BLACK IN TIME

By John Jakes

PAPERBACK LIBRARY

New York

PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

First Printing: September, 1970

Member, Science Fiction Writers of America

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Excerpt from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers": copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1954 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted from Selected Poems, by Langston Hughes, by permission of the publisher.

Paperback Library Is a division of Coronet Communications, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Paperback Library" accompanied by an open book, is registered in the United States Patent Office. Coronet Communications, Inc., 315 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

FOR LUTHER AND JENNY ERICKSON

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to

sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids

above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe

Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've

seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

—Langston Hughes

On the stage, the actors playing the eunuch and Phaedria's brother had been rehearsing the same scene for half an hour. Each time they did it, the young man lounging down in the front seats called a halt before the scene was half over. Finally, he leaped up in a rage.

"No, no, you're ruining it. Absolutely ruining it!"

Those might not have been the exact words. Harold couldn't be sure. He had prepared only twelve hours, one long night's deep sleep under the hypnolearner. But there was no mistaking the sense of the cry that went ringing through the big old wooden playhouse.

The young man continued to fume and wave his arms, which were decorated with costly circlets he'd probably picked up from his aristocratic patrons since being manumitted. Harold inched his buttocks to the front edge of his seat. It was one of the cheapest seats, at the very shadowy back of the house. He was little more than a black spot among shades of shadow.

Harold's palms were moist. He could hardly take his eyes off the splendidly dressed young man down front.

The beefy comedian playing the eunuch flounced downstage and peered at his tormentor. "If you don't mind my

asking, sir, what am I doing wrong? I read the speech the way you instructed me."

"You did not read it the way I instructed you." The young man was yellow-brown, frail, even ascetic-looking. "You read it with about as much expression as I might expect out of a cow. Remember your position, man! You're a eunuch! A slave! This young whelp is trying to persuade you to change places so that he can get next to the wench he loves! You're giving in much too easily! All that asinine eye-rolling and giggling—"

The fat man grumbled, "The comedic effect for which I was striving-—**

"Was to upstage me," put in the younger actor, a handsome lad except when he stuck out his lower lip, as now.

"Oh, shut your bitchy mouth," said the fat one.

Harold covered his mouth and his glee. A fascinating sidelight for his paper, proving that some things about the acting profession never changed.

The aristocratic yellow-brown man said something under his breath, then waved. "Take a break. Get yourselves some wine. Maybe you'll do the scene better drunk. And send the master out to me."

The actors slouched off stage. Presently, from the wings, there appeared a villainous-looking dark-haired type. Corsican, perhaps. Like the actors, he seemed resentful.

"You wished to see me, Publius Terentius?"

"I did. I wish to inform you that if your players keep buggering up my script, I will hold you personally responsible."

"Shall I have them killed?"

This startled Harold. Then he remembered that most actors, in these times, came from outside the country. No self-respecting native-born citizen would be caught dead in the profession. Players in a troupe were usually the slaves of the managers, an unscrupulous breed.

Harold turned his attention back to the yellow-brown man. In spite of his fine garments he seemed to harbor a trace of melancholy. Recalling his own slavery? The young man said to the manager:

"No, don't kill them. But if they don't put aside their petty jealousies and get down to work, I want them caned. And vou can withhold their rations till the opening."

"Yes, sir. Is that all, sir?"

"No, that isn't all. I wish to discuss your miserable scenic effects. They are completely undermining the mood of my—"

All at once Harold no longer heard the conversation. Two soldiers, obviously off duty, had slipped unnoticed into the back of the house. How long had they been leaning there on their spears?

Harold tried to look small, unworthy of notice. It had nothing to do with his skin, but everything to do with the warranty he'd signed at the Foundation.

—and in the course of said research, for which the Freylinghausen Foundation has granted me use of its Nexus apparatus at the time specified in schedule B, I agree to draw no undue attention to myself in the course of said research in the indicated era, in order that temporal paradoxes will not result from—

It went on and on that way. The essence was, never make waves yesterday.

But Harold shrank down too late. The soldiers had noticed him. They swaggered over.

"You, there," said the larger. "What are you doing?"

"Only watching, sirs," Harold said, having trouble with the phrasing. He tried a leer but knew he failed. He'd never leered successfully in his life. "My master is visiting his favorite courtesan. She lives nearby. He's a great patron of this theater, and he said it would be all right for me to sneak in and watch the players preparing the new comedy."

"You certainly have a weird accent," the other soldier remarked.

"What do you expect of an Aethiop slave?" said his companion, gigging Harold in the navel region. The spear head was sharp. Some other things hadn't changed much either.

The big soldier stuck out his jaw. "What's your name,-black man?"

"Rufus Cornelius Afer, sir. After my master."

"How long have you been in Rome?"

"Not long," Harold hedged. About an hour and fifty minutes would have been the exact answer.

The aristocratic young man up front yelled, "What's all that stinking clack back there?"

"We found this slave loitering—"

"Well, kick his arse out. No one watches my rehearsals!"

"Yes, sir," said the soldier, insincerely. He prodded Harold in the hind end. "You heard the scribbler. Out." To his companion he added, "That scribbler's pretty uppity for having been a slave not too long ago."

The second soldier blanched. "Ssssh! He has important friends."

Unceremoniously, Harold was gigged outside. He was too jubilant to be really annoyed. Yet at the same time he couldn't help worrying. This was his first scholarly venture by means of the Nexus. Hadn't the soldiers seen the incongruities in his tunic, his sandals, his very appearance and speech?

Fortunately, the street near the Tiber docks provided a moment's diversion. The street was noisy this spring day in 160 B.C. The air smelled of piss, oranges, and the refuse on the river. A couple of prostitutes wandered by. They gained the attention of the soldiers at the exact moment Harold's control device, hidden on an elastic belt around his waist, sounded its warning.

The second soldier scowled. "Who rang a gong?"

"Masters, if you please—" Harold wiggled free of their grip. A vestigial impulse seized him: he wanted to deck the white men. He suppressed the impulse as unworthy.

"What is it, black man?"

"I think I see my lord coming round the corner—yes, there he is. He's summoning me—"

And off he went, tunic flapping.

The clatter of his sandals disguised the repeated bongs of the control device. The bongs meant he had to return to the Foundation forthwith because the allotted period of study was over. Oriented toward the humanities as he

was, he disliked the device and its technological omnipresence. The thing could be set to emit a continuous locator signal. Thus the scholar's whereabouts were known to the Foundation's computer at all times. Other scholars in other eras could also receive the signal on their belt devices if they wished. Harold didn't understand how any of it worked.

Back over his shoulder he saw the soldiers regarding him with suspicion. He dodged around a wine stall. Someone spat and made a rude remark about pushy slaves. He ducked up a steeply inclined side street clotted with clove-scented shadows. In an empty doorway, he manipulated the belt device through his tunic.

"Ready," he said.

More than a little relieved, he vanished from old Rome.

He awoke pleasantly enough, lying on a couch in one of the private departure rooms. Overhead, the wires of the Nexus hummed, glowed, and slowly faded from gold through amber to dull gray.

Harold hopped off the couch, stripped, hung up his tunic and elastic belt with the round control device. He had just pulled on his boxers—he wore white ones; they were cheapest; besides, the militant brothers never got a peek—when the door flew open.

"Professor Quigley! How did it go?"

Outside the window, the deserted Virginia countryside was dappled with twilight. Harold smiled. He had a nice smile, easygoing. Having escaped the soldiers, he could say honestly:

"Just fine, Dr. Freylinghausen."

Dr. Norval Freylinghausen was a little old white troll with spiky white hair and wicked bright eyes. He wore a decade-old peace button in the lapel of his unspeakable tweeds. He hopped up and down, rubbing his hands.

"Capital, capital. Did you see him?"

"I certainly did. I located the theater without any trouble. I watched a rehearsal of The Eunuch."

"Was the playwrite—?"

"Handling production of the comedy personally." At

ease, his belly settling down as it forgot the epochs it had just jumped, Harold continued, "I can now state without equivocation that Publius Terentius Afer is—uh, was—if not technically black, then certainly Negro. North African black, if you get what I mean. Lighter than I am. With some Arab's blood, maybe. All the scholarly surmises are correct. He looked exactly like a slave brought to Rome, then freed. Everyone always thought so because of the Afer tacked on after the name he took from his master. But now we know." Harold seized Dr. Freylinghausen's hand and shook it. "I'm proud to be the scholar the Inundation allowed to prove it."

Freylinghausen was in a transport. "The great Terence! How thrilling!"

"I couldn't agree more. That an associate professor of speech from Ruggles could ever stand in the same theater with him, watching him—an' me bein' jus' a po' black boy fum Waycross, Gawgia—"

Freylinghausen cried, "Stop!"

"Doctor, what's the trouble?"

"None of those sambo postures in my presence, please. Not even in jest. Ruggles is one of our leading black universities. You are its leading theater scholar. But you'd be a leading theater scholar in any collegium, white to apple green. Don't dwell on your color, Quigley. It's racism in reverse!" Freylinghausen put his arm across Harold's shoulder as they stepped into the cool, empty marble corridor. "Besides, I remind you that I accept scholars here only on merit. I choose my time travelers solely on the basis of the project application they submit."

"And the scholarly community owes you a big debt of gratitude, sir."

"You bet your sweet Nobel payments it does! When I serendipitously stumbled across the Nexus principle years ago, I knew I had a hot one. I kept quiet. When I announced construction of the Foundation on this site— and the purpose—the Pent was fit to lose its privates. That temporal penetration should be discovered—and kept secret!—by a dirty old leftwinger and pacifist to boot! Shameful!"

There was glee in the old man's eyes. Being filthy rich from patents, he had a right to indulge himself, Harold supposed. He'd heard this same recitation five or six times during the preliminary interviews and preparations. But he didn't say a word as Freylinghausen croaked on:

"The Joint Chiefs would have moved in on me if I hadn't called the press the instant I made the first overture to an architect. With the Nexus public knowledge, the Pent couldn't expropriate the process, the bastards. That left me free to use the Nexus as I'd always dreamed of it —for peaceful, humanistic purposes. Historical research. What nobler? Nothing! So long as I have anything to do with it, the past shall only be open to scholars!"

"I applaud," said Harold. He really did. He'd shared a moment beyond the reach of kings. Publius Terentius Afer. Live! In person! Even though he knew some of his black brothers would hoot at him, he couldn't help himself. He was thrilled.

Dr. Freylinghausen paused at the lamplit door of his private office. "You must come in, Professor Quigley. Have a sip of Dickel. I always keep a bottle—"

"I'm not much of a drinker, Doctor."

"But I must know all the details of your excursion!**

"Well, sure, I'll be glad to—" With a little shock, Harold remembered. Consulted his watch. "I can't. I'm supposed to be at my sister's for a party. Next time—?" ' Freylinghausen acted miffed. "When are you due again?"

"Tuesday. I'm scheduled to take the microrecorder with me."

"To the same date?"

"No, I was going to jump ahead and record some of the opening night."

Freylinghausen digested this while poking at the inside of his left ear. He peered up and down the hall. It was late. Long slanting sunbars streaked the faraway foyer floor. Most of the Foundation staff had left for the weekend. But somewhere the Nexus hummed; Harold felt it through the soles of his Hush Puppies.

"I'll go along and see Professor Coppi's arrival, then,"

Freylinghausen was grumbling. "I know the man's a demon on Tsarist Russia. But when he keeps insisting on visiting Catherine, I suspect violation of his warranty not to upset the past. Not to mention carnal motives! Well, good evening, Professor Quigley." A peremptory handshake. "At your convenience I look forward to hearing about your experience. I did pay for it, after all."

Hunched and trollish, he went away up the corridor into the silence.

For a second Harold thought of yelling and saying he'd be late to Sally's. He didn't much want to go anyhow. But Freylinghausen vanished. So Harold straightened his jacket and went along to the foyer and out past the dozing old guard into cool Virginia dusk.

Birds sang. The trees were breaking out, all sweet smells. The evening conjured a memory of the red earth around Waycross in the spring. Odd that he could look back and remember those times so filled with so much of the familiar, cliched humiliations and still love the memory of the land.

He liked this quiet evening too. Liked the over-arching trees moving gently, creating patterns. He was a rather slight, small-boned, not bad-looking black man in his early thirties, alone and filled with joy in an empty parking lot on a spring night.

He had no illusions about the world that lay beyond the stately hedgerows abutting^ Freylinghausen's imposing concrete building. He just didn't care about it much right at this moment.

He sighed, feeling guilty. They kept telling him he should care. Perhaps he should. But he wasn't cut out for the barricades.

As Gator once remarked while drunk—an encompassing condemnation and resignation in one: "You got a kink in you, Harold. You just a motherfucking bookworm, I guess."

He drove his little Pontiac Electric through McLean and on toward the Potomac. He got his pipe going with one

hand. Breathing the Turkish smoke, he reflected that he probably did have more kinks than those visible in his neatly trimmed hair. By rights he should have held a huge reservoir of resentment. He hadn't had the funds to complete his doctorate in theater, managing to take only his M.A. at Northwestern. He'd known when he went to Ruggles that he was getting hind tit. Black higher education in the country was coming up, but slowly.

Yet even with all these limits, he could apply himself with diligence and joy. He was a scholar; he was accepted; and as he began to publish papers on the Greek borrowings in the comedies of Republican Rome, he was advanced through the academic ranks to associate professor.

He was, in all things, prudent. He avoided, for example, those streets where Whisk's crack-brained adherents congregated with greater and greater frequency these days. A prudent man living a mild; satisfying life.

Of course there had been the marriage to Julia. Seven months. An emotional bender from which he recovered only a year and a half later. But Christ, whitey had divorces by the dozen. That didn't segregate Harold Quig-ley. That integrated him.

He was proud of the long way he'd climbed—with help —from Waycross. And today had been the absolutely best day of his life. He'd been in Rome. Rome! As he drove on through the evening, he hoped the mood would last at least a little while.

Damn fool, he thought as soon as he was back across the river into Washington. Damn fool black boy. He accelerated past a corner where three white youths with red, white, and blue armbands were beating the bejesus out of a black youth their age.

Six blocks further along he passed a gang of young blacks with Malcolm cuts loitering on a corner. He caught the wink of knives.

There seemed to be an unusual amount of traffic for this dinner hour. He rolled up his car windows as sullen faces, white and black, turned his way from other cars at stoplights. In the back of a shabby convertible parked at a curb, he saw a white boy and girl balling. A red,

white, and blue streamer fluttered from the car's aerial.

Yeah, man, some tired, resurrected inhabitant of him- , self said. You're back home.

He grew aware of the bands roaming again. Both blacks and whites, in large numbers. He saw the big posters plastered on sides of buildings: a white Christ, eyes up-rolled to the sky, right hand raised and fisted in mockery of the old black power gesture, robe a multi-stripe of red, white, and blue. There was a legend in screamer-size glo-type:

WHISK FOLLOWS— TO LEAD THE WAY.

It was all souring—the evening, the birdsong in Virginia, the crystal memory of the dim old theater in Rome. He understood the reason for the restless streetcorner crowds, the restless traffic rivering him along toward Wisconsin Avenue. On many of the posters, large paste-ons had been added.

A.A.A.F. PARADE & RALLY

The date was today. The time was tonight.

More blood? There usually was blood whenever Whisk's followers foregathered publicly these days. And my, how they were foregathering, up and down the land.

For a couple of decades there'd been pretty decent progress. Nowhere near enough to make up for all the hell that had gone before, of course. But the mood had been—well—right for a few years. A lot of blacks had moved up, Harold among them.

Then that old damn white devil had begun to go to pieces over the disintegration of his country and Harold's. The filth in the skies. The crowding. The crime. The endless Oriental wars. The pervasive feeling that even country clubs were no longer safe from—something.

Who's to blame? Who's to blame?

It had been said sometimes, whispered often, thought

frequently in the early 70's that the blacks were to blame. Now it wasn't whispered, it was said. Frequently. The backlash was lashing in earnest, and posing the eternal puzzle of whether the times produced the man, or the man produced the times.

In any event, Whisk had arisen, and was busy exacerbating both sides. He was anathema to blacks, while his followers, kneeling before their red, white, and blue Jesus, got good and ready to stop this goddam black conspiracy. The worst of Waycross was on the wind again.

Even for a Friday night, traffic seemed unusually thick on Wisconsin. Harold had plenty of time to study the ugly, aimless crowds. The D.C. cops were out in force. In cars. On foot, in pairs and trios. Bad.

Turning off into the right street in Georgetown, Harold decided he vastly preferred Rome in 160 B.C. to Washington in A.D. 1977. There was war coming. For the first time, real war.

The plane trees seemed to droop in the dark as he parked and walked up the steps of the fine old home that had once belonged to a senator but now bore the telltales of subdivision into flats. Four sets of curtains, in different styles, hung at four different sets of windows.

Up top left, behind the red and black pseudo-Mexican drapes, he heard the blare of Sally's party. Stevie Wonder. Getting on now, but still belting it on Gator's too-expensive, credit-bought four-channel. There were shrill voices along with the music. He went up reluctantly through the dim hall.

Sally let him in.

"Well. I'm glad you got back from ole Rome in time to come to your sister's party, Harold. I s'pose after hobnobbing with emperors, this is a comedown."

Long ago he'd ceased trying to fend her bitterness. It came in spurts, and much of it was his fault, he knew. He kept busy enough just massaging away that guilt.

He eased around Sally with a forced smile. The cheaply furnished, garishly lit flat was overcrowded with thirty or forty blacks, most of whom he didn't recognize. Three he

did. They were standing in the hall leading back to the kitchen. He had mixed feelings.

"Wasn't hobnobbing with any emperors, Sally," he said. "Just a crowd of actors." He kissed her on the cheek, routinely. "Where's your husband?"

"Oh, Gator'll be here." Sally's brown eyes masked something.

She was a small, nicely formed woman eight years his senior. He could never remember a time when she hadn't looked exhausted. She was wearing too much of the Christmas perfume he'd given her, Nuit de Mozambique.

Sally worked as a domestic for an aide at the Finnish embassy. Her husband, whose real name was George, was a Floridian who'd played college ball on scholarship in the north, then failed to graduate because of a drinking ..offense. He sold used cars when he wasn't ruminating about his sixty-five-yard run against Purdue, or thinking up strategies to render the entire U.S. east coast inoperable if and when BURN decided that was necessary. Harold didn't much mind Gator being absent.

"—vrybody! Say hello to my little ole time-travelm' brother, Harold."

Several black ladies of size squealed and zeroed in on him. Sally whispered, "You be nice to them. They're my sorority sisters."

Harold smelled pot in the apartment. Then the smell was overwhelmed by the perfume of the sorority sisters. Yes, he had just returned from the first of ten planned research trips. Yes, he intended to write a paper after the final trip. No, he couldn't go on the telly and talk about it. Freylinghausen disliked and distrusted the mass media; and besides, Harold's use-of-Nexus contract specified that he could make no telly appearances, grant no print interviews, until his monograph had been in print in a scholarly journal one year. And no, he hadn't had anything to eat yet. Yes, he supposed a Queen of Sheba Brand Frozen Soul Dinner and a glass of Wild Irish Rose from the kitchen would fill the bill. Queasy, he disengaged.

He smiled and wedged ahead, wedged and muttered polite nonsense. He had to pass by the three he'd recog-

nized. They were still lounging in the hall. The blare of early Motown made his temples ache. Oh, what the hell. He was hungry.

"Earl," he saidjn greeting to the largest of the trio.

"Earl C. Ingersoll of Philadelphia was a slave, sweet. I am not that cat anymore and I wish you wouldn't forget it."

The huge and huge-bellied ebony man wore a velour shirt. He was smoking his joint between thumb and forefinger, palm cupped underneath, European film spy style. His smile dazzled but his brown eyes didn't.

"Sorry, Jomo," Harold said. "I did forget.'*

" 'S all right." But it wasn't.

"We been fightin' the good fight for BURN, Harold," said the feisty little yellow man beside Jomo. "We hear you been haulin' ass back to the past."

"Don't mind Little Che, Harold," Jomo said. "He's a good bodyguard but he doesn't have any head for the finer, jivey pursuits, you grok?"

"I'm well aware he's your bodyguard," Harold said, rubbed wrong. "How are you, L. C?"

Little Che allowed as how he was good, though he modified the condition with several obscenities. He hardly came up to Jomo's belly but, in his own way, looked quite as dangerous as his huge companion. Jomo was Gator's best buddy. He was also the head honcho of the eastern U.S. unit of Brothers United for Revolution Now.

Lazily the third, female, member of the group said, "Jomo, I wish you'd stop using that damn white jargon all the time."

"Which?"

"Grok."

"Di, you can't stop white culture any more'n you can stop the Sears catalog coming to the suburbs. At least not till you blow up the suburbs."

Harold said hello to Diana, whom he'd encountered with the others at Sally's parties. He found the girl almost sinfully sexual: young, bronze, no longer Afro-cut now that that style was out. She'd never looked good Afro anyway. Her hair was too long, straight, lustrous. He

suspected more than a touch of the proverbial whitewash brush somewhere.

The only name he knew for her was Diana X. It was a hangover from her days as a haunchbaby with one of the last Muslim mosques. In Omaha? Someplace. She wore a sweater that positively turned Harold to jam. Jomo flaunted his right of possession by fondling it.

Diana puffed her joint and refused to acknowledge Harold's hello with much more than a nod.

"I hear there's food in the kitchen—" he began.

"There is," Jomo nodded. "Get some and hurry back. We're all just busting to hear about your work."

"You don't mean that."

"I do, sweet! I've been thinking about that time travel gizzy a lot. You could really use that to benefit your black brethren if you weren't such a white-lovin' fella. Oh, excuse me. You're not just a fella. Pardon me, there. You're a perfesser."

Harold fumed. Jomo could pronounce professor as well as the next. This was typical of the nastiness he always got from these three.

Diana X insinuated her bosom a little closer to Jomo's side. "We're just so interested, Harold. Time travel is a whole new cop-out."

"Yen," Little Che agreed, with some saliva. "While we're takin' care of business with that Whisk crowd—"

"I'm taking care of my kind of business," Harold said. "It's called earning a living."

As he stamped down the dark hall to the kitchen, he heard Jomo give him a raspberry. "That boy'll be playin' all the best white supper clubs next, do you grok?"

Harold passed the bathroom. A man was vomiting while a couple made love in the bathtub. He licked his lips. Black or white, people of this life style weren't his kind. Like Terence, maybe he was getting too uppity. Sally had accused him of it last time he came to supper.

He entered the kitchen. A group of men in lavender and lime shirts were crowded around a transistor.

"Hi," Harold said. "What's up?"

"Whisk's taking his parade down past the capitol."

"Yell, but they's brothers hangin' round."

"Gator's out there," said a third. "He's leading a brigade tonight."

A brigade? A BURN brigade? Good God. Poor Sally. BURN's ultramilitant activities were being vigorously in--, vestigated by the conservative Attorney General. With a start, Harold realized that while Gator was out there, Jomo was here. It helped him understand why he disliked Jomo so much.

"They goan be trouble," remarked one of the listeners, making Mantan Moreland eyes.

"There's going to be blood," said another.

Harold eyed the Queen of Sheba brand dinners standing cold in their little aluminum trays on top of the stove. The greens looked rancid, the yams anemic. He settled for a glass of Wild Irish Rose, which stirred up his stomach unmercifully at the first sip. He wanted to make a stab at placating Sally—no wonder she was worried and short-tempered—but that meant another trip through the hall. He slugged the wine, poured more.

"Oh-oh," said one of the radio listeners. "News blackout."

"Hot damn! That means trouble for sure."

Somehow the word was transmitted up the line. The whole party grew noisier. Harold was already light-headed from the second glass of wine. He bumped into Little Che in the hall. The little yellow man assumed a fighting crouch, goatee a-quiver.

"Easy, sweet," Jomo laughed, restraining him. "The perfesser's nervous because some of our brothers with balls are mixing it up right about now."

"I notice you're not out there," Harold said.

Diana X said a bad word to signify the depth of Harold's misunderstanding. "He's the brains. The brains have to be protected."

"Perfectly true," Jomo agreed. "But what say we all get off this current events bit? Let's discuss something I've been meaning to take up with you for some time, per-fesser. Namely your lack of interest in the cause. I mean" —he flicked Harold's chin with his index ringer—"I get

the idea you're happiest when you're truckling to whitey. I get the idea you just"—another flick—"don't care."

"You mind keeping your hands to yourself?"

"I mind, sweet. But I will, time being. Till I get an answer."

"An answer. Well—I just don't think blabbing about how you're going to blow up water reservoirs does anybody any good, black or—"

"We're gonna do lots more than blow up reservoirs," Little Che volunteered.

"We may put something in the reservoirs," Diana said. She mentioned a popular aphrodisiac. - Jomo chuckled. "White women go crazy. Oh my."

Harold tried again. "You people don't even begin to relate—"

"And you're a yellowbelly with no stomach for killing charlie," Jomo smiled.

"I've no stomach for killing anybody. Murder solves nothing."

Diana said, "You make me sick. You made me sick the first time I heard about you."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Your sister went to work when she was fourteen just so your father could save enough money to send you to a white man's school. Talk about black exploitation! And all so you could rent a nice little pad in a quiet part of town and close your windows and keep out the screaming. Well, baby, you can't shut out the screams forever. There'll be more and more. The whites are setting us up—"

"We're the next Jews!" Jomo said. "Whisk's got it all planned. Zap! and all the brothers and sisters go in the chemical vats. Into the Potomac. Into whatever's handy. The next Jews. Ole Sammy Davis—he was prophetic."

"But we won't take it," Diana said. "We'll make them scream."

Someone did.

Pandemonium engulfed the apartment. Into the kitchen, his forehead and houndstooth sport coat aglare with blood, came Gator. A young woman half out of her clothes,

apparently surprised with her swain on the back stairs, was the one holding her cheeks and hollering.

On signal from Jomo, Little Che decked her to shut her up. Gator staggered to Jomo's side.

"Baby, I bit big trouble."

"Yeh?" Jomo was cool, ever the supreme leader. Potato chip bowls in hand, Sally came down the hall. She saw her husband and dropped both bowls. Gator's knees sagged.

Diana caught him, began hauling him toward an open bedroom door. Harold stepped forward to help. Little Che stepped on his foot. Harold said a loud ow! Diana glared.

"Stand aside. That's where you always are anyway."

Jomo directed Gator's hospitalization in the bedroom. He sent Little Che for wet towels, then barred everyone, including his close associates and Sally, by shutting the door. He reappeared in five minutes. ,

"Folks, our hero really did bite big trouble. He was with the brothers, mixing it up after the Whisk parade. When the Whisk religiosos started cracking black heads, Gator got a little impetuous and pulled his gun. He shot one of the Right Reverend's assistants"—a cheer—"but he also unfortunately shot a cop." A moan. Jomo looked immensely pleased as Sally fainted.

In the confusion that followed, many things happened rather too fast for Harold.

Little Che and Diana X got busy muscling the most casual guests out of the apartment. Harold lingered near the transistor in the kitchen to avoid a rousting. The news was no longer blacked. Apparently the worst was over. He tried to listen as Little Che ran around the flat shutting off lights. Gator howled in the bedroom. Sally sobbed in the parlor.

"—fourteen dead, eight whites and six blacks. The riot at the Ellipse followed a parade by partisans of the Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk, head of the crytopatriotic church known as the Ail-American Apostolic Fellowship of the U.S.A. One of the white dead has been identified as Casper Blount, characterized by Reverend Whisk as a dear friend and close associate. Whisk, however, has denied rumors alleging that he said he would exact a price of one hundred black corpses in revenge for Blount's death." "

Wetting more towels in the kitchen sink, Diana said, "Liar. Whisk's probably got his gunnys roaming all over

town by now. Gator's one dead black man unless we move him fast and hide him deep." She hurried away. It was a measure of Harold's numbness that he did not respond even slightly to the sight of her rear wiggling in black tights. ^ '

"—Sergeant Alex Waldo, the police officer wounded in an exchange of gunfire with an unidentified black, will apparently recover, according to the latest medical bulletin from—"

Harold felt too miserable to feel relieved. The streets were becoming nightmares. In the bedroom, loud voices: Gator hollering for a shot of whiskey to ease his dying pain; Little Che telling him to calm down, hadn't he heard Jomo pronounce the scalp wound superficial? A portly black woman with hair in curlpapers appeared on the porch jerrybuilt onto the back of the house. She peered into the kitchen.

"Mrs. Davis?"

He couldn't think of anything to say except, "I'm not Mrs. Davis."

"Well, I just want to tell somebody this party is growing entirely too noisy."

Jomo and Little Che appeared from the hall, equipped with a .45 apiece. The portly woman clutched her bosom.

"Go home, sister," Jomo said. "Fast."

She did.

Jomo jumped to the door, kicked it shut, bolted it, killed the kitchen light. In the gloom his huge black face was an apparition.

"Stop standing around looking stupid, perfesser. Gator shot one of Whisk's top boys. We're in a state of war." He seized Harold's arm with a pressure that boded ill. "Sally wants a private word."

The bedroom door shut, ka-latch. Sally sat on a chair at the bedside, holding Gator's hand. Gator's other hand pressed a reddened towel to his forehead.

"I want a drink," he said. "Whoever just came in get me a drink."

"It's Harold," Sally said.

"Good old bookworm Harold." Gator began to mumble as if feverish.

Sally stared at her brother. "You know how bad this is?"

"Christ! You and your friends act as though I've no feelings for—"

"Sometimes we wonder," Sally interrupted, fighting tears. "I want you to hear me now, brother, and hear me good. George is a good husband. He's got plenty of faults, and maybe you'd say one was mixing with Jomo and that crowd." Harold glanced away. "But I love him."

"I know that, Sally."

"All right. I don't want him killed. He's not safe in the city. Whisk's a crazy man. He'll hunt George down and shoot him. And if the police get hold of George, he'll be hustled to jail. In jail, Whisk will still be able to reach him. Buy guards. If George goes to jail, Harold, he'll be murdered sure as God made me black."

Knowing local jail conditions, Harold had to allow as how it was probably true.

"You've got to help hide him, Harold."

