CHAPTER
NINE 

Liz Naile didn’t like her hair. Without the use of a hair dryer, it always looked flat. It reached to her shoulder blades. If she cut it short, as she’d worn it sometimes, drying it would be easier, but women in 1898 didn’t wear short hair, and she would only draw more attention to herself. 

Once, while substitute teaching for the frequently ailing Margaret Diamond, as she did periodically and more often than she cared to, she’d remarked to one of the students—a pretty girl of thirteen with really gorgeous hair—that the girl’s hair always looked so perfect, she reminded her of Marsha Brady. Since television hadn’t even been invented yet, and The Brady Bunch wasn’t even in first runs let alone re-runs, Liz had quickly made up some little piece of bullshit to cover the slipup. 

On another occasion, when the class had been studying a unit called “History of The World,” and the closest thing to a textbook for twenty students had been one beautifully illustrated two-volume set with the same title, she had compared Genghis Khan to Adolph Hitler. She’d covered that by telling her students, “You’ll study about him a lot later on.” 

That night, Lizzie asked her father and mother the dates for World War Two, realizing that, indeed, it would be much, much later on that anyone would hear of him. Her father had told her, “Hitler should be about nine years old right now.” 

“What if we went over to Germany—” 

“Austria. He wasn’t born in Germany. But what if we went over there and killed him?” 

Lizzie thought about it and then said, “I guess we’d still be killing a nine-year-old boy and not a dictator, because he hasn’t even heard of Nazis yet, right?” 

“History,” her mother began, “is going to present us with a lot of dilemmas, Liz. And a lot of opportunities. We’re just going to have to decide on a case-by-case basis if something we do is going to screw up history and do more harm than good. Lots of times, it’ll be a compromise.” 

As Liz stared at herself in her makeshift bedroom’s mirror, compromise was exactly what she saw looking back at her. She wore her high school tennis-team T-shirt under a sweatshirt that had Calvin Klein emblazoned across the front, all of this over an ankle-length full skirt, the toes of her solitary pair of track shoes poking out from beneath its hem. 

If someone rode up to the house, she could always lie and say something like “Uncle Calvin likes to personalize his gifts” and scrunch down a little so her skirt would cover her shoes completely. 

She quit her room and started toward the front door along the wide corridor. One side of the house—where they had been living most of the time for the last six months—was completed, her father and mother still holding off on finishing the rest of the house in the—she considered—vain hope that somehow they’d find a way of electrifying parts of it. Liz had about given up on that. And David, who spent most of his time in town running the store, didn’t seem to even think about it. 

As she exited the house into the early December morning—it was nearly noon, but sleeping late when she could was one part of her old life she’d been able to hold on to—she saw her father. There was a chill in the air but, in spite of it, he was shirtless. He wore a gun, as he always did, but not his fancy one in the fancy black gunfighter rig, just a plain one he’d bought in town, worn crossdraw in a plain brown holster on a plain brown belt. Jack Naile was using a posthole digger, and she knew that he’d be expecting her—and her mother—to help him after a while. And she would. Despite her sex, she’d always had a great deal of upper-body strength; with David rarely home because of the store, more and more she’d found herself filling the function of surrogate son. She just thanked God that her body type didn’t get big muscles from doing that sort of stuff, like guys did. 

Her mother was down by the stream working with the cereal box-like camera and tripod she’d ordered from St. Louis. David brought it out on his last visit from town. Ellen Naile, all her adult life forced by necessity to take photos of little else but guns and holsters and knives in association with Jack Naile’s magazine articles, was determined to actually do something she wanted with a camera; wisely, saving the film she had brought with her for special occasions, she was attempting to master the equipment currently available. Her mother was into compromise as well, Liz thought, smiling. For as long as Liz could remember, her mother had always preferred pants in the fall, winter and spring and shorts in the summer, only wearing a dress or skirt when the occasion called for it. Now Ellen Naile wore a long, dark blue skirt and a light blue long-sleeved blouse. The sleeves of the blouse were rolled up past her elbows, the collar of the blouse was left unbuttoned and the back of the skirt was drawn up between her legs, its hem tucked into the skirt’s waistband, forming something like baggy legged pants. Her mother flat-out refused to wear an apron as so many women did as part of their regular attire. 

