Eventually, the thieves twig to his presence, which startles them considerably. Most owners would have announced themselves with some useless bluster, like What do you think you’re doing? (Stupid. What did it look like they were doing?) But this skeletal figure simply watches in silence and that puts the three a little off their game. There is something in his eyes, a certain quietus to his expression. Two of the three take involuntary steps back, but their leader thrusts his chin out. “Watcha lookin at, fool? This your car?”
Nagkmur says, “No,” but he means that it is not a car, not that it isn’t his.
“Then get your ass in gear and fart on outta here.” The other two think this the height of wit, or perhaps of poetry. Nagkmur is reminded of the old adage that “sin makes you stupid.” Criminal masterminds are genuinely rare upon the earth, and among their ranks these three are not to be numbered.
Nagkmur searches his newly impressed language and finds the warning he wants. “Please, to back away from transporter.” He adds a second command in pudding-wa and his vehicle hears and activates certain defenses.
The sudden hum alarms the youths, driving them together. “What’d you do, chink?” demands the leader.
“You are advised not to touch the transporter.”
“Yeah?” the leader mocks. “And what happens if I do?” And he stretches out an insolent fingertip to do just that.
The answer to his question is “electrocution.” His entire body stiffens, his eyes bulge, and his sneer pulls back into a rictus. A moment later, he drops insensate to the cobblestones.
It is a momentary distraction, and in that moment Nagkmur flicks his baton to half-extension and, whirling, breaks the wrist of the second thief, who is belatedly clawing a pistol from his waistband. Completing his spin, Nagkmur pivots into the Flying Mule, and catches the third tough with a shod foot to the side of the head. The boot is steel-toed so this young man joins his leader on the pavement.
The second one has had enough and, abandoning his companions to the Fates, he runs into the night, clutching his wrist to him.
Nagkmur knows an unseemly glow of satisfaction. He has never heard of the five stages of grief, but he is—by damn!—in number two. Ever since his discovery that the world had been wiped out, anger has been building up as in a capacitor, and it feels good to discharge the load, even on a trio of phantoms.
But there is no time for his bottled grief to pour forth. A distant siren heralds the approach of the local authorities. Someone on the graveyard shift has possessed sufficient civic virtue to summon the police—perhaps the man on the loading dock at the warehouse across the truck apron, ready to scribble the license plate number when Nagkmur’s vehicle pulls out of the shadows.
Of course, time machines do not “pull out” in any manner normally understood, nor do they bear license plates; but one admires the fellow’s staunch rectitude.
Nagkmur sighs. So much for passing unnoticed.
He kicks the dropped gun to a place where it will be found. The local police might learn something useful from its study, and as a fellow lawman he will make this one gesture in their aid.
That he intends to wipe all of them—police and thugs, bartenders, drunks, and warehousemen—from the very face of the Earth is no reason to neglect courtesy.
His vehicle senses his shield number and the door permeates to allow him entry. He seals up and activates the external screens and audio pickups. The transporter’s hull clarifies, providing him with an ecumenical view of his surroundings. He drops into his seat, takes a deep breath and, wasting no time in light of the approaching sirens, brings up a map of the phantom world that he had earlier gleaned from a radio-accessible juku. He identifies “Manhattan” and enters its coordinates into the transporter. Then he kicks in the temporal precessor and the aetherial gyroscopes spin up.
That is when the hammer hits.
Something blacker than the night emerges from the shadowy interior of the electronics warehouse. It is a great ebon sphere peppered with lights like a thousand eyes, as if a portion of the starry sky has come to ground. The warehouseman flees without getting its number, and the apparition sprints toward the transporter in a complex, five-legged gait that defies description. Terror chokes Nagkmur’s throat.
Then he pops the clutch and detaches from the space-time manifold. His transporter coasts backward and spinward along the worldline, and he removes trembling hands from the control yoke.
What was that? he wonders. Has it anything to do with the catastrophe that has marooned him here? Perhaps he should have confronted it, interrogated it. But deep within, down where the shaking has its roots, he is quite as happy he had not.
He reaches lower Manhattan earlier that same evening and coasts out of phase until he locates the nexus of the apartment house fire. Then he finds a nearby abandoned building where he can conceal his transporter and backs up a few hours to give himself time for his preparations.
External sensors show no signs of life beyond the usual small and scuttling things common to derelict buildings, so he reattaches to the manifold. Papers, dirt, and other detritus swirl about in the air displaced by his point-expansion, and his transporter settles into the moment.
He sits for a while in his saddle, arms dangling at his sides, breathing slowly and calmly and calling upon his balance. In fear and trembling, the Superior Man sets his life in order and examines himself. His son, his father, his brothers and colleagues… they had never been. Or “will not have been,” however this new language expresses such thoughts. Their resurrection is now up to him. To escape difficulties, the Superior Man falls back upon his inner worth. Resolutely, he stuffs the terrifying apparition into another corner of his mind for later consideration. It had likely been no more than the drunken binge making one last punishment for his sin.
Upon first apprehending the calamity, Nagkmur had fled into the distant past, lest he be extinguished when his colleagues restored the worldline. But where the massive buildings of Deep Time HQ had once stood, the broad interglacial steppes had swept unvexed to the horizon. He knew then beyond all hope of doubt that the Shy?n Baw had never been, and of his entire Department he alone survived. It would be up to him to restore the true history.
But to rectify the worldline, he must identify the nexus at which time had gone awry. And to do that, he must research the phantom history and compare it to the true history. And to do that, he needs an epoch far enough forward to have radio-accessible juku, but not so far forward that time would have abraded the crucial details into smooth and shiny fables.
He has already spent time in Chicago learning the geography and impressing the dominant language on his neural pathways so that he can read and even habitually think in it. Now he must begin his search in earnest. Somewhen within this unknown history, written in this half-grasped tongue, nestles that singular incident which has derailed the proper course of time.
And that was why the Shy Hero in Manhattan—who would be saving a phantom baby later this very night—was so important. For why should he recognize anyone in this fate-condemned world unless she too were a traveler orphaned by time?
Consider now the woman fleeing a burning apartment building on the edge of the West Village in Manhattan. Fire holds a special horror for her so she cannot say even afterward why she turns aside to grab the crying baby from the first-floor apartment. She has learned not to care overmuch about the shadows among whom she lives, but the infant’s cries touch something primal within her and she hardly knows what she is doing when she snatches it from Moloch’s jaws.