Incident in a Ghost Town

It ran across Lang's face and woke him with a start. Sitting up on the mattress he saw the back end of the creature disappear behind a loose board in the wall. 'Damn mice,' he said, wiping a hand across his face.

He laid back down and glanced out the room's single window to see the sky and then looked up at a the beam of sunlight shafting across the ceiling. Except there really wasn't a ceiling. It was just a canvas shroud, strips hanging down in places, that had been used in lieu of boards to make a ceiling when the place was built. Through the worn canvas he could see daylight in the gaps of the tin roofing.

Lang tried to decipher the time from the color of the sky and the intensity of the sunbeam. 5:15, he guessed. Lang looked to his watch. 5:25. Not bad! Again he wondered how many more mornings he might have. If McIntosh was right, in a few days he could be gone from 1932. But would he be alive or dead in 1985? Four others would die. He wanted to be back in 1985 but not dead.

And Clavell doesn't seem to show up in 1868. What if he, Lang, doesn't go back to his time? Well, maybe 1932 wouldn't be so bad. He knew he was falling in love with Sarah, and he was pretty sure she was with him. It might be a poorer life, materially, but he could be happy.

Then he thought of Lang, Jr. If he stayed in 1932, he'd never see him again...for that matter would Lang, Jr. even be fathered? A better question; would his own father ever father him? 'Christ,' he said. 'What a Rube Goldberg situation.'

Then he had another thought. What if I end up back in 1868? Living in a whole world full of McIntoshes?

'This is making my head hurt,' Lang said, sourly. 'I'm getting up.'

He swung his legs off the bed and reached for his hat. That in place, he stood and grabbed his pants, running a hand over his stomach. 'Flatter then it was a week ago,' he said. 'If nothing else, I'm losing a little flab on this diet.'

Lang dressed and went out the back door of the little bedroom to wash and shave. When he was done he stopped next door and gave the razor back to Voit with his thanks. The sergeant, walking about, his face impassive, was watching the troopers still working on the corral, trying to chip holes for the posts in the cement-like hardpan. Lang wondered if McIntosh had shared his information from the history book with the sergeant. He doubted the man would tell the troopers. He walked to where the mare was picketed and let her go to graze.

Lang went back into the house. Even in the bedroom he could feel the heat from the potbellied stove in McIntosh's area. It wasn't particularly welcome, as warm as the day's air already was, but McIntosh liked his coffee hot in the morning. For that matter, so did Lang. He headed for the pot as soon as he cleared the door frame and stepped into the front room.

McIntosh was sitting at the table, another magazine spread out before him, brushing flies away from a piece of salt pork on his plate. Lang took a sip of coffee--it almost tasted decent. A bad sign. He was getting used to it.

'Still at the books,' said Lang. It was a statement, not a question.

'You ever hear of the 'Triangle Shirtwaist Factory'?'

Lang sat down and rubbed his chin. 'Yeah. Somewhere. Seems I saw a TV...a television program...on that a few years ago. Something about a factory that fell down or something...'

'Burned down. Here.' The lieutenant swiveled the magazine around for Lang to see.

Lang looked down at a full-page spread that bore the title: 'Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Fifteen Years After.' Below that was a picture of a large squarish building, apparently in the downtown section of some big city, smoke pouring from it.

'Yeah. Now I remember. It was a place full of women, making clothing. Fire started. Turned out the owner of the place had most of the doors locked. No one could get out. Lot of people burned to death.'

McIntosh nodded his assent. 'One hundred and forty-six of them. I'm beginning to understand what you were trying to say the other night.' He sat back, his coffee cup cradled between his hands. 'You see, in my time, most people worked on the farm. We didn't have that many factory workers. Today, it seems to be different. Most people appear to be in manufacturing.'

'That's right. I think something like seven percent of Americans work to feed the other ninety-three percent. And a lot of the rest of the world to boot. And that seven includes a lot of people who process the food, not grow it.' Lang moved the magazine around again. 'Today, well, after the depression which is over in nine more years, most people work for wages, not selling stuff they grow...which is what I do. Or did. Beef.'

'In any case,' McIntosh made a wave of his hand over the rest of the magazines Lang had taken from the closet shelf, 'in reading this article, and others in these books, I see that labor unions, as they call them, and social laws may be necessary. Men who control the means of production do not always do so in beneficial ways.'

'Right. That's what I was trying to get across. And it's not like these guys have been hurt by paying good wages and building safe places to work in. The workers have more money, they spend and buy more, the fat-cats make more...everybody wins.'

Lang finished his coffee, shook out the cup and turned it face down on the edge of the stove. 'I'm going up to see Parker,' he said, heading for the door.

He stopped at the screen and looked back. 'I don't think people are any better or worse today then fifty years ago, Mac, or fifty years from now. We just have a little more of what we call 'social consciousness.' A sense of doing things that help everyone. I don't think our basic nature has changed all that much. We still all have about the same amount of angel and scalawag in us.'

'Except politicians.'

Lang grinned. 'Right. Especially the Department of Agriculture. They're all scalawag.'