human and very ordinary and yet unexpectedly warm, no longer a symbol or a stiff historical photograph,
but real. The discomfort seemed irrational, but somehow very human in and of itself. We do not expect our myths and our symbols to be ordinary people. He crossed the street and went around the block, coming back to his inconspicuous stakeout spot diagonally across the street. He was aware that he'd taken a chance now, since anyone else watching the house might well recognize that the same boy had just gone to some lengths to wind up in the same spot as he'd started, but he was only mildly concerned. The quarries had no reason to believe that they were being stalked. As far as they knew, their confederates had destroyed the other suits, even if later taken. The luggage was inside now, the cabbie paid, and the hansom cab, pulled by a gray sorrel, went on down the street and back into the mainstream of London traffic. It grew dark as he continued his watch, but still no one had passed who seemed inordinately interested in the house or its occupants. Still, he was certain they would come tonight—at least one of them, anyway. Their time was quickly running out, and having been dealt the unexpected ten-day delay, they could not afford to miss him by chanc-ing a meeting the next day. The twenty-first was a Tuesday, and certainly Marx, who'd been out of the country for a couple of months, would have many errands and catch-ups to do, perhaps a multitude of visitors and appointments. If Marx was indeed their quarry, and they still had their wits and will about them, they had barely thirty-six hours to do whatever they had gone to all this trouble to do. He was getting tired, though, and getting resigned to the idea that he would have to get some sleep if he were to resume the stakeout the next day, when a horse and wagon came up the street. The gas lamps were far apart in the block, but as the wagon passed by, he stared at the driver, a rumpled-looking man of middle-age dressed in well-worn and baggy gray coat and trousers. He appeared to be some kind of street peddler, although what, if anything, the wagon contained was not clear, and he was certainly nondescript, although a bit out of place in this neighbor-hood at this time of night. Still, he would have rated only a passing glance, except for the fact that he had come by twenty minutes or so earlier from the same direction.
The man in the wagon had circled the block. The first time through, Moosic hadn't paid him any more attention than any of the others, although Maitland was short and off the main track and hadn't had a huge amount of traffic, but he still remembered him.
Beyond a few local residents, a strolling bobby, and the lamplighter, there hadn't been much foot traffic, either, but just as the man with the wagon reached the end and turned right out of sight, another figure came from that direction and began walking up the street. She was a plain-looking and weary woman with short-cropped hair and a long, light blue dress that had obvi-ously been patched almost to death—obviously a woman of the lower class. A factory seamstress, or perhaps a hired cleaning woman for one of the houses—that would be about the highest she could have been. Her age was indeterminate, anywhere from eighteen to the mid-thirties. It was that kind of face and walk.
Concealed in the shadows and by the bushes of Number 38 Maitland, he remained unseen to her, but his eyes fol-lowed her intently. As she walked past Number 41, she paused for a moment and looked at the house, then around the street. His heart quickened, and, almost without thinking, he guided his hand to the revolver in his bag.
After a moment, she continued to walk up the street to the other end, young eyes with far too much knowledge in them tracing her way. He knew what he expected next, and waited for it. It took the man with the cart only ten minutes to turn back in and start up the street, but as he passed the first gas lamp, it was clear that he and the woman had been satisfied. She now rode next to him on the seat, looking warily around. Either they were taking few chances or, even after all this time in assimilation, old habits were hard to break.
They seemed confident at last, though, and the man reined in his horse in front of Marx's house, got down, then helped the woman down, although she clearly didn't need such help. They looked more like father and daughter than anything else, and might well have been, Moosic realized. Still, he was pretty sure that they were also, originally, something quite different. He resisted the urge to confront them immediately. There was no way to tell if either or both were armed, but they were both bigger than he. Short of shooting them down cold, on Marx's front lawn, there was no way to do it safely here.
Abruptly he realized that shooting them cold was ex-actly what the admiral and the others who'd sent him here expected him to do. Worse, they were right—here, on this deserted and dark street, well-placed shots would do the deed and allow him a good opportunity for a getaway. There was no knowledge of

fingerprints in 1875 that would stand up in court, so he could just shoot, drop the revolver, and make his
getaway. Find the time suit, and off he would go to his own time. They were on the porch now, ready to knock. He made his way across the street on silent feet, crept around the rear of their wagon, and, using the shadows, approached very close to the house. The man gripped the woman's hand in a rather familiar gesture, but they hadn't yet knocked. He stepped out, still unseen, grasping the pistol with both hands. . . . The man turned the bell on the front door. In a few moments the door opened, and Helene Demuth was there, framed by the interior light.
"Ja? Vat is it dat you vant?"
"Horace Whiting's the name, mum, and this is me daughter Maggie. We'd like a word or two with Dr. Marx, if it be all right with him."
"It is not all right at all!" Demuth huffed. "He's been home only a few hours and is very tired. Any business you haff vith him can vait until the morrow." She said this in a tone that indicated there was no business she could conceive of that Marx might have with such as these. "Will you just do the courtesy of givin' this note to 'm, if you please, mum. Then, if he won't see us, we'll go away and wait until tomorrow."
She looked at them hesitantly, and with disdain, but she took the note. "Very vell. You vill vait here!" And then she closed the door firmly in their faces. There's still time, Moosic told himself, but he couldn't make his finger close on the trigger. He knew who
they were, and what they were, but he could not bring himself to shoot them down coldly in the back. He slipped back into the shadows.
"D'ya think he'll take the bait, luv?" the man asked worriedly. "We cum this far, 'e's got to," she replied. "We're so far gone now we either git in ta see 'im or we 'av t' risk another jomp. Another day 'ere and I won't remember 'ow." The man scratched his head. "I ain't so sure I want ta. I'm in trouble now jes' rememberin' that other one. I kind of loike who I be."
With a shock, Moosic realized that time had played a cruel joke on the couple. Not only had it made the lovers father and daughter, it was Austin-Venneman who was the father and Sandoval the daughter! He only hoped that Marx would refuse to see them. If so, then he could confront them. Then—when there was no chance of hitting anyone else. The door opened, and Demuth was back. She still re-garded the pair as she would a month-old dead fish. "He'll see you," she told them with her tone making no bones about how she regarded the decision. "Come into the living room. He vill be down in a minute." They entered, and the door shut, leaving Ron Moosic outside and his quarry inside with the man who was the object of it all. He cursed to himself that he'd let the golden opportunity slip away, that he'd given them li-cense to do damage, by his own failure to be as cold-blooded as they. "But it wouldn't be sportin'," his Alfie part seemed to say. "If we did it that way, we'd be just like
them, wouldn't we?''
To beat them, you often had to be like them, he re-flected sourly. But he wasn't like them, and never had been. Not yet.
The living room was on the first floor in front of the house, and the curtains were only partly drawn. Stealthily he crept up onto the porch and made his way to below one of the windows. Both were raised an inch or so to allow some air to circulate, and he could hear, and occasionally risk seeing, what was going on. That is, if the beat cop didn't come around and catch him first. Karl Marx was a striking figure in person. Although thin, he had an athlete's build and broad shoulders that gave the impression of great mass and strength. His car-riage was strong and upright, the body of a much younger man than his fifty-seven years. It was clear that his trip had done him much good; he looked excellent for any age.
He had a large brow framed by curly, white locks that reached to his powerful shoulders, a snow-white beard that flowed deep down, and brown eyes that sparkled with warmth and intelligence from underneath black, bushy eyebrows. The eyes, in fact, were a giveaway that did not generally reveal itself in photographs. They were warm, human, emotional eyes, highly expressive and penetrating at one and the same time. He was full of what the Greek called charisma—both visitors involuntarily stood up and waited in awed silence when he entered the room, not just from politeness but from the strength and magnetic

power he radiated without doing or saying a thing.
He had changed into informal black pants, a white shirt, and had obviously thrown on an old smoking jacket for the visitors.
If Marx more than lived up to what the visitors expected to see, they certainly lived up to Helene Demuth's descrip-tion in his own mind. In his hand he held the envelope they had handed to the housekeeper, its top now torn open. "So," he said in an orator's baritone that more than fit his striking appearance, "vat in hell is the meaning of this?" He held up the envelope and shook it for emphasis. His speech was heavily accented, and somewhat hesitant. Although he spoke, read, and wrote a half-dozen lan-guages with ease, it was clear that he was not blessed with the translator's talent of thinking in the tongue he was using. Everything, although extremely quickly, was trans-lated into German in his mind and then back again when he spoke.
"If y' please, sir," said the woman, "that is, as y' must know, the title and first few pages of yer rev'lut'nary book in the French and Russian tongues, along with some words from a letter y' haven't yet mailed to yer Russian friend."
"I am veil avare of the content, young lady," Marx responded coldly. "I vish to know how it is possible for you to know a letter I am writing still, and vhy somevun vould to the trouble go of printing up pages of books not yet published. Und Russian, yet! Vhen it is possible to Russian publish, they vill still be too stupid to read it!"
"They're for real, sir," she assured him, somewhat shocked by his rather anti-Russian scorn. "It was the only way to show you we ain't what we seem, sir." The massive brows came down. They were all still standing. "Und, just vat 'ain't' you, then?" he responded scornfully.
She blushed, feeling ashamed of her dialect. In point of fact, it was taking an extreme amount of will to take the lead in this conversation at all. Her upbringing and back-ground was as deferential and passive as Sandoval's had been commanding and assertive. Clearly, whatever laws of time there were had moved hardest on Roberto Sandoval, to quench his fanatical personality and impulsive amorality. Time had contrived to make it difficult for someone to make tiny ripples even if they desired to make great waves. There was clearly a war of wills going on between what time had imposed and the strong-willed fanatic who'd stop at nothing—and, to Moosic's surprise and grudging respect, Roberto Sandoval was winning. Clearly, whoever had planned this had chosen well indeed—but, then, why the empty-headed accomplice? The beat cop came down the street at this moment, causing the listener to have to move away and crouch flat in the darkness to avoid being seen. The cop stopped by the wagon and inspected it warily, then looked right at the Marx household. For a few precious minutes Moosic dared not move, fearful that the cop would come up to the house to see just who would be visiting in that kind of vehicle at this time of the evening. Indeed, the cop seemed to be mulling over whether or not to do just that. Moosic prayed that he would not, for there was no clear exit off the porch without coming into full view of the cop, and he was certain to be spotted now—him with a revolver in his pocket! The bobby finally decided on a middle approach, walk-ing on down the street but walking with frequent glances back at the cart and horse. Clearly, he was not going to go far until he saw the owners. The cop finally was far enough down to allow him to cautiously return to his listening post. He had no idea what had gone on in the few minutes he'd missed, but clearly Sandoval had been convincing. ". . . You must understand," Marx was saying, "that vat you say is true is the one total und horrible negation of my laws. If a device truly exists that can make changes in history, und such a device vould be qvite naturally in the hands of the capitalists, then the revolutionary process may be postponed indefinitely, even cancelled out after the fact! This is horrible, horrible! It is the same as if you came to a professor of physics und let go of an apple und it floats up to the ceiling!" "It is exactly the point," the woman responded, still in that lower class accent but with the grammar now seeming to smooth out. "The weapons of our toime can kill all livin' things on Earth. The capitalists, then, must fall from within. But this—this is eternal slavery or the end of 'umanity!" So that was it. More than enough to convince the committed, although it still didn't explain Karen Cline. "Ja, ja. Or ve haff a time var, vith history obeying vatever laws one side makes up that the other cannot see."
"We can destroy the place, kill the scientists, but it'll do no good," Sandoval told him. "They know 'ow. They'll just build another bigger and better. So we busted in and brung the suits t'you." Moosic felt a shock run through him, and he almost cursed aloud. The two time suits were in the wagon! All he had to do was steal them or get at them long enough to destroy them and this would all be over! He looked back out at the street—and saw that damned copper standing over near where he'd hid out all day.

