He wavered, then hesitantly, almost on tiptoe, he crossed the street and stepped up to the heavy wooden door of The Vigilant Rowsby. The place’s old name sign squeaked gently back and forth on its chains over his head as he tried to work up the nerve to take hold of the S-shaped iron door handle.
The decision was taken out of his hands when the door was yanked open from the inside and a tall, burly man stepped out onto the pavement, seeming almost propelled by the burst of warm air, redolent of beef and beer and candle tallow, that billowed out around him. “What’s the problem. Jack?” exclaimed the man loudly. “No pence for beer? Here. When Morningstar drinks, everybody drinks.” He dropped a handful of copper into Doyle’s pocket. “In you go.” Morningstar placed a giant hand between Doyle’s shoulder blades and shoved him inside.
Keeping his face averted from most of the tables and booths, Doyle hurried to the long counter at one end of the room and bought a beer from the bored-looking publican. Doyle brushed his hair down across his forehead and then tilted the heavy glass beer mug up to his face and, with only his eyes showing, turned his back to the counter and started a slow scan of the room while he took the first long sip.
Halfway through it he froze, and almost choked on his beer. The man who had been whistling was sitting over a beer in a tall-backed booth against the far wall; his hat was set next to his glass, and the candle on the table lit his slack, blear-eyed face clearly. It was Steerforth Benner.
When he had convinced himself that he was neither mistaken nor hallucinating, Doyle gulped some more beer. Why hadn’t Benner returned with the rest of the party? Had anyone else missed the boat? Doyle pushed away from the counter and, taking his beer with him, crossed to Benner’s table. He slipped his free hand into his coat pocket and gripped the ruined pistol.
The big, sandy-haired man didn’t look up when Doyle stood over him, so Doyle lifted the pistol inside his coat until the muzzle showed as a ring against the taut fabric, and then shook him by the shoulder.
Benner looked up, his wheat-colored eyebrows raised in irritable inquiry. “Yes?” he said, and then, carefully, “What is it?”
Doyle was impatient. Why did the man have to be drunk? “It’s me, Steerforth. It’s Doyle.” He sat down on the opposite side of Benner’s table, letting the barrel of the concealed gun clank onto the wood. “This is a pistol here,” he said, “and it’s pointed, as you can see, at your heart. Now I want some answers to some questions.”
Benner was staring at him in wide-eyed, slack-jawed horror. He said quickly, the words tumbling out of his mouth, “Christ Brendan don’t torture me are you real, I mean there, good God you’re not a ghost or a DT are you? Say something, god-dammit!”
Doyle shook his head disgustedly. “I should pretend to be a ghost, just to see you really crack. Get hold of yourself. I’m real. Do ghosts drink beer?” Doyle performed this trick, without taking his eyes off Benner. “Obviously you know I was shot at Sunday. Tell me who did it and why—and who else is going around whistling Yesterday.”
“They all are, Brendan,” said Benner earnestly. “All the boys Darrow brought back here with him. The tune’s a recognition signal with them, like that three note thing the Jets whistled to each other in West Side Story.”
“Darrow? He’s back here? I thought the return trip worked.”
“The trip you came along on? Sure it worked. Everybody except you got back fine.” Benner shook his head ponderously. “I’ll never know why you wanted to stay here, Brendan.”
“I didn’t want to. I was kidnapped by a crazy gypsy. But what are you telling me, then? That Darrow came back again? How could he? Did he find new gaps to jump through?”
