“What?” said Lucas. “Are you saying that…”
But suddenly, the chair was empty. Darkness had simply disappeared. Except for the empty whiskey glass standing on the table, it was as if he’d never been there.
Neilson clocked back into Tombstone shortly before dawn. P.R.T. (Present Relative Time). He had been gone slightly longer than twelve hours, but only three minutes had elapsed in 19th-century Tombstone since he had left. He had “gained” a day, a phenomenon of time travel that was one of the most difficult things fin rookie temporal agents to grow accustomed to. They would depart upon a mission to the past, or Minus Time, and could be gone for days or weeks or months or even years, yet when they returned, often no more than several hours had passed. And duty spent in Plus Time, or in the 27th century, was all that counted toward the completion of an enlistment period. This was always made very clear to new recruits, but the consequences of it were often overlooked, Since there were two different pay scales in the service-one for duty served in the present and one for time spent in the past, with the latter being far more lucrative. The pay scale for Temporal Observers, for example, was higher than that found in almost any other career, and if one was able to avoid the hazards of the duty and survive to complete his tour of enlistment, he could retire a very wealthy man.
But it was not, by any means, a route to easy street. As Neilson had already discovered. It was an exciting way to make a living, but it was highly dangerous. as well. Most temporal agents found that they had to leave their former. civilian lives completely behind them. After Neilson had returned from his first assignment to the past, he had taken some leave and gone back to Tucson to visit his family and his girl. It had been a shock to them to discover how much he had changed. For them, from the time he had gone off to join the service to the time he returned from his first tour of Observer duty in the past, only a month or so had elapsed. For Scott, it had been four years. Four years in which he had grown immeasurably older and more experienced He had found it difficult to connect with them. His girl, whom he had loved with all the fierce intensity of youth, had suddenly seemed immature and superficial. And the concerns of his family seemed suddenly irrelevant to him. He was still his mother’s little boy.” but he had returned a man and found that she could not snake the adjustment Since then, he had not gone back home again. It was a different time and place
As he reappeared inside his room in the Grand Hotel, it looked no different than when he had left, about twelve hours earlier. Only minutes had passed here. The outline of Jennifer’s head was still impressed into the pillow. He gazed at the rumpled sheets on the bed and thought about her. He found those thoughts disturbing.
It was hard to believe she was a prostitute. He was not naive about the subject. He was in the service, he’d been with prostitutes before. Only this had been different. He’d only had a couple of experiences with hookers and, at first, there had been a sort of illicit thrill to it, but it was a thrill that was very short-lived. He knew that some men liked going with prostitutes because it was easy, uncomplicated sex, coupled with a sort of sleazy thrill, but he had found it frustrating and unsatisfying. He’d heard it said that prostitution victimized women because it made them into objects, but in another sense, it also victimized those who patronized them-to the hookers, they were objects, too. There was really no personal connection. It was, in many respects, a lot like masturbating. He had found it even less satisfying, because there was another human being involved, yet there was no real emotion, no affection, no genuine desire or intimacy. And when it was over, he was left with an empty feeling.
Only with Jennifer, it had been different. He had expected a relatively quick coupling, with little or no foreplay, and with her making all the obligatory expressions and sounds of sexual passion, only it had not turned out that way. It had started with that damn calico dress. It made her look like something out of Little Women, for God’s take, demure and innocent. The moment they entered the room, he had expected her to start stripping in a matter-of-fact way, only she hadn’t done that. She had approached him rather shyly, put her hands upon his shoulders and stood on tiptoe to kiss him softly on the lips. It was a hesitant, gentle kiss, almost chaste. They had exchanged several kisses like that, very brief and tentative, and then she had sighed as he pressed her against him and started undoing the buttons on the back of her dress.
