The air on the other side was cold and wet. Smoke bit at my nostrils and mud was already oozing down my cuffs. I had come back in the middle of no-man’s-land—but when? Instinctively I kept my head down, awaiting shells screaming overhead.
“Lieutenant?” I jumped at the word, but it was in English and the speaker was the Canadian lad I had sent back to warn my men before I entered the cave. “Lieutenant?” he asked again. “How did you get here?”
I was outside the cave, next to the ladder leading back to our lines. I babbled something about another way out of the trench and chivvied him along without further delay. We reached our line without incident, and I sent the boy off post-haste to report to the captain.
When no one took the bait, the Germans finally decided that we had not only not fallen for their ruse, but had ourselves retreated. When they advanced to take over our supposedly abandoned position, we were waiting.
It was called “a glorious victory” by those who had not fought in it, and “a slaughter” by those who had. Captain MacLean dressed me down privately for my insubordination, but stood by as proudly as a father when the general pinned a medal on my chest. That was the end of my fighting days. Heroes are too important to be risked in battle; they are much more useful back home to recruit other poor innocents, and that was how I spent the remainder of the Great War.
In the twenty years since, my life has progressed from paranoia to depression to occasional fits of usefulness. My continued youth has proven both a blessing and a curse, for men are superstitious and afraid, and every few years it becomes easier simply to move on than to endure what begin as remarks and jokes and ultimately grow into stares and whispers. Even today, I have aged outwardly hardly a year since I last saw Maire.
At first I was afraid the Silver Men would come after me again, but eventually I realized that had they wanted to, they could have seized me the same moment I appeared here and simply put me through the same procedure again. Perhaps they were afraid of further complicating the timeline, or perhaps they themselves are unsure as to why or how my life will affect the future.
I have a good living. I wrote down the story of my adventures and sold it as a romantic fantasy to a publisher. It sold well enough that there was talk of motion picture rights, but that went nowhere, as I am given to understand is typically the case.
Mostly I keep to myself, although lately, with the advent of troubles in Europe, I have considered offering my services to the government. My telepathic powers are largely useless in this era, when no one has the same ability, but I do have what appears to others to be an uncanny knack for knowing when someone is hiding the truth. Sooner or later, America is going to be pulled back into Europe’s troubles, and on that day our counterintelligence agencies are going to need all the help they can find.
I have never abandoned the hope that Maire or Timash or one of my friends might find a way some day to bring me back. In our long nightly discussions, the Librarian and I have formulated hundreds of reasons why they might not have been able to retrieve us before now. (Oh, yes, the Librarian came back with me. The Library was in my pocket when I was kidnapped, and sensing something had happened, placed itself in a mechanical suspended animation. When analyzed by the Silver Men, it appeared only a featureless solid metal ball bearing. Dismissing it as insignificant, they had left it in my possession.)
I have, of course, never married. My heart remains in the future, loving a woman who will not be born until civilizations undreamt of have been raised and passed to dust and raised again. They say that love never dies. I only know that nearly a million years from now, my love will live again.
The Secret City – Book 2
The Stolen Future Trilogy
Brian K. Lowe
Copyright © 2018 Brian K. Lowe
All rights reserved. 3rd Edition. July 2020.
To all the teachers who helped me get this far, to all the writers who taught me how to read, and to all the readers who taught me how to write.
Prologue
By my own calculations, I had just lived through the longest twenty years in all of history. The longest, that is, if one includes the 867,000 years I crossed at the very beginning of that period. Then again, as my logical friend the Librarian might well argue, since I had returned along the same 867,000-year route, that would in some sense imply that I had given them back, leaving me in a zero-sum game. Were that the case, however, he would not be with me and I would not have spent two decades alone.
In the end I had only my own memory to rely upon, and by any measure it is very long indeed. Should anyone reading this chronicle find himself at a loss to understand these maudlin meanderings, I would self-consciously refer him to my one and only literary foray, The Invisible City, by Charles Clee. Through some miracle, it continues to sell after nearly two decades (and has twice been optioned for motion pictures, although nothing has ever come of that). It has provided me with a cushion that has saved me more than once from destitution. One critic called it, “A marvelously-constructed fable,” and I only wish that he were right, and that it was “marvelously-constructed.” The truth is that it was not “constructed” at all—I lived it.
Without revisiting the entire volume, the relevant fact was, and remains, that at the end of months of fighting and deprivation and surviving the most incredible dangers, I won—through no virtue that I can claim—the heart of the beautiful and courageous Maire por Foret, daughter of the ruler of Dure, the Invisible City. Yet no sooner had we confessed our love than I was stolen from her, kidnapped by agents of the Time Police who thought my presence in her era was a potential danger to the entire timeline of Earth’s history. I escaped them and returned to my own time at almost the precise moment I had left it, rescuing my infantry company from a German ambush and making myself a hero in two epochs.
