The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Arne smiled patiently. “Hardly that. Cowards almost never run toward the enemy.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “When I have finished what I am going west for, there will be plenty of work left to do here.”

  “You would be invaluable to the Peer of Lant. With her huge armies to run, not to mention administering all the peerdoms she has conquered, she needs a first server. Before long, she will be the only peer who does. She needs a general, too. Look at the fumbling way her army attacks. You are going west?”

  Arne nodded.

  “So am I. West to find the Peer of Lant.”

  “She will have you executed—if the Lantiff don’t kill you first.”

  Deline tossed her head disdainfully. “The Lantiff wouldn’t dare lift a finger to me, and the peer is a warrior. So am I, and she will respect that. Will you come with me?”

  Arne shook his head. “I’m fighting tyranny. I would choose death before I joined it.”

  “Then I will go alone.”

  As Arne took a step toward her, she sprang for her horse. Hutter had not yet dismounted. Deline reined up and turned to him.

  “Hutter, I am going west—to give myself up to the Peer of Lant and fight for her if she will let me. Come with me or not, as you choose.” She rode off.

  Hutter hesitated—but only for an instant. Then he raced after her. Neither of them looked back.

  Bernal and his scouts were waiting nearby. Arne shouted a command, and they ran for their horses. They were off in a thunder of hoofs, but he knew they would be too late.

  Inskor came later, listened, shook his head gravely. “She certainly would inspire the Lantiff to a greater effort in battle,” he said, “but that hardly matters now. There aren’t going to be any more battles—not here. Does she know the plan?”

  “I think not. She had heard we were going to withdraw, but she thought it was only another adjustment of the defense line.”

  “Then she doesn’t know anything that would hurt us. She knows where some of our troops are, but they will be gone before morning.” He paused. “Unless—does she know about Egarn?”

  “No. She knows nothing about the ruins. She has never heard Egarn’s name. That is fortunate for us. If the Peer of Lant knew Egarn was there, she would call off all of her wars and set her armies to digging him out.”

  “Does Hutter know anything?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe the scouts will catch them,” Inskor said.

  But they didn’t. The army of Easlon withdrew that night, according to plan, and divided into two groups that went east and south. Arne, with his little troop of scouts and one-namers, went west.

  17. ROSZT AND KAYNOR; EGARN

  Everywhere Roszt and Kaynor went, they found themselves confronted by telephones. A motel pretending to any status at all had one of these contrivances in every room. From the beginning, they regarded them with deep suspicion. Their very shape defied logic; and though Egarn had explained telephones thoroughly, they hadn’t fully believed what he said. Certainly no telephone they encountered spoke to them, and for a long time they had no inclination whatsoever to speak to a telephone.

  What Egarn said also seemed to imply that telephones were able to listen, which at first made them reticent about talking to each other in the presence of one.

  Then they began to overhear people discussing all manner of things on public telephones, and eventually they discovered that one could ask anonymous questions by telephone and obtain information that otherwise would have required hours of investigation and kilometers of travel. The telephone became a valuable adjunct to their breaking and entering activities. All they had to do was telephone one of the Johnsons, pretend to have dialed a wrong number—something bafflingly easy to do—and thus find out whether anyone was at home in the house. Or one could telephone a business enterprise and discover, simply by asking, the times that it opened and closed.

  This use of the telephone produced such excellent results that they became more venturesome. Factories intrigued them because they were so effectively sealed off from outsiders. A retail concern went out of its way to make strangers feel welcome. Factories, with tall fences topped with barbed-wire, guards on the gates to inspect the identification of anyone wanting to enter, and, remote behind vast parking lots, buildings whose functions were not only indiscernible but unimaginable, seemed specifically designed for a sinister object like making Honsun Lens.

  One factory could have hundreds, even thousands, of employees. They knew from their research in city directories that many of them had employees named Johnson. They began to wonder whether all of them did.

  Once the name of a factory was known—and usually it was painted on the building or displayed on a prominent sign—it was a simple matter to look up its telephone number in the directory. As an experiment, Kaynor called one and asked for Mr. Johnson. The switchboard operator handled the call cautiously; when Kaynor couldn’t identify the Johnson or the department he wanted, she transferred him to personnel. The personnel operator was less diplomatic.

  “We’ve got five Johnsons,” she said exasperatedly. “Don’t you know which one you want?”

  Kaynor preserved his anonymity by hanging up. After that, whenever he and Roszt chanced to pass that factory, they wondered again what was transpiring in those remote buildings, what roles the various Johnsons were performing, and whether any of them were on their lists.

  They discovered an entirely new reference source in the student directory of the University of Rochester. This gave them an assortment of Johnsons who weren’t mentioned in the telephone directory or the city directory. It also introduced them to the university’s world of laboratories, classrooms, and dormitories. Several times they sauntered through its lovely campus along the Genesee River, but these incursions gained them nothing. Dormitories were even more risky than apartment buildings to prowl in, and they could make no sense at all of the multitude of things that seemed to be going on in the laboratories.

