Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  The odds favored surprise. The hinterland was firmly con­trolled, had been for long years, would be for longer. Had not the Sachem verified this on his journeys to his future selves? More and more the Eyrie prospered, not alone in wealth but in recruits to serve the great purpose. So one could be at ease during a holiday. As many agents as possible took their fur­loughs in winter, to escape its gloom and cold. But the Sachem was always present for a New Year, whose eve began with cere­monies and speeches, ended with revelry. Who could blame a guard if, in the bitterness before dawn, eyes bleared and lids drooped?

  “Okay,” Havig said; and: “I love you, Leonce,” he whis­pered. Her lips winged across his. The band loped to the door of that tower wherein dwelt Caleb Wallis.

  It was immovable. The woman cursed: “-Oktai’s tail, I didn’ ‘spec’-” Maatuk’s .45 blasted out the lock. The noise smote eardrums and rang between the sleeping walls. A thought flashed through Havig. No combat operation goes perfectly. My studies told me, always allow a margin--But this was the one part of the whole thing where slippage could most readily throw him off the cliff.

  He led their way inside. Behind them, he heard a shout. Was it more puzzled than alarmed, or did he delude himself? Never mind. In the entryroom, up the stairs!

  Soles clattered on stone. The impact jarred through Havig’s shins, clear to his teeth. Four were at his back, leaping along a dusky skyward spiral. Gutierrez and Bielawski had taken sta­tion below, to guard main door and elevator exit. Indhlovu and Chao peeled off on the second and third levels, to capture the apartments of a secretary--Havig didn’t know who he cur­rently was--and Austin Caldwell. And here, next landing, brass-bound, here bulked the portal to Wallis.

  That wasn’t secured. Nobody dared enter uninvited, unless they came armed to bring this whole creation down. Havig flung the door wide.

  Again he knew wainscoting, furriness, heavy desk and chairs, photographs of masters and mother. The air lay hot and damp. Frost blinded windowpanes, making twilight within. Maatuk whirled about to keep the entrance. Havig and Leonce burst on into the suite beyond.

  Wallis surged from a canopied double bed. Havig was flick­eringly shocked at how the past several lifespan years had bitten the man. He was quite gray. The face was less red than netted in broken veinlets, and sagged beneath its weight. Horrible, somehow, because of being funny to see, was his nightshirt. He groped for a pistol on an end table.

  “Ya-a-a-ah!” Leonce screamed, and launched herself in a flying leap.

  Wails vanished from sight. Likewise did she, her fingers upon him. They reappeared, rolling over and over across the floor, wrestling, he unable to flee through time while she gripped him and set her will to stay in the now. Their breath rasped through the shrieks of some commoner girl behind the bed draperies. Havig circled about, in search of a way to help. The grapplers were well matched, and desperate. He saw no opening which wasn’t gone before he could strike.

  Gunfire raged in the anteroom.

  Havig pelted to the inner door, flattened himself, peered around the jamb. Maatuk sprawled moveless. Above him Austin Caldwell swayed, dripped blood, wheezed air through torn lungs, while his revolver wavered in search of more foe-men. The old Indian fighter must have gotten the drop on Chao, or taken a couple of bullets and slain him anyway, as Maatuk had then been slain- “You’re covered! Surrender!” Havig called.

  “Go ... to ... hell ... traitor’s hell ...“ The Colt roared anew.

  Across years Havig remembered many kindnesses and much grim swallowing of pain at what had seemed to be horrors in­escapable in the service of the Sachem. He recalled his own followers, and Xenia. He slipped a minute uptime while he stepped into the doorway, emerged, and fired. His bullet clove air and shattered the glass on Charlemagne’s photograph. Cald­well had crumpled.

  Explosions racketed down in the yard, throughout keep and ancillary buildings. Havig hastened back to Leonce. She had gotten legs around Walls’s lower body and thumbs on his ca­rotid arteries. He beat her about the shoulders, but she lowered her head and hung on. His blows turned feeble. They stopped.

