Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  _Total population by the turn of the century_: based upon the foregoing, three hundred and forty million people in the forty-eight contiguous states and an additional ten million in the three remaining states (the northern tier of plains states projected as consistent annual losers but with Alaska up significantly; Manhattan Island reaching point of saturation within two years, California by 1990, Florida by 2010). _Footnote_: recommended that immigration to Manhattan Island, California, and Florida be forbidden by law, and that monetary inducements be offered to relocate in middle states having low densities of population.

  Brian Chaney felt a certain unease about some of his conclusions.

  Trial marriages could be expected to increase at a phenomenal rate once their popularity caught on, but with the trial term limited to one year he fully expected both the murder and suicide rates to climb; the murders were apt to be crimes of passion committed by the female because of the probability of losing her shortterm husband to another short-term wife, while the suicides were predicted for the same reason. The recommended two-year renewable term would tend to dampen the possibility of either violent act.

  A certain amount of joy-riding was to be expected in trial marriages, but he was gambling they would contribute almost nothing to the birth rate. Nor did he believe that another pill--the new pill--would affect his projections. Chaney held a low opinion of the recently introduced KH3-B pill, and refused to believe it had any restorative powers; he clung to the belief that man was alloted a normal three score and fifteen, and the projected increase of one point nine years by 2050 would be attributed to the eradication of diseases--not to pills and nostrums purportedly having the power to restore mental and physical vigor to the aged. The patients _might_ live six months longer than their normal spans because they were buoyed by euphoria, but six months would not affect a mass of statistics.

  Great population shifts had been earlier predicted and borne out, with the emphasis of change along the natural waterways. The greater densities of population--by 2050--would lie along five clearly defined areas: the Atlantic seaboard, the Pacific seaboard, the Gulf Coast from Tampa to Brownsville, the southern shores of all the Great Lakes, and the full lengths of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. But he knew serious misgivings about those Lakes belts. The water levels in the Lakes had been rising steadily since the beginning of the twentieth century, and the coming flooding and erosion--combined with heavier populations--would create problems of catastrophic proportions in those areas.

  Major Moresby broke the silence. "We will be expected to confirm all this, after all."

  "Yes, sir. Careful observations are desired for each of the three target dates, but the greater amount of work will fall upon Mr. Chaney. His projections will need to be verthed or modified."

  Chaney, with surprise: "Three? Aren't we going up together? Going to the same target?"

  "No, sir, that would be wasteful. The schedule calls for three individual surveys on carefully separated dates, each at least a year apart to obtain a better overall view. You will each travel separately to your predetermined date."

  "The people up there will sneer at our clothes."

  "The people up there should be too preoccupied to notice you, unless you call attention to yourself."

  "Oh? What will preoccupy them?"

  "They will be preoccupied with themselves and their problems. You haven't spent much time in American cities of late, have you, Mr. Chaney? Didn't you notice that the trains you rode into and out of Chicago were armored trains?"

  "Yes, I noticed that. The Israeli newspapers did publish _some_ American news. I read about the curfews. The people of the future won't notice our cameras and recorders?"

  "We _sincerely_ hope not. All would be undone if the present demand for privacy is projected into the turn of the century, if that present demand is intensified."

  Chaney said: "I'm on their side; I enjoy privacy."

  The woman continued. "And of course, we don't know what status your instruments may have at that future date, we don't know if cameras and recorders will be permissible in public, nor can we guess at the efficiency of the police. You may be handicapped." She glanced at Saltus. "The Commander will teach you to work surreptitiously."

  Saltus: "I will?"

  "Yes, sir. You must devise a technique for completing that part of the assignment without discovery. The cameras are very small, but you must find a way to conceal them and still operate them properly."

  "Katrina, do you really think it'll be illegal to take a picture of a pretty girl on a street corner?"

  "We do not know the future, Commander; the survey will inform us what is and is not legal. But whatever the technique, you must photograph a number of objects and persons for a period of time without others being aware of what you are doing."

