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The Empire of Time by
Crawford Kilian
Chapter One
The intertemporal shuttle between Earth/ 2015 and Beulah/1804 was an old
subway train. For decades, its three cars had carried passengers on the old IRT
line up and down Manhattan; now they sat on a hundred-meter strip of track in a
tunnel in Flushing, on the basement level of the New York Transferpoint
Building. Twice every hour, the I-Screen was turned on at the end of the runnel,
and the three cars rumbled through the screen toward an identical tunnel on
Beulah. The cars were painted in Agency blue and white, and defaced by
emigrants' graffiti, scratched, chalked, inked, and sprayed on every surface:
LOIS & BILL, JAN. 27, 2015. BACKSLIDERS RULE. AID is NO HELP. 1804
OR BUST. The Agency for Intertemporal Development did not care; these were,
after all, the parting shots of people who would no longer be a nuisance.

Jerry Pierce was one of the few passengers coming uptime on the shuttle, but
over a hundred people were waiting on the shuttle platform for the trip back.

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Some were emigrants, dressed in blue-and-white Agency-issue fatigues and
clutching their shabby luggage. Most, however, were Trainables on official
business: civil servants, technicians, and scholars. Some ostentatiously wore
flickreaders pushed up on their foreheads, like sunglasses, as if their civilian
clothes and attach├й cases were not enough to proclaim their privileged status.

The shuttle came through the Screen and screeched to a halt. Pierce was the first
one off. He announced nothing. In his dusty buckle shoes, knee breeches, and
tailcoat, he looked like a visiting endochronicтАФ possibly a senior bureaucrat in
President Jefferson's administration, traveling to the twenty-first century to beg
favors from the Agency. He ignored the Trainables' patronizing smilesтАФand the
emigrants' sullen staresтАФ as he handed his suitcase to a porter and shot his cuff,
flashing his wrist ID.