by Gene Wolfe
“And we were gone,” Barnes said. He was standing behind the witch’s seat.
“Right. So I figured you had probably headed toward the front of the plane, and I went that way too. I’ve got most of this worked out, I think.”
Free said, “You recognized me when you saw me here, but you had not recognized me on the ground. I suppose that was only a few hours ago.”
Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I should have, but you were younger and you had a clean shave, and it was too crazy. Of course that girl, Kip, had blown smoke in my eyes with the story about the twins. Is she really your daughter? She looks a little like you.”
“Yes, my only child. Eventually she will kill me, I suppose.”
Stubb stared at him.
“She reported to me; you must have realized that. Even then I had begun to suspect that Benjamin Free had been myself.”
Barnes said, “Wait a minute. You were the man in the duffel coat?”
The witch murmured, “The Master will tell us everything, if he will. Perhaps first of all, his name.”
“No,” Free said. “Not first. First I want to hear how Stubb deduced my identity. I apologize for calling you Short, by the way. I was playing drunk.”
“I knew it,” Stubb told him. “That’s why I didn’t mind.”
“And the deductions?”
“Hell, there was so much of it. For a long time I didn’t believe it, but it all pointed the same way. To start with, Kip’s gun.” He fell silent.
“Go ahead,” Free said. “It hurts less to talk of it than to think of it, and I have thought of it a great deal.”
“It was a Colt New Service, one of the biggest, heaviest pistols ever made. Colt built them for the Army in the First World War, because they couldn’t make enough forty-five autos. You still see a few around, and I suppose they’ll last forever; you couldn’t break one with a sledge. But why would a small girl like Kip carry a heavy, old-fashioned gun like that?”
“I taught her to shoot with one,” Free said. “I had a Woodsman too, but a revolver is safer for a beginner.”
“Then when we met you, you had a Thompson. With the round magazine, yet, like you were Al Capone. Those things are in museums. Then you let me keep your flask, figuring that if we each had a jolt it might loosen us up a little when we went upstairs. It had an art deco design and a bottom that said, ‘Tiffany and Company, Fifth Avenue, New York.’ Just like that. Everybody puts the state and zip on now. Sure, maybe it was an antique, but it pointed the same way as the guns.”
The witch demanded, “And in what way was that? You men, you are so maddening.”
Candy added, “I’ll say!”
“Leave me out,” Barnes told them.
Free asked, “Then you knew when we put you on the plane?”
Stubb shook his head. “I was thinking about it, but I couldn’t accept it, it was so crazy. Then the plane looked funny to me, but what the hell do I know about airplanes?”
“And on the plane?”
“I guess the first thing was the cigarettes. The copilot got them out and gave one to everybody who wanted one, which was damned nice of him. They were Camels, my regular brand, and the package was almost exactly like I’m used to, only not quite. Then I got the matches from Ozzie. Matches are the oldest, corniest clue there is, you know what I mean? The Great Detective looks at the matches in the third reel, and they’re from the Club Boom-Boom. So he goes there, and it turns out the guy is a regular. Anybody who’s done any real investigating knows you can’t trust them. A guy goes into a place, buys cigarettes, and picks up a folder of matches. He’s been inside maybe three minutes and nobody remembers him for shit. Then he gives them to his buddy, who leaves them on some bar, and somebody else takes them. Sure, you follow them up, you follow everything up, but nine times out of ten it goes nowhere.”
“I see,” Free said.
“But look at these.” Stubb reached into his pocket and produced the matches. “They’re from the Stork Club. It went out of business in the sixties; but the paper hasn’t yellowed, and the matches work just fine.”
Free nodded. “So then you knew.”
“Just for laughs, I like to watch those old Sherlock Holmes flicks,” Stubb told him. “You know, with Basil Rathbone and what’s-his-name.”
Free smiled. “I used to enjoy them myself.”
“And in one of them Sherlock says to eliminate the impossible, and then you’ve got to go with what’s left. Of course, the problem is, what’s impossible? People coming here from some time when the Stork Club was still open, when that flask was new, when people with serious business would still use those guns—was that impossible? Or was it impossible that everything would point that way but mean something else?”
Candy asked, “Is he saying what I think he’s saying, Mr. Free?”
Free nodded again, and Barnes said, “Well, blow me down!”
“It is I who should have guessed,” the witch said. “We know such things are not impossible.”
“That’s how we got onto it in the beginning,” Free told her. “Please understand, all of you, that I’m going to have to explain from my own point of view. I couldn’t do it from yours even if I wished to.”
“Go ahead,” Stubb said.
“Let me start with Bill Donovan. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Stubb shook his head.
“I met Bill Donovan when we were both hardly more than boys. We were in a home-town National Guard cavalry troop together. Real horse cavalry—it’s the simple truth.”
Free paused, stroking his beard. “Bill was a lawyer, an Irish Catholic whose mother had pushed him to go to college and make something of himself. I was a wealthy young man-about-town. That was what we called it then, the town being Buffalo, New York and wealthy being rich the way we thought of rich in Buffalo around nineteen fourteen.”
Stubb darted an I-told-you-so glance at the witch.
