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

by Crawford Kilian

  Few of the first parties had contacted the natives — endochronics, they were now called — but telephotos showed small hunting parties on some chronoplanes far downtime. A band of Neanderthals had been positively identified in southern France on Thel: they were taller than anyone had expected, warmly dressed in fur and leather, and they wore their platinum-blond hair in long and elaborate braids. A Cro-Magnon tribe on Luvah was spotted hunting aurochs in Poland. The hunters were tall, brown-skinned, and handsome; their naked skins were elaborately scarred and painted, and their hair hung down their backs plaited with eagle feathers.

  Contacts with endochronics on the historic chronoplanes were being made as carefully as possible. The Americans on Beulah were already deep in a political crisis because of the arrival of the first explorers from Earth. A German expedition to Eden in the twelfth century had opened negotiations with Frederick Barbarossa to allow scholars to study his government and society. For the time being, Ahania’s Mediterranean region was declared off-limits to exploration: no European government wanted contact with the early church fathers of the first century A.D. for fear of political repercussions on Earth.

  Doria wrote to him from Mountain Home: Everybody’s talking about going downtime, but most people want somebody else to go. They want the Wabbies and the PAF to be plunked down in the twelfth century to make life miserable for the Indians. Boy, I wouldn’t want to go if those guys were my neighbours. The kids in school talk about Doomsday, about how weird things look on Ulro. A few of them get upset by what they see on TV, but most just shrug it off. I guess 2089 is a long way away to a bunch of fifth-graders.

  The emigration issue was growing. Pierce suspected Doria was right: apart from some back-to-nature types and every historian, anthropologist, and archaeologist in the world, most people preferred to stay on Earth regardless of their troubles. Many people wanted to use the downtime chronoplanes as a dumping ground, or as the ultimate survivalist hideout; others warned against the impact that colonization would have on endochronic cultures.

  The Iffers, increasing in strength, were calling for no emigration except as directed by an international authority. So far, that had provided national governments with a convenient excuse to do nothing, although the Americans, Soviets, and Japanese were accusing one another of planning national emigration programs. The media were full of disinformation, and governments had put security clamps on much of the data from uptime and downtime alike. For Trainables, however, the data flow continued unimpeded.

  Pierce and Wigner talked every couple of days on a secure circuit. Near the end of the Houston course, Pierce said he wanted to talk with the men who’d gone through to Ulro.

  “Not available, old son. They’re both psychologically upset and undergoing treatment.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “They lacked your assets. First, they had no specific program to fulfil; their job was just to go through and find whatever they could. Second, they were on Ulro much too long. You’ll be there only a few hours.”

  “And you’re going to pump me full of tranquilizers before I go.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When am I going to meet my backup?”

  Wigner paused. “Ah, that’s a dicey problem. You have no backup, old son.”

  Pierce’s pause was twice as long. “That’s crazy.”

  “I agree. We’re spending well over twenty million dollars on this project, and it’s all down the toilet if something goes wrong.”

  “I’d better pray it goes wrong on this side of the I-Screen,” Pierce said dryly.

  “I could tell you how bitter I am about this, Jerry, but you wouldn’t believe me. Clement keeps shrugging and saying yes, what a false economy it is, ain’t it awful, but that’s the way Langley approved it.”

  “And you bought it?”

  “Not for a nanosecond, old son. It means Clement is hoping we’ll succeed and make him look good for endorsing the project, but he’s also hoping we’ll screw up and make me look bad for starting the project. Office politics, I’m afraid.”

  Pierce thought for a moment. His personal safety was not in extra danger because of this; he knew the specs of the tank’s systems and had no reason to expect them to fail under Ulro’s conditions. The danger was to Wigner's project and to his career.

  “Is Clement likely to encourage a failure?” he asked at last.

  “Sabotage? No, that’s spy novel stuff. Anyway, Clement’s smart enough to know that sheer entropy can do more harm to your enemies than active intervention.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to do it all right the first time.”

