LORDS TEMPORAL by Joseph H Delaney.
Chapter One
There is nothing quite so terrible as a big city on,a cold night. By day at least there are people to panhandle, vehicles to dodge, cops to avoid, chances to duck inside store foyers and warm up a bit. It is a shade less lonely.
These distractions flee with the sun, leaving streets so silent that the crunch of a foot on dirty gray snow sounds like thunder. The people leave for warm, comfortable homes elsewhere in the sprawling city and lock the doorways of their stores with collapsible steel gates studded with padlocks. They trust to luck that when the sun comes up again the show windows will still be intact; that out of dim shadows will come no thief with the determination to break in, or that if one does he will be quickly caught by vigilant police on patrol.
This was Wyckoffs world. New York City, 2069 A.p. He shared it with perhaps half a million others as unfortunate as himself, who had no homes, no jobs, and who lacked the capability to get out of the north when the frost came.
For most of the year the street was not too bad. Wyckoffknew his jungle well. Every season was unique, bringing both new rules and new opportunities. He liked winter the least, because it was physically the
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hardest and the pickings so abysmally slim. Some days it was all he could do to get enough to eat. And seldom in the dead of winter could he accumulate enough coins to buy a flop. The flophouse operators knew the desperation the cold bred in their customers and raised the rates as the temperature fell.
So, those who could pay, did. The others just kept going all night or, if they were really badly off, descended into the subways or the Mission hostels.
Wyckoff huddled out of the wind, standing in a darkened doorway half a block from the nearest light, and tried to make up his mind what to do with the rest of the evening. It had not yet gotten really cold—the temperature was still in the high twenties—but a look up at the sky told him this would not last long. The night was comparatively clear, and stars could be seen even through the heavy smoke and haze. There were no clouds to hold the planet's heat.
He felt in his pocket with fingers stiffened by the cold, counting coins gathered during the day. There were so few of them; no chance of getting in anywhere warm with what he could afford to pay.
Not so long ago he had been lucky enough to have a hole beneath a demolished building, where a couple of small, dank basement rooms were still habitable, if the occupant possessed the determination. For a while Wyckoff had exercised that determination, leaving each day just before dawn and returning after dark, lest he be seen entering or leaving.
Then the cold had come, and he'd taken to building fires in a makeshift stove fashioned from an old oil drum. It worked fine until the ruins caught fire, and on that night he escaped with his life only by the sheerest luck.
Now, until he found another such redoubt, he was at
the mercy of the elements or the flophouse operators, and
he couldn't make up his mind which he detested more.
Suddenly these dismal reminiscences fled, replaced
by another, more immediate problem. Lights caught his
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eye, arcing through the night with that curious languid pause peculiar to roving police patrols. With practiced skill, Wyckoff froze and huddled deeper into the shadows. This was a neighborhood of commercial shops in which, during the day, labored printers, shoe finders, cutlers, hardware wholesalers, electrical and plumbing jobbers, and the like. Here was no score, unless a man happened to be a burglar. Wyckoff was not, though to the approaching police patrol that might be a distinction without a difference. He decided he didn't want to chance it.
The patrol edged closer, having stopped at an alley a little farther down, while a cop inside the car shined his spotlight on the rows of locked doors. Cops didn't do that very often; these must have found a break-in somewhere nearby.
That changed everything, and Wyckoff s street savvy told him that this doorway was no place for him to be. Though it would be comparatively warmer, he preferred not to be in jail, even in winter. Some street people did, and routinely provoked some incident at the first frost. These were usually the older dudes, who'd lost that stamina Wyckoff still possessed and weren't good candidates for the press gangs, who sold their dignity for three months out of each year.
Wyckoff knew some of them well. There was a guy called Silky, a giant black dude who claimed to have been a prominent pimp in his younger days and who told endless stories about how things had been then. Jails, he said, had been palaces, with clean cells and decent food, where an inmate could lie around and do his time watching TV. Nobody worked on the roads, or cleaned public buildings, or was shipped off to algae farms or sludge plants. The con's life was an easy life then.
Whose wasn't? To hear the old geezers talk—and WyckofF had, from the day he'd been old enough to understand—the quality of life had worsened with every generation. His own grandfather hadn't been em-
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ployable the last thirty years of his life, and he'd let the world know he didn't like that. His endless complaints about the system constituted some of Wyckoff s earliest and most vivid memories.
