A Matter of Time Read online

  She frowned in perplexity.

  “Ah, me manners. O’Driscol. Patrick Michael himself.... Ah, it’s not me manners. Ya sweet thing, ya don’t speak the language.”

  “I do. But do you?”

  “Ah, she’s got the tongue, don’t she, Patrick Michael? Aye, it’s the Queen’s Own Anglish I’m talking. Her Majesty just hain’t the proper use of it yet.”

  And thus O’Driscol drifted into their lives, initially as a porter helping with their baggage, and later as a guide. And later still, as a bodyguard when, quite unaware of what he had saved, he drove off three would-be robbers while Fian was carrying twenty thousand dollars.

  One morning, a year later, they went to see Fial off to his new home in Rochester.

  As the train pulled out, Fian asked, “Patrick, what’s haunting you?”

  The Irishman was forever looking over his shoulder and starting at the passage of unknown people. Hitherto, though, he had been completely uninformative about his past, except to proclaim that he came of the Kerry O’Driscols and not the Kilkenny, which made all the difference.

  Patrick glared. Then grinned. “I’m an Irishman, ain’t I?”

  “That might be explanation enough to another Irishman. Maybe even to an Englishman. But we lesser races...”

  “Ah, the Anglish. They’d know, yes, but they’d never understand. A stubborn, thick-headed race.”

  “So. Maybe you left home after some ill-starred attempt to educate them?”

  “You know the Fenians, then?”

  “No. But I understand the cantankerous nature of the human beast. You really think the Queen’s men would chase you this far?”

  “No. But there’s them here what would be pleased to lay hands on the genuine Kerry O’Driscol. Them as put down the draft laws during the recent brouhaha with the South. And there’s them from Washington City worried about what the Fenians might be planning for Canada, and them on the other side o’ the law what feels O’Driscol owes them.”

  With those points as arguments, and Patrick’s growing interest in Fiala to tilt the balance, Fian did not have a great deal of difficulty convincing O’Driscol that he should join their move west. The Irishman had lost virtually all taste for the life of a political activist.

  It was a romantic era. With no State to demand her total devotion, Fiala enjoyed a postponed adolescence. Her life became a masquerade, she a tourist enjoying a foreign time. Even Fian succumbed, somewhat, to the Mardi Gras spirit.

  Without duties or obligations, the soul was at liberty to chase butterflies of personal happiness.

  Diversion was a necessity. Two centuries could make a long, boring walk home.

  That making it was possible was beyond doubt. Fiala didn’t abandon herself completely. She researched contemporary medicine with the same intensity given play. And she quickly developed substitute rejuvenation courses that would see them into a more medically enlightened age, where the real thing could be obtained.

  Fial’s job was to twist the tail of the tiger of capitalism till it yielded up enough danegeld to finance Fian in the creation of a primitive tachyon communicator. Fian was driven by a need to warn his future, or past, of Neulist’s imbecilic actions.

  “What I’m trying to do,” he once told Fiala — she had just rendered a professional opinion, warning him that he had begun showing obsessive-compulsive tendencies — illustrating with a piece of string in which he had tied a loop, “is use the machine to snip out this backward loop, so, and have a straight line again.”

  “Too many paradoxes for me.”

  “Such as?”

  “If you were going to be successful, we would’ve gotten the message already. We wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Not necessarily. There’s still a knot in the string. Anyway, without computers, all I have to go on is intuition. My feeling is that there’s an oscillation. A duplication. Where it happens both ways. And going either way makes the other happen.”

  “Isaac Newton?”

  “Or thermodynamics.”

  But Fian erred in his topological analogy, though he was on the right track. The string and loop were too linear. He should have been thinking of a Klein bottle, where the loop could go any of a thousand directions, inside and out, and still come back to the same starting point.

  • • •

  “It’s... elegant,” Fiala decided. They were viewing the St. Louis house for the first time. “Period. Definitely period.” She descended from the carriage. Patrick helped, then ran to open the gate. She had captivated the Irishman completely.