“No. Why should he need to? Look, the whole Coleridge speech thing was just a lucky way to finance Darrow’s real purpose—which was to move back here to eighteen-goddamn-ten permanently. He was hiring open- minded, history-savvy lads to be his personal retinue—physician bodyguards—that’s the job I got that I wouldn’t tell you about, remember? And then he noticed that old Coleridge was giving a speech in London during the period of the gap. He’d been having problems paying for everything, and this was the solution—get a million a head from ten rich culture freaks to go hear Coleridge. And he decided he needed a Coleridge expert for that, and that’s when he hired you. But all along, the main… objective… was to come back again, just him and his hand-picked staff, to live. So when the Coleridge party got back to 1983, he hustled them all off into cars and then set up for another jump back to the same September first gap, and we jumped again. But this time we arrived in the middle of the gap, an hour or so after all of you—us—had driven off to see Coleridge, and we cleaned up the signs of our arrival and were long gone by the time the two coaches came back, minus one Coleridge expert, and waited for the gap to end.” Benner grinned. “It would have been fun to drive to the Crown and Anchor and look in on ourselves. Two Benners and two Darrows! Darrow even thought about doing it, and seeing that you didn’t go AWOL, but he decided that changing even that small a bit of history would be too risky.”
“So why does Darrow want me killed?” demanded Doyle impatiently. “And if Darrow’s so damn concerned about the inviolability of history, why has he kidnapped William Ashbless?”
“Ashbless? That jerk poet you were writing about? We haven’t messed with him. Why, isn’t he around?”
Benner seemed to be sincere. “No,” Doyle said. “Now quit ducking the question. Why does Darrow want me dead?”
“I think he wants us all dead, eventually,” Benner muttered into his beer. “He’s been promising that his staff will be permitted to return to 1983 through a gap in 1814, but I’m pretty sure he intends to kill us all, one by one, as he stops needing us. He’s holding all our mobile hooks, and he’s already killed Bain and Kaggs—those were the two who were supposed to do you in a week ago. And then this morning I overheard him order me shot on sight. I managed to grab a fair amount of cash and get away, but now I don’t dare go near him.” Benner looked up unhappily. “You see, Brendan, he doesn’t want anyone else here who knows twentieth century things—radio, penicillin, photography, all that kind of stuff. He was worried you’d patent a heavier than air flying machine, or publish ‘Dover Beach’ under your own name, or something like that. He was very relieved when I—”
There was a pause that lengthened uncomfortably while a hard smile deepened the lines in Doyle’s cheeks. “When you reported to him that you’d shot me through the heart.”
“Christ,” whispered Benner, closing his eyes, “don’t shoot me, Brendan. I had to, it was self-defense: he’d have had me killed if I didn’t. Anyway, it didn’t kill you.” He opened his eyes. “Where did it hit you? I didn’t miss.”
“No, it was a good shot, square in the center of the chest. But I was carrying something under my jacket, and it stopped your bullet.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad of that.” Benner smiled broadly and rocked back in his seat. “You say you didn’t choose to go AWOL from the Coleridge trip? Then you and I can help each other tremendously.”
“How?” Doyle asked skeptically.
“Do you want to get back? To 1983 ?”
“Well… yes.”
“Good. So do I. Man, don’t know what you got till it’s gone, eh? You know what I miss most? My stereo. Christ, back home I could play all nine Beethoven symphonies in one day if I wanted to, and Tchaikovsky the next. And Wagner! And Gershwin! Janis Joplin! Hell, it used to be fun to drive up to the Dorothy Chandler and hear things in concert, but it’s lousy if that’s the only way you can hear ‘em.”
“So what’s your plan, Benner?”
“Well—here, Brendan, have a cigar—and,” he waved at a barmaid, “let me get us another round, and I’ll tell you.”
Doyle took the cigar, a long Churchill-sized thing with no band or cellophane wrapper, and bit a notch in the end; then, again without taking his eyes off the other man, he lifted the candle and puffed the cigar alight. It didn’t taste bad.
“Well,” began Benner, lighting one for himself when Doyle put down the candle, “to begin with, the old man’s nuts. Crazy. Smart as you could ask for, of course, a very shrewd guy, but he hasn’t got both oars in the water anymore. You know what he’s had us all doing since we got here? When we could be, I don’t know, booking passage for Sutler’s Mill and the Klondike? He’s bought a damn shop in Leadenhall Street and outfitted it, completely, as a for God’s sake depilatory parlor—you know? Where you go to get unwanted hair removed?—and he’s had two men staffing it at all times, from nine in the morning until nine-thirty at night!”
Doyle frowned thoughtfully. “Did he… say why?”
