The Lincoln Hunters

by Wilson Tucker

In panic, he turned on his heel and fled, retaining only the presence of mind to drag the helpless thespian after him. The dog kept pace.

  Long, agonizing and precious seconds were spent in regaining the shelter of the timber. It seemed incredibly far away. Steward sprinted deep into its concealing fastness, until without warning he was tripped by the underbrush and thrown to the ground. Bloch fell on top of him. With his last bit of strength, Steward pinioned the other man’s legs to hold him down and clapped a feeble hand over his mouth.

  Then he closed his eyes and sobbed for breath, awaiting oblivion.

  The dog raced around them, yelping furiously.

  14

  LET THE END TRY THE MAN

  A TRANSIENT HUSH enveloped the grove.

  Even the volatile dog was quiet for the moment and had settled down to a wary watchfulness, eyes and ears alert for any resumption of the strenuous game.

  Inert and supine, Benjamin Steward lay on the timber floor with arms and legs outflung, gazing passively at the swatches of bright sky seen through the treetops. He could discern the upper half of the smoke column climbing to meet the morning, while high above that the wispy strands of cirrus feathered the sky. Between the smoke and the clouds a hawk soared gracefully in the early sunlight. The view was idyllic and reassuring.

  The Character rested.

  He was content to lie there, uncaring and unmoving; content to watch the hawk glide through all eternity if that was the bird’s desire. His legs felt like leaden weights and it was easier not to move them. His feet reflected torture. The agonizing band of steel which had encircled his lungs was freshly broken, and now he breathed gently and peacefully. The crushed shrubbery beneath his body was as agreeable as a soft mattress. Steward lay dormant, absorbing the soothing tranquility of the timber.

  Above him, the hawk sailed majestically through the Old Nation heavens.

  Time passed him by as Steward dozed.

  After a lengthy but unclocked interval a stealthy sound caught his attention, and he turned his head to seek out the source. The cause of the sound calmly stared him in the face. He and his companion were ringed by mute, curious Indians squatting around them.

  Bobby Bloch lay nearby with his face buried in his arms. He was silently crying.

  Steward returned his wary gaze to the natives. He knew that he could not defend himself against an attack by an Indian squaw at that moment. There were no weapons in evidence.

  The Indians were staring at the two white men, not impassively and immobile as tradition would have it, but with frank inquisitiveness. They did not appear to be at all aroused or even warlike.

  Steward grinned weakly and asked, “How?”

  The troop inspected him briefly and then returned their attention to Bloch. Steward held no interest for them.

  “Make talk,” one of the Indians said brokenly to the actor. “Running tongue, more talk.”

  The Character relaxed and rolled his eyes back to the sky. The hawk pivoted and wheeled. It seemed to sail for endless miles without ever beating its wings. For some senseless reason Steward was reminded of Evelyn and the gaming house and the silly amusement they called the Chinese Water Torture. How many droplets of water would fall into the silver cup before it tipped of its own weight and closed a relay, causing a pretty Chinese girl to plunge into a tank of “icy” water? For how many hours could the hawk soar without moving its wings?

  He dozed again as he watched the hawk and finally fell asleep, unaware that exhaustion had claimed him.

  The hawk was gone from the sky.

  A bright and glaring noonday sun pouring down into his unprotected face awakened him.

  Benjamin Steward scrambled to his knees with alarm before he was fully awake. Only then did he rediscover where he was.

  The Indians and their noisy dog had deserted them. There were sounds of life in the timber but it was at a distance. The column of smoke had dissipated.

  Bobby Bloch sprawled on the ground nearby, as motionless as the rooted trees. The actor’s face was a sickly white, his demeanor grave and depressed. Only his eyes moved in their sockets as Steward got to his feet and then stiffly bent to rub away the ache in his legs. Bloch did not speak.

  The Character glanced around the small clearing—and then stared with open astonishment at his boots and socks. Mud from the creekbank still clung to the soles of the boots.

  “ ’Sdeath, Bobby!”