"Alfie" calculated the odds, and decided there wasn't a chance in hell of getting to that wagon and getting
away with it unless he killed the copper. Just after that, all hell would break loose anyway. So easy—it could have been so easy. If he'd shot the pair, that would have been the end of it, and only the guilty would have suffered. If he'd known, or guessed, that the suits were in the cart, he could have easily made off with it between the time they entered the house and the time the beat cop showed up, with nobody dead. Now, there was an innocent life at stake—and he couldn't take that kind of chance. It was a long shot, sure, but killing the cop might change things worse than letting this run its course. No chance to do it easy now. He waited for the cop to saunter on down the block once more, and then, when the coast seemed clear, he stood up and drew the revolver. He was standing just outside the living room window, which was chest-high at its base and had no screen this time of year. He peered in, saw the two radicals seated on a couch against the wall to his right, while Marx sat in an over-stuffed armchair facing them. Steeling himself, he mea-sured his moves and then counted down in his mind. Suddenly he pushed up on the window and stuck the revolver inside. "All roite!" he commanded in Alfie's less than elegant voice. "Everybody just stay still! This gun's loaded and I know 'ow to use it!" The three in the room froze, and it was Marx who dared the first move. "Now vat is dis?" he roared. "Who vould stick a gun in my parlor?'' He was clearly more angry than scared. Being as careful as possible, he got a leg over the sill and slipped into the room. "You moite call me the toime coppers, Doctor Marx. Just stand easy—I got no business with you, only wit' them what're tryin' to choinge what is."
The woman whose form hid Roberto Sandoval looked crushed. "So they didn't hold on even for a day." "No," he told them. "You killed a lot of people, but we killed 'em all that you left. Don'cha remember me, ducky? Moo-sic?"
Both of the radicals blanched at the name, even the old man who was almost too far gone into the time frame. The one man they couldn't scare. The one man who'd scared them. "Who is this person?" Marx wanted to know. "An American capitalist agent," Sandoval told him. " 'Is job is to make sure it stays theirs." "So vat vill you do? Shoot them and fade away?" Marx asked him calmly. "No. We're just all going out to that wagon. You, too, sir, Oi'm afraid. Everybody in front of me. Nobody needs to be 'urt in the least."
'"E's gonna shoot up the suits!" Sandoval exclaimed, understanding it all. "Leave us 'ere all stuck good'n proper!"
He gestured with the revolver. "All roite, let's get it over with. All of you, up and out. Oi don't wanna shoot nobody, but Oi will if Oi hav'ta. Now—move! And no tricks! Just all noice and pleasant-loike." They stood up, and even Marx looked hesitant. Alone, Moosic guessed, he might have tried something, but with his family in the house this was no time to make a move. They walked out into the hallway leading to the double door, and he followed, eyes on them. As he walked through the doorway into the hall, someone suddenly made a grab for him from the side. Powerful hands grabbed his arm, but so hard and sudden was the grab that the pistol discharged—once—then he was on the floor and Helene Demuth was on top of him. The pistol fired three more times before she got it away, screaming and banging his head against the floor. He was unconscious before the cop reached the porch.
OF ANGELS AND DEMONS
Medical science had progressed only a small amount from the Middle Ages by 1875. It was true that physicians were now true scientists and knew a great deal. The trou-ble was, they also couldn't do very much more about it than their Aristotelian forebears could with their leeches and bad humors. All doctors really knew in 1875 was how futile all that old stuff was. He was mostly in a coma—a strange dreamlike state that produced few dreams and mostly only a sense of floating, with occasional snatches of an unreal reality. The prison surgeons were not exactly in the forefront of medical skills and research, either, but they were competent and did what they could. He was aware, at times, of people flitting about and even discussing him, and once or twice it seemed like some people were asking him questions, but he could neither make out the questions nor form an answer. When he finally did regain consciousness, he wished he hadn't. The doctors and nurses were hard and

cold and could do little except load him with morphia for the pain. They would answer no questions. Within
a few hours of coming out of it, though, there appeared a young man in a neat business suit who asked many and would answer some.
"I am Inspector Skinner of Scotland Yard," he told the patient, who listened through a drugged haze that still didn't quite blot out the pain, "I think you should give some answers." "Uh—'ow long 'ave Oi been here?" he croaked. "You've been in a coma almost seven days," the inspec-tor told him. "The old woman did a job on you, she did."
Seven days. That would make this the twenty-seventh of September. He tried to think about why that was important, but couldn't quite manage it. "Now, then," continued the detective, "I think it's time for a statement of sorts." He took out a fountain pen and a small notebook. "First of all, I've told you who I am. What's your name?" "Alfie," he rasped. "Alfie Jenkins."
"How old are you, Alfie?"
"Dunno. Never got to countin'."
The inspector nodded. "Do you remember last Monday night?" He thought back. Something. . . . Some kind of shooting. "It's all kinda dim." "You shot two people, Alfie. You broke into a man's home and shot him and a guest of his. You remember that?"
Alfie nodded, getting a little handle on what had happened, although still somewhat confused as to why. "Didn't mean to shoot nobody. The old hag grabbed me gun." He nodded. "Nevertheless, you broke into the house and you brought the gun. You understand that, don't you?"
Alfie managed a nod. "Yes, sir. 'Ow are they—the two wot got shot, that is?" "Dead, Alfie. Both dead."
Somewhere in the back of his mind something screamed, My god! I just killed Karl Marx! "The old peddler lingered on for a few days, but it was just too great a shock to his system." Things were coming back to him now, in little bits and pieces. "The old boy 'ad a daughter. Wot's 'appened to 'er?"
"They say she fled screaming in panic. Got on the cart and went. We haven't found her as yet, but we're looking."
He felt totally lost and alone. Worse, after all that, he might swing for murder or be sentenced to life in prison, which was as sure a death to somebody like him. Marx was dead, and at his hand. History had been changed. And the important one had gotten away and was now—where and when? At least it answered one big question, that of why Sandoval had brought the woman along. He needed somebody to wear the suit to get it back—for Marx.
As the intellectual part of him stirred in response to the questions, it found itself being pushed back, almost as if under attack. It took a supreme effort just to bring those thoughts up, and they were fading almost as they were made. The combined effect of the morphia and the addi-tional seven days were having full effect. Not that it mattered, of course. He was in a prison hospital some-where in London, with no real hope of ever getting out in time to reach the suit. He had mucked up everything with his failure to act coldly and decisively, and now the villain was free to roam again, while he faced a short and un-happy future as Alfie Jenkins.
"Wot—wot'll 'appen to me now?" he asked plaintively, knowing the answer. "Ordinarily, you would stand trial as an adult because of the seriousness of the offense, and you know what that result would be. There are mobs outside the prison demand-ing that they be allowed to save the Queen the expense. Doctor Marx, you know, was a famous and well-loved man." "Oi'd 'eard that, sir."
"However, you may be lucky here. There is no liking for making a big trial with a roaring crowd that could become a circus or, worse, a scene for rioting and violence. You're quite ill, Alfie. Did you know that?"
"Just a cough, sir."
"It's far more than that. You have a very bad lung disease. We can do little for it. Do you understand that?"
He managed a nod, feeling oddly better at the news. It beat hanging—maybe. The inspector sighed, put away his pen and notebook, and looked down at him. "Just rest and relax, Alfie. You'll not come to trial while gravely ill—we'll see to that."

After the inspector left, he thought it over as much as he was able to do so. They expected him to die
here. It would be better for everybody if he did, in fact. Marx wanted revolutions, he remembered, and he was smart enough to see that Her Majesty's government wanted none of that here, no symbol to rally everyone against.
With that thought, he drifted back into sleep. "Wake up," a woman's hushed voice said from some-where near. He felt hands gently shake him, and when he stirred and opened his eyes, he frowned, thinking the vision a dream. She had a chubby, freckled face and hair cut very short, like they used to cut the boys' hair at the orphan asylum. She was dressed entirely in some strange black body-garment that looked like dull leather but was soft, like cloth. Around her waist was a thick, black, belt-like con-traption that seemed more like a misplaced horse collar, but had a bunch of red lights on it, both on top and around her middle. The tight-fitting garment emphasized her chubbiness, and was not very complimentary. A pair of goggles sat atop her head, ready to be pulled down at a moment's notice. '"Ho're you? Some kind of prison nurse?" "No," she whispered, "and keep your voice down. Time is very short, and the amount of power required to allow me to be here without assimilation is enormous." He was in great pain, but much of the morphia had worn off, allowing the Moosic personality a little latitude. He mustered all his will to force himself forward, reminding himself that Sandoval had done it. "You—you are from the future." It was a statement, not a question. "In a way, yes. I've brought you something you need desperately, but you'll have to move fast. Can you make it out of bed?"
"Oi . . . think so." He tried and, with her help, got to a shaky standing position. It was then that he saw it, there on the floor. "The toime suit!" he breathed. He sat back on the bed and she helped him into it. It was enormous for the body of Alfie Jenkins, far too large to be practical, and he said so.
"Don't worry. Once you punch out, it'll be O.K., and both Alfie and Ron will live. Understand?" He nodded dully.
"The power pack is on full-charge now—I did it before coming here. And I've set it for the correct time and place. There is still a chance of catching Sandoval." "But 'istory—it's already changed."
"Very little. Marx would have died in a few years anyway, and all his important work was done. He was killed by a boy in the pay of anti-Communists, a boy who then escaped from gaol. That's all the change. Now—helmet on. Check the pouch when you arrive. And remember— Sandoval's power is nearly gone. He's landed a hundred miles from his goal. You can beat him there. Now—seal and go!" "But wait! Just 'ho are you?"
But the seal snapped in place and he was in silence, although nearly swimming in the suit. If he stood up, he knew he'd sink below and out of the helmet, so he didn't try. The mysterious woman reached out and touched the suit activation switches.
Reality faded. The suit's anti-glare shield snapped on, and all around was blinding light. He was falling again, falling through time and space. . . . The journey this time was the same in all physical respects, but not for the man himself. Suddenly he felt the cramping and pinching of the suit once more and realized, with a start, that he was Ron Moosic once again in form.
Mentally, the trip was stranger. Slowly, ever so slowly, the personality of Alfie Jenkins came to equal status with his own. There was a period of terrible confusion in his mind, as he lost all true orientation of self. It was a strange, indescribable feeling of being, at one and the same time, not a rider in someone else's head, but two people simultaneously.
Now, rapidly, the elements of Alfie Jenkins' life and personality began to merge with his own. The process was strange and total, and he realized, with a shock, that he was still Alfie Jenkins, would always be Alfie, but only a part, only a small part. . . . He knew, intellectually, that this would change him, perhaps in subtle ways, but in a permanent fashion. He also realized that he would not really be aware of that change, that the new whole would be natural and normal and right for him.
This was something Silverberg and the others had not warned him about. Lives created could be

absorbed, but not destroyed once they were real. And yet, now that he thought of it, it was logical. And,
somewhere, he knew, Alfie Jenkins was free and happy at last. . . . But where—and when—was he going now?
After Sandoval, that was clear. And, for now, that was enough. Still, he couldn't help but wonder about this fourth player in the game and why she had come to him and helped him. He wished he'd had more of his wits about him and had been able to ask more questions. It was quite certain she was on his side, and the simplicity of her time mechanism, compared to the bulky suit he wore, made it certain that she was from some future time. So the "leading edge" of the time stream was not his own origin time, but rather farther into the future. How far ahead? he wondered. Or did that matter as much as the fact that she seemed definitely on his side. An enemy of any sort would have let him rot. Still, if someone from the future was assisting him, that presupposed a fifth player in the game. Perhaps the one that initiated all this? The one that converted Dr. Cline? But, if that were so, why had they needed the help of some radicals from the past at all? Why not just go back with their superior equipment and do it themselves? Questions, always more questions, and no one to get the answers from. For now, it would have to be enough to know that history's alteration had been a mere ripple, of no major consequence in the long run, no matter how much pain and sorrow he'd caused Marx's innocent family. And he could still complete the mission. This time I won't hesitate to shoot for a moment, Sandoval, he swore.
The falling sensation stopped, and he felt himself fall forward onto solid ground. He had forgotten that he'd left in a more or less sitting position. This time it was also night, but the area looked quite different from England. Releasing the seals on the suit, he was also relieved to find that it was relatively warm. He couldn't help wondering what happened when his naked self was forced out into a sub-zero February for a couple of hours, with no fire able to warm him. The instruments on the suit indicated a charge at still well over ninety percent, which meant he couldn't have come far. The month and year he could make out by simple subtraction, but the geographic coordinates were beyond him.
The time was some point in June, 1841. The closeness of the date surprised him. Silverberg had said something about a "twenty year window," which would cover Alfie, barely, but hardly the girl who had been Sandoval. Clearly, the scientist had been wrong—or the date the mysterious woman had set for him was wrong. That latter worried him, but only a little. He had more than enough power to get home now, and all he had to do was set the controls to zero. Perhaps, he surmised, it was not a flat twenty years but an individual thing. Running into the twenty-year bar-rier in one case would cause the scientists to clamp down a limit and accept it. In his time, after all, time travel was in its earliest stages. Perhaps those who'd coached Sandoval had more experience. He spent a little time scouting the area. It was a city, certainly, old but not very large. It was immediately evi-dent by the signs that it was in Germany, but he had no knowledge of German and so couldn't get more than vague information. Certainly the central square contained some relatively tall buildings for the time, at least one of which rose six stories to a flat-topped pyramidal structure that went up perhaps two or three more. The centerpiece to the square was an ornate European fountain which looked ancient even for 1841, but it still functioned.
To one side of town was a mammoth structure that made even the medieval fountain seem new. A massive structure of weathered stone, it was clearly an ancient city gate, with portals to pass two-way mounted traffic, two levels on top of the portals, and two towers, one the same height as the rest of the structure, the other with yet an additional story on it. He really didn't recall them being much in Germany, but damned if the thing didn't look kind of ancient Roman. It stood majestically in the middle of the roadway, with incongruous German-style buildings adjoin-ing its taller tower on one side and a park on the other. He was conscious of the press of time now, and he searched frantically for some place to hide the suit. He finally decided on a heap of rubble very near the Roman gate. The stones were fairly easy to move and replace, not likely to be quickly disturbed, and the ruin itself was a proper landmark. Still, it was a major undertaking to get the cavity made, the suit put in, then covered to his nervous eye. This time, if possible, he'd do what the radicals had done in 1875 and retrieve the suit as soon as possible. He was still positioning and repositioning stones when he felt the nausea and dizziness strike him. In a matter of minutes he'd passed out.
Holger Neumann had been born in Trier in 1805, which made him thirty-six now. He was the only child of