  "For how long a period of time?"

  "For as long as possible; for as long as you are in the field and your supply of film lasts, The emphasis is on depth, Commander. A survey in depth, to determine the accuracy of the Indic projections. Ideally, you would be in the field several days and expose every roll of film and every reel of tape you are carrying; you would record every object of major interest you might see, and as many lesser objects as time allowed. You would penetrate the field safely, accomplish all objectives, and withdraw without haste at a time of your choosing." A shadow of a smile. "But more realistically, the ideal is seldom attained. Therefore you will go in, record all you are able, and retreat when it becomes necessary. We will hope for the maximum and have to be content with the minimum."

  Chaney turned in the chair. "You make this sound like a dangerous thing."

  "It could be dangerous, Mr. Chaney. What you will be doing has never before been done. We can offer you no firm guidelines for procedure, field technique, or your own safety. We will equip you as best we can, brief you to the fullest extent of our present knowledge, and send you in on your own."

  "We're to report _everything_ we find up there?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I only hope Seabrooke has anticipated public reaction. He's headed for a rift within the lute."

  "Sir?"

  "I suspect he's headed for trouble. A large part of the public will raise unholy hell when they find out about the TDV--when they find out what lies twenty years ahead of them. There's - something in that Indic report to scare everybody."

  Kathryn van Hise shook her head. "The public will not be informed, Mr. Chaney. This project and our future programs are and will remain secret; the tapes and films will be restricted and the missions will not be publicized. Please remember that all of you have security clearances and are under oath and penalty. Keep silent. President Meeks has ruled that knowledge of this operation is not in the public interest."

  Chaney said: "Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster."

  Saltus opened his mouth to laugh when the engineers pushed their rig into a vacuum. The lights dimmed.

  The massive rubber band snapped painfully against their eardrums; or it may have been a mallet, or a hammer, driven under cruel pressure into a block of compressed air. The thing made a noise of impact, then sighed as if it rebounded in slow motion through thick liquid. The sound hurt. Three faces turned together to watch the clock.

  Chaney contented himself with watching their faces rather than the clock. He guessed another monkey was riding the vehicle into somewhere, somewhen. Perhaps the animal bore a label: _Restricted_ and was under orders not to talk. The President had ruled his trip was not in the public interest.

  FOUR

  Brian Chaney awoke with the guilty feeling that he was tardy again. The Major would never forgive him.

  He sat on the side of the bed and listened carefully for tell-tale sounds within the building, but none were audible. The station seemed unusually quiet. His room was a small one, a single unit sparsely furnished, in a double row of identical rooms fitted into a former army barracks. The partitions were thin and appeared to have been cheaply and
hastily erected; the ceiling was less than three feet above his head--and he was a tall man. Larger common rooms at either end of the only corridor contained the showers and toilets, The place bore an unmistakable military stamp, as though troops had moved out the day before he moved in.

  Perhaps they had done just that; perhaps troops were now riding those armored trains serving Chicago and Saint Louis. Without armored siding, a passenger train seldom could traverse Chicago's south side without every window in every car being broken by stones or gunfire.

  Chaney opened his door and peered into the corridor. It was empty, but recognizable sounds from the two rooms opposite his brought a measure of relief. In one of the rooms someone was opening and closing bureau drawers in frustrated search of something; in the other room the occupant was snoring. Chaney picked up a towel and his shaving kit and went to the showers. The snoring was audible all the way down the corridor.

  The cold water was _cold_ but the hot water was only a few degrees warmer--barely enough to feel a difference. Chaney came out of the shower, wrapped a towel about his middle and began rubbing lather on his face.

  "Stop!" Arthur Saltus was in the doorway, pointing an accusatory finger. "Put down the razor, civilian."

  Startled, Chaney dropped the razor into the bowl of tepid water. "Good morning, Commander." He recovered his wits and the razor to begin the shave. "Why?"

