When we went out, there weren’t as many people as usual. Bill said it was between shifts. Somewhere along the way, Jaybee joined us. We went down stairs and around corners. I didn’t recognize anything or anyone from before, but then everyone looked alike. Almost everyone was the same size, their hair was cut alike, they wore the same clothes, they had the same dead, no-expression blanks for faces. We came to a gate with two men outside who were dressed a little differently, in high-buttoned jackets and hats with metal trim on them.
“Cleaning crew,” Jaybee said in the bored voice everyone used.
“You’re early,” one of the metal-hats complained.
“We’re late,” said Bill. “Should have been here last shift. There’s a stalled walkway down toward the nine-hundreds and everybody’s jammed up.”
The man nodded without paying any attention and let us through. Inside were more corridors and stairs, and then Alice came out of a room and walked along with us. She was carrying a little bag.
“Janice is already down in the control room,” she said.
She was there when we arrived, dressed as we were. She nodded at us, then we all moved out into the huge, high room where the machine was. I hadn’t really looked at it from the outside before. It looked like it was made out of rock, like a great tub carved from stone. The door of it clanged behind us. Alice pushed some buttons. My insides came out through my nose, and then back in again.
“Quick,” said Alice. “We’ve only got seconds.”
Bill opened the door and we all fell out. When we turned to look behind us, the machine was shimmering, then it was gone. In its place was a signpost pointing ten miles to a place I had never heard of.
“Nineteen ninety something or other,” Janice murmured. “In what used to be the States of America. And God help us.”
[We found her! We feared she had gone forever, except we could feel what was inside her, pulsing a little, like a faraway heart still beating. We knew she was still alive, for I could feel her life, just as I could feel that life dwindling. All we could do was lurk along the borders of that time and hope she would come out Oh, the pain of living where there is no magic at all Even humans need a little of it. The Holy One, Blessed be He, knew that. Perhaps it is why he put both our races here to begin with.
Never mind. We’ve found her. We know where she is. She is in a time of little magic, but there may be enough. We can reach her, slowly, slowly, setting our lures, readying our hooks. We will draw her back to us!]
14
July 1991
We joined the homeless, many of whom are from the twenty-first and slightly later times. Janice said it was odd the authorities of the 1980s never caught on to the fact that the homeless sprouted rather suddenly. Time-travel was perfected in 2080, and the hundred-year limit means that the homeless began showing up in the 1980s, many of them with limited communications skills, covering up by pretending to be crazy. There’s a secret finger sign we travelers use among ourselves to tell each other that we’re what we call “comebacks,” and there are enough real 1980s homeless that we comebacks can hide among them without difficulty.
Evidently the people in this time decided to knock down all the poor people’s hovels because they weren’t nice enough and close all the asylums for crazy people because they weren’t perfect either, but the people who had lived in the hovels and the asylums didn’t have any other place to go, so now they live under bridges and places like that. I think we did it better back in the fourteenth. At least we didn’t knock down hovels just because they were substandard. It seems to me substandard is better than nothing.
Anyhow, Bill and the rest of us took advantage of the situation by seeking shelter in an almshouse run by the Church, which did not surprise me at all, though the first time I attended Mass I was considerably astonished. The priest did the whole thing facing us and speaking English, which is what the language is now called. Evidently no one uses Latin anymore. I thought of all those sessions with Father Raymond and could have cried.
Jaybee and Alice and Janice had a big fight, and then Jaybee and Alice left for some big, big city where they can both sort of disappear into the mob. I was so glad when Jaybee went. It was like smelling rain after a long dry spell, just to know he was gone. Bill and Janice have signed up for job training here. You have to, or they won’t let you stay in the almshouse, that is, the shelter. After a few weeks of being tutored by Bill in arithmetic and by Janice in geography and current history, which I know nothing about (Bill shakes his head and tells me not to believe half of what Janice