  Before they had quite decided what to do about the university, they were befuddled by another discovery. Far to the south, but also on the bank of the Genesee River, was the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose directory doubtless would give them a new list of Johnsons if they could find a copy. Probably there were other such institutions. Each additional discovery complicated their task further.

  They returned to the University of Rochester Campus, strolling along perplexedly and not knowing what they were looking for or whether they would recognize it if they found it, and quite by chance they overheard one student call to another, “I’ll meet you at Wilt Johnson’s restaurant.”

  There was no Wilt Johnson on any of their lists. This mystery occupied them off and on for a tenite before they finally discovered Wilt’s Snack Shack, a little diner located in a run-down section of busy West Henrietta Avenue just south of Mt. Holly Cemetery. The place did look dismally like a shack on the outside. The interior was scrupulously clean, but there was a makeshift air about it. The lunch counter and the booths were of rough plywood; tables and chairs were rickety; nothing matched. The elaborate white hat the proprietor wore while he worked over the grill was the diner’s one ornate feature. Most of the patrons seemed to be students.

  Wilt Johnson was a young man, and he had admirable rapport with his youthful customers. He seemed to know most of them personally. The young waitress who flitted gracefully about the crowded room was his wife.

  There was nothing to suggest that this Johnson had the remotest connection with any kind of len; nevertheless, he exemplified the problem they faced. They began to eat breakfast regularly at his Snack Shack. They sat in the most remote corner, enjoyed the largest meal the establishment offered at that time of day, and listened to the other patrons’ conversation while they gave the proprietor their puzzled scrutiny and reflected on the fact that all of their laborious research had missed him completely. They wondered how many more anonymous Johnsons this enormous city
contained.

  The revelation seemed to add an entirely new dimension to their investigation, and they weren’t quite sure what they should do about it. Puzzle reposed within puzzle in this baffling civilization. If a “restaurant” could be called a “snack shack,” was it possible that Johnsons, too, were sometimes called something else? Roszt and Kaynor had learned—again entirely by accident—that women often changed their names when they married. It was also true that they often didn’t. The two men from the future could think of no reason why the Honsun Len couldn’t have been invented by a woman—but what if she no longer called herself Johnson?

  One morning at the Snack Shack, the conversation took a totally unexpected twist: Roszt and Kaynor suddenly heard themselves talked about. In a booth near the front, four students—two couples—were having their morning coffee. Roszt and Kaynor watched them surreptitiously when they weren’t watching the proprietor. The manners of students, particularly their overtly sexual behavior, confounded them.

  One male student was reading a newspaper. The others were studying. The couples had arms draped about each other affectionately, but all of them kept their attention on their reading.

  The student with the newspaper called to the proprietor, “Hey Wilt—those Johnson burglars get around to you yet?”

  “Why would they bother me?” Wilt demanded. “I got nothing worth stealing.”

  “What are they stealing?”

  “How would I know? Ask Fred—he’s working on it.”

  The student with the paper called, “Hey, Fred—you the detective on those Johnson burglaries?”

  A man of about thirty, wearing an ordinary suit but every inch a policeman, turned and grinned. “Some of them.”

  “What is being stolen?”

  “As far as we can make out, nothing.”

  The student said incredulously, “Nothing? All those burglaries and nothing taken?”

  His girlfriend nudged him. “Wilt’s got a problem.”

  “How do you figure that?” the student with the paper asked.

  “He says he’s got nothing worth stealing, and that’s what’s being stolen. Nothing. He’s in danger of losing his nothing.”

  Her boyfriend glared at her. Then he got up and dropped some change on the table. “I’ve got a class,” he said and hurried away.

  A student across the room remarked, “Whoever’s doing it must be looking for something. Do you suppose it’s connected with those characters who’ve been pretending to trace Johnson heirs?”

  The detective grinned but said nothing.

  “You’ve got descriptions, haven’t you?” the student persisted. “Even the papers have descriptions.”

  “Descriptions—” the detective shrugged. “We have as many descriptions as there are witnesses. All we know for certain is that there were always two of them.”

  “How are you going to catch them? Stake out every Johnson residence in Monroe County?”

  The detective grinned again and shook his head, and the conversation turned to a subject Roszt and Kaynor found totally bewildering—baseball.

  They were shocked and alarmed. They ordered more food and kept themselves as inconspicuous as possible until the students and the detective had left. Then they carefully calculated the tip—giving the waitress too much or too little would fix themselves in her memory, Egarn had said—and left with what they hoped was calm nonchalance.

  Not only had they been the subject of casual conversation in a restaurant; they also were the object of a strenuous police search, and that staggered them. They didn’t know what “stake out” meant, but it sounded sinister.

  Further, someone had connected their innocent queries about Johnson heirs with the burglaries. They would have to stop everything until the clamor died down. While they were waiting, perhaps they could think of an entirely different approach. It was obvious that the one they were using had become dangerous. Also, it hadn’t worked.

