The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2)

by Crawford Kilian

  They slipped into a more public mode of conversation, gossiping about relatives and swapping rumours. The discovery of the chronoplanes had been made public only a few days before Ishizawa’s death, and that could not be covered up, so the world was uncertain what to make of events. Jaz had learned of several millenarian groups springing up all across the south; some were camping out on hilltops and waiting to be raptured by Christ. Wigner had a report that several universities were pooling resources to build their own I-Screen. That seemed to be pushing free enterprise entirely too hard, and Jaz agreed. He had also heard of a Pentagon faction under a General Pendlehurst that was arguing for using I-screens as weapons against the Soviets and Arabs.

  “The idea is to ship nuclear weapons back to Beulah or Eden, transport them to Moscow and Baghdad, and then build a new I-Screen and toss the bombs through.”

  “How do you manage to ship nuclear weapons across the Atlantic and Europe in the eighteenth or twelfth centuries?” Jaz objected. “Not to mention everything you’d need for an I-Screen, including the power.”

  “When you care enough to send the very best, someone will come up with a vehicle. But it shows how out of control people are getting. With the bad news from the future, we can’t afford clowns like Pendlehurst anymore. Nationalism is dead.”

  “Oh, you sound so trendy,” she sighed.

  “The Iffers are more than a trend, my love. It’s our big chance to get everything back under control.” In the wake of the discovery of the chronoplanes, the International Federation Movement had sprung up; the glimpse of Ulro had strengthened it. Latest Agency estimates put its membership at over 100 million; even the Soviets and Arabs were afraid to hinder it.

  “Whose big chance?”

  “Yours and mine. And anyone else with enough sense to see what has to be done.”

  “Which is?”

  “Surrender of sovereignty to a central world government, with representation on the basis of gross national product divided by population. Then we can start developing the chronoplanes in some kind of orderly way, instead of claim-jumping and trying to toss bombs at one another.”

  “Beautiful dreamer. I’d never have taken you for an idealist.”

  “Sensible of you. If we go on as we have, I get nowhere. In an international federation, I get everywhere.”

  “I’ll watch your progress with interest.”

  Doria refused to spoil their last evening together by weeping or complaining. It had been a fluke, falling into an affair with a boy, really, discovering that at a certain time and place they offered each other some comfort and pleasure. She was seven years older than he, old enough to know that they could not have lasted much longer together in any case. His leaving would only put a clean end to it, she told herself. And then she could look around for a man her own age, with eyes that didn’t mask secrets, whose dreams didn’t make him gasp in his sleep.

  Pierce came over and made dinner — poor man’s spaghetti, with a vegetable sauce — and they talked cheerfully about nothing in particular: school problems, a knife-fight at Hometown Mall, the TV interview last night with George Washington. They agreed Washington had not been very articulate.

  After dinner they sat by the fire drinking Spanish brandy and not saying much.

  “I’m going to miss you,” she said quietly.

  “It’s going to be lonely.”

  “You didn’t have to take the job, did you?”

  “I think I did. They can use me better back east, and I can help make sure the right decisions are made.”

  “And how will you do that,” she said with a smile, “with a couple of tear gas grenades?”

  “You guessed my secret. No, it’s just a matter of being close to what’s happening. Most of the I-Screens are back east, and they want me to go through a few of them.”

  She couldn’t keep from asking: “Are you going to be back here?”

  “Maybe. I hope so, but I’m not sure.” He read her feelings in her closed eyes, her embarrassed smile. “I like you too much to lie to you, Doria. If I can come back to you, I will. If I can’t, I can’t.”

  “I understand. It’s okay.” She leaned against him, put her head on his shoulder, and enjoyed the heat of the fire, the solidity of his body. Enjoy them while they last, she thought. They don’t last long.

  “General Pendlehurst?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m, uh, an admirer of yours, sir. I represent a consortium of firms in the defence field, and we’re very impressed with your quick response to the opportunities that have recently arisen. Uh, am I making myself clear, sir?”

  “Yes, I think so. How did you get this number?”

