Allen Steele - ...Where Angels Fear to Thread

“You could be right,” Franc carefully replied. “Of course, it’s a little difficult for me to answer, considering that I don’t know who you are…”

“Name’s Murphy… Dr. Zack Murphy.” The stranger seemed to relax a bit. “Astrophysicist. Office of Paranormal Sciences, United States Government.”

A scientist. However, despite his extensive research of the twentieth century, Franc had never heard of the Office of Paranormal Sciences. A manifestation of this new world-line? No time to wonder about that now.

“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy,” he said, taking a cautious step forward as he held out his hand. “I assume you’ve been looking for me?”

“Well, not really, but…” Murphy raised a hand, started toward him. “You still haven’t told me…”

He hesitated just then, and for an instant Franc wondered if Murphy had a glimmer of his intentions. Then he audibly gasped, and even in the darkness Franc could tell that he was staring upward at something in the sky above.

“What the hell is…?”

That was the break he needed. Ducking his head, thrusting his arms and shoulders forward, Franc rushed Murphy.

He cleared the distance in a few quick steps. Distracted, the astrophysicist was caught entirely off-guard. Two fast, hard blows to the stomach, and he doubled over. Franc heard the breath whuff painfully from his lungs, then Murphy stumbled against him; his hands clawed at Franc’s clothes, either in a feeble effort to fight back or simply to keep from falling.

Franc wasn’t about to let him do either; he slammed a fist straight into Murphy’s jaw. There was the angry sound of tearing fabric as the other man toppled backward, and he felt cold air against his chest. Then the scientist hit the asphalt and lay still.

Now the limbs of the surrounding trees were whipping back and forth as if caught in a supernatural gale. A loud hum surrounded him, then Franc was pinioned by a bright shaft of light. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Murphy’s face—he didn’t seem much older than himself—then he turned to see a broad black oval hovering only a few meters above the ground.

Metz was in a hurry; he hadn’t lowered the landing flanges, and he hadn’t switched off the chameleon again. The light was from the open airlock hatch; Lea knelt in the hatch, extending her arm downward.

“Move it! We’ve got to get out of here!”

The wind whipped at his ripped coat; Murphy had managed to tear it when he went down. In a panic, he felt at his coat pockets; the glasses were still there. But he wasn’t done here yet…

“Hold on!” he shouted, then he stole a moment to kneel beside Murphy. Not completely unconscious, the scientist groaned softly as Franc rolled him over, but he was too groggy to offer any resistance. Franc pawed at his parka until he felt coins and heard the soft jingle of loose change. He reached into a pocket, retrieved the two dimes and one nickel that he had thoughtlessly left in the pay phone. Now the scientist had no tangible proof that he had ever encountered a chrononaut.

He started to stand up when he heard Murphy whisper something to him:

“Does… it… get any better?”

Franc knew what he meant.

“Depends what you do, my friend,” he murmured. Then he leaped up and dashed toward the waiting timeship.

7:02 P.M.

Headlights were already racing up the hill when Metz took the Oberon back into the sky. Minutes later, the timeship pierced the dense cloud layer above the Tennessee countryside. This time, there were no hostile aircraft in the sky, only the thinnest reaches of the stratosphere and, far above, the twinkling stars.

By then, Lea had taken Franc’s glasses to the library pedestal, where she downloaded the chronological figures gathered by its nanochip into the AI. She and Franc hurried into the control room, and held their breath until Metz informed them that the parameters for a successful crosstime jaunt had been established. Oberon was still wounded, but it was healing rapidly; a few orbits, and it would be capable of opening a tunnel.

“But we can’t go home.” Metz’s fingers nervously tapped the console beneath a flatscreen image of two parallel closed-time circles. “We’ll get back to our year, no question about that. But we’ll still be in a different continuum.”

“So Chronos Station won’t be there.” Lea’s voice was flat, nearly hopeless.

“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.” The pilot shrugged. “We’ll have no idea until we get there. But we can’t stay here, and don’t even consider returning to 1937…”

“I know,” Franc said. “We can’t change what we’ve already done. Not without creating another paradox, at least.”

“Sorry, but no.” Metz shook his head. “What’s done is done. We’re stuck with the results, whatever they may be.” He looked over his shoulder. “On the other hand, we could always go back to some point before 1937. Find a place to settle down in the past. A little farm in Kansas, circa 1890? A chateau in southern France around 1700? A modest vineyard in ancient Greece… ?”

“Not tempting in the very least.” Franc smiled. “It’s a new universe, to be sure, but I don’t think it’ll be all that different.” His smile became a broad grin. “In fact, we may find it surprisingly similar.”

Metz’s face was unapologetically skeptical, but Lea stared at him “What makes you think that?”

Franc absently played with the torn lining of his coat. “Only a hunch.”

Friday, January 16, 1998: 7:09 P.M.

“And you didn’t see the guy who hit you?”

“Not clearly, no.” Seated on the front bumper of the Hummer, Murphy leaned back against the grill. “I mean, it’s pretty dark…”

“I got that, but I still don’t understand why he’d just attack you.” Illuminated by the headlights, Ogilvy crouched on the road before him. “Neither do I understand what you were doing all the way up here. The sergeant at the checkpoint said you had just gone to the store for a soda. That’s a quarter mile down the road from here.”

Murphy gently touched the asphalt scrape on his forehead. It wasn’t very sore, but the motion helped hide his face. “Only wanted to stretch my legs a bit more before heading back to camp, that’s all. I hope I didn’t get your man in any trouble.”

“He’ll live.” Ogilvy glanced over his shoulder at the two soldiers searching the roadside with flashlights. “Let’s try it again. You walk all the way up here, just to stretch your legs, and when we find you, you’re beat up and lying here in the road. You say it’s because some total stranger stepped out of the woods and asked you for some spare change, and when you told him you didn’t have any, he attacked you. Then he vanishes, just like that. Have I got everything?”

“I don’t have an explanation, either.” Murphy looked the colonel straight in the eye. “Maybe he was just… I dunno. Some crazy hitchhiker. Things happen like that.”

“Right.” The colonel slowly nodded. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth?”

“That’s all there is. Honest.”

Ogilvy sighed as he stood up. “Well, whatever happened up here, it made you miss all the excitement. The yew-foh vanished. We think it lifted off.”

“Oh, shit! Really?” It was all Murphy could do to feign astonishment. “You mean it’s gone?”

“Happened about ten, fifteen minutes ago. First, it went invisible again, right under the eyes of the guys we left on the island. We heard a loud hum, then all the lights and electronic equipment went dead. Water shot up into the air where the saucer had been resting, and then… well, it was gone.”

“And you didn’t see anything?”