  “Make him fast,” she panted. “Quick.”

  From a pocket Havig drew the set of manacles and chain which were standard equipment for every person of his. Squat­ting, he linked Wallis to the bedstead.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” he said. “Unless somebody comes to release him. You stand guard against that.”

  She bridled. “An’ miss the fun?”

  “That’s an order!” he snapped. She gave him a mutinous look but obeyed. Their whole plan turned on this prisoner. “I’ll see about getting somebody to spell you, soon’s may be,” he said, adding: When the battle’s over. He left. The concubine had fled, he noticed, and wondered briefly whether she was bereaved or relieved.

  On the next level a balcony overlooked the courtyard. Here the Sachem delivered his speeches. Havig stepped forth, into waxing bleak light, and gazed across chaos. Fights ramped between men and knots of men; wounded stirred and groaned, the slain looked shrunken where they lay. Yells and weapon-cracks insulted the sky.

  There didn’t seem to be a pattern to anything which hap­pened, only ugliness. He unshipped a pair of binoculars and studied the scene more closely. They let him identify an oc­casional combatant. Or corpse ... yes, Juan Mendoza yon­der, and, O Christ, Jerry Jennings, whom he’d hoped could be saved--A new squadron of his army blinked into normal time and deployed. And suddenly parachutes bloomed overhead, as those who had leaped out of a twentieth-century airplane, each with his chronolog, entered this day.

  The confusion was more in seeming than truth. From the start, Wallis’s on-duty garrison, most of them commoners, was nearly matched in numbers by a group of their traveler asso­ciates--who had been here for years and had quietly avoided drinking themselves befuddled last night. The fifth column was invented long before Havig was born; but his generation saw the unmerciful peak of its development and use.

  Given it, and information carried forth by its members, and that precise timing which the chronolog made possible, and plans hammered out by a team which included professional soldiers, tested and rehearsed over and over on a mockup of the Eyrie itself ... given this, Havig’s victory was inevitable.

  What counted was to minimize the number of agents who, seeing their disaster, would escape before they could be killed or secured. Of secondary importance in theory, but equal in Havig’s breast, was to minimize casualties. On both sides.

  He let the binoculars dangle loose, took a walkie-talkie radio off his shoulder, and began calling his squadron leaders.

  “Between surprise and efficiency,” he told me, “we didn’t lose many who time-hopped. Some of those we collared ‘later.’ Knowing from the registers who they were, we could make fairly good guesses at where--when they’d head for. It wouldn’t be a random flight, you see. A man would have to seek a milieu where he might survive by himself. That didn’t give too wide a choice.”

  “You didn’t net the entire lot?” I fretted.

  “No, not quite. We could scarcely hope for that.”

  “I should think even one, prowling loose, is too many. He can slip back uptime, though pastward of your attack, and warn--”

  “That never worried me, Doc. I knew nobody ever has, there­fore nobody ever will. Not that that can’t be explained in ordi­nary human terms, quite apart from physics or metaphysics..

  “Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infal­libility.

  “Therefore, those who did escape had their morale pretty well shattered. Their main concern must be to stay hidden from us. And if they thought about the possibility of returning, they’d realize that we’d have
agents of our own planted throughout the period of Wallis’s reign, just a few but enough to keep a lookout for them and hustle them away before any warning could be delivered.” Havig chuckled. “I was surprised myself, when first I learned who some of those people would be. Reuel Orrick, the old carnival charlatan ... Boris, the monk who went to Jerusalem ...“

  He paused for a drink of my Scotch. “No,” he finished, “we simply didn’t want bandits loose who’re able to skip clear of their crimes. And I think--I dare hope--that never happened. How can, say, a condottiere, penniless, educationless, entirely alone, how can he get along in any era of white America or make his way to Europe? No, really, his best bet is to seek out the Indians. And among them he can do better as a medicine man than a robber. He might actually end his days a useful member of the tribe! That’s a single example, of course, but I imagine you get the general idea.”

