The Fury Out of Time (10 page)

“Unless I could hit the Sahara Desert dead center, there wouldn’t be any welcoming committee for me.”

“The same would apply at the other end. You wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity, and if you killed a few thousand people when you arrived you’d start your negotiations under a handicap.”

“That’s a risk we’d have to take.”

“There’s no doubt that the job is made to order for you,” Haskins said slowly. “A freak accident cost you outer space, and saved you for man’s ultimate frontier—time.” He smiled. “If your theory is correct. But U.O.
_-2
belongs to the French. It’s a shame. I’ll put it to you frankly. The U.O.’s are utterly beyond us. We aren’t ready for them, technologically or morally. The man who could put a stop to them just might be the savior of twentieth-century civilization.”

“Will you put the proposition to the French?”

“No. I know they’d refuse, and it might make them suspicious. We’re working together nicely, and I want to keep it that way.” He glanced at his watch. “You’re staying here for a while? I’ll keep in touch with you. If there were anything for you to do in France I’d take you along, but there isn’t. Will you roll up the screen, Bert?”

He shook hands with both of them and was gone as suddenly as he had arrived. Whistler stood in the trailer door, watching the diminishing taillights and muttering to himself.

“St.-Pierre-du-Bois. I still think I shoulda heard of it.”

“What did you do in the army?” Karvel asked.

“I was mess sergeant in a lousy replacement depot. I wanted to kill Germans, so they made me a cook.”

“So you killed Americans instead. What would you rather do—stay here by yourself and study philosophy, or—”

“You’re going to France.”

Karvel nodded.

“You think you’re going to swipe that U.O. and take a ride in it.”

Karvel nodded again.

“I can see it now—you carting it away in your wheel chair, with an army of Frenchmen chasing you!”

“I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s a thousand to one against my getting close to the U.O., and another thousand to one against my finding it refueled and ready to go. After that, the odds start getting long. But I’m going.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“There isn’t time. The longer I wait, the less chance I’ll have. The present security arrangements look pretty feeble, but any minute the French may decide to put the U.O. behind fences and locked doors.”

“What does that have to do with taking me?”

“Do you have a passport?”

“That won’t take long,” Whistler said confidently. “I know a bartender in Washington—”

Karvel laughed.

“—that knows everybody. You need me. You need somebody to drive your car, and push your chair, and run errands. Like I told you, I been all through that part of France. I parley enough French to be understood, and I know at least four hundred dames, and four thousand black market operators—every other Frenchman was a black market operator in those days—and all the taverns.”

“The black market operators I can understand,” Karvel said. “And the taverns. But I never would have suspected the four hundred dames. All right. I think 1 can manage a more direct connection with the State Department than through your bartender. I’ll start packing, and you telephone for the plane schedules.”

Chapter 6

Seven days later Karvel took the Night Ferry at Dover, leaving behind in England the cast from his knee, a substantial portion of his bank balance, and a mystified firm of engineers. In Dunkerque he left an equally mystified customs official, who was overtly suspicious of the heavy, wheel-mounted trunk that Karvel’s various papers and documents alleged to contain routine business equipment.

“I’m in the salvage business,” Karvel explained, with as much aplomb as he could muster. “Marine salvage. Underwater work. This is diving equipment.”

His papers were in order, and he had a beautifully forged letter from the Port Authority of Strasbourg concerning a construction project. In the end the customs official could discover no reason why Karvel and his trunk should not be admitted to France, though he spent some time in trying.

Whistler was waiting with a small panel truck. He hurriedly got the trunk loaded, and they drove away into an overcast French dawn.

“The wheels were a mistake,” Whistler announced. “A trunk with wheels is unusual. The French don’t like things to be unusual.”

“Later on, you’ll appreciate the wheels,” Karvel told him. “I have all I can do to move myself around. You’ll have to handle the trunk.”

“We’ll have plenty of help,” Whistler said confidently.

“What about the U.O.?”

“It’s still there. The bigwigs have gone—Haskins and his bunch, and the French civilians. They were staying in Thionville and commuting every day, but they moved out last night. I think they finished studying it, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do with it.”

“Is it still in the tent?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t understand why they’d leave it there.”

“They want to make it easy for us, why should we worry? I guess you made out all right in England.”

“No one could understand why I’d be putting diving equipment through such a small opening, but it was my money. Did you have any trouble?”

“Naw. I arranged things without hardly showing my face. You got nothing to worry about. Just leave everything to me.”

Karvel smiled. “You’ve arranged to have the U.O. fueled and ready to go?”

“Oh, that. I don’t know what you’ll find when you get there, but I guarantee to get you there. I got a plan.”

They traveled southeast along the sparsely traveled roads of northern France, following a route that avoided the larger towns. Their leisurely pace soon became irksome to Karvel. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Lost your nerve?”

“Relax,” Whistler said. “We got plenty of time. We don’t want to get to Thionville much before dark.”

“Why not? I’d like to see St.-Pierre-du-Bois by daylight.”

“You couldn’t get close enough for a look anyway. They got roadblocks up. Anyway, it wasn’t nothing to see even when it
was
a town. I been through it dozens of times, and never noticed it. Like you said, it was too small to have a bar.”

At noon they stopped to stretch their legs and make a roadside meal of long loaves of French bread, and cheese, and raw red wine. Karvel’s left leg was badly in need of stretching. He sat on the grass and massaged his knee while Whistler paced back and forth, chomping on bread and cheese and casting wicked aspersions on the morals, habits, and institutions of the French peasantry.

