Prologue: The Last Attack
Sam Gill was awakened by a noise in the downstairs hall. He checked his watch—the solid-gold mechanical timepiece his father, Emerson Gill, had carried for the past fifty years—and learned it was twenty-one minutes after four o’clock. The new day that was about to dawn in London would be the 24th of April in the year 1867, and a cold premonition told Sam Gill he would have reason to remember the date.
He reached for the box of sulfur matches on his bedside table, drew one, and paused. Something about this movement was familiar, too, but he couldn’t remember exactly what. He struck the match, turned the tap on the lamp on the wall above his head, and lit the gas. Gill’s father had plumbed the walls for town gas—something the old structure never had—when he rebuilt Crossroads House after the fire of 1833.
It should have been his father who woke in the middle of the night to watch over his family and the house’s guests. In other circumstances, Emerson would have remained hale and hearty and able to discharge the duties of proprietor long into his third century. But in 1859 the elder Gill began experiencing stomach problems, abdominal bloating, darkened urine, and jaundice of his skin and the whites of his eyes. Other inhabitants of Victorian England might have dismissed these symptoms as the stigmata of a normal old age or a warning sign from the “Angel of Death.” For the Gill family, the symptoms suggested something had gone wrong with the genetics of his endocrine system, through either toxic or radiologic insult. Emerson returned through the mirror-maze on the second floor to the family’s original home in the eighth millennium and never came back. After his cure, Emerson said, he preferred to retire to “the other side of time.” And then Sam Gill had held his breath, waiting for InterTime Systems to send through a new proprietor. But the next day a messenger arrived to announce that, with his father’s recommendation, Sam had been confirmed in place.
So now he sat up in bed and considered the noise downstairs and what to do next. Travelers seldom came through the mirror after dark. Although time for them was an utterly fluid concept, the choice of when to emerge from the maze was still governed by good manners, which dictated a concern for those who lived in the diurnal present on the other side of the mirror. And those approaching the house from the outside, because they needed to exit this age through the mirror, would be confronted at the street entrance by locked doors and its posted business hours.
Since the noise that had awakened him was not likely to concern the house’s normal business, and since the new gas light had not yet been made portable, Sam Gill reached into the drawer of his nightstand and took out his electric torch. After a moment’s hesitation, he took the pulse pistol, too. Both items were forbidden under the protocols governing the operation of a temporal station in this time frame. But new dangers had emerged since those protocols were written.
As he descended the stairs from the family quarters, which he alone now occupied, Gill heard the noise once again and this time more clearly: the rasp and snap! of stout wooden panels, built to withstand rough inspection, being torn apart. He followed the noise down to the second floor, moving by feel so as not to alert the intruder to his approach. When he had reached the landing, crept out into the hallway, and finally shone his torch beam on the area before the built-in cabinet, Sam Gill suffered a moment of vertigo.
It was the same child-sized figure—the same blue suit, gray gloves and boots, the same helmet with lozenge shaped lenses for eyes—that he had seen thirty or more years earlier, in his own childhood. His father had called it the “Blue Demon.” In the years since then, InterTime Systems had expanded and improved their intelligence. This was no phantom or enigma but a flesh-and-blood human being, small in stature, hairless in appearance, known to operate from several thousand years beyond the Gill family’s distant future. It was an operative of an organization that, for reasons yet to be explained, had declared war on earlier forms of time travel—particularly those built and used by InterTime Systems. Like temporal cockroaches, these operatives appeared, did whatever damage they could manage, then flew away in a cloud of mist.
And now, for the second time in his life, Sam Gill had cornered one.
A name drifted up from memory and he said it aloud. “Rydin!”
The figure turned, the lenses staring back into the light.
The gloved hands continued tearing at the cabinet.
“I have a gun and will shoot you,” Gill said.
The figure shrugged and kept working.
Rydin was probably right not to be afraid. The last time they met, Sam’s father had shot the intruder dead-center with a pulse pistol. The charged particles had not penetrated the suit material, although the imparted energy made the small figure stagger. Gill did not think the helmet was made of any weaker stuff, and he wouldn’t bet that Rydin was willing to take it off now.
