"Malcolm," he said under his breath, "as you are a friend, don't do that again."
Malcolm's brows soared. "Good Lord, Kit, what's eating you? Can't a man even pay a lady the compliment of noticing?"
"No."
Margo just put her hands over her face.
"She's, uh ..." Oh, hell.... "She's my grandkid."
Malcolm rocked back on his chair and stared. "Margo's your granddaughter?"
Conversation cut short throughout the bar. Kit felt the flush start in his neck and work its way up into his hairline. Margo risked a peek, then groaned and hid her face again.
"Well, I'll be... suckered." Malcolm Moore was grinning like the proverbial village idiot "Miss Margo, you can't imagine what a wonderful surprise this is."
The buzz of conversation picked up again, livelier than ever.
"I, uh," Margo floundered for words. She shot a stricken glance at Kit, then settled for a faint, "Thanks."
Kit glowered at Malcolm. "What I'm trying to do, here, is keep her alive. She wants to scout."
Malcolm's grin widened, which Kit would've bet was physically impossible. "Really? What was it you said the other day
"Never mind what I said the other day. I'm training her. Maybe. If-" he turned a severe glare on Margo "-she listens and learns."
"I'm listening ! So show me, already"
"Good." Kit drew a breath and downed half his water in one gulp, wishing it were something stronger. "Malcolm, here, has scouted a couple of times."
Malcolm nodded "Exactly twice. Then I switched to guiding."
Margo rested her chin on her hands. "Why?"
Malcolm chuckled. "Because I wanted to live to see thirty."
"Why does everyone keep saying scouting's so dangerous?"
Malcolm lanced over. Kit just shrugged, leaving
Malcolm on lanced own-and Kit was sure any answer the guide provided would be more than effective.
"Well," Malcolm said quietly, "because it is. My first time out, I beat the witch finders to the gate by about four minutes. One of them actually got through on sheer momentum and had to be tossed back through just as the gate was closing. If the gate hadn't opened up, I'd have ...Well, never mind. The second time, I missed
Shadowing myself by about half an hour. Promised myself I'd never set foot through an unknown gate again."
Then he chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, I did risk it just once more, when we rescued the folks who fell through that unstable gate in the floor, but I didn't stop to think, then, I just jumped. I was lucky. Someone, thank God, had their log and ATLS with them, so at least I have a record of which gates we stumbled through trying to get home again."
"Okay, so it's dangerous. What's this Shadowing stuff all about, exactly?"
Kit tapped the personal log absently with one fingernail. "It means you can't cross your own shadow. Not and survive. If you step through a gate into, say, Rome on A.D. 100, March twenty-fourth, 2:00 P.m. sun time, you log into this machine exactly when and where you are. How you determine when and where you are, I'll explain in a minute. The point is, you note down exactly when you arrived, where you arrived, how long you stayed, and when you left. You keep track of when and where you've been. Okay, let's say somebody else pushes a gate into Meso-America, A.D. 100, March twenty-third. If you step through that gate, and stay past March twenty-fourth 2:00 P.m. Italian time, one of you disappears. The current you. The Roman you is alive in the past, but the real-time you just died. You cannot cross your own shadow. Paradox doesn't happen, because you vanish completely, forever."
Margo shrugged. "Sounds easy enough to avoid. You just don't try to watch Julius Caesar murdered twice."
Malcolm said, "You couldn't do that, anyway. The two ends of the time strings that form gates are connected. They move at the same pace. If a week goes by here, a week goes by there. Once you miss an opportunity to see something, it's gone forever, unless another time string opens up to the same point in time.
Of course, if you tried to go back, you'd cross your shadow and end up not seeing it-or anything else ever, ever again.
"The point is," Kit nodded, "the more down-time trips you make, the greater the odds that when you step through a gate into some unknown time, you'll already exist somewhere and somewhen else. Eventually the odds catch up and you die."
Margo chewed her lower lip in a thoughtful fashion. "So ...you take this gamble every time you walk through an open gate, because you never know when-to what time-it leads? Why bother to keep records at all, if you could just vanish anyway? Seems like a lot of fuss, when you could blip out before you knew what hit you, no matter what you put in this thing. I mean, you don't know when you're going, so what does it matter that you know when you've been?"
Kit told himself that Margo was very young. "A couple of reasons. First, it's your job, as scout, to keep meticulous records. Scholars and tour companies will want to review any data you bring back. Second, if you don't keep records, you could accidentally kill yourself just trying to take a vacation or by, trying to visit another station, or even the wrong gate in the same station."
"Huh?" She leveled an incredulous stare in Kit's direction. Clearly, she hadn't done enough research. Margo damned small-town libraries, high schools controlled by school boards opposed to things like "Evillution" and a father who'd drunk every penny she might have saved toward a computer to hook into the big information nets.
Malcolm nodded. "He's right. Even guides have to be careful about that. Every station is built at least as far back as 1910, to get around the problem of people stepping into a time after they were born. That's why up-time lobbies have warning signs. Surely you saw the one on the other side of our Primary? `IF YOU WERE BORN ON OR BEFORE APRIL 28, 1910, DO NOT STEP THROUGH THIS GATE. YOU WILL DIE IF YOU ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE TIME TERMINAL.' The date on that sign changes every day, to match Shangri-las relative temporal location. They had to beef up security about ten years ago when a few desperate senior citizens committed suicide by stepping through, rather than face starvation or terminal cancer."
"Well, I understand that danger," Margo sniffed, "and I remember seeing TV shows about those poor old couple who killed themselves. But what's this stuff about if you visit some other terminal or the wrong gate?"
"We're not just trying to scare you off," Kit said quietly. "The temporal position of any station, in its relation to absolute time, is different from any other station's temporal position. Terminals 17 and 56 are absolutely deadly to anyone on Shangri-la. If I tried to visit TT-56, I'd accidentally emerge into last week, when I was very much present at Shangri-la Station, which is currently..."
He checked the chronometer built into his personal log. "Which is currently April 28,1910, 22:01:17, locale. Tibetan-time zone. Time guides have to be careful, too."
Malcolm nodded. "It's why we guides tend to specialize in tours through Just a handful of gates leading out of one terminal. I could go to one of the other terminals and look for a scouting job, but I'd have to do careful homework first to be sure which terminals and which tours were safe for me. The Denver and London gates here in La-La Land can be just as deadly. The Denver gate is currently opening into 1885, the London gate into 1888. If I try to take a tourist to Denver during the same week I'd already taken someone else to London three years previously..." He shrugged. "I'd accidentally kill myself. So we keep damned good records of where and when we've been. That little credit card you were issued when you bought your Primary Gate ticket? The one they encoded for you before you came down time? When tourists use the gates, their Timecards are encoded-in both directions-going down time and coming back-so they have a record of when they've been. If the computer catches an overlap, it sounds an alarm."