  Fian followed with an amused smile. For Patrick’s peace of mind he pretended ignorance of what was going on.

  “It’s remote enough.” The nearest house was a quarter mile away, on the Shaw estate. “Come on, Father! Let’s see what it looks like inside.”

  “I’m glad you’re making the best of this. I never gave you much happiness before the accident.”

  “You were all right. For our times. Anyway, it’ll all get tiresome. It’s a long time to wait.”

  “Have a good time while you can, then.”

  Fian’s obsessive work on his communicator persisted for a full two decades. He was compelled, to all practical purposes, to create his own technology, and that was a challenge worthy of an Einstein. Patrick made an invaluable, if ignorant, assistant.

  Fial, from Rochester, made it all possible.

  Patrick’s eventual disappearance finally murdered the little joy left in the working vacation.

  There was nothing mysterious about it. He had found a woman interested in marrying and raising children. He hadn’t the nerve to explain in person, so just left a note.

  “And I taught him to read and write!” Fiala spat.

  “He was a good Catholic man,” her father replied. “His conscience got to bothering him. It had to happen someday. Be glad you got as much as you did.”

  Fiala would not be consoled. She had loved O’Driscol in the silly, romantic style of the time, and insisted that she was desolate. In a month, though, the hard-headed twenty-first century doctor returned and the decades with Patrick slipped into perspective. An amusing, diverting episode along the long road home. Nothing more.

  The absence of the Irishman’s perpetual optimism made itself felt in Fian’s work immediately. Fian had never realized just how much donkey work there was. But he kept plugging for another two years.

  “That’s it!” he shouted disgustedly one morning. “There’s no way to build the thing using tubes. I can’t create a pure enough vacuum. It’ll be another seventy years before I can go solid state. Fiala, I’m going home.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Prague. Just for a year or two. It’s time those coins were replaced anyway. Fial can spare the money now.”

  The new land held no more excitement for Fiala, either. “I’ll start packing. Are we going to sell the house?”

  “No. I want you to stay. You’ll be safe. Neulist could be prowling Europe like some vengeance-mad Wandering Jew. Damn. Wouldn’t it have saved a lot of trouble if that bomb had killed him?”

  The argument ran for days, but Fiala finally had to accept her fate, to remain behind.

  Thus did the lonely years begin.

  For one reason or another — his excuses always sounded good — Fian never got around to coming back. Eventually, Fiala resigned herself. He never would.

  There was the occasional lover, when she encountered a man who, like Patrick, couldn’t sense the difference about her. She tried making friends with the new people building nearby, but few of them were immune to her alienness.

  The loneliness became unspeakable for one raised in the crowded communal life of the densely populated State. It was broken only by occasional letters from Fial or her father. And those, ultimately, only depressed her more, for their loneliness leaked through their cheerful words.

  The past was indeed a foreign land.

  Maybe the Christians were on the right track. There
was a hell. And this was it.

  Over the first twenty-seven years — as long a time as she had lived in her own era — Fiala gradually forgot the thing in the back of her mind. Fian and Fial had annihilated their predecessors in the flesh within hours of reaching the new age, and she assumed hers had perished as well, though more slowly and quietly.

  She was to be unpleasantly surprised.

  The first attack came the evening of April 12, 1893, as she was about to retire.

  She barely survived.

  The thing had lain back all those years, studying, learning, abiding the opportune moment.

  After four attacks spanning the next three years, Fiala finally determined the pattern. The assaults came only when she was tired and deeply depressed.

  The Other wasn’t stupid. It wouldn’t attack when she wasn’t vulnerable....

  So many years to wait and battle for existence.

  And Fian just wouldn’t come to help.

  The woman who had been her mother’s body had died. Those who remembered Fian as a peasant had all passed away. Shortly after the turn of the century, he re-established himself at Lidice. He hoped, he explained in his letters, to have more luck contacting the Agency from that site.

