was like. They used to go there, the guide told them, and put on “peasant garb” and play at being peasants, the better to get the “feel” for the people. The masses. But when Marie Antionette, who used to lead such playing, was faced with the concept of starvation, she had not been able to conceive of it.

And the leaders of the dictatorship of the proletariat collected fancy cars and lived in lavish apartments and brought their children up in much the same manner as royalty had raised their own. They believed in the ultimate socialist dream; they couldn’t understand why the Alfie Jenkinses of the world could not.

“Why, let them eat cake, then!”

Sandoval was here, someplace. Had probably already stood where Alfie Jenkins now stood, looking over the house. He was a true proletarian and a true believer in the dream. In the revolution he’d fight to win, the rulers he would put in power would make sure he was the first to be shot. In the meantime, he was fed at their direction by the guilt money of the Austin-Vennemans of the world, the Engelses of the late twentieth century.

Who had sent them here, with such perfect intelligence, and on what mission? Did it, in fact, center on that house over there, so innocent and calm? It had to. It just had to.

Alfie Jenkins had never heard of Karl Marx.

The assimilation process was so insidious he really was only slightly aware of it. Still, he was beginning to dream Alfie’s dreams, beginning to think more and more Alfie’s way. Slowly, but quite progressively, he was beginning to merge with the mind and soul of the boy.

It hadn’t hit him at all until, in the late afternoon of September 19, he’d taken out the dossier one last time to look through it and had found considerable trouble in reading it.

Alfie, of course, was illiterate.

The problem scared him, and set his mind to wondering. Just how much had he begun to become the street urchin whose body he wore? It was beginning to be very difficult to separate the two of them, and he was still well within his “safety margin,” according to the time project’s formula. The two revolutionaries had a far narrower margin. Austin-Venneman would reach the critical point by the twenty-second; Sandoval on the twenty-fourth. Within a day or so after that point, they would become more the personalities they now were than their old selves; they would not go back of their own free will.

Both had to know and understand that, all the more because what was happening to him must be happening with even more force to them. He was convinced that they would waste no time once they had their objective where they wanted him. If, in fact, Marx was their objective, they would attempt a visit on the afternoon or evening of the twentieth; of that he was certain. If the old boy was too tired and fatigued to see them, well, all the better. Callers late on the twentieth who were turned away and then returned the next day would certainly be prime suspects. Stuffing a leather pouch with sandwiches and a water bottle, he was determined to camp out within sight of 41 Maitland Crescent from early on the twentieth until—well, until as long as it took.

The waiting was the most difficult thing. Stakeouts were dull, boring work of the worst kind, not the sort of romantic cops-and-robbers business most people thought of when they thought of police work. At the start, he and Alfie had been distinctly separate personalities, but now it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. He chafed with the impatience of a thirteen-year-old and found distraction in small games satisfying only for a brief while.

The house, however, was not bereft of activity, for it was clear that something was up. Many times he saw the squat, rotund figure of Helene Demuth, the Marx family’s devoted housekeeper who looked the very model of the quintessential German nannie, rushing to and fro, airing out rugs and cleaning up inside and out.

But the tip-off that they were expecting something important was the occasional appearance of Jenny, Marx’s wife, who was in extreme ill health and had not been seen on any of the earlier forays when he’d “cased” the place. She looked very old and very tired. Seen, too, was the pretty but frail-looking Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, an aspiring actress who usually went with her father to the continent but had not this trip. Unseen was the truly frail and sickly daughter Jenny, but he had no doubt that all were working hard to get things just right for the homecoming.

As the day wore on, the sky darkened and a light rain began. He had never felt so miserable or so bored out of his mind. Every time a cab had clattered past, he’d gotten his hopes up, but it was well after the city clocks chimed four that one of them came up the street and stopped in front of the gray frame house.

The driver, a fat, jolly-looking man, jumped down with surprising agility and opened the door on the curb side, away from the watcher’s view, first helping someone out of the cab and then unloading the luggage. Moosic decided on a more open approach and actually crossed the street and walked right by, seeing the cabbie and Helene Demuth struggling with a large trunk while another figure was already on the porch, affectionately greeting his wife and youngest daughter.

