In the Western
                Tradition
                 PHYLLIS EISENSTEIN

  It was obvious from his reaction that Holland had never bought time on
the Bubble before. He could scarcely sit still in his chair. "That's him!
That's him!" he shouted. He was grinning like a child on Christmas
morning, surrounded by toys.
   I knew how he felt. I would never forget my own first assignment, and
my first view of the man I sought. Holland knew his quarry from
photographs; I had only stone likenesses to guide me. Yet I knew him
immediately, though the statues had been idealized, youthful, flawless.
That was back in the beginning, when almost all of us were involved in the
Life of Jesus Project based in Istanbul. I was assigned to the western
branch—the less important one, I thought. But my hands started to shake
when I saw my man in the Forum, shaking as hard as if I were seeing
Jesus himself, and they kept shaking while I brought his face closer and
closer, close enough that he could have spit in my eye if he had not been
just an image in the Bubble. Augustus Caesar, dead two thousand years,
was in that fellow Bubble operators, and the most significant man in
history. Yes, I knew how Dr. Frederick Holland felt. And no matter how
often I sat at the console, or even just watched another operator at work, I
still experienced a strong echo of that initial thrill every time I saw the
Bubble spring into being from nothingness in a small, bare room. For I
knew that within its confines the dead would walk again. Holland had
known that, I supposed, on an intellectual level; how he knew it as I did, in
his soul.
  I sat behind him, a casual visitor to his enterprise. I was there because I
never tired of watching the Bubble and because Alison and I would be
going out to dinner as soon as she finished her shift. To my left, she played
on the computer and gave Holland what he had paid for—Ellsworth,
Kansas, August 18, 1873:
  Wyatt Earp took a seat under the wooden awning that shaded Beebe's
General Store from the scorching afternoon sun. He tipped the chair back
against the weathered clapboard wall and surveyed the street from
beneath the wide brim of his dark hat. Beyond him, the town stretched
hot and dusty to the railroad tracks, and in the distance, long-horned
cattle could be seen moving sluggishly as they grazed on an endless
expanse of prairie grass.
  Earp turned his face toward us; gaunt, hollow-cheeked, he appeared to
be in his early twenties, not yet the legend he would become in Dodge and
Tombstone. His eyes focused briefly on something we could not see.
  "Shall I turn the viewpoint and catch what he's looking at?" Alison
asked.
  Holland shook his head violently. "No, stay where you are. We can check
that out in another session."
   A muffled uproar heralded the appearance of two men: they burst from
a doorway down the street, shouting curses over their shoulders.
  "The Thompsons," said Holland. "Ben and Bill."
  They crossed the square at a run and entered a two-story building
whose sun-bleached sign said GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL.
   Earp rose from his chair, tall and loose-limbed, and stepped into the
doorway of Beebe's, flattening himself against the jamb. Up and down the
street, people peered out of other doorways, roused by the clamor but
unwilling to come out into the sunlight.
   Quick footsteps sounded nearby, hard heels on the boards of the
sidewalk; a man materialized from nothing directly in front of the console,
his back to us. He was short and stocky, and the sleeves of his white shirt
were rolled up over thick, gray-haired forearms. He wore a sweat-stained
vest.
  "Whitney," said Holland.
  Whitney stopped by Earp. "What's going on?" he asked.
  Earp shook his head.
  "Now Logan," whispered Holland.
   More footsteps, very fast this time, and a young man—scarcely more
than a boy, really—appeared abruptly to clutch at Whitney's arm. "I ran to
find you as soon as it happened, sheriff." He was breathing hard, and his
dark hair was plastered in wet points against his forehead. "Bill Thompson
got nasty drunk, and John Sterling gave him the flat of his hand across the
mouth. When Bill invited John to get a gun and meet him outside, John
hit him again and knocked him out of his seat. Then Bill and Ben ran after
their guns."
   Whitney turned, fists on his hips, and I could see the glint of the metal
star on his vest.
  By this time the Thompsons had returned to the street with gunbelts,
shotgun, and rifle and were standing behind a hay wagon, shouting
threats toward the saloon.
   "All right," said Whitney. "We can't have this." He started across the
street toward the wagon.
  "You keep out of this, sheriff!" shouted a Thompson. "We don't want to
hurt you."
  "Don't be foolish, Ben," Whitney replied.
   "You tell that to Sterling!" said Ben, and he shook a fist toward the
saloon door, adding a string of profanities for Sterling's benefit.
  Whitney went into the saloon.
  Several people from the interior of the store crowded its doorway,
craning over Earp's shoulder, trying for a good view of the excitement
without exposing themselves to danger. Holland pointed to them one by
one, relishing their names as if they were fine wines. "Stacey. Anderson.
McDonald. And there's Beebe himself in the apron."
   Alison leaned forward, elbows coming to rest among the telltales,
fingers interlacing beneath her chin. "Logan's the young one, the one who
brought the news?"
   Holland nodded. "Jimmy Logan. Blacksmith's son. Hangs around the
saloons too much for his father's taste."
  She smiled. "You've really done your homework."
  "I know every one of them," he replied. "I know every man, woman, and
child who impinged on Wyatt Earp's life."
  "Must be quite a crowd," murmured Alison.
  "Ah—he's coming back now."
  Whitney strode down the sidewalk like a man very sure of himself. At
Beebe's he waved as if clearing the air of flies. "You can all go about your
business; there won't be any gunplay out here today. Sterling's gone out
the back way, gone clear out of town."
  "I didn't take Sterling for a coward," said young Logan.
  The sheriff shook his head. "It wasn't his idea. He was ready to come
out shooting, but he had some friends with better sense, and they wouldn't
let him. Now everything is just fine, nothing to worry about. I'm going to
treat the Thompson boys to a couple of drinks at Brennan's, and that'll be
the end of it."
   With some muttering, those who had been Beebe's customers drifted
back inside while Whitney approached the Thompsons with his offer. Up
and down the street, the rest of the audience melted away, too. Earp
settled back into his chair, and Jimmy Logan leaned against the wall
beside him.
  “They've got this town treed good," said Logan. He was looking toward
Brennan's.
  Earp gazed out into the street. "Why'd you go for the sheriff? I hear he's
not much use with a gun. Marshal, now—he's a man with a reputation."
  "I knew the sheriff would be in his store. It was close-by."
  Earp shook his head. "A man should be a full-time peace officer, not
half merchant and half sheriff. Job's too hard in a town like this any other
way."
  "You're sure right about that."
   They lapsed into silence, each surveying the street in his own way. As
the minutes passed, I found myself restless. Alison's shift had only about
an hour to go, and I began to wonder if anything significant would happen
in that time. Holland, however, seemed to find every swirl of dust in that
scorching summer day fascinating. He had one elbow balanced on the
edge of the console now, fist tight against his mouth; the outside of that
hand almost brushed the insubstantial edge of the Bubble. He looked like
he wanted to reach out and touch Earp. I thought he might be the kind
that would try to enter the Bubble space to get closer to his subject, in
spite of the standard warning. I had worked with one of those once—in his
enthusiasm, he kept edging into the Bubble itself and blotting out sections
of the scene with the interference generated by his own body. But as the
minutes passed, Holland sat, obviously yearning but able to restrain
himself.
   Alison, too, seemed to have found some sort of fascination in the vision
of two men doing nothing; she hadn't moved since speaking to Holland.
My own restless shuffling sounded loud in the quiet room, and I was glad
when Whitney finally came out of Brennan's, striding noisily.
   He turned toward us and crossed the few meters that separated him
from Earp and Logan. He stopped, smiling, self-satisfied. "They've calmed
down a bit. They're inside with a bunch of Texas men."
  Earp looked up at him. "Did you take their guns away from them?"
  "No, they wouldn't stand for that."
   Before Earp could comment further, Bill Thompson stepped out of the
saloon, shotgun in his hands. "I'll get me a sheriff if I don't get anyone
else!" he shouted.
   Whitney turned to face him just as Thompson fired both barrels. At
point-blank range, the blast caught the hapless sheriff full in the chest.
The sound of the shot, earsplitting in such close quarters, rocked Alison
and me back in our chairs; my pulse lurched wildly, while her knee
slammed the underside of the console, and she clutched it, growling
curses. Holland, evidently expecting the shot, was unruffled.
  Whitney had fallen back into Earp's arms. Above the pounding of my
heart I heard him gasp, "I'm done. Get me home."
   Thompson had run back into the saloon. But there were hundreds of
other people in the street now, most of them with drawn guns, and more
were gushing from the hotels, the stores, the saloons with every passing
moment. At last both Thompsons strode out of Brennan's, guns waving
from one side to the other, and walked to the nearest rail where horses
were hitched.
  "Those are their friends," said Holland, pointing to a group that was
gathering in front of the Grand Central Hotel. "Peshaur, Pierce, Kane,
Good—"
  "All right," said Alison, one hand still massaging her knee. "You don't
have to name them all. I just work here."
   Holland threw her an injured glance, then sighed. "Sorry. Still, you have
to know some of them, for future reference."
  'They can't all be important."
  "That depends on how many times my grant is renewed."
   Alison shook her head. "I won't remember most of them. Not from a
single session."
  "Very well," said Holland. "I'll try to keep to the crucial ones."
  The sheriff had friends, too, it turned out, inside Beebe's. They bore his
barely breathing body off. Earp and Logan backed into the doorway once
more. Within a couple of minutes, a third face peeped out between them.
  "Morco," said Holland. "Deputy marshal."
  The deputy elbowed Logan aside and peered into the street. The
Thompsons were facing the other way, engrossed in their guns.
  "Jump out and get them now," Earp said to Morco.
  Morco shook his head. "Those fellows across the street might get me."
  "You'd get both Thompsons first."
  "Not me, friend."
  An expression of disgust passed over Earp's face.
  Bill Thompson rode out of town, and Ben Thompson covered his retreat
by stalking up and down the street with half a hundred armed men at his
back. One of them fired his gun into the air and crowed, "I'll give a
thousand dollars to anybody who'll knock off another lawman!"
   Holland chuckled then. "Watch this next piece of frontier bravery. Here
comes the mayor." Appearing from our side of the Bubble, the mayor
edged along the wall of Beebe's as if magnetized to it. He slid into the
doorway, crowding Logan and Earp. "And there's the marshal—that new
face just behind Logan. He came in the back.”
  "You've really picked the center of the action. Dr. Holland," said Alison.
   He hushed her with a sharp gesture, and we spent the next few minutes
listening to the mayor try, unsuccessfully, to talk the marshal and his
deputy into arresting Ben Thompson. At the end of his tether, the mayor
himself shouted at Thompson to lay down his arms and submit to arrest.
But the mayor did not dare go out into the street to say that, and
Thompson's only answer was some colorful profanity.
   Earp had been silent since he suggested that Morco take action. Now he
folded his arms across his chest and said to the harried mayor, "Nice
police force you've got."
  The mayor, whose face was red enough to explode, said, "Who the hell
are you?"
  Earp shrugged. "Just a looker-on."
  "Well, don't talk so goddamned much. You haven't even got a gun."
  Earp, wearing dark trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt with soft
collar and string tie, looked more like a frontier schoolteacher than a
gun-fighter. "It's none of my business," he said slowly, "but if it was, I'd get
me a gun and arrest Ben Thompson."
  "Don't pay any attention to that, kid," said the marshal.