"Me! But, Sally, my place is no safer than any—"

"No, Harold. You don't get it. I want you to put him back someplace safe with that time machine."

Several moments later, Harold recovered sufficiently to exclaim, "That's impossible! That's insane! I'd be cheating on the Foundation if I used their equipment for something private like this. Sally, you tell your wild-eyed friends—"

"It wasn't Jomo's idea, Harold. It was mine."

"Yours! Sally—"

"You listen, Harold. Jomo wants to beat you up to make you say yes. I said no, I'd talk to you."

Somehow she was crying with dry eyes. She stood up, letting Gator moan, and moved closer. Harold felt the first turn of the emotional screws.

"You remember Waycross, Harold. You remember how I went to work when I was fourteen because Papa said you had to go get a college education. Well, I wanted an education too. But I haven't got one because I helped

you. All I've got is mops and furniture polish and garbage eight or nine hours every day. I've never complained. I've never asked anything in return, have I? Not once, have I?"

Stricken dumb, he shook his head.

"All right, then. Now I need you." She seized his arms. "I know you can do it, Harold. You've told me so much about that Foundation place, I feel I've been there. With Jomo and L.C. to help get the guards out of the way, it'll be easy. You do know how to run the machine, don't you?"

Here was his chance. His lie.

Impossible.

In a shaken voice he said, "I don't understand any of the theory. But operating the Nexus is simple."

"Then for the first and only time in my life, Harold, I'm asking you."

A dozen good reasons why not sprang to mind. They were all destroyed by the look in her eyes. He started to speak. Clamped his mouth shut. Opened it again. Swayed. Palmed his eyeballs. He couldn't jeopardize his career. If they were caught, he'd be barred from use of Foundation facilities forever.

"Harold?"

He opened his eyes. Saw her, in his mind, on her knees. Scrubbing.

"Harold?"

"Let me think—just—let—me—think!"

Sobbing with joy, she flung her arms around his neck and hung on. Gator woke up and began to complain about being thirsty.

Jomo sent Little Che out to steal a station wagon. He returned about one a.m. By then, Harold's original panic had passed. He'd figured out what he might do: hide Gator somewhere in the past and return to the realtime present with only a few minutes having elapsed. Then next week, next month, whenever it was safe, he could reenter the past—he'd worry about the how later; no choice—and

fetch Gator home again. The real problem was, where to put him.

Eventually, just before Little Che bounced into the dimmed-out flat jingling a set of keys, he unmuddled his mind enough to focus on a date that just might work.

They bundled into the station wagon, Harold, Che, Diana and Gator hiding in the rear while Sally rode beside Jbmo up front. Harold recalled that he'd forgotten to phone the Ruggles switchboard to report that he might be late for tomorrow morning's departmental meeting. God; How had he gotten involved in this?

Now and then they heard small arms fire in the distance. A D.C. prowl car cruised up, shone its spot into the wagon, but didn't order them to stop. They were across the river, and through McLean to the country.

Penetrating the Foundation was, as Harold had sink-ingly known it would be, ludicrously easy. Freylinghausen guarded the place with hired private policemen. Most of them were inefficient, prone to malinger, close to retirement, or all three.

Little Che glided from the wagon like a lizard as Jomo idled the car at the edge of the parking lot. He glided back in five minutes, announcing that he'd scrogged the old white fellow circling the outside of the building. For one wild moment, Harold wished that Freylinghausen had staffed up with platoons of guards. But the Foundation's owner disliked and distrusted policemen too. He only accepted the very minimum necessary to keep out the coocoos and curiosity seekers.

While the others skulked in the bushes, Jomo approached the front doors. He clicked a coin on the glass.

"Officer? Oh, officer! I got a flat and no spare. Can I use the phone?"

The private policeman roused himself from his stool, laid aside the Danish porno he'd been reading, and advanced to the inner side of the door, eyes suspicious. He inched his fingers toward his holstered revolver while Jomo, remarkable thespian, succeeded in looking positively pious.

"Flat tire!" Jomo yelled in response to the guard's query. "Phone!"

Munching his underlip, the guard unlocked the door. He stepped back to admit Jomo, then yelled, too late. Jomo dragged him out into the crickety night air and kicked his groin. He dropped the guard with a couple of neat, efficient chops. They tied up both guards with some rope L.C. had brought along.

They trooped inside. Gator was walking in a wobbly way. There was a bandage over his head wound. Harold led them to one of the departure rooms; the same, in fact, from which he'd journeyed to Rome. Entering and switching on the lights, he suddenly did a take.

Jomo scowled. "All right, now, sweet, don't start making up phony excuses about why you can't—"

"But I just remembered a problem."

"What problem?"

"Costumes. Wait a minute, I think we can manage. Gator, take off that loud jacket. Shoes, socks—everything but your trousers and shirt. And tear the cuffs of both. Raggedy."

"Just where are you taking him?'' Diana wanted to know.

"Back to 1815. New Orleans."

"Nawrleans!" cried L.C. "Jesus, no black man would be safe back-—"

"To the contrary! Now, do you all want a history lesson or do you want Gator safe?"

Sally stepped to his side. "We want him safe. You all leave Harold alone."

Harold helped the enfeebled Gator tear his clothing. Then he helped him put on the elastic belt with the round control device.

His eyes were watering a lot. He tried to remember the four-hour instructional lecture delivered by the Freyling-hausen staff man. Let's see—

The Nexus could either be put into operation by a voice command spoken into the control device, or manually by means of calibrated dials on the device's face. This last method was provided mostly in case the main

computer link ever malfunctioned while a traveler was in time. Harold had been required to memorize a long, complicated series of coordinates. Setting these on the dials would get him back to the Foundation by means of a smaller, failsafe system available at all times in case the larger computer went blooey.

He was too nervous to fool around with anything but the vocal route. He lay down beside Gator on the wide couch and pulled the device up near his mouth.

"Site of the Battle of New Orleans. Uh"—he wished he wasn't so rotten on dates and black history—"January 8, 1815."

The Nexus wire warmed from gray through amber to gold, singing faintly.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Just about two," Sally said in a hoarse voice.

"You all wait here. I'll be right back," Harold announced with trepidation and, as it turned out, scant truth.

Like the first trip backwards, Harold's second wasn't in the least discomforting. Just a quick surrender to absence of consciousness, as when falling asleep promptly, followed by a brief semi-awareness of mild disorientation. It was during this interval that he heard the field pieces booming and the balls whizzing to land, plopp, in water nearby.

The Freylinghausen staff said individual recovery time varied from forty to sixty seconds. Gator had awakened first.

"Harold! You're s'posed to save me, not get me shot again!"

Aware that he was standing up to his navel in smelly water, Harold opened his eyes. He perceived a cypress swamp on a dank, chilly afternoon. Directly ahead, dim in powdersmoke from cannons, men were packed into trenches dug in higher, more solid ground. A water moccasin poked its head up from the scum and eyed Harold with interest.

"Let's go, Gator!"

In moments, they were on the higher ground behind the

trenches. Lord, he'd certainly miscalculated. Thinking that the battle of New Orleans had taken place around the first or second of January; 1815, he'd asked for an arrival at what he thought was a safe interval afterwards. The battle was in full swing.

In the trenches, an unlikely assortment of local militiamen and frontiersmen in leggings and coon-tailed caps were firing muskets into the murk. From where he stood Harold could see British regulars in bright scarlet tunics advancing in perfect formation. Up to their hocks in swamp water* they refused to break ranks. The less elegant marksmen in the trenches mowed them down.

"Sweet Kentucky grass! We got 'em runnin'!" howled a man in a fringed jacket. Gator huddled behind Harold, peering across his hipbone at the trenches.

"Once whitey gets a look at us, we'll be lynched,'* Gator said.

"No, you don't underst—"

"Hey-yoJ" A burly woodsman with a scar where one eye should have been saw them when he twisted around in the trench to reach for more powder ana* ball. "You gents lost?"

"Gents?" Gator whispered. "Who's he talkin' about?"

"Us," Harold hissed.

"But he's white! We—"

"Keep quiet, Gator." To the frontiersman, loudly: "We got separated from our unit."

The woodsman gestured. "Try that way, toward the Mississip'. Last free men o'color I saw was fightin' next to old You's pirates. But'you better hurry. The way this is goin', won't be any redcoats left past sundown."

Excruciating screams from in front of the trenches, plus the regular splash of corpses falling into the swamp, gave proof to his statement. Harold nodded quickly, seized Gator's hand and pulled him along through the slanting sunbeams and churning smoke.

All up and down the long trench, muskets spurted, decimating the even lines of red-coated soldiers. Harold and Gator slathered up hillocks, down through stinky pools of swamp water. They leaped aside when a big

white man with gleaming epaulets nearly rode them down.

From the saddle of his white warhorse the magnificent old hawk fixed them with stern eyes. "The day is nearly ours. Hommes de couleur, I salute you." He touched his cockaded hat and rode on.

Gator goggled. "No white man ever told me I did anything good, ever, 'cept my football coaches."

"But you .were never a free man of color in New Orleans. They weren't slaves. For a time they were almost first-class citizens."

"Who was that big white boss?"

"Old Hickory. General Jackson. Come on. We've got to find a safe place so they won't spot us leaving again."

"Leaving? We just got here!"

"Never mind, come on."

The safest place proved to be behind a mammoth cypress standing up in the water a little further on. Distantly through the trees Harold caught a glint of the great river. The musket fire from the advancing British had grown desultory, the shrieking incessant. In the trenches nearby, an aggregation of Negros, mostly tan to yellow in color, reloaded their muskets and kept firing while singing a rousing song in French. Further up the line, ruffians with beards and filthy clothes blasted the remaining enemy with everything from duelling pistols to blunderbusses. They counterpointed the French song with screamed obscenities. Gator continued to tremble:

"That bunch—that's a lynch mob for sure."

"Not at all. Those are Dominique You's Baratarians. Pirates who helped Jackson." Harold pulled up his shirt.

Some British cannister exploded over the trenches, disemboweling two of the free men of color. Harold and Gator sank to their necks in the water as chips flew from the cypresses. When the excitement was over, Harold stood up again. He stretched his elastic belt and held the control device near his face.

"Hang on, Gator." To the device: "Ten days forward and—uh—make it three miles north."

"Harold, I've 'bout decided Whisk isn't so bad after—"

The smoke, the shouting, the last shots, the hammer of

hoofs as Old Hickory came riding back crying that the day was carried, the first notes of Hail, Columbia! played by an unseen military band, all wiped.

They arrived behind some kegs of rum sitting on the dock beside the Mississippi. A few more feet and they'd have been drowned. On the other side of the kegs, another band was playing a martial air. Harold heard a lot of voices, the squeal of cart and wagon wheels.

He coaxed Gator out from behind the shipment. They found themselves in the midst of a New Orleans triumphant because of the American victory. They walked to Canal Street. It was teeming with wheeled vehicles and humanity. There were quite a few light-colored Negroes in evidence, strolling with handsome yellow girls on their arms or lingering in doorways to converse. Harold and Gator, by contrast, looked like a couple of fugitive field hands.

Bells pealed in a great cathedral a couple of blocks away. Harold led Gator in that direction. Where could he find a safe^-spot to deposit his charge?

Gator had gone completely silent, staring at the spectacle which undoubtedly included himself, unmolested, walking freely down a public street in the Deep South in the nineteenth century. No one seemed the least interested. Not the militiamen sprawling drunk in the gutters. Not the Kentuckians with their coon caps and long rifles and their jugs of corn. Not the abandoned celebrants glimpsed on the iron balconies.

One of these, a dumpling-breasted white tart, leaned over the rail and called, "Have the British all gone?"

"Yes," Harold answered, presuming that was why most everyone was celebrating.

"Then come on up, boys! Black, white and in-between, Madame Cecile says the door's open today to all who helped save us. At no charge!" She popped her blouse open to expose her bosom.

Gator said, "Sumbitch."

At a crowded cafe on the square by the Cabildo, a moustached Frenchman was hugging people and offering

free drinks to all. The place was packed with blacks as well as whites. Wine was being opened in case lots. Harold wanted to suggest that they omit the revelry, but before he could, a couple of rowdy Kentuckians picked him up bodily.

"Let's have two more for a couple o' lads who helped prove they can't tread on us 'Mericans!"

Children assisting the proprietor pressed goblets on Harold and Gator, then jumped up and kissed them both on the cheek. "Merci, merci!"

Gator gulped his wine. Then he snagged a bottle from a tray carried by the passing proprietor. Harold found himself jammed next to an elegant yellow man in lace shirt and fawn trousers. The fellow smiled charmingly, lifting his glass.

"Hommes de couleur, your brother toasts you. I see by the blood on your clothing that you have just come up from the battle line. I returned yesterday." He extended his hand. "Dr. Etienne Firoche, physician of Bayou Ste. Terre."

Giddy, Gator yelled, "Gator Davis! Halfback at Pittsylvania U! Hot damn, doc, give me five!" He slapped the doctor's palm.

Harold gulped. The doctor recoiled. Gator drank the second half of his bottle of wine—

Second half? Where had the first gone?

Gator punched Harold in the shoulder. "Hot damn, this is the greatest!"

Dr. Firoche was studying them suspiciously. Harold edged Gator toward the street, realizing that, under stress, poor Gator had gotten unusually drunk unusually fast. "Come on, come on, Gator. We need to find a place to stash you."

"Oh, man, do I feel mellow. Man, so loose. Just like the time I ran sixty-five yards against those white sumbitches from Purdue. Wasn't any black brothers playing for Purdue that year. I said to myself, Gator baby, it's up to you." He crouched, doubling an imaginary ball under his arm and instantly attracting much attention. He bared his teeth. "Up to you!"

With a lunge, Harold tried to stop it. He missed Gator's arm by a fraction. Gator let out a maniacal howl, ducked his head and took off in a broken-field run up past the Cabildo. Harold ran after him.

Gator zigzagged, whooping and hollering as he knocked people aside. Unfortunately he failed to reckon with football not having been invented yet. He banged head on into a detail of the New Orleans watch coming to investigate. When they tried to restrain him, Gator started swinging.

"Let go of him!" Harold said, charging forward. That was his mistake. Apparently homines de couleur, though granted many privileges not accorded blacks later in the century, could not attack the town's law-keepers with impunity.

Outnumbered, Harold and Gator went to jail.

They were the only occupants of the cell, which had straw on the floor and rats in all the corners. Outside the high window, lamps flickered in the chilly dark. New Orleans continued to celebrate noisily.

Harold squatted on his haunches, cursed his ill luck and contemplated kicking Gator in the head.

No, that wasn't fair. But the turn of events still made him mad. Gator was passed out. His head lolled to one side as he snored.

Harold thought about the dismal prospect of being hauled up before a magistrate and charged for drunkenness, lunacy, or worse. Then he remembered the control device under his shirt. He began to feel a little better.

The garrulous jailer, spouting French, unlocked the cell door. The watch hustled three Kentuckians inside and left quickly. Two of the Kentuckians simply fell down. One attacked the closing door with both fists, nearly splintering it. But finally his eyes rolled up in his head and he too folded.

"Well," Harold said in a rueful way, "I suppose this is as safe a time as any." For he could, by memorizing the exact calibrations now visible on the computer-set dials of the control device, return at any time to this precise

spatio-temporal jftnction and reclaim Gator to the present. Before^ he was hauled in front of a magistrate.

In the jail hall, the Frenchman was bellowing "Alou-ette." Kneeling, Harold unfastened Gator's elastic belt. He stuffed the device in his back pocket. He was breathing hard. This kind of derring-do wasn't for him.

He sneaked to the loophole window in the door. The guard sat on a stool close by. Harold was afraid to speak to the Nexus computer through the belt. He decided to try the silent method, via the Foundation's failsafe system. He set the long series of return calibrations the Freyling-hausen staff man had made him memorize.

Unfortunately he had trouble seeing clearly because of the cell's poor light. He returned to find the departure room at the Foundation empty. The others were gone.

He checked the lobby clock. Almost four a.m.! A slight error in his manipulations of the dials had landed him in the present about two full hours after his departure. He hoped it was still the same night.

Well, nothing for it but to get to the city as best he could, and there try to locate Sally and the others. They probably thought something catastrophic had happened to him.

It might yet. He had strange, ominous feelings. He was still a black man, times like this; full of portents.

He rushed back to the departure room, reclaimed the rest of his clothing and left the building. In the shrubbery, the trussed guards heard his footsteps. They snarled like dogs behind their gags. He ran down the lane to escape the rattle of their angry kicking.

He limped into McLean and finally found an all-night taxi driver willing to overlook his color and drive him to town—for a stiff overcharge. As the driver revved up and pulled out, bandoliers of bullets crisscrossing across his chest gleamed in the light of a streetlamp.

"Most old boys roun' here wouldn't take a fare 'cross the river this time of night," remarked the white man, extracting a .38 revolver from the glove. "Don't scare me none, though. I'm primed."

He grinned into the rear mirror. Harold noticed a red,

white, and blue cross of glowing plastic hanging on a chain from one of the dash knobs. He hid his eyes behind his hand and slumped in the seat. The country had armed before. But never so openly, or with such certainty.

He paid off the driver outside Sally's place. The neighborhood was silent in this hour just before dawn. His brains felt like pudding. He blinked at lights shining behind the curtains up in the Davis flat. For a moment he had the weird feeling that he was being watched.

But he saw no sign of watchers on the street. He crept around to the rear and up the jerrybuilt stairs. Carefully he tested the back door. Open. He eased into the brightness of the kitchen before the realization of his dumbness penetrated his fatigue.

Earlier, departing, they'd doused all the lights. Locked up, too.

A white lout in a red, white, and blue satin jacket stepped out from behind the Frigidaire. The white boy, all cowlicks and pimples, had huge shoulders. And a revolver.

"Hands up, sambo."

Harold froze. Another white man, older, but also armed and wearing a similar jacket, slid into view in the hallway. He said over his shoulder:

"Miss Adelaide? We treed a coon."

A third gun appeared. This one was held in the small, delicate hand of an outrageously lush little white girl. She was hardly more than five feet tall, with honey hair and sweet blue eyes of the kind typically owned by housewives in color telly messages for floor wax.

The girl wore a light coat open over a peekaboo leather one-piece, the kind against which Rev. Billy Roy Whisk, as well as other, less harebrained theologians, fulminated while on the topic of American moral decay. The girl's bosoms poked out through the two openings in the garment. Her nipples were rouged red as her sweetly smiling , mouth.

"I declare," she said in an accent so thick Harold could practically hear the crinoline bloomers rustling down on the old plantation, "who we got here?"

"Where's my sister?" Harold demanded.

The girl's plucked brows shot up. The harsh kitchen lights revealed a few wrinkles at the eye-corners, giving the he to the first impression of youthful freshness.

"Oh, my. You're the brother? We sure are in luck. I been busier than a two-headed chicken in a bucket of bugs, tryin' to find your address round here someplace. She talked about you, 'mongst others, when we picked her up a while ago."

"P—p—picked her up?"

"Why, yes. Some friends dropped her off outside. We were waitin' up here, don't you see? But I'll be switched if she would say a word about the whereabouts of that no-good, murderin' husband of hers." The sweet blue eyes lost some sweetness. "We identified the nigra who shot 'n' killed Caspar Blount, don't y'see? I don't mind telling you that Billy Roy is pretty furious about—"

"Billy Roy? You're—?" Harold swallowed. The red, white, and blue jackets meant more than partisanship, then.

"Miss Adelaide Pepper," she said, wiggling her bosom. "A close associate. I think we better calm you down some 'fore we take you to see Billy Roy."

She pulled out a rod, thumbed one end, and squirted nark gas in Harold's face.

Of the next half hour or so, Harold had only vague and soupy memories. ,

The nark gas kept him hanging continually on the edge of nausea. He didn't remember being hustled from the flat. But he was awake when they shoved him into the rear of a late-model, highly chromed Lincoln turbine. The thugs managed to poke and elbow vital spots in his body several times during the loading.

With the gun of one thug jammed into his side, Harold was chauffeured through the city as dawn broke. He passed out several times. Adelaide Pepper hummed the latest Nashville hit. They pulled up before a cathedral-like edifice in an unfamiliar section. The front of the structure was tricked out with Rheimsish gargoyles made of plastic. An immense red, white, and blue neon sign flashed the words ALL-AMERICAN APOSTOLIC FELLOWSHIP OFTHEU.S.A.

The thugs dragged Harold down the main aisle of the vaulted interior. His knees gave out again. He slipped sidewise into a pew. They bopped his kidneys, pulled him

up and pulled him on, down to the altar and then sharp left.

The altar was dominated by a thirty-foot sculpture of Christ bathed in constantly changing patterns of red, white, and blue light. The Savior's right hand was raised in a fist. An organ played America while a syrupy male voice, obviously recorded, boomed a devotion into the echoing chamber.

"—blast off to that saving grace, children! And do It now! Because verily I say unto all ri^ht-thinking Caucasian men, women, and children—the countdown to judgment has begun! Are you A-OK with the big mission controller in the sky? Don't wait! Down on your knees! Feel the fuel of the Holy Ghost lifting you into the orbit of—"

A chrome door slid open. Harold was shoved through. He fell on his face on a thick carpet of red, white, and blue.

The door shut, cutting off that voice whose richness somehow terrified Harold utterly. But relief was brief. The actual voice said:

"Get up, boy. Get up so I can get a look at you.'*

Harold couldn't locate the source of the voice right away. The drug was wearing off but he still saw starbursts in his mind. The thugs released him, stepped back. Harold started to wobble. In desperation, he grabbed the nearest support, Adelaide Pepper.

Adelaide gasped. A presence thrust between them. Harold took a pounding blow in the midsection. It forked him backwards onto the carpet.

As he hit, his brain cleared. He stared straight up at the apocalyptic figure of a tall white man with long, silky brown hair and a handsome toothy face. The man's powerful shoulders shook. He wore a red, white, and blue robe, and his mud-brown eyes were murderous.

Adelaide giggled. "Don't take on so, Billy Ro^. He didn't have hold of me more'n a minute."

"It's the principle!" boomed the giant. "Let me tell you one thing, nigger boy. You ever lay a hand on my woman's white body again, I'll kill you on the spot. On— the—spot!"

Words choked in Harold's throat. He concealed his fright as best he could and stood up. He was ashamed of the reaction the tall-robed man produced. Maybe it was tiredness; hunger; or everything that had happened since dusk last night, but Harold could never remember being so cold-sweat-terrified of anybody since that night in his eighth year when he wakened in Waycross with firelight flickering on the ceiling. Before his mother and father and Sally could shush him, he made it to the cottage window, and saw the burning cross, and the sheeted figures behind it. The terror now was like the terror then. Humiliating. Complete.

The Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk returned to his immense executive desk. He sat down in his swivel chair. His breathing became regular again. Adelaide pranced around to stand next to him. Whisk slipped his hand up under her coat from the rear. A lazy smile creased his face.

Smiling, Whisk was handsome enough for Hollywood. No wonder his oratory drew them like lemmings. Harold felt even more dismal.

"This is her brother," Adelaide explained, showing no inclination to move from Whisk's busying hand. "The one she was talkin' about. I was tryin' to find his address when he just up and walked in."

"Right handy. I keep tellin' you God's on our side in-combating these nigra troublemakers. What's your name, boy?"

"Don't call me boy."

"Then you tell me your name."

"Harold Quigley."

Whisk withdrew his hand with obvious reluctance. He touched a control under the desk and directed Harold's attention to one wall.

Half the wall was taken up with an imitation stained

glass window, a reproduction of The Last Supper. Christ

and his apostles wore patriotically striped robes. All, that

-is, save Judas, who was depicted as a mulatto with an

AJfro cut and black robes.

The phony stained glass sank straight down, revealing

a real window. On the other side, in a sparsely furnished room, Sally sat on a cot, hands locked together.

"She won't tell us where her husband is, Figley."

"Quigley."

"Well, she still won't tell us.'*

Harold searched for signs that Sally had been harmed. He saw none. But she looked terribly frightened. The glass had to be one-way. Sally gave no sign that she knew she was being observed.

Harold cleared his throat, fighting down that gut fear of the terrible handsome white man lounging behind the desk. "Uh—why are you interested in her husband?"

"Don't poop around with me boy," replied Whisk affably. "You know very well. We got a positive identification on the nigra who shot my dear departed deacon, Caspar Blount. Gator Davis is the name. One of them BURN hotheads we're gonna tangle with real soon now. But I can't wait even a week to take care of Davis. Poor Caspar gettin' killed—that's personal, y'see. Requirin' immediate action."

"What makes you think I know where Gator is?"

"If you don't, you and your sister are in a mighty big fix."

Sickened, Harold found courage to exclaim, "And you've got the infernal gall to call yourself a Christian minister!"

"I call myself American! I'm gonna save this country! Just like the blessed St. Paul, I had my vision. Outside the main gate of the Buick plant in Flint, Michigan. It was there I dreamed of a purifyin' holy war. It was there the Lord God Almighty snowed me that someone had to bring the good old U. S. of A. back to the God-fearing ways of our dear departed founding fathers! That very day, I quit my job on the 'sembly line—"

"Now, now, Billy Roy," Adelaide soothed, bending down to nuzzle his cheek. "Don't get wrought up."

"The way I heard it," Harold said, "you were fired because you were shiftless; and just by accident, a black man replaced you."

"That'll be just enough, nigger!"

"How can you pervert the teachings of Jesus the way you—"

"Stop, boy, stop!" Whisk's arms were flung wide. "You make one more remark about our meek and gentle Savior an' I'll nail your nuts to a stump. Jesus is the man. The patriot supreme. The greatest white who ever lived. In fact there's but one thing in all the world I find wrong with our sweet and blessed Christ, and of course that wasn't even his fault."

Stricken by the man's lunacy, Harold could only gasp, "W-what—?"

Whisk thumped the desk. "He was a kike."

Harold didn't know whether to sob or laugh wildly. The sight of Sally in that small, sterile room beyond the glass prevented him from doing either. Adelaide Pepper murmured in Whisk's ear; smoothed his hair. This therapy seemed to restore the Reverend to some degree of calm. He pulled the girl onto his lap and engaged in a long, passionate kiss.

Finally he pushed her off. Adelaide took out a compact and began to inspect her breasts in the mirror. Whisk placed his palms on the desk.

"All right, Shigley. Where's Davis?"

"I don't know."

"That's all your sister says, I don't know, I don't know. She's lyin'. You're lyin' too. I can spot a lyin' nigra a mile off. Let me make it plain for you. I am going to take the life of that murderin^, coon in return for the life of my dear departed deacon, Caspar Blount, and I am going to do so in the spirit of Holy Writ, which says, an eye for an eye. If I don't find out from you where Davis is hid out, then that little ole black girl in there is gonna get hurt."

"No!"

"Yes, boy, yes! Where is he?"

"I—I told you, I don't know."

To the white louts lounging near the chrome door, Whisk said softly, "Deacon Fred? Deacon Buzz?"

"What kin we do for you, Reverend?"

"Would you kindly step into that next room and, for

starters, just do what comes naturally? I realize I'm callin' upon you for an act of unnatural heroism—"

"Yessir," answered one. "I hate to pollute my body that way."

"This is a most unusual circumstance. An emergency."

"Well, in that case, Reverend—you want it easy or rough?"

"To spare your sensibilities, fellas, I suggest you get it over with quick. Rape her."

The two louts headed for a door. In that instant, Harold finally understood that this wasn't a leftover dream; wasn't any hallucination lingering after the nauseous gas. And although he knew he would probably despise himself later, he rushed to the desk:

"Don't hurt her!"

"What you say, boy?"

"Call them off. I'll tell you."

Giving a little chuckle, Whisk tented his fingers. "That's more like it. You deacons hold up there." He paused. "Talk, boy."

"I'm a teacher," Harold began. "I've been doing scholarly research—"

"I thought you looked like a smartass nigger," Whisk nodded. "Keep goin'."

"—at the Freylinghausen Foundation—"

Whisk's eyebrows shot up. "That Commie place over in Virginia? The one where they got that time travel contraption?"

"That's the one. I—knew you'd be after Gator, so—'*

He hesitated. Should he? Oh, God, what a mess. His eyes slid to Sally beyond the glass. No choice.

"—so I broke into the Foundation last night and took Gator back in time. I left him where I thought he'd be safe."

Whisk guffawed.

"It's true! I took him back to New Orleans in 1815!"

"Come on, boy! You strainin' my credulity! The very suggestion that a nigra would be safe down south in eighteen hunnerd and fifteen stamps your story a plain

damn lie. I'm a student of nigra historyr I believe that old saying about knowin' your enemy."

"You've got to believe me, Whisk. Don't you know that in New Orleans back then, free men of color were—"

"Okay, you deacons. Go to it."

"No!" Harold lunged forward. "No, please, you—"

An explosion beyond the chrome door rocked the office.

Whisk jumped up. "We're under attack!"

Adelaide dove for the desk and hit a switch. The office went dark. Harold heard oaths, another explosion, the chatter of small arms fire. Bullets ponged the chrome door as the deacons unlimbered their revolvers.

Sally's cell was still lit. She heard the explosions, pressed her hands to her cheeks. The Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk hauled a machine pistol from his desk with one hand. With the other he hit another switch. The chrome door sprang open.

In the church there was flickering firelight. Voices yelled, "Burn, burn!" A pistol barked. One of the deacons shrieked and fell to the rug, clutching his shin.

Whisk rushed to the doorway in a crouch. He poked his nose around the edge. "Black guerillas! Where in the name of Lazarus are all my deacons?"

"You let most of 'em go get breakfast, honey," Adelaide reminded him. "You said lazy nigras never got out of bed this early."

. "Jesus! That's right! But there's hundreds of boogies out there!" Whisk maneuvered himself behind the deacon, kicked him in the backside. "Go out and hold 'em off, Buzz! The bunker, Adelaide—the bunker!" And, gathering up his robe hem, Whisk hightailed around behind the desk again.

Deacon Buzz rushed out. A gun popped. Deacon Buzz yelped. A machinery-roar shook the office. Adelaide and Billy Roy Whisk sank from sight behind the desk, a half second before Jomo, Little Che and several fierce-looking blacks rushed in.

"I never thought I'd be glad to see you," Harold said.