It didn’t pay to stop and stare, but Moosic’s impression was of a surprisingly slender man of medium height who gave the impression of youth and great strength, despite a flowing white beard and shoulder-length white hair; he was dressed in a dark brown suit. Although appearing quite wrinkled, he was highly emotional and his joy at being home and with his loved ones was obviously genuine. It was a touching, very human scene glimpsed in passing, one that caused Moosic some unease, and he was surprised by that.

Somehow, Karl Marx had never been a real person, a real human being. He’d always been a face on the Kremlin wall during parades, a posed statue in the history books. Up until now, Alfie’s London had been a real place, but in an exotic sort of way, like visiting some remote island country in the Pacific or an ancient village in the heart of Europe. Now, suddenly, this was Karl Marx—the real one—looking and acting very human and very ordinary and yet unexpectedly warm, no longer a symbol or a stiff historical photograph, but real. The discomfort seemed irrational, but somehow very human in and of itself. We do not expect our myths and our symbols to be ordinary people.

He crossed the street and went around the block, coming back to his inconspicuous stakeout spot diagonally across the street. He was aware that he’d taken a chance now, since anyone else watching the house might well recognize that the same boy had just gone to some lengths to wind up in the same spot as he’d started, but he was only mildly concerned. The quarries had no reason to believe that they were being stalked. As far as they knew, their confederates had destroyed the other suits, even if later taken.

The luggage was inside now, the cabbie paid, and the hansom cab, pulled by a gray sorrel, went on down the street and back into the mainstream of London traffic. It grew dark as he continued his watch, but still no one had passed who seemed inordinately interested in the house or its occupants. Still, he was certain they would come tonight—at least one of them, anyway. Their time was quickly running out, and having been dealt the unexpected ten-day delay, they could not afford to miss him by chancing a meeting the next day. The twenty-first was a Tuesday, and certainly Marx, who’d been out of the country for a couple of months, would have many errands and catch-ups to do, perhaps a multitude of visitors and appointments. If Marx was indeed their quarry, and they still had their wits and will about them, they had barely thirty-six hours to do whatever they had gone to all this trouble to do.

He was getting tired, though, and getting resigned to the idea that he would have to get some sleep if he were to resume the stakeout the next day, when a horse and wagon came up the street. The gas lamps were far apart in the block, but as the wagon passed by, he stared at the driver, a rumpled-looking man of middle-age dressed in well-worn and baggy gray coat and trousers. He appeared to be some kind of street peddler, although what, if anything, the wagon contained was not clear, and he was certainly nondescript, although a bit out of place in this neighborhood at this time of night. Still, he would have rated only a passing glance, except for the fact that he had come by twenty minutes or so earlier from the same direction.

The man in the wagon had circled the block.

The first time through, Moosic hadn’t paid him any more attention than any of the others, although Maitland was short and off the main track and hadn’t had a huge amount of traffic, but he still remembered him.

Beyond a few local residents, a strolling bobby, and the lamplighter, there hadn’t been much foot traffic, either, but just as the man with the wagon reached the end and turned right out of sight, another figure came from that direction and began walking up the street.

She was a plain-looking and weary woman with short-cropped hair and a long, light blue dress that had obviously been patched almost to death—obviously a woman of the lower class. A factory seamstress, or perhaps a hired cleaning woman for one of the houses—that would be about the highest she could have been. Her age was indeterminate, anywhere from eighteen to the mid-thirties. It was that kind of face and walk.

Concealed in the shadows and by the bushes of Number 38 Maitland, he remained unseen to her, but his eyes followed her intently. As she walked past Number 41, she paused for a moment and looked at the house, then around the street. His heart quickened, and, almost without thinking, he guided his hand to the revolver in his bag.

After a moment, she continued to walk up the street to the other end, young eyes with far too much knowledge in them tracing her way. He knew what he expected next, and waited for it.

