ONE
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My Preliminary Interview
On August Sixteenth, 2444, an idle Saturday, I had stopped in my greenhouses to have a look at the hybrid agaves I had growing in Unit Five, before I went fishing with Jack for the rest of the day in Fremont Creek, and I was there when the courier found me. I tipped the boy and at once opened the letter.
“Mr. Randel,” I read, “your nation needs your service. Please come tomorrow afternoon at one to the St. Regis Hotel in Salt Lake City. Ask at the front desk for Dr. Rogers. We realize we are forcing you to travel on a Sunday, but not coming to see us will be interpreted as a refusal of our very critical offer.”
There was no signature or return address, only the embossed face of an open pocket watch at the bottom of the page, a symbol my old cathedral home instructor, the Reverend Charles Kellogg, had taught me the significance of many years before. The picture looked exactly as Reverend Kellogg had described the real thing: The common axis of the minute and hour hands formed the nose of the timepiece’s face, the tiny dials showing the seconds and the days of the week were the eyes, and a crescent-shaped slit formed by the words Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni gave the face its ever-smiling mouth.
The road north from Hanksville and Salt Lake City’s urban streets were nearly empty because of the Sabbath. I made the drive in my steam car in merely four hours. As every filling station along the way was closed, I knew I would have to wait until Monday to buy fuel and water for the return trip, and I was thankful my secretary had packed me some sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade to give me something to eat while I waited for the morrow. The St. Regis Hotel was a grand old downtown Gothic built during the Medieval Revival after the style of Francis. It sits over the downtown office buildings as a Medieval church towered above the hovels of old Europe.
Unlike most of the restaurants and shops in the city, the St. Regis remained open for business, or at least the owner/manager was at the front desk. The rest of that drafty pile of stones seemed empty on that very hot day. When I asked the man for Dr. Rogers, he took me into the long, vacant banquet room the hotel usually reserved for wedding receptions. There the man left me and closed the door behind himself when he exited. At the far end of the ballroom, I could make out the outlines of two men seated at what appeared to be a card table. I never cared for steam lights myself. I concede it is a great innovation to pump hot steam through a titanium tube so that it heats the noble gas inside the bulb and thus creates light, but the results are too glaring for my eyes, which is why in my greenhouses I use either natural light or magnified kerosene lanterns. Inside the hallway, the blazing overhead lights nearly blinded me. Squinting as I advanced toward the two seated men did not help my eyes focus any better.
“Dr. Rogers?” I asked into the glare.
“Ah, Mr. Randel,” said one of the seated men. “Come have a chair. The air conditioner works better over here. We are much cooler by the wall.”
A bank of lights directly over the card table forced me to screen my eyes with my hand as I found my chair on the side of the table facing the two men.
“Do the lights bother you?” asked one of the men.
He stood, and with a hooked pole that had been leaning against the wall slid shut the panels that concealed the lights directly over us. In the indirect light, I could now see I was facing a vigorous man in his fifties and another man of at least seventy, perhaps seventy-five years. Both were wearing seersucker suits in the summer heat. The older man was leaning against a distinctive duck’s head cane. As soon as the younger man was seated again, they each took from their vests a gold pocket watch and opened it for me to look upon for a moment. The faces on their timepieces looked exactly like the embossed image on the letter they had sent me.
“Shouldn’t we call you ‘Doctor Randel,’ sir?” asked the older man. “You do have a doctorate degree, do you not?”
“No, sir, I have only a bachelor’s degree from Grand Harbor Polytechnic,” I said.
“Did not Southlands University bestow an honorary doctorate upon you?” asked the older man. “In 2442, after you created the new scholarship fund at their institution?”
“That was withdrawn, sir,” I said. “After they did some further research and discovered my background, the university took back the honor.”
“Thereupon, you withdrew your donation to that institution?” asked the older man.
“I never take back what I have given, sir,” I said. “The scholarship fund provides tuition, books, and housing to fifteen students a year.”
“Very generous of you,” said the older man. “Before we go on, we should tell you there is no Dr. Rogers. That is a name we use when we’re traveling. This is Dr. Adrian Prichard. I am Dr. Jonathan Murrey. Perhaps you will have heard of us.”
