This story was a winning entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition and has since been published in the Sands of Time Anthology. All profits from the anthology support Scope, the inspiring charity dedicated to enabling and empowering people with disabilities. The book is available now in both paperback and ebook formats, directly from Rushford Editions or Amazon.
Last Man Standing by Robert Piepenbrink
Time travel was dangerous not just to the time traveler, but to Time itself. It was discouraged by custom and forbidden by law. Anyone who engaged in it was bound to be visited, sooner or later, by the Time Police, who were Utter Bastards, prone to shooting everyone and arresting any survivors. They came for Charlie Connor at 8:45 AM, GMT—a squad of four young fit officers, dressed in the traditional black but in the modern tunic instead of the older shirt and jacket. Captain Charles Connor (Time Police, Ret.) approved. He was dressed in uniform and waiting. Fifteen minutes early was on time for Charlie. It always had been.
Remembrance Day, AKA Stop the Clock Day itself was only just in time, he suspected. He was still reasonably mobile, and (so nearly as he could tell) compos mentis, but his doctor had stopped fussing with his medications, and had started to take an alarming lack of interest in his personal habits—the sort of attitude which suggested that diet and exercise weren’t going to make much difference at this stage.
Well, it had been a long run. No one, including Captain Connor himself, really knew how old he was. There had been long missions all over time, and time itself had changed during a few of them. Heaven knew he looked and felt old enough. He’d been offered retirement long before he accepted. He’d only taken it when he had because of Ann. Serving Time Police officers couldn’t marry, and Ann deserved nothing less. But Ann was gone—five years now? About that. Everyone was, really. Last year on Remembrance Day, He and Joe Callahan had been the last officers to actually have served in the Time Wars. Three months later, Joe had killed himself in a fall, walking down a flight of steps. Charlie remembered him once jumping from a second-story window with nothing worse than a broken ankle, and running on that to shelter before the building blew up, swearing in about five languages. But half of living to whatever ages they’d reached was knowing what you couldn’t do any more.
It looked as though the team sent to fetch Charlie knew that too. They didn’t exactly carry him out of his flat, down the steps and into the waiting black van, but the way they were positioned he couldn’t have fallen if he’d wanted to.
Not that he did. You reached a point at which travelling in a van with an armed escort was the best way to see London. On your own, you lost track. The old slums became the best walks, and the solid neighborhoods you visited for fine dining turned into places where the police went armed in pairs. They’d told him his time-traveling days were over when he turned in his badge, but it wasn’t so. He was still travelling in time, but slower, and the briefings were less reliable. Done like this, the trip across London was relaxing these days, passing the great London landmarks, the Tower, the Gherkin and the Startled Gerbil which were now reassuringly solid. In the worst days of the Time Wars, they’d tended to blur or flicker. In the very worst days, one morning they’d have been there for generations, and the next morning have never been there at all. Some of his team had stayed in TPHQ—Battersea Power Station, once upon a time--never looking out, and refusing to look at news, let alone read history. The stability of the modern world had come at the cost of many of their lives.
Thinking of which...
“Driver, isn’t that flowerpot new?”
“Yes, Sir. Someone tried to get in by the land side last summer.”
“Can you stop for a moment and let me get a look at the plaque?”
“Of course, Sir. Plenty of time.”
There was a period in which the grounds around TPHQ looked like a park, with walkways, grottoes and trees. The idea had been to make the Time Police seem more approachable. Charlie remembered the day they’d been approached, with men in armor with power guns pouring off barges on the river side. Charlie remembered it especially in damp weather. The left wrist had only healed so-so. There had followed a brief era of barbed wire and land mines.
Today, the river approaches to TPHQ were marvels of landscaping and military engineering. Grass and flower gardens filled the shallow slope from the Thames to the entrance of TPHQ, and broad shallow concrete steps led straight to the door and the welcome center. People picnicked on the lawn—not Time Policemen, who preferred to be further away from supervisors when off duty, but regular Londoners and tourists. It was a beautiful environment. But it was an environment without a speck of cover or concealment. If invaders came up the Thames again, the two heavy power guns concealed in the welcome center could sweep everything.
On the landward approach, they’d tried something different. Big concrete planters eight feet tall—the “flowerpots”—both added to London’s greenery, and ensured that no large vehicle filled with explosives or men could reach the building, and smaller ones could do so only at slow speeds. Of course, the flowerpots did provide cover and concealment for attackers on foot. Hence the memorial plaques.
PEDRO GONZALEZ
LIEUTENANT, TIME POLICE
KILLED IN LINE OF DUTY
Simple and to the point. Five feet above ground. About twelve inches up and down, eighteen right to left, slightly curved to conform to the curve of the pot. You had to be a Time Policeman to know the plaque was a “claymore” mine, about an inch and a half thick, made of a mix of plastic explosive and steel pellets, and intended to be detonated from inside the building at need. The memorial inscription gave it a more personal feel than the traditional “FACE TOWARD ENEMY.” And leaving enemies so they were more mopped up than buried was very much the Time Police way.
“Thank you, Driver. I knew Speedy. He would have appreciated the honor. Never knew a better man with booby traps. He bought the farm putting down the New Inquisition.”
“I never heard of them, Sir.”
“No one has, now. That was the objective.”