It took the man with the cart only ten minutes to turn back in and start up the street, but as he passed the first gas lamp, it was clear that he and the woman had been satisfied. She now rode next to him on the seat, looking warily around. Either they were taking few chances or, even after all this time in assimilation, old habits were hard to break.

They seemed confident at last, though, and the man reined in his horse in front of Marx’s house, got down, then helped the woman down, although she clearly didn’t need such help. They looked more like father and daughter than anything else, and might well have been, Moosic realized. Still, he was pretty sure that they were also, originally, something quite different.

He resisted the urge to confront them immediately. There was no way to tell if either or both were armed, but they were both bigger than he. Short of shooting them down cold, on Marx’s front lawn, there was no way to do it safely here.

Abruptly he realized that shooting them cold was exactly what the admiral and the others who’d sent him here expected him to do. Worse, they were right—here, on this deserted and dark street, well-placed shots would do the deed and allow him a good opportunity for a getaway. There was no knowledge of fingerprints in 1875 that would stand up in court, so he could just shoot, drop the revolver, and make his getaway. Find the time suit, and off he would go to his own time.

They were on the porch now, ready to knock. He made his way across the street on silent feet, crept around the rear of their wagon, and, using the shadows, approached very close to the house. The man gripped the woman’s hand in a rather familiar gesture, but they hadn’t yet knocked. He stepped out, still unseen, grasping the pistol with both hands…

The man turned the bell on the front door. In a few moments the door opened, and Helene Demuth was there, framed by the interior light.

“Ja? Vat is it dat you vant?”

“Horace Whiting’s the name, mum, and this is me daughter Maggie. We’d like a word or two with Dr. Marx, if it be all right with him.”

“It is not all right at all!” Demuth huffed. “He’s been home only a few hours and is very tired. Any business you haff vith him can vait until the morrow.” She said this in a tone that indicated there was no business she could conceive of that Marx might have with such as these.

“Will you just do the courtesy of givin’ this note to ’m, if you please, mum. Then, if he won’t see us, we’ll go away and wait until tomorrow.”

She looked at them hesitantly, and with disdain, but she took the note. “Very vell. You vill vait here!” And then she closed the door firmly in their faces.

There’s still time, Moosic told himself, but he couldn’t make his finger close on the trigger. He knew who they were, and what they were, but he could not bring himself to shoot them down coldly in the back. He slipped back into the shadows.

“D’ya think he’ll take the bait, luv?” the man asked worriedly.

“We cum this far, ’e’s got to,” she replied. “We’re so far gone now we either git in ta see ’im or we ’av t’ risk another jomp. Another day ’ere and I won’t remember ’ow.”

The man scratched his head. “I ain’t so sure I want ta. I’m in trouble now jes’ rememberin’ that other one. I kind of loike who I be.”

With a shock, Moosic realized that time had played a cruel joke on the couple. Not only had it made the lovers father and daughter, it was Austin-Venneman who was the father and Sandoval the daughter!

He only hoped that Marx would refuse to see them. If so, then he could confront them. Then—when there was no chance of hitting anyone else.

The door opened, and Demuth was back. She still regarded the pair as she would a month-old dead fish. “He’ll see you,” she told them with her tone making no bones about how she regarded the decision. “Come into the living room. He vill be down in a minute.”

They entered, and the door shut, leaving Ron Moosic outside and his quarry inside with the man who was the object of it all. He cursed to himself that he’d let the golden opportunity slip away, that he’d given them license to do damage, by his own failure to be as coldblooded as they.

“But it wouldn’t be sportin’,” his Alfie part seemed to say. “If we did it that way, we’d be just like them, wouldn’t we?’’

To beat them, you often had to be like them, he reflected sourly. But he wasn’t like them, and never had been. Not yet.

The living room was on the first floor in front of the house, and the curtains were only partly drawn. Stealthily he crept up onto the porch and made his way to below one of the windows. Both were raised an inch or so to allow some air to circulate, and he could hear, and occasionally risk seeing, what was going on. That is, if the beat cop didn’t come around and catch him first.

Karl Marx was a striking figure in person. Although thin, he had an athlete’s build and broad shoulders that gave the impression of great mass and strength. His carriage was strong and upright, the body of a much younger man than his fifty-seven years. It was clear that his trip had done him much good; he looked excellent for any age.

