Scott moved to the edge and looked down. Brocius, having heard the gunfire, was staring up at him, his jaw hanging open. The moment he saw him, he lifted his gun and let off a wild shot, then took off running.
Scott ducked hack from the edge as soon as Brocius fired at him. When he heard his running footsteps on the boardwalk below, he moved forward again and looked down at the body of the sniper, sprawled on the street below. It was Ross Demming.
Scott’s lips were set in a tight grimace. It was possible that Demming and Brocius had been acting on their own, but he didn’t believe it for a second. It had to be O’Fallon, in his guise of Johnny Ringo, setting him up for an ambush. The gloves were off. He moved back from the edge of the roof as people came running out into the street to see what happened. He set the transition coordinates on his warp disc for his room back at the hotel and clocked out. As soon as he materialized, he spun around quickly, his guns out, but the room was empty.
It would no longer be safe to stay here. Only where else could he go? It would no longer be safe anywhere. Brocius didn’t seem in the least bit worried about having Jenny witness the shooting. Nor did he try to stop her when she ran. Which could only mean one thing. He was not concerned about the Earps. He checked the date on his disc. October 25. 1881. The eve of the O.K. Corral shoot-out.
He frowned. That couldn’t possibly be right. That was still days away. But the warp disc couldn’t be wrong. He had never heard of one malfunctioning. And if it had malfunctioned… no, he didn’t want to think about that. It was getting late. He hurried downstairs to the bar and got a copy of the Tombstone Epitaph. He stared at the front page with disbelief.
“Like a drink, Kid?” asked the barman.
“Yeah,” said Scott, dully, “Whiskey. Make it a double.”
The date on the front page was October 25. 1881. It seemed impossible. Somehow, without even being aware of it, he’d lost an entire week.
He downed the whiskey in two quick gulps, feeling the fire as it burned down his throat and in his stomach. A whole week? How was it possible? He paid for his drink, put the paper down on the bar and went back up to his room, in a daze. He locked the door and sat down on his bed, his mind racing.
He could think of only one possible explanation. The temporal instability was increasing rapidly and dramatically Either he had somehow crossed over from one timeline into the other without realizing it, and lost a week in the process, or the timeline had started to ripple and the effect was concentrated in thi
s sector. Somehow, a week had passed in a matter of hours. And he hadn’t even noticed. It was as if he’d been picked up by a timewave and deposited farther down the shore.
He tried to think what implications this new development could have for the mission. Had he alone experienced this effect, or were Priest. Cross and Delaney caught up in it as well? And, if so, were they aware of it? Would he be able to warn them, or were they still in the other timeline? And what would happen if they’d been caught in the ripple effect and carried farther down the timestream than where he was now?
He had no answers. No idea what to do. Priest was in command of the mission. Only Priest was not around to give commands. There was no going by the book because the book had never covered situations such as this. There had never been a situation such as this before and, quite possibly, there never would be again. Was this where the whole thing fell apart? Was the temporal instability in this sector going to grow into a timewave that would travel down the timestream, eventually breaking somewhere in the future in a massive timestream split? Was it possible that he was the only one who could prevent it?
No. Not prevent it. Change it. Because whatever it was he was fated to do, according to history as it was seen from the time that Darkness came from, he had already done it. If, in fact, he was the one. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps it wouldn’t have anything to do with him at all. in spite of the powerful gut instinct that he had, telling him that he was about to be involved in something of monumental significance.
We can change history. Scott thought. We learned that the hard way. Everything that’s happened from the first time a man traveled back into the past has led to this point. And it was a point of no return, because they had learned that there was really only one chance to effect a temporal adjustment. If it failed the first time, and another effort was made to clock back to a point before the original adjustment mission was attempted and try again, it only contributed to the instability of that temporal scenario and increased the odds against them.
If a temporal anomaly or disruption was discovered and a team was clocked hack to effect an adjustment, they were already working against the force of temporal inertia and their very presence meant there was a chance that instead of adjusting the disruption, they would only make it worse. If they failed, and another team was clocked hack to try again, they would be clocking into a time sector that was already unstable to begin with and they would also encounter the original adjustment team, which in itself could bring about a temporal paradox. They had learned that the hard way, too.
Temporal anomalies that had been brought about by the actions of the Time Wars had resulted in historical disruptions that had to be adjusted, but the adjustment missions themselves, even though successful, had undoubtedly affected temporal inertia in ways that manifested themselves as more anomalies and disruptions further down the timestream. Nor was there any way of knowing how many temporal anomalies brought about by time travel had gone completely undiscovered.
