The Nick Of Time Part 10

"Just like the Wizard of Oz," said Cheryl.

Mihalik stared at her. His mouth opened, then closed. "That's it!" he shouted. "That's just what I've been trying to remember all afternoon! The Wizard said he'd help Dorothy get back home, if first she did this one little thing for him. She had to steal the Wicked Witch's broom. Just like you had us go back to the seventeenth century and clear out the Temporary Underground for you. Well, we did, and now we're back. And you have to help us go home."

"What's this Wizard jazz?" asked Dr. Waters. He looked at Private Brannick, who only silently shook his head.

"It's a film in our universe," said Cheryl. "With s.h.i.+rley Temple as the little girl."

"So what happens?" asked Dr. Waters. "Does the Wizard get her back home?"

"It wasn't s.h.i.+rley Temple," said Mihalik.

"Yes, it was s.h.i.+rley Temple, I remember her tap dancing with Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, who played the Licorice Man who ferried them across the Root Beer River."

"I don't give a d.a.m.n about any of that!" cried Dr. Waters. "What happens?"

"Oh, the Wizard can't help her," said Cheryl. "It turns out that it doesn't matter, anyway, because the girl is actually dying of blackwater fever, and all of this Oz business is just a delirious nightmare she's having in the hospital, and all the people in the dream are really the doctors and nurses taking care of her."

"So she never does get home?" asked Private Brannick sadly.

"Well, she dies, see," said Cheryl, "but at the end you see her going up to Heaven, which looks just like Oz but all her family is there, just like at home. They all died of the fever, too."

Dr. Waters drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. "You're telling me that none of this is real.

You're wrong, folks. It is real. You may not be real, Frank, and Cheryl may not be real, but all the rest of this is real. If you died right here on the spot, I promise you that the rest of us wouldn't blink out of existence. You're not G.o.d, Frank."

"I never claimed that I was." Suddenly, Mihalik's eyes opened wider. "Do you remember, Cheryl, the other Dr. Waters said something about how it wouldn't be so easy to get back home? Not like just tapping our heels together and saying 'There's no place like home'?"

"Yes," she said breathlessly. "d.a.m.n it," said Mihalik. "I'm getting confused, trying to keep straight which Dr. Waters said what.

We've met three of you already. You seemed more substantial than the last one, because this universe looks more like ours. But this one and all the others are just blurry, distorted copies of the real universe."

Dr. Waters laughed softly. "You can make up theories like that all night if you want to. The important point -- the only truly important point -- is that you are here, whatever you want to think about this universe. It's your problem, not ours."

"But you have to help us!" said Cheryl.

"Show me where it says that," said Dr. Waters. He took out one of his expensive imported cigarettes and leaned a tall white taper over to light it.

"Then you never meant to help us," said Mihalik. He raised himself halfway out of his chair.

"Now, now, Frank, you've always been hotheaded. I'll do what I can, which isn't much. I'm a chronicist, not a wizard. But I owe you something. First, though, I want you to tell me exactly what you accomplished on your mission."

Mihalik looked blankly at Cheryl. "We don't know," she said.

"Well," said Dr. Waters impatiently, "did you run up against the Underground?"

"Of course we did," said Mihalik. "You could have given us a little more information before we left here. It took me a full day to figure out that the Musketeers were the good guys and the Cardinal's Guards were the rebels."

Dr. Waters squinted a little. "When you left here, we didn't know who the rebels were. But I'm pretty sure they weren't the Cardinal's Guards. They weren't, at least, the last time I checked.

"But the Musketeers couldn't have been, either," said Cheryl.

"That's right," said Dr. Waters.

"Then who the h.e.l.l was the Temporary Underground?"

Private Brannick cleared his throat loudly. "We, uh, we've since learned that they've taken over the Flemish textile industry. You should have infiltrated the society of Flemish merchants."

Mihalik looked at Cheryl. "I didn't see a G.o.dd.a.m.n sign of any Flemish merchants, did you, Cheryl?"

"Nope."

"No Flemish merchants," growled Mihalik. "No Dutch uncles, no German shepherds, no English m.u.f.fins, no Spanish moss, no Portuguese men-of-war, no Swiss cheese, and no Maltese falcons."