  Bloch’s answering voice was so low as to be nearly indistinguishable. “I fetched them.”

  “Foolish risk, man.”

  “There is nothing to risk, now. It is done.”

  Steward looked toward the distant creek and the sentinel oak but they were not visible through the maze of trees. He had run deeper into the timber than he first believed. A shiver of cold fear rippled through him and he hugged his chest to ward it off.

  “We’re locked out,” he whispered.

  “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Bloch dropped his eyes. “I am a coward.”

  “Locked out,” Steward repeated. “Seven hundred years from home.” He stared again at the muddy boots awaiting his feet. “Were the engineers wrong?”

  “No,” the actor said miserably.

  Wonderingly, Steward gazed toward the unseen creek.

  “That one canceled? That one out there?”

  “He canceled.”

  Steward studied the unhappy actor. Prickly arrows of fear invaded the pit of his stomach.

  “Did you see it happen?”

  “No, thank God.”

  “Then how can you be sure?”

  “One cannot quibble with the engineers.”

  “The engineers be hanged—I’m still among the living.”

  “The other one is not.”

  “How can you be sure?” was the repeated demand.

  Bloch examined his pale and sweating palms. “At the briefing, you told us you reached the field at sunrise. Precisely sunrise. Evelyn said your field time was four hours and nineteen minutes.” He glanced up at the towering crew leader and hastily looked away. “When you fell asleep, I crept to the edge of the woods to reconnoiter. To watch for you. I looked on the prairie, but you were not there. I waited for you to return from the town four hours and nineteen minutes later, but you did not come back. I went down to fetch your boots, and there was no indication of your presence. Nothing.”

  “My duplicate never reached the town?”

  “Your duplicate did nothing but die. He canceled when he climbed the bank; or before; or later. What matter now?; it is done.”

  What was it like to die?

  The mental image of those pictorial charts dangled in Steward’s mind—those prophetic charts picturing two deep-sea divers suspended in the deeps at the ends of their air hoses. He was one of the luckless divers, and his duplicate who had entered the field on the wrong day was the other. Binary Stewards, rotating at the end of a time line. He had sought refuge in the timber, hiding in fear and awaiting judgment. The duplicate fell afoul of the omnipresent nexus—had stumbled blindly over the invisible cord of the tardy other and ceased to be.

  ’Sdeath!”

  Why hadn’t he canceled instead of the duplicate? For that matter, which of him was the original and which was the facsimile? He could not answer either question. He didn’t know, and couldn’t guess. That was a problem for the mathematicians, and he readily admitted to his ignorance. He knew only that he was still among the living—and damned glad of it. It was wise to be thankful for the bird in hand. There was the haunting certainty that neither of them would be alive at this moment if he had met his twin out there on the bank. And as for those waiting in the chamber, they would have no other recourse than to believe that both had canceled.

  To them, Benjamin Steward was as dead as Sam Wendy.

  Standing spraddle-legged in the Indian grove, standing now in the animated years of Lincoln’s lifetime, he was dead to his colleagues, to the eng
ineers, to Whittle, and Evelyn Kung. Dead as a doornail. Sam Wendy’s widow could now acknowledge her revenge, if she wished.

  The engineers at last possessed a kind of grim, demonstrable proof of their theories. The paper bogey had assumed a cloak of flesh and bones. They had no way of knowing the theory was only half right, that under a particular set of circumstances only one of the duplicates ceased to exist, but the proof in their hands was sufficient for their purposes. Because of faulty planning, a shoot had gone askew; because a field man failed to observe the tolerance limits, a cancellation had been effected. A Character had finally, witlessly succeeded in erasing himself. Put that on the company books and raise the ante to the client. The triumphant engineers could hang grisly new reminders on the walls of the lounge.

  “Poor wight!” he muttered softly.

  The thespian raised his eyes. “Who?”

  “The man who rolled out of the bullet this morning. The man who climbed the bank to admire the sunrise.” Steward gazed up at the treetops. “I wonder if he lived long enough to see the sky?”

  Bloch looked at the sky and then to the Character.