"Stand aside, sweet." Smoke trickled from the muzzle of Jomo's .45. "Where's that lousy minister?"

Harold gestured. "He escaped down through a trap door."

Jomo's troops shot around the desk, ripped up the carpet and proceeded to bang and hammer on the floor. Steel, it rang like a bell.

The oaths of frustration were suddenly counterpointed by the wail of sirens. A young black with grenades looped on his belt dashed into the office.

"The man's comin', Jomo!"

"Damn. We can't get this trap open."

Little Che brandished his revolver. "We'll meet 'em in the street!"

"Forget it," Jomo said. "Our job now's to find Gator's wife."

"In there." Harold pointed their attention to the oneway glass. Jomo heaved a chair through it.

Sally screeched as the glass broke. But she got control of herself when she saw Harold. He helped her over the jagged window frame and followed the others back into the church proper.

Several windows had been knocked out, a few pews ripped up and set afire. Jomo led the way out a side door and around to an alley. He held the door of the first of several autos into which the two dozen black commandos were piling helter-sekelter. The first vehicle was the stolen wagon, Diana at the wheel.

Harold shoved Sally inside. Little Che jumped into the back aftef them. Jomo shouted at the cars behind:

"You all split an' wait for word." He hopped in front. "Bug."

Diana laid a strip of rubber leaving the alley. They narrowly avoided a collision with a prowl car heading for the church. But Diana was a cool, expert driver. Before long, the cars had separated and the station wagon had lost all pursuit.

Harold cradled Sally in his arms. She stopped crying long enough to ask, "Is George all right?" <

"Safe in 1815." I think.

"Head for the bridge," Jomo ordered. "We're going to McLean." He swung around, a sweaty, curiously catlike grin on his big face. "That old Doctor Freylinghausen does live in McLean, didn't you say, Harold?",

"Yes, he lives by himself in a little—wait a minute. What's that got to do with anything? I don't even know how you found me."

"Simple."

"So tell me."

"When you didn't come back to the Foundation right away, we figured something had gone wrong. We waited -an hour and left."

"Thanks for your concern.'*

"Now, now, don't get snotty, perfesser. There wasn't much we could do by hangin' around. Besides, I believe in lookin' out for number one."

"Tell me something else new."

"You want to hear, sweet, or you just want to flap your mouth?"

"All right, go on."

"Well, first we fixed Sally up with a couple o' tranquilizers from my friend who runs the Black Arts Pharmacy. She was the only one who didn't want to leave the Foundation. But I persuaded her, and the pills calmed her down some. We dropped her at the flat. I figured she'd be safe. That was a mistake, I hate to admit. They were waiting. They got her out through the back while I was organizing a few brothers to watch the place. We tried to catch them but we lost them. I went back and pulled off all the brothers but two. 'Bout half an hour later, one of them phoned all in a lather to say that Whisk's little white poon had just gone in the apartment with a couple of bodyguards. Deduction—they had Sally someplace but she wasn't talking, so they were hunting somebody else with the information they wanted. You, as it turned out."

Harold gaped. "You were watching the place when I came back?"

"Sweet, there were black eyes thick as peas on that street. Didn't you feel 'em?"

"Come to think of it, I did. So when they took me—"

"We up and followed. Had to stop for extra ammo, which explains the slight delay." Jomo studied the view in the side mirror. "Right now, I figure Whisk will grok the situation wrong. He'll come up from that strongroom under the floor and figure we're still hiding somewhere in Washington. So instead, we're going to Virginia." Jomo's ebony face cracked with a glee Harold didn't understand., "And we won't even be in Virginia very long."

"We won't? Why not?"

" 'Cause I've got this big idea, that's why. Had it ever since Sally first told me about that Freylinghausen place. Just as simple as this. If a perfesser can go back in time just to look, somebody else can go back and change things around. We're never going to have to worry about Whisk again, old Harold. Or Jim Crow, or freedom rides, or any of that stuff. We need to hide out, don't we? All right, then. Back we go. To fix up a little history."

The enormity left Harold limp. "To—to fix up—?"

"History."

"Black history," Diana said. "Isn't Jomo a beautiful thinker?"

"Indeed I am," Jomo said as they sped onto the bridge across the Potomac. "When we come back, it may be a whole new world."

"But—but—" Harold was short of breath. "Freylinghausen won't permit—"

"Freylinghausen won't have a thing to say about it, sweet."

"That's why we're gonna kidnap him right now," said Little Che. At which point Harold passed out.

For the remainder of the day, Harold existed in a dream state in which he spoke—argued vehemently, in fact— with the strange feeling that his rhetoric really had no' bearing on reality.

Sally was torn from him. An old internal combustion car met them on a country road outside McLean. A tall, tired black in coveralls passed over hampers of ribs and promised that Sally would be safe at his farm. Harold

protested. Nobody paid any attention. Sally kissed him and was gone. .

Harold stared at the polluting exhaust of the vanishing car. Then he roused himself:

"Jomo—"

"What's it now?"

"You've got to listen to me. What you're planning is so incredibly dangerous—-"

Jomo replied with a terse obscenity. "Split, Diana. Freylinghausen's place."

"I won't tell you where he lives!" cried Harold.

"We already know."

"But the possible paradoxes—ouch!" Harold smacked his head as he climbed into the wagon. It was that or be abandoned on the country road. "What if whatever you do back in time wipes us all out?"

"I'll take the risk. Hell, we could all be wiped out tomorrow in Whisk's little holy war. The other way— why, I could end up the martyred savior of the whole goddam black race. Diana, you drop me at the McLean library while L.C. picks up Freylinghausen. Are we moving and grooving?"

The beautiful bronze girl glowed. "We are."

They meant it. They truly meant it. Harold heard Jomo saying, "I need to do a mite of date-checking before we buzz back and—"

Harold's brain simply couldn't accept the rest. He took refuge in passing out all over again.

Well after twilight, four people were present in one of the Foundation's by-now-familiar departure rooms. A fifth joined them: Little Che.

"Guards all gone," he reported. "Pretty nice of you to send them all home that way, perfesser."

Pale and wrathful, Freylinghausen said, "It's Doctor. And I didn't do it by choice, I remind you. Do you all truly realize the catastrophic course you're contemplating?" He'd been singing much the same tune ever since Little Che abducted him at gunpoint from the secluded rose garden behind his bachelor cottage earlier that

afternoon. "To tamper with the fabric of history—that simply cannot be countenanced! I vowed when I discovered the Nexus principles that I would not permit two things. Utilization of the Nexus by the military-industrial complex, and any attempt to in any way alter—"

"Shut up and show me how to get this belt on, you old white windbag," Jomo said.

Diana had already managed to fit hers beneath her lushly filled sweater. "Here, I'll help you."

Jomo grunted. He passed his .45 to Little Che, raised his arms. "As I grok it, Doctor, we can trip backwards, stay as long as we want, then tell the computer to bring us forward again, and we'll arrive about a second after we left?"

Freylinghausen glared. "I have nothing to say. Professor Quigley, I hold you personally responsible for—"

"I've been trying to talk them out of it, for God's sake!"

"Right," Diana agreed, tightening Jomo's elastic belt. "Harold doesn't have much stomach for social action."

"Social lunacy!" he countered. "Historical disaster!"

Unperturbed, she went on, "But we decided to take him along anyway. He's the expert at operating the controls."

" 'Sides," said Jomo, "it might stiffen his backbone. As for you, Doctor Ofay, my brother Che will stay right here with you, with that gun trained in your direction. Should you try to overpower him, he has orders to shoot. Just a precaution, you understand. We won't be gone all that long." He began to rummage in his pockets. "Guess we can't help the language barrier." Harold thought about the hypnolearners, said nothing. "But we could make it easy on ourselves with some of those costumes the per-fesser mentioned."

"I saw a room back there marked Wardrobe," Diana said.

"See what you can dig up in the Arab department. Three of those burnous things ought to do it."

She left. He continued digging.

"Where's that note from the library? I've studied a lot

of Muslim history but my head's not much for dates. Oh, yeh." He produced a wrinkled scrap. "Here, perfesser."

"For the last time, Jomo, I beg you to consider what—"

"Stuff it. The first stop's Timbuctoo. I bet you've turned so white you don't know where that is. Or what. The Songhay empire, 1591. The date we want is there on the slip."

"I—I don't know the settings."

"Now, Harold. Do I have to lean on you? Do you want your white buddy here to keep breathing? You've told Sally and everybody else that all you have to do to get where you want to go is talk to the computer through one of these belt gizzys."

Dr. Freylinghausen stabbed fingers through his spiky hair. "To think that I, Norval Freylinghausen, a lifelong spokesman for the cause of black freedom, should be treated this way! Should have my life's work expropriated by a pack of lunatics!"

"You parlor liberals are passe," Jomo waved. "Personally I feel we either fix this world so the blacks are on top for a change, or you can have it. In a cinder-like condition. Di sweet—simply fabulous!" He caught the burnous she flung him and began struggling into it. He hid his .45 in the folds. Then he looked at Harold.

"Harold, talk to the time machine."

Jomo snapped his fingers. Little Che shoved his automatic against Freylinghausen's side.

"Talk to the time machine, Harold."

Harold swallowed. His eyes began watering again. He looked at Jomo. He looked at the .45. He pulled his control device up near his face. He talked.

"I got a feeling it's going to be a whole new world," Jomo chuckled as he tossed Harold a burnous. The Nexus lit up. "Damn if it isn't prettier already."

"Allah akhbar.t" screamed a thousand horsemen, brandishing scimitars.

"My God, watch out!" cried Harold, a moment after the threesome materialized among reeds along a river-bank.

The horsemen thundered along the bank, shaking the earth, passing by the hundreds on magnificent coaly stallions. Without waiting for Diana's leave, Harold tackled her and bore her backwards into the brown water, out of the path of half a dozen riders who would have trampled her.

Two of the riders spotted them, started to turn back. But it was either ride into the river or force a collision with the horsemen coming along behind. The two were swept on ahead.

Surfacing, Harold breathed hard. The air was hot, steamy. Diana was floundering. And mad. Her eyes shone like mirrors in the sun.

The riders went streaming on by. Several thousands spread out over a plain, it now appeared. They were converging on a splendid city of pastel-colored buildings.

Flags bearing a crescent device snapped over the heads of the attackers, most of whom rode those beautiful black horses.

"A llah akhbar! A llah akhbar!"

"I can manage, thanks," Diana whispered as Harold tried to assist her. He couldn't hide a scowl, which she noticed. "What the hell's wrong?"

"You!" he said as he motioned her down into the concealment of the rushes. A little further on, Jomo was already crouched and hidden. Diana reluctantly took Harold's suggestion, giving him a chance to hiss, "You're acting like a fool. Those wild men would have run you down."

"Sssssh!" Jomo said from his hiding place.

"Don't shush me, Jomo," Diana said. "Where'd you bring us to, anyway?"

"You could at least thank me," Harold said at practically the same time.

Diana's glance withered. "I'm just too shocked. I didn't know you had the guts to leap in front of a horse that way."

"I can do what I need to do, woman, and don't you forget it." He was rather surprised at his own -^n^er.

"My, my. Pussycat's got claws." She flexed her right hand. "Miaow."

A fierce-looking rider going by noticed the girl's movement. Screaming his war cry, he swung out of line and rode them down.

Up to his knees in river water, Harold prepared to defend himself. The warrior's horse charged into the reeds, throwing up great splashes. The man's scimitar winked over his head, ready to strike down—

Jomo leaped at the rider from the side. He caught the man around the waist, pulled him off his horse, tore the sword out of his hand. Jomo disemboweled the man with one stroke. He shoved the corpse under the brown water.

The water began to redden. Standing still now, the black warhorse dipped its head. Jomo slapped it on the flank. "Get the hell out of here!"

The horse took off, amid much splashing. Jomo thumbed toward the blood-tinged water. "Hope nobody spots that. Meantime, will you two heads quit tryin' to attract so much attention?"

Squatting in the river amid the rushes, they had a fair view of the splendid city under attack. From its walls, many black men in spotlessly white robes poured the contents of firepots on the horsemen milling outside the heavy gates.

"Just what is all this?" Harold asked.

"You're lookin' at the heart of the greatest black empire the world ever knew, sweet. The empire of the Song-hay blacks. That's Timbuctoo. This river's the Niger."

Harold swatted a fly. "Central Africa."

"Well! I'm s'prised you knew even that much."

Diana shoved a lock of wet hair back under the hood of her burnous. "I never heard of it."

"That just shows what a dumb little broad you are. This is 1591. The Songhay got started 'round the year 476, right after the Roman boys came a cropper. In that city right there, you'd find the University of Sankore, where smart people from all over the known world—and I mean all over—came to study. In that city you'd also find salt. Plus gold. Plus leatherwork like you've never seen. Plus dates, cloves, tea, silk, teapots—and camel caravans, in season. It could have been bigger than Rome's empire except that those fugheads on the black horses made it expire right about now."

Something dawned on Harold. "The crescent flag— they're Muslims."

"Aren't you smart. The Muslims—the Moors—got run out of Spain last year or so. Greedy as ever, they headed south. What we're watchin' is the end of the long, happy life of the Songhay. Tall black men who could have ruled the whole damn world if it hadn't been for one man. And that boy is the boy we're going to get."

Columns of smoke were rising from the city now. The invaders had breached the gates. "I wanted to show you all this before we got down to the real business," Jomo said.

"Your silly sightseeing trip almost got us killed," Harold said.

"What's the real business?" Diana wanted to know.

"Like I said—killing the boy who got all these hop-heads hopped—may my_Muslim brothers at all those defunct U.S. mosques forgive me! This black empire would've thrived if it hadn't been for one man. The Prophet."

"Phooey," said Harold.

"What the hell do you mean, phooey?"

"You're gambling on a theory of history that says one man was inevitable. That no other man would have arisen to do what he did if he hadn't been born—Jomo, you're crazy! You can't seriously be planning to do away with Mohammad."

"I sure am. Everybody get ready to tell these belt gizzys where we want to go. Perfesser, these things are easier to run than they look. As a technical expert"—an evil grin —"you are rapidly becomin' expendable."

"Where is it we want to go?" Diana asked.

"The oasis of Taif. That's outside Mecca. The date's the equivalent of July 16, A.D. 622. That's the night the political cats who didn't care for ole Prophet's new religion tried to bump him off. He'd been hiding at the oasis a couple of years because Mecca wasn't safe."

"Did they succeed?"

"'Course not. The Prophet went on his flight—his hijra—to-Medina. From there he really began to spread the faith. Only we're goin' to fix that, aren't we, sweet?" His gargantuan backslap nearly knocked Harold in the water. Harold glared. One of these days—

"Let's go, let's go," Jomo prodded. He started talking to the Nexus computer via the control device.

The howls of the Muslim cavalry faded into black. They arrived momentarily at a sandy, moon-dappled oasis.

They crawled to the edge of a pool reflecting stars. Several silk pavilions snapped in the breeze. Inside the largest one, angry voices were raised. Angular figures

passed back and forth in front of lamps burning beyond the silken wall.

"I think the wrecking crew got here ahead of us," Jomo whispered. He fidgeted, pulled his .45 from underneath his robes. Lying between the big black and Diana, Harold was freshly horrified.

The voices inside the pavilion, high-pitched, grew louder. On the far side of the oasis, horses stamped. Harness jingled.

"Jomo?" Diana whispered.

"What?'* "

"Do you really think it's okay to change things that have already happened?"

Harold sM her a glance. "Pangs of conscience?"

That was definitely the wrong remark. She said, "Never!"

"Hush up," Jomo ordered.

Three robed men were creeping to the large pavilion. They led black horses.

Two more adherents of the Prophet came sneaking up from another direction. They passed so close to the pool that with one misstep, a slipper would have descended on Harold's outstretched hand. But that hand was dark against the rocks at the pool's edge. Black, on this occasion especially, was lifesavingly beautiful.

The two robed men continued to creep toward the pavilion. Inside, the discourse changed from tones of argument to tones of threat. Suddenly, wfuck-whack, Harold heard the jdithery sounds of swords.

A lantern overturned. Much cursing. A man of unprepossessing stature slit the pavilion from inside with a scimitar, then jumped through the opening. His followers dragged the horses forward.

The man leaped to the saddle of the first horse, just as more men with scimitars came through the fresh-cut opening, all a-tumble.

One swung his blade to hamstring the smaller man's horse. But the man reared his mount in time. The blade chopped the thigh of one of the horse handlers.

Jomo leveled Ms .45 at the pawing stallion. "Got him right in my sights-—"

Four of the assassins lunging from the tent spilled against the Prophet's black mount. The horse pranced aside. Jomo's automatic boomed. A fat, bearded shaikh type clutched his corporation and fell over. With ferocious oaths, Mohammad's two other horse handlers jumped aboard their mounts, swinging scimitars the while. Diana gasped as one of the blades whacked off a head.

The Prophet's horse reared away from spouting blood. Grim and afraid, Harold could still think, "Well, she's a little bit human anyway."

The Prophet galloped off. His adherents were still arriving in force from all sections of the oasis. A brief, bloody battle ensued, the politicians soon getting the worst of it. Leaving several dead, the survivors whistled up their horses and went pounding away into the night. The Prophet's followers conferred, likewise took horse, and went pounding away in the opposite direction, presumably to Medina and the real start of a religion that would sweep half the world.

Harold felt the same stunned awe as he had in Rome. He couldn't really believe that history had happened while he watched, though on an objective level he understood that it had. He listened to silence enfolding the oasis. Not a ripple disturbed the stars reflected in the pool. The wind had died to practically nothing. The smell of horse dung was ripe.

Jomo started stamping up and down, mouthing every sort of obscenity. "Failed—(swear, swear)—just like the history books said—(swear)—"

"Jomo?" Diana touched him.

He whirled. "What?"

"See if I understand this right. We came here once, didn't we?"

"Yen."

"Then what's to keep us from going back to the Foundation, then coming here again? Only next time you could shoot from a different spot?"

"Why, nothing," Harold said. "Nothing except meeting

ourselves, that is. Then which of us would be the real us?"

For a long moment Jomo stared at him. He jammed his palm against his eye. "Ugh. Gives me a headache just to think about."

Pushing, Harold said, "When you tamper with time, you encounter all sorts of what-ifs and paradoxes that sooner or later will tangle you—"

"Be quiet, you white-loving mother!" Jomo raised his .45 as if to strike Harold's forehead. Harold backed away fast. Diana smiled, not kindly.

Hell, let her interpret his move as cowardice if she wanted. He had to stop this mad tripping in time as soon as possible. The only way to do it was to seize on an opportune moment. And this wasn't it. One wrong move now and Jomo'd brain him, then toot off again to try to wreak more historical havoc.

"Maybe we should go back to the Foundation, period," Harold suggested.

"You're damn right, sweet! But not forthe reason you want. Not to give up. We can change things. I know we can. But maybe we don't have the right attack point. Maybe we don't know enough about where to change things. I've studied up on the Muslims some. But I don't know as much about the rest of black history. Maybe there's a better attack point than this." His teeth blazed in the moonlight. "So let's go back and learn."

Diana blinked. "Learn what?"

"Black history! Start to finish."

"Oh, you're going to enroll in college a few years, are you?"

"You thick bitch!" he exclaimed, grabbing her arm.

"Let her alone."

Harold was astounded at the sound of his own voice. Slowly Jomo turned to him. Inclined his head forward—

"What was that?"

"I—I said let her alone."

Jomo leered. "Perfesser! I do believe you've got a case for this little piece of stuff!"

Diana shook herself free. "That's stupid."

"You've got no call to manhandle her, that's all," Harold said. "And it's not our fault you missed Mohammad. I wish you'd wake up! You're liable to futz around and wind up obliterating the whole damn black race."

Diana seemed to react deeply to that: *'Oh, you don't really believe—"

. "Who knows? Nobody knows, that's who! That's why Freylinghausen won't stand this kind of tinkering!"

"Sweet, I don't give one shit about the opinions of that ofay egghead."

"Then what about your own people? Do you give one shit about them?"

Sudden silence.

The wind stirred palm leaves high up against the moon. In Jomo's face Harold saw militant madness.

"Haven't I made it clear by now, perfesser? I'm willing to take some pretty big chances to get some changes made. And if you don't like it, you just remember that it's my boy Che with a gun at Freylinghausen's head. If I say shoot—bang!"

Their eyes held. Then, in a raw voice, Harold said, "Message received."

" 'Bout time. Now, didn't I hear from your sister that there are gizzys at the Foundation that can put a whole flock of history into your head? And do it fast, so you can talk and act right wherever you go in time?" Jomo grinned that awful grin. "I'm just sure I heard that, perfesser."

Suddenly Harold knew he couldn't retreat. He was the man who had to stop Jomo if Jomo was going to be stopped. That meant dissembling. Stringing along; even though it petrified him. In a meek voice only half faked, he answered:

"Yes, the Foundation has machines like that. The hyp-nolearners. They're linked with the Foundation's computer."

"And we can get black history outa them?"

"You can get the whole sum of human knowledge out of them."

"Then what are we hangin' around here for?"

Too dazed to correctly read the odd, intense stare Diana was sending his way, Harold got ready to talk to his control device. A dromedary wandered out of the dark and blubbered its lips at them until they vanished.

"What happened?" cried Dr. Freylinghausen as the travelers appeared beneath the Nexus.

Diana and Jomo hopped up quickly, started climbing out of their bedouin togs. Harold didn't. For a moment he was tempted just to lie on the couch, staring up at the pretty amber glow fading from the wires, and quit trying to fight this flaky battle.

The sense of conscience that had seized him at the oasis of Taif refused to let him. He unfolded his* tired, empty body—he hadn't eaten in positively hours—and replied to the old troll:

"Jomo tried to shoot the Prophet Mohammad."

Freylinghausen's spiky hair seemed to quiver. "In God's name—why?"

"He had a notion that if the founder of the Muslim religion was wiped out, the Muslims would be too." Harold gave a rapid account of their hairbreadth visit to Timbuctoo and Taif, during which old Freylinghausen came to resemble a cheap comic miming terror. His cheeks turned plum color. His mouth flapped, giving off sounds something like waugh-waugh-waugh. To deliver

all the bad news at once, Harold finished, "Now Jomo's decided that maybe he went about it in the wrong place."

"Went about what, went about what?"

"Changing black history. I guess the idea is to try it somewhere—I mean sometime—well, somewhere and sometime else. Jomo wants a black history course from the hypnolearners."

Through this, Jomo had displayed a keen amusement. It came bubbling up in chuckles as the stricken Frey-linghausen sat down on a chair and again went waugh. Jomo punched Harold's chest.

"Slight correction. We want a black history lesson."

"Don't include me. I'm not having any part of—"

"But I am including you," Jomo said with a treacly smile.

Harold glanced away. So far, so good. He had to stay with Jomo if he meant to stop him.

Jomo itched his paunch. "Little Che, you run out to that drive-in we saw near McLean. Pick up some chicken and malts and come right back. After we go under that hypnodingus, you'll have to guard old flannelmouth again. We do go to sleep, right?"

Harold's shoulders were slumped. "Sort of. First there's an injection of—"

"Don't tell him a thing!" Freylinghausen warned, fires in his eyes. He pulled a hanky from the breast pocket of his tweeds and mopped his forehead. He bobbed the hanky up and down at Jomo with sharp, furious motions. "You'll not get a whit of help, you ill-mannered, pea-brained roughneck. I don't care what color you are, you are not going to tamper further with the fabric of the temporal—are you paying attention to me?"

"Not much," Jomo admitted. "Okay, Harold. You're gonna tell us how it works."

"Unfortunately—" Harold couldn't hide his cool, sweet relief. "—uh—unfortunately I only went under the hypno-learner. I didn't get any lessons hi how it operates."

A sudden tensing in the big black's shoulders communicated his bitter realization that Harold wasn't lying. Jomo scrutinized Harold another minute, so piercingly

that even Diana shuddered. Then he kicked Little Che in the shins.

"What are you doing still here? Get your ass geared up and get back with the food!"

With a gulp and a nod, Little Che vanished. Presently Harold heard an auto start, big batteries humming. Jomo sat down on the Nexus couch. He relaxed his hold on the .45. The gun swung from his index finger by its trigger guard. For one mad moment, Harold contemplated a jump. He refrained because he was afraid that Jomo, attacked, might pump Freylinghausen full of holes by accident.

"Hey, perfesser."

Freylinghausen glared. "I told you—It's Doctor."

"Okay, okay. You like this place you built here?"

"Like it! What an asinine question! My whole life has been devoted to it—not to mention virtually every cent of my not inconsiderable income. Why do you think I prostituted myself for so many years doing applied research for silly commercial corporations? Why do you think I labored so hard on inventions I knew would be commercially successful even though they were socially useless? Simply because I had the idea—the theoretic bases!—for the Nexus by the time I was twenty-seven years old. I poured the next thirty and then some years of my life into one thing—raising the funds for this edifice and the equipment it contains, so that I could operate the Nexus my way, not surrender it to the Pentagon. And you ask whether I like this place! You simplistic fool."

"Hoi' on there, sweet," Jomo growled, rising from the couch.

"You hold on! Your black-or-white mentality is as deranged as that of Whisk whom you pretend to despise. Your solution is the same as his—if you don't like it, burn it up! shoot it down! Do you know—can you conceive— of the complexity of the terminals—the phasors, the compensators—required to construct just the central time Nexus? There are six stories of equipment under these floors, plus two more stories occupied by the main computer, plus one more for the failsafe system. Do you

think one finds money to construct such a complex by walking into the nearest full service bank and saying, Pardon me, could you loan me fifty million dollars so that I can construct a time machine? You chocolate-colored ass!"

Diana giggled behind her hand. Jomo's lower jaw actually dropped as Freylinghausen shouted:

"My entire life is in this place. My life and my faith that man's mind is stronger than his glands. And you ask me whether I like it!"

A peculiar silence ensued. Harold found himself wanting to applaud. He tried to show approval by means of expression. Freylinghausen was too worked up to notice. Jomo bit his lip, took a firmer grip on his automatic, said:

"Well, thanks. That was kind of gabby. But it gave me the answer I wanted." He cocked his head. "I'll put it to you now. Operate the hypnogizzy for us or I'll burn the place down."

Diana said, "Isn't that kind of an extreme—?"

Jomo didn't even pay any attention: "You hear me, old man. I've got as much sweat and hate in what I'm doing as you've got love in these marble walls. I aim to have a complete cram course in all the important names, dates, places in black history, and I aim to have it now. Otherwise, when Little Che gets back, I'll put my expertise to work and start a fire that won't leave anything. I've been in plenty of riots. You better believe I know how to get a big one started."

Blanching, Freylinghausen again applied the hanky to his forehead. Harold had never seen the old scientist look so stunned.

Freylinghausen gave Harold one quick, embittered look. Then all resentment and resistance seemed to peter out. He made a vague gesture at the door.

"If you'll come this way—"

"Doctor, don't!" Harold exclaimed.

"The—the hypnolearning center is located at the end of the corridor."

They tramped down the chilly marble corridor. Or rather,

Jomo tramped. Diana walked. Harold just sort of drifted, and Freylinghausen shuffled, bent and murmuring to himself.

The old doctor opened the double doors at corridor's end. He turned on the ceiling rheolights with a gesture.

"Lie down, please," he said, indicating the half-dozen contour couches that sprouted inputs all around their perimeters.

Jomo approached the couches warily. "How long's this going to take?"

"I'll have to query the computer.'*

Freylinghausen shuffled to the far wall, two stories of complex baffles, levers, lightbanks. He performed arcane manipulations. The lightbanks began rippling. Presently a bell rang. A card popped from a slot.

Reading, Freylinghausen reported, "Approximately two hours and forty-five minutes."

"When we're under, I warn you that you better not try—"

"Don't be a child," the old troll said. "I told you I want the Foundation to survive."

As if to ease the tension of waiting for Che, Diana said, "It really is kind of admirable, Jomo. All this dedication to a single idea, I mean."

"That's the white man's trouble. Dedication. To the wrong idea."

The doctor got some of his starch back. "I need no compliments from those who would rip the fabric of history without thought."

"No use makin' conversation," Jomo agreed. "He's got his hobbyhorse. We've got ours. That's that."

So they settled into a dismal wait.

Harold felt unwashed, fatigued, hot around the eyeballs, queasy in the stomach. The buckets of Smackin-Good Chikkin from the Robt. E. Lee Chik-a-teria eventually fetched in by Little Che did nothing to soothe his condition. In fact they worsened it. The stink of the greasy batter raped his sensibilities. The notion of eating fried chicken—or peanut butter, vichysoisse, anything—just

prior to maybe toppling civilization as they knew it struck him as perverse and frightful.

"Come on, sweets, sock the smarts to me," Jomo said as he flopped down on a couch at last. He continued to munch a chicken leg clean while Freylinghausen covered him with phones and vibrato pads, then attached the clips of dozens of dermal inputs.

Diana went next, Harold last. Freylinghausen said, *There will be a slight sensation of vertigo at first." He moved back to the controls. "Then an absence of any consciousness whatsoever until all the programs have been fed into your mind."

"And if we're not wide awake in two hours and forty-six minutes, L.C.," Jomo said as he handed his .45 out through the tangled wires, "take him out and plug him."

In his phones Harold began to hear a familiar rhythmic tone pattern. Lassitude overcame him instantly. By bone conduction, hypnosis was induced in moments. His lids drooped.

Through the various clips and vibratos, wave-phase reactions set in. This created a sensation akin to his bones being taut wires that were suddenly tweaked. His stomach started to revolve. A dynamo-like sound built in both phones. Then he went out.

First to waken, Diana made the discovery: -

"Jomo? Jomo, you better wake up. They're gone." Harold's head ached. It felt huge. He jumped ofi the

couch, ripping away the pads and inputs without regard

for their cost. Jomo tottered like a drunk bear.

"Wha—I don't see—" His eyes focused. He gaped at

the lightbanks rippling without human supervision.

They hurried down the hall. Harold spotted a sticky

pool on the marble floor. "That's blood. I mean it looks

like—" He knelt. Touched. He swallowed. "It is." "What in hell's been goin' on here?" Jomo looked bad. Diana seized his arm. "Hear that?" "I hear a Venetian blind clankin', that's all." But Harold heard it—a groan drifting along the dim

corridor. They ran on.