  “Regardin’ the future,” Leonce said, her tone tiger-soft, “we hold that. The Eyrie for the years it has left; the Phase Two complex till it’s no longer needed--an’ we built it. We’ve learned from our campaign. Nobody will shake us loose.”

  “Well, in a military sense,” her husband was quick to put in. “It can’t be done overnight, but we mean to raise the Eyrie’s subjects out of peonage, make them into a free yeomanry. Phase Two never will have subjects: instead, non-traveler mem­bers of our society. And--goes without saying--our agents be­have themselves. They visit the past for nothing except research and recruitment. When they need an economic base for opera­tions, they make it by trade which gives value for value.”

  Leonce stroked fingers across his cheek. “Jack comes from a sentimental era,” she crooned.

  I frowned in my effort to understand. “Wait a minute,” I protested. “You had one huge problem with spines and fangs, right after you took the Eyrie. Your prisoners. What about them?”

  An old trouble crossed Havig’s countenance. “There was no good answer,” he said tonelessly. “We couldn’t release them, nor those we arrested as they came back from furlough or sur­prised in their fiefs. We couldn’t gun them down. I mean that in a literal sense; we couldn’t. Our whole force was drawn from people who had a conscience, able to learn humaneness if they hadn’t been brought up with it. Nor did we want to keep any­body chained for life in some secret dungeon.”

  Leonce grimaced. “Worse’n shootin’, that,” she said.

  “Well,” Havig plodded on, “you may remember--I think I told you, and the telling is closer to your present than it is to mine--about those psychodrugs they have in the late Maurai era. Do you recall? My friend Carelo Keajimu will be afraid of them, they give such power. Inject a person, talk to him while he’s under the influence, and he’ll believe whatever you order him to believe. Absolutely. Not fanatically, but in an ‘of course’ way that’s far more deeply rooted. His own mind will supply rationalizations and false memories to explain contra­dictions. You see what this is? The ultimate brainwash! So com­plete that the victim never even guesses there ever was anything else.”

  I whistled. “Good Lord! You mean you converted those crooks and butcher boys to your side, en masse?”

  Havig shuddered. “No. If nothing else, I at least could never have stood such a gang of, of zombies. It’d have been neces­sary to wipe their entire past lives, and--impractical, anyhow. Keajimu had arranged for several of my bright lads to be trained in psychotechnology, but their job was quite big enough already.”

  He drew breath, as if gathering courage, before he pro­ceeded: “What we destroyed in our prisoners was their belief in time travel. We brought them to their home milieus--that took a lot of effort by itself, you realize--and treated them. They were told they’d had fever, or demonic possession, or whatever was appropriate; they’d imagined uncanny things which, being totally impossible, must never be mentioned and best never thought about; now they were well and should return to their ordinary lives.

  “Our men released them and came back for more.”

  I pondered. “Well,” I said, “I admit finding the idea a bit repulsive myself. But not too much. I’ve been forced to do cer­tain things, tell certain lies, to patients and--”

  Leonce stated: “There were two exceptions, Doc.”

  “Come with me,” the mind molder said. His voice was gentle. Drug-numbed, Caleb Wallis clung to his hand as he left.

  Havig remained, often toiling twice around the same clock, till he and his lieutenants had properly underway the immense task of making over the Eyrie. But time flowed, time flowed. At last he had no escape from the moment when the psycho-technician told him he could enter that guarded tower.

  Perhaps the most appalling thing was how well the Sachem looked, how jauntily he sat behind his desk in an office from which scars and bloodstains were blotted as if they had never been.

  “Well!” he greeted. “Good day, my boy, good day! Sit down. No, pour for us first. You know what I like.”

  Havig obeyed. The small eyes peered shrewdly at him. “Turned out to be a mighty long, tough mission, yours, hey?” Wallis said. “You’ve aged, you have. I’m sure glad you carried it off, though. Haven’t read your full report, but I intend to. Meanwhile, let’s catch up with each other.” His glass lifted. “To the very good health of us both.”

  Havig forced down a sip and lowered himself to a chair.

