The tall blonde led me away from the Zwickau Marketplace. I looked behind us one last time at the Gypsy wagon and its little clutch of tents, beneath a setting crescent moon.
“Professor,” she said, “I need to know how much you remember about me.”
I looked at her as we walked. She did look familiar. But every time I tried to recall anything about her, it was like trying to recapture a forgotten dream.
“Ms. Moro, I...”
“Ariyl! Call me Ariyl!”
“Fine, Ariyl.” Then I shook my head. “Nothing. Can’t you just tell me?”
“I wish. But it doesn’t work that way.” She rubbed her forehead, frustrated. “Um, look...tell me about the sand in your pockets.”
“I don’t know where it came from. It was there when I woke up in that alley this morning. But I remember it was hot. Burning hot sand. Like a desert.”
I suddenly had a tactile memory of sand undulating beneath me, like a gritty wave on a scorching dry ocean...and feeling whatever the dry equivalent of mal de mer is.
A shooting pain went through my head. I gasped, winced and clamped my hand over my eyes.
“What is it?” she asked, holding my shoulders.
“Light. I remember blinding light that I couldn’t shut out even with my arm over my face. I could see my own bones like shadows inside my skin. And a roar so loud my ears are still ringing. I’ll never forget the sound.”
“Of what?” she pressed.
A jolt of memory electrified me. “The asteroid! I saw it! It was burning its way through the sky. I was in the desert...wait. I was in the Australian outback.”
“How did you get there?”
“I don’t know. But I feel like right before that, I was in a freezing blizzard. With snow everywhere.”
“Right. You were in my era: 2109, in an ice age that shouldn’t have happened. That’s what we have to prevent.”
“Prevent an asteroid impact?!”
“Nobody else can do it.”
“And by we, you mean, you and me?”
“Yes. And one other person. Now focus up, David...do you remember seeing anyone else in that blizzard?”
The ache in my skull subsided. Unexplained images elbowed their way into my consciousness.
“A black woman. Really tall.”
“Right. What was her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think, David! You have to remember!”
“I know that I was kind of drunk. On red wine.”
“Okay, okay. Where did you have this wine?”
“A restaurant named...Brannigan’s? I think that’s it.”
“Who were you there with?”
“I was...I was with my folks.”
“What are their names?”
“Mom and Dad. Oh, you mean...uh, Jenny and Richard Preston. And my big brother, Brad. They were all there at the table.”
She stopped and faced me.
“You’re doing great,” she said. “Can you remember anyone else?”
I concentrated. The mental fog began to lift. Now I could see in my mind’s eye, my family’s faces, as if I were still sitting with them. As if it had just been last night.
“I remember a beautiful woman.”
Ariyl Moro smiled. “And?”
“She was, uh...”
She gazed into my eyes, nodding, encouraging. At once, her name came to me.
“Moira.”
The tall blonde gave a disgusted grunt.
“Moira Shea. I’m sure of it,” I insisted. “I can see her face—she was lovely. Auburn hair...”
Ariyl Moro turned on her heel and marched on towards the fields at the edge of Zwickau. I hurried to catch up, as more memories stumbled into my consciousness.
“And I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think I might have been engaged to this Moira. Does that sound right?”
“For you? It sounds just about perfect,” she snapped, not breaking her stride.
“What’s the matter? Are you upset? Where are we going, anyway?”
“New York City, 1902. To finish putting history back the way it was before you screwed with it.”
“Will you tell me what went wrong? I mean, did someone get killed? Did a war start?”
“When you were in her tent, I heard you give her the Pentol, and tell her to forget you. But I just had a bad feeling. So I went to 1912...”
“Just now?”
“I can return within a minute of leaving, if there’s no paradox involved. I only stayed ten minutes to see if everything’s fixed. It’s not. She still has the wrong name.”
“Who? Kati Brumbach?”
“She’s not supposed to be Kati Brumbach. She was supposed to become Katie Sandwina.”