Thus for twenty years I had lived as a man in his own time, and yet not of it. I live in the Twentieth Century, but my life is in the far future. Ironically, the Librarian’s situation was exactly the mirror image of my own. A hologram who preferred the look of an Oxford don, he had been created and programmed in the future by the main Library, to assist me in looking for the time machine that might send me home—a search which circumstances prevented me from ever actually commencing.
The branch library, a small sphere that resembles nothing so much as a common ball bearing, had been my constant companion from the moment it was presented to me, and owing to its inconspicuous appearance, the Time Police had neglected to confiscate it. Now, for twenty years, he had been my sole confidant.
Each anniversary of the day I left (and returned) left me depressed and unsociable, but every ten years was the worst. At the tenth, I had left my home and wandered the United States as a vagrant for more than eleven months, thankfully returning before the advent of the Great Depression made vagrancy such a common affliction. Tonight was the close of the second decade, but tonight I had found a new way to stave off self-pity.
As a result of powers I developed in the world of the future, I had managed to ingratiate myself with men of authority during the latter part of the Great War. In Maire’s world, almost all communication is conducted by means of mental telepathy, a skill taught me by friends who took me in when I arrived there lost and alone. In our era, of course, no one uses telepathy, rendering my skills useless, except to the extent that I can almost universally detect a lie. I do not know why, but it is so, and by helping to ferret out spies and enemy sympathizers, I believe that I in some small measure shortened the conflict. More importantly, my superiors had believed it, and so with war clouds once again gathering over Europe, when I reappeared in Washington and offered to resume my old duties, they were only too glad to accept me.
The Librarian had been quite intrigued to learn that I was embarking on a career in law enforcement. I was quite intrigued in turn when he offered to give me pointers.
“Wait,” I had said, gesturing at him with a glass of merlot. I had become overly fond o
f alcohol, seeking its solace, only to find that the treatment bestowed on me by an unnamed doctor in a Nuum bio-research outpost had made me nearly impervious to the wine’s effects. It did not stop me from trying. “I thought you were programmed to help me get around Nuum territory without giving myself away. What do you know about law—let alone police work?”
The Librarian sipped at his own holographic glass. “I was programmed to help you, Charles, but I was not a tabula rasa before that. Every branch has a fund of basic knowledge—I am a library, after all. Part of that knowledge is the history of the library system, and that history, as you know, extends back over 600,000 years.
“Every few hundred years, someone conceives what he considers to be the highly brilliant and original notion that the Library, as a completely objective collector and disseminator of facts, should function as a judicial system—in short, act as a sort of supreme judge. The Library is given all the facts of the case, weighs them, analyzes them in the context of applicable law, and renders a decision. In all of our recorded history, there has never been an accusation that the Library has made a biased ruling. Our honesty is universally unquestioned.”
I frowned. “So—why do they stop using you?”
“Because we cannot be bought off, manipulated, pressured, or impressed. Eventually those in power realize that what they asked for was not what they really wanted.”
As I am fond of saying, mankind never changes. The Librarian did have a few good points to make about interrogations, though.
On this night of the twentieth anniversary, I was back home, in Los Angeles, prowling the docks at San Pedro Harbor. The FBI had received information concerning the importation of contraband from the Far East, possibly Chinese opium. It was rumored the tongs were planning to move south from San Francisco; it was known that members of the Chicago syndicates were thinking of moving west in response to the burgeoning film industry. If these two mobs should collide, blood would flow like the Los Angeles River.
An FBI agent named John Naylor and I were questioning various dockworkers to see if they were aware of illegal activity, under cover of an immigration sweep. John would ask the questions with me acting as a lie detector.
“How about him?” John asked after the latest of a long line of heavy men in heavy clothing stomped out the door. John’s voice was tired, not simply from our six hours of repeated questions, but from six hours of repeated answers.
“Him, too.” I rolled my head around. “Every time you get close to asking about shady dealings on the docks, he starts lying. They all start lying, but there’s no way for me to know what they’re lying about. They can’t all be connected to our smugglers.”
John had long ago done me the favor of not asking about my ability. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe instead of waiting for the answers to come to us, we need to go out looking for them.”
I picked up my hat. “Now you’re talking.” I studied the personnel list on my desk. “The man who just left here, Emory Hardison. Let’s start with him.”
John’s eyebrow went up. “Did you see something in particular?”
“Just call it a hunch.” Truthfully, it might have been a quirk of my mental powers, or it might have been an excuse to break up the boredom. Certainly Hardison had to be guilty of something.
“Hardison hasn’t come back yet,” his foreman reported. “I thought he was talkin’ to you guys.”
“Maybe he stopped for a smoke,” John theorized. He looked at me, and we both shook our heads. “We’ll wait for him outside,” he said for the benefit of anyone paying attention to us, and we left.
The dockyards cover an immense area, but Hardison had left only moments ahead of us, so he couldn’t have gone far afield, not if he wanted to be back in his shop fairly soon. We moved in the direction furthest from any legitimate activity. We didn’t have to go far.
