Save for an ikon of the Virgin, their bedroom was decorated in gaiety. Seen by what light trickled in a glazed window, the painted flowers and beasts jeered. It was wrong that a lamb should gambol above Xenia where she lay. She was so small and thin in her nightgown. Skin, drawn tight across the frail bones, was like new-fallen snow dappled with blood. Her mouth was dry, cracked, and gummed. Only the hair, tumbling loose over her bosom, and the huge frightened eyes had luster.
The man in East Roman guise, whom Havig did not know, held his left arm in a practiced grip. Juan Mendoza had the right, and smirked each time he put backward pressure on the elbow joint. He was dressed in Western style, as was Waclaw Krasicki, who stood at the bedside.
“Where are the servants?” Havig asked mechanically.
“We shot them,” Mendoza said.
“What--”
“They didn’t recognize a gun, so that wouldn’t scare them. We couldn’t let a squawk warn you. Shut up.”
The shock of knowing they were dead, the hope that the children had been spared and that an orphanage might take them in, struck Havig dully, like a blow on flesh injected with painkiller. Xenia’s coughing tore him too much.
“Hauk,” she croaked, “no, Jon, Jon--” Her hands lifted toward him, strengthless, and his were caught immobile.
Krasicki’s broad visage had noticeably aged. Years of his lifespan must have passed, uptime, downtime, everywhen an outrage was to be engineered. He said in frigid satisfaction:
“You may be interested to know what a lot of work went on for how long, tracking you down. You’ve cost us, Havig.”
“Why ... did ... you bother?” the prisoner got out.
“You did not imagine we could leave you alone, did you? Not just that you killed men of ours. You’re not an ignorant lout, you’re smart and therefore dangerous. I’ve been giving this job my personal attention.”
Havig thought drearily: What an overestimate of me.
“We must know what you’ve been doing,” Krasicki continued. “Take my advice and cooperate.”
“How did you--?”
“Plenty of detective work. We reasoned, if a Greek family was worth to you what you did, you’d keep in touch with them. You covered your trail well, I admit. But given our limited personnel, and the problems in working here, and everything else we had to do throughout history--you needn’t feel too smug about your five-year run. Naturally, when we did close in, we chose this moment for catching you. The whole neighborhood knows your wife is seriously ill. We waited till you went out, expecting you’d soon be back.” Krasicki glanced at Xenia. “And cooperative, no?”
She shuddered and barked, as an abandoned dog had barked while her father was slain. Blood colored the mucus she cast up.
“Christ!” Havig screamed. “Let me go! Let me treat her!”
“Who are they, Jon?” she pleaded. “What do they want? Where is your saint?”
“Besides,” Mendoza said, “Pat Moriarty was a friend of mine.” He applied renewed pressure, barely short of fracturing.
Through the ragged darknesses which pain rolled across him, Havig heard Krasicki: “If you behave, if you come along with us, not making trouble, okay, we’ll leave her in peace. I’ll even give her a shot from that kit I guess you went to fetch.”
“That ... isn’t ... enough ... Please, please--”
“It’s as much as she’ll get. I tell you, we’ve already wasted whole man-years on your account. Don’t make us waste more, and take added risks. Look, would you rather we broke her arms?”
Havig sagged and wept.
Krasicki kept his promise, but his insertion of the needle was clumsy and Xenia shrieked. “It’s well, it’s well, my darling, everything’s well, the saints watch over you,” Havig cried from the far side of a chasm which roared. To Krasicki: “Listen, let me say good-by to her, you’ve got to, I’ll do anything you ask if you let me say good-by.”
Krasicki shrugged. “Okay, if you’re quick.”
Mendoza and the other man kept their hold on Havig while he stooped above his girl. “I love you,” he told her, not knowing if she really heard him through the fever and terror. The mummy lips that his touched were not those he remembered.
“All right,” Krasicki said, “let’s go.”
Uptime bound, Havig lost awareness of the men on either side of him. They had substance to his senses, like his own body, but only the shadow-flickers in the room were real. He saw her abandoned, reaching and crying; he saw her become still; he saw someone who must have grown worried and broken down the door step in, days later; he saw confusion, and then the chamber empty, and then strangers in it.
