The Probability Broach (7 page)

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Authors: L. Neil Smith

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BOOK: The Probability Broach
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At long last a fancy scrollwork signpost announced PLACE d’EDMOND GENET. My stomach tightened, my mouth went dry. Who
was
this other Edward Bear?
All of a sudden a 747 was trying to land on my back! I whirled; a long black hovercraft tore down the street, coming my way
fast.
It bellowed, riding a tornado as other drivers bumped up over the sidewalk, swerved and slid to avoid being hit. Six feet above the ground, the monster covered blocks in seconds, sending a hideous roar ahead and a shower of sparks. Bullets sang around my head.
I leaped a low hedge and rolled, thankful I’d reloaded the forty-one. Pain throbbed through my exhausted body; muscles screamed and cuts reopened. Crouching, I pumped six heavy slugs into the hovercraft, but on it flew, never hesitating. Dimly aware that my hand was bleeding again, I wrestled the automatic free from my coat and thumbed the hammer back, jerking the trigger again and again as the machine slid crazily around the corner. It was like a dream where nothing you do has any effect. Bullets whistled, tearing leaves and branches, plucking at my hair. The slide locked back on the Browning—empty.
Dipping and weaving more from fear and pain than strategy, I thrust both weapons into my coat and twisted, running, tearing at my hip for the derringer. A house rose huge before me, “626” embossed in foot-high characters on its broad garage door. I ran that endless curving drive as bullet-shredded paving stung my ankles. Halfway there, as if on cue, the door began to rise. Would I die, trapped in a garage like that miserable soul on Emerson Street—what?—only yesterday?
Ragged holes began appearing in the door, an erratic hemstitch working in my direction. I swam toward it in slow motion as the hovercraft, guns blazing, started up the drive.
My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in
front
of me! The bottom edge rose past me as I fought to clear the derringer, bring it to bear for its one pitiable shot. No strength to pull the hammer back … the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.
 
“Reach for the sky, hombres!” Red Cloud levelled his trusty Rogers & Spencers at the desperados, thumbs ratcheting back the hammers, loud in the sudden, dust-filled silence.
“It’s the Marshall!” their leader exclaimed. No mask could disguise the voice of Max Goldstein, alias “The Colorado Kid.” “That varmint was hiding in the luggage boot all along!”
“Right you are, Kid,” Red Cloud winked assuringly at Hua Chong, the pretty new schoolmarm. “You brigands have robbed your last steamcoach—now you’ll answer to the Nevada Pinkertons!”
—Ted van Roosevelt
The Steamcoach Pillagers
 
Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.
“Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.
A fuzzy shadow loomed over me. “Great molten muskets! Look at
these!”
“Don’t jog my elbow, Lucy!” A masculine voice, and somehow familiar. “You’re in Clarissa’s light!”
“She’s right, though,” the first voice said. “Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning
gray!”
“Radiation or old age?”
“Neither, Ed.” It was the first voice again, worried. “But you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him”—
plink
!
plink!—
“he’d be gone in another ten years.”
Plink!
I’d heard that sound before, watching buckshot pulled from a prisoner after a liquor-store holdup. I’d have resented the conversation that went with it this time, but the agony made everything else seem trivial. “Lucy! There’s no response to somasthesia. Give it another notch!”
“Right … Any luck?”
“We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”
“What painkillers?”
I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.
“Take it easy, friend,” the male voice said. “You’ll be all right—won’t he, Clarissa?” Even out of focus, he reminded me of somebody.
“Yes, yes, you will.”
“Shucks, sonny, you’re not missing any
important
parts!” It was an old lady. She leaned over me and winked.
“That’s g-good news …” A whispery croak was all I could manage. “The pain …”
“I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy,
electrosleep—
out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”
“Sure thing, honey, Anything else?”
“Yes,” the male voice said. “Check the ’com again. If that Frontenac comes back, I want a crack at it!”
“Have to beat
me
to the draw, kiddo! You see what
used
to be my front windows?” She gestured menacingly with a huge handgun. “Wish I’d thought to go for their boiler!” Her voice trailed off as she left, muttering to herself.
“So do I,” he answered under his breath. “Clarissa, is it all right for him to talk … just take it slowly? Who are you? What’s this all about?”
I tried to clear my vision. The guy looked enough like me to get drafted in my place. “Win Bear … Lieutenant, Denver—used to be a city, sixty miles south. Only it’s
gone!
Blown to—” I stopped, breathing heavily against withering pain. “I’m, well, from the past—a time traveler!”
He frowned perplexedly. Nothing was wrong with my vision. I could make out every hair in his bushy, very familiar eyebrows. “Friend, sixty miles south of
here,
there’s only Saint Charles Town. Been there, oh, 125 years. Nothing but buffalo before that.”
That queer cold chill I felt had nothing to do with bullet wounds. “But I was born there. That’s where I Labor in the Vineyards, pushing back—” I started wretching, gasping, and sank back, too exhausted to finish.
This was it. I’d been booby-trapped, blown up, machine-gunned, and on top of it all, run face-first into a garage door. By some circumstance not bearing close examination, I was alive. But evidently some of my marbles hadn’t made the trip with me. I knew this guy: the other Edward Bear. If this wasn’t the future, where the hell was I?
Lucy came back, her horse pistol shrunken to snubbie proportions. Clarissa gave her a nod. Before I could protest, she shoved the little gun against my neck—“This oughta do the job!”—and pulled the trigger.
 