“I know Dr. Prichard from his articles in Aerospace magazine,” I said. “Everyone who has studied history or modern philosophy knows who you are, Dr. Murrey. It is a great honor to meet you both.”
Dr. Prichard opened a manila folder on the card table and examined some documents therein for a few seconds as he pondered asking me something, but instead leaned back in his chair.
“So, tell us, Mr. Randel, what do you know of the Timermen?” he asked.
“I know only the rumors everyone hears, sir,” I said.
“Rumors are a start,” he said.
“Well,” I began, “they are a secret society of scientists and engineers—”
“Some of us are scientists; all of us are engineers,” inserted Dr. Murrey.
“I confess I am ignorant of much, gentlemen,” I said. “I do know the Timermen were formed at Purdue University in the mid-twenty-first century.”
“In 2045, to be exact,” said Dr. Murrey and twirled his duck head walking stick between his hands.
“There were five of them in the beginning,” I continued. “Jessup, McCombs, Zwatek, Holly, and Mitchell. Today, there are—according to rumor—perhaps a couple hundred Timermen, or maybe several thousand. Outsiders like myself do not know very much about you.”
“As they should not,” said Dr. Prichard.
Dr. Murrey laid his walking stick on the table and relaxed against the back of his chair.
“Tell us—since History is the queen of all the academic disciplines—what did the five original Timermen do in April of 2047?”
he asked.
“They released the Personal Pulse Weapon,” I replied. “The PPWs, they were called. The Yukons built them for the Timermen here in North America. Terrorists and criminal gangs then built PPWs around the world.”
“Speaking as an engineer and a scientific researcher, describe the PPWs to us,” said Dr. Murrey.
“They were a handheld weapon that had a backpack energy source,” I said. “Thanks to the Jessup lens, it could project a stream of positively charged microwaves for approximately six miles. These microwaves interrupted the flow of negatively charged electricity as it moved through metal conductors. Electrical devices no longer functioned properly. Communications were disrupted, commerce came to a near standstill, movement over wide areas became next to impossible, and all of the military equipment of that age became useless. The world was plunged into forty years of chaos.”
“At the end of those forty years . . . ?” said Dr. Murrey.
This was History everyone learned in grade school. I wondered what the point of this recitation was. Such a well-known subject seemed to be the preliminary litany to some task or initiation.
“On October First, 2081, the Timermen turned on the Storm Machines,” I said. “As you know, these are satellites orbiting the Earth. Each satellite is an electrical generator that produces a powerful charge of positrons, which they send through the ionosphere via a narrow tether hundreds of miles long. At the end of each tether is a balloon device from which point the positrons are broadcast onto the atmosphere. The Storm Machines ended all electricity everywhere on the Earth.”
“Everywhere?” said Dr. Murrey.
“Rumor has it,” I replied, “that the Timermen have launch bases onto which the Storm Machines do not broadcast. They are outside the broadcast pattern of the Storm Machines.”
“Now tell us what you know of the Blinking Stars,” said Dr. Prichard.
“They are observation satellites positioned slightly above the Storm Machines,” I said. “They, too, have tethers that provide them a clear view of the Earth’s surface without any atmospheric interference. These satellites also send ultraviolet beams to the thousands of glass domes positioned throughout the Yukon Confederacy. Within each dome is a continuously rotating spool of ammonia-treated blue paper on which the ultraviolet beams leave a series of dots and dashes, constituting a code every dome operator can read. Because of the Blinking Stars, the Yukons can communicate instantaneously over great distances, can navigate over the ocean, and always know where they and their enemies are.”
“Making the Yukons invincible in war,” said Dr. Murrey.
“Yes,” I said. “At least so far, they are, sir.”
“But return to the twenty-first century and tell us of the other people living on what we now call the Yukon Confederacy,” said Dr. Murrey.
