Up The Line

42.

I went back down to Istanbul and reported for duty, and took a party of eight out on the two-week tour.

Neither the Black Death nor Theodora had burned away my passion for Pulcheria Ducas. I hoped now that I’d shake free of that dangerous obsession by getting back to work.

My tour group included the following people:

J. Frederick Gostaman of Biloxi, Mississippi, a retail dealer in pharmaceuticals and transplant organs, along with his wife, Louise, his sixteen-year-old daughter Palmyra, and his fourteen-year-old son Bilbo.

Conrad Sauerabend of St. Louis, Missouri, a stockbroker, traveling alone.

Miss Hester Pistil of Brooklyn, New York, a young schoolteacher.

Leopold Haggins of St. Petersburg, Florida, a retired manufacturer of power cores, and his wife Chrystal.

In short, the usual batch of overcapitalized and undereducated idlers. Sauerabend, who was fat and jowly and sullen, took an immediate dislike to Gostaman, who was fat and jowly and jovial, because Gostaman made a joking remark about the way Sauerabend was peering down the neckline of Gostaman’s daughter at one of our orientation sessions. I think Gostaman was joking, anyway, but Sauerabend got red-faced and furious, and Palmyra, who though sixteen was underdeveloped enough to pass for a skinny thirteen, ran out of the room in tears. I patched things up, but Sauerabend continued to glare at Gostaman. Miss Pistil, the schoolteacher, who was a vacant-eyed blonde with an augmented bosom and an expression that managed to be both tense and languid, established at our first meeting that she is the sort of girl who takes these trips in order to get laid by Couriers; even if I hadn’t been preoccupied with Pulcheria, I don’t think I’d have taken advantage of her availability, but as things stood I felt very little urge to explore Miss Pistil’s pelvis. This was not the case with young Bilbo Gostaman, who was such a fashion-plate that he was wearing knickers with padded groin (if they can revive Cretan bodices, why not the codpiece?) and who got his hand under Miss Pistil’s skirt during our second orientation session. He thought he was being surreptitious about it, but I saw him, and so did old man Gostaman, who beamed in paternal pride, and so did Mrs. Chrystal Haggins, who was shocked into catalepsy. Miss Pistil looked thrilled, and squirmed a little to afford Bilbo a better angle for groping. Mr. Leopold Haggins, who was eighty-five and pretty leathery, meanwhile winked hopefully at Mrs. Louise Gostaman, a placid and matronly sort of woman who was destined to spend most of our tour fighting off the old scoundrel’s quivering advances. You can see how it was.

Off we went for two happy weeks together.

I was, again, a second-rate Courier. I couldn’t summon up the divine spark. I showed them everything I was supposed to show them, but I wasn’t able to do the extra things, the leaping, cavorting, charismatic, Metaxian things, that I had vowed I would do on every trip.

Part of the trouble was my edginess over the Pulcheria situation. She danced in and out of my mind a thousand times a day. I pictured myself dropping down to 1105 or thereabouts and getting to work with her; surely she’d remember me from the spice shop, and surely that was an open invitation she had given me then.

Part of the trouble was the ebbing of my own sense of wonder. I had been on the Byzantium run for almost half a year, and the thrill was gone. A gifted Courier — a Metaxas — could derive as much excitement from his thousandth imperial coronation as from his third. And transmit that excitement to his people. Maybe I just wasn’t a naturally gifted Courier. I was becoming bored with the dedication of Haghia Sophia and the baptism of Theodosius II, the way an usher in a stimmo house gets weary of watching orgies.

Part of the trouble was the presence of Conrad Sauerabend in the group. That fat, sweaty, untidy man was an instant turnoff for me every time he opened his mouth.

He wasn’t stupid. But he was gross and coarse and crude. He was a leerer, a gaper, a gawker. I could count on him to make some blunt and inappropriate remark anywhere.

At the Augusteum he whistled and said, “What a parking lot this would make!”

Inside Haghia Sophia he clapped a white-bearded priest on the back and said, “I just got to tell you what a swell church you got here, priesto.”

During a visit to the icon-smashings of Leo the Isaurian, when Byzantium’s finest works of art were being destroyed as idols, he interrupted an earnest iconoclastic fanatic and said, “Don’t be such a dumb prick. You know that you’re hurting this city’s tourist trade?”

Sauerabend was also a molester of little girls, and proud of it. “I can’t help it,” he explained. “It’s my particular personal clutchup. The shrink calls it the Lolita complex. I like ’em twelve, thirteen years old. You know, old enough to bleed, maybe to have a little hair on it, but still kind of unripe. Get ’em before the tits grow, that’s my ideal. I can’t stand all that swinging meat on a woman. Pretty sick, huh?”

