Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson by Greg Bear, Gardner Dozois Page B

This time two of them came in and stood watching him, weapons ready. After a few hours they were replaced by Germans, though those stuck to the corridor outside, evidently on the theory that if any were in the room he could somehow jump them and get their guns. Time ticked by . . .
    But I’ve got to get out of here. The Turk understood me. The question is, can he do anything about it?

    V:

    Vienna/Colorado/Munich/Vienna

    He’s there. Or at least the sonic stunner and the communicator in his watch are, Wanda thought.
    She dialed the magnifying optic and it automatically stepped up the light. A medium-sized flat-roofed building currently being used as offices, with guards outside the entrances—military, not police, and in three different types of uniforms. The scanner couldn’t get a precise fix on the instruments, not at this range, and any lower and the timecycle could be seen from the ground. She’d had to dodge a couple of biplanes already.
    Time to take a closer look, on foot.
    The problem with that was her clothes; she couldn’t pass for a local, or anything acceptable, dressed as she was. A quick check had showed that nobody here was showing more than an inch of ankle, not even the hookers. What they were wearing during the daytime looked like a jacket or tunic, a long narrow tubular skirt, feathered hats and broad cloth belts slung at hip-height, with various accoutrements. Her shoes would definitely pass, but nothing else she was wearing—and her short hair was going to be conspicuous too. Evidently girls wore theirs long and down or braided, and women had it long and done up with pins and combs under the floppy-brimmed hats. She didn’t know whether that was because things had changed differently here, or because older fashions hadn’t changed as quickly as in her Jazz Age.
    Wanda sighed; there was nothing she could do about the hair but wait six months of time she didn’t have. There was a way to solve the clothes problem, but she didn’t like it. Her money was worthless here, but her stunner worked perfectly. Still . . .
    You’re going to wipe out this entire world , she told herself. Be realistic! A painless mugging is no huhu.
    A spin of the magnifying optical screen, and she picked a woman walking through the dusk down a fairly narrow street. Clothes not too shabby and not too new, height and build about like hers; that took a while, because she was a full three inches taller than the female average around here-and-now. Then an instant transition to an alley, and she was waiting.
    “ Tut mir sehr leid, meine Liebe, ich brauch’ das jetzt dringender als du, ” she called.
    “What?” the woman said, turning, her eyes going wide at the strange dress.
    Then she gave a little shriek at the sight of the stunner, so like a gun at first glance.
    My need is greater than thine, lady, Wanda thought, and pressed the stun.
    A quick bound and she caught the slumping figure of the young woman before she struck the ground, and a grunt of effort as she pulled her back into the alley and slung her across the rear seat of the timecycle. A touch of the controls, and they were in a meadow in the Rockies, in a stretch of summer high noon ten thousand years ago. A quick jump had shown the meadow wouldn’t be bothered by sabertooths, paleo-Indians, or grizzlies in the next few hours.
    Getting the clothes off a totally limp body was more difficult that she’d expected; dressing a totally limp body in her own outfit was even more of a struggle. When she had the new clothes on she walked around to accustom herself, and cursed the way the narrow skirt wrapped around her legs; if she had to run, she’d need to rip it off. A sudden thought struck her.
    “Do I have to take her back to nineteen twenty-six, mark, II? That world’s going to blink out of existence. It’s sort of like dropping her in a volcano.”
    It was one thing for Deirdre van Sarawak to outlive the history that had produced her; she’d had a place to