Borrowed Time (2 page)

“His clothes appear to be original to here and now,” Jeannie added. “Their fabric has indications it has aged substantially since its manufacture.”

The sick man in the old clothes smiled weakly at his helper, waving off further offers of assistance, and stumbled away, one hand carrying some sort of valise. If the jump mechanism was as primitive as Jeannie thought, it might in there instead of being an implant. I saw the jumper pause after several steps and look around in the fashion of someone who was unfamiliar with their surroundings. But as soon as his eyes fell on the same hotel where I was staying he headed that way as if he knew the place on sight. More strangeness. “Any idea when he’s from, Jeannie?”

“I cannot correlate the apparent age of the garments and his apparent ethnic mix with any specific uptime period which would account for his physical condition.”

“Maybe he’s from inside a closed loop.” Somewhen created by an attempted temporal intervention, and then choked off by a countervailing intervention, so it’d been but never been.

“A loop born of a late Twentieth Century full-scale nuclear war might correlate to his appearance and the apparent age of his garments.”

An ugly possibility, but that could certainly explain the man’s physical ailments. “Why would someone from that kind of loop come here?”

“Insufficient data.”

A refugee fleeing a horrible future and seeking what he thought was an idyllic rural past? That wasn’t impossible, but if so I needed to see what he was up to. An amateur messing around in my history might create any number of inadvertent interventions with big consequences down the road. If he did intend some deliberate intervention, now was an important period, but he’d picked an odd here to do it. All the Temporal Interventionists I knew of in 1918 A.D. were working in Europe or in national capitals. I’d picked 1918 myself only because the year was so well mapped for temporal jumps. Like me, though, this guy had jumped into a here where nothing of great importance had ever happened.

Except the start of the Spanish Influenza. But that’d apparently already been underway for a while. “When were the first reports of the Spanish Influenza?”

“March, 1918 A.D.”

“And he just got here. So he couldn’t have brought that germ with him and introduced it by accident.”

“Not unless he had an earlier or subsequent jump to the earlier date,” Jeannie reminded me.

Oh, yeah. But that made very little sense. Why jump back a few months, or forward a few months, in a small Kansas town in 1918? Even if jumps weren’t extremely expensive, they also involve physical stress, and my unknown traveler obviously wasn’t up to the stress of pleasure trips. Nor did wherever and whenever he came from seem wealthy enough to pony up money for jumps that frequent.

I sat down on a handy bench and thought about it, my eyes on the door to the hotel. I was still thinking when the jumper came out again, his handkerchief once again over his nose and mouth, and walked unsteadily down the street. The other hand still held the valise. I waited until he’d gone a good distance past me and then followed, ambling along as if I were talking a pleasure walk in the Kansas heat and wind and dust.

“He appears to be headed toward Fort Riley,” Jeannie advised.

“Why is an obviously physically frail man heading for the place where a lot of sick people are located?”

“Insufficient data.”

“Somehow I knew you’d say that.”

The swelling of Fort Riley’s population due to the demands of the so-called Great War had resulted in a fairly steady stream of transit between Junction City and the not-too-distant main entrance to the Fort, which far from being a stereotypical wooden stockade turned out to actually be a pretty large expanse of northeast Kansas dotted with military facilities and housing.

The jumper didn’t try to enter, instead mingling with those outside the gate. I wandered close enough to hear him asking about the epidemic. How many were sick? Had many died? Were people worried? Understandable questions, which attracted no special interest from the locals. Their replies were fairly reassuring, speaking of not as many sick as before, not too many dead, and a general feeling that the epidemic was winding down. After asking those same questions of numerous people, including soldiers heading on and off the Fort, and getting roughly the same answers from all of them, the jumper went back toward town. The whole process should’ve reassured me, except for the unmistakable depression the jumper radiated on the way back to Junction City. He didn’t seem to regard the information he’d acquired as good news.

The trip had clearly worn out the jumper, who stumbled back to the hotel. I waited for a few minutes after he’d entered, then went in myself and cornered the desk clerk. “Did a tall, skinny, pale-looking fellow just come in?”