an attorney with a small local practice, and he'd been rather spoiled early on. His father had been something
of a wimp at home, and it was his mother who dominated almost everything either one of them said or did. He'd gone to good schools and received a solid middle-class education, but, despite his father's hopes, he found the law did not appeal to him. College had interested him for a while, but after his mother's death while in his third year, it no longer seemed interesting or important, and he hadn't gone back after the funeral.
His father seemed to shrivel a bit each day after his wife's death, and just lost the will to live, or so they said. He followed her in less than two years. Holger was sur-prised to discover that there was a substantial estate, grown even fatter when he sold the family's house and his father's office. It was not enough for champagne and the Grand Tour, but as long as he was quite modest in his lifestyle, it was sufficient to support him.
He'd gotten to Bonn, Cologne, Berlin, even Paris, al-though he found the French intolerable and his inability to learn their language impossible. At the moment he was, in fact, back home for one of his annual conferences with the bank that managed his money. He was living in Cologne, so it wasn't much of a trip, taking odd jobs here and there as the spirit and his needs above the annuity dictated, but he was now trying to decide where to move on to. He required a major city, but one in which he could keep a certain amount of anonymity. He was tempted by Austria, and particularly by Vienna, which had an open atmosphere like Paris but also spoke the correct tongue. He was a pure blond with large, soft blue eyes and a complexion so fair that he appeared far younger than his years. If, in fact, things had been different, he might well have gone far in any profession he chose, but he did not have that freedom. Position meant being a public person, and he could not afford that luxury. He had simply never been able to get close to, or feel anything for, any woman except his mother. All other women had seemed rather boring and shallow, and cer-tainly unappealing sexually. From his earliest sexual awakenings, Neumann had been attracted to young men. In a town like Trier that meant total suppression, but in the open atmosphere of Heidelberg things had been different. Within a year he'd discovered that there were others like himself, and that revelation hit him with tremendous force. It had, in fact, been a graduate assistant assigned to help him with the exams who had spotted in him what he thought he had so completely concealed. Through him, he'd discovered a secret society, a brotherhood of sons, that had made life turn on its head. Still, there was fear, constant fear, of being exposed.
It was that constant level of near-panic among the brotherhood, all of whom were looking to successful careers, that convinced him that he was wasting his time with that sort of academic pursuit. He simply could not live with the fear that he would lose a professorship or judgeship or some other high post in one moment of loose guard. Still, all of the German states were to one degree or another police states, which tolerated this sort of behavior only on the lowest of levels. That, in fact, was why he was now thinking of moving on. Austria was no Paris, but it was far looser and more tolerant—perhaps because, as it was often said, it was less competently run—than anywhere else he'd been. He awakened in the small hotel room, dressed, and went down first to the communal toilet in the rear, then across the street for breakfast. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. Time is a creative bastard, he thought while eating a pastry and drinking some strong Turkish coffeee.
First a thirteen-year-old dying orphan, now a gay man forced by his time and place to be a wastrel.
Ron Moosic wondered who and what Roberto Sandoval was now. On a hunch, he spent the morning doing some surrepti-tious checking, and found the name of Marx with ease. In fact, he remembered the family now, although only vaguely. He'd never had much use for Jews, even if the family were all converts. Jews might fake conversions to make life easier for them, but they were still born with the blood.
Moosic was shocked to find "himself thinking those thoughts, but he understood that this was common thinking at the time. If only they knew where it would finally lead, he reflected sourly. Still, it was rather easy then to find the Marx household, and just as easy, through casual conversation with locals he knew from his youth, to discover that their son Karl, now Herr Doktor Marx, was home for a while. There was gossip that he and his mother did not get along, though, and he was thinking of moving to either Bonn or Cologne, depending on how easily he could establish himself in either city. He was hoping to obtain some sort of position before marrying his fiancee, a local girl, Jenny Westphalen. Things worked out so well he almost swore it was planned that way. At least, he couldn't have planned it better himself. In the town bookstore, where he was drawn partly out of curiosity and partly out of boredom, he met a man looking through the magazines and papers. He was originally attracted to him because he was a young, some-what handsome fellow with a short-cropped brown beard. Moosic thought

he looked the very image of the young, thin Orson Welles of Citizen Kane. But when the man looked up
and he saw those eyes, he knew who this man had to be. Karl Marx was not the Moses-like patriarch of 1875, but he had those penetrating, electrifying eyes. They intro-duced themselves, and soon Marx and Neumann, not Moosic, were talking away about socialism, Hegelism, communism, and revolutionary movements in Europe. Marx seemed even more oppressed by the small town of his birth than was Neumann, and was delighted to find a kindred outsider, a native who hated the place but had more than a bit of education. Neumann's ingrained distaste for Jews in general and the Marxes in particular faded under the direct contact, particularly when Marx unexpectedly cracked a very anti-Semitic joke.
Karl Marx was absolutely fascinating, a riveting speaker who seemed to know very much about almost every sub-ject imaginable. His brilliance was enhanced, rather than tempered, by his unsuppressed emotionalism. Neither his Neumann nor Moosic self could resist the energy and intellect; both were in fast agreement that this was indeed the most brilliant and electrifying intellect they had ever met. It was for Moosic to additionally understand that the old man he'd seen so very briefly still had much of this power. It made him feel a great deal of regret he couldn't have known him longer, and it added to his guilt as to having shortened that man's life.
Neumann, quite naturally, was instantly madly infatu-ated with Marx, but frustratingly so. He knew, even with-out Moosic, that Marx was solidly conservative in his sex life and totally in love with and devoted to a single woman. It didn't maner in the end; Neumann could fantasize and not act or reveal himself because he feared that if Marx knew, he would never see the younger man again. Just to be talking to him, around him, near him, was enough for now.
Moosic watched the flow of Neumann-thoughts and saw where it would lead. This sort of futile passion could easily end in suicide—which might well be time's easy out all along. In the course of the afternoon, Marx also talked a bit about himself and some of his plans. He was writing for an anti-government newspaper in Cologne, as well as other essays and critical articles for a variety of places. He was thinking of a university career and was shortly going to Bonn to see his closest friend and contact, a professor at the university there. In the meantime, he was staying not with his family but with the Westphalens, the family of the woman he intended to marry. Moosic wondered if Sandoval knew that. The mysteri-ous woman had said that the radical had landed far from Trier and had to make his way here. The setting for a quick panic jump would not be easy to do without a computer. He remembered his own problem in reading any sense into location on the time suit's readout.
Over the next few days he contrived to meet with Marx here and there, and also was introduced to Jenny, a really pretty young woman. It was very hard to repress the cold, sheer hatred Neumann felt for her. Although he was cau-tious enough not to be a leech, this shortened considerably his stakeout time, divided as it had to be between various key points in the city. The most important of those, however, was the hotel itself. If Sandoval was to be a stranger, he would need a place to stay while here. Late on the second night, he retrieved the time suit from its hiding place near the ancient Roman gate to the city and managed, with the aid of a very large laundry bag he'd purchased earlier, to get it up to his hotel room. There he sat down with it, opened the pouch, and was surprised to see some more material in it. Then he remembered that his mysterious savior had told him that things of interest would be there. What there was was a very modern-looking pistol with one full clip and a note saying, "Peter's Fountain, A.M., the 22nd," and nothing more. The note was written in a terse and unfamiliar female hand. It was now Saturday the nineteenth. He replaced the pistol in the pouch and put the whole thing back in the suit, which would at least give it the energy protection from time's ravages. He would not like to need it and find it turned into a flintlock.
He'd prefer to stick Sandoval with one of those and take his chances. With this gun, he couldn't miss. MORE PLAYERS IN THE GAME
He didn't see Marx during the weekend; this was a time for personal matters, although he knew, too, that Marx had fallen behind in his writings and wanted a little bit of time alone to catch up. He was most interested in the Monday morning coach from Cologne, which brought three newcomers to town. One was a middle-aged man who apparently sold barber and surgical equipment. Moosic tentatively

dismissed him, although one could never be sure. If Sandoval had under-gone assimilation a hundred miles
or more from Trier, he was not likely to have a profession that would normally take him here. The other two, however, were equally improbable—a man in his early twenties in Prussian mili-tary uniform accompanied by a pleasant-looking young woman who could not have been out of her teens and was introduced at the desk as the military man's wife. It didn't seem to fit the pattern—both young and attractive-looking, and newly married. He began to wonder if Sandoval had yet to arrive. He had a quick lunch with Marx, who was effusive about finally being exempted from the obligatory year of compulsory military duty. He'd been fighting the battle for some time with the bureaucracy, and he'd finally won. "The first and only time these sickly lungs of mine ever did me any service," he told Neumann. To avoid problems, Marx had most of his mail sent to the post office for pickup, and they walked over to it, Marx hopeful that a couple of articles he'd submitted long ago to two journals had finally seen publication. He was disappointed, though; there was, in fact, only a single letter, with no return address. Marx opened it, still talking cheerily, and glanced at it, then stopped talking and just stared at the pages. "Something wrong?" Neumann asked him, concerned. "Bad news?" "No, no. But someone, somewhere, is playing tricks with my privacy and I will have to get to the bottom of this." He frowned and handed a page of the letter's con-tents to Neumann. "What do you make of this? It appears to be handwritten, yet it has something of the appearance of a photograph of some kind." He looked at the page, which seemed to be a fragment of a letter. Moosic realized with a sudden thrill what had disconcerted Marx so much.
It was unquestionably a photocopy. And the copier would not be invented for almost a hundred and twenty years.
He handed the sheet back to Marx. "Very odd. I see what you mean about the photographic quality, but I can't imagine how such a thing is possible to do. Is the text of any importance?" "It is a personal letter of mine to my father from some years back," Marx responded angrily. "A letter I am certain I personally destroyed."
"Even given the means as possible, which it must be, for there it is, who could have gotten their hands on such a thing, and why? The police?"
That was the obvious first thought, since Prussia was in most senses of the word a well-controlled police state.
"It is possible, for some of my writings have already made me less than popular with the authorities. But, somehow, I think not." He seemed to be mulling over whether to go further, and finally made his decision. "What do you think of this?"
Neumann took it and glanced at it, and the effect was to heighten his already overbearing sense of excitement still further. It was a small, handwritten note which said, "I have the power but not the mind to change the history of the world. If you would be that mind, come to Peter's Fountain, alone, at 2 A.M. on the 22nd." It was unsigned.
He handed it back to Marx. "This sounds like the rantings of a maniac. You are not going, of course?" "I am thinking about it. Otherwise, I shall never know how this letter was acquired, and I shall spend my life wondering if my most private moments are someone's public business." Neumann frowned. "Let me go instead. If this person is truly insane, he will betray it to me, not you, and we will know. If he is not insane, then a subsequent meeting could be arranged." "I have never put much faith in dueling, my new friend, but if I were to have a duel, I would never permit my second to stand in my place. No, I must think on this some more, but whatever I do, I must do alone. I thank you for your counsel and your kind offer, but if you value our friendship, you must forget that you ever saw or heard this."
"I will come with you, then. ..."
"No! You will get a good night's sleep, and tomorrow I promise you I shall describe the results in glorious detail. But you must swear to me that you will forget it now, on your honor." "I . . . value this friendship above all things," Neumann waffled, hoping Marx would not press further. The younger man considered it sufficient, and they parted soon after. A Xerox copy had lasted at least a day, perhaps more, out of this time frame. That, at least, was to the good. It meant his pistol would probably work as advertised. The central square of Trier looked eerie and threatening in the early morning hours, lit only by a few huge candles in the street lights, their flickering casting ever-changing and monstrous shadows on the