Harold's soles crunched broken glass. He dropped behind long enough to examine the source of the glass: one of the departure room doors was wide open. The room's window had been smashed. The Venetian blinds hung askew, going clank in the earth-smelling nightwind.

Harold had no time to rummage through the contents of his own mind; no time to see what had been deposited there. He charged after the others.

He located them in another departure room, whose console gave off a low, steady gonging. Several control devices hanging from wall hooks emitted the same gongs.

Little Che was being helped to his feet. He was spitting and snarling. A large cut on his forehead had dribbled blood down his nose, and the blood had dried on his upper lip, a grotesque mustache. Harold saw no weapons and, inexplicably, no sign of Freylinghausen.

"They scrogged me," Che said as Jomo propped him up. "They got in here 'thout even setting off the burglar alarms. The old ofay and I were wallrin' down to the drinking fountain at the other end of the hall when— Jomo! Don't look at me like that! It ain't no sin to be thirsty! I just didn't hear 'em comin'!"

"They broke windows," Harold said.

"You were probably blabbing too much," Jomo said.

"Okay, maybe I was raggin' the old guy a little about bein' white. I don't remember much. But those mother-rapers were fast. They jumped me from behind and damn near broke my arms and legs."

"Who were they?" Diana asked.

"Whisk! Whisk an' a bunch of his deacons!"

Jomo's mouth really went low that time. Diana goggled too. Harold felt even more enervated, if that was possible. Questions came from all three of them at once. Little Che thrust up his hands as if to fend them. Suddenly Harold sighted an oxblood shoe with a hole in the sole, sticking out from behind the Nexus couch.

"Doctor Freylinghausen!"

Harold tried to rouse the old man. Freylinghausen's breath was thin, whistly. Both his eyes were turning blue-

black underneath, and a nasty scrape decorated his shin. After a moment, Harold decided that no bones were broken, no wounds visible. But the old troll was out good and cold.

Harold staggered to his feet! reaching for the couch for support

"—that white mother's soft in the head," Little Che was saying. "I never seen eyes like his before. Never." Harold certainly understood that remark.

"You're not making sense," Diana said. "What was Whisk doing here?"

"Said—he was gonna make the world safe for the white majority."

"How in the name of Malcolm would he do—?"

Jomo stopped. Exchanging stares, suddenly and sicken-ingly united, Diana and Jomo and Harold knew.

Of them all, Jomo acted most outraged. "It can't be! I mean, how would Whisk know about this place?"

Little Che's teeth stopped chattering. He pointed a finger at Harold.

"Whisk said he told him."

"I did!" Harold cried, "I told them in the church. It was either that or have them rape my sister. My God, is that such a crime?"

To judge from Jomo's pulsing nostrils, it was. Harold rubbed his eyes. "I thought he didn't believe me. He acted like he didn't believe me—" Doubt robbed his words of force.

"Hell, perfesser, I didn't believe this place existed the first time I heard about it from Sally. But it didn't take me long to get convinced an' start dwellin' on all the interesting possibilities. Whisk's hyena-smart. He could reason out that trippin' back in time to change things might swing the balance in his favor as well as in ours." Jomo turned to Che. "How'd he force the old coot to operate the machine?"

"Threatened to blow the place up." Che smiled feebly. "You and that flaky mister charlie, you're two of a—"

Jomo knocked him flat.

Diana moved her head from side to side. "I don't believe it."

"No," Jomo said, "there's got to be a foulup somewhere."

"There's no foulup," Harold said. He waved a hand at the gonging control console, the gonging belts hanging on their hooks. "Whisk doesn't know enough to turn off the locator signal. He's back there—they're all back there somewhere—"

The elastic belts and the control devices went bong, gong, bong, gong. Harold laughed wildly:

"They're changing things around! Whitey's way!"

Profanely, Jomo inquired what the locator signal was. Though Harold didn't understand how it operated, he could explain its function:

"Each control device is equipped to give off that kind of signal. The Foundation's main computer monitors all of them. The computer knows at any given moment whether a given scholar is in a given epoch—" "Skip the goddam givens and lay it on me!" Harold turned hot but he didn't retort. Jomo had the dangerous look of a man trying to think out new moves too quickly. Harold explained that the individual control devices worn by time scholars could also tune in on the locator signals from other devices, this last fillip having-been added to permit research teams to hunt for a particular event within a span of days. One team member could start searching for the unknown beginnings of an assassination plot on a Tuesday, for example, a second man could search on a Friday, and a third could jump into next week. Whichever one found the first meeting of a cabal could alert the others with his locator signal. They in turn could query the Foundation's computer and,

down the stream of time, it would automatically reset their controls and transport them to the time and place from which the signal had originated.

During this recitation, Jomo peered at Harold in a frustrated, almost cross-eyed way. At the end he said:

"You just full of the white man's jive, aren't you?"

"I'm only trying to answer your question. The signal, era-to-era, is potentially very useful. I heard talk that a team from Tulane was going to hop back and go over various locations thought to be the sites of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK."

"What I want to know is, where is Whisk right now?"

"Two ways to find out. Punch up a control device, get shifted to wherever he is, and you'll find out where you are when you arrive."

"When we arrive."

"I was afraid you'd say that. The other way—if you want to know ahead of time—well, that takes a minute or so. I'll have to ask the computer."

Jomo shoved him toward the wall controls. "Do it."

Hot and gallish inside, Harold shut his lips tight. This wasn't the time, not yet. He'd vowed to stop Jomo and the girl when it was possible, but now a new factor had been scribbled into the equation: Whisk.

As Harold interrogated the computer, Jomo said to Che, "Did you hear Whisk askin' Freylinghoozy about any particular dates? People? Events?"

Little Che wiggled under the fierce stare. "Jomo, you got to remember I was scrogged out of my mind on the floor. Yeh, Whisk asked plenty of things before he decked the old guy, but—"

"How long did they talk?"

"An hour, maybe. I don't know. I kept fallin* asleep. Feel the damn goose egg I got up here—"

"Let go of my hand!"

Little Che began to shake again. The computer disgorged a punched paper strip from the wall, just as Little Che erupted:

"You ought to quit bein' so mad at me, Jomo. Wasn't for me lyin' there on the floor half scrogged to death, they

might have tortured mel Made me tell that you an' Di an' the perfesser were right down at the end of the hall, asleep. They could of killed you."

"My God! They could of."

Harold managed some extra hardness: "I guess Frey-linghausen didn't tell them either. He could have, easily. You still hate all the whites, Jomo?"

Up came the big man's head. Venomous brown eyes looked out under his brows. His face grew strange and shivery.

Harold remembered seeing such a face as a child, down near Waycross. His Uncle Parnassus had taken him motoring in his postwar Chevrolet. They'd run out of gas. Uncle Parnassus walked to a filling station. Harold tagged after.

Most politely, Uncle Parnassus waited until the bull-shouldered white boy jockeying the pumps was done filling all the cars driven by whites. Then Uncle Parnassus respectfully asked for a fill of his red gas can. The pump jock shrugged, unslung the nozzle and, in the process of fitting the nozzle into the can, brushed the back of his hand against that of Uncle Parnassus. To this day, Harold could remember the strange, shivery way the pump jockey's face changed.

As though he'd touched filth.

The pump jockey managed to squirt gas on Uncle Par-nassus's Sunday trousers, too. Now, staring at Jomo, Harold saw only the face of the filling station boy; a face with bright eyes like blue bubbles; a face wanting to hear no reason; a face wanting only to sip its own hate-To the suggestion that Freylinghausen might have done them a turn, Jomo replied, "Ah, the old ofay probably forgot about us."

"You're as full of poison as Whisk."

"Yeh, man. But mine's righteous. Now, what's on that tape?"

Harold dissembled. He couldn't let on that he was convinced Jomo, like Whisk, was enemy; that both had to be tracked now in order to be stopped. How had this cup

passed to him? He wished he were back with Terence's comedies.

In a loud voice he read, "Washington, D.C. July 12, 1862."

Jomo frowned. "After just dozin' through that course, I should recall—"

It surfaced cool and certain into Harold's mind, shot up from his fresh-stored trove of knowledge. At the same time, Diana articulated it:

"Lincoln!"

Harold nodded. "He started working on the first drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation that month."

"Didn't make it public till the first of January the next year, though," Diana added, with a funny, look-at-me smile. Harold wanted to smile back. How damn lovely she was when no hate transfigured her face.

"If Whisk's after ole Abe," Jomo said, "we got to travel."

Aloud, Harold instructed the Nexus computer to land them as close as possible to Whisk's party. He felt the control device tickle his skin, whirring, setting itself. The Nexus changed from gray to golden. Doctor Freyling-hausen began to blubber flatulently.

"—kind of risky," Harold was saying, so he wouldn't have to think, feel, be afraid. "That is, if Whisk's up to something rotten, ideally we should arrive a short time before he did. Maybe I should try to reset—"

"No, don't waste any more time." Jomo dragged him to the couch. Harold wedged between the big BURN man and Diana, the former's bulk robbing him of any excitement he might have gotten from the latter's nearness. Down into the well of dark he went. He woke to bugles and rumbling caissons.

It was a miserably hot day. The river—Potomac, only much cleaner—glinted like melted silver. The leaves overhead looked flaccid, dusty. From a distant parade ground a limp cadence count sounded. Through the trees Harold glimpsed several companies of soldiers in blue doing close order drill.

On a nearby road, a troop of cavalry in Union blue thundered by, raising dust. The spokes of field cannon rattling along behind were blurs.

Diana glanced around the park. "What the hell am I going to do about these slacks? A sweater I can get away with, but—"

"You just got to walk fast, sweet. We just can't lug costumes enough to take care of everyplace ole Whisk might turn up."

As they started off, she said, "Where are we going?"

"White House. Where else would ole Abe be hanging out?"

That seemed as good a guess as any. A platoon of infantry went hupping by along the road they had to cross. Just for safety's sake, Jomo and Harold stepped in front of the girl.

"Keep your head down," Harold whispered.

"I don't bend my head for any white soldier-boy, sweet."

"Shut up," Harold said through a set, crap-eating grin aimed at the white troops passing. The Union boys looked angry in their hot wool capes. A few looked even angrier at the sight of three blacks in a public park. The officer in charge ceased counting cadence, pulled out a hanky and wiped his face. Some of the soldiers began whistling "Shenandoah" in a fast tempo.

Jomo kept on bristling.

"Try to stifle your silly-ass temper, will you?" Harold hissed. "Pretend you're a secret agent. Pretend anything, but don't get us killed. This is 1862, remember. We won't be free, so to speak, for another six months." Without even a hesitation, he found himself hypnolearnedly brilliant on the subject: "A number of reputable scholars have even suggested that Lincoln was more pragmatic than humanitarian when he signed the Proclamation. Oh, he was against slavery all right. But what really pushed him off the dime was the specter of the South beefing up its army with thousands of black volunteers."

"I already know that," Jomo complained. "I got the same info in my head you do."

"Sorry. I forgot."

The infantry platoon was gone. They left the park.

It took them about an hour to make their way to Pennsylvania Avenue, mostly because of their uncertainty about how open they dared be. They drew plenty of stares from white merchants and pedestrians. Harold was afraid they might be trounced right off the sidewalk by loitering whites. But fortunately the brisk military traffic in the streets kept the loungers diverted.

There was a constant galloping and counter-galloping of Union units. Bugles blasted often, and dust was thick. The worst they got were a few outraged remarks about Diana's tight pants. Harold put on his plantation grin and said, "Yassuh, yassuh," whenever he encountered hostile eyes. He didn't feel full of wounded dignity. To him it was a matter of survival.

Suddenly Jomo pulled him over against the clapboard wall of a church. "That must be the place."

Through the trees on the opposite side of Pennsylvania one block up, Harold glimpsed Hoban's lovely white house of Virginia freestone. They started moving again, along into the next block. Harold studied the White House. It was guarded by Union soldiers. Nowhere did he spot anything to indicate danger.

The trio passed the mouth of an alley. "Jesus!" someone exclaimed from the gloom.

A mellifluous voice said, "Don't waste time taking the blessed Savior's name in vain, Deacon Otto. Just go up there and kick them boogs out of the line of fire."

Harold knew the voice. Ah, how he knew it—with irrational, gut-deep fear.

A couple of white thugs in ill-fitting Union uniforms came marching up the alley, fists cocked. Behind them Harold saw three more men. One, in a sergeant's outfit, was the Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk.

Whisk held a smoldering punk. The punk quivered close to a small-bore cannon whose barrel was aimed high enough to lob a ball across the road into the White House.

"Clear those coons away pronto,'' Whisk exhorted.

"We can't wait around for Wilkes Booth to do his thing."

"You jigs get movin'!" snarled one of the deacons.

Somewhere down Pennsylvania a bugle blared. Harold heard the ratplat of another cavalry troop approaching. A deacon collared Jomo, who seemed to be stunned into a slow reaction by the unexpected appearance of Reverend Whisk. Diana had her wits, though. With a wild HaU, she gave the back of a deacon's neck the blade of her hand.

Jomo got going, picked up the deacon who had hold of him, and hoisted him over his head. Twentieth century coins rained from the man's pockets.

"What in holy hellfire—?" Whisk began.

"Assassins!" Harold shouted through cupped hands. "Get those soldiers over here, Captain!"

The leader of the cavalry yelled, "Hooo-wp/", signaling with his saber.

"They're trying to blow up the President!" Harold cried. He pointed into the alley and then charged into it himself. Aware that he'd met trouble, Whisk was bending to apply the punk to the fieldpiece.

Gne of Whisk's deacons stepped in front of the cannon to confront Harold with upthrust fists. "Get your butt out of the way!" Whisk exclaimed, seizing the man's tunic.

Thrown off balance, the deacon let go with a punch that missed. Harold kicked him in the shins. The deacon doubled. Harold hurled himself hard against the cannon muzzle, deflecting it sideways as it went off.

The ball exploded a huge hole in the top story of the building toward which Harold had shoved the muzzle. Whisk tore off his cap and danced on it: "Damnit, damnit, we had the range 'xactiy right!"

"Reverend, help!" shrieked the remaining deacon, who had fallen into Jomo's clutches. The huge black was hammering the lout up against the wall of the building.

"Who are these zigaboos?" Whisk swooped a horse pistol from his belt. "Who are you, I say? Berserk field hands who dare—?" Abruptly, the awful brown eyes focused on Harold. "It can't be! I know you!"

The deacon Harold had knocked aside came racing

back. "How can you tell one fum 'nother, Reverend? They all look crazy!"

"Look at the pants on the black bitch, Deacon Otto. They've come from the Foundation to Balk me! This one—"

Down came the horse pistol, an improvised pointer. Harold dove flat on his face underneath the cannon muzzle. Whisk started to crawl over the cannon to get him.

"—this one I held prisoner! That Davis bitch's brother, - Niggley or somethin' like that. Hold still, boy! I'm goin' to send you to your redeemer!"

The horse pistol wiggled and waggled as Whisk tried to get it aimed. Harold scuttled away from the cannon on all fours. Confusion in the smoke-choked alley was compounded by the sudden arrival of the Union cavalry officer, who rode his roan in full tilt.

"These mothers are trying to blow up President Lincoln," Jomo informed him.

"You're all under arrest!" The officer flourished his saber and charged his roan right up to the cannon. The horse bent to sniff the muzzle, got burned, reared suddenly. The captain fell off.

Whisk readied a shot at Diana. Harold jumped at the Reverend's legs, miscalculated, landed on the top of his head at Whisk's feet. For one horrific minute he stared up into apocalyptic eyes.

"I get your game, Squigley! Oh yes, I remember you, you perverted anti-Christian black son of a bitch." Whisk's finger whitened on the trigger. "I'm goin' to blow your pickaninny brain out the back of your head, and while you're dyin', you just treat yourself to this thought. You stopped me right here, okay. But I got plenty of dates and places out of that Commie Freylinghausen, and there's plenty more I know myself. And one of the stops I make'll be the right one. One of 'em will stop the clock of black radicalism in the U.S. of A. forever!"

This last, maniacally screamed, accompanied the clutching of the horse pistol with both hands. Harold grabbed for Whisk's boots. There'd be a ball in his brain any second—

"You just hold up there, Sergeant." The captain seized Whisk's arm.

Whisk bashed the captain in the side of the head with the gun. The officer fell. But cavalrymen on foot were pouring into the alley. Whisk decided that safety was more important than revenge:

"Deacons?"

They came running. In seconds the whole raggy band had escaped into the dust clouds and disappeared around a corner.

Bugles blew again. Cavalrymen cursed. The captain's horse kept stepping on the captain's head. Jomo shoved Diana, dragged Harold. They ran for their lives down the alley, chased by the halloos of two dozen soldiers trying to get around the cannon at the same time.

They ran six blocks, then halted in another alley. Jomo wondered profanely where Whisk had gone.

"To some other time," Harold panted. A gripping memory evoked a shudder. "He told me once he knew black history because he believed in knowing his enemy. Put that together with all the information he pried out of Doctor Freylinghausen and there's no telling where—"

Under their clothing, the control devices began to gong.

Bugles sounded the charge in the Washington heat. Hoofs pounded. The fugitives spoke to their devices, telling the Nexus control to forward them to the next source of Whisk's signal. They blinked out of existence during the War Between the States ten seconds ahead of capture.

"Oh my God, take me back to de sunny soufland," said Jomo, in reaction to their abrupt arrival in a blazing winter's day.

Icicles like flashing swords hung from the gutters of imposing brick buildings round about a common where they stood shivering. Snow was piled high, blue-white and blinding. Ice-sheathed branches cracked and popped. A white man bundled in muffler and greatcoat and carrying a load of books came along a path and stopped, nonplused.

Suddenly he rushed toward them. .-

"If you're runaways, you shouldn't be in the open like this!"

Harold thought quickly. "We got lost."

The bookish man surveyed their clothing. "Didn't they give you coats at your last stop?"

"No, sir. They were fresh out."

"Oh, you poor, poor creatures."

"Listen here," Diana said. "We don't need any of that phony liberal jive."

Harold shushed her with a gesture. His rnind was spewing up hints of where they might be. "The last stop wasn't too well organized, sir. No food, no spare coats,

just instructions that we should make our way to—"" He scratched his head, trying to look vacant, as though memory had failed.

"Brunswick, Maine,'* said the bundled-up man. "The Canadian border isn't far. But you'll never make it in those pitifully thin garments. You hurry along to Reverend Stowe's house. Either the Reverend or his wife will help you. Tell them Professor Lacksdale of the Latin department sent you." And he gave rapid instructions "for locating a house not many blocks away.

"Yassuh, thank you." Harold touched his forehead and dragged his companions away.

They raced across the common, passed a sign reading Bowdoin College, turned along a residential street lined with houses whose gutters and gables had festoons of ice. They jogtrotted to keep from freezing.

"Reverend Stowe?" Jomo puffed. "You don't 'spose that would be Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe?"

"Nobody else," said Harold, understanding the situation completely all at once.

"Then this has got to be 1851," Diana chimed in.

Harold squinted against the sun-dazzle on snowbanks and iced fir trees. Bells a-jingle, a sleigh drawn by a matched team passed at the next intersection. Children on a broad lawn flung snowballs. Jomo raised a fist. Harold urged him on, his mind whirling. - How weird—^frightening, almost—to know from a few simple points of orientation exactly where they were, and what was probably happening, or about to happen. The consuming question was, had they arrived in time?

Washington in '62 had been perilously close. What if the Nexus had planted them down at the instant Whisk was doing his nefarious work?

"Better hold on," Diana warned. She tugged them into cover behind a massive tree. "See that bunch loitering down there in front of the big house?"

Jomo peered. "The deacons! But where's Whisk?"

"Inside, I bet," Harold said. "I'll try to get around the back way. If I need help, I'll yell. And you come," he added, with fervency.

Off he went, slipping and sliding past a picket fence. He ducked around a corner. Whisk's deacons, all four still wearing their stolen Union blue, were talking intently among themselves, for which Harold was thankful. Had they turned at the wrong time, a black against the snow would hardly have been invisible.

His teeth began to chatter in earnest as he slipped along the alley behind the great old houses. He found the right yard, raced by the fishpond and sundial to the back porch. He screwed up his nerve, opened the back door, stepped in.

No screams greeted him in the big, cheerful kitchen. It was empty. A copper kettle of chowder bubbled on the brick hearth.

Somewhere in the front of the house he heard voices. He crept through the hall and crouched behind a listless rubber plant next to open doors to the parlor.

"—extremely sorry that Reverend Stowe is not here this morning," a woman was saying. "He would have been most interested to hear of the activities of the Tenafly Anti-Slavery Club."

"Quite all right, little lady," came the supermellow male voice that managed to knot Harold's bowels up every time he heard it. "When business brought me to your fair state, I determined to pay a call on you and learn more of this work in progress. Those of us in the—ah—movement understand you have hopes for it."

"Indeed I do, Mister—excuse me, sir, but it's—?"

"Whisk, little lady. William R. Whisk. Of Whisk and Whisk. We're in calico."

"Quite so. As you have inferred, Mr. Whisk, I do have expectations that my small effort will have some salutary effect upon the climate of opinion as regards black men and women held in bondage." The woman's voice quickened. "I have based my work upon personal interviews with Mr. Josiah Henson, and also upon the excellent autobiography he has written."

"Henson, Henson," Whisk muttered. "Is he a nigg—ah, nigra?" ^y

"Yes sir, he is. Lately escaped from slavery in Ken-

tucky. He is now a spokesman for the numerous runaways who have traveled our underground railroad to find haven in Canada."

"You do have plans to publish this work?"

"The editors of the National Era have spoken favorably of printing it in serial form. Of course I hope to see it issued by a regular book publishing house subsequent to that. The truth must be told far and wide about the plight of the slave, Mr. Whisk."

"Oh, yes, yes." Whisk oozed sincerity. "Might I—that is—would it be possible for me to glimpse a portion of—?"

"More than a portion! There on the writing desk you see the entire first draft manuscript. I was engaged in revisions when you rang the bell. If you will step here— Mr. Whisk! Whatever is wrong?"

"Oh—hah-hah!—nothing, dear lady."

"Come, sir. You look quite strange."

"It's just that I was unable to obtain breakfast this morning. I'll be perfectly all right as soon as the dizziness passes."

"How thoughtless of me! May I offer you tea and bis-: cuits?"

"That would be wonderful. Will your—ah—servants prepare it?"

"My husband and I keep no servants, sir. I will prepare it myself. Be so kind as to wait just a few moments."

Harold jammed himself against the wall and hauled the rubber plant in front for cover as the small, graying woman left the parlor. Perhaps forty, he guessed, from the flash he caught of her: head high, eyes purposeful, skirts a-trail. Shortly she was busying at the rear of the house. From the parlor came a sinister scratch-and-hiss.

Trying to forget that it was Whisk in there, Harold leaped from behind the rubber plant and jumped through the door.

Somewhere Whisk had found a greatcoat. He was bent over a secretary, in the act of applying a large match to the first of many handwritten manuscript sheets.

"That's the end of this brainwashin' piece of tripe," he

mumbled as Harold crept up behind him. A floorboard squeaked.

Whisk whirled. The corner of the manuscript page began to burn. With a cry Harold launched himself, batting th& burning match out of Whisk's hand while he sat on the manuscript to extinguish the fire.

Whisk recognized him and bellowed. Harold's weight tipped the secretary. Sheets written in a fine hand cascaded past his eyes. He glimpsed one reading, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN; or, Life Among the Lowly, by (Mrs.) Harriet Beecher Stowe.

"Biggley, you meddling- coon—!" Whisk aimed a kick at Harold's groin. Mrs. Stowe rushed in with cries of alarm.

"He's not from any anti-slavery club," Harold shouted as he dodged Whisk's kicks. "He wants to destroy your book!"

Mrs. Stowe read the truth in Whisk's face. The Reverend made another grab at Harold. "Goddamn you, boy—" Mrs. Stowe seized a poker from the hearth and lashed down hard.

Whisk stumbled backwards, rubbing his pate. Harold rocketed off his knees, took advantage of Whisk's out-of-balance condition and butted him in the belly. Whisk fell over the back of a sofa and through the parlor window.

Glass rained down on him as he floundered in the snow. The deacons across the street started for the house. Mrs. Stowe demanded Harold's identity. He zipped for the front door. He tore it open, called for Jomo and Diana at the top of his lungs.

Wrathful, Whisk was on his feet. He feinted in Harold's direction. Then he saw Harold's friends coming double time. Doors in neighboring houses began to open. Whisk blinked, signed the deacons back, and ran toward them.

As he ran, he stuck his hands under his greatcoat. His mouth worked, as if he were speaking to someone. Suddenly he and his deacons vanished. In the doorway, Mrs. Stowe dropped her poker and swooned.

By the time Harold reached Jomo and Diana on the sidewalk, neighbors were pouring from the surrounding

houses. Harold's control device started gouging again. So did Jomo's and Diana's.

Out of breath and dizzy, Harold slid his fingers beneath his shirt. He spoke to the computer. Then to the black man and girl:

"Too close again. This time we've really got to get there ahead of him. When the computer sets your belts, grab this dial and try to move it back just a hair."

The various calibrations on his belt began changing. Harold seized one knob, turned it fractionally as a bearded man grabbed him.

"See here, you black rabblerousers—!"

Harold blinked out of Maine.

He woke in a verdant, sunny countryside full of the smell of wild raspberries. The air was spring-warm. Behind him, a whip cracked and hit skin.

Harold ducked down in the meadow grass. A short distance away he saw a crude corral adjoining a ramshackle barn. A powerful-looking young black, stripped to the waist, was bound hand and foot to the corral fence. From the center of the corraL a squat, pug-nosed white man in a filthy hat and muddy boots was applying the whip to the black's back.

The lash zinged in the air, striking the black man hard. The black's face constricted for an instant. But the black made no sound.

"You gonna scream 'fore I'm done, boy," grinned the white man. "They doan call Jeb Falco the best slave-breaker in Maryland for nothin'."

A rustle in the meadow grass drew Harold's attention. He saw Diana's bronze cheek suddenly. He hissed, and motioned till she saw him.

She came crawling over, observing his finger-to-lip caution. The whip sang again. This time the black man groaned.

"Where's Jomo?" the girl whispered.

"Not here yet. He probably didn't set the control back as far as we did. I don't see Whisk anyplace eith—" Suddenly he couldn't finish it. He just said, "Oh, Christ."

"What's wrong, Harold?"

"This chasing up and down trying to stop a madman like Whisk. I—I'm no big hero. Jomo's right, I'm not even a little bit violent. I don't know what I'm doing, or how to handle—"

He was diverted from finishing by the rattle of a carriage. It came to a stop on the road that ran by the corral and barn. The squat man coiled the lash and ambled over to greet his white visitor.

Jomo appeared abruptly, thrashing and floundering. Harold shushed him. The slave-breaker put a boot up on the corral rail. In the spring sunlight a bird chattered. The whip was a cat, Harold saw. The tails were red.

"That's certainly a big buck you've got today, Jeb," remarked the gentleman in the carriage.

"Yessir, squire. Name's Fred. Tried to escape twice already. Last time was from the shipyard in Baltimore. They sent him to me to put a stop to it."

"They couldn't have selected a better disciplinarian than Jeb Falco."

"Yessir, squire, thank you much."

"Well, Jeb, a pleasant day to you—and much luck. We must keep these hotheaded animals in their place."

With a cluck to his team, the squire drove on.

Jeb Falco licked his lips. He strolled back to his position behind the bound black. Harold studied the black's strong-planed face. He felt guilty. He doubted that he could show such courage in a similar situation.

"All right, Fred," Falco said, uncoiling his cat. "You gonna yell for me now."

"Fred," Jomo breathed. They all knew, without words. "Diana, can you distract that white bastard's attention so Harold and I can sneak up and deck him?"

"I don't know. If he gets a look at me in these pants—"

"Stand in the grass, dummy! And get a move on. Whisk's liable to show up any second to try an' stop the escape."

With a reluctant nod, Diana waited till the slave-breaker'is attention was on the black. Then she stood up and began to saunter toward the corral.

Her bottom wiggled deliriously. Harold swallowed. At least the temporal hopping hadn't debilitated him altogether.

Falco spotted the girl all at once. She stopped a few feet from the corral, feigning a dumb, yawny kind of shyness. The slave-breaker smiled too, lasciviously.

"Well I'll be spanked! Hello, sister."

"Hello," Diana returned with a smouldering smile.

Falco scowled. "You're not runnin' away, are you, sister?"

"Naw." Diana waved. "I just sneaked off a bit."

"From the squire's?"

She nodded.

"Never saw you there before. 'Pears I've been missin* something." The lewd smile returned. "What you after, little sister? Some fun?"

In profile, Diana's bosom appeared to heave rapidly. She slid her palms down over her hips as she glanced up at the barn's dim haymow.

"Might be," she said. Harold winced.

Jeb Falco scratched his chin, then coiled his cat. "Hell, I can finish breakin' this buck anytime. Why don't you 'n' me take a stroll inside where it's cooler? I want to find out a little more about what's on your mind."

Langorously, Diana started walking through the high meadow grass. It effectively concealed the fact that she wasn't wearing a skirt. "That's one smart broad, sometimes," Jomo whispered. Watching the way Diana moved out toward the side of the corral abutting the road, Harold had to agree. She took her time.

And Jeb Falco's little eyes followed every step.

Harold and Jomo crept forward. Jomo slid a pocket knife out of his pants. A couple of quick slashes and Fred would be free—just the way he was supposed to be, Harold realized with a start.

When they were about a yard from the rail, the black saw them. He gasped low but didn't move. Diana was almost to the road. Soon she'd be out of the high grass. Harold crawled faster, urging Jomo with anxious glances to do the same.

The big black's body tensed. He sensed the nearness of freedom.

"Watch out down there! Hey, white man, watch out!"

Jomo swore. Harold quaked. Reverend Whisk and his deacons had arrived. Slightly disoriented in space:

They'd all materialized on the roof of the barn.