  The mayor looked the marshal in the face and said, "You're fired,
Norton. You, too, Morco." He snatched the marshal's badge from Norton's
shirt and turned to Earp. "I'll make this your business," he said. "You're
marshal of Ellsworth. Here's your badge. Go into Beebe's and get some
guns. I order you to arrest Ben Thompson.''
  Earp took the badge and went inside.
  "Follow him!" said Holland.
  Alison's hands moved over the console; the viewpoint swung sideways to
center on the doorway and swoop inside past the mayor, past the
ex-marshal and his deputy and Logan, their bodies melting away at the
edges of the Bubble like mist at sunrise.
   The interior of the store was dim compared to the sun-scorched plaza.
Without breaking stride, Earp turned to his left, to the firearms counter,
where he requested second-hand forty-fives, holsters, and cartridges.
Beebe himself hurried over to help with the selection and to watch the new
marshal examine the weapons, load them, settle them on hips. Our
viewpoint wheeled to float above Beebe's shoulder as Earp returned to the
door and the store owner followed, then swept on past when the latter
stopped with his customers at the threshold. Earp went out to the street
alone save for our invisible, unknowable presence.
   Fifty meters away, Thompson spotted his new adversary as soon as Earp
stepped off the sidewalk. The shotgun muzzle swerved to point toward him
as he began to close that gap with a slow, steady gait.
  "What do you want, Wyatt?" shouted Thompson.
  Until that moment, I had not realized they were acquainted with each
other. I wondered how much Thompson knew about Earp, how much
there was to know at this early date.
  "I want you, Ben," said Earp.
   "I'd rather talk than fight," said Thompson. Whatever their
relationship, he clearly did not think Earp insane for facing him down in
that Ellsworth street.
  "I'll get you either way, Ben," said Earp. He kept walking.
  "Wait a minute. What do you want me to do?"
   "Throw your shotgun into the road, put up your hands, and tell your
friends to stay out of this play." He was less than ten meters from
Thompson.
  Close up, Thompson was ugly, bloated from too much drinking, and
powerfully built. He looked belligerent. Earp looked cool. I had to admire
him; how many men could appear so calm while facing a loaded shotgun?
And then there were all those other half-drunk cowboys in Thompson's
entourage, including the one who had offered the reward for the lawman. I
began to understand the making of a legend.
  "Will you stop and let me talk to you?" shouted Thompson.
  Earp halted. He still had not drawn a gun.
  "What are you going to do with me?" Thompson asked.
  "Kill you or take you to jail."
   "Deputy Brown's over there by the depot with a rifle," Thompson said,
tilting his head in the appropriate direction. 'The minute I give up my
guns he'll cut loose at me."
  Earp said, "If he does, I'll give you back your guns and we'll shoot it out
with him. As long as you're my prisoner, the man that gets you will have to
get me."
  Thompson hesitated.
  "Come on. Throw down your gun or make your fight."
   Thompson threw down the gun. "You win." He raised his hands above
his head. "I'm all yours."
  Now Earp's right hand went to his hip, touched the butt of the weapon
there, but still he did not draw. With his left hand he pointed toward
Thompson's supporters, swinging his arm wide to encompass them all.
"Get back, all of you! Move!"
   They moved, and Earp took his prisoner's shotgun and gunbelts and
marched him through the throng to the courthouse. Some of Thompson's
friends attempted to storm the court, but Earp drove them out and locked
the door.
  The arraignment was swift. "What's the charge?" said the judge.
   The mayor was there, and the peace officers who had been fired, but
now that they were sealed into a room with Thompson—a room
surrounded by his supporters, who could be heard shouting through the
thin walls—none of them had any suggestions to make.
  "How about accessory to murder?" offered Earp.
  The judge looked to the mayor. "How about it?"
  The mayor frowned, hesitating, and finally said, "Well, your honor, in
my opinion, Ben Thompson here could be charged with... disturbing the
peace."
  "Guilty!" said the judge. Twenty-five dollar fine."
   Thompson grinned and peeled two bills from a roll of greenbacks. He
slapped them down before the judge. "Do I get my guns back now?"
  "Certainly," said the judge. "You have paid your fine, and the marshal
will restore any property he may have taken from you."
   As Thompson started to strap a gunbelt on, Earp caught his arm.
"Listen to me, Ben," he said. "Court or no court, don't you put those guns
on here. You carry them straight to the Grand Central, and don't so much
as stop to say hello to anybody on the way. I'll be watching you. Keep
moving till you're out of my sight. After that, whatever you do is your own
business."
   Earp watched Thompson walk into the waiting crowd, which engulfed
him and moved en masse toward the hotel. When Thompson was
completely lost to sight, he turned to the mayor, plucking the badge from
his shirt, unbuckling the gunbelts from his hips. "I don't need these any
more," he said.
  The mayor stared at him, his hands receiving the items like coat hooks.
"Don't you want to be marshal of Ellsworth?"
  "I do not."
  "We'll pay you a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month."
  Earp looked him in the eye. "Ellsworth figures lawmen at twenty-five
dollars a head. That's too cheap for me." He turned and walked out of the
courthouse, down the street which no longer swarmed with armed men.
We followed him for some minutes, but he only went into a hotel—not the
Grand Central—for some dinner. He was just being served his steak when
Holland's time ran out.
    Alison hit the finish button, and the Bubble collapsed into itself like a
deflating balloon, dwindling to a spot of light before winking out. Without
it, the room beyond the console was bare and lonely.
  "All right," said Alison, swiveling her chair to face Holland. "I'm
impressed."
  "He was quite a man," said Holland. "Now, where do I get the tape?"
  “At the records office. Down the hall to your left."
   He rose from his chair and offered her his hand. 'Thank you very much
for all your efforts. I'm very grateful that the company assigned me one of
its best operators."
  She smiled. "I'll see you tomorrow."
   "Yes." He hurried out, obviously eager to lay his hands on the tape and
live the whole experience again.
   Alison turned to me, still smiling, and shook her head. "Sometimes I
think the ones who just sit there with their mouths shut the whole time
are the best clients of all, even if they don't offer any cues."
   I laughed as I reached out for her. "He's in love with his subject matter."
I pulled her onto my lap. "Almost as much as I'm in love with you."
   She slid her arms around my neck and touched my forehead with her
lips. "Don't we have a 1900 dinner reservation?" she murmured.
  "Uh-huh." She was warm, and soft in all the right places. I could have
sat there for an hour, just holding her.
  "And Myra's due on shift in about five minutes."
  I gave her a last squeeze. "You must be hungry."
  "Dying," she said. "Nothing like a little simulated fresh air to give a
person an appetite."
   "It was just the look of that huge steak, I know. They don't make them
like that any more. Or at least they don't serve them like that."
   "And a good thing, too," she said, extricating herself from my embrace.
'That was grass-fed beef, and I'm sure it tasted terrible by modern
standards. Let's go get our dinner."



   We passed Myra on the way out; she was one of the two other operators
who used Alison's Bubble. She had a sour-faced old woman in tow — a
woman I had seen so often that I was beginning to wonder when her grant
would run out. She was studying the Plains Indians, and I was sure she
must have enough information to write a dozen books by now. Hers was
one of the longest ongoing projects in the Kansas City Center, and Myra
had been complaining lately that the whole thing was starting to bore her.
I had never had that experience myself. All of my assignments had been
fascinating; perhaps that was the luck of the draw or just a reflection of
my attitude toward time viewing. Time viewing, after all, had given me
everything I wanted—the endlessly marvelous past, a fat salary, and
Alison.
  She and I had been living together for about a year just then, sharing an
apartment in one of Kansas City's plushest high-rises. The place suited us
well—it was full of creature comforts, of deep-cushioned chairs and thick
carpeting, and of the personal things of our lives, the music we loved and
the souvenirs of our work. We stayed there during most of our free time,
relaxing together, content with each other's company. We had the money
to do anything, go anywhere, but that never mattered. The only thing we
ever spent it on was good food; and because neither of us cared much for
cooking, we went out for almost every meal.
   That evening we visited one of our favorite restaurants. We were
dressed plainly compared to the other patrons, wearing our work clothes
while other diners wore furs and jewels, but the manager was accustomed
to that and did not even raise an eyebrow. His place was frequented by
Bubble operators, and that only boosted its reputation.
  We ordered wine, lobster, pat é. Alison had a weakness for Maine
lobster; there were not many places in Kansas City that served it.
  "I thought you'd be having steak," I said, "after seeing it in the Bubble."
  She shook her head. “The more I thought about it, the less appetizing it
seemed. Earp probably ate it every day of his life. He probably never tasted
lobster. Why should I limit myself to his menu? I can have steak anyplace.
The famous Kansas City Steak."
   I had to laugh. "People in New England probably care as little about
lobster."
  "Ah, yes," she murmured. "One never appreciates what's available at
home."
  We stopped for a swim after that, in the pool on the fortieth floor of our
building. Ordinary people would probably have taken in a show instead,
but Bubble operators rarely found the artificial life of either the theatre or
the holomovies attractive—they spent their days with the reality of the
past, live people instead of actors, and if that moved more slowly than
professional entertainment, it was still too similar for the other to be
diverting.
   We went to bed early, and to sleep somewhat later. Alison seemed
distracted while we made love, and quickly tired, but I put that down to
an irritating session with a new client; I had had the same experience
myself often enough. Clients—invariably Ph.D.s in some variety of history
or anthropology—would sit still for a short time, patient at first while the
operator worked the Bubble back to the appropriate time period, patient
still while the Bubble swept through space to locate the precise spot
requested. Only when the process began to drag out did they become
restless; only when they began to realize that pinpointing events in time
and space was not a simple matter, that it took a practiced and delicate
hand and a great deal more patience than they ever thought existed, did
they start to show their annoyance. Some clients merely became tense and
twitchy as their sessions stretched toward Finish and they saw nothing
that they were searching for. Others became sarcastic, making snide
comments on the ability of the operator. Some became abusive. One
client—back in the early days, just after the Jesus Project was finally
geared down to ordinary proportions, when we had trained enough
operators that a few could be spared for other parts of the world and other
projects—actually tried to strangle me for, as he put it, delaying him
unconscionably. Fortunately, the intercom to the maintenance office was
open as usual, and about ten seconds after I yelled for help, three
technicians erupted into the room and pulled him off me. He was gabbling
about me wasting his grant money as they dragged him out. The company
refunded his grant money and barred him from further use of the Bubble.
  Alison had never had quite so bad an experience—I was something of a
showpiece among the operators, the guy everyone pointed to when new
operators asked if there was anything else to know about handling clients.
But she knew her share of petty irritants. No matter how well an operator
worked, the clients were hardly ever satisfied. Ultimately, they always
thought there was something else they could have seen. And they were
probably right. Especially in the cast of tracing historical figures, there
was always far more to a person's life than could be viewed in a few hours,
even a few hundred hours, in the Bubble.
   Alison had been an operator almost as long as I, though I had known
her only two years when we moved in together. She had come out of the
Paris office, one of the earliest set up after the experimental Bubble in Los
Angeles and the first commercial office in Istanbul. She had been kept
busy with the Romans and the Vikings there until the Kansas City office
opened and needed some experienced operators. When that finally
happened, there was considerable maneuvering among the company staff,
mostly people trying to avoid the Kansas City assignment; they pleaded
that it was an out-of-the way place without much intrinsic interest, not
like Istanbul, Paris, or even Los Angeles. But it was a good central location
as long as the Bubble was limited in range to about 1500 kilometers—
superior to Chicago, which would have pleased some operators better as a
base. The result of all the maneuvering was that only the operators with
the most interest in the job itself went to Kansas City, those who got
pleasure from time viewing almost to the exclusion of outside concerns.