Everybody knew the story—how the so-called Cold War between the United States and Russia had ruined the economy of the whole world. It was history, rapidly becoming ancient history at that; but its effects continued to be felt with undiminished severity almost a century after the fact.
The SDI, they called it: Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars. America said she wanted it, though many of her most illustrious scientists argued ably and at length that it wouldn't work.
They were wrong. To a man they were wrong. The SDI, though it failed technically for scientific reasons, nevertheless worked perfectly and devastatingly, precisely as western economists intended.
Because the only possible way to stop U.S. development of the system was to have the devastating nuclear war it was meant to avoid, and because they were unwilling to trust their enemy to share the technology as he said he would, the Russians had no choice. They had to try to match the effort—and thereby tumbled neatly into the economic trap.
They did not at first understand this trap—or, more likely, did not appreciate that worldwide realities operated upon their fiscal system the same as on any other. And so by the time the situation's true character was apparent, they were lost; they had spent too much of a national wealth that never had matched that of their adversaries' to begin with. The result was economic chaos and political collapse.
In the United States the reaction had been joyous. A hundred years of nuclear bondage had come to an end at last. Better yet, there now existed, thanks to the effort, a well-developed space technology. In near-Earth orbit, satellite factories and cities had sprung up. At the LaGrange points, vast laboratories and workshops had
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been constructed, and a young mathematical physicist named Eric Aschenbrenner was busy trying to prove that there was a way around the light-speed barrier. It was about this time that Wyckpff's grandfather had left his prostrate Russian homeland and emigrated to the United States, now unquestionably the dominant power on Earth.
Grandfather Wyckoff was a farmer of sorts. Raised and trained under the Russian system, he had understood the theory of large-scale agriculture better than most—well enough, in fact, to move steadily upward within the country's foremost agricorp.
But it was a long way down from the top. Grandfather Wyckoff did not understand the reasons, while it was happening, but he figured them out afterward, and spent the remainder of his life explaining them to anyone he could persuade to listen.
Being a child, young Stanislaus had little choice in the matter. Grandfather was around constantly, with nothing to do, and he was often lonely. Worse, there was a bitterness in him that his double portion of calamity could only fortify. He had emerged from one decaying economy just in time to witness the collapse of another; this time, that of the entire world.
He told his story often. With each telling it was embellished, and details were added that had not been apparent before. It was the story of the little bank in. Singapore whose wild speculations in overvalued real estate had created a Frankenstein's monster of tiered credit in Eurodollars and brought about the collapse of the entire worldwide banking system. "Deflation," Grandfather had called it, as though he understood what that meant.
And maybe he had; Wyckoff didn't know. But he did know that there was one thing all the old-timers agreed upon: the Great Depression of 2028 made all prior economic upheavals pale by comparison. More than a quarter-century later it still exerted its effects.
Because young Stanislaus had grown up during those
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years and had known nothing else, his approach to his lifestyle had been a great deal more philosophical than that of his elders. What they lamented he endured without a murmur, because he knew no better. As a child, he had not been aware he was poor, because everyone around him had been poor, and he was the same as they.
Only when he had grown a little did he learn that there dwelt on Earth people who did not sleep a dozen to a rodm or eat porridge with their fingers from a common pot, who wore shoes in summer when they were not needed. Wisdom arrived about the time his first whiskers appeared, when a sanctimonious social worker appeared at their flat accompanied by a recruiter from the Conservation Corps. The Corps, they said, was just the thing to make a man of him.
The Corps, Wyckoff mused—it still existed. He and his contemporaries called it the "Corpse." It was the principal reason he avoided the Mission hostels like the plague. Too many people he had known had checked into these—and into the arms of a press gang.
Wyckoff crept out of the doorway just as another car was passing the police cruiser, and while the spotlight was trained on another doorway farther up the block. He hoped the cops inside would be distracted enough so that they wouldn't notice him.
It was a hope soon dashed, and he knew as soon as he ducked around the corner that they would be after him. Reason told him not to run; he'd done nothing and he had nothing to hide. Impulse argued differently. At the very least it meant detention here on the street, a search, perhaps a beating, while they tried to learn his true identity. As a fugitive from the Corps, Wyckoff didn't carry an I.D. That would have made it too easy for the police to check his background if they ever stopped him. This way was safer.
He took off down the alley, sprinting over the hard-packed snow, which in places had already started to glaciate into cloudy ice—the kind that would still coat
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patches of the alley in June. He reached the end of the alley and took a turn to the right, so that he could come up behind the squadron. In this neighborhood the police always kept one man in the car, and though the man in the car might move it, he would not be likely to join his companion in a foot search.
