To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Page 46
“Count Dracula!”
“Yes?”
“Go hang by your heels!”
“Don’t interrupt again. The operation has been fully planned. Jack the Ripper and Lucrezia Borgia will go with you, and coach you. You can kill him in his bed, or, if you balk, you will be killed as he is killed and the two of you arranged in a tableau that will give substance to the rumors about him.”
The attention of everyone was on the row between the new chairman and me; proctors poured in off the balcony before they were seen. But a voice I recognized called out, “Watch it, Maureen!” and I dived for the deck.
The robes and hoods were the Ku Klux Klan ersatz of the proctors, but the voice was the voice of Dagmar. When I turned my head at her voice, I spotted Pixel with her.
Time Corps military units have stun guns they use when killing must be selective. They fanned the room with them. I got the edge of one charge, did not quite pass out but did not object when a big, husky proctor (one of my husbands!) scooped me up. Then we were all out on the balcony and into a small troop carrier hovering at the rail.
I heard the door close, felt it in my ears. “Ready?”
“Ready!”
“Has somebody got Pixel?”
“I’ve got him! Let’s go!” (Hilda’s voice)
And then we were home in Boondock, on the parking lawn at the Long residence.
A voice I know well said, “Secure all systems,” and the pilot turned in his seat and looked at me. “Mama,” he said mournfully, “you sure give me a lot of grief.”
“I’m sorry, Woodrow.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped.”
“I’m sure you would, dear. But I was merely scouting.”
“But you should have—”
Hilda interrupted. “Stop it, Lazarus. Mama Maureen is tired and probably hungry. Mama, Tamara has lunch ready. Two hours from now—local time fourteen hundred—is an operation briefing, all hands. Jubal in charge of the briefing and—”
“‘Operation briefing’? What operation?”
“Your operation, Mama,” Woodrow answered. “We’re going to go find Gramp. Either rescue him, or slip him into a body bag. But we’re doing it right, this time. It’s a Time Corps major operation, resources as needed; the Circle of Ouroboros is unanimous. Mama, why didn’t you tell me?”
Hilda said, “Shut up, Woodie. And stay shut. We’ve got Mama Maureen back and that’s all that counts. Right, Pixel?”
“Rrrrite!”
“So let’s go to lunch.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
At The Coventry Cusp
I didn’t eat much.
The party was in my honor and I loved it. But I needed two mouths one for eating, one for the fifty-odd people who wanted to kiss me—an I wanted to kiss them. I wasn’t really hungry. Even when I was a prisoner in the Cathedral the food had been adequate, and when I was another sort of prisoner with the Committee for Aesthetic Deletions, I was quite well fed, within the limits of hotel cooking.
But I was starved for love, and warm and loving people.
Did I say the party was in my honor? Well, yes, but any party Pixel attends is primarily in his honor. He is sure of that and behaves accordingly. He zigzagged among the couches, tail high, accepting hand feeding, and rubbing against his friends and retainers.
Dagmar came over, asked Laz to make room, and squeezed in by me—hugged me and kissed me. I found that I was leaking tears. “Dagmar, I can’t tell you how I felt when I heard your voice. Are you going to stay here? You’ll like it here.”
She grinned at me, hanging on to my neck. “Do you think I want to go back to Kansas City? Compared with Kay See, Boondock is Heaven.”
“Good! I’ll sponsor you.” I had my arm around her, which caused me to add, “You’ve put on a few pounds and it becomes you. And such a beautiful tan! Or is it out of a spray bomb?”
“No, I did it the best way, lying in the sun and increasing the dosage slowly. Maureen, you won’t believe what a treat sunbathing is to someone who would be risking a public flogging if she sunbathed in her home town.”
Laz said, “Mama, I wish I could tan the way Dagmar does, instead of these king-size freckles.”
“You get that from me, Lapis Lazuli; I always freckle. It’s the price we pay for red hair.”
“I know. But Dagmar can sunbathe every day, month after month, and never get a freckle. Look at her.”
I sat up straight. “What did you say?”