We prided ourselves on being the best, the cream. Alison, Myra, and I, and
half a dozen others.
  There was no lack of work for us, certainly. Pre-Columbian culture
studies swept up most of the viewing slots at first, though Vanderbilt
University did put in a big, successful bid for the Civil War period as soon
as the office was announced. Having a relatively small grant, Holland had
been forced to wait a long time for his opportunity to study Wyatt Earp.
   On the day after I watched Alison's first session with Holland, the holos
appeared in our apartment. It was a common practice among operators to
surround themselves with pictures of the current assignment—people,
genre scenes, anything typical of the period, anything attractive to the eye.
We kept in the mood of the assignment that way, kept our minds working
on it even in off-duty hours. In some ways, we were never off duty, because
there were always calculations to be made, procedures to be planned,
suggestions to be formulated. Few of the scholars who used the Bubble
understood its techniques or its limitations, nor did they often even know
exactly what they wanted from it. Part of the Bubble operator's job was to
show them what could be discovered with the device. Too many users
wanted to know why things happened in addition to the events
themselves. And they fumed that they couldn't walk right into the Bubble
and ask questions of the people there. "Anthropology without informants"
was what one of my clients called it—valuable, of course, but not enough
for some researchers. Two clients out of three would moan that they
wished the company sold time travel instead of time viewing.
   Myself, I was glad enough that it was just viewing. The complexities of
actually going to the past made my mind spin every time I considered
them. I was happy to sit at the console, safe in the world I understood,
guiding people through the museum of the past, where everything was
locked away behind the invisible walls of the Bubble, tamper-proof and
secure.
   Not all of the operators agreed with me, of course. Some of them
surrounded themselves with so many holos of the past that their homes
seemed to be there instead of in the Twenty-first Century. Myra usually
turned entire walls of her place into scenes from her current project—for
example, endless vistas of the Great Plains, complete with buffalo herds
and Indian villages. When we sat in her living room during that period, it
was like being camped on the prairie. Other operators were less extreme,
like Alison and me, with a few holos from the current project plus a few
well-loved shots from previous ones. In my bedroom there was a
full-length, life-sized portrait of Augustus Caesar standing in the Forum,
just as I had seen him that first time. Alison's room had a dragon-prowed
Viking ship, one-quarter size, but still large enough to span an entire wall,
and the waves beneath it lapped gently at its wooden sides; she said the
motion soothed her when she was thinking.
   The day after her first meeting with Holland, she put up holos of the
main street of Ellsworth and of Earp, Whitney, Logan, the
Thompsons—almost everyone we had seen in the Bubble, some full body
shots, some just faces. She put them in her own room, scattered them on
the three walls not occupied by the dragon ship; we had agreed when we
moved in together that we would each fill our rooms with whatever we
wanted and that the common rooms—living room, dining room,
kitchen—would be decorated by consultation. The result of that was that
our bedrooms were crowded with memorabilia but the other three rooms
held only furniture and drapes and a few music tapes that we both liked.
  From the doorway, I looked around her walls. “They mostly seem to
need baths," I said.
  She nodded, still adjusting placement of the pictures. "Except Earp and
Whitney. And Logan, I think—he bathes frequently, but smithing is dirty
work. Lots of soot."
   I glanced at Whitney's face. "I suppose you won't be seeing much more
of the sheriff." I pointed at him.
  "Some," she said. "I've seen him die from two viewpoints already.
Holland says we'll try at least one more."
  "How many times can you watch a man be shot?"
  "It's Earp he's interested in, not Whitney. He thinks by watching this
scene closely enough, he'll be able to figure out why Earp goes after
Thompson in the face of all that opposition." She grinned at me. "He
wants to read the man's mind."
  "I take it nobody knows why Earp did it."
   There are a couple of books, each with its own interpretation, but
Holland says they're both based on interviews with Earp when he was an
old man. He suspects eighty-year-old Earp of either embroidery or
forgetfulness." She shrugged. "I don't think he knew why he did it. He just
did it. He was crazy."
   "Wyatt Earp crazy? The greatest legend of the West?" She started to
step back to see the effect of her adjustment of the holos, and I eased
myself behind her so that she ended up in my arms. I locked my hands
over her navel. "What a cruel thing to think," I murmured, nuzzling her
neck.
  "He has that penetrating look of madness in his eye," she said. She
covered my hands with her own. "He has restless eyes, as if he thinks
someone might be after him."
  I chuckled against her hair. "That's the piercing gaze of the lone scout
you're criticizing, you know."
  "And he's thin—the nervous type that eats and eats but never gains
weight. You saw the meal he ordered."
   "He's the calmest person I ever saw. The way he faced that Thompson
fellow, with the mob behind him...."
   "A suicidal impulse." She ticked items off on her fingers, pressing one
after the other against my hand. "Suicide prone. Paranoid.
Megalomaniacal."
  "Megalomaniacal? How so?"
  "No one but a megalomaniac would have thought he could face down all
those armed men and get out alive."
  “That's not consistent with the suicidal part of your diagnosis."
  She shrugged. "I'm looking at all the options."
  I had to laugh. "Have you discussed any of this with Dr. Holland?"
   "No. I don't think he'd want to hear it. Earp is his hero—pure, good, the
epitome of courage. Sort of larger than life. And, anyway, why should I
offer my theories? He's not paying me for psychiatric services." She turned
her head to look at me sidelong. "Besides...an operator should always try
to maintain a tranquil relationship with the client."
  "You think Dr. Holland would try to do something unpleasant if you told
him you thought Earp was insane?"
  She pivoted in my embrace and slid her arms up around my neck. "Who
knows," she replied. "I don't know how crazy he is yet."
  "We're all crazy somehow," I said. "Me, for example—I'm crazy about
you.”
  "That's good to know," she whispered.
   We spent the rest of that night in her bedroom, surrounded by
Ellsworth, Kansas, and its incongruous partner, the Viking ship.
  My own project of the period was as routine as any had ever been—the
endless trek along the Oregon Trail. There were thousands of stories in
those covered wagons, most of which I never saw completed, for they
passed beyond range of our equipment at the Snake River in Idaho, just
before the last leg of their journey. Still, I thought their history, in a
dramatic sense, had been pretty well covered by a multitude of classic
movies I had seen as a child. So I didn't much mind it being cut short for
me. My client, of course, didn't see things that way, and she would be
finishing her research in Los Angeles, where she could view the other end
of the Trail.
  I had been living with several holos of covered wagons, dusty mules, and
poke-bonneted women for some time on the day that Alison installed her
new pictures, and it was shortly after that that I decided to get rid of them
and bring back some old favorites. I had steeped myself in the period long
enough, I thought, that I no longer needed visual inspiration; I just knew
what to do every day, almost without conscious effort. That was a common
experience among operators during extended projects.
  I dumped the holos and surrounded Augustus with other successes.
There had been failures, of course—certain historical figures who could
not be found no matter what I tried, leading me to believe that either they
were entirely mythical or that my clients' literary researches were less than
perfect—but there were few operators who liked to keep records of that
sort. Nothing was more frustrating, and more ulcer-making, than
searching time and space for someone or something that wasn't there.
   The central office had those records, of course—and the failures would
go before the upper echelons of the company during the semiannual
employee evaluation. So far, though, no operator had ever been fired for
lack of success. There were just too few of us to go around, and training
was, at that time, too long and expensive a procedure to waste on anyone
without considerable potential. The bad risks were weeded out early, and
most operators had a strong sense of having found their life's work. I know
I did.
   Not long after I got rid of my Oregon Trail holos, Alison added to her
Earp collection. She and Holland had moved on to Wichita, and a new set
of faces replaced the citizens of Ellsworth. Earp was more mature, I saw,
but gaunt as ever, and I thought there were five pictures of him on the
wall until Alison explained, that two were of his brothers Morgan and
Virgil. Only someone who had seen them often, alive, in motion, could
have told them apart.
  I also recognized another face, though at first I couldn't place it.
   "Jimmy Logan, the blacksmith's boy, remember?" said Alison. "He
followed Earp to Witchita. Hero-worship, I think. Wants to be his deputy,
but Earp says he's too young."
   Logan looked older than before, had gained some weight, just enough to
give him a mature physique. But he still had a boy's face, and I could see
why Earp had said what he did.
   "One less new name to memorize," Alison said, crossing her arms over
her breasts. "Sometimes I suspect Holland can't possibly have any living
friends —his mind can't have room for their names.”
  I had to smile at her. "Maybe he has holos of his living friends on his
walls, just to remind him of them." She laughed.
  With the lights low, we couldn't see all those eyes looking down at us.
When I was new at time viewing, that had made me feel strange—dead
people watching my sleep. Now, it was nothing, and I slept well beneath
them, perhaps better than if the walls had been bare. There was a kind of
childish security in knowing that the shadows in the room held only
familiar things. I even dreamed about my holos, nights spent as my days
were, perhaps even a touch more vividly. In my dreams I was often inside
the Bubble instead of sitting at the console. Alison would smile when I told
her that. She said she didn't dream about that sort of thing at all.
   About a week after she and Holland began work on Wichita, the Viking
ship vanished from the fourth wall, replaced by more shots of people.
Alison's room was crowded with pictures now, every available centimeter,
a kaleidoscope of pictures. She made no attempt at pattern, or at any
illusion of reality; they were just scattered randomly, like a crowd pressing
close to the bed. Her room had become a scrapbook.
  Then she started spending her independent time in the period.
   Most operators ran uninterrupted six-hour shifts, each trio assigned to
a console arranging its own flexible schedule. The remaining time was,
theoretically, reserved for maintenance, but in practice the machines
rarely needed more than brief routine servicing. That left a couple of extra
hours per day on each console. The company could have sold that time, of
course, no matter how inconveniently placed the slots were, but early in its
history it established a different policy: operators were required to sign up
for those odd hours, every operator taking at least one of those slots every
week, to practice search techniques. In the Kansas City Center, at least, no
one had to be told to take a turn in independent study, and we all had pet
private projects going that were important only to us. The company
oversaw it all but generally looked the other way when an operator used
independent time to make certain kinds of profit in the outside world.
More than one operator had earned a minor scholarly reputation on
independent work; even I had published a paper on the Indian Wars.
Others just played at their consoles, watching famous sporting events or
entertainments of the past. In the Paris office, according to Alison, the
most popular independent study was viewing the great Elizabethan plays
as they had been originally performed, with Shakespeare himself
sometimes appearing onstage. Some of us would have liked to view more
recent events, the great baseball and football games, and the Olympics of
the middle and late Twentieth Century—but the Bubble failed us there.
The 93.675 years immediately before our own were closed to the Bubble,
too near for focus. That was an explanation the Company had to give out
tiresomely often, especially to the various governments of the world, which
wanted to spy on each other from the vantage of yesterday.