cobblestones and the sides of the now-dark buildings.
Moosic gave the square a professional going-over be-tween midnight and one, noting the rounds of the local policeman. He wanted no repetition of the debacle in London. This time there would be one target and one target only, and that target would be taken out as soon as positively identified. That should not be too difficult, he thought, if he could shoot straight. He already knew the policeman, and he knew Marx, so anyone else likely to be here at two almost had to be his quarry. It was an eerie wait, back in the shadows of an alleyway looking on the square. All was silence, and there was no movement except for those shadows and the noise of the multiple fountains pouring into the catch basin. In the stillness they sounded like huge waterfalls, the noise caught by the buildings and echoed back again and again.
It was a short wait compared to London, but it seemed forever in the stillness. When the church clock struck the three-quarter hour, he tensed, checked his pistol for the hundredth time, and began to look for signs of another, either Sandoval or Marx. At approximately 1:50 the police-man patrolling the area walked into the square, panicking him for a moment. The cop checked all the doors facing the square, looked around, and finally made his way from the square and down a side street, but not before the clock chimed two. The minutes now crept back as the patrolman's footsteps receded and finally died away in the distance, but there was still no sign of anyone else in the square. Then, quite suddenly, he heard the clicking of shoes on cobblestone. Someone was coming down the same street the policeman had used to leave, coming towards the square. He tensed, praying that Marx had decided not to come after all, and waited until the oncoming figure strode into the square. He strained to catch a glimpse of the newcomer, and saw him at last, in the glow of a street lamp. It was certainly no one he'd ever seen before. He was tall, thin, and at least in middle age, with a long and unkempt black beard and a broad-brimmed hat that con-cealed much of the rest of his features. He was dressed in the seedy clothes of one who was used to sleeping in his only suit. He didn't seem armed, and he certainly didn't have the time suit with him, if indeed he were Sandoval and not just some bum avoiding the policeman.
Moosic stood up and was about ready to go out and confront the man, when there was a sudden noise behind him. He felt a pistol at the back of his head, and quietly a man's voice whispered, "I think you better remain where you are and not make a sound. Put the gun down, nice and quiet, on the ground. No false moves, my friend! At this range I could hardly miss." He did as instructed, then slowly got up as the pistol was pulled away. He turned, and saw his captor. The man was dressed entirely in black, in a uniform rather similar to the one his mysterious woman in London had been wearing. But this was no ordinary-looking chubby woman; this man was tall, lean, and extremely muscular, with a strong face like a Nordic god's, his pure blond hair neatly cut in a military trim. Behind him lurked two large black shapes that looked somehow inhuman, but whose features were impossible to determine in the near total darkness of the alley. One thing was clear, though—from the blinking little lights—all three wore belts similar to the one the woman had worn. This, then, was the true enemy.
Knowing it was hopeless, he turned again to watch the scene in the square. More footsteps now, and the seedy-looking man leaning on the lamppost stiffened, then stepped back into a doorway for a moment. In another minute, Moosic saw Marx walk nervously into the square from his right and look around. He appeared alone and unarmed.
The twin personalities inside the Neumann body converged in an emotional rage. He glanced back briefly at the mysterious blond man, and noted with the professional's eye that his captor was looking less at him than at the scene in the square. The time agent was larger and more powerful than Neumann, but if he could just idly get one step back, just one step, that might not mean a thing. Pretending to watch what was going on in the square, he measured the distance and moves out of the corner of his eye. Quickly he lunged around, his knee coming up and hitting the blond man squarely in the balls. The man in black cursed in pain and doubled over, dropping his strange-looking pistol. Quickly Moosic rolled, picked up his own pistol, and was out of the alley and to his right. "Herr Marx! It's a trap! Drop to the ground!" he shouted. Marx was about ten feet from Sandoval, and at the noise and yell he froze and turned to look back in utter confusion. Sandoval reached into his pants and pulled out a gun, while behind Moosic, in the alley, two strange figures ran out into the light. Two figures out of nightmare. They seemed to be almost like living statues, black all over, although they seemed to wear nothing except the time belts, their skin or whatever it was that was glistening like polished black metal. Their features were gargoyle-like, the stuff of nightmares in any age. Both had auto-matic rifles in their hands.

They had, however, overrun Moosic, who unhesitatingly brought up the pistol and fired at them. The
strange pistol seemed to chirp rather than explode, but a tiny ball of light leaped from it and struck one of the creatures in the back. There was a scream, and the thing collapsed in pain. Sandoval panicked, raising his own pistol and firing continuously at Moosic, the bullets or whatever they were coming out like tracers. But Moosic was no longer there. He'd rolled back towards the alley and found cover. There was no sign of the blond man, but in the square there were two bodies sprawled out, one of them bleeding into the cobblestones. With a shock, Moosic realized that Sandoval's panicked fire at him had hit Marx instead. There was no way to really aim such rapid fire, and he had been in the way. The other creature roared, and Sandoval, nervous, never-theless approached it, seeming to know just who or what it was. With a snarl, the creature's rifle came up; there was a quick burst, and Roberto Sandoval was pushed back sev-eral feet by the force of whatever was striking him. The creature then turned and started back towards the alley. Moosic fired a few shots that caused the thing to drop, then fled down the alley as fast as he could run. Sandoval was dead. He hoped Marx was not, but it hadn't been his doing. Let these black-clad maniacs and monsters sort it all out—he was heading back for the hotel, and fast.
The ancient city became suddenly a nightmarish place, a surreal horror whose shadows reached out and threatened him at every turn. Behind, and possibly from above him, he thought he heard the sounds of pursuit.
The hotel door was locked, of course, at this time of night, but he'd made certain he had a key, telling the proprietor earlier that he had a very late party. He fumbled in panic with the key, finally got it in and shut the door behind him. He almost ran up the stairs until he realized that he hadn't his room key, went back quickly and got it from behind the desk, then bounded up the stairs not caring whom he awakened. He unlocked the door and went immediately to the steamer trunk, where he'd locked the suit. Fumbling for yet another key in the darkness, he dropped it twice and had to calm himself down before he could find it again and fit it in the large brass lock.
A scratching sound caused him to turn towards the window, and in a split second he saw the horrible face of the second gargoyle framed in it, gun coming up. He picked up his own and fired, and the thing was gone. He didn't know if he'd hit it or not. He kicked off his shoes and got into the suit, which fit his new frame rather well. Placing the gun so he could easily pick it up again, he put on the helmet as he heard noises and shouting both in the hall and outside. The noise had apparently roused half the town. He got the helmet on and sealed it, then adjusted the small pentometers for across-the-board zeroes, then pressed "Activate."
Inside the helmet, a little message flashed saying, "Insufficient power." He cursed. The dials still said ninety-five percent power reserve. That should be more than enough to get back home! He tried again, and again the little words flashed inside the suit. He reached up to adjust them again, and at that moment another, perhaps the same, grinning black monstrosity showed in the window. He spun the damned controls and activated. The creature got off a shot, but where its target had been, there was suddenly nothing at all but an empty room. Behind, there were loud yells and curses and some-body shouted, "Break the door down!" The creature, looking very disgusted, vanished from the window just as the door came crashing in. FLYING BLIND
The sensations of time traveling were becoming almost routine to him now, and even the process of merging and integrating yet another real person into him seemed almost beside the point. What seemed far more pressing was the problem that something more than the goals of the job had gone wrong at this point. The suit should have brought him home with even ten percent power, possibly even less. Releasing the settings acted, or so they'd told him, almost like a rubber band released from its hold. The suit power was needed only to keep him alive and breathing until he reached the leading edge, or zero point. Why had the microprocessor refused to take him there? How could there be insufficient power with a fully charged suit? And where could he find a mechanic?
After the dizzing effects of the merge had passed and he had calmed down enough to think clearly, he

checked out the suit's instrumentation. Both Sandoval and Austin-Venneman were dead; their suits would
no longer have anyone to guide on and would automatically return to their own source of power. Cline had destroyed the third suit, so he was the only one now traveling in time from the Calvert installation. That probably meant that he had a hundred percent of their generating energy, which suppos-edly could take somebody back as far as Columbus' time.
He checked his settings. He hadn't changed the setting on location, but it was more than probable that it had been knocked around, at least slightly. There would be some drift, but not a great deal. Certainly he should still be in Europe when he emerged—but when? The central LEDs read 603.2 The very size of the number was a shock. How far had he turned the dials? And did he have enough power and air to reach that point? There was no turning back now—he had to ride it out. Once locked in, they were fixed until you arrived. He had settled down now, resigned to a very long "trip," and was surprised to arrive in whenever it was within little more than two hours by the suit's relative time clock. He checked the air supply and saw that it was still at rather high levels—seventy-four percent full—while the power read eighty-two percent. It was not the drain he expected from such a journey, and he began to wonder if perhaps he had not gone back as far as the setting indicated. Both the set clock and the check clock agreed, though, reading 603.2. Nothing was making sense any more, or working out as they'd told him. That would make him now in the fourteenth century!
It was night—he was beginning to suspect that it always landed you in the middle of the night—and there was little that could be seen, no lights anywhere at all, nothing to get a bearing on. He remained in the suit for a bit and again carefully reset the dials, all of them, to zero, and attempted activation. The suit said there was insufficient power for it. What could have happened? Clearly, he could travel back and forth in time with it, until the air and power wore out, but there seemed no way to go home and he was flying blind, unable to determine a correct destination. Was there a correct destination anymore? he wondered. Certainly, he needed some time to think things out, and this seemed as good or bad a place as any. He switched the suit to maintenance level, released the seals, and removed the helmet. The air seemed fresh and clean, although a little cool for what he had expected. The decimal in the readout, if that readout could be trusted, indicated two months from when he'd left Maryland—July. He got out of the suit, but found himself still in near total darkness. He walked around a bit to keep an air supply coming in, but did not want to wander far. He was afraid that if he got too far from the suit, he'd never find it again.
Once freed of the helmet, he found visibility much better, thanks to the light of a nearly full moon. He seemed to be in a mountain meadow of sorts, a bit high for trees but covered with grass and shrubs. Down in the valley far below, he thought he could make out a small village, although it might be a trick of the moonlight. The other way, a bit further up in the mountains, he thought he could make out a single large stone building with what looked like a steeple inside. At first he thought it was a castle, but then he decided that it looked more like a monastery. That suited him, to a degree. Being a friar in such a remote place might well give him the chance to sort things out. The area didn't give him many places for concealment of the suit, but he managed to find a small crack in the rock wall that would fit it, then covered it with brush. It wasn't perfect, but the spot was so remote it was better odds than the rock pile in Trier that it would remain unspotted. The one thing that unsettled him was the fear that he might not be able to find the spot again. Using the moonlight to best advantage, he tried to memorize all of the reference points he could, particularly some uniquely formed peaks that seemed in the darkness to be the top of a giant cat's head. Then he wandered a bit, both to breathe well and to protect himself against the chill of the altitude. Already he was thinking of the events in Trier, and the cool, blond man who'd intervened to stop him. Him and his monsters.
Clearly there were two sides from the future, two sides going back in time to try to change things to their advantage. But why had the blond fellow chosen to act through radicals of his, Moosic's, time? Perhaps, he thought, because it might lead the other side to believe that their enemy was not the cause of the change. Or perhaps it was because each side had some way of tracing the energy sustaining their own time equipment to the other's source of power. Surrogates would be less risky. But why, when they'd failed, had they risked coming after him? He was still pondering that question when the nausea hit, and he passed out.

