Jack Chalker - Downtiming the Night Side

“That’s it, then,” Lind sighed. “There is no sign anyone left before dark, so that’s when and where we’ll hit them. It was an ideal location for them, and it makes an ideal location for us. Almost no locals in the area, few cops—quiet. Doc, I hate to ask it of you, but it’s all yours now. Be careful.”

Kahwalini nodded and turned to Dawn. “Come. Let’s go back and talk this over.” They went back to her office.

“Dawn,” Doc said carefully, “now is the time to think a little about not only this but what comes next. Louis is already uptime with the agents, as Jerry Brune, a laid-off steelworker. I’ll be going up just before the raid, to handle the stakeout on Cline’s apartment. If she gets spooked, we hope she’ll make for her belt, and that will turn the tables.”

“You think Eric is in that house, as somebody else?”

She nodded. “We think so. We’ve accounted for all four radicals, and there is a fifth person in the house, a middle-aged man with one leg who walks on crutches but never comes outside. We think that’s Eric.”

“So I’m not really needed.”

“Except as an observer, somebody there at the start who should be there at the end, no. I was thinking, though, that for better or worse this would be an ideal place for you to go trip. No use putting it off, and you’re more use to everyone, including yourself, in one whole piece.”

There was really no reason not to, but she resisted the idea. “You know what I’ll become there.”

Doc nodded. “It’s too set a pattern to really change. Why does it bother you now?”

“Because I was out of it for so long. I’ve been a person now for a long time, and now you want me to go back to being… merchandise.”

“I don’t want it. But it’s that, over which we have at least some control, or one of the others, or the edge. That’s it. What can it do except give you a new and better body?”

And a new mind, she thought sourly. “You said you could control it. What do you mean?”

“I mean we can at least select as optimal a situation as events allow. You can be young and attractive. There will be tradeoffs, but it won’t be Hell.”

“I guess the Almighty computer has already run it through.”

She nodded. “It isn’t possible to get specifics, because you’ve had too many wild card jumps, but we do our best. That’ll mean putting you away from the action, to start; so we’ll insert you early. Once you’re inserted, we’ll know who and where you are. One of us, either Louis or I, will get you before it all blows open and bring you down, so keep your belt where you can grab it in a hurry. If we catch anybody, we’ll bring them back here. Even if we don’t, I’ll have to stay around a couple of days to cover up the situation and pay off the agents. You trip at approximately seventeen days, four hours. We’re going to insert to trip you on the fourteenth, so it’ll be over by then. Then we can come back here and talk about what happens next.”

“I wish I could see the children one last time.”

“I wish so, too, but it’s not working out. At least, after, you’ll have two good eyes to see them.”

Yeah, she thought— but will they still be my children?

Probably not, she knew, even if they were now. She felt suddenly very old, very used up. There was no more use righting, because the decisions really had already been made. “O.K.,” she said, “let’s get the belt and do it.”

“Now?” Even Doc was surprised by that.

“Now—or never. If I have to think about it, I’ll go nuts, and if I start dwelling on it, I might commit suicide. Let’s go. Let’s get it over and done with.”

“All right,” Doc said, went out for a moment and then came back with a belt. She handed it to Dawn, who put it on. “Now, a few things you should know in advance and remember. First, the ‘Home’ key is keyed to the old location, as before. Use plus eighteen hundred for the period, use one hundred eighty for the latitude and three hundred sixty for the longitude. If you forget, I’ll remind you.”

“I won’t forget. I don’t think so, anyway. Anything else?”

“You’ll come out in Washington, so don’t panic. As I say, we’ll make sure you’re picked up in time. There are more choices in D.C. than in the southern Maryland sticks. Also, it’s less likely for the enemy to pick you up if you’re outside the area. They’ll be concentrating there, and so we all are coming out elsewhere and getting down the hard way. And don’t worry so much. You have my personal promise—you haven’t run out of choices yet;”

“O.K., Doc. Here goes.” She pressed the activation button and fell uptime. The circle was becoming completed.

Her name was Holly Feathers, and she was seventeen years old, but while most girls her age were preparing to graduate from high school and going on heavy dates, Holly was a very experienced seventeen.

She’d been born last in a three-child family, the first two of which were boys. Her dad used to be a steelworker in Pittsburgh, but he’d lost his job both to the cuts in the industry and to heavy drinking, and after that they just sort of drifted around, with him going from one part of the country to another in search of work, hauling them along because he’d long ago lost the house and run the bank account dry.

All this was while she was very small, so she had no memory of the better times in the past. All she knew was that they seemed to be constantly moving around, almost living in an antique Chevy, her old man grabbing a job here, a job there, but never the kind you could hold for a while. Her mother just seemed to tune out the world, doing a lot of Bible reading and pretending like nothing else was wrong.

Often, after she’d grown into womanhood, her father would get drunk and take her off somewhere and undress her and, well, do things. When she didn’t want to, he would often beat her or slap her around. Her brothers were wild, and no protection at all. One of them wound up doing five to twenty in Kansas or somewhere for robbery.

She had some schooling, but because of the situation and the constant moving around, it hadn’t done much good. Oh, she could write her name in a childish block-print way, and get through a basic menu or maybe Dr. Seuss, but that was about all. She had no real skills, either, and except for helping out on some picking jobs in harvest seasons, she’d never really done much of anything.

What she was was pretty, almost classically so, even dressed in worn-out sandals, dirty tee shin, and over-patched jeans. At five foot two with big green eyes and long reddish-brown hair, a nearly perfect figure with an almost impossibly narrow waist, olive skin, and a big, wide, but sensuous mouth, she was, as her father said, “something else.”

When she was fifteen, she got pregnant—and got a bad whipping from her father, as if it was her fault instead of his. Panicky, he’d taken her to a back alley abortionist who almost killed her. When she wound up hemorrhaging and got rushed to an emergency room, they determined that the fetus was gone all right, but it was no longer possible after they repaired the damage for her to have children ever again.

To her surprise, her mother visited her in the hospital, looking ancient and terrible. She gave her some money, more money than she thought they had. “Take it and go,” her mother told her. “He’s already scarred you, child. Don’t make me bury you.”

So she found her shirt and jeans and dirty, worn sandals, the first two cleaned by the hospital, and she sneaked out of the place, got down to the bus station, and bought a ticket to Washington, not because it was anyplace she knew but because it was the nearest big city to West Virginia she knew on the destination list.