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“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?”
Ster
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.
Dazed with fatigue and grief, he would do best to follow her lead. She’d gotten him free, hadn’t she?
She really had. He needed a while to conceive of that.
They sat in the woods, one summer before Columbus was born. The trees, oak and elm and birch mingled together, were gigantic; their fragrance filled the air, their leaves cast green shadows upon the nearly solid underbrush around them. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed and a bluejay scolded. The fire glowed low which Leonce had built. On an improvised spit roasted a grouse she had brought down out of a thousandfold flock which they startled when they arrived.
“I can never get over it,” she said, “what a wonderful world this is before machine man screws things up. I don’t think a lot o’ the High Years any more. I’ve been then too often.”
Havig, leaned against a bole, had a brief eerie sense of déjà vu. The cause came to him: this setting was not unlike that almost a mille
“How long for you?” he inquired.
“Since you left me in Paris? ’Bout three years.” She frowned at the bird, reached and turned it above the coals.
“I’m sorry. That was a shabby way to treat you. Why did you want to spring me?”
Her scowl deepened. “S’pose you tell me what happened.”
“You don’t know?” he exclaimed in amazement. “For heaven’s sake, if you weren’t sure why I was under arrest, how could you be sure I didn’t deserve—”
“Talk, will you?”
The story stumbled forth, in bare outline. Now and then, during it, the tilted eyes sought him, but her countenance remained expressionless. At the end she said: “Well, seems my hunch was right. I haven’t thrown away much. Was gettin’ more an’ more puked at that outfit, as I saw how it works.”