The muzzle was still cool on the side of my neck. I turned. “Lucy, how you’ve changed!” Standing over me was a breathtaking peaches-and-cream blonde, perhaps thirty, hazel eyes—when she smiled, the corners crinkled like she meant it—and an ever so slightly upturned nose. She wore a bright-red coverall with a circled white cross embroidered on the left shoulder.
The wall seemed one huge window opening into a honey-colored meadow and purple columbines. Maybe a mile away an evergreen forest fronted foothills and the ghostly peaks of the Rockies. The illusion was spoiled by a door through the wall and the railed top of a staircase. Television? A beautiful job. I could almost smell the sage.
The rest of the room contained the bed I was in, a wall-length bookcase beneath a pair of real windows—sunshine, treetops—and one of the ten most gorgeous women in whatever world this was. I took a deep breath, found the pain completely gone, and tried sitting up.
“Hold on, Lieutenant! You’re not quite ready for that!” The lady dimpled, pushing me back gently. “How do you feel?”
“I guess I’ll do, at that. Is this a hospital?”
“You want to get
really
sick? A
hospital,
indeed! I almost believe you are a time traveler as you claimed last night.”
“What else did I say? Hope I had enough sense to make an improper suggestion or two
your
way.”
“You’re a ‘Man from the Past,’ from a city that’s never existed. Otherwise you were quite gentlemanly, all things considered.”
“Too bad. So this is what the subtitles call ‘The Next Morning.’ And you—”
“Clarissa Olson, Certified Healer—
your
Healer, if you want.” Dimples again. “Anything else we’ll decide after you’re up and around.”
“In that case, I think I’ll go on living for a while. When
will
I be up and around?”
“Well, you’re healing pretty slowly. You were gradually dying of malnutrition: deficiencies in the nitrilosides, lecithin, ascorbic acid; a dozen degenerative diseases I’ve only
read
about. But as that clears up, your wounds will knit faster. Day after tomorrow—at least for a brief walkaround?”
“Where I come from, bullet holes take a lot longer than that to heal up! This has
gotta
be the future … or heaven, if you’ll pardon my getting personal.”
She smiled tolerantly. “Persist with this time-travel business and you’ll need something stronger than what’s in my bag over there!”
“I could do with something stronger, about eighty proof in a tall glass. Forget time travel. Let’s talk about bullet holes, and how come mine don’t seem to be terminal.”
She crossed the room; I enjoyed watching her do it. “Here’s your explanation.” Two plastic-covered masses, overflowing with shredded fiber. “That’s why there was enough of you left for me to work on.” I recognized the tattered remains of my Kevlar body armor. Someone had driven a tank over it while something red and squishy was inside. “Whatever this contraption is, it saved your life.”
“That’s what it’s for. Sort of forgot I had it on. But it wasn’t designed for machine guns. How many times was I hit?”
She frowned. “I removed—you really want to hear this?—okay, perhaps a dozen bullets, mostly fragments. And fiber. This vest was practically
stitched
into you. We had trouble cutting it off.”
“That’s a relief!” I risked a peek under the covers. “I thought you’d cut off something a little more valuable—at least to me.”
She indicated the cast on my left arm. “You have a shattered wrist and fractured humerus. The shoulder blade itself and the collarbone are in bad shape, but they’ll heal. Your right arm, I don’t see how they managed to miss. You should see Ed’s garage door!”
“And his mother’s windows?”
“His what? No, Lucy—Lucy Kropotkin—is Ed’s next-door neighbor. She’d be flattered, though. She thinks a lot of Ed.”
“And so do you, apparently. I’m hurt to the quick.”
I won’t say she actually blushed. She’s one of those naturally pink types you don’t dare take home to Father. “Yes, I do. He’s the real reason you’re still alive. He drove off your attackers.”
“I was elsewhere at the time. You want to tell me about it?”
“Well,” she answered, “just about the time the shooting started, Ed was on the Telecom. He’d been at it all morning, clearing things for his first real vacation in years …”
 
