“Certainly, Senator,” said the driver. “Those stairs, sir—they look a little steep.”
“You stay right here,” said Senator Andrew Oakes. “Go sit behind the wheel. Time comes when I can’t climb stairs I’ll go back home and let some young man have my seat. But not right yet,” he said, wheezing a little. “Not right now. Maybe in another year or two. Maybe not. Depends on how I feel.”
He stumped toward the stairs, clomping his cane with weighty precision on the driveway. He mounted the First step and stood there for a moment before attempting the next one. As he mounted each step, he looked to either side of him, glaring into the landscape as if daring someone to remark on his progress. But no one was in sight except the chauffeur, who had gone back to sit behind the wheel, studiously not watching the old man’s progress up the stairs.
The door came open when he was crossing the pillared entrance.
“I am glad to see you, Senator,” said Grant Wellington, “but there was no need to make the trip. I could have come to your apartment.”
The Senator stopped, planting himself sturdily before his host. “Nice day for a drive,” he said. “And you said you would be alone.”
Wellington nodded. “Family’s in New England and it’s the servants’ day off. We’ll be quite alone.”
“Good,” said the Senator. “At my place you can never be sure.
People in and out. Phones ringing all the time. This is better.”
He stumped into the entry. “To your right,” said Wellington, closing the door.
The old man went into the study, shuffled across the carpeting, dropped into a huge upholstered chair to one side of the fireplace. He laid his cane carefully on the floor beside him, looked around at the book-lined shelves, the huge executive desk, the comfortable furniture, the paintings on the wall.
“You have got it good, Grant,” he said. “I sometimes worry about that. Maybe you have it too good.”
“Meaning I won’t fight? Will be afraid to dirty my hands?”
“Something like that, Grant. But I tell myself I’m wrong. Did plenty of fighting in your day. Out in the business world.” He gestured at the paintings. “Always suspicious of a man who owns a Renoir.”
“How about something to drink, Senator?”
“Late enough in the afternoon,” said the Senator judiciously, “for a splash of bourbon. Great drink, bourbon. American. Has character. I remember you drink scotch.”
“With you,” said Wellington, “I drink bourbon.”
“You been listening to what is happening?”
“Saw some of it on TV.”
“Man could stub his toe on a thing like that. He could stub his toe real bad.”
“You mean Henderson.”
“I mean everybody. Easy thing to do.”
Wellington brought the Senator his drink, went back to the bar to pour his own. The old man settled more deeply into the chair, fondling the glass. He took a drink, puffed out his cheeks in appreciation. “For a scotch man,” he said, “you carry a good brand.”
“I took my cue from you,” said Wellington, coming back and sitting on a sofa.
“I imagine the man at sixteen hundred has a lot on his mind. Maybe more than he can handle. Batch of decisions to be made. Yes, sir, a lot of them.”
“I don’t envy him,” said Wellington.
“Most terrible thing that can happen to a man with election coming up next year. He’ll have that on his mind and it won’t help him any. Trouble is he has to say something, has to do something. Nobody else has to, but he has to.”
“If you are trying to say that I should say nothing or do nothing, you are succeeding very well,” said Wellington. “Never try to be subtle, Senator. You’re not very good at it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the Senator. “You can’t come straight out and tell a man to keep his mouth shut.”
“If these people are really from the future—”
“Oh, they’re from the future, all right. Where else could they come from?”
“Then you can’t go wrong on them,” said Wellington. “They are our descendants. What they are doing is like a bunch of kids running home after they got hurt.”
“Well, now, I don’t know,” said the Senator. “Anyway they’re not exactly what I came to talk about. Not the people—but old Sam up there in the White House. He’s the one who’s got to do something about them and he’s bound to make mistakes. We got to watch carefully and evaluate those mistakes. We can jump on some of them and some of them we can’t. There may be even a few things he does that we have to go along with—we can’t be too unreasonable. But the thing right now is not to commit ourselves. You know and I know there are a lot of people want that nomination next summer to run against old Sam and I mean, if I can imagine it, that you are the one who gets it. Some of the other boys will think they see some opportunities in what the man up there does and they’ll get anxious and start shooting off their mouths—and I tell you, Grant, that the people won’t remember who was first, but the one who happens to be right.”
“Of course I appreciate your concern,” said Wellington, “but it happens that you made this trip for nothing. I have no intention whatever of taking a position. I’m not sure right now there is a position one can take.”
The Senator held out his empty glass. “If you don’t mind,” he said. “Another little splash.”
Wellington poured another little splash and the Senator settled back again.
“That matter of a position,” he said, “is something that is going to require some long and prayerful thought. It has not yet become apparent, but there will be positions practically begging to be taken and a man must look over good and select very carefully. What you say about these folks being our descendants is all well and good. You being a man whose family history is long and proud would think that way, of course. But you got to remember that there are a lot of people with little family history and not proud of what they have and these people—who make up the greatest part of the good old USA—are not going to give a damn about these particular descendants. Maybe them being our descendants will make it all the worse. There are a lot of families these days that are having lots of trouble with their own immediate progeny.