Liz sauntered over toward the stream. When her dad saw her, he waved and she waved back, which gave him an excuse to stop using the posthole digger and roll a cigarette. He smoked much less than he had before they’d traveled back in time, but took a certain pride, she thought, in having learned to quite deftly roll a cigarette, even outside when it was a little breezy, as it was this morning. 

Her mother was looking through the camera lens, and Liz could hear her snarling, “What a piece-of-crap lens!” 

“Hey, Momma.” 

“Hi, sweetheart,” her mother responded. “I’d be better off with Dad’s mother’s old Box Brownie. You know, I’m not into fancy cameras. That 35mm of mine we bought at 

J.C. Penney’s back in 1975, I think. And I almost never used the wide angle lens. But this thing really sucks!” 

Liz had started to hitch up her skirt just like her mother’s as she asked, “Isn’t there a better camera available? Maybe from Europe or someplace!” 

“I don’t know.” 

Liz was about to say something reassuring as soon as she could think of it. As she tucked the hem of her skirt into her waistband, she caught sight of a cloud of dust coming from the direction of town and the higher mountains beyond. “Who’s that? It must be a big wagon or something?” 

Her mother turned the camera around and leaned over it. “I can actually see something through this lens! You’re right. That’s a big dust cloud. Go tell your father.” 

Lizzie ran toward where her father was building the new corral, on the other side of the house from the stream, where the ground was flatter. “Daddy! Daddy!” 

Her father had, apparently, just picked up the posthole digger again, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “What’s the matter, princess?” 

“Look! In the direction of town!” 

She stopped running, about halfway between her mother and her father, her hands fumbling with the hem of her skirt to pull it out of her waistband so she could hide her 1990s track shoes from 1890s eyes. 

“Lizzie. Go up on the porch and get that new Winchester shotgun David brought up from town. It’s loaded, but the chamber’s empty. Be careful.” 

Liz ran toward the porch, nearly tripping on her skirt. The shotgun—her father had told her what it was called, but she didn’t remember—was leaned beside the door frame, its butt resting in a notched piece of wood her father had chiseled out for it, then nailed to the porch floor, the muzzle in a similarly contoured piece of wood. The shotgun was big and heavy. 

Her father and mother had both gravitated toward the porch. She joined them, giving the shotgun to her father. 

The cloud of dust was bigger, definitely nearer, but she couldn’t see what was causing it. “Hey, guys? You think it’s a stagecoach?” 

“No stage line passes this way. No freight line, either. Whatever it is, whoever’s driving it is coming to see us.” 

“You don’t think it’s Fowler’s guys, now that you’re no longer filling in as town marshal?” Ellen asked. 

“A wagonload of range detectives? Doubtful. But be ready to get up on that porch and into the house and grab a gun if it looks like trouble.” As he finished speaking, Jack seemed to weigh the shotgun in his hands. “Ellen? Lizzie? This shotgun was first used by the United States military as a trench gun during what will be World War I.” 

“Now is not the time to play Jeopardy, Jack.” 

“It’s a ‘97 Winchester Pump. And if you have to use it fast and at close range, anchor the buttstock against your hip, work the pump and hold the trigger back. Peculiarity of ‘97s. As long as you hold the trigger back, the gun will fire as soon as the action closes. There’s buckshot in here, and at close range—and I mean pretty close, like from here to the porch—you’ll do a lot of damage. Just a good thing to remember.” 

“Right, Jack. We’ll remember that. Won’t we, Liz?” 

“Oh, yeah! You bet!” Lizzie remembered the ‘97 part was what the gun was called, her attention elsewhere, on the still growing cloud of dust. 

“‘A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust—’” 

“It’s probably not the masked man and his faithful Indian companion, Jack.” 

“Just trying to lighten things up a little bit, ladies.” 

“Don’t try and lighten things up, Daddy. Just try and see what—” 

“It’s the Suburban!” Ellen Naile exclaimed. 

“You’ve got good eyes, kid,” Jack Naile declared. “Not only can you see through a cloud of dust that’s more than a mile away, but you can see a hundred years into the future.” 