Private Brannick frowned and took a warning step toward him. "Remember where you are, Mr.

Mihalik" he said softly.

"Can't take a joke," said the chrononaut. "That's the trouble with all you time fascists, no sense of humor. So if the Musketeers weren't the Underground and neither were the Guards, who the h.e.l.l was that guy who was looking for Brother Fortunati?"

Dr. Waters raised his eyebrows. "Fortunati? He's one of the Commander's right-hand men."

"Who is the Commander?" asked Cheryl.

"The top dog of the Temporary Underground," said Private Brannick with a murderous expression.

"The head honcho. The big noise in the mutiny department. A number 1. The bee's knees and the clam's garters, as far as sedition goes. He thinks he's hot stuff and a real pipperoo, but he's not so tough. He's nothing to write home about."

"Sounds like Brannick's spent too much time on the sidewalks of New York sixty years before he was born," said Mihalik.

"Oh," said Dr. Waters with some amus.e.m.e.nt, "Brannick's all right. That will be all, private." When the uniformed man left the suite, Dr. Waters smiled again. "He'd love to get his hands on the Commander, but that guy's slippery as an eel. The Commander likes to hide in the most G.o.dforsaken places and eras.

We found him once on Samoa in 220 a.d. Who would have thought to look for him there?"

"Who did think to look?" asked Cheryl.

"Your buddy there," said Dr. Waters.

"Me?" said Mihalik.

"Well, the real Mihalik did." Cheryl raised a hand. "Let's not start that business again. We thought the Cardinal's Guard were the enemy. We decimated them, and then we came back. If we were wrong, it wasn't our fault. We didn't have the right information."

Dr. Waters sighed. "I guess it's ultimately my fault. Anyway, no harm done; we can accomplish our objectives by sending another mission back to the same time. There won't be a single Flemish textile trader alive in that century when we're through. But I do owe you something for letting me know where that Fortunati b.a.s.t.a.r.d is holed up."

Mihalik relaxed a little. "Then you will help us, after all?"

"Certainly, Frank, certainly! What do I look like, some sort of tyrant, some awful despot of time? Ha ha, we're old friends, even if we've only just met. Now what do you think would be the best thing to try?"

"I don't know," said Mihalik thoughtfully. "The other Dr. Waters -- I mean, the second Dr. Waters, in the universe we visited just before this -- well, he said that we ought to go into the future, where they've got all this sort of thing figured out."

"That makes sense."

"Wait a minute, though," objected Cheryl. "It made sense before, too, and all it got us was a quick trip to another wrong universe."

"It might work this time," said Mihalik. "We're starting out a lot closer to home than before."

"But there are an infinite number of universes, Frank," explained Cheryl patiently. "You keep forgetting that. We can get closer and closer from now until doomsday, and still never find our way back."

"Now, now, my dear girl," said Dr. Waters, fixing his magnetic gaze on the distraught young woman.

"You are correct, after a fas.h.i.+on. However, the differences between any two universes may be so small that for all practical purposes you may call them identical. Suppose you land in another wrong reality, but the only reason it's 'wrong' is that two tiny grains of sand in the Sahara Desert are transposed in position.

Would you ever know about it? Of course not. That 'wrong' universe would seem completely 'right' to you. And I don't need to remind you that a universe exists for every possible combination of details: for every transposition of every grain of sand, or drop of water, or atom of hydrogen, or anything else you care to mention. There are a staggeringly vast number of universes that will seem 'right' to you."

Cheryl jumped up. "The problem with your line of reasoning is so big, I don't even need to discuss it,"

she cried.

"Well, I don't see it," said Mihalik glumly.

Cheryl didn't pay any attention. "Have you noticed, Frank," she said, "that when we try to reason our way out of some situation, nothing happens? And that when we just act, things change?"

Dr. Waters patted the air soothingly with one hand. "Have you noticed, Cheryl, that when things change, they change for the worse?"

Cheryl had no answer to that; she sat down again and waited for Mihalik to make some contribution.