The clerk nodded. “You just missed him. Goin’ to his room, I expect. Sickly fellow. I’d have thought he’d be better by now.”

“You’ve seen him before?”

“Yes, sir. He stayed here a few months back.”

“A few months?” I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.

“That’s right. Um, lessee, that’d have been . . . ” The clerk frowned, checked his ledger, then nodded. “February. Yes, sir. Checked in February the 26th and checked out March 5th.”

And the Spanish Influenza had first been noted around here in March. I faked a smile I didn’t feel. “That’s my friend, all right. What room did you say he was staying in?”

“I didn’t.” The clerk grinned at his own joke. “3B, sir.”

“Thank you.” Had the man jumped ahead a few months to avoid the disease he might’ve carried here? But if so, why had he seemed so morose after finding out at the Fort that the epidemic seemed to be under control? Depression over knowing he could’ve caused the deaths which had occurred already? I had too many questions to which Jeannie would only answer ‘insufficient data.’

I knocked firmly on the door to room 3B, waited a long minute, then knocked again in a way that conveyed I’d keep knocking all day if I had to do so. I heard sounds on the other side of the door, then it opened and the jumper looked cautiously out at me. “Yes?”

“Hi.” I shoved my way into the room, using some subtle unarmed fighting techniques that pushed my opponent off balance until I was inside. I shut the door and held it closed. “We need to talk.”

The jumper staggered back and held up his hands as if to ward me off. Seeing the extremities for the first time close-up, I could easily spot the swollen joints and twisted digits that marked severe arthritis. Was there anything this guy
didn’t
suffer from?

I stood still, spreading my own hands out at waist level, palms out. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then why are you here?” His voice was raspy and weak. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Asthma, too?

“I’m collecting seeds,” I informed him.

“What?”

“Really. But I’m not from here. Just like I know you’re not. And I’m not from now. Just like I know you’re not.”

It took a few moments for my statements to sink in. The man’s eyes grew bigger, then started watering heavily. He sneezed, staring at me. “You’ve been to the grain elevator?”

“Seed suppliers.”

“Uhhhh.” He staggered back again like I’d threatened him. “Wheat dust.”

Of course. “You’re allergic to wheat.” That could explain the malnutrition and anemia. The jumper stopped backing up when he reached the window, where the ever-present breeze blowing in would keep any grain dust I’d picked up from reaching him. “Do you mind telling me your name?”

“Call me John Smith.”
“Very funny.”

“That’s the only name you’re going to get.”

“Fine. Mr. Smith, I don’t know exactly when you’re from, but I have reason to believe you’ve brought a disease back to here and now.” Smith’s expression had closed down, revealing nothing. “On the Fort, Mr. Smith. I know you’re aware of it.” Smith nodded. “Why’d you make a jump from March to July? Did you think the epidemic would be over by then?” Smith didn’t answer, didn’t move. “Do they remember germ theory when you’re from?”

His face finally shifted expression, twisting into some sort of disbelief at my question. “We’re not primitive.”

“You’ve obviously suffered some . . . uh . . . problems.”

Smith grinned widely, as if I’d said something funny. “You’ve noticed that?” he rasped in that feeble voice.

“You need to go away. If you’re the vector causing this epidemic you need to isolate yourself. That’s not that hard around here. Stay there, until you’re sure you’re not a carrier.”

He nodded again. “Certainly.”

Liar. I didn’t need Jeannie’s analysis of his breathing and other external signs to know that. The answer, the agreement, had come too easily. “Why are you here? I want the truth.”

“I’m . . . seeking refuge.”

Another lie, I was certain. “A man allergic to wheat seeking refuge in twentieth century Kansas? A man with a lot of medical problems seeking refuge in a time when medicine was still very primitive?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Share them with me. Please. Or else.” I’d long ago learned that keeping threats vague allowed the recipients to imagine the worse thing they could envisage, which could easily be worse than anything I’d really do. But, if this deceitful idiot really was spreading what would become known as the Spanish Influenza, I had to bring him to his senses.

