The Chronocide Mission

21. ARNE AND EGARN

A police car screamed past on Mount Hope Avenue. And then another. Bob, wearing a sweat suit and jogging shoes, miraculously survived a reckless dash through Mount Hope Avenue traffic and arrived panting at the row apartments. His shouts were inarticulate, but his arm waving was eloquent. Students began pouring out of the apartments.

Bob gasped, “The murderers are dead.”

“How do you know?” Ruth demanded.

“They broke into the old chapel.” He paused for breath. “A jogger noticed the door smashed open.” Another pause. “He looked inside, and there they were.”

“What killed them?”

“Don’t know.”

“Let’s go!” Charlie said.

They poured across Mount Hope Avenue, almost stopping traffic, and rushed through the cemetery gate. At the old chapel and crematorium, police were already holding back a crowd. Alida and Jeff were among the latecomers, but they edged their way to the front.

“What has happened?” Jeff asked a police officer.

“It’s those two characters we chased into the river yesterday. They holed up here last night, and someone robbed them and cut their throats.”

Detective Fred Ulling emerged from the building and walked over to them. “This is more ironic than yesterday,” he said. “We can call off dragging the river for these guys, but now we have to start looking for their murderers. If you don’t mind an unpleasant sight, Miss Brylon, it would be helpful to know if you have seen these characters before. We are wondering how long they’ve been hanging around.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” Alida said.

Alida and Jeff followed him into the chapel. The detective leaned over and pulled the blanket away from one body and then from the other. Alida gripped Jeff’s arm firmly.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I have seen these men maybe three or four times, but I never connected them with anything. Janie and I saw them crossing the campus one day. Janie joked about them.”

“Were they following Janie?”

“No. They were just crossing the campus. They walked past us headed in the opposite direction. I saw them do that at least two other times, and once I saw them over by the Johnson Center.”

“Are you sure Janie didn’t know them?”

“I’m certain she had never seen them before. What sad faces.” Alida went on meditatively, “They looked on all the misery of the universe, and then they died. I thought I would hate them, but I don’t.”

“They looked on a lot of misery of their own making, and they died because thieves cut their throats,” the detective said.

“What did they have to steal?’” Jeff asked.

“They were wearing money belts—well-filled belts according to the marks left on their skin. The thieves took them and also emptied their pockets.

“Seen enough?” Jeff asked Alida.

She nodded. “It doesn’t solve anything. It just raises more questions.”

“It certainly does that,” the detective said. “Who were they, where did they come from, and what did they want?”

In the new workroom, the day was spent committing acts of theft. The large len was shifted to Buffalo and focused on the men’s clothing section of a department store. When there seemed to be no one watching, Inskel snatched packaged shirts, underwear, pajamas. Egarn and Arne tried them on; then Inskel snatched again, from adjoining displays, until they were properly fitted. Trousers, sportcoats, and raincoats were a problem—their hangers were difficult to pull from the rack—but after a few tries he managed it. Shoes and slippers, with both members of a pair fastened together, were easy to steal, but it was difficult to find correct sizes.

When they were completely outfitted and supplied with all the spares they needed, he stole a suitcase for them to put the extra clothing in. Then, with Egarn directing him, he ranged through the store sucking up anything Egarn thought they might need: An electric razor, wallets for both of them, wrist watches, handkerchiefs, socks, neckties and tie pins, ball point pens and pocket-sized memo pads, a traveler’s alarm clock— anything a traveler might carry with him. They saw no money belts, so they snatched some cloth and sewing supplies, and Garzot made two of them by hand.

Money posed a special problem. Roszt and Kaynor had needed a huge sum that would support them indefinitely and allow for expensive purchases like automobiles. Egarn and Arne could do with considerably less, but they couldn’t risk running short. Egarn decided to take the money from banks located as far from the scene of their activity as possible just in case there were records of the serial numbers on bills they stole.

They switched to the West Coast, found a large city Egarn didn’t bother to identify, and created mysterious shortages in several of its banks.

