Real Time
                       LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS




  Someone was tampering with time again; I could feel it, in my head
and in my gut, that sick, queasy sensation of unreality.

  I put my head down and gulped air, waiting for the discomfort to pass,
but it only got worse.

  This was a bad one. Someone was tampering with something serious.
This wasn't just someone reading tomorrow's papers and playing the stock
market, this was serious. Someone was trying to change history.

  I couldn't allow that. Not only might his tampering interfere with my
own past, change my whole life, possibly even wipe me out of existence,
but I'd be shirking my job. I couldn't do that.

   Not that anyone would know. They must think I'm dead. I haven't been
contacted in years now, not since I was stranded in this century. They
must think I was lost when my machine and my partner vanished in the
flux.

   But I'm not dead, and I had a job to do. With help from headquarters
or without, with a partner or without, even with my machine or without, I
had a job to do, a reality to preserve, a whole world to safeguard. I knew
my duty. I know my duty. The past can't take tampering.

   They might send someone else, but they might not. The tampering
might have already changed things too much. They might not spot it in
time. Or they might simply not have the manpower. Time travel lets you
use your manpower efficiently, with one hundred percent efficiency,
putting it anywhere you need it instantly, but that's not enough when you
have all of the past to guard, everything from the dawn of time to the
present—not this present, the real present—you'd need a million men to
guard it all, and they've always had trouble recruiting. The temptations
are too great. The dangers are too great. Look at me, stuck here in the
past, for the dangers—and as for the temptations, look at what I have to
do. People trying to change everything, trying to benefit themselves at the
cost of reality itself—they need men they can trust, men like me, and there
can never be enough of us.

    I sat up straight again and I looked at the mirror behind the bar and I
knew what I had to do. I had to stop the tampering. Just as I had stopped
it before, three—no, four—four times now.

   They might send someone else, but they might not, and I couldn't take
that chance.

   I had to find the tamperer myself, and deal with him. If I couldn't find
him directly, if he wasn't in this time period but later, then I might need
to tamper with time myself, to change his past without hurting mine.

   That's tricky, but I've done it.

   I slid off the stool and stood up, gulped the rest of my drink, and laid a
bill on the bar—five dollars in the currency of the day. I shrugged,
straightening my coat, and I stepped out into the cool of a summer night.

   Insects sang somewhere, strange insects extinct before I was born, and
the streetlights pooled pale gray across the black sidewalks. I turned my
head slowly, feeling the flux, feeling the shape of the time-stream, of my
reality.

   Downtown was firm, solid, still rooted in the past and the present and
secure in the future. Facing in the opposite direction I felt my gut twist. I
crossed the empty street to my car.

   I drove out the avenues, ignoring the highways; I can't feel as well on
the highways, they're too far out of the city's life-flow.

   I went north, then east, and the nausea gripped me tighter with every
block. It became a gnawing pain in my belly as the world shimmered and
shifted around me, an unstable reality. I stopped the car by the side of the
street and forced the pain down, forced my perception of the world to
steady itself.

   When I was ready to go on I leaned over and checked in the glove
compartment. No gloves—the name was already an anachronism even in
this time period. But my gun was there. Not my service weapon; that's an
anachronism, too advanced. I don't dare use it. The knowledge of its
existence could be dangerous. No, I had bought a gun here, in this era.

  I pulled it out and put it in my coat pocket. The weight of it, that hard
metal tugging at my side, felt oddly comforting.

   I had a knife, too. I was dealing with primitives, with savages, not with
civilized people. These final decades of the twentieth century, with their
brushfire wars and nuclear arms races, were a jungle, even in the great
cities of North America. I had a knife, a good one, with a six-inch blade I
had sharpened myself.

  Armed, I drove on, and two blocks later I had to leave the avenue, turn
onto the quiet side-streets, tree-lined and peaceful.

  Somewhere, in that peace, someone was working to destroy my home,
my life, my self.

  I turned again, and felt the queasiness and pain leap within me, and I
knew I was very close.

  I stopped the car and got out, the gun in my pocket and my hand on the
gun, my other hand holding the knife.

   One house had a light in the window; the homes on either side were
dark. I scanned, and I knew that that light was it, the center of the
unreality—maybe not the tamperer himself, but something, a focus for the
disturbance of the flow of history.

   Perhaps it was an ancestor of the tamperer; I had encountered that
before.

   I walked up the front path and rang the bell.

   I braced myself, the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.

   The porch light came on, and the door started to open. I threw myself
against it.

   It burst in, and I went through it, and I was standing in a hallway. A
man in his forties was staring at me, holding his wrist where the door had
slammed into it as it pulled out of his grip. There had been no chainbolt;
my violence had, perhaps, been more than was necessary.

   I couldn't take risks, though. I pointed the gun at his face and squeezed
the trigger.

   The thing made a report like the end of the world, and the man fell,
blood and tissue sprayed across the wall behind him.

   A woman screamed from a nearby doorway, and I pointed the gun at
her, unsure.

  The pain was still there. It came from the woman. I pulled the trigger
again.

   She fell, blood red on her blouse, and I looked down at her as the pain
faded, as stability returned.

   I was real again.

   If the man were her husband, perhaps she was destined to remarry, or
to be unfaithful—she would have been the tamperer's ancestor, but he
might not have been. The twisting of time had stopped only when the
woman fell.

   I regretted shooting him, then, but I had had no choice. Any delay
might have been fatal. The life of an individual is precious, but not as
precious as history itself.

  A twinge ran through my stomach; perhaps only an after-effect, but I
had to be certain. I knelt, and went quickly to work with my knife.

   When I was done, there could be no doubt that the two were dead, and
that neither could ever have children.

   Finished, I turned and fled, before the fumbling police of this era could
interfere.

   I knew the papers would report it the next day as the work of a lunatic,
of a deranged thief who panicked before he could take anything, or of
someone killing for perverted pleasure. I didn't worry about that.

  I had saved history again.

  I wish there were another way, though.

   Sometimes I have nightmares about what I do, sometimes I dream that
I've made a mistake, killed the wrong person, that I stranded myself here.
What if it wasn't a mechanical failure that sent the machine into flux,
what if I changed my own past and did that to myself?

  I have those nightmares sometimes.

   Worse, though, the very worst nightmares, are the ones where I dream
that I never changed the past at all, that I never lived in any time but this
one, that I grew up here, alone, through an unhappy childhood and a
miserable adolescence and a sorry adulthood—that I never traveled in
time, that it's all in my mind, that I killed those people for nothing.

   That's the worst of all, and I wake up from that one sweating, ready to
scream.

  Thank God it's not true.