 
ONE FREEMAN K. BERTRAM of Paratronics, Ltd, had a problem: someone had gotten away from a company warehouse, laden with a half-ton of valuable parts and equipment, despite a dozen of Securitech’s best plus an alarm system worth thousands of ounces.
Ed might not be the best-known consulting detective in the land, nor the most highly paid, but he was clearly headed in that direction at an age most North Americans considered young. There were more clients than he really had time for, and although he’d worked for Paratronics, Ltd. before, and this sounded interesting, plenty of schedule-juggling had gone into shaking three vacation weeks loose. With several hundred ounces already to his credit at Mulligan’s Bank and Grill and a brand-new Neova convertible waiting in the garage, come law or high water, Ed was heading for Leadville’s summer sun and man-made snow, business be hanged.
Could he recommend another operative, suggest security-tightening measures? Ordinarily, even this advice would cost plenty. Bertram’s stereo image sulked until his lower lip threatened to fall right out of the screen. He wasn’t used to taking no for an answer or having his gold turned down, but what could he do? Bertram made notes and promised to call back at the end of the month.
Connection finally broken, Ed started toward the garage, following his suitcases. Locking his skis on the squat little hull, he levered himself into the cockpit. The garage door ground slowly upward: for the twentieth time that week he—
Abruptly there was a hair-raising metallic chatter. Something else wrong with the door? Or the sportscraft? A glance at the instruments: no, wheels were down and locked under the flaring skirt, fans idling gently; thrusters waited silently in their nacelles for a take-off ramp somewhere along the Greenway.
He killed the engine and climbed out. Beneath the half-open door, a baggily clad form ran toward him then slammed violently into the slowly rising panel. Spots of sunlight pierced the door as a brilliant dotted line raced toward Ed. The Neova’s windows disintegrated as he dived, flinging back his sportcloak for the .375 on his hip. The shadow, faceless against outdoor light, slumped and fell in a pool of splattered blood.
A huge Frontenac steamer crabslipped up the driveway, bullets streaming. Ed pulled the trigger. Heavy slugs spat toward the steamer—five! six!—and silenced its machine gun. He thumbed the selector and ripped through the rest of his magazine, fountaining metal and glass from the black machine in three-shot bursts. It fishtailed clumsily across the lawn and limped away.
“Death and Taxes!
What was
that
about?” Enter a frail-looking elderly woman, .50 caliber Gabbet Fairfax smoking in her hand. She clutched her bathrobe together, shoving the monstrous weapon into a pocket, where it hung dangerously.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lucy.” Ed swapped magazines and holstered his gun, cautiously approaching the inert figure lying in the doorway. “Give me a hand. This fellow’s badly hurt!” He gently rolled the body over and looked down. At
himself.
 
