“Something like that, I guess.” Steward massaged his legs. “ ’Sdeath, but I’m tired.”
“I can go into town for you.”
“You can’t satisfy my conscience.”
“No—only save you some legwork.”
“I’ll go in.”
“It’s your show, boss. How long shall I stay?”
“Midnight.”
Dobbs was taken aback.
“Confound it, Stew! That’s only a few hours away.”
“No later than midnight,” Steward repeated firmly. “I’ll be out to check with you. If Bobby shows, hold him here.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“You will follow Bonner home. I’ll keep on with it.”
“I wish I could overrule you.”
“You can’t.”
“Don’t push that tolerance limit, Stew.”
“I’m pushing it,” Steward answered wearily, “but I aim to stay on the safe side.”
Dobbs hesitated in awkward indecision, and then voiced a thought neither of them seriously considered.
“You could abandon him.”
The silence between them was so deep and so prolonged that Dobbs wondered if the other had heard him. He felt ashamed of the suggestion, and was already wishing he could recall his words.
The muted sounds of drunken revelry came from the nearby saloon, blending with the greater but more distant noise of the townspeople packed around the courthouse square.
Steward played with a handful of dust. His eyes were shut tight.
“Karl,” he said at last, “did you know a Character named Samuel Windermeer? A Dutchman? They called him Sam Wendy, and sometimes Windy Sam.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Dobbs replied noncommittally. He fidgeted with discomfort, knowing what was to come.
“They called him Windy Sam because he was just the opposite—the most closemouthed man I ever knew. One or two words an hour was his standard operating procedure. And he was a first-class field hand—put that down in the book. The best. I’ll never understand why they tabbed me for crew leader, over him.”
Dobbs said nothing to interrupt. He had known the Character.
Steward opened his eyes and then his fingers, to watch the fistful of dust trickle away.
“Sam was a good friend—not a close friend, but a good one. We knocked around together, did some fishing in the Erie, and joined a ball club now and then. I liked to pull him on shoots. He was reliable, and more than competent. That was Sam Wendy when he was alive.”
Dobbs silently nodded his agreement.
Steward continued tautly, “I had to abandon Sam Wendy in a Roman arena. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was like throwing away my wife, or my child.
“We were filming one of those bloody Roman circuses, a show put on to entertain a couple of royal lovers named Antony and Cleopatra. This was a couple of years before their suicides. Sam was handling the slaughter in the arena, while I concentrated on the royal couple. Just the two of us—that’s all the crew we had in those days. I still don’t know what happened or how it happened. I can’t explain it. But . . .
“Suddenly, I heard Sam scream, and I jumped.
“Two men had him on the arena floor, two of those big Roman warriors—or perhaps they were slave warriors from some other country, I don’t know. They were armed and Sam was not. One of the warriors had thrown a net around his legs, trapping him, while the other was cutting him to pieces with an ax. Literally cutting him to pieces. And there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.
“Sam Wendy died while I watched. And except for that scream, he died in the same manner he had lived—without a useless word.” Steward spread his hands in resignation. “No—I won’t abandon Bobby.”
“It was a foolish suggestion, Stew. I apologize.”
“A thing like that can happen to a man only once, because after that first time he will do anything to prevent its happening again. I would have exchanged places with Sam, if that were possible.”
Dobbs shot him a probing, curious glance, but did not comment.
“Sam Wendy’s death accomplished only one worth-while goal—it resulted in the doubling of minimum crews. The guild had been agitating for that a long time. Sam’s death and my total failure to deliver the goods cinched it. There was no hope of recovering Sam’s equipment, of course; it was broken with his body. And I lost mine while trying to do something for him. Somewhere between that bloodthirsty, amorous couple and the arena wall, I dropped my camera. I never found it. So I jumped for home without a crewman, without equipment, without pictures—a complete washout. The client probably blew his stack. The office certainly did!
“I believe those bastards in the office regretted the loss of the equipment and films more than they regretted Sam’s death. They cried as if the expense money were coming out of their pockets, rather than the company treasury. They put one of those big black marks on my dossier, and placed me on probation—as if that mattered to me, after losing Sam.
“But, meanwhile, the guild applied the screws. I was named to the negotiating committee, and taken along to every meeting to serve as the horrible example. I remember sitting for hours in the conference rooms, talking in circles and being painfully polite. All except me—I couldn’t be polite. The wound was still fresh. We demanded four men on any shoot entailing an element of risk or doubt. They held out for three. Well, you know that score-we won, and the client pays the bill. To hell with that. If we’d had a four-man crew that day in the arena, somebody would have brought home the bacon. It wouldn’t have saved Sam’s life, but we would have accomplished what we set out to do.”
Steward lapsed into a moody silence, thinking of Evelyn Kung.
He had not yet solved the riddle of Evelyn. He could not understand why Evelyn had shared his company for so long, why she had passively consented to their dating and playing together. He would always marvel at the woman’s gentle temperament and her complete lack of rancor. Sam Wendy’s death had struck him a stunning blow—but the effect on his wife was infinitely greater. And yet Evelyn had never sought to inflict on him any degree or kind of revenge for her husband’s death.
