The Year of the Quiet Sun

by Wilson Tucker

  Chaney wondered what she really thought of all this? Apart from her superior’s opinions, apart from the stance officially adopted by the Bureau, what did she think? At breakfast she had exhibited some embarrassment — it may have been alarm — at the prospect of filming the alternate target, filming the Crucifixion, but other than that he’d found no sign of her personal beliefs or attitudes toward the future survey. She had revealed pride and triumph in the engineers’ accomplishments and she was fanatically loyal to her employer — but what did she think? Did she have any mental reservations?

  He failed utterly to understand Seabrooke’s interest in the second scroll.

  Every scholar recognized it as midrash; there had been no controversy over the second scroll and had it been published alone he would have escaped the notoriety. He thought Gilbert Seabrooke something of a lunatic to even introduce it into the briefing room. There was no meat here for the survey. There was nothing in the Eschatos relating to the coming probe of the turn of the century; the story was firmly rooted in the first century before Christ and did not look or hint beyond 70 A.D. Actually it didn’t peer beyond its own century. It made no claim or pretense to genuine prophecy as did, say, the Book of Daniel — whose scribe pretended to be alive about five hundred years before he was born, only to betray himself by his faulty grasp of history. Gilbert Seabrooke was reading imaginary lines between the lines, grabbing at rays of yellow light and the droppings of dragons.

  One of the three telephones rang.

  Kathryn van Hise jumped from her chair to answer and the three men turned to watch her.

  The conversation was short. She listened carefully, said Yes, sir three or four times, and assured the caller that the studies were proceeding at a satisfactory pace. She said Yes, sir a final time and hung up the instrument. Moresby was half out of his chair in anticipation.

  Saltus said: “Well, come on, Katrina!”

  “The engineers have concluded their testing and the vehicle is now on operational status. Field trials will begin very soon, gentlemen. Mr. Seabrooke suggested that we take the day off as a token of celebration. He will meet us at the pool this afternoon.”

  Arthur Saltus yelled, and was halfway to the door.

  Brian Chaney dropped his copy of the Eschatos scroll into a wastebasket and prepared to follow him.

  He looked to the woman and said: “Last one in is a wandering Egyptian.”

  SIX

  Brian Chaney came up from a shallow dive and paddled to the edge of the pool; he clung to the tiled rim for a space and attempted to wipe the gentle sting of chlorine from his eyes. The sun was hot, and the air warmer than the water. Two of his companions played in the water behind him while a third — the Major — sat in the shade and stared solemnly at a chess board, waiting for anyone to come along and challenge him. The pieces were set out. The recreation area held a few others beside themselves but none seemed interested in chess.

  Chaney glanced over his shoulder at the pair playing in the water, and felt the smallest pain of jealousy. He climbed from the pool and reached for a towel.

  Gilbert Seabrooke said: “Afternoon, Chaney.”

  The Director of Operations sat nearby under a gaudy beach umbrella, sipping a drink and watching the bathers. It was his first appearance.

  Chaney stretched the towel over his back and ran across the hot tiles. “Good afternoon. You’re the red telephone.” They shook hands.

  Seabrooke smiled briefly. “No; that’s our line to the White House. Please don’t pick it up and call the President.” A wave of the hand extended an invitation to the other chair beneath the umbrella. “Refreshments?”

  “Not just yet, thanks.” He studied the man with an open curiosity. “Has someone been carrying tales?” His glance went briefly to the woman in the water.

  Seabrooke’s smooth reply attempted to erase the sting. “I receive daily reports, of course; I try to keep on top of every activity on this station. And I’m quite used to people misunderstanding my motives and actions.” Again the smallest of stingy smiles. “I make it a practice to explore every possible avenue to attain whatever goal is in view. Please don’t be upset by my interest in your outside activities.”

  “They have no relation to this activity.”

  “Perhaps, and perhaps not. But I refuse to ignore them for I am a methodical man.”

  Chaney said: “And a persistent one.”

  Gilbert Seabrooke was tall, thin, taut, and looked like that well-known fellow in the State Department — or perhaps it was that other fellow who sat on the Supreme Court. He wore the carefully cultivated statesman image. His hair was silver gray and parted precisely in the middle, with the ends brushed backward at a conservative angle; his eyes appeared gray, although upon closer inspection they were an icy blue-green; the lips were firm, not used to laughter, while the chin was strong and clean with no hint of a double on the neckline. He carried his body as rigidly erect as a military man, and his pipe jutted out straight to challenge the world. He was Establishment.

  Chaney had vague knowledge of his political history.

  Seabrooke had been governor of one of the Dakotas — memory refused to reveal which one — and was only narrowly defeated in his bid for a third term. The man quickly turned up in Washington after the defeat and was appointed to a post in Agriculture: his party took care of its faithful. Some years later he moved to another post in Commerce, and after several years he dropped into a policy-making office in the Bureau of Standards. Today he sat beside the pool, directing everything on station.

  Chaney asked: “How’s the battle going?”

