“Brian, people everywhere were starving, dying of disease, rotting in neglect and misery, but those people possessed a leadership we now lacked. Ramjets had efficient leadership. Their leaders used them against us and it was our turn to suffer. There was revolution but little or no morality; whatever morality they may have possessed was quickly lost in the rebellion and we all suffered. The country was caught up in a senseless savagery.”
“That’s when Moresby came up?”
A weary nod.
Major Moresby witnessed the beginning of the civil war when he emerged on his target date. They had chosen the same date for the outbreak of the rebellion — they had selected the Fourth of July as their target in a bid for independence from white America and the bombing of Chicago was intended to be the signal. Ramjet liaison agents in Beijing had arranged that: Chicago — not Atlanta or Memphis or Birmingham — was the object of their greatest hatred after the wall. But the plan went awry.
The rebellion broke out almost a week earlier — quite by accident — when triggered by a riot in the little river town of Cairo, Illinois. A traffic arrest there, followed by a street shooting and then a wholesale jail delivery of black prisoners, upset the schedule: the revolt was quickly out of control. The state militia and the police were helpless, depleted in number, their reserve manpower long since spent overseas; there was no regular army left standing in the United States except for token troops at various posts and stations, and even the ceremonial guards at national monuments had been removed and assigned to foreign duty. There was no remaining force to prevent the rebellion. Major Moresby climbed out of the vehicle and into the middle of the holocaust.
The agony went on for almost seventeen months.
The President was assassinated, Congress fled — or died while trying to flee — and Washington burned. They burned many of the cities where they were numerically strong. In their passion they burned themselves out of their homes and destroyed the fields and crops which had fed them.
The few remaining lines of transportation which were open up to that moment ceased entirely. Trucks were intercepted, looted and burned, their drivers shot. Buses were stopped on interstate highways and white passengers killed. Railroad trains were abandoned wherever they stopped, or wherever the tracks were torn up, engineers and crews were murdered wherever they were caught. Desperate hunger soon followed the stoppage of traffic.
Katrina said: “Everyone here expected the Chinese to intervene, to invade, and we knew we could not stop them. Brian, our country had lost or abandoned twenty million men overseas; we were helpless before any invader. But they did not come. I thank God they did not come. They were prevented from coming when the Soviet turned on them in a holy war in the name of Communism: that long, long border dispute burst into open warfare and the Russians drove on Lop Nor.” She made a little gesture of futility. “We never learned what happened; we never learned the outcome of anything in Europe. Perhaps they are still fighting, if anyone is left alive to fight. Our contact with the Continent was lost, and has never been restored to our knowledge. We lost contact with that military group in Virginia when the electricity failed. We were alone.”
He said in wonder: “Israel, Egypt, Australia, Britain, Russia, China — all of them: the world.”
“All of them,” she repeated with a dull fatigue. “And our troops were wasted in nearly every one of them, thrown away by a man with a monumental ego. Not more than a handful of those troops ever returned. We were done.”
Chaney said: “I guess the Commander came up at the end — seventeen months later.”
“Arthur emerged from the TDV on his target date, just past the end of it: the beginning of the second winter after the rebellion. We think the rebellion had ended, spent and exhausted on its own fury. We think the men who assaulted him at the gatehouse were stragglers, survivors who had managed through the first winter. He said those men were as surprised by his appearance, as he was by theirs; they might have fled if he had not cornered them.” Katrina laced her fingers on the tabletop in familiar gesture and looked at him. “We saw a few armed bands roaming the countryside that second winter. We repaired the fence, stood guard, but were not again molested: Arthur put out warnings he had found in the book you gave him. By the following spring, the bands of men had dwindled to a few scavengers prowling the fields for game — but after that we saw no one. Until you came, we saw no one.”
He said: “So ends the bloody business of the day.”
EIGHTEEN
Katrina peered across the table and sought to break the unhappy silence between them.
“A family, you said? Father, mother, and child? A healthy child? How old was he?”
“I don’t know: three, maybe four. The kid was having himself a fine time — playing, hollering, picking up things — until I scared off his parents.” Chaney still felt bitter about that encounter. “They all looked healthy enough. They ran healthy.”
Katrina nodded her satisfaction. “It gives one hope for the future, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
She reprimanded him: “You know so. If those people were healthy, they were eating well and living in some degree of safety. If the man carried no weapon, he thought none was needed. If they had a child and were together, family life has been re-established. And if that child survived his birth and was thriving, it suggests a quiet normalcy has returned to the world, a measure of sanity. All that gives me hope for the future.”
“A quiet normalcy,” he repeated. “The sun in that sky was quiet. It was cold out there.”
The dark eyes peered at him. “Have you ever admitted to yourself that you could be wrong, Brian? Have you even thought of your translations today? You were a stubborn man; you came close to mocking Major Moresby.”
Chaney failed to answer: it was not easy to reassess the Eschatos scroll in a day. A piece of his mind insisted that ancient Hebrew fiction was only fiction.
They sat in the heavy silence of the briefing room, looking at each other in the lantern light and knowing this was coming to an end. Chaney was uneasy. There had been a hundred — a thousand — questions he’d wanted to ask when he first walked into the room, when he first discovered her, but now he could think of little to say. Here was Katrina, the once youthful, radiant Katrina of the swimming pool — and outside was Katrina’s family waiting for him to leave.
He wanted desperately to ask one more question but at the same time he was afraid to ask: what happened to him after his return, after the completion of the probe? What had happened to him? He wanted to know where he had gone, what he had done, how he had survived the perilous years — he wanted to know if he had survived those years. Chaney was long convinced that he was not on station in 1980, not there at the time of the field trials, but where was he then? She might have some knowledge of him after he’d finished the mission and left; she might have kept .in touch. He was afraid to ask. Pindar’s advice stopped his tongue.
He got up suddenly from his chair. “Katrina, will you walk downstairs with me?”
She gave him a strange look, an almost frightened look, but said: “Yes, sir.”
Katrina left her chair and came around the table to him. Age had slowed her graceful walk and he was acutely distressed to see her move with difficulty. Chaney picked up a lantern, and offered her his free arm. He felt a flush of excitement as she neared him, touched him.
They descended the stairs without speaking. Chaney slowed his pace to accommodate her and they went down slowly, one cautious step at a time. Kathryn van Hise held on to the rail and moved with the hesitant pace of the aged.