AFTER THE FACT Read online

  It could be, it could very well be he supposed, that someone had put something other than wine in his glass. Certainly Jan Chen had had the opportunity. Jerry hadn't been taking any paranoid precautions—hell, he hadn't even been paying attention. But why should she, or anyone else, have drugged him?

  Because, the obvious answer came, Jan Chen and Dr. Pilgrim, and probably Olivia and Mr.

  Helpman too, had determined that he was going to wake up here. Wherever "here" might be.

  Have they spoken to you about your going on a trip of any kind?

  But basically he couldn't believe it. No, somewhere there was a real explanation. A better one at least than the one he couldn't swallow, involving as it did the armies of Grant and Lee. This place through which he was riding now was some kind of extended historical area, an expansion of New Salem. And… and Jerry couldn't really believe that either, but at the moment he had nothing better.

  Somehow the hours passed, and with them the miles of the seldom-traveled road, with never a utility pole in sight, or even a contrail in the sky. Instead there was the smell of the open land in the spring, and the feel of the open air. There were also a great many flies, drawn perhaps by the smell of horse. Once Johnson pulled off the road and whoa'd the horse, and the gentlemen relieved themselves in the tall roadside grass, beside a copse of trees. There were whole sections of mature woodland here, much more of it remaining than in the Illinois that Jerry knew.

  They climbed back into the buggy and drove on. The burden of Johnson's conversation was what a smart man ought to do after the war, what turn the climate for business was going to take when peace became the normal state of affairs once more. Johnson was not so much anxious to convince Jerry of any course of action as to use him as a sounding board. What did Jerry think of petroleum as an investment?

  "I think it might do well."

  Eventually the woods thinned out considerably, and they passed some dwellings that were not attached to farms.

  "Looks like we made it," Johnson remarked unnecessarily.

  The unpaved road was gradually becoming an unpaved street. The capital city of Illinois was even muddier than the countryside, and Jerry's first general impression was that of an extended rural slum. Not only dogs, but pigs, goats, and chickens appeared unfettered on every road. But the houses were clustering more closely now, and the gardens grew closer together. Now the streets were tree-lined; elms speckled with green springtime buds made graceful gothic arches, spanning some streets completely.

  "Where can I drop you off, Jim?"

  "Eighth and Jackson." Jerry had been pondering how best to answer this question when it came, and now he gave the one Springfield location that he was able to remember.

  "Right you are. Remember what I said, Chicago's probably the place for you to try."

  "I'll remember, thanks. And thanks for the ride."

  "Don't mention it."

  Jerry jumped out of the buggy when it slowed almost to a stop at the proper corner. He remembered to retrieve his carpetbag. Win Johnson clucked to his horse and rolled away.

  Long afternoon shadows were falling across Eighth Street. There was one building in sight that Jerry could recognize, the house on the north-east corner of the intersection. He stood in the dusty street with his carpetbag in hand, staring at that house, for some time after the sounds of Winthrop Johnson's horse and buggy had died away. That was Abraham Lincoln's house on the corner, and if Jerry only went up to the door of it and knocked… but no. If Grant and Lee were fighting in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln couldn't be here in Springfield, could he? President Lincoln would have to be in Washington.

  Unless, of course—it hit Jerry suddenly that Lincoln had been shot, just as the war was ending. Of course; Jan had talked about that at some length last night: the tragic loss that Lincoln's death had been to the country and the world. The peculiar intensity of her talk came back to Jerry now, though at the moment he couldn't recall all the details of what she'd said.

  Now he seemed to remember that she'd even kept on talking to him about Lincoln after he'd passed out. And then—or was it earlier—he'd seen that unbelievable figure in the bed in the next room. And before that, the little monster running across the bedroom hall.

  No, those visions must have been hallucinations, brought on by whatever drugs they'd dosed him with. Jerry couldn't possibly have seen what he now remembered seeing. That would be as crazy as—

  Looming to the northwest above the springtime trees and the common rooftops, the bulk of the Old Capitol building made a half-familiar sight, rising above nineteenth-century frame houses. Jerry walked toward it almost jauntily, swinging Jim Lockwood's bag. There were moments when he was almost dead sure he was dreaming, ready to give in and enjoy himself without responsibility.