  He even intended pursuing the obvious in crosstime communications by burying a warning note with the Austrian treasure.

  Fial visited occasionally during the decades straddling the century’s turn, and Fiala made several journeys to Rochester. These vacations did little but make the loneliness worse after separation. By 1914 they had restricted communication to the occasional letter.

  Populations were exploding near both homes. The St. Louis neighborhood, especially, was in the grip of a building boom. It seemed wise to retreat from public view lest too many questions be asked about their apparent agelessness.

  Fiala invested that summer in concealing Fian’s machine with a wall and beneath a new basement floor. For several months that kept her too busy and too tired to be lonely.

  An attack, a week following Fial’s final visit, came closer than ever to destroying her. Her haunt did seize control for a few minutes, driving her body into the street, where she shrieked for help in Bohemian German. Her Irish neighbors decided she was insane, but took no action.

  The thing, fortunately, had no strategy for maintaining control. Fiala fought her way back.

  Now it was she who lived in terror. The next episode, or the one following, might be her last. She was certain she could not destroy her unwanted companion. The thing had made itself invulnerable. She was much less confident of the reverse. Each assault educated the Other a little more, highlighting her weaknesses. She feared that, if it successfully supplanted her, she would suffer the fate of the spirits that once had occupied the bodies now inhabited by Fian and Fial.

  Once the Other had been an ignorant peasant girl with severely restricted horizons. Barbarically ignorant. But it was smart, savagely crafty, and making full use of its advantages.

  It had complete access to Fiala’s memories, thoughts, and emotions — while revealing none of its own. It knew what Fiala knew, could do what Fiala could do. Fiala, on the other hand, had gotten almost nothing from it since leaving Bohemia.

  One thing she did know. The need to break out, to reassert control, to extract a revenge, had driven her mind-companion completely mad.

  It was like living in the same head with a Colonel Neulist.

  And someday, if she didn’t make it home first, the Other would win the one victory it needed to reach its goals.

  XVII

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  It began to move. Monday morning Cash called his New York friend.

  “Come on, Frank. You owe me. Big. The Jackson brothers last fall? I wore out a pair of shoes on your account. Come on, don’t try to snow me. What about that bond-skipper? Branson.”

  Frank seemed to be a one-way favor man. He argued.

  “Hey, I know Rochester’s out of town. But it ain’t in Poland. I ain’t got time — or the evidence — to go through channels. And you’re my only connection back there. Why don’t you get your state police to check it?”

  Frank bitched and moaned. Cash remained adamant, going so far as to show a little temper. “Look, One-way, you owe me clear back to the Gallo War. And you’re going to want something again someday.”

  As soon as the man folded, Cash yelled, “Beth, be a darling and see if you can’t get ahold of somebody in Immigration who knows their history and record-keeping.”

  The woman materialized in his doorway. “The Groloch thing again?”

  “Yeah. Still. You look sexy this morning.”

  “Well. You’re getting frisky, old folks. Good weekend?”

  “I guess. Matthew turned up. We had a barbecue.... Yeah. It was okay. Made it to the ballgame too. I think they’re going to start winning, they keep playing that good. What’d you do?”

  “Cleaned house and watched TV.”

  “Thought you and Tony would —”

  “He had something else come up.”

  Cash thought her fiance was a first-class prick. The only time he came round was when he couldn’t get screwed anywhere else.

  “Beth?”

  “Uhn?”

  “Oh, never mind. I keep my mouth shut, I won’t have to taste my dirty sock.”

  “Oh.” She smiled weakly. “You might as well say it, Norm. Everybody else has. My mother... God. Must’ve spent an hour yesterday trying to get me to move back home. It don’t hurt anymore. Much. I know I’m a fool.”

  One more minute and the tears would start.

  “You deserve better.”

