6320 Words Frank 0. Dodge 11056 Airline Highway-30 Gonzales, La. 70737 email: fdodge@eatel.net SECOND OPINION The Mediterranean coast of France whimpered under the lash of the Black Death. Tens of thousands supurated, vomited, and died faster than the corpses could be hauled away and burned. Pierre Reynard prodded the ox with his goad, and the sluggish beast threw its weight into the yoke. The clumsy cart with its cargo of dead lurched forward. Iron-tired wheels clashed harshly and struck sparks from the cobblestone roadway. The cart jolted as one wheel sank into a pothole filled with scummy water, and the flaccid body of a young woman slid from the pile and fell to the ground. Pierre cursed the dead girl, and looked around. No other living being stirred in the narrow street. He cursed again. He'd have to wrestle her back into the cart by himself. There is no easy way to get a grip on something so maliciously limp as a dead body. He grasped the girl under the armpits and heaved her upright, stooping to let the corpse fall across his shoulder. For a moment he felt her weight, then slowly stood erect and flexed his empty arms. Holy Mother of God! Where had she gone? He looked at the vacant eyes and grinning faces of the dead but they offered no answer. # Jake Sloan, Chief of Medicine at University Hospital, stared with disbelieving eyes at the filthy, half-naked young woman lying on his office floor. Her hair was a matted tangle laced with straw and offal, her face ashen beneath a coating of grime. Where in the hell had she come from? He looked at the office door. It was locked. He'd locked it himself so as not to be disturbed while trying to puzzle out just what the hell was wrong with the patient in A-304. The girl looked dead. Sloan got up, walked around his desk, and peered closely at her. No, she was breathing. Faintly, shallowly, but breathing. The few grimy tatters she wore revealed a great deal of dirty skin, most of which was covered with scrapes and bruises. Her face was battered and swollen, but traces of prettiness remained. Jake Sloan looked helplessly around his office. Reason told him that there was no girl on the floor. Reason told him that he was hallucinating. Reason told him that he had suddenly lost his mind. His eyes told him different. His nose told him different. The girl on the floor stank. She smelled of rotten garbage, excretia, and death. Sloan touched her with the toe of one shoe. He half expected it to pass right through her, but she was solid enough. Which made the impossibility of her presence doubly impossible. He rounded his desk and picked up the phone. "Helen, will you come in here, please?" He hung up the phone, and crossed the room to unlock the door. Helen Brady, nurse-receptionist, put the back of one hand to her mouth and uttered a little gasp. "Eileen!" Sloan looked at the nurse. "You know her?" Helen nodded, puzzled. "It's Eileen Howard, Tom Courtney's assistant." "Courtney? You mean that nut who thinks time is a creek, and all you need is a canoe to paddle up and down it? That Tom Courtney?" A small smile quirked one corner of Helen's lips. "Something like that. Doctor, don't you think we should do something about Eileen?" Sloan came out of the daze into which he'd been thrown by the inexplicable appearance of the girl. "Yes. Of course. Call for a gurney." Helen picked up the phone and punched a button. "Mike, bring a gurney to Dr. Sloan's office STAT." The next half hour was pretty hectic. Eileen Howard's limp body was handled gently, despite the fact that she was so filthy nobody really wanted to touch her. She was taken to ER treatment room #3, where two nurses stripped her of the stinking rags that were all that remained of her clothing, and did a reasonably good job of cleaning her up enough so that she could be examined. Jake Sloan took charge of the examination personally. The contusions and abrasions were superficial, but there was one deep laceration of the scalp that would take stitches, and a number of suppurating sores. Her vital signs were marginal, but indicated the possibility of a recovery. Sloan didn't care too much for those sores and high fever. Nor for her general debility. He ordered plasma and antibiotics. The thing that bothered him most was the swelling of the lymphatic glands. He didn't want to think what he was thinking. If the fever began to alternate with chills .... "Tell the lab I want that bloodwork and cultures STAT, and I mean STAT!" He looked around at the personnel assisting him. "As soon as I get this scalp wound closed, I want this room sealed off and sterilized." He broke off as there was a stir in the group of curious staff members outside the treatment room, and Tom Courtney pushed his way through the curtains. "How is she? My God, what happened to her? Helen called me at the lab ...." Sloan tied off the last suture, and eyed the agitated young man. "She'll live." He stripped off the thin surgical gloves and turned to the resident who had assisted. "I want this patient placed in quarantine. Nurse, get the lice and fleas off her, and get the poor kid cleaned up." He eyed each in turn. "Everyone here is to shower and shampoo thoroughly immediately, and make sure you're free of fleas. Then report to me for inoculation. Get maintenance in here. I want this room and my office sprayed for fleas. STAT. Move." One of the nurses' aides looked at the flea crawling on her arm. She looked at Sloan and asked, round-eyed, "Doctor, why the concern about the fleas? What is it?" Sloan took a deep breath. "Bubonic Plague is spread by rat fleas." Tom Courtney started. "Bu .... Good God!" "Yes. