Up The Line

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.