Alternities (8 page)

Jet-haired and lithe, Jason March was unembarrassedly sitting naked on the bench by his gray steel lockerlike wardrobe, polishing a wing-tip shoe. March was the first friend Wallace had made in the Guard. He had been a G2 when Wallace was a trainee. Thrown together by the soon-to-be-abandoned mentor system, they found themselves united by their love of combo music and dark beer and their virulent hatred for the Boston Celtics.

March was G5 now, and his growing command of Russian and Arabic kept his schedule full with Black and White Section assignments. That meant that Wallace crossed paths with him less often, mostly in the change-out room, and one or the other of them seemed to miss their Thursday night Notes Club “date” about half the time. But friends they still were.

“Hey, Rayne,” March called back, looking up from his labors. “I heard you came back from your run in several pieces.”

“I came back in one piece,” Wallace said, spinning the dial on his closet. “But I felt a bit subdivided when Adams got done with me.”

March chuckled. “My informant must have confused the two.”

“You inbound or out?”

“Out.”

“I guess I can’t interest you in a beer at Reggie’s.”

Shaking his head, March said, “Too early, anyway.”

Wallace checked the watch he had just retrieved from the smallest of the three compartments inside his locker. “A little, maybe. Where to?”

“Yellow. Domestic drop.”

While he slipped his wedding ring back on his finger, Wallace took a second look at the clothes hanging from March’s valet. Jacket and tie, pale blue dress shirt—that almost always meant a Yellow puddle-jump.

The Alternity Yellow gate house was abandoned Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, on the North Sea. For obvious reasons of logistics the field station had to be elsewhere. For less obvious reasons it was in lower Manhattan, though the Guard did operate a small substation in London.

To get from the gate house to the field station meant a five-hour flight on one of the needle-nose Lockheed screamers, and a runner had to look the part of someone who could afford the trip. March wouldn’t even have to wear a pouch on this run—Yellow Section would have a leather briefcase waiting for him.

“I guess that means scratch Thursday.”

“ ’Fraid so. I left a message for you upstairs. But let’s do something this weekend, huh? How about Saturday?”

“Sure,” Wallace said, closing his wardrobe. “I’ll look at the papers. Somebody worth hearing ought to be playing.” He edged away, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. “Have a good run.”

He took the long way out, past the door to the chute and the oak-backed brass plaque that hung on beside it. The plaque called him back, and he paused in front of it to scan the single column of names.

There could be no monuments to fallen Guardsmen outside the walls of the Tower, so they remembered their own inside them. The Guard had neither seal nor motto, and so the plaque carried a legend only: “In Memory Always With Us.” Mawkish and uninspired, and yet somehow enough to stab straight through to the place where disquieting emotions lived.

Thirty-one names, but room enough left for twice that number. Which made the plaque not only a memorial, but also a warning. It was the last thing the runners saw before starting down the chute, the direct corridor to gate control. Even those who chose not to look at it saw it in their mind’s eye in the process.

Thirty-one names, soon to be thirty-two. He remembered Brenda Hilley as a plumpish girl given to white turtleneck sweaters and silver and turquoise Indian jewelry. Pleasant smile. A screening analyst, he seemed to remember. He wondered if she’d volunteered for the transit or been volunteered by the stationmaster. Wondered if it mattered.

Thirty-one names. He ran a fingertip across the metal where Brenda’s name would be added, leaving a faint chromatic streak of body oil on the gleaming brass. It seemed a desecration, and he hastily rubbed the streak away with the sleeve of his shirt.

“In Memory Always With Us,” it said, but that was a lie. No one talked about the lost, even those who’d known them. It was considered bad form, maybe even bad luck. The people whose names appeared on the plaque lived on only as an uncomfortable reminder that the maze killed.

For, except for the odd mole or two killed in a random traffic accident or caught up in a riot, everyone on the list had disappeared between gates. Crackers lost probing the maze, runners who never completed a routine transit, ferrymen who failed to deliver themselves and their packages to the other side.
Gee, R.W., you could have been one of the exceptions—

Wallace shivered and tore himself away before his imagination put his own name on the plaque. “Ready for the engraver.” That was the Guard’s joking euphemism for death. It was an honor he had come close to earning himself, an honor he could do without.

For more than twelve hours, the suggestion that he had screwed up had been eating at Wallace. As he left the change-out room, the only way he could think to rid himself of the bilious taste of that thought was to get a good run under his belt, as soon as possible.

The dispatcher on duty behind the assignment desk was Deborah King, a familiar if not friendly face. More than a year ago Wallace had made the mistake of innocently flirting her up with his wedding ring resting in his locker. The scolding she had given him when she discovered he was married had been hot enough that his ears still burned when he thought about it.

It had been impossible, then or since, to persuade her that he had not been looking to cheat on his wife. Worse, at a yard party a few weeks later at Jason’s, Deborah had made a point of seeking out and befriending Ruthann. Seeing them sitting together, but not knowing what they were talking about, had made for a miserable afternoon.

Which was exactly what Deborah intended. “I didn’t tell her anything,” she had said just before leaving. “I just thought you needed to squirm a little.” The only comfort Wallace could take was that her ferocious reaction meant that she might have said yes if the proposition had come. And there was at least some balm for the ego in that.