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm not." # Sloan took young Courtney, and hustled him along to the male doctors' locker room and showers. "Strip, kid. You were close enough to her to get a flea or two. I want to try to nip this thing quick. I know we have antibiotics to treat bubonic, but even a small epidemic can kill a lot of people. And you know how fast it can spread. God knows there are enough rats in this city, and the way people are packed into the slums it could be a disaster I don't even want to think about." The Chief of Medicine stepped out of the shower and toweled off. He took two sets of scrubs from the shelf, and tossed one set to Courtney. "Okay, Kid," he said, "explain." "I don't know what you mean." "The hell you don't. There's only one way that girl could have gotten into my office through a locked door. She didn't come in by any of the three dimensions, length, breadth, or height, so she came in by the fourth dimension, time. Time, my young genius. Time. You remember your cockamamie theories on the subject. Talk." Tom Courtney chewed his underlip, and eyed the older man warily. "You don't believe that." "You know damned well I do. I didn't, but I do now. What have you been up to? How far along have you gotten with your experiments? What did you do to that poor girl? Where did you send her?" Courtney wet his lips. "It was an accident. A fluke. She wasn't supposed to have been caught up in the time-field. She was well out of the critical area. We were only going to send back a rabbit ... just one day into the past ...." The young physicist shook his head. "Doctor, time is ... strange ... we'd planned the experiment. We planned to send the rabbit back yesterday, Tuesday, to arrive the day before, Monday. Consequently, Monday we watched the temporal-extension area between the impulse electrodes pretty much excited, and were delighted beyond our expectations, when the rabbit materialized on schedule ... the same rabbit that also sat in its cage across the laboratory. We checked the metal tag clipped to its ear to verify, but we had no doubts ...." "You mean you now had two of the same rabbit?" Courtney grinned. "Confusin' ain't it? We still haven't figured out how to deal with that aspect of the project." "Go on." "Well, we waited until the proper time yesterday, positioned one of the rabbits in the displacement area, and prepared to send him back. I don't know what happened. Eileen slipped ... stumbled ... fell ... tripped ... I don't know ... but she took a step onto the timegrid just as I closed the switch. Both she and the rabbit disappeared. "It took a moment for the full horror of it to sink in. The rabbit had come back to us yesterday, but Eileen hadn't! She was lost somewhere ... somewhere in the past." "Oh, My God." "Yes. Doctor, there is no way I can even begin to explain what happened, without taking you over to the lab and showing you the equipment." "Let's go." # Sloan inoculated Courtney, Helen Brady, and himself, and left orders for the treatment of all who had come in contact with Eileen Howard. He told Helen where he was going, and gave strict instructions that he was to be beeped immediately should there be any change in Eileen's condition. He accompanied Courtney across the street to his lab in the Physics Building. Sloan inspected the laboratory with intense interest. Courtney started to explain some of the myriad panels, switchboards, dynamos, bewildering coils and helices that crammed almost every square foot of space, but Sloan waved him to silence. "Forget it," he laughed, "just give me the kindergarten version." Courtney pointed to a small panel with several switches and dials, and to an open area on the floor about four feet in diameter, with thick copper bars embedded in the perimeter. "It all boils down to these. This is the power board, and that's the time grid. I won't even try to go into the math, but what it does ..." He waved an arm at all the complex paraphernalia. "... is create a magnetic field so strong that it warps the very structure of space and time, and creates an opening from one level to another. These various levels are subject to calibration in space-time secants that transect the temporal tan- gents where they intersect with the spatial continuum.... " "Whoa! What the flaming hell are you talking about?" Courtney laughed. "In plain language, it's possible to project a controlled transfer from one space and time, to another space and time." "You mean you can send someone or something from here to there, and from now to