Time Tracker

by G. Miki Hayden

 

The footprints led off into the thicket, but Ryder Darvish stopped at the edge of the beach and sank to the ground. He wanted to rest a minute before plunging into the unfamiliar jungle. Damn, he was good, but he wasn't that good. The trip always took a lot out of him, first of all, and, furthermore, this forest primeval was hell to wrestle with. The towering canopy and overgrown marshland were all right for the brontisauri and the rest, but the puny human animal had a little more difficulty smashing a trail into the greenery-gone-wild.

            If Ryder could pick one thing about the job he hated, it would be having to occasionally come back this far. He didn't mind being out of his time-slot, generally, but diving into the Paleolithic, or whatever they called it, was downright spooky. The thing was, there weren't any other people around--except for his target. No matter when in time Ryder was, for the most part, he could imagine himself getting along quite well--adjusting--should he have to live there the remainder of his life. But Ryder Darvish was a sociable man who said hello to strangers in the skyriser and always inquired after the door guard's family. He didn't think he could hack it with only large-sized carnivores as friends.

            Oh, he would make it back to his own time all right. He had no reason to doubt. He always did, and, counting on the odds, he always would. He knew guys who had been at this job 30 years or more and they had never mistaken their way through the time strands yet. Of course Roger had heard of some trackers who'd simply disappeared and others who had returned and refused to travel into the past again. Ryder wasn't going to wind up like that, he promised himself; a little worry was normal. He wasn't the type to lose his nerve.

            The thought of getting stuck in this time-slot put Ryder on his feet again and he dodged flapping branches and insects bigger than his toes as he followed Derick Wiley into the dank tangle of overambitious vegetation. Derick was a bad, bad man who deserved to be hunted down like a dog. Ryder would find him and bring the fugitive back to his own time to face the consequences of his horrific deeds.

            Where the hell was Derick, though? There was no sand here and consequently no footprints... only trees so overbearing Ryder couldn't spot the heavens above, and the ground-level thudding of some mammoth dino seeking its dinner or hoping to entice a mate. The air was wringingly humid, too, and the sweat poured down Ryder's rugged face.         Agg! He spotted Derick. Ryder had found him. What was left of him, that was. The remains of Derick Wiley included little more than a femur, clavicle, and a few odds and ends of 21st century clothing. Whatever had killed the man must have thoughtfully left a memorial feast for a whole swarm of voracious little nibblers, because a few were still strolling about the desiccated bones, seeking a tidbit.

How did Ryder know this thing was Derick? Well, the odds were sensational, but Ryder would take the skull back with him and have the dental work IDed or the DNA typed.

            Ryder juiced up his psych-amp and thought about home. That was how Dorothy had done it in The Wizard of Oz, as Ryder liked to joke, and the technique had worked quite well for her.

            Pheew. Yeah. This looked more or less like the year 2055 the way he had left it--kind of crumbling around the edges, but all gilt and lavish construction in the center--a society of haves and have-nots, where Ryder played the role of servant to the rambunctiously wealthy. He was one of those necessary evils in this world--a time tracker. The bold and honest Private Searcher who always got his target because he was so kind and sensitive. That was the way the story went in the kid-vids, anyway.

Where the hell had he landed this time though? He needed a shower and a beer or two. Oh, dopey him--he'd turned up about a block north of Noreen's house. He must have gotten his map confused. He was no longer the only man in the world for her and it was time he remembered that--however much such thoughts shredded his insides. He'd better catch an air-float to his tenement and crash.

 

In a way he was sorry the search had ended like that with Derick--not having that dramatic bring-em-back-alive conclusion had been so anticlimactic to the chase. And the pile of rubbish had been Derick, as they had certified at the forensic lab Ryder used. He could collect his reward for a job well done from the survivors of Wiley's senseless massacre.

            The circumstances had been peculiar though. Something had gotten scrambled back there and a random concern was chomping at Ryder's awareness--sort of the way the whatevers had chewed at Wiley. How long had it taken the prehistorics to gnaw up the cadaver?--that was the question begging for a logical answer. Other than the damp from the climate itself, the target's skeleton had been...well, bone-dry.

The complete consumption of what had constituted mass-murderer Derick Wiley wasn't something that had come to pass in the hour or two Ryder Darvish had been chasing him. And the gap should have only been that long between the moment that the target had leaped and the instant that his pursuer had jumped into the time stream. Unless, of course, something funny had happened. And not something ha-ha, to be sure.

 

Although Ryder preferred not to take another job right after a long reach like the Wiley one, the request from the Pele family was a desperate cry for help and Ryder was the sentimental sort. He met his potential clients in their 100th floor suite at the Excelsior Palace Hotel.

