Against the Day (80 page)

He might have hesitated, but not
quite long enough to sound unpracticed. “The most extraordinary offer of
Deliverance to be tendered us since—that other Promise made so long ago
. . . .
”

Chick had a momentary vision of a
ship’s passageway somewhere, perhaps inside a giant airship of the future,
crowded with resurrected bodies of all ages, dazed smiles and tangled bare limbs,
a throng of visitors newly arrived from all periods of the past two millennia,
who must somehow be fed, clothed, sheltered, and explained to, not to mention
away—an administrative nightmare largely fallen to him to resolve. He had
a kind of newfangled speaking trumpet in his hand. “Has it come to this?” His
voice sounded unfamiliar to him. He could think of nothing further to say. They
were all watching him, expecting something.

   
Now,
at the Ball in Hand, he only shrugged. “Guess I’m game.”

   
“Come
along.” Alonzo led Chick out of the tavern and up across the night

campus, then through a looming Gothical gate, and downhill
again into the northern purlieus of the University, a region of inexpensive
student housing adjoined by an unlit sweep of aboriginal prairie, the streets
into which they passed becoming narrower and lit by gas, rather than the
electric lamps of the more “respectable” parts of town, which at each step were
receding, it strangely seemed, disproportionately farther as the young men went
on. At length they came to a street of ungainly rowhouses, already halfway to
selfdemolition, the tattered millwork testifying to the spirit of haste and
greed in which they had been erected but scant years before. Asphalt shingles
layfallen and broken. Fragments of windowglass sparkled in the dim light.
Somewhere close, feeder lines to the interurban fretfully hummed and spat,
while farther up the street, a pack of dogs swarmed into and out of the humid
penumbræ of the streetlamps.

Alonzo seemed to expect a remark
about the neighborhood. “We don’t want that much attention, see, not just yet.
When enough people find that they need us and start seeking us out, maybe then
we’ll move someplace bigger, closer to town. Meanwhile—”

   
“Discretion,”
Chick supposed.

The youth’s face returned to its
accustomed petulance. “Hardly necessary. They are not afraid of anything ‘this’
world may confront them with. You’ll see.”

Afterward Chick could not rid himself
of an impression, lying deeper than he cared, or was able, to go, of having
been psychically interfered with. In the event, somehow—as if
positive
expressions
of silence and absence were being deployed against him—he
could not escape the conclusion that, despite conventional signs of occupancy,
these rooms were all, in fact, vacant. He found himself oppressed by a clearly
visible veneer of disuse, not only of dust, which lay over everything, but also
of a long stillness, perhaps of years, without a living voice, a strain of
music, the notquiteeven percussion of human footfalls. The chill suspicion grew
on him, further, that in here what seemed to be lamplight was not—that
through some nonearthly means his optic sensorium was being locally addressed
and systematically deluded, without disturbing the reign of an unresponsive
darkness. Even more unsettling in its way was the change that had come over his
companion the moment they stepped across the doorsill—a relaxation young
Meatman did not bother to conceal, as if, having delivered Chick, he might now
retreat unmolested into the quiescence of a tool returned at task’s end to its
crib, a state he seemed almost to prefer to the troublesome demands of the
quotidian.

   
Abruptly,
sweeping into the scene like an opera singer with an aria to un

load, here came “Mr. Ace,” as he called himself. Glossy black
eyes, presented like weapons in a duel. The gently damaged, irrevocably
educated eyes we associate with the visiting dead. When he smiled, or attempted
to, it was not reassuring.

Dispensing with phatic chitchat, he
began straightaway to tell the story of his “people.”

“We are here among you as seekers of
refuge from our present—your future—a time of worldwide famine,
exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of the capitalistic
experiment. Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that
Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist
illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth aloud were denounced
as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious
Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced to migrate, with little choice but
to set forth upon that dark fourthdimensional Atlantic known as Time.

“Most who chose the Crossing made it
through—some did not. The procedure is still hazardous. The levels of
energy required to make that leap against the current, across the forbidden
interval, are unavailable here at present, though certain of your great dynamos
have begun to approach the necessary powerdomain. We have learned to deal with
that danger, we train for it. What we did not expect was your own determination
to prevent our settlement here.”

   
“First
I’ve heard,” Chick said at last, as sympathetically as he could.

   
“The
Fraternity of the Venturesome—”

   
“Beg
pardon?”

A strange electrical drone overtook and
blurred Mr. Ace’s voice for an instant. “The
nzzt
ChumsofChance? You are
not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some
attempt of our own to enter your timeregime?”

   
“I
assure you, that never—”

“You are sworn to obedience, of
course.” An intense, silent struggle as if not to laugh, as if laughter were an
unfamiliar vice whose power to shake him apart Mr. Ace could not afford to
risk.

“All this is sure news to me,” said
Chick. “And even if what you say’s true, how could we be of any use to you?”

His great eyes seemed luminous with
pity. “We might ask you to accept a commission from us now and
then—though, regrettably, with no more detailed explanation than you
currently receive from your own Hierarchy.”

   
Chick
must have been silent for a while.

   
“
ZZnrrt
compensation . . .”

   
“Oh.
Sorry?”

   
“Mr.
Meatman has not suggested the dimensions of our gratitude?”

   
“He
wasn’t clear. It sounded kind of religious.”

   
“Excuse
me?”

   
“Eternal
life.”

   
“Better.
Eternal youth.”

   
“Well,
by ginger. Sure can’t beat that.”

