-- Omar Khayyam

THIRTEEN

          Saltus was prepared to celebrate.

          The red light blinked out. He reached up to unlock the hatch and throw it open. The green light went dark. Saltus grasped the two handrails and pulled himself to a sitting position with his head and shoulders protruding through the hatchway. He was alone in the room as he expected to be, but he noted with mild surprise that some of the ceiling lights had burned out. Sloppy housekeeping. The air was chill and smelled of ozone. He struggled out of the hatch and climbed over the side; the step stool was missing and he slid down the hull to the floor. Saltus reached up to slam shut the hatch, then turned to the locker for his clothing.

          Another suit belonging to Chaney hung there in its paper sheath waiting to be claimed. He noted the locker had collected a heavy amount of dust and a fine film of it had even crept inside. Wretched housekeeping. When Saltus was dressed in the civvies he had elected to wear, he took out a pint of good bourbon from its place of concealment in the locker and surreptitiously slipped the bottle into a jacket pocket.

          He thought he was adequately prepared for the future.

          Arthur Saltus checked his watch: 11:02. He sought out the electric calendar and clock on the wall to verify the date and time: 23 Nov 00. The clock read 10:55. Temperature was a cold 13 degrees. Saltus guessed his watch was wrong; it had been wrong before. He left the room without a glance at the cameras, secretively holding his hand against the bottle to mask the pocket bulge. He didn't think the engineers would approve of his intentions.

          Saltus walked down the corridor in eerie silence to the shelter; dust on the floor muffled his footfalls and he wondered if William had found that same dust sixteen months earlier. The old boy would have been annoyed. The shelter door was pushed open and the overhead lights went on in automatic response--but again, some of them were burned out. Somebody rated a gig for poor maintenance. Saltus stopped just inside the door, pulled the bottle from his pocket and ripped away the seal from the cap.

          A shout rattled the empty room.

          "Happy birthday!"

          For a little while, he was fifty years old.

          Saltus swallowed the bourbon, liking its taste, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he stared around the shelter with growing curiosity. Somebody had been at the ship's stores--somebody had helped himself to the provisions set by for _him_ and then had carelessly left the debris behind for _him_ to find. The place was overrun with privateers and sloppy housekeepers.

          He discovered a gasoline lantern on the floor near his feet and reached down quickly to determine if it was warm. It was not, but a jostling shake told him there was fuel remaining in the tank. Many boxes of rations had been cut open--emptied of their contents--and the cartons stacked in a disorderly pile along the wall near the door. A few water containers rested beside the cartons and Saltus grabbed up the nearest to shake it, test it for use. The can was empty. He took another long pull from his birthday bottle and roamed around the room, making a more detailed inspection of the stores. They weren't in the ship-shape order he remembered from his last inspection.

          A sealed bag of clothing had been torn open, a bag holding several heavy coats and parkas for winter wear. He could not guess how many had been taken from the container.

          A pair of boots--no, two or three pair--were missing from a rack holding several similar pairs. Another bundle of warm lined mittens appeared to have been disturbed, but it was impossible to determine how many were gone. Somebody had visited the stores in winter. That somebody should not have been the Major--he was scheduled for the Fourth of July, unless that gyroscope went crazy and threw him off by half a year. Saltus turned again to count the used ration boxes and the water cans: not enough of them had been emptied to support a big man like William for the past sixteen months--not unless he was living outside most of the time and supporting himself from the land. The used-up stores _might_ have carried him through a single winter, supplementing game from outside. It seemed an unlikely possibility.

          Saltus worked his way around the room to the bench. It was littered with trash.

          Three yellow cartons rested on the bench top, cartons he'd not seen there on previous visits. The first one was empty, but he tore away the lid flaps of the next to discover a bullet-proof vest made of an unfamiliar nylon weave. He did not hesitate. The garment looked flimsy and unreliable buf because Katrina always knew what she was doing, he put on the protective vest beneath his civilian jacket. Saltus sipped at his bourbon and eyed the mess on the bench. It wasn't like William to leave things untidy--well, not _this_ untidy. Some of it was his work.

          A tape recorder and another gasoline lantern were on the bench. A moment later he discovered empty boxes which had contained rifle cartridges, another box for the tape now in the recorder, an opened map, and the insignia removed from the Major's dress uniform. Saltus thought he knew what that meant. He touched the lantern first but found it cold although the fuel tank was full, and then leaned over the bench to examine the recorder. Only a few minutes of tape had been spun off.

          Saltus depressed the voice button, said: "Mark," and rewound the tape to its starting point.

          Another push and the tape rolled forward.