  There was nothing dreamlike about the square, lined with shops and stores, when he reached it. On the east side, just about where he remembered Pilgrim's offices being located, was a totally different structure called the State Bank building.

  He had found the bank. And now there was something—what was it?—that he had to do.

  He walked the wooden sidewalks, liking the sound his bootheels made, attracting no particular attention among men who were dressed in much the same style as he was, and women gowned more or less like the two in the passing carriage. Some people, including all of the blacks in sight, were in much poorer clothing.

  Letting himself move on impulse now, Jerry made his way to the front door of the bank and entered. He had taken the big key from his pocket, again without quite knowing why, and now he put it down silently on the polished wood of a counter, under the eyes of a clerk who wore garter-like metal clips pinching in his voluminous shirtsleeves, and held a wooden, steel-nibbed pen in hand.

  The clerk scrutinized first the key and then Jerry. He did not appear to be much impressed by what he saw in either case.

  "Not one of ours," the clerk finally remarked.

  The compulsion, whatever its cause, had vanished now. Jerry was on his own. "Just thought it might be," he got out with a clearing of his throat. "I found it. It… belonged to my uncle. It was in a box of his things that got sent to us… after Gettysburg."

  The other at last picked up the key and silently turned it over in his fingers. He looked at Jerry for a long moment, then said, "From one of the Chicago banks, I'd say." The clerk's accent was different from Winthrop Johnson's, and sounded even odder in Jerry's ears. Indefinably American, and yet harsher than any regional dialect Jerry had ever heard.

  Jerry took the metal object back. "I'll ask around when I get there. Thanks." It was only on the way out of the bank building that he remembered consciously: Jan Chen advising him, somewhere, sometime, to go to a Chicago bank.

  The railroad depot was not hard to locate, being only a few blocks away—nothing in Springfield appeared to be much more than a few blocks from the center of town. Inside the wooden depot a chalked schedule, and a tall wall clock with a long pendulum, informed him that he had two hours before the next train to Chicago. Jerry purchased a ticket for the considerable sum of ten dollars and then returned to the town square. There was an unmistakable restaurant open there, and he listened to people talk cheerfully about the war being over while he enjoyed some of the best chicken and dumplings he'd ever had.

  Some of the diners around him were consuming what seemed to Jerry an amazing amount of hard liquor with their meals. Quantities of wine and beer were disappearing also. Remembering last night, he contented himself with a mug of beer, and found it tasty but somewhat warm.

  His dinner cost him less than a dollar, a bargain as compared to the price of the train ticket. Well-fed but feeling deadly tired he walked back to the station. Departure at night, by gaslight and lantern, was a scene of many sparks from the wood-burning engine. The engine smoked every bit as much as Jerry had expected it would, and the conveyance jolted noisily along. The sunset had completely faded now, and the countryside outside the window at Jerry's elbow
was as dark as death.

  The only light inside this coach was a poor lantern, hung near the ceiling in the rear. Maybe there were first, second, and third class coaches, and he'd got into fourth class by mistake. Jerry buttoned his coat, whose inside pockets held his money, slumped in his seat, and fell into the dreamless sleep of great exhaustion.

  SIX

  The train carrying Jerry labored its way into Chicago shortly after dawn. It looked like the start of a grim day in the city, which was wrapped in an atmosphere composed of coal soot and mist in about equal parts. The railroad station was a darkened brick cavern, smoky and bustling at that early hour, crowded with human activity.

  Walking stiffly, he made his way out of the station amid the throng of other overnight passengers, all of them blinking as they emerged into the more-or-less full daylight of the street outside. The streets of downtown Chicago were marginally better, or at least less muddy, than those of Springfield. The boots of an army of pedestrians sounded on the wooden sidewalks with a continuous hollow thumping, a sound regularly punctuated by the sharper tap of crutches. Here and there Jerry noted the different impact made by the crude shaft of a primitive artificial leg.