  “Precisely, Jerry.”

  Late in July Pierce was back in New York. The summer was even worse than last year’s, an endless succession of what were now called ninety-ninety days. The city sweated through the heat and humidity, welcoming the frequent thunderstorms despite the floods and blackouts they brought.

  On one of the hottest days, when the sky was dirty white and air conditioners whined and failed, Pierce walked north along Broadway, following a parade.

  He had known it was planned and had gone out to get a look at it out of curiosity and interest: curiosity as to how the authorities would handle it, and interest in how many people would turn out.

  Within minutes of seeing the parade, he showed his military ID card to a policeman on a motorcycle at 15th and Union Square.

  “Where’s the CO of march security?”

  “Up around 35th, Colonel. They’re trying to keep level with the middle of the march.”

  Pierce’s eyebrows rose. “So the parade must be at least forty blocks long.”

  “Be longer before it’s over, sir. They estimate Washington Square’s still got a hundred thousand people waiting to start.”

  Pierce strode north on the sidewalk, sweat trickling down his bare legs and sticking his T-shirt to his chest. The marchers filled Broadway, extending north and south in ragged ranks. He paced alongside, looking at the police and soldiers lining the route. One mistake, one wrong order, and everything would go wrong.

  The marchers weren’t sullen hicks like the Wabbies in Mountain Home, looking for a fight they didn’t have the guts to pick themselves. They were very ordinary-looking people, many of them young, dressed in shorts, T-shirts, light summer dresses. They carried few signs, but everyone seemed to be wearing a ribbon or sash of rainbow-colored cloth. Dozens carried rainbow flags, the stripes running from red at the top to violet at the bottom. This was the first major Iffer demonstration in New York City, and Pierce estimated close to two hundred thousand people must be taking part.

  Despite the heat and glare, the marchers seemed cheerful, lively, a little impatient. They stepped out of ranks to buy soft drinks and ice-cream bars, or to take each other’s picture. An occasional marching band filled the humid air with old tunes from Broadway musicals. The only really strange thing about the marchers was that they carried no American flags, no flags of any nation.

  They scared Pierce, because he knew they must scare the government. He walked faster, until he finally found an armoured personnel carrier parked at Times Square. The security CO, a round-faced major with a bristly moustache, greeted Pierce civilly.

  “Heard you might be on your way, Colonel. What can I do for you?”

  “Just keep things as cool as possible. Whatever you do, not a shot, not a drop of Mace, not a single violent thing,” Pierce said. The major nodded.

  “Know what you mean, Colonel. Funny thing, though. Five years ago, these folks’d be traitors and we’d be kicking their ass. Now I’m damned if I know what the hell they are.”

  Pierce walked back home, watching the marchers flow north under their rainbows and their terse signs — LET’S GO; IT’S TIME; THE WORLD NEEDS US. The bystanders on the sidewalk seemed reserved, amused, sometimes baffled, sometimes hostile. But no one shouted insults, no one threw a bottle. Looking in the eyes of the hostile ones, Pierce could see why: the size and mood of the demonstration were p
owerful deterrents. That would change in time, he suspected. Reaction would come, probably a violent one. No social system dies quietly.

  At home he watched the TV newscasts, ignoring the announcers’ bias, and when the broadcasts were over he looked out his window and rejoiced that no one had been hurt, no one had been shot.

  Early the next morning, before the sun had risen too high, Wigner picked Pierce up in an Agency Ford and took him uptown. They went up Broadway, the Ford’s red license plate sticker enabling them to slip quickly through the roadblocks. The car’s air conditioning wheezed.

  “See the parade yesterday?” Wigner asked as they drove through Times Square.

  “Some of it.”

  “Most impressive. Nothing like it since the days of Martin Luther King. All those Iffers marching through here to Central Park, in filthy hot weather. A hundred thousand, I heard.”

  “That was a low estimate.”

  “No doubt. Senator Cooledge made an excellent speech. We may be at a cusp.”