At the door, they had a wheelchair waiting “purely to save time, Sir” It was a polite fiction. He could have made it on his own to the Atrium, and (probably) in time. But this gave him a chance to pause at the Time Map—the four-dimensional projection of every time trip ever made, currently under way or to be made, if those distinctions were quite valid. Sadly, too many to investigate them all. But once you had a starting point to understand the who and why—well the Time Map had saved his life more than once. Had probably saved Time. And now they said the Map Master was a product of those moronic time jumpers of St Mary’s. Probably he wasn’t hearing it properly.
Shortly they whisked him to the Atrium, and formed him with the other retired officers—some of whom he’d trained—on the right as they faced The Clock, with serving officers on the left, everyone in dress blacks. As the last Time Wars veteran, he had the post of honor—first rank and leftwardmost seat of the retirees, closest to the aisle. Commander Lockland shook his hand and took her place behind the podium. Every year, as The Clock struck eleven, it was stopped, and the commander read out the names of those who had died on duty, or as a consequence of duty—falling victim years later to radiation, poison or disease. And, doctor or no, everyone understanding, or no, when those names were read, Charlie Connor was on his feet, as close to “attention” as he could get with the current state of his hands and spine.
“DeZago, R., Llewellyn, K., Kim, J., Peyton, J., Harris, E.…
The list grew longer year by year, but the vast majority were still casualties of the Time Wars—his friends and in many ways his family--and by this time next year, there would be no one left who knew any of them except as old men, and no one at all left who remembered them as young people, with futures before them, quirks and preferences....
“Campbell, C, Martin, M., Goodenough, W….”
Certainly no one left who’d remember that Bill Goodenough always pronounced his name “Good-enuff” and not Good-enow.” But there was a whispered voice behind him.
“Still not getting it right.”
“Bill??”
“Still at the position of attention, officer.”
Old discipline held, mostly, long enough to have the last of the names read and The Clock resuming striking before he looked around. Bill Goodenough in the flesh—and looking a lot better than the last time Charlie had seen him. But that didn’t say much. That Bill Goodenough had been missing a few pieces, and bleeding to death in Charlie’s arms.
“Bill, you’re dead!”
“I should hope so. Do you know what year this is? And how old I’d be if I were still alive? even forgetting the whole ‘two bodies at the same time’ business.”
“No, I mean—“
“Don’t want to hear. Probably shouldn’t hear. Louis? You want to hear?”
And now Charlie looked around in earnest. He was in fact surrounded by dead men—Louis de Camp, Dieter Henlein, Sam Moore, Joe Reynolds—16 Time Policemen in all; four teams all wearing the old shirt and jacket dress blacks of a bygone era, and not a man of them much over 40. “Someone want to spell this out for me?”
“It was the old Map Master, Charlie. She picked up on four trips from TPHQ to TPHQ, none of them moving an inch, and all arriving on the same day. Then when The Time Wars were over and this “Stop the Clock” business began—nice ceremony, by the way—the date made sense. Sooner or later, there was going to be just one of us left, and we couldn’t have that.”
“OK, but how did anyone know who the last man was going to be? You all know better than to take any chance of appearing in your own lifetimes.”
“Easy. We didn’t know who the last man would be: we just knew who wouldn’t be him. You know how teams overlap at the hot spots—Berlin, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca? And how you don’t always go in chronological order? Map Master passed these coordinates to a few guys she was pretty sure would never make old bones, and told them if they ever knew for sure a team was dead, then saw a younger version of them, to give that younger version these coordinates and tell them to show up here in best dress blacks before we did any further missions. We weren’t supposed to tell them why, but I think everyone’s figured it out by now. You know the funny bit? I was one of the guys the Map Master picked to find a team. I was standing there with the coordinates in my jacket when Joe Callahan gave them to me. “
Louis chimed in. “It’s OK, Bill. When you get back, you’ll give the coordinates to last week’s version of my team. That’s why we’re here. What I can’t figure out, Charlie, is why you’re here looking ancient. If I were picking a man to live to a ripe old age, Chargin’ Charlie Connor wouldn’t have been on the short list. Or the long list, come to that.”
Charlie laughed. It was good to be—home? He’d been feeling like a museum exhibit for much too long. “OK. So now what do we do?”
“Well, first and most important, we go get drunk at the Pig Bar. Major Parrish of Big Business and Organized Crime is buying. Then we take you home.”
It sounded great, but only for a moment. “You can’t take me home, guys. Can’t be twice in the same time, remember?”
“Nah, The Commander and the Map Master got it all worked out. You remember that time you got back to back assignments and spent six straight months in 8th Century Medina?
“I remember, all right! I don’t think I ever did get all the sand out of my gear. The worst administrative foul-up in the history of the Time---oh.”
“So you hang out in your own room, because we know you won’t be needing it, and when you need something more, we move you down to our MedCen. We’re the Time Police, Charlie. We’re Utter Bastards who shoot everyone in sight and arrest the survivors. But we don’t leave one of our own to die alone.”
About Robert Piepenbrink:
Old History major, retired intelligence analyst and long-time SF fan. Not the first time I've wanted to write a piece of SF, but the first time I completed one. This just sort of came to me. Hope you like it.
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Loved it! Major Parrish! Commander Lockwood!! And some product of St Mary's in charge of the Time Map!!!
Superb. Bravo. More, please.