Had she?
Benjamin shuddered, perhaps from the brisk, cooling wind blowing off the prairie. He rose to his feet.
“I can’t shake Sam Wendy’s ghost,” he complained. “The bloody thing follows me on every shoot.”
He deliberately turned his back on the wind to stare at the town. In there, the restless and shifting torches suggested a convention of fireflies.
“‘Sdeath! How many saloons can they have?”
Dobbs stood beside him. “Eight thousand people can get mighty thirsty.”
“In truth—but one useless actor can outdrink them, all eight thousand of them. And he’s probably doing just that.”
Contemplating the moving lights, Steward suddenly uttered a single, tight expletive.
“Yes,” Dobbs agreed. “In spades.” And then he added worriedly, “I don’t mind your company, Stew, but Whittle’s sand is running out.”
Steward nodded tiredly and buttoned his coat. “Hold the fort, Karl. Time to saddle and ride.”
“Midnight,” Dobbs said in warning.
The Characters parted.
Karl Dobbs rested his weight on the hitching rail.
His deliberative gaze followed the crew leader along the mean dirt street until the man vanished into the night. The exigency worried him.
Dobbs was a man given to sober contemplation, a man of advanced years who had learned from experience to anticipate, if possible, the coming actions and plan for them. The errors committed on this shoot were onerous and he constantly sought means to circumvent them.
The technicians had committed the first error.
They had actually committed two of them, but that initial mistake of dropping Steward into the creek was inconsequential. That was a fault of the cartographers, and a minor thing. The earlier and gravest blu
nder must be set down at the door of the men who had plotted the time-curve, and the engineers who translated it into action.
They had fouled Benjamin Steward by overshooting, by placing him a full day beyond the target date.
That had been a startling bungle.
Steward had walked the plains and the streets of the town on May 30, twenty to twenty-four hours beyond the actual target. Afterward, he returned to the chamber of report, and to gather his crew.
Whittle and the engineers committed a third mistake at that point. They allowed Steward to continue the shoot and accompany the crew to the target: May 29.
That should not have been done. Guild regulations and company policy to the contrary, Steward should have been taken off the shoot and kept at home. The second-in-command, or any other reliable Character for that matter, should have been placed in charge. For Benjamin Steward could not again cover the same ground on the same date without risk of meeting himself.
Whittle had overlooked the matter in the resultant confusion, but that was no valid excuse. And so far as he knew, a comparable situation had never before happened in company history, but that still was insufficient reason.
There were mechanical safeguards, of course. The nineteen-hour maximum tolerance set by the engineers would retrieve the bullet before the sun rose on May 30. That would prevent the missile from fouling its own nest, and bring back its occupant to the chamber. But mechanical safeguards did not satisfy Dobbs.
His worried mind kept dwelling on the cancellation effect.
That was a pretty engineering term.
Actually it was only a theory, a paper bogey. And again, so far as his knowledge went, the occurrence had never happened in company history. But as a theory it remained dreadfully real.
The T-R engineers had explained it countless times in the jargon of their calling. In addition, they issued pamphlets and distributed pictorial charts interpreting the situation in primary terms understandable to morons—as they firmly believed most Characters to be. They hung reminders on the walls of the lounge, and still other reminders in the guild meeting halls. The theory was drilled into the skull of every recruit until his head ached, and was monotonously repeated to every Character who considered himself an old hand. Dossiers were carefully compiled and endlessly annotated; no field man was permitted to closely approach a previous target date covered by himself.
Calculated risks were necessary only where the advance man was concerned, and that risk was coldly analyzed and doubly hedged. An advance man was sent into the field to scout the target and prepare the way. His exploratory mission was confined to a few hours; the fewer the better. One or more days later, protected by mathematical and mechanical safeguards, that man returned to the field with his crew to complete the assignment. The scouting trip was safely behind him.
The theoretical threat was deceptively simple.
Two like objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Two like objects, meeting in the field, did not collide. One simply canceled out the other.
The engineers had reams of computations to support their thesis. No one cared to put it to the test.
There was an equally grave parallel risk.
A man leaving the chamber to work in the field left an indelible track, a time-spanning nexus which linked him to his point of origin. It could be broken only by self-cancellation. The pictorial charts furnished by the engineers showed that man tied to the chamber as securely as the ancient deepsea divers were tied to the mother ship with air hoses. It was a striking illustration. Two duplicate Characters, accidentally in the field together, need not meet to cause a cancellation. The one need only stumble over the other’s vinculum. It was as final as a severed air hose.
The T-R engineers had conquered time for pecuniary rewards, but they failed to solve the problem of collateralism.
Dobbs hunted through his pockets for the native cigar Steward had given him. He lit it, smelled it, tasted it and found it strong like the whiskey.
An incredible series of blunders, and what was to be done about them now? Little or nothing. They were done.