He had a large brow framed by curly, white locks that reached to his powerful shoulders, a snow-white beard that flowed deep down, and brown eyes that sparkled with warmth and intelligence from underneath black, bushy eyebrows. The eyes, in fact, were a giveaway that did not generally reveal itself in photographs. They were warm, human, emotional eyes, highly expressive and penetrating at one and the same time. He was full of what the Greek called charisma—both visitors involuntarily stood up and waited in awed silence when he entered the room, not just from politeness but from the strength and magnetic power he radiated without doing or saying a thing.

He had changed into informal black pants, a white shirt, and had obviously thrown on an old smoking jacket for the visitors.

If Marx more than lived up to what the visitors expected to see, they certainly lived up to Helene Demuth’s description in his own mind. In his hand he held the envelope they had handed to the housekeeper, its top now torn open. “So,” he said in an orator’s baritone that more than fit his striking appearance, “vat in hell is the meaning of this?” He held up the envelope and shook it for emphasis.

His speech was heavily accented, and somewhat hesitant. Although he spoke, read, and wrote a half-dozen languages with ease, it was clear that he was not blessed with the translator’s talent of thinking in the tongue he was using. Everything, although extremely quickly, was translated into German in his mind and then back again when he spoke.

“If y’ please, sir,” said the woman, “that is, as y’ must know, the title and first few pages of yer rev’lut’nary book in the French and Russian tongues, along with some words from a letter y’ haven’t yet mailed to yer Russian friend.”

“I am veil avare of the content, young lady,” Marx responded coldly. “I vish to know how it is possible for you to know a letter I am writing still, and vhy somevun vould to the trouble go of printing up pages of books not yet published. Und Russian, yet! Vhen it is possible to Russian publish, they vill still be too stupid to read it!”

“They’re for real, sir,” she assured him, somewhat shocked by his rather anti-Russian scorn. “It was the only way to show you we ain’t what we seem, sir.”

The massive brows came down. They were all still standing. “Und, just vat ’ain’t’ you, then?” he responded scornfully.

She blushed, feeling ashamed of her dialect. In point of fact, it was taking an extreme amount of will to take the lead in this conversation at all. Her upbringing and background was as deferential and passive as Sandoval’s had been commanding and assertive. Clearly, whatever laws of time there were had moved hardest on Roberto Sandoval, to quench his fanatical personality and impulsive amorality. Time had contrived to make it difficult for someone to make tiny ripples even if they desired to make great waves. There was clearly a war of wills going on between what time had imposed and the strong-willed fanatic who’d stop at nothing—and, to Moosic’s surprise and grudging respect, Roberto Sandoval was winning. Clearly, whoever had planned this had chosen well indeed—but, then, why the empty-headed accomplice?

The beat cop came down the street at this moment, causing the listener to have to move away and crouch flat in the darkness to avoid being seen. The cop stopped by the wagon and inspected it warily, then looked right at the Marx household. For a few precious minutes Moosic dared not move, fearful that the cop would come up to the house to see just who would be visiting in that kind of vehicle at this time of the evening. Indeed, the cop seemed to be mulling over whether or not to do just that. Moosic prayed that he would not, for there was no clear exit off the porch without coming into full view of the cop, and he was certain to be spotted now—him with a revolver in his pocket!

The bobby finally decided on a middle approach, walking on down the street but walking with frequent glances back at the cart and horse. Clearly, he was not going to go far until he saw the owners.

The cop finally was far enough down to allow him to cautiously return to his listening post. He had no idea what had gone on in the few minutes he’d missed, but clearly Sandoval had been convincing.

“…You must understand,” Marx was saying, “that vat you say is true is the one total und horrible negation of my laws. If a device truly exists that can make changes in history, und such a device vould be qvite naturally in the hands of the capitalists, then the revolutionary process may be postponed indefinitely, even cancelled out after the fact! This is horrible, horrible! It is the same as if you came to a professor of physics und let go of an apple und it floats up to the ceiling!”

