Connie Willis - All Clear

“We must go, Viola,” Hunter said urgently. “The theater could go up any moment.”

Of course, the gas. One of the stretcher-bearers’ hobnailed boots will scrape against the iron leg of a seat, and the gas will explode in a fireball and envelop us all.

Including Hunter, who stayed behind to try to help me.

She had to get away from him. Perhaps if he wasn’t near her or the stretcher when the theater went up, he’d only be injured. “I’m all right. I can walk on my own,”

she said, and struck out away from him across the tangle of seats, going as quickly as she could with one shoe and one bare foot.

“Careful, slow down!” Hunter called behind her. “You’ll fall.”

She clambered across a row of seats and over a mahogany railing. The men carrying the stretcher were halfway across the theater, the bottle of plasma held aloft like a lantern.

Polly stepped down onto what had been a wall, painted with masks of Comedy and Tragedy. She glanced back at Hunter. He was only a few steps behind her.

Go away, she thought frantically, hobbling across Tragedy, across Comedy, I’m deadly, and her single heel went through the plaster, all the way up to her ankle.

She fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“What happened?” Hunter said, and before she could warn him to keep away, he jumped down beside her and helped her to stand. “Are you hurt?”

“No, my foot—”

“I need some help here!” Hunter called after the stretcher-bearers. “She’s—”

“No,” Polly said. “You need to leave me here and go fetch a crowbar.” But he was already on one knee beside her, pulling on her ankle.

“The heel’s caught,” he said. “Can you pull your foot out of the shoe?”

No, she thought, twisting around to look at the stretcher. The rescue crew nearly had it to the opening. The explosion would come any moment. Hunter wouldn’t have time to make it out, even if he left her now.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

And he must have thought she was talking about the shoe because he said, “No matter. We’ll just have to get you out, shoe and all.” He reached his hand down through the ragged-edged plaster and fumbled with her foot. “I told you you’d get into trouble clambering about an incident in high heels, though all in all, it’s a very good thing you did.”

No, it isn’t, she thought bitterly. I got you all killed. She turned to take one last look at Sir Godfrey and the men carrying the stretcher, but they weren’t there.

“Where?” she said, and heard voices shouting, doors slamming, a motor starting up.

The ambulance, she thought. They’re transporting him to hospital.

The ambulance roared off, bells ringing. Which meant Sir Godfrey was still alive. And the rescue crew was still alive. The theater hadn’t gone up.

“They made it out,” she murmured, unable to take it in.

Hunter looked up briefly from struggling with her foot. “Good. He should be right as rain once they get him to hospital and get him stitched up. You should be proud. You saved his life.”

Like Mike saved Hardy’s life, she thought. And Eileen kept Alf and Binnie from going on the City of Benares.

“It was clever, you stopping up that hole with your clothes,” Hunter was saying. “If you hadn’t found him and known what to do, he’d have been for it.”

It’s true, she thought. If she hadn’t caught her heel and bent down to free it, she’d never have heard him calling. And if she hadn’t been wearing these shoes, her heel wouldn’t have caught.

“For want of a shoe,” she murmured, and had a sudden vision of Mike saying, “If I hadn’t come through when I did, I wouldn’t have missed the bus and been stuck in Saltram-on-Sea, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep on the Commander’s boat …”

And if I hadn’t gone to the Works Board to volunteer to be an ambulance driver, I wouldn’t have been assigned to ENSA, I wouldn’t have been performing at the Alhambra …

“Try to move your foot back and forth,” Hunter said. “That’s it.” He reached his arm down deeper. “Keep moving it. I’ve nearly got it free.”

She nodded absently, thinking, If Mrs. Sentry hadn’t seen me in A Christmas Carol, she wouldn’t have assigned me to ENSA.

But why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it kept her from being here the way it had kept Mike from getting to Dover, the way it had kept her and Eileen and Mike from reaching Mr. Bartholomew the night of the twenty-ninth?

Mike pushed two firemen out of the way of a collapsing wall that night, Polly thought suddenly. And Eileen saved someone’s life, too. The man in the ambulance.

And Binnie had been driving. Binnie, whom Eileen had nursed through pneumonia.

Why, if the past had sealed itself off to repair the damage Mike had caused, hadn’t it stopped Eileen from saving that bombing victim’s life? A hundred and sixty people had been killed the night of the twenty-ninth. It would have been easy to kill Mike and Eileen and her, too. Or to let them find John Bartholomew and go back to Oxford.

If they’d gone back, they wouldn’t have been here to further complicate things. She wouldn’t have been able to save Sir Godfrey, and Eileen wouldn’t have been able to save the man in the ambulance. And Eileen had had John Bartholomew in her sights. She’d run after him.

But Alf and Binnie had kept her from catching him. Alf and Binnie, whom Eileen had kept from going on the City of Benares.

“Got it,” Hunter said, and her heel, and foot, came abruptly loose.

She nearly fell. “Are you all right?” he asked, steadying her.

“Yes,” she said, righting herself and pulling her foot up out of the broken plaster, annoyed that he had interrupted her train of thought. What had she …? Alf and Binnie. They’d kept Eileen from catching John Bartholomew—

“Is your ankle injured?”

“No.” She set out across the wreckage again so he’d stop talking, so he wouldn’t break the fragile thread of thought she was following. If Alf and Binnie hadn’t kept Eileen from catching John Bartholomew …

They kept her from going back to Oxford the last day of her assignment, too, Polly thought, by getting the measles. If Alf hadn’t fallen ill, Eileen wouldn’t have been caught by the quarantine, and she wouldn’t have been there to take them back to London and keep the letter from Mrs. Hodbin. And if the net had sent Mike through on the right day, he would have been able to catch the bus to Dover, and he would never have ended up in Dunkirk, never have ended up saving Hardy.

And if the net had sent me through at six in the morning instead of the evening, I wouldn’t have been caught out during a raid and ended up at St. George’s. I wouldn’t have met Sir Godfrey.

But the slippage was supposed to prevent historians from altering events. It was supposed to—

“Wrong way,” Hunter said, taking her arm.

“What?”

“You can’t get out that way. It’s blocked. Through here,” he said, leading her over a fallen pillar and down a broken staircase. “That’s it, only a few more steps.”

“What did you say?” Polly asked him, pulling back against his hand on her arm, trying to make him stop.

“I said, ‘only a few more steps.’ We’re nearly there.”

“No, before that,” she said. “You said—”But they were down the stairs and out of the theater and he was handing her over to two FANYs.

“She needs to be taken to hospital,” Hunter said. “Possible internal injuries and exposure to gas. She’s a bit muddled.”

“Over here!” a man in a helmet called from across the street, and Hunter started toward him.

“Wait!” Polly called after him.

She had nearly had it, the knowledge which had been hovering just out of reach since he’d told her she’d saved Sir Godfrey’s life. “I need to speak to him,” she said to the FANYs, but he was already gone, she was already being wrapped in a blanket, being bundled into the back of an ambulance. “I need to ask him—”