Castaways in Time

by Robert Adams

  "Gamebird and its dozens of related sub-projects went on and on, lavishly funded by the government, which saw in the project a possible way to rob the past of the raw materials which were in such short supply—thanks in no small part to the greed and inefficiency of that very government and its predecessors, I might add. Most of our facilities were located in a complex built upon riverside land that once had been used for the purpose of raising small feathered and furred game for the restocking of designated wilderness areas. From what occurred, I would assume that the main chemistry laboratory was on the same coordinates as was your house."

  "To make a long and tedious story short, Bass, after almost twenty years of trial and error, success and failure, in which a veritable host of experimental animals either disappeared completely or met singularly messy deaths, an apparently effective process was developed. I won't try to explain it to you, because I don't think you'd understand even the basics of it. The government put a great deal of hope in the Project, and, as time wore on, brought much pressure to bear upon Dr. Fox, the director, to adapt the process to humans. Finally, Fox acquiesced."

  "The first volunteer came back dead and mutilated, but analysis of the clothing in which his returned body was clad showed that he had lived—and had died—in western France during the middle years of the thirteenth century. Adjustments were made in the process and a second volunteer, one who spoke medieval French, was projected. He, too, was dead upon his return, with a stiff parchment placard nailed to his forehead. The language was a corrupt dialect of Low Latin and, when translated, read: I am a dead spy."

  "The third volunteer was a young man but recently assigned to Gamebird. Lenny Vincenzo had been a prodigy of sorts, and at only twenty-five years of age already held several doctorates in widely diverse fields. Dr. Fox did not want to use and possibly lose him, but government pressure was intense, the fates of the first two subjects had scared off most prospective volunteers, and, above all, Lenny was eminently qualified, being steeped in late-medieval and Renaissance cultures and speaking early variants of French, Italian, Latin, and Greek."

  "So, Lenny was dressed in recreations of fifteenth-century attire, entrusted with a few pounds of gold, and projected."

  Harold paused to take a long draft of ale. "Lenny never came back. The device which had been implanted under his skin to allow the projector to home in on and retrieve him did return, tucked just in the proper place under the sloughing skin of a decomposing cadaver, which lacked head, hands, and feet."

  "Then how could you say it wasn't your boy?" asked Foster.

  "The blood type was wrong," answered the old man. "As were many other factors. At the government's order, the whole affair was hushed up, but the director knew, and so too did some of the senior staffers, of which, by that time, I was one. And it was then that Dr. Emmett O'Malley and I decided to do as Lenny had done."

  "But why, Hal? You have relative immortality, you've just said you were some kind of big mucketymuck in a project that was being supported by your government. So why would you want to run off to another time? Romanticism?" Foster was honestly puzzled.

  "Romanticism? Hardly that." The Archbishop smiled fleetingly. "Not in my case, at any rate. Though," he added thoughtfully, "there may well have been an element of romanticism in Emmett's behavior. But then the Celts always have been the master dreamers of Western civilization, the inveterate champions of lost causes."

  "Bass, the America from which you were snatched was still a democracy governed by popularly elected men and women, was it not?"

  "Yes," said Foster.

  "It did not long stay such, Bass; had you and the others remained you would most likely have witnessed the beginning of the change. In 1988, the brother of an earlier President was elected for his second term, for all that the vast majority of the electorate actively hated him. There were long, loud cries of foul play and fixes, but on every level those whose voices were the loudest and most influential met, invariably, with singularly unpleasant and usually fatal 'accidents.' In 1991, our dictator-in-all-but-name was successfully assassinated, only to be succeeded, not by the Vice President, but by his own nephew."

  "Thereafter, there were no more popular elections, on any level. Governors were chosen by the President, and they, in turn, appointed the rulers of the cities and counties. Senators chose their successors and the House of Representatives was dissolved as superfluous."

  "Well, Jesus Christ," demanded Foster, "what in hell were the American people doing? They'd never sit still for that kind of takeover."