          Voice: "Moresby here. Four July 1999. Time of arrival 10:05 on my watch, 4:10 by the clock. Six hours and five minutes discrepancy. Dust everywhere, stool missing from operations room; shelter unoccupied and stores intact, but the water is stale. Am preparing for the target."

          Brief period of miscellaneous sounds.

          Arthur Saltus had another drink while he waited. He stared again at William's discarded military insignia.

          Voice: ". . . moving around the northwest corner in a southerly direction--moving toward you. Estimated strength, twelve to fifteen men. Watch them, Corporal, they're packing mortars. Over." The sound of gunfire was loud behind the voice.

          Voice: "Roger. We've got a hole in the fence at the northwest--some bastard tried to put a truck through. It's still burning; maybe that'll stop them. Over."

          Voice: "You _must_ hold them, Corporal. I can't send you any men--we have a double red here. Out."

          The channel fell silent, closing off the firefight.

          Arthur Saltus stared at the machine in consternation, knowing the first suspicions of what might have happened. He listened to the small sounds of Moresby working about the bench, guessing what he was doing; the sound of cartridges being emptied from boxes was quickly recognizable; a rattle of paper was the map being unfolded.

          Voice: "Eagle one! The bandits have hit us--hit us at the northwest corner. I count twelve of them, spread out over the slope below the fence. They've got two--damn it!--two mortars and they're lobbing them in. Over." The harsh, half-shrieking voice was punctuated by the dull thump of mortar fire.

          Voice: "Have they penetrated the fence? Over."

          Voice: "Negative--negative. That burning truck is holding them. I think they'll try some other way--blow a hole in the fence if they can. Over."

          Voice: "_Hold_ them, Corporal. They are a diversion; we have the main attack here. Out."

          Voice: "Damn it, Lieutenant--" Silence.

          The pause was of short duration.

          Voice: "Moresby, Air Force Intelligence, calling Chicago or the Chicago area. Come in, Chicago."

          Arthur Saltus listened to Moresby's efforts to make radio contact with the world outside, and listened to the ensuing dialogue between Moresby and Sergeant Nash holding somewhere west of Chicago. He sucked breath in a great startled gasp when he heard the Chicago statement--it hit him hard in the belly--and listened in near-disbelief at the exchange which followed. Baja California clearly indicated the shortwave signals were being bounced to the Orient: _that_ was where the Harrys were and _that_ was where they had been called in from. The Chinese at last were retaliating for the loss of their two railroad towns. It was likely that now--sixteen months after the strike--Lake Michigan and the lands ad joining it were as radioactive as the farming area around Yungning. They had retaliated.

          But who called it in? Who were the bandits? What in hell were ramjets? That was a kind of aircraft.

          Voice: ". . . Fifth Army HQ has been re-established west of the Naval Training Station, but you'll pass through our lines long before that point. Look for the sentries. Use care, sir. Be alert for ramjets between your position and ours. They are heavily armed. Over."

          Moresby thanked the man and went out.

          The tape repeated a snapping sound that was Moresby shutting off his radio, and a moment later the tape itself went silent as he stopped the recorder. Arthur Saltus waited--listening for a postscript of some kind when William returned from his target and checked in. The tape went on and on repeating nothing, until at last his own voice jumped out at him: "Mark."

          He was dissatisfied. He let the machine run through the end of the reel but there was nothing more. Moresby had not returned to the shelter--but Saltus knew he would _not_ attempt to reach Fifth Army headquarters near Chicago, not in the bare fifty hours permitted him on target with a firefight underway somewhere outside. He might try for Joliet if the route was secure but he certainly wouldn't penetrate far into hostile territory with a deadline over his head. He had gone out; he hadn't come back inside.

          But yet Saltus was dissatisfied. Something nagged at his attention, something that wasn't quite right, and he stared at the tape recorder for a long time in an effort to place the wrongness. Some insignificant little thing didn't fit smoothly into place. Saltus rewound the tape to the beginning and played it forward a second time. He put down the birthday bottle to listen attentively.

          When it was finished he was certain of a wrongness; _something_ on the tape plucked at his worried attention.

          And yet a third time. He hunched over the machine.

          In order:

          William making his preliminary report; two voices, worried over the bandits and the mortars at the northwest corner, plus the fighting at the main gate; William again, calling Chicago; Sergeant Nash responding, with a dialogue on the Chicago situation and an invitation to join them at the relocated headquarters. A farewell word of thanks from William, and a snap of the radio being shut off; a moment later the tape itself went silent when William turned off the recorder and left the shelter--

          There--_that_ was it.

          The tape went dead when the recorder was turned off. There were no after-sounds of activity about the bench, no final message--there was nothing to indicate William had ever touched the recorder again. He had shut off the radio and the recorder in one-two order and quit the room. The tape should have ended there, stopped there. It did not. Saltus looked at his watch, squinting at the sweep hand. He ran the tape forward yet another time, from the point when William had shut it off to the point when he turned it on again and said: "Mark."

