Free Alternities by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

combo music and dark beer and their virulent hatred for the Boston Celtics.
    March was G5 now, and his growing command of Russian and Arabic kept his schedule full with Black and White Section assignments. That meant that Wallace crossed paths with him less often, mostly in the change-out room, and one or the other of them seemed to miss their Thursday night Notes Club “date” about half the time. But friends they still were.
    “Hey, Rayne,” March called back, looking up from his labors. “I heard you came back from your run in several pieces.”
    “I came back in one piece,” Wallace said, spinning the dial on his closet. “But I felt a bit subdivided when Adams got done with me.”
    March chuckled. “My informant must have confused the two.”
    “You inbound or out?”
    “Out.”
    “I guess I can’t interest you in a beer at Reggie’s.”
    Shaking his head, March said, “Too early, anyway.”
    Wallace checked the watch he had just retrieved from the smallest of the three compartments inside his locker. “A little, maybe. Where to?”
    “Yellow. Domestic drop.”
    While he slipped his wedding ring back on his finger, Wallace took a second look at the clothes hanging from March’s valet. Jacket and tie, pale blue dress shirt—that almost always meant a Yellow puddle-jump.
    The Alternity Yellow gate house was abandoned Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, on the North Sea. For obvious reasons of logistics the field station had to be elsewhere. For less obvious reasons it was in lower Manhattan, though the Guard did operate a small substation in London.
    To get from the gate house to the field station meant a five-hour flight on one of the needle-nose Lockheed screamers, and a runner had to look the part of someone who could afford the trip. March wouldn’t even have to wear a pouch on this run—Yellow Section would have a leather briefcase waiting for him.
    “I guess that means scratch Thursday.”
    “ ’Fraid so. I left a message for you upstairs. But let’s do something this weekend, huh? How about Saturday?”
    “Sure,” Wallace said, closing his wardrobe. “I’ll look at the papers. Somebody worth hearing ought to be playing.” He edged away, feeling vaguely dissatisfied. “Have a good run.”
    He took the long way out, past the door to the chute and the oak-backed brass plaque that hung on beside it. The plaque called him back, and he paused in front of it to scan the single column of names.
    There could be no monuments to fallen Guardsmen outside the walls of the Tower, so they remembered their own inside them. The Guard had neither seal nor motto, and so the plaque carried a legend only: “In Memory Always With Us.” Mawkish and uninspired, and yet somehow enough to stab straight through to the place where disquieting emotions lived.
    Thirty-one names, but room enough left for twice that number. Which made the plaque not only a memorial, but also a warning. It was the last thing the runners saw before starting down the chute, the direct corridor to gate control. Even those who chose not to look at it saw it in their mind’s eye in the process.
    Thirty-one names, soon to be thirty-two. He remembered Brenda Hilley as a plumpish girl given to white turtleneck sweaters and silver and turquoise Indian jewelry. Pleasant smile. A screening analyst, he seemed to remember. He wondered if she’d volunteered for the transit or been volunteered by the stationmaster. Wondered if it mattered.
    Thirty-one names. He ran a fingertip across the metal where Brenda’s name would be added, leaving a faint chromatic streak of body oil on the gleaming brass. It seemed a desecration, and he hastily rubbed the streak away with the sleeve of his shirt.
    “In Memory Always With Us,” it said, but that was a lie. No one talked about the lost, even those who’d known them. It was considered bad form, maybe even bad luck. The people whose names appeared on the plaque lived on only as an uncomfortable