  “Which battle?”

  “The one with the Senate subcommittee. I suspect they’re counting the dollars and the minutes.”

  The tight lips quavered, almost permitting a smile. “Eternal vigilance results in a healthy exchequer, Chaney. But I am having some little difficulty with those people. Science tends to frighten those who are infrequently exposed to it, while the practitioners of science are often the most misunderstood people in the world. The project could be different if more imagination were brought into play. If our researches were directly connected to the hostilities in Asia, if they would result in practical military hardware, we would be drowning in funds.” A gesture of discontent. “But we must fight for every dollar. The military people and their war command priority.”

  Chaney said: “But there is a connection.”

  “I said this would be different if more imagination were brought into play,” Seabrooke reminded him dryly. “At this point, imagination is sadly lacking; the military mind often does not recognize a practical use until that use is thrust under the nose. You may see an application and I believe I see one, but neither the Pentagon nor the Congress will recognize it for another dozen years. We must pinch pennies and depend upon the good will of the President for our continued existence.”

  “Ben Franklin’s rocking chair didn’t catch on for the longest time,” Chaney said. But he saw a military application, and hoped the military never discovered it.

  Seabrooke watched the woman in the water, following her lithe form as she raced away from Arthur Saltus.

  “I understand that you experienced some difficulty in making up your mind.”

  Chaney knew his meaning. “I’m not an unduly brave man, Mr. Seabrooke. I have my share of brass and bravado when I’m standing on familiar ground, but I’m not a really brave man. I doubt that I could do what either of those men do every day, in their tours of duty.” A tiny fear of the future turned like a worm in his mind. “I’m not the hero type — I believe discretion is the better part of valor, I want to run while I’m still able.”

  “But you stayed on in Israel under fire.”

  “I did, but I was scared witless all the while.”

  Seabrooke turned. “Do you believe Israel will be defeated? Do you believe this will end at Armageddon?”

  Flatly: “No.”

  “You don’t find it suggestive �
� ?”

  “No. That land has been a battleground for something like five thousand years — ever since the first Egyptian army marching north met the first Sumerian army marching south. Doom-criers marched with them, but don’t fall into that trap.”

  “But those old biblical prophets are rather severe, rather disturbing.”

  “Those old prophets lived in a hard age and a hard land; they almost always lived under the boot of an invader. Those old prophets owed allegiance to a government and a religion which were at odds with every other nation within marching distance; they invited punishment by demanding independence.” He repeated the warning. “Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t try to take those prophets out of their age and fit them into the twentieth century. They are obsolete.”

  Seabrooke said: “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I can predict the downfall of the United States, of every government on the North American continent. Will you hang a medal on me for that?”

  Seabrooke was startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that all this will be dust in ten thousand years. Name a single government, a single nation which has endured since the birth of civilization — say, five or six thousand years ago.”

  Slowly: “Yes. I see the point.”

  “Nothing endures. The United States will not. If we are fortunate we may endure at least as long as Jericho.”

  “I know the name, of course.”

  Chaney doubted it. “Jericho is the oldest town in the world, the city half as old as time. It was built in the Natufian period, but has been razed or burned and then rebuilt so many times that only an archeologist can tell the number. But the town is still there and has been continuously inhabited for at least six thousand years. The United States should be as lucky. We may endure.”

  “I fervently hope so!” Seabrooke declared.

  Chaney braced him. “Then drop this Eschatos nonsense and worry about something worthwhile. Worry about our violent swing to the extreme right; worry about these hippy-hunts; worry about a President who can’t control his own party, much less the country.”

  Seabrooke made no comment.

  Brian Chaney had pivoted in his chair and was again watching Kathryn van Hise playing in the water. Her tanned flesh, only partially enclosed in a topless swim suit, was the target of many eyes. Those transparent plastic cups some women now wore in place of a bra or a halter was only one of the many little jolts he’d known on his return to the States. Israeli styles were much more conservative and he had half forgotten the American trend after three years’ absence. Chaney looked at the woman’s wet body and felt something more than a twinge of jealousy; he wasn’t entirely sure the cups were decent. The swing to the ultra-conservative right was bound to catch up with feminine clothing sooner or later, and then he supposed legs would be covered to the ankle and the transparent cups and blouses would be museum pieces.

  There would likely be other reactions in the coming years which would make some of his forecasts obsolete; the failure to anticipate a weak Administration was already throwing parts of the Indic report open to question. His recommendation for a renewable term trial marriage would probably be ignored — the program itself might be repealed before it got started if the howls frightened Congress. The vociferous minority might easily swell to a majority.

  To move off an uncomfortable spot of dead silence, he asked casually: “The TDV is operational?”

  “Oh, yes. It has been operational since an early hour this morning. The years of planning and building and testing are done. We are ready to forge ahead.”

  “What took you so long?”

  Seabrooke turned heavily to look at him. Blue-green eyes were hard. “Chaney, nine men have already died by that vehicle. Would you have cared to be the tenth?”