Wyckoff reached the right-angle street and raced across a bare sidewalk to the other side. Behind him, he could hear curses echoing through the stillness of the night, and he knew the pursuing cop had fallen on the ice. That assured his getaway, since he could now easily put two or three blocks between them.
Even when he knew it was no longer necessary, Wyckoff continued at a slow trot. The exertion was warming his body, and he was reluctant to let that feeling go. He'd have to be careful not to sweat, though, since that would aggravate his problems with the cold. He ran on through the silence.
The run ended at the next intersection, where two arterial streets met in chilled, forsaken emptiness. One side of the intersection was blind. There a huge truck had apparently broken down, and now sat with five feet of its length protruding into the crosswalk. In the morning, when traffic swelled to its daytime proportions, it would have caused a snarl which would have had every cop on the force here. But in the dark, nighttime emptiness it was safe, serene, and unnoticed—until now.
Notice arrived late to the driver of the low-slung Mallory Electric who whipped around the corner just as Wyckoff was stepping off the curb. The idiot! He didn't have lights on, and electrics made almost no noise. The car missed Wyckoff by only a hair, as he frantically leapt back up on the curb, shaking his fist in the air.
The Mallory's driver must have first seen him at that instant. He must also have been greatly startled at what had almost happened. He turned sharply away from the curb. Then he tried to correct.
But by that time he was out of the intersection. There, the driver made a second mistake and laid his
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foot heavily on the brake. Lacking friction on the frozen slush, the brakes could lock, but they could do nothing else, and natural laws sent the car onward in the direction of its present motion. That motion was toward the next corner—the one where, down the street, the lone cop sat in his cruiser.
Wyckoff watched. The car slid onward, its momentum undiminished either by the driver's frantic braking or his erratic steering. Nothing he did would stop the car. A fireplug slowed it, though its upper casting broke off instantly as the car plunged on.
A torrent of water rose high into the air, where it was caught by the icy wind. Wyckoff's clothing was saturated with freezing droplets before he could take a step. His chance to survive the night outside vanished, though he quickly moved out of the worst of it.
Already the numbing cold was seeping into him. He knew he'd have to go with the police now; he'd die if he didn't. If he was lucky they might not bother to check his fingerprints against the files. Wyckoff knew that doing that was a lot of trouble, and that as a bum he wouldn't rate close attention. If they learned he was a deserter from the Corps he would be in real trouble, but the odds were that these guys would understand and hold him only long enough to dry him off.
He started to turn to find the foot cop, intending to surrender and be marched off to jail. The cop could hardly have failed to hear the crash and should be coming around the corner any moment.
Wyckoff waited patiently, glancing behind nervously. He was growing colder by the instant, and still there was no cop. He was about to start walking to the squad car and give himself up when he heard wheels squealing behind him. He looked at the Mallory, now stationary with its nose against a building and its back wheels turning frictionlessly in a snowbank. The driver couldn't be conscious; not unless he was so stupid or drunk that he planned to drive through that wall.
Wyckoff despaired of finding the cop. The cop, too,
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must be unconscious from his fall, or else they had received another call with a higher priority than this and left—left Wyckoff here to freeze to death.
Well, Wyckoff would see about that. Though he was even now starting to shiver uncontrollably, he struggled through the drift of snow toward the trapped car. Its rear wheels were still spinning.
He reached it and grasped the handle to the driver's door, hoping it would not be locked. It came open with a crunch that told Wyckoff the hood had been forced back against its leading edge.
Inside, the driver lay against the wheel, out like a light but moaning softly. He smelled heavily of the sauce and was bleeding from the nose. Its bridge looked curiously and unnaturally flattened, and it was starting to swell. Blood was trickling from the corner of the driver's mouth, which made his injuries look more serious than they actually were. Wyckoff had seen enough battered mugs in his time to know the difference.
Wyckoff noticed something else. The car was warm inside. Somewhere below the dash a catalytic heater filled the interior with the characteristic odor of burning alcohol.
Not by any means a man to disdain comfort, Wyckoff slammed the driver's door and raced around to the passenger's side. He slid in gratefully and began soaking up heat. After a moment he felt the edge of the chill leave him, and he stopped shivering. Then he reached down and pulled the driver's foot off the accelerator pedal. The squealing stopped.