          The elapsed time was one minute, forty-four seconds. Someone _after_ William had done that. Someone else had opened the shelter, pilfered the stores, donned winter clothing, and listened to the taped report. Someone else had let the machine run on another minute and forty-four seconds before shutting it off and taking his leave. The visitor may have returned, but William never did.

          Arthur Saltus felt that fair warning. He closed the corridor door and thumbed a manual switch to keep the shelter lights on. An Army-issue automatic was taken from the stores and strapped around his waist.

          Another mouth-filling pull from the bottle, and he rolled the tape back to his "Mark."

          "Saltus checking in. That was my mark and this is my birthday, 23 November, in the nice round number year of 2000. I am fifty years old but I don't look a day over twenty-five--chalk it up to clean living. Hello, Katrina. Hello, Chaney. And hello to you, Mr. Gilbert Seabrooke. Is that nosey little man from Washington still knocking around back there?

          "I arrived at 10:55 or 11:02 something, depending on which timepiece you read. I say something because I don't yet know if it's ack-emma or the other--I haven't put my nose outside to test the wind. I have lost all faith in engineers and mercury protons, but they'd better not cheat _me_ out of my full birthday. When I walk out that door I want to see bright sunshine on the greensward--morning sunshine. I want birds singing and rabbits rabbiting and all that jazz.

          "Katrina, the housekeeping is awfully sloppy around here: it's poor ship. Dust on the furniture, the floors, lights burned out, empty boxes littering the place--it's a mess. Strangers have been wandering in and out, helping themselves to the drygoods and pinching the groceries. I guess somebody found a key to the place.

          "Everything you heard before my mark was William's report. He didn't come back to finish it, and he _didn't_ go up to Chicago or anywhere near there--you can rely on that." The bantering tone was dropped. "He's outside."

          Arthur Saltus began a straightforward recital of all that he'd found. He ticked off the missing items from the stores, the number of empty boxes stacked haphazardly along the wall, the used water cans, the two lanterns which had seen but little service--William may have tested the one found on the bench--the debris on the floor, the insignia, and the peculiarity of the tape being rolled forward. He invited his listeners to make the same timedelay test he'd made and then offer a better explanation if they didn't care for his.

          He said: "And when you come up here, civilian, just double-check the stores; count the empties again to see if our visitor has been back. And hey--arm yourself, mister. You'd damned well better shoot straight if you have to shoot at all. Remember _something_ we taught you."

          Saltus flicked off the machine to prevent the tape from listening to him take a drink--as difficult as that might be--and then flicked it on again.

          "I'm going topside to search for Wffliam--I'm going to try tailing him. Lord only knows what I'll find after sixteen months but I'm going to try. It's likely he did one of two things: either he'd go for Joliet to find out what he could about that Chicago thing, or he'd jump into the squabble if it was alongside.

          "If the squabble was here--on the station--I think he'd run for the northwest corner to help the Corporal; he'd _have_ to get into the fight." Short pause. "I'm going up to take a look at that corner, but if I don't find anything I'll run into Joliet. I'm in the same boat now with old William--I've got to know what happened to Chicago." He stared solemnly at the. empty space in his bottle and added: "Katrina, this sure knocks hell out of your survey. All that studying for nothing."

          Saltus stopped talking but let the machine run on.

          He plugged in a radio and connected the leads to the outside antenna. After a period of band searching, he reported back to the tape recorder.

          "Radio negative. Nothing at all on the GI channels." Another slow sweep of the bands. "That's damned funny, isn't it? Nobody's playing the top ten platters."

          Saltus switched over to the civilian wavelengths and monitored them carefully. "The forty- and eighty-meter bands are likewise negative. Everybody is keeping their mouths shut. What do you suppose they're scared of?" He went back to a military channel and turned up the gain to peak, hearing nothing but an airy whisper. The lack of communications nettled him.

          The _send_ button was depressed.

          "Navy boot, come in. Come in, boot, you know me-- I caddied for the Admiral at Shoreacres. Saltus calling Navy boot. Over."

          He reported himself two or three times on several channels.

          The radio crackled a sudden command. "Get off the air, you idiot! They'll get a fix on you!" It went silent.

          Saltus was so startled he turned off the radio.

          To the tape recorder: "Chaney, did you hear that? There _is_ somebody out there! They don't have much going for them--the power was weak, or they were a long ways off--but there _is_ somebody out there. Scared spitless, too. The ramjets must have them on the run." He stopped to consider that. "Katrina, try to find out what a ramjet is. Our Chinese friends _can't_ be here; they don't have the transport, and they couldn't get through the Pacific minefields if they did. And keep _that_ under your hat, civilian--it's top secret stuff."