“I said she doesn’t freckle. All our men are following her around.” Laz tickled Dagmar in the ribs. “Aren’t they, Dag?”
“Not so!”
“You said, ‘Month after month—’ Dagmar, I saw you last two weeks ago. Less than three. How long have you been here?”
“Me? Uh…slightly over two years. Yours was a tough case—or so they tell me.”
After being in the Time Corps twenty years of my personal time, seven years of Boondock time, I should not have been surprised. Time paradox is no news to me; I keep a careful journal to keep me sorted out, Maureen’s personal time versus times and time lines and dates for each of the places I scout. But this time I was the subject of the operation (Operation Triple-M = Mama Maureen is Missing). I had been gone (my personal time) five and a half weeks…but it had taken over two years to find me and rescue me.
Laz called Hilda over to straighten me out. She snuggled in between Lorelei Lee and me on my other side; the couch was getting crowded. But Hilda does not take up much space. She said, “Mama Maureen, you told Tamara that you were just going away for a day’s holiday. She knew you were fibbing, of course, but she never contradicts any of our little white lies. She thought you were just shuttling to Secundus for some private fun and maybe some shopping.”
“Hilda Mae, I did intend to be back here the next day, no matter how long I spent in research. I planned to spend a few weeks in the British Museum in 1950, time line two, soaking up as much detail as possible about the Battle of Britain, 1940-41. I had a fresh recorder implant for that purpose. I didn’t dare go to England during that war without careful preparation; England was a battle zone—easy to be shot as a spy. I would have done the research and been back the next day, in time for dinner…if that time-twister bus had not broken down.”
“It didn’t break down.”
“Huh? I mean, ‘Excuse me?’”
“It was sabotage, Mau. The Revisionists. The same pascoodnyoks who came so close to killing Richard and Gwen Hazel and Pixel on time line three. We don’t know why they wanted to stop you, or why they chose that method; neither side was taking prisoners, and we killed too many too fast. By ‘we’ I don’t mean me; I’m the drawing-room type as everybody knows. I mean the old pros, Richard and Gwen and Gretchen and a strike force from time line five commanded by Lensman Ted Smith. But the Circle had put me in charge of Operation Triple-M, and I did dig out information that led us to the Revisionists. I got most of it from one of my employees, the pilot of that bus. I made a bad mistake, Maureen, in hiring that evil maggot. My poor judgment almost cost your life. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what? Hilda Mae, my precious, if you hadn’t rescued me in Albuquerque, years ago, I would be dead, dead, dead! Don’t ever forget it, because I never forget it.”
“Spare me your gratitude, Mau; I had fun. Both times. I borrowed some snakes from Patty Paiwonski and hung this oaf upside down over a snake pit while I questioned him. That sharpened his memory and got us the correct time line, place, and date—Kansas City in Gregorian 2184 starting at June twenty-sixth, on a previously unexplored variant of time line two, one in which the Second American Revolution never took place. It is now designated time line eleven, and is a nasty enough place that the Circle put it in the Someday File for cleaning or cauterizing when we get around to it.”
Hilda leaned down and twiddled her fingers at Pixel, spoke to him in cat language; he came at once and settled in her lap, purring loudly. “We
put agents into that version of Kansas City but they lost you the same day you arrived. Or that night. They traced you from Grand Hotel Augustus to a private home, from there to the mayor’s palace, and then outdoors into the carnival. And lost you. But we had established that Pixel was with you…even though he was here every day, too. Or almost—”
“How does he do that?”
“How does Gay Deceiver have two portside bathrooms without being lopsided? Maureen, if you insist on believing in World-as-Logic you will never understand World-as-Myth. Pixel knows nothing about Einsteinian space-time, or the speed of light as a limit, or the Big Bang, or any of those fancies dreamed up by theorists, so they don’t exist for him. Pixel knew where you were, inside the little world that does exist for him, but he doesn’t speak much English. In Boondock, that is. So we took him where he can speak English—”
“Huh?”