“The Yukons living in North America, the British Isles, and Australia controlled those regions’ supply of non-hybrid seed,” I said, retelling a tale that had been told millions of times before. “After the planting season in 2082, the sterile hybrid seed the non-Yukons possessed could no longer produce crops, and they starved. The population of non-Yukons was already much depleted by forty years of social unrest and by various epidemics. The Yukons had been developing steam-powered machines for decades, and as they were mostly farmers—as the majority of us are still today—they were better prepared for this crisis. The Yukons only had to defend their farmlands. Within a very few years they rounded up the few remaining non-
Yukons and transported them to the underdeveloped world, particularly to northern Mexico, which, like other poor lands, still had non-hybrid seeds. Moslems overran Europe, save for the Slavic Remnant in the Ural Mountains. Until they were defeated in the Four Points War twenty years ago, China and the Turks were great world powers. The four and a half to five million Yukons living at the end of the twenty-first century have grown into the powerful Confederacy of thirty-one million souls of today.”
“One more scientific question,” said Dr. Murrey. “Why aren’t the Storm Machine satellites turned on all the time?”
“That would cause too much energy to be concentrated in the earth’s outer shell,” I said. “The Storm Machines are turned on only when the Blinking Stars detect an artificial electrical field somewhere on the earth’s surface.”
“And we Timermen maintain, as you say, these two satellite systems for the benefit of our fellow Yukons,” smiled Dr. Murrey, looking much too proud of himself to be a man who had ever done anything merely to benefit someone else. “Enough of History. You seem to know enough of us, Mr. Randel. Now we want to speak of you.”
“Where does the name Randel come from?” asked Dr. Prichard, and he took from his coat pocket a tiny tin container, from which he took a little pinch of snuff and put it up his nose. I had read of people using tobacco in this manner, but I had never seen anyone use the substance in anything other than a cigar or a pipe. I presumed this was an odd habit of the upper classes and let the matter pass unremarked.
“I was named after a street in Grand Harbor,” I said. “If I am not mistaken, the same street was so named even in ancient times, back when Grand Harbor was called San Francisco.”
“You were raised as an orphan in the cathedral home in Grand Harbor?” continued Dr. Prichard, glancing at the folder in front of him.
“Yes, my legal guardian when I was young was the Reverend Charles Kellogg, sir,” I said. “He was the headmaster of the orphanage school.”
“They called you ‘Gunner’ in the Army?” said Dr. Murrey, and grinned when I winced. They had certainly done a deep background check on me. I wondered who had told them this.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and turned away so I did not have to meet
his gaze.
“Do you know anything concerning the whore who was your mother?” asked Prichard.
Since I left the Army, in my home and greenhouses in Hanksville I have had contact only with my adopted children and with neighbors who know little of my genealogy, and consequently I had been merely shunned by my betters and had not been insulted or heard my mother slandered for nearly a dozen years. I fear I took the abuse badly. I fidgeted in the metal folding chair and stuttered when I first attempted to reply.
“No, I . . . I . . . only have a locket with her picture in it, sir,” I said. “Reverend Kellogg gave it to me when I turned sixteen and went into the Army, sir.”
“Do you have it with you?” asked Dr. Murrey.
I had carried the locket in my breast pocket for the previous forty years, and had it then to present to the two learned scholars. Dr. Prichard did not respond when he looked at the oval-shaped photograph of the dark-haired girl in a print cotton dress. Dr. Murrey—ever the freer man with his emotions—pursed his lips and declared:
“What a pretty little whore she was! She must have done a thriving business with the sailor boys.”
I could not help myself from trembling. To clear something that had arisen into my throat, I had to swallow hard before I spoke again.
“For everything I know, my mother may have been an unfortunate young girl in trouble, sir,” I said.
“If she had sexual relations outside the institution of marriage,” said Dr. Murrey as he clicked the locket shut, “then by definition she was a whore.”
He tossed my treasured locket back to me as if it were a piece of filth. When I held it again in my hand, I felt ashamed that I had let these two men handle it.
“You were an outstanding student,” said Dr. Prichard, again referring to the file. “This Charles Kellogg seems to have thought much of you. He directed you into botany?”
“He had studied botany when he was younger,” I said. “He kept a garden behind the cathedral school, sir. Perhaps the happiest hours of my youth were spent working there.”
“This Reverend Kellogg had the seed for the Aztec corn, didn’t he?” asked Dr. Murrey.
