Although there seemed to be no sentries to guard these forbidden passageways, the laws of the Great Race were strict and final, and there was no question what the result of a trespass (unspoken as it was) would be. After careful consideration and some veiled inquiries, however, Peaslee came to believe that such penalties would not apply to him. He was, after all, inhabiting the body of one of their scholars, and could not be expected to understand all the subtleties of their social order. Just as they held his mind hostage, he held their scholar’s body hostage.
Soon, Peaslee’s curiosity overcame his desire to please his captors. Although the library was never deserted, Peaslee chose a time during what seemed to be some sort of political rally to make his foray into the depths of the secret library. It was in his third year. Over a period of weeks, tens of millions of the cone creatures had gathered in the endless city which surrounded the library. Peaslee understood it to be something like an election, but one which also held religious meaning which defied clear explanation. All the Great Race appeared to be drawn to the meeting, and few of those that he knew to be menial workers seemed to be at their regular posts. The Great Library was as deserted as he had ever seen it.
One evening at the height of the rally, with an endless “cheer” of clicking claws filling the night air like the cries of huge crickets, Peaslee, seeing none of the creatures at the opening to the basements, crept down the forbidden slope into the vaults beneath the library. A small, luminescent crystal, clutched in his clumsy, surrogate claw, lit his way. Past a huge, hourglass-shaped opening in the enormous sandstone blocks an unlit hangar-like chamber beckoned. Inside, when he crossed the threshold, the ghostly light of the crystal played across the millions of “books” the Great Race had arranged on hundreds of shelves which lined the room. These tomes were of a uniform design, grey-lidded metal boxes which opened to reveal hundreds of pages of a clear fibrous cellulose which was invulnerable to damage.
Peaslee’s initial disappointment vanished when he realized that he had found the original texts which formed the source of the library above, the “hand”-written recollections of minds snatched from myriad times by the Great Race. Pertinent content from them had been copied into the books which formed the library above, transcribed by calligraphers who translated the various languages into the hieroglyphic scrawl of the Great Race. Peaslee had often wondered why such effort was taken. Why not just stock the library above with the original texts, when machines to translate them were available so readily and worked so well?
The portion of the shelving nearest to the doors concerned later Earth history - Peaslee recognized the looping sigil in the Great Race’s script which represented his species. Peaslee fumbled through the gray binders clumsily, flipping each open in turn, searching for the familiar Latin characters. Soon enough he stumbled upon a dozen binders which had been set aside, written in scrawled, clumsy letters of English:
...so there was nothing to be done. At night the skies burned, lit by the glowing things which turned the war around almost immediately. Enemies became allies, but still nothing seemed to stop them, whatever they were, from over-running first Africa, and then Europe. It went quick, less than two months and Europe was gone. England too. I never thought Speer, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt would sit together at the same table. But they did, for all the good it did them.
Already, the Russo-Japanese front was crumbling; this was late 1945, you see. And the talk from America, that was my home, was that we would not be far behind. Troops piled on troops to stop the advance of the things—there really isn’t any other word I can think of to describe them—but men never came back from the front, and then the president told the world about the Bomb. The atom bomb, like Professor Einstein had worked out
Peaslee watched in horror as the text he was reading disappeared before him, fading out like a lampwick slowly dimmed. For a frantic second, the page remained absolutely blank, and Peaslee feared he had triggered some sort of security device. Then, seconds later, the writing was replaced with new writing, fading in like a magic trick, in an identical hand-written scrawl which read:
...1945. They formed the United Nations, I think. I remember reading about it, anyway, in the New York Post. New York is a big city, like here, which I lived in when the war ended. I was going to fight in the Pacific (that’s an ocean) on islands there to stop Japan (an enemy country) from taking more territory from America (that’s my country), but the war ended abruptly thanks to the A-Bomb. The atom bomb, like Professor Einstein had worked out.
Peaslee’s clawed “hand” flipped to another page and watched it carefully. Over a period of minutes it flickered and changed nine times, its contents shifting, but never settling, often retelling the same events over and over again, but sometimes the narrative was so different that Peaslee could hardly believe what he was seeing. He snatched another random book from the shelves and watched as it too shifted like waves on the ocean.
Dropping the haunted book to the tiles Peaslee fled the vault, terrified at the disorder which was the true basis of the culture above. It seemed even the council of the Great Race knew nothing about the future, the true future, except that it would occur one way or another. Like humans, they were subject to the perils of time. Peaslee realized that the library above was just a placebo, an explanation—a sampling of that the general public were allowed to peruse, which would keep the council in unquestioned authority.
Peaslee had uncovered, to his own dismay, that in many ways the seemingly perfect society of the Great Race was almost exactly identical to that of his native time.