“Look! When the dust parts a little, Daddy,” Liz said. “It’s big and kind of gray—” 

“Holy shit,” Jack Naile hissed. “It is the Suburban, I think.” 

By this time, the horses, which were tethered to a sturdy rope picket line while the corral was being built, were starting to react, at first to the gigantic dust cloud. Soon they would see, and then hear the Suburban. The horses were hobbled, so they couldn’t run. 

Lizzie had to urinate, but that could wait. 

So this was the legendary Naile family, minus the one that Clarence talked about more than any of the others. Clarence often quoted Jack or Ellen, talked unendingly about how wonderful and pretty Lizzie was—and she was beautiful, certainly—but he talked about David’s capabilities as if David were some sort of “wunderkind” who was, somehow, beyond the ordinary human. 

Peggy had stood off by the Suburban, the tethered horses seeming skittish but not terrified as the initial greeting, the reuniting of this oddly mixed family, took place. She’d smiled, was hugged by Lizzie, had shaken hands with Ellen, shaken hands with Jack, too, then was hugged by Jack as Clarence had mentioned, almost in passing, that they were engaged and had waited to be married until the family was reunited in the past. At this, Lizzie not only hugged her again, but seemed on the verge of tears of happiness. Ellen only looked at her, at once warmly yet oddly. Jack had said, “Welcome to the family, Peggy.” 

There were several exchanges about what was in the Suburban, in the trailer, some of the most genuine enthusiasm she had ever seen when Clarence reassured all and sundry that he’d brought all of the electrical wiring. There was the perfunctory man thing when Jack inspected the handguns, selected a “brace” of them, as he called them, and shoved them in his belt. She’d noticed that he was already wearing one gun and holding another in his hands as they’d approached. 

There was a quick exchange between Clarence and Jack Naile about “How’d you get here?” 

Clarence ended it by telling his uncle, “Long story. Tell you about it later.” 

Jack Naile stood about an inch or so under six feet tall, had a broad chest, a surprisingly narrow waist with little trace of a middle-aged gut. His arms—he was shirtless at first, but donned a shirt as they entered the house—were long, muscled with reasonably well-defined triceps. His hair was reddish-brown, with plenty of silver-gray, especially at the sides, though not yet at the temples. His mustache had the mottled look of both his hair colors and held a hint of yellow from his smoking. He’d lit a cigarette—rolling it first; Clarence kidding him about it—as they stood outside and talked. He had brown eyes and his hands—bony, with the knuckles and veins prominent—looked as though they should have belonged to a pianist, a violinist or a surgeon. He was, of course, none of these. According to Clarence, Jack had a really good singing voice but was too fumble-fingered to play any instrument requiring more manual dexterity than a kazoo. Clarence had told her, on more than one occasion, that Jack would say, “I was going to be a brain surgeon, but I couldn’t complete my studies because of the expense. It was those custom-made surgical gloves with ten thumbs.” 

The hair on Jack Naile’s chest, particularly the right side, had significant white in it, and there was some beginning trace of white hair on his shoulders. He had a lot of hair on his back, and she didn’t like that, although she imagined that some women probably found it sexy. 

Ellen Naile, who was forty-six, Peggy knew, looked barely thirty. With the right clothes and makeup—and she didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup—she would have looked younger still. There was a gray hair or two visible when the sun caught her just right, but her hair— a dark auburn—was beautiful. Parted down the middle, sixties fashion, or what kids in the 1990s called a “butt cut,” Ellen had hair almost to her waist. Ellen’s features were prominent without being at all sharp. With the right makeup, her cheekbones would have looked like the kind a model would have envied. Ellen stood about five seven, discounting the period shoes she wore which added another inch or more to her height. Her eyes were what some would call hazel, gray and green without being either or both. They were very pretty. 

Jack’s voice was baritone, at once soothing and commanding. Ellen was a perfect alto. 

The much-spoken-of Lizzie immediately struck Peggy as the warmest, sweetest person she had ever met. Her features more closely followed those of her father than her mother, even to his eye color, and she shared his hair color. And her hair, without any part, held back by an anachronistic plastic headband, fell just past her shoulders. Dark-eyed, with the most genuinely, sincerely engaging smile Peggy had ever seen, Lizzie somehow had her mother’s look about her, even though there was no particular feature or combination of features that could at all be compared. 

