Timeline Wars 02 Washington's Dirigible by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Alternative History, Alien Contact
ISBN: 9781497625921
Google: GJrWAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00L2TDQGI
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-07-07T21:00:00+00:00

-11-

In a line of work like mine, you can learn to relish the dull times, even the frustrating dull times. The steamer took twenty days getting across the Atlantic and swinging around the south of England to come into London, and I would honestly have to say that I enjoyed most of it. I spied a lot on my other self, and mostly I found that he was bored and depressed, he didn’t appear to be communicating in any way with anyone in this timeline or elsewhere, and he did pretty much the same things every day—ate, exercised enough not to lose muscle tone, began to drink late in the afternoon, and then either spent the evening at cards (he cheated, just a little, not so much to win I think as to make the situation a bit riskier) or drank himself into an early stupor and went to bed.

That helped me considerably, because he didn’t usually go into the aft saloon, where the main meals were served. He ate at the gaming tables or sitting in a chair in the forward saloon, and he ate only enough to keep himself alive. Meanwhile, I was free to go wherever he didn’t—deck promenade in the afternoons, a big breakfast before he got up, a huge tea while he got his start on the afternoon’s drinking. I suppose that of the crew that tended to the passengers, about half thought Mark Strang was that morose, silent man who appeared to be working hard at drinking away some small personal fortune, and the other half thought Mark Strang was that burly man in scholar’s clothes, hat brim always pulled low outdoors, who liked to sit in corners and read, and ate immense meals.

As to which of us was really which—well, I leave that to the philosophers. I know who I was, anyway.

The last day of the voyage, we entered the mouth of the Thames and a steam tug, one of those paddle-wheel contraptions like the one I had seen in Boston, came out to drag us into London Harbor. The afternoon was fine, but I had sent my counterpart a lot of rum punch, a lot of gin punch, and the girl the night before, and he was still asleep in his cabin. Just for fun, once he was really asleep, I had slipped in and done some some random damage to his Colt, then carried off his hypervelocity gun, since when he woke, to a series of surprises he would know I had been there anyway. We’d all fired them at COTA, and I thought it might do better things in the hands of the good guys than it would where it was.

So he was asleep belowdecks when the bum boats came out. Those were little boats, mostly operated by women, that came out to sell trinkets, tourist stuff, fresh fruit, and anything that people might want at the end of a sea voyage. More importantly, from my standpoint, they generally carried off mail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.