“Oz, of course. Pixel doesn’t know what a cathedral is but he was able to describe that one fairly well once we were able to get his mind off all those wonderful new places to investigate. The Cowardly Lion helped us question him, and for the first time in his life Pixel was impressed—I think he wants to grow up to be a lion. So we hurried back and sent a task force to get you out of the Supreme Bishop’s private jail. And you weren’t there.”
Dagmar picked it up. “But I was, and Pixel led them straight to me—looking for you. I was in the cell you had been in—the proctors came for me as soon as you escaped.”
“Yes,” agreed Hilda. “Dagmar had befriended you and that was not a safe thing to do, especially after the Supreme Bishop died.”
“Dagmar! I’m sorry!”
“About what? ‘All’s Well That Ends Well,’ to coin a phrase. Look at me now, ducks; I like it here. So back they went to Oz, taking me along this time, and after I listened to Pixel, I was able to tell Hilda that you were being held in Grand Hotel Augustus—”
“Hey! That’s where I started!”
“And that’s where you wound up, too, in a suite that isn’t in the hotel directory and can be reached from inside only by a private elevator from the sub-basement. So we came in by the scenic route, and caught the Committee with their pants down.”
Lazarus had joined us, and now sat on the grass at my knees, without interrupting—and I wondered how long his angelic behavior would last. Now he said, “Mama, you don’t know how true your words are. You remember when we moved? I was in high school.”
“Yes, certainly. To our old farmhouse, out south.”
“Yes. Then after World War Two you sold it, and it was torn down.”
(How well I remembered!) “Torn down to build the Harriman Hilton. Yes.”
“Well, Grand Hotel Augustus is the Harriman Hilton. Oh, after more than two centuries not much is the same structure, but the continuity is there. We researched it, and that’s how we located this VIP suite that is not known to the public.” He rubbed his cheek against my knee. “That’s all, I guess. Hilda?”
“I think so.”
“Wait a moment!” I protested. “What became of that baby? And the man with the bloody stump? The one with his arm chopped off in that accident.”
“But, Maureen,” Hilda said gently, “I tell you three times: It was not an accident. That ‘baby’ was just a prop, a lifelike animation, to keep your hands busy and your attention distracted. The ‘wounded’ man was a piece of grisly misdirection while they injected you—an old amputee with makeup; he wasn’t freshly maimed. When I had my driver hanging over the snakes, he became downright loquacious and told me many details, mostly nasty.”
“I’d like to speak to that driver!”
“I’m afraid you can’t. I don’t encourage employees to sell me out Maureen. You are a gentle soul. I’m not.”
“The surgical teams will be”—we were gathered in a lecture room in Ira Johnson Hall, BIT, and Jubal had started his briefing—“matched as nearly as possible in professional background. Tentatively they are:
“Dr. Maureen with Lapis Lazuli as her scrub nurse;
“Dr. Galahad with Lorelei Lee;
“Dr. Ishtar with Tamara;
“Dr. Harshaw—that’s me—with Gillian;
“Dr. Lafe Hubert aka Lazarus, with Hilda; and
“Dr. Ira Johnson with Dagmar Dobbs.
“Dagmar, your match with Johnson Prime is not too close; you are over-qualified by a century and a half, plus whatever you have learned here. But it’s the best we can manage. Dr. Johnson will not know that you are assigned to him. However, we know from library research and from quite a lot of oral history research—interviews conducted by field agents in Coventry and elsewhere in the years 1947-50, recording the experiences of persons who served in civil-defense first-aid teams in that war—we know that team-up between surgeon and nurse could be last minute, scratch, either one of them not fully qualified. Battle conditions Dagmar. If you get there first when the sirens sound—and you will—Dr. Johnson will simply accept you.”
“I’ll try.”
“You will succeed. All of us assigned to first aid will be wearing gowns and masks that won’t look odd in wartime England, 1941, and you’ll be using surgical instruments and other gear that does not scream anachronism…although anachronisms won’t matter much, we think, in the pressure of a heavy bombing raid.”