So he might have resisted, willed himself to stay in normal time at their first stop for air, an inertness which his captors could not move. But there are ways to erode any will. Better not arrive at the Eyrie crippled alike in body and spirit, ready for whatever might occur to Caleb Wallis. Better keep the capability of revenge.
That thought was vague. The whole of him was drowned in her death. He scarcely noticed how the shadows shifted--the house which had been hers and his torn down for a larger, which caught fire when the Turks took Pera, and was succeeded by building after building filled with faces and faces and faces, until the final incandescence and the drifting radioactive ash--nor their halt among ruins, their flight across the ocean, their further journey to that future where the Sachem waited. In him was nothing except Xenia, who saw him vanish and lay back to die alone, unshriven.
While summer blanketed the Eyrie in heat and brazen light, the tower room where Havig was confined stored cool dimness in its bricks. It was bare save for a washstand, a toilet, a mattress, and two straight chairs. A single window gave upon the castle, the countryside, the peasants at labor for their masters. When you had looked out into yonder sunshine, you were blind for a while.
A wire rope, welded at the ends, stretched five feet from a ring locked around his ankle to a staple in the wall. That sufficed. A time traveler bore along whatever was in direct contact with him, such as clothing. In effect, Havig would have had to carry away the entire keep. He did not try.
“Sit down, do sit down,” Caleb Wallis urged.
He had planted his broad bottom in one of the chairs, beyond reach of his prisoner. Black, epauletted uniform, neatly combed gingery whiskers, bare pate were an assertion of lordship over Havig’s grimed archaic clothes, stubbly jaws, bloodshot and murk-encircled eyes.
Wallis waved his cigar. “I’m not necessarily mad at you,” he said. “In fact, I kind of admire your energy, your cleverness. I’d like to recall them to my side. That’s how come I ordered the boys to let you rest before this interview. I hope the chow was good? Do sit down.”
Havig obeyed. He had not ceased to feel numb. During the night he had dreamed about Xenia. They were bound somewhere on a great trimaran whose sails turned into wings and lifted them up among stars.
“We’re private here,” Wallis said. An escort waited beyond the door, which stood thick and shut. “You can talk free.”
“Supposing I don’t?” Havig replied.
The eyes which confronted him were like bullets. “You will. I’m a patient man, but I don’t aim to let you monkey any further with my destiny. You’re alive because I think maybe you can give us some compensation for the harm you’ve done, the trouble you’ve caused. For instance, you know your way around in the later twentieth century. And you have money there. That could be mighty helpful. It better be.”
Havig reached inside his tunic. He thought dully: How undramatic that a new-made widower, captive and threatened with torture, should be unbathed, and on that account should stink and itch. He’d remarked once to Xenia that her beloved classical poets left out those touches of animal reality; and she’d shown him passages in Homer, the playwrights, the hymners, oh, any number of them to prove him wrong; her forefinger danced across the lines, and bees hummed among her roses ...
“I gather you were ke
eping a wench in Constantinople, and she fell sick and had to be let go,” Wallis said. “Too bad. I sympathize, kind of. Still, you know, lad, in a way you brought it on yourself. And on her.” The big bald head swayed. “Yes, you did. I’m not telling you God has punished you. That could be, but nature does give people what they deserve, and it is not fitting for a proper white man to bind himself to a female like that. She was Levantine, you know. Which means mongrel-Armenian, Asiatic, hunky, spig, Jew, probably a touch of nigger--” Again Wallis’s cigar moved expansively. “Mind, I’ve nothing against you boys having your fun,” he said with a jovial wink. “No, no. Part of your pay, I guess, sampling damn near anyone you want, when you want her, and no nonsense afterward out of her or anybody else.” He scowled. “But you, Jack, you married this’n.”
