Robert Lionel, page 7
He eyed the bulge beneath Bathurst's tunic. Bathurst eyed the bulge beneath his cloak.
Bathurst's face broke into just a suggestion of a grinl, fighting man's smile. "Well," he began, "this is my story.
My name is Benjamin Bathurst and I'm an English diplomat. I have been to the court at Vienna, with secret dispatches, I was returning from that court, on the 25th day of November, in the year of our Lord, 1809, and I'll swear to that on my dying oath, I stopped at the little town of Perleberg, in Germany, and I was on the verge of departing again. My coach and horses were in the yard; ostlers and postillions were standing around me. I was just checking the horses for my own satisfaction, for no man can afford to have horses that will run out on him when he is in such a dangerous predicament as I was, chased by the French, Russians, and various other international espionage agents, not least among them the Count d'Entraigues. So, as I said, I checked my horses for myself. As I walked around the head of the horses, I became aware of a strange grey mist. I dropped an important package I was carrying, and the next minute, I can't explain it, I was enveloped in this mist. The mist turned purple and then
black. The blackness became as thick and intense as mud.
I felt as though I were drowning. The next instant it began to ease up. I felt the stress being alleviated a little; gradually it grew lighter. It became purple then grey, and finally as a kind of opalescent light filled the place I saw as a round glass cylinder. It lifted at the touch of my hand, and I stepped off the strange floor of what looked like crystalline quartz and found myself in a room, an underground room with concrete walls. I made my way up some steps and heard two men coming toward me. I didn't like the look of them. They struck me as evil men, though I had never seen anything like them before. I also heard from their conversation that they were coming down into the cellar to search it, to look at the machine, or whatever it was, that I gathered was responsible for my being here. I wasted no time; secreting myself in the doorway, I fired my pistols and killed them both. One of those pistols, the effectiveness of which I have just recounted to you, is leveled at your heart, and I would like to remind you of that fact, in case your finger is growing impatient upon the trigger of your blaster--or whatever you people call them.
They seem to throw lightning from heaven."
"More likely lightning from hell," gritted the little gnome. "But continue with your story, if you please."
"I put on the uniform of one of the men because I looked so conspicuous. I then picked up their hand weapons and thrust them into my belt and made my way across the street, wondering what to do next. That in outline is what has happened to me. You can tell me now whether you believe it, or whether you can explain it."
"Very strange indeed," said the little gnome. "You're not the man I took you to be. I'll tell my side of the story now and put you in the picture. I think perhaps we had better go somewhere a little less open." With strange jerky movements the diminutive figure with the brown cloak led the way down a side alley and through a lengthy conglomeration of warren-like doors and cellars. The ancient town of Perleberg was without doubt the perfect hide-out for the resistance move:ment of the 24th century
. . . a perfect 'warren in which the enemies of Rajak the Magnificent might breed and multiply and hatch their plots for the destruction of the ruthless dictator.
After what seemed miles of walking, the diminutive gnome called a halt outside the door of a tall building hidden deep within the maze of passages and alleyways leading off from the main street in which he had first met Bathurst. They walked forward into the depths of the mysterious building. Bathurst realized that without the guidance of his companion it would be utterly impossible for him to make his way back to the High Street of the town, for the maze was labyrinthine in its complexity. The old house was illuminated by phosphorescent strips which cast a cold, rather eerie glow over the jagged stone corners of the room in which the young diplomat now found himself. It was as bleak and barren as the original chamber in which he had extricated himself from the cylinder of the strange device, which he now knew, deep down within himself, must have been a time machine. The method of its working was utterly beyond him; he only knew it did work. The gnome was looking at him very intently.
"In a few minutes," he said startlingly, "you shall meet the leader of our organization, and he will then explain everything to you. Just wait here." The twisted figure went away into a darkened corner of the room and disapp,eared into what seemed to be a doorway. Bathurst's eyes remained on that dark comer. There were strange, furtive, shuffling sounds, and less than ten seconds later, from out of the darkness of that corner, strode a tall, broad-shouldered individual; taller and broader even than Bathurst, a powerluI, athletic man. As he looked at the awe-inspiring newcomer, Ben felt his throat suddenly contracting in dread, for despite the tremendous ~hangein the physical proportions, the head, and the eyes in particular were those of the gnome-like creature who had led him in-to the secret place.
Chapter Five
Crossfire
Old Eric Rhinegow had talked until his throat was dry and until his tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth. He had poured out every shred and scrap of information to the avaricious mechanical ears of the police tape recorder.
He had gone through every scientific technological detail of the manufacture of the time machine, and Captain Ertzmann was quite confident that the regime back-room boys could easily reproduce it whenever they wished. He was a man who did not believe in taking chances of any kind whatsoever, and he at once had the magnetic recording duplicated, a copy locked in the safe, and three transcriptions taken from the remaining one. The transcriptions on their microfilm were immediately rushed to regional headquarters in Berlin. The wheels of Rajak's magnificent Empire would go into operation, the gears engaged, the clutch released, and the machinery of auto-cratic government, the weapon of tyranny, began to operate. . . .
