The young man was horror-stricken. “Mr. Steward, if you aren’t—” And then he broke off, belatedly aware that he was the butt of a joke. A hasty glance at Evelyn’s constrained face confirmed the suspicion.
The devil take the Characters! He briefly wished, throttling the surge of guilt, that someday some Character would overstay his tolerance limits and meet himself later returning with the regular crew on assignment. It would serve the clown right to cancel himself out.
The chamber door swung open behind them and Whittle entered on bouncy step.
“Ah, here we are,” he greeted them, “here we are. All ready, Mr. Steward? All ready, gentlemen?”
In answer he received two “Yes, sirs,” and a “Yep.”
“The briefing complete, I trust?”
Evelyn said, “Yes, sir.”
“Splendid! Now then, Mr. Steward, I trust you are fully prepared. Remember our motto: We Sift the Sands of Time. We always strive to give our client value for value received.”
Steward glanced at Evelyn and silently mouthed the words, “Our motto is for the birds.” To Whittle, he complained, “The underwear itches.”
“Splendid. Authenticity, sir. You know your task. Scout the village and get acquainted; meet the people; verify the hour of the speech; inspect Major’s Hall and make plans for your recordings. We will be awaiting your speedy return, Mr. Steward. This little machine runs on money, you know.” He finished with an appreciative giggle at his own joke.
“Will you bake me a cake?” Steward asked.
“My dear sir, you are a jocular fellow. Come, come now, it is nearly time for the shoot. What, gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir,” and “Yes, sir.”
Benjamin Steward turned his back on them and blew Evelyn a secret kiss. He slid his rangy length into the bullet and lay down on the floor. An engineer stood over him, checking each preparation on a tally sheet. Steward pulled the chronograph key down onto his stomach, rested the soles of his feet lightly on the kick-bar, closed and locked the door, and firmly grasped the two handrails. His thumbs were resting at the bases of the push buttons.
“Fire one, you jackasses,” he said aloud within the soundproof confines of the missile.
Whittle smilingly stepped away as the engineers ran up a safety barrier enclosing the dais. Before completely sealing it off, they moved to either end of the projectile and attached cables to the protruding terminals. That done, the engineers retreated to their stations at the instrument panels to run the final checks. Satisfied at last, one of them turned and signaled the Character. The other watched a chronometer.
Whittle lifted his fingers to wave good-bye. Evelyn studied him with a calm face, her emotions hidden. Steward blinked, and closed his eyes against the alternate, dazzling flashes of lightning that would follow.
The engineer closed a switch and the bullet vanished.
The electrical cables, only minutes ago carefully connected to the terminals, now emptied onto nothing which was discernible. The dais was vacant.
4
LINCOLN’S LAND
BENJAMIN STEWARD’s eyes were jolted open when the machine dropped. His backbone protested the cruel blow.
“Damn all engineers!”
He stared upward and around him with astonishment, to repeat the malediction with some choice phrases added.
The vehicle was under water.
Reaching for the chronograph key, he laboriously tapped out: Snafu.
The one-word message instantaneously shot forward seven centuries to the terminus in chamber B, using the machine’s own secure timeline as a carrier beam. It was the only means of communication possible between the base and the field.
The engineers wouldn’t know the meaning of that obsolete term, of course, but they would have sufficient curiosity to request a translation from the files. And in due time the files would deliver it up. Steward’s only regret was that the sting would be deleted from the message; the translator would substitute one word for another.
He waited impatiently, knowing that the distant instruments had revealed his predicament.
After a long moment the missile began rising. It broke surface and he found the thing had dropped into the muddy waters of a creek. He hoped the splash hadn’t attracted attention.
The key on his stomach came alive: Guidance?
Steward glanced around quickly and found he was alone. He tapped out an answer.
Starboard 10 ft.
The missile drifted away from the creek. Steward picked out the exposed roots of a great tree growing on the creekbank.