Havig tried not to listen. He failed. The voice boomed in on him:
“There’s more wrongness in that than meets the eye. It’s what I call a symbolic thing to do. You bring yourself down, because a mixed-breed can’t possibly be raised to your level. And so you bring down your whole race.” The tone harshened. “Don’t you understand? It’s always been the curse of the white man. Because he is more intelligent and sensitive, he opens himself to those who hate him. They divide him against himself, they feed him lies, they slide their slimy way into control of his own homelands, till he finds he’s gotten allied with his natural enemy against his brother. Oh, yes, yes, I’ve studied your century, Jack. That’s when the conspiracy flowered into action, wrecked the world, unlocked the gates for Mong and Maurai ... You know what I think is one of the most awful tragedies of all time? When two of the greatest geniuses the white race ever produced, its two possible saviors from the Slav and the Chinaman, were lured into war on different sides. Douglas MacArthur and Adolf Hitler.”
Havig knew--an instant later, first with slight surprise, next with a hot satisfaction--that he had spat on the floor and snapped: “If the General ever heard you say that, I wouldn’t give this for your life, Wallis! Not that it’s worth it anyway.”
Surprisingly, or maybe not, he provoked no anger. “You prove exactly what I was talking about.” The Sachem’s manner verged on sorrow. “Jack, I’ve got to make you see the plain truth. I know you have sound instincts. They’ve only been buried under a stack of cunning lies. You’ve seen that nigger empire in the future, and yet you can’t see what ought to be done, what must be done, to put mankind back on the right evolutionary road.”
Wallis drew upon his cigar till its end glowed beacon-red, exhaled pungent smoke, and added benign-voiced: “Of course, you’re not yourself today. You’ve lost this girl you cared about, and like I told you, I do sympathize.” Pause. “However, she’d be long dead by now regardless, wouldn’t she?”
He grew utterly intense. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Except us. I don’t believe we travelers need to. You can be among us. You can live forever.”
Havig resisted the wish to reply, “I don’t want to, if you’re included in the deal.” He waited.
“They’re bound to find immortality, far off in the world we’re building,” Wallis said. “I’m convinced. I’ll tell you something. This is confidential, but either I can trust you eventually or you die. I’ve been back to the close of Phase One, more thoroughly than I’d been when I wrote the manual. You remember I’ll be old then. Sagging cheeks, rheumy eyes, shaky liver-spotted hands . . . not pleasant to see yourself old, no, not pleasant.” He stiffened. “This trip I learned something new. At the end, I am going to disappear. I will never be seen any more, aside from my one short visit I’ve already paid to Phase Two. Never. And likewise a number of my chief lieutenants. I didn’t get every name of theirs--no use spending lifespan on that--but I wouldn’t be bowled over if you turned out to be among them.”
Faintly, the words pricked Havig’s returning apathy. “What do you suppose will have happened?” he asked.
“Why, the thing I wrote about,” Wallis exulted. “The reward. Our work done, we were called to the far future and made young forever. Like unto gods.”
In the sky outside, a crow cawed.
The trumpet note died from Wallis’s words. “I hope you’ll be included, Jack,” he said. “I do. You’re a go-getter. I don’t mind admitting your talk about your experiences on your own hook in Constantinople was what gave Krasicki the idea of our raid. And you did valuable work there, too, before you went crazy. That was our best haul to date. It’s given us what we need to expand into the period. Believe me, Caleb Wallis is not ungrateful.
“Sure,” he purred, “you were shocked. You came new to the hard necessities of our mission. But what about Hiroshima, hey? What about some poor homesick Hessian lad, sold into service, dying of lead in his belly for the sake of American independence? Come to that, Jack, what about the men, your comrades in arms, who you killed?
“Let’s set them against this girl you happened to get infatuated with. Let’s chalk off your services to us against the harm you’ve done. Even-Steven, right? Okay. You must’ve been busy in the years that followed. You must’ve collected a lot of information. How about sharing it? And leading us to your money, signing it over? Earning your way back into our brotherhood?”
Sternness: “Or do you want the hot irons, the pincers, the dental drills, the skilled attentions of professionals you know we got--till what’s left of you obliges me in the hope I’ll let it die?”
Night entered first the room, then the window. Havig gazed stupidly at the recorder and the supper which had been brought him, until he could no longer see them.
He ought to yield, he thought. Walls could scarcely be lying about the future of the Eyrie. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em, and hope to be an influence for mercy, in the name of Xenia’s timid ghost.
