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  Gallie smiles. “Thank you for dinner,” she says and Bess smiles back.

  “Yes, dinner with friends is no place for politics,” Asmus says. “Now, what would you say to hand-made ice cream?”

  “Why are you murdering TMA security officers and imprisoning the rest?” I ask.

  “Imprisoning?” Asmus says with indignation. “They’re free to stay or to leave any time. As are you.”

  “They need to be free to go home.”

  “Ah. Go home.” Asmus puts on a wide smile and sips more wine. “So tell me about your career with TMA Joad. Did you enjoy it? Was it fulfilling?”

  “Was it? It’s still going on unless you know different.”

  He turns to Gallie. “You see, Joad and I go way back. Old friends.” I stay quiet. “It may be hard to believe looking at us now, but I always considered Joad as a sort of mentor. He was a decade older than me and had his feet well under the TMA table.” His smile fades. “I was so proud to be part of TMA. We all were, right Joad?”

  “It’s a privilege,” Gallie says.

  “Yes, a privilege” Asmus agrees. “But it turns out that my love for TMA was unrequited.” He turns to Bess. “That hurts.”

  “Maybe it was your personality,” I say, and Gallie squeezes my leg hard under the table.

  “Well, yes, that’s a fair point,” Asmus says. “But none of us were the warm, fuzzy type were we? God knows you weren’t, Joad. You see, at least your contributions were admired, appreciated.” His smile has now vanished. “You know, I developed the theoretical basis for enhancement of the tachyon reflection coefficient by almost twenty percent?”

  “Yes,” I reply but it’s a lie. I don’t remember much about anything Asmus did at TMA.

  “Yes. Guess how much credit I got for that.” I shrugged. “I wanted to be in the big chair. You knew that. To one day be in the big chair.” He looks at Gallie. “You made it there. You know what that means to someone.” She looks back at him but says nothing. “I got nowhere in TMA. Nowhere. And the people who did ...” He looks into middle distance. “Maybe I was no Prasad, but I was next tier down. I was. Is that arrogant? But I was. And it took me nowhere!” For an instant his face contorts, but just as quickly he regains his composure. “But c’est la vie. I’ll call for ice cream.”

  “I don’t want fucking ice cream Kasper. I want you to let us take the TMA team back.” He looks offended.

  “No ice cream?”

  “Why did you take the 2021 team?” Gallie asks calmly. “You were just starting out then.”

  He nods. “Yes, good question Dr. Galois, I was just starting out. Yet, it had already set in. I knew I was going nowhere even then. Couldn’t understand it.” He looks at me. “It didn’t take long for me to be the reject. The guy without a future.” He takes another sip of wine. “So I decided one day, why not go back to the very beginning. That’s the TMA that set my career in the direction it was always going to go. It was their doing.”

  “So you thought you’d just abduct them all and teach them a lesson?” I say. “And thought you might as well blow up the array while you were there. Remove some temporal protection, indulge in a little time vandalism.” Asmus raises his palm upwards as if to say will you listen to this guy?

  “That makes me sound like a lunatic.” He grins. “And as you know, I didn’t get all of them.” I look behind me again and one of the guards looks back.

  “So you and your goon came back to kill me just so you’d score the complete set.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way. Besides, I knew you’d make trouble for me left to your own devices. And here you are, making trouble for me.”

  “So this is where you kill me?” I ask.

  “What?” he feigns shock. “Why would I do that now that you’re reunited with your friends? And certainly not before dessert.” He picks up a bell and rings it.

  “And the arms trafficking?” I ask. He leans back as a bowl of ice cream is placed in front of him. He affects puzzlement.

  “The what?”

  “Giving them the weapons.”

  He speaks around a mouthful of his dessert. “Weapons? Hmm. Interesting concept. But now you’re the one who sounds crazy.” I stare at him but my curiosity is not reciprocated as he digs into his dish of ice cream.

