Chaney contented himself with watching their faces rather than the clock. He guessed another monkey was riding the vehicle into somewhere, somewhen. Perhaps the animal bore a labeclass="underline" Restricted and was under orders not to talk. The President had ruled his trip was not in the public interest.
FOUR
Brian Chaney awoke with the guilty feeling that he was tardy again. The Major would never forgive him.
He sat on the side of the bed and listened carefully for tell-tale sounds within the building, but none were audible. The station seemed unusually quiet. His room was a small one, a single unit sparsely furnished, in a double row of identical rooms fitted into a former army barracks. The partitions were thin and appeared to have been cheaply and hastily erected; the ceiling was less than three feet above his head — and he was a tall man. Larger common rooms at either end of the only corridor contained the showers and toilets, The place bore an unmistakable military stamp, as though troops had moved out the day before he moved in.
Perhaps they had done just that; perhaps troops were now riding those armored trains serving Chicago and Saint Louis. Without armored siding, a passenger train seldom could traverse Chicago’s south side without every window in every car being broken by stones or gunfire.
Chaney opened his door and peered into the corridor. It was empty, but recognizable sounds from the two rooms opposite his brought a measure of relief. In one of the rooms someone was opening and closing bureau drawers in frustrated search of something; in the other room the occupant was snoring. Chaney picked up a towel and his shaving kit and went to the showers. The snoring was audible all the way down the corridor.
The cold water was cold but the hot water was only a few degrees warmer — barely enough to feel a difference. Chaney came out of the shower, wrapped a towel about his middle and began rubbing lather on his face.
“Stop!” Arthur Saltus was in the doorway, pointing an accusatory finger. “Put down the razor, civilian.”
Startled, Chaney dropped the razor into the bowl of tepid water. “Good morning, Commander.” He recovered his wits and the razor to begin the shave. “Why?”
“Secret orders came in the middle of the night,” Saltus declared. “All the people of the future wear long beards, like old Abe Lincoln. We must be in character.”
“Nudists with bushy beards,” Chaney commented. “That must be quite a sight.” He kept on shaving.
“Well, you bit hard yesterday, civilian.” Saltus put an exploratory hand under the shower and turned on the water. He had anticipated the result. “This hasn’t changed since boot camp,” he told Chaney. “Every barracks is allotted ten gallons of hot water. The first man in uses it all.”
“I thought this was a barracks.”
“This building? It must have been at one time or another, but the station wasn’t always a military post. I spotted that coming in. Katrina said it was built as an ordnance plant in 1941 — you know, during that war.” He stepped under the shower. “That was — what? Thirtyseven years ago? Time flies and the mice have been at work.”
“That other building is new.”
“The lab building is brand new. Katrina said it was built to house that noisy machine — built to last forever. Reinforced concrete all the way down; a basement, and a sub-basement, and other things. The vehicle is down there somewhere hauling monkeys back and forth.”
“I’d like to see that damned thing.”
“You and me together, civilian. You and me and the Major.” His head popped out of the shower and his voice dropped to a stage whisper. “But I’ve got it figured.”
“You have? What?”
“Promise you won’t tell Katrina? You won’t tell the man in the White House I broke security?”
“Cross my heart, spit at the moon and everything.”
“All right: all this is a plot, a trick to be ahead of everybody else. Katrina has been misleading us, We’re not going up to the turn of the century — we’re going back down, back into history!”
“Back? Why?”
“We’re going back two thousand years, civilian. To grab those old scrolls of yours, pirate them, as if they were classified or something. We’re going to sneak in there some dark night, find a batch of them in some cave or other and copy them. Photograph them. That’s why we’re using cameras. And meanwhile, you’ll be using a recorder, making tapes of the location and the like. Maybe you could unroll a parchment or two and read off the titles, so we’ll know if we have anything important.”
“But they seldom have titles.”
Saltus was stopped. “Why not?”
“Titles just weren’t important at the time.”
“Well — no matter; we’ll make do, we’ll just copy everything we can find and sort them out later. And when we’re finished we’ll put everything back the way we found it and make our escape.” Saltus snapped his fingers to indicate a job well done and went back into the shower.
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough for us — we’ve scooped the world! And a long time afterward — you know, whatever year it was — some shepherd will stumble into the cave and find them in the usual way. Nobody but us will be the wiser.”
Chaney wiped his face dry. “How do we get into the Palestine of two thousand years ago? Cross the Atlantic in a canoe?”
“No, no, we don’t ride backwards first, civilian — not here, not in Illinois. If we did that we’d have to fight our way though Indians! Look, now: the Bureau of Standards will ship the vehicle over there in a couple of weeks, after we’ve had our field trials. They’ll pack it in a box marked Agricultural Machinery, or some such thing, and smuggle it in like everybody else does. How do you think the Egyptians got that baby bomb into Israel? By sending it parcel post?”
Chaney said: “Fantastic.”
A face emerged from the shower. “Are you being disagreeable, civilian?”
“I’m being skeptical, sailor.”
“Spoil-sport!”
“Why would we want to copy the scrolls?”
“To be first.”
“Why that?”
Saltus stepped all the way out of the shower.
“Well — to be first, that’s all. We like to be first in everything. Where’s your patriotism, civilian?”
“I carry it in my pocket. How do we copy the scrolls in the dark, in a cave?”
“Now that’s my department! Infra-red equipment, of course. Don’t fret about the technical end, mister. I’m an old cameraman, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, I was a cameraman, a working cameraman, when I was an EM. Do you remember the Gemini flights about thirteen or fourteen years ago?”
I remember.
“I was right there on deck, mister. Photographer’s apprentice, stationed on the Wasp when the flights began; I manned the deck cameras on some of those early flights in 1964, but when the last one splashed down in 1966, I was riding the choppers out to meet them,” A disparaging wave of the hand. “Now, would you believe it, I’m riding a desk. Operations officer.” His face mirrored his dissatisfaction. “I’d rather be behind the camera; the enlisted men have the fun with that job.”
Chaney said: “I’ve learned something new.”
“What s that?’
“Why you and I were brought in here. I map and structure the future; you will film it. What’s the Major’s specialty?”
“Air Intelligence. I thought you knew.”
“I didn’t. Espionage?”
“No, no — he’s another desk man, and he hates it as much as I do. Old William is a brain: interrogation and interpretation. He briefs the pilots before they fly out, tells them where to find the targets, what is concealing them, and what is defending them; and then he quizzes the hell out of them when they come back to learn what they saw, where they saw it, how it behaved, how it smelled, and what was new firing at them.”