Free Alternities by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Page B

don’t know, five minutes. It felt like five minutes.… Of course I was scared. Every time I go through the gate I get the heebies. It’s so fucking weird, coming out and seeing streets jammed with big cars.… I don’t have any idea what it was if it wasn’t someone from here. Maybe that’s what happens when you put two of us in the same corridor. But if it wasn’t you, then I don’t know. And I don’t want to think about it, either. Maybe we’re not the only ones who know about this… No, I don’t want to think about that. Brian’s been missing for three weeks. How could anybody stand to be in there for three weeks? That’s what scares me the most you know? Getting lost in there, and never being able to find my way out. Bad enough when I think about being alone. I’d be worse if I had to think I wouldn’t be… Just a shadow, a break in the corridor. I wish you could tell me what it was.
    Investigator’s Report
    No corroboration is available. Stress-induced psychosis is inferred. (Possible case study for postulated transit anxiety syndrome.) Nonpunitive transfer to alternative assignment ordered. Psychological division follow-up recommended.
    Eleanor Emerson
Staff Operations & Training
NRC 02-243

CHAPTER 4
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Alpha List
Bethel, Virginia, The Home Alternity
    Even with a steel-chassised gas-burner, it was a tedious forty-minute drive from the Capitol garage to the tree-lined approach to Walter Endicott’s rural mansion. But serving in the Senate had conditioned Endicott to the point where his tolerance for tedium was very high, and he was barely aware of the bicycle-snarled approaches to the Potomac bridge or the crawling commuter traffic on the Jefferson-Davis Highway.
    It helped that he had nothing to do but ride in the back seat of the Mercedes and read his copy of the day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer . Endicott rarely left his office until the paper arrived, usually shortly after three. It was a daily ritual now nearly a decade old.
    Considering how much trouble was involved in getting him the paper, he wished sometimes that he enjoyed it more. Most Senators received their homestate newspapers by federal mail, three to six days late if from east of the Mississippi, ten days or more if from the West Coast.
    Endicott’s copy got special handling all the way through—the first of the midnight press run, it was couriered to Cleveland’s interurban train station, shuttled to Pittsburgh, transferred to a Washington-bound train, and picked up at Union Station by a junior staffer from Endicott’s office.
    All so it could be discarded by the chauffeur when the car was cleaned at the end of day.
    For forty minutes was more than enough time to read this Plain Dealer, and rarely was there anything in it Endicott needed or wanted to read twice. He usually left it behind on the seat of the Mercedes without a thought.
    The national section was interchangeable with the national section of any Federal News Service paper. Fair enough—the same could be said of the AP or UPI papers of home. But by comparison with those syndicates, and Endicott had been no great booster of the press, the FNS offered an unpleasant mix of half-truths, studied silence, and propaganda, leavened with what it called “cheer” pieces.
    What interested Endicott were the local features, from city government down to the minutia of engagements and obituaries. Through his business connections, his wife’s patronage of the arts scene, his friendships high-placed and low, Endicott knew by face and name literally thousands of people in that “other” Cleveland. Hundreds had partied or been overnight guests on the Endicott yacht berthed along the Gold Coast.
    It was an irresistible curiosity to Endicott how those same people had fared in this world, a curiosity partly satisfied by scanning the paper for news of them. On any given day, he would find from five to a dozen references, most of them surprises in one way or another.
    Sometimes it was