She said the name as if it were Madame Curie. But ‘Katie Sandwina’ meant nothing to me.
“And?”
“I went to see her at the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and she was billed as Katie Brumbach.”
“Well, Katie is just Kati anglicized. But why wasn’t it Katie Heymann? You said she was going to marry Max.”
She whirled so suddenly I almost ran into her.
“Well, she didn’t. And why are you smiling?”
For some reason, I didn’t want to admit I still had a thing for Kati. Instead, I snapped back at her.
“Hey, I did exactly what you told me to do!”
“It wasn’t enough, professor. They’re going to meet one day late. That must have thrown off other things, and multiplied over two years, it made a difference.”
“One day made that big a difference?” I scoffed.
“History says she and Max got married in 1903 and he was her partner onstage. But in this timeline, her first American tour will be a bust, and they’ll break up in 1902. She never became a famous strongwoman. By 1912 she’ll be doing some stupid tumbling act at the circus. Not even in the center ring.”
“That sucks,” I said, sincerely. “She could have been a star.”
“Katie Sandwina was a star. She was as big as you could be in America in 1912. She made all the papers: the stronglady who tosses her husband around like a toy. She was a hero to the women’s movement. And 1912 was the year she became the vice president of the suffrage group at the circus.”
“And that’s what you went expecting to see?”
“Only there was no group, because she wasn’t who she was supposed to be.”
“Okay. I can see Katie Sandwina was a powerful symbol. While Katie, the tumbler... no one even gave her a tumble.”
“That’s not funny, David. Thanks to you, she didn’t do any of it.”
“C’mon, were circus suffragettes that important in the whole scheme of things? You know, Sandwina’s not exactly a major historical figure in my time.”
“Your time is pretty clueless about a lot of things.”
“So educate me.”
“There was supposed to be a Nineteenth Amendment that let women vote, right?”
“Yeah.” I rummaged around in my mental attic, which was still only dimly lit. “Ratified in 1920, I think.”
“Well, it won’t happen till 1951 in this timeline.”
“Uh-oh. And did you go to 2109...?”
She nodded, impatient.
“The world’s still a ski resort with nobody left to ski.”
“All right. What else do you want me to do?”
“You know that German bodybuilder I showed you in the nickelodeon machine?”
“Eugen Sandow.”
“However you say it. He has to be there at her first performance in New York City in 1902. In the history we’re heading into right now, he never shows up!”
“Oh, I get it! He was a big star, and he discovered her and made her famous?”
Ariyl Moro stared at me for a long beat.
“Yeahhh...no,” she drawled. She looked at me like a second-grader who’d just asked her to explain quantum mechanics to him. “Look, I just need you to help me track him down. You’re really good at that stuff. But once we find him, let me do all the talking.”
Well, Ms. Moro was the time traveler. I was just hitching a ride home.
That is, if she wasn’t lying or crazy. I didn’t doubt that I had somehow gone back in time, but I wasn’t convinced it was her doing. My memory might be slow in recovering, but I didn’t recall ever seeing her alleged ability to time travel. Still, she held all the cards. I saw no alternative to going along with what she wanted.
“Fine. What do you know about this guy Sandow? Do you know where he lived?”
“England. But he visited America a lot. He was a super successful author. I know the day and time of Katie’s show, which is the same day when he was in New York. So where do we start looking for him?”
“The best hotel in town. I think that’d be the Waldorf-Astoria.”
“You sure?”
“I’m still not sure who you are, or what my own birthday is. But yeah, I remember enough about old New York to say the Waldorf is the place to start.”
Ariyl Moro nodded, satisfied.
“Okay, listen: We’re going to shoot for a morning arrival, which’ll give us about twelve hours to get to the Belasco Theatre. But your Time Crystal’s dark—that means it needs hours of solar recharge. And my Crystal gets kinda wonky when I carry someone with me. So I’m afraid we won’t arrive together.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t panic. I’m not going to let go, but you’ll feel my hand disappear, and you’ll arrive anywhere from one to three hours before I do. Now this is important: Don’t. Go. Anywhere.”
