Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (10 page)

The Austrian went on, with a gesture towards a neat pile of Manse’s folded clothing and the contents of his pockets and wallet:

“Plus, of course, there are your clothes and documents.”

And my communicator in that watch, dammit. Aren’t Austrians supposed to be a bit sloppy?
You
certainly aren’t, Freiherr von Starnberg, even if you’re a dead ringer for Graf Bobby’s sidekick. You had me stripped right down to the skin and separated from everything I carried down to belly-button lint.

As if to prove Everard’s judgment of his capacity, the baron went on: “None of them
quite
what they should be, even the American passport. Money in a denomination which doesn’t exist, printed with the name of the Austrian Republic . . . which, almighty Lord God be thanked, does not exist either. You were accompanied by a most attractive young lady showing enough leg that she would have been arrested in any city in Europe, except possibly Paris or Bucharest, who then disappeared into thin air on that remarkable vehicle. And the
pièce de résistance
, this.”

He lifted a cloth and Manse’s stunner lay beneath it. The smooth, neutral-brown curved shape was splashed with lead from the bullet that had smashed it out of his hand, but still fully functional; you could drive a tank over it, and it would still look like a minimalist sketch of a pistol with a pointed projection cone where the muzzle should be.

“Whatever this is, it knocks men or horses or dogs unconscious for a quarter hour at up to a hundred meters, and renders them helpless at twice that distance. It is uncannily accurate, soundless, has no recoil, weighs less than a pound and is made from something that cannot be scratched by diamonds or penetrated by X-rays. According to Privatdozent Herzfeld at the university here—”

“Damned Jew,” the German muttered.

“Yes, but a very, very clever Jew, Horst. They are often extremely useful that way. And he says this—” he prodded the stunner with a finger “—is an absurdity, but that if it did exist it would function by some impossible focusing of high-frequency sounds, probably. He was quite angry with us until he realized it wasn’t a joke, and even angrier when we took it away again before he could study it further. So, Herr Everard. You tell us . . . what are you, exactly? Where are you from? The world of the future, perhaps, in the manner of the Englishman Wells?”

A jolt of alarm; the Austrian wasn’t joking, and he thought the Turk at least was taking the possibility seriously as well. He wouldn’t have bet against the German either, but the man seemed to have only one expression, a snarl.

“Or Mars? No, not Mars, I have checked and current thought is that Mars is uninhabitable.”

The German grinned unpleasantly. “Wherever he’s from, he arrived in a manner he didn’t anticipate. Or he wouldn’t be here now. Something went wrong for him.”

Manse looked him in the eye. “I am someone who can turn a minor nation into a Great Power,” he said . . . in Turkish.

Existence focused down to a needlepoint. The pale blue eyes of the taciturn Ottoman flared, the pupils opening until they almost swallowed the iris; the other two gave sudden sharp glances at him and at Manse.

Scar-face there didn’t get any of that. I don’t think von Starnberg understood it either, or not all of it. And Mustafa got it perfectly and is thinking hard. This can’t be a happy alliance.

“German, Herr Everard,” the Austrian said. “Or English, or French. What was that . . . something about power?”

“The American said that his country was also a Great Power,” Mustafa said in a neutral tone.

“If he is an American,” the German growled. “When I was in German South-West Africa and Tanganyika and Tsingtao, I learned how to make lying pigdogs eager to speak the truth.”

“Horst, Horst, perhaps
you
should go to America, to Hollywood.”

“What?” the German said, puzzled.

“To act in their movies, playing the stereotypical Prussian Brute,” the Austrian said, and waved a placating hand when the man sputtered. “Please. To business. Herr Everard?”

“I’m an engineer,” Manse said calmly.

It was even true; at least, he’d been in the Army Engineers in the Second World War, and an engineering consultant after it . . . until he answered a very odd help wanted ad.

“The pistol and dimensional motorcycle are inventions of mine,” he said calmly. “As Captain von Stumm noted, the motorcycle malfunctioned.”