  “Dr. Galois, can I show you around the house?” Bess says. Asmus looks disquieted for a moment, but then his smile returns.

  “Yes, of course,” he says. “You’ll enjoy a tour. Leave the menfolk to talk serious matters. This is the eighteenth century, after all.”

  Gallie forces a smile as she and Bess get up to leave and I’m left with Asmus. “It’s pathetic,” I say. Asmus raises his eyebrows. “So you went back and made sure Bess could never marry me. Teach me a lesson, eh? That’s so very sad, Kasper. Sad even for you.” He shakes his head.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree there, Joad. That never happened. Besides, to be honest, you missed a bullet. She’s a handful–fucked most of the British garrison.” He belches.

  “You really are an asshole Kasper.”

  “Keep the clothes, by the way. You look good in them. Your big chair whore, too. By the way, there’s quite an age difference between you two. Must be like fucking your mother.” He stretches. “But, you should be getting back to your team. I thought I’d let you be the one to tell them what’s happening.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Fifty parents had waited up for us. We huddle in the dark of the barn while Gallie and I share what we’ve learned. The sheer incredulity that Kasper Asmus is behind all of this causes a dozen conversations to erupt. Then the volley of questions. Why this era? Why is he in a mansion? When will we go home? Will we go home?

  “This is crazy,” Ramuhalli says and jumps up. “He’s crazy.” Jenn takes his hand to pull him back down but he snatches it away and storms out of the barn.

  “You have to feel for him,” Jenn says. “Not what he expected out of his new job.”

  “This is not a problem suited for tackychemists,” Gallie says. “Crazy isn’t our specialty.” We are asked more questions and give the answer I don’t know in a hundred different ways. Then the talking wanes but for the occasional obscenity. I hear someone weeping in the dark.

  I open my eyes to the daily chores that have already begun. Someone is raking hay across the barn floor. There’s the clattering of tin trays being brought back from a rinsing at the well. I dwell on the fact that the serving of gruel could stop at any time. It’s repulsive slop, but it’s keeping us alive. For an instant I feel gratitude toward Asmus. Then that disgusts me. Gallie comes over to sit by me and is about to say something when Mack McEwan lumbers over.

  “You have a visitor,” he says, pointing to the back door of the barn. Gallie and I are nonplussed. I step outside and my visitor turns to face me, rubbing her upper arms in the cool morning air.

  “Bess,” I say. She smiles.

  “No one calls me Bess.” I apologize. “No, you can call me that. I like it.”

  “Okay ... well ... What can I ... sorry this feels awkward, Bess.”

  “I think I know why,” she says. “At least I do if we’re feeling awkward for the same reasons.” The trees are casting a long shadow over us as the sun rises, and there’s a cool breeze that isn’t yet comfortable.

  “Do you? It’s just that, we do have a history, but I don’t know ... which one it is.” She waits for me to continue. I don’t.

  “Yes. No,” she says to fill the silence. “That’s sort of why I’m here. I do have a ... version of our history, Joad, but it’s very short, simple. I know because of the weirdness that goes on around my husband that not everyone remembers things the same way. So I just wanted to tell you.” I nod. “That okay?” I nod again. “Yesterday I didn’t recognize you at first because it was so long ago. I hope I didn’t seem ... rude.” I’m looking at her and I’m seeing the wife with whom I could count in the thousands the times we’ve gone to bed together, shared private
jokes, had intimate conversations, told her that I love her, and argued savagely. But our history is very short and simple, she says.

  “Rude? No, not in the scheme of things.”

  “So this is it: You and I had one date in college. Just one. Met during Orientation Week, I think.” One date? “Then I got a phone call.” A smile flickers across her lips.

  “A phone call.”

  “From your father.” I must have look astonished. “So you didn’t know? Yes, I don’t know how he got my number, but he did.”

  “My father called you?” She nods and then hesitates, as if searching for the right words. It’s a long search. “What he said to me was, and I remember this pretty exactly, because it’s not something you’d forget. What he said to me was ‘get the fuck away from my son or there’ll be big trouble.’” I stare at her blankly.