  "Secret orders came in the middle of the night," Saltus declared. "All the people of the future wear long beards, like old Abe Lincoln. We must be in character."

  "Nudists with bushy beards," Chaney commented. "That must be quite a sight." He kept on shaving.

  "Well, you bit hard yesterday, civilian." Saltus put an exploratory hand under the shower and turned on the water. He had anticipated the result. "This hasn't changed since boot camp," he told Chaney. "Every barracks is allotted ten gallons of hot water. The first man in uses it all."

  "I _thought_ this was a barracks."

  "This building? It must have been at one time or another, but the station wasn't always a military post. I spotted that coming in. Katrina said it was built as an ordnance plant in 1941--you know, during _that_ war." He stepped under the shower. "That was--what? Thirtyseven years ago? Time flies and the mice have been at work."

  "That other building is new."

  "The lab building is brand new. Katrina said it was built to house that noisy machine--built to last forever. Reinforced concrete all the way down; a basement, and a sub-basement, and other things. The vehicle is down there somewhere hauling monkeys back and forth."

  "I'd like to _see_ that damned thing."

  "You and me together, civilian. You and me and the Major." His head popped out of the shower and his voice dropped to a stage whisper. "But I've got it figured."

  "You have? What?"

  "Promise you won't tell Katrina? You won't tell the man in the White House I broke security?"

  "Cross my heart, spit at the moon and everything."

  "All right: all this is a plot, a trick to be ahead of everybody else. Katrina has been misleading us, We're not going up to the turn of the century--we're going back down, back into history!"

  "Back? Why?"

  "We're going back two thousand years, civilian. To grab those old scrolls of yours, pirate them, as if they _were_ classified or something. We're going to sneak in there some dark night, find a batch of them in some cave or other and copy them. Photograph them. _That's_ why we're using cameras. And meanwhile, you'll be using a recorder, making tapes of the location and the like. Maybe you could unroll a parchment or two and read off the titles, so we'll know if we have anything important."

  "But they seldom have titles."

  Saltus was stopped. "Why not?"

  "Titles just weren't important at the time."

  "Well--no matter; we'll make do, we'll just copy everything we can find and sort them out later. And when we're finished we'll put everything back the way we found it and make our escape." Saltus snapped his fingers to indicate a job well done and went back into the shower.

  "Is that all?"

  "That's enough for us--we've scooped the world! And a long time afterward--you know, whatever year it was--some shepherd will stumble into the cave and find them in the usual way. Nobody but us will be the wiser."

  Chaney wiped his face dry. "How do we get into the Palestine of two thousand years ago? Cross the Atlantic in a canoe?"

  "No, no, we don't ride backwards _first_, civilian--not here, not in Illinois. If we did that we'd have to fight our way though Indians! Look, now: the Bureau of Standards will ship the vehicle over there in a couple of weeks, after we've had our field trials. They'll pack it in a box marked _Agricultural Machinery_, or some such thing, and smuggle it in like everybody else does. How do you think the Egyptians got that baby bomb into Israel? By sending it parcel post?"

  Chaney said: "Fantastic."

  A face emerged from the shower. "Are you being disagreeable, civilian?"

  "I'm being skeptical, sailor."

  "Spoil-sport!"

  "Why would we want to copy the scrolls?"

  "To be first."

  "Why that?"

  Saltus stepped all the way out of the shower.

  "Well--to be _first_, that's all. We like to be first in everything. Where's your patriotism, civilian?"

  "I carry it in my pocket. How do we copy the scrolls in the dark, in a cave?"

  "Now that's my department! Infra-red equipment, of course. Don't fret about the technical end, mister. I'm an old cameraman, you know."

  "I didn't know."

  "Well, I _was_ a cameraman, a working cameraman, when I was an EM. Do you remember the Gemini flights about thirteen or fourteen years ago?"

  I remember.

