by John Barnes
It even occurred to me to wish Al and Sandy hadn’t departed quite so fast—I’d have liked to have seen the city with them, Al for his passionate enthusiasm, Sandy for naïveté—both of which I was a bit lacking in, but this Hanoi in the Free Zone was my first real taste of the Orient, and it occurred to me that to see it as a burned-out, world-weary cynic was not to see it at all.
Finally, after a very long time, a physically slight, neatly dressed Vietnamese man came in; he spoke perfect English with a very slight accent. “Mr. Strang. I am General Giap. I must say, we have heard a number of very unusual statements from a number of very unusual people, but yours are the most unusual I have ever seen. Moreover, we have the odd fact that you have a certain amount of support and corroborating testimony from many people we would dearly like to believe. So you pose us quite a dilemma. This device you call a SHAKK”—he pulled it from a box beside him—“will you help me to examine it, please?”
He handed it to me, pointed to the readout, and said, “You claim to have an implant behind your ear which allows you to read this text?”
I bent forward and showed him the implanted device.
“Hmmm. Can you remain in that position? Thank you … now read to me the words displayed here?”
I hesitated, then translated, using the chip on the back of my head. “Reload before firing again.”
Something felt slightly funny in my head, and he asked me to translate the characters next to the fire-control switch. I looked but couldn’t read them, and said so, “But I’ve used it enough. All the way forward for single shot semiauto, middle position for hex bursts semiauto, all the way back for full auto.”
“All right, now hold still—” he said.
Again my head felt extraordinarily strange, but this time more so; I almost fell, and he steadied me. “What did you just feel?”
“Very dizzy,” I said. “But not like I’m ill—”
“Look at the fire control switch again,” he said.
“‘One shot per pull, hex cluster shot, stream of shots,’” I read. “I don’t—”
“I pulled out your translator chip, then put it back in. It proves nothing, of course, you might just be a superb actor for all I can tell, but at least it proves you are good enough to fool me. If you are acting, the slight dizziness when I put the chip in and took it back out were superb touches.” He sat down and pressed his fingers together lightly at the tips, clearly thinking. “The physicists assure me that the material they have received is genuine, but of course it was not entirely received by your agency. A colleague of mine is looking at another piece of evidence; provisionally I am forced to believe you may be who you say you are.”
I nodded. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“So are we. We are the Free Zone only in the sense that we are not under the heel of the Axis. Some day we hope to make it mean a good deal more than that, of course, but for right now it really does not. There are no guarantees of the rights of the accused here, and if, for example, we had become convinced you were not who you said you were, we would not hesitate to use drugs, torture, or whatever coercion stood the best chance of working. We are the side of the right, I believe, Mr. Strang, but for the right to be right it must first win—and that is our goal just now.” He got up and paced slowly over to the window. “I do hope you understand that. Should we conclude that you are working against us or dangerous to us, we would take swift and possibly violent measures to deal with the problem …”
“And if you become convinced I’m on your side?”
Giap smiled slightly. “One of my first postings here was in intelligence, and I retain an interest in that field. I am never entirely convinced that anyone is on my side.” The smile he added to that was utterly without compassion.
I nodded, understanding he meant to frighten me and frankly agreeing that yes, if he wanted to, I could hardly stop him, but then I said, “Just the same, if you decided the risk of my disloyalty was low—”
“Then we have a hundred possible billets to put you in, assuming you want to join the Free Zone Forces, as you said you do.”
The door opened. The next man who came in was large, strong, and looked like a comic-strip boxer, his nose a little flattened and bent, his whole way of moving as if he were looking for a fight. He wore what had to be the only perfect GI battle dress I saw the whole time I was there, and twin ivory-handled revolvers graced his hips.
He was carrying my Colt automatic. “Giap,” he said, “damn all if this thing isn’t perfectly consistent with the story the bastard is telling. According to his debriefing the States had two big wars after World War II, in his timeline—if you believe in all that bullshit about timeline—and shit if the serial number here isn’t right up in the two millions where it ought to be. And the cops just got done checking his jacket and it’s a synthetic they don’t recognize. And not least, that silly watch of his is displaying consistent time but there are no moving parts except the buttons, and when we looked inside all we could find was something that looked like a complicated midget crystal radio.”
Giap nodded. “After my examination of him I’m inclined to think he is telling the truth, George.”
“I’m sure he is. I guess that should be I’m sure you are, Strang. How the hell are you after all this probing? We’ll get your stuff back to you later today.”
“I’m fine,” I said, “and I’m not sure whether in your place I’d have believed me, sir. I do have the honor of speaking to General Patton?”
“You do indeed, and I’m damned glad somebody realizes it’s an honor. It’s an honor to speak to Giap, here, too, though he’s quiet about it. Well, the question now is what we do with you. You look like you’re in decent shape, and from what that crazy poet you brought with you says you might make a soldier, so I guess we can just enlist you, but it seems like something as unusual as you are would have a better use than just lugging a rifle.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, sir, if you’ve read the interview, then no doubt you know that all I have training to be is an art historian or a bodyguard. I’m good at both, but I don’t imagine you’ve got much need for either.”
