Borrowed Time (3 page)

“The Spanish Influenza vanished after the epidemic. Attempts to analyze the disease from fragmentary samples in partially preserved victims were undertaken in the early twenty-first century, but were inconclusive.”

“Jeannie, diseases don’t just vanish. They may be driven to extinction by proper medical actions, like small-pox was, or go underground for a while like bubonic plague before they pop up again, but even I know diseases don’t simply vanish without a trace and never resurface.”

“The Spanish Influenza has never resurfaced.”

Every new thing I learned about the disease made it a greater anomaly. “Is there anything else unusual about it?”

“Clarify?”

“Anything else that made the Spanish Influenza different from other outbreaks of influenza?”

“Yes. Influenza viruses normally posed the greatest mortality risk to humans who were very young or very old.”

“The weakest, in other words.”

“Correct. However, the vast majority of those killed by the Spanish Influenza were in the age range of fifteen to forty chronological years.”

“Adults? Were they predisposed somehow?”

“Insufficient data. The only conclusions medical researchers have been able to affirm are that those who should’ve had the strongest immune systems were those who were most likely to be killed by the illness.”

I leaned on the rail of the ship, looking out across bright blue waves capped by spurts of white foam. Clouds of sooty ash from the ship’s smokestacks drifted slowly down into the water astern of us, disappearing without apparent trace. Little wonder now-humanity still believed the ocean was a limitless sink for pollution. “I guess in this case strong immune systems were a bad thi -.”

Jeannie waited a moment. “Clarify?”

“Jeannie. Auto-immune diseases. Like that Smith guy has. Those were caused by immune systems attacking their own bodies, right?”

“That is essentially correct.”

“So, asthma and arthritis and wheat allergies, they’re all signs of an, uh . . . ”

“Overactive immune system.”

“But the Spanish Influenza wasn’t an auto-immune disease?”

“The Spanish Influenza was very definitely a type of influenza.”

A type of influenza that seemed to have uncharacteristically targeted the strongest human immune systems. I had a lot of pieces, but none of them fit into a reasonable picture. I needed Smith. And the next time I had him cornered I’d wrap my hands around his scrawny neck to keep him from jumping away from me again.

I prowled Freetown for a good week after arriving, spreading around more bribes and descriptions of ‘John Smith,’ with promises of bigger pay-offs for anyone who found him for me. Eventually, somebody did.

I waited until I knew he was in the room he’d taken at a transients’ boarding house, then broke the door open and had one hand on his neck before he could move. “Hi. We have a conversation we need to finish.”

Smith stole a glance toward the valise he had no chance of reaching, then glared at me, his eyes very wide in that very pale face. “You have no idea what’s at stake.”

“So tell me.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Maybe I’ll break your neck, then take that bag of yours and drop it into the hottest boiler I can find so that anything inside it is totally incinerated.” Smith’s eyes widened even more and he trembled. Then his eyes swung all the way to one side and stuck there, while his body went limp except for his hands, which twitched over and over again.

“He is suffering a seizure,” Jeannie advised me.

“I figured that out.” I kept my hand on his neck. “Could he be faking?”

“It cannot be ruled out, but a seizure disorder such as he apparently suffers from can result in seizures being triggered by stress.”

Stress like someone breaking into his room and threatening to break his neck. I sighed, made sure Smith’s seizure didn’t seem life threatening, transferred my grip to his wrist, and waited.

Three minutes later Smith’s eyes regained their focus. He stared at me for a long moment before recognition entered them. “Happy?” he whispered.

“Knock it off. I have no sympathy for you.”

“Really?” He held up his free hand, the arthritic joints almost painful to even look at. “Do you see this? I can barely grasp my bag with it. Even then it hurts. It always hurts. Do you know what’s it like to always hurt?” Smith’s weak voice broke on the last word, as if he’d run out of air.

I kept my eyes away from the twisted ruin of Smith’s hand. “No. How does that justify what I think you’re doing?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Right. I don’t. So why don’t you and I take a paired-jump to my uptime where some people in authority can listen to you explain it all in detail?”