It was a time of terror and schism for the Church. Much of the Catholic world was in revolt against the
Pope through-out much of the century, particularly after the Papacy had moved to Avignon and become, in effect, an ally totally under the control of France and highly corrupt. Much of Italy was in revolt against the Papacy, and now the ultimate horror had happened, with Clement VII, backed by the College of Cardinals, pope in Avignon and Urban VI, elected earlier by that same College of Cardinals, pope in Rome. Each had excommunicated the other and the other's followers; each had a legitimate claim to the Papacy, since Urban had been elected under death threats by the Italians to any of the cardinals who did not choose a Rome-committed Italian, while Clement had been elected more or less freely. Kings and mercenaries clashed over which was the true pope and true church; philosophers tied themselves in knots trying to sort it out. The increasingly fat and corrupt church—both of them—backed one side or the other that best preserved its own money, power, and prestige. In the midst of this, a devoted and disgusted nun lived in the little finger of Milan above Venice, a forgotten and ig-nored little area near the boundary with the Holy Roman Empire. Dismayed by the corruption and lack of leadership, and frustrated at being unable to either do anything about it or sort it out, she gathered like-minded nuns from throughout the region and led them to a monastery, one abandoned in the theological strife, that was high in the Alps. Con-vinced that one of the popes was the Antichrist, but unable to determine which one, she resolved to remain there, with her flock, praying and anticipating the Second Coming, which looked very likely.
More than a hundred and fifty women from several orders had followed her, and there were occasionally oth-ers drifting in as they heard about it and made their way there. There they established a convent that soon was quite heretical to both churches, but so minor and so understand-able it was ignored. For their part, the scared and confused nuns, many of whom were run out of places like Florence by anti-clerical governments and mobs, became convinced that they were in the presence of a delivering saint. For her part, the new Mother Superior, who had been Sister Magdelana, more or less became convinced of that, too.
The theology of Holy Mount was simple, basic, and heretical in the extreme. No man, not even a priest, was permitted entry, for one could not be certain if the priest were of the true pope or the Antichrist. Magdelana con-vinced them that she had visions from the Virgin Mary herself establishing the place, and none who had come this far with her doubted her in the slightest. As they were all Brides of Christ, Christ Himself would say the Mass and administer the sacraments, through the body of the Mother Superior. All reaffirmed their vows of poverty, chastity, and absolute obedience. An additional vow of silence was imposed if not in the performance of religious duty or dire emergency. To cement them to the new order, they were also to renounce all worldly ties, including their names and their nationalities. They were a unit, a sisterhood; henceforth, there would be no individuals or individualism. Thanks to some good salesmanship on the part of the Mother Superior with the nearest town, almost ten miles away—mostly down—they acquired a few cows and goats and a rather large number of sheep. The wool from the latter the sisters made into fine wool garments, and traded their products with the town on a seasonal basis. The town's lone parish priest, disgusted himself with the situa-tion but allied in the heart with the Italian Urban, went along with them and helped them to a degree, thanks to the sponsorship of a local nobleman who had been caught up in the political and religious turmoil and who liked to think of his help as a thumbing of his nose at what had become of the Church. With his sponsorship, however slight, the nuns on Holy Mount were allowed their pious heresy and enough food and materials to get by. The townsfolk, of course, were not told of the heresy, just the fact of the convent and the extreme otherworldli-ness of its occupants. When a local peasant gave the sisters some fruit as a gesture, and then his wife who'd borne him two daughters presented him with a son, word got around that these were holy folk indeed, ones that would bring God's blessing if helped. It seemed as if she had always been on Holy Mount. Certainly she'd had a life before it, but it was a total blank in her mind. Only a scar, the remains of an old but serious burn, indicated that her past had at least terminated in violence which had driven it from her grasp. She had been brought to Holy Mount by those who knew of it and thought it the best place for her, but even that was just a hazy memory. Certainly, she had been a nun, for she retained that much as her identity and knew the prayers and rituals. It was strange for Ron Moosic to recognize brainwash-ing and understand the nature of a cult even as he was a part of it. Far stranger than being a woman. He had wondered how Sandoval had adjusted back in London, but now he understood that it was just like the gay Neumann in Trier. One was what one was, and had the knowledge and intimacy that being raised female brought. Even with the amnesia, the result possibly of some war or being caught in some terrible fire, it was natural and normal to feel your body this

way, and to know and accept and cope with the periodic cycles of the body.
The routine was simple and automatic. Up before dawn from your straw bed in the tiny monastic cell, don the simple woolen habit, then make your way up to the chapel for morning services, which were always the same. Then down to the kitchen, for her, to knead the dough and bake the simple bread that would be part of the breakfast meal. The kitchen was a horror by twentieth-century standards, but familiar and normal to her. She felt a familiarity as close as to any family member with the others helping her in the kitchen, each doing her own tasks. She felt no boredom at the tasks, for prayer was joy, and she was mentally reciting prayers constantly, over and over, in her mind, while her hands did the work automatically. All except the sounds of the crackling fire and the clatter of pots and pans was silence. So unvarying was the routine and the work that there was an almost telepathic bond between them, and even when more than one pair of hands was required the other always knew and was there to do it right. She looked into those smiling faces and knew that she loved them as much as humans could love other humans, that they were one in total love and harmony. Their minds and hearts were with each other and with God; the rest of the world simply did not exist. The power of this total and absolute emotional commit-ment was beyond Moosic's power to fight, for even if he exerted his will, he would stand out and call attention to himself. The more the sister sensed his worry, fear, and confusion, the greater and more powerful was the assault on his own psyche. Unlike the first two times, he found himself quickly swallowed up and dominated by the pure fanatical power of this host personality.
After breakfast there was cleanup, and then several hours of intensive communal, repetitious prayer. Others then served a communal midday meal that was more of a snack, a hot porridge of lumpy consistency and the taste of bad library paste. The afternoons were her favorite time, spent looking after the sheep that grazed all over the meadow. This, of course, was also a time for prayer and glorifying God, but at least it was outside the walls and the view was tremendous.
He realized that the woman, all the women, had effec-tively ceased to think at all, but were, rather, some glori-ously happy automatons full of tremendous, overpowering emotion. Although he might want to do something differ-ent or think of something different, the social pressure from those around her prevented him from any sort of deviation. Deep inside her mind, he found that deviation was the one thing to be feared—and the one thing not to be tolerated. The punishment was so painful that one eventu-ally no longer even wished to deviate.
The Mother Superior was clearly centuries ahead of her time. Evenings for her were spent cleaning the interior of the place. Although a pigsty by modern standards, they kept it as clean and as neat as was possible under the circumstances. There were even prescribed times to use the pit-type toilets that emptied into a small stream below. Bladder control was considered a part of the test of faith and endurance. Finally, after fourteen hours of prayer and hard work, there was an evening meal that was hardly much but was elaborate by the standards of the others, another service, and then, finally, to bed, where she was so dead-tired there was no time to think or reflect before sleep. The more pressure Ron Moosic put on her to get some control, the more counterpressure was applied on him. At the end of a mere five days, he, too, found it difficult to think at all, and he knew intellectually that the longer this went on, the less he'd be able to fight it. But Thursday was to be a feast day, and that meant someone had to be sent down to the village to fetch back from the town the makings for the feast. This was known from the morning service. Volunteers were requested, and no one really wanted to volunteer, to leave this cocoon even for a day. No one except Ron Moosic, that is.
When she went forward to the Mother Superior, another sister, a thin, mousy little woman with strong Italian features, went with her. Two would be enough. They knew what was expected of them, of course. They would hitch the two mules to the cart and drive it down the steep mountain slope to the village. There, at the small market, they would get what the villagers were willing to donate, and be gone. It would be an all-day journey, and they would not return before dark. The road was long, winding, and narrow, and Moosic strained to spot the meadow in which he'd hidden the time suit, but things looked different in the light of day and nothing looked really familiar. Still, finally out of the automatics and the prison of the convent, he managed to get some time to think on his own. He had to get away, get to the suit and away from this time, place, and existence, he knew—and quickly. Still, there was little chance to do much on the way down. Her companion kept the silence admirably, but it wasn't until they stopped for a while to give the mules a

rest and snack on the bread loaf they'd brought along that she saw why. The other nun, it appeared at least,
had little or no tongue. It seemed that way, anyway. It was sobering to Moosic. That's what you get for breaking that vow. The village itself was a tiny, ramshackle affair that showed its poverty and its primitiveness in every glance. Chickens ran down the lone street, and there was the smell of human and animal excrement everywhere.
The man who seemed to be in charge of the tiny outdoor market in front of the church looked more German than Italian, which was to be expected in this area. The lan-guage was harsh and barely understandable at all to her ears, but the people were emotional, seemed genuinely pleased to see them, and extended them every courtesy. They responded with smiles and signed blessings, which seemed to be payment enough.
The sister who came with her began acting a bit strange, though, as they went through the assigned tasks. Although the village was tiny and quite poor, even by the standards of the day, it seemed to awaken in the other long-suppressed memories. The sight of fruit, and even some wines, seemed to draw her, but it was the simple normalcy of the place that was the real kicker. It was certainly a far cry from the gloom-and-doom, end-of-the-world scenarios painted in the services. The implications of the simple village were strong indeed, and questioned the dogma upon which the convent was based. Surely, Moosic thought, the Mother Superior must have suspected that this was a potential rebel before sending her down. Why do it? As a test of faith and loyalty? It was possible, of course, but more likely the girl was expected to run away. The only thing standing between the other and some measure of freedom was—her companion. Did the Mother Superior suspect two rebels, and decide to try and get rid of them? But that, too, hardly made sense, since she in whose body Moosic was trapped was totally committed and, with her amnesia, truly had no place else to go. She expected that one was to run away, the other to bring back the food.
Thus, it was with some surprise that, with the cart fully loaded, the tongueless one climbed meekly back aboard and they set out again for the distant mountain lair. They had spent more time than they should have in the village, but it was impossible to fend off the townspeople and not give them their blessings, particularly so with a vow ol silence.
They were only a bit more than halfway back at dusk, and they soon had to stop on the steep and winding trail to wait for the rising of the moon. They had no flintstone to make a torch to lead the way, so they just had to wait.
They unhitched the mules to let them graze, and Moosic, at least, took the opportunity to lie down in the tall grass. She was tired, and grateful to God for the opportunity to have some extra rest. Tomorrow, back at Holy Mount, it would start all over again. She was startled first by a strange noise that grew increasingly close and which Moosic's mind identified as electronic. She sat bolt upright. Electronic? In this day and age? Suddenly one of the mules brayed a protest, and she heard the noise like someone was over there. The moon was not yet up, but her eyes were accustomed enough to the darkness to see a shape trying to mount one of the animals. Her first thought was thieves, but suddenly two larger, hulking shapes rose up out of the darkness on either side. The rider saw them and screamed a horrible, deep scream and kicked the mule fiercely.
Moosic knew those shapes now, particularly as one adjusted something on what seemed to be a belt and then soared into the air after the fugitive nun. The other stood and watched for a while, then went over to the cart and started examining the contents. Moosic crept slowly towards the figure, getting as close as she dared. Her time-frame per-sonality identified the creature as a demon from Hell, and it was entirely possible that it wasn't too far off the mark. Whatever future had spawned these creatures was certainly no earthly paradise.
The gargoyle found food in the cart, and after a quick glance in the direction his companion had gone, it put down its rifle and picked up an apple. Now the sister understood for the first time why God had placed the unhappy soul in her head to accompany her. Some soul had been plucked from the tortures of Purgatory to give her the knowledge and strength to meet the demonic threat.
There was no time to get the best angle, for the creature's companion could return any moment now. With a silent and fervent prayer to God from the both of them, she ran, rolled, came up with the rifle, and as the thing dropped its apple and roared, she fired, holding down the trigger. Tiny little tracer balls leaped out and struck the thing in the chest. It fell backwards against the cart, screaming in agony, twitched for a moment, then died.

