Sea of Tranquility(50)

2


Gaspery walked around the side of the house, and in the shadows at the base of a weeping willow, he stood staring at his device for a moment. A message pulsed softly on the screen: Return. He had exhausted the limits of his itinerary. The only possible destination was home. For just a moment he entertained a wild notion of staying here in 1918, burying his device in the garden and cutting his tracker out of his arm, taking his chances in the flu pandemic and trying to find some kind of life for himself in a foreign world, but even as he thought this he was already entering the code, he was already leaving, and when he opened his eyes in the harsh light of the Time Institute, he was unsurprised to see the figures gathered there, the men and women in black uniforms waiting with weapons drawn. What was surprising, though, was that Olive Llewellyn’s publicist was standing next to Ephrem. They were the only two out of uniform.

“Aretta?”

“Hello, Gaspery,” she said.

“Stay where you are, please,” Ephrem said. “There’s no need to leave the machine.” His hands were clasped behind his back. Gaspery stayed where he was. At the back of the room—he had to crane his neck to see around the black uniforms—Zoey was being restrained by two men.

“I never guessed,” Gaspery said, to Aretta.

“That’s because I’m competent at my job,” Aretta said. “I don’t go around telling people I’m a time traveler.”

“That’s fair.” Gaspery felt a little unhinged. “I’m sorry,” he said to Zoey. “I’m sorry I tricked you.” But she was already being escorted from the room, the door closing behind her.

“You tricked her?” Ephrem asked.

“I told her I was going to 1918 as part of the investigation. I was really there to try to save Edwin St. Andrew from dying in an insane asylum.”

“Seriously, Gaspery? Yet another crime? Does someone have an updated bio?”

Aretta was frowning at her device. “Updated bio,” she said. “Thirty-five days after Gaspery’s visit, Edwin St. Andrew died in the 1918 flu pandemic.”

“Isn’t that the same bio?” Ephrem reached for her device, read for a moment, then handed it back with a sigh. “If you hadn’t changed the time line,” he said to Gaspery, “he still would’ve died of the flu, just forty-eight hours later and in an insane asylum. You see how pointless that was?”

“You’re missing the point,” Gaspery said.

“That’s very possible.” Were there tears in Ephrem’s eyes? He looked tired and strained. A man who’d preferred being an arborist; a man in a difficult position, doing a difficult job. “Is there anything you’d like to say?”

“Are we at last words already, Ephrem?”

“Well, last words in this century,” Ephrem said. “Last words on the moon. I’m afraid you’ll be traveling some distance and not returning.”

“Can you take care of my cat?” Gaspery asked.

Ephrem blinked.

“Yes, Gaspery, I’ll take care of your cat.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything else?”

“I’d do it again,” Gaspery said. “I wouldn’t even hesitate.”

Ephrem sighed. “Good to know.” He’d been holding a glass bottle behind his back. He raised it now, and misted something in Gaspery’s face. There was a sweet scent, a dimming of the lights, then Gaspery’s legs were giving way—





3


   —as he faded out, he had an impression that Ephrem had stepped into the machine behind him—





4


—Two gunshots, in quick succession—

Footsteps, a man running away—

Gaspery was in a tunnel. Light at either end, not just light but snow—

No, not a tunnel, an overpass. He could smell the exhaust of twentieth-century cars. He was very sleepy, from whatever he’d just been misted with. His back was to the embankment.

Ephrem was there too, calm and efficient in his dark suit. “I’m sorry, Gaspery,” he said softly, his breath warm in Gaspery’s ear. “I really am.” He plucked Gaspery’s device from his hand and replaced it with something hard and cold and much heavier—

A gun. Gaspery looked at it, curious, and the running man—the shooter, he realized dimly—disappeared, scrambling away and out of sight. Ephrem was gone too, a passing ghost. The air was cold.

He heard a soft groan near his feet. It was difficult for Gaspery to stay awake. His eyes kept closing. But he saw two men lying nearby, two men whose blood was seeping across the concrete, and one of them was staring directly at him. There was clear confusion in the man’s stare—Who are you? Where did you come from?—but he’d passed beyond speaking, and as Gaspery watched, the light left his eyes. Gaspery was alone under an expressway with two dead men. He nodded off, just for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he was staring at the gun in his hand, and the pieces of the puzzle were drifting together. It’s possible to get lost in time, Zoey had said, in a different century. Why go to the bother of incarcerating a man for life on the moon, when that man can be sent elsewhere, framed, and imprisoned at someone else’s expense?