            The Peles were a wealthy clan from Argentina, here in the States with their daughter Clara for the Hamblington Women's Tennis Open. Clara was a whiz with a racket and mightily indulged by mom and dad. Traveling with them was Clara's tennis coach, Ernesto Ruiz. Now Ruiz and the fifteen-year-old daughter had gone lost.

            "What makes you think he zipped her back through the time zones?" Ryder probed. "He could just as well have taken her to Cincinnati." Half of his cases turned out that way, earning him a great deal less than he had been banking on.

            "No," insisted Papa Pele. "Ruiz was absolutely fascinated with the history of the American Civil War. And because of him, Clara developed an interest in the topic, too. I'm absolutely certain that's where they are." He patted his wife's hand as she dabbed at her eyes with a white linen cloth. Their two teen-aged sons tried to comfort mama, also.

            "Time travel requires more than just plain interest. It takes the equipment, too," Ryder pointed out.

            Papa Pele hung his head. "They had the means," he answered the time tracker with what seemed to be regret. "I had just bought a Macon-300 booster for my own amusement. Very, very expensive, as you know. Very powerful, requiring far less innate skill than most earlier models. Before we left home, the Macon seemed to be missing, but I didn't have time to do much more than report its loss to the local police."

            Ryder nodded. The distraught father could be right in thinking the couple had taken refuge in the past. "Do you have a picture of Clara and Ruiz?" the tracker asked. The mother handed Ryder a silver-framed holo of her daughter.

The girl was a lively, sparkling, newly-minted chicklet. Taking advantage of something that innocent would be more than a crime; it would also be a crying shame.

            Another holo on the reverse clicked on, a picture of Clara and Ruiz together. The man was in his early thirties, perhaps--strikingly handsome in a classic Latin way. The two were dressed in tennis whites and whisked the implements of the game toward the viewer. Ruiz had his arm tight around the girl and both continued smiling brilliantly.

            "I should have know," Clara's mother moaned. "I should have suspected something between them."

            "These things aren't predictable," Ryder comforted her. "If they were, I wouldn't be earning a living the way that I do."

 

He jumped to 1863 in order to start his sniffing around. A lot of his work was purely intuitive. If he could locate traces of the missing pair at any point in their travels, he would then go backward to the moment of their arrival and stop them before anything got started between the two--unless they had begun their affair in their own time zone. Ryder had taken this kind of a commission four or five times previously and had a pretty good idea of how these things went.

            But, wait a tick. Where the heck was Ryder now? Some big hall like a museum or something--only no exhibits to admire. Here was a kid coming his way with--were those books? Good heavens, Ryder loved those things. To think of how people used to read print actually inked right onto the paper tickled his fancy. "Excuse me, son," he called out. "Can you tell me which way Gettysburg is?"

            The young man stared at Ryder as if he were completely nuts. "Huh?" was the only sound the boy managed to utter.

            "Where am I then?"

            "The physics department. Columbia University."

            "Oh, way off, I see. Sorry to bother you." Physics came after 1900 at least. Anyway, the kid wasn't dressed for the 1860s--more like the 1930s or so.

Ryder was only an ad hoc historian. He was unschooled, but he had been around the zones. Well, there must be a reason he had wound up here. Usually, he zeroed in on his time-line pretty well.

Ryder opened a door along the corridor at random. A man about his own age looked up and scowled. "Knock first, damnit," the man snapped out.

Ryder closed the door, noted the name plate reading `David J. Callahan, Ph.D.,' knocked, and turned the knob again without awaiting a reply. "Good-day," he said, groping for the proper salutation for the period. "I'm looking for these people." He displayed the hologram of the couple in their tennis gear.

            "Where the hell did you get something like this?" asked the academic, rising from his desk and grabbing for the holo.

            "Have you seen them?" Ryder persisted, pulling the picture out of the stranger's grasp.

"Is that done with a laser technology?" Callahan--presumably--wanted to know.

"I suppose so," answered Ryder without much interest. "Don't you people make holograms yet? What year is this, anyway?"

            "What year do you think it is?" The professor was gaping.

            "I aimed for 1863," acknowledged Ryder with some chagrin. "This doesn't seem to be the right century though." He picked up a calendar from his host's desk. It was cute--paper and print again and the pages turned one at a time. The year was 1963. Unbelievable. One hundred years off. Something in his psych-amp was on the blink--or something in Ryder Darvish was.

