Time Scout by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Which she might have, for all practical purposes, if she’d gone scouting from another terminal.

Whatever the solution to the mystery of Margo’s whereabouts, TT-86 no longer felt quite so much like home.

Kit ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Maybe I ought to retire up time.” To do that, he’d have to close his accounts, find a buyer for the Neo Edo, locate a place to live in the real world, which had changed a lot and not for the better, so far as he could tell during the years he’d been down time.

Kit grunted. “I’m too tired to leave and too bored to stay.”

So he picked up a stack of bills and started scanning them for errors, just to avoid government forms. He was halfway through an itemized bill from the library when an entry caught his attention. He hadn’t done any research on fuel-consumption and lift-capacity for Floating Wedge ultralight airships.

”What the …”

He checked the access code assigned to the bill. It was Margo’s. He grunted. So she had been using the library, after all. Then he noticed the date. Kit swivelled in his chair, punching up gate departures for the past two months. There was the day Porta Romae had cycled, the day his granddaughter had walked back out of his life. The library entry on the bill was dated seven days afterward.

”Oh, hell, she couldn’t even keep her goddamned password a secret. How many other charges did this thief run up against my account?” He found several additional entries, neatly itemized by subject matter and data source as well as computer time logged onto the mainframe. Each one post-dated Margo’s precipitous departure through Primary.