He didn’t really expect to be believed. Just having a story gave him somewhere to start, though. The questions hammered at him after that; he was drenched in sweat by the time they finished, not from inventing plausible lies but simply from making the ones he used consistent. Several times he thought the German was going to come around the table and use the riding crop on him, or his fists.

And the good Baron von Starnberg is just as ruthless, under that veneer of Viennese good-humor,
Manse thought, as the guards shoved him out at the point of their machine-pistols and marched him back to his cell. This time two of them came in and stood watching him, weapons ready. After a few hours they were replaced by Germans, though those stuck to the corridor outside, evidently on the theory that if any were in the room he could somehow jump them and get their guns. Time ticked by . . .

But I’ve got to get out of here. The Turk understood me. The question is, can he do anything about it?

V:

Vienna/Colorado/Munich/Vienna

He’s there.
Or at least the sonic stunner and the communicator in his watch are,
Wanda thought.

She dialed the magnifying optic and it automatically stepped up the light. A medium-sized flat-roofed building currently being used as offices, with guards outside the entrances—military, not police, and in three different types of uniforms. The scanner couldn’t get a precise fix on the instruments, not at this range, and any lower and the timecycle could be seen from the ground. She’d had to dodge a couple of biplanes already.

Time to take a closer look, on foot.

The problem with
that
was her clothes; she couldn’t pass for a local, or anything acceptable, dressed as she was. A quick check had showed that nobody here was showing more than an inch of ankle, not even the hookers. What they were wearing during the daytime looked like a jacket or tunic, a long narrow tubular skirt, feathered hats and broad cloth belts slung at hip-height, with various accoutrements. Her shoes would definitely pass, but nothing else she was wearing—and her short hair was going to be conspicuous too. Evidently girls wore theirs long and down or braided, and women had it long and done up with pins and combs under the floppy-brimmed hats. She didn’t know whether that was because things had changed differently here, or because older fashions hadn’t changed as quickly as in her Jazz Age.

Wanda sighed; there was nothing she could do about the hair but wait six months of time she didn’t have. There was a way to solve the clothes problem, but she didn’t like it. Her money was worthless here, but her stunner worked perfectly. Still . . .

You’re going to wipe out this entire world
, she told herself.
Be realistic! A painless mugging is no huhu.

A spin of the magnifying optical screen, and she picked a woman walking through the dusk down a fairly narrow street. Clothes not too shabby and not too new, height and build about like hers; that took a while, because she was a full three inches taller than the female average around here-and-now. Then an instant transition to an alley, and she was waiting.

“
Tut mir sehr leid, meine Liebe, ich brauch’ das jetzt dringender als du,
” she called.

“What?” the woman said, turning, her eyes going wide at the strange dress.

Then she gave a little shriek at the sight of the stunner, so like a gun at first glance.

My need is greater than thine, lady,
Wanda thought, and pressed the stun.

A quick bound and she caught the slumping figure of the young woman before she struck the ground, and a grunt of effort as she pulled her back into the alley and slung her across the rear seat of the timecycle. A touch of the controls, and they were in a meadow in the Rockies, in a stretch of summer high noon ten thousand years ago. A quick jump had shown the meadow wouldn’t be bothered by sabertooths, paleo-Indians, or grizzlies in the next few hours.

Getting the clothes off a totally limp body was more difficult that she’d expected;
dressing
a totally limp body in her own outfit was even more of a struggle. When she had the new clothes on she walked around to accustom herself, and cursed the way the narrow skirt wrapped around her legs; if she had to run, she’d need to rip it off. A sudden thought struck her.

“Do I have to take her back to nineteen twenty-six, mark, II? That world’s going to blink out of existence. It’s sort of like dropping her in a volcano.”

It was one thing for Deirdre van Sarawak to outlive the history that had produced her; she’d had a place to go and someone to look after her. And anyway Piet had rescued her on impulse when Manse snatched him out of captivity, in a future in which Carthage had won the Punic Wars thanks to a couple of ambitious Neldorians with energy rifles hiring on with Hannibal. This poor woman . . .

I can’t just take her back. It’s personal. I picked her just because we have about the same dress size! Dammit, that doesn’t make sense but it’s the way I feel.