“Can we talk about this?” Gill asked. “Whatever it is you want?”
“Nothing to talk about,” came the electronically conveyed voice.
Gill noted that Rydin was speaking the panEuropan of his own millennium—not the English of the nineteenth century—but using softer vowels and smoother consonants.
The last panel of the twin doors covering the entry to the mirror-maze fell away, and the electric light above its focus came on automatically, powered from the same source that kept the mirror itself fixed in this part of the time stream. Rydin stood for one moment, obviously studying the three-part mirror. Then he stepped forward, detached something small and dark from his utility belt, and thrust it through the central pane. When his hand came back, it was empty.
“You want to leave now,” the voice said. “This event is not survivable.”
“What is that thing?” Gill asked. He started forward to protect the node.
Rydin shrugged. “A medium-sized singularity. Fifty exagrams in mass. Cleaved and only temporarily patched. You have about thirty seconds.”
“But that will—!” Sam gasped.
“—yes, it will.” Rydin nodded.
The small figure pushed past him then, heading for the stairs. Gill could either stop him or try to find a way, as was his duty, to retrieve and neutralize the bomb. He decided—once again—to let the demon go.
Stepping into the central mirror, Gill found himself in the familiar first cell, as large as six of the external mirrors drawn around into a tight hexagon. He stooped to pick up the package, which wasn’t all that heavy. But then, it wouldn’t be, not with so much of its mass extending into another temporospatial dimension. Still, it was awkward to carry, with both hands already full with his torch and pistol. Because he was wearing only his nightgown and cap, like a proper Englishman at bedtime, he had no pockets to hold them. But he wouldn’t need light or a weapon inside the maze, so he left them on the floor.
What he needed now was distance, in terms of both time and space. Like any station keeper, Sam Gill was familiar with the immediate surroundings of his own node, especially along the time stream that led back to its founding in the fifteenth century and forward to his own entry through the InterTime Systems node in the eighth millennium. Taking the bomb to any point along that stream and depositing it there would simply blow out access to the node in either the past or the future. Not a good solution.
Based on Rydin’s estimate, he now had twenty seconds to act.
Gill had to find a side stream. He had to cross over into some parallel to his own Crossroads House in the Seven Dials rookery in nineteenth-century London—one that he did not know and would not care about destroying. According to temporal theory, such places existed all over the multiverse, generated by divergent events in the past that had created altered probabilities, sending that version of the house and that branch of the Gill family off into another temporal direction.
With the map of the maze—or at least as much of it as he knew—in mind, he stepped into the second mirrored panel to his right. To get away from his own time stream, he executed a drunkard’s walk of 60- and 120-degree angles, keeping track of his turns while counting seconds inside his head. When he figured he was well off the stream in which his version of Sam Gill lived and slept and kept station, he put the package down and fled back the way he had come.
He could feel it when the bomb—the unleashed force of a quadrillion tons of collapsed matter, exiting into normal space—went off. The maze around him shivered in silence. The mirrored floor beneath his feet bounced. But space and time did not collapse.
Breathing a sigh, Sam Gill walked more slowly back along his route to the cell that existed just inside his own node’s entry point. His pulse pistol and torch lay on the floor there, untouched. He picked them up and was about to step through the mirrored pane that would take him back into the second-floor hallway.
Instead of the white light of the overhead diode array, the pane glowed with a flickering red-and-yellow fire. Obviously, Rydin had decided to burn down Crossroads House—once again. Perhaps it was to cover the force of the explosion—although that, occurring in a maze cell immediately adjacent to an existing point in space, would itself have leveled the building and much of the neighborhood besides.
Sam Gill couldn’t go out there now, not while the house was burning. He was safe enough inside the cell, on the other side of the mirror. And then, when the house’s structure had collapsed and the embers cooled, and preferably after dark, he could crawl out into empty space in his cap and nightgown, let himself drop into the littered basement, trying not to land with his bare feet on anything sharp, and prepare to rebuild his father’s hotel one more time.