Patton nodded and handed me back my .45; he said, “You seem to take good care of your weapon, and that’s another plus for you. Since you’re a bodyguard, why don’t you come to lunch with us? About when I started to think you might really be what you seemed to be, I started to want to hear about your world.”
“Shouldn’t you take other guards—”
“Oh, I’ll have them whether I take them or not. Certain other generals around here insist on having me followed. How about you, Giap?”
The Vietnamese blinked innocently. “I have never followed you, George.”
“I’ll say!” Patton grinned; I suddenly realized that these men were very old friends. “Will you come along to lunch with us?”
“Gladly.”
“By the way,” Patton added, “there are two fewer rounds in there than usual. We pulled the two you had left over from your own timeline. They looked like we should copy them.”
“They’re called Black Talons,” I said, “and I don’t know how they do it exactly, but they’re supposed to have maximum stopping power.”
“Well, we’ve got some whiz kids in our labs, and they’ll figure it out. But I’d be damned surprised if a 1990 round isn’t better than what we’re using.”
We were out on the streets now, and I had to admit I was amazed—and that I felt like I was going to earn my keep as a bodyguard. Giap and Patton walked through all the swirl of bicycles, vendors, shrieking kids, handcarts, oxen—with just me as their apparent guard—like any two tourists anywhere.
As we rounded one corner and actually went deliberately into a narrow alley, Giap turned to me and muttered, “He refuses to be afraid. And to be fair, people love him for it. As for me, I have to follow him like this because I will not let him make it look like I am afraid of my people!”
He stopped for a m
inute to let a little parade of waddling ducks go by, and we caught up with him. “There’s a noodle house over here I like,” he said. “Mac introduced me to it, and I like to visit it now and then in his memory.”
To my astonishment, the place was a Japanese restaurant. Giap and I exchanged glances, and Patton explained, “Here, watch …” and as we went in, he said, “Hey, Jimmy, where’s my baby doll?”
The Japanese man behind the counter grinned and bellowed—in a thick Bronx accent—“You keep your white devil paws off my daughter! Ruthie, get out here and wait on these gents!”
The girl who came out to lead us to our table was about eighteen and terribly cute; her Bronx accent was as thick as her father’s.
“Jimmy’s from New York, if you haven’t guessed,” Patton explained. “Used to be a steward on a Navy cruiser, then drove a landing craft, then was an artillery spotter for me in Australia, then spent a year or so sparring with Krauts on New Guinea before they gave that up for a bad business. Now that he’s a little older, he’s settled into being the noodle king of Hanoi.”
We found ourselves conducted to a table in the back; no menu ever appeared, nor did any bill I noticed, but what did turn up, again and again, were plates full of all sorts of wonderful food. I ate sparingly, and so did Giap, but we were both a little logy by the end of the meal.
Then, as the tea was poured for us, Patton said, “All right, now all I need from you is the whole history of the USA from your timeline.”
Even when you’re reasonably well educated, that’s not easy to do. Unfortunately for Patton, too, military history is off in one small corner of academia, art history in another, and the twain touch rarely. He was glad to know my father had served in the Third Army and that he had commanded it, and glad to know he’d won distinction.
Patton had a certain generosity of spirit, too … when I told General Giap that he had defeated first the French and then the Americans in a deeply political war, he said, “All wars are political.”
Patton grunted. “Not the ones that are any fun.”
“Nonetheless,” Giap persisted.
“Yeah,” Patton grunted. “I know you’re right, Giap. Ah, hell, I’m glad you got the glory, friend, but I wish to hell you hadn’t had to beat my side to do it.”
“Here, we are on the same side, George,” he said. “Now, if you could tell us once more, a little more about this space program …”
The afternoon passed pleasantly enough. Two hours later, the two generals seemed ready to go. “The strangest thing of all,” Patton said, “is that just now there’s not much work for either of us. Though a couple of the projects we will be putting you to work on just happen to be the sort of thing that might get either of us employed again …”
Giap nodded. “Who did you say, again, was the first American to orbit the earth?”
I was getting puzzled by how often he’d returned to that point. “John Glenn. A Marine Corps pilot, I think from Ohio—at least that’s where he went to get himself elected to the Senate.”
The same flock of ducks started to cross the street in front of us, but something was different this time—
There. Under the canvas of one booth, someone had pushed those ducks out to walk in front of the generals.
I’d had a lot of practice at noticing things that weren’t quite right; I had tackled both of them, the tall burly American and the frail Vietnamese, in a moment, and then was standing above them, the Colt in firing position, just as a too-late shot screeched wildly by. I’d seen the muzzle flash in the dim tent, and fired back—what came back out was a flurry of shots, and then there was a scuffle and the tent itself went over.
Police had been near the tent on the other side and had jumped on the men inside—there was a struggle and a shot or two more, but it was clear that matters were under control.