  In the street, as inside the station, soldiers in blue uniforms made up a large part of the crowd. Most of the uniforms were faded and worn. Young men with missing legs or arms, some still in uniform, were a common sight. There must be, Jerry thought, a military hospital or demobilization center near.

  Stretching his stiff limbs and rubbing sleep from his eyes, he lugged his carpetbag to a small restaurant a couple of blocks from the station, where he ordered breakfast. He would have paid a princely sum for cold orange juice, but nothing like that was on the menu. At least the coffee was hot and invigorating, surprisingly good. The prices were reassuringly low—incredibly so, in fact, and he fortified himself with hotcakes, ham and eggs.

  He ate his breakfast sitting beside a window that gave him a good view of the street outside. The volume of street traffic was impressive, made up of horse-drawn vehicles of all shapes and sizes. This, like the Chicago he remembered, was an energetic city, though so far Jerry had seen no building more than five or six stories tall. Were there any? He wondered.

  Many of the men in the restaurant—the place was fairly crowded but there were only one or two women among the patrons—were reading newspapers. Jerry beckoned to a ragged newsboy on the street outside and bought a paper through the open window.

  Half of the front page of the Chicago newspaper was filled with advertisements, the other half with news, mainly about the war. The armies of Grant and Lee, it seemed, were still pounding away at each other in Virginia, though from the tone of the reporting, clearly the writer expected final victory soon. It was further reported that hopes were widespread that the "great rebellion" would be crushed completely out of existence in only a few more days.

  Jerry sat for at least a minute just staring at the date on the newspaper. Seeing it in print made it official, and therefore somehow more believable. Today was Thursday, April 6, 1865.

  Still he sat there, time and again looking up at the world around him, then dropping his eyes to stare at the paper again. Only now, this morning, after a night of exhausted sleep aboard the train, was he able to win the struggle with his outraged sense of logic, his engineer's scientific propriety, and finally come to grips with his situation. No longer was he going to be able to pretend to himself that any part of this could be a fake, a trick. And he wasn't crazy—or if he was, there was nothing he could do about it. However it had been managed, every test he could apply indicated that he was really there, in the last days of the Civil War. Whatever that damned Pilgrim had done to him, for whatever purpose—and Jan Chen, that damned, lying, sexy woman—

  But first things first. He was a long way from being able to take revenge on Pilgrim and his helper now. Unless some rescuing power should suddenly intervene to save him, and he saw no reason to expect that, he was going to have to somehow find his own way back to his own time.

  The trouble was that he had no indication of any place to start. Of course the letter to Jim Lockwood, whoever he might be, might be a clue, if Jerry could understand why it had been given to him.

  Still sitting at his breakfast table, he dug the single page of the letter and its envelope out of his pocket once more, and tried again to read the water-damaged writing. He had no better success than before.

  As he put the letter back in his pocket, his hand once more encountered the bank key and he pulled it out. It was much bigger than the keys he had commonly carried in the twentieth century. The hard, precisely shaped metal lay in his hand feeling large and solid and enigmatic. Jerry could not shake the intuition that it had to be of great importance.

  Putting away his change as he left the restaurant, Jerry let his hand remain in his pocket, resting on the one key. The same irrational compulsion to use the key that he had felt in Springfield, was now stirring again, though less wildly this time.

  Carpetbag in hand again, he set out, with the odd feeling that once he started walking he would go in the right direction.

  On his short walk from the railroad station to the restaurant he had noticed only one bank, one with a conspicuous painted sign. Now he was walking toward that sign again. Probably the establishment under that sign would be the most logical place to go, for someone arriving on a train, who had been advised to patronize a Chicago bank.

  And Jerry suddenly recalled that he, on the night of wine and pizza, had been mysteriously advised to do just that.