Jubal looked around the hall. “Everyone in this operation is a volunteer. I can’t emphasize too often that this is an actual battle you are going into. If you are killed in England in 1941, history may be revised—but you will be dead. Those so-called ‘iron bombs’ used by the Nazi Luftwaffe will kill you just as dead as an exotic weapon of a later century. For that reason all of us are volunteers and anyone can quit right up to H-hour. All of Major Gretchen’s young ladies are volunteers…and are on max hazard pay, as well.” Jubal stopped and cleared his throat, then went on,
“But there is one volunteer we don’t need, don’t want, and who is urgently requested to stay home.”
Jubal looked around again. “Ladies and gentlemen, what in the hell are we going to do about Pixel? When the bombs start falling and the wounded start piling up at that field station, the last thing we need is a cat who can’t be shut up and can’t be shut out. Colonel Campbell? He’s your cat.”
My grandson Richard Ames Campbell answered, “You have that the wrong way around, Doctor. I don’t own Pixel. Whatever ownership there may be points in the other direction. I agree with you that we can’t afford to have him underfoot during battle. But I don’t want him there on his own account; he’s too unsophisticated to know that bombs can kill him. He got involved in another fire fight when he was just a kitten…and it did almost kill him. I don’t want that ever to happen again. But I never have figured out how to lock him up.”
“Just a moment, Richard.” Gwen Hazel stood up. “Jubal, may I offer a suggestion?”
“Hazel, it says on the organization chart that you are in command of this operation, all phases. I think that entitles you to make a suggestion. One, at least.”
“Come off it, Jubal. There is a third member of our family that has more influence over Pixel than either Richard or I. My daughter Wyoming.”
“Does she volunteer?”
“She will.”
“Stipulating that she will, can she control Pixel every second for about four hours? For technical reasons involving how we handle the time/space gates we will use about that much Boondock time. So Dr. Burroughs tells me.”
I interrupted. “May I say something?”
“Hazel, do you yield?”
“Don’t be silly, Jubal; of course I do.”
“Certainly we should use Wyoh; the child is utterly reliable. But don’t have her try to hang on to Pixel here; one sneeze and he’s gone. Take both of them to Oz and have them stay with Glinda. With Betsy, rather, but with Glinda’s magic to insure that Pixel doesn’t walk through any walls.”
“Hazel?” Dr. Harshaw inquired.
“They’ll both love it.”
The executive computer’s voice came out of the air: “Thanks, Papa Jubal, but that’s ‘Shiva’s’ work—Mycroft Holmes and me linked in synergistic parallel, with Minerva waving the baton. Now that I’ve got you all gathered together, let me remind you that all of you are invited to our wedding, Minnie and me to Mike, after the conclusion of Operation Coventry Cusp. So you all had better start thinking about wedding presents.”
“Teena, you are crassly materialistic and neither of your composite bodies can possibly be ready that soon.”
“Gotcha! Ish okayed moving our bodies to Beulahland, so now we can be uncorked and animated on any date we pick. You better study up on the laws of temporal paradox, Jubal.”
Dr. Harshaw sighed. “Conceded. I look forward to kissing the brides. Now will you please let us get on with the operation?”
“Don’t sweat it, Pops. You know or should know that there is never any hurry in a time operation.”
“True. But we’re all a bit eager. Friends, Teena—or Shiva—built our practice field from photos, stereos, holos, and motion pictures taken at Coventry on the first of April, 1941. You will recognize 1941 as a date so far back that all time lines patrolled by the agents of the Circle of Ouroboros are, in 1941, a single time line. In short, anything we do in Coventry in 1941 affects all civilized time lines—‘civilized’ in a parochial sense, of course; the Circle is not unbiased.
“Research for this operation turned up an odd fact. Lazarus?”
My son stood up. “History of World War Two 1939-1945 as I recall it shows a more favorable outcome in England and in Europe than that which turned up in this operation’s field research. For example, my oldest brother, Brian Smith, Jr., was wounded in the landing at Marseilles, whereupon he was sent to England, to the Salisbury Plains and the American training command. Mama?”