            Ryder sat on the desktop, trying to think. He swung his leg out and it thumped back hard against the wood. This old stuff really got him daffy with species nostalgia. Seeing the artifacts of history was one part of what he liked about his job. "I'm headed for Gettysburg," he explained. "I thought that would be a logical starting place for a Civil War buff. Or when Grant accedes to General Sherman."

            "You mean when Sherman surrenders to Grant," the man from the past corrected Ryder.

            Ryder laughed. "I believe it was the South that won the war," he insisted good humoredly. Boy, he thought, this was supposed to be a university.

            The academic gave Ryder a peculiar look.

            "Okay then," said Ryder, "if the South didn't win the Civil War, who won World War II? We should be able to agree on that."

            "The Allies," responded the man from 1963.

            "Well, they were allies, but not allies of ours. You mean the Germans and the Japanese won, isn't that right?"

            The stranger appeared more than merely dumfounded. "In your sense of world history, Germany and Japan won the war? That means in your view, they now dominate Europe and the Pacific?"

            Ryder was flabbergasted. What a bizarre conversation. "Certainly not," he protested in some confusion. "The German Revolution broke apart the Reich in 1947."

            Callahan sat there shaking his head. "I never thought I was the type of teacher to have my students play a prank on me. You'd better get out of here. I have too much to do to sit around and listen to this sort of nonsense."

            "Yeah," agreed Ryder. "I'd better get on with it. I have another hundred years to hop." He set the psych-amp, focused, and leaped. He prayed he had hit it just right this time.

            Ryder tried to shrug off that last encounter, but it smelled like something was rotten in the state of time. A creepy, icky feeling was giving him the chills.

 

Not only had he landed in the correct time zone; he'd hit on the right location as well. He was here in time for the Battle of Gettysburg, according to an astonished local farmer who seemed to think Ryder must be a Confederate general. The time tracker sat well out of view of the primitively, but dangerously armed combatants, chewing on a piece of grass (real grass!) and reflecting on his case. He about had the whiff of the tennis coach and the teenager now. Of course, he wasn't sure if they'd arrived yet, or would be arriving momentarily--or how he'd find them when they got here. The thing was, he always got his targets. He had the Talent. He could locate a hawk or a handsaw in a rainstorm, as the saying went.

            Ryder much preferred to skip witnessing the troops at war, but he supposed that Ruiz would pick the exact time of the conflict to appear because he lusted after the boom, boom, boom of the canons and blood and guts all over the battlefield. Gettysburg made a strange setting for the seduction of a teenage girl, but perhaps the trip was meant only as a history lesson and the two intended to return to the hotel a minute or two after their disappearance... Of course, Ryder believed that as much as he believed that history was set in stone.

            Without thinking, Ryder stood and started walking. This was the way he often did his tracking--by letting his feet lead him where they wanted to go.

            It wasn't only psychic ability that helped him find fugitives who had fled through time. Although sometimes Ryder missed and had to make two or three jumps before he struck gold, the tracker frequently zoomed in right away on the time and place his target had gone--sometimes by lucky guessing and sometimes by an indefinable "universal confluence." Much of the rest from that point on was legwork. He'd show up in the Union camp, maybe, and they'd say to him, "Gee, you're dressed funny, kind of like that other guy we saw yesterday by the river." Ryder would question them, narrowing down the time frame to find the exact spot, then jump back to the day before and grab his target.

            That's the way the search went more often than Ryder could have conceived when he'd started out in this career. How had he found his occupation? What a story that made! But no time to think about his personal past today. The detective plodded forward, right into an ambush.

 

Ryder was used to one-on-one confrontations, not war, and hadn't connected with the idea that sentries might be posted around the area or that the soldiers might view interlopers with some suspicion. Now that he thought about it, though, that precaution of theirs probably made some sense. Ryder's situation wasn't particularly distressing to him however. Whenever he liked, he could turn on the psych-amp and jump out of this place.

            The time tracker smiled to himself as two soldiers marched him on down the road. This was actually a positive, he realized. It would give him an opportunity to mix it up with the locals and get the lay of the land.

            Ryder and his guards reached a part of the field filled with canvas tents and milling soldiers. He was a little distracted upon realizing that by the end of the battle most of these men would be dead. About 50,000 had lost their lives at Gettysburg, he recalled from his research, twice the number who had perished in the Second American Revolution.

            Ryder was shepherded past men cleaning their gear or sitting around the cooking fires chatting. He glanced at them pityingly. The past up close was a bit different than history on the screen. It was raw and real, frightening at times.

            Ryder was taken to a tent where apparently he was to be kept under guard. But first, one of privates holding him captive went through Ryder's pockets despite the time tracker's snarls of protest. The psych-amp caught the soldier's attention.