  Shock. “No.”

  “No. Nor would anyone else. The engineers had to test again and again until every last doubt was erased. If any doubt had remained, the project would have been canceled and the vehicle dismantled. We would have burned the blueprints, the studies, the cuff-notes, everything. We would have wiped away every trace of the vehicle. You know the rule: two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

  “That’s elementary.”

  A curt nod. “It is so elementary that our engineers overlooked it, and nine men died when the vehicle returned to its point of origin, its precise second of launch, and attempted to occupy the same space.” His voice dropped. “Chaney, the most dreadful sight I have ever seen was the crash of an airliner on a Dakota hillside. I was with a hunting party less than a mile away and watched it fall. I was among the first to reach the wreckage. There was no possibility of anyone surviving — none.” Hesitation. “The explosion in our laboratory was the second worst sight. I was not there — I was in another building — but when I reached the laboratory I found a terrible repetition of that hillside catastrophe. No man, no single piece of equipment was left intact. The room was shattered. We lost the engineer traveling with the vehicle and eight others on duty in the laboratory. The vehicle returned to the exact moment, the exact millisecond of its departure and destroyed itself. It was an incredible disaster, an incredible oversight — but it happened. Once.”

  After a space, Seabrooke picked up the thread of his recital. “We learned a bitter lesson. We rebuilt the laboratory with thicker, reinforced walls and we rebuilt the vehicle; we programmed a new line of research accenting the safety factor. That factor settled itself at just sixty-one seconds, and we were satisfied.”

  Chaney said: “They’ve been counted for me, again and again. I’ll lose a minute on every trip.”

  “A passenger embarking for any distant point, you, will leave at twelve o’clock, let us say, and return not sooner than sixty-one seconds after twelve. The amount of elapsed time in the field will not affect the return; if you stayed there ten years you would return sixty-one seconds after you launched. If we could not be absolutely certain of that we would close shop and admit defeat.”

  “Thank you,” Chaney said soberly. “I like my skin. How are you protecting those men now?”

  “By reinforced walls and remote observation. The engineers work in an adjoining room but five feet of steel and concrete will separate you. They operate and observe the TDV by closed circuit television; indeed, they observe not only the operations room itself but the corridor to it and the storeroom and fallout shelter: everything on that level of basement.”

  Curiously: “How do you really know the vehicle is moving? Is it displacing anything?”

  “It does not move, does not travel in the sense of passing through space. The vehicle will always remain in its original location, unless we choose to move it elsewhere. But it does operate, and in operation it displaces temporal strata just as surely as those people in the pool are displacing water by plunging into it.”

  “How did you prove that?”

  “A camera was mounted in the fore of the vehicle, looking through a port into the operations room. A clock and a day-calendar hang on a wall in direct line of sight of that camera. The camera has not only photographed past hours and dates but has taken pictures of the wall before the clock was placed there. We know the TDV has probed at least twelve months into the past.”

  “Any effect on the monkeys?”

  “None. They are quite healthy.”

  “What have you done to prevent another accident — a different kind of an accident?”

  Sharply: “Explain that.”

  Chaney said carefully: “What will happen if that machine probes back into the past before the basement was dug? What will happen if it burrows into a bed of clay?”

  “That simply will not be allowed to happen,” was the quick reply. “The lower limit of displacement is December 30, 1941. A probe beyond that date is prohibited.” The Director emptied his glass and put it aside. “Chaney, the site has been carefully researched to determine a lower limit; every phase of this operation has been researched so that nothing
is left to chance. The first building on the site was a crude structure resembling a cabin. It burned to the ground in February, 1867.”

  “You went back that far?”

  “We were prepared to go farther if necessary; we had access to records dating back to the Black Hawk war in 1831. A farmhouse with a basement was built on the site during the summer of 1901, and remained in place until demolition in 1941 when the government acquired this land for an ordnance depot. It has since been government owned and occupied, and the site remained vacant until the laboratory was built. The engineers were very careful to locate that basement. Today the TDV floats in a sealed tank of polywater three feet above the original basement floor, in a space that could have been occupied by nothing else. We even pinpointed the former location of the furnace and the coal room.”

  “And so the deadline is 1941? Why not 1901?”

  “The lower limit is December 30, 1941, well after the date of demolition. The safety factor above all.”

  “I’d like to see that tank of polywater.”

  “You will. It is necessary that you become quite familiar with every aspect of the operation. Have you been visiting the doctor for your physicals?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had weapons training?”

  “No. Will that be necessary?”

  Seabrooke said: “The safety factory, Chaney. It’s wise to anticipate. The training may be wasted, but it’s still wise to prepare yourself in every way.”

  “That sounds pessimistic. Wasted in what way?”

  “Excuse me; you’ve been out of the country. All weapons for civilians will probably be prohibited in the near future. President Meeks favors that, you know.”

  Chaney said absently: “That will please the Major. He doesn’t believe civilians have enough sense to point a gun in the right direction.”