then, and put 'em down where you want 'em? And bring 'em back?" "Yes." "Then why didn't you say so?" "I did." "But in what language? No, don't tell me. Show me." Courtney indicated several dials on the control panel. "By setting these verniers we pinpoint a time and an area anywhere and anywhen on earth. The transfer is instantaneous ...." Sloan interrupted excitedly. "Don't you realize that you've also solved the problem of interplanetary, maybe even intergalactic space travel? Migod, man! Instantaneous teleportation to... ." "No, no, Doctor. You misunderstood. I said anywhere on earth. The effect is damped by the earth's gravitational pull, but with more research, who knows?" Courtney turned back to his dials. "Eileen and I set these coordinates to send the rabbit back twenty four hours. When I realized what had happened, my first reaction, naturally, was to check the board." The young physicist ran his fingers through his hair. "The needles were occilating wildly. There must have been a power surge ... I don't know how it could have happened. We have fuses and dampers ... a dozen safeguards .... still the extra, unprovided for, mass of Elaine's body threw the computations completely off. At any rate when the verniers settled down and gave me a reading, it took me eighteen hours to correlate with the temporal retractor. I went over and over the math to make sure. "Sending someone back in time is the easy part. Getting him back is a little more tricky. But we had that worked out. To be more accurate, Eileen had worked it out." Courtney's eyes took on a warm glow. "Doctor, that woman is phenomenal. Not only does she have one of the finest scientific minds since Einstein, but she's pretty, too!" Sloan chuckled. Courtney grinned. "Not very professional of me but, Doctor, you haven't seen her looking her best. Anyway, Eileen worked out the formulae. In layman's terms, intruding an anomaly like someone from the future causes ... ripples ... vibrations ... in the continuum, that can be vectored in on ... sort of like a multi-dimensional radar." Courtney patted a square steel box with more coils and dials. "That's this baby here. The Retractor." He indicated the dials. "As I said, without specific information, it took me eighteen hours to run her down." Sloan bent, and studied the panel. One dial read 'May 14, 1348'. Another 'Marseilles, France'. Still others fine-tuned latitude and longitude to micro-seconds of micro-degrees. Sloan whistled. "It's this accurate?" Courtney nodded. "Pinpointed to within milli-fractions of an inch, and nano-seconds of time." "Okay, so you found her. How'd you bring her back?" "The temporal probe not only locates the traveler but acts as a ... tractor beam ...? A tweezers...? Doctor, there are no words for this branch of physics yet. The probe vectors in and ... retracts ... the traveler, returning him to the here and now.... " Sloan snorted. "To the 'now' perhaps, but not to the 'here'. She landed in my office, remember?" "Yes, and I don't fully understand it. Doctor, there are so many things about this new physics remaining to be understood!" Sloan snorted again. "Doctor," he said a little acidulously, "aren't you sort of firing a shotgun in the dark? Have you any idea of just how dangerous a toy you're playing with?" Courtney ran his hands through his hair, and looked at the older man. "Playing? My God, Doctor, do you think I'm playing? This was a very carefully controlled experiment. We took every precaution. This is an entirely new branch of science, with unknown parameters. Dr. Sloan, we tried to foresee, tried to prepare for every contingency, every step calculated, and fail- safes provided. Yes, Doctor, we were aware of the danger. What happened to Eileen wasn't supposed to happen. She stepped on the grid. I don't know why." "All right. Shelve that for the moment. How the hell did she wind up in my office?" "Fluke. One of the unknowns... I have a theory ...." "I'd like to hear it." Courtney looked out the window to the hospital across the street from his lab in the Physics Building. "We're on the same level here as your office over there. I estimate the distance as forty to forty five meters. The lateral difference could be accounted for by the earth's position in its orbit today being that much ahead or behind its orbital position six hundred and fifty years ago ...." The young scientist shook his head. "That's one of the unknown parameters we'll have to take into consideration before we try again." Sloan nodded. "All right. I buy it. It makes sense ... that is, if anything makes sense in this Alice In Wonderland of yours." "Dr. Sloan, what do you think happened to her?" "That's something only she can tell us. We'll just have to wait until she regains consciousness. That is if the poor kid does regain consciousness. One thing's for sure. She spent one hell of a lot longer than eighteen hours back there in that hell that was Europe during the Black Death." # A continuous twenty four hour watch was kept on Eileen Howard. For days the girl bravely held her own. The antibiotics, at least, seemed to be