   I really didn't mind the loss of ninety-three-odd years. Like most
operators, I was fascinated by the remote past, by the worlds that were so
different from the one that had encompassed my life before I discovered
the company. There was no single period that drew me; I moved from one
to another as whim took me— which was typical. Ordinarily, an operator
chose an area of independent study because of something he had seen
during his regular work, something at a tangent to the client's desires but
intriguing to the operator.
  As Alison had chosen the period of Earp.
   I became aware of her new interest when she signed a tape out of
records and brought it home to project in her room. Projection required
that she move a wall of holos, and for that she requested my help. I
thought it was amusing that we didn't stack the holos but moved them to
the ceiling, where she could see them from the bed. I had always thought
of the ceiling as sacred blank territory, but Alison didn't want to discard
any of the pictures. She asked me if I wanted to view the tape, knowing
that I would demur. I rarely viewed tapes myself, only when necessary for
the job, because their reality was so much less than that in the Bubble;
they were not two-dimensional, but they seemed flat to me, and dead as
the past really was. I left her there, propped on a mound of pillows on the
bed, and I went out to the living room to listen to a little music.
   She didn't come out that evening and didn't invite me in. I never knew
when she stopped viewing the tape. Rather than disturb her, I went to bed
in my own room, alone. We had an agreement about that, too—we
respected each other's privacy.
   She brought another tape home the following evening. And the one after
that. She said they related to Holland's investigations, that she was doing
extra preparation for some difficult searches. Alison had always been
diligent that way. She came back to my bed on the fourth night, and I was
certainly glad to welcome her; I decided that she was working just a little
too hard on Dr. Holland's project—a little too hard for my taste. But I
didn't say anything. It was her job, she loved it, and this project wouldn't
last forever.
  Holland's grant had to run out someday.
   So for a time I didn't see much of Alison, though we shared the
apartment and similar work schedules. But when I did see her, it was
wonderful. fresh, as if we had just discovered each other, as if she were
trying to make up for having so little time for me. There was an extra
measure of passion in her lovemaking, and of unpredictability, for I would
never know when she was going to creep into my bed in the middle of the
night—after staying up that long—and wake me in the best possible way. It
was fresh, and frustrating, and a little silly, and at last I tired of it and
found myself looking forward impatiently to a return to the old, settled
relationship.
   But I saw less and less of her, and what I did see began to be moody and
morose, as if there were something nagging at her. I thought I recognized
those symptoms—the signs of a project going sour, the goals not realized,
seeming farther and farther away every day, or completely unrealizable.
Better, I decided, not to discuss that possibility with her; I knew how
oppressive such discussions could be. I saw Holland a couple of times in
the corridors of the company building, and he seemed buoyant. He hardly
noticed me, probably didn't recall me from that first day. The contrast
between his and Alison's attitudes didn't seem odd to me; often the
operator was the first to suspect that something was going bad, while the
client was still wrapped up in evaluating earlier achievements.
  Then her wardrobe changed.
   Alison had never been much interested in clothes. Normally she wore
jeans and a tee shirt and sneakers just this side of worn out. Now she
traded the jeans for dark slacks, the tee shirt for man-cut long-sleeved
white, the sneakers for boots. It was an unfamiliar style, not particularly
attractive, except that Alison was wearing it. She never needed beautiful
clothes in order to look beautiful. I didn't care that she wore something
different. Except that it was...different. The change in wardrobe seemed to
betoken some other change in her. She was...brisker, somehow. With me,
at least. She didn't seem to have any time at all these days. There was
pressure on her, of Holland's making or her own, I couldn't be sure which.
Perhaps, I thought, his grant was running out and he was transmitting the
pressure he was feeling to her. I found myself hoping that his grant would
run out very soon.
  Then she stayed away from our apartment all night.
   It had happened before, always work. There was no reason for me to
think it was anything else this time. When I saw her the next day, she
didn't talk about it. She was in too much of a rush.
  I hadn't wanted to believe it, but I couldn't resist the feeling that
something was coming between us. The way Holland looked at me in the
corridor, that look of complete disinterest... could it have been him? The
new wardrobe nagged at my mind. Holland didn't dress that way, of
course; he was just a typical, somewhat conservative academic type,
subdued colors and patterns, his clothing ten or fifteen years behind the
current fashions in their cut. But Earp dressed that way, and other men of
the period—Sunday clothes, they called them, clothes of the leisure time.
Alison wouldn't wear a hoop skirt and a poke bonnet, of course, but she
might immerse herself in the masculine fashions of the day to be more in
harmony with Holland's fascination.
  I told myself not to be jealous. Holland was considerably older than
Alison and I and, to my eyes, not particularly attractive. I didn't know if he
was attached to someone else. But he wasn't a Kansas City resident, and so
he would have to leave eventually. If it was Holland indeed, I could
weather that. Alison and I had too much going for us for any outsider to
pry us apart. I told myself that when she was out a second night, when I
had lost track of how many nights it had been since we had made love.
   I went shopping for myself. I figured that two could play this game, and
so I bought myself a pair of dark slacks and some boots and a soft white
shirt of the proper style. I even bought a string tie and did it up the way
Earp did his. And then I checked at records to see when Alison was
scheduled for her next independent stint; I was going to surprise her with
my new outfit and see if I could get a laugh out of her. We had always
laughed together, before Holland.
   Records revealed that she had been spending an unusual amount of
time in independent work. She had traded with the other operators
assigned to her console, amassed a considerable number of extra hours,
and spent them all viewing the period between 1873 and 1885. She had
also signed out tapes of everything she had viewed independently and had
claimed a projection room for replaying them. There were no records of
how often she had used the projection room, just that she had access to it
full-time. I thought about those rooms, with their wide, plush
couches—perfect for meeting close friends. I wondered if she had viewed
any of the tapes in that room, or if she had done something else entirely
there.
  I had always been honest with Alison. I had thought she would be
honest with me. I was sure there was something wrong now between us.
And I wanted to bridge the gap before it became too wide. I didn't want to
lose Alison. I didn't think I had done anything that would cause her to stop
loving me. But maybe I hadn't done enough to keep her wanting to love
me. All I could think of was Holland. What did he have to offer that was
better? How could he possibly love her more than I did? He hardly knew
her. I went to the door of her projection room when she should have been
there. It was locked. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to ring the call bell.
It wouldn't have been fair to disturb whatever she was doing in there. I
stood by the door awhile, hoping she would come out on her own, hoping
someone would come out, but at last I gave up. I told myself I was too
hungry to wait for her. But when I got to the restaurant, everything on the
menu looked like dust; I could hardly choke down the light salad that was
all I ordered.
   Finally, she changed shifts. We had always arranged our shifts to more
or less coincide, since the first day we decided to live together. No—before
that, back when we first realized that we had something special. Each of
us had settled into an arrangement with the other two operators of our
consoles, and except for a few brief, temporary readjustments, everyone
had been satisfied. Now I found a note taped to my bedroom door:
  MYRA IS ON A NEW PROJECT AND HAS ASKED ME TO SWITCH
SHIFTS WITH HER FOR THE DURATION—LOVE, ALISON
   I stared at the word LOVE. In spite of its presence, the note felt cold and
impersonal. In other days, she would have told me herself, in bed, in an
apologetic tone. She and Myra were very close, they did each other favors
often. Myra always had a good reason for asking Alison to take her shift. It
never lasted long. But... for the duration?
  Because Alison obviously didn't want to discuss the matter with me in
person, I called Myra—she was at home at the same times I was now,
while Alison was not.
   "You can't imagine how glad I was to get rid of that old prune!" she said
almost as soon as I could say hello. "She's taking a vacation, and with any
luck, I won't be available when she comes back, and she'll have to drive
another operator crazy!"
   "Yes," I said. "I'd heard from Alison that you had a new project. Some
problem with the scheduling, wasn't there? Was it a local academic with a
teaching conflict?"
  Myra's expression was puzzled. "No, just the usual out-of-towner. From
Dallas this time. Why do you ask?"
  "Well, I was wondering...why you switched shifts with Alison."
  She frowned a little. "Why, that was Alison's idea. She did it to stay in
synch with you, didn't she?"
  "I haven't changed."
  "No?"
  "No."
  Her eyebrows rose slowly. "Are you and Alison...having problems?"
  I said, "I don't know. How long is your new project going to last?"
 "Awhile. A few weeks maybe. It doesn't look like anything monumental.
Maybe she just wants a change. A vacation."
  "From me?"
   "Well, any relationship can get...." She shrugged. "Claustrophobic." She
leaned forward. "Is she talking about moving out?"
  "She isn't talking at all. I haven't seen her in days."
  "Maybe you should leave her alone for a while. Let her work through
whatever it is that's bothering her."
  "I don't think I have a choice on that. We may be living in the same
apartment, but we don't seem to be living in the same world any more."
    "Oh, Barry...I'm sorry." She spread her hands in helplessness. "Maybe
it's just the job. She's been looking tired lately. Maybe she just doesn't
have the energy left for her private life. After her current project is over,
you two should take a long vacation, get away from the company, from the
Bubble, from the pressure. Just the two of you."
  "If it's still the two of us by then."
  "Take it easy, Barry. Maybe it will all blow over, whatever it is."
  I tried to smile at her, but my lips felt very stiff. "I hope so," I said.
"Thanks, Myra. See you tomorrow." I broke the connection, and her face
vanished from the viewscreen, but I couldn't get her expression of
sympathy out of my mind. How did I look to her, I wondered, that
provoked that expression? I went to the bathroom mirror and stared at
myself for a while.
  I hadn't examined my own face so carefully in a long time; in the
morning when I got ready for work, it was all business—the hair, the
comb, the chin, the depilator. I never looked at my eyes. Now I saw they
were bloodshot, as if I hadn't slept well in a long time. For the rest, it could
have been misery or anger; I felt them both lapping over me, fighting with
each other for supremacy. I wanted to break the mirror. The apartment
felt so empty with Alison gone. So cold. I stood before her door, that blank,
familiar territory. We respected each other's privacy; I knew it would not
be locked; I knew Alison would never have dreamed that I might go in
without her permission. I touched the smooth panel with the flat of my
hand. What did I expect to find? The walls covered with pictures of
Holland? Or everything packed up, ready to be removed, a trunk standing
in the middle of the floor? Or...nothing—an empty room, already divested
of all the individuality that was Alison?
   I slid the panel aside. At first glance, the room appeared to be in its
ordinary condition, much as I had seen it last, with holos on three walls
and the ceiling, the fourth wall blank for projection. Scenes and people of
the Classic West surrounded me, and Alison's bed and belongings were in
their usual places. She wasn't moving out, at least. Then something began
to nag at me and I turned slowly to take in all the pictures, to look at what
they were, not just at the whole kaleidoscopic effect.
   There was only one man on the walls of that room. In a hundred
different poses, a hundred different sets of clothing, full body shots and
portraits, profiles and frontal views, with mustache and clean-shaven, at a
dozen different ages, but still, unmistakably, the same man. I knew him, I
was sure of that, but it took me a few moments to place him. For me, he
would never have stood out from a crowd, but I had seen him in the
Bubble and I had seen him before on that wall. His name came at
last—Jimmy Logan, the blacksmith's boy, the one who hero-worshipped
Wyatt Earp. In one of the holos, a full-length shot, life-sized, he appeared
to be about thirty years old, and he wore a marshal's star on his
long-sleeved white shirt.