Wyckoff took a look out the back window, wondering how long it would be before somebody noticed the ruined hydrant, connected its condition to this car, and threw both him and the driver in a cell. Certainly this would happen long before Wyckoff's clothing was dry. Wyckoff liked being warm so well that he decided to take the car somewhere where he could cozy out the night next to the heater. The driver wouldn't know; drunk as he was, he wouldn't care, either.
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Besides, he owed Wyckoff—he was the reason for Wyckoff's predicament, and it was only right that he pay for his transgression in coin of Wyckoff's choosing. Though the driver obviously had money, and therefore clout, WyckofF doubted the city would look kindly at the damage he'd done. Getting him away from the scene of his crime might be the biggest favor Wyckoif could do him. He might even be grateful enough when he sobered up to reward Wyckoff for his trouble.
That possibility was the kicker. Though reluctant to leave the heat, even for an instant, Wyckoff stepped out and dragged the driver over to the passenger's side.
A minute later he was behind the blood-slippery wheel, carefully backing the car out along the tracks it had made coming in. Wyckoff wasn't a very good driver— he'd never had much practice—but the car's controls were simple and he took his time.
Fifteen minutes later, with the driver now sleeping uncomfortably and noisily, he parked on a deserted residential street on the east side. He sat there, waiting for his clothes to dry, and thought about tomorrow.
Tomorrow, now that it looked like he would still have his freedom when it came, would still find Wyckoff with his usual problems: no money, no dinner, and no place to sleep but on the street.
That is, he told himself, unless this dude is carrying some real green on him—some "pocket money," out of which a reward could be gained. He didn't look like the kind who would. The typical individual affluent enough to drive a car of any kind generally carried only credit cards, if he carried anything at all. In many instances voiceprint verification was all that was needed to buy. almost anything, anywhere in the country.
Wyckoff checked him over anyway, noting that they were about the same size and build and that the dude was sporting a really fine set of threads. To Wyckoff, even in the dim light on the instrument panel, the cloth looked polyinsulated. Polyinsulated clothing was
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very new. It had been developed for astronauts, but the civilian market included many of the affluent, and Wyckoff had seen lots of it down around Wall Street this winter.
Pockets, let's see; where were the pockets? He fumbled around on the sleeping body until he found a ridge, which indicated a seam.
Awkwardly, he managed to pry an opening with a thumbnail. It had nothing in it.
He gave his companion a roll, so that he could get at the one on the other side, and was rewarded by a blast of stale whiskey-breath in his face. He pushed the other's head aside and dived into that pocket. This one held a slim leather case, which Wyckoff extracted and held under the dash to read.
He found an I.D. card, examined it carefully, then dug underneath the plastic flap and pulled it out. The plastic laminate card had an elaborately scrolled green border and a white and yellow striped interior. Printed in the margin in bold type were the words UNITED
STATES AERONAUTICS and SPACE ADMINISTRATION. Below
that was a long number, separated into four groups of three digits each: some kind of I.D. code for the card's owner, Emory Knowles. And underneath that were the words, "This certifies that the bearer hereof is a member in good standing of the Brotherhood of Masters, Mates, and Spacemen." It bore countersignatures of the Space Administrator and of the Union Secretary.
So: his benefactor was a spaceman. Wyckoff wondered briefly just what kind of spacehand he was. He had never, of course, met one before. Few people had. When planetbound, they stayed aloof from the rest of the population. They were an elite, well-paid group, who commanded the best company in the best accommodations. They were a new nobility.
"What's a bird like him doing in the neighborhood I found him in?" Wyckoff asked himself. He got no answer, of course, and the man was obviously not in any
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shape to ask. He'd certainly sleep the night, perhaps part of the next day, and he'd be reasonably comfortable until his alcohol tank ran dry.
Wyckoff fished around some more in the pocket. He found nothing except a thin, barely readable copy of some kind of rental receipt which listed Knowles' local address as the Carlton Arms Motel, but he did notice how warm his hand had become. That polyinsulated fabric was all right, he thought. With a suit of that, he could be comfortable anywhere, all winter.
Well, why not? Would the chance ever come again? Certainly not. Would its owner miss it? Not until he sobered up, and besides, dudes like him had money all the time. He could just buy himself another one.
In that instant Wyckoff realized that he would be foolish to count on generosity from a stranger, that he risked all by being squeamish, that the only sure way was to take: as the rest of the world took, as this Knowles must have taken to get where he had gotten.
...
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