“Several millions of these people are already through the tunnels and they are still pouring through. But while we can hold up our hands in pious horror and ask how we are going to take care of them, the real gut reaction will come when those extra millions begin to have an effect on the economy. Food may suddenly get scarce and other things, too. Then prices will go up and there’ll be a housing problem and a labor problem and there won’t be good enough to go around. And while all this is now just economic talk, in a little while it will cease to be just talk and every man and woman in this fair land will feel the impact of it and that’s when there’s hell to pay. And that’s the time when a man like you must pick out his positioned study all the angles before settling on one.”
“Good God!” said Wellington. “This thing happening out there is made up of our own people fleeing back to us—and here we sit, the two of us, and try to figure out a good, safe political position—”
“Politics,” said the Senator, “is a very complicated and a most practical business. You’ve got to be hard-headed about it. You can’t ever afford to get emotional about it. That’s the first thing that you must remember—don’t get emotional about anything at all. Oh, it’s all right to appear to be emotional. Sometimes that has a certain appeal for the electorate. But before you can afford to feel anything you must have every angle figured out. Emotions are for effect only.”
“The way you put it, Senator, is not too attractive. It leaves a slightly dirty taste.”
“Sure, I know,” said the Senator. “I know about that dirty taste myself. You just shut your mind to it, is all. It’s all right, of course, to be a great statesman and a humanitarian, but before you get to be a statesman you have to be a dirty politician. You ha
ve to get elected first. And you never get elected without feeling just a little dirty.”
He placed the glass on the table beside his chair, fumbled for his cane and found it, heaved himself erect.
“Now, you mind,” he said, “before you go saying anything you just check with me. I been through all this many times before. I guess you could say I have developed political instinct for the jugular and I am seldom wrong. Up there on the Hill we hear things. There are some real good pipelines. I’ll know when anything’s about to happen—so we’ll have time to study it.”
18. The press conference had gone well. Arrangements had been made for the President’s TV appearance. The clock on the wall ticked over to 6 P.M. The teletypes went on clucking softly.
Wilson said to Judy, “You’d better call it a day. It’s time to close up shop.”
“How about yourself?”
“I’ll hang on for a while. Take my car. I’ll pick it up at your place.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to her.
“When you get there,” Judy said, “come up for a drink. I’ll be up and waiting.”
“It may be late.”
“If it’s too late, why bother going home? You left your toothbrush last time.”
“Pajamas,” he said.
“When did you ever need pajamas?”
He grinned at her lazily. “Okay,” he said. “Toothbrush, no pajamas.”
“Maybe,” said Judy, “it’ll make up for this afternoon.”
“What this afternoon?”
“I told you, remember. What I planned to do.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, oh, that. I’ve never done it that way.”
“You’re a shameless child. Now run along.”
“The kitchen will be sending coffee and sandwiches to the press lounge. Ask them nice and they’ll throw a crust to you.”
He sat and watched her go. She walked surely, but with a daintiness that always intrigued and puzzled him, as if she were a sprite who was consciously trying to make an Earth creature of herself.
He shuffled the loose papers on the desk into a pile and stacked them to one side.
He sat quietly then listened to the strange mutterings of the place. Somewhere a phone rang. There was the distant sound of someone walking. Out in the lounge someone was .typing and against the wall the wire machines went on with their clacking.
It was all insane, he told himself. The entire business was stark, staring crazy. No one in his right mind would believe a word of it. Time tunnels and aliens out of space were the sort of junk the juniors watched on television. Could it, he wondered,-be a matter of delusion, of mass hysteria? When the sun rose tomorrow would it all be gone and the world be back on the old footing?
He shoved back the chair and stood up. Judy’s deserted console had a couple of lights flashing and he let them flicker. He strode out to the corridor and followed it to the outer door. In the garden outside the heat of the summer day was waning and long shadows stretched across the lawn. The flower beds lay in all their glory—roses, heliotrope, geraniums, nicotiana, columbines and daisies. He stood, looking across the park to where the Washington Monument reared its classic whiteness.
Behind him he heard a footstep and swung around. A woman stood a short distance away. She wore a white robe that came down to her sandaled feet.
“Miss Gale,” he said, a little startled. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“I hope,” she said, “I have done nothing wrong. No one stopped me. Is it all right to be here?”
“Certainly. As a guest—”
“I had to see the garden. I had read so much of it.”
“You have never been here, then?”
She hesitated. “Yes, I have. But it was not the same. It was nothing like this.”
“Well,” he said, “I suppose that things do change.”
“Yes,” she said, “they do.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, I guess not.” She hesitated again. “I see you don’t understand. I can’t imagine there is any reason why I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what? Something about this place?”