With a more amply endowed bosom than her mother, Lizzie stood perhaps five-three or five-four. Like her mother, Lizzie was also alto-voiced. 

Lizzie seemed to convey her mother’s femininity and confidence, while mingling it with her father’s apparent strength. She was an interesting girl, complex yet somehow seeming to be one of those people about whom it was said, “What you see is what you get.” 

After they had all entered the house, Ellen offered drinks, apologizing for not having any sort of refrigeration. There was only wine, whiskey, water, coffee or tea. Clarence announced, “We brought a bar refrigerator, Jack!” 

“Bless you,” Lizzie declared emphatically. “Now we can have ice.” 

Clarence took a glass of water. Peggy had a glass of wine, as did Jack and Ellen. Lizzie had water, complaining that it tasted like nothing at all, only wet. 

Clarence smiled as he held out a package of unfiltered Camel cigarettes to Jack and said, “I’ve got a dozen cartons packed in the trailer.” 

“Which nut you want me to cut off, the left or right?” 

“Daddy!” 

“Sorry, princess. I was overcome by emotion.” 

Emotion was, it appeared, the watchword here. Ellen had merely given Clarence a light hug and a peck on the cheek when they first arrived. But that she loved Clarence was obvious from everything about her. Jack had hugged Clarence as if Jack and his nephew were two bears about to get into a wrestling match. Lizzie had hugged Clarence around the neck and given him several kisses on the cheek, then held his hand for a while. 

“Anybody want some lunch?” Ellen asked, as if desperate to do something. 

“I’ll help,” Peggy volunteered. 

“The kitchen’s awfully small at the moment. With no refrigeration, we’ve been eating a lot of pasta. I make it myself. Liz helps me.” She looked at Clarence, “I hope that’s a pretty good-sized bar refrigerator, or we’ll be eating smoked turkey for Christmas. How soon before you guys can get some electricity in here?” 

“Ahh—” 

“Think about those devilled eggs you like, Clarence, before you give me an answer. And, Jack, you think about that cherry cream-cheese pie Lizzie makes. You don’t like smoked turkey, remember?” Ellen smiled and walked off, presumably toward the kitchen. 

The house—what was completed of it—was remarkably (and uncharacteristically for the period) bright and airy, with large picture windows about the size of what might be seen in a jewelry store. The furniture was quite plain, simple. It looked less than half-finished, but when it was done, its size would be impressive. 

The homemade pasta was good, but Ellen apologized for it. “You can’t get most of the herbs and spices to make a decent spaghetti sauce. In the spring, I’m finally going to start a garden.” 

The water for the pasta was boiled over the hearth, the room slightly warmer than comfortable, but the fire was gradually diminishing. How could any woman who had been living and working in the late nineteen hundreds ever live here, Peggy Greer wondered. No stove, no refrigerator, probably no running water. “There may be a chance for you guys to escape,” Peggy blurted out. 

Jack and Ellen both looked at her. Without shifting his gaze from her face, Jack said, “Clarence—it’s about time you told me how you guys were able to get here.” 

Clarence started, Peggy chiming in with some of the scientific details, assuming that Jack and Ellen and Lizzie might understand at least some of the process, pleased that they seemed to grasp it quite well. When Clarence recounted Jane’s tragic death and the death of the cowboy, Jack Naile offered an explanation of just who Jess Fowler was and the nature of his range detectives. 

“Daddy killed two of Jess Fowler’s range detectives when they tried to assault Momma and me. David was fighting one of them off, but the second one hit him from behind. When Daddy was town marshal, Fowler’s men left us alone. Now, though . . .” Lizzie let the sentence hang unfinished. 

“Clarence told me something,” Peggy Greer volunteered. “It’s important. There was a tech guy—head guy, really, like the mission-command guy—and his name was Marc Cole. I didn’t notice it, but Clarence thought that Marc Cole seemed strange somehow, familiar but not. And the young cowboy was named Cole. He was a twin, and he and his brother were in love with the same girl. Now, suppose that because Jane Rogers came into the past, the young cowboy’s life ended when it shouldn’t have. What if Marc Cole was somehow different? I mean, there’s no way to tell from this end, but if we could get back, and we found out that Marc Cole’s great-grandfather was the young cowboy’s brother, what if that’s the reason Marc Cole struck Clarence as somehow odd, something wrong with him? What if Marc Cole, as we knew him just before we left, was different because the young cowboy should have been his great-grandfather and Jane changed all of that?” 

