Borrowed Time Read Online Free

threatening, transferred my grip to his wrist, and waited.
    Three minutes later Smith’s eyes regained their focus. He stared at me for a long moment before recognition entered them. “Happy?” he whispered.
    “Knock it off. I have no sympathy for you.”
    “Really?” He held up his free hand, the arthritic joints almost painful to even look at. “Do you see this? I can barely grasp my bag with it. Even then it hurts. It always hurts. Do you know what’s it like to always hurt?” Smith’s weak voice broke on the last word, as if he’d run out of air.
    I kept my eyes away from the twisted ruin of Smith’s hand. “No. How does that justify what I think you’re doing?”
    “You don’t understand.”
    “Right. I don’t. So why don’t you and I take a paired-jump to my uptime where some people in authority can listen to you explain it all in detail?”
    His eyes showed fear. “You can’t.”
    “Yes, I can. And I’m about to.”
    “No!” Smith tried to twist out of my grip, then started gasping for breath.
    “Asthma attack,” Jeannie informed me. Smith’s free hand fumbled desperately in one pocket. I watched, trying to remain dispassionate, as he tried to bring out a small device and dropped it on the bed. “Aerosol medication delivery device,” Jeannie added.
    I picked up the thing and offered it to Smith. He grasped it as carefully as his warped hand and labored breathing allowed, then sprayed something from it into his mouth. A few minutes after this labor his breathing was back to normal. For him. He stared at me, then nodded his chin to indicate the device. “Thank you.”
    “I assume I may’ve just saved your life.”
    “Yes. You may have.”
    “Why did I do that?” I asked even though I knew the answer; because I still wasn’t certain of Smith’s guilt, and even if I were I didn’t have it in me to watch someone die if I could prevent it.
    But Smith looked away as if embarrassed. “That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it? You’ve guessed what I’m doing.”
    “Am I right?”
    I couldn’t look directly into his eyes, but Smith’s face twisted with some emotion I couldn’t read. “Yes.”
    “You’re deliberately spreading what will be known as the Spanish Influenza. You dropped off the first batch in Kansas in March, then checked on its progress in June and figured out it wasn’t lethal enough. So you’re here and now to spread a much more lethal variant.”
    “That’s right.”
    “I assume you’re doing this for a reason.”
    He kept his face averted from me. “I need to change the future.”
    I couldn’t help sighing. “A temporal intervention. That’s what the Spanish Influenza is/was?”
    “Of course.” His raspy voice had sunk to a whisper, but I could still hear it clearly enough. “What else?”
    “I’d wondered what natural disease would appear in three places at the same time, and then disappear without a trace.”
    “Yes. It’ll disappear. We designed it that way. A genetically-engineered suicide instruction. What you call the Spanish Influenza virus will die out after one year.”
    “Gee, that’s really humanitarian of you.”
    My sarcasm got a reaction. Smith swung his head back and glared at me. “What the hell do you know about it? Humanitarian? You smug bastard! Have you ever heard of the auto-immune plagues?” I shook my head slowly and Smith trembled. “It works. You’re from . . . when?”
    “None of your business.”
    “After the twentieth century? After the twenty-first?”
    I decided to tell him that much. “Yes.”
    “God help me.” Smith let his gaze wander, staring straight up as if he could see through the roof. “We stopped it.”
    “Stopped what ?”
    “The auto-immune plagues.” Smith held up his hand again, his eyes still staring up toward the heavens he couldn’t see. “We didn’t know what was happening. Sudden surges in the incidence of diseases and ailments. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred percent