“YOU WERE IN nasty shape when I arrived,” Clarissa finished, “blood loss, concussion, bruises all over. You also had a hairline fracture of the right large toe.” First chance to show off my Tae Kwon Do, and I’d blown it. All at once, the whole of yesterday came trickling back, half-forgotten in my surprise at being alive.
Funny, you resign yourself to dying and it’s almost annoying when it doesn’t come off on schedule. I’d been through the process three times in the last twenty-four hours, and I knew. A Kevlar vest may keep your ticket from being punched, but it won’t spare you the bullet’s energy—just distributes it. I was lucky.
Which brought me up short. That guy in the laboratory corridor was cold meat. The one I’d pistol-whipped—where was my Smith & Wesson?—would have a broken cheekbone, possibly a punctured lung. Others, who can tell? There wasn’t time for counting coup. One confirmed, uncounted possibles. Not my first time …
 
I’D RUN OUT of cigarettes about 2 A.M., pulled pants on over pajama bottoms, and strolled over to one of those little twenty-four-hour groceries with inflated prices and lonely teenage clerks. Only this one wasn’t lonely—not with a .25 automatic pressed against her temple. He stood well away, gun arm fully extended, prancing nervously as he watched her shove small bills into a wrinkled paper bag, preparing herself for death.
You’re a cop around the clock. On my own time, I carried a beat-up .45 S & W sawed off to three inches. The door stood open, ten yards away—I didn’t dare get closer. I knelt, braced my hands on the rear corner of his ’57 Chevy, and pulled the trigger. She screamed for thirty minutes. When the coroner cut the stocking mask away, half the bandit’s head came with it. But his gun had never gone off: he’d forgotten to shuck one into the chamber.
Stupidity is a capital offense.
When Evelyn and I were first married, we’d picnic up in the foothills, west of Denver—lushly green in springtime, yellow-gold in the high-country summer, and absolutely brim-full of rattlers. We never went without that old .45. Guess I wasted dozens of nasty things before I got too old and fat for hiking.
Many a cop sees thirty years without firing a shot in anger, others quit cold after their first. You’d be surprised how often. Some few start enjoying it, but we try to weed them out—too bad the feds don’t follow the same policy. I was surprised how I felt: like shooting those rattlesnakes. The world was cleaner, safer. Not much, but a little. I hadn’t liked doing it any more than, say, washing dishes, but I’d do it again. I’m not for capital punishment, a useless, stupid ritual, degrading to everyone involved—
except
at the scene and moment of the crime, preferably at the hands of the intended victim.
Rattlesnakes with machine guns. Wish I’d aimed for their goddamned boiler too.
 
EXPLAINING TO CLARISSA how I’d ended up in her competent hands was difficult. I didn’t really know. I was fairly confident I wasn’t bananas: I could remember the first house I’d ever lived in, the name of my second-grade teacher, what I wore at my wedding—all the nuts and bolts. Somebody
was
persecuting me, but I had the persecution marks to prove it.
This
was
northern Colorado. Out my second-floor bedroom window, I could see Horsetooth Mountain, an unmistakable Fort Collins landmark. I could reel off everything that had happened, from the moment the investigation began at Sixteenth and Gaylord, to the moment the bad-guys done me dirt at the corner of Genet and Tabor. But according to my shapely physician, today was Thursday, July 9, 211 A.L. After reflecting, she added that A.L. stands for
Anno Liberatis.
“That’s something, anyway. Mind if I asked what
happened
two hundred and eleven years ago?”
Clarissa shook her head in bewilderment. “But how can you
not
know? That’s when the thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Britain. Every schoolchild knows—”
“Maybe I need to go back to school. Let’s see … 1987, minus 211 … six, seven, seven, one—You’re right! July Fourth, 1776! Obvious!”
She sadly shook her head again. “No, it was the
Second
of July—firecrackers, rockets, guns firing into the air … Lee and Adams—”
“July second—rings a bell somehow. Well, set it aside a minute. Now tell me
where
we are: this city of yours doesn’t amount to a wide spot in the road, where I come from.”
She shook her head a third time. It was becoming a habit. “Win, I’ll be what help I can, even it if means playing silly games. Laporte is a
very
wide spot indeed. One of the largest cities in the North American Confederacy. In—”
“Hold it!
Confederacy?
Let me think—who won the Civil War?”
“Civil War?” she blinked—at least it was a change from headshaking. “You can’t mean this country, unless you count the Whiskey—”
“I mean the War Between the States—tariffs and slavery, Lee and Grant, Lincoln and Jefferson Davis? 1861 to 1865. Lincoln gets killed at the end—very sad.”
Clarissa
looked very sad,
systematic delusions
written all over her face. “Win, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In the first place, slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., very peaceably, thanks to Thomas Jefferson—”

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