“So,” Jack Naile posited, “we know that Ellen and the kids and I were supposed to come here, into the past. But anyone else, like you guys, could alter history in little ways or big ways.” 

“Like when I suggested going to Austria and killing Hitler!” Lizzie enthused. 

“Hitler?” Clarence repeated. 

“Yeah, he’s about nine years old now,” Jack said dismissively. “Where we came from, though, the little shit grew up—nobody killed him while he was nine. On the surface, if you get around the moral problem of killing a nine-year-old who hasn’t become a mass murderer yet and won’t for another three-plus decades, you’ve gotta basically ask yourself if playing God could cause more evil than it prevented. The point I think you’re making, Peggy, should have dawned on you guys before you came here in the first place. 

“I’m ecstatic over having the contents of the Suburban,” Jack Naile went on, “especially the electrical wiring—” 

“And the cigarettes,” Ellen supplied. 

“And the cigarettes—right. And, we don’t have to tell you how much we missed you, Clarence, and how happy we are to know that you and Peggy are getting married. But if Alan Naile was right that there was no historical record of you being with us in the past, then you’ve altered the time loop. Even if you guys go back—and you have to explain how that would work—the damage—” He lit a precious Camel cigarette. “‘Damage’ is too harsh a word. Let’s say the change could already have radically or subtly altered the future. Maybe for the good, or maybe for the not so good.” 

“Going back is simply a matter of figuring how to reverse the process, if it can be done,” Peggy volunteered. 

“And if it can’t be reversed,” Ellen Naile said, “you and Clarence can’t go off and be hermits, never interacting with anyone.” 

“Well, shit!” Clarence swore. 

“Clarence,” Lizzie said, “you’ll just have to do your best to, well, do your best. And rely on that to get you through and not cause anything bad to happen that wouldn’t have happened already. You’re a good man, so the chances of you doing good are greater than the chances of you causing something evil or terrible to happen.” 

“Well put, kiddo,” Jack Naile told his daughter. 

Peggy wondered if she had—somehow—done something which would unravel history, merely for her own selfish ends. And, if the process couldn’t be reversed, if they couldn’t even at least communicate with the future, they’d never even know . . . 

“It’s so damned obvious!” Alan declared. “God, I’m stupid,” he told Marc Cole and Morton Hardesty. Morton Hardesty was his chief scientific advisor, privy to anything that had to do with Horizon Enterprises and technology. They sat in Alan’s trailer, the note Clarence and Peggy had left inside the crate-shaped capsule on a round table around which they all sat. “It’s a fricken mailbox to us, the capsule, but we can send stuff out by express. We can communicate with the past and the past can communicate with the future. They still use the capsule as a mail drop. What we do is periodically send smaller capsules back, with mail from here.” 

“You know what it costs, Alan, every time we send something back?” Morton Hardesty queried. 

“Yeah, and I bet you do, too, Mort. Hell, it’s worth it. We can pass messages through time.” Alan looked at Marc Cole. “Did you find out if your great-grandfather had a twin brother who died?” 

Marc Cole ran his fingers back through his long blond hair. “I got my mom on the phone and she called my aunt Clarisse, who was named after my great grandmother. Great grandpa Jim had a brother named Al. Al turned up missing a year or so before the turn of the century.” 

“My God, what have we done?” Alan murmured, not expecting a direct, immediate answer . . . 

Bethany Kaminsky paced back and forth in front of her enormous and spotless desk, her hands thrust into the pockets of pleated, loose-fitting, charcoal-gray slacks. She wore a silk blouse with long, full sleeves and deep cuffs with multiple buttons covered in the same material, the blouse nearly as dark a gray as her slacks, unbuttoned to her cleavage, a solitary—and large—diamond visible, pendant from a thin gold chain. This and a Jubilee band Rolex—he couldn’t see it, but she always wore it, even in bed—were her only jewelry. 