   I sat down on the bed. In my periods of greatest devotion to Augustus
Caesar, I had never been so immersed in him. It was overwhelming,
stifling, claustrophobic. I lay back, and there he was on the ceiling,
inescapable; he had his shirt off in the most central shot, hot sun pouring
down on him, and the beads of sweat on his shoulders and chest glistened,
giving him the appearance of being covered with oil. I rolled over, burying
my face in her pillow to escape him. The pillow smelled faintly of her
shampoo, and I wondered when the last time was that she had slept there.
A glass half-full of water sat on the bedside table, the inside surface of the
lower part covered with bubbles. Stale. Was it yesterday that she had
drunk from that glass, or last week?
  Behind the glass was a stack of tapes, coded with the company's
emblem. The recording dates were all recent. These, I thought, were what
she had been spending some of her spare time with. I dimmed the
overhead light and slipped one into her projector.
   A dusty street materialized upon the blank wall. The sun was low,
shadows long, few people walking anywhere in sight. The street looked
vaguely familiar; it might have been Ellsworth, or any one of a hundred
similar Western cowtowns of the period. I half expected to see Wyatt Earp
stride through the field of view. Instead, Jimmy Logan entered it, Logan in
his mid-twenties, I judged, walking with a sure stride down the street. The
center of town was behind him. He was passing into a more residential
sector, an area of clapboard houses surrounded by burnt-out gardens and
white picket fences. He stopped to unlatch the gate at one of the houses, to
step through it and latch it once more behind him. He hurried up the
walk, climbed three steps and pulled the front door open without
knocking. I guessed that it was his own house and he had come home for
supper.
   I swooped in behind him and found that more than supper was waiting
inside for him. She was about his age, rather prim-looking in the tradition
of the time, hair pulled back in a tight knot, dress high at the neck and
long-sleeved, falling to the floor. Still, she was rather pretty and quite
nicely built, and she gave him a very warm welcome. When her hand
touched the back of his neck, I saw that she wore a wedding ring. They
kissed for quite a long time, and the tape went on afterward, following
lovingly close as they went into the bedroom and undressed each other
and eased to the bed. From their intensity, I supposed that they hadn't
been married long. Alison had caught everything, had recorded an
excellent piece of erotica. I found myself reacting very strongly to it.
  And wondering how she reacted.
   I scanned the other tapes at high speed. They were all different, yet all
fundamentally alike. Not that they were all erotic, not overtly. A few just
showed him moving, chopping wood, riding a horse, working in his
father's forge. Still, there was an erotic element to them all, a physical
element. When I had seen the lot, I had a very fine awareness of his body,
of the play of muscles, the style of walk and posture, the little habitual
gestures. And I knew I would never again have any trouble recognizing
him. If he had been alive, if he had walked into the company's offices, I
could have greeted him by name.
   And I didn't know who he was. I knew, of course, that he was Logan, but
who was Logan? What was his place in history? Why was Alison so
fascinated by him?
   I put everything back as I had found it, smoothed the bed. When she
came home...if she came home, she wouldn't be able to tell I had breached
her privacy. I felt guilty about doing it, but glad. Out in the living room, I
put in a call to the Encyclopedia Britannica, requested all their
information on James Logan of Ellsworth, Kansas, approximate birth year
1853. They had no listing for him. He wasn't important, at least not that
our contemporary culture knew. I thought that he must be important just
to Dr. Frederick Holland.
   So I waited until Alison was off shift and called Dr. Holland, taking a
chance that he and she would not be together at his place. I was at work
by then and didn't know if Alison had gone home. Records gave me
Holland's number at the guest house. He was bright, polite, not rushed as
if he had company. He didn't seem to recognize my name or face.
   "Just some checking on behalf of records. Dr. Holland," I said. "We just
want to confirm that some of your time has been devoted to an intensive
study of one James Logan."
  Holland looked puzzled. "Don't you people know what I'm studying?"
  "We have a listing for Wyatt Earp, Dr. Holland, but you seem to have
expanded your researches to include this other person."
  "Is that wrong? Is that not allowed? I thought the fee covered whatever
researches I chose to make."
  "It does. Dr. Holland, it does. We only want to keep our records
organized for purposes of cross-referencing. Someone else has requested
materials on James Logan, and to avoid duplication of effort we would
appreciate knowing how much of his life you intend to examine."
  Holland shook his head. "Very little," he said. "If someone else is
investigating him, they won't profit by my studies. Who is it, anyway?"
   "I'm sorry, Dr. Holland, but we can't give out that information. Would
you please tell me approximately how many hours of work you have spent
or intend to spend on James Logan? An estimate."
   "Well, none on him per se. I suppose he's appeared in an hour or two of
my viewing so far, but just as a bystander. I don't expect to see him at all
in the future."
  "Thank you for your time, Dr. Holland. Sorry to have disturbed you.”
  "Not at all," he said. "I'm sorry I couldn't be more help."
  I snapped off the connection.
  Unless Holland was lying, Logan was Alison's own project. Unless he
was lying. Perhaps the lack of recognition was just a sham, and he knew
perfectly well that I was Alison's lover. Ex-lover? Still, I had called
unexpectedly; he hadn't had time to prepare camouflage for his reactions.
And the more I saw of him, the less likely he seemed as a reasonable
replacement for me. Of course, I couldn't be objective on that. I was
rapidly discovering that I couldn't be objective on anything where Alison
was concerned.
  I had tried calling her during her off-shift, at work, at home. Her line
had a block on my personal code; she wasn't accepting my calls. It seemed
absurd—we lived together, but I didn't see her, couldn't talk to her. Part of
that was my own doing, and I decided the time had come to ring at the
door of her projection room, even if it meant disturbing her privacy.
   I traded shifts with one of my co-workers, putting myself back in synch
with Alison. Now I had time to spend in trying to touch her. It took me
quite a while to get up the courage to ring. I kept telling myself that the
truth couldn't possibly be worse than what I imagined.
  I rang.
   At first there was no answer, and I thought perhaps she wasn't inside;
like every room of the building, it was totally soundproofed. So I couldn't
tell if it was occupied by pressing my ear against the panel, though I did
that anyway. I rang again. And as I waited, while the occasional company
personnel passed by and looked at me curiously, I began to think that she
was inside all right, watching erotic tapes with Holland. I hadn't bothered
to check on him. And then I didn't care. I rang again, a long, long ring, my
finger pressed against the call button until the nail reddened.
  The door opened.
  Alison wore her new clothes, or perhaps they were her only clothes now.
The soft white shirt, the dark trousers, the boots made her look like
someone else, someone I didn't know. She wore her hair tied back now,
too, with a thin ribbon, not loose about her shoulders any more.
  "Oh," she said. "Hello." She leaned against the door, as if to block my
way inside and my view of it.
  "May. I come in?"
  "Why?" she said.
  "I hope I'm not disturbing you too much."
  "Some," she said.
  "I'd like to talk to you. Please. If not now...then maybe I can make an
appointment?" I tried to smile at that suggestion, but my mouth didn't
want to cooperate.
  She sighed heavily. "All right. Come in." She stood aside, holding the
door with both hands, like a shield.
  There was no one else in the room. It was a very bare little room, with
minimum comforts. A thick rug. A couch in the center of the floor. A
four-way projector, for displaying tapes on all the walls simultaneously.
Alison walked to one end of the couch and stood there, waiting for me.
  "Sit down," she said.
  I sat, but she remained standing, I thought so that she could go back to
the door any time she wanted and hold it open for my exit.
  "Well?" she said.
  I tried to smile again, but the effort was too much for me. I patted the
cushion beside me. "Come here?"
  She shook her head. "I don't have time for a long discussion."
  I said, "Alison, what's wrong?"
  "I'm just busy."
 I leaned toward her. "You know what I mean. What's wrong with us?
What's happened?"
  She half turned away, looked down at the carpet. "Let it go, Barry. I
don't want to talk about it."
   "Let it go?" I stood up, took a step and reached for her, but she backed
off, just beyond my grasp. "Alison, I lovee you.”
   She crossed her arms over her breasts. "Let's not play tag, Barry. Just
leave me alone."
   "Have you...changed your feelings about me?" The words caught in my
throat, and I thought for a moment that they would choke me. Then I
realized that the sensation was tears held back. I didn't want to cry in
front of her; my pride wouldn't allow that.
  "Do you want me to move out?" she said.
  "No!"
   "I don't want to. It's a lot of trouble." She spoke so casually, so
effortlessly, while for me every word was like pulling knives from my belly.
  "Alison," I began.
  She walked over to the door and opened it for me, as I had known she
would. "You'd better go. I'm very busy."
   I couldn't move for a moment. Watching her walk—no, stride was the
word to describe it—jarred me. Clothes, manner, even walk, this was a new
Alison indeed. She didn't even stand the way she used to. Her step was
longer now, harder, though maybe that was a result of the hard high heels
on those boots, like the boots that Earp and Logan and Whitney had worn,
the boots that hammered so hard on wooden sidewalks. She walked like
the men of Ellsworth, Kansas, those men whose natural habitat included
dusty, unpaved streets and wide prairie pounded flat by the hooves of
buffalo. And she stood as they did, legs wide, hips canted as if a pair of
forty-fives rode on them.
   Standing by the couch, I felt as though time itself had come between us,
as if some strange avatar of a man dead a century had come out of the
Bubble to stand in Alison's place. I sagged. I, a mere mortal of the
Twenty-first Century—what did I have in common with this creature from
the past? I shook my head sharply. No, I told myself, this was just Alison,
no matter how deeply she had immersed herself in vanished days.
Perhaps, I thought, too deeply. I glanced sidelong at the projector, at the
tapes racked in its holders. Four were in playing position; Alison had
probably been running them one at a time, but I had only to touch a
button to show them all simultaneously. A serious breach of operator
etiquette.
   "What's been keeping you so busy?" I asked softly, and my finger
stabbed the button.
  "No!" shouted Alison. But it was too late. I saw what she had been
seeing until she opened the door for me.
  Four walls of Logan was too much for me. My head spun.
   Logan in the dusty street, star on his chest, facing down a waiting
gunman, tension evident in his straining stance. Logan with chest bared
and running sweat in his father's forge, muscles glistening with the ruddy
light of the coals. Logan making love to his wife in the bed I had seen once
before. Logan by a brook, lying on green grass, obviously far from
Ellsworth, and with him someone other than his wife, laughing, holding
her arms out to him.
   Alison reached the projector then and punched the OFF button. "Get
out," she said, her face white with anger, her eyes hard. But she was so
close as we both stood by the projector that I couldn't help encircling her
with my arms, pressing her against me. She turned her face away from my
kiss and tried to push me away; for a moment I held her tight, my lips
against her hair, and at least she smelled like the old Alison. She hadn't
changed her shampoo. She broke free. "Out," she said, her hands making
fists at her hips, and I could have sworn that if those forty-fives had been
there she would have drawn on me. I had seen that kind of anger before, in
the Bubble.
  I didn't move. "What's going on, Alison?" I whispered. "What are you
doing in here? Making tapes for public consumption? Or maybe just...for
private?"
  "What I do in here is none of your business."
   I shook my head slowly. "What have I done, Alison? We used to confide
in each other. We used to trust each other. We used to...love each other."
  "I don't love you any more," she said. "Now leave me alone."
    The words were like bricks dropping on my head, but instead of being
beaten down, I felt myself drawing the strength of fury from them. "Who is
it then?" I shouted. "Who is it? Holland?"