  The old man shrugged, saying, "The American people of the first half of the twentieth century would not have, certainly, but by the waning years of that century, they were, if no more placid in basic nature, at least far easier to manage and to delude with distortions of facts and outright lies. Almost all the information-disseminating agencies had by then become nothing more or less than mouthpieces of government; very few really privately owned corporations were left, so nearly everyone worked for some level of government—federal, state or municipal. But I am not a true historian, Bass, and I must admit to having ignored current events, except in those instances which touched upon my several specialities, as did far too many of us until it was far too late."

  "Anyway, O'Malley and I surreptitiously studied archaic languages, customs, and skills, late-medieval and Renaissance histories of Europe, horsemanship, and weapons skills; those pursuits we could not conceal from the rest of the staff we passed off as hobbies or physical exercise."

  "From the past experiences, O'Malley and I fully expected to wind up in Italy or France of the Renaissance, so we hypnotaped ourselves full of Latin, several dialects of French and Italian, Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque. In addition, I added Old Middle German and Flemish, white O'Malley assimilated Erse, Gaelic, and what little was by then known of such tongues as Frisian and Breton."

  "With the announced purpose of taking up jewelry-making, I began to purchase cut gemstones and gold, then spent many an evening casting golden disks of ounce and half-ounce weights. Since Emmett's work at Gamebird was involved with various aspects of metallurgy, he could and did get away with doing much of his private experimentation on the job until, at length, he had mastered a formula for producing a really fine stainless steel that would hold a keen edge indefinitely and that, moreover, could be wrought from raw ores or cast iron with abysmally primitive facilities."

  "So that's how Tara steel originated," Foster guessed aloud, tapping the hilt of his dirk.

  The churchman nodded. "Yes, true enough, but that's getting a bit ahead of my tale, Bass."

  "Emmett and I laid our plans with exceeding care, Bass, for although the Dictator's government could and did treat favored persons such as ourselves infinitely better than the vast bulk of the population, no one—from the highest to the lowest—was really deemed trustworthy; secret police agents and informers swarmed everywhere and the treatment of suspects when arrested was harsh to the point of savagery. Both of us had, unfortunately, had some close exposure to both the cult of the informer and the atrocious handling of those informed upon, you see. It had been those episodes that first had drawn us two together and had placed us in the proper frame of mind to plan our ultimate defection from a world we had begun to find unbearable. But I'll go into no details; even after all these long years, it still hurts to talk of it."

  "Emmett had only been in his mid-twenties when he first received the longevity treatment and was still a very handsome, very personable, young-looking man, so he found it quite easy to cultivate a close, very personal relationship with one of the upper-echelon staff members, Jane Stone. Within a few months, she was regularly inviting him to observe testing of the projector and actively encouraging him to study its proper utilization. At the end of twelve months of this, he felt that he knew enough to enable us to use the projector as we had planned. There was no thought of including Dr. Stone in our escape, for all that Emmett had become somewhat attached to her, since we
both knew that in addition to her scientific function, she also was a colonel in the secret police and in charge of the entire secret network at Gamebird."

  "Obtaining period clothing would have been impossible, but the styles of that day called for trousers to be skin-tight, which we thought might look enough like trunk hose to suffice. Emmett had, in pursuing his 'hobby,' manufactured two broadswords and two long daggers and had openly presented me with a set upon the occasion of the Dictator's last birthday. We had practiced in their use until we both were highly proficient swordsmen."

  "I had needed to cultivate no other person to obtain access to the longevity drug, since I had been one of the pioneers in the research and by then had advanced to assistant director of the chemistry complex. The original formula had required injection, and initial treatments still did, but boosters had been so refined that they might be administered orally, a dosage being required at least every five years. I secretly prepared enough to fill six hundred capsules and placed it in capsules color-coded as headache remedy. I stored the big bottle in my private office and took a handful at a time back to my quarters."