Morton Hardesty couldn’t take his eyes off her, hadn’t been able to take his mind off her since their first clandestine meeting six months earlier. In all that time, this was the first time they’d met in her penthouse office at Lakewood Industries’ world headquarters. Because it was Sunday morning, she had insisted that it would be safe. 

Bethany Kaminsky’s blonde hair formed a perfect bell shape, barely touching her shoulders, moving as she moved, thick, gorgeous, beautiful, in control, as she was. Her blue eyes sparkled under a brow that was knit in concentration and—he’d seen the look before—anger. “So,” she said at last, looking at him, “you cannot bring them back from here.” 

“I don’t think so, Bethany.” 

“You either think or you know, Mort! What is it?” 

“Given current technology, I know that we can’t. See, as I’ve told you ever since Lakewood Industries approached me about this, Dr. Rogers didn’t invent time-travel. All she did was unwittingly participate in an accident, and her equipment kept a nearly perfect record of what transpired. She would have been the first person to tell you that time-travel, given our current level of technology, is impossible, if it would ever be possible. All she wanted to do was broadcast electricity without wires. On the plus side, we’re close to achieving that; maybe another decade’s worth of work and Horizon Enterprises will be able to bring electricity to every corner of the globe. Or,” Hardesty digressed, “if you keep paying me, Lakewood Industries will beat Horizon to the punch and get the patents and the loot that goes with them. 

“All that we did when we sent inanimate objects and the like into the past,” he explained, “then eventually sent Dr. Rogers and the Nailes’ nephew, Clarence, and Dr. Greer with him into the past was to artificially duplicate the energy waves Dr. Rogers had accidentally created during the thunderstorm. Horizon Enterprises still doesn’t have a clue as to why it works. We’ve gotten really efficient at duplicating the process, however, like a dog that just keeps getting better and better at performing the same popular trick. But all that we can do is send someone or something back in time a period of ninety-six years, sixty-eight days, four hours, twenty-three minutes and sixteen seconds. We can only send someone or something to the same place and nowhere else. The whole thing is probably a research blind alley as far as real time-travel might be concerned. No way to tell.” 

“So, if you time-traveled somebody from my office—” Bethany Kaminsky almost sprang onto her desk, crossing her legs Indian fashion like a child sitting on the floor, waiting for someone to tell her a story. But she was doing the talking. “So, if you time-traveled me right now, I’d wind up in exactly the same place.” 

She had such tiny feet and tiny shoes. “Which,” Morton Hardesty pointed out, allowing himself to laugh a little, “would be very bad for you, Bethany. Ninety-six years and sixty-eight days ago, Lakewood Industries hadn’t yet built a high-rise office building in the Chicago Loop. Therefore, you’d wind up in the air hundreds of feet over turn-of-the-century Chicago, and you’d fall to your death.” 

“I get the point, Mort. What’s the exact problem with making it a two-way street?” 

“Okay, Bethany, you’re not a physicist, but this is the general idea. We can’t reverse the wave pattern fully unless we have equipment in place at the point of origination for the persons or things that we wish to bring back.” 

“You mean there, there, ahh, back in the past.” 

“Bingo! In theory, if we were to send duplicate equipment ninety-six years back in time, and we had it perfectly synchronized with the equipment here in the present day, we could probably do it.” 

“Then why hasn’t Horizon done it? What’s Alan Naile afraid of?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a cigarette, climbed off the desk and took an ashtray from the glass coffee table in front of the couch. She set the ashtray on the desk and resumed her cross-legged seated position, this time kicking her shoes halfway across the office. She wore semi-transparent black stockings. He wondered if they were pantyhose or if she used a garter belt. 

“A couple of things. First, Alan’s afraid he’ll fuck up history. I told you about the thing with the dead cowboy and our mission control guy, Cole. We don’t know if it happened, but if it did, the consequences of any further deaths in the past might prove devastating, people disappearing all over the place and we’d—for the most part, at least—never even know they were gone, because they never would have been here . . . in a way, at least. You need the damn math to even talk about this, Bethany. This is—” 

“What else?” 

“That’s the principal thing,” Hardesty told her. “As much as he’d like to get Clarence and Peggy Greer back, and Alan Naile feels he needs to before history is further disrupted, there’s an even bigger problem.” 