“I’d had the advantage of a governess as a kid, a nice, perfectly batty little Frenchwoman I called Madame du Betes. She had taught me conversational French and German, and I used to show off in restaurants and so on. As it turned out, Bill never forgot that.
“The Great War came and we both went in as officers; Bill, who had that Irish charm, because we had elected him captain of our troop, and me because just about anybody with a degree from Princeton could get a commission then. After the war, Bill left the Army with a hatful of medals and went back to his law practice. I stayed in because I had nothing better to do and had sense enough to see that it was the only way I could keep on flying. In nineteen thirty-seven, I retired as a brigadier general. My father had died, and I wanted to take over the family business. We make glass, by the way; some of the finest crystal in the world.”
Stubb asked, “How old were you?”
“Forty-eight. Don’t ask me how old I am now, because I don’t know. Somewhere between sixty and seventy, I think.
“Anyway, to fill you in on some things I only learned later, Bill had a partner who knew President Wilson and did some globe-trotting and fact-finding for him. Eventually Bill did some of that too. I think Bill himself knew Roosevelt back when; he was practising law in Buffalo, remember. He must have gone to Albany often, and Roosevelt has been mixed up in state politics all his life. Anyway, when Roosevelt decided America should have something like the British Secret Intelligence Service, guess who he picked?”
The witch nodded. Barnes was too rapt to nod. Candy stared at the rectangular panes that made the big cockpit seem almost a small greenhouse; she might have been half asleep. Stubb said, “And Donovan picked you.”
Free nodded. “One among many, of course. The business had been almost shut down by the war, and I had a manager who could take care of what little there was as well I could. I was getting a lot of pressure from the Army to come back, and I knew that if I did, I’d probably end up in charge of a training field in Texas—not exactly my cup of tea. This was the summer of forty-two, by the w
ay.
“High Country had already been built, and the top men in the nation were on her. Donovan felt the Office of Strategic Services ought to have somebody up here too, and I got the job, I think mostly because I’d been one of General Mitchell’s supporters. Supposedly, I was just coming to High Country temporarily, but my confidential orders were to stay as long as I could.”
Barnes said softly, “I wouldn’t have believed something this big could fly.”
“Neither could I,” Free told him. “And if it had been aluminum and steel, it wouldn’t have. It’s a matter of weight, really—the weight-to-lift ratio. The plywood has a layer of cedar on the outside for rot resistance, then alternating layers of balsa and spruce. When they found out it worked, they had Hughes Aircraft build one that was all spruce. You couldn’t get balsa from South America any more, you see. But that one didn’t fly. It was too heavy.”
Stubb said, “You mentioned that plane when we were on the ground.”
“Did I? Sorry, but you have to remember it’s been a few years for me.”
The witch interrupted. “You said it was the occult that led you to what you found. I have waited and waited to hear how that is so.”
“Hitler believed in it,” Free said. “And Hitler had been extremely successful. When he joined the National Socialists, he got membership card number seven—the Nazis literally had only a half dozen members. In a few years he was Chancellor of Germany. In a few more he was walking over the French army, supposedly the best in Europe. Nobody knew then that his luck would run out in Russia and Africa.”
The witch said, “Those with whom he leagued himself destroyed him when he had accomplished their purposes. It is ever so with them—they break their tools.” Almost in a whisper she added, “We went into the death camps too, though only we remember.”
Free said, “They thought Hitler might be able to look into the future, and they thought there might be some way to duplicate that mechanically and reliably. They found out—well, you know what they found out.
“There was a tremendous effort being put into weapons development then, so one of the obvious things was to try to anticipate the result. That was my first real job—to go ten years ahead and grab the best I could and bring it back. I think you can guess what I got.”
Barnes whispered, “Nuclear weapons.”
“Not everything, but a lot. Enough to speed up development to the point that we had an atom bomb in less than three years. But when I’d been flown back here, back to High Country, I’d noticed a lot of the people were gone. I couldn’t ask about that, you understand. The men on that level could have swatted Bill Donovan like a fly. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and went back to my own period.”
Two Doors
“After I’d gone down and been debriefed,” Free continued, “I went back up and through the gizmo again for more. I’d been practically solo the first time—nobody with me but the plane and crew I’d need to get up to High Country again and get back to forty-two. You see, this was the only gizmo there was, and if it hadn’t existed in fifty-two, I’d have had to find another one, or stay where I was until somebody brought me one.
“This time it was going to be different. Besides the plane crew, I had my pick of the available people. I took my daughter Kip and a friend she’d brought in, and half a dozen others. Kip had volunteered to work for Donovan when she learned I had, you see, and if I hadn’t taken her, she might have been sent into Germany or occupied France.
“I also had a small version of the gizmo, a take-down job big enough for a person. That was so that if High Country was gone we could ditch the plane and get back. On the other hand, if High Country or some successor—back then we thought there might be one—was still flying and we wanted to take something big home, we could do that in the plane. And of course the plane was a backup if the portable gizmo didn’t work.
“This time my orders called for me to make a special effort to locate items that would be valuable to our own outfit. We snooped around the electrical stores and got onto tape recorders and some other things. Have I told you about the money?”