Mr. Ace went on to explain—or,
maybe not explain but certainly to allege—that scientists of his own
time, in the course of their extensive research into time travel, had
discovered, as an unintended windfall, how to transform the class of
thermochemical reactions once known as “irreversible processes,” notable among
them human aging and death, so as actually
to reverse them.
“Once we
acquired the
technique,
the whole problem became trivial.”

   
“Easy
for you to say, I guess.”

“Now it is no more than a form of
trade goods, like the beads and mirrors your own newcomers to the American
shores once traded with the Indians. A gift of small worth, but tendered with
great sincerity.”

“So this is supposed to be like
Squanto and the Pilgrims,” Chick reported to the plenary session called
hurriedly next morning. “We help them through their first winter, sort of
thing.”

“And suppose it isn’t that,” said
Randolph. “Suppose they’re not pilgrims but raiders, and there’s some
particular resource here, that they’ve run out of and want to seize from us,
and take back with them?”

   
“Food,”
said Miles.

   
“Women,”
suggested Darby.

“Lower entropy,” speculated Chick.
“As a simple function of Time, their entropy level would be higher. Like rich
folks taking mineral waters at some likely ‘spa.
’ ”

“It’s our innocence,” proclaimed
Lindsay, in an unaccustomedly distraught voice. “They have descended on our
shores to hunt us down, capture our innocence, and take it away with them into
futurity.”

“I was thinking of something a little
more tangible,” Randolph frowning in thought. “Negotiable.”

   
“Yeeah
aand who says we’re ‘innocent’?” Darby piped up.

“But imagine
them,
”
Lindsay in stricken tones, as if
before some unbearable illumination, “so fallen, so corrupted, that we—even
we—seem to them pure as lambs. And their own time so terrible that it’s
sent them desperately back—back to us. Back to whatever few pathetic
years
we
still have left, before
. .
.
whatever is to happen . . .”

“Say, Lindsay.” It was Darby, for the
first time in group memory concerned for his Puritanical shipmate.

After a moment’s paralysis in the
discussion, “There is always the possibility,” Chick pointed out, “that they
are only bunco artists, confederates of Dr. Zoot—or, even more
underhandedly, that this is some theatrical exercise, a sort of Moral Drill,
got up by Hierarchy to detect potential rebellion and suppress dissent. I
wouldn’t put it past them.”

   
“So
either way,” said Darby, “we’re totally—”

   
“Don’t
say it,” Lindsay warned.

Understanding that he would not be
allowed to learn any more from Mr. Ace than whatever story the sinister
traveler chose to tell, Chick arrived at their next meeting with Miles, who
alone among the crew possessed the clairvoyance the situation required. At his
first sight of Mr. Ace, Miles began to cry, heedless and desolate, the tears of
a high professional cleric after receiving a direct message from God
. . . .
Chick looked on in astonishment,
for tears among this Unit were virtually unknown.

“I recognized him, Chick,” said Miles
forthrightly, when they had returned to the ship. “From somewhere else. I knew
he was real and couldn’t be wished away. He is not what he says he is.
Assuredly he does not have our best interests in mind.”

   
“Miles,
you must tell me. Where have you seen him?”

“By way of these
visual conduits
that
more and more seem to find me in the course of my day. For some time, it has
been possible for me to look in on him and these other trespassers, as through
‘windows’ into their home space. I may have been invisible to them at first,
but no longer—they’ve away now to detect me whenever I observe them
. . .
and lately, whenever they know I’m
watching, I see them
pointing something
back at me—not exactly a
weapon—an enigmatic object. . .

“It is by way of these ‘windows’ that
they cross over, for brief periods, to our own time and space. That is how this
‘Mr. Ace’ comes to us.” Miles shivered. “Did you see how he looked at me? He
knew. And he wanted me to feel guilt, out of proportion to the offense, which
was after all only peeping. I think that ever since we arrived here at
Candlebrow, some ‘Agency’ of theirs has been commissioned expressly to deal
with us. Which must make any stranger in our midst,
even—especially—the most innocentlooking, immediately suspect.” At
the deep alarm in Chick’s face, Miles shook his head, reached out a steadying
hand. “Not to worry—we are sound and straight as ever. If there were any
‘doublecrosser’ in our midst, Pugnax would know, and soon be feasting on his
entrails. As for immediate steps, I’d say make tracks, and the quicker the
better.”

·
    
·
    
·

Soon the crew
began to find evidence of Trespass
everywhere, some invisible narrative occupying, where it did not in fact
define, the passage of the day. And it was soon evident that at all levels,
from local to international, a neuropathy had taken over the Chums of Chance
organization. The Trespassers had studied their targets closely, knew of the
Chums’ unquestioning faith that none of them, barring misadventure, would ever
simply grow old and die, a belief which over the years many had come to confuse
with a guarantee. On learning that they might be no more exempt than any of the
human supernumeraries they had been so carelessly aviating above all these
years, some Chums of Chance turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the
Trespassers, ready to deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if
only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the
early boys’book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and
violate on behalf of their insidious benefactors.

That there existed more than one such
traitor soon became widely known, though not their identities. So, with anyone
a likely candidate, there arose an unprecedented and widely destructive wave of
slander, paranoia, and character assassination, which had continued unabated
through the present day. Duels were fought, lawsuits brought, all for nought.
The Trespassers went on undeterred with their dark confidence game, though some
of their victims would seek, at last, out of conscience or contingency, to
break free of the sinister contracts they’d been gulled into signing, even if
the price be their immunity to death.