  "I was right there on deck, mister. Photographer's apprentice, stationed on the _Wasp_ when the flights began; I manned the deck cameras on some of those early flights in 1964, but when the last one splashed down in 1966, I was riding the choppers out to meet them," A disparaging wave of the hand. "Now, would you believe it, I'm riding a desk. Operations officer." His face mirrored his dissatisfaction. "I'd rather be behind the camera; the enlisted men have the fun with that job."

  Chaney said: "I've learned something new."

  "What s that?'

  "Why you and I were brought in here. I map and structure the future; you will film it. What's the Major's specialty?"

  "Air Intelligence. I thought you knew."

  "I didn't. Espionage?"

  "No, no--he's another desk man, and he hates it as much as I do. Old William is a brain: interrogation and interpretation. He briefs the pilots before they fly out, tells them where to find the targets, what is concealing them, and what is defending them; and then he quizzes the hell out of them when they come back to learn what they saw, where they saw it, how it behaved, how it smelled, and what was new firing at them."

  "Air Intelligence," Chaney mused. "A sharpie?"

  "You can bet your last tax dollar, civilian. Do you remember those maps Katrina gave us yesterday?"

  "I'm not likely to forget them. Top secret."

  "Read that literally for the Major: he memorized them. Mister, if you could show him another map today with one small Illinois town shifted a quarter of an inch away from yesterday's location, old William would put his long finger on the spot and say, 'This town has moved.' He's _good_." Saltus was grinning with high humor. "The enemy can't hide a water tank or a missile launcher or an ammo bunker from him--not from _him_."

  Chaney nodded his wonder. "Do you see what kind of team Katrina is putting together? What kind the mystery man Seabrooke has recruited? I wish I knew what they really expect us to find up there."

  Arthur Saltus left his room and crossed the corridor to stand at Chaney's door, dressed for a summer day.

  "Hey--how do you like our Katrina?"

  Chaney said: "Let us consider beauty a sufficient end."

  "Mister, did you swallow a copy of Bartlett?"
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br />   A grin. "I like to prowl through old cultures, old times. Bartlett and Haakon are my favorites; each in his way offers a rich storehouse, a treasury."

  "Haakon? Who is Haakon?"

  "A latter-day Viking; he was born too late. Haakon wrote _Pax Abrahamitica_, a history of the desert tribes. I would say it was more of a treasury than a history: maps, photographs, and text telling one everything he would want to know about the tribes five to seven thousand years ago."

  "Photographs five thousand years ago?"

  "No; photographs of the remains of tribal life five thousand years ago: Byzantine dams, Nabataean wells, old Negev water courses still holding water, still serving the people who live there today. The Nabataeans built things to _last_. Their wells are water-tight today; they're still used by the Bedouin. Several good photographs of them."

  "I'd like to see that. May I borrow the book?"

  Chaney nodded. "I have it with me." He stared at a closed door and listened to the snores. "Wake him up?"

  "No! Not if we have to live in the same room with him all day. He's a bear when he's routed out of his cave before he's ready--and he doesn't eat breakfast. He says he thinks and fights well on an empty stomach."

  Chaney said: "The company is Spartan; see all their wounds on the front."

  "I give up! Let's go to breakfast."

  They quit the converted barracks and struck off along the narrow concrete sidewalk, walking north toward the commissary. A jeep and a staff car moved along the street, while in the middle distance a cluster of civilian cars were parked about a large building housing the commissary. They were the only ones who walked.

  Chaney asked: "This is swimming weather. Is there a pool here?"

  "There has to be--Katrina didn't get that beautiful tan under a sun lamp. I think it's over that way--over on E Street, near the Officers' Club. Want to try it this afternoon?"

  "If she will permit it. We may have to study."

  "I'm already tired of that! I don't _care_ how many million voters with plastic stomachs affiliated with Party _A_ will be living in Chicago twenty years from now. Mister, how can you spend years playing with numbers?"