  “Mutual friends, sir. Well, sir, we’re aware of the controversy over your suggestion, and we can see how political pressure could put you in an awkward position. We’re interested in backing you up and giving you all the help you require, including financial aid, sir.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, Mr. — ”

  “Brown, sir. Richard Brown. Uh, General, I realize how a conversation like this can be misunderstood if it’s monitored. Believe me, we have no desire in complicating life for you. Would it be possible to meet with you personally to discuss matters in more detail?”

  “Well, Mr. Brown, I suppose so.”

  “Would you be free for dinner this evening at the Washington Plaza?”

  “I think so. About 8:00 P.M.?”

  “Excellent! I’ll be with a couple of associates in Suite 1020. I think you’ll remember them from’82.”

  “Indeed! Well, it’ll be old home week, then.”

  “It sure will! Well, thank you, sir. We’re looking forward to this evening.”

  Pendlehurst was a tall, erect man with close-cropped white hair and oddly droopy eyelids. Wearing a three-piece blue suit under a camel’s hair overcoat, he entered the elevator at the Washington Plaza. He pressed the button for the tenth floor. The elevator rose smoothly to the third floor and stopped. The doors slid open and Pierce walked in wearing the black suit and gold nametag of a floor manager. General Pendlehurst smiled absently at him. Pierce smiled back, pressed the button for the ninth floor, waited until the doors closed, and shot Pendlehurst in the left ear with a Mallory at Impact 5: hard enough to drive the flechette into his brain, but not hard enough to rupture the skull and make a mess.

  On the ninth floor he hauled in a waiting trolley that normally carried fresh linens in a heavy canvas bag, and dumped the corpse into it. The elevator descended to the subbasement, where Pierce pushed the trolley out and down a corridor to a parking garage with a loading bay. The trolley went into the back of a black Ford van with magnetic signs on the sides:

  VERSATILE CLEANING SERVICES, SILVER SPRING, MD.

  Pierce took off his jacket and stowed it in the trolley. He pulled on a heavy grey cardigan sweater lying on the front seat of the van. Then he got in, started the engine, and drove out of the parking garage into the sleeting January night.

  “It’s certainly been lively,” Wigner said. March drizzle fell steadily outside Pierce’s Bleecker Street apartment.

  “You’re a master of understatement,” Pierce said, tossing him a can of Tuborg. It was worth twenty-five dollars in the stores, if you could find it, but the Agency looked after its own.

  Wigner was comfortably slumped on Pierce’s couch, with his feet on the teak coffee table; Pierce settled into the armchair by the window. The apartment was furnished in Salvation Army modem, and Wigner was gratified to see five or six houseplants, including a healthy young avocado. He felt comfortable here as he did not on East 52nd, and he expressed it in a manner of speaking that Jaz Jones would have found prolix.

  “Great times we live in, old son. Six downtime chronoplanes and promises of more to come. Colonists screaming to be allowed to emigrate to the wide open spaces. Chiliasts howling about the coming of the Lord. It’s almost enough to let you forget the people starving in the subways and the mutiny of the 101st Airborne.�
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  “Never would have happened in District 23.”

  “I’m sure. We’ve also managed to forestall at least one putsch, and the other factions in the Pentagon are biding their time.”

  “Pendlehurst was no putsch.”

  “No, but his disappearance was food for thought for a gentleman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and life has been happier since his decision to retire.”

  “You know Senator Cooledge has gone over to the Iffers.”

  “Yes, isn’t that wonderful news! Brilliant woman. California is clearly ahead of the country on the International Federation issue. We will do what we can to smooth her path. But we are a long way from moving the whole country. The bureaucrats are against us; most of the politicians are against us. Two centuries of cheap jingoism are against us. The IF has an unpleasant Third World aroma to many of our fellow-citizens.”

  “But we have Ulro on our side.”

  “Ulro. The tank went through yesterday at Fermi-lab.”

  Pierce’s eyebrows rose. “Did it?”

  “Without incident. The chamber was evacuated, of course, and it did acquire a little residual radioactivity. Otherwise, no problem. It’s programmed to travel east to the lake and then return.”