Finally they had every necessity Egarn could think of, they were packed, they were ready to go. Egarn used the new razor; Arne refused to. He had seen an occasional beard in 20th century society, and he was determined to keep his. While Inskel tried to focus on the time and place chosen for their landing, and Egarn rested, Arne had a last minute errand of his own to perform. With instructions from Inskel, he used the small len to scan the remnants of the war in the east.

His direst predictions had not been fulfilled—yet. Inskor had spread destruction across Lant, burning Lant Court, destroying mills, wrecking roads and bridges, laying waste to the countryside, even raiding the peer’s prized stables and seizing her horses. Her people, especially her one-namers, would be suffering greatly, but the only damage the peer suffered would be to her pride. And now Inskor was in trouble, slipping out of one trap after another.

As for the trek south, it was far behind schedule. Inskor had enlarged the military escort after hearing Arne’s warning, and the column was still intact. Arne recognized Bernal, so the scout had reached it safely with the train of supplies and the reinforcements. No doubt both had been desperately needed. Now food was in short supply again, Arne’s caches were too far apart for the group’s slow progress, and it certainly could not reach the south before winter. As a harbinger of things to come, the Peer of Easlon was dead—perhaps killed leading the column, which would have been like her. Arne knew this because the former prince now received a peer’s obeisance. Her leadership was certain to be as bold and resourceful as her mother’s—but the march was doomed.

When Inskel called them, Arne had seen enough, and he knew would never have the slightest desire to look again. He said nothing to the others about what he had seen, and none of them asked him. As Inskel had already said, there was no way they could help, and worrying about it would interfere with their work.

Egarn and Arne were launched into the past almost without ceremony. There had been no wine since Roszt and Kaynor left; there was no longer a team to see them off. They clasped Garzot’s hands and then Inskel’s, and then, one after the other, they stepped under the large machine. Inskel put them down in a deserted section of Mount Hope Cemetery shortly after dark. They strolled past the Civil War graves and exited through the same hole in the fence that Roszt and Kaynor had used coming in the other direction. They went down the residence hall path, across the parking lots, and through the campus to Joseph Wilson Boulevard, which they followed along the river.

Egarn was unaccustomed to walking, and by the time the street curved eastward to intersect Mount Hope Avenue, he was exhausted—but this was not even a problem. They hailed a cab, and he told the driver to take them to the Sharber Motel. As he registered for himself and Arne, he carelessly displayed a well-filled wallet to the desk clerk and wondered whether it would be possible to have the same room he’d had several years before. Eying the wallet, the clerk thought it would be no problem at all if the room wasn’t occupied, and it wasn’t.

In this simple fashion they found themselves installed in the room Roszt and Kaynor had used for so long. They wistfully hoped the two men had left behind something that would be useful—records, notes, documents—but the chambermaid had cleaned thoroughly, and the safe under the bed was unlocked and empty.

“We will have to get along with what we already know,” Egarn said. “At least we have arrived safely, and we are ready to to work. Now if this scientist who was trying to study the len has a telephone listing—”

He did. The address was in Penfield, an affluent Rochester suburb, and the street number matched the one they had read on the mailbox. “We will go there now,” Egarn told Arne. “If he seems sympathetic, and if I like his looks—and if he will listen to me—I just might tell him the whole story. It will be dangerous, but he is the one person who may be able to understand what we are trying to do, and we will need help—especially now that the Lantiff are interfering.” He took two steps toward the door and collapsed.

Arne lifted him onto the bed. His old heart was racing wildly; his face was pale and moist with perspiration. He muttered, “I can’t do it. I waited too long.” He stared at Arne wildly. “And you can’t even speak English. You would be helpless.”

“Rest until you are feeling better,” Arne suggested. “Then you can make telephone talk with the man.”

“No. He would consider it a crank call. We can’t do anything unless we are taken seriously.”

“Then rest until you are able to write a message. Invite him to come here. I will take it to him.”

Egarn shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t be able to say a word. He would think you were a mental case and notify the authorities. Even with me there to explain things, this will sound preposterous. I will have to talk fast to keep us from being thrown out.”

“I can show him this,” Arne said. “Then he will take me seriously.”

