Free Live Free

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 induction 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.”

“Kip never suspected?”

“She knew something had happened,” Free said. “When I came back from Virginia, came back in that second June of my nineteen forty-two, she told me how good I looked. I was prominent enough in Buffalo then that they had quite a few pictures of me on file at the paper. I got them to let me examine them.”

Candy asked, “And you looked the way you had a couple of years back?”

“You’re a very clever woman, Miss Garth. No. That was what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. Younger, yes, but different too. Stronger. I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Better. That’s really all I can say. When I went into the plant, some of the problems we’d been having, things that had worried me for months, seemed simple. I saw where we might get a local substitute for the high silicon sand we’d imported from the Philippines before Pearl Harbor, for example. I think now that what happened was that my two selves had merged, and that the coming together made a single self that was stronger than either.” He stamped one foot, and all of them jumped a bit. “Plywood,” he said. “Each ring on a tree is a year’s growth. When you make plywood, you peel those rings apart, then glue them back so the grains cross. What you get is a piece of wood that’s stronger than both were in the old trunk.”

Stubb said, “What if one of the layers were rotten, General? Wouldn’t the plywood be rotten too?”

Free nodded.

“General, I’m going to tell you something you won’t like to hear. When I was living in your house, you told me you had a ticket that would take you back to the High Country. But you told me too that it was too late for you to use it. You weren’t senile, or at least I don’t think you were, not really. But you were a very old man.”

Free nodded. “You’re telling me I’m going to die, Mr. Stubb. Every man does. Unlike other men, I know how I’ll die as well. It’s the simple truth.”

“Wait just a minute!” Candy exclaimed. “You said Kip had reported to you. I heard you. That means there were two of you then.”

Free did not reply. A long moment passed. At last Stubb said, “No, it doesn’t. She reported after the Ben Free we knew was dead.”

“Miss Garth, I think that when I went to your time, to this time now, Ben Free wasn’t there. How long did you—did all four of you—live with him?”

“Three nights, Master,” the witch said. “After the third, the house was partly torn down.”

“I think he must have gone to some other time, although I have no idea what that time might be. To the Lewis and Clark expedition, I hope. Decades later, old and sick, he came back and discovered what he told Mr. Stubb: that it was too late.

“And when he came back I disappeared, as far as Kip and the rest were concerned. Kip thought Free had done it, and she must have been frantic. We had people monitoring the papers and the television news fulltime, as you can imagine. When one of them spotted Free, Kip threw caution to the winds. She assigned an agent to watch the house, and she and Robin questioned a woman in the neighborhood and got your names. She got the FBI to put a mail cover on all of you, and when they found that Mr. Barnes here was answering lonelyhearts ads, she had Robin write to him. Eventually she had all four of you under surveillance. Then Free returned to his house, and she got him.”

There was another pause. “And she killed him,” Stubb said softly.

Free nodded. “I won’t tell you what she told me about it. She was lying, and I could always tell. Hell, I raised her, and that’s the truth. I think she took him to the house because he—I—told her the portable gizmo was still there, built into a wall; and that when they were alone, I explained everything to her. After that she must have known she would never get her father back as long as I—Free—refused to go back.

“If you’re wondering where the general is now, let me assure you he’s gone. Not vanished because I’m here, but gone to a better time, taking his portable gizmo with him. He deduced the location of Free’s ‘ticket’ you see, and carried the one he’d brought from nineteen forty-two through it.

“And now we’ve come to what Miss Garth calls the payoff. I don’t know who you four are, but I know I’ll let you live with me when the time comes. I know you’ll fight to save my house, the house that was my base for so many years, and fight pretty well from what Kip told me. And that you’ll try to find me when you think I may be in trouble, though all of you have troubles enough of your own. The message I left for the general I used to be—I wired a calendar clock to turn on the radio and one of your neat little tape recorders, by the way—said you should get your greatest desires. I did it because I’ve learned we all have to get them before we can have better ones.”

Stubb said, “I don’t think we have them yet. At least I don’t.”

Free nodded. “I’m about to give you one, I hope. There are two doors out of this High Country, you see. One is the one you came through. The other is the gizmo. I’m offering all of you a chance to go back, to fold yourselves in upon your earlier selves and live new lives, if you want them.”

“Yes!” Candy shouted. The witch threw herself at Free’s feet, as Stubb nodded and rose from where he sat.

Barnes said, “Swee’ pea—”

“Mr. Free—or rather, the person we call by that name—has concealed a talisman. The acaryas do so at times, putting by their unearthly crowns and orbs to walk among mortals. Now he lacks strength to take it up again. But if we could find it …”

“You mean this,” Barnes said. “You’re serious.”

“I was never more so. Do not think to cheat me of the prize, Ozzie. You could no more wield such a talisman than you could summon the green-haired wantons of the sea. But if you help me, you shall be my vizier in an empire encompassing the world.” The witch’s hands toyed with his own, stroking their backs, tickling their palms.

Icy though the room was, his face was damp with sweat. “I wish I knew if you’re crazy.”