Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

“You all right?” Lucia asked Herb, but he was lying on his side, fumbling with his belt.

“Everybody—jump now! Home! Don’t wait! Lucia— punch out anybody who can’t do it themselves, dead or alive!”

Somebody ran to Dawn, punched in a set of numbers, and pressed the “Home” key.

She was falling downtime.

“The plot all along,” Chung Lind commented, “was the capture of the squad’s belts, that’s clear. And in spite of knowing we were set up, we almost fell into that trap.”

“My fault,” Herb said flatly. “I just got overconfident, that’s all. They must have been on the rooftops around the square all the time. As soon as we picked an exit route, they moved to seal off the far end of that street. It was a clever setup, I got to admit. If Nicky and Lucia had obeyed orders and jumped, we’d all be happy little citizens of Prussia right now.”

“Or dead,” Faouma added. “It was doubly lucky that they were all set to stun instead of kill.”

“Not so much luck there,” Lind responded. “They could have their cake and eat it, too. Get the belts, keep the scan on tight, then come back and pick you all up in your Trier identities and take you forward on their belts. In any case, they couldn’t risk a killing beam for fear of destroying those belts. It was close.”

“You’ll never know how close,” Nicky told them. “There were two of us and four of them. When the woman gave the orders to stun, I told Lucia on the personal band we’d better move in. We just figured that they’d stun the squad, so they couldn’t bring their own weapons back up on us. We just did a wide spray and prayed for the best.”

Chung Lind sighed. “Well, enough recriminations. History is composed of a series of lucky breaks, and this one was ours. The point is, they have the capacity to stage this again and again. The next time might be different. The only way to be secure is to turn the tables on them.”

“You got a line on who that woman was?” Herb asked them all.

Everybody shrugged or shook their heads. “Never seen or heard of her before. They’ve let Benoni run a one-man show up to now,” Nicky said.

“I don’t like it,” Lind told them. “Up to now, we’ve been pretty secure, believing that they didn’t have sufficient power to mount two simultaneous teams or the expertise to handle them. Well, now we know we were wrong. Makes me worry what else we don’t know.”

Lind’s attention turned now to Dawn. “Are you O.K.?”

She nodded. “I think so. I thought we were gone for sure there, though. Half of me couldn’t move. It was like I had nothing below my stomach at all.”

“Partial stun effect,” Herb told her. “We all got it. Faouma was out cold. It wears off, though—like it did with our friend Marx.”

She looked at Lind. “It’s O.K., then?”

He nodded. “The loop’s closed. Marx will live and do his major work. I admit the irony that we just accomplished something which, in the long run, will strengthen the enemy and prolong the war, but it was necessary. We’ve bought several years of absolute time to continue our work, and time is pretty much back on its original mainline track. Everybody relax and get some rest. We’ve got a lot of work to do yet, and I want you all fresh and ready to go.”

Dawn sought out Doc and asked about the children, whom she didn’t see.

“They’re uptime, under guidance,” the physician told her. “Don’t worry about them. They’re safe and secure.”

“I—I may not even know them when they’re through this. It worries me.”

“You and I know it’s the only way. Get some rest now, and we’ll close that second loop tomorrow.”

“Uh—Doc?”

“Yes?”

“I’m worried. I—I don’t know, I just am. Killing that man back there—I wanted to do it, and I don’t really understand why.”

Kahwalini sighed and sat down beside her. “Long ago I told you that none of the people I’ve been are dead. They’re all still here, locked in my mind, a part of me in some way or another. We forget it, because we no longer feel it. They’re not separate anymore, and maybe it’s only small parts of them, but they’re there. You didn’t know him, but a little bit of Ron did, a little bit of hate born of what he’d seen that man do. Now it’s over. Mission accomplished. Now you can sleep.”

But she couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the killing anymore, not really. She could understand at least the basics of what Doc told her, and accepted it. No, it was lying there in the permanent darkness, feeling very alone. Ron was gone, and would never be back. Any last remnants of him had been purged by the killing of Sandoval. She didn’t have to have it proved to her—she felt it. He, through her, had finally done his job, and there was no more reason for him to exist except as a memory in her mind.

Doc, however, for all her wisdom and genius, couldn’t really understand the basic problem now. Maybe Kahwalini had been somebody like her once upon a time, but, if so, it was a long time ago. Doc was strong, and smart— somebody who made things happen. She, Dawn, was not, and could never be.

The world was made up of survivors and victims, she thought glumly. She wasn’t a victim—at least, she didn’t think she was, in the sense of personality—but survivors survived in different ways. Doc, Herb, Lind, Nicky, Lucia, Faouma—they survived by being tough, by being leaders. Ron had been a leader-type, and that’s what had made him strong.

She wasn’t really strong, she knew, no matter what she’d just gone through. She’d done it because she had to, but she did have to have it forced on her. She survived through others, and that wasn’t all that bad. She survived to be a companion, a lover, to Ron. She survived for the sake of the children. She wanted to keep surviving.

Now Ron was gone, and the children were being lost to her. She couldn’t do anything more for them. When Alfie escaped, then they would try to prevent it from happening at all. Supposedly, they had a better chance of doing that because of what they were doing now, but she really didn’t try to understand it anymore.

Win or lose, the next few days would be the end of what purpose she still had, what need she could fill. No matter what happened, she would be alone then, and she couldn’t stand to be alone…

Rescuing Alfie was not as simple as it had first appeared. To start with, she had to get down to that bridge where the time suit was anchored and haul it up, and she had to do it all herself. Not one of the squad could afford to travel in this particular time frame, which was one reason why Eric had chosen it for his test.

The suit was incredibly heavy, and large even for her. Still, she remembered all the instructions, first removing the huge, bulky power pack from the rear backpack and carrying it back and letting it drop into the Thames. Time was crucial now, for once the suit’s residual power was exhausted, a matter of only a few minutes, it would cease to exist.

Quickly she snapped in the new power pack, a small and light plant similar to the ones used on the belts with framing and contacts made so that it would fit into the power pack bracket in the suit and provide the necessary juice.

It worked fine, and, as a side effect, it made the suit far lighter, although no less bulky. She wondered how she could both be somebody entirely different yet recognized as the same person by the suit, but while she’d had many explanations, she knew she’d never get it straight.

Because she was not in phase, she was not subject to assimilation and its limitations. First she reset the suit controls the way they’d instructed her, then carefully drew it to her, using an extender device to wrap around the suit, connected on both sides to her time belt. In a sense, it was an extra belt just for the suit, but controlled and managed by her belt’s microprocessor.