Patton was on his feet as well, his famous pistols drawn, but Giap seemed to have vanished—for just an instant. Then the booth from which all the trouble had started tipped over, and I saw him locked in a knife fight with the man who had been under there. They rolled over my way, and I stepped on the attacker’s knife arm at the wrist and placed my .45 against his temple. The man let the knife fall, and we pinned him down and flagged some more of the police.
After they had taken him away, Patton said, “Well, he could be one of our bodyguards.”
“True,” Giap said. “But in all truth, I think I’d rather send him over to Engineering Seven. As a bodyguard. And I certainly hope he has better luck with those lunatics than we do.”
“Engineering Seven is—”
“Not for discussion here in the street,” Patton said firmly. “But I do believe Giap has the right idea. Come along, then, Strang, I think we’ve found a place where your mix of skills can be some use.”
I had been bewildered at having that much attention from two senior generals; it was only later that I came to understand that because in the Free Zone officers kept the commands they brought with them and units kept their weapons, by and large, high-ranking generals like Patton, Giap, Montgomery, and the rest were usually not wanted for anything but sliding counters around on maps and talking about what could be done next.
The exception to this was an organization called the General Council, which was as much of a coordinated command as the Free Zone really had. (The local legislatures and governments that raised taxes and ran civil affairs had no military power whatsoever—they had only the choice of either raising levies to pay for the armed forces, or of starving their own forces, letting the Axis win, and then seeing what deal they could come up with. It’s wonderful how a serious situation can introduce the spirit of cooperation into a legislature.)
The General Council had one hundred engineering projects going at any one time, scattered around various parts of the Free Zone. Of these one hundred, at least half were dummies, but which numbers were dummies varied from year to year as well. It turned out that Giap had mentioned Engineering Seven for me only because it was a dummy. “Actually,” Patton said, “we’ll send you to Engineering Fifteen. That’s the one that’s being supervised by General LeMay, who’s all right if you don’t mind maniacs, and has a bunch of good people working on—well, you’ll see. And you have one additional duty—write down everything you remember of your home timeline. We have no way of knowing what’s going to be useful, so we want all of it before any of it can fade from your memory.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and took the orders that were to get me on a plane out of Hanoi to Engineering Fifteen’s offices in Singapore.
“Oh, and Strang?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Thanks for saving my life. And old Giap’s, too. I’d miss the old commie if anything happened to him.”
“My pleasure, sir, but you should be more careful.”
The general looked at me a little incredulously. “Are you aware whom you’re asking to be careful?”
I thought about it for one long instant, realized he was right, said so, and took my leave. The last I saw of him, the palm-frond ceiling fans were turning over his head and he’d pulled on a pair of pince-nez to study a map.
The flight was all space-a, meaning whenever there was room on an airplane and a more important sack of flour was not ahead of me in line, I got to move toward Singapore. The first hop was right down to Saigon, but then I was stuck there for a day, tried jumping to Bangkok, and ended up coming back on a DC-3 that was going on from Saigon to Ipoh down in the Malay Peninsula, before finally catching a flight to Singapore.
Once, on my way to a dig in India, I had passed through Singapore, and in my part of my timeline, it looked sort of like a chunk of Manhattan torn off, wrapped up in bits of Hong Kong, and stuck out into tip of the jungles, protruding into the sea. But in my world Singapore had been fought over just once in the twentieth century, and had been utterly undefended from the land side; the Japanese took it with no trouble at all.
Here, it had fallen to them at the outbreak of
fighting, been retaken almost at once by Aussies and New Zealanders (able to get there because the Japanese fleet was busy with the invasion of Hawaii), fallen again when the Japanese made their brief counter-attack, fallen again to the Free Zone forces … and so it had been worn down by shellfire and fighting until it became one vast, grim, forbidding fortress complex, nothing like the exciting trade entrepôt it was in my timeline.
When the old Ford Trimotor I had managed to hitch a ride in touched down at Singapore, what I saw was about as attractive, esthetically speaking, as East Berlin used to be. It was from here, just three years ago, that an air sortie had sunk the aircraft carriers Kaga, Graf Spee, and Gloire, but only after the island had taken yet another pounding; bomb craters were still visible here and there.
I was met at the airport by an older guy named Bob, who practically talked my ear off on the way back to Engineering Fifteen; he didn’t know where I’d come from and my official new title was “chief of security,” so as far as I could tell what he was trying to do was make sure I knew how important Engineering Fifteen was. He kept referring to “the future of humanity itself,” which after all was pretty much what the Free Zone was all about, anyway.
It wasn’t until we reached the secure bunkers that I finally found out what I was guarding: the Free Zone’s space program.
Just as Patton had scooped up and run with most of the American nuclear program in his long run that went past Oak Ridge and through Los Alamos, Marine General Puller, stationed on the West Coast, had had the presence of mind to grab the advanced research projects from the Consortium’s Hughes Aircraft facility. One of those projects had been a group of men around Robert Goddard and Willy Ley, and they had been working on rockets.