Stubb shook his head.
“Well, after the first time, I’d seen that it would be easy to supply myself with all the operating capital I needed. All I had to do was make a fair-sized deposit back in forty-two that nobody but Kip or I could touch. What’s more, I could assure the cooperation of the FBI and the OSS, or any successor organizations, just by leaving messages saying that anyone who used certain code phrases was to get it.”
Candy opened her eyes. “That was how you got my john bumped off his flight. I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Right. Only we couldn’t tell the FBI or the CIA—those were the new people—about the gizmo, so we couldn’t tell them where we came from. But we needed them because it didn’t take long to see that this time we weren’t the only show in town. I’d already begun to suspect the men in High Country were using the gizmo themselves, and that a lot of them were going to periods they couldn’t return from, periods in which High Country did not exist. At first I thought it was one of them.”
Stubb asked, “When did you know it was you?”
For almost half a minute, Free stared out at the night. The snow clouds were breaking up, and the dark, tossing water of the Atlantic showed through the breaks. “There wasn’t any exact time I can put my finger on,” he said at last. “I felt the urge; we all did. We knew the Allies would win—it was in all the history books—so perhaps the call of duty wasn’t as strong as it should have been. And I saw the future we’d built.” He paused again.
“Do you know what I wanted? The old frontier. To see what this country was like before they chopped down all the trees and paved it over. The wanting got so strong sometimes I knew I’d do it sooner or later, and the more we got on the man who called himself Free, the clearer it was that he looked like me. My full name’s Samuel Benjamin Whitten, by the way. Buck’s just a nickname.”
“You’re Buck,” Barnes said. “You owned the Flying Carpet.”
Free nodded. “We needed someplace where we could meet people without leading anybody to the old military compound at the airport, which was where we kept our files and some sensitive equipment, like the portable gizmo. I bought the Flying Carpet and staffed it with people I felt I could trust to look the other way whenever something a little odd happened.”
Barnes said, “May I ask a question, sir? When I was in the Flying Carpet, I met a musician called Binko. Was he one of the people you brought out of the past?”
Free shook his head.
Stubb said, “Ozzie mentioned him when he was telling Madame S. and me what happened to him. I asked him about the music. That seemed to be another clue.”
“I suppose it was,” Free admitted. “I knew I’d be hearing a lot of whatever band I hired, so I hired a band I liked.”
Candy opened her eyes again. “You still haven’t got to the payoff. Are you ever?”
The witch darted a glance at her. “What do you mean? Do not question the Master!”
“Really. Listen, he didn’t bring us up here so he could tell you about Hitler or talk about matches with Jim or music with Ozzie. So why did he? And why did he have the people down below—that’s him too, don’t forget—do stuff to us? When we were in the little plane, Jim told me they tried to give all of us more than we could handle, and I was the only one who could handle it. Why do that and send us up here?”
Free said, “I wanted to answer your questions first, Miss Garth. I felt I owed you that. Now your questions have come around to the matter I wanted to talk with you about, and I admit I’m glad they have.”
He paused. “Do you remember what I told you about going back to nineteen forty-two to be debriefed? I had gone ten years forward and gathered what information I could about nuclear fission, then returned.”
All four nodded.
“The gizmo—the men who actually developed it called it a space-time singularity i
nduction coil, so you can see why I say gizmo—couldn’t be controlled with pinpoint accuracy then. I had left for fifty-two on August eighteenth, nineteen forty-two. I returned May thirtieth.”
Candy sat up straight, her china-blue eyes wide open. “Holy God! There were two of you?”
Free shook his head. “No, though I didn’t realize that at first. I was debriefed by the people on High Country before I was sent down, of course. They told me when the debriefing was over.” Free paused again. “They also told—ordered me, in fact—not to tell anyone on the ground.
“I wasn’t taken to Washington for further debriefing, as I had expected, but flown down to Langley Field and released. I spent a day there wondering whether I dared phone Buffalo.”
Candy asked, “And did you?”
“Yes. I called our plant and asked to speak to the president of the company, after swearing to myself that if I answered, I would hang up. Kip came on the line and asked in her most business-like manner what I wanted. I said something along the lines of ‘Are you in charge, Miss?’ She recognized my voice and said—these were her exact words, I’ll never forget them—‘It’s you, Daddy! We were all so worried.’”
“My God,” Candy said softly.
“I questioned her and learned that I had gone into my office about an hour before the time our shuttle plane must have appeared in the sky of forty-two. No one had seen me since. I told Kip where I was and said that I had been called away on urgent Government business, that I would be back soon, but that I would be going to work in Government full time within a month or so.”
“So you went to work for this Donovan when he asked you.” Stubb made a circular motion with one hand. “It seems to me that when you went to fifty-two again and came back, you’d get stuck in a loop.”
“That’s what we thought,” Free said. “So I didn’t go. There was no point in it, after all; the people in High Country already had everything I’d learned about the bomb. When August eighteenth rolled around, the shuttle plane flew me down again for debriefing by Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Donovan. I told them I had just returned, and in a sense it was true.”