Up The Line

51.

I said to them, “I’m sorry as hell to be putting you through all this trouble.”

The men I respected most in the world laughed and grinned and chuckled and spat and said, “Shucks, ’t’ain’t nothin’.”

They were frayed and grimy. They had been working hard and fruitlessly for me, and it showed. I wanted to hug all of them at once. Black Sambo, and plastic-faced Jeff Monroe, and shifty-eyed Sid Buonocore. Pappas, Kolettis, Plastiras. They had rigged a chart to mark off the places where they hadn’t found Conrad Sauerabend. The chart had a lot of marks on it.

Sam said, “Don’t worry, boy. We’ll track him down.”

“I feel so awful, making you give up free time—”

“It could have happened to any one of us,” Sam said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Sauerabend gimmicked his timer behind your back, didn’t he? How could you have prevented it?” Sam grinned. “We got to help you out. We don’t know when same’ll happen to us.”

“All for one,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe. “One for all.”

“You think you’re the first Courier to have a customer skip out?” Sid Buonocore asked. “Don’t be a craphead! Those timers can be rigged for manual use by anyone who understands Benchley Effect theory.”

“They never told me—”

“They don’t like to advertise it. But it happens. Five, six times a year, somebody takes a private time-trip behind his Courier’s back.”

I said, “What happens to the Courier?”

“If the Time Patrol finds out? They fire him,” said Buonocore bleakly. “What we try to do is cover for each other, before the Patrol moves in. It’s a bitch of a job, but we got to do it. I mean, if you don’t look after one of your own when he’s in trouble, who in hell will look after you?”

“Besides,” said Sam, “it makes us feel like heroes.”

I studied the chart. They had looked for Sauerabend pretty thoroughly in early Byzantium — Constantine through the second Theodosius — and they had checked out the final two centuries with equal care. Searching the middle had so far been a matter of random investigations. Sam, Buonocore, and Monroe were coming off search duty now and were going to rest; Kolettis, Plastiris, and Pappas were getting ready to go out, and they were planning strategy.

Everybody went on being very nice to me during the discussion of ways to catch Sauerabend. I felt a real sentimental glow of warmth for them. My comrades in adversity. My companions. My colleagues. The Time Musketeers. My heart expanded. I made a little speech telling them how grateful I was for all their help. They looked embarrassed and told me once again that it was a simple matter of good fellowship, the golden rule in action.

The door opened and a dusty figure stumbled in, wearing anachronistic sunglasses. Najeeb Dajani, my old tutor! He scowled, slumped down on a chair, and gestured impatiently to nobody in particular, hoping for wine.

Kolettis handed him wine. Dajani poured some of it into his hand and used it to wash the dust from his sunglasses. Then he gulped the rest.

“Mr. Dajani!” I cried. “I didn’t know they had called you in too! Listen, I want to thank you for helping—”

“You stupid prick,” said Dajani quietly. “How did I ever let you get your Courier license?”