“I have always acknowledged the debt I owe him, sir,” I said. “He had collected the seed when he was in Mexico with the Army. He taught me I could make something of myself if I would learn how to make a new strain of corn.”
“Yet he also saw that you would have the mathematics and the physics classes an engineer would need,” commented Dr. Prichard.
“The good reverend also saw to it you studied foreign languages,” said Dr. Murrey.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Then at age sixteen you entered the Army as a soldier-cadet,” said Dr. Prichard.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why the Army?” asked Dr. Murrey. “Grand Harbor is a naval town. The Lords in your hometown usually send young men into the Navy or the Bluejackets.”
“Reverend Kellogg suggested I go into his old division, the Eighth, sir,” I said.
“Where you would have a better chance of advancement,” said Dr. Murrey, flashing his contented smile. “I’m sure the good reverend explained all of that to you.”
“He did, sir.”
“After two years in the Army,” said Dr. Prichard, shifting through the papers in the file, “you attended Grand Harbor Polytechnic on scholarship. Outstanding grades. A double major in mechanical engineering and botany. Very good. Then back into the Army. You served in the Second Army during the Four Points War. Saw action at the Battle of Northern India. It says here you were ill for a time?”
“Dysentery, sir,” I said.
“The report we have says you did everything demanded of you,” said Prichard. “By this time the perennial corn you had created when you were younger was being purchased by all the important seed companies. You had become quite wealthy. Then at twenty-five, you married one of your sergeant major’s spinster aunts. This was, of course, an arranged marriage. She was how old?”
“One hundred and eighteen,” I said. “She died eleven years ago, sir.”
The two men found this terribly amusing. When they were done laughing at me, Dr. Murrey asked me:
“You never lived together?”
“I saw her on the wedding day, and never again, sir,” I said. “Her Lord, Lord Clarence of New Barton, Northfield Province, remains
my Lord.”
“That same year, due to the importance of your scientific work, you were allowed to leave the Army and work at the compound you constructed at Hanksville, Desert Province,” said Dr. Prichard, again reading from the report. “You have been there ever since. What is this about Drunkards’ Outreach?”
“I had a period in my life when I drank too much, sir,” I said. “I have conquered the urge.”
“You have other urges,” said Dr. Murrey. “Your last commanding officer in the Army said you sometimes visited loose women. Women similar to your mother. Do you still do that?”
I was trembling again and had to cradle my right hand in my left to calm down the shaking.
“When I conquered the drinking, sir, I promised I would put aside everything else I was doing that was wrong,” I said. “That is everything I have to say on the matter, sir.”
“It is not, however, everything we wish to ask,” said Dr. Murrey, again leaning forward and toying with his walking stick. “Imagine the guilt you must have felt when you took advantage of prostitutes whose condition was so similar to your dear mother’s.”
“I have confessed my sins to God, and God has forgiven me, sir,” I said. “I carry no guilt.”
“Oh really,” said Dr. Murrey, and he smiled so broadly I could see his teeth reflecting the harsh light. “Look at this record of your achievements: You have made a dozen types of perennial seed.”
“Corn is a grass and can be crossbred with any other grass,” I said. “I created a perennial barley, a wheat, a rice—”
“You are developing a new type of agave to produce biomass for our machines,” said Murrey.
“I have made a great deal of money on the patents of those seeds,” I said.
“But look: You have patented a new, more nutritional cassava and a disease-resistant millet,” said Murrey, thumping his walking stick on the report in front of Prichard but never looking away from me. “Cassava and millet aren’t Yukon crops.”
“The new cassava will improve the diet of millions in South America, sir,” I said. “Peasants in northern China need a disease-resistant strain of—”
“You didn’t make a half penny on either plant,” said Murrey. “What were you thinking? That some darkies in China or South America will be grateful to you? They certainly can’t pay you any royalties.”
“‘Charity does not ask to be repaid in gratitude, sir’,” I said, citing something he himself had written.
“On the subject of charity, I cannot help but note that you have given nearly a quarter of your fortune to orphanages, scholarship funds for the underprivileged, nature reserves, almshouses, and so on. You live like a monk in your research station and pour what money you do keep into your work.”