  "Emmett and I finally decided that our defection should occur during the five-day celebration of the Dictator's birthday, when most of the staff would be either drunk or absent and security most lax. The projector complex was situated on the north side of the river and connected to the main complex and the living quarters by a tunnel running beneath the bed of the river from bank to bank. There were always guards stationed at both ends of the tunnel and usually one or more at the entrance to the projection chamber, as well. Normally, no one would be allowed even to traverse the tunnel without written authorization, much less enter a sub-complex to which he or she was not assigned, but we thought we might be able to get to the projector during the Birthday Days."

  Harold again plunged a glowing loggerhead into his drink, sending up a hissing cloud of pungent steam.

  "You must understand, Bass, people had changed from your time and so had the customs, even the calendar. It had been juggled into months of an even thirty days; the five or six leftover days were designated Birthday Days, and during those days everyone went a little mad. The government distributed free alcohol, hallucinogens, and food to all the people in almost unlimited quantities. Very few persons worked during the Days and then only in skeleton crews; there was dancing and fornication in the very streets by day and by night. Staff members who were confined to the complex all year long were allowed to leave and visit family or friends during the Days, and those who remained behaved no more sanely than the general populace."

  "Emmett and I chose the third night of the Days. We stuffed our pockets with booster capsules, gold discs, little bags of gems, and food concentrates and put even more into the big cargo pockets of the thigh-length parkas we were issued for outside work in bad weather, then we belted our daggers and slipped into our baldrics, thoroughly rinsed our mouths with raw alcohol, and splashed the rest of the bottle over each other's clothing."

  "We drew little notice as we staggered through the complex, since many persons dressed oddly during the Days and most of those we encountered were drunk or drugged, in any case. The guard cubicle at our end of the tunnel was empty, so we activated a car and rode to the other side. One of the guards there was lying on his back snoring and the other just stared at us glassy-eyed, obviously all but insensible from drink or drugs or both. We left the car and took the lift up to the level of the projector room. And that was when we ran into our first spot of trouble."

  Silently, one of the Archbishop's servants entered, poked at the fire, then heaped two more logs upon it. That done, he took away the near-empty ewer, replacing it with a brimming one, then departing whence he had come.

  The old man sipped at his mug, then asked, "Where was I in my tale, Bass?"

  "You were approaching this projector room, and said that there was trouble."

  Bass sounded and was impatient, Harold of York nodded. "The guard before the door of the projector chamber was neither drunk, nor drugged, nor absent, but wide-awake and alert though, fortunately for us, not immediately suspicious of our motives. He was fully armed with a heat-stun weapon hung from his shoulder, a smaller, shorter-range one at his belt, and a truncheon."

  "Heat-stun weapons?" queried Bass. "I've never heard of anything like that. Sounds like Buck Rogers stuff to me."

  Harold took another sip. "Buck Rogers? No, Bass, the inventor was a man named James Rednick, and the weapons came in a number of sizes and potential intensities, from tiny, handheld, purely defensive units up to big, wide-angle weapons used for crowd control and requiring three or four men to operate properly. I cannot, I fear, tell you too much about the mechanics of them; sonics is not my field. But, when set on 'heat' and within the optimum range of the individual weapon, they could melt plastics, set cloth aflame, and render metal objects too hot to hold; on 'stun,' they brought unconsciousness if set properly for distance, death, if not. Both Emmett and I had small, personal heat-stunners, but they were of very short range and we hoped we'd not have to try to use them until we were within arm's length of the guard, if at all.

  "Although feigning the ill-coordination of drunkenness, we narrowly observed the guard for the first signs of tenseness, but he remained relaxed after the first few seconds, recognizing Emmett and speaking to him in the amused patronizing tones one uses to the drunkenly bemused."

  "Emmett averred that he had promised to show me certain aspects of the projector and, as he stumbled closer, commenced to fumble for the key card with which his paramour had provided him weeks before. But the guard frowned and said that he would first have to clear through complex Center, whereupon Emmett brought out his heat-stunner, rather than the card, and dropped the man before he could more than reach for the communications button."