In bed, he had marveled at the soft, lithe suppleness of her, the flawless, creamy skin, the gentle curves, the silky texture of her hair… They spent almost half an hour languorously exploring one another’s bodies, kissing and caressing and whispering endearments to each other, and when they moved beyond the foreplay and started making love, that too had been nothing like what he’d expected. There were no melodramatics; rather there had been a genuine, loving intimacy that took him completely unprepared. He could not believe she was that good an actress. He had climaxed quickly, carried away by the intensity of his feelings, yet she had not gotten out of bed to use the washbasin, dressed and gone away. Instead, she had lingered, and they had held each other and talked, and then they made love once more, and the second time, as she reached orgasm, she had cried out softly and wept real tears. She left shortly before dawn, after hugging him and holding him close for a long time, and it was only after she had gone that he had realized she had never even mentioned money.
He wondered what the hell he was getting into. Was he falling in love with a hooker? Jesus, that would be really stupid. Stupid and destructive. And yet, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. What they had shared was real. He had no doubt of that. He did not know how he felt about it. Logically, he told himself, he should forget it. Don’t get involved. He had a job to do and he could not afford distractions. Nor could he afford to fall in love with someone who, when he was born, had already been dead for over eight hundred years.
He could not reconcile the image of the tender and loving young woman he had made love to with the image of a girl who worked in a saloon and hustled drinks and would have sex with any cowboy who could afford the price. A hooker with a heart of gold? Come on, he told himself, get real. Don’t be an asshole. Yet, he kept thinking of her lying on top of him, with her hand gently placed against his cheek, her beautiful blue eyes gazing deeply into his, as if in wonderment
…
Don’t do this, he thought to himself. It was just a brief sexual encounter, nothing more. She had been excited by the prospect of making it with a handsome, dangerous, young gunfighter and there was nothing more to it than that. Hell, it was probably only a come-on. Next time, she’d charge him. If there was a next time. He knew it would be stupid. There would be no next time, he told himself. However, his resolution lacked conviction. He sat down on the bed and touched the pillow where her head had lain Jesus, he thought, she had actually cried.
Why had she cried?
Hop Town was west of the Tombstone business district, just past Third Street, yet it might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was Tombstone’s Chinatown, home to some five hundred Chinese immigrants, “coolies.” as they were often called, who came to work on railroad construction gangs and in mining operations and in laundries and whatever other menial labor they could find. For most of the Chinese residents, it was a temporary situation, a way to find some work and make some money and return to the homeland, so they made little attempt to become acculturated to American society. As a result, Hop Town was like a little slice of China dropped into the frontier. Most of the residents of Tombstone never ventured there, preferring their own saloons to the Chinese opium dens and gambling houses. There was one exception.
Jennifer Reilly entered the opium parlor and held her breath as she walked through the smoke-filled room with its tiers of wooden couches, like cramped little bunk beds, most of them occupied by Chinese men reclining in states of drug-induced stupor. Jennifer had often thought that if there really was a Hell, it must be a lot like this. Heaven, she imagined, with a childlike simplicity, would be like some Elysian field, with waving heather and wildflowers and dreamy little thatch-roofed cottages from which harp music emanated while laughing little children, those innocents who had tragically died young, ran barefoot through the grass with little lambs and goats. It was a wistful vision, made melancholy by her certainty that she would never go there when she died.
She wasn’t sure if she would go to Hell. She was a sinner, of that she had no doubt. She never went to church. Aside from the fact that it would have scandalized the respectable women of Tombstone if she had done so, she knew that she did not belong there. Church, like Heaven and Hell, was a place where people went. Real people. Not creatures like herself.
Often, when she looked in the mirror, she thought to herself that she looked real. She looked pretty-she knew that because so many men had told her so, and she knew they could not tell that she was not what she appeared to be. When she examined her own image in the minor, she thought that she could not tell, either. But she knew. She would often think to herself, longingly, ‘How am I different?” And yet she knew she was. Because she had not been born. She had been made.
The nature of her creation was something that she didn’t really understand. God created Man and Woman. The Master had created her. He was the closest thing to God that she would ever know.
He had made her in his laboratory, where she had been born not of a woman, but of an artificial womb, and