It was like trying to plug a hole in a pipe that had sprung a leak, only each time one leak was stopped, two more appeared. There seemed to be no end to it.
Only what if this was the end? What if, this time, history could not be changed? What if, this time, they had run out of time?
Scott took his pistols out of their holsters and laid them on the bed, beside him. One had been fired when he had killed Ross Demming a short while ago. Or was it a week ago?
He picked up the fired piece in his left hand, pulled the hammer back to half cock and opened the loading gate on the right side of the frame. Strange, he wondered, how for so many years no one had thought to question that. It was simply accepted. To load or unload the gun, a right-handed shooter had to transfer the weapon to his left hand, open the gate on the right side, and manually rotate the cylinder, using the ejector rod to push out one empty brass casing at a time, then load with the right hand. For a left-handed shooter, the procedure was much simpler and more natural. One simply continued to hold the gun in the shooting hand, pulled back the hammer halfway, opened up the gate and proceeded to reload. Colonel Sam Colt had been left-handed and he had designed the Peacemaker as a left-handed gun. Thereafter, the entire world had unquestioningly used the left-handed design for well over a hundred years, until the late 20th century, when a man named Bill Grover had finally hit upon the idea of manufacturing a right-handed Peacemaker with the loading gate on the left side of the frame. It seemed incredible that no one had ever thought of that before. It was a testimony to the genius of Sam Colt that his Single Action Army had been considered so perfect that for over a hundred years, no one had thought of modifying the design.
As he ejected the fired brass casing and slipped in a fresh cartridge. Scott wondered what it meant that he knew about things like that. In the 27th century. it was completely useless, trivial knowledge, and yet he had researched such obscure facts with relentless fascination, long before it ever occurred to him that he might one day enlist in the Temporal Corps. Why, in a time when lead projectile weapons had been obsolete for several hundred years, had he become so fascinated with them? Why had he devoted so many long hours to practicing with them, going to all the trouble of making his own bullets from scratch, only to perfect an arcane form of marksmanship and self-defense that would have no use whatsoever for him in modern life? Why had he been so intensely interested in the history of the Old West, more so than in that of any other time, and in the lives of the men who became frontier legends? Was it fate?
All his life. Scott had felt he had been born in the wrong time. Then when he had first clocked into this temporal scenario, he had felt suddenly and inexplicably at home, as if this was where he truly belonged. In the other timeline, he-or his twin-apparently did belong here. Maybe that was the anomaly. Maybe he should have been born in this time in the first place, only because of some temporal disruption brought about by time travelers before him, something had gone wrong and he had been born about eight hundred years too late. A man out of time, returned by Fate to the time in which he really belonged, completing some sort of temporal cycle, a missing piece of the puzzle finally dropped into place. Only now that he was here, was it his fate to live or die? The fate of billions of future lives could rest on the answer to that question.
He held the handsome, engraved and silver-plated Colt in his hand. It felt as if it had always belonged there. He had dreamed of owning such a revolver all his life. He thumbed back the hammer and sat for a long moment in silent thought. What would happen if he stuck the barrel in his mouth, angled upward, and squeezed the trigger? The big. 45 caliber bullet would smash through the roof of his mouth and into his brain in a inert fraction of a second. There probably wouldn’t be time to feel any pain.
Perhaps that was the solution. If he killed himself, then he wouldn’t be able to do anything to upset the balance of the timestream and bring on that disaster in the future. If he was, in fact, at the center of the whole thing, then killing himself might be the perfect solution to it all. It would absolve Priest, Cross and Delaney of having to do it. And if it could save lives, then he was prepared to do it.
But, on the other hand, what if that was exactly the wrong move? What if the act of his suicide triggered off whatever was supposed to happen? But, if that were the case, then Priest, Cross and Delaney would be in a position to do something about it. To stop him, perhaps. Wasn’t that what Darkness had told them? In that case, maybe he should go ahead and do it… and see if they arrived to stop him in the nick of time. Only if they didn’t
Scott was in an agony of indecision. He had never wanted to live so much as he did now. He had never felt as vibrantly alive as he did now. He had never been in love the way he was with Jenny. It was as if, after all those years of living out of time, he had finally found himself. Only what was he to do?
He started at the loud knocking on his door. He picked up his other gun and cocked it.
“Who is it?”
“Wyatt Earp. Open up, Kid.”