George Martin - Wild Cards

“Indeed, sir?” the valet asked. His gaze swept over them briefly and then focused somewhere on a distant spot between them. “And does everyone in the future go about disrobed?”

“Ah, well,” Croyd replied. “That’s just an effect of time travel, itself. You can’t bring anything with you. Not even clothes.”

The young man had turned around and was eyeing them with a puzzled expression that somehow seemed habitual. “Rummy, that,” he said, then added briskly, “Well, we can’t have you sporting about starkers. There must be something you can find—”

“Immediately, sir.”

“Well, fine. Fine, fine, fine.” The young man beamed at the unexpected arrivals. Nighthawk couldn’t help but feel an instinctual liking for him.

“Well, sit down and tell me all about this ‘future’ business. Or”—his expressive face suddenly took on a concerned expression—“wait a mo’ … let’s get some”—he made a helpless gesture with his hands—“you know, some, uh, before you sit, you know.”

Nighthawk understood, and shook his head at Croyd, who was about to plop his butt into the overstuffed chair. Croyd caught himself at the last moment and nodded.

“Oh, sure. Sure. Very generous of you—”

The young man shook his head, briskly. “Not at all. Not at all. I’ve been touring your country—just out of New York, Boston. Fascinating. Everyone’s been most accommodating. Least I can do to help out you chaps. And from the future you say! Extraordinary!”

The valet had been piling up articles of clothing from both a dresser drawer and the wardrobe, and he approached Nighthawk and Croyd with an armload. The young man’s face fell as he handed the items over. “Not the new checked suits!” he said. “I just got those in New York.”

“I know, sir,” the valet said imperturbably. “I feel they will serve these gentlemen more suitably.”

Nighthawk thought he could detect something of a note of relief in his voice as he handed the suits over. Nighthawk understood. They were not exactly his style, either.

“Ah, well,” the young man said, shrugging. “Needs must, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir,” his man said. He watched critically as Nighthawk and Croyd dressed. “I’m afraid, sirs, that the fit is not perfect. The young master is taller—”

“That’s all right,” Nighthawk said. “We’ll make do.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was something in this man, Nighthawk perceived, something that bound him to the younger man who was so generous and, well, naive was probably a kind word, with cords of loyalty and protectiveness that went deep into the soul. He nodded, and the valet nodded back.

“So,” the young Britisher said eagerly as they dressed, “tell me all about the future.”

“Well—” Croyd began. He and Nighthawk exchanged glances. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Croyd finally said.

“We can’t say much,” Nighthawk explained, “on the chance that you can use your knowledge to change history.”

The Englishman looked crestfallen. “That’s a bit of a disappointment.”

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Croyd said.

“Yes?” the young man said eagerly.

“Don’t trust Hitler. And another thing—whatever you do, don’t visit New York City on September 15, 1946. It’ll be very dangerous on that day.”

“Well, thanks awfully for the warning.”

“You bet,” Croyd said. He and Nighthawk looked at each other. “Well, time to go save the world. Thanks for everything.”

“Certainly. Good luck, chaps.”

Croyd paused. “One last thing.”

“Yes?”

“Could you loan us a twenty?”

The young man shook his head as he reached for his wallet. “I say,” he said, “they’ll never believe this at the Drones Club.”

“So how does this temporal tracking ability of yours actually work?” Nighthawk asked Croyd as they went down the hotel corridor, heading for the elevator.

“I kind of see those displaced in time as blips on the temporal landscape,” Croyd said. “Sort of like a radar screen. I can’t tell who they are and it’s hard to say how many are in a given location, especially since we’re dealing with a relatively small number of people.”

“Seems like enough to me,” Nighthawk said. “And the actual place where they landed is, essentially, the same place they left?”

They stopped at the elevator bank and punched the button for the lobby.

“Well, most times anyway. I suppose. Actually, I really haven’t sent too many people back in time. Just that pigeon. Oh, and an alley cat when I first woke up. It seems like a pretty useful power, but, really, how often would the necessity for using it come up?”

Great, Nighthawk thought. Our temporal expert seems to be groping around as much as I am. The elevator arrived and Croyd and Nighthawk got on. The car was empty except for its operator, a tall, young black man in Palmer House livery. Seeing him took Nighthawk back through a hundred and forty–some years of memory to a time when he, too, wore the Palmer House uniform, when he worked at the hotel that stood on this very spot, before the Great Chicago Fire. Memories flooded into his mind and he clamped down on them and sent them away to where he kept them, hidden, but never forgotten.

“Floor, please,” the young man said.

“Lobby,” Croyd said.

“So,” Nighthawk said as the door closed, “whoever we’re after—”

Croyd looked at him and nodded. “Would have ended up—”

Nighthawk shook his head, his eyes shifting to the elevator operator who stood in front of him. “Say,” he said, “any strange things happen in the hotel, lately?”

“Mister,” the operator said without turning around, “strange stuff is always happening around here. You’d be surprised.”

Actually, Nighthawk thought, he wouldn’t. “Like what?” he asked.

“Well—” He thought for a moment. “Couple of weeks ago this crazy white man broke into a room, somehow, naked as a jaybird. He—”

The operator glanced back over his shoulder, catching Croyd’s eye. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no,” Croyd said. “This is fascinating. Do you know what he looked like?”

“Well, he was kind of, uh, stocky, I guess you could say.” He paused for a moment. “And he had a funny haircut for a grown man. You know, like that Buster Brown in the comic strip.”

Croyd and Nighthawk looked at each other.

“Charlie Flowers,” they said simultaneously.

A bell dinged as the elevator stopped.

“Your floor, sirs,” the young man said.

The air on the Chicago street was cool and crisp with the tang of early autumn. It was as crowded a street as any Nighthawk had walked down during the twenty-first century and perhaps even noisier. But he’d forgotten the old smell of the city. It all came back to him in a sudden rush when they left the Palmer House lobby.

“What’s that smell?” Croyd asked, wrinkling his nose.

Nighthawk waved at the street. “Horse manure.”

Horse-drawn carts and carriages were still battling the automobile for supremacy on the streets of Chicago. It was a losing fight, but there were enough of the old-fashioned conveyances that the distinctive sweet tang of horseshit still lingered on the air. They stepped into the flow of the foot traffic and let it carry them down the street until they came upon a café that had a few tables set out on the sidewalk as well as inside.