And he was throwing the blame straight between my eyes.
I felt a stirring of anger inside me. I'd done my best, damn it, considering the tightrope I had to walk here. Didn't he see that? Or did he simply not care?
He didn't care. That was it. He was just a musician, a barroom pianist who couldn't even hold onto the same job for more than a week at a time. How dare he judge me? How _dare_ he?
I clenched my teeth as the music buffeted me, feeling my heart pounding its own indictment of my incompetence. I knew Weldon was looking at me, and I knew what his expression must be. I wished violently that I could turn my head around so that I could look him squarely in the eye; wished bitterly that I could free my tongue so that I could snarl his pious self-righteousness back at him. My hand twitched, aching to reach over and slap the contempt right off his face --
I caught my breath. _My hand had twitched?_
I tried again. This time, to my astonishment, the whole arm moved a little.
And not just my arms. My legs were twitching now, the agony of massive cramps changing to the subtler pain of the cramps working themselves out.
I turned my head -- I could do it now -- and looked at Weldon.
He was looking back at me, all right, but not with the contempt I'd imagined would be there. His face was fixed and intent, his eyes blazing with some of the same anger and resolution that was pile- driving its way through my rapidly relaxing muscles.
He didn't speak, maybe afraid of breaking the spell. Neither did I, for the same reason. Just as he'd done with Amanda, he'd found a way to connect his music with my soul and my need, whipping up anger and adrenaline and sheer willpower, forcing my body to burn off the effects of the paralyzer far more quickly than should ever have been possible.
They were out the door by the time I was able to get shakily to my feet. But not very far out; and more to the point, they wouldn't be expecting me. I nodded to Weldon, got an answering nod that somehow also asked if I would need help. I smiled tightly and shook my head; and as I crossed the room I could hear the music once again change mood. No longer angry, it was now glowing with a triumph that said he was trusting me to come through.
I wasn't going to let him down.
They were two doorways away, two of them holding Amanda still while the third was trying to reattach the restrainer I'd taken off her neck. Watching the street for cops, they never even knew anything was wrong until I had dropped the first of them. They had me spotted by the time I dropped the second. The third had just enough time for a curse and a hopeless lunge for his weapon before he joined his pals on the pavement.
Amanda was standing there shaking as I hurried up. "W-who -- ?" she began shakily.
"It's all right, Miss Lowell," I soothed her, crouching down and slipping a dog-collar restrainer around the neck of each of the unconscious men. Only then did I return my stunner to its holster. "It's all over. My name's Sigmund Corcoran; I'm a private investigator. Your father hired me to find you."
Her eyes searched my face as I stood up again. "I can go home?" she asked, as if still not believing it.
"Absolutely," I assured her. "Our portal is in an apartment in Columbus. Let me bundle up these characters where they'll keep for an hour or two, call it in to my coordinator, and I'll drive you there. You'll be home in five hours."
She looked down at the men. "You're not going to just leave them here, are you?"
"Absolutely not," I said grimly, grabbing one under the arms and starting to drag him to a nearby alley. "Aside from anything else, I rather like watching kidnap trials."
It took some long and fancy persuasion to get Sir Charles and the authorities to allow me to go back. Even then, they made me wait until two months after I'd brought Amanda home.
Which was fine with me. I'd been planning to wait that long anyway.
The biographies said that Weldon had quit his barroom career by this point and was writing full-time out of a downtown Pittsburgh apartment. He seemed cautiously pleased to see me. "Hello, Sigmund," he greeted me, stepping back to let me into the room. "I was hoping you'd come back."
"It took some doing," I said. "But I managed to convince them it would be safer to give you the whole story than leave you with only half of it."
"I have a full half, do I?" he asked wryly as he waved me to a somewhat threadbare chair.
"Possibly a bit less," I conceded, studying his face as I sat down.
Two months had worked wonders on the man. The emptiness I'd seen in his eyes that last night was gone, replaced by the creative fire the biographies had so often commented on. "You're looking good," I added. "Much better than the last time I saw you."
"I could say the same about you," he reminded me. He hesitated, just noticeably. "How is Amanda?"
"She's fine," I assured him. "She sends her greetings, and her deep thanks."
"So what exactly was that all about?" he asked, sitting down on a mismatched couch across from me. "I watched the papers for days, but there wasn't a thing in there. I was about ready to march into the police station and demand some answers."
"I thought you might," I said. "That's one reason I pushed them to let me come back."
"Back from where?" he asked, some tension creeping into his face as he leaned forward. "Russia? China?"
I shook my head. "I'm from the future, Weldon. To be precise, from November 7, 2153."
He took it better than I'd expected him to. A couple of owlish blinks of the eyes, and he was back on track again. "Two hundred years exactly," he said thoughtfully. "Coincidence?"
"No, that's just how it works," I told him. "You can only do jumps in one-hundred-year multiples. No one knows why."
"I've read stories about that sort of thing," he said. "Science fiction, they call it. I never thought it could really happen. So Amanda was a time-traveler too?"
"A very unwilling one," I said. "She was a kidnap victim."
That one got me no less than three blinks. "She was _kidnapped? _" he asked. "Why?"
"The usual reason," I told him. "Her father has a lot of money. A gang of sewage-eaters wanted some of it."
He mulled at that a moment. "And they decided to hide her in the past while they waited for the ransom to be paid?"
"Basically," I said, rather impressed he'd made the connection so quickly. "It's a little trickier than that -- they wanted some complicated power transfers instead of straight cash. But never mind that. The point is that it was going to take time, and the way everything's interconnected they knew they could never hide her that long."