With cries and oaths, two deacons slid off. Reverend Whisk clung to the roofpeak like an animated weather-vane, screaming at Jeb Falco:

"Kill that big buck before he gets away!"

Falco did a take at the collection of whites clinging to the roof and sliding off. "What in sin—?"

"That nigger Frederick Douglass is gonna escape today!" Whisk cried. "This very day, 1838, he's gonna escape and go up north and start an infernal anti-slavery paper called The North Star unless you stop him!"

"Who—who—who—?" Falco repeated, like a blanching owl.

"I'm tryin' to tell you!" Whisk shouted, waving both fists. "Never mind how I know, I know! You let this buck get away today, he'll bring down havoc on the white race! Stir up those damn abolitionists so much they'll—oh my God!"

Whisk had lost his grip on the roofpeak, not to mention his balance. He started to slide.

"Cut him loose," Harold whispered.

The big BURN man lunged forward. He slashed Douglass's bonds with four strokes.

A joyous fire lit the slave's eyes. "Thank you, brothers, whoever you may be." With one leap he cleared the top rail of the corral.

Jeb Falco realized he was undone. He started unlimber-ing his whip. Having fallen off the roof, Whisk fulminated somewhere out of sight behind the barn.

"You deceitful black bitch!" Falco screamed at Diana. "You're in on this!" He cracked his whip back over his shoulder to strike.

Cool now, Diana danced in. She dropped the slave-breaker with two neck chops. Harold waved. The three of

them dashed for a nearby copse as Whisk's deacons ran around the barn in a disorganized way, searching for their fallen leader.

The three staggered into the copse and sank down in protecting shadow. Jomo mopped his brow.

"Gettin' more hairy every time, sweets."

Diana was jubilant. "But we did it! Douglass is on his way to New Bedford and Rochester just the way he's supposed to be. And one day he'll be dining at the White House, telling Abe Lincoln about the evils of his bondage. We—"

Jomo's hand on her arm stopped her. They peered out among the trees. In the sun-dappled meadow grass, Whisk and his four deacons had formed a line. They were sweeping the field, moving steadily toward the copse.

"Run for it," Harold said.

They plunged out the far side of the copse and across a creek, dashing the best part of two miles before Diana sank to her knees. A cardinal sailed up over their heads. Their control devices gonged.

"Oh, God," Harold said. "Not again."

"Yen, again," Jomo said. "For as long as that flake-headed minister is running around trying to do the black race in."

Diana climbed to her feet. She reached over and touched Harold's hand. Jomo scowled. She ignored it. That gave Harold the strength he needed to pull up his now-filthy shirt and speak to the control device. Blinking in the sunshine, he waited wearily for the Nexus computer to hurl them to the next encounter.

They skulked to the end of the alley that smelled of old fish. It was evening. Rain had fallen recently.

A lamplighter in a ratty gray wig was firing up a lamp in front of an apothecary shop across the way. Light reflected in pools in the street shattered suddenly as a man in colonial costume rode by on a swaybacked horse. Harold shivered despite the moderate temperature.

"Not many people stirring," he said. "Wonder where We are."

"Got to be England or America," Jomo said. "I grok the signs okay."

Diana pointed. "There's a building lit up down there."

They proceeded down the crude plank sidewalk. At least the inclement weather and late hour kept people off the street and allowed the trio to move unnoticed. Harold had the impression they'd landed somewhere in the eighteenth century. Beyond that, he was not student enough to know where or when without more exact information.

They got a little of that information when they arrived at the lighted building. It was a square, single-story structure of plain plank. Smeary light filtered through windows of gray bottle glass. Standing up close to the wall, Harold could hear someone speaking inside.

Diana made her fingers go pop. They hurried to where she stood by unadorned double doors. She showed them a signboard beneath a flickering lamp.

Meeting House

Harold rushed back to one of the windows and pressed his eye to the bottle glass. He made out vague human shapes seated in rows inside. He thought he recognized the configuration of one particular head thrusting up above those surrounding.

"I think I see Whisk. We may be too late already."

Jomo shoved by. "Let the old urban guerilla try that door. Maybe we can sneak in 'thout anybody hearing a thing."

Jomo's expertise proved to be more than bragging. One by one, they slipped into the gloom behind the last row of benches.

Most of the benches were' occupied by white men and women in somber suits and somber dresses. Harold pressed his back to the plain room's rear wall. Jomo accidentally made the door squeak as he shut it. A man on the last bench turned around.

Harold expected the worst. Instead, he got a warm

smile. The man faced front again, toward the speaker, without further commotion.

A familiar, rather pudgy man was talking to the crowd. But Harold's eyes were drawn to the third bench from the front. Whisk's long hair was unmistakable. Two of his deacons sat on either side of him. Harold rubbed his throat.

The speaker wore a seedy waistcoat. His gray hair was pulled back and tied with a frowzy ribbon. Half spectacles sat far down on his nose. He was addressing the group in what sounded like a dialect of modern English:

"—and so, good friends, it behooves us, as citizens of the enlightened city of Philadelphia, to recognize the plight of those pitiful human beings brought to our shores in chains. The Quaker religion has always maintained a strong bias in favor of what is not only moral but just. That is why I issued the call for this meeting in this location. What I propose tonight is nothing less than the founding of what shall henceforward be known as the first society in all the colonies to forthrightly take a stand against the immoral and involuntary servitude of black men, women, and children."

"Friend," boomed Whisk, standing suddenly and turning in profile so that more might see him. Without wanting to, Harold cringed.

Whisk folded his hands on the bosom of his long black greatcoat. His upcast eyes lent him a pious air. "I wonder if thee would permit me to inject myself into these proceedings and make a statement to the brethren assembled."

"Identify yourself, friend, and be welcomed."

"I am friend Whisk. Like most of those here gathered, I am of the Quaker faith."

"If you come in peace," smiled the pudgy man, /'the platform is yours."

"Thank thee," said Whisk^ into the aisle with speed. He rushed to the front, instantly losing his saintly air. "Thank thee, you nigger lover!"

Before Harold and his companions could react, Whisk had Benjamin Franklin down on his knees and was throttling him to death.

Too late again, Harold thought, at the same time his vocal chords gave off what seemed to be the most natural response in a deperate situation:

"Police! Somebody fetch the po—"

Flap, Jomo's big palm slapped over Harold's mouth. "We look like runaway cotton-pickers! They'll roust—"

"Quit jawing and go help Franklin!" Diana cried.

The Quaker meeting hall was already in pandemonium. Friends of both sexes leaped to their feet to protest the horrid act taking place before them. On his knees, Ben Franklin hit at Whisk's strangling hands with no success. His hair ribbon came loose. His half spectacles fell off. Whisk choked harder. Franklin's cheeks turned plum.

The deacons leaped across the benches and formed a protective shield in front of their leader. A stern-lipped lady in a bonnet tried to penetrate the cordon.

"Thee must unhand him! If thee will not stop, I will take it upon myself to sink to violence!" One of the deacons seized her upraised arm and tipped her over. "Thee are not a nice person!"

Two of the deacons spotted Harold and his friends

struggling forward from the back of the hall. They braced for a fight.

"Will you get outa my way, lady?" Jomo demanded, surrounded by Quakers. Franklin had all but disappeared behind the deacons. Jomo pulled his .45. "I mean get outa my way now."

The alarmed Quakers took him seriously. Whisk's head became visible over the shoulders of his helpers. Jomo leveled the gun.

"You look round here, Whisk!"

"What is that awful weapon thee brandishes?" cried one Quaker.

" 'Tis a dueling pistol of macabre design," cried another. "Plainly a violent tool conceived by the devil to—"

"Whisk!" The candles in brackets around the walls actually fluttered. "I got a dead aim on your head."

The Right Reverend Whisk received the message. He turned his gaze out toward the voice. He saw the .45. His eyes widened. The deacons shifted stance, ready.

The crush at the front of the hall was fearsome. Only the height of Jomo and that of his target made it possible for the .45 to stay aimed over the turbulence of struggling bodies. Benches kept overturning, crash after crash.

"You let ole Franklin go," Jomo ordered.

Whisk glanced down at his hidden victim. Glanced back at the automatic. Fuming, he showed both his hands above the shoulders of his confused assistants.

"Don't shoot!"

Instantly, Franklin popped into view between two of the deacons. He massaged his reddened throat and gasped for air.

"Let's get 'em outside," Jomo said from the side of his mouth. Harold started to protest. No use. Jomo was already shoving ahead. Harold looked to Diana, hoping to find an ally. Her face was grim.

The Quakers appeared to be cowed by the huge black with the peculiar weapon in his fist. They backed off, opening a small area at the front of the meeting hall. Jomo ordered Whisk out from behind his protectors.

Franklin, meantime, was staring at Jomo in a cross-eyed way. He started to speak, suddenly collapsed sideways.

Two Quakers caught him, helped him to a bench. He held his head in his hands.

Whisk sidled between two of his boys. One of the deacons said:

"We ain't gotta take this, Reverend. We ain't gotta take this off a couple of dirty zigs."

"You pin-headed Judas, shut the hell up. Mister choco-latebar there, he's got the gun. For the time being, we take it."

"Open that side door, Di," Jomo said without looking around.

She sprang to do it. No one tried to stop or even question her. By now the atmosphere in the smoky meeting hall had changed. Voices were more subdued. Jomo didn't smile. He merely kept staring at Whisk and his whey-faced assistants.

Whisk tugged at his long brown hair. Licked his prominent teeth. His handsome face grew peaked all at once. He saw the death in Jomo's brown eyes, and so did the hushed Quakers.

"One by one," Jomo said, "you make it through that door and you stop the second you're outside. You go last, Whisk. That way, if your punks start something, the first bullet goes in the back of your head."

"Nobody will resort to violence." Whisk cast heavy glances at his aides. "Nobody."

The Quakers fell back. Diana held the door open. Harold was disheartened by her hard smile.

The deacons marched out into an alley that ran alongside the meeting house. Harold noticed that they had affected crude disguises by reversing their red, white, and blue jackets so that the plain linings showed.

Jomo followed Whisk through the door. Harold brought up the rear. His Hush Puppies sank in mud.

"Shut the door, Harold, so our peace-loving brethren don't get too upset by the shots."

One of the deacons swiped a sweaty cheek. "You ain't going to kill us—"

"I certainly am, sweet."

"Look here, brother," Whisk snorted. "Where's your Christian compassion?"

"I lost it when I was twelve, Reverend. In Philadelphia. My older brother n' sister were comin' home from high school late one afternoon in the winter time. A gang of white boys jumped them. My sister Clarice wouldn't look at a boy ever afterwards because of what they did to her. My brother Teddy—well, the white boys had switchblades on them. They tried to castrate him and botched it. He died in Philadelphia Presbyterian about midnight that night, and somewhere along there—" Jomo's gun hand steadied. "My Christian compassion just went away altogether."

Harold's belly actually made a noise in the silence. He was moved by Jomo's pain. But a conscience still made him say:

"No matter what happened, it doesn't justify killing them."

"Not to you, maybe.'*

"It doesn't."

"It certainly does."

"I can't be a party to murdering anybody."

"Yeh, perfesser. That's the trouble. That's what makes you a disgrace to the black race."

The silence hung again. A carriage passed in the distance, hoofs of its team splashing in the rain-pools. Not a sound could be heard from within the meeting house.-Suddenly Whisk folded his hands on the bosom of his greatcoat and raised his eyes piously.

"Deacons," he intoned, "if we're going to pass through the pearlies right soon, let's do it like God-fearing white Americans. We are at the mercy of these rampagin' animals, but we need not act like th—"

"Don't hand me that jive, Reverend. You're the one running your ass off trying to stop the clock for blacks. You preached white jihad from the soapbox and the telly back in the twentieth century too. Let's not split the old wild hairs 'bout who's an animal."

-97

Especially, Harold thought, since Jomo had been first to suggest a little time-tampering.

Whisk composed himself. Harold's palms began to prickle. He felt a familiar, consuming terror. What was being plotted inside that white head?

"You can at least have the decency to grant the condemned men a couple of last wishes," Whisk said.

"Oh," said one of the deacons, "we going to get dinner first?"

"Shut your blasphemous mouth." To Jomo: "May I be permitted to meditate in prayer 'fore you blow me to kingdom come?"

"We'll think about it," Diana said.

"While you do, grant my other request. Tell me how you black sons of—how you black folks dogged our heels every step."

"You mean how we stopped you from burning Mrs. Howe's novel?" Harold asked. "Kept you from preventing Douglass's escape?" Maybe if he talked, Jomo would calm down and think twice about wholesale murder.

Harold moved so Whisk and his white companions could see him in the light sifting through a bottle glass window. He tugged up his shirt and exposed the control device.

"The Foundation engineered these controls so that they give off locator signals audible to other time travelers."

"What kind of signals?"

"Sort of a bell note."

"Like gongs?"

"Yes."

"Jesus in the temple of the moneychangers! I thought I was bugs when I heard it the first time. All our belts were doing it. I punched a few buttons and it stopped."

"Uh, that's right. You discovered accidentally that you can eliminate reception of the signals, but in addition, you can program the controls so that your belts give off no locator signals of their own."

"Do tell. Why'd I want to do that?"

"The locator signals can be useful sometimes. But they can be trouble, too. When you're observing an era cov-

ertly, your belt could attract undue attention if it suddenly picked up somebody else's signal. The only signal you can't shut off is the master recall from the Nexus computer, and even then, that's just a signal—you can set this one and the Nexus can't pull you back."

Diana moved her feet in the mud; oozy, impatient sounds. Jomo cleared his throat. Probably in preparation for an ultimatum. Harold hurried on:

"The recall signal is deemed necessary, though, because a scholar might—" The side door of the meeting house opened, smacking him in the back.

"I must find my benefactors," said Ben Franklin, emerging suddenly. He bumped into Harold, who was momentarily thrown between Jomo and Whisk. One of the deacons grabbed Harold, shoved.

"Get out of the way!" Jomo hollered, too late.

Whisk bashed Harold in the back of the neck, then kicked him in the tail. Harold fell hard against Jomo, who in turn bounced back against the wall of the meeting house.

Another deacon sprang in, jabbed his thumb in Jomo's eye. Jomo doubled. Whisk tore the .45 out of his hand. A deacon tripped Diana, sprawled her in the mud and stepped on the back of her head.

Whisk brandished the .45. "Vengeance is mine!—but later. Come on, Deacons!" And away he went into the dark behind the meeting house, greatcoat flapping. The^>deacons followed on the run.

Diana blubbered in the mud. Franklin wrung his hands. Jomo hurled Harold aside and went charging after the runaways. He was back in half a minute.

"They blinked out before I could catch up. Damn!"

"I fail to comprehend this," Franklin said. "You black gentlemen wear peculiar garments. Your speech is exceeding strange. Pray tell me—"

"Go play with your kite, whitey," Jomo said. "Perfesser, there's never been a black man dumber than you. Never a dumber, more wooly-headed black man since the first day of creation."

"Okay!" Harold retorted. "I'm sorry they got away,

but I can't take murder, and you can beat the hell out of me and I still won't like it."

"I am going to beat hell out of you. Starting right—"

Gong-bong. Bong-gong. Franklin started, then peered around trying to detect the source of the chiming.

Diana wiped mud from her cheek. "Don't you think we ought to skip the recriminations and go after them, Jomo?"

Between a gong and a bong, the signals stopped. Oh-oh, thought Harold.

"Perfesser?"

"Wh-what?"

"You gave them the little lecture on how to turn the belt signals off, perfesser."

"I was stalling for time. I hoped you'd change your mind about killing—"

"And now we don't know where they are, perfesser, and we can't find out." Jomo picked Harold up by the shirtfront and crashed him against the meeting house. "Thanks a motherfucking heap."

Harold kicked Jomo's shins. "Put me down! I'm getting fed up with being pushed around by gun-crazy hopheads who—"

"Oh, Lord," Diana whispered. "Jomo—"

Franklin peered at the half dozen men standing at the street end of the alley. Behind the new arrivals were a couple of dozen more men, women, and children. An electric light shone in Harold's face.

An electric light?

Suddenly he recognized the peculiar thing about the half dozen men in front. They all wore peaked hats with wide brims and chin straps. Brass buttons twinkled.

"I think we've got them," said one of the men. "At least they fit the descriptions."

Harold darted back from the light, mind throbbing with questions. Chief among them was—what had gone wrong at the Foundation?

"Constables?" Franklin said in puzzlement.

"Cops," Jomo said. "Pigs. Twentieth-century style."

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"All right, you black people," said the officer who had spoken before. His five men spread into a line on either side of him, effectively blocking the alley. Blue metal flashed. "This is Captain Lee of the Virginia state police talking. We've been sent to bring you back to the—lih— present. I have a positive visual make on all three of you, so don't stall. My men are armed. If necessary, we'll take appropriate—Lieutenant, will you kindly quit shoving me the hell in the back?"

"Those weirdos are shoving me, Captain," said the ' other, in reference to the Philadelphians clogging the alley behind him.

"Those aren't weirdos, Lieutenant, those are merely—**

Lee sounded as if he were dying of disbelief.

"—citizens of 1776 or whatever the hell year this is.**

Ben Franklin clutched Harold's arm. "Good sirs! What is that incredible device which the stranger shines in our faces?"

"As if you didn't know," Jomo snarled.

"You people march up here where we can see you,** Lee ordered. His voice was extremely loud, because, the

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Philadelphians were making a lot of noise themselves. They sounded angry.

Three more flashlights snapped on. Franklin covered his face with his frayed sleeve, but not before one of the troopers cried, "Is mat who I think it is? Jeez, just like in the history books."

Harold had trouble keeping track of everything that was happening. Jomo whipped around so that his back was toward the troopers. "—got to get out of here. Some nice safe place—let's try Lydia round 560 B.C. My head tells me there was a black man there who—"

"Are you gods?" cried Franklin. "To think that I— hardened atheist!—should tremble in such awe. But your costumes—your dialect—the miraculous devices borne by those who've come seeking you from—can it be? Another era?"

"Uh, sort of," Harold fenced, peering past old Ben's wig. The obviously nervous troopers were conferring. Captain Lee wigwagged his flashlight while the Philadelphians kept grumbling.

"If you won't come out here and surrender," Lee said, "we're coming in. We're under orders to return you to the Freylinghausen Foundation. All right, men! One, two—"

Something all sloppy struck a trooper's peaked hat. "An' you kin tell Farmer George there's more where that come from!"

The struck trooper swung around, wiping the drippings of rotten cabbage from his hatbrim. All at once Harold understood.

"Talk to the computer, somebody," Diana said.

"Just a minute, just a minute." Jomo fumbled.

"Baby, they're coming for us!"

As indeed they were, all six of the troopers having squared their shoulders and hefted their flashlights and revolvers. Behind them, the Philadelphians grew tumultuous, some lobbing additional vegetables and even a dead Cat. But the troopers marched with faces front.

Harold heard Jomo jabbering to his control device. The

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troopers kept marching. Harold managed to loosen the knot in his throat and cry:

"Why don't you people show the old King what you think of his soldiers?"

"I told you that's what they were!" a Phildelphian exclaimed.

Another: "But their coats are blue, not red."

"They're mercenaries," Harold confirmed. "Special get-up!"

Of a sudden, Franklin caught the idea and fisted his hand high over his head. "Let's show the Hanoverian's toadies what we think of his persecution of free men!"

"Charge!" shrieked Captain Lee, who sensed that the game was up. His troopers followed him at a dead run.

Six paces from the side door of the meeting house, they were caught from the rear by a mob of howling patriots who proceeded to turn them around, strip them of their weapons, and pummel them to the ground.

"Wait, wait, I'm no British—yow!" Captain Lee wound up flat on his back with several colonists vying for the opportunity to jump up and down on his crotch. Harold's control device tickled his belly.

Diana vanished. Then Jomo.

Harold had a last surreal glimpse of Benjamin Franklin's glasses flashing in the beams of flashlights being tossed back and forth by the patriots. Somewhere, Captain Lee of Virginia pleaded for mercy—

Everything wiped.

"Over behind these trees, quick," Diana whispered.

On hands and knees, Harold followed her voice across the rocky hillside until he reached the safety of long shadows cast by the firs. He fell panting on his side. Jomo came scrambling down the hill, and without ceremony, pulled up Harold's shirt.

"Hey, what do you think you're—?"

"Shutting off your damn signal, grok? I need a little rest."

He punched Harold's buttons, then his own. He reached for Diana's. Her glance said she'd handle it herself.

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Jomo squatted in the fir tree shadows and shielded his eyes against a burnished sun setting behind nearby mountains. "Asia Minor, huh. Kinda pretty." He sounded tired.

Harold flogged his mind for the reason why their mental storehouses would contain this particular picture: a wild, deserted land at twilight, with fir groves and grape arbors spreading through the foothills in both directions. Below, a rambling city of low, white-columned buildings spread before them. Immediately at the base of the hillside, some white men were gathered in a small grove, taking their ease on couches.

The men wore immaculate pastel robes. Slaves, some white, some black, moved among them with ewers of wine and platters of food. Harold's stomach growled. Diana smiled.

Jomo scowled. "Pm starved too. But we can't go down there 'cause we don't know the language. Besides, we're all still wearin' pants."

"That town must be Sardis, the capitol of Lydia," Harold said all at once.

"That's what my head tells me," Diana agreed. "But Where's Aesop?"

Harold looked hard. 'There! Back in the shadows, see?''

Diana slid up next to him, a contact Harold didn't mind in the least. Yawning, Jomo never noticed.

Fascinated, Harold and the girl watched the little scene in the grove. A slight, delicate-boned ebony man of middle years walked back and forth in front of a splendid throne. On the throne sat a puffed-up white monarch with a garland on his head. The wind was sighing the firs, blowing the wrong way for them to hear any of what transpired below. It would be Greek anyway. But it was still a thrill to watch the black, bis robes so spotless, stride back and forth telling a story with words and swift, fluid gestures.

Harold's artificially induced memory reminded him that the name Aesop was but another spelling of Aethiop. Back here in the ancient world, that meant Ethiopian, a generic term for all blacks out of Africa. All slaves.

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Aesop flashed a sly grin, dropped to-all fours. He scuttled around pantomiming a four-footed animal. Then he leaped up and became the animal straining for something over his head—something unreachable.

"Old fox and grapes," Harold chuckled.

"And that porky old charlie on the throne must be Croesus of Lydia," Diana said. "The king who liked the fables so much, he set Aesop free."

"When you two can tear yourselves away from cultural history, I think we better discuss where we go from here.'*

Harold rolled over and blinked in the winy twilight. Fragrant fir needles clung to his shirt. As he brushed them off, he said, "Aren't we going back to the Foundation? We can't go after Whisk. We don't know where he is."

"That's right, you just keep reminding us, sweet."

"I told you I was trying to stall for time. I said the first thing that came into my head."

"You were stalling for time because you didn't want me to dirty these black hands with white blood. Well, these hands have been dirty before and they'll be dirty again, I promise you." Jomo sucked his underlip. "For a so-called intellectual, you really are a dumb shit, you know? Do you seriously think we can hop back to the Foundation now? Isn't it plain somebody discovered the break-ins? Who else but your friend Ofreylingwhoozy could've put those troopers on our tail? Who else could've equipped 'em with belts and told 'em where to look?"

Diana knelt, her hands in fists on her thighs. "But they can't find us now, can they?"

"No, sweet. Not since we turned off our signals.'*

In the grove below, Aesop's story concluded. There was applause. A lyre began to throb a sad air. Linkboys drifted in and out among the trees, holding smoky brands high so that the departing guests could see their way. The sun was nearly down behind the stark mountains. The arbors and groves looked lonely. Few lamps glowed in the city of Sardis. The streets were dark.

The night, settling with the last notes of the lyre, the last glimmers of the links in the grove, reminded Harold with deep fear of that bogus holy man who was out there

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somewhere in all of time, roaming and planning harm. In his most reasonable voice, he said:

"The way I see it, we've got to go back to the Foundation. We can go back to the minute after we left. Even earlier! What about trying to catch Whisk and his deacons breaking in?"

Jomo shook his head. "I'm through chasing that conniving white bastard like I'm scared of him. It's not my style to be sidetracked that way. I been makin' a big, big mistake running after him." Some of the old fervor returned; Jomo thumped his chest. "I started out to change history in our favor, remember? Resuming at once, that's what I mean to do."

After a long, aching minute, Harold said, "Uh, I don't think I heard what you—"

"You did. I said I'm going back to my original plan."

"Diana, what do you think?"

She avoided his eyes. "Well, I guess I think Jomo's right."

" 'Course I am. It's a matter of black pride."

"Nuts," said Harold. "It's stupid and there's no black, white, or green to it. When are you two going to realize that this time-tinkering can't go on ^definitely without a serious accident? Then you'll wonder who screwed things up."

"You predictin' catastrophe again, perfesser?"

"You're right."

"What kind?" Diana asked.

"How should I know what kind? We won't know that till it's too late—till the changes are suddenly there, pouf, like that. Whisk's already loose in time. If two sets of people start tampering—my God, the odds are simply fantastic in favor of a first-class disaster. As I've said before—maybe no black race at all."

Suddenly Jomo purred: "And as I've said before, you're just short in the backbone department."

Harold sighed. "That old crap again."

"I think it's true," said Diana.

That hurt.

"And I just learned somethin' else about you," Jomo

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went on. "Somethin'-r-like they say—relevant. I got a feeling you're the kind who never went driving on a vacation trip without forty roadmaps in the glove."

Discovered. Discovered. Guilty. Guilty.

But did that make him a coward? A black coward?

He felt confused. His tongue wouldn't respond.

Jomo stood up, brushed fir needles from his pants.

"You coming along, Di?"

A glance at Harold. "But of course."

"I still say it's wrong chasing around in time looking for easy answers," Harold blurted. "We belong back where we came from. That's the world with the problems. We ought to be buckling down back there to—what the hell's wrong now?"

"Nothin', perfesser—except for one little thing. I've been on the barricades ten years and more, trying to change things. In all that time, I've rolled the boulder uphill about a half inch. Now I want more. I also remind you^ that while I was out there organizing BURN—while this little lady was helping me push that damn boulder up the white man's hill—you were sitting on your ass in some college library reading Greek tragedy."

"Comedy."

"Same difference," Jomo shrugged. "For you to become the champion of activism all at once—"

"People do change, you know. Or don't you grant them that privilege?"

"Not you, I don't."

"Maybe I've been wrong about—ⁿ

"Nah, sweet, it won't straighten, no matter how much Dixie Creme pomade you slap on it."

Diana's eyes reflected the sinking sun. "He is asking a relevant question, Harold. Where were you.ten years ago when we were yelling for black power?"

Exposed. Unmanned. Guilty.

Casually, Jomo lifted his shirt, getting ready to talk to the computer. "You comin' with us, perfesser?" "I can't in good conscience—" Jomo sighed. "Okay, white nigger. I read you." To the

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control device: "Computer ole buddy, can you gimme a fix on the camp of Antar? Somewhere in Africa. The Sahara, I think. 'Bout the sixth century A.D."

"The danger—" Harold began again.

"Screw off," Diana said.

"You can both go to hell!" Harold exclaimed.

Jomo grinned. "No, sweet, we're going to see a real black man."

And he vanished with the girl.

Wounded, uncertain, stupefied, Harold was alone on the tree-soughing hillside in Asia Minor.

He thought he was right. The conviction he'd expressed —conviction that they should be working for change in their own present—was what he believed, he knew now. It had taken painful exposure of his own lackadaisical attitude toward the struggle to bring that belief to the surface. But, in the sudden heat and pain of self-revelation, he did believe.

His control device began to bong. Harold chuckled, a harsh sound. Jomo had neglected to turn off the locator signal.

With shaking hands Harold punched up the Nexus computer and said:

"Take me wherever they went."

It did.

The sand seethed. Diana caught a flicker of Harold's shadow stretched down the side of a dune. Jomo spun.

"Oh> Jesus, he's followin' us."

Harold floundered after them, up to his cuffs in wind-driven sand.

"Listen, leave us be, will you?" Jomo gestured to a sprawling oasis about half a mile distant. There, unfortunately, they had attracted the attention of something on the order of a thousand raggedy-looking Bedouins, all jabbering and pointing to the black figures isolated against the dunes. Jomo didn't seem to worry much.

"Younder lies the campsite of an honest-to-God black hero. We're goin' to make his acquaintance without you,

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since you already turned down our company back in Lydia."

Harold's mind disgorged facts. Antar: black slave; great physical prowess; escaped to the desert at an early age; proved his manhood in hand-to-hand combats with the nomadic tribesmen; became chief of a small band; attracted more nomads to his standard; became revered because of his talents as warrior, lover of captured women, extraordinary poet—

Bedouins were pouring from the oasis, waving their swords and making grisly sounds in their throats. From the rear ranks, an unusually tall man thrust forward. He was soon outdistancing those in front. The wind whipped his headcloth. His face was black.

"Get away from us, you white nigger,'* Diana said as Harold pursued the pair.

"No, stop, listen to reason." He seized Jomo's arm.

"Leave go of me, sweet."

Harold shot his hand toward Jomo's belly. "Give me that control-—"

Jomo balled his left hand and hit.

Harold's face turned mushy with pain. He fell on his spine in the sand. The ululations of the desert warriors grew louder. Jomo crouched down, gripped Harold's throat. Diana pulled his shoulder.

"No need to kill him, Jomo. Just leave him."

"But I want to meet Antar. And he'll keep followin' us."

"Not if we split this scene and turn off those locator bells."

"Well—maybe you're right." Jomo jumped up and kicked Harold's ribs. He shielded his eyes. "Antar an' his bunch don't look too friendly anyway."

That was an understatement. Damascus blades winked in the sun.

Using one thumb, Jomo broke a button on his control device. The device shot off a whiff of smoke. He startled Diana by reaching over and lifting her sweater. With a grunt he demolished the identical button on her control.

Viperish, he grinned down at Harold. "There. No more

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locators." He stretched the elastic of his belt so that the control device was next to his lips. He spoke quickly, in a whisper. In the whining wind Harold couldn't hear a word.

Jomo laced his fingers in Diana's. Both of them regarded Harold with a wicked joy.

"Try to catch us now, perfesser.'*

They disappeared.