  “They must have learned a little more already.”

  “Mm. The vacuum’s not quite as hard as they’d thought…What could have removed the atmosphere? I’ve done a couple of physics courses this winter, just to have a basis for speculation. Didn’t matter, it’s still beyond me.”

  “The media are full of alien invader stories.”

  “And they could be right. If the aliens see our tank, let’s just hope they’re ignorant of I-Screens.”

  Pierce snorted. “You’re not serious.”

  “I give aliens a very low probability, but not zero. The public likes the idea a lot. We’ll have to respect their anxiety if we’re going to explore Ulro as fully as we should. It will be easier when one of the Agency I-Screens is assigned to Ulro.”

  “Has it been?”

  “Not yet. I’m hoping the tank will tell us enough to make our ignorance all the more painful, especially to Clement.” He sipped his beer. “And I want to be in charge of that I-Screen, at least part of the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Curiosity. About a great many things.”

  Pierce looked at the ceiling. “How Ulro was destroyed.”

  “Of course.”

  “What happened before it was destroyed.”

  “Ah. Especially what happened between, say, 1990 and 2010 — our present happy spot on the timeline.”

  “And to whom it happened, and why.”

  Wigner raised his beer can in silent homage. Then he asked: “Why should the Beulans be the only ones to benefit from hindsight?”

  “Is it a benefit?” Pierce was thinking of poor Washington, preserving his dignity at the price of his speech while cameras stared into his florid face and confirmed that he wore wooden teeth: Washington who already knew he would become the president of his country, and who must already wonder if the task was worth it. “Of course.”

  “We could also find out about ourselves, you know.”

  “So we could. I’d love to know how I turned out.”

  “I don’t know. Suppose you learned that you’d married someone, had children, grandchildren. That’d all be changed, even if you knew who the woman was. It’d be like being robbed of a life.”

  Wigner lighted his pipe; he no longer thought it made him look more mature, but he had grown fond of it.

  “All those lives were snuffed out, Jerry. And the billions who might have followed them, for all eternity. Perhaps on Ulro Eric Wigner and Jerry Pierce were happy fellows who had good careers and beautiful wives and fine children. They’re all dust now. Happiness on death row is all very well, but it doesn’t postpone execution. Besides,” he added, “on Ulro we may have been miserably unhappy and dead before we were thirty.”

  “Indeed,” Pierce agreed with a smile, thinking: It could happen on Earth as well.

  “In any case, we certainly won’t waste time on egocentric searches for our own dossiers. I’m thinking about much more prominent people in the government, and in whatever government would have followed this one. Who won, who lost, why? Who had unpleasant sexual tastes, who took bribes, who made mistakes?”

  Wigner puffed his pipe, filling the room with the aroma of Rattray’s Red Rapparee, and looked out the window at rainy Bleecker Street. People hurried down the sidewalk in groups, almost never alone, while a three-man army patrol stopped some at random for ID checks.

  “We’re going to save the world, old son,” he said with a chuckle. “You and me and a small circle of friends. But to do it we’re going to have to whack some people’s balls as they’ve never been whacked before.”

  CHAPTER VI

  When the Fermilab I-Screen came on again, the tank had been waiting. Radioactive as expected, it did not return from Ulro; instead, it launched a shielded canister of tapes and photos through the screen. Copies were soon in Wigner’s possession.

  In addition to containing an I-Screen, the Agency safe house, on West 45th between 10th and 11th avenues, was now a training centre as well. Behind its decrepit facade the five-storey apartment building was now a complex of labs, briefing rooms, dormitories, and offices. In one office, Wigner and Pierce reviewed the tapes and the reports based on their data.

  The tank had moved east from Fermilab across a flat terrain of glassy rubble, avoiding occasional hillocks of drifted debris. Approaching Chicago through the suburbs of Wheaton, Glen Ellyn and Lombard, it had found the terrain scoured bare and baked.

  “It looks to me as if the western suburbs were never rebuilt after last year’s riots,” Pierce suggested. “At least not substantially. So the disaster just cleared everything, blew it away to the north somewhere.”