“It is exactly the point,” the woman responded, still in that lower class accent but with the grammar now seeming to smooth out. “The weapons of our toime can kill all livin’ things on Earth. The capitalists, then, must fall from within. But this—this is eternal slavery or the end of ’umanity!”

So that was it. More than enough to convince the committed, although it still didn’t explain Karen Cline.

“Ja, ja. Or ve haff a time var, vith history obeying vatever laws one side makes up that the other cannot see.”

“We can destroy the place, kill the scientists, but it’ll do no good,” Sandoval told him. “They know ’ow. They’ll just build another bigger and better. So we busted in and brung the suits t’you.”

Moosic felt a shock run through him, and he almost cursed aloud. The two time suits were in the wagon! All he had to do was steal them or get at them long enough to destroy them and this would all be over! He looked back out at the street—and saw that damned copper standing over near where he’d hid out all day. “Alfie” calculated the odds, and decided there wasn’t a chance in hell of getting to that wagon and getting away with it unless he killed the copper. Just after that, all hell would break loose anyway.

So easy—it could have been so easy. If he’d shot the pair, that would have been the end of it, and only the guilty would have suffered. If he’d known, or guessed, that the suits were in the cart, he could have easily made off with it between the time they entered the house and the time the beat cop showed up, with nobody dead. Now, there was an innocent life at stake—and he couldn’t take that kind of chance. It was a long shot, sure, but killing the cop might change things worse than letting this run its course.

No chance to do it easy now. He waited for the cop to saunter on down the block once more, and then, when the coast seemed clear, he stood up and drew the revolver. He was standing just outside the living room window, which was chest-high at its base and had no screen this time of year. He peered in, saw the two radicals seated on a couch against the wall to his right, while Marx sat in an overstuffed armchair facing them. Steeling himself, he measured his moves and then counted down in his mind.

Suddenly he pushed up on the window and stuck the revolver inside. “All roite!” he commanded in Alfie’s less than elegant voice. “Everybody just stay still! This gun’s loaded and I know ’ow to use it!”

The three in the room froze, and it was Marx who dared the first move. “Now vat is dis?” he roared. “Who vould stick a gun in my parlor?’’ He was clearly more angry than scared.

Being as careful as possible, he got a leg over the sill and slipped into the room. “You moite call me the toime coppers, Doctor Marx. Just stand easy—I got no business with you, only wit’ them what’re tryin’ to choinge what is.”

The woman whose form hid Roberto Sandoval looked crushed. “So they didn’t hold on even for a day.”

“No,” he told them. “You killed a lot of people, but we killed ’em all that you left. Don’cha remember me, ducky? Moo-sic?”

Both of the radicals blanched at the name, even the old man who was almost too far gone into the time frame. The one man they couldn’t scare. The one man who’d scared them.

“Who is this person?” Marx wanted to know.

“An American capitalist agent,” Sandoval told him. “ ’Is job is to make sure it stays theirs.”

“So vat vill you do? Shoot them and fade away?” Marx asked him calmly.

“No. We’re just all going out to that wagon. You, too, sir, Oi’m afraid. Everybody in front of me. Nobody needs to be ’urt in the least.”

“E’s gonna shoot up the suits!” Sandoval exclaimed, understanding it all. “Leave us ’ere all stuck good’n proper!”

He gestured with the revolver. “All roite, let’s get it over with. All of you, up and out. Oi don’t wanna shoot nobody, but Oi will if Oi hav’ta. Now—move! And no tricks! Just all noice and pleasant-loike.”

They stood up, and even Marx looked hesitant. Alone, Moosic guessed, he might have tried something, but with his family in the house this was no time to make a move.

They walked out into the hallway leading to the double door, and he followed, eyes on them. As he walked through the doorway into the hall, someone suddenly made a grab for him from the side. Powerful hands grabbed his arm, but so hard and sudden was the grab that the pistol discharged—once—then he was on the floor and Helene Demuth was on top of him. The pistol fired three more times before she got it away, screaming and banging his head against the floor. He was unconscious before the cop reached the porch.