“Which is?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a second cigarette from the glowing tip of the first. He could almost taste her lipstick on the filter. 

“To do it—and we never really shared this point with Dr. Rogers—we needed a small nuclear-powered generator. We were extremely careful and nothing ever happened out of the ordinary. To bring them back from the past, if we could, we’d have to ship the identical apparatus, about which I spoke a moment ago, into the past. Including a duplicate nuclear-powered generator. If something went wrong and we lost control of the device, we could be responsible for something incalculable. 

“You have to remember,” Hardesty continued patiently, “that there were whole bunches of really sharp scientists around ninety-six years ago. Once we shipped the equipment into the past, there’d be no way of retrieving it, since the equipment itself would be needed to transport the equipment. Somebody would have to stay behind, and then there’d still be potential problems, maybe worse than those that Clarence and Peggy Greer might cause or have caused already. And, if some really good and creative scientists from 1898—well, it’s 1899 there, now—got hold of that generator, instead of the first atomic bombs coming at the end of World War Two, hell, a nuclear weapon might have been dropped— Here,” he said, motivated by a flash of inspiration. “Let’s say that all of that happened and the right German scientists got their hands on fissionable material. Instead of everybody slogging back and forth through the mud of no-man’s-land in France during World War One, the Germans could have used biplanes to fly cover and dropped a nuclear weapon over Paris or something, out of a dirigible, or smuggled a nuke into London to force the British out. Hell, when America joined the war in 1917, the Germans could have sent a bomb to New York or Washington and cleaned our clocks for good. 

“Alan is right, I’m afraid,” Hardesty concluded. “There’s just too much risk in this thing for any rational person to take.” 

Bethany Kaminsky seemed unfazed, and Hardesty was more than slightly unnerved at the thought. “So, if we went back in time to—1899 now?—to 1899, and, let’s say, we set up the initial equipment at a spot somewhere in present-day Germany or England or wherever, we could ship all the equipment we needed back in time to that same spot in Germany or England. And we could just travel back and forth between now and the past, however we wanted, like going through a damn revolving door. And, if we had a cadre of personnel armed with state-ofthe-art modern weaponry, nobody back then could hope to win against us and seize the stuff. Right?” 

“In theory, yeah—but, Beth, you can’t—” And Morton Hardesty suddenly shivered, because he realized that what he feared was exactly what she was thinking. 

“Think of the possibilities, Morty. Hmm,” Bethany purred. “The reason Horizon Enterprises has always been a jump ahead of Lakewood Industries isn’t because the Nailes were such sharp business people. No! Hell, no! They knew what was going to happen. So, what if we went back and made a deal, long before Horizon Enterprises became anything more than a fucking fancy variety store and a pissy little ranch? We offered the future’s technology to the three countries which would have the capability and the balls to use it, the manufacturing infrastructure to make it happen to our specifications. The United States, England and Germany. The only three contenders, with France a distant number four. 

“Whichever one came out as the best deal,” Bethany enthused, “gets us under contract with a shitload of money and real power in exchange for us giving them the tech stuff to take over the whole fucking world. And they can’t double cross us, because we still control superior technology that they want and we can use to crush them like fucking bugs if we have to. And they’ll be terrified we’ll make a deal with their enemies. It’s perfect. It’s a marriage made in Heaven, Morty.” 

“Look, Bethany. I’m nuts about you. You know that. But you’re talking crazy stuff now. What you’re proposing could just as easily be a marriage made in Hell.” 

“Well, if the fucking’s good, who cares, right?” Bethany didn’t glare at him, only smiled. “By the 1920s, we’d be the ultimate power in the whole world, Mort. By now, 1995, we’d flat-out rule the whole fucking planet.” 

“You might obliterate your own existence, too, Bethany. Or you might destroy the whole population of the planet with just one mistake.” 

“Then again,” Bethany smiled almost wistfully, “I might pull it off. We might, Morty,” and she drew her feet up under her then, catlike, and sprang from her desk. She crossed to his chair in two long, easy strides and sat down in Morton Hardesty’s lap. Bethany Kaminsky’s hands grabbed his face roughly, and her mouth crushed his lips under her own.