doing their job. The running sores cleared up. On the sixth day the fever broke, and her vitals strengthened. She continued to improve, and on the eighth day, regained consciousness. But it was three more days before Eileen could tell them what had happened. She was still weak, and her face thin and pale, but the prettiness was coming back, and she looked like a fragile child lying propped up on her pillows. The hair that had been such a matted filthy mess, now formed a soft golden-brown halo around a pixyish face that wore an expression of little-girl guilt. She held the sheet up under her chin and gave Courtney a tentative smile. "I'm really sorry, Tom. Are you very mad at me?" "Mad at you? Whatever for?" "Mucking up the experiment." "You stepped on the grid on purpose?" She gave a little nod. "I wanted to go back a day and surprise you." Courtney's stare became bewildered. "But darling, you knew only the rabbit came back." The girl made a little face. "I remembered that a split second too late." # The countdown had nearly reached zero when the mischievous urge to join the rabbit on its twenty four hour journey gripped Eileen. It would be a lark to surprise Tom by popping up yesterday. It would have come as a shock to Tom Courtney, to know that the 'finest scientific mind since Einstein' had an un- expected, impulsively school-girlish side. That the brilliant Ms. Howard could occasionally behave in a remarkably juvenile manner. And Eileen had acted on her impulse unthinkingly, cold reason dousing her like a bucket of ice water a nano-second too late. Too late she remembered the unaccompanied rabbit. She experienced a momentary disorientation, during which it seemed lightning flashed around her. There was a strong odor of ozone, and the distinctly unpleasant sensation of electricity running through her body. 'Power surge', she thought. The rational, reasoning portion of her mind had taken back charge. Of course. The transporter had been calibrated only for the rab- bit. Her additional mass had thrown the verniers out of temporal-spatial synchronization. The sensations lasted for only a moment then she blacked out. Even before she opened her eyes, she recognized the language being spoken around her as French. It wasn't anything like the French she'd studied in college, but she could understand most of it. The second thing that smote her senses was the stench. A powerful effluvium compounded of excrement, garbage, and rotting flesh. Then came the sounds. The harsh clash of iron-shod hooves and wagon wheels on stone. The clangor of continuously tolling church-bells. Cries, shouts, yells, bursts of drunken laughter, and piteous moans that tore at her nerves. Above the cacophony an uncaring voice sing-songing, "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead." Something with sharp claws squeaked, and skittered across her face. She opened her eyes. The first thing to meet her gaze was a heap of corpses lying a few yards away and the horde of rats that burrowed into the pile of bodies, eating. Coarse, brutal looking men smashed at the rats with cudgels, and heaved the dead, like sacks of grain, into a large cart. The girl sat up, terrified. Where was she? When was she? The pock-marked villain who'd been on the point of picking her up grinned, showing broken teeth. "I'd not nap in such a place at such a time, little one," he said with unexpected gentleness. "You're apt to wake to find yourself in the burning pits." The face into which Eileen looked was deeply pitted with old smallpox scars, one nostril partly eaten away by the disease, but the hideous features were overlaid with an expression of real compassion and concern. The man extended one callused hand, and helped Eileen to her feet. He glanced at the girl's long white lab coat, and equated it with the white habit worn by one order of the Sisters of Mercy. "How came you here, Sister?" Eileen looked at the ruined face. "I ... I'm not quite sure ..." She swayed dizzily. The heat, the sights, the stomach- wrenching stench, all combined to make her feel faint. The man put an arm around her shoulders, and led her to a shaded bench along a stone wall. "Sit here, Sister. I'll fetch you a sip of wine." He disappeared into a noisy tavern, and reappeared a few moments later with a leather jack of sour wine. "Drink this, Sister. 