“What if...?”
“Just stay where you land. Don’t talk to anyone. Stay calm, and just blend in till I show up. Got it?”
I nodded.
She took me by one hand while she spoke the date and location into her Time Crystal.
I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Instantly we were suspended in darkness. My stomach felt like I was in a plummeting elevator, but a moment later there was light and I realized we were not falling, but instead racing, horizontally, westward across the ocean, as the sun zoomed past us some seven hundred times and the sky strobed through dawn-day-dusk-night. My migraine returned with a side of seasickness. I couldn’t take it any more, and I shut my eyes.
I felt my feet land on pavement. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in an alley that opened onto Fifth Avenue. And my hand was empty. As she’d predicted, Ariyl Moro was nowhere to be seen.
My God. She really could travel through time. And space. For some crazy reason, I wasn’t gobsmacked by it. On some level, I knew I had done this before.
A freestanding clock across the avenue read five minutes after seven. Well, at least we had plenty of time to find Sandow.
Ever since she’d showed up at the Gypsy wagon, memories had been crowding back into my conscious mind like subway riders at rush hour. I now recalled my visits to twenty-first century New York: stately old buildings bedecked in signage, ads and other graffiti, litter and grime and surrounded by clamorous crowds, horns, sirens and the constant echoing roar of traffic.
But the 1902 New York that surrounded me now was a whole different town: a showplace of pristine, soaring Gothic buildings of brick and granite and brownstone, imitation castles mixed with mansions of Victorian gingerbread, on a clean, uncrowded Fifth Avenue.
And it struck me that I stood out by being bareheaded. Every last person that I could see was wearing a hat. Headwear (except as protection, or to proclaim your team) has largely disappeared from my era. But on this late summer day in 1902 under a sky filled with puffy, pink clouds, there was no need to ward off sun or rain or cold. Yet along the sidewalk from 33rd to 34th Street came a parade of fedoras, Borsalinos, Stetsons, Homburgs, Panamas, plus bonnets of every conceivable floral, feathered or ribboned decoration...derbies, top hats, toques, newsboy caps, bowlers, straw boaters, and military caps. There were tall bobby-style helmets and matching brass-buttoned uniforms on the civic employees: dark blue for the walrus-like policeman, blue-gray for the lanky postman, white for the sanitation worker who swept and shoveled the streets.
I saw children, who would be heading to school in my era, out on the street working: newsboys and newsgirls, bootblacks, bicycle messengers, Western Union boys, even a sooty little chimney sweep.
Fifth Avenue traffic consisted of trams, carriages, delivery wagons, hansom cabs...almost all drawn by the horses that kept the street cleaner gainfully employed. There were even the occasional horseless carriages, their sickly sweet gasoline fumes helping to perfume the road-apple-scented air.
I turned and looked up. Towering above me was the original Waldorf Hotel: a thirteen-story fairytale castle made of brick, appointed with balconies, arcades, loggias, turrets, gables and green copper-roofed cupolas; its loftier upstart addition, the Astoria, was next door. I felt a pang of regret that such a wonder would come crashing down in 1929 (along with the economy), even though it was to make way for an even greater marvel on this spot, the Empire State Building.
But why was the sky so red? This time of year, the sun should have been up for at least an hour. And it should be behind me, since I was on the west side of Fifth Avenue.
Then I realized the terrible truth: Ms. Moro’s Time Crystal was indeed wonky. She’d specified our arrival time as seven A.M., yet I had arrived after seven P.M.—half an hour after sundown. Kati’s show had already started!
Then I staggered, dizzy. I realized I was still nauseated from traveling through time, and again feeling weak with hunger. I’d been so excited about meeting Kati after dinner, and so nervous about being around her Sasquatch father, that I’d forgotten to eat. That now seemed like years ago, instead of hours. But there was no time to grab a bite. I prayed that our quarry was at the Waldorf-Astoria because if he wasn’t, he’d never make the show.