          Arthur Saltus equipped himself for the target, always remembering to keep an eye on the door.

          He helped himself to a parka and pulled the hood over his head; he removed the light shoes he'd been wearing the summer he left and found a pair of hiking boots the proper size. Mittens were tucked into a pocket. Saltus slung a canteen of water over one shoulder and a pack of rations on his back. He picked out a rifle, loaded it, and emptied two boxes of cartridges into his pockets. The map was of little interest--he knew the road to Joliet, he'd been there only last Thursday to look into a little matter for the President. The President had thanked him. He loaded a camera and found room to pack away a fresh supply of nylon film.

          Saltus decided against taking a radio or recorder, not wanting to be further encumbered; it would be awkward enough as it was and all signs clearly indicated the survey was sunk without a trace. Chicago was lost, forbidden, and Joliet might be a problem. But there was something he could do with the recorder and William's brief message--something to insure its return to home base. A last searching examination of the room gave him no other thing he thought he would need. The lights were turned off.

          Saltus took a long pull on his dwindling supply of bourbon and quit the shelter. The corridor was dusty and vacant, and he fancied he could see his own footprints.

          He carried the tape recorder with its dangling cord back to the operations room where the vehicle waited in its polywater tank. A thorough search of the room failed to reveal an electric outlet; even the service for the clock and the calendar came through the wall behind the encased instruments, wholly concealed.

          "Damn it!" Saltus spun around to stare up at the two glass eyes. "Why can't you guys do something right? Even your lousy proton gyroscope is--is sheeg!"

          He strode out of the room, marched along the dusty corridor to the adjoining laboratory door, and gave it a resounding kick to advertise his annoyance. _That_ ought to shake up the engineers.

          His jaw dropped when the door swung open under the blow. Nobody slammed it shut again. Saltus edged closer and peered inside. Nobody shoved him back. The lab was empty. He walked in and stared around: it was his first sight of the working side of the project and the impression was a poor one.

          Here too some of the ceiling lights had burned out, without being replaced. A bank of three monitoring sets occupied a wall bench at his left hand; one of them was blanked out but the remaining two gave him a blurred and unsatisfactory image of the room he had just quit. The vehicle was recognizable only because of its shape and its supporting tank. The two images lacked quality, as though the tubes were aged beyond caring. He turned slowly on the ball of his foot and scanned the room but found nothing to suggest recent occupancy. The tools and equipment were there--and still functioning--but the lab personnel had vanished, leaving nothing but dust and marks in the dust. A yellow bull's eye on a computer panel stared at him for an intruder.

          Saltus put down the recorder and plugged it in.

          He said without preamble: "Chaney, the treasure house is empty, deserted--the engineers are gone. Don't ask me why or where--there's no sign, no clue, and they didn't leave notes. I'm in the lab now but there's nobody here except the mice and me. The door was open, sort of, and I wandered in." He sipped whiskey, but this time didn't bother to conceal it from the tape.

          "I'm going topside to look for William. Wait for me, Katrina, you lovely wench! Happy birthday, people."

          Saltus pulled the plug from the receptacle, wrapped the cord around the recorder and walked back to the other room to drop the machine into the TDV. To compensate for the added weight, he pulled loose the heavy camera in the nose bubble and threw it overboard after first salvaging the film magazine. He hoped the liaison agent from Washington would cry over the loss. Saltus slammed shut the hatch and left the room.

          The corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit. The painted sign prohibiting the carrying of arms beyond the door had been defaced: a large slash of black paint was smeared from the first sentence to the last, half obliterating the words and voiding the warning.

          Saltus noted the time on his watch and fitted the keys into the locks. A bell rang behind him as he pushed open the door. The day was bright with sunshine and snow.

          It was five minutes before twelve in the morning. His birthday was only just begun.

          An automobile waited for him in the parking lot.

FOURTEEN

          Arthur Saltus stepped out warily into the snow. The station appeared to be deserted: nothing moved on any street as far as the eye could see.

          His gaze came back to the parked automobile.

          It was a small one resembling the German beetle and olive drab in color, but he tardily recognized it as an American make by the name stamped on each hubcap. The car had been there since before the snow: there were no tracks of movement, of betrayal. A thinner coating of snow lay over the hood and roof of the vehicle and one window was open a crack, allowing moisture to seep inside.