'Tis none the best, but will put a bit of strength into you." Eileen gagged a little on the bitter brew, but the man was right. She began to feel better. She wiped her lips with the back of one hand, and smiled at her benefactor. "I thank you sir, but you are mistaken. I'm not a nun." A grin split the scarred face, but it no longer looked frightening to her. "'Tis of no matter, little one." A look of sadness crossed his features. "You've the look of my Jolie before the Death took her ...." His smile returned. "...without the marks of the pox, of course." Eileen felt a quick sympathy. "Your wife?" "Nay child, my daughter. The pox took my wife three years ago along with my infant son." "I'm so sorry. You're all alone?" "Aye." The girl looked around. The dead-cart, with its grisly cargo, had departed. The people on the street seemed to be divided into two classes. Those who walked woodenly, stiff- legged, stunned, horror-stricken ... and those who roistered noisily, feverishly driven by a desperate gaiety that sought to deny reality. She shuddered. "So am I," she said in a small, frightened voice, "alone, I mean." The man patted her shoulder. "Nay, child. Not so long as Andre Pasteur continues to draw breath ... if you'll have my friendship." The girl clasped the big scarred hand. "I'm Eileen Howard. And I thank you, M'sieur Pasteur. I... I'm far from home, and afraid." Andre looked at her. "Howard? You're English, then?" Without thinking, Eileen responded, "No, I'm American." The man's eyebrows shot up. "American?" He switched from French to English. "Holy Cow!" He looked at Eileen more closely. He shook his head. "I've been here too long! I've started to think like one of them. Hell's bells! I should have recognized a lab coat ... but who'd expect to see one here? And nylons! What happened to your shoes? What happened to you? Time experiment backfire?" Eileen goggled at him. Andre laughed. "Thirty years! I've been here thirty years! I've almost become the dull-witted peasant I've had to mimic in order not to be burned at the stake as a witch!" The girl's mouth opened and closed. She squeaked. Andre chuckled. "Well, well. A fellow time-traveler. Come on, kid, let's blow this pop stand! What year you from?" Eileen continued to goggle at her companion, her mind a swirling chaotic mass of confusion. He helped her up, and led her down the street. He turned into a narrow alley-way and indicated a door. "I've got a pad up here. Come on." Andre opened the door to a neat, small room. There was a low cot along the far wall with a straw-filled mattress, a small table and three stools. Against a second wall was a wooden chest, and the third held a stone ledge with the ashes of past fires. Two swiveled iron arms projected from the wall above, suspending iron cookpots. The room was tidy and the first clean place she'd seen since opening her eyes. Andre motioned. "Sit on the cot. It's the only comfortable seat in the place." He brought out a straw-covered wine bottle and two earthen mugs. "This," he said, waving the bottle, "is a little better than the muck they serve in the grog shops. If you feel anywhere near as screwed up as I did when I landed here, you need a drink. But watch it. This stuff isn't the wine you're used to back in.... Say, what year are you from, anyway?" Still in a state of shock Eileen, mumbled, "Nineteen ninety eight." "Nineteen sixty two. U.S.C. at Berkley. How about you?" Eileen took a sip of the strong sweet wine. She couldn't seem to take her eyes from Andre Pasteur's ruined, pockmarked face. She started to speak, swallowed, and wet dry lips. "Gainsberg University in Ohio." She took another sip of the wine. It was beginning to thaw some of the ice in her brain. "Sixty two? You were working on time travel way back then?" Andre pulled up a stool and sat down. He chuckled. "We didn't get much publicity. Even the high muck-a-mucks in the University didn't know for sure what we were doing. 'Controlled Time Research' is what we called it, and sort of let the idea get around that we were working on a project to develop a chronometer even more accurate than the atomic clock. That had a good solid scientific sound to it. You can imagine about how much we'd have gotten in grants if the money boys knew we were attempting time travel! "How about you? Time travel pick up respectability in the nineties?" By this time Eileen was adjusting to the bizarre coincidence. "Some. Most people thought Tom and I were mental basket cases, but there were a few with vision ... enough to get us funding to advance the project." "Advance it how far? Do you have a method for returning to your own time? Or are you as foolish as we were, and jumped the gun in girlish enthusiasm?" Eileen blushed. "A little of both." She described the infantile impulse that had gotten her into her present predicament. "I know Tom's working on vectoring in on me with the retractor, but there's no way of knowing how long it will take. That was to be our next experiment." She looked at Andre. "It's just as possible that your people are busting their behinds to locate you .... My God .... " "What?" "What if it takes thirty years for Tom to find me? Or rather, what if thirty years passes here before he does?" Eileen shuddered. "I could return twenty four hours after I left ... thirty years older...." Andre gave her a sympathetic smile. "I take it you have romantic designs on this 'Tom' guy." Eileen managed a small smile of her own. "Let's just say I wouldn't be too thrilled to go back to him an old hag." An undulating wail of grief came from a nearby apartment. A sudden spasm of terror contorted the girl's face. "Oh, Andre, do we have any chance at all of surviving the plague?" The man lifted her to her feet and held her in a comforting embrace. "Easy, child. We've a better chance than the rest of them. At least we know what