The muffled clunk of a shipping container being closed with an effort at stealth drew us forward, guns drawn. We quickly found Hardison in urgent conversation with two other men, one dressed as a stevedore, like Hardison, the other slimmer, wearing a fur-lined flyer’s jacket. The warren of shipping containers gave us a chance to get close enough to overhear.
“This has gotta be the last one for a while! The Feds are here and they know somethin’s up.”
“Not a chance,” said the slim one. “The boys upstairs aren’t going to back down from a couple of G-men freezing their butts off in a shack. You don’t do anything stupid, and they’ll go away.”
By silent assent, John moved to flank the three while I kept an eye on them. I never knew there was a fourth member of the gang until I felt his gun barrel cold against my neck. He took my gun and marched me into the open without a word.
“Aw, hell!” Hardison’s voice echoed among the huge bins.
“Shut up, you moron!” Slim snapped. “You want the whole yard to hear you?” He pulled out a revolver. “There’s another one around. We need them both.”
The prospect of violence seemed to act like a tonic to Hardison. He reached down and picked up a length of pipe.
“Yeah, but we don’t need them both alive,” he said, and advanced on me.
“Federal agents!” John screamed, and fired at the same time. Hardison jerked and fell to his knees. Slim ducked, firing back at random, and my captor moved his gun from my neck as he sought this new threat.
I grabbed the gun with both hands and stomped on his instep, trying to wrest the gun away while he dealt with the pain, but he was wearing the stevedore’s heavy boots, and my efforts were of little use. He was stronger than me and wrapped his free arm around my throat. Unable to breathe, I let go of the gun, seized his fingers, and twisted them in directions they were not meant to go.
Suddenly I pushed loose and darted down the nearest dark avenue, a tingle in my spine anticipating the spot where I would take a bullet at any moment. But the fusillade that sounded behind me was not aimed in my direction, and I realized that John was holding off both assailants alone. It was dark, I had no gun, and no one knew we were there. With all of the metal containers around us, the sounds of the shots would echo and re-echo; even if rescuers had been en route, they could not have easily located us. And my partner was back there, covering my escape against two armed foes.
Perhaps I could have escaped, but once John was down they would waste no time hunting me down, and I had no idea how many of the stevedores were part of the gang. Nor could I leave John. I crept back the way I had come, hoping no one would be expecting me. The night was still pierced by the occasional gunshot, but who was shooting? Was John holding them at bay, or was an armed criminal even now sneaking up on him as I was hoping to do to them?
I reached the scene of battle to find my worst fears realized. Across the way, John was slumped against a container. I couldn’t make out his face because his head was nodded to his chest, but even in the dimness the spot of red staining his shirt was unmistakable. Three of the men clustered around him. Of Hardison I saw nothing.
“Let’s finish this,” said Slim. “We’ve still got the other one.” And he raised his revolver.
“Hey!” I shouted, banging on a container. “Over here!” And then I ran once more, praying they would come after me without taking the time to put a last bullet into John.
A shot rang out, and never in my life had I been so happy to hear the zing of a bullet near my own head. I whipped around a corner—and ran myself in a dead end.
I spun about but my way was already blocked by my pursuers. One of them grunted a laugh as he raised his pistol.
But he did not shoot.
“What in the hell is that?”
Despite myself, there was something in his voice that compelled me to look. There at the end of the row into which I had fled a shimmering silver haze had appeared, the size and shape of a door. My stomach sank and my heart leaped at the sight, for I had seen such an apparition before, twenty years ago this night, on a battlefield in France.
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Then, as now, I had no choice. Heedless of the shouts and the shots behind me, I hurled myself through the door.
Chapter 1
My Return
As before, I experienced no appreciable lapse of time or sense of movement from when I fell through the door to when I found myself rolling on hot sand. I jumped to my feet at once, which had the door remained open might have been the death of me, as my pursuers would likely have continued to fire into it so long as it was in evidence, but as I expected, it had already vanished—and along with it any opportunity for me to reverse course and return to the Twentieth Century.
As I scanned my new surroundings, it was immediately evident that I had not returned to the same spot where I originally entered this world, but then again, my starting point then had been France, not California, and I had no idea whether any spatial displacement had occurred, or could occur. For that matter, I could not say for certain that I was still on Earth, although even given the vast span of time that may have elapsed, the Sun was still yellow and the air still breathable.
So far as I could see, golden dunes of sand stretched into the distance, unbroken save for a mist-covered mountain range on the horizon which I did not see until I had turned all the way about, and some numbers of hardy tufts of grass across the leading edges of many of the dunes.
I removed my branch Library from my pocket—thank heavens I kept it with me always—and held it in my open palm.
“Do you recognize this place?” I asked. In order to augment its data-collection capabilities, the Library was equipped with what it called “a limited sensor array.”
“It is a desert,” the Librarian answered. Whether he was being deliberately ironic was impossible to tell.
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 37