“ ’Lo, Deb,” he said, approaching the desk. “21618—Red released me. Mark me clear and tell me what you have.”

“Some kind of release. Your Red certification’s been suspended.”

“I know. It’s protective, not punitive. I’m still okay on Blue and Yellow. What’s the rotation look like?”

“Normal. Eight or ten names ahead of you on each. Not that—”

Eight or ten names was a two-hour wait, at least. “I can do ferry runs.”

“Not that it matters,” she repeated. “You also have a three-day medical hold from Dr. Glass.”

“What?”

She reached for a clipboard and showed him the order.

“So what does this mean?” he asked, glancing at the paper and looking up.
Nice eyes
—

“It means you’re going home. Did you even call your wife last night?”

“No,” he admitted, realizing.

“Figures. Well, you’ve got a couple of days to make it up to her. Give the little one a hug for me.”

That was the most annoying fallout of all, Deborah King’s self-appointed, proprietary interest in the happiness of the Wallace household. But this time Wallace barely noticed, realizing for the first time how close he had come to never seeing his daughter Katie again.

“Yeah,” he said with a crooked smile. “I’ll try to work an extra one in.”

Even with a steel-chassised gas-burner, it was a tedious forty-minute drive from the Capitol garage to the tree-lined approach to Walter Endicott’s rural mansion. But serving in the Senate had conditioned Endicott to the point where his tolerance for tedium was very high, and he was barely aware of the bicycle-snarled approaches to the Potomac bridge or the crawling commuter traffic on the Jefferson-Davis Highway.

It helped that he had nothing to do but ride in the back seat of the Mercedes and read his copy of the day’s Cleveland
Plain Dealer
. Endicott rarely left his office until the paper arrived, usually shortly after three. It was a daily ritual now nearly a decade old.

Considering how much trouble was involved in getting him the paper, he wished sometimes that he enjoyed it more. Most Senators received their homestate newspapers by federal mail, three to six days late if from east of the Mississippi, ten days or more if from the West Coast.

Endicott’s copy got special handling all the way through—the first of the midnight press run, it was couriered to Cleveland’s interurban train station, shuttled to Pittsburgh, transferred to a Washington-bound train, and picked up at Union Station by a junior staffer from Endicott’s office.

All so it could be discarded by the chauffeur when the car was cleaned at the end of day.

For forty minutes was more than enough time to read this Plain Dealer, and rarely was there anything in it Endicott needed or wanted to read twice. He usually left it behind on the seat of the Mercedes without a thought.

The national section was interchangeable with the national section of any Federal News Service paper. Fair enough—the same could be said of the AP or UPI papers of home. But by comparison with those syndicates, and Endicott had been no great booster of the press, the FNS offered an unpleasant mix of half-truths, studied silence, and propaganda, leavened with what it called “cheer” pieces.

What interested Endicott were the local features, from city government down to the minutia of engagements and obituaries. Through his business connections, his wife’s patronage of the arts scene, his friendships high-placed and low, Endicott knew by face and name literally thousands of people in that “other” Cleveland. Hundreds had partied or been overnight guests on the Endicott yacht berthed along the Gold Coast.

It was an irresistible curiosity to Endicott how those same people had fared in this world, a curiosity partly satisfied by scanning the paper for news of them. On any given day, he would find from five to a dozen references, most of them surprises in one way or another.

Sometimes it was startling how little difference there was, like the Northside city councilman who was arrested in both worlds for taking bribes. Sometimes the twists were startling enough to make Endicott laugh out loud, such as when the woman he had known as a call-girl madam turned up as the owner of a chain of upscale bedroom boutiques.

He came by his curiosity honestly. He had spent most of his first three months in this strange twisted reflection of the world studying his own counterpart, at once repelled and fascinated.

In this world, as in his own, he had done well for himself—perhaps even a bit more so here. His alternate was married, as he had been, but to a different woman—curiously, to a woman with whom Endicott had enjoyed a quiet affair half a dozen years back. When he finally gained entrance to his alternate’s elegant Gates Mills house, he found a hundred familiar objects and a thousand more that were unfamiliar but pleasing to his tastes and sensibilities.

The truth was that Endicott had not planned at first to kill his alternate and replace him. But here was a power base ready for the taking. And as he thought on it, he saw that it would be easy, an invisible crime. If it even qualified as a crime. He
was
Walter Endicott. These possessions, this life, belonged to Walter Endicott. To
him
, if he was bold enough to assert the claim.

It was that conviction, as much as need or opportunity, which finally moved him. With each passing day, the existence of his alternate distressed him more. Something which came from deep inside him, from the place where the self fights for recognition, came to find the sight of the other to be intolerable.

He did it by his own hand, at a time of his own choosing. And when it was done, when he had faced himself without flinching and seen himself die without disintegrating, Endicott knew for certain that there were no rules, no cosmic plan, no God. Life truly was a game, and there was nothing to fear in this life but unfriendly Chance and the selfish drives of those more ruthless than himself.

And understanding that, he intended to see that he was not victimized by either.