All at once Harold felt neither courageous nor full of conviction. He wobbled to his feet in the sand as the horde of Antar poured toward him. The sun scorched his brainlobes dizzy. He was cut off. Cut off. Where were the blacks now? Where were the whites? What were they doing?

What a hell of a mess.

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Perhaps it was the African sun, addling his head, driving him to unreason.

Perhaps it was the harassment and abuse he'd suffered from Jomo as, each time he tried to counsel rational behavior, the counsel was thrown back and he was found contemptuously wanting. As a man. As a black man.

Perhaps it was the unsettling sight of the thousand-odd Bedouins scrambling over the dunes, closer every moment. Some brandished their blades and wailed in their beards. Some whetted their swords on their thumbs with spit.

Perhaps it was the appearance of their black leader, Antar, whose exploits had earned him the highest accolade that could be given a Muslim: one of his poems was hung—later, of course—at the entrance to the great Mecca temple. For a man who'd devoted himself to literary pursuits—thirty-two volumes worth,, to be exact —Antar looked exceedingly militant, swinging his Damascus blade higher and wider than his followers. That Harold's skin was the same color as his own seemed to make no damn difference.

Ill

Perhaps all these things conspired to drive him to what he did. And perhaps something else too—

They had called him a white nigger. Diana had called him a white nigger.

Were they right about him? Was she right? Why should the question even make a difference?

But it did. He was a man. But less than a black man. Without words, Diana said that to his mind—and glands —whenever he was close to her. Why did that matter? He didn't know. But it did.

Mouth open, he stared at the Bedouins coming at him full tilt—

"You stupid, lovesick, irrational dumb ass!" part of him said.

"You got to show that pussycat," another part said.

In the flaring sun, Antar yelled to rally his stragglers. The first of the fearsome aggregation came piling up the dune on whose summit Harold was standing. His intellec-tualism simply melted, fffflub. He jammed the control device up near his mouth.

"Want to go to Boston. Middle of May, 1645!"

Antar the warrior-poet uttered a fearsome oath doubtless denoting his pleasure at capturing Harold. He was within six feet of the top of the dune when his face dissolved through black into gray rain.

Soaked and shivering, Harold gazed at Boston harbor, a thicket of masts.

The few people abroad this grim morning wore queer garb somewhat resembling that which he'd seen in Philadelphia. They gave Harold stares of dismay, surprise, or wrath.

He stood under the eaves at the side of the tavern where he'd materialized. Boston. A dripping, cod-smelling town. He started walking along the cobbles. At the street's end, he'd glimpsed a wharf and several large sailing vessels riding out the chop.

A drunken sailor peered at him from the door of an ale shop. He hurried on, head down, while the rational part of him grew vocal.

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Listen, Harold Quigley, you idiot. Are you going to do the very thing you warned Jomo not to do? Are you going to mess around just for the sake of a sleazy smile from a girl who—

She's not sleazy, and you shut your damn mouth.

You have absolutely no taste.

Shut up.

You have absolutely no reason to go on this kind of emotional binge.

That's the trouble with you, all you want are reasons, reasons.

Harold, Harold—this is Harold. You're acting like a child.

I'm trying to act like a man for a change.

To prove what? To her? If you're only doing it because of her—

/ don't know why I'm doing it, so shut up.

I know why you're doing it. You think you can do this and rub off a phony, emotionally loaded label she—

Shut up, I don't give a damn what you think, you're the white nigger part of me. He felt feverish, exhilarated, absolutely crazy and fine. Not to mention wholly confused.

7 think I'm in love.

In Boston? Harold, you make me sick, said his other self, and expired to silence.

When he reached the wharf, Harold halted. He studied the three large vessels anchored nearby. Two seemed un-tended, secured for rough weather. The third had its gangplanks down, and casks were piled high on the dock near each plank. A few seamen could be seen on deck, hurrying about their business.

He crept into cover behind some of the casks. He didn't want to be accosted till he found out whether this was the right ship. He heard someone whistling, peered out.

An untrustworthy-looking white boy of around ten or eleven was approaching along the wharf. He carried a hamper full of bottles. As he passed, Harold jumped out and hissed.

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The boy jumped back. Without thinking, Harold seized his wrist.

"I'm not going to hurt you!"

"Leggo!"

"Just tell me—what ship is this?'*

The boy's ferret eyes darted every which way. "Uh— she's the Rainbowe."

A surge of excitement. "Captain Smith the master? Bound for Madeira with a cargo of barrel staves and saltfish?"

"Aye." The lad sneered at the casks. "Can't you smell *em?"

"Is Captain Smith aboard?"

"How should I know?"

"Why shouldn't you? I'll bet you're his cabin boy.ⁿ

The guess was a good one. The boy began to tap his foot nervously. He glanced up at Rainbowe¹ s rail, evidently hoping that one of the sailors might see his plight.

The boy kept tap-tapping, the rhythm growing fast and ragged. "Yas, I'm his boy, all right. Captain Smith sent me for this rum and I got delayed some. He—he's probably left the ship by now."

"You're lying, I can see it on your face."

"Leave me go, can't you?"

"In a minute. I must see the captain. I'm not trying to cause trouble. I just want to talk to him. He mustn't sail. You see—"

Harold released the cabin boy's wrist, spread his own black hands, a gesture of reason. He swallowed.

"I know this'll sound odd to you. Strange. I mean, how could I know? But I do! If Captain Smith sails from Madeira, empty and looking for a cargo, and if he goes to the Guinea Coast, Rainbowe'11 become the first known vessel to bring slaves to the American colonies. This ship started it all—I mean she will start it all unless—look, I'm telling you the truth! Help me! Tell Smith I'd like to talk—hold on!"

During the recitation, the urchin's eyes had become rounder and rounder. Suddenly he seized one of the rum

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bottles from the hamper, darted in and broke the bottle over Harold's head.

"Halp, halp, Captain! First mate! Second mate! Anybody!"

"You little loudmouth—"

"Halp, halp, runaway blackamoor! Runaway wild blackamoor!"

A hirsute face popped over the rail. "Tad! What's amiss?"

"Somebody's wild blackamoor escaped!" Tad shrieked, flinging another bottle.

The bearded sailor bawled, "Grab yer spikes, lads!"

"Wait, wait!" Harold protested, his hair a mess of rum and bits of glass. His cheek was gashed, too. "You don't understand—"

A man came running along the wharf. Yelling so hard his cheeks turned a deep violet, Tad informed the man that he'd cornered a wild blackamoor. In a trice, doorways of seedy ale houses up and down the quay began to bang open. Citizens converged from nearby streets. At the first thud of boots, Harold spun around.

A crew of burly sailors was pouring down the planks off Rainbowe with dirks and belaying pins.

"Runaway blackamoor! Wild blackamoor!"

The voices came from all directions. Harold saw distended eyes, bared teeth, grotesque faces in the rain. His last plea strangled in his throat. He ran.

He bowled between two sailors reeling from a tavern. They brought their dirk handles down on him from opposite sides as he lunged through, and hit each other. There were purple oaths as he ran on.

He slipped on the cobbles, leaped up again. His lungs ached before he'd gone a block. He turned right up a narrow street and glanced back over his shoulder. A huge mob was coming on through the rain, with all manner of weapons displayed. Harold swiped his cheek. The back of his hand came away bloody. Shutters crashed open.

"What's happenings, boys? Where are ye bound?"

"Bound to catch the wild blackamoor! He slew three already—"

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"Six! With his bare hands!"

"Face black as sin—black as the pit—I seen it—"

"God," Harold panted, slipping again. He fell on his face. A muscle in his ankle wrenched. He tried to rise and for a moment could not. The bay of the mob grew louder.

He managed to get to his feet. He pulled up his soaked shirt, croaked to the control device, "Jamestown—uh, James River. Virginia, 1619. The month—August. The last of August, I think. The last day of—"

As if lamps had been blown out in a waxworks, the faces of the mob disappeared—

To be replaced by hot, briny water filling his mouth, nose and ears.

Harold began to tread water. He'd been dropped in the middle of a river. The James, certainly, to judge from the stockade on shore, and the squat merchant ship anchored near the the settlement.

A Dutch flag flew from the ship's mast. On the river bank, several seamen were conferring with a number of bearded men in picturesque costumes. Nearby, standing in the shallow water, Harold saw some splendidly built black men. Tlie blacks were chained together at wrists and ankles by continuous chains.

Suddenly Harold remembered that he hadn't done too well in swimming at the all-black Y in Waycross. He began to sink.

With effort he managed to stay float, though treading with his sore ankle wasn't pleasant. The sunlight dazzled on the water, and it was very hot.

On shore, the parties to the discussion—the white parties—were making vigorous gestures. The blacks still stood in the lapping water, docile. Harold's thrashings and splashings had brought Dutch sailors to the rail on his side of the squat sailing ship. He hollered at his control device:

"Same time—same place—but move me—to land—I —blub:'

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He sank, and every light went out.

He woke in brambles. He was dripping, out of breath. He rolled over.

He pricked his hands parting the thornbushes for a view of the negotiations taking place not far from the small stockaded settlement. A twinge of fear raced through him. The Jamestown men, tough-looking, lean, were armed with fowling pieces.

Well, he couldn't help that. This was his first, best chance. Surely they would listen to reason, for history recorded that the Jamestowners had only been trying to aid the crew of a distressed ship blown out of its latitudes and dangerously short on provisions. Harold's mind was blank on the name of the Dutch vessel, or her port of origin, or her ports of call—as history was blank.

He stood up and stepped out from behind the wild creepers. Slowly—no repetition of that wild blackamoor nightmare!—he began to work his way down the slope.

A jowly, bearded Dutchman was first to notice him. Then a black out in the shallows. The black nudged his neighbor. Soon every one of the twenty chained blacks looked a little less despondent. A couple even smiled shyly, pleased by the sight of Harold's skin glittering wet in the tidewater sun.

Two of the Jamestown men stepped away from their fellows and aimed their fowling pieces at Harold. The Dutch sailors pulled knives. Harold pressed on, choking back fear. It helped to glance at the men in chains. He saw haunted eyes; glistening sores. The wind was blowing from the Atlantic. Perhaps he smelled only the twenty. Perhaps he smelled the whole Dutch ship. Either way, the stench made him nauseous.

So as not to force the Jamestown men to fire their fowling pieces in fright, Harold stopped at what he considered a prudent distance. He raised a hand in a peaceful gesture. One of the sailors queried a colonist. The Jamestowner, his long locks riffling in the breeze, shook his head. Then he replied to the questioner.

Harold had trouble understanding the English. It sounded like a dialect. The meaning was clear, though.

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The Jamestowner knew no more about Harold's identity than did the raggy seaman.

"May I speak to you?" Harold asked.

"Wherdooyocomfra?" At least that's what Harold thought the colonist said.

He gestured behind him, deliberately vague. "There. I want to ask you—please—give these seamen the food they want. But don't take the blacks they're offering in return."

Of the colonist's next remark, Harold caugjit only a phrase or two. A phrase that seemed to repeat the word black. The front of his skull began to ache. He kept trying:

"Tell the Dutchmen ydu don't want the black men. You don't want them, do you? You only took them—I mean, you're only going to take them—because they're being offered."

Damn. No progress. The Jamestowners looked as blank and suspicious as ever.

Trying to speak more slowly, he continued:

"Look, nobody blames you. You didn't want slaves. But you took the first ones brought to the New World. I want you to refuse them."

Something—perhaps his pointing at them—made the blacks in the shallows afraid again. They huddled together. Harold raked a hand through his hair. It came away cut by glass and smelling rummy.

He tried miming eating. "Eat! Food! Give them the food—" Head nodded. "But don't take the slaves." Head shaken. "Tell them to put the slaves back on the ship with the other eighty they've brought from Africa. Tell them to take the slaves on down to the Caribbean and maybe slavery won't get started here."

No communication.

He stamped his foot. "What's wrong with you people? Can't you understand English? Get them out of here!"

With a growl, one of the Jamestowners crouched and braced his fowling piece against his hip. Two other colonists began moving toward him slowly, plainly intent on driving him back.

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Harold wiped his cut hand on his shirt. It left a red smear. He knew they were frightened of him; failed to comprehend his speech or his message. He tried so hard his voice grew crackly:

"Don't—let—the—blacks—land! Can't I get through to you that unless—"

On unless, he hit an unintentional peak of loudness. That really spooked the Jamestowners. The one with his fowling piece ready fired a warning shot at the sky.

The reverberations drifted on the Atlantic breeze. The smoke scattered. More colonists began pouring from the stockade. He heard one cry something like, "Getemm, catchemm!" He turned and bolted up the slope.

They came after him, Dutchmen and colonists together. He heard a cheer, whipped his head around. One of the blacks was dancing up and down in the shallows, delighted that Harold had chosen to run. A burly Dutchman, cheeks pinking, sloshed out into the water and, seizing the black's shoulder with one hand, shoved his dirk in the man's belly with the other.

The remaining blacks made ominous sounds as the Dutchman leaped back. The murdered slave fell and hung from the chains like a puppet with a lolling tongue.

Failure, Harold thought. Twice you tried to change things. Twice you failed. He gulped for air as the pursuers crashed up the slope close behind.

He clenched up his nerve and jumped into the thorny patch, shielding his face with his arms as best he could. Stickers slashed his exposed skin. He struck the ground, grabbed the control device:

"Take me someplace safe! Uh—the U.S.—New York! The eighteen-nineties—" .

A fowling piece with an angry face behind it poked into the thorns where he lay. He knew his mortality: he was surely dead. Then Virginia started to fade.

But in the swallowing darkness he thought he heard a sustained explosion. Too close. Too close. Too cl—

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Things weren't much better when he woke. He heard the rattle of gunfire.

He lay with one cheek against a damp rock. He smelled salty wind over water. At first he thought his eyesight had failed. But it was only twilight.

A peculiar, sullen twilight, though. He propped himself up, saw a river that looked tantalizingly familiar.

On the far shore, some warehouses were afire. Behind them, huge areas of tenements were also burning. The smoke from the widely separated conflagrations rolled on the hot evening air. In another instant, he identified one of the bridges upriver.

New York on fire?

He choked on the dryness of his own throat. A spark-shot red light suffused the sky. There was more gunfire behind him. He clambered up the rocks away from the East River. Beyond railroad tracks, he saw black men with bandanas around their foreheads firing over barrel barricades with Winchester rifles.

The object of their attack was a police van that had just rounded a corner out of one of the crosstown streets.

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The manes on the four horses flew as the driver whipped them into a wild gallop. The van's bell clanged. Brass-buttoned policemen clung to the sides, the top, the rear step, emptying pistols at the barricades.

Harold watched horrified as the police van crashed the barricade. Several blacks drove pitchforks up into the bellies of the horses. The van overturned, crashing barrels and men.

The police fell off every which way. Two of them flung a black sharpshooter to the pavement .and stamped on his head. Bone cracked. Blood squirted.

A black crept up behind a dazed policeman and rammed a pitchfork into his spine. Another black man thrust a Winchester barrel into a stunned policeman's mouth and pulled the trigger.

The fighting continued several minutes, a surreal glom-eration of writhing bodies, thrashing horses, glaring knives, spurting firearms. Then the black men carried the day, regrouped, went charging off across town.

As Harold climbed from the rocks and staggered toward the carnage, he caught a last glimpse of one black waving a policeman's head from the tines of a pitchfork. Then the man was lost in a red glare. Half the frame buildings in Manhattan appeared to be burning in the hot night wind.

The smell of horse urine and blood clogged Harold's nose as he picked his way to the van. A wounded policeman saw Harold, lifted himself on his elbows, his pistol butt gripped in two hands. The pistol barrel wavered, then aimed at Harold's groin. Too stricken to move, Harold simply waited.

The policeman opened his mouth. His eyes glared. Then they filmed over. He dropped his pistol and vomited blood. His cap fell off. A little metal badge glinted in the firelight. N.Y.P.D. Harold lurched across the street and headed into the fireglare.

Halfway along the first block he dodged as someone in an upper window discharged a pistol.

"I saw a nigga, I got him, I got him!" A woman's voice.

Christ, what was happening? This couldn't be New

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York. Not with every other gaslight smashed, the streets choked with wrecked wagons, storefronts gutted.

In a dress shop Harold spied a young white woman lying with her skirt hoops mangled around her thighs, Someone had torn her bloomers off. Her pubis was covered with blood.

He crawled over the glass shards in the window frame. He kicked aside a dress dummy, knelt, lifted the girl's waxy eyelid. Her eyeball seemed to glow. But that was only a trick of reflected gaslight. She was dead.

He stood up, drew a long breath. On one wall someone had scrawled the words prophut Nat in blood. A calendar —a Currier and Ives pastoral; ah, irony!—showed the month of August, 1896.

He lunged on crosstown. He hid behind an overturned brewery wagon on the corner of First Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street as a mob of armed whites—all ages and both sexes—rampaged along, heading uptown. Many carried torches. The light rippled on their whiskey flasks and weapons. Three drunken men in gory waistcoats bellowed a song: . . _

We will nail the nigger's privates to the sour apple tree, we will nail—

Trailing noise and torchsmoke, the mob was gone.

Harold clung to the wagon for support. The night was all noise: distant small arms fire; flaming buildings falling; fire and police bells ringing; hoofs thundering the pavement. He began to walk downtown on First Avenue.

In a doorway he discovered three black bodies—two women, one man—with their heads, arms and legs cut off. Fat green flies buzzed. He staggered on, feeling demented.

He ransacked his deposited memories for a recollection of a race riot in Manhattan in August, 1896.

No memory. No riot. *

Yet the island was afire like Watts; like Detroit.

Then the answer had to be someone at work in the past. Whisk and his deacons? Jomo and Diana? Where? How?

"There's a black sojer! Hey, black sojer! C'mere!"

Abstractedly, Harold realized the voice meant him.

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With, effort'he focused his eyes. Around fifty or sixty blacks, mostly younger, were crossing First Avenue on Forty-Third, heading west. One of them, a buxom yellow girl in a torn frock had spotted Harold weaving to and fro, zapped nearly mindless by horror.

"You goan miss all the sport if you don't come along, black sojer," the girl called as she waved her meat cleaver merrily. Harold staggered in her direction. As he got closer he saw a dark stain all along the cleaver's edge.

"Where are you going?" he asked the girl.

She grinned. "That high-assed Delmonicker's place. Champagne for one and all. Then we're goan burn it down."

"How—how long has this been going on?"

She wigwagged her cleaver at the ruddy sky. "This here? Where you been?"

"On the road," he lied. "Uh—walking from the Caro-linas."

"Well, sojer, they burnt down 'Shcago las' Saturday night. We ain't goan be outdone roun' here! Just as ole Prophet Nat said—let the blood come down!"

Harold assimilated that. Prophet Nat—

Turner.

When the sun was eclipsed that February in 1831 in Virginia, Prophet Nat took it as a sign. Prophet Nat threw off his slave chains and led a revolt, only to be hunted down by mad-dog militia—

What in God's name did that have to do with such carnage?

Up at the head of the mob, the blacks had caught two white men. The unfortunate victims were speedily dismembered. Limbs and organs were tossed from hand to hand like souvenirs. Jolly, the crowd rushed on across Third Avenue. Harold kept trying to find out what was going on.

"That Turner—I heard of him. But he's been dead a long time. How come—?"

"What he said ain't been dead a long time," the yellow girl retorted. "We was jus' too scairt to do anythin' about it. Too scairt and too dumb. You ever hear of Booker-T,

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sojer? That big ole black buck fum that school down souf? I forget whatchacallit—"

Tuskegee. He didn't speak the name, just kept pace with the yellow girl's lithe, lustful stride and let her tell it.

"Maybe you never hear of ole Booker-T where you come fum, sojer, but he did lots o' talkin' bout us black folks. Keep your mouth shut, he say. Stay in your place, he say. Git an eddication, he say. Work hard, all that shit. Lots of black folk paid heed till he got shut up for good down in 'Lanta las' year. Hee-hee!" she laughed. "An' right when he was sayin' nigger-be-good to make all the white folks happy. You never heard 'bout that?"

"No," Harold said, gripped by the beginning of a dismal comprehension.

"You certainly are a ignorant country boy. I bet I could teach you plenty." By way of example, she hoisted her skirts. She showed him her sex and guffawed.

Harold simply stopped walking. He sidestepped into a doorway, hung there out of breath. The yellow girl's voice trailed back.

"Hey, hey, what kind of queer black stuff are you, sojer—?"

He chewed his knuckle. The pattern formed. Thoughts popped into his head like puzzle-pieces: these were the nineties; the decade when old Linkum's Proclamation started to ring hollow, and Jim Crow was a lively infant below the Mason-Dixon. The black urge to rebel, typified by Prophet Nat, hadn't died. It had merely been squashed —and largely because the efforts of the white squashers were, if not endorsed, then reinforced by the voice of the era's number one black, the man Jomo would have called the head white nigger. Washington of Tuskegee.

All in a rush, Harold remembered the speech, the place, and the world-wide white sigh of relief. That speech had been the weight that helped the whites keep the lid on—

But now, one year later, in New York and evidently Chicago too, race war was blowing on a fiery wind. Some-

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where up Third Avenue, a cannon discharged. The lid was off. Booker-T was shut up for good.

A squad of mounted militiamen went galloping along Third toward the open spaces at the north end of the island. Harold crouched in his hiding place and spoke to the computer.

"Atlanta. The Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. That was last year—"

A group of whites appeared as Harold finished his instructions. The whites were rushing downtown. A little black boy of four or five peered out from the shadows on Forty-Third across the Avenue. The whites spotted him. Two chased him and caught him by the heels. They whirled him and flung him head first against a building.

Harold disappeared from the night of fire as blood and brains leaked down the brick—

A band played "Dixie." Torchlight threw strange shadows among large, ramshackle buildings. Harold landed on his rear in red dust behind a water barrel.

He looked out from behind the barrel, saw large doors leading into a hall. One of the doors stood part way open. Harold listened to a mellow voice from within.

"—education, moderation—these shall be the watchwords of my black brethen—"

Luck for once! He was right on the spot while Booker-T was making the address some thought highly dangerous. No other black had ever been invited to speak to those attending a white exposition in the Deep South. But Booker-T was safe. Booker-T believed the black should learn agriculture and simple math and shut up. That was what the whites wanted to hear. They took the chance and invited him up from his little school in Alabama. His address was reprinted in every major paper in the nation, and in Europe as well. And ever afterward, Booker-T, who honestly believed what he said, and gave his life to teaching his black brethren what he thought they needed to know—ever afterward, Booker-T was cursed.

Except, in another Manhattan a year from now, it hadn't worked that way.

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Based on what little he'd read, Harold had never thought much of Booker-T either. But he was damned if he could countenance the carnage he'd seen, nor the fact of history being wrenched to permit it. His own abortive attempts in that direction put him firmly back in the anti-manipulation camp where he'd started. So he sidled toward the double doors at the back of the exposition hall, holding his breath. *

"Who that out theah?" said a cornbread voice.

The white guard who appeared was a skinny cracker with a white satin brassard on his right arm. He collared Harold and menaced him with his truncheon.

"What you doin' round, heah, boy?"

"Please, sir," Harold dissembled, "I just want to set eyes on Booker-T."

"Yen, he's a mighty fine and upstandin' nigger. But we don't 'low no black boys on the exposition grounds 'cept for porters. And you ain't dressed like no porter. So get out, get me?"

To be sure Harold did, he aimed a kick at his backside.

Standing with head down, Harold suddenly shot out his hands. The guard yelled. Harold spilled him backwards. He snatched the truncheon and rapped the guard twice on the forehead. The cracker sighed and slept.

Getting up, Harold became aware of a strange, frosty change inside himself. There was a capacity for violence after all. When it became necessary. And he'd indulged it pleasurably while whacking the guard's skull. The new self-knowledge spooked him not a little.

He crept inside the hall. He found himself in a dim, narrow corridor that led to steps at the back of a bunting-draped platform. He stopped, condemning himself. Should have found out more about the assassination! When did it take place? Within the hall or later?

The rich black voice rolled on. Flattened against the wall, Harold inched his way ahead. He glimpsed Booker-T at the rostrum, shoulders and a black head above the wattles and hair-curling necks of seated white dignitaries. Fortyish Booker-T spoke to a vast blur of faces and lamps, his right hand lifted in the air:

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"And so I say this. In all things that are purely social—"

A tiny curl of smoke leaked from under the bunting that concealed the back of the platform.

"—we can be as separate as the fingers—°

On all fours, Harold headed for the bunting at a rapid clip. He heard a spitting, hissing noise under there now. One fat old colonel in a white linen suit had squeaked his chair around and was sniffing, sniffing, a segar rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"—yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress"

Separate but equal as fingers on the hand. Equal but definitely separate. The exposition audience burst into cheers. Harold whipped the bunting aside and came face to face with Jomo and Diana.

The latter went, "Eed" The former gaped. Four bundled sticks of dynamite in his hand continued to give off smoke from their single fuse.

"Give me that stuff!" Harold croaked, reaching.

"Get out of the way or we'll all go up!" Jomo cried.

"Who's that down unduh theah?" exclaimed one of the colonels on the platform. A cane began to rap suddenly. "Do I heah nigras? I could sweah I heah—"

"Let me have it!" Harold shot out his hands toward the dynamite. Diana grabbed the back of his neck. Rap-rap-rap went the cane.

Little more than three inches of fuse remained. Harold kneed Jomo in the gut, writhed free of Diana's clutch. He tore the dynamite from Jomo's hand as the big man fell on his side in the sawdust, bellowing.

"I sweah to God theah's nigras messin' aroun' down theah!" came the cry from above. Applause and cheering continued to reverberate. Still on his knees, Harold headed out. His eyes bulged at the sight of four sticks of dynamite about to explode in his face.

Jomo seized his ankle.

"Wheah's the sheriff?" roared the platform alarmist.

With a mule kick to Jomo's chin, Harold got free. He banged his head on the platform when he stood up. Half

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conscious, he reeled down the hall and burst through the double doors. He glanced wildly in both directions. The fuse hissed down to an inch.

Commotion inside. Stomping boots. Booker-T calling for order in a worried voice. Jomo and Diana making a racket as they followed Harold on the run. His teeth began to clack. The fuse was down to half an inch.

Suddenly he remembered the rain barrel.

He ran like one demented. Just as the fuse began to emit a bigger fizz of sparks, he plunged both arms into the water up to the elbows.

Underwater, the last sparks vanished. Harold let go of the dynamite. Jomo spun him around.

"You've interfered the last goddam time, you—"

"Behind you!" Diana said.

Jomo let go. Half a dozen muscular law officers in ten-gallon hats, plus two bloodhounds on leash, were rounding the corner of the exposition hall. Their eyes were mean. Their clubs were big.

"Guess we got somebody else to fight now," Harold panted.

Jomo crouched, making his hands into fists. "Guess we do."

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Dragged along by their yapping hounds, the two peace officers in the lead headed right for the trio. Harold knew he and his companions would be beaten first, interrogated later. So he clenched up his hands as Jomo had done, and waited.

Someone hissed in his ear, "On second thought—let's split."

Harold turned his head. Did a take when he saw Jomo's expression. If the big black could be said to have gone pale, it had happened. He looked less than full of fight. Diana's eyes were accusing.

"I can't help it!" Jomo said. "In Philadelphia when I was little, I was bit by a rabid police dog—"

"Surround those nigras!" said the leader of the lawmen, bogged down by an outflux of whites at the doors of the exposition hall. The fat colonel, with linen suit and segar, got his feet tangled in a bloodhound's leash. He fell. The bloodhound nipped him on the neck. - "Hold on, Devil!" cried the head lawman. "That's no nigra!"

"Cain't he smell I ain't?" The bloodhound lapped the colonel's chin. The man punched the dog's ribs. The bloodhound snapped. "I'll have yoah star, deppity!"

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More and more whites kept pushing into the alley, heightening the confusion and affording Harold the chance to grab Diana's moist hand. He pulled her along as he back-pedaled into the dark. Old linen-suit was in a worse fix than ever because the second bloodhound had come to the aid of the first, fangs bared. The lawman kept pulling and hauling on the snarled leases.

"Devil, you sumbitch—Killer, you stupid lop-eared bastard—stop it!'*

His rearward lunges further hampered the efforts of his fellow lawmen to get around him. And the crush of waving, shouting, excited white men from the hall now numbered thirty to forty.

Jomo's eyes were unnaturally large as he followed Harold and Diana. In the dark the girl stepped on something that moved, swore, sat up. The cracker guard Harold had decked grabbed Diana's leg and tripped her.

Snap went one of the bloodhound leashes. The dog leaped over old linen-suit and dashed toward the escapees. Drool flew from the dog's muzzle. Harold didn't know whether bloodhounds bit, but Diana, fallen, was a perfect target if they did. Harold raised his foot.

The bloodhound whipped his head to the side, snapped at Harold's flying toe. The bite missed. Harold kicked the hound's side.

The blow drove the hound up against the exposition hall. Harold pulled Diana up and away.

By now the cracker guard was screaming, the lawmen were screaming, and the dignitaries were screaming too. Harold and the others ran like hell.

"Hsssst!" went someone at the corner of the building. "Don't go that way, folks. This way—quick!"

"Whozat?" Jomo said.

A thin old black in a comic opera porter's uniform stepped far enough into the light so that they could see him. Toothless, he carried a straw broom.

"Come on this way, I say. I can hide you. If you-all go the other way, you'll end up at the main gate. Then you caught for sure."

"Lead on," Harold gasped gratefully.

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They hurried away through the dark alongside the exposition hall, then turned left between two small agricultural buildings. "I don't know who you-all are," the porter said, "but you black and that's good enough for me. My name's Ebenezer Brown."

Jomo kept casting wild glances over his shoulder. The hounds were still yapping. "P—p—pleased to meet you."

"My, you talk funny," Ebenezer allowed.

"We're from—uh—up north," Diana explained.

"In here, quick."

Ebenezer rolled aside the door of yet another agricultural pavilion, this one obviously having been recently devoted to a showing of pigs. Per Ebenezer's instructions, they found some clean straw and burrowed in.