“I live as I feel I should, sir,” I said.
“More than the charities concern us,” said Prichard.
“Yes,” beamed Dr. Murrey. “At your greenhouses, you employ one of your old sergeant majors from your Army company.”
“Mr. Woolery is a man without family, as is his wife, sir,” I said. “If I did not give them a home, they would have none.”
“Exactly,” said Murrey, and slid his chair around the side of the table so he would be closer to me. “There is the young girl you adopted . . .”
“Sharon was a young girl in the same . . . the same condition as my mother, sir,” I said. “I gave her an Article Twenty-Two and employ her as a secretary.”
“You didn’t stop there,” said Murrey. “You found her a husband, this former private, Mr. Daniels—”
“Gary Daniels is a wounded veteran, sir,” I said. “He has a prosthetic right leg—”
“And he had nowhere else to go,” said Dr. Murrey. He stood and came all the way around the table so he might lay his hand upon my shoulder. “You hired him, made him and his wife and her bastard child your legal heirs, took care of all their needs.”
“I saved them, sir, from the stigma that has burdened me all my life,” I said.
“You did them a good deed,” said Murrey. “Are you aware of what you’re doing, sir?”
“What . . . what am I doing, sir?” I said, growing very uncomfortable with the hand he kept on my shoulder.
“The man at the front desk of this hotel,” said Murrey, and bent his gray head down to the level of mine. “You know why Mr. Felder is open on a Sunday? Because he’s a Jew. Oh, he’s also a war hero, and he gives to all the charities, like you do, except he isn’t wealthy like you. He keeps the Christian name on his establishment and does the Timermen the odd favor now and then, but he remains a Jew. I’ve seen Catholics do the same thing. Do one good deed after another, as if they will make people forget what they are. You have tried to do the same your entire life. We in the Timermen don’t forget.”
I gripped my mother’s locket in my hand while the great man spoke these words into my ear. In spite of Dr. Murrey being so much older than I and in spite of the military code, I confess I wanted to strike his grinning face.
“Did you gentlemen bring me here only to humiliate me by bringing up the circumstances of my birth?” I asked.
“No, of course not, Mr. Randel,” said Dr. Murrey, and he returned to his chair. (He moved with such ease, I doubted he used the walking stick for anything but decoration.)
“We resolved to offer you a position before we summoned you here,” said Prichard.
Dr. Murrey took from the folder a page-sized photograph of a young woman. He considered showing it to me at once, then decided to withhold it for several minutes.
“Are you familiar with the Timermen’s right of dissimulation?” he asked me.
“I think, sir,” I said, “it is an article in the Constitution that gives you the right to pretend to be who you are not.”
“Yes, it even grants us the right to pledge fealty to one Lord, when we are each actually pledged to the Guild,” said Murrey. “This right allows us to operate unnoticed in the larger world. What do you know of the present political situation in the capital?”
“I have never been involved in politics,” I said. “Certainly, I am aware Lord Newsome is currently consul, sir. When I was in the Second Army, my brother officers and I were supporters of Lord Isaac Fitzpatrick. Lord Newsome is, by marriage, a relative of his, so I don’t hold the present consul any ill will, sir. I know there are many in the Confederacy who do not care for his innovations.”
“His innovations . . .” stammered Dr. Murrey, and for the first and one of the few times in our acquaintance he showed a flare of anger. He quickly removed the snarl from his lips and recovered his superior smile. “What would you say if I told you Lord Newsome is merely a puppet of his wife, Lady Chelsea Shay Newsome, the one they call the Chrysanthemum Woman, after the Shay family seal?”
“I would say we might have a better world if more men were ruled by their wives, sir,” I said. “Women seem less vicious than we.”
Murrey and Prichard allowed themselves to laugh another time.