            "I have my medication in there," Ryder explained. "I need it for my medical condition." He thumped his chest and faked a cough.

            "We'll see about that," grumbled the youngster, walking off with Ryder's lifeline back to his home.

            Well, such things had happened to Ryder before. Confiscation wasn't uncommon. He'd get his module back. Either that or live through the Reconstruction of the North. Ryder would probably wind up as a day laborer, wandering from place to place--such was his luck, and such were his skills in terms of 1863. The searcher's strong intention was not to get stuck in this time zone. At least in his own world if he could no longer sleuth, he had saved enough cash to open up an antique store.

            Since no cot was in evidence, Ryder lay on the ground and practiced pranayama breathing techniques. Every time one of the guards stuck his head in the tent, Ryder complained that he was sick and required his medicine.

            When Ruiz and Clara were unexpectedly tossed into the tent with Ryder a few hours later, the tracker brightened and stood up to greet the pair. He had hit his mark; he was the greatest. "Ah, fellow prisoners. Glad to see the two of you. I was starting to get lonely," Ryder exclaimed. 

            The tennis coach barely gave Ryder a glance. Obviously, he hadn't given a thought to the fact that Ryder was not only out of uniform, but that the clothing he was garbed in originated in another time and place.

            Clara noticed, however. Ryder could see it in her eyes, although the girl didn't speak. She looked bedraggled and frightened. Maybe by now she wanted to get away from her one true love. Or maybe the man had kidnapped the girl from the beginning, rather than having lured her into the past with sweet, loving words.

            Once the guards were gone, Ryder made his move. He simply punched the tennis-playing Casanova in the face, knocking him out. Clara screamed and flailed her hands at Ryder in defense of her companion, but the detective caught the child's arms and put his hand over her mouth, shushing her. "Quiet down. Your parents sent me here to bring you back. If I take my hand away, do you promise to be good? We don't want the soldiers interrupting us."

            His captive seemed to be suffocating, and Ryder tried taking his hand away from her mouth. The girl didn't scream, but bit at him. He quickly snatched his hand away.

            "Calm down," he begged her. "Calm down a minute." But Ryder had already turned away from the girl and was searching through Ruiz's pockets, looking for the psych-amp. Ryder hoped to God that the guards hadn't taken this one as well. He had some cold black caviar and vodka waiting for him at home.

            Then he clutched the Macon-300 and Ruiz was groaning and coming to. Ryder reached for the girl. He intended to get Clara out of this time and leave Ruiz to rot in the 19th century.

            The girl eluded Ryder's grasp. "We're not going with you," she said. "We don't want to go back."

            "That's all right," agreed Ryder. He inclined his head toward the tennis player who was starting to sit up. "He's not coming with us."

            Ryder should have jollied her along. But no, he had to be his own obnoxious, defiant self, showing off his power for the world in general and the little girl in particular. She ran behind Ruiz and threw her arms around him in a stranglehold. Ruiz himself pulled his girlfriend off.

            "What's going on?" demanded the coach.

            "You missed the second act," answered Ryder. "If I take you with us, back to 2055, you'll stand trial for at least a couple of capital-type crimes. If I were you, I'd choose to stay here." Not much call for tennis pros during the Civil War, any more than there was for time trackers, Ryder imagined. He sized Ruiz up. Another day laborer. But maybe in this time and place, teenagers married guys Ruiz's age and their parents thought it a desirable match.

            Well, Ryder'd lost the element of surprise and Clara didn't care to desert her paramour at Gettysburg. So Ryder considered one other option: simple force. Since that was his style much more than complex stratagems, he kicked Ruiz in the face, breaking his nose and stunning him, then pulled the little girl out of range of her Don Juan. The time tracker juiced the Macon-300 and held Clara's hand tightly while they headed for home.

 

He found it hard to believe he'd gotten off track again, but he surely had. Something was either wrong with him or all of time was going haywire. Ryder tended to suspect that time was behaving pretty much as usual, but that his own mechanisms were out of whack. On the other hand, it could be that the girl was pushing out some psych-influence of her own. Ryder turned and gave Clara a look of deepest suspicion, but she didn't appear to be harboring a single guilty thought. She glanced about in wonder at their surroundings. Ryder thought they must be in 1963 again, but the sight of a newspaper in what he guessed was a vending machine told him the year was 1982. The investigator really loved this old stuff, but he had no reason to have missed his own time by such a mile. Crap. He was cracking up. He might have to do day labor with the rest of the lowlies on his return to 2035 if he had lost his gift. If he was even able to return, in fact.

