I didn’t find all this conducive to creative Couriering.
Then there were minor annoyances, such as the ineffectual lecheries of old Mr. Haggins, who persecuted the dim Mrs. Gostaman mercilessly. Or the insistence of Sauerabend on fiddling around with his timer. “You know,” he said several times, “I bet I could ungimmick this thing so I could run it myself. Used to be an engineer, you know, before I took up stockbroking.” I told him to leave his timer alone. Behind my back, he went on tinkering with it.
Still another headache was Capistrano, whom I met by chance in 1097 while Bohemond’s Crusaders were entering Constantinople. He showed up while I was concentrating on the replay of the Marge Hefferin scene. I wanted to see how permanent my correction of the past had been.
This time I lined my people up on the opposite side of the street. Yes, there I was; and there was Marge, eager and impatient and hot for Bohemond; and there was the rest of the group. As the Crusaders paraded toward us, I felt almost dizzy with suspense. Would I see myself save Marge? Or would I see Marge leap toward Bohemond and be cut down? Or would some third alternative unreel? The fluidity, the mutability, of the time stream, that was what terrified me now.
Bohemond neared. Marge was undoing her tunic. Heavy creamy breasts were visible. She tensed and readied herself for the dash into the street. And a second Jud Elliott materialized out of nowhere across the way, right behind her. I saw the look of shock on Marge’s face as my alter ego’s steely fingers clamped tight to her ass. I saw his hand splay wide to seize her breast. I saw her whirl, struggle, sag; and as Bohemond went by, I saw myself vanish, leaving only the two of me, one on each side of the processional avenue.
I was awash with relief. Yet I was also troubled, because I knew now that my editing of this scene was embedded in the time-flow for anyone to see. Including some passing Time Patrolman, perhaps, who might happen to observe the brief presence of a doubled Courier and wonder what was going on. At any time in the next million millennia the Patrol might monitor that scene — and then, no matter if it went undiscovered until the year 8,000,000,000,008, I would be called to account for my unauthorized correction of the record. I could expect to feel the hand on my shoulder, the voice calling my name—
I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice called my name.
I spun around. “Capistrano!”
“Sure, Capistrano. Did you expect someone else?”
“I— I— you surprised me, that’s all.” I was shaking. My knees were watery.
I was so upset that it took me a few seconds to realize how awful Capistrano looked.
He was frayed and haggard; his glossy dark hair was graying and stringy; he had lost weight and looked twenty years older than the Capistrano I knew. I sensed discontinuity and felt the fear that I always felt when confronted with someone out of my own future.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“I’m coming apart. Breaking up. Look, there’s my tour over there.” He indicated a clump of time-travelers who peered intently at the Crusaders. “I can’t stay with them any more. They sicken me. Everything sickens me. It’s the end for me, Elliott, absolutely the end.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t talk about it here. When are you staying tonight?”
“Right here in 1097. The inn by the Golden Horn.”
“I’ll see you at midnight,” Capistrano said. He clutched my arm for a moment. “It’s the end, Elliott. Really the end. God have mercy on my soul!”
43.
Capistrano appeared at the inn just before midnight. Under his cloak he carried a lopsided bottle, which he uncorked and handed to me. “Cognac,” he said. “From 1825, bottled in 1775. I just brought it up the line.”
I tasted it. He slumped down in front of me. He looked worse than ever: old, drained, hollow. He took the cognac from me and gulped it greedily.
“Before you say anything,” I told him, “I want to know what your now-time basis is. Discontinuities scare me.”
“There’s no discontinuity.”
“There isn’t?”
“My basis is December, 2059. The same as yours.”
“Impossible!”
“Impossible?” he repeated. “How can you say that?”
“Last time I saw you, you weren’t even forty. Now you’re easily past fifty. Don’t fool me, Capistrano. Your basis is somewhere in 2070, isn’t it? And if it is, for God’s sake don’t tell me anything about the years still ahead for me!”
“My basis is 2059,” said Capistrano in a ragged voice. I realized from the thickness of his tone that this bottle of cognac was not the first for him tonight. “I am no older now than I ought to be, for you,” he said. “The trouble is that I’m a dead man.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Last month I told you of my great-grandmother, the Turk?”
“Yes.”
“This morning I went down the line to Istanbul of 1955. My great-grandmother was then seventeen years old and unmarried. In a moment of wild despair I choked her and threw her into the Bosphorus. It was at night, in the rain; no one saw us. I am dead, Elliott. Dead.”
“No, Capistrano!”
“I told you, long ago, that when the time came, I would make my exit that way. A Turkish slut — she who beguiled my great-grandfather into a shameful marriage — gone now. And so am I. Once I return to now-time, I have never existed. What shall I do, Elliott? You decide. Shall I jump down the line now and end the comedy?”
Sweating, I said, after a deep pull of the cognac, “Give me the exact date of your stopoff in 1955. I’ll go down the line right now and keep you from harming her.”
“You will not.”
“Then you do it. Arrive in the nick of time and save her, Capistrano!”
He looked at me sadly. “What’s the point? Sooner or later I’ll kill her again. I have to. It’s my destiny. I’m going to shunt down now. Will you look after my people?”
“I’ve got a tour of my own,” I reminded him.
“Of course. Of course. You can’t handle more. Just see that mine aren’t stranded. I have to go — have to—”
His hand was on his timer.
“Capis—”
He took the cognac with him when he jumped.
Gone. Extinct. A victim of suicide by timecrime. Blotted out of history’s pages. I didn’t know how to handle the situation. Suppose I went down to 1955 and prevented him from murdering his great-grandmother. He was already a nonperson in now-time; could I retroactively restore him to existence? How did the Paradox of Transit Displacement function in reverse? This was a case I had not studied. I wanted to do whatever was best for Capistrano; I also had his stranded tourists to think about.