causes it." Eileen looked at Andre's ravaged face. "We know what causes smallpox, too, but that didn't help." Andre smiled encouragingly. "True. There is, at least, one thing we can do, and I was on the point of doing it when we met. Get out of the city. There are villages where we can be safe for a while ... we can keep moving ...." He broke off. "But will that affect your Tom's efforts to locate you?" Eileen bit her lip. "I don't know. I don't think so, according to my figures, but we've never tested it." She shivered. "But it won't be any good if he finds me, and I'm dead. Oh Andre, get me out of here? Please?" # It was three months before the Black Death came to the village. Eileen had learned to eat the rotten meat without throwing up. She had learned to survive in a society without any conveniences. Of course she missed gas and electricity. Of course she missed stores, and cars, and air conditioning. And refrigeration. And running water, and indoor plumbing. And the hundred other things she'd always taken for granted. Those were minor annoyances. What had been hard to accept was the abysmal ignorance, the lack of sanitation, the utter filth. The babies that died of a hundred causes that could be avoided, even with the facilities available. Children who were adults at twelve. Old at thirty. Senile at forty. Dead at forty five, if they lived that long. The bigotry. The religious intolerance ... the domination by the Church. The class distinction that allowed the 'nobility' to own the peasantry as chattel. The lack of human dignity. Wells so close to the jakes, that the ground water tasted of human excrement. Water that had to be boiled, and mixed with wine to kill some of the germs, and disguise the flavor, before it could be safely drunk. Facing the ridicule of villagers who believed that frequent bathing was injurious to the health. Who bathed once a year, and wore the same garment until it rotted. Peasants ranging from dull-witted to idiotic, due to brain damage from lack of nutrition. Peasants with teeth rotted, and coated with green tartar, and who accepted lice and fleas and ticks as part of every day living. Slaving in the fields of the Siegneur from before dawn until after dark and retaining only enough of the fruits of their labor to not quite keep body and soul together. But she learned to live with all this, survival being the prime directive. She also learned about 'Le Droit de Siegneur'. The right that nobility had arrogated unto itself to bed the bride of any of his serfs ... thralls ... vassals ... the word 'slave' was generally eschewed ... on her wedding night. Many 'lords' extended this right to include any peasant girl who caught his fancy. Eileen caught the fancy of the noble on whose domain the village stood. He fancied her for a full week. The girl endured the rape stoically as a matter of survival. She was restrained from gutting the odiferous 'lord' with his own poniard only by the knowledge that such action would earn her an agonizing death at the hands of his lordship's torturer. Eileen's own knowledge of medicine, and the village midwife's herbal lore, prevented her from conceiving from the dehumanizing experience. The girl learned the infinite gentleness and tenderness of the man with the smallpox-ravaged face, and of the depth of his grief over the deaths of his wife and their two children. She learned why he had volunteered as guinea pig for the Berkley experiment. She also learned to love him, despite the fact that he was twice her age. # Inevitably, the Death came to the village. Their first reaction had been to remain, and do what they could for the poor souls who had been their friends. But cold common sense told them that it was a no-win situation, and that to stay would only be to throw away their own lives. Even had they had the facilities to back up their medical knowledge, they would have been flying in the face of the Church, which had proclaimed the plague as God's punishment on the people for their sins ... and contradicting the Church was a certain way to charges of heresy, and burning at the stake. Eileen, for all her sweetness, felt satisfaction that one of the first to fall victim to the plague was the 'lord' who had ravished her. Andre and the girl moved off to the north, putting many leagues between themselves and the forefront of the devastation. By this time Eileen was no longer consciously aware of her companion's pox-raddled face, seeing only the goodness of the man. His strength. His dream. For Andre had confided in her. "Come on, kid," he'd said. "With a name like 'Pasteur' I was damn near obligated to nose into the old family tree. "I traced it back to the Crusades. I found that one branch of the family had died off during the plague. The records are fuzzy as hell about that period. Totally understandable, but even so, there were contradictions that made no sense whatever. The more I dug into it, the more I became convinced that the line that ran out during the Black Death should have continued. I had no evidence. Just a conviction that it was important to the world as we