Smith took a step to one side, reaching out to grasp the handle of his valise. “Sorry,” he whispered, just about the time I remembered that the valise probably contained his jump mechanism. I hadn’t taken half a step toward him before Smith popped out of existence.

“He has jumped out of the temporal period,” Jeannie announced.

“Really?” I tamped down my irritation. “Which way did he go?”

“Uptime.”

“Can you estimate the length of the jump?”

“My calculations are very tentative, but based on the strength of the temporal pulse I would estimate the jump involved a chronological period of less than one month.”

One month. This was July. Next month was August. When three different locations would simultaneously or nearly-simultaneously experience outbreaks of a much more virulent strain of the Spanish Influenza. I remembered Smith’s unhappy reaction after he’d heard the epidemic appeared to be subsiding here and now. Maybe he hadn’t been depressed for the reasons I thought he had been. “He’s doing it on purpose. Whatever he introduced here in March isn’t doing the trick, so he’s going to set loose something a lot worse.”

Jeannie managed to follow my logic trail without having it spelled out for her. “There is a significant probability that you are correct.”

“Why would anyone do something like that?”

“Insufficient -.”

“Yeah. I know.” Smith didn’t look like a mass murderer, but I’d personally seen people as diverse as Caligula, Genghis Khan, and Adolph Hitler. None of them had ‘looked’ like mass murderers, either. I still don’t know what a mass-murderer looks like, and I’ve seen some of the worst. “Where were those three locations again? The one’s where the much more virulent strains of Spanish Influenza will pop up in August?” Jeannie recited them and I thought over my options. Boston was (for this now) a big city, filled with humans who had the same general ethnic appearance as Smith. My chances of finding Smith there were damned close to zero. Same for the city of Brest, in France.

But Freetown was another story. A much smaller town, and Smith would be a Caucasian in an African country. A Caucasian who’d be particularly easy to track down given his appearance and ailments. All I could do was hope Freetown was his first planned stop. “Jeannie, is my bank balance good enough to afford a jump to Freetown?”

“No.”

“Is my credit good enough -.”

“No.”

“Can I mortgage -.”

“No.”

“Are there -.”

“No.”

Jeannie didn’t have to read my mind. We’d had this sort of conversation before, on other jumps, and her learning subroutines were well up to the task of figuring out this was another case of my wishing for more than I could afford. I sighed and pulled out the small device that would manufacture as much local currency as I needed. Too bad the now I came from could detect the counterfeit stuff in a heartbeat. “Can here and now transportation get me to Freetown, Sierra Leone within three weeks?”

“Possibly.”

“Let’s get going.”

I bid adieu to the Kansas prairie, using plentiful amounts of local currency to bribe my way onto the next train east despite wartime travel restrictions. American east coast ports were full of ships, and a lot of those ships would be stopping at Sierra Leone. I’d wondered why it might be a good place to feed an epidemic, if that’s what Smith was doing, but it was in fact a very good place, indeed. Or a very bad place from a different perspective. Freetown was, now, the primary re-coaling site for ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean as well as those enroute other parts of the world. Just about every ship stopped there. If Smith intended having those ships take on a nasty new variant of the Spanish Influenza, it’d spread worldwide as fast as now transportation could possibly manage it.

Not that those coal-fired ships were as swift as I would’ve liked. Even while thanking providence that I didn’t have to worry about a wind-dependent sailing ship for this crossing of the Atlantic, I still had entirely too much time to think on my trip to Freetown. “Jeannie, how many people died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic?”

“Exact figures are not known.”

“What’s the estimate?”

“Twenty million dead is the low end. The high end is generally set at around forty million dead.”

Twenty million. At least. “What’s the now world population?”

“Of humans?”

“Yes.” What else? Artificial intelligence, again.

“Approximately 1.8 billion.”

I did some math in my head. One or two percent of the world’s population dead in the course of less than a year. Amazing, in a very bad way. “You told me we don’t have a vaccine for it. Why not?”