Our Children's Children (20 page)

There was marching in the land, a surge toward Washington—by hitchhiking, by bus, by old beat-up clunkers of cars. An inward streaming of the countercultural young. Some of them reached the city before the fall of night and marched with banners saying: Back To The Miocene; Bring On The Sabretooths! Others continued through the night or rested in the night to continue with first light, sleeping in haystacks or on park benches, wolfing hamburgers, seeking out alliances, talking in hushed tones around campfires.

Other bands marched as well in the streets of Washington, bands in the center of which were young men staggering under the weight of heavy crosses, stumbling and falling, then staggering up again to continue on their way. Some wore crowns of thorns, with blood trickling down their foreheads. Late in the afternoon a furious fight broke out in Lafayette Park when an indignant crowd, among them many of the hopefully Miocene-bound youngsters, moved to stop a crucifixion, with the victim already lashed to the cross and the hole half dug for its planting. Police charged in and after a bloody fifteen minutes cleared the park. When all were gone, four crudely fashioned crosses were gathered up and carted off. “These kids are crazy,” said one panting officer. “I wouldn't give you a dime for the entire lot of them.”

Senator Andrew Oakes phoned Grant Wellington. “Now is the time,” he said in a conspiratorial voice, “to lie extremely low. Don't say a word. Don't even look as if you were interested. The situation, you might say, is fluid. There is nothing set. No one knows which way the cat will jump. There is something going on. The Russian was at the White House this morning and that bodes no good for anyone. Something we don't understand is very much afoot.”

Clinton Chapman phoned Reilly Douglas. “You know anything, Reilly?”

“Nothing except that there really is time travel and we have the blueprints for it.”

“You have seen the blueprints?”

“No, I haven't. It all is under wraps. No one is saying anything. The scientists who talked with the future people aren't talking.”

“But you.…”

“I know, Clint. I'm the Attorney General, but, hell, in a thing like this that doesn't count for anything. This is top secret. A few of the Academy crowd and that is all. Not even the military, and even if the military wanted it, I have my doubts …”

“But they have to let someone know. You can't build a thing until you know.”

“Sure, how to build it, but that is all. Not how it works. Not why it works. Not the principle.”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“I should think it would,” said Douglas. “I, personally, would be distrustful of building something I didn't understand.”

“You say it is time travel. No doubt of that, it is really time travel.”

“No doubt at all,” said Douglas.

“Then there's a mint in it,” said Chapman, “and I mean to.…”

“But if it only works one way—”

“It has to work both ways,” said Chapman. “That's what my people tell me.”

“It will take a lot of financing,” said Douglas.

“I've talked to a lot of people,” said Chapman. “People I can trust. Some of them are interested. Enough of them. Definitely interested. They see the possibilities. There'll be no lack of funds if we can put it through.”

Judy Gray got on the plane and found her seat. She looked out the window, saw the scurrying trucks—saw them mistily and quickly put up a hand to wipe her eyes. She said to herself, almost lovingly, through clenched teeth: “The son of a bitch. The dirty son of a bitch!”

40

Tom manning spoke guardedly into the phone. “Steve,” he said, “I have been hearing things.”

“Put them on the wire, Tom,” said Wilson. “That is why you are there. Put them on the wire for the glory of dear old Global News.”

“Now,” said Manning, “that you've had occasion to show off your shallow sense of humor, shall we get down to business?”

“If this is a ploy,” said Wilson, “to trick me into seeming confirmation of some rumor you have heard, you know that it won't work.”

“You know me better than that, Steve.”

“That's the trouble, I do know you.”

“All right, then,” said Manning, “if that's the way of it, let's start at the beginning. The President had the Russian ambassador in this morning.…”

“The President didn't have him him. He came in on his own. The ambassador made a statement to the press. You know about that.”

“Sure, we know what the ambassador said and what you said in this afternoon's briefing, which, I might say, added very little light to the situation. But no one in town, no one in his right mind, that is, buys what either of you said.”

“I'm sorry about that, Tom. I told all I knew.”

“OK,” said Manning. “I'll take your word for that. It's just possible that you weren't told. But there's a very nasty story being whispered up at the UN in New York. At least, it was whispered to our man up there. I don't know how much farther it has gone. Our man didn't put it on the wire. He phoned me and I told him to hold it until I talked with you.”

“I don't have the least idea, Tom, of what you're talking about. I had honestly assumed the ambassador told all that could be told. There have been some conversations with Moscow and it sounded reasonable. The President didn't tell me differently. We mentioned it, I guess, but we didn't talk about it. There were so many other things.”

“All right, then,” said Manning, “here's the story as I heard it. Morozov talked to Williams and the President and offered troops to help hunt down the monster and the offer was rejected.…”

“Tom, how good is your source? How sure are you of this?”

“Not sure at all. It's what our man at the UN was told this afternoon.”

“You're talking about Max Hale. He's your man up there.”

“One of the best,” said Manning. “He's fairly good at sorting out the truth.”

“Yes, he is. I remember him from Chicago days.”

“Hale's informant told him that tomorrow the UN will be told of our refusal and a demand made that we be forced to accept troops from other nations. It'll be said that we are negligent in not accepting them.”

“The old squeeze play,” said Wilson.

“And that's not all of it. If other troops are not accepted and the monsters can't be controlled, then, the UN will be told, the entire area must be nuclearly destroyed. The world can't take a chance.…”

“Wait a minute,” said Wilson quickly. “You're not putting this on the wires, you say?”

“Not yet. Probably never. I hope that it is never. That's the reason I phoned. If Hale heard it, there's a likelihood someone else will hear it and, sure as God, it will get on a wire or be published somewhere.”

“There's no truth in it,” said Wilson. “I am sure of it. Christ, we're all in this together. For the moment, political power plays should be set aside. Or it seems to me they should. Tom, I simply can't believe it.”