  "No, it isn't Holland. It isn't anyone. Now will you leave before
everybody on the floor comes running to see what the shouting's about?"
She pointed peremptorily toward the door.
  I went to the door, but I kicked it shut instead of going out. "He isn't
worth it," I said, turning back to her, my voice a bit more under control.
"He'll bore you out of your mind!"
   "I told you I'm not interested in Holland," she said. "And I'm not
interested in continuing this conversation."
  "Who, then?" I demanded. "Who are you making these tapes for? Who
are you going to enjoy these choice bits of erotica with? Is it someone I
know?"
  "It isn't anyone," said Alison. "And even if it were, you have no right to
ask who."
  "I have the right to know who the competition is. I have a right to know
what he's doing for you that I haven't done."
   She turned away. "Go home, Barry. It's over, that's all. Since you feel
this way, I'll move out as soon as I can find a new place."
  "I don't want you to move out, Alison!"
  "Well, what do you want?"
  "I want...to understand." I took a step toward her and held my hands
out, pleading. "What have I done wrong?"
 She sighed. "Nothing, Barry. Nothing at all. I'm just...not interested any
more. You're going to have to accept that."
  'Then what are you interested in?" I looked at the projector. “This?
Watching dead people make love? When you can have someone live and
warm?”
  "I'd rather not discuss it."
  "What kind of replacement is that for me? Am I so...repulsive?
  "You're not repulsive, Barry."
  I eased up behind her, touched her shoulders tentatively. "I've changed
my schedule, Alison; we're back in synch. Why don't we go out for dinner
and then home? Or whatever you want. I'll do whatever you want.
Anything." I squeezed her shoulders with stiff fingers, trying to be gentle,
knowing that I was too tense to be so. "Come home, darling. Please come
home."
  She shook her head.
   "I'll wait for you, till you're finished with whatever it is that you're
doing. You can't stay here around the clock. You've got to eat, to sleep. It's
all so much more pleasant with a warm body nearby. I won't even talk if
you don't want me to."
  Again, she shook her head.
  "Alison, please."
  "Barry," she said quietly, "I would rather stay here with him than go
anywhere with you."
  "With him? Who?"
  "Jim Logan."
  I glanced at the projector. "You'd rather watch a dead man than spend
any time with me."
  "Please don't take it as an insult."
  "No?" I swung her around to face me. "How else can I take it?"
  "He's fresh, Barry. He's different. He fascinates me."
  "I can see that."
  "I can watch him for hours. He's struggling to move from one world to
another. His father wants him to be a blacksmith, but he wants to be a
peace officer. He has a very strong sense of right and wrong. And courage.
Barry, I've never seen such courage."
  "And his body isn't bad, either," I said. "Which do you watch more—the
body or the courage?"
  She shook her head. "You don't understand. He fulfills my highest
expectations. I couldn't expect more from a human being than I see in
him."
  "There was Earp."
  She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. "Earp wasn't the wonderful
person legend would have him."
  "And this guy is wonderful. It just makes you go all warm inside to
watch him be so terrific."
  She pushed away from me. "I knew I couldn't discuss it with you."
  I stared at her for a long moment. At last I said, "Alison, do you have a
crush on this guy?"
   She stared back at me, her lips a thin, white line. "Don't be silly," she
said.
   I looked her up and down, slowly, and everything I had seen and heard
since she opened the door began to make a sort of bizarre sense to me. "I
don't think I'm being silly," I said. "I think you're acting like a teenager in
love with an entertainment idol. Only this... this one isn't even accessible
through the stage door. You'll never touch him, Alison. You'll never even
get close enough to find out if he has bad breath."
  'That's nonsense."
  "Then tell me who's really taking up your time. Tell me that I'm wrong,
that it's a live person edging me out. I'd rather believe that, Alison."
   "Barry, you're wrong on both counts. Look—you have your hobbies, your
favorite historical people. I remember very clearly all those stories you
used to tell about Augustus. I didn't accuse you of having a crush on him."
   "This is different! I didn't trade time with my fellow operators to spend
all my waking hours following his life. I didn't tape his orgies for later
replay. I didn't wear a toga."
  "So I traded a few hours; so what?" Her brows knit. "You've been
checking up on me?”
  I nodded. "I'm fascinated by you, Alison."
  "I don't think I care for that level of curiosity.”
  "I missed you. I was jealous. Isn't it understandable?"
   She strode to the projector, pulled out one of the four tapes and inserted
a replacement from the stack in one of the holders. She hit the ON button,
and Logan flashed onto one of the walls, life-sized, standing
spraddle-legged on the empty prairie, one hand raised before him holding
a gun. He was shooting slow and steady at something—a target, I guessed,
beyond the edge of the picture. He wore no hat, and a sharp wind ruffled
his hair, his shirt collar. He made a striking figure against the endless
expanse of prairie and cloudless sky.
   "All right," said Alison, not looking at me but at the image on the wall.
"There's your competition. Now get out of here. Or I'll call for help and
have you thrown out. I signed out this room, and you haven't any right in
it without my approval."
  “Alison," I said. This is all wrong."
  "I'll be out of the apartment as soon as I can manage it."
  "You don't have to move. I want you to stay."
  "I don't want to stay," she said.
  "Alison.. .he's dead. He's dust."
  "Get out!"
  I felt my whole body slump, my legs carry me toward the door without
any conscious volition on my part. I touched the panel with my fist before
opening it. "I love you," I said. "I'll wait this thing out."
  "Goodbye."
   I closed the door softly behind me, leaned against the wall beside it.
Then I just slid down to the floor and sat with my knees up, my head
pillowed on my arms, and I wept. I didn't care who saw me. Several people
passed in the ensuing minutes, most of them operators I had known for
years, and each one of them asked if I needed any help. I did, but none
they could give. At last I got tired of hearing their offers and staggered
away. I locked myself in a bathroom for a while, and eventually I was
empty enough to go home.



   Alison moved out three days later. I wasn't home when it happened; she
took a day off while I was on shift, and she cleaned her room out so
thoroughly that it looked as if no one had ever lived there. When I got
home I discovered her bedroom door ajar and went in and stood in the
bare room for a time, not thinking anything at all. It was like our
relationship had never been. Even the music collection, when I looked
through it later to put something on the system, was missing the
recordings she had selected. As I sat and listened to one of my own choices
—I didn't really know which one— I couldn't help wondering if Holland
had been angry at missing a day with the Bubble.
  The next afternoon, Myra was sympathetic, everyone was sympathetic,
though not all were verbal about it. Everyone knew that Alison had left me.
But Myra assured me that she hadn't moved in with anyone else; she had
taken a small place near the company building. I guessed that Myra
thought she was being kind to me, to tell me that, and I didn't have the
heart to explain that I would have been happier the other way, any other
way.
   I called Alison a couple of times in the following weeks, after Myra gave
me her number, but her line was blocked to my code as before. I didn't
know what I would say anyway; I just wanted to see her face. I didn't see
her at work at all, though she was still there. I wondered briefly if her next
step would be to transfer to another office, but then I realized that only in
Kansas City could she watch Logan—he was out of range anywhere else. I
was assuming, of course, that he spent his whole life in Kansas. After a
while I thought she might transfer when she had tracked his life to some
point where he moved to another base's range. Earp had done it, gone to
California eventually, as Holland would have to do if he wanted to follow
his quarry all the way.
   I realized I didn't know very much about Logan. But Alison's interest in
him was mesmeric. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand her
fixation. So in my independent time I began to study him. If the records
people thought it was strange that two operators were spending a lot of
time in the same milieu, they never said anything, even when I, like Alison,
traded away my future independent time to other operators willing to give
up their present allotments.
   I can't say I grew fond of him, though his wife was very pretty. The
other woman I had seen him with on Alison's tape turned out to be a
second wife, acquired after the first one died in childbirth. He was a very
moral person, this Logan—never gambled, rarely drank, sent his children
to Sunday school. His contemporaries considered him a pillar of the
community. He moved back to Ellsworth soon after Earp left Wichita for
Dodge, becoming its marshal in 1876. The town was past its days of glory
then, but still a rowdy place, and there was plenty of work for a man with
a fast gun hand and more courage than I could comprehend. I didn't
compare to him there. I had seen a lot of guns pointed in my direction in
the Bubble, and my mouth had gone dry at every one of them, though the
bullets couldn't touch me; I probably would have fainted at the same sight
in reality. Or at best, frozen. I had the wrong reactions to be a frontier
gun-fighter. I knew she compared me to him and found me lacking. But
how well would James Logan function in the Kansas City of the
Twenty-First Century, where the skills he had spent so many years honing
would be useless? He wouldn't even be able to function as a contemporary
law officer now that the police no longer carried guns.
    I worked forward through Logan's life, watched his children grow,
watched the trees that shaded his white clapboard house rise up and up
till the street beneath them was moist with shade instead of dusty in the
summer. Ellsworth aged, too, softened, settled down to quiet anonymity.
In 1889 he and the family moved west to Colorado, where the town of
Lamar needed a marshal. Life was more exciting for him there. He seemed
to thrive on excitement, to be restless when things were quiet.
  And then, he disappeared.
   The standard procedure for a quick Bubble survey of the life of a
historical figure involved a delicate and almost intuitive use of the device.
The operator had to guess where people were going, how long they would
be there, when they would return. The operator had to skim through
events at a speed that made them virtually incomprehensible to the
layman, halting the process by some instinct that sensed significance. It
took a long time to develop that instinct, but every good operator had it. I
established my baselines immediately—the house Logan lived in, the
marshals office. I saw him pass in and out of them like a wraith, almost
insubstantial against the long-lasting solidity of the walls and furnishings.
I could run through the days of his life in the minutes of my own.
Sometimes I lost track of him and had to retrace laboriously—when he
escorted a prisoner to the next state, when he took a posse out after stage
robbers, whenever he left the town for an extended period of time. Then,
the process of following him had to slow enormously, and sometimes I
didn't bother, merely returning to the house, trusting that he would come
back there eventually and I could take him up again.
   I did that this time. I didn't know why he vanished, but I stationed my
view in the bedroom, sure that he would return to the room where his wife
slept fitfully every night he was away.
  He didn't.
  After going through a dozen stages of worry, his wife persuaded the
mayor to send a search party out for him—which was when I learned that
he had gone to check on some rumors of cattle rustling among outlying
ranches. I backtracked to the day he left and followed him.
  I watched him die.
   At that point I had spent months on Logan, and I had had enough.
Alison was right about him, completely right. I could see how attractive he
was—charming, handsome, with all the qualities that his era valued. And
in addition there was that touch of sadness about him, especially after he
lost his first wife—just a touch of vulnerability to make the rest all that
more endearing. And I was tired of watching such a paragon.
   Alison, however, was not. Records showed that her use of the Bubble
was still as heavy as ever in the period between 1873 and 1885. She kept
returning to certain time segments, replaying them. She could have taped
them, of course, probably had, but I could easily understand her desire to
see them in the Bubble instead—the near-reality of the Bubble. She was
selecting from his life, the high points, the cream. But not after 1885.