Through the straw the old porter whispered, "You-all should of knowed better 'n to come on the grounds. This is strickly a white folks' fair, 'cept for Booker-T, o' course. You stay hid now. When the grounds close up at nine thirty, I come back for you. You got any place to stay?"

"No," Harold said, then sneezed because there was straw up his nose. "We just arrived in Atlanta."

"Well, I reckon Miz Brown can find some extry greens and grits at our place. Don't make a sound, hear? I be back."

The door of the ag building squealed shut. Harold lay sweating and breathing hard. There was a thrashing to his right, followed at once by agitation somewhere else.

"Jomo, lie still the way the man said."

"Di, me and the perfesser have a little settling up to d—"

"You lie still/'

Jomo ignored her: "Perfesser?"

Harold curdled. But he kept his voice steady. "I hear you."

"It's comin' to something final between us, you know?"

"I sort of had that feeling."

"Your yellowbelly antics screwed me up royally."

"Look who's calling names," Diana whispered. "I didn't exactly see you wearing the hero suit back there.

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Harold kept his head while you went to pieces over those damn dogs."

"Not one more word, sweet. Not one more. I"—catch in his voice—"I have this thing about dogs, that's all."

Fortunately Jomo's thing prevented an immediate confrontation, because the bloodhounds were yelping louder. Harold tensed. The search party was near.

The door of the building squealed. He heard men trampling straw. He was gripped by an overpowering urge to sneeze. He pinched his nose till it hurt.

Still the sneeze kept building. The men came closer. Fire glinted through the straw in front of Harold's eyes. The sneeze inflated his insides until he was forced not only to pinch his nose but bite his lower lip. He tasted his own salty blood as a heavy voice rumbled:

"Damn, Oral, I can't stand the stink in here."

"I don't think even niggas could stand it. Come on, less go."

Squeal went the door. The yapping of the hounds receded.

Jomo didn't resume his harangue. Harold was grateful, even though he knew that before the night was done, Jomo would demand an accounting.

Time dragged. All three of them stayed still, content to rest. Presently the door rolled open again. Ebenezer sounded the all clear.

They stole through the darkened exposition grounds, climbed the perimeter fence without incident, and were soon tramping a narrow dirt street in a section of town consisting mostly of hovels and one-room shacks. Lamps glimmered behind oilpaper windows. Heavy black women rocked on porches in the grassy fragrance of the night.

Diana dropped back to walk with Harold, an occurrence that Jomo, who was up ahead with Ebenezer, didn't fail to notice.

There was an odd new tone in her voice as she said, "I meant what I told Jomo in that barn. You were nice and cool when all the trouble started. I—thank you for driving off that dog."

The words thrilled him. She was a quicksilver girl,

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given to detesting him utterly without much warning. Yet she could become womanly on whim. He was glad that now was whim time.

He let his eyes slide sideways. He relished the shape of her bosom in silhouette against the lamplight from a cottage. She was like a Christmas package, really. What was inside? Who was she? From where? He knew so Utile about her, yet that made her exciting, because there was always the prospect of that fine moment when something in each of them might say / want to know more about you. What telly shows you liked when you were little in— Omaha, wasn't it? And what was it like being associated with the Muslims? And do you like to go for walks? Sleep on your side? Dance till you drop? And when was it that you first got hurt—and knew you were hurt—only because you were black? So much to discover, as on Christmas morning—if they'd ever have a chance in all this turmoil; and if she'd want to share the discovering. Sometimes, as now, something in her eyes said she might—

"Evening, Mr. Brown," someone called from the porch x>f the cottage they were passing. Ebenezer saluted politely with his broom:

"Evenin', Miz Anderson. Is Will 1n good health?"

"Yes, sir, and working down at the foundry tonight. Say hello to the missus."

"I will, many thanks."

In the crickety dark of Atlanta's blacktown, Harold finally said:

"Diana, I didn't even think about what I did. You don't owe me a thing."

"Maybe I owe you a new look."

"What?" _v .

"Maybe I've got you all wrong."

"No, you haven't. I'm still against what you and Jomo want to do."

"But we didn't do anything. You stopped us. Well— him. Bombing that poor misguided Tom was more his idea than mine."

"You succeeded until I stopped you," Harold corrected.

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"You succeeded beyond your wildest hopes. I saw it. By accident I landed up in New York a year from now—no, wait. I want Jomo to hear too."

"He won't pay you any mind."

"Because I won't rant and scream? Well, too bad. That's not my style and never will be."

"But the cause, Harold—that is worthy of emotion, of—" .

"Not of murder. I don't care what you call me, I'm still one of those old-time squares who doesn't believe the end justifies the means."

"Well, sometimes I'm not positive I do either. But Jomo can be pretty persuasive."

"Yelling has its advantages," he admitted.

"I wish I knew you a little better, Harold."

"Wish you did too," he said.

Tramping along with dust in his pores, aches in his bones, fears in his head, he still managed to take some joy from the way she smiled. She didn't smile with complete trust; not even with friendliness. The smile was guarded, saying only that she'd changed her mind ever so little; saying they might not—might not—have to be perpetual enemies. It's a start, anyway, he thought. A one-smile detente.

Only why couldn't it have happened any time but now?

They turned through a neat fence of pickets and met a robust, middle-aged black woman on a shack porch. Mrs. Brown unquestioningly accepted Ebenezer's explanation that they were from the north and invited them in to heaping plates.

Jomo mopped up pot liquor with piece after piece of bread. But he never once laid eyes on his food. He kept watching Harold across the table in the lamplight.

Mrs. Brown sensed the enmity. So did Ebenezer. He moved closer to his wife and slipped his thin old arm around her waist.

"I surely would like to hear 'bout the cities in the north," Ebenezer said, trying to start a conversation for the umpteenth time.

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"New York—" Diana began.

"Later." Jomo pushed up from the table. He wiped his hands on the clean rag provided for a napkin. "My friends and I have got to have a little private discussion. Very tasty meal," he added in a perfunctory way. Mrs. Brown looked sad. She knew it was politeness, not compliment. Jomo tramped toward the door.

Really smelling trouble, Ebenezer said, "Wouldn't a little sip of mule settle the stummick first? It always 'laxes a person so's they can think better about—"

"I don't need to think," Jomo said. "I know what we got to discuss."

Harold wiped his mouth, bobbed his head. He got up and started around the table.

Resigned to something violent happening, Ebenezer clutched his wife's waist. "We'll stay in here an' clean up, then. You all use the porch. The yard if you want it really private."

Jomo stomped into the night.

Harold glanced at Diana. He couldn't read her eyes. He pushed the door open and stepped outside.

He walked up to Jomo in the yard. In a flat voice the big black said, "You've buggered me up for the last time, sweet."

"I'll go right on buggering you up, as you put it, till you get rid of that insane idea about changing history." Harold leaned forward. "Do you know what I saw before I got here? I saw New York a year from now. Burning. People rioting—"

"You mean I did it and you wndid it?'*

"And I'm damn glad I did."

"But—but I didn't blow up Booker-T!"

"Maybe on some other time line you did. Don't ask me to explain all the paradoxes! I told you once I couldn't. Besides, the why doesn't matter. But the what does. What I saw in New York was ugly and inhuman. Booker-T was dead and there was no restraint on either side."

"We've been restrained too goddam long already!'*

"I saw slaughter. Blacks and whites ripping each other apart. Dying by the hundreds—thousands, for all I know!

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Half the city was on fire! Those people—black people— our people—died without even understanding what set them loose. It's one thing for a man to join a revolution on purpose. It's another for him to become the victim of some bloodthirsty manipulator, some—some self-appointed black Hitler!"

The crickets rasped loud. Across the shantytown street, a screen door banged open. A head popped out. It was quickly withdrawn for, in the starlight, the positions of the two men's bodies suggested terrible anger.

"You're a traitor to the black—" Jomo began.

"Oh shit, will you change the record? I'm telling you this. If you go on—if you keep jumping around in time—"

Harold's throat grew dry suddenly. Somewhere behind them, Diana moved in the grass.

"You'll do what, perfesser?"

"I'll have to stop you."

Jomo almost giggled. "Sweet—you don't mean— physically?"

"Yes."

"You? Kill we?"

Half blinded by sweat, Harold repeated, "Yes."

He expected a lunging attack, braced for it. Instead, Jomo got hold of his time control device and cracked off, "The Foundation, would you? Home base. The year 1977—right before we left."

Then he laughed.

Jomo's laughter pealed. More heads popped from more cottages. Even Ebenezer Brown looked outside. Harold began to shake in the Shockwaves of sound from Jomo's huge torso. This was unexpected counterattack. It threw him into confusion— Jomo vanished.

Diana rushed to Harold's side. "Where's he going? What does he want back there?"

Harold cried, "Sally!"

Because there she was.

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She wrestled against Jomo's grip on the little lawn in front of the Atlanta cottage. Her eyes were large and white in the star-gleaming. She saw Harold. Called his name. Jomo levered her arm up behind her back, drove her to her knees.

"Took"—he was puffing—"took about two hours and a half, all told. Had to"—breath—"fetch her back from the farmer's where we stashed her. Had to dodge some of the pigs too. Guess I arrived right when Freylinghoozy was sending them off to Philadelphia." With his free hand he snapped the elastic belt of the control device. "This is a dandy little thing even if it is a white man's toy. I was really hopping up there in 1977, but how long was I gone here? A minute? And you see who I brought. Shall we discuss what you're going to do to me, perfesser? I don't think so. The first move out of you—" Jomo levered Sally's arm higher. She groaned. "I'll kill her."

Harold felt like an old man. A frightened old man.

"I think you're losing your mind, Jomo," Diana said.

"Don't you turn into a white nigger too, sweet." He struggled to raise the control device to where he wanted it. Sally wore a similar device and belt around her middle. To the computer Jomo said, "Oasis of Taif. July 16, 622."

Harold was mesmerized by his sister's face. Its anguish said, Why is this? Why? He weighed her life's value and thus hesitated one moment too long.

Jomo and Sally disappeared.

An old granny across the street wailed, "It's ha'nts! They's ha'nts out tonight! Everybody lock your doors!"

Sally returned first, her head, then her shoulders, then the rest. She was on the verge of hysteria. Jomo appeared feet first. The reddened tip of a scimitar came into sight, followed by the blade and finally the hilt clutched in his fist. Harold felt a physical shock. The black stood tall, a war god.

"This time I was closer to the tent, perfesser. I even saw myself, and you two, which was kind of novel. I got hold of a sword by jumping one of those Arabs." His teeth appeared, cheshire-like. "Ole Prophet's dead. After July

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16, A.D. 622 on the Christian calendar, he never existed. The Muslims never existed. Timbuctoo never fell—" Jomo's smile grew beatific. "There's got to be a whole new world waiting now. A black world." He flung his hand high, drove the scimitar down. "A world I made!"

The scimitar quivered in the ground. Mrs. Brown, who had crept to the porch, fainted noisily. Jomo paid no attention.

"I'm going up to see it now. Going to take your sister along for my insurance. You can come if you've got the balls."

He spoke his instructions to the computer in a perfectly controlled voice. He ordered a return to the Foundation. Half swooning, Sally still understood some of what Jomo meant. She moaned and sobbed. As for himself, Harold was numb. Jomo vanished. And Sally a heartbeat after.

Diana came around in front of him. Starlight fell across her eyes, lighting her question.

Harold's shrug said it all. His weariness. His shame. His defeat.

They went up through time to see the future.

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Harold arrived dumped on his bottom on damp earth that smelled of spring. The woodland glade was suffused with the glow of sunset.

Jomo pulled a face. "Damn. This is disappointing."

Diana jumped down from a low branch of a tree and shook her head. She began to wander around, kicking the ground as if searching for something.

Harold located Sally by the sound of her groaning. She was out of sight behind a growth of ferns. To reach her, he had to pass Jomo. He approached with caution, then felt a twinge of irritation when Jomo paid him hardly any notice.

Jomo walked off. Harold pushed through the ferns and dropped down on his knees beside his sister. He put his arms around her and hugged her to his chest, just as much for his sake as for hers. Shadows in the glade grew long.

"What—what &-all this, Harold?" Sally said through her tears.

Harold squinted into the slanting light. "It's supposed to be 1977."

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"I'm going crazy, Harold. I really think I am. There were these tents-—all these Ayrabs in bathrobes—Jomo put a sword in one of them." Her fingers dug in. "I saw you there. And—another Jomo."

As best he could, he tried to explain the multiplicity of Jomos. But she was too numb and terrified, and didn't catch half. He wasn't sure he did either. He switched his tack.

"I don't think Jomo will hurt any of us now. He thinks he's got what he wants—a black world, though it's hard to tell from here. Can you get up?"

"I turned my ankle—" She leaned on him; managed it. Her hair was in her eyes. She pushed it back. "Harold, what about George?"

He started patting her right away to abort hysteria. "Now, now, Sally. Gator ought to be fine where I left him." Unless he isn't there any longer, "I can go back to 1815 any time and pick him up."

He was thankful she didn't see all the flaws in that, including the fact that he certainly couldn't go back if there was no Freylinghausen Foundation on this site.

Or could he?

He touched the elastic belt of his control device. Was there a Foundation on some other time line? Was the control still linked in with it? A dim little hope surfaced. Suppose he were still connected to the Nexus. Then he might be able to whip back and undo Jomo's murder of—

"Not a sign of a building," Diana said, returning from the far side of the glade. Her skin looked metallic in the light. "How did we get here, then?"

"Di!" Jomo yelled somewhere. "Come see this!"

But the gjrl talking. "If the Foundation's gone, that means there's been a drastic change. Would we have been born? Shouldn't we be dead?"

In the silence a cardinal went riffling through the tree-tops. Harold's skin prickled. He rubbed his eyes.

"I don't know. This is why I warned Jomo about paradox. We traveled in time to get to a world where apparently time travel doesn't exist. At least Freylinghausen's

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kind. But we've got these." Fingers to the control device; a bleak, sad stare. "I just don't know."

"You all come here!" Jomo shouted. "You won't believe it!"

They emerged from the trees to find him hip deep in weeds. In the distance, across a meadow that bore a similarity to the land around the Foundation, a glittering superhighway slashed north and south. The highway was elevated on chrome piers. It winked with fast traffic. Jomo was grinning a fat grin. Finally Harold saw the source of his joy.

A monstrous outdoor display, also on piers, faced motorists heading north on the highway. The board showed a three-wheeled vehicle that was clearly cousin to the automobile, yet different in design. Longer; more rakish; all sparkly, as if the body was entirely chromeplated. The bumper was cut out so that it resembled a wide mouth. By means of headlamps and centerpiece, the grille formed the eyes and nose of a metal face.

Harold's neck itched. The face reminded him of an African tribal mask.

The vehicle was depicted oversize, in full color. There were people inside. Mom, pop, some kids—

All black.

The blacks grinned the mindless grins of the idealized ad family. There were giant letters above the image of the car:

new

MASAI SPEAR V-7

"That tells it all," Jomo chuckled. The dying sun burnished his face as he lifted his eyes to orange clouds drifting in the sky. "I think we're privileged to be the first to set eyes on the promised land. It's a black world. Beautiful."

Harold refrained from voicing the thought that it might be a black world in which, as corporeal beings, they didn't exist.

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A short, not very heated argument ensued.

Jomo wanted to travel north to see what if anything remained of his old home town of Philadelphia. Out of a sense of dread rather than joyous exploration, Harold wanted to go south. Waycross was the destination he had in mind. Jomo proved surprisingly agreeable now that his vision had come true.

"All right, let's break up and meet back here. Say seven or eight days? I got a feeling we won't have too many problems traveling—" He chuckled again, like a kingfish. "Maybe currency and the language, but that should be about all. Di sweet, you come along with me. Perf esser—" He rested a hand on Harold's shoulder. "If things got kind of rough and personal up till now, I hope you'll soon realize it was in a good cause."

"I hope so," Harold replied, drained of all emotion; he was beyond trying to explain that they might no longer be people. He didn't even care to bring it up to make Jomo feel bad.

Jomo and Diana—the latter giving Harold a very interesting over-the-shoulder glance—disappeared into the north.

Harold and his sister camped the night in the woods, undisturbed. They breakfasted on berries and started walking south.

Soon they came to a town. The city limit marker gave the population as 3200, the name as WOMO.

It looked prosperous for a small place. There were large numbers of black people on the streets.

The blacks seemed to own all the shops too. They moved about freely, like normal people. Harold and Sally drew a few strange looks because of the ragtag state of their clothes. But most of the blacks wore things of similar cut, though they were somewhat bolder in pattern and color.

At a corner rack Harold discovered a newspaper. He was relieved to see he could read it. The paper was called the WOMO DRUM. The front page was dated April 12, 1977.

The lead story stated that the Prime Minister of New

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Songhay had departed safely by jet for Ms trilateral economic conference with the chief executive officer of the Federated European Black States and the trade secretary and queen and prince consort of the Commonwealth. Said conference was being held someplace called Mozamo-polis. Overseas? Africa? Sally's glance was strange, frightened. Harold glanced away, to hide his own dread.

On a highway outside Womo, Harold tried thumbing. It turned out that cultural history hadn't changed much. An ebony-skinned man pulled up in one of those three-wheelers. The car's exhaust system resembled a small jet's afterburner, Harold noticed.

"You folks need a ride?"

"Yes, south," Harold told him.

"I'm going that way. Where are you headed?"

"Uh, Waycross."

The man frowned. "Weh-kress?"

"I don't know this part of the country too well. If you've got a map—"

The man unfolded it on the sill of the open window. The continental outline was the same. But all else, including state and territorial boundaries, was changed. Across the familiar American shape, plus Canada and half of Central America, curved type spelled out, Republic of New Songhay. States had become provinces with African-sounding names. He found a large population center about in Atlanta's position, though it was named Pfeffertown. And where Waycross should have been—

He grew a little dizzy, pointing. "Here." The place was now called Al-Sidakh.

"Right on my way," the man smiled. "I'm making a swing along the gulf coast. Climb in."

They did. The three-wheel accelerated with a low jet whine.

"My name's Vanjye Robison." He indicated some colorful valises in the back seat, next to Sally. "I'm in gentlemen's ready-to-wear. Handle the whole Southeast. Normally I wouldn't pick up bummers because most of the ones you see these days are whiteys." His voice had a scowl in it.

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"We wouldn't be bumming," Harold forced himself to say, "but we had family problems. I'm Harold Quigley. She's Sally. My sister."

"Pleased to make your acquaintance. Where you from?"

"Out west," Harold said.

Traffic grew thick—mostly black drivers—and Robi-son was kept busy for a time. He was a bland man. A bachelor, he said later. But he was generous. He insisted on paying for their meal, claiming he could bury it in his expense account with ease. And why not, since Harold and his sister were the victims of personal problems?

They sped south in the three-wheel propulsion job, Harold letting a picture of this strange 1977 form by listening to Robison's numerous, almost painfully middle-class opinions. Harold replied only when absolutely forced, and then with noncommittal monosyllables.

Robison was certain, for example, that the Prime Minister of New Songhay would take the worst of it at the trade conference, since the FEBS—Federated European Black States—were getting, in his view, much too super-powerful, to the detriment of the countries in the Commonwealth headed by the queen and the prince in Africa.

Then of course there was inflation, with the kooroo worth half its value of ten years ago.

Then there was the rising crime problem.

Then of course—Robison scowled again—there were the whiteys.

At the outskirts of a city somewhere in what used to be the Carolinas, black policemen stopped them at a barricade.

"We're asking all drivers to take the Zambesi Falls Boulevard route," the cop said. "I'm afraid there's a civil disturbance downtown."

Robison's jaw muscles clenched. "Bad?"

The cop indicated red smudges on the evening horizon. "Fires. The usual. The province headman has activated the home guard. The situation is under control. It's just safer to stay away if you've no business in the area."

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Robison accelerated away from the barricade, following markers to the detour.

"I don't understand what these people want," he growled. "Oh, I admit slavery was a damn cruel system. We shouldn't have brought them over from Europe, separated them from their families—but they've been free two hundred years, for God's sake! They have a better life in this country than anywhere else in the world."

"Sometimes the smell from the bakery makes you steal one loaf," Harold said.

Robison skewed his head around and gave him a queer, are-you-a-radical? stare. The salesman didn't venture another comment on anything for quite a while.

As a consequence, they drove through the city in silence. With the window down, Harold clearly heard the chanting above the sibilance of the car's powerplant:

"Freedom—right—away! Freedom—right—away!

Freedom—right—away!"

Robison glanced down a cross-boulevard where flames shot high in the distance.

"White bastards." He accelerated.

Two days later, the superoad as it was called bore them through the sprawl of Pfeffertown, which was built on the red earth Harold remembered so well. They saw mile after mile of black ruins, much of it still smoldering. Pfeffertown had experienced its own racial upheaval a week ago. If Harold interpreted Robison's grumphing comments correctly, similar destruction had been occurring throughout the length and breadth of New Songhay for the past five years.

On the southern outskirts of the huge city, a warm spring rain began to fall. The rain depressed Robison's spirits all the more. When he let them out in downtown Al-Sidakh, his last counsel was:

"Frankly, you folks seem like real black people. I wouldn't go traveling on the highways, whatever the emergency, without at least one gun. There's going to be civil war before long, you mark my word. The white

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radicals want to tear the Commonwealth to pieces. Well —nice meeting you. Good luck." The jet car sped away. Thus, in the evening rain, Harold Quigley came home to Waycross.

He might as well have rocket-shipped to the moon for all the familiarity he felt They walked an hour, then found a band pavilion in a public park and went to sleep, exhausted and shivering.

Next morning they walked to the part of town where they'd lived as children. Instead of hovels, they found prosperous middle-class housing. The black housewives who were out and about gave them suspicious stares.

An imposing complex of glass and chrome buildings had replaced the rundown, separate-but-equal high school where Harold had first sniffed the wild narcotic of greasepaint. He wondered what had become of Miss Ruth. Miss Ruth Roosevelt, middled-aged, certainly weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. She had a faint mustache. But she had a voice like a beautiful cathedral bell, and a love of theater that she infused into her speech classes, and she had brought Harold out of himself, thrust him not only into the great world of plays that could be found in the public library, but into the spotlight as well: "Louder, Harold, louder!" He could still hear the voice from the back of the auditorium as he stumbled through first rehearsals as De Lawd, in what must have been one of the last performances anyplace of The Green Pastures. Miss Ruth, whose parents had been field hands, thought it was a terrific piece of theater, but even when the high school performed it with Harold acquitting himself moderately well in a big role, there were pressures to shelve it as racially stereotyped. Miss Ruth, Miss Ruth, you changed me so—and you're here no more—

Once, a tiny burying ground had served the shanty community in which Harold and Sally grew up. A large, even lavish cemetery had replaced it; a cemetery full of imposing monuments and mausoleums. Harold and Sally walked beneath the live oaks, searching the tombstones.

At last Harold yawned and sat down on a grave. He

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had never felt so miserable in all his life. It was raining again, drip-drop on redolent earth, veined marble.

"No sign," Sally said.

"No momma, no poppa—" He shook his head. "I don't know what to make of it."

"I know what to make of it. I think we're ghosts."

Harold thought of the hundreds of miles they'd come. For nothing. Of the hundreds of miles more they must travel to make rendezvous with Jomo and Diana. For a time he considered giving up. But he rejected the idea. To be abandoned in this strange black land would be unbearable.

And yet he couldn't lift his body from the grave where he was seated. He yawned again, rubbed his legs to soothe the ache. Sally sat down beside him and hung her head.

"We ought to be moving," he said.after five minutes.

"I just feel like I want to lay down. I've never been so tired."

"Me too. Funny."

"I just want to go to sleep an' die, Harold." She clutched his arm and began to cry. "Oh, Harold, what's happened to Momma and Poppa? Where are they buried?"

He swallowed. "Probably noplace. They probably never got born."

Rain and tears mingled on her cheeks. "Then what about us?"

He looked at her. "Maybe that's why we're getting so tired."

Bad weather persisted. They made their way north in the worst of it, bumming. They had less luck than on the trip down. They were picked up mostly by freight haulers driving huge airlift vans that skimmed a half-inch off the roadbed. They declined all offers of food because their appetites were gone. When they were fortunate enough to have a bum, they simply introduced themselves and curled up and slept.

The feeling of debilitation grew worse by the day. Harold kept pinching himself. There was a noticeable loss

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of feeling in his skin. He wished Freylinghausen were at hand to explain whether what he feared—the balancing of nature's accounts—was actually taking place. Was time catching up with them? Correcting an error? Nullifying the paradox of their existence?

Nine days after departing the Foundation site, they reached it again in a gray, dripping dawn. Diana and Jomo were already there.

Jomo lay with his head against a log. IBs eyes were glassy. Diana heard Harold and his sister coming through the wet foliage and ran to meet them. Her knees gave out suddenly. She fell, crying out. Harold ran to her. That is, he tried to run. His step was lethargic.

He touched the girl's shoulder. She rolled her head over; massive exertion.

"You—you're as slow as we are," she said.

"It started a few days ago. We barely made it here."

"We came in last night. Jomo literally crawled the last few miles. I put him over against that log and he hasn't moved since."

"Did you find—?" Harold began. He lacked the strength to finish the sentence. -

"Nothing. In Philadelphia—it's got a new name—Jomo never existed."

Harold stared at the cracked, stained tips of his Hush Puppies. "None of us ever existed. This isn't our promised land."

"Are we just being wiped out of time? Are we just— dying?"

"I think so."

She cried like a child then, loudly. Trying to comfort her, Harold was slow to react to the commotion on the other side of the glade. He saw the white man finally. But he was so tired his mind didn't even signal the danger. It was an effort just to recognize the Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk.

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"Whigley, you black-hearted, connivin' boogie radical you! 'Splain what's goin' on here!"

Crying thus, Whisk loomed above Harold, and yanked him to his feet. Harold was grateful. He doubted that he could have risen otherwise.

Whisk's expression was a weird, flickery mixture of fear and wrath. He kept shaking Harold vigorously.

"Where's that Foundation at? Why are all you nigras lyin' around like sleepy field hands? Isn't this Virginia? Isn't this 1977? That's where I told this damn thing"— he indicated his control device visible beneath the ratty greatcoat which Harold had last seen him wearing in Franklin's Philadelphia—"to take me to. Now you tell me what's goin' on!"

Harold sighed, almost too exhausted to feel the raw fright the white man always generated in him. "It won't do you any good to yell, Whisk."

"I'll yeU till I get me some answers!" He flung Harold away, began to stamp back and forth in the glade like a scenery-chewing actor. "I went to Washington in nineteen an' fifty-four to 'sassinate that crowd of Supreme

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Court pinkos that desegregated our white schools. There wasn't any court! I mean, no white court. Just a bunch of black boys lollin' up there on the bench in their fancy robes. They called for the arrest of me an' my deacons. My deacons got caught, but I popped back to Detroit where that rotten Malcolm X was in jail when he was just a tad. There wasn't any Malcolm! There wasn't any Detroit! Just some big town with some goddam African name and a lot of crazy three-wheel cars rollin' around! Then I tried to hunt up ole Martin Luther Coon when he was boycottin* busses and stirrin* up trouble back in '56. No Montgomery! No Alabama! No Coon! Just a lot of high-assed nigras that run me off the street when I tried to cool my throat with a drink from their goddam public drinkin* fountain! I tell you, boy—" Had he not been so weary, Harold would have laughed to see his mortal terror. "I think I'm losin' my Christian mind!"

"No," Harold told him, "it's just that history's been changed. The blacks are on top."

Whisk absorbed this with his mouth hanging open. Clearly he couldn't believe it. "Then—then why aren't all you black devils dancin' in the street? Why are you lyin' around like a bunch of corpses?"

"Because we are corpses. Because of the way things were changed, it turns out that we were never born. We're fading out of time. Probably you are too."

The Reverend stifled a yawn. "I just can't believe—oh, my God."

He ran this way and that in the glade.

"Adelaide? Adelaide! Sugar, where are you? Adelaide, you little tease, where you hidin'?"

Suddenly he was back, confronting Harold with the old, murderous eyes. "I had her with me when we fixed these here belts to make the last hop from Montgomery to right now. What'd you do with her?"

"Nothing. I haven't seen her."

"Where is she, boy?"

Immune—almost—to the bludgeoning voice, Harold shrugged. "How should I know? I'm no time expert. May-

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be the wipe-out effect works faster on some than on others. Apparently she's never been born."

"Mercy God. You mean we're all—?"

"Yes, we're all—"

Sally screamed Harold's name.

In the rainy light he wasn't certain that his eyes were operating right. He couldn't be seeing what his retinas reported to his mind. And yet, as he stared, he and all the others did indeed see Jomo grow transparent where he lay unmoving with his head against the log. As in a film's special effect, Jomo simply faded out all the way and was no more.

Whisk fell to his knees. He clasped hands to heaven. "Blessed Jesus, you got to listen. I am in the hands of black anti-Christ. Black anti-Christ has bewitched my mind—"

The ranting prayer went on and on. Harold took not the slightest smidgin of satisfaction. He was too busy trying to calm his caterwauling sister and stay upright at the same time. Every thrash of Sally's hands threatened to topple his weakened body. Diana compounded the problem by grabbing his shoulder.

"Harold, stop it. Harold, you've got to do something. I don't want to die."

Die rang sharp in the woodland. For a moment there was no sound save the patterpit of the rain on the leaves. Harold yawned for the better part of two minutes. All he really wanted to do was he down.

Had he been stronger, he would have laughed. He'd warned Jomo, hadn't he? But what good were recriminations now? The situation was more than desperate. It was terminal.

In a minute a solution suggested itself. He said to himself, You don't expect me to do that, do you? I'm half dead.

But of course nobody else could handle it. Not deranged Whisk and certainly not the women. He thrust Sally at Diana. "You take care of her. I'll see whether—" The words trailed off. Speaking required effort. He had to save the precious little 4e had left.

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He stumbled deeper into the glade, bumping into trees frequently. He felt like giggling. Then like crying. He had no idea whether, along some other tenuous, fast-fading time line, the Freylinghausen computer still functioned. He fought his shirt open with fingers made clumsy by his exhaustion.