  “A cusp?” repeated Pierce, willing to play the straight man.

  “A radical change in direction. At some point in the middle ages, one serf too many decided to light out for the towns, and feudalism was finished. Yesterday, we had thousands of people marching to demand a reduction in national sovereignty. Perhaps it’s true, you know, that a dying culture seems most vigorous in its death throes. Chivalry was at its peak when the urban businessmen already owned the rural nobility. Nationalism was in its glory when we were kids, and now it’s on its way out.”

  “Not a minute too soon, either.”

  “Indeed.”

  Wigner parked the Agency Ford in the basement garage of a twelve-storey apartment building at Riverside and West 84th.

  “We own the building,” he said. “The tenants are all Agency people. The first three floors are actually offices and storerooms. This is the upper basement. Below this is where they’re building the I-Screen. And the subbasement is also the access to the repository.”

  They left the garage and walked out onto Riverside Drive. A squad of joggers — running together for mutual protection — was just coming out of the park a block away, but otherwise the neighbourhood was deserted.

  In shorts and T-shirts, Pierce and Wigner could have been joggers, too, but they only walked across the drive and into the park.

  “The tunnel runs under the street and down the hill to the repository,” Wigner said. Pierce, looking around at the terrain, nodded. “It’s about a hundred and fifty yards west and ten feet down.”

  “Why here?”

  “We needed someplace in the city that wouldn’t be buried under too much rubble in a nuclear attack, so that meant a park. We already had this building, which turned out to be really convenient. There’s an old abandoned tunnel under here, used to be part of the water system. We sealed off a thousand yards of it and put in some extra reinforcing. I’ll take you down and show you the layout in a little while.”

  “So, I bring the tank through, move north about a hundred and fifty yards, and start digging.”

  “No, you’ll probably have to dig first. We’re assuming the screen will open onto rubble. We’ll do two quick reconnaissance openings before you go through, and adjust the location of the screen if it’ll do any good. But then you’re on your own.”

  “The screen’s not likely to stay stable for more than a minute or two.”

  “I know. Means you may have to dig yourself out a couple of good scrapes at a time while we turn the screen on and off. But we did a computer simulation,” Wigner added helpfully, “and figured out where the buildings probably fell. The I-Screen’s being located with that in mind, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

  They walked a little farther downhill along a cracked asphalt path, past a deserted and vandalized playground. The trees and shrubs were luxuriant in the humid warmth. Traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway, on the western edge of the park, was sparse and mostly military, and the river was empty. Across the Hudson, the Spry sign was barely visible through the smog.

  On the edge of a long, narrow lawn, Wigner stood and pointed north.

  rocky outcrop might be your best landmark. Just to the left of it, just to the west, is about the farthest point in the tunnel where we’re still storing files. The north-end wall of the tunnel is maybe two hundred yards farther north.” They walked up the lawn and sat on the outcrop: black Manhattan schist.

  “I reach here and I start digging,” said Pierce. “1 cut a trench from about there” — he pointed a few yards to the west — “into the tunnel. Then 1 go into the tunnel and find the Daily Executive Briefings and the Senior Personnel Files for the next ten years, and I bring out as many of them as possible. Then I hop in the tank and come back to the transition site.”

  “You’ll have exactly four hours.”

  “And I’ll have thirty seconds to a minute to get back through the screen.”

  “Yes. On foot.”

  “Because of radioactivity?”

  “In part. A bit awkward to decontaminate a tank.” Wigner looked embarrassed. “But we can’t just leave it there and use it again for the next expedition. People in Washington seem to get their most reliable intelligence from the National Enquirer. Some of our masters appear to believe that the catastrophe was caused by an alien invasion, and that the aliens might still be there.”

  Pierce sprawled across the rock, laughing silently.

  “It’s true, Jerry. Some of them are even scared to send the tank through at all. They’re afraid it’ll leave tracks or be spotted. So, when you get back to the screen, you have to activate a bomb that’ll blow the tank into nice little pieces no alien monster would ever notice.”

