He shut down the vid feed. “So I’ve got two choices,” he said to himself. “I can move, or wait it out and hope.”
Neither option filled him with joy. Moving would be difficult; he’d literally have to relocate to another living space, and he’d have to find a suitable one first, one that still existed in at least a comparable physical state in the future, and which was unoccupied in both 1930 and the present of 2041. If he waited, those who’d busted into ‘his’ unrented place in 2041 might have left, but he’d never be certain it wasn’t being watched.
The problem was time. Both options required it, and without knowing if anyone was on to him or Silvia, that was time he didn’t want to spend.
He stared bleakly at the tablet. “I guess it’s time to move.” Thankfully the place was fully furnished. He barely owned a thing. A few clothes, his trade supplies, his mobile gear, some groceries he’d bought at the market down the street. He could leave those. The rest belonged to the landlord, whom he paid weekly.
He sat back at the desk and started scanning real-estate possibilities. Empty or abandoned places were the best. Unrented rooms were rare, but on his initial location scouting, he’d come across some abandoned places that might do. He’d passed them up because of the risk of vagrants seeing his comings and goings through time, but now he needed something quickly.
“This might do,” he muttered to himself. Images of a half-collapsed tenement flickered across the screen. “It’s old enough to be around now. Not far from Silvia, either.” The place had apparently been damaged in one of the riots back in 2038. A sad irony, that; the riot had been over the high costs of living, and the building’s collapse had put yet more people out on the streets.
He put $50 in an envelope and gathered his things, plus a little of the food for his lunch, then walked out of the place for the last time. The landlord failed to answer at his knock, so he scribbled a goodbye note and slid the envelope under the door. $50 would have kept him current on rent for another couple of months, but in 1930 money wasn’t a big problem for him.