know it, that that line should have continued." "Okay Andre, I'm not stupid," Eileen had responded. "You're saying that you believe Louis Pasteur descended from that branch, and that unless you could save it, much of modern medicine would still be in the dark ages." Andre had blushed. "Well, yeah." He looked embarrassed. "Go ahead, tell me I'm putting too much importance on myself. Call me an egotistical jerk. You're probably right." A spasm of pain crossed the pox-pitted face. "The son I thought would carry on the line, died in the same epidemic that left me looking like the Phantom of the Opera...." Eileen had uttered a little cry of denial and stroked the scarred face with a soft palm. "No, Andre, no." She crept into his arms and held him tightly. "There will be a son to carry on your dream." # Eileen looked at Courtney. There was pleading in her eyes. Pleading for understanding and acceptance. There was love, and hope, and wanting. But there was no sign of regret or shame. "I bore him that son, Tom. A beautiful sturdy son. To the man who had saved my life, and my sanity, in a world of death and madness. I bore him that son out of love." Tom Courtney took the pale hand that lay passively on the cover, and said the one thing guaranteed to insure him a life of happiness. "God bless the man for caring for you, and God bless you for loving him for it. What of the boy? It couldn't have been easy for you to leave him." Eileen laid her fingers on Courtney's cheek, and the light in her eyes would have caused flowers to bloom out of a block of solid ice. "I love you." Sloan cleared his throat noisily. "All very sweet and touching, I'm sure," he said gruffly. "But, young lady, just how the hell did you get back here?" # Eileen had an easy delivery. The midwife knew her craft, and had an extensive knowledge of pain-dulling herbs. Andre saw to it that strict observance of sanitary conditions prevailed, forestalling the possibility of 'childbed fever' carrying off both mother and child, as happened all too frequently in that age of ignorance. He had a stormy time convincing the midwife to scrub her hands, and rinse them in strong wine before touching the girl, but the woman reluctantly complied after Andre threatened to beat her with a stick of firewood. It was a boy, and a lusty, squalling young pagan he was. Opinionated and demanding from his first breath. Both his scarfaced father, and his dainty mother, were delighted with him. They were to have three blissful months before the times caught up with them again. The Black Death gained momentum, spreading from the seaports of the Mediterranean coast, inland, with increasing rapidity. Andre Pasteur was among the first to fall when the plague struck the village. When he felt the first symptoms of the disease, he ordered Eileen to take the boy and go, to leave him and insure the child's survival. The girl did not argue with her husband. The love between them was such that no protestations were needed. Each understood what was in the other's heart. Eileen silently packed what few things she could carry, kissed Andre, and took their son to safety. She took the boy up into the mountains to the Sisters of Mercy at the convent of Ste. Agnes, and placed him in the care of the gentle nuns. Then, following a vague inner compulsion, she returned to Marseilles. Andre had furnished her with enough funds to provide lodging and food, and she lived quietly for several weeks. Eileen gradually became aware of a vague unrest within. The unfocused urgency became more and more acute. She had been so long in the stultifying miasma of the Dark Ages that it took some time before she realized that the unsettling inner turmoil was due to the probing of the retractor searching the time-lines for her. She was at a loss as to how to aid Tom Courtney in his quest, but figured that it might be helpful if she lingered in the vicinity where she had first appeared in this age. The probings became stronger and she could begin to hope that rescue was at hand, when she fell victim to the plague. The villainous landlord from whom she rented her tiny room was aware that the girl had money, so he didn't wait until she was dead before carrying her, semi-conscious, to one of the public burial pits and casting her onto the heap of half-rotted corpses waiting to be covered. Eileen regained her senses in the night, and dragged herself from the pit of death. She made her way, stumbling and crawling in the filth and offal of the city's streets, until she collapsed finally and dropped into the velvet blackness of near death. She knew nothing more until she awakened in the safety and blessed cleanliness of a hospital bed. # Had the genealogical line which produced the nineteenth century genius to whom modern medicine owes so much, been preserved? Or had Andre Pasteur been mistaken? Jake Sloan, Chief of Medicine at University Hospital, doesn't know. But he bends all his considerable talent for fund- raising to garnering big bucks to further the research of Tom Courtney and his wife, who are devoting their lives to finding out. * * * * *