  Sauntering into the bank lobby, Jerry tried to adopt the air of a man of wealth—it wasn't really hard to do, now that he had realized how many stacks of hotcakes the money in his pockets could buy. The air inside the bank was blue with smoke. Half the men in the lobby seemed to be smoking cigars; but unless there were compelling reasons, he didn't really want to go that far in trying to project an air of affluence.

  Brass cuspidors stood beside almost every counter and under every table in the bank, the floors and carpets around these targets being heavily stained by poor marksmen. The mellow brightness of gaslights augmented the smoky daylight that entered through high narrow windows to shine on the wood panelling of the walls.

  Jerry set his bag down on the tobacco-stained carpet. He had brought his newspaper with him from the restaurant, and he opened it now and used it as a cover, observing the activity in the lobby past its edges, now and then turning a page. It took him a few minutes to identify the counter where safe-deposit business was being transacted, and the clerk who handled it.

  Unhurriedly he loitered closer and observed more closely. When, finally, he was able to catch a glimpse of one of the keys being presented, he decided that it was a good match for the one he was carrying in his own pocket.

  Jerry read for another minute or two, then unhurriedly folded his newspaper under his arm again and strolled up to the counter.

  The clerk accepted the key calmly. "And the name, sir?"

  Jerry had had the time to get his cover stories and his excuses, if any should be required, as ready as he could get them. "Lockwood," he announced. "James Lockwood."

  The clerk, his eyes in a permanent squint, moved his shirtsleeved shoulder to let the gaslight fall more fully on the pages of the register he had just opened. "Yes, Mr. Lockwood. Sign here, please."

  The book was turned and pushed across the counter to rest in front of Jerry. He felt no more than faintly surprised to see that the open page already contained several specimens of Jim Lockwood's signature, presumably one for every time he'd visited the box. More surprising somehow was the fact that in several places another name, this one signed in a definitely feminine hand—though for once not that of Jan Chen—alternated with Lockwood's. Jerry read the lady's name as Colleen Monahan. The most recent visit by Ms. Monahan, it appeared, had been only yesterday.

  Jim Lockwood's penmanship looked nothing at all like Jerry Flint's usual band, but he committed the best qui
ck-study forgery he could, and then held his breath, waiting to see if it would sell. But it seemed that he need not have worried, for the clerk scarcely glanced at the book when Jerry pushed it back across the counter.

  "This way, sir." And the man was lifting open a gate in the counter to let Jerry through. He was now facing the entrance to a kind of strongroom, walls and door of heavy wood reinforced with plates of iron or steel. Together they entered the strongroom, where Jerry's key in the clerk's hand released one of a row of little strongboxes.

  "Would you prefer a booth, sir, for privacy?"

  "Yes. Yes, I would."

  In another moment, Jerry, clutching in both hands a small metal box that had the feeling of being almost empty, was being shown into one of a row of tiny partitioned spaces, the door of which he was able to pull closed behind him. The booth was open at the top, enabling its occupant to share in the light from the windows and the gas-jets of the lobby.

  Jerry set down his metal box on the small table provided, opened the catch, and swung back the lid.

  There were two items in the box, one a mere folded piece of paper, the other a large, old-fashioned, stem-winding pocket watch, with chain attached.

  Paper first. The timepiece did not look all that informative, but with paper there was hope. He took the small sheet up and unfolded it to read a note.

  Dear Jim Lockwood—

  Things have gone a little sour. Whatever day you get this, bring this note when you come out and meet me outside the bank. If I am not there come back every hour at ten minutes after the hour in banking hours.

  Our employer is concerned about your health.

  Colleen M.

  The handwriting of the note, he thought, matched that of the alternate signature in the book kept by the clerk. Jerry sighed and folded up the note and put it in his pocket.

  Next he picked up the watch. It was ticking, evidently wound and functional. To Jerry's inexpert eye the timepiece, looking serviceable but plain, did not appear to be of particularly great value. Its case was of bright metal, hard enough to be steel. There was a round steel protective cover over the face, and Jerry thumbed a little catch and swung the cover back. Then he caught his breath.