Wanda transferred her belongings to the unconscious woman’s purse, all but some jewelry she’d had along, then turned the thong of her own around the snoring figure’s wrist. They should fetch the equivalent of ten or fifteen thousand dollars anywhere in the earlier twentieth century; and even in Central Europe in those days you just didn’t need much in the way of identity documents.

It’s the best I can do; if you keep your mouth shut you won’t end up in the booby hatch right away, you’ve got a stake. Or maybe the Patrol can retroactively pick you up a minute after this and fix something for you. I was right when I joined up, I’m
not
cut out to be a time-cop. Mammoths and sabertooths I can do. Offing someone I can’t, not unless it’s self-defense. Not face to face, not even this way.

She studied the menus, and did another hop; this time to a quiet, leafy upper-class suburb of Munich in August of 1910, just before dawn and well before the change-point. The woman was beginning to come to as Wanda tipped her onto a wealthy family’s lawn and blinked out of existence.

Vienna again, and a park not far from the building where Manse was being held. It was a governmental district, quiet after dark, but well-patrolled. She stepped off the timecycle and touched her watch; the nanoscale controls slaved to the communicator sent the vehicle skyward, hovering invisibly on antigrav until she summoned it. Closer, closer . . . people were walking by outside the building, giving the guards curious looks; evidently that wasn’t standard. The soldiers carried rifles with fixed bayonets and their noncoms had machine-pistols; they were older than your average farmboy conscript, and looked harder-faced and more alert, probably some sort of special brute squad.

Wanda bought a copy of the
Reichpost
. The newsboy gave her a curious glance when she waved away the change from a
krone
coin, and then a delighted grin when he realized she was serious, and thanked her with a thickly accented
danke
and a sentence in some Slavic language.

The paper gave her something to hold up as she sat on a bench across the street. The little machine built into her watch could project a pseudo-screen in the air in front of her, but that would be just a
bit
conspicuous without camouflage. Right now, and at this distance, it showed Manse’s stunner and his communicator, like hers concealed in a watch. They were close together, probably no more than a few feet, and neither was moving.

She waited an hour while the sun fell and the streetlamps came on, reading the paper to keep the fear at bay, the knowledge that the world around her and herself and Manse could—very well might—just
stop
at any instant. That it would bring Monica back and that the Van Sarawaks would take good care of her was some consolation, but not much.

In the paper . . .

The Three Emperors were meeting
to consolidate the peace of the Middle European and Near Eastern zone
; the editorial writer solemnly assured his readers that this grouping was the pillar of world order and progress. Kaiser Wilhelm was present, plus Emperor (and King of Hungary) Franz Ferdinand, and Mehmed VI Vahid ed-din of the Ottoman Empire, as well as what the editorial page called an ‘unspeakable rabble’ of Balkan leaders, subordinate puppets and satellites from the sound of it.

The British Prime Minister Lord Milner was reported to be considering lifting martial law in Ireland if there were no more outrages; Russia was in the middle of something more than riots but a little less than a civil war that had been going on for years, and the Reichpost was not-so-quietly happy about the way it defused the “Pan-Slav menace.”

Bolivia and Paraguay were fighting over some stretch of scrub; the Austrian government had granted the Grand Cross of the Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen to the President of Mexico, who was called Félix Díaz Velasco and was continuing the
wise and stable policies of his predecessors Victoriano Huerta and his great uncle Porfirio Diaz
; someone she’d never heard of named Andrew Mellon was President of the US; the new Emperor of China, Yuan Keilang, was at loggerheads with the British-backed Japanese; there was a list of scheduled airship flights that included New York, Rio, Dar es-Salam, and Singapore among their destinations . . .

There it goes!

The stunner and the communicator were moving away from each other, at walking pace. The communicator was moving towards a room on the third floor, the top floor of the floridly neo-Baroque building. Manse would have been working to bust the situation loose, and once things started to shift she had a chance.

Wanda slipped the display into her purse and rose, dropping the paper on the bench. A wintry keenness filled her as she walked back towards the park. No need for much caution; this wasn’t a history the Patrol wanted to preserve.