As far as Ertzmann was concern his job was done until further orders reached him. He looked at the pathetic brain-washed old creature, who had once been a prominent scientist 'in the liberation movement. He laughed, a short, callous laugh, for there was in him a streak of savage sadism that typified most of the security guards in Rajak's empire. .. All right. He's yours; we're finished with him," he said to the guards. "He's of no more use to the Empire; destroy him as you think best. . . ."
Half an hour later, when he returned, he was interested only partially by the writhing figure pinned to the floor by bayonets. As he looked in for a final inspection a few hours later, he noticed that the writhings had ceased. He made arrangement for a disposal detail, and the last mortal remains of Eric Rhinegow were disintegrated as thoughtlessly as though they had been so much garbage.
It was the following day when the party from Berlin arrived. A double security cordon had been thrown around Perleberg, for the scientists had come at Rajak's own personal instruc~ons, and they were considered significantly inlportant to the success of the Eurasian Empire. With the
information that the truth drug had extorted from the dead freedom fighter, it took them less than thirty-six hours fully to comprehend the machinations of the time traveling device. The process was copiously noted, and copies filed in all principal security check points, and time travel had become an ultimate fact in the arm of Rajak the Magnificent. . . .
It seemed to be yet another seal; a seal with which he fastened the doors of his empire; a seal with which he bade a last grim farewell to any hopes the freedom fighters might have had. . . .
And that tiny isolated township, which had been the last pocket of resistance, became the place at which, to all mtents and purposes the complete immutability of Rajak's tyranny was finally and irrefutably established.
Captain Ertzmann was very pleased with the com-mendation given to him by the visiting scientists, but his pleasure waned with a sudden, though understandable alacrity when he received special orders. "You will take a party of security guards selected by you and, at the direction of scientists A34 and A36, you will be transmitted with your men through the time vortex. It will be your duty to seek out and destroy Grafton the liberationist, who is suspected of having made his escape by this route."
It was with a strangely sick feeling at the pit of his stomach that Ertzmann realized that there was no provi-sion for a return, for either himself or his detachment.
However, being a loyal and obedient servant of the Empire, he tried to persuade himself that such a minor detail was bound to have been taken care of by the superbly efficient scientists, who controlled the destinies of their in-feriors in Rajak's forces. He also knew, with a streak of almost rebellious realism, that there would be no earthly use in his endeavoring to disobey the order, for the slightest sign of distrust of one's superiors, the slightest hesitation in carrying out an order, particularly by a security officer, could have only one logical conclusion: the devitalizing chamber. It was a process as irrevocable as the process of day and night. If one obeyed Rajak in every respect, one lived-that is, until Rajak decided that one had lived long enough. H one did not obey Rajak in every respect, one died-swiftly, ruthlessly very often painfully. It was not so much a question of choosing between life and death as of choosing between a protraction or an extinction of life. Sooner or later, by Rajak's weird code, everybody in the society became redundant. When a man's turn came and he was no longer regarded as being of any use to the community, he was dealt with. If he had served the community well, he could have a few extra years of life. H he was one of the inner party, he might be allowed to die naturally of old age. But with the majority of the citizens of Eurasia, old age had ~ to become a problem. They knew with grim certainty, and accepted as one of the facts of life, the knowledge that they would never be an embarrassing burden to the community by reason of their white hairs. Rajak, in his own way, could solve any problem. He had been faced with a problem of over-population. He had solved it with a ruthlessness that might be expected of him. He had set a series of physical and mental tests for the citizens of his community. The
twenty percent who failed to pass were declared "un-suitable." They met their end within twenty-four hours of the time the results were known. Should the population figures again prove a problem, there was little doubt in the minds of Rajak's subjects that he would deal with them in the same swiftly ruthless, efficient manner.
Ertzmann looked grimly at the thirty men comprising the Perleberg detachment. There was an almost frightening sameness about them, he decided, and as he looked from one to the other he knew that they would obey his orders with the same resigned, unquestioning acceptance as he in turn obeyed the orders of those higher up the lad-der. The Rajak's Eurasian "Utopia" was a masterpiece, if one liked one's masterpieces neat and well-disciplined.
Nothing was out of place. Nothing so untidy as human desires, human wishes or human rights were allowed to protrude their heads above the neatly disciplined framework of the state and the community. Ertzmann himself realized that had there ever been any possibility of a rebellion, it had gone. It had gone, at least as far as he could ascertain, from the second that the truth serum was pumped into the old scientist's arm. The dictator held within his grasp the power to traverse time. Ertzmann was not an imaginative man by any means, but he could see what it meant.
He could see that any rebellion that looked as if it were getting out of hand could be nipped in the bud, and once the rebellion had started, one knew who the enemies were.
One sent a small, highly trained suicide detachment back Into the past; one destroyoo the leader of the rebellion in his cradle, if necessary. The rebellion would not take place.