  Humbly, he said, “I’m sorry, Stew. Does that have a meaning?”

  “No—not now, it doesn’t.” The reply was tinged with harshness. “Give me time-plenty of time. Enough time to let the shock wear away. Maybe then.” For however much he envied this young world, it was still a numbing jolt to find himself thrown bodily into it and confined there. Seven hundred years was a long way from home.

  A whisper: “I regret it all, Stew. I regret it from the depths of my heart.”

  Steward ignored the whisper.

  “What happened?” Bloch asked after a while. “Oh, I know what happened to me. I fell from grace. But . . .?”

  “We covered you,” Steward said with some asperity. “When we missed you in the auditorium we guessed what had happened, and started covering up. Dobbs and Bonner faked a recording. Bonner went back first, with three recordings and a scarestory about you. The old foul-play alibi. Dobbs followed him a few hours later with a damaged spool—a spool coated with blood—and another story calculated to shake Whittle’s teeth. They set the stage for your death scene.”

  “My death?”

  “I was supposed to follow along and close the case, one way or the other. If I found you, I would bring you in alive with a harrowing tale of rescue in the nick of time, and all that. But if I failed to find you, I was supposed to go home with a big lie which would wipe you off the roster. The Ramses business. You would be a field fatality—irrevocably lost, with circumstantial evidence pointing to your death. The final cover. That was all we could do for you. Dobbs hoped you would take intelligent advantage of it and make a new life here.”

  The actor revealed his complete surprise.

  “They believe me a mortality?”

  “Us,” Steward retorted. “In the plural.”

  “But if they believe me dead, they will not send the security men after me!”

  “They don’t waste money on a corpse,” Steward told him bitterly. “I suppose we should be thankful.”

  Bloch was again studying his hands, unwilling to meet the other’s eyes. In the same low and intense voice he said, “I am grateful, Stew.”

  “Oh, stuff it.”

  The Character turned his back the better to mask his momentary disgust. He wished he could put the actor out of sight and out of mind for a few hours. He wanted time to think, time to orient himself. He wanted to try to comprehend and then appreciate the miscalculated miracle which had left him alive. He wanted solitude.

  “What shall we do, Stew?”

  “Do?”

  “This is an alien world. What shall we do now?”

  “We have the same choice we had at home, Bobby. We can live in it, or die in it.”

  They could still die in it, for despite all medical precautions a man could easily die in any world. They could be run down by a horse, fall from a building, be shot, or skewered, or scalped—or even burned as a witch, if this nation still burned witches and the male gender was no safeguard. They could live in it an extraordinarily long time if they were careful, for they had an almost miraculous advantage over the natives. The limbs of their bodies told of numberless inoculations to ward off disease, to prolong life.

  “You do not think they will come for us?”

  “Did they go back to pick up Sam Wendy’s corpse? How many times must I repeat it—no. They’ve written us off. Like it or lump it, this is home now.” Steward glared at the actor. “How did the pickpocket get your recorder?”

  Bloch revealed his surprise. “Then you know?”

  “I get around, Mr. Rosencrantz.”

  “It is a matter for weeping. I encountered the foul fellow in the street, as we were waiting to enter the hall. We struck up a friendly conversation. He left me after a space, and I did not miss the machine until I went to ascend the stairway. The machine, and my watch! I did not dare go up, then.”

  “So you got drunk.”

  “Indeed not, not then.”

  “Okay, you got drunk later. And landed in jail.”

  “How the blood burns! Aye, I encountered the disreputable thief a second time, later in the evening, and did remonstrate with him. The wretch. But the innkeeper ejected us from the premises . . . and, yes, we ended in durance vile. The trickster had already disposed of my treasures.”

  “The trickster dumped your spool of wire on the auditorium floor, after the meeting. We never found the recorder. And a fat lot of good it will do him. Maybe he’ll show it to somebody, and be burned for a witch. If they still burn witches around here.”

  Bloch attempted to conceal a shudder.

