Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

As he ran along the path beside the river, he was barely aware of a whistling sound, faint at first, but growing steadily louder. Finally it became so pervasive that it shocked him out of his panic and redirected his mind to the unknown, new danger. He stopped, and it seemed all around him. Vaguely he was aware that he was breathing normally, despite the fact that he was standing still, and that a breeze was chilling his sweat-soaked body.

Abruptly he was hit by a trememdous dizzy spell that brought him crashing to the ground. He tried to rise, but the nausea wracked him while the terrible whistling sound became unbearable. He was abruptly in the worst agony of his life, and it became too much to bear. He passed out.

Alfie Jenkins awoke coughing. He often did, particularly during times of heavy fog. He got up from his makeshift bed of straw and crudely fashioned wood framing. After a bit the coughing stopped, at least for a while, and he was able to take in some deep breaths and get awake. From far off, the bells tolled six, and he knew at least that his personal clock hadn’t failed him. Somehow, he always woke up at six, no matter what the previous day and night had been like.

He struggled to put on his well-worn shoes and tattered jacket that he’d found discarded in somebody’s rubbish, then pushed a bit against the board held only by one nail and peered out into the street. All clear, it looked like. He squeezed out and made certain the board fell naturally back in place. The old stable hadn’t been used in months, but it was still owned by somebody and he’d rather they not find out they had a boarder.

The neighborhood, down by the old docks, could be called a slum only by someone with extreme charity, but he knew it as an old friend and liked the fact that he felt so free and comfortable in an area where the coppers went around in pairs and most adults would avoid unless there was a bright sun on a clear day.

He ducked into an old warehouse through a broken ground-level window and heard the rats scuttling away, wary of the unknown intruder. He treated them with respect, but they didn’t particularly bother him unless one crept into his “home” and bit him in the night, as had happened.

The warehouse was as abandoned as his stable, but it had something most of the other buildings accessible to him lacked—a working pump. The thing screeched an awful racket when used, the sound reverberating through the large, empty building, but it was the one chance he took each time. In the two years he’d lived this existence he’d never been found out, and he knew more exits than any investigator could. He was good, he was, and smart, too. He hadn’t stayed long in that hole of an orphan asylum where they’d put him after his mum had died of consumption. His father, she’d said, had been a seafaring man, but he’d never known that man and never would. Mum hadn’t even been sure which of the dozen or so seamen it had been, anyway.

His life now was luxury compared to that asylum. Up at six, some cruddy mess they called porridge for breakfast, then off to the woolen factory promptly at seven. Twelve hours a day, and if you made your quota, the asylum got the two quid a week the company paid. If you didn’t, you got beaten real bad. All by stern men who seemed to really think they were doing their best for the “poor, unfortunate children.”

Well, he’d foxed them. Lit out one Sunday in the middle of church, when they couldn’t do very much. Back up to where things never changed much from when he played here as a kid. He wasn’t no kid anymore. He was past thirteen.

Finished with his drink and wash-up, he relieved himself in a corner and then scrambled back out again. Breakfast was first on his mind, thanks to old Mrs. Carter paying him a few shillings to clean up the pub from the previous night’s rowdiness. He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Carter suspected his existence or just filled in the blanks to suit herself, but he didn’t mind. They didn’t ask no questions in this area.

It was a very routine morning for Alfie Jenkins in every respect but one. Instead of the usual hustling over by the market, he had to go down to the river.

Ron Moosic could waste no time in finding that time suit. It had a lot of period money—and a pistol.

There was a strangeness about this temporal existence he now lived. For one thing, he knew intellectually that, until this morning, there had never been such a person as Alfie Jenkins, at least not the one he now was. Time had adjusted to accommodate his alien presence by creating the boy by some process not understood.

There were natural laws, Silverberg had explained, that we knew nothing about, and this appeared to be in the arcane field of probability mathematics. He had created a ripple in the time stream by appearing where he should not be, but in this case it was a backward ripple, flowing the shortest possible rearward distance to find the point where Alfie Jenkins might have been conceived or, perhaps, had been stillborn. A minor probability had been changed, and he now existed and, in fact, had now and forever afterwards always existed. But time had not been indiscriminate in its creation; it had created the first individual to fit all the time and place criteria who had the least possibility of interacting to cause a forward ripple.

There were millions of Alfie Jenkinses in the past and present and, probably, the future as well. The legions of those who might as well have never lived. But now Jenkins did live, and he was subject to the same randomness in his subsequent existence as anyone else born into this time and place and situation. There were no guarantees now, any more than Ron Moosic had had in his own life and time.

The experience, the dual personality, was odd but nonetheless clear to both parties. Alfie was Alfie, and would act and react as Alfie, but Ron Moosic was there as well, sharing Alfie’s body and his memories and sensations, although it was by no means clear that the reverse was true. Still, Alfie knew he was there and regarded him as a distinct and separate individual, one whose important and romantic mission appealed to the boy. Moosic made suggestions, but mostly he remained along for the ride, letting Alfie be himself. He knew, though, that he could take control, if he wished, simply by willing it.

The sunlight burned off some of the industrial smog, but it was still thick and ugly even in the full light of day. It was almost ten o’clock by the time Alfie had finished his chores, gotten his shilling and breakfast, and was able to be on his way. It didn’t take very long, though, to find the path and the bridge. Apparently, location was specific in this time business—the bridge was very near Alfie’s lair. Much more difficult was getting down there and doing the business unobserved. The streets, deserted in the early morning darkness, were now alive with traffic and pedestrians.

Ron Moosic took it all in with a feeling of awe. The hansom cabs clattered across the bridge, and peddlers with horse-drawn carts went this way and that. The dress styles seemed archaic, but really not that much different in the details than his own time, at least insofar as men were concerned. Women were extremely well covered from neck to ground, with most of the dresses appearing to have been made to hide almost any physical attributes.

The atmosphere was certainly big-city cosmopolitan, with lots of people of all sorts going this way and that on countless unknown errands, while the physical atmosphere was a mixture of garbage-like smells and foul industrial odors. To most, perhaps all, of the people, the sights and sounds and smells were normal and taken for granted. To Moosic, it was not at all that romantic or pleasant, despite his awe and excitement.