  Beth was extremely shy, and, apparently, subconsciously convinced that whatever happened to her was the result of her own shortcomings. She was extremely vulnerable to the Tony-type of predator, who knew all the right things to do and all the right things to say to snare the shy ones. He was so arrogantly self-certain that girls like Beth surrendered even while aware of what was happening. The man’s complete lack of self-doubt was, even more than his lack of concern for the feelings of others, the reason Cash loathed him. Cash envied that certitude.

  He had seen Beth get dumped on before. He had been her crying shoulder more than once. In one way she was right. It was her own fault — because she kept letting it happen.

  “Norm, I...” She took a tentative step into his office.

  He later suspected that she would have said something important and difficult for her had she been allowed the opportunity.

  It had taken her four years to feel safe enough to play their everyday game of office banter, a game she engaged in with no one else.

  Hank Railsback shattered the fragile crystal moment.

  “Norm, I got it.”

  Beth closed up like a poppy at sunset.

  “What?” Cash snapped. Hank was startled. But only momentarily.

  “A whole new angle on your damned Groloch case. I think it’s the answer.”

  “Excuse me,” said Beth. “I’ll start calling.”

  Bulwarked by anonymity and long distance, she could sometimes be a dragoness. It was too bad she couldn’t live her life via the long lines.

  “Thanks, Beth. So clue me, Hank.”

  “I got the idea watching the Bijou on four Friday night. Know something? I can’t even remember the name of that turkey now.”

  “I don’t care what it was.”

  “You don’t have to bite. What it was was, there was this private eye who had a problem something like yours. Couldn’t get the facts to add up.”

  “So?”

  “So, in the end, it turned out that the cop who supposedly found the body was really the guy who did it.”

  Cash raised a hand, asking a chance to think.

  He grinned. The rattle of his head machinery must be shaking windows throughout the building.

  Of course! Hank had to be right. Or on the right track, anyway. Not once had he bothered counterchecking the evid
ence itself. Nor had he questioned the reporting officers, nor the evidence technicians, nor the man who had done the autopsy. There was plenty of room for error or outright lying....

  “Goddamned, Hank! After all these years I’ve got to admit I was wrong about you. You just keep your genius hidden. Hey! How much pressure can I put on? Could I use a polygraph?”

  A phone rang. Beth, with receiver in hand already and another call on hold, said something neither shy nor ladylike.

  “I thought I’d dump it on the inspector’s office.”

  “My ass. This’s mine, Hank. You start the ball rolling. Soon as Beth finishes what I’ve got her on now, I’ll have her dig up the names and current shift assignments.”

  Beth called out, “Your wife, Norm.”

  “Eh?” He went to take the call at Beth’s desk.

  “Not that one. The other one. I’ve got Immigration on hold there.”

  Cash grabbed the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “What happened to the twenty thousand?” Annie asked.

  “Huh? What twenty thousand?”

  “The counterfeit money O’Brien snatched. I think you said it never turned up. I thought maybe he might have left it at Miss Groloch’s.”

  “She would’ve gotten rid of it....” The wheels were turning again.

  “She hung on to that doll. And she probably wouldn’t have known it wasn’t any good.”

  “Could be. Could be. I’ll talk it over with John.”

  Harald had been in and out at start of shift almost too fast for “Hello.” He was rushing his legwork because they had a court appearance that afternoon. Cash was to meet him in the civil courts building at one o’clock.

  Hopefully, jury selection would be complete and they would spend just the one afternoon testifying.

  “Beth, be a doll and, when you get a chance, see if you can get me a meeting with Judge Gardner during lunch.”

  She sighed into the phone she was holding. “More Groloch?”

  “Of course.”

  “You really should let go.”

  “Noway. Annie?”

  “Patiently waiting.”

  He couldn’t think of a thing more to say. Norman Cash would never win prizes as a phone conversationalist. When on he would speak his message, then wait, first nervously, then impatiently, for the other party to end it. He was completely aware of what he was doing even while doing it, yet could never smooth over with small talk. Even with a wife of half a lifetime.