  “‘I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.’“

  “If you’re smart,” Steward pointed out irritably, “you will haul tail down to that theater and beg for a job. Any kind of a job. There’s the girl show in town now, and a Shakespearean troupe coming in next week—the Booth Players.”

  “The Booth-Willoughby Players.”

  “Whatever the name, beg for a job. Beg or starve, Bobby. Play your sad part on the stage and stop feeling so damned sorry for yourself.”

  “‘What, must I hold a candle to my shames?’“

  Benjamin Steward turned abruptly on his heel and strode away in disgust.

  The day was dying.

  Walking blindly through the timber, immersed in thought, Steward found himself at the outermost ring of trees.

  The sun was setting, limning the distant town in sharp relief. Lamps glowed in the windows and lanterns flickered about the outbuildings. Nearer at hand the darkening sky was casting a dim curtain over the prairie and cool shadows reached for the woods that sheltered him. He glanced covertly at the creek and the oak tree standing guard beside it. Sam Wendy’s wraith was a dim and fading thing.

  Steward returned his gaze to the settlement.

  “I’ve got three irons,” he said aloud, “and that town is my forge.”

  The town contained a weekly newspaper, a man who would be president, and a speech no one would accurately remember. Three irons to be heated with the fires of his past failures.

  He had been a news editor before he signed on with Time Researchers, a second-rate and practically worthless editor because he was too slow, too lackadaisical. He couldn’t meet the deadlines, couldn’t keep pace with the hectic tempo. His dismissal had come as no surprise. And before the news job he had suffered a brief career as a second-rate politician. He was continually subject to a kind of disease called lack of money, and had precious little talent for public speaking. The political career was short-lived.

  But down there in the sleepy town was a weekly newspaper lacking frequent, hectic deadlines; down there was a man headed for the presidency. That man might only suspect his destiny, or dream of it, but Steward knew it. Steward had that much advantage over him.

  He aimed to try both the
paper and the man.

  He could write and edit when he was not pushed, and a country weekly should not be too fast for a slowpoke. He knew some of the things that would happen to the nation in the next half-dozen years, and that was an added advantage.

  Meanwhile, he had an invitation from the future president, an invitation to drop in and talk. He aimed to do that, too. If the newspaper was his immediate goal, Abraham Lincoln and his Whitehouse was the long range one. Mr. Lincoln would have to be handled with care, for he was no fool, but it was just possible that Steward could latch onto the man’s coattails and ride them all the way into the president’s office. All the rulers of antiquity had ministers and cabinets, and the man who made himself the most useful before the fact stood the best chance of getting a position after election. Steward decided to make himself extremely useful, beginning at once. Lincoln was a good man to latch onto. His election to the presidency could not be too many years away.

  Admittedly, both he and Bobby Bloch were second-raters, but what was second-rate at home might be a little better here. This was an unsophisticated world.

  Meanwhile, there was the provocative speech.

  He dug into his pocket and produced the total amount of his worldly wealth. Two watches, a handful of silver dollars, and the expensive ring Karl Dobbs had given him. The Rosencrantz bail fund. It was all the stake he had in the new world but he thought he saw a means of increasing that stake, of multiplying it to his advantage.

  It would be entertaining (and profitable) to contribute to a future legend.

  To peddle copies of the cherished address.

  Mr. Lincoln’s soon-to-be-lost speech would be very definitely lost no matter what anyone did about it; it would remain lost for seven centuries until a set of wire recorders tracked down the man and his words. History confirmed that, and Benjamin Steward was not a man to refute history. This was an opportunity to turn a pretty penny. The speech could be printed up in booklet form and hawked about the countryside.

  It would not be the correct speech, reproduced exactly as delivered, because despite his good memory he could not remember everything that had been said during those ninety hectic minutes. He doubted very much that even Mr. Lincoln could now recall what was said. So his version would of necessity be a paraphrasing which managed to retain the fervor and the patriotism—and of course the ring of authority. He could, at this moment, repeat long sections of the speech, sections which might astound Lincoln with their accuracy. Could Mr. Herndon do better?