Glen Cook - A matter of time

"I went to the funeral for the O'Brien doppelganger. And Neulist showed up, like I said. That left me in a state, not thinking very good. Otherwise, I might have handled it differently.

"While I was out, one of the detectives got into the house. He must've lost track of time. He was still there when I got home. He left the door open a crack. Because I was upset, I was ready to be suspicious of anything. I snuck in. He was in the little west parlor going through my journals. I did a lot of them in English, to practice. He was so preoccupied that it was child's play to slip up with a hypodermic… It just didn't occur to me that I didn't have to kill him, not if I was going to run anyway. What I should've done was sedate him while I scoured the house and got out. Nobody would have believed him. But at the time I just didn't see that there was any choice."

"Okay. I understand. I don't like it, but I understand. What about the body?"

"I shipped it in a trunk again."

"I'm running out of room in the basement." He smiled weakly. "You're sure you can't be traced? The police are more sophisticated now."

"I made it as complicated as I could. I bought a railway ticket to Indianapolis. The police sergeant looked the type to think me too old-fashioned to travel any other way. Then I went to the airport. I spent the last five days hopping from Memphis to Chicago to Detroit, to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit again, Buffalo, then here. Sometimes I used the bus, the railroad, or went by plane. The luggage I sent by bus and several other shippers, skipping every other city. I used three different names and paid for everything in cash. I changed my clothes every time, and I wore wigs." She was unable to put into words the fright, the feeling of anachronism that had accompanied her every step of the way. She had kept going on sheer willpower.

"Okay. You used your head. If they can untangle that at all, it'll take a month. We'll get the jump on them in the meantime. It's time we went back to Europe anyway. The international situation is going to get nasty soon. The Chinese are going to start in. I've been getting ready for ten years, aiming for seventy-eight, just before it hit. But now is just as good.

"The route will be as complicated as yours was. We'll use four different identities. They've existed for years, and they've been leaving the necessary paper residue in the files of several governments. They'll keep on, because these people really exist. We'll eventually end up tenants on a little farm near Tirschenreuth, at the edge of the Bohemian Forest, just on the Bavarian side of the Czech border, in West Germany. We can cross over whenever we want. Hans handled the arrangments. He knows some ex-Nazis who can manage things like that. I've done them a few favors over here.

"When Hans gets back I'll have him contact his people. I'll contact my brokers in New York and tell them to start moving our money. To Beirut, not Zurich. They always look in Switzerland first these days. After that, we can leave as soon as your body is buried. For my part, I'll apparently die and be buried here. I made the arrangements a long time ago. Seemed the best way to disappear. Hans will get this place. He'll cover our backtrail."

Fial chuckled. "Now we've even got a body to put in my coffin."

"Father couldn't have done better, Fial."

"He couldn't have done as good. That's why he always left me the staff work."

For ten minutes they said little, just sipped tea and contemplated the dramatic tricks fate had played with their lives.

"Eighty-one years to go," Fial muttered. "It'll be one colossal drudge."

"And no way of knowing what we'll face when we get there. Things are so different."

"Not so much. It's our perspective and revisionist educations, more than anything. The real difference peaked around nineteen fifty. Since then history has been undergoing a normalization. It's as if the fabric had been stretched, but now it's going back to its normal shape. But, still, I sometimes wonder why we bother."

"What are we doing here, Fial? A surgeon and a physicist playing secret agents in somebody else's time."

"It's no game. Not with a crazy colonel out there somewhere, willing to shuffle history all over again. Not with Fian killed…"

"Don't forget an angry St. Louis police sergeant named Norman Cash. He'll get me if he can, Fial. He's another Neulist. You'd think the young policeman, the dead one, was his son, the way he acted toward him."

"Cash? Norman Cash? A homicide detective? From St. Louis? In Missouri?"

"United States of America, planet Earth. Yes. So?"

"Fiala, think! Christ, how bizarre is this thing going to get? Girl, there has to be a God. Not even a dynamic of historical restoration can explain this. Don't you see? He has to be Michael Cash's father. Just has to be. There couldn't be two policemen with the same job in the same city with the same name."

"You think so? Really? I never thought of it. But you might be right. His wife said they lost a son in Vietnam. Her name was Ann, and I think she said her son's name was Michael. Or Matthew…? I just never made the connection. You see how stupid I am sometimes?"

"No. You've never been that interested in history or geneology."

"Grandmother told me all those stories when I was little… About the old days, before the State… It is a coincidence as big as the Great Pyramid. But does it matter? Michael Cash would still be in China. He won't come over for years yet, will he? By then we'll be gone."

"I was thinking about his visits to Prague. But I guess you're right. It doesn't matter. Still, it gives me the queasies, having to live through the same times as these people…

"Things have changed, but history is sliding back into its old groove. It looks like the State will be born right on time. The way we learned it, with Grandma and Grandpa colluding to make it happen. What scares me is that we might still change it. One slip. Anything that would keep Cash out of Prague, or from coming here to take over at the right time…

This United States would survive. Cash wouldn't dump his Chinese allies during their Russian adventure, because he hated that man Huang for what he did to his friend. He wouldn't fix it up with the Czech leadership while the Russians and Chinese are smashing each other. Prague would remain just another capital of an occupied satellite, not the European hub of the new order…"

How critically important this one man would be, Fiala reflected. He would shape the future as surely as Adolf Hitler had shaped the past.

Yet what she had heard about him, so long ago in her own future-past, made him seem a pretty ordinary man. Not at all a megalomaniac. Her grandmother had talked about him ceaselessly.

Michael Cash's driving forces had been a neurotic love and a devouring hatred, each targeted on one woman, one man. He would become powerful only to satisfy the two emotions.

And having done so, he would abdicate…

When had a dictator ever yielded his power voluntarily? Or forbid his family to have anything to do with politics afterward?

Even his wife. And she, chairing the European Party, had been as powerful as he.

That tangled skein fled her mind.

"The doorbell," Fial observed nervously.

"Must be the man with the luggage." Fiala squirmed in her chair, unaccountably nervous herself.

She would like to meet Michael Cash sometime, while the opportunity existed. The memories of a grandmother who had passed away nearly twenty years before their translation into the past, and a father who had seen little of the man, satisfied few of the questions she had today, when she could finally recognize and understand the issues of Cash's day.

Fial had known him too, though only as a child. Maybe he would want a look from an adult perspective. Maybe he would let her tag along.