“You know nothing of this? Of any of it? There hasn't been a breath?”

“Not a breath,” said Wilson.

“You know,” said Manning, “I wouldn't have your job, Steve. Not for a million dollars.”

“You'll hold off, Tom. You'll give us a little time to check.”

“Of course. Only if the pressure gets too great. Only if someone else—I'll let you know.”

“Thanks, Tom. Someday.…”

“Someday, when this is all over,” said Manning, “we'll go off in some dark corner in an obscure bar, where no one possibly can find us, and we'll hang one on.”

“I'll stand the drinks,” said Wilson. “All the drinks.”

After hanging up, he sat slumped. Just when another day was about to end, he thought. But hell, some days never ended. They just kept on and on. Yesterday and today had not been two days, but a nightmare-haunted eternity that seemed, when one thought of it, to have no reality at all. Judy gone, kids marching in the street, the business community bitching loudly because it was prevented from using the economic disruption to go out and make a killing, pulpit-thumping preachers hellbent to make another kind of killing, monsters running in the hills and the future still emptying its humanity upon this moment in the time track.

His eyelids slid down and stuck and he forced himself erect. He had to get some sleep tonight—he had to find the time to get some sleep.

Maybe Judy had the right idea. Just up and walk away from it. Although, he told himself, quite honestly, there still remained the question of what she'd walked away from. He missed her—gone no more than an hour or two and he was missing her. Quite suddenly, he realized he'd been missing her all day. Even while she still had been here, he had been missing her. Knowing she would be leaving, he had started missing her. Maybe, he. thought, he should have asked her once again to stay, but there hadn't been the time and he'd not known how to do it—at least he had not know how to do it gracefully and you did things gracefully or you did them not at all. More than likely, had he known, she'd not have listened to him.

He picked up the phone. “Kim, you still there? I'll need to see the President. It is rather urgent. The first chance you have to squeeze me in.”

“It may be some time, Steve,” she said. “There is a cabinet meeting.”

41

Sergeant Gordon Fairfield Clark said to Colonel Eugene Dawson, “I had it in my sights and then it wasn't there. It disappeared. It went away. I'm sure it didn't move. I saw it move before it stopped. It blurred when it moved. Like a cartoonist drawing something moving fast, lettering in a SWISH, but this was without a swish. When it disappeared there wasn't any swish. The first time I could see that it was moving. But not when I had it in my sights. It didn't move then. It didn't blur. It didn't swish.”

“It saw you, Sergeant,” said the colonel.

“I would think not, sir. I was well hidden. I didn't move. I moved the launcher barrel a couple of inches. That was all.”

“One of your men, then.”

“Sir, all those men I trained myself. No one sees them, no one hears them.”

“It saw something. Or heard something. It sensed some danger and then it disappeared. You're sure about this disappearance, Sergeant?”

“Colonel, I am sure.”

Dawson was sitting on a fallen log. He reached down and picked up a small twig from the duff of the forest floor, began breaking it and rebreaking it, reducing the twig to bits of wood. Clark stayed squatting to one side, using the launcher, its butt resting on the ground, as a partial support to his squatting pose.

“Sergeant,” Dawson said. “I don't know what the hell we're going to do about all this. I don't know what the army's going to do. You find one of these things and before you can whap it, it is gone. We can handle them. I am sure of that. Even when they get big and rough and mean, like the people from the future say they will, we still can handle them. We've got the firepower. We have the sophistication. If they'd line up and we'd line up and they came at us, we could clobber them. We have more and better armaments than the people of future had and we can do the job. But not when they're trying to keep clear of us, not in this kind of terrain. We could bomb ten thousand acres flat and get, maybe, one of them. God knows how much else we'd kill, including people. We haven't the time or manpower to evacuate the people so that we can bomb. We got to hunt these monsters down, one by one.…”

“But even when we hunt them down, sir.…”

“Yes, I know. But say that you are lucky. Say you bag one now and then. There still will be hundreds of them hatching and in a week or so, a month or so, thousands of them hatching. And the first ones growing bigger and meaner all the time. And while we hunt for them, they wipe out a town or two, an army camp or two.…”

“Sir,” said Sergeant Clark, “it is worse than Vietnam ever was. And Vietnam was hairy.”

The colonel got up from the log. “There hasn't nothing beat us yet,” he said. “Nothing has ever beat us all the way. It won't this time. But we have to find out how to do it. All the firepower in the world, all the sophistication in the world is of no use to you until you can find something to aim the firepower and the sophistication at and it stays put until you pull the trigger.”

The sergeant got to his feet, tucked the launcher underneath his arm. “Well, back to work,” he said.

“Have you seen a photographer around here?”

“A photographer?” said the sergeant. “What photographer? I ain't seen no photographer.”

“He said his name was Price. With some press association. He was messing around. I put the run on him.”

“If I happen onto him,” said the sergeant, “I'll tie a knot into his tail.”

42

The Reverend Jake Billings was in conference with Ray MacDonald, formerly his assistant public relations manager, who had been appointed, within the last twelve hours, to the post of crusade operations chief.

“I really do not think, Ray,” said the Reverend Billings, “that this business of crucifixion will advance our cause. It strikes me as being rather crude and it could backlash against us. As witness what one paper had to say of the attempt at Washington.…”

“You mean someone has already gotten around to editorializing on it? I had not expected such prompt reaction.”

“The reaction is not good,” said the Reverend Billings, with some unaccustomed heat. “The editorial called it a cheap trick and a pantywaisted effort. The young man's arms, it turns out, were fastened to the crossbar with thongs—not nails, but thongs. The entire editorial, of course, is in a somewhat facetious vein, but nevertheless.…”

“But they are wrong,” MacDonald said.