He held up one of two small tubes he carried in his pocket. Egarn’s weapon.

“Yes,” Egarn agreed. “Yes—that is what you must do. He has already seen the end the girl broke off Kaynor’s. He is a scientist. If I offer tell him what it is, and where it came from, and how it works, he certainly will come. Yes. Let me rest for a moment, and then I will try to write.”

He wrote a letter on the motel’s stationery. Then he read it over and carefully rewrote it. A lifetime had passed since he composed anything in English, and he had difficulty thinking of words. On a separate sheet he wrote the scientist’s address in Penfield for Arne to show the cab driver. He also gave Arne a blank sheet of stationery with the motel’s name and address so Arne could show it to another cab driver if he had to return alone. If that happened, they would have to go into hiding until they found out whether the scientist had alerted the police.

After listening patiently to a long lecture about what he must and must not do, Arne put Egarn to bed, saw that he was resting comfortably, and slipped quietly from the room.

He was enormously worried about the old man. At that very moment, the six Lantiff might be leaving their retreat by the river bank and trekking toward the center of the city, and they would find Egarn exhausted and helpless—as they had found Roszt and Kaynor.

But Arne had no choice. The quest had become his.

He told the cab driver, “Penfield.”

“What was that?” the driver demanded.

Arne repeated the word twice while the driver, twisting his body so he could stare into the back seat, scrutinized him severely. The driver saw a decently dressed young man with long hair and a beard, apparently sober, probably not an addict. He talked like a foreigner, in which case he was harmless and likely to tip well. “Sure,” he said. “What address.”

Arne handed him the slip of paper.

The driver glanced at it, returned it, said cheerfully, “Gotcha,” and drove off.

The trip, through the night-time strangeness of a vast metropolitan area, seemed interminable to Arne and confusing beyond the scope of reason. He’d had no idea how fond the people of the past were of words and letters. Occasionally he had seen these displayed in scenes the large len showed them, but he hadn’t realized that the night sky would be ablaze with them— for what purpose he couldn’t imagine.

Eventually they put the city’s clutter behind them. The scientist lived in an area of widely-scattered, wealthy-looking homes. His house was set far back from the road in a wooded, park-like setting, and they followed a winding drive to the front door. Outside lights came on while Arne was getting out of the cab. He read the fare on the meter, deftly calculated a fifteen percent tip, and added another five per cent for unusual service. As first server of the Peerdom of Midlow, he’d had to be adroit in figuring percentages—that was how he apportioned food among the villages—and he had learned about numbers and money when Roszt and Kaynor were studying them. He paid the driver and watched the cab roll away before he mounted the steps.

The door opened as he reached the stoop. The man who faced him through the screen door was same tall, slender, bearded man he had watched doing tests on the len. Arne felt comfortable in his presence at once because of the beard. A civilization of clean-shaven men, along with so many women with long hair, gave him a sensation of inferiority everywhere he turned. To Arne, all of them were peeragers.

The man said—testily, as though he didn’t welcome being disturbed by late callers—“Yes?”

Arne said, “Marcus Brock?”

For a moment he thought the man was going to deny his own identity, but it was only Arne’s pronunciation that he was denying. “Marcus Brock,” he said, making it sound very different. “That’s me. What do you want?”

“Have let-ter,” Arne said and offered it.

The professor opened the screen door. “Come in.”

He escorted Arne into a large room that seemed packed to the bursting point with meaningless clutter, got him seated in a plushly cushioned chair, and sat down nearby to read the letter. When he finished, he studied Arne doubtfully for a moment, and then he read it again.

“You are Arne?” he asked finally.

Arne pointed to himself. “Arne.”

“And you don’t understand English. ‘Saving Earth from destruction’ sounds serious,” he went on good-naturedly, “but surely it isn’t imperative to rescue it at this hour of the night. On the other hand, I certainly would like to know where that lens came from, and how it was made, and what it was used for. A pity you don’t speak English. Is there any other language we could communicate in? Parlez vous francais? Sprechen sie Deutsche? No? But I suppose the person who wrote this letter speaks English well enough. He says you have something to show me.”