Bobby Bloch must be found, and Steward must leap for the chamber before the engineers pulled in their missile at the end of nineteen hours. That mechanical safeguard was the only one left him. No math-magic could erase the overshoot, nor protect Steward when he walked the streets of the town after sunrise tomorrow morning.
Dobbs smoked the cigar and watched the darkened street. Stray thoughts diverted his attention.
He had known Sam Wendy. He had known that Sam was married, and he knew the identity of the woman.
Was Steward aware of that? Aware of her identity?
Dobbs glanced around at a distracting noise. An inebriated man lurched out of the tavern, stared at him owlishly and then wandered off up the street.
Another wisp of thought crept into Dobbs’s mind.
He could write home and ask for a transfer of command.
It would entail explaining the full circumstances to Whittle, and it would place a second mark on Steward’s dossier which would be difficult to erase, but he could ask that Steward be relieved and sent home, with himself taking charge of the search. That would eliminate all possibility of further risk to Steward.
He could . . .
Dobbs shook his head savagely, wiping away the thought as an evil, unethical thing. He could not.
For the second time in an hour a sense of shame engulfed him as thoroughly as immersion in icy water. His own weakness angered him.
He could not do that.
Like his earlier, impulsive words, it was an act which could never be undone, a blot never to be erased. An indelible stain. And it would be futile, hopelessly futile and stupid to attempt a reasonable explanation of his act when all of them—Steward, Bloch, Bonner and himself—were safely back in the chamber. Who understands the inutile interpretation when the danger had passed?
No, he could not pull Steward’s command from under him. Benjamin Steward was worth a dozen useless Characters.
Bobby Bloch could rot on a labor squad in hell before he would be guilty of cutting Steward’s throat by stealing his field authority.
Anxiously, Dobbs consulted his watch and was surprised to find only a few minutes gone. The growing apprehension was warping his time values.
He resumed his scrutiny of the long dark street.
Benjamin Steward began his tedious search at Major’s Hall.
That was the last place where the missing actor was seen. After eating lunch at the Chinamen’s tent, they had sprawled to rest on somebody’s lawn. It might have been a vacant lot, or a small public park, or actually some honest citizen’s front lawn—he didn’t remember now. But whatever the identity of the real estate, it had been comfortable and tranquil; they took their ease on the peaceful greensward to digest the meal. They had not been molested.
Karl Dobbs had dozed in the warm shade; it was his habit to nap a lot when preparing for a night’s work. Bonner and Bloch, finally exhausting a renewed debate on the merits of girly shows, had fallen back upon still another discussion of Shakespeare—the original Shakespeare, and not the upstart bard of t-he same name and calling who had appeared on the theatrical scene shortly after the Second Revolution. Mindful of their intrusion into a land of strangers, the two actors carefully avoided all mention of the latter-day imitator; they preferred to quote the old original, and to criticize his shortcomings in a very untheatrical manner. Bonner was of the opinion that the old bard was not above a snow-job, and had hired himself out as a character-assassin via his King Richard III.
Steward had listened to them for a while and then allowed his attention to wander; he wasn’t particularly interested in either of the Shakespeares, although the first had provided a meaty collection of quips and quotes. With a full belly—and a warming shot of strong whiskey—it was more profitable to indulge in his own private vice: envy and speculation of the other man’s world.
The afternoon hours h
ad whirled away.
Dobbs eventually got them on their feet and pushed them toward the target; the overcautious and ever-watchful Dobbs whose prudence matched his advanced years. (What kind of old maid would the man be, as he neared the end of his second century of life?)
The quartet had separated outside Major’s Hall, to join the milling throng spilling over the sidewalk and into the street while waiting to ascend the stairway. There had been some delay; the auditorium doors had not been opened until several minutes past the appointed hour. Finally, Steward mounted the steps, some paces behind Karl Dobbs. Bonner and Bloch were lost to sight, somewhere behind him, at that moment. He had not seen Bloch again.
Steward began his search at the hall.
The large auditorium doors were closed but not locked. The Character lit one of the lanterns he found on the landing and entered the hail. It was empty.
To plant an alibi—should someone discover him there—he knelt quickly and placed his pocket watch beneath one of the chairs. Thereafter he spent many minutes combing the entire area. He never found the spool from the recording machine, but he found bushels of trash, and the wire. Countless yards of the fine, silvery wire were strewn across the floor between two rows of seats. The stuff appeared to have been deliberately unwound from its spool and thrown away.
Steward wasted only a few seconds longer looking at the confounding wire, and quit the hall. He pocketed his watch, blew out the lantern and descended to the street.
Circling the building, he remembered Bonner’s humorously intended reference to the public rooms at the rear of the structure, and checked them. Bloch was not in either of the small shanties. Upon reaching the street once more, he turned east and walked to the end of the expanding business district, inspecting the interior of every illuminated shop or store open to his gaze. Few of them contained lights or people. The saloons and eating places required a more thorough search, so he entered and searched them.
The Lincoln Hunters Page 13