His eyes showed fear. “You can’t.”

“Yes, I can. And I’m about to.”

“No!” Smith tried to twist out of my grip, then started gasping for breath.

“Asthma attack,” Jeannie informed me. Smith’s free hand fumbled desperately in one pocket. I watched, trying to remain dispassionate, as he tried to bring out a small device and dropped it on the bed. “Aerosol medication delivery device,” Jeannie added.

I picked up the thing and offered it to Smith. He grasped it as carefully as his warped hand and labored breathing allowed, then sprayed something from it into his mouth. A few minutes after this labor his breathing was back to normal. For him. He stared at me, then nodded his chin to indicate the device. “Thank you.”

“I assume I may’ve just saved your life.”

“Yes. You may have.”

“Why did I do that?” I asked even though I knew the answer; because I still wasn’t certain of Smith’s guilt, and even if I were I didn’t have it in me to watch someone die if I could prevent it.

But Smith looked away as if embarrassed. “That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it? You’ve guessed what I’m doing.”

“Am I right?”

I couldn’t look directly into his eyes, but Smith’s face twisted with some emotion I couldn’t read. “Yes.”

“You’re deliberately spreading what will be known as the Spanish Influenza. You dropped off the first batch in Kansas in March, then checked on its progress in June and figured out it wasn’t lethal enough. So you’re here and now to spread a much more lethal variant.”

“That’s right.”

“I assume you’re doing this for a reason.”

He kept his face averted from me. “I need to change the future.”

I couldn’t help sighing. “A temporal intervention. That’s what the Spanish Influenza is/was?”

“Of course.” His raspy voice had sunk to a whisper, but I could still hear it clearly enough. “What else?”

“I’d wondered what natural disease would appear in three places at the same time, and then disappear without a trace.”

“Yes. It’ll disappear. We designed it that way. A genetically-engineered suicide instruction. What you call the Spanish Influenza virus will die out after one year.”

“Gee, that’s really humanitarian of you.”

My sarcasm got a reaction. Smith swung his head back and glared at me. “What the hell do you know about it? Humanitarian? You smug bastard! Have you ever heard of the auto-immune plagues?” I shook my head slowly and Smith trembled. “It works. You’re from . . . when?”

“None of your business.”

“After the twentieth century? After the twenty-first?”

I decided to tell him that much. “Yes.”

“God help me.” Smith let his gaze wander, staring straight up as if he could see through the roof. “We stopped it.”

“Stopped
what
?”

“The auto-immune plagues.” Smith held up his hand again, his eyes still staring up toward the heavens he couldn’t see. “We didn’t know what was happening. Sudden surges in the incidence of diseases and ailments. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred percent increases annually. Asthma. Hypothyroidism. Hyperthyroidism. Arthritis. Many other things. We didn’t understand, for the longest time. Too long. Finally, we knew. Evolution and science had failed us. Given us better and better immune systems as we survived the assaults of everything Earth could throw at us, while we developed vaccines to keep many natural ailments away from our ever-stronger, ever more vigilant immune systems.” He fell silent, breathing heavily.

“And?” I prompted.

“And? You fool. Don’t you see? Our immune systems were so strong, so vigilant. They didn’t have enough to do. They attacked
us
. More and more. Our digestive systems, our nervous systems, our joints, our cardiovascular systems. Everything. And we didn’t realize what was happening until literally millions were afflicted and more coming down by the day.”

“Millions?” I prompted.

“At first. By now it’s billions. Crippled and dying by the very immune systems which are supposed to protect them.” He looked back at me at last, his eyes wild. “Billions. Society is collapsing. Worldwide. Too many people sick in the most fundamental ways with no means of correcting their conditions. They just linger on, dying very slowly, needing more and more medical care. The only ‘cure’ we have is to suppress the immune system with some crude methods available to us. Do you know what happens when you do that? The auto-immune diseases go into remission but then you die from any number of ‘normal’ illnesses. We can’t win.” He gestured down his own body. “The medications I have to take to keep my immune system from causing me further agony themselves make me prone to seizures. How’s that for a bargain with the devil?”