"I like what Dr. Waters just pointed out," he said. "Our trouble is that we've been going off half-c.o.c.ked. Our own Dr. Waters wasn't entirely sure about what he was doing -- that's the way it seems to me now. He just punted the both of us through some trapdoor in the air, and we landed entirely by accident in 1939. Then that crazy Marquand guy zapped us with his lightning bolt just because it seemed like a good idea to him. No calculations, no preparation, no safeguards. And look where we ended up then."

"Some awful place where everybody always has enough to eat and somebody else to cook it for them," said Dr. Waters. "Frightening."

"You had to be there to see how terrible it was," said Cheryl.

"And then," Mihalik went on, "the second Dr. Waters shunted us here. He was aiming for the far future, so his technology couldn't have been much better than the Dr. Waters in our own world."

Cheryl shook her head. "Yet he claimed that time travel had been perfected, too."

"Time travel, maybe," said Dr. Waters, "but not inter-reality travel. That's something altogetherdifferent. As it happens, I don't have that kind of universe-leaping perfected, either, but at least I have a lot of promising equations and a plausible model to base my experiments on. If you'd be willing to volunteer, I'd be glad to provide whatever limited a.s.sistance I can."

"You want to send us off, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, into the infinite congregation of universes?" asked Cheryl. She looked dubious.

"You've already done it twice," said Dr. Waters, smiling in a kindly way. "You're no worse for the experiences, are you?"

"We've been incredibly lucky," said Cheryl. "There are more ways for a universe to be wrong than to be right. The next time, we might end up in a universe with no Dr. Waters at all, no time travel, maybe not even human life."

Dr. Waters shrugged. "There is that chance, I must admit. But come on, aren't you game? Aren't you up for the adventure?"

"I know that I am," said Mihalik. "Adventure is my profession."

"Good lad," said Dr. Waters.

"If only you had some kind of emergency recall mechanism," said Cheryl wistfully. "Some kind of insurance."

"I'll give you insurance: I'll make the trip with you. I'd love to visit another plane of existence. You know that I wouldn't take the risk unless I was pretty certain of success."

"All right, then," said Cheryl, "let's do it."

"Fine," said Dr. Waters, standing and beaming at both of them. He went to his desk and pushed a b.u.t.ton. "I signaled Ray. He'll meet us at the transmission stage."

"Good old Ray," said Mihalik.

"He'll have to operate the screen. He'll push us through to my selected universe, and then draw us back after sixty minutes. If it seems acceptable to you, we can send you there permanently. How does that sound?"

"Great," said Mihalik, "unless something horrible happens during that hour."

Dr. Waters frowned. "I'm disappointed in you, Frank. Where's your explorer's zest for discovery?"

"Oh, I'm not worried for myself, sir. I was just concerned about you and Cheryl. You don't have all the tempo-neering training I've had. Besides, the universe and I seem to be reaching an understanding."

Dr. Waters laughed. Together the courageous trio left the suite and took the elevator to the laboratory. Ray was there to meet them, just as Dr. Waters had promised; both Mihalik and Cheryl shook his hand and promised to be careful. "We've been doing a lot of this lately," said Cheryl. "Saying goodbye to you two, I mean."

Dr. Waters and Ray were amused. They took their positions: Ray at the controls of the apparatus, the three adventurers on the transmission stage. "Ready?" called Ray. "Counting down now: Five, four, three, two, one, switch on!"

There was a flicker of blue light, and Dr. Waters disappeared.

"My G.o.d!" cried Cheryl. "Come back! Don't go without us!"

"It's that d.a.m.n movie again," muttered Mihalik. "The Wizard going off in the balloon, leaving Dorothy behind in Oz."

"My fault," called Ray, "I forgot to split the beam. I'm sorry. I'll split it in two, now. Counting down again: five, four, three, two, one, switch on!"

After another s.h.i.+mmer of blue and a rolling crackle of thunder, the world went dark. There were coiling mists on the ground and a faint yellow glow everywhere. Mihalik and Cheryl looked around in terror. There was nothing to see. They were nowhere at all.

Book Four

Time Is What Keeps History from Happening All at Once

This Place Is Fantastic!

Mihalik and Cheryl said the same thing at the same time: "Now you've done it," said Mihalik.

"Now you've done it," said Cheryl.