   Out of curiosity, I tuned in the last 1885 date myself. That turned out to
be the day that Logan was shot by a drunken cowboy, shot from behind,
from cover—a practice that occurred more often than admirers of the
Classic West would have liked to believe. It was not a serious wound by
modern standards, but in a world without antibiotics it came close to
claiming his life. He was bedridden for a long time, but he recovered well
under his wife's diligent care.
   She was avoiding the shooting, the period of convalescence, the life
afterward. Even though that life wasn't very different from the one he had
led before. He hadn't let the shooting faze him.
   I thought...maybe...he had come too close to death for her taste—his
mortality had suddenly become too real. And I thought, too, that maybe
now I had a way to pull her away from him and back to me. One last
attempt, I told myself, now that she'd had some time to herself. I was
hoping that, perhaps, she was beginning to get lonely for someone real.
She still lived alone, and according to Myra, there was no one in her life.
No one, at least, but Holland, whose grant had been renewed because of
Alison's excellent work. I hated Holland by that time because he was
seeing her, even if in a professional capacity. Holland; unattractive as he
looked to me, he was still real and available for whenever she wanted
reality. And Alison, even the new strange Alison, must have provoked some
kind of reaction in him. Unless he was as fixated on Earp as she was on
Logan. It was possible. I no longer knew what to believe, what to scoff at.
Even my own clients seemed to have unnatural interests in their subjects.
I found myself in a mental prison, and I had to escape somehow, and take
Alison with me.
   I taped about twenty minutes of James Logan, and with that tape I
went to Alison's apartment. She had given up on the projection room after
moving out of our place; she didn't need that extreme of privacy any more,
didn't have to concern herself with the annoyance of encountering me in
the kitchen or living room at home. I knew her door wouldn't respond to
my code, though I tried it anyway. And I knew she wasn't there, but she
was due soon, her shift having just ended. I waited for her, waited a long
time. She must have gone someplace else before coming home, perhaps to
dinner. I waited. She arrived at last, alone as I expected, alone for an
evening with him.
  She saw me when she stepped out of the elevator. She stood stock still
and stared at me.
  "Hello, Alison," I said. "It's been...a long time."
  "Whatever you want," she said, "I haven't got it."
  I shook my head. "I have something to show you."
  "Another time, Barry. Catch me at work." I blocked her way to the door,
but she elbowed me aside—harder than necessary—to open it.
  "Please let me come in, Alison. It won't take long. Just a few minutes."
   "I'm very tired,” she said. "I'm going to take a bath and go to bed. I
don't want any company." She stepped across the threshold, turned, and
started to slide the portal shut in my face.
  I leaned into the opening, blocking the door's closure. "Please."
  "I don't want to see you, Barry. Now, go away or I'll call the police."
  "Oh, Alison, it can't be that bad between us.”
  She looked at me rather sadly. "I don't know what you expect me to do,
Barry. I'm really sorry, but it's all over. Why can't you understand that?"
  I said, "Alison, have you changed so much...?"
  "These things happen all the time. Look at how many men Myra has run
through."
  "Myra is Myra, and you're you."
  "And you're you, and I've had enough of it. Barry, don't try to recapture
something that's gone. Can't we part friends? Can't we just...part?"
  I put one hand on the door. "You're not being very friendly, Alison."
  "You're being pushy."
  "I haven't bothered you lately."
  "You've tried to call."
  "Why not? I'm still interested."
  "And I'm not. So why don't you go home and get a good night's sleep
instead of standing in my doorway?"
  I pulled the tape out of my pocket, held it up. "I have something to show
you. It won't take long."
  She sighed, shifted her weight from one leg to the other and put one
hand on her hip. "How long? That's a two-hour tape,"
  "Not full," I said, "maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty at most."
  "Of what?"
  "You have to see it."
  "Why?"
  "Because I'll keep bothering you until you do."
  "There are ways of dealing with that kind of harassment, Barry."
  "Just view the tape. After that...I'll let the next move be up to you."
  "It's not going to change my mind. I don't care what it is."
  "Afterward...if you still want me to leave, I'll go. I promise."
   "You're betting a lot on this tape," she said, eying it suspiciously. "What
is it?"
  "You can find out right now."
  She pursed her lips, then sighed so heavily that her shoulders heaved.
She stepped aside. "All right. Come in. But I'm just doing this because you
promised. I trust you, Barry—I trust you'll keep that promise. If you
don't...."
  "I will."
   This was Alison's apartment, no compromise with another human
being; as soon as I entered, my eyes were assaulted with Logan—Logan on
the living room walls, Logan visible through the bedroom door, even in the
kitchen. Alison went into the bedroom to fetch the projector, which she
placed on a low table beside the living room sofa.
  "You sit there," she said, indicating the sofa. She seated herself in a
chair some distance away. "You can project over here." She pointed to the
wall facing the chair, the only wall with a large blank space.
  I nodded, slipped the tape into the slot and flicked the machine on.
  I heard her sharply indrawn breath as Logan bloomed into view; he was
on horseback, riding among rolling hills near a wide river. He was heading
westward, and beyond him we could see the lowering sun above
mountains purple with distance.
  Alison gripped the arms of her chair with white-knuckled fingers.
"What is this?" she demanded.
  "You said you'd watch."
   She pushed herself deeper into the chair, and I could see the flexion of
her jaw where the teeth were grinding. "All right," she murmured. "All
right."
   As Logan topped the next rise, we were behind him and saw what he
saw— a cabin set well back from the river. A thin plume of smoke drifted
from the chimney. Logan rode down to it, tethered his horse at the rail
before the front porch, climbed the two steps to the door and knocked
loudly. The panel swung open, and he entered, with us at his back. He was
hardly a pace past the threshold when someone who had been concealed
to one side of the aperture struck him over the head with a club. He fell
without a sound and lay still upon the floor. The two men—the assailant
and the one who had opened the door—picked him up by the shoulders
and the heels and carried him outside. There, they draped him across his
horse, and while one of them led the animal, the other steadied the
unconscious body in the saddle. They walked toward the river.
  I watched Alison. She was tense, but she never spared a glance for me;
once she had begun to concentrate on Logan, she didn't seem to notice
anything else. Her eyes were wide, staring, and her expression was stark.
  At the riverbank, the two men pulled Logan's limp body from the horse,
and between them they hauled it into the stream until the brisk current
swirled about their waists. Then they held his head underwater for a long,
long time before letting go of him. He sank.
  The rest of the tape was disjointed, jumping forward in time, skimming
the surface of the river until the body washed ashore, bloated, scarcely
recognizable. In fast motion we watched it decompose, watched buzzards
pick the carcass, watched the skeleton separate into a scatter of bones as
the last ligaments gave way. Dust alternated with snow in covering the
remains, and before the tape ended they had disappeared from view.
  Alison stood up when it was over, when the wall was blank once more.
"Get out," she said in a low, tight voice.
  I looked at her for a long moment, looked at the white face and wide
eyes, at the fists working convulsively at her sides. "Don't you see? I said
softly. "He's dead. He's dust. Before you were born he was dust. If you love
a man like that, you might as well be dead yourself."
   She reached the projector in two strides, pulled the tape out and dashed
it against the floor. "Get out of here!" she shouted.
  I tried to pull her into my arms; but she struggled. "Alison, you're warm
and alive! How can you waste yourself on him?”
   She glared up into my face, her fingers curling into my shirt front till
the fabric cut into the back of my neck. "Murderer!" she said. "Murderer!"
And then she yanked me sideways, and suddenly we were on the floor,
rolling over and over, and she was all nails and sharp knees and kicking
feet. She went for my eyes, my throat, my groin, but I twisted and freed
myself somehow, staggered to my feet. I felt my face bleeding, and the
numb places scattered over my body where bruises would rise soon.
  "Alison," I gasped, "time killed him, not me!"
   She lay on the floor, her fists striking the rug in a slow, steady beat.
"Murderer," she moaned. She turned her head gradually, till her
tear-streaked face was visible. Her eyes seemed to look past me,
unfocused. "Get out before I kill you." There were no tears in her voice, but
there was something that chilled me.
   "All right," I said. "I'll go. But I want you to know that I love you. I did
this today because I love you. I hope... someday you'll understand that."
  She was still beating on the rug when I left.
   For three days I nursed my bruises, calling in sick to work. Finally, I had
to go in, with a spray bandage covering the gashes on my cheeks. My
client was sympathetic when I explained that I had fallen down a flight of
stairs. Some of my fellow operators looked at me curiously, but none made
any comment; they were much too engrossed in a more vital topic of
conversation: Dr. Frederick Holland. As I came off shift, word of his
complaints was buzzing through records. A crowd of workers was
gathered about the counter there, discussing him. Myra, who was due on
shift in a couple of minutes, took me aside as soon as she saw me.
   "Maybe you could sub for her, Barry—double shift until she comes back.
You must know more about his project than anybody else here. He's
furious, threatening to sue, and the front office is giving us all a hard
time.”
  "Threatening to sue? What's going on?”
  "It's Alison. She's gone. She hasn't come in to work for three days, and
nobody knows where she is or when she'll be back."
  "She didn't call in?"
  "She didn't anything. Her line rings forever, nobody answers the door,
and her mail is piling up."
  I clutched at her arms. "Maybe something's wrong! Have you called the
police?"
  "The police?" She frowned. "You think it might be that bad?"
  I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what crazy ideas could have
gone through Alison's mind after I left that day. "You'd better call them.
They'll have to break in. I'll wait for them there. You want to come with
me?"
  "I can t. I'm on duty,"
  "Isn't this more important? She's your friend."
  "You'll be there," she said. "What good will two of us do?"
   "I don't know. I don't know." I let go of her. "I'll let you know what we
find out." I started for the door at a run.
  She called after me, "Will you take her shift?"
  "Ask me later!"
   She started to say something else, but the door cut her voice off as it
slid shut behind me.
   The police took their time. I paced the corridor outside her apartment
for what seemed like hours before they finally arrived. They waved a
warrant at me when I began babbling about the delay—"You don't get
these things in five minutes, you know," they said. Then they asked for my
company ID, to prove that I really was one of her co-workers, that I had
some legitimate business witnessing the procedure. They asked me a lot of
questions, too, and found out that she and I were former lovers and had
had an argument three days before. One of them stood very close to me
after that, while his partner rang the bell for a long time before
unscrambling the lock.
  We went inside. The apartment was just as I remembered it. The police
did not seem to pay much attention to the pictures of Logan everywhere.
They searched very thoroughly— rooms, closets, even under the bed. When
they started on the bureau drawers and the kitchen cabinets, I began to
wonder if they expected to find pieces of Alison hidden everywhere. But
they found nothing—no blood, no sign of a struggle, and no Alison.
  They were obviously disgusted, with the search and with me.
  "Maybe she just went home to her mother," one of them suggested.
  "She's an orphan," I said.
   "Well, maybe she has a favorite aunt." They ushered me out and
re-locked the door. "People have been known to leave home for a few days,
you know, even without telling anybody where they were going. Maybe she
just wanted to get away. Maybe from you. You work together, don't you?"
 I shook my head. "Just in the same building. We don't see each other
much any more."
  "Okay, maybe she just wanted to get out of that building, even out of
the town. A little vacation. Why don't you wait a few more days—she'll
probably turn up." He looked at me hard then. "But don't go anywhere we
can't find you easily until she comes back,
  "I didn't do anything to her," I said.
  "Looks like she did something to you."
  I nodded. "It was a bad argument. Short, but bad. When I left she was
very upset. She could have done... anything."