“I wish I could speak French,” Karvel said. “It’d be interesting to find out what they think of you.”

Whistler halted his pacing and regarded Karvel quizzically. “I don’t think I ever asked you. Why do you want to take a ride in that thing?”

“Good question. I wish I had a good answer.” To find Ostrander? There wasn’t a chance in a million that the lieutenant was still alive. To save twentieth-century civilization? It was doomed anyway. No civilization was immortal, and Karvel would not lament the passing of this one.

He said slowly, “Have you ever visited an orphanage?”

“No. What does that have to do with it?”

“I was brought up in an orphanage. There may be worse environments for a child than that particular institution, but I hope not. My earliest resolution in life was that I’d never make any child an orphan, or any wife a widow.”

“So that’s why you never got married,” Whistler said. “I guess that’s why you lost your leg, too—trying to keep from making some dame a widow.”

Karvel did not answer.

“What’s all that got to do with taking a ride in the U.O.? Just ‘cause you had a rough time as a kid is no reason for not having fun now. So it was a lousy orphanage. So what? We got lousy legislatures, and lousy colleges, and lousy hospitals. Why should orphanages be different?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand that you’re a damn fool. Here you are, still young, with a good pension for life and nothing to worry about, and you’re bellyaching about being an orphan. I been an orphan myself for nearly ten years, and you never heard me complaining.”

“I suppose an honest answer would be that I’m running away.”

“That’s even sillier.”

“It is,” Karvel agreed.

It was also true. His escape to the stars had been frustrated, but now he saw that it would have led him into a trap. Amidst the lonely splendor of the moon, or the arid wastes of Mars, or the steaming clouds of Venus, he could not have been free from this civilization that he hated, but helplessly dependent on it. Each delicious breath of transported air would have been a bitter reminder of the unseverable ties that forever bound him to this Earth and this century.

A psychiatrist had once told him that he was still attempting to run away from the orphanage, something he had tried—unsuccessfully—dozens of times. Karvel declined his offer of an easy cure. His own idea of destroying an urge was not to think it out of existence, but to satisfy it.

The U.O. offered the only genuine opportunity for escape, except through death, that he was ever likely to have, and he fully intended to annihilate any Frenchmen who got in his way.

“It’s your neck,” Whistler said. “If you’re sure you want to go, I won’t worry about why. I ain’t had so much fun since the war.”

They drove more slowly as the afternoon waned, and reached Thionville at dusk, precisely on schedule. There they turned north, and soon left the main Luxembourg highway to follow a narrow, winding road. From a hilltop Karvel had a disconcerting view of drab farmland, sparse forests, and a distant village of stone houses pinned to the landscape by its church spire. Abruptly it was dark.

“One good thing—it’ll be a black night,” Whistler said.

“How much further is it?”

“Just a few miles. I figure we’ll start at eleven, so you got time for a nap, if you want it.”

“No, thank you.”

The long, tedious ride had done nothing to alleviate the tension that had been building in Karvel ever since they left Tucson, and he was more worried than he cared to admit.

For all of Whistler’s confident planning, the odds against success remained overwhelming.

“Here we are,” Whistler said finally.

They turned into a rough lane, and at the end came upon a cluster of stone buildings. There were lights in the house, and the door opened as they got out of the truck.

“Jacques?” Whistler called.

“Oui.”

A ruddy, corpulent, middle-aged Frenchman assisted Karvel over the threshold, shook his hand, and said with a grin, “Hi. Okay.”

Jacques’s wife put food on the table, and Karvel munched at it absently, only half aware of what he was eating, and listened to Jacques and Whistler spout French at each other. Whistler’s fluency amazed him, but as they talked Karvel quickly sensed that something was wrong. Whistler’s manner changed rapidly from incredulity to anger, and then to disgust, and when finally he turned away Karvel had never seen him so chagrined.

“They’re going to chicken out,” he announced.

“What’s the matter?”

“He says the whole French army is guarding the place, and with submachine guns. He doesn’t want any part of it.”

“I don’t blame him. I hadn’t counted on submachine guns myself. Or on an army.”

“Aw—that isn’t what he saw. It’s just what he thinks he saw. This really messes things up. Jacques runs a sawmill. He got permission to haul away the trees knocked down by Force X, and he’s been all over the place. I ain’t even been near it. There wasn’t no point in an outsider snooping around and getting their backs up if it wasn’t necessary.”

“Does Jacques know what we’re trying to do?”

“He thinks we’re news photographers, trying to get pictures of the village. The official word is that an ammunition truck blew up there, but the French still haven’t let reporters near the place.”

“He thinks we’re trying to get pictures—at night?”

“We got a whole trunkful of special equipment. I guess we’ll have to figure out another plan. We can’t use the road, and I wouldn’t try to find my way through the woods at night. Anyway, we’d need Jacques’s men to help with you and the diving stuff. It’s all up-and-downhill.”

“I suppose there’s only the one road.”

“With two roadblocks on each side—one at the nearest crossroad, to turn traffic around the village, and another just before you get there.”

“If we make the effort at all, it’ll have to be at night,” Karvel said thoughtfully. “Ask Jacques if he’d be willing to take us to some point at the edge of the forest south of the village. We probably wouldn’t be able to see anything, but at least we’d get an idea of the route. Then we could decide what to do.”

“They could take the trunk part way, and hide it in the woods.”

“We might have a devil of a time finding it. No. Tell him there won’t be any equipment and we won’t go a step closer than the edge of the forest. We only want to know the best way to get there.”