          Saltus scanned the parking lot, the adjoining flower garden and the frigid empty spaces before him but discovered no moving thing. He held himself rigid, alert, intently watching, listening, and sniffing the wind for signs of life. No one and nothing had left tell-tale prints in the snow, nor sounds nor smells on the wind. When he was satisfied of that, he stepped away from the operations door and eased it shut behind him, making sure it was locked. Rifle up, he inched toward a corner of the lab building and peered around. The company street was trackless and deserted, as were the walks and lawns of the structures across the street. Shrubbery was bent under the weight of snow. His foot struck a covered object when he took a single step away from the protective corner.

          He looked down, bent, and picked a radio out of the snow. It had been taken from the stores below.

          Saltus turned it over looking for damage but saw none; the instrument bore no marks to suggest it had been struck by gunfire, and after a hesitation he concluded that Moresby had simply dropped it there to be rid of the extra weight. Saltus resumed his patrol, intent on circling the building to make certain he was alone. The sun-bright snow was unmarred all the way around. He was relieved, and paused again to sample the bourbon.

          The automobile claimed his attention.

          The dash puzzled him: it had an off-on switch instead of the usual key, and but one idiot light; there were no gauges to give useful information on fuel, oil, water temperature, or tire pressures, nor was there a speedometer. Propelled by a sudden exciting idea, Saltus climbed out of the little car and raised the hood. Three large silver-colored storage batteries were lined up against a motor so compact and simple it didn't appear capable of moving anything, much less an automobile. He dropped the hood and got back into the seat. The switch was flipped to the on position. There was no sound but the idiot light briefly winked at him. Saltus very gently pulled the selector lever to drive position and the car obediently crept forward through the snow toward the empty street. He pushed down on the accelerator with growing exhilaration and deliberately threw the car into a skid on the snow-packed street. It lurched and swung in a giddy manner, then came back under control when Saltus touched the steering wheel. The little automobile was fun.

          He followed a familiar route to the barracks where he'd lived with William and the civilian, swinging and dancing from side to side on the slippery surface because the car seemed to obey his every whim. It would spin in a complete circle and come to rest with the nose pointing in the proper direction, it would slide sideways without threatening to topple, it would bite into the snow and leap forward with a minimum of slippage if just one wheel had a decent purchase. He thought that four-wheel-drive electric cars should have been invented a century ago.

          Saltus stopped in dismay at the barracks--at the place where the barracks had been. He very nearly missed the site. All the antiquated buildings had burned to their concrete foundations, nearly hiding them from sight. He got out of the car to stare at the remains and at the lonely shadows cast by the winter sun.

          Feeling depressed, Saltus drove over to E Street and turned north toward the recreation area.

          He parked the car outside the fence surrounding the patio and prowled cautiously through the entranceway to scan the interior. The unmarked snow was reassuring but it did not lull him into a false sense of security. Rifle ready, pausing every few steps to look and listen and smell the wind, Saltus advanced to the tiled rim of the pool and looked down. It was nearly empty, drained of water, and the diving board taken away.

          _Nearly_ empty: a half dozen long lumps huddled under the blanket of snow at the bottom, lumps the shape of men. Two GI helmet liners lay nearby, recognizable by their shapes despite the covering snow. A naked, frozen foot protruded through the blanket into the cold sunshine.

          Saltus turned away, expelling a breath of bitter disappointment; he wasn't sure what he had expected after so long a time, but certainly not that--not the bodies of station personnel dumped into an uncovered grave. The GI liners suggested their identities and suggested they had been dumped there by outsiders--by ramjets. Survivors on station would have buried the bodies.

          He remembered the beautiful image of Katrina in that pool--Katrina, nearly naked, scantily clad in that lovely, sexy swim suit--and himself chasing after her, wanting the feel of that wet and splendid body under his hands again and again. She had teased him, run away from him, knowing what he was doing but pretending not to be aware: _that_ added to the excitement. And Chaney! The poor out-gunned civilian sat up on the deck and burned with a green, suiphurous envy, wanting to but not daring to. Damn, but that was a day to be remembered!

          Arthur Saltus scanned the street and then climbed back into the car.

          There were two large holes in the fence surrounding the station at the northwest corner. Action from outside had caused both penetrations. The shell of a burnedout truck had caused one of them, and that rusted shell still occupied the hole. A mortar had torn through the other. There was a shallow cavity in the earth directly beneath the second hole, a cavity scooped out by another exploding mortar round. Snow-covered objects that might be the remains of men dotted the slope on both sides of the fence. There was the recognizable hulk of a thoroughly demolished automobile.

          Saltus probed the wreckage of the car, turning over wheels with shredded tires, poking among the jumble of machined parts, picking up to examine with mild wonder a windshield fashioned of transparent plastic so sturdy it had popped out of place and fallen undamaged several feet away from the hulk. He compared it to the windshield of his own car, and found it to be identicaL The batteries had been carried away--or were entirely demolished; the little motor was a mass of fused metal.