The control device weighed as much as an elephant He inched it up to his lips and gargled:

"Tail 622 A.D. July-—" He winced. The date wouldn't come.

He prayed in silence. That didn't work so he cursed.

"July—"

The control device threatened to slip from his fingers. He heard distant sounds of rain; Diana's voice trying to calm Sally; Whisk invoking his old white grandfather god. Thinking as hard as he could, Damn it, you must, he forced his mind to cough up:

"July—16."

Nothing happened.

The rain went patterpit. Was the other time line fading from reality concurrently with their eradication?

Very slowly, Virginia dimmed out. The lights came up on desert moonlight

Harold crouched down behind the thick trunk of a palm. It took him several moments to accomplish the move, though second by second he felt less weary, more clearheaded.

The pavilions snapped in the breeze. Inside the largest, angry voices ranted. Their owners cast shifting shadows as they stalked between the silk and glowing lamps. Harold spied three human beings lying on their stomachs on the far side of a pool that reflected the stars. Gunmetal glinted.

He was eerily thankful that he could see so few details. Especially of the man in the center.

Inside the pavilion, the haranguing grew worse. Horses stamped, harness jingled. After a moment, three robed men came sneaking into sight. They led black horses.

From Harold's left, two more rustling figures skirted

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the edge of the pool and joined the horse handlers. All at once the familiar whick-whack of scimitars sounded inside the tent.

Over went the lantern. More swearing. A man of unprepossessing stature slit the pavilion from inside and leaped through the opening.

His followers dragged the horses forward. The man leaped to the saddle of the first. A dozen more men in robes jammed through the fresh-cut opening, bouncing off one another. Harold held his breath.

Over by the pool, the .45 barrel winked, in position to fire.

But where was the real assassin?

The scene unreeled like a familiar film. An attacker swung his sword to hamstring the Prophet's mount. But Mohammad reared the horse in time. One of the horse handlers shrieked, his thigh chopped.

Four more assassins hurled out of the tent, stumbling into the Prophet's mount. The horse pranced aside. Jomo-of-the-pool fired, the automatic's noise thunderous. The fat old shaikh took the bullet in his paunch.

Mohammad's other two horse handlers started to mount. At that moment, a massive figure came lunging out of the dark, to the right and behind Harold's position.

One of the robed men was decapitated as the handlers swung their swords. Blood gushed like oil The Prophet's horse reared away from it. All through the oasis, slippers pounded on sand. Harold drove himself out from behind the palm and toward that terrible melee, following as fast as he could on the heels of the Jomo who came from the dark.

This Jomo reached up and wrested a scimitar from a mounted man. He was in excellent position, directly next to the Prophet's prancing horse. He fastened both hands on the hilt.

Alert eyes glittered above the Prophet's facecloth. Mohammad leaned to the right, away from the raised blade. Harold shouldered one of the assassins aside, prayed for strength, jumped high as Jomo's deathstroke started down, a silver flash—

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Harold's fingers closed on Jomo's thick wrist. He clung with both hands and let his weight drag.

The deflected scimitar ripped Mohammad's cloak. Jomo recognized Harold and cursed.

No strategist, Harold took what seemed to be the best approach. He ducked under Jomo's hammering fist, which nearly broke his shoulder, and sank his teeth in Jomo's wrist.

"Owww!"

Jomo let go of the sword. The Prophet knocked it aside and whistled to his mount. The horse leaped forward.

Teeth still locked on Jomo's wrist, Harold managed to catch a last glimpse of Mohammad galloping into the desert. No sign of blood, thank God.

Jomo reached under Harold's arms, picked him up, hurled him against a nearby palm.

Harold conked his head and slid down, half out. One of the assassins from the pavilion seized Jomo's shoulder, spun him, spit furious oaths which Harold presumed translated to, "Bungler!"

The assassin started to ram his sword in Jomo's belly. Jomo fell back on his BURN training and thumbed the whiskered Arab in the eyeballs.

The man covered his face with his palms and shrieked. Jomo picked up the man's fallen scimitar and skewered him in the gut.

Dragging the scimitar free, he hewed a path through the press of assassins and Prophet's men. The latter were taking to horse, to gallop off as they had done in the version of the scene Harold had witnessed from poolside. Now, however, the scenario was changing.

Before, Mohammad's followers and the assassins had battled briefly, the latter getting the worst of it. Both factions now took Jomo and Harold to be the immediate enemy. Harold clawed the palm trunk and in that way pulled himself to his feet. Jomo rushed him, red scimitar in hand, murder in his eye. Right behind him came the mixed bag of adherents and assassins, crying oaths, imploring Allah's assistance, and brandishing swords.

Harold's legs jellied. He flopped face down in the sand.

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He snatched at the elastic belt at his waist. Pulled the control device up in front of his chest. Jomo landed on his back with both knees. He seized Harold's jaw and yanked his head back. Harold felt cold metal against his neck.

"Should have done this—" Jomo panted.

"Allah, Allah!" exclaimed the Arabs, seizing Jomo and toppling him off.

This permitted Harold to pull the control device up to his mouth and cry, "Freylinghausen Foundation! 1977!"

Just then, Harold heard a sound forevermore to be carried in his mind and recalled in nightmares:

Time creaked.

It was a great, cosmic creak, accompanied by a rush of wind for a millionth of a second. The oasis began to blacken—

Which was waiting up there? A black world? A white world? No world?

Darkness.

Silence.

Amber light seeped against his closed lids.

He awoke on a couch beneath the Nexus fading to gray. He turned his head. There was Sally. Diana.

The Right Reverend Billy Roy Whisk and, in the crook of his arm, a flustered Adelaide. There was Little Che.

And the white troll hair of Dr. Freylinghausen. Harold opened his mouth to speak— Jomo bent over him like black vengeance.

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So it was undone, Harold thought, oblivious to Jomo's stare of fury. The knots in time untied. The black world of New Songhay wiped out. He thought briefly, poignantly of the hundreds of thousands, the millions of black lives that must have been ended when Jomo's scimitar failed to end the Prophet's life. Had those blacks actually lived? Did they continue to live on some parallel-running time line none of them would ever see again? Who could explain the paradoxes and complexities? Did anybody, among all those shouting at once, have a headache pill?

"—became of Captain Lee and his troopers? They went to search for you in Philadelphia! Professor Quigley, the fault is all—"

That was Freylinghausen, an absolute fright with his gashed chin and purple-yellow blacked eyes. Suddenly Jomo seized Harold's jaw and jerked, so that Harold had to look at him.

"—you and me, sweet—"

"Watch Mm!"

Diana's warning diverted Jomo's attention, giving Harold the chance to sit up and slide off the couch. Little

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Che's chin beard jiggled furiously as he chewed his lip. He didn't know what to do with the .45 he'd reclaimed somewhere. The Reverend had backed to the door to the hall. Arm around the waist of Adelaide's leather peekaboo, he glared at them from behind the cover of her body. Only his toothy face was visible over the girl's shoulder.

"You people are goin' to get yours," he said. "By the blessed bleeding nail-poked hands of Our Lord, I swear that. I'm leavin' here and when I do, Fm going to ring the clarion call from shore to shore an' we're goin' to rid this land of blacks forever! Anybody try to stop me, there'll be heads busted."

"Hers," Jomo sneered. "You're pretty brave, hidin' behind her knockers that way."

"Shut your blasphemous black mouth!" Spittle flew from Whisk's lips, and Harold understood why the scene struck him as so surreal: the Reverend was by now completely unhinged. The fires of jihad had consumed what passed for his brains. He was therefore doubly dangerous.

Whisk took another hitching step backwards, pulling Adelaide along.

"Don't you think you have things backwards, Reverend?" Jomo asked with sweet reason. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. "My boy's got his finger on the only trigger in this room."

"Shoot this dear little white girl, nigger, find you'll be the first one we take out of action when I rally my forces*"

Adelaide wiggled. "Listen, Billy Roy, don't you be so free with getting my body all shot up, hear? If we're goin* to go, let's go, but don't stand around darin' these jiggys to shoot me. They might do it."

Diana said, "You think we haven't got the guts, dear?"

"You ain't," Whisk spat. "You're yella, just like all your race. I'm walkin' out of here free an' clear, and the next time you see me, it'll be at the head of a Christian army of patriots. We've waited too long—I've waited too long. Tonight I sound the call!"

Dr. Freylinghausen said, "Have you all lost your minds?"

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"The day of the fire has come!" Whisk cried. "We're through pussyfootin'! It's all-out war!"

Suddenly Harold began to worry again, in earnest. For despite the cowardly way the white preacher crouched behind his doll-eyed girlfriend, Whisk's eyes said he meant what he said. Race war. White legions marching with red, white, and blue armbands. BURN squads and platoons fighting back in parks, sewers, torched department stores—the visions were apocalyptic and complete: red wounds; gunfire; smells of charred human skin; smoke-palls on the land—

Of course Whisk was insane. It required an insane man to conceive and execute such horror. Hiding behind his girlfriend wasn't cowardice, Harold realized. Above all, Whisk wanted to live to launch his crusade.

The idea terrified Harold so much, he started shaking again. Suddenly he despised himself.

You stop it right now, he said to himself, while Jomo made some physical move he didn't quite see. You stop it or you'll never be a man.

It was true. All his life he'd run to his studies, his books; run away from the challenge of just such an encounter as this. He had to force himself to keep his eyes on the man. Whisk's streaming silky hair, Whisk's protruding teeth over Adelaide's shoulder, Whisk's cat-crouch as he eased into the Foundation hallway—they scared him to death.

"Just hold on one minute," Jomo said, snatching the .45 out of Little Che's hand. He raised the gun to eye level and extended his arm full length. "Don't move one more step."

Dr. Freylinghausen tried to seize Jomo's arm. "I will not countenance butchery on these premises for any—" Little Che sidled in and chopped him. He folded.

"You don't dare put a bullet in this innocent girl's body," Whisk breathed.

"That's what I say!" Adelaide agreed.

Sighting along his arm, Jomo chuckled. "Reverend, it's positively amazing. I truly think you believe that because I'm black, I haven't got the nerve to shoot. Well, sweet, hear this. From right here,, I can and will put a spot right

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between your eyes. I won't even come close to your little pussy's shoulder."

What Jomo said of Whisk was true: the Reverend, all blanched and perspiring, had actually believed—believed! —none of the blacks had the courage to call his bluff. Then Harold realized something else.

"Let him go, Jomo," he said.

Astonishment

"I mean it, Jomo. If you kill him, you'll just martyr him. Make his influence all that much greater after he's dead."

"Something in that," Diana said.

Jomo's furnace eyes turned in Harold's direction. "You're only savin' that because he scares the shit out of you and we both know it. So shut up."

And, slowly, Jomo steadied his gun hand again.

Whisk's eyes began to rove every which way. He finally realized what was coming. Adelaide wriggled harder. And Harold was seized in a flux of forces that raised thunder in his mind:

// Whisk dies by the bullet, the race war comes.

If Whisk stays alive, the race war comes.

If Whisk stays alive—

BUT I CANT DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!

You can. Must. Before Jomo shoots—

Jomo's finger tightened on the trigger, and his grin grew jvide.

Suddenly Harold had a plan. IBs insides yelped, fighting away from it: No, no, thafll put you against Whisk, Whisk the terrible—

But who had a choice any longer?

One last try: "If you martyr him, you'll bring the blood in the streets as surely as—"

"And if I let him go, the blood will come down for certain. So long, Reverend. I hope Jesus and all his white angels are ready for you upstairs."

The end, Harold thought, and jumped.

He knocked the gun aside as it thundered. The slug plowed into the ceiling. Fluorescent tubes popped, rained

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glass. The light level in the room was instantly reduced by half.

Jomo swung on Harold to club him. Harold whacked Jomo's forearm down over his knee. The .45 came loose. Harold threw it underneath the Nexus couch and dodged away from Jomo's fist.

In the hallway, Whisk started to run. Adelaide was a mite slower. Harold leaped for her, seized her around the waist and planted a big kiss on her mouth.

v Three yards down the hall, Reverend Whisk made a sound:

"Annnnngh?"

"Oh,. Lordy," said Adelaide, wiping her mouth and spitting.

"I kissed your white girl, Reverend." Harold tried to keep the trembles out of his voice. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Annnnngh!" said Whisk, as the magnitude of the crime struck him. Suddenly he came running at Harold like a bull.

"ANNNNNGH!"

Harold popped back into the room, whipped up his time control device and ordered it to take him instantly to the U.S. Southwest in the year 1539.

Whisk was coming for the door, screaming like a gored animal. Jomo was coming from the other direction. Harold fumbled to set the locator signal. Then he had to grab Diana, throw her at Jomo so Jomo wouldn't get him. Harold looked at those in the room for one instant.

"You let him come after me," he said, with such intensity that Jomo blinked three times.

A hand caught Harold's shoulder. "You filthy, blaspheming boogie!" Whisk's spit hit him in the eye. He prayed for deliverance, for the working of this mad plan that was the only alternative to blood in the streets.

Whisk throttled Harold. "No black man touches—" Suddenly Harold's throat was no longer within the circle of Whisk's hands, and the Reverend's booming voice faded to blackness and to wind.

Harold blinked awake in glaring sunlight behind a huge

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throne cactus. Not a quarter mile away, against the raw silhouette of buttes, white men in Spanish armor waged a battle against Indians in ferocious-looking masks.

The armored men fired antique rifles, sending booms and puffs of smoke across the landscape. The Indians were armed only with knives. But they outnumbered the whites, and were rapidly overcoming the makeshift breastworks the Spaniards had formed out of the corpses of their mules. Among the whites Harold spotted a couple of padres and a small black man in rags. Estevanico. Little Stephen. The black who had shown the first Spaniards the way to the fabled gold cities of Arizona and New Mexico—

No gold cities were visible anywhere. The hot light was filled with the smell of powdersmoke and the cries of the Zunis massacring the explorers.

"There you are, you little black fugger!"

Harold flopped over, rolled in the sand as Whisk materialized, hurled himself like a football tackier. "No nig lays a hand on my—oh, Jesus!"

Whisk's tackle was off. He banged his head first into the spines of a cactus. So the locator signal was working. Whisk could follow him. Okay.

Harold went limping across the sand as the Reverend floundered to his feet. In the distance, a Spaniard died noisily, his own halberd buried in his throat.

Whisk jumped up and resumed his pursuit. Finished instructing the computer, Harold let go of his elastic belt and waited for the next transport. Whisk's long hair streamed in the southwestern sun. He was eight paces away, hands outstretched, foam curling at the corners of his mouth, when Harold disappeared—

To wake in a corridor of mirrors.

Wigged footmen in satin breeches and frogged coats converged to collar him. Harold seized the handles of the nearest double doors, levered them, darted through.

Lords and ladies in the resplendent chamber gasped. So did the handsome light-colored black man in military uniform who stood before the throne. The man's bosom

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blazed with decorations almost as brilliant as the jewels in the crowns of the king and queen.

Harold charged straight across the hall, the footmen right behind and, all at once, Whisk bellowing behind them.

The hall rang with sudden jabbered French. He crashed against French windows, fought them open, darted onto a balcony overlooking the smudgy sky above Paris in 1793. The ceremony at which Thomas Alexandre Dumas— child of a black mother in Haiti; father of the celebrated novelist—was being elevated to generalship in the French army was completely disrupted. Harold didn't give a hoot. He was busy talking to the control device:

"I think it's 940 B.C. Solomon's court—"

"Come here, rugger!"

Harold didn't even look around. The blackness seized him.

King Solomon reared up on his throne. He was bald, slightly fat, and obviously enraged to see Harold racing toward him from the other end of the cool, clay-walled chamber.

"Excuse me," Harold said to BaMs, who was surrounded by muscular Nubian men-at-arms. The Nubians had been interrupted while opening casks for the Israelite monarch.

Harold zipped by the group, gaining only a glimpse of the fabled black beauty, Sheba's queen. He whipped around behind the throne and talked to his control device fast. Tumult broke out among the assembled dignitaries.

"There you are!" Whisk jumped into sight at one corner of the throne. Solomon was thundering. Harold darted back and was engulfed by the dark.

Smack-crack, a bat hit a hard ball just as Harold arrived in an aisle in the bleachers at Ebbets Field in 1946.

The batter broke for first on a grounder. The stadium shook with cheering. The Dodger shortstop scooped up the ball and rifled it. A black baseman caught it, stepped on the bag.

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Instantly there was booing. Pop bottles and beer cans began to rain on the field. The runner wheeled back to home without so much as a glance at the ex-UCLA athlete who simply stood, unreacting, while the booing grew.

Two sections away, Whisk appeared next to a popcorn vendor. The man fainted. All around Harold, white fans were yelling:

"You gonna be the first and last black boy in the majors, you coon!'*

"Hey, Robinson, what's your name? Jackie or Blackie?"

"Take the jig out of the game!"

"I see you up there, I see you!" Whisk ranted, climbing over spectators. He stepped on a man's groin. The man jumped up and punched him in the face, providing Harold time to scuttle up the aisle to the top row of the bleachers, talking to his control device all the while.

Whisk freed himself from the melee. He chose a parallel aisle for pursuit, waving his fist to show Harold that he still had him in sight.

Not for long. An ebony curtain descended on Brooklyn.

"Where are you from, sir?" asked a journalist.

"Is this another poor people's march?" demanded another.

"Excuse me, pardon me," Harold panted, stepping over TV camera cables.

Racing to the far side of the rotunda, he twisted his head around, watching for Whisk to appear. He kept going backwards as he watched. Someone was saying:

"—and in its first major decision of 1969, the so-called Burger Court has just handed down a landmark decision rendering the doctrine of deliberate speed in school desegregation unconstitutional. Supreme Court observers note with interest that—for Christ's sake, buddy! This camera is five!" >

"Sorry," Harold gulped, disentangling from the correspondent who'd raised his mike to bat him one.

"Did they get that on the network?" asked the panicky reporter.

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"They must have, Bob," said the cameraman behind his chin mike. "New York just cut us off."

"Somebody stop that boogie!"

Harold dove past the lens and bowled his way out of the Supreme Court building into a drizzly, humid Washington rain. Uniformed guards burst from the building to give chase, and Whisk popped outside right after them. Harold plunged down the steps, talking to the control device as.his mind raced. So far he hadn't put Whisk far enough behind. So far the diversionary tactics hadn't given him enough margin in which to—

He was wrenched through dark and time again.

Tackle creaked. The air was fetid, scorching. Harold felt the heat of the decks in his knees and palms as he pushed off, stood, looked around.

The ship had a dreadful smell. She was becalmed in a still sea glittering with chrome highlights. He stepped around the mainmast, walked toward the quarterdeck. A bearded sailor, naked except for ragged pants, heard him pass. The sailor lifted his head. The man's eyes were milky. They oozed at the corners.

Harold started to tiptoe. Other sailors lying here and there still heard him, turned their heads. He swallowed the bile rising in his throat. They too were blind, as was the captain up at the wheel.

The captain held the spokes and stared out over the simmering sea, his face forlorn, his generous beard crawling with little insects. Harold counted twenty men on deck, all standing or lying motionless. The ship, sails furled, creaked and rolled gently in the waveless water. On every quarter of the horizon there was emptiness.

This was the place he wanted.

Creeping to the open hatch, he grew uncontrollably frightened again. An abysmal stink rose to his nose. He looked down. Glimpsed luminous black torsos, arms, legs— dozens and dozens of blacks packed cheek by jowl in an ebony coffin. He rubbed his mouth. He waited.

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Whisk materialized up by the bow. He saw Harold and immediately began cursing and yelling. The blind sailors stirred. Some started to move hesitantly toward the noise Others asked questions in Spanish. Whisk stared down the deck at Harold. Tall, handsome and deranged, his frowzy greatcoat fluttering around his knees, he came after Harold then. Harold stepped up on the edge of the hold and jumped.

Unavoidably he landed on black bodies. The slaves rattled their chains, plucked at him, cried out in an African dialect he didn't understand. He tried to find more secure footing. His heel slipped in human feces.

The blacks sensed someone among them. Hands touched Harold's legs, spidery-soft. In the glare of sun falling through the hatch, milky pupils glistened. Harold choked down vomit, pushed off the hands, stumbled toward the darker part of the hold.

The blacks set up a sustained moaning. Harold found an open place between a milky-eyed young woman with a milky-eyed babe at her black breast, and an old man who lay on his back, his body covered with chancres, his milky eyes staring straight up. Harold realized the old black man was dead.

"I know you're down there, boy," Whisk called. "You made a big mistake leavin' your belt signal on like that.'*

Yes, Harold thought, all chilled. Yes, a mistake.

Greatcoat flying, Whisk dropped into the hold like a huge bat. Harold reached down, explored with his fingers, found the dead man's leg chain. About three feet of it connected the corpse's ankle and a ring fastened to the deck.

"What's wrong with these niggers?" Whisk panted, batting off the plucking hands. "What's wrong with their eyes?"

"They're blind," Harold said across the moving black bodies. "Every man aboard is blind. Ophthalamia. It was a common disease on the slave ships because of the crowding and the filth. Sometimes the crew caught it from the cargo. That's what happened here. This ship's name is Saint Leon. A Spanish slaver. She—"

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Whisk was tittering.

"Everybody's blind 'cept you and me? How 'bout that. I can still see fine. Fact is, I see you plain as day."

Harold said nothing. The slaves began to mutter more angrily now, stirred by the Reverend's loud voice. They grabbed at Whisk's legs as he started for Harold, stepping on heads, toes, crotches. Whisk had to jump to keep from being snagged and pulled down. The hold was like a black sea coming to life in a storm.

Harold wiped his mouth. Momma, I'm afraid. I'm too afraid for this. The tall white man with the silky hair and the handsome mad eyes is coming for me and I'm afraid I'm going to die.

"I got you now, boy! I got you cornered! I'm goin' to pull your balls off with my bare hands. Nobody touches the Reverend Billy Roy Whisk's woman, especially no black stud—"

"That's right, you just come on, Whisk. You just come on over here and get me."

"Be right there," Whisk replied, his figure huge, stark, black against the glare from the hatch. "And when I get my hands on you—look out!"

Momma, hide me. Momma, I'm so afraid.

Harold had his back to the wall of the hold. Whisk was stepping on black faces, black thighs, black breasts, breathing hard, floundering. Harold wanted to hide his eyes. For a moment he almost did.

Then, remembering a good many things, he let his mind say what it had to say:

Look, Harold, you better do something. This man who'd swill the streets with blood is six feet from you, reaching out.

Four feet from you, Harold. Reaching out.

Three feet from you—

Harold jumped, battering with his fists.

Evidently Whisk hadn't expected such a direct attack. He fell among the slaves, seizing Harold and pulling him down after him.

Blind blacks on all sides began to lash their chains, growling, pushing at the unseen bodies thrashing in their

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midst. Harold tried to get upright. Whisk seized his calf, tumbled him over again. Whisk got his hands on a length of chain, wrapped it around Harold's neck. Harold began to writhe.

"The sons of Ham shall perish," Whisk said, his face very close, all spit and big teeth. "The sons of Ham shall not inflict their foul blackness on the earth."

Give me a minute more, God, Harold thought. His eyeballs were fuming with pain as the chain wound tighter. By feel he found Whisk's elastic belt, pulled. The belt snapped. ' "The perfidy and sin of the sons of Ham—"

Whisk screamed. Black nails reaching across his forehead had found his eyes.

Another blind slave pulled Whisk's head back. Another gripped his throat. The chain around Harold's neck loosened. He flung it off, lurched up.

Whisk cried out as other slaves rolled over on top of him. A slave grabbed Harold's leg. He kicked away, jumped high, caught the edge of the hatch and hung there. In the hold there were sounds of bodies in motion, chains clinking, throats making low guttural sounds. Harold's arm sockets ached. If he fell into that churning mass—

"—que 'sta? Que esta?"

A Spanish officer was peering sightlessly downward. With maximum effort, Harold kicked his legs up, caught his heel on the edge of the hatch; pulled himself, panting, to the deck.

He avoided the blind Spanish sailors groping their way toward the hold. The growling, the sounds of thrashing bodies grew louder as Harold staggered to Saint Leon's rail. The light off the sea was blinding.

He flung Whisk's control device, belt and all, overboard. To his own belt he said:

"Take me back."

He didn't turn around while he waited. The stench and the snarling were sufficiently bad without adding visual horror. He'd had enough. Out on the chrome sea he suddenly saw a sail.

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"Le Rodeur," he said in a cracked voice, and vanished out of 1819.

"How long have I been gone?" was the first question he asked.

Threatening as ever, Jomo answered, "About five minutes. Where the hell's Whisk?"

"Aboard a slave ship in the nineteenth century." Harold pressed his palms against his cheeks, trying to rub away some of the weariness and horror. "I left him without his control belt. I threw it into the Atlantic. We'll never see him again unless someone goes back to fetch hm. And we won't do that, will we?"

Jomo seized Harold's shirt. "You goddam interfering—"

"I've taken enough of your shit," Harold said, and knocked him down.

Jomo landed on his tail with a whoomph of breath. Sally, bedraggled and forlorn, giggled. Jomo opened his mouth to retort. He snapped his lips shut, then clambered slowly to his feet. He peered at Harold in a strange way.

So did Diana. "I've never seen your face like that, Harold."

"Well, surprise, surprise." He felt peculiar. Relieved. Hard. Cool. Full of sickness. Soul. And—how odd it felt —no more fear.

"What's happened to you?".

"Something," was all he couid say.

"You have abandoned Whisk in time?" Freylinghausen asked.

"In 1819, to be exact. Aboard Saint Leon out of Spain."

He explained about it: how cargo, then crew, had fallen victim of ophthalamia as the ship lay becalmed. By a strange and grisly turn of fortune, a second slave ship, also drifting, appeared on the horizon. It was one of the unbelievable coincidences of history that all aboard Le Rodeur out of France were likewise stricken blind with the disease, every man from the captain from Marseilles

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to the blacks in the hold. Hallooing, blind called to blind across the water.

"The ships drifted on. Le Rodettr made it to a Caribbean port when a few of her crew partially recovered their sight. That's why the story is in the history books. Nobody ever saw Saint Leon again, and that's where I left the Reverend." Harold's brown eyes looked opaque as he glanced from face to face. "He was blind all his life. Why shouldn't he die that way?"

"Yeh, but all them whites who listen to him will know something's happened to him, won't they?" little Che asked.

"Not if we shut up about it. He won't be a martyr that way, either. If we handle it right, maybe we can cool off this whole situation. But to do it"—Harold wiped his palms on his pants—"we'll have to be smarter, not just bloodier." He looked at Jomo. "Smarter."

"My idea—" Jomo began. "I mean, sweet, the whole BURN philosophy is based on—"

"I'm sick of your ideas, I'm sick of the BURN philosophy, I'm sick of you. Do me the kindness of leaving me alone."

"Somebody sure rammed a rod up your backbone," Little Che said.

Harold shrugged. "Maybe." Infinitely tired, he searched their faces again. "I guess I tasted too much of old Whisk's poison, I can't hide behind books any more." A pointed stare. "But you won't find me blowing up everything, either. There are better ways. Smarter ways. I've been wiped off the slate once by this all-or-nothing crap. It isn't going to happen again."

"But—but—but you're as much as tellin' us you're givin' up the struggle!" Jomo exclaimed.

"Will you knock that off? According to you, I was never in the struggle to begin with, so all I'm giving up is going along with your struggle. Ill take care of my own struggle my way."

«B_ut—»

"Earl Ingersoll, do like he says," Diana said. "Keep quiet for once. We tried your way. Like Harold says, all

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that got us was watching ourselves drop dead in a black world where we didn't even exist. I admit this world's pretty rotten. But at least Fm alive."

Her glance at Harold—did it hope for approval? He felt a little stir but he was really too tired to appreciate it. He'd come through a vast sea change, the ramification of which he was only beginning to understand. Certainly he'd become involved. That meant, perhaps, danger. At very least it meant an end to quiet hours scratinizing Terence. The alternative was leaving everything in the hands of the Whisks and the Jomos.

Diana for Terence? A fair exchange? Maybe so. He felt a little better. He'd have to try hard there. He would.

Dr. Freylinghausen ran his hands over the couch below the grayed-out Nexus wires. "I had such high hopes. I've unleashed serpents—"

"Plus a bunch of state troopers still wandering around in 1774," Harold reminded him.

"That's right! We must do something! Rescue them!"

"And George is still where you put him, too," Sally said.

Harold sighed. He'd completely forgotten Gator in jail in New Orleans in 1815.

Sally began to cry. Harold forced himself to go to her, slip his arm around her, murmur soothing words to the effect that someone would go back and fetch Gator to safety.

"I da want him back, Harold," Sally sobbed.

"He may have to stand trial."

"I don't care, I love him."

"Okay, hon." He patted her. "Well get him, don't you worry." He licked his lips. "I've developed a powerful thirst. There wouldn't be any booze on the premises, would there, Doctor?"

"Uh, oh, ah? Liquor? Spirits?" In a cross-eyed way, Freylinghausen had been staring up at his Nexus. "I believe—in my private office—my bottle of Dickel—"

"I'll have a sip," Harold said. He needed it before concentrating on the loose ends. He needed it for armor and didn't mind admitting it. When he left the Foundation this time, he would be entering a whole new world.

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He didn't care for the idea much, but the decision was made. When and where, he couldn't be sure. Yet it had an inescapable inevitability.

Time enough to worry after he drank that drink. One arm around Sally, he started for the door. He paused to speak to Freylinghausen.

"You know, Doctor, after we get Gator and those troopers back, it might not be a bad idea to consider dismantling the Nexus for a while."

"And close the Foundation," Freylinghausen replied. "And repair to some pleasant South Sea isle where I cannot be located by any more time-tinkerers. I am a giant step ahead, Professor Quigley, thank you. The world is not ready, if indeed it ever will be. Yes, a drink. I feel more than a little melancholy.'*

Of a sudden, Jomo was blocking their exit "listen here, perfesser—"

"You know my name."

"Well, yeh, but listen—you just can't abandon the single greatest hope that black people have ever.—"

Harold raised his right hand in a fist, holding it at eye level so Jomo could get a good look. Without even thinking, he clenched his fist as tight as he could.

"Move," he said.

Jomo moved.

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