Moosic wasted no time. The noise, if nothing else, would certainly bring the companion back, and this
time they wouldn't be so lucky. The creature had come to rest on its side, and she saw the belt and clasp securing the time mechanism and undid it. It was tough for the slight girl to roll the thing over, particularly with it oozing blood and body parts, but Moosic saw his chance and, through sheer will to survive, beat back his saintly host. It was far too large for her, of course, but the straps bracing it allowed it to be worn by almost anyone. She saw with panic that one shot had struck off the top of the mechanism, burning a deep groove in it, but the rest of the lights and symbols were still on. She twisted the dials at random, just wanting to be anywhere and any when from here. Nothing happened, and, off to one side, she heard a whooshing noise nearby and the sound of a heavy object landing. That was enough. She just started pushing every-thing on the belt. There was the sensation of falling a great distance very fast through near-total darkness. It was quite different than the sensations of the time suit, but Moosic was only dimly aware of the comparison. He seemed frozen, immobile, not even breathing. Suddenly she suffered a drop of several inches and came down hard on rocky ground. It was still night, but the scene had changed dramatically. There was a paved stone road off to one side, and off in the immediate distance was the unmistakable glow and skyline of a low city. Moosic relaxed a bit and was surprised to find that he was still in the body of Sister Nobody, and that she was still very much with him, although too scared and in awe of anything to give even a peep of protest. The refined time mechanism, then, was far more versa-tile than the suit. No air supply was needed, and it appar-ently wrapped the body in some sort of energy shell to protect it. Arrival, too, had been different. This was not any frozen tableau, but a moving city. Time was progress-ing at its normal rate, yet the time traveler was unchanged.
Again Moosic remembered the woman in London. It took a great deal of energy, she said, to maintain someone without assimilation. So it was not only possible; it was done all the time—the woman had done it, as Blondie had done it in Trier, and those creatures, whatever they were, also did it. Those creatures. . . . How had they found him back in that randomly selected time and place? And, more important, why?
He remembered the noise, the electronic noise, earlier. They had been using some sort of device to sort him out among all the others. It wasn't perfect—when the other one had run off, they'd naturally assumed she was he—but it was close enough.
Energy bands. One led from the suit to the power source, but another had to lead from the suit to the traveler who came with it. Power was needed not only for travel, they'd said, but to maintain yourself against assimilation. Somehow, the body of Sister Nobody was not quite like all the others of her time. Some little part of it was . . . out of phase? As good a term as any. But what good was Ron Moosic to them? Certainly, he hadn't mattered much in the square at Trier until. . . . Until everything had gotten so fouled up. "I recharged your suit," she'd said. But how? Not with the folks back at Calvert, that was for sure.
She'd done more than recharge it—she'd changed its power source from Silverberg's crew to her own! That explained a lot. His assumption since Trier had been that two groups were fighting a war against each other in time. If they both had devices to scan the time stream and find anomalies—unassimilated people—they would be targets for the other once they took off their belts. Hence, all this business with contacting Sandoval and his people and getting them in position to do the dirty work. Early time-travel experiments would tend to be ignored or discounted by the monitors even when discovered. Why hadn't concealed time suits, belts, whatever, ever been discovered? It had to be because they couldn't be discovered. Perhaps they were only real, only tangible, to people out of phase with the time
frame. Maybe that was why you got assimilated after a certain point! After that point, you were in phase with your time frame, and so no longer could access the suit. Not being in phase, the time suits couldn't be ade-quately tracked or pinpointed by their sensors—but slightly out-of-phase people could. That would mean that they weren't really after him at all—they were after his time suit! A suit which now was linked to their enemy's power supply. With it, perhaps, they could track down that power supply, send an army of these gargoyles to it, and destroy it. Time would be left at the mercy of the other side.
He was sure he had it right, as far as it could be taken, but that didn't help; it only raised more unpleasant possibilities. He had on one of the enemy's time belts. They could turn it off or bring him back involuntarily, as soon as they knew it—and if they didn't know it already, they soon would. The longer he wore it, the greater the possibility that they would do so—or worse, since with their devices they would know exactly when and where he was. Even Silverberg could do that.

There was no question in his mind that he had to get rid of it, to take his chances in this new time and
place no matter what. He would then appear on the sensors of both sides, and they might well come after him—but at least it would be even odds.
Unhesitatingly, he unloosed the straps and let the belt fall to the ground, then stepped over it. He was hit almost instantly by the nausea and dizziness, and passed out in less than a minute. Time continued to play its sick sense of humor upon him, and his luck continued to be really bad. Now, at last, he knew he was trapped for good. After several tries, time at last had killed him in its sardonic way. At least, this time, he had no worries about assimilation. He would not last that long. Even without the elaborate and sad past of Marcus Josephus, he would have known that this was the end.
They were roused once more by the Roman soldiers and lined up. They were not fed, as usual, and the lack of both food and water was taking its own toll on the prisoners. It made for some will power, some extra strength on the part of those for whom hope never fled, for the ones that collapsed or could not go on in the chains they wore were the first.
It had been but two weeks since the final battle, the one they had so decisively lost, and now they walked, thou-sands of them in a line six across, down the Appian Way, guarded by two combined Roman legions. The men who had defeated them this last time were curiously merciful, even sympathetic. They did not goad or harm, and some even occasionally would offer a marcher a sip of water or a crust of bread in defiance of orders. It wasn't just that they respected their fallen foe for a battle well fought or that they felt the merciless punishment for rebellion was too terrible, although clearly many did. Six thousand prisoners, although starving men, women, and children, could still be formidable death-dealers, should they be goaded into a last suicidal attempt.
The crosses had begun at Capua, at the start of the Appian Way. They now stretched out behind them as far as the eye could see, but there was no hurry. It was still quite a ways to Rome, and the column of the condemned was still huge. He was a young and strong man, and near the end of the line of marchers. He might have three or four days yet, before it was his turn. Like his host, Ron Moosic felt now a totally defeated man, one who no longer had anything left to fight for or live for. He had precipitated the death of a great man, possibly altering history far more drastically than if he had not gone back at all. For that, he had been cast adrift, flying blindly backwards in time, pursued not because he was of any value, but because he alone knew the location of a time suit that held a possible key to victory in a war being fought by two groups he did not know over things he could not know. He considered ending it quickly, but knew he could not. Where life remained in him, he had to cling to it, no matter how terrible the end might be. It was sickening to march slowly past that endless line of crosses. He almost had to wonder where the Romans had found enough wood for them. Wood and nails. For these were not routine crucifixions, where one was strapped on and left to slowly starve or die of shock and exposure. The army could not afford to tie up so many men to guard such a line. If the nails, and wood, held out, all, even the women and children among them, were to be nailed on, their cries and screams of pain and pleas for mercy so commonplace now that his senses were dulled to them. Had they known this would be the result, they would have fought to the last, every one of them, but who could ever have imagined that a civilized society would order this terrible death for six thousand people? But the Spartican Rebellion was more than a simple revolt or war; it was, in fact, a threat to the slave basis of that very system. Six thousand who could never again be trusted, who had Roman blood on their hands, would be sacrificed in order to set an example, to reassure the citizenry and to so terrify the slaves that it would not happen again.
In fact, it took four days before they got to him, and even then he had a feeling of unreality about it. They grabbed him, and when he fought, they knocked him half unconscious with clubs. Then they strapped him to the cross on the ground, and in rapid fashion drove the nails in his wrists, waist, and legs. They were fast and professional; they had been getting a lot of practice. The terrible pain of the nails was nothing to the pain felt when the cross was raised and gravity tugged on his body. Shock quickly set in, not ending the pain but somehow making it bearable. He still passed out, and came to only intermittently. He was no longer rational or wholly able to see or concentrate, and he knew he was slipping fast. Some of them lingered on for days, but he knew he would not be one of them. Lord God, I will be with you tonight, if the time maniacs have not killed you as well, he thought. It
would take a squad of Marines to get me out of this now.

THE TIME HAS COME, THE WALRUS SAID, TO SPEAK OF
MANY THINGS
The squad of Marines landed just off the Appian Way, and quickly they took up positions. There were eleven of them, clad in boots and camouflage uniforms, but they were not the Marines Ron Moosic was used to, nor were their weapons and belts standard issue. The Romans had posted guards every twenty crosses, mostly in order to make sure that none were freed before death overtook them, for all the good rescue would do. The shock, loss of blood, and crushed bones would make them useless, and perhaps hopeless, in any case. The squad spread out, each taking the five guards clos-est to either side of Moosic, while the eleventh stood poised, waiting for a clear path. On a signal transmitted to each member of the squad, they fired as one, their rifles issuing brief bursts of light. As they struck the guards, those guards went down; then each advanced to the guard's previous position and assumed it. There were few torches along the Appian way at this point, and it was hoped that the Romans nearest to the fallen guards would simply see a figure there in the dusk. It wouldn't have to be for long. Waiting a couple of minutes to make certain they had not been discovered, and prepared for a display of fire-power if they were, they relaxed and all but the outermost guard replacements moved in to aid the leader, who was already at Moosic's cross. Quickly they lifted it up, then gently lowered it to the ground. Moosic had passed out by that time and had seen none of this. The leader, a huge, fat man with Oriental features who resembled a Sumo wrestler, whispered, "Doc—check on him. Are we in time?"
Another figure approached and ran a few checks with some portable instruments, then nodded. "Barely," she told him. "No way we're going to risk taking him down, though. Get this spare belt around him and I'll program it. He hasn't reached a trip point yet, so I think we can get him back to the base as his original self."
Quickly they strapped the belt around him, and around the cross as well. He groaned lightly, but otherwise re-mained unaware of the activity.
"Hurry!" somebody else whispered. "Those guards will be coming to in a couple of minutes!" Doc nodded. "All set. Chung, you sound recall. I'll set his and mine for the same point. Let's move! He can die on us at any moment!"
Chung, the huge leader, unhooked a small wireless microphone from his time belt. "Recall to Base. Ten seconds, everybody. Acknowledge!"
As the acknowledgments were still coming in, Doc reached over and with one hand tripped Moosic's belt, and with the other her own.
Both vanished into time.
Ron Moosic awoke slowly, as if from a very bad dream. He lay there for a while, confused and disoriented, as strange sounds around him began to resolve themselves into voices. "Shock is as much mental as physical," Doc told a couple of worried-looking young men in the small base hospital. "He'll be O.K., as we know, but don't expect an immediate recovery. We were very lucky with him, I can tell you."
Moosic understood none of the words, not because of his condition but because they were spoken in a language he did not understand. Still, he recognized the language as real, opened his eyes, and groaned. Standing near him was a white-clad woman who was rather tall and dark-complected, sort of Polynesian in appearance, with dark brown eyes and jet black hair cut very short. The two others with her were both men: one was dressed in a camouflage uniform and appeared almost too large to fit through any known door; the other, a light-skinned black man with strong Negroid features, was dressed in a one-piece outfit of black leather-like material. Even so, he looked like everybody's vision of a military drill instructor. The white-clad woman saw that he was awake, turned to him, and smiled down at him. She had a very nice smile. "Glad to have you back among the living. I am Kahwalini, generally known to everyone as Doc. That way they don't have to remember how the name is pronounced." She had excellent command of English, but her accent was strange, like no other he had ever heard before.

"Ron Moosic," he croaked. "I take it I'm not dead?"
She laughed. "No, you're not dead, although it was a very close thing. Minutes, perhaps." He realized with a start that he was Ron Moosic—real and in the flesh. But, somewhere in his mind, he also knew that he was a little bit of Alfie Jenkins, and Holger Neumann, and Sister Nobody, and, yes, Marcus Josephus as well. He could still feel the pain of the nails and the agony of the cross, and a little part of him, certainly the Sister, seemed to take some perverse satisfaction in that. "Where—when—am I?" he managed, and tried to sit up. He felt instantly weak and dizzy and settled back down.
"Don't try to move for a little bit yet," the doctor warned him. "You have had a great shock, and it will take some small time to convince your body that it is not the one which suffered. As to where you are, we call it simply Home Base, although it has many names. As to when— well, that is something even we aren't certain about. Some period after the age of dinosaurs but before the domination of mammals, although mammals there are around this place."
In the prehistoric past, even before the appearance of apelike beings, he thought wonderingly.
"The very large gentleman over there is Commander Chung Lind," Doc told him. "The other just calls himself Herb."
"Herbert Axton Wethers," Herb added, "for all the good that does now. Me and a hundred other folks." His accent was as strange as Kahwalini's, but totally different. "You don't have a tall, rough-looking blond fellow with you, do you?" Moosic asked hesitantly. Chung Lind laughed. "Hardly. That'd be Eric. Him and we don't get along very well." A third accent, equally odd, equally unique. Now that he thought of it, the woman in London and Blondie had both had such accents as well.
"What about a short, chubby woman with short black hair?" Kahwalini's eyebrows rose slightly. "Yes, she's here. You'll meet her and the others soon. Right now you need sleep most of all. You two—get out of here! I'm going to let him rest." "But I don't want—" Moosic started, but he saw he'd been too slow to win this battle. It wasn't exactly a needle, but it hissed slightly against his arm and stung for just a second, and he began feeling very groggy in a matter of seconds.
It was a deep and apparently dreamless sleep, and when he awoke, he felt much, much better. He looked to see if he was attached to anything—IV tubes or the like—and, finding nothing, he sat up. He was still a little dizzy, but otherwise he felt pretty good. The door slid aside with a hissing sound and Kahwalini entered, this time dressed in the basic black outfit that seemed the standard around here—wherever "here" really was. "Glad to see you're looking good," she said cheerily. "How do you feel?" "A little dizzy, and hungry enough to eat a horse." "Excellent! The dizziness, I think, will pass, and will be helped by a meal." She opened a small cabinet and took out a package, then unwrapped something and offered it to him. "Here—eat this. It's a sort of candy-and-cake roll, lots of sugar and not much else, but it should help until I've finished my examination and we can get you some real food."
The examination seemed like a normal general exam— stethoscope on the chest, a look at the throat, eyes, ears, and such—but it also included placing two small instru-ments on him, one on his forehead, then another on his back. She checked both and nodded to herself. "Looking good," she told him. "I think you're fit enough to join the rest of the human race, such as it is in this day and time." The confection had helped a lot, although he was still thirsty and starved for more food. She got him a black suit of their standard issue, and he was surprised to find how well it fit when he put it on. It was, in fact, a two-piece affair, top and bottom, but he discovered that when he ran his index finger along the seam, it essentially vanished. "Good trick," he told her. "There's a fly like that in yours, too," she told him. "To open, simply press where you want the slit to start and continue down, keeping your finger on the material until it is open enough. Reverse the process to close."
"This is not exactly one-million-B.C. technology," he noted. The boots were less impressive, being almost exactly the same as the pairs he'd worn in the Air Force. They were, however, without laces, and he found that you sealed them like you did the suit. Finally, she gave him a black belt with a small, and empty, leather-like pouch on it. The buckle, of flat black metal, was disappointing—it was a simple clasp type with no special features. "You'll find the pouch useful, since you have no pockets," she told him. "No underwear, either," he noted, seeing every shapely part of her anatomy. He looked down and found