  “You’ve doubtless heard already, mine hasn’t been the best,” Walls continued. “Down and out for quite a while. Actual brain fever. Some damn germ from past or future, probably. The sawbones claims germs have evolution like animals. I’ve about decided we should curtail our explorations, partly on that account, partly to concentrate on building up our power in normal time. What d’ you think of that?”

  “I think it would be wise, sir,” Havig whispered.

  “Another reason for pulling in our horns is, we lost a lot of our best men while you were away. Run of bad luck for us. Austin Caldwell, have you heard? And Waclaw Krasicki--Hey, you’re white’s a ghost! What’s wrong? Sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes, sir. . . . Still tired. I did spend a number of years downtime, and--”

  --and it had been Leonce who found Krasicki chained, said, “Xenia,” drew her pistol and shot him in the head. But it was Havig who could not make himself be sorry this had happened, until Xenia sought him in his sleep and wept because he did not forgive.

  Well. “I’ll recover, sir.”

  “Fine. Fine. We need men like you.” Wallis rubbed his brow. For a minute his voice came high and puzzled: “So many peo­ple here. So many old gone--or are they? I can’t tell. I look from my balcony and see strangers, and think I ought to see, oh, somebody named Juan, somebody named Hans ... many, many... but I can’t place them. Did I dream them while I lay sick?” He hugged himself, as if winter air had seeped through into the tropical warmth around him. “Often, these days, I feel alone, alone in all space and time--”

  Havig mustered briskness: “What you need, sir, if I may suggest it, is an extended vacation. I can recommend places.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right. I do.” Walls gulped from his tumbler and fumbled after a cigar.

  “When you return, sir,” Havig said, “you ought to work less hard. The foundation has been laid. We’re functioning smoothly.”

  “I know. I know.” Walls lost hold of his match.

  “What we need, sir, is not your day-by-day instruction any longer. We have plenty of competent men to handle details. We need more your broad overview, the basic direction you foresee--your genius.”

  Behind the gray whiskers, Walls simpered. This time he got his cigar lit.

  “I’ve been talking about it with various officers, and thinking a lot, too,” Havig proceeded. “They’ve discussed the matter with you, they said. Sir, let me add my words to theirs. We be­lieve the ideal would be if a kind of schedule was established for your passage through the future. Of course, it’d include those periods your past self will visit, to let you show him how well everythi
ng is going. Otherwise, however--uh--we don’t think you should spend more than a minimum of your lifespan in any single continuous set of dates. You’re too precious to the grand project.”

  “Yes. I’d about decided the same for myself.” Wallis nodded and nodded. “First, like you say, a real good vacation, to straighten out my thoughts and get this fuzziness out of my head. Then, a ... a progress through tomorrow, observing, issuing orders, always bound onward ... till at the end, when my work is done--Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “God!” I exclaimed, a word as close to prayer as I’d come in fifty skeptical years. “If ever there was a revenge--”

  “This wasn’t,” Havig said through lips drawn taut.

  “What, well, what’d it feel like, when he came?”

  “I’ve avoided being on hand for most of that. When I had to be, it was naturally always a festive occasion, and nobody cared if I got drunk. Men who regularly deal with him told me--tell me--one gets used to leading the poor apparition through his Potemkin villages, and off to some sybaritic place downtime for one of the long orgiastic celebrations which use up and shorten his lifespan. They’re almost fond of him. They go to great lengths to put on a good show. That eases their thought of the end.”

  “Huh? Isn’t he supposed to vanish in his old age?”

  Havig’s fist knotted on the arm of his chair. “He did. He will. He’ll scream in the night, and his room will be empty. He must have thrown himself far in time, because searchers up and down will find nothing reappearing.” Havig tossed off his drink. I saw he needed more, and obliged.

  Leonce caressed him. “Aw, don’t let it gnaw you, darlya,” she murmured. “He’s not worth that.”

  “Mostly I don’t,” he said, rough-throated. “Rather not dis­cuss the business.”