          As best he could, Saltus scraped snow from the ground in search of something to indicate that William Moresby had died here. He thought it likely that William had found his car in the parking lot--a twin to his own vehicle--and drove it north to the scene of the skirmish. To here. It would be a hell of a note if the man had died before he got out of the car. Old William deserved a better break than that.

          He found nothing--not even a scrap of uniform in the debris, and for the moment that was encouraging.

          Down the slope a cluster of tree stumps and a sagging billboard were visible. Saltus went down to see them. A snow-blanketed body lay smashed against a stump but that was all; there was no weapon with it. The blown remains of one mortar lay around in front of the billboard and from the appearance of the piece, he would guess that a faulty shell had exploded within the tube, destroying the usefulness of the weapon and probably killing the operator. There was no corpse here to back up that guess, unless it was the one hurled against the tree stump. The second of the two mortars mentioned on the tape was missing--taken away. The winners of _this_ skirmish had to be the ramjets; they had picked up their remaining mortar and retired--or had penetrated the hole to invade the station.

          Saltus picked his way back up the slope and walked through the hole in the fence. The snow pattern dipped gracefully, following the rounded rough-bottomed contour of the cavity. His foot turned on something unseen at the bottom of the hole and he struggled to save his balance. A cold wind blew across the face of the slope, numbing his fingers and stinging his face.

          He began the distasteful task of scraping snow off each of the fallen man-objects, brushing away just enough to catch a glimpse of the rotting cloth of the uniform. The defenders had worn Army tans, and one of them still carried a GI dogtag around his neck; in another place he turned up a Corporal's stripes attached to a bit of sleeve, and not far away was an empty pair of shoes. William Moresby's dress blues were not found.

          An oversight nagged at him.

          Saltus retraced his steps down the slope, annoyed at the oversight and annoyed again by the futility of it: he uncovered the remains of civilians wearing nondescript civilian clothing, and one yellow armband. A faded black cross on a rotting patch of yellow goods meant nothing to him but he folded it away for later examination. Katrina would want to see it. The ramjets themselves were beyond identification; sixteen months of exposure had made them as unrecognizable as those other bodies above the fence line. The only thing new he'd learned was that civilians were the bandits on the tape, civilians equipped with mortars and some kind of central organization--maybe the same group that had called in the Harry on Chicago. Ramjets allied with the Chinese--or at least inviting their cooperation.

          To Saltus the scene read civil war.

          He stopped at the next thought, staring with hard surprise at the covered bodies. Ramjets blowing Chicago--in retaliation? Ramjets losing in Chicago twenty years ago, trapped behind their own wall, but striking back in harsh retaliation _now?_ Ramjets working with the Chinese, welded together by a mutual hatred of the white establishment?

          He picked again at the body against the stump, but the color of the man's skin was lost.

          Arthur Saltus climbed the slope.

          The world was strangely silent and empty--deserted. He'd seen no traffic on the distant highway nor on the nearer railroad; the sky was uncommonly bare of aircraft. He stayed continually on the alert for danger, but sighted no one, nothing--even animal tracks were missing from the snow. Deserted world--or more likely, a concealed world. That angry voice on the radio had ordered him to silence lest he betray his cover.

          Saltus stayed only a few minutes longer on the cold upper slope, standing amid the debris of the smashed car. He hoped to God that William had jumped clear before the mortar smashed in. The old boy deserved at least a couple of whacks at the bandits before his doom prophets caught up to him.

          He was finally convinced the Major had died there.

          Saltus drove by the mess hail with little more than a passing glance. Like the barracks, the wooden parts of the structure were burned to the concrete block foundation. He thought it likely the ramjets had swept the station after the fence was breached, burning what was flammable and stealing or destroying the remainder. It was a blessing that the lab had been built to withstand war and earthquake, or he would have emerged into a room open to the sky and climbed down from the vehicle into snow. He hoped the bandits had long since starved to death--but at the same time remembered the pilfered stores in the shelter.

          _That_ bandit hadn't starved, but neither had he fed his fellows. How had he gotten through the locked door? He would need both keys and he would have to take them from William--but a direct hit on the car would have scattered the keys as thoroughly as the parts of the auto itself. Assuming possession of the keys, why hadn't the bandit, thrown open the doors to his companions? Why hadn't the stores been looted, cleaned out, the lab ransacked? Was the man so selfish that he had fed only himself and let the rest go hang? Perhaps. But more than one pair of boots was missing.