that it worked both ways.
"We wear whatever is needed, no more. Most of so-called Western civilization overdressed to death, even in the tropics."
He couldn't argue with that.
They assigned him a small, comfortable apartment in the complex and got him a good meal—the meat was apparently synthetic, but tasted very good, while all the rest was organically grown on the base—and then took him down to meet the others, answer questions, and show off the base. There were a total of twelve members in the squad, which was all they ever called themselves. They were, in fact, the only humans on the base or, as far as they knew, in the time frame, except for himself, although the place could accommodate about a hundred people, if pressed. "The whole place is automated," Doc told him. "In fact, much of the complex is a large, totally sealed computer. It's the computer that keeps watch on the time stream, charting its phases and changes, and dispatches some or all of us."
He nodded. "But why back this far in time? I would have thought that you would put this in your present." "Our—oh. I should explain. None of us are from the time of the builders. We're all just like you—nightsiders originally from the other times. You are the earliest, I think, but we recruit from those who go nightside. The amount of power required for time travel is enormous. To do it the way we do, the power complex here could power your world for a year all by itself." He was shocked. "You mean you have never seen who you work for?" She shook her head negatively. "None of us. Oh, as nightsiders, we could travel all the way to the leading edge, but that wouldn't do us any good." Several others joined in the conversation, and at last he was given a picture of just what was going on.
The leading edge was a little well over two hundred years in the future of his time. On the main line, atomic war was averted in a most terrible way, when two small countries went at each other with nuclear weapons. The results were a glaring case study of what a nuclear war would really be like, and the climatic changes caused by even the limited exchange were dramatic for many years. The larger nations did not rush to disarm, but they were clearly frightened. Together, they took steps to stamp out nuclear weapons and control such materials, no matter what the cost to smaller countries. Seeing the results but still not convinced an all-out holocaust could be avoided, both East and West turned their energies to space, both as a diversion and because, both sides felt, the establishment of a true human perma-nence in space would guarantee the survival of humanity in the future. This, in fact, was the case, but the results were not at all what they expected. Terraforming Mars, for example, was very possible, but also very lengthy—the time involved being at least several centuries. Other places in space that would be self-sufficient and require no Earth support were even less hospitable. So, instead of risking the time that it would take to radi-cally change those places, they changed the people themselves. There was no shortage of volunteers, which surprised them, but between those who felt it was the only salvation of the human race and the romantics, the dreamers, the scientists, and, indeed, the down-and-out looking for a new start, it was irresistible. By the time of the leading edge, colonies had been established not only on Mars but also on some of the distant moons of the gas giants and on asteroids. Expen-sive terraforming was done, but it was bargain-basement by comparison and short- rather than long-term oriented. The people, by a process they didn't know, were altered to fit what the engineers could create. The dividends were enormous beyond the salvation of humanity. New ways to find and use energy, and new sources of it, were discovered and even created by those who became known collectively as the Outworlders. They also bred new generations true to their mutated forms, and those new generations made new discoveries. But there was a great push on Earth now for large masses of people who wanted to undergo the processes and live as Out-worlders. Many who were sent were political dissidents or criminals; other places used the new colonies, which had fragile ecosystems able to support only limited numbers, as population control valves.
Ultimately, the Outworlders faced the historic choice that all colonies eventually face. They could continue to supply the rapidly resource-depleted Earth with all it needed, while getting little in return, and continue to absorb new groups of people, many of them undesirables, until finally their ecosystems would collapse, unable to support the vast bulk of people and Earth's requirements—or they could quit. Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, European, and American the Outworlders had been, and culturally they continued for a while as these groups. But transport interdependence and their alienness from Earth's race which had spawned them drove them ever closer together, no longer as echoes of Earth nations but as Outworlders. Political control was difficult anyway, since even the controllers had to become Outworlders.

Eventually there was a revolt. The Confederation of Outworlders was proclaimed, an association of free
and independent races with a common military force. They took many of the spaceships of Earth, and revealed that they had many more of their own. Earth did not take it easily, for they'd come to depend on the Outworlds for much of their resources and technology. For the first time, countries always hostile to one another put aside their differences and pooled their resources to mount a fleet to wrest control from the still weak Out-worlders while they still could. The Outworlders struck quickly, destroying the vulnera-ble orbital power stations and spaceship relays, where transfers were made from Earth to Orbit shuttles to deep space vessels. The installations on the moon were overrun or destroyed.
In the political backwash of this action, and as the standard of living for Earth's vast population dropped like a stone from this cutoff, governments fell and the semi-combined military forces stepped in. The Earth came quickly under a ruthless worldwide military dictatorship formed from the officers of the multinational force. There was no nuclear war, for the very people on both sides who would have to ultimately fire the warheads refused to act—except against those who refused their rule. The military men may not have liked each other, but they understood that the future of Earth depended on retak-ing the Outworlds at all costs. National and even ideologi-cal disputes could wait, for they were of no consquence.
If humanity in the twentieth century had suddenly lost all use of electrical devices, all civilizations would have fallen and much of the world would have died as surely as it would by nuclear bomb. Their ancestors had gotten along without it, but they had grown up without it and in an economy and culture that had never had it. The knowledge of how to survive in a society without such power had essentially been lost. In the twenty-third century, this had been taken a step further. The economics and very survival of human civili-zation depended on what the Outworlds produced and managed. Without the orbital power satellites, without the minerals and miracles of space production, the basis of civilization could not stand. There could be merely a holding action.
The Outworlds, too, understood this, but had expected to come to terms after presenting Earth with a fait accom-pli. They had not expected, however, to be dealing with a massive multinational military complex,
but with the old political leaders they were accustomed to. They had struck too hard and too well. The military ruthlessly stamped out all opposition, kill-ing millions in the process. Their technological base was dwindling, but hardly exhausted, and they used all they had in the single effort to get back out there at all costs. The Earth became effectively a slave labor camp dedicated to the one goal of retaking space. The Outworlds, stunned by this, realized that only a massive military defeat would insure their future. Ironically, they also found themselves fighting to free Earth from a form of oppression no past dictator had ever dreamed possible. They had the high ground, and could bombard the Earth almost at will, although the Earth had formidable defenses and took her toll. Still, Earth's posi-tion was hopeless until some formerly Soviet generals happened on the American time-machine project. The project, in fact, had been shut down for years for lack of funds, but the great store of knowledge was intact, and many of the laws and limitations of time had been worked out. A theoretical plan for the defense of Earth from a possible time war was uncovered. It had been discovered through instrumentation and un-manned probes that beyond the dawn of human civilization time was far more tolerant. With sufficient power, a com-puter could be placed far back in time, perhaps to its origins, with no true link to the leading edge at all. With a supporting self-generating power supply, it could monitor time forward, with all its changes, and power at least a small force of time-traveling agents. If need be, much of its output could be diverted in the event of a complete collapse or nuclear war to take the leadership and selected others all the way back to the complex. A few hundred, no more, but it was another way to perhaps preserve humanity, which could then wait it out until enough relative time had elapsed, the leading edge advancing a few centuries, to return to a future Earth in the process of righting itself or finding a new balance.
Such a computer had been sent back, in the golden days of limitless Outworlder power. It could be accessed.
"Then this is that station," Moosic said wonderingly. "And those things I called gargoyles—Outworlders?" They looked shocked. "Oh, no," Lind responded. "This is the base the Outworlders built to counter the time threat. The gargoyles, as you call them, are the products of the same process that created the Outworlders, but changed to produce the perfect soldier—dumb, totally obedient, very tough and strong. This is the Outworlder base, and we're the enemies of Earth."

A bit later in the afternoon, he met the woman again. She'd not been there for the initial bull session, and
he'd been too curious to inquire, but now that she'd come in from wherever she'd been, he had the feeling she was avoiding direct contact. He dismissed that as crazy and went over to her. "Hi! I finally get the chance to say thanks for saving my life," he said cheerfully, sitting down in a chair opposite hers. "How's that for a good opening line?" She smiled, but there seemed to be a lot of thinking going on behind those dark eyes. She seemed much young-er than he'd remembered her, but, then, he'd been drugged and the light had been poor, and Alfie had a different perspective of what old meant. She sighed, and seemed to decide whatever it was that was troubling her, or at least she put it off for a time. "I'm sorry for not being a little more hospitable," she responded. "I'm afraid I've got a load on my mind and a lot of hard decisions to make. I've just had a nasty personal shock."
"Try being crucified," he suggested, surprised he could make light of it so soon. "I have. It's not very nice. Not much has been nice lately." He shrugged, a bit disconcerted by the answer, and made as if to leave. "I don't want to intrude on what's none of my business."
"No, no. Stay, please. I'm still a little new at this myself, and it's pretty hard to get used to. As soon as you think you've found out everything, you find you don't understand anything at all. This whole business of time is the craziest thing you can think of. Just think of this, for starters—neither of us is a real person." "Huh? We both look pretty solid to me."
"Maybe. But we're nightsiders. We have no existence outside of this base, outside of the Safe Zone—the time before people. Neither of us has a home to go to anymore." He considered that a moment. "I imagine I still do—if I could ever get back to my own time." She shook her head. "They haven't told you yet. Go ask Doc or Herb. I think I understand it, but they'll explain it better than me."
He excused himself and found Herb, who told him. Karl Marx had now been killed in 1841, at twenty-three years of age, before he'd even formed any of his ideas, let alone committed them to paper. Thus, the potential theoretician of the Communist movement had also been killed. Without him, competing theories dominated, particularly Bakunism, which is essentially anarchy. The theories of the left re-mained classical rather than radical. Because there was no Marx, there was no Marxism to inspire Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, they drifted into the more radical anarchy of Bakunin, and went nowhere. Because there was no Lenin and Trotsky there to take firm control, the Russians, when they overthrew the Czar, remained a weak social democracy.
"Because it was a weak democracy dominated by lib-eral nobles, it did little to really better or modernize the Russian nation," Herb continued. "Stalin did not rise to power and ruthlessly modernize, mobilize, and arm the nation, building it into a twentieth-century country. There was also an independent Ukraine, so Russia did not have control of its breadbasket or a firm buffer. But Germany still lost World War I, and Hitler still rose to power, only this time there was no strong Soviet state under a firm leader to hold on." Moosic was reminded that on his own time line Russia nearly lost the war to Germany again: Now it had lost, allowing Germany to put its full might into North Africa and against England. "With the collapse of England," Herb informed him, "America turned its full attention to the Japanese." He blanched. "You mean—because Joseph Stalin didn't come to power, the U.S. lost World War II?" "Oh, no. It finally won, the same way it had won the original one—at least, I think it was the original one. I'll have to ask the computer sometime. But an untouched German Empire, stretching from all of Europe into all of the Saharan regions and across to the Urals, was able to do what America did. They had the bomb, too. Fortunately, Hitler died, they tell me, in 1947, before delivery systems were perfected. The hierarchy that followed him wanted to consolidate its empire, and so an informal peace was struck, dividing the world in much the same way as the pope had back in Columbus' time. They have Europe, the Middle East, much of Africa, and Russia. The U.S. has a Chinese ally—no Mao, remember—that is weak but which it supports, as well as southern Asia and the Pacific, and most of Latin America is under its thumb." He left Herb, his mind reeling from the magnitude of the deed. And yet, somehow, the world had come out pretty much the same, only more messed up than ever. He rejoined the mystery woman. "I see what you mean about complicated. And your original present isn't there, either?" She shrugged. "No, not really. It doesn't mean any-thing to me anymore, anyway. I can't even remember it too well, and I don't think I want to. What's the difference? I mean, you feel bad about that guy Marx, right?"
"Yes, I do."