Down 3 in. he messaged. Astern 2 ft.
The remote engineers moved the machine according to his directions. Steward continued sending in his slow fashion, guiding the vehicle well into the interlaced roots. Invisible or not, he remembered without amusement a racing horseman once stumbling over the carrier. The unlucky fool broke his neck, the horse ran away, and Steward had known several anxious moments before he relocated the machine. It would not be lost to him again.
When the bullet was securely tucked among the roots, he gently rocked it to and fro to form a muddy bed. A final message went forward.
Fix.
Steward swung the key away from his belly and depressed the twin buttons. The door slid smoothly open.
“Land ho! Mister Christian.”
He felt a wild, joyful exhilaration, as he always did. Although he was the veteran of some forty or fifty shoots, each new one always thrilled him. Each one was a new experience, a new exploration into living history.
Two distinct impressions rolled through the open door to greet him, as he had expected they would.
The sound of gently running water was his introduction to the world of 1856, and it was a pleasant sound. The crisp, almost cold spring air which followed was equally pleasant. It was markedly cooler than the spring air of his homeland, but welcome nevertheless. The air was new; air he had not breathed before.
Steward wormed his way out of the cramped machine and crawled among the roots to the top of the creekbank. Behind him, the missile was no more than a shimmering nothing, glimpsed from the corner of the eye. Of such things are mirages made.
It was just sunrise.
Steward looked at his pocket watch. It had stopped.
Sunrise-plus or minus nothing. The engineers had fouled twice on the same shoot. They could be proud of themselves and congratulate each other for running at par.
The fresh prairie air was invigorating and he gulped it in like a hungry man, reveling in the sweetness of it. It was always like this when he escaped the cities and found himself in the open country. The cities were missing the real breath of life.
Obeying an impulse, he sat down on the dew-wet grass and spread his hands, letting his fingers curl about the tufts of grass. The sod was cool and refreshing. He wished that he could fully recall a phrase which lingered on the rim of his mind—something about being homesick for dirt. He was that. The feel of moist grass readily brought another ancient line to the fore: The wizard silence of the hours of dew. That was apt, here. Or nearly apt-he could hear a dog barking somewhere. But inwardly and wholly, he was and always had been homesick for dirt.
A sigh of contentment escaped his lips. This was living.
This was the bright kind of living which Evelyn, Whittle, Peabody and the engineers would never know. They didn’t want to know it; they were chained to their age, their world and their occupations. They were as firmly rooted in their native lifetimes as was the great building rooted in the soil of Inner Cleveland. This kind of zestful, adventurous living was reserved to the Characters.
The dog barked again and he sought out the source.
In the near distance stood a thick grove of trees and after a moment he spotted a column of smoke rising above their tops. The dog was there, and other sounds of human habitation. The grove was too small to conceal a village. It probably contained an Indian camp.
He debated whether or not to investigate th
e grove and then decided against it. The Indians just might notice he was unarmed. Twisting around, he searched the prairie. The settlement was a mile or more behind him.
Research was wrong again—but he had long since become used to that. For all their massive files and endless data, for all their professional pains, they frequently went astray on the finer details. This was not a primitive village but a thriving town.
It covered a surprisingly large area for an isolated prairie town and he knew that indicated growth. A number of tents were pitched on the outskirts while several farmhouses closely ringed the town’s borders. His prying eyes picked out a telegraph line and then a railroad beneath it. A cluster of low buildings about the rails would be the depot and the repair shops. There was another and smaller settlement a few miles to the north but he could not guess if it was a part of the town or a separate entity of its own. The briefing mentioned only one village.
Steward chose the larger and nearer town as his probable target.
But nothing impelled him to start moving.
Contentedly, he sat where he was and watched Mr. Lincoln’s sun come up. That was exciting, too.
