At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball
by Alexander Jablokov
Jacob Landstatter is an art critic, and his chosen objects d’art are the alternate
realities that the Lords of Time commission from artists who go back in time to make
specific changes that result in worlds of one sort or another. So who could want to kill
someone with such an occupation as innocuous as Jacob’s?
Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis.
Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates.
Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three
million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I
had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the
buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan.
“At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball” by Alexander
Jablokov, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August
1987.