"Well, forget it. Eric and his things were out to kill Marx all the time. They don't know why, since the end
came out pretty much the same in any case. Time jokes abound even with the big things." He was thunderstruck. "What do you mean, 'they were out to kill Marx all the time'?" "Not at the start. At least, they don't think so. The first trip was more of a test. I doubt if that fellow—" she halted, as if trying to remember something. "Sandoval?"
She nodded. "Yeah, Sandoval. They don't think he knew this. But, you see, if they just went back and did it, we could go back and undo it. We would be able to spot just where and when they showed up, like they did with you, then go back to a point just before that. But that time is pretty crowded for the Outworlders. Almost all of the team has been somewhere in that time period, and not anywhere in Germany." "I see. So, if Lind, say, went back, he'd be in America someplace, taking up the life he'd lived when he was there before."
She nodded. "That's where they have it all over us. They can take their creatures and come into a time for just an hour or so, staying who they are. That's about the limit before you become somebody else regardless. Since they can use their creatures for this, they don't have to worry about becoming somebody else the way we do. They make the damned things, any of which can be sent back for an hour or so. They breed them in tanks somewhere back here in the Safe Zone, or so it's said." "Blondie was real."
"Eric, they call him. He has a lot of names, but that's the one they use the most. Somebody has to direct those things. But we don't know if he has ever stayed more than an hour in any time frame. We know nothing about him, except that he is the leader of the enemy's time project." "So they put Sandoval and Marx together in the square, materialize just before the fateful meeting, and if I hadn't acted, they would have shot him, having him in the right time and place so they could go to the very spot."
She nodded. "It was the only way to be sure, since so much of Marx's early life isn't really known." A funny thought struck him. "They said Soviet generals rediscovered the time project. The idea of Soviet officers ordering the death of Marx and a German victory over Russia just doesn't ring true." "No, it doesn't," Herb put in, coming over and joining the conversation. "They would never allow such a thing. That's what makes Eric so fascinating. He's the wild card in the game. They trusted him, and he double-crossed them as well, although there are no consequences, of course, because there now never were any Soviet generals. We don't know what kind of game he's playing, but it's one to win, that's for sure. Win for Earth and win for him, too. I suspect, at the expense of his bosses." He paused a moment. "Um, I see you two have met."
He looked over at the woman. "I still don't know your name," he pointed out. "When you've nightsided past your trip point, you may as well pick any name," she told him. "I call myself Dawn, because it's a new start and I kind of like the sound of it. I have lots of other names, but they don't mean nothing to me anymore."
He liked her, felt a strange attraction for her, although he couldn't really say why. She reminded him of a lot of people, but he couldn't really put his finger on even one. Certainly she was no looker, but there was a lot inside there, including much that was probably never revealed to anyone, yet that spark showed through. And she had raised an interesting question. "What's this trip point business?" "You can reach a trip point in several ways," Herb told him. "One way is to become so damn many people you're more them than you. It's an occupational hazard. Another way is to stay in a time period too long, so that your self-identity is changed. Despite the folks you've been, you're still Ron Moosic, because at the core of your mind that's who you are. But if another personality became dominant, got into that core, then you wouldn't be Moosic anymore; rather, you'd be somebody else." He thought of Sister Nobody, who was still very much a part of him, and grew nervous. "I had one that I couldn't really fight," he told them. "If I hadn't been attacked by those creatures, I might never have gotten control. So, you mean that if I stayed as her too long, then she'd be the dominant personality?" Herb nodded. "Yes, indeed. And Ron Moosic would become one of the subordinate elements—but he could never rise again. The only reason we were able to get you here with your old body intact was that you still are Ron Moosic. You see, that's what makes you different than any of us. We—none of us—are the folks we started out as being. And the more you're somebody else, the less real that original fellow becomes."
He began to understand Dawn's problem now. She was still new at this herself, she'd said, so she wasn't long, perhaps, past her trip point. Somewhere, deep down, there was an identity crisis that she was only just starting to be able to handle. He sympathized, and realized with a ner-vous start that it was probably his

fate, too. He frowned, a sudden thought striking him as he realized the extent of Dawn's comment on the
insanity of time. "Uh—is there, or was there, a Ron Moosic in my own time—now?" Herb shrugged. "Beats the hell out of me. If there is, you could go home—but to a nastier America than you left, and a dirtier world. You'd just merge with him and fade out the old you. Certainly, the time project still exists, but it sure wasn't invaded by any Marxist fanatics. There aren't any anymore. I heard her explain that to you."
"Wait a minute! If Sandoval and I never went back, nobody was there to kill Marx! This is crazy!" "Oh, there's a logic to it; it's just not the kind you're used to. No, time rippled from the event and flattened out at the edge. The main line now has Marx killed by who-ever the hell Sandoval was in that time. He died there, too; so it's complete. You didn't kill him—that fellow born in that time did, for whatever purpose. It doesn't matter a bit. Marx and his murder ain't even a footnote in the history books anymore. Only the computer and us nightsiders and Eric and his computer know the real truth. That leaves you hanging in a paradox time can easily resolve. It just re-moves the paradox, meaning you. Either you go back and merge with yourself and that's the end of it, or you assimilate elsewhere, or you stay nightsided. Any way, you're no problem to the fabric of time now. See?" The trouble was, he did see—sort of. Time took the best shortcut to keep its integrity. He was not a problem. "Uh—but what if I had shot Marx in Trier, instead of Sandoval? What would time have done then?"
"You would have been instantly assimilated. The same way you'd go if you shot your father before he met your mother. Another Ron Moosic might exist up front, but it wouldn't mean anything to you." So that was it. The basic law seemed to be that time resolved paradox in the most direct manner it could. And Holger Neumann, distraught at the death of Marx, would most certainly have killed himself. End of problem. Time is changed, but the equations balanced out. And that left him, here, with an unpalatable problem. Remain, and therefore be the newest recruit in the squad, eventually reaching a trip point and becoming someone else entirely, someone not of his own choosing. Or pick a time and assimilate there. No, that was out. Time had shown him no favors at all, and there'd be nobody to rescue him the next time. Or have them return him to his own time, but a time far changed from the one he'd left, to become a Ron Moosic who might have come out very differently than he. If he existed at all. If not, there was assimilation again. He was beginning to feel as worried and confused as Dawn. AFTER THE FALL WAS OVER
Over the next few weeks, Ron Moosic was able to explore much of the complex and the surrounding area. Dawn still seemed somewhat uncomfortable around him, but also drawn to him, and she became his guide. He kept having the feeling that she wanted to get something off her chest, but he didn't push it. She would tell it, if she had to, when she was ready for it. The area was perfect as a hidden base. The complex itself, viewed from outside, looked like nothing so much as two huge, shiny metallic cubes, one on top of the other, the whole complex rising several hundred feet into the air. Around it were the gardens abundant with fruit-bearing bushes and trees, vegetables, and more. Some of the plants were unfamiliar and native to the time; most, however, had been brought back after being altered to fit the existing conditions. The Outworlders were master biologists, that was for sure. The place could feed a popula-tion of hundreds if it had to, and it required very little maintenance. One day Dawn said, "Come on. I'd like to show you my favorite spot around here," and led him outside the base perimeter.
Beyond the base itself was a dense, jungle-like forest which showed what it all must have looked like before the area was cleared and the complex built. Here there were insects and even small mammals, although nothing large or particularly threatening. A small, clear stream flowed through the dark jungle, until, a bit over a mile from the complex, it suddenly plunged a hundred feet or more in a spectacular, if small-volume waterfall. Here was the sea, looking much as it did during anyone's time, clear and blue and untouched.
They sat there, letting the wind carry some of the spray from the falls to them, and just enjoyed it. It was, Moosic had to agree, a truly pretty place, a place to come and sit and think. His indecision, and unwillingness to really commit himself, made him more of a hanger-on than a member

of the squad. Dawn, for example, always carried a time belt when outside the base—just in case something
happened, for, back here, there was no way to wait for rescue. He had not been issued one, and wouldn't be until and unless he told them he was freely joining and undertook some training. Dawn, however, was willing to show him the basics of the belt. "It personalizes itself to the wearer," she told him. "No one can touch it or see it except the person it brought to a particular time and place. Still, it's a good idea to hide it, since you never know when the enemy will show up. If they traced anyone to a time frame and got them to retrieve and deactivate the belt, they'd have a homing device leading straight here." There were four master controls, noted by squiggly little symbols that meant nothing to him. He soon learned, however, that they were "Activate," "Standby," "Home," and "Off." The last two were the most interesting. "Home" would immediately bring the wearer to the frame and location of the power supply—in this case, to where they were. "Off" was used only at the base or in Safe Zones, since it made the belt phase into a frame and thus would not only allow anyone to see or find it but also subject it to the assimilation process. The Safe Zone was safe not only because no one could affect the course of time to any great degree there, but also because it was impossible for a human being to be tracked in it. Time simply disregarded human beings this far back; it had so much room to correct whatever they might do that they simply were no threat to the orderly time stream. Even a nuclear explosion could be adjusted for in the space of a million years.
"They say they picked this spot because it's a volcanic island," she told him. "Inactive now and for the foresee-able future—they checked—but still an island, and a transi-tory one. It will disappear in the ages, and so will any trace we make on it. That's why it's so safe." To set the belt, you merely picked a reference point and set it with the dials. All of them being from near his time, the basic Julian calendar was used. Place basically used a grid of latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds, but in a pinch the microprocessor could come up with the coordinates if you used the little microphone attached to tell it—and if it had the place you wanted in its files. It was almost three weeks before he made his decision. He and Dawn walked out to the falls on the coast and he told her there. "I'm staying," he said simply. "After all is said and done, I suddenly realized that I didn't have anything to go back to, even if it were back to my own time. I kept fighting against it, I don't know why, but then I remembered why they asked me to go back in the first place. I really did have the least to lose of the available qualified personnel." "I know why you hesitated," she told him. "It's this whole time business. It makes everything unreal. There's nothing left solid to stand on. Nothing is fixed—it's all variables. I think that's why I like it here so much. This place is fixed, unchanging, permanent. And so are we— here." He was about to reply when, off in the distance, there came the sound of tremendous explosions. Both jumped up in a minute and, without looking at each other, rushed off back into the jungle for the base. The explosions continued, together with the sounds of shouting people. The acrid stench of explosives was in the air. They reached the edge of the jungle clearing, and Moosic was shocked to see a small horde of the gargoyles attacking the great structure. The base itself offered little resistance, but while they were making a mess of the gardens, the metallic building itself seemed untouched. That was clearly changing, however. A small knot of gargoyles under the direction of a human leader were busily assembling some sort of imposing weapon aimed right for the heart of the complex. The attacks were clearly designed to keep the Outworlders inside and unable to prevent the completion of the assembly. He looked at Dawn. "We have to do something!" She looked back at him resignedly. "What do you suggest? We can't get through that mob—they'll kill us. We can't get to that weapon, whatever it is. It'd be suicide. And neither of us is armed." The sheer irrefutability of her logic both maddened and quieted him. All he could do was crouch there at the edge of the jungle and watch and wait. "Why don't they defend themselves?" he muttered. "Surely they must have been prepared for this." He had a sudden thought. "Your time belt! We could use it to go back just a little and warn them!"
She shook her head. "Won't work. Just like any other time, you can't be in two places at once. Besides—they were warned. The computer refused to let them take any action." "Huh? Why?"
"It's part of a nightside time loop. In time, causes can precede events, but the events must be allowed to come about or much worse will happen. God knows, I don't pretend to understand it. I—I just accept what must be now."
He looked at her strangely, then back at the scene, which was getting worse. The device was completed now and powered up, and what was clearly a barrel or projector was aimed directly at the base. The sound of an air horn caused the attack from the gargoyles to be broken off, and they retreated a respectful