          Saltus turned a corner at a fast clip, skidding in the snow and then straightening his course toward the front gate. It was a small comfort to find the gatehouse still standing: concrete blocks were difficult to burn or destroy. The gate itself was torn open and twisted back Out of the way. He drove through it and concentrated on the barely visible pattern of the road ahead; the smooth unbroken expanse of snow flanked by shallow ditches to either side guided him. Only last Thursday he and William had raced over the road hell-bent for a day in Joliet.

          A bearded man leaped out of the gatehouse and put a shot through the rear window of the car.

          Arthur Saltus didn't take the time to decide if he was astonished or outraged--the shot did frighten him, and he reacted automatically to danger. Slamming the accelerator to the floor, he spun hard on the wheel and threw the car into a sickening skid. It lurched and swung around in a dizzy arc, coming to rest with its blunt nose aimed at the gatehouse. Saltus floored the accelerator. The rear wheels spun uselessly on the slick snow, found a purchase only when they had burned down to the pavement, then thrust the car forward in a burst of speed that caught him unprepared. It careened wildly through the gate. He rammed the nose hard against the gatehouse door and leaped clear, hugging the side of the vehicle.

          Saltus pumped two quick shots through the sagging door, and was answered by a scream of pain; he fired again and then scrambled over the hood to crouch in the doorway. The screaming man lay on the floor tearing at his bloodied chest. A tall, gaunt black man was backed against the far wall taking aim at him. Saltus fired without raising the rifle, and then deliberately turned and put a finishing shot through the head of the man writhing on the floor. The screaming stopped.

          For a moment the world was wrapped in silence.

          Saltus said: "Now, what the hell--"

          An incredibly violent blow struck him in the small of his back, robbing him of breath and speech, and he heard the sound of a shot from an unimaginable distance away. He stumbled and went to his knees while a raging fire burned up his spine into his skull. Another distant shot shattered the peace of the world, but this once he felt nothing. Saltus turned on his knees to meet the threat.

          The ramjet was climbing over the hood of the little fun car to get at him.

          Caught up like a man swimming in mud, Saltus raised the rifle and tried to take aim. The weapon was almost too heavy to lift; he moved in a slow, agonizing motion. The ramjet slid down the hood and jumped through the doorway, reaching for him or his rifle. Saltus squinted at the face but it refused to come into clear focus. Somebody behind the face loomed over him as large as a mountain; somebody's hands grasped the barrel of the rifle and pulled it away. Saltus squeezed the trigger.

          The looming face changed: it disintegrated in a confusing jumble of bone, blood, and tissue, coming apart like William's electric car under a mortar barrage. The face out of focus disappeared while a booming thunder filled the gatehouse and rattled the broken door. A large piece of the mountain teetered over him, threatening to bury him when it came down. Saltus tried to crawl away.

          The toppling body knocked him off his knees and knocked away his weapon. He went down beneath it, still fighting for breath and praying not to be crushed.

          Arthur Saltus opened his eyes to find the daylight gone. An intolerable burden pinned him to the gatehouse floor and an overpowering hurt wracked his body.

          Moving painfully but gaining only an inch or two at a time, he crawled from under the burden and tried to roll it aside. After minutes or hours of strenuous effort he climbed as far as his knees and threw off the knapsack hammering at his back; he spilled as much water as he drank before the canteen followed. His rifle lay on the floor at his knee, but he was astonished to discover that his hand and arm lacked the strength to pick it up. It may have taken another hour to draw the service automatic from uiider his coat and place it on the hood of the car.

          An unbelievable time was spent in crawling over the same hood to get outside. The gun was knocked to the ground. Saltus bent over, touched it, fingered it, grew dizzy and had to abandon the weapon to save himself. He grabbed at the door handle and hauled himself upright. After a while he tried it again, and only managed to seize the gun and stand upright before the recurring wave of nausea struck him. His stomach doubled up and ejected.

          Saltus climbed into the car and backed it off from the gatehouse door. Opening the near window to get the cold bracing air, he tugged at the drive selector and steered a tortuous course from gate to parking lot. The car glanced off one curb and skidded across the snow to jump the other curb; it would have thrown its occupant if it had been traveling at greater speed. Saltus had lost the strength to push down on the brake, and the little car stopped only when it slammed into the concrete wall of the laboratory. He was thrown against the wheel and then out into the snow. A spotted trail of blood marked his erratic path from the car to the door with the twin locks.

          The door opened easily--so easily that a dim corner of his fogged consciousness nagged at him: had he inserted _both_ keys into the locks before the door swung? Had he inserted _any_ key?

          Arthur Saltus fell down the flight of stairs because he could not help himself.

          The gun was gone from his hand but he couldn't remember losing it; his bottle of birthday bourbon was gone from his pocket but he couldn't remember emptying it or throwing away the bottle; the keys to the door were lost. Saltus lay on his back on the dusty concrete, looking at the bright lights and looking up the stairs at the closed door. He didn't remember closing that door.