CHAPTER 12:
Circumstance and time conspire
February 19, 1943: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Commander Martin Cook looked tired and disheveled when Arnold entered the spacious room housed in the Department of the Army, Civil Affairs Building on Mercator Avenue. The room and other facilities were on loan from the Chief of Staff, in compliance with orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in D.C. Wild Bill had pulled strings and rubbed elbows to fine effect with some of the top army brass in London, who seemed pleased that the OSS was coming together so easily, despite the fact that army intelligence appeared to be floundering. Besides, anyone in command with a brain knew Donovan had the president’s ear, and the president was a willful, intelligent, and very vengeful man with absolute control over the military.
Unfortunately other matters in North Africa had called Donovan away, and he could not make it to the states for the update on the investigation into Project Parsifal. Cook, eyes bloodshot and hands shaking, appeared in his stead.
Arnold hung his hat and sat down in a plush leather seat.
“Tom,” Cook said in way of greeting and looked out the window.
“Commander,” Arnold replied, and glanced at the scattered contents of his desk. Two manila files lay open amidst a sea of disordered papers and photos along with a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels, a .45 automatic, and an assortment of loose cartridges.
“So...fill me in,” the old man said and slowly sank into his chair with a grunt.
“Me and Barnsby followed up some leads here about Peaslee...it’s in the report. You read it? Well, Barnsby tried some of his voodoo on one of the doc’s books and, well...you know I guess...he’s still in the hospital. Oh, and we found the book. The Observations on the Several Parts of Africa in the Peaslee’s kid’s study.”
“Yeah, I read the report about it...by...what’s his name. The guy we got from Miskatonic?”
“The Africa guy? Smith. Dr. Smith.”
“Yeah, him. It looks pretty grim. It’s almost certainly true. All of it. Though thankfully only the Nazis and us know anything about it.”
“Listen, are you guys going to bring Wingate Peaslee in on this? He could probably help us out.”
“Already done. He’s on his way to Australia along with Mark Steuben.” Cook looked up at Arnold through heavy-lidded, dog-brown eyes. Mark Steuben, another OSS/DELTA GREEN man, had
been with Arnold on the beach at the Cap de la Hague, raining shells down on the innocent and the damned. For some reason it was hard for Arnold to imagine Mark and Peaslee together. It was even harder to imagine Australia, far away and serene and perfect. As the days passed, everything beyond Arnold’s direct knowledge and observation seemed to grow more and more hazy and indistinct. What once seemed assured as fact was fading slowly to fantasy.
“Why Australia?” Arnold fiddled with his lighter and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it in a swift movement.
“Peaslee and his dad went on an expedition there in ‘35. We just got through reading the father’s journals from that period. They...found something out there in the desert. Some type of written record from...before.”
“Before what?”
Cook looked down at his hands on the table, which he had pressed flat to its surface like he was trying to stop them from trembling.
“Before everything.” Cook replied, and when their eyes met, Arnold could see it was eating him up inside.
“I think Barnsby mentioned something like that. A library or something.”
“At first when I read the PISCES stuff on their ‘Talents,’ I wanted to laugh. Now I don’t know what I want to do. Cry, maybe. It seems they can actually do what they say they can do.”
“I believe in Barnsby. Don’t know about the others,” Arnold stated matter-of-factly, looking at the tip of his cigarette. A haze of smoke hovered in the room, coalescing in a cloud amidst the lights in the ceiling.
“The doctors say he’ll be up and around in no time. We’re trying to assemble a new team of DELTA GREEN-briefed OSS men, but our people are few and far between. We’re sending Dr. Smith with you. He’s fluent in the languages and culture of the area. He checks out.” Cook shuffled through some of the papers as he spoke, searching, it seemed, for something specific.
“What about the other men on the team that went into France?”
“They’re gone. All except Steuben, who stayed behind, and Stillman. But Stillman is in no shape to go.”
Arnold and Cook sat in silence for a long time.
“How?” It was all Arnold could say.
“I’ll get you the report. It’s not pretty. PISCES lost two men as well.”
“So what’s the play from here?” Arnold asked and rubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe.
“You’re going to lead a small DG team into the Congo. You’re going to find this Grey city—this Thule, as the Krauts call it, and you’re going to blow it, and everything in it, to hell. That’s the play. Denied to the enemy. Everything we can’t contain, denied to the enemy. Anyone with one of Cornwall’s ‘Talents’ who won’t work for us—denied to the enemy. That’s the policy from now on. Steuben and Peaslee will do the same in Australia.”
Cook pointed at the bottle of Jack Daniels with his eyebrows raised. When Arnold did not reply, the fat man poured himself a large tumbler full of the last of the amber liquid. He downed a third of it at a go, finishing the whole thing in less than a minute. Arnold watched him, thinking about the problems ahead of him like a dancer reviewing an unfamiliar series of steps.
“We’re going to need some jungle specialists.”
“We’re already working on it. I’ll have him debriefed by Steuben in Australia on the way over,” Cook coughed back, wheezing. His bloodshot eyes stared forward into space as if drawn there by some breathtaking sight. He leaned back in his chair and sat transfixed. Arnold wondered what it was the man was seeing in his mind’s eye. The ruins in the Congo ablaze? The Third Reich a fading memory? The war over? Arnold somehow didn’t think that was it.