  "At that point, Bass, the die was irrevocably cast for us—we had committed the inexcusable, and neither our caste, ranks, nor the supposedly altered conditions of our consciousness would mitigate our punishments, this we knew. We had no choice save to proceed. Emmett took the guard's heavy-duty heat-stunner and gave me the belt unit and the pouch of spare charges for both. Then we entered the projector chambers and secured the door behind us."

  "While Emmett went from place to place in the main chamber, throwing levers and depressing keys and doing the various things that would bring the projector to full operational life, there was nothing for me to do save stay where he had told me, for I had never before been within the room and knew nothing helpful of it. Finally, he wheeled a console about four feet high and two broad and deep onto the six-foot silver disc sunk into a section of the floor, connected various cables depending from the console and motioned me to join him . . ."

  As the old Archbishop painted his word-picture, Bass, despite his impatience, almost felt himself to be within that chamber far in the past/future . . .

  ——«»——«»——«»——

  Emmett O'Malley had studied hard, so now his big, freckled hands moved surely upon the face of the console, minutely adjusting this, switching on that, slowly setting the other. As the vast, gray bulks of the gigantic computer banks heated up, the soft whirring noises that had greeted their entrance gradually rose in volume, lights began to flicker on here and there, a deep humming commenced, and there seemed to be a smell of power in the very air.

  At last he made the final adjustment and stepped back to stand beside Harold Kenmore at the center of the silver disc. "It won't be long now, Ken. I've set the projector to trigger immediately as sufficient power is attained. And—"

  "You fools!" The low-pitched voice came from the shadows behind the gray metal housing of a computer bank. Then into the light stepped Colonel Jane Stone. She held a heavy-duty heat-stunner leveled at them, and her face was twisted with a mixture of contempt and rage.

  "Did you really think me so stupid, Emmett? Think our security so lax and inefficient? Your childish, asinine little conspiracy has been the joke of the
security network for months. I was just waiting to see if you two had the guts to go through with it. Will you deactivate that console, Emmett, or shall I simply switch to 'heat' and melt the cables a bit?"

  While speaking, the angry woman had been slowly advancing. Harold Kenmore was speechless, his throat dry and constricted with fear, but he saw Emmett open his mouth to speak and—

  Doctor Stone was gone! The bank of computers was gone! The console remained, but it and they were surrounded by walls of dark, roughly dressed stones and at their feet lay a decomposing corpse clad in dirty woolens and ill-tanned hide. With a quick bound, Emmett O'Malley was before the console and had thrown a lever and turned two knobs as far to the left as they would go, then he sighed gustily and wiped the back of his hairy hand across his damp forehead.

  "Whew, that was far too close, Ken. Sweet Jane would have had us, had I not put the device on automatic. . . ." He shuddered, then said, "You've been hypnoing more history than I. Does that . . . that thing's clothing tell you anything?"

  Harold advanced as closely as his churning stomach would permit to the stinking cadaver. "Probably Northern European, dead three, maybe four, days. Skull crushed and neck broken, likely in a fall from up there, somewhere." He gestured at the flight of unrailed stone steps that mounted upward along two of the four walls.

  "But his clothing, the way he's dressed?" said O'Malley. "Can you tell what period, what area?"

  Harold shook his head. "Emmett, this kind of rough clothing was normal cold-weather wear for peasants from Scandinavia to Sicily, Poland to England, for close to two millennia. As for the architecture of this place . . ." He glanced around the rectangle of stone walls, finding the stones really massive—some of them looked to be four or five feet long and at least half that measure in thickness, and nowhere was there a trace of mortar in their interstices. Here and there a few iron bolts had been sunk into the stonework, and thick, hand wrought iron rings were affixed to them; long streaks of rust stains ran down the face of the damp stones from these, and the floor seemed to be of hard-packed earth.