Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

This was, after all, the London of Sherlock Holmes, of Disraeli and Gladstone, Victoria and the British Empire near the height of its glory. Holmes might not really be here, but Doyle was, somewhere, and probably Wilde, perhaps Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Robert Browning. Winston Churchill was a year old; Albert Einstein, whose work would eventually lead to Moosic being where he was, hadn’t even been born yet.

And in nine days, up in the northwest part of the city, at 41 Maitland Park Crescent, Karl Marx would be returning home from the continent.

There was simply no way to gain access to the bridge in broad daylight, so he abandoned it for now and allowed Alfie to have his own way. The boy was a streetwise thief, panhandler, and hustler of the first order. He was well known to a number of people of all ages from the docks up to Whitechapel, and he wasn’t the only young boy working the streets. Moosic watched with growing admiration as the boy hustled anyone who looked like a soft touch, slickly grabbing an apple from a fruit stand almost in full view of the suspicious and nasty-looking proprietor, and getting a few pennies for helping a vegetable merchant bring out more stock.

It was an active, and educational, day for the time traveler, a day that would normally not have ended with darkness but did this time. Alfie went back to his “digs” to catch a catnap, knowing that he had to get down to that bridge when things quieted down once more.

It was not, in fact, until the bells chimed two that he risked going back down there. The fog had closed in even more, making sight almost totally useless, which was fine for Moosic and all right with Alfie, too. He didn’t need to see much in this neighborhood. Only the boy’s occasional coughing spasms caused any problems at all.

Getting down to the right spot was no problem, and even though occasional boat whistles could be heard as the commerce of a big city continued, there was no chance anyone could see him down there in this fog. The river helped, of course, to make it so dense. Away from here, in the better neighborhoods, it was probably rather pleasant.

Alfie, however, was not Ron Moosic. The suit was extremely heavy, and it seemed as if he was never going to be able to haul it up and close. Going into the water was out of the question; Alfie couldn’t swim, and Moosic was not all that certain he could manage the boy’s unfamiliar frame. Still, he was almost willing to take the chance after repeated tries to pull the suit in had failed.

Finally, though, with one last mighty effort, the boy managed a mighty heave and the helmet broke the surface. It still took some tying-off of the rope and a lot of breathers before it was within his grasp.

Quickly the seals were broken and he removed the precious pouch from the outside. The pocket was then reclosed and sealed, and the suit eased back into the water once more, where it sank quickly from sight.

Alfie hurried now, clutching the precious cache with both hands, and made it back to his hiding place in no time. Although he was nearly done in by the night’s work, both he and Moosic were not about to nod back off without seeing the contents of the pouch.

“Cor!” Alfie swore as he looked at the most familiar of the contents. “It’s a bloomin’ fortune!”

Well, it wasn’t that, but it was the amount of pre-1875 notes they could round up on short notice. Fortunately, this period was one of those in which some research project was ongoing, and they had accumulated a small store of such material to help with the work. While very little from the future could go back and remain unchanged, things could be brought forward, including currency. Then, as now, a little ageless gold or gems could be converted into cash rather easily in London.

There was, in fact, more than two hundred pounds in the pouch, mostly in small bills. That was a year’s wages to many in this period of time, and men had been killed for far less. Additionally, there was a small map of London of the period and a short dossier on what was known of Marx and his neighborhood and friends. There was also a small .32 caliber pistol of the era, along with a box of twenty-five cartridges.

Alfie was almost overcome with the sight of all that money, more than he had ever seen in his whole life or expected to see. The pistol provided an almost equal thrill, one that Moosic wasn’t sure he liked. Still, the boy was exhausted from his night’s work and finally succumbed to sleep.

Moosic abandoned any ideas of tracking down the two fugitives ahead of time. Just being Alfie had convinced him of the futility of that task. He used the time well, though, first making some judicious purchases to get the boy in better clothes. There was really no way for a thirteen-year-old to take a room at a hotel or rooming house without arousing suspicion, and Alfie’s manners and dialect were a dead giveaway that no cover story could be really convincing. There was something to remaining cautious and, particularly, not arousing suspicion at the sight of sudden wealth. In his neighborhood, it would have meant death; in the better ones, it would raise questions as to its source. Still, by using the small bills one at a time and never showing the money in the same place, it was convertible. Far more so, in fact, than if he’d had no money at all to work with.

Sandoval and his girlfriend had nothing of this sort when they had traveled back to this time and place. That put him a jump ahead.

There was also the advantage that no one really took much notice of a young cleanly dressed man when he boarded the horse-drawn omnibuses or walked through various neighborhoods by day.

Forty-one Maitland Park Crescent, N.W., was easy to find with the map and some exploration. It was a nondescript three-story, gray frame house—Moosic thought it Victorian, until he realized the ridiculousness of that term in 1875—that was, nonetheless, a large and comfortable single dwelling in a peaceful, middle-class neighborhood. Moosic was enough of a cynic to think that this was one of the ironies of the founders of Communism. Somewhere in Britain, Engels, the millionaire industrialist, was financing the Communist movement while living what could only be thought of by a twentieth-century mind as the Playboy philosophy. Marx, the middle-class German, descendant of a line of rabbis, college-educated and devoted to intellectual pursuits, lived in a house the London proletariat could only dream about, although it was certainly no mansion and no luxurious abode in any sense of that word, and took frequent trips to Karlsbad to take the mineral bath “cure” far beyond the means of the working man.

Later, this man’s work would be modified by the upper-middle-class born and bred Russian son of a school superintendent who would call himself Lenin and the upper-middle-class librarian in Hunan, Mao Tse Tung.

These men all sincerely believed they were revolutionizing the world for the poorest and the most downtrodden of humanity. Marx, who loved children as a group and class of their own, had been horrified by the child labor and the terrible factory conditions. They had all been, at least to some extent, and Marx totally, devoted to removing the mass of the proletariat from these inhuman, near-slavery conditions.

Let them spend more than a week in the body and mind and existence of Alfie Jenkins, Moosic thought sourly. It would make them all more dedicated than ever to their goals, certainly, but perhaps it would also add true understanding of just what it was like to be the lowest of the low in a class-oriented society. That had been the basic problem and the reason for the perversion of the noble ideals of men like Marx, after all. It was an intellectual problem, or a problem dealt with out of guilt in the way many rich men became champions of the poor, but these were human beings in the individual sense as well as the faceless “masses.” How could they know, or really understand, what it was like to be an Alfie Jenkins?