“It’s this,” she said. “In my time, five hundred years ahead, there isn’t any garden. There isn’t any White House.”
He stared at her.
“See?” she said. “You don’t believe it. You won’t believe me. We have no nations there—we just have one big nation, although that’s not exactly right. There aren’t any nations and there isn’t any White House. A few ragged, broken walls is all, a piece of rusted fence sticking from the ground that you stub your toe on. There isn’t any park and there aren’t any flower beds. Now can you understand? Can you know what all this means to me?”
“But how? When?”
“Not right away,” she said. “Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. The history you will make will not quite be ours.”
She stood there, a thin slip of a girl in her chaste white robe, speaking of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered.
“How much do you understand,” he asked, “of this time-track business?”
“There are equations that you have to know to grasp it all,” she said. “There are, I suppose, only a few people who really do. But basically it’s quite simple. It’s a cause and effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here—”
He made a motion of futility with his hand. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what a picnic is. So we’re even.”
“Some day I’ll take you on a picnic.”
“I wish you would,” she said. “Is it something nice?”
19. Bentley Price came home a bit befuddled, but somewhat triumphant, for he had talked his way past a roadblock set up by the military, had yelled a jeep off the road and honked his way through two blocks clotted by refugees and spectators who had stayed in the area despite all efforts by the MPs to move them out. The driveway was partly blocked by a car, but he made his way around it, clipping a rose bush in the process.
Night had fallen and it had been a busy day and all Bentley wanted was to get into the house and collapse on a bed. But first he had to clear the car of cameras and other equipment, for it would never do, with so many strangers in the neighborhood, to leave the stuff locked in the car, as had been his habit. A locked car would be no deterrent to someone really bent on thievery. He hung three cameras by their straps around his neck and was hauling a heavy accessories bag out of the car when he saw, with outrage, what had happened to Edna’s flower bed.
A gun stood in the center of it, its wheels sunk deep into the soil, and around it stood the gun crew. The gunsite was brightly illuminated by a large spotlight that had been hung high in the branches of a tree and there could be no doubt of the havoc that had been wrought upon the flowers.
Bentley charged purposefully upon the gun, brushing aside one astounded cannoneer, to square off, like an embattled bantam rooster, before a young man who had bars on his shoulders.
“You have your nerve,” said Bentley. “Coming here when the owner happens to be gone—”
“Are you the owner, sir?” asked the captain of the gun crew.
“No,” said Bentley. “I am not, but I am responsible. I was left here to look out for the joint and—”
“We are sorry, sir,” said the officer, “if we have displeased you, but we had our orders, sir.”
Bentley yelled at him, “You had orders to set up this contraption in the middle of Edna’s flower bed? I suppose the orders said to set up in the middle of a flower bed; not a few feet forward or a few feet back, but in the middle of a bed a devoted woman has slaved to grow to perfection—”
“No, not
precisely that,” said the officer. “We were ordered to cover the mouth of the time tunnel and to do that we needed a clear line of fire.”
“That don’t make no sense,” said Bentley. “Why would you want to cover the tunnel with all them poor people coming out?”
“I don’t know,” said the officer. “No one bothered to explain to me. I simply got my orders and I’m about to carry them out, flower bed or no flower bed, owner or no owner.”
“Somehow,” said Bentley, “you don’t sound like no gentleman to me and that’s what you’re supposed to be, ain’t it, an officer and a gentleman? There wouldn’t be any gentleman set up no gun in the middle of a flower bed and there wouldn’t be any officer aim his gun at a bunch of refugees and—”
A shrill scream split the night. Bentley spun and saw that something was happening in the tunnel. People were still coming out of it, but they weren’t marching out four and five abreast as before. They were running out, fighting to get out and overriding them and plowing through them was a horror that Bentley never quite got sorted in his mind. He had the impression of wicked teeth and mighty talons—of terrible power and ferocity—and quite by habit his hands went down to grip a camera and bring it to his eye.
Through the lens he saw that there was not one, but two of the creatures, one almost through the tunnel and the other close behind. He saw the bodies of people flying through the air like limp dolls thrown about by children and others were crushed beneath the monster’s treading feet. And he saw writhing tentacles, as if the creatures could not quite make up their minds if they were animals or octopi.
Sharp orders rang out behind him and almost at his elbow the gun belched sudden flame that lit up all the houses and the yards and gardens. A thunderclap knocked him to one side and as he hit the ground and rolled he saw a number of things. The tunnel had suddenly blinked out in an explosion that was little more than a continuation of the thunderclap, although it was more mind-numbing and nerve-shaking. There were dead people and a dead creature that smoked as if it had been fried. But while one of the animals lay on the lawn beneath the great oak tree that had marked the tunnel, the other was very much alive. That one and the gun and its crew became mixed up and people were running, screaming in terror.
The Complete Serials Page 143