“Your next trip,” said Protopopolos, “will be as assistant to Metaxas, on the one-week tour.”
“When do I leave?”
“In two weeks,” he said. “Your layoff comes first, remember? And after you return from the trip with Metaxas, you begin soloing. Where will you spend your layoff?”
“I think I’ll go down to Crete or Mykonos,” I said, “and get a little rest on the beach.”
The Time Service insists that Couriers take two-week vacations between trips. The Time Service doesn’t believe in pushing its Couriers too hard. During layoffs, Couriers are completely at liberty. They can spend the whole time relaxing in now-time, as I proposed to do, or they can sign up with a time tour, or they can simply go hopping by themselves to any era that may interest them.
There’s no charge for timer use when a Courier makes jumps up the line in his layoff periods. The Time Service wants to encourage its employees to feel at home in all periods of the past, and what better way than to allow unlimited free shunting?
Protopopolos looked a little disappointed when I said I’d spend my vacation sunning myself in the islands. “Don’t you want to do some jumping?” he asked.
The idea of making time-jumps on my own at this stage of my career scared me, frankly. But I couldn’t tell Protopopolos that. I also considered the point that in another month he’d be handing me the responsibility for the lives of an entire tour group. Maybe this conversation was part of the test of my qualifications. Were they trying to see if I had the guts to go jumping on my own?
Protopopolos seemed to be fishing for an answer.
I said, “On second thought, why waste a chance to do some jumping? I’ll have a peek at post-Byzantine Istanbul.”
“With a tour group?”
“On my own,” I said.
23.
So I went jumping, smack into the Paradox of Discontinuity.
My first stop was the wardrobe department. I needed costumes suited for Istanbul of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Instead of giving me a whole sequence of clothes to fit the changing fashions, they decked me out in an all-purpose Moslem rig, simple white robes of no particular era, nondescript sandals, long hair, and a straggly youthful beard. By way of pocket money they supplied me with a nice assortment of gold and silver pieces of the right eras, a little of everything that might have been circulating in medieval Turkey, including some bezants of Greek-ruled times, miscellaneous coinage of the sultans, and a good deal of Venetian gold. All this was installed in a currency belt that I wore just above my timer, the coins segregated from left to right according to centuries, so that I wouldn’t get into trouble by offering an eighteenth-century dinar in a sixteenth-century market place. There was no charge for the money; the Time Service runs a continuous siphon of its own, circulating coinage between now-time and then-time for the benefit of its personnel, and a Courier going on holiday can sign out any reasonable amount to cover his expenses. To the Service it’s only play money, anyway, infinitely replenishible at will. I like the system.
I took hypnosleep courses in Turkish and Arabic before I left. The Special Requests department fabricated a quick cover identity for me that would work well in any era of my intended visit: if questioned, I was supposed to identify myself as a Portuguese national who had been kidnapped on the high seas by Algerian pirates when ten years old, and raised as a Moslem in Algiers. That would account for flaws in my accent and for my vagueness about my background; if I had the misfortune to be interrogated by a real Portuguese, which wasn’t likely, I could simply say that I couldn’t remember much about my life in Lisbon and had forgotten the names of my forebears. So long as I kept my mouth shut, prayed toward Mecca five times a day, and watched my step, I wasn’t likely to get into trouble. (Of course, if I landed in a really serious mess, I could escape by using my timer, but in the Time Service that’s considered a coward’s route, and also undesirable because of the implications of witchcraft that you leave behind when you vanish.)
All these preparations took a day and a half. Then they told me I was ready to jump. I set my timer for 500B.P., picking the era at random, and jumped.
I arrived on August 14, 1559, at nine-thirty in the evening. The reigning sultan was the great Suleiman I, nearing the close of his epoch. Turkish armies threatened the peace of Europe; Istanbul was bursting with the wealth of conquest. I couldn’t respond to this city as I had to the sparkling Constantinople of Justinian or Alexius, but that was a personal matter having to do with ancestry, chemistry, and historical affinity. Taken on its own merits, Suleiman’s Istanbul was a city among cities.
I spent half the day roaming it. For an hour I watched a lovely mosque under construction, hoping it was the Suleimaniye, but later in the day I found the Suleimaniye, brand-new and glistening in the noon light. I made a special pilgrimage, covertly consulting a map I had smuggled with me, to find the mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror, which an earthquake would bring down in 1766. It was worth the walk. Toward midafternoon, after an inspection of the mosquified Haghia Sophia and the sad ruins of the Great Palace of Byzantium across the plaza (Sultan Ahmed’s mosque would be rising there fifty years down the line), I made my way to the Covered Bazaar, thinking to buy a few small trinkets as souvenirs, and when I was no more than ten paces past the entrance I caught sight of my beloved guru Sam.
Consider the odds against that: with thousands of years in which to roam, the two of us coming on holiday to the same year and the same day and the same city, and meeting under the same roof!
He was clad in Moorish costume, straight out of Othello. There was no mistaking him; he was by far the tallest man in sight, and his coal-black skin glistened brilliantly against his white robes. I rushed up to him.
“Sam!” I cried. “Sam, you old black bastard, what luck to meet you here.”
He whirled in surprise, frowned at me, looked puzzled. “I know you not,” he said coldly.
“Don’t let the beard fool you. It’s me, Sam. Jud Elliott.”
He glared. He growled. A crowd began to gather. I wondered if I had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t Sam, but Sam’s multi-great-grandfather, made to look like his twin by a genetic fluke. No, I told myself, this is the authentic Sambo.
But then why is he pulling out that scimitar?
We had been talking in Turkish. I switched to English and said, “Listen, Sam, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m willing to ride along with your act. Suppose we meet in half an hour outside Haghia Sophia, and we can—”
“Infidel dog!” he roared. “Beggar’s spawn! Masturbator of pigs! Away from me! Away, cutpurse!”
He swished the scimitar menacingly above my head and continued to rave in Turkish. Suddenly in a lower voice he muttered, “I don’t know who the hell you are, pal, but if you don’t clear out of here fast I’m going to have to slice you in half.” That much was in English. In Turkish again he cried, “Molester of infants! Drinker of toad’s milk! Devourer of cameldung!”
This was no act. He genuinely didn’t recognize me, and he genuinely didn’t want anything to do with me. Baffled, I backed away from him, hustled down one of the subsidiary corridors of the bazaar, stepped out into the open, and hastily shunted myself ten years down the line. A couple of people saw me go, but faex on them; to a Turk of 1559 the world must have been full of efreets and jinni, and I was just one more phantom.