            "This isn't my home time-zone," the girl said at last.

"Aren't you a clever little thing," Ryder observed, irritated, as if she'd criticized him intentionally. He squared his shoulders, turned on the psych-amp, grabbed Clara's arm and jumped in one motion. He hoped to catch her off-guard in case she was placing her stamp on the destination.

            This time they landed in 1963. He knew because they were in Callahan's office. The professor blinked rapidly as Ryder appeared. He got up from his desk. "Where did she come from?" he demanded of Ryder. "Are you one of my students?" he turned and asked the girl.

            "How long was I gone?" Ryder wanted to know.

            "Gone? You weren't gone at all, although that would be very much appreciated."

            Ryder swore. If he weren't using the Macon-300 now, he would have believed that his psych-amp had gone on the blink. Instead, the time tracker himself appeared to be defective.

            His eyes met Clara's. The girl was clearly as puzzled about events as Ryder was. But he was the one who had to solve this conundrum. "All right. We'll go back and pick up your boyfriend, if you like," he told her as if they were striking a deal. "Want to go back to Gettysburg?" he offered temptingly. Maybe the teenager's focus would help them jump back accurately. He juiced the module.

            They had returned to the tent. Ruiz's hands were over his face. Both fingers and features were covered with blood.

            "Sorry," Ryder grunted. He gave a sickly smile as Ruiz backed away from him. "I feel bad about what happened," Ryder told the tennis coach. "Let's all return home together then. We'll go back to a time before you even left. No charges against you, everything fine and dandy, as it should be. You simply promise not to touch the girl and not to run away with her again. Is that fair?" A psych boost from Ruiz had better do the trick.

            Ruiz obviously had taken a minute or two to think about what life would be like for him in the 19th century. Maybe, like Ryder, he had honestly appraised his own ability to rise to a station befitting his inclinations. He nodded at the time tracker without removing his hands from his nose.

            Ryder smiled. This was one way of doing business--not a very profitable one. They would get back before he had been given the job of finding the girl and he wouldn't see one red cent from his endeavors. But at least he would be home; that counted for something. The three of them jumped.

 

Ruiz had been beaten by some muggers, he told the Peles. Ruiz actually was dazed and his memory wasn't working so well. Stepping into their own past took some people that way, Ryder mused. He was the one who had saved the tennis instructor from his assailants. Ryder knew from the way that Clara didn't take her eyes off him that she remembered the sequence of events with absolute clarity. She was a sharp one. He wondered what would become of her.

            He shook the girl's hand. "Good luck with your tennis," he said, trying to impart a warning about life with his farewell. Papa and Mama Pele thanked him for coming to the rescue of Ruiz and Clara.

            Ryder left the hotel. At least he still had the Macon-300. He could sell that and live on the proceeds for a while. In fact, he didn't feel like doing too much time traveling anymore. He had taken one trip too many and didn't know whether he was coming or going. Here he was in his own past and it wasn't the first time. Time-line dissonance addled the brain for some, the scientists said.

            He headed home. Maybe the problem was the thought of one day opening the door and finding himself already sitting on the sofa dining on vegetable pate and cold borscht.

            Such was not the case when he arrived in his apartment tonight, and he sighed in relief at being somewhere familiar. His message unit was blipping and he played back the vid.

            "Hi, honey," said Noreen sweetly. "I've been waiting for you. Even if you get home late, give me a call. Or just drop by. I've got to see you." Her Persian green eyes beckoned him to her and that same old sunny smile bore him a promise.

            Then the realization hit him. Ever since she had walked out, his time sense had gone blooey. Maybe that was his way of reacting to the loss of her love. And, funnier still, when the three of them had leaped at Gettysburg, once again Ryder had gone seriously off the rails. Although this was his own time-zone, he wasn't in the right time-track.

Where he came from, Noreen had broken away from him in anger. But in whatever time and place he was standing now, she was still in love with Ryder Darvish.

            Was that really so bad? he asked himself. He had nowhere special to go from here, anyway, and he probably wasn't capable of getting where he ought to be. He flipped the switch on his information center and dialed up the bank. Had he been the thrifty soul in this time track he always tried to be in the original one?

            The balance was nothing to sneer at, although not great wealth.

            He headed for Noreen's. He might as well surprise her.

            What he had always known about himself was true, he thought. He could turn on a dime, make any transition. If he got stuck in a time and place not his own, he would always be able to adjust.

                                                                        ############

 

 

G. Miki Hayden, who writes both mystery and science fictio,n also writes about writing. Miki’s latest book out is The Naked Writer, a style and composition guide.