Yet if--for example--Walls learned about the Maurai psychodrugs, which the Maurai themselves dreaded, and sent men uptime--Well, Julius Caesar butchered and subjugated to further his political career. In the process he laid the keel of Western civilization, which in its turn gave the world Chartres Cathedral, St. Francis of Assisi, penicillin, Bach, the Bill of Rights, Rembrandt, astronomy, Shakespeare, an end to chattel slavery, Goethe, genetics, Einstein, woman suffrage, Jane Addams, man’s footprints on the moon and man’s vision turned to the stars ... yes, also the nuclear warhead and totalitarianism, the automobile and the Fourth Crusade, but on the whole, on balance, in an aspect of eternity--Dared he, mere Jack Havig, stand against an entire tomorrow for the sake of a little beloved dust?
Could he? An executioner would be coming to see if he had put something on tape.
He had better keep in mind that Jack Havig counted for no more in eternity than Doukas Manasses, or Xenia, or anybody.
Except: he did not have to give the enemy a free ride. He could make them burn more of their lifespans. For whatever that might be worth.
A hand shook him. He groped his way out of uneasy sleep. The palm clapped onto his mouth. In blackness: “Be quiet, you fool,” whispered Leonce.
13
A PENCIL FLASHLIGHT came to life. Its beam probed until the iron sheened on Havig’s ankle. “Ah,” she breathed. “That’s how they bottle you? Like I reckoned. Hold this.” She thrust the tube at him. Dizzy, rocked by his heartbeat, scarcely believing, he could not keep it steady. She said a bad word, snatched it back, took it between her teeth, and crouched over him. A hacksaw began to grate.
“Leonce--my dear, you shouldn’t--” he stammered.
She uttered an angry grunt. He swallowed and went silent. Stars glistened in the window.
When the cable parted, leaving him with only the circlet, he tottered erect. She snapped off the light, stuck the tube in her shirt pocket-otherwise, he had glimpsed, she wore jeans and hiking shoes, gun and knife-and grasped him by the upper arms. “Listen,” she hissed. “You skip ahead to sunrise. Let ‘em bring you breakfast before you return to now. Got me? We want ‘em to think you escaped at a later hour. Can you carry it off? If not,
you’re dead.”
“I’ll try,” he said faintly.
“Good.” Her kiss was brief and hard. “Be gone.”
Havig moved uptime at a cautious pace. When the window turned gray he emerged, arranged his tether to look uncut to a casual glance, and waited. He had never spent a longer hour.
A commoner guard brought in a tray of food and coffee. “Hello,” Havig said inanely.
He got a surly look and a warning: “Eat fast. They want to talk to you soon.”
For a sick instant, Havig thought the man would stay and watch. But he retired. After the door had slammed, Havig must sit down for a minute; his knees would not upbear him.
Leonce--He gulped the coffee. Will and strength resurged. He rose to travel back nightward.
The light-gleam alerted him to his moment. As he entered normal time, he heard a hoarse murmur across the room:
“--Can you carry it off? If not, you’re dead.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good.” Pause. “Be gone.”
He heard the little rush of air filling a vacuum where his body had been, and knew he had departed. “Here I am,” he called low.
“Huh? Ah!” She must see better in the dark than he, because she came directly to him. “All ‘kay?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“No chatter,” she commanded. “They may decide to check these hours, ‘spite of our stunt. Here, hold my hand an’ slip downtime. Don’t hurry yourself. I know we’ll make it. I just don’t want ‘em to find out how.”
Part of the Eyrie’s training was in such simultaneous travel. Each felt a resistance if starting to move “faster” or “slower” than the partner, and adjusted the chronokinetic rate accordingly.
A few nights earlier, the chamber was unoccupied, the door unlocked. They walked down shadow stairs, across shadow courtyard, through gates which, in this period of unchallenged reign, were usually left open. At intervals they must emerge for breath, but that could be in the dark. Beyond the lowered drawbridge, Leonce lengthened her stride. Havig wondered why she didn’t simply go to a day before the castle existed, until he realized the risk was too great of encountering others in the vicinity. A lot of men went hunting in the primeval forest which once grew here.
There Will Be Time Page 15