Once again—as it had always happened on past shoots—he experienced the keen regret that this (or that, or the other,) was not his native age. The other man’s air was infinitely more pleasant to breathe, the other man’s grass was greener, the other man’s world wilder and more agreeable. The other man invariably lived in a more envied, provocative year.
Envied? Steward examined his choice of adjectives, and then agreed with it. He was envious of the other man.
He knew most of his own weaknesses. He had been born out of step with time and never permitted himself to forget it. He had recognized that temporal misframe even before embarking on his very first journey to another era, before discovering firsthand what another world was like.
The sight, sound and smell of that first new world confirmed his belief. He envied the people in it. Home just wasn’t worth a tinker’s dam afterward.
Any prehistoric date-or at least, any of those prehistoric dates he had thus far witnessed—were vastly preferable to his own regimented day and age. Even that ill-starred shoot to the Mediterranean to record the double suicides of Antony and Cleopatra; that world was not all pain and death, not all bread and circuses. The good life was available to those who had the wit to search it out.
Each new world, he was forever reminding himself, was where he should be. The here and the now. He could have been born on this rolling prairie or yonder in the grove. He could have been a part of Mr. Lincoln’s world and taken an active interest in it. A man could really live in this lush, green world.
The Character said, “Damn!” and reluctantly got to his feet.
A profound melancholy had slipped up unawares to seize him. The mood was more pointed than any he had known before. This world was lovelier than any he had ever seen, but it could not be his.
Steward studied the landmarks; the towering tree, the creek and the shimmering wraith nestled within the exposed roots, the nearby Indian grove. The excited dog would not hush. He fixed the exact locations in his mind and struck off for the town.
It was not difficult to pawn the gold ring.
He took breakfast in a hotel dining room, not wishing to rely on any of the numerous boardinghouses which advertised meals to convention visitors, and not trusting the sanitary standards of the many tents which dotted the open lots. The dining room was crowded with men for all its spaciousness. The town had come alive with the sun.
Breakfast conversation was heady and excited.
Steward listened closely, alert for some overly curious reference to himself or his clothing. There was none. He was accepted as just another native character, as he felt sure he would be. But still he listened.
The food was good—rather heavy, and in too large a quantity, but good. That was another point in favor of these alien worlds. Most of them ate well, in a manner which would surprise—and probably shock—conservative Inner Cleveland. Rationing seemed to be unknown here.
In the midst of the meal a phrase caught his attention. He thought at first it was only another colorful phrase to which his ears were perpetually attuned, but the following few sentences shocked him. He stopped eating to listen. The shock multiplied. A man at the next table said a startling thing, and said it rather matter-of-factly. His companion answered in kind. The tenor of many fragmentary conversations fell into place and made them crystal clear.
Steward searched wildly about the room and found a calendar at the cashier’s desk. The corroboration jolted his self-imposed silence.
Involuntarily, he said, “Oh, hell.”
“Please, sir?” The waitress stood at his elbow.
Steward covered the outburst by pushing a cup toward her. “Another coffee, if you please, my good woman.”
He stole a second glance at the calendar.
When the woman had filled his cup and left the table, Steward dropped his gaze and studied the hot, black liquid. His mood was comparable to the cup’s contents. The earlier sense of melancholy was giving way to profound disgust. Those stupid engineers! Snafu compounded by fubar.
Those ignorant, imbecilic engineers! They had really fouled up this shoot! First the cartographers and the maps which deposited him underwater, and then the jewelers and their timepiece which would not work, and now the engineers. The bright young men proudly parading in their white uniforms.
They had overshot the target.
The date was May 30.
Mr. Lincoln’s political address had been given yesterday. Both Lincoln and his speech, as well as the successfully concluded convention, were being hotly discussed in the dining room.
It was all over but the Monday morning quartering.
Benjamin Steward finished his meal with glum introspection, wondering what was to be expected next. So many things had gone wrong with the shoot—if he was at all superstitious, he knew he would be worrying and watching for black cats. Where was the thirteenth step?