“Overlooking the legal fiction of your marriage,” said Murrey, “you have been a bachelor all your life. You obviously know nothing concerning women. In this instance, Lady Chelsea and her Shay relatives have used the influence she has upon her husband to turn the Confederacy’s central government into a criminal enterprise. Moreover, she strives to make the same government so powerful it will undermine our feudal system of local lords and family clans. She wishes to remake the Yukons, to change them into an immoral, secular, materialistic people interested in amusements and sex, thus rendering them easier to rule. She gives grants to the leading universities, establishing professorships to spread her ideology. She does the same in the publishing industry. She will, I believe, brainwash everyone when she obtains absolute power over everyone in the entire Confederacy.”
“People say the worst about the powerful, sir,” I said. “Anyway, if the Timermen detest the present government so much, why doesn’t your guild do something about it? You are hardly powerless.”
Throughout the interview, Prichard had been the more reserved of my two interrogators. Upon hearing me suggest the Timermen do something if they disliked the government, his grin became as broad as Murrey’s.
“The first thing we are going to do is send an agent of ours into the Chrysanthemum Woman’s court,” he said.
“Someone Lady Chelsea and her people will never suspect,” said Murrey.
They both stared at me for a few silent moments. Murrey’s head nodded up and down several times as he continued to smile at me. The inner voice that had been telling me to leave at once was now ordering me to run for the exit. That was when Murrey at last showed me the photograph he had taken from the folder.
Before me was a face such as I had only imagined in the hazy times between going to bed and falling asleep. She had gray-blonde hair tied into a loose ponytail at the back of her skull, causing her already high, prominent forehead to seem even higher, yet allowing random strands of her mane to fall around the soft oval of her countenance. Her very green eyes and very wide red lips made a startling contrast to the pale skin on the rest of her face, throat and shoulders. The only visible lines on her were the parentheses framing the ends of her smile. Everything else that was her was sunlight and softness.
“She’s very pretty, isn’t she, Mr. Randel?” asked Dr. Murrey.
“Yes, sir.”
“She is Lady Constance Fuller,” said Murrey. “The rebellious daughter of a Lord in Centralia Province. At the age of seventeen, she left her home against the wishes of her parents. Like so many wrongheaded and well-born girls these days, she saw a heroine in the free-wheeling and powerful Lady Chelsea. So, Constance fled to Cumberland and attached herself to the Chrysanthemum Woman’s court. Officially, Lady Constance is one of Lady Chelsea’s seamstresses. She actually does some sewing and some fashion designing in the court. Unofficially, pretty Constance is one of the legions of fashionable young people living the good life in the reflected glow of Lady Chelsea’s glorious light. Constance is now twenty-five; she needs a husband if she is ever going to inherit any of her family’s property.”
Both of them were again looking meaningfully at me.
“I am too old for her, sir,” I said.
“Everything is arranged,” said Dr. Murrey. “We have one man inside Lady Chelsea’s court. Not an agent, mind you—a compromised individual able to whisper certain suggestions into Lady Chelsea’s ear. You, Mr. Randel, would be a jewel in the Shay family’s diadem. You not only would have money to give her family, you are a hero to many people, the man who has made millions of farming families wealthier, helped feed a hungry world. In the Chrysanthemum Woman’s court your background would be an asset to both you and Lady Chelsea; you are a man risen from nothing to great prominence; she wants to project an image of herself as the people’s champion and would be pleased to have you about.”
“You must be lonely, Mr. Randel,” said Prichard and held up Constance’s photograph again. “It is natural for a man to desire a beautiful young wife—”
“To make warm his nights while he is still vigorous and to give him children when he is old,” said Dr. Murrey.
My inner voice was screaming at me by then. Get out the door! Get out! it said. They are old men. You can outrun them!
“Do you know what the Mandate of Heaven is, Mr. Randel?” asked Murrey.
“That we do unto others as we would do unto ourselves, sir?” I guessed.
The two men had chuckled at me before; now they both laughed so hard they rocked back and forth in their chairs. Prichard literally slapped his legs as he roared, and Dr. Murrey had to take off his glasses and wipe the tears from his eyes with his pocket handkerchief.
“You are too droll, Mr. Randel. ‘Do unto others,’ he says. Oh my. Write that down, Addie,” giggled Murrey. “I’ll use that to open my next seminar. No,” he said to me and drew in a deep breath, “the Mandate of Heaven is an ancient Chinese axiom which avers that a bad ruler will be replaced by a better one.”