  “‘Effects are consonant with a heat flash and blast wave moving from south to north,”’ Wigner recited from one of the reports. “Trouble is, the effects should have dropped off exponentially from wherever ground zero was, but they don’t.”

  “A line of H-bombs?” Pierce suggested.

  “Seems likely,” Wigner agreed.

  “I wonder what New York will be like.”

  “Much the same, I’m afraid.”

  If the Agency was not yet exploring Ulro, others were. Within days of the tank’s survey, five I-screens opened up on the dead chronoplane. Two were in North America, two in Europe, and one in China. All sent probes through: two American tanks carrying men, two modified French cruise missiles, and one small Chinese rocket that was launched two hundred kilometres straight up, sending televised images back through the open I-Screen for almost three minutes.

  The data, as they came into the house on West 45th, were fragmentary and often enigmatic, but they formed a clear enough pattern.

  On April 22, 2089, the world had been at peace. To some extent it must have been a peace of exhaustion, Pierce believed, because vast stretches of the planet’s surface had been abandoned after a series of wars and upheavals early in the century. The population had fallen from six billion in 1995 to just under one billion in 2015, with most of the fatalities due to famine and biological warfare. Most nation-states had disappeared by 2020; after two decades of warlordism, a new kind of society emerged to dominate the planet.

  The terms for it varied: Groups, Arrays, Collectives, Systems. Whatever the term, the new societies were highly regimented and technically advanced beyond the dreams of the late twentieth century. Many of those who survived the fall of the old order had been Trainables. They had inevitably gained power, and their new societies had reflected Trainable concerns. Un-Trainables were used for menial tasks not worth automating, and otherwise allowed to amuse themselves with sports, drugs, and non-reproductive sex. They were the minority now; the Trainability gene sequence had been identified, and four out of five children of Trainables were also Trainable. (An apparently popular theme
in the literature of the period was the domestic sorrow of rearing an un-Trainable child.)

  By 2089 the population had climbed to three billion and stabilized there. Reclamation projects were underway on the desertified Amazon basin, on halting the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and on bringing the planet’s mean temperature back down to mid-twentieth-century levels after a century of increasing greenhouse effect. A lunar base had been established, and another on Mars was having difficulties but surviving. The horrors of the first decades of the century were receding. The plagues, the revolutions, the martyrdoms, the famines, and warlords were now the stuff of entertainment for the younger generation.

  That much, at least, was comprehensible. Many of the objects brought back by the manned expeditions were inexplicable scraps of a technology based on unknown principles. A few written records had been retrieved, most of them in an elliptical form of English with a substantially changed vocabulary; they were ambiguous at best, baffling at worst.

  Pierce and Wigner studied photos of one object, a fist-size glossy black teardrop with a small yellow symbol embossed on it.

  “They can’t even tell if it’s damaged or not, or how to turn it on,” Wigner said. “If it can be turned on.”

  “Could the symbol be a logo?”

  “Maybe.” Wigner puffed his pipe and smiled. “Suppose an eighteenth-century spook like Fouquet was handed an electronic camera with no explanation.

  Would he have any idea what it was, how to operate it, what it could do for him? That’s how I feel looking at that object.”

  Nothing, out of all the data retrieved and derived, indicated that Ulro had known anything about I-Screens and chronoplanes, or had any reason to expect catastrophe. The physicists were unhappy about that, although Ishizawa himself had suggested that “Heisenberg cascades” could work from the quantum level to influence events in different ways on different chronoplanes.

  The cruise missiles and the Chinese rocket had provided a glimpse of a world as strange and dead as a Jovian moon. Only traces of water could be found on the surface, evidently frozen out of the atmosphere at night and then restored by sunlight to the thin haze of carbon dioxide and methane that served for an atmosphere. The dead sea bottoms were basins of evaporites, grey wastes of salt beds and dried ooze; the continents were predominantly pinkish-brown, evidently from rapid oxidation in the superheated atmosphere before its deoxygenated residue had been blown into space.