  "For example?"
  I clenched my teeth. "Suicide?"
   The officers looked at each other, then back at me. "Well, we'll keep that
in mind. Now I'd suggest that you go home and get yourself some rest."
  "You're not...going to take me in?"
   "For what? Meeting us at an empty apartment? Having a scratched
face? Go home." He shook his head slowly. "Let me tell you, I've seen
people gone four, five months and then they come back safe and sound.
Drives their families crazy, and the families drive us crazy. You want to file
a missing-person report? She has to be gone at least a month for that."
  My hands gripped each other tightly. "She might have drowned herself."
  "Oh? What makes you think that?"
  "She...worked with someone who drowned. She was very despondent
over his death."
  "Well, we haven't had any reports of drownings lately. Of course, if she
threw herself in the river, she might not have been found yet. She normally
carries identification, doesn't she?"
  "Yes."
  "All right, we'll look into it. But there's really no point in worrying. She'll
probably turn up when she's good and ready."
   We went downstairs in the elevator together, and they watched me walk
to the tram and catch my line before they got into their vehicle.
   I had made myself a murder suspect, but I didn't care. I felt drained.
Where was she? What had she done? I tried to put myself in her place that
night after I had left. I tried to feel what she must have felt. Fury? Hate?
Despair? I tried to feel that I had seen someone I loved die. It didn't seem
difficult. She had lost someone. I had lost her. What next?
   Kansas City fled by as I leaned against the tram window, and I hardly
saw it. I saw Ellsworth instead, in my mind's eye, and Logan stalking the
streets with a star on his chest and a pair of forty-fives on his hips. Kansas
City was cool with November, but Ellsworth was dusty summer, always
would be for me, since the first day Holland and Alison had worked
together.
  And then I knew where Alison had gone.
  When I got home I checked out the Kansas air schedules and called in
my reservation for the next hop to Salina. The computer answered my
query on Alison: she had taken the same route the morning after I left her.
  At Salina I rented a vehicle and drove west on old Route 140. The new
highway, the rental agent told me, was restricted to wheeled traffic and
very crowded. This road was in poor repair, but it was virtually deserted,
and my hovercraft made good time over the cracked pavement. In less
than an hour I was in Ellsworth, seat of Ellsworth County, population
2000.
  Foolishly, I had expected to recognize the town. But a century and a half
had erased the old village, and this Ellsworth could have been any county
seat of the Great Plains—courthouse in the town square, traffic circle
around that, streets extending grid-fashion from that center. The latest
vehicles were parked at the curbs, both hovercraft and ground cars, not a
horse in sight. And the dust had been laid by the damp November breeze.
Citizens walked casually in the cool morning, dressed like anyone in
Kansas City, and no one packed a gun, not even the traffic cop stationed
by the stoplight in front of the courthouse.
  I parked by a meter, fed it my credit card for the eight-hour maximum,
then started my stroll around town. I really didn't know where to begin. I
was disoriented, trying to figure out where the old street had run; there
was a Main Street on one side of the courthouse, but I couldn't connect
that with Ellsworth's old Main Street, nor the courthouse with the old
court building. There was no necessity for either of them to occupy the old
sites, except perhaps human lethargy. So I just wandered, spiraling
outward from the courthouse, thinking that eventually I'd find the place
where the Logan house had been. Alison, I thought, would most likely be
there.
   I walked for hours. The sun reached its zenith and began to sink. I must
have covered every street in town. some twice, and everywhere I walked
people looked at me, the stranger. But none of them was Alison. At last I
realized that I was very hungry, and I stepped into a bar for a sandwich.
The town had only two restaurants—lunch counters, really—and by that
time both of them were closed. The bartender served me a hamburger and
a beer, and though he looked at me rather pointedly, he didn't ask any
questions. I asked him: "Is there a hotel in town?”
  "Motel," he replied, flicking a thumb toward the south, "On the big
highway."
  "Any others?"
  "No, just the one. Nice place, though. Clean. Truckers stop there."
  Thanks." I finished my beer and paid for the meal. I left him a big tip.
One motel in town—where else could Alison be?
  I took the hovercraft over to the highway, and there the place was, just
beyond the foot of the exit ramp, without any name but MOTEL in
medium-sized letters on the roof. I counted twelve units and five vehicles;
they had room for me. I didn't ask about Alison when I checked in. I didn't
want the owner suspicious, and I didn't want her to tell Alison that
someone was looking for her. But I glimpsed a familiar signature in the
motel's records—she was there all right. In my room I settled down in a
reasonably comfortable chair by the window, the heavy drapes barely
twitched aside to give me a view of the parking lot. Anyone walking from
the town would be visible to me, too, though I didn't think Alison would be
walking that sort of distance.
  A couple of big rigs pulled in just after dark, their headlights flashing
across the building like searchlights. Sometime later, more exhausted
than I realized from the long day's activities, I fell asleep. I woke in the
chair when one of the rigs revved its engine at first light.
   I was cramped and stiff from sleeping in the chair, especially my legs. I
had been doing my traveling by Bubble for a lot of years, and that and
riding the tramways of Kansas City had not prepared me for tramping all
over Ellsworth. In the bathroom, I splashed some water in my face and set
the coffeemaker for a couple of cups. If Alison had come in as late as I
suspected, she would still be sleeping and I would catch her as she left. I
waited by the window, sipping my coffee.
   I didn't recognize her at first. She stepped out of a unit somewhere to
my left and climbed into a small hovercraft. She was wearing a
ground-sweeping dress of some heavy black material, with long sleeves
and a high neck. Covering her head and shoulders was a black veil pulled
back from her face for driving. She gunned the hovercraft and swung out
of the parking lot, heading for town. I scrambled to follow her. By the time
I was in my own vehicle, she was no more than a swirl of kicked-up dust in
the distance.
   She drove all the way through town, turning west at the courthouse,
onto a road as old and decrepit as the one I had taken from Salina. Not far
beyond the town limits, the land rose gently. At the crest of the rise, stark
amid the endless stubble of harvested wheat fields, a parcel of land was
surrounded by a spike-topped wrought-iron fence. The gate, replete with
curlicue vines and leaves of age-darkened iron, stood wide open in the
morning sunlight. As I eased my hovercraft into the small lot before the
gate, I saw the gravestones, row on neat row, and the browning grass that
cloaked them.
   Alison was inside already, delicately picking her way among the graves,
her long skirt lifted in front. She seemed extraordinarily slim in black,
fragile, swaying a little as the prairie wind gusted against her. She stopped
at a far corner of the cemetery and sat down on a stone bench.
  It was an old place, maybe Ellsworth's original Boot Hill. Some of the
markers were so weathered that their inscriptions were illegible. Those I
could make out spanned the Twentieth Century, reached back into the
Nineteenth, forward into the Twenty First. A few were sharp-cut in their
newness. None was exceptionally elaborate, none taller than my waist—it
was not a place of ostentatious grief, that cemetery. It was just a spot
where the dead were laid with some respect. Aside from Alison and me, it
had no other visitors that November morning. Slowly, I walked up behind
her. Over her shoulder I read the inscription on the marker at her feet.



               SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
                           JAMES LOGAN
                               1853-1890
                             REST IN PEACE


  It was very new. The space in front of it, however, was flat and
completely overgrown with grass. If a grave lay there, it was not a recent
one.
  "Hello, Alison," I said.
   She started at my words, her back straightening, but she didn't turn to
look at me. "Good guess," she said.
  "An operator has to know how to find people."
  Her hands were folded in her lap, and the veil had fallen over her face,
dark, shadowing her features. In old Ellsworth they would have called her
dress widow's weeds.
  "May I sit down?" I asked.
  "Do what you like."
  I sat on the very edge of the bench, an arm's length between us. "He's
not buried here," I said.
  "No."
  "Who is?"
  "Nobody. Does it matter?"
  I gestured toward the marker. "You put up the stone."
  She nodded almost imperceptibly. Behind the veil, I couldn't read her
expression. She said, "His mother would have wanted it."
  "Are you...going to try to recover the remains?”
 She tilted her head, seemed to be looking down at her hands. "Not
much point in that, is there? It's just bones."
  I nodded. "Don't you think you should come back to Kansas City now?
You've done... all that could be expected here."
  "He spent most of his life here. This was his home. This is where I
belong."
 "You can't mean that, Alison. What about your work, your friends?
What about your contract with the company?"
  "Let them sue me. I don't care."
  "Of course you do. You love your work. I know it. You can't give it up
to... to bury yourself in this backwater."
   She turned her face toward me, but the veil was a barrier between us,
keeping her thoughts from me. "You don't understand me at all," she said.
"And you don't know when you're not wanted. You are intruding upon my
grief. I would appreciate it if you would go away."
  "Grief over someone you never knew, Alison? What kind of grief is
that?"
  "A kind you obviously will never know."
  "I know the other kind of grief."
  "Fine. Go back to Kansas City and practice it there."
  "Alison...Dr. Holland wants you to come back."
  She let a moment of silence pass, and then she laughed a choking laugh,
half a sob. "Holland. How I wish I had never met him! How I wish it!"
  "Then...you would never have seen Logan."
   "No," she said, looking at the gravestone. "Never." Then she bent
forward a little and raised her hands to her face, pressing the veil against
her cheeks. Her shoulders trembled, and I couldn't help reaching a hand
toward her. But she shrugged off my comfort and slid to the far end of the
bench. "He's dead," she murmured. "And I'm dead, too. Why won't you let
me rest in peace?"
  "Oh, Alison...come home. You're not going to find peace in this
cemetery."
  "I don't want to talk to you any more, Barry."
  I stood up slowly. "All right. I'll go. I just want you to remember that if
you ever need me, I'll always be there."
 Her back toward me, she straightened up, shaking her head, the veil
moving gently about her shoulders. "No," she murmured. "Nobody can
make that kind of promise. You'll die someday. Everybody dies."
   "Oh, Alison...." I half lifted my hands toward her, but no words would
come. What could I say? That, yes, we all die someday—James Logan,
Augustus Caesar, and me...and that emotions die as well, eventually—love,
hate, even grief. I knew she didn't want to listen. So I consoled myself with
that knowledge instead of offering it to her, and I turned away and
trudged back to the cemetery gate.
  That night I was back in Kansas City. In the morning, I added Alison's
shift to my own, tolerated Holland's indignation and gave him his money's
worth. Earp was in Tombstone now, the hearing that followed the gunfight
at the O.K. Corral behind him, one brother crippled, another dead. Soon
he would be leaving for a new life in California, and Holland would have to
move on, too, if he wanted to follow his subject. He was already foreseeing
difficulties for the period that Earp would be spending in Alaska—it was
out of range of all the company offices. He badgered me for information
about new branches to be opened, obviously hoping for Seattle or
Vancouver, and he was angry when I told him that all I knew about was
the one in Tokyo.
  He was gone by the time Alison came back.
   I had known she would, known it in my soul. She was an operator first,
like Myra, like me. Nothing could make us quit. Nothing.
   She didn't speak to me. I passed her in the corridor a few times, but she
just looked through me, walking briskly, as if to some important meeting.
  She transferred to the Tokyo office as soon as it opened—looking for a
new challenge, Myra said. Shortly afterward, I returned to Istanbul. To
Imperial Rome. Someone needed an expert on Augustus Caesar.