Up The Line

62.

Metaxas took his leave, and I took a bath. And then, really relaxed for the first time in what seemed like several geological epochs, I contemplated my immediate future.

First, a nap. Then a meal. And then a journey into town to call on Pulcheria, who would be restored to her rightful place in the Ducas household, and unaware of the strange metamorphosis that had temporarily come over her destinies.

We’d make love, and I’d come back to the villa, and in the morning I’d go into town again, and afterward—

Then I stopped hatching further plans, because Sam appeared unexpectedly and smashed everything.

He was wearing a Byzantine cloak, but it was just a hasty prop, for I could see his ordinary down-the-line clothes on underneath. He looked harried and upset.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“A favor to you,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I said I’m here as a favor to you. And I’m not going to stay long, because I don’t want the Time Patrol after me too.”

“Is the Time Patrol after me?”

“You bet your white ass it is!” he yelled. “Get your things together and clear out of here, fast! You’ve got to hide, maybe three, four thousand years back, somewhere. Hurry it up!”

He began collecting a few stray possessions of mine scattered about the room. I caught hold of him and said, “Will you tell me what’s going on? Sit down and stop acting like a maniac. You come in here at a million kilometers an hour and—”

“All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll spell it all out for you, and if I get arrested too, so be it. I’m stained with sin. I deserve to be arrested. And—”

“Sam—”

“All right,” he said again. He closed his eyes a moment. “My now-time basis,” he said hollowly, “is December 25, 2059. Merry Christmas. Several days ago on my time-level, your other self brought your current tour back from Byzantium. Including Sauerabend and all the rest of them. Do you know what happened to your other self the instant he arrived in 2059?”

“The Time Patrol arrested him?”

“Worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“He vanished, Jud. He became a nonperson. He ceased ever to have existed.”

I had to laugh. “The cocksure bastard! I told him that I was the real one and that he was just some kind of phantom, but he wouldn’t listen! Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry to see—”

“No, Jud,” Sam said sadly. “He was every bit as real as you, when he was back here up the line. And you’re every bit as unreal as he is now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re a nonperson, Jud, same as he is. You have retroactively ceased to exist. I’m sorry. You never happened. And it’s our fault as much as yours. We moved so fast that we slipped up on one small detail.”

He looked frighteningly somber. But how else are you supposed to look, when you come to tell somebody that he’s not only dead but never was born?

“What happened, Sam? What detail?”

“It’s like this, Jud. You know, when we took Sauerabend’s gimmicked timer away, we got him another one. Metaxas keeps a few smuggled spares around — that tricky bastard has everything.”

“So?”

“Its serial number, naturally, was different from the number of the timer Sauerabend started his tour with. Normally, nobody notices something like that, but when this tour checked back in, it just happened that the check-in man was a stickler for the rules, and he examined serial numbers. And saw there was a substitution, and yelled for the Patrol.”

“Oh,” I said weakly.

“They questioned Sauerabend,” Sam said, “and of course he was cagey, more to protect himself than you. And since he couldn’t give any explanation of the switch, the Patrol got authorization to run a recheck on the entire tour he had just taken.”

“Oh-oh.”

“They monitored it from every angle. They saw you leave your group, they saw Sauerabend skip out the moment you were gone, they saw you and me and Metaxas catch him and bring him back to that night in 1204.”

“So all three of us are in trouble?”

Sam shook his head. “Metaxas has pull. So have I. We wiggled out of it on a sympathy line, that we were just trying to help a buddy in trouble. It took all the strings we could pull. But we couldn’t do a thing for you, Jud. The Patrol is out for your head. They looked in on that little routine in 1204 by which you duplicated yourself, and they began to realize that you were guilty not only of negligence in letting Sauerabend get away from you in the first place, but also of various paradoxes caused in your unlawful attempts to correct the situation. The charges against you were so serious that we couldn’t get them dropped, and we tried, man, we tried. The Patrol thereupon took action against you.”

“What kind of action?” I asked in a dead man’s voice.

“You were removed from your tour on that evening in 1204 two hours prior to your original shunt to 1105 for your tryst with Pulcheria. Another Courier replaced you in 1204; you were plucked from the time-flow and brought down the line to stand trial in 2059 for assorted timecrimes.”

“Therefore—”

“Therefore,” Sam swept on, “you never did slip away to 1105 to pay that call on Pulcheria. Your whole love affair with Pulcheria has become a nonevent, and if you were to visit her now, you’d find that she has no recollection of having slept with you. Next: since you didn’t go to 1105, you obviously didn’t return to 1204 and find Sauerabend missing, and anyway Sauerabend had never been part of your tour group. And thus there was no need for you to make that fifty-six-second shunt up the line which created the duplication. Neither you nor Jud B ever came into being, since the existence of both of you dates from a point later than your visit to Pulcheria, and you never made that visit, having been plucked out of the time-flow before you got a chance to do it. You and Jud B are nonpersons and always have been. You happen to be protected by the Paradox of Transit Displacement, as long as you stay up the line; Jud B ceased to be protected the moment he returned to now-time, and disappeared irretrievably. Got that?”

Shivering, I said, “Sam, what’s happening to that other Jud, the — the — the real Jud? The one they plucked, the one they’ve got down there in 2059?”

“He’s in custody, awaiting trial on timecrime charges.”

“What about me?”

“If the Patrol ever finds you, you’ll be brought to now-time and thus automatically obliterated. But the Patrol doesn’t know where you are. If I you stay in Byzantium, sooner or later you’ll be discovered, and that’ll be the end for you. When I found all this out, I shot back here to warn you. Hide in prehistory. Get away into some period earlier than the founding of the old Greek Byzantium — earlier than 700B.C., I guess. You can manage there. We’ll bring you books, tools, whatever you need. There’ll be people of some sort, nomads, maybe — anyway, company. You’ll be like a god to them. They’ll worship you, they’ll bring you a woman a day. It’s your only chance, Jud.”

“I don’t want to be a prehistoric god! I want to be able to go down the line again! And to see Pulcheria! And—”

“There’s no chance of any of that,” Sam said, and his words came down like the blade of a guillotine. “You don’t exist. It’s suicide for you ever to try to go down the line. And if you go anywhere near Pulcheria, the Patrol will catch you and take you down the line. Hide or die, Jud. Hide or die.”

“But I’m real, Sam! I do exist!”

“Only the Jud Elliott who’s currently in custody in 2059 exists. You’re a residual phenomenon, a paradox product, nothing more. I love you all the same, boy, and that’s why I’ve risked my own black hide to help you, but you aren’t real. Believe me. Believe me. You’re your own ghost. Pack up and clear out!”