"Closer t' seven." The clerk took the card back, eying Garwood through a freshly replenished cloud of smoke. "Be thirty-six seventy-five."
Garwood handed over thirty-seven of his forty dollars, silently cursing his out-of-date schedule. He'd cut things a little too fine, and now he was going to look exactly like what he was: a man on the run. For a moment he debated simply turning around and leaving, trying it again tomorrow on someone else's shift.
But that would mean spending another night in Springfield. And with all the Lincoln memorabilia so close at hand...
"Bus's boarding now," the clerk told him, choosing one of the preprinted tickets and pushing it under the grille. "Out that door; be leavin' 'bout five minutes."
Gritting his teeth, Garwood picked up the ticket... and as he withdrew his hand, there was a sudden crack, as if someone had fired a cap pistol.
"Damn kids," the clerk growled, craning his neck to peer out his side window.
Garwood looked down, his eyes searching the ledge inside the ticket window grille. He'd heard that particular sound before... and just inside the grille, near where his hand had twice reached, he saw it.
The clerk's ashtray. An ashtray once made of clear glass... now shot through by a thousand hairline fractures.
The clerk was still looking through his window for the kid with the cap pistol as Garwood left, forcing himself to walk.
—
He half expected the police to show up before the bus could leave, but to his mild surprise the vehicle wheezed leisurely out of the lot on time and headed a few minutes later onto the eastbound interstate. For the first few miles Garwood gave his full attention to his ears, straining tensely for the first faint sound of pursuing sirens. But as the minutes crawled by and no one showed up to pull them over, he was forced to the conclusion that the clerk had decided it wasn't any of his business.
The thought was strangely depressing. To realize that the latest upswing in the "not-me" noninvolvement philosophy had spread its rot from the polarized coasts into America's heartland bothered Garwood far more than it should have. Perhaps it was all the learned opinions he'd read weighing upon him; all the doomsayings about how such a national malaise could foreshadow the end of democracy.
Or perhaps it was simply the realization that even a nation full of selfish people didn't make a shred of difference to the cloud of destruction surrounding him.
Stop it! he ordered himself silently. Self-pity... Taking a deep breath, he looked around him.
He'd chosen his third-row seat carefully—as far from the bus's rear-mounted engine as he could reasonably get without sitting in the driver's lap, and well within the non-smoking section. His seatmate... He threw the kid a surreptitious look, confirmed that his first-glance analysis had been correct. Faded denim jeans and an old cotton shirt. That was good; natural fibers held up much better than synthetic ones, for the same reason that plastic had a tendency to disintegrate in his presence. Reaching a hand under his jacket, Garwood checked his own sweat-soaked polyester shirt for new tears. A rip at his right shoulder lengthened as he did so, and he muttered a curse.
"Don't make 'em like they use'ta, do they?"
Startled, Garwood turned to see his seatmate's smile. "What?" he asked.
"Your shirt," the kid explained. "I heard it rip. Guys who make 'em just get away with crapzi, don't they?"
"Um," Garwood grunted, turning away again.
"You headed for Champaign?" the kid persisted.
Garwood sighed. "Mahomet."
"No kidding!—I grew up there. You, too, or are you just visiting?"
"Just visiting."
"You'll like it. Small place, but friendly. Speaking of which—" he stuck out his hand. "Name's Tom Arnold. Tom Benedict Arnold, actually."
Automatically, Garwood shook the proffered hand. Somewhere in the back of his head the alarm bells were going off.... "Not, uh, any relation to...?"
"Benedict Arnold?" The kid grinned widely. "Sure am. Direct descendant, in fact."
An icy shiver ran up Garwood's back, a shiver having nothing to do with the bus's air conditioning. "You mean... really direct?" he asked, dropping the other's hand. "Not from a cousin or anything?"
"Straight shot line," Arnold nodded, the grin still in place. He was watching Garwood's face closely, and Garwood got the distinct impression the kid liked shocking people this way. "It's nothin' to be 'shamed of, you know—he did America a lot more good than he did bad. Whipped the Brits at Saratoga 'fore goin' over on their side—"
"Yes, I know," Garwood said, interrupting the impromptu history lesson. "Excuse me a second—washroom."
Stepping into the aisle, he went to the small cubicle at the rear of the bus. He waited a few minutes, then emerged and found an empty seat four rows behind the kid. He hoped Arnold wouldn't take it too personally, though he rather thought the other would. But he couldn't afford to take the chance. Benedict Arnold's victory at Saratoga had been a pivotal factor in persuading France to enter the war on the rebels' side, and Garwood had no desire to see if he had the same effect on living beings that he had on history's more inanimate descendants.
The afterglow in the sky behind them slowly faded, and as the sky darkened Garwood drifted in and out of sleep. The thought of the boy four seats ahead troubled his rest, filling his dreams with broken ashtrays and TV sets, half-melted-looking car engines and statues. After a while the bus stopped in Decatur, taking half an hour to trade a handful of passengers for an equally small number of others. Eventually they left; and back out in the dark of the prairie again, with the stars visible above, he again drifted to sleep....
The sound of the bus driver's voice jolted him awake. "...and gentlemen, I'm afraid we're having some trouble with the engine. Rather than take a chance on it quitting straight out before we get to Champaign, we're going to ask you to transfer to a bus that's being sent up from Decatur. It ought to be here in just a few minutes."
Blinking in the relative brightness of the overhead lights, Garwood joined the line of grumbling passengers moving down the aisle, a familiar knot wrenching at his stomach. Had it been him? He'd been far enough away from the engine—surely he had. Unless the effective distance was increasing with time... Forcing his jaw to unclench, he stepped carefully down the bus's steps, hoping desperately it was just a coincidence.
Outside, the only light came from a small building the bus had pulled alongside and from one or two dim streetlights. Half blind as his eyes again adjusted, Garwood took two tentative steps forward—
And came to an abrupt halt as strong hands slipped smoothly around each arm.
"Dr. James Garwood?" a shadowy figure before him asked quietly.
Garwood opened his mouth to deny it... but even as he did so he knew it would be useless. "Yes," he signed. "And you?"
"Major Alan Davidson; Combined Services Intelligence. They miss you back at your lab, Doctor."
Garwood glanced past the husky man holding his right arm, saw the line of passengers goggling at him. "So it was all a set-up?" he asked. "The bus is okay?"
Davidson nodded. "A suspicious clerk in Springfield thought you might be a fugitive. From your description and something about a broken ashtray my superiors thought it might be you. Come with me, please."
Garwood didn't have much choice. Propelled gently along by the hands still holding his arms, he followed Davidson toward the lighted building and a long car parked in the shadows there. "Where are you taking me?" he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.