  Pierce stopped laughing and sat up. “Are you serious?”

  “I wish I weren’t.” He shrugged. “Politics, old son.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Crazy? If people find out that we’re opening an I-Screen to Ulro here on the West Side, with twenty thousand people living within a few blocks, then you’ll see crazy.”

  The city government knew nothing about the Agency’s Riverside Drive building except that it housed federal VIPs and had suddenly acquired the need for a great deal more water and electric power. Extensive remodelling to the subbasement was also necessary. Sooner than go through municipal red tape, Wigner saw to it that several officials were placed, as the phrase had it, on retainer. Among other services, they provided detailed maps and engineering data on all underground facilities on the upper West Side. Pierce reviewed them carefully.

  The computer simulation had been accurate; two quick checks showed the I-Screen, oriented to the southwest, opened very close to the local Ulro surface. A gap of about two feet showed at the top, and simply opening the screen caused convenient landslides of nibble into the transition chamber, widening the gap to five feet. Radioactivity was a nuisance, but a manageable one; the infallen debris was shipped to a nuclear waste disposal site in Vermont, and the chamber decontaminated without difficulty. Nothing leaked into the rest of the building or the neighbourhood.

  On the first Sunday in August, in a pouring rainstorm, a tractor-trailer rig delivered the tank. It was the same one Pierce had trained on in Texas, and he was glad to see it again.

  It was, however, a tank in name only, designed to Agency specifications by a consortium of International Harvester and McDonnell Douglas. With its backhoe arm and low-slung body, it looked, thought Pierce, like a scorpion. The cabin, mounted between two eight-foot caterpillar treads, was covered by a Plexiglas canopy with its top painted over to shield the driver from the sun. Power came from an array of batteries and solar panels capable of running all the tank’s systems for twenty-four hours straight, even through a night on Ulro. The tank was painted in camouflage shades of yellow and beige and rust — the better, Pierce supposed, to deceive genocidal aliens still looking for survivors on a dead planet.

  Pierce himself drove the tank down the ramp to the subbasem
ent and into the transition chamber. There it squatted with only inches on either side and ten feet between it and the ring of the I-Screen. That, said the engineers, would give Pierce enough room to dig a passage. Pierce, sitting in the tank, hoped they were right. He had unpleasant fantasies about being jammed halfway through the I-Screen when the field broke down.

  *

  The night before the mission, Pierce stayed home in his apartment on Bleecker Street. He tried to call his mother in Taos, but the phone system was down all over the south-western United States. He called Doria, and found her grading papers. They talked happily and inconsequentially for a few minutes before he said good-bye and promised to call again soon. He did not mention what he was about to do.

  Wigner was a passable cook and sometimes invited RSD people for dinner. This evening he’d had four of his colleagues, all Trainables but none in the network yet. One was Jasmin Jones, and he was pleased to see that she volunteered to stay and help clean up. The others tactfully excused themselves.

  “So you’re boldly going uptime tomorrow,” Jaz said as she dried dishes.

  “Thank God, I thought we’d never get around to talking shop. No, I’m boldly going uptown. Jerry Pierce is doing the rest.”

  “I‘d like to meet him someday. How did you ever find him?”

  “District 23 suddenly enjoyed a low crime rate, domestic tranquillity, improved church attendance. My Polymath couldn’t believe it, so I looked into the matter. It was all true, and Jerry Pierce was the T-Colonel.”

  “So you’re going to throw away this paragon.”

  “Nonsense. He’s going to Ulro because he’s got guts and he’s coming back because he’s got brains.”

  “With the dossiers on the spies we haven’t caught yet.”

  “If there’s any justice in the world.”

  She looked solemn. “There wasn’t any on Ulro.”

  “They died that we might live, dear. Would you like to be part of the analysis team?”

  “With the Ulro data? Eric, you sweet man.”

  “It may be disappointing,” he cautioned her.