  “Oh.”

  “So, when you called me to ask for a second date, well–”

  “Well, yes. Understandable.” I’m staring at the ground because I can’t look at Bess. “Indeed.” My father was saving me. That’s what he was doing. In his way. “So how did you end up with Asmus?”

  “That was a long time and a marriage or two later. Met him in a bar in Albuquerque.”

  “And I never came up?” I ask. Does that question even make sense? Yes, sure it does if you’re willing to bound across timelines. Or maybe it doesn’t. I can’t think.

  “It would have been wild if you did. Those dots were never connected for me until yesterday. And even now, are they connected?”

  “And he took you on a pretty wild ride, I’m guessing.”

  “Wild’s the word,” Bess replies. “One word, anyway.” We’re both looking for words when I notice a commotion coming from the barn–agitated voices getting louder. If Bess can hear it, she’s ignoring it. “Now tell me your version, Joad.”

  Jenn bursts out of the barn door just long enough to say “need you,” then disappears back in.

  “Can you wait here?” I say. Bess grabs my hand and steps closer.

  “I want to hear it–your version,” she says, her eyes fixed on mine. I return her gaze momentarily then pull my hand free.

  I overhear conversations and glean that someone has gone missing. Jenn, Gallie and Jim Chen are huddled and I join them.

  “Arun Ramuhalli. He’s missing,” Jenn says.

  “He’s been taken?” I ask.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.” Gallie nods at Jim Chen.

  “Arun was hyper agitated last night,” he says. “Kept getting up and pacing, muttering. I think he took it real badly ... what you told us about Asmus.” Gallie and I exchange glances.

  “So he’s gone AWOL?” I ask.

  Jenn looks at Chen. “For a while now he’s had a theory,” Jenn says. “A bit of a nuts one.” She nods at Chen again.

  “Yeah. He was sort of convinced that if you follow the wagon track in the opposite direction from Leatown you’ll wind up in a city, or big town, or something.”

  “I think he thought twenty-first century Philadelphia is that way,” Jenn adds. “Or something more civilized than Leatown, anyway.”

  “Based on what?”

  “The wagons and coaches we see coming from there, I guess. It’s not an airtight theory.”

  “So a bearded, Indian guy in twenty-first century clothes is walking up the wagon trail. Oh, he’ll be fine. When did he go missing? Anyone see him this morning?” Heads shake. I stand and shout “did anyone see Ramuhalli leave? Anyone see him this morning?” No response. I sit back down and take a breath. “I’ll look for him.”

  “Why you?” Chen asks. I lift my arms and look down at myself. “You’re not the only one who can wear those clothes.”

  “You expect me to give up these fine threads? Besides, I’m clean and fed.”

  “I qualify too,” Gallie says. “And I can take better care of myself.”

  “Well thanks for that, but I think someone is going to notice Jane Austen en route to the debutante ball.”

  Gallie grimaces. “Okay Darcy. You’re it.”

  “Give me a minute.” I exit the barn to look for Bess but she has gone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Strangulation is at the heart of my plan once I catch up with Arun Ramuhalli. This is a man who survived the meticulous and excruciating scrutiny of the TMA screening process, and yet he’d do something as fabulously wild as running off into the night of an alien era. I imagine him lying in a pool of his own blood that’s swelling with each dying heartbeat, and I picture a terrified young guy who could never have imagined his well-earned Ph.D. leading him there.

  Setting out I have a sack containing a few supplies Gallie put together for me: a few bones and fat salvaged from the haute cuisine served to Asmus’s barn guests and a cloth-covered jug of water. At most, this is two days’ supply–one out and one back. I pick up the pace. To my right are open meadows so I’m likely to see trouble coming from way off, but on my left there’s forest that could conceal a multitude of dangers.