Arne was gazing at him bewilderedly.

“Show me—” The professor glanced again at the letter. “Show me len.”

Arne got up and went to him, holding out Egarn’s weapon. He repeated the words Egarn had taught him. “Danger. Not touch. Look.”

Brock squinted carefully at the end that was extended to him. When he’d had time to recognize it as identical to the fragment he had seen, Arne obligingly let him see the len in the other end.

Brock got to his feet. “The letter also mentions a demonstration. De-mon-stra-tion. Never mind, I’m sure you know.”

He led Arne through rooms full of strangenesses, pausing along the way to take a handlight from a drawer. They exited through a rear door, and Brock’s handlight picked out a path. They moved past flower beds and a garden, past Brock’s workroom, and finally into a gully at the back of the property where a small stream flowed. Arne selected a huge boulder as his target. Lightning flashed, there was a crash of sound, and the professor hurried forward to wonderingly examine the smooth hole bored through stone. Arne waited, tube in his hand, in case another demonstration was needed.

It wasn’t.

Brock led him back to the house and to the room they had occupied before. “Wait,” he said and left Arne there. Arne seated himself and waited. He heard voices in a distant part of the house. Then the professor returned carrying a jacket.

“Are we going to the motel the stationery came from?” he asked. “I keep forgetting you can’t understand. Where—are— we—going? Where—”

Arne showed him his own piece of stationery.

“At least it’s a respectable address,” Brock said. “Let’s go.”

He led Arne through a different door and into a room where two automobiles were parked. They got into one of them, and Arne turned wide-eyed to watch the wall behind them rise up and fold against the beams overhead. They backed out and drove away.

The night-time strangeness looked just as confusing to Arne on the return trip. At the motel, Egarn responded to the signal Arne tapped. He greeted Brock warmly; the two shook hands. Then they sat down to talk.

And talk.

And talk.

Egarn used up the remaining stationery and much of his pocket notebook drawing diagrams. The two men forgot about Arne, who finally stretched out on the bed and fell asleep.

It was almost dawn when Egarn shook him awake. Brock was talking on the telephone. “He thinks we aren’t safe here,” Egarn said. “Probably he is right. If Gevis finds out where we are, it would be only too easy for him to land a company of Lantiff in the parking lot. One of us would have to keep alert all the time, and there are things that must be done. So we will check out immediately. Brock is asking friends to look after me. They will take me to a safe place—even Brock won’t know where are—but he can get in touch with me by telephone whenever he needs to. I know you wouldn’t enjoy being hidden away with nothing to do, so you can go with him. Help him as much as you can and guard him well—before this day is over, the Lantiff may be after him, too.”

“I can’t give him much help when I can’t talk with him,” Arne complained.

“You can recognize a Honsun Len when you see it. Except for me, you are the only person in the world—at this moment—who can.”

Brock hung up and turned to them. “Ready to go?”

He drove them to the office and waited outside with his motor running while the night clerk performed the necessary paperwork to check them out. Egarn explained that they had been called away by a business emergency but hoped to return in a day or two. The clerk diffidently accepted a large tip and breathed, “Yes, sir! We will be happy to have you back, sir.”

They drove away. After threading through the downtown area, Brock turned south on Mount Hope Avenue. “He hates war as much as we do,” Egarn told Arne. “He will see that the len is destroyed if he can find a way to do it. Separating us is his suggestion. Then if something happens to one of us, the other can fight on.”

They turned onto Joseph Wilson Boulevard. When they reached the university campus, a parked car blinked its lights at them. They slowed and came to a stop beside it. Egarn clasped Arne’s hand.

“I will be all right,” he said. “You are not to worry about me. You have a job to do.”

He stumbled awkwardly from the car, swung his own door shut behind him, and scrambled into the other car. Both vehicles drove away quickly.

Arne leaned back in the rear seat and worried about Egarn. He doubted Brock’s friends could be trusted to guard him properly. However capable they were, they would know nothing about dealing with an utterly ruthless Peer of Lant who possessed the means of sending an army through time. They wouldn’t even be able to imagine such a thing.