“This is something the Timermen believe, sir?” I asked.
“We believe only that civilizations wear themselves out, if the natural historical process is allowed to take place, that is,” said Murrey. “Every great nation progresses from a primitive frontier era into a golden age, and then becomes an empire; all empires decline as soon as their inhabitants lose their shared solidarity of purpose. They mix with other peoples, become unnaturally wealthy, and adopt the degraded ways of the people they rule. We believe we, the Timermen, have to prevent that natural process from taking place. We have to keep the Yukons forever in the first stage of civilization. That is our part in bearing the Burden of History.”
He came around the table a second time, and for another time, he laid a hand on my shoulder and bent forward so he could speak directly into my ear.
“I can’t guess what you are thinking at this moment,” he said. “Maybe you are attracted to Miss Constance, maybe not. Perhaps you think Dr. Prichard and I are cynical old men playing games with the world. Who can say whether you have any feelings whatsoever about the Chrysanthemum Woman and her idiot husband? None of that matters. What is important is that you are a man impelled to do whatever you think will redeem yourself. We, of course, have a special goal for you. First, tell me if you can identify what this is.”
Behind them was a canvas tarp situated against the wall. Previously, I had given the object little notice. From under this bit of heavy cloth he took an object resembling a modern rifle, albeit on its side were a series of dials, and it was attached to a small box with several cables.
“Well, sir?” said Dr. Murrey.
“I have been a botanist for close to two decades, sir,” I said. “I have forgotten much of my engineer’s training, yet I believe that is a replica of an ancient electrical weapon, specifically a directed energy rifle.”
“Very good,” said Murrey. “It is indeed a replica of an ancient directed-energy weapon; however, it is nothing we made. This little box” (he pointed to the small box attached to the rifle) “is a plasma energy battery. Back in the twenty-first century, this thing could shoot a charged particle beam that would destroy anything within eight hundred meters. There were several much larger versions of this Devil’s tool, weapons that could reduce to smithereens anything within ten miles. The ancient Americans had thinking machines that could guide these devices to shoot down jet airplanes and other objects moving too swiftly for a human marksman to hit. This model can move only as swiftly as a human can direct it. Now it is said a few men armed with these things could defeat an entire army carrying conventional gunpowder weapons.”
“But, gentlemen,” I said, and now nearly laughed myself because this was so absurd, “none of these weapons could work today. The Storm Machines would immediately render them powerless.”
Dr. Murrey put the old weapon away.
“You are not aware of this, Mr. Randel,” he said, “but Cumberland City, our Capital, is situated about fifty miles west of Washington, the ancient American capital city. Back in the Electrical Age, the governing class built hundreds of miles of tunnels in that vicinity; some of these tunnels were little more than bomb shelters, and others extended clear into the Appalachian Mountains. They were places of refuge for the elite in the time of crisis. We in the guild know where some of these tunnels are, and others we do not. Now, Mr. Randel, this weapon, put together piece by accurate piece, was assembled in one of those tunnels. We have seen them bringing the parts to and from the tunnels on our satellites.”
“That makes absolutely no sense, gentlemen,” I protested. “They are spending millions to make harmless bits of junk. These things would not work unless—” I was about to say unless the Storm Machines were shut down, and then I remembered who exactly controlled those satellites. I stopped myself in time.
“They will work only if a traitor in our Guild shuts down the Storm Machines,” said Dr. Randel, completing the sentence I had begun. “We do have such a traitor in our midst, sir. You are going to help us find him.”
He paused and let this notion sink into my startled mind.
“Do this for us, and you will become a Timerman, a real ranking Timerman, and you will have fealty to us and to no one else. You could ask for time to consider our offer. We both know you have to say yes to us. Why not save us the wait, and tell us now?”
Dr. Murrey was correct, for many reasons.
He handed me a silver pocket watch, and we knelt down together so I could pledge my fealty to the Timermen before God. Both Murrey and Prichard shook hands with me after we arose to our feet.
“Go back to Hanksville, Mr. Randel,” Murrey advised me. “Prepare your staff for your move to Cumberland. You will be given further orders within a week.”