  I walk throughout the morning and then ahead of me the road plunges into the forest. My fantasies of strangulation sharpen. I enter the forest and the temperature drops as I walk through patches of light and shadow. Do I need to be worried about wild animals, too? I have the thought that for a tackychemist with expertise in temporal acceleration, I’ve never bothered to learn much about other times, about history. But then, my job was to block acceleration, not ride it.

  I take a bone from my sack and gnaw the threads of meat off it. I spit. Then my thoughts drift to Bess. She looked different yet the same; strangely unburned by the fire of time. And I think about my father who did what he did. Saving me from her. As if saving my mother from himself? That’d be a profound thought for my father. In Bess I see a woman who is front and center in the last decade of my life and in my plans for the rest of it, and she sees a man who was a single night out, a few drinks and maybe an awkward goodnight kiss.

  It’s twilight and I need to turn back. Ramuhalli has sealed his own fate and I’m not going to kill myself over it. It’s then that I hear a new sound and I dive off the road, rolling down the slope into the foliage. It had sounded like the whinny of a horse. I lie on my belly looking up the slope and wait. The horse appears, mounted by a soldier, then another, and another, all in single file. I count about ten horsemen, all uniformed in the blue of the Continental Army. Following them is their infantry, some in the blue, others in ragged civilian clothes, and all carrying rifles. There are maybe thirty or forty troops on foot. I freeze until they pass. They’re headed to Leatown, is my guess, to give hell to the British garrison. Maybe give some to Asmus, too. That’s a nice thought.

  The cold thing on my ear is a bayonet. I don’t risk moving my head but strain my eyes to look up.

  “Stay as you are,” a deep voice commands.

  “What is this we have here?” This is a second, high-pitched voice. Then I’m grabbed by my collar and brought up to my knees. Both men are wearing grimy, ripped civilian clothes and pointing flintlock rifles at my face. The one with the bass voice pats me down for weapons, then opens my sack. The other keeps his musket trained on me.

  “A tory spy is it?” the shorter one with the higher-pitched voice says. They both have an accent indistinguishable from those I’d heard in Leatown; sort of British yet different in a way I can’t pinpoint.

  “No, I’m not a spy,” I say feebly.

  “Ah, I’m pleased to hear that,” the short one says. “Be on your way then.” They laugh heartily.

  I’m marched up the slope at gunpoint having gained the attention of the motley column of troops. Messages are being mumbled up the line and eventually the column comes to a halt. I’m walked to the head of it where a mounted soldier looks down to study me. His blue jacket is adorned with gold and his white breeches are spotless, tucked into shining black boots. He asks where they found me. The short soldier tells him. The officer scans the surrounding terrain and then looks up thr
ough the canopy of trees.

  “We camp here,” he says and dismounts.

  I’m roped to a tree trunk, arms behind me. The soldiers settle down and gather in knots around campfires. On the other side of the encampment, a white marquee and a smaller tent had been erected, for the officers I assumed.

  I know that spies being shot is a thing. They’re probably not sure that I’m a spy though. But why take the risk? Yet, here I am, still breathing. The horrifying thought hits me that I’m alive only because they want to extract intel about the Leatown garrison. What do I know about it? Almost nothing. I’ll tell them that. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. For a moment there, I thought maybe I was in trouble.

  An hour passes and I see two soldiers coming my way. This is it. This is the end. I’m untied and marched across the camp under the surveillance of many suspicious eyes. Sitting outside the marquee and warming his hand at a campfire is the soldier–the general maybe–who’d led the column. Besides him is another soldier, similarly dressed in blue and gold. I stand facing them through flickering flames with the two guards behind me.

  “Your name?” the general asks. No point in making one up, so I tell him. “And where are you from?” That’s a tougher one to answer honestly.

  “Leatown,” I say. The general takes a draft from a metal mug. In the flickering light of the fire I see his skin is pink and pocked, and his black hair is tied back over his ears into a low ponytail.

  “Leatown. And what’s your work in Leatown?” He’s looking into the fire rather than at me.