I tried to read truth or falsehood in his eyes and couldn’t manage either. I asked Jeannie, instead, then relayed her information. “That sort of thing started to happen. In the very-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We developed treatments.”

“We didn’t! Don’t you understand?
We bought you time
.”

“Bought us . . . ?” The things I knew suddenly clicked into place. An influenza which killed those with the strongest immune systems. Killed them by the tens of millions. Leaving those with weaker immune systems still alive to pass that on to future generations. “Eugenics.”

“No! This isn’t about making humanity ‘better,’ whatever the hell that means. It’s about culling enough of the strongest immune systems from the human gene pool
now
in order to put off the onset of the auto-immune plagues for another one or two generations. Long enough for medical science to develop the means to diagnose and treat the disorders before they overwhelm the human race.”

I turned inward to Jeannie again. “Is what he’s saying plausible?”

“The scenario outlined does not fall outside the realm of possible historical outcomes.”

“Is it likely?”

“Insufficient data.”

Smith shuddered, and I looked down to see my hand gripping his arm so tightly that even on his thin frame the flesh was coming up in ridges between my fingers. “You want to be free to kill tens of millions of people.”

His gaze was defiant, now. “Yes. For the sake of billions of people in the future.”

“I’ve heard that argument before.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“Do you think this’ll save you? Produce an alternate version of you who’s healthy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Not about me.” His eyes flicked away from mine, but I saw tears welling there. “The kids.” He was whispering again. “Dear God. The kids. They don’t even know. Don’t understand what’s twisting and crippling and killing them. They live and die in pain and we can’t even explain to them what’s happening. We can’t help them.”

It’s not supposed to be like this. When you meet someone bent on mass-murder they’re supposed to foam at the mouth and talk like a fanatic and their eyes are supposed to be filled with righteous certainty. And I was supposed to be absolutely certain that stopping those deaths was the right thing to do. Instead, I felt a sick uncertainty inside, and translated it into anger. “You’re just killing a few tens of millions of people for the kids, huh? You don’t plan on being better off yourself? Do you realize the odds that introducing this plague here and now could just cancel you out? Eliminate your ancestors so you never exist outside of the closed loop you’ve created? You’d never see that great new world you say you want to make.”

Smith’s mouth worked for a moment before he could answer, but I saw a strange glint of what I thought must be eagerness in his eyes. “This is more important than me.”

I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of his. There was only one thing I could be certain of. In my history, Smith’s mission had unquestionably succeeded in its immediate goal. The Spanish Influenza had killed its millions upon millions. If I stopped him, I’d be making a major temporal intervention with results I couldn’t predict on the future from that point forward. Would it be the hell Smith was describing? Or better? Or worse? There simply wasn’t any way for me to know. “How can I let you go out of here and kill tens of millions of people?” I finally said softly.

Smith kept his eyes fixed on mine. “For the sake of billions yet to come.”

“That kind of math is an abomination.”

“It’s also true. Dammit, do you think we
wanted
to do this?”

And somehow I knew then that Smith wasn’t lying. He might be delusional or crazy, but he believed what he was saying. Which left it up to me. Change my future, or let Smith kill on a scale unmatched in human history. Save tens of millions, maybe, and if Smith was to be believed condemn billions to awful fates. Take a chance that whatever my own intervention caused here would produce a future no worse than the one I knew of from this point forward. But that was impossible to know. Even aside from the group impact of so many humans living who’d died in my history, any one of those individual Spanish Influenza victims could’ve been another Hitler or another Einstein or another Martin Luther or another Julius Caesar. I looked at Smith again, letting my eyes stray down his ruined body. What kind of society would send somebody in his physical condition on a mission it regarded as so important? Only a society at the end of its rope.