The Character swallowed the hot coffee, morosely rearranging his program. He could not recall this kind of stupid mistake ever happening before, but if it had occurred, the people at T-R were entirely successful in hiding it. There had not been so much as a rumor, or a bit of gossip among his colleagues. An ancient phrase came to mind: what cannot be cured, must be endured. ’Sdeath—he would have to endure this unwelcome turn. There was nought to do but carry on; the target must still be covered and the client kept happy. His survey would be accomplished a day after the event, instead of a day before; he would have to determine what had happened, instead of what was expected to happen. The reverse of an ordinary operation.
Steward shoved back from the table. Once again he was making company history, unwillingly and unavoidably, but making it nevertheless. The knowledge was depressing.
He purchased cigars at the cashier’s desk and paid his bill with a silver dollar.
“Have you ever heard anything like it?” the buxom and friendly cashier demanded.
Steward shook his head. “I’m flabbergasted.”
“He sure woke up this town! That’s what my husband said. He sure woke up this town! When my husband went to bed last night he was a Free-soiler, but when he got up this morning he was a Republican.” She gave Steward his change. “That Mr. Lincoln! He’s going to wake up this whole state, you mark my words.”
Steward seized his cue. “I sort of think these new Republicans will amount to something.”
“My husband’s very words. These new Republicans will amount to something, he said. There had better not be a blinking Whig left in town by next week, he said. Begging your pardon, sir, if you be a Whig. All the menfolk are going Republican. Whigs, Democrats, Free-soilers, Know-nothings, antiNebraskans, everybody! We thank you, sir.”
“Thank you, and good morning.”
Steward moved out into the street to look for a Whig.
He counted the change in his hand an
d reflected that Inner Cleveland would again be shocked. The price of a meal and a handful of cigars was ridiculously cheap. The other man’s envied world once again.
For the better part of an hour he did nothing more strenuous than stroll the town, absorbing the picturesque atmosphere. The town was bathed in it. None of the buildings was more than three stories high, although some of them sought to create the impression of height by erecting tall, false fronts above their first or second levels. A building boom was in progress, with lumber and carpenters much in demand. There were many stables, blacksmith and livery shops, and the streets were clogged with horse drawn vehicles. The traffic raised a pall of dust and, of course, the town was incredibly dirty. All the towns and cities of the ancient worlds were dirty beyond belief, when compared to the fastidious cleanliness of his own modern city-state, and he never failed to marvel that the children could grow into adulthood in such unsanitary surroundings. Some of them did not, he knew, but the numerous adults about him now proved that many did. In spite of the dirt.
A courthouse dominated the center of the town, set to itself in the middle of a square block and entirely surrounded by green lawn. He recalled the phrase in the idiomatic table: the courthouse square. The lawn was a favored lounging place and a scene of free and open public debate. Any subject under the sun was admitted; plainly, the courthouse square was now coming into its own in the Old Nation way of life.
A traveling medicine show caught his eye.
The show was closed at this early hour of the day, but he paused to inspect it with pleased anticipation. It was no more than a gaily painted wagon with canvas sides and end flaps. A piebald horse was tethered at one end of the wagon, eating from a shallow feedbox. There was no other sign of life about the show. Steward experienced a small difficulty in translating and reading the extravagant announcements painted on the side panels of the wagon.
Doctor Mudgett was the traveling attraction’s impresario, and also the master pharmacist who offered to the world that priceless boon, Doctor Mudgett’s Bitterroot & Snake-Oil Elixir. The secret formula for the elixir had been whispered to the doctor by a dying Pawnee Chieftain, at midnight under a full moon, and the wonder medicine was now said to cure most of the ills of mankind, as well as some of the more common diseases of cattle and swine. Too, hunters and trappers reported beneficial results when the elixir was rubbed on their boots—it destroyed the scent of man.
The Lincoln Hunters Page 4