Havig’s group stopped for a last rest in the house of a young farmer who was no traveler but could be trusted. They needed it for a depot, too. It would have been impossible to go this far through time on this point of Earth’s surface without miniature oxygen tanks. Otherwise, they’d more than once have had to stop for air when the country lay drowned, or been unable to because they were under a mile of ice. Those were strong barriers which guarded the secret of their main base from the Eyrie.
The equipment absorbed most of their mass-carrying ability. Here was a chance to get weapons.
Lantern light glowed mellow on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table, polished iron and copper, stove where wood crackled to keep warm a giant pot of coffee. Though the nearest neighbors were half an hour’s horseback ride straight across the fields, and screened off by trees, Olav Torstad must always receive his visitors after dark. At that, he was considered odd for the occasional midnight gleam in his windows. But he was otherwise a steady fellow; most likely, the neighbors decided, now and then a bachelor would have trouble sleeping.
“You’re already fixing to go again?” he asked.
“Yes,” Havig said. “We’ve ground to cover before dawn, remember.”
Torstad stared at Leonce. “Sure don’t seem right, a lady bound for war.”
“Where else but by her man?” she retorted. With a grin:
“Jack couldn’t talk me out of it either. Spare your breath.”
“Well, different times, different ways,” Torstad said, “but I’m glad I was born in 1850.” In haste: “Not that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
“You’ve done more for us,” Havig answered. “We grub-staked you to this place strictly because we needed something of the kind close to where the Eyrie will be. You assumed the ongoing risk, and the burden of keeping things hidden, and--No matter. Tonight it ends.” He constructed a smile. “You can get rid of what stuff we leave behind, marry that girl you’re engaged to, and live the rest of your days at peace.”
For a few seconds, behind Torstad’s eyes, something rattled its chains. “At peace?” Abruptly: “You will come back, won’t you? Tell me what happened? Please!”
“If we win,” Havig said, and thought how many such promises he had left, how many more his followers must have left, across the breadth and throughout the duration of the spacetime they had roved. He jumped from his chair. “Come on, let’s get the military gear for our men. If you’ll hitch up a team, we’d like a wagon ride to the site. Let’s move!”
Others were moving. They are. They will be.
It was no enormous host; it totaled perhaps three thousand. Some two-thirds were women, the very young, the old, the handicapped: time porters, nurses, whatever kind of noncombatants were required. But this was still too many to gather at one intermediate station, making rumors and traces which an enemy might come upon. Simply bringing them all to America had been an endlessly complex problem in logistics and secrecy.
Beneath huge trees, in a year before Columbus, some took a deer path. The Dakotan who guided them would have become the next medicine man of his tribe, had a patient wanderer not found him. The chronolog he carried, like other leaders elsewhere and elsewhen, would identify an exact place before he set it for an equally precise instant.
Once during the eighteenth century, certain coureurs de bois made rendezvous and struck off into the wilderness.
Not quite a hundred years after, the captain of a group explained to what few white people he met that the government in Washington wished a detailed survey prior to establishing a territory.
Later it became common if unofficial knowledge that you saw Negroes hereabouts—briefly--because this was a station on the Underground Railway.
In the 1920’s one did not question furtive movements and gatherings. It was common if unofficial knowledge that this was a favorite route for importers of Canadian whiskey.
Later an occasional bus marked CHARTERED passed through the area, setting off passengers and baggage in the middle of the night, then proceeding with its sign changed to NOT IN SERVICE.
Toward the close of the century, a jumbo jet lumbered aloft. The motley lot of humans aboard drew no special attention. “International Friendship Tours” were an almost everyday thing, as private organizations and subdivisions of practically every government snatched at any imaginable means to help halt the dream-dance down to catastrophe.
Well afterward, a fair-sized band of horsemen trotted through the region. Their faces and accouterments said they were Mong. The invaders never did establish themselves in these parts, so their early scouts were of no importance.
Havig and his half dozen flashed back into normal time.
His chronolog had winked red an hour before sunrise, on New Year’s Day in the one hundred and seventy-seventh year of the Eyrie’s continuous existence. The sky loomed darkling to the west, where stars and planets stood yet aglow, but icegray in the east. Shadowless light brought forth every brick of walls and keep and towers; it glimmered off window glass and whitened frost upon courtyard paving. Enormous stillness enclosed the world, as if all sound had frozen in that cold which bit lungs and smoked from nostrils.
This band had rehearsed what they must do often enough. Nonetheless his glance swept across them, these his troopers chosen for the heart of the mission.
They were dressed alike, in drab-green parkas, padded trousers tucked into leather boots, helmets and weapons and equipment-loaded belts. He knew their faces better, their very gaits, after lifespan years of comradeship: Leonce, ablaze with eagerness, a stray ruddy lock crossing the brow he had kissed; Chao, Indhlovu, Gutierrez, Bielawski, Maatuk ibn Nahal. For a pulsebeat their hands remained clasped together. Then they let go. He set down his chronolog. They readied their guns ere the sentries at the battlements should spy them and cry out.
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 su
rged 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 liter
al 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.”
There Will Be Time Page 18