Pretty sick, yes. And also pretty annoying, because we had Palmyra Gostaman with us; Sauerabend couldn’t stop staring at her. The lodgings provided on a time-tour don’t always give the tourists much privacy, and Sauerabend ogled the poor girl into despair. He drooled over her constantly, forcing her to dress and undress under a blanket as if this was the nineteenth or twentieth century; and when her father wasn’t looking, he’d get his fat paws on her behind or the little bumps of her breasts and whisper lewd propositions in her ear. Finally I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop bothering her, I’d bounce him from the tour. That settled him down for a few days. The girl’s father, incidentally, thought the whole incident was very funny. “Maybe what that girl needs is a good banging,” he said to me. “Get the body juices flowing, huh?” Papa Gostaman also approved of his son Bilbo’s affair with Miss Pistil, which also became a nuisance, since we wasted a terrific amount of time waiting for them to finish their current copulations. I’d be giving a preliminary talk on what we were to see this morning, get me, and Bilbo would be standing behind Miss Pistil, and suddenly she’d get this transfigured look on her face and I’d know he’d done it again, up with her skirt in back, wham! Bilbo looked pleased as hell all the time, which I suppose was reasonable enough for a fourteen-year-old-boy having an affair with a woman ten years his senior. Miss Pistil looked guilty. Her sore conscience, though, didn’t keep her from opening the gate for Bilbo three or four times a day.

I didn’t find all this conducive to creative Couriering.

Then there were minor annoyances, such as the ineffectual lecheries of old Mr. Haggins, who persecuted the dim Mrs. Gostaman mercilessly. Or the insistence of Sauerabend on fiddling around with his timer. “You know,” he said several times, “I bet I could ungimmick this thing so I could run it myself. Used to be an engineer, you know, before I took up stockbroking.” I told him to leave his timer alone. Behind my back, he went on tinkering with it.

Still another headache was Capistrano, whom I met by chance in 1097 while Bohemond’s Crusaders were entering Constantinople. He showed up while I was concentrating on the replay of the Marge Hefferin scene. I wanted to see how permanent my correction of the past had been.

This time I lined my people up on the opposite side of the street. Yes, there I was; and there was Marge, eager and impatient and hot for Bohemond; and there was the rest of the group. As the Crusaders paraded toward us, I felt almost dizzy with suspense. Would I see myself save Marge? Or would I see Marge leap toward Bohemond and be cut down? Or would some third alternative unreel? The fluidity, the mutability, of the time stream, that was what terrified me now.

Bohemond neared. Marge was undoing her tunic. Heavy creamy breasts were visible. She tensed and readied herself for the dash into the street. And a second Jud Elliott materialized out of nowhere across the way, right behind her. I saw the look of shock on Marge’s face as my alter ego’s steely fingers clamped tight to her ass. I saw his hand splay wide to seize her breast. I saw her whirl, struggle, sag; and as Bohemond went by, I saw myself vanish, leaving only the two of me, one on each side of the processional avenue.

I was awash with relief. Yet I was also troubled, because I knew now that my editing of this scene was embedded in the time-flow for anyone to see. Including some passing Time Patrolman, perhaps, who might happen to observe the brief presence of a doubled Courier and wonder what was going on. At any time in the next million millennia the Patrol might monitor that scene — and then, no matter if it went undiscovered until the year 8,000,000,000,008, I would be called to account for my unauthorized correction of the record. I could expect to feel the hand on my shoulder, the voice calling my name—

I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice called my name.

I spun around. “Capistrano!”

“Sure, Capistrano. Did you expect someone else?”

“I— I— you surprised me, that’s all.” I was shaking. My knees were watery.

I was so upset that it took me a few seconds to realize how awful Capistrano looked.

He was frayed and haggard; his glossy dark hair was graying and stringy; he had lost weight and looked twenty years older than the Capistrano I knew. I sensed discontinuity and felt the fear that I always felt when confronted with someone out of my own future.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked.

“I’m coming apart. Breaking up. Look, there’s my tour over there.” He indicated a clump of time-travelers who peered intently at the Crusaders. “I can’t stay with them any more. They sicken me. Everything sickens me. It’s the end for me, Elliott, absolutely the end.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I can’t talk about it here. When are you staying tonight?”

“Right here in 1097. The inn by the Golden Horn.”

“I’ll see you at midnight,” Capistrano said. He clutched my arm for a moment. “It’s the end, Elliott. Really the end. God have mercy on my soul!”