And then, even as he made his selection of the men who were to accompany him into the time machine in the search for Mike Grafton, he became aware of another thought. He wondecoo if any of the other Iiberationists knew the secret of the machine. . . he wonderoo if that had been its original purpose. Of course if time travel could be used to stamp out the enemies of the Republic, it would also have an equally sinister purpose in the hands of the revolutionaries themselves. For if one could destroy the infant Rajak, the Republic, the whole police state as such would cease to exist. The thought was a deep and metaphysical one. It was beyond the comprehension of the stolid and rather mundane police captain. . . . He wondered how many other things would be affectoo. He wondered what difference the man from the future would make when he went back into the past. These were tltings he would have likoo to discuss with the scientists.
When he had gotten his men groupoo together, the area sub-officer, who was Ertzmann's superior by about eight degrees in the security promotion scale, came to brief them on the mission.
"The position, " he said coldly and mechanically, "is this." His face, thought Ertzmann, is like the face of a robot. He wondered if they all got like that when they went higher up the scale toward the leadership of the security force, and the leader himself was perhaps nothing more than an automaton, answerable to every whim of the dictator.
"It will be necessary for you all to assume the costume
and weapons of the period. You will, of course, carry with you our more modem weapons in places of concealment.
We have succeeded in tracing the exact historic background and period into which Grafton has disappeared. There we have a considerable advantage over him, insofar as he was probably quite ignorant of the point at which he would be jettisoned, due to the magnificent technological advance of the supreme scientists of the Eurasian Utopia. That magnificence in turn is entirely dependent upon the magnificence of our glorious Rajak."
Again the bowing of the head and the two-handed salute.
As I have said, the superior science of our own technologists has succeeded in comprehending far more about that machine than the original liberationist in-ventor." It did occur to Ertzmann to wonder, if these scientists were so superior technologically, why they hadn't invented the machine before the liberationist whose body had so recently been disposed of; . . . But he wisely kept these thoughts to himself,
"The period was the early 19th century. The uniforms have been carefully copied from the museum, and are now being flown to you by airograph transport and will be here by the time this lecture is completed. You will then don the uniforms and receive an intensive course in the history of the period, and in addition, the French language of the times. This course will be ele:ctrically in-terprete4 to your brains, by the new process with which you are no doubt reasonably familiar. . . . It is of course an adaptation and reversal of the 20th century telegraph."
The officer's voice was a clipped staccato as he went on with their briefing. "You will then present yourselves, as the encephalograph machine will instruct you, as members of the Douanier Guard, and to the local inhabitants you will say that you are in pursuit of a spy who has been working in close collaboration with another spy who has mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately our records at this point are extremely good. Through the brilliant research work of the Archeological Institute, we have at our disposal the complete records of the mysterious disappearance of one Benjamin Bathurst in the year 1809. Our scientists have shown us that the machine is set to project someone from the future into the year 1809. The original designer did not know at the time that he was creating a deal vacuum vortex in the time continuum. This, of course, our glorious scientists have already discovered." Ertzmann found the repetition of the propaganda phrase extremely irksome. It was a feeling that had never troubled him before.
"Our glorious scientists," went on the officer as though dleliberately to irritate Ertzmann still further, "are now in a position to say with accuracy that this mysterious Bem-jamin Bathurst, whose disappearance has mystified historians for centuries, was sucked through the time vor tex, and is now loose somewhere in our present day and age. Unfortunately, it was not until too late that we discovered where he had made his arrival. The bodies of our late colleagues, Dr. Korblenz and Fritz Muller, have been found in the chamber containing the liberationists time machine. The bodies were not destroyed by modern means. Post-mortem has proved that they were destroyed
by a lead ball discharged from an old-fashioned gun-powder pistol-a pistol such as would have been common in that century. . . . All our efforts to locate the man from the Past have not so far met with satisfactory results although success is expected at any moment." Again Ertzmann felt like wrinkling his nose in disgust at the repeated propaganda phrases. "Are there any questions?"
snapped the officer suddenly. Ertzmann's attention jerked back from the present m
would dream of posing a question. They were still at that stage where if the dictator said so, one did it. Ertzmann -
realized with a tremor of excitement that he had begun to think. He was in danger! His sympathies lay, although he himself would have been the last to admit it, more with the liberationist principle than with the principle of his own government. Yet he knew that one false move, one false word, one false gesture, even, would be more than enough to bring swift and ruthless destruction on him without a second's hesitation. He too shook his head as the officer's eyes bored, gimlet like, into the entire row.
"No questions, sir," he said sharply on behalf of the letachment and himself. "Thank you for the briefing, sir.
Most concise; most helpful." Soft soap, he told himself.
Soft soap and grease is the only way to live in the dictatorship. Keep on telling him how wonderful the party is, keep on repeating the old parrot phrases. Lay it on, with a trowel. Don't let them suspect anything. They've got to keep on believing that I'm as indoctrinated as the rest; otherwise my life isn't worth a tinker's curse. Odd thoughts were shaping at the back of his mind; thoughts about what he might be able to do when he got back into the past. The past is a big place, and even if they could send other detachments of guards in pursuit of his own, he had little doubt that they would be able to elude capture in so vast and untrammeled an area, as they would be in the limited confines of his own day and age and generation
