Up The Line

“Right.”

“All clear, then? You spend a few days at the villa resting up, and come back here half an hour from now. And then I’ll go.”

“Clear,” he said, and went down to the street to jump.

I returned to the room and resumed my melancholy vigil. At three in the morning, Jud B was back, looking like a new man. He had shaved, taken a bath or two, changed his clothes, obviously had had plenty of sleep. “Three days of rest at Metaxas’ place,” he said. “Magnifique!”

“You look great. Too great. You didn’t, perhaps, sneak off to fool around with Pulcheria?”

“The thought didn’t occur to me. But what if I had? You bastard, are you warning me to leave her alone?”

I said, “You don’t have any right to—”

“I’m you, remember? You can’t be jealous of yourself.”

“I guess you can’t,” I said. “Stupid of me.”

“Stupider of me,” he said. “I should have dropped in on her while I was there.”

“Well, now it’s my turn. I’ll put in some time on searching, then stop at the villa for rest and recuperation, and maybe have some fun with our beloved. You won’t object to that, will you?”

“Fair’s fair,” he sighed. “She’s yours as much as she’s mine.”

“Correct. When I’ve taken care of everything, I’ll get back here at — let’s see — quarter past three tonight. Got it?”

We synchronized our timetables for the 1105 end of the line to avoid discontinuities; I didn’t want to get there while he was still there, or, worse, before he had ever arrived. Then I left the i

Metaxas, bleary-eyed and stubble-faced, greeted me at the porch by asking, “Which one are you, A or B?”

“A. B’s taking over for me at the i

“Lousy,” said Metaxas. “But don’t give up hope. We’re with you all the way. Come inside and meet some old friends.”

51.

I said to them, “I’m sorry as hell to be putting you through all this trouble.”

The men I respected most in the world laughed and gri

They were frayed and grimy. They had been working hard and fruitlessly for me, and it showed. I wanted to hug all of them at once. Black Sambo, and plastic-faced Jeff Monroe, and shifty-eyed Sid Buonocore. Pappas, Kolettis, Plastiras. They had rigged a chart to mark off the places where they hadn’t found Conrad Sauerabend. The chart had a lot of marks on it.

Sam said, “Don’t worry, boy. We’ll track him down.”

“I feel so awful, making you give up free time—”

“It could have happened to any one of us,” Sam said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Sauerabend gimmicked his timer behind your back, didn’t he? How could you have prevented it?” Sam gri

“All for one,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe. “One for all.”

“You think you’re the first Courier to have a customer skip out?” Sid Buonocore asked. “Don’t be a craphead! Those timers can be rigged for manual use by anyone who understands Benchley Effect theory.”

“They never told me—”

“They don’t like to advertise it. But it happens. Five, six times a year, somebody takes a private time-trip behind his Courier’s back.”

I said, “What happens to the Courier?”

“If the Time Patrol finds out? They fire him,” said Buonocore bleakly. “What we try to do is cover for each other, before the Patrol moves in. It’s a bitch of a job, but we got to do it. I mean, if you don’t look after one of your own when he’s in trouble, who in hell will look after you?”

“Besides,” said Sam, “it makes us feel like heroes.”

I studied the chart. They had looked for Sauerabend pretty thoroughly in early Byzantium — Constantine through the second Theodosius — and they had checked out the final two centuries with equal care. Searching the middle had so far been a matter of random investigations. Sam, Buonocore, and Monroe were coming off search duty now and were going to rest; Kolettis, Plastiris, and Pappas were getting ready to go out, and they were pla

Everybody went on being very nice to me during the discussion of ways to catch Sauerabend. I felt a real sentimental glow of warmth for them. My comrades in adversity. My companions. My colleagues. The Time Musketeers. My heart expanded. I made a little speech telling them how grateful I was for all their help. They looked embarrassed and told me once again that it was a simple matter of good fellowship, the golden rule in action.

The door opened and a dusty figure stumbled in, wearing anachronistic sunglasses. Najeeb Dajani, my old tutor! He scowled, slumped down on a chair, and gestured impatiently to nobody in particular, hoping for wine.

Kolettis handed him wine. Dajani poured some of it into his hand and used it to wash the dust from his sunglasses. Then he gulped the rest.

“Mr. Dajani!” I cried. “I didn’t know they had called you in too! Listen, I want to thank you for helping—”

“You stupid prick,” said Dajani quietly. “How did I ever let you get your Courier license?”

52.

Dajani had just returned from a survey of the city in 630-650, with no luck at all. He was tired and irritated, and he obviously wasn’t happy about spending his layoff searching for somebody else’s runaway tourist.

He put out my sentimental glow in a hurry. I tried to foist on him my gratitude speech, and he said sourly, “Skip the grease job. I’m doing this because it’ll reflect badly on my capabilities as an instructor if the Patrol finds out what kind of anthropoid I let loose as a Courier. It’s my own hide I’m protecting.”

There was a nasty moment of silence. A lot of shuffling of feet and clearing of throats took place.

“That’s not very gratifying to hear,” I said to Dajani.

Buonocore said, “Don’t let him upset you, kid. Like I told you, any Courier’s tourist is likely to gimmick his timer, and—”

“I don’t refer to the loss of the tourist,” said Dajani testily. “I refer to the fact that this idiot managed to duplicate himself while trying to edit the mistake!” He gargled wine. “I forgive him for the one, but not for the other.”

“The duplication is pretty ugly,” Buonocore admitted.

“It’s a serious thing,” said Kolettis.

“Bad karma,” Sam said. “No telling how we’ll cover that one up.”

“I can’t remember a case to match,” declared Pappas.

“A messy miscalculation,” Plastiras commented.

“Look,” I said, “the duplication was an accident. I was so much in a sweat to find Sauerabend that I didn’t stop to calculate the implications of—”

“We understand,” Sam said.

“It’s a natural error, when you’re under pressure,” said Jeff Monroe.

“Could have happened to anyone,” Buonocore told me.

“A shame. A damned shame,” murmured Pappas.

I started to feel less like an important member of a close-knit fraternity, and more like a pitied halfwit nephew who can’t help leaving little puddles of mess wherever he goes. The halfwit’s uncles were trying to clean up a particularly messy mess for him, and trying to keep the halfwit serene so he wouldn’t make a worse mess.

When I realized what the real attitude of these men toward me was, I felt like calling in the Time Patrol, confessing my timecrimes, and requesting eradication. My soul shriveled. My manhood withered. I, the copulator with empresses, the seducer of secluded noblewomen, the maker of smalltalk with emperors, I, the last of the Ducases, I, the strider across mille