  * * * * Egarn had watched their fumbling search with increasing distress. In the complications of getting them to the right place, and preparing them to live in 20th century America, he hadn’t given enough thought to the problem of finding the right Johnson. Their intense activity when they first arrived in Rochester elated him. As time passed, they began to resemble the man who mounted his horse and rode off in all directions. If only he could have talked with them for a couple of minutes—asked them what they thought they were doing and pointed them in the right direction.

  Suddenly they dropped everything and did nothing at all. They kept to their motel room except to exercise Val, and they began buying and reading newspapers. He had no idea what had happened, and he was plunged into despair.

  He kept trying unsuccessfully to send them messages and to pick up the messages they faithfully left for him on their table each night. The code messages they signaled with a flashlight had long since degenerated into a routine, “Search continuing, no results,” and the date. They continued to go through the motions of communicating, but because they had heard nothing from Egarn, they probably thought he was no longer watching. Now their search was at a standstill. Egarn’s workroom was shrouded more deeply in gloom each dae.

  The loyal team of helpers, most of whom never saw the workroom’s interior and had little notion of what went on there, sensed that things were going badly. They connected Egarn’s distress with the fact that supplies were running low. The food seemed to get worse with each succeeding meal, and Fornzt was in despair. Every time he used the last of something, he knew he was one step closer to the last of everything. Some of the outside sentries went on regular foraging missions—they thought they weren’t needed at the ruins because no outsider had been sighted anywhere in Midlow since the Lantiff left—but they rarely found anything. Old Marof, the one person who could have helped them, had died shortly after the destruction of Midd Village from illness and perhaps a broken heart.

  Then Arne arrived, and everyone brightened. Egarn’s confidence in Arne was shared by all of them. Arne would take care of everything. First and foremost, he would refill their empty larder. If Egarn’s distress had to do with something else, Arne would repair that, too.

  He knew where each village had kept its reserves of flour and tubers—or, if he didn’t, he knew how to find them. He had been ranging all across the Ten Peerdoms emptying these underground storage bins, many of which were buried under the villages’ charred remains, and he had sent a huge pack train east for the use of those still fighting the Lantiff. Now he plundered the reserves of Midlow for Egarn’s team and quickly restocked Fornzt’s shelves.

  He did more than that. The Lantiff, on their murderous swoop through the Ten Peerdoms, appropriated the horses, drove off all the animals they could use for meat, and removed every scrap of food they could find. No-namers of the conquered peerdoms, with their lasher supervisors, were left to fend for themselves. Except for the lack of meat, this was no problem. No-namers were accustomed to producing their own vegetables and tubers and growing grain for the entire peerdom. Now they would have to thresh and grind the grain by hand, but they had plenty of time for it because they no longer had to perform the peerdom’s heavy labor.

  Egarn’s team likewise had long been without meat, but Arne quickly corrected that. He knew where to look for stray animals, and the day after his arrival, beef and mutton returned to Fornzt’s menu, and a row of carcasses hung in a room in the depths of the ruins where the temperature was always cool. Arne also found a suitably remote place where meat could be dried and smoked.

  With the food problem resolved, Arne next set about tightening the security system—the sentries thought they had the entire peerdom to themselves, and they had become inexcusably lax. Not until that had been taken care of did Arne turned his attention to the workroom—and discover that the Great Secret was a shambles.

  “It is Roszt and Kaynor,” Egarn said. “They haven’t found the Johnson, and they have stopped looking.” Neither Egarn nor any of the others
could understand why the Johnson had proved so elusive or why Roszt and Kaynor had given up. Arne, trained all of his life to apply logic and common sense to any problem that confronted him, inquired about the messages that should have been sent and received. Egarn never cared to dwell on his failures, and he waved the question aside disgustedly.

  Later Arne pressed Inskel for the details. In theory, the system should have worked at least occasionally, but it had never worked at all. Even in tests, the instrument rarely sucked up the small objects it was aimed at. Much more frequently it snatched things they didn’t want. They had failed to retrieve any of Roszt and Kaynor’s messages. The messages they sent went somewhere, but they never arrived at Roszt and Kaynor’s motel room. Neither Egarn nor Inskel could understand this.

  Arne sat for an entire day alternating his gaze between the non-activity of Roszt and Kaynor on the len and the mammoth contraption that sent or drew people and objects through time. Gevis, the former assistant schooler who was so valuable both as Egarn’s assistant on historical matters—he had made himself virtually an authority on life in the 20th century, Egarn said—and as Inskel’s assistant with the machines, sat beside Arne, answered his questions, and discussed what he had seen Roszt and Kaynor doing before they suddenly seemed to quit.

  Finally Arne went to Egarn. Could it be possible, he asked, that Egarn’s machine didn’t work accurately with such a small thing as a message because of its enormous size? A smaller machine might be much more precise with small objects.

  Egarn and Inskel stared at him. Then they stared at each other.

  “The size of the machine shouldn’t make any difference,” Egarn said slowly. “None at all. On the other hand—”