“That’s all we need for now, Tom. We’ll contact you.”
In his own mind’s eye Arnold beheld the edges of something to which all these events were nothing more than the most insignificant occurrence. Cook, he thought, perhaps, saw the same thing.
Arnold left without saying goodbye. The word somehow didn’t do the meeting justice.
CHAPTER 13:
The play becomes clear when all the actors are dead
February 11, 1943: Somewhere near Myitkyina, Burma
Joe Camp was pretty sure he had malaria, although it was hard to tell if it was just the heat. Buried in the midst of rhododendron bushes beneath the humungous vaulted ceiling of evergreen hardwoods and coated in the all-pervading, ever-present Burmese humidity, it was difficult to gauge whether the droplets on his body were sweat or just water vapor. He decided to believe it was just the humidity and shifted his pack further back so he could glance over a mold-wrapped tree stump at what passed for a road in the interior highlands. Anyway, at 115 degrees in the midst of the hot season, what did it really matter if he had a fever?
Camp imagined what would happen if his mother could see him now, if somehow he found himself back in the real world. Chances were, she would just walk right by him without the slightest hint of recognition. He knew what he looked like from his shaving mirror. As time had passed in the highlands, it had become more and more like some magic device. In the magic mirror he had slowly transformed from the short, muscular, well-groomed football player he once was, to a tiny, gaunt skeleton in sweat-stained, muddied fatigues, with wild, sunken, ice-blue eyes and skin the color of red clay, sprinkled with dozens of bug bites. Joe had begun to think of it as his transformation from American into a Burmese local. Soon enough, he guessed, it would be difficult to pick him out of the lineup of his men—at least without looking at his eyes.
Force 101, team 4a—fourteen men, his men, squatted, invisible in the underbrush around him, waiting for the enemy. Joe Camp had spent months in the jungle now for the OSS. The time frame seemed incredible to him whenever he had access to modern amenities. Luckily, his temptations since showing up for duty in Burma were few. The last time he bathed in a tub was in India during a brief layover, before riding into the jungle on a plane which was literally little more than a bundle of well-placed sticks propelled by an engine that belonged on the back of a rowboat. Since then he had been lucky to eat, much less bathe.
Group 4a had stalked the interior highlands with skill, ambushing Japanese patrols and destroying their handiwork in northern Burma with heavy explosives. Camp, unlike the other western officers, enjoyed the company of the native Burmese Kachins, who comprised the majority of his force. The little men fought with a determination and fervor that westerners could not believe (much less match), and their dispositions were almost always sunny. Few understood why. The Kachins had been made an example by the Japanese. Killing the Japanese therefore made them happy, and it interfered little with their religious beliefs.
Camp recalled a story told with utter sincerity by a boy named Aung, who had collected in his brief time as a guerrilla over thirty pairs of Japanese ears; it was the only thing that Kachin culture considered something of a sport. The boy recalled that when the Japanese had entered the village of Langtau near the Chaukan pass to India, they had nailed every man over twenty to a tree to prevent them from fleeing to join the British forces. The Japanese had made a dreadful mistake. Few besides the Kachins knew the highlands to the northwest so well, and few besides the Kachins in Burma had the courage to fight. If left to their own devices, the Kachins would not have fought at all.
Camp liked the Kachins, but he was secretly happy that the Japanese had crossed the line. The Allies needed all the help they could get in the thinly guarded corridor.
Technically Burma was now a member of the Japanese puppet states which comprised the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In reality, the jungles were overrun with small groups of British, American and Burmese troops, and few places in the north were heavily defended by the Japanese.
In just over six weeks, Camp had picked up the language of the little, happy people who took Japanese ears for sport. Joe spoke eight languages—mostly those of the Far East and a smattering of Romance tongues. It was what his mother had called his “gift.” A natural propensity for language brought him to Harvard and
then to the OSS, and from there it was just a brief jump to the middle of a jungle in Burma.
If mother could only see what his “gift” had gotten him, and where.
The Kachins called him “Father” in their tongue now, and followed him around like he was Christ off the cross. Not only because he was the only white man to speak their language in Force 101, but because he had secured them a shipment of pump action shotguns from Remington (at his family’s expense). Joe preferred his Thompson submachine gun, but the little Kachins would have nothing to do with such technology. Joe once asked why and found the answer as eccentric and insightful as the Kachins were themselves:
“A shotgun is like a machine gun, but all the bullets fire at once. The machine gun is too slow.”
Now Joe Camp sat his rapidly numbing ass on the wet ground, leaning against his pack, watching the path for enemy movement. A report had bled out of Myitkyina that troops burdened with supplies would be heading towards a small Japanese camp on the western slopes of a mountain the Kachins called Loi Leng. From this camp, routine patrols would circulate around the Chaukan Pass intercepting commando groups sneaking over the border from India.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 17