          A voice said: "Fifty hours."

          He knew he was losing touch with reality, knew he was drifting back and forth between cold, painful awareness and dark periods of feverish fantasy. He wanted to sleep on the floor, wanted to stretch out with his face on the cold concrete and let the raging fire in his spine burn itself out. Katrina's vest had saved his life-- barely. The slug--more than one?--was lodged in his back, but without the vest it would have torn all the way through his chest and blown away the rib cage. Thanks, Katrina.

          A voice said: "Fifty hours."

          He tried to stand up, but fell on his face. He tried to climb to his knees, but pitched forward on his face. There was not much strength left to him. In time with the measured passing of an eternity, he crawled to the TDV on his belly.

          Arthur Saltus struggled for an hour to climb the side of the vehicle. His awareness was slipping away in a sea of nauseous fantasy: he had the hallucinatory notion that someone pulled off his heavy boots--that someone removed the heavy winter garments and tried to take off his clothing. When at last he fell head first through the vehicle's open hatch, he had the fever-fantasy that someone out there had helped him over the side.

          A voice said: "Push the kickbar."

          He lay on his stomach on the webbing facing in the wrong direction, and remembered that the engineers wouldn't recover the vehicle until the end of fifty hours. They had done that when William failed to return. Something was under him, hurting him, putting a hard new pressure on a rib cage already painfully sore. Saltus pulled the lump from beneath him and found a tape recorder. He pushed it toward the kickbar but it fell inches short of the goal. The hallucination slammed shut the hatch cover.

          He said thickly: "Chaney . . . the bandits have burned the treasure house . . ."

          The tape recorder was thrown at the kickbar.

          The time was forty minutes after two in the morning, 24 November 2000. His fiftieth birthday was long past.

          Brian Chaney

          2000-plus

          The meek, the terrible meek,

          the fierce agonizing meek,

          Are about to enter into their inheritance.

                                       -- Charles Rann Kennedy

FIFTEEN

          Chaney was apprehensive.

          The red light blinked out. He reached up to unlock the hatch and throw it open. The green light went dark. Chaney grasped the two handrails and pulled up to a sitting position, with his head and shoulders protruding through the hatchway. He hoped he was alone in the room--the vehicle was in darkness. The air was sharply cold and smelled of ozone. He struggled out of the hatch and climbed over the side. Saltus had warned him the stool was gone so he slid cautiously to the floor, and clung to the polywater tank for a moment of orientation. The blackness around him was complete: he saw nothing, heard nothing but the hoarse sound of his own breathing.

          Brian Chaney reached up to slam shut the hatch but then stopped himself--the TDV was his only lifeline to home base and it was wiser to keep that hatch open and waiting. He stretched out his hand to grope for the locker; he remembered its approximate location, and took a few hesitant steps in the darkness until he bumped into it. His suit hung in a dusty paper sheath, prepared by a dry cleaner now many years behind him, and his shoes were on the bottom beneath the suit. An automatic pistol--put there at the insistence of Arthur Saltus--now was an ungainly lump in the pocket of his jacket.

          The weapon underscored his apprehension.

          Chaney didn't bother to check his watch: it lacked an illuminated dial and there was nothing to be seen on the wall. He quit the darkened room.

          He moved slowly down the corridor in a black eerie silence to the shelter; dust stirrea up by his feet made him want to sneeze. The shelter door was found by touch and pushed open but the overhead lights failed in their automatic response. Chaney felt for the manual switch beside the door, flicked it, but stayed in darkness: the electric power was out and the lecturing engineer was a liar. He listened intently to the unseen room. He had no matches or lighter--the penalty paid by a non-smoker when light or fire was needed--and stood there for a moment of indecision, trying to recall where the smaller items were stored. He thought they were in metal lockers along the far wall, near the racks of heavy clothing.

          Chaney shuffled across the floor, wishing he had that cocksure engineer here with him.

          His feet collided with an empty carton, startling him, and he kicked it out of the way. It struck another object before it came to rest: Saltus had complained of sloppy housekeeping, and Katrina had written a memo. After a period of cautious groping the ungainly bulge in his jacket pocket struck the leading edge of the bench, and he put forth both hands to explore the working surface. A radio--plugged in and wired to the antenna--a lantern, a few small empty boxes, a large one, a number of metal objects his fingers could not finmediately identify, and a second lantern. Chaney barely hesitated over the objects and continued his probe. His roving fingers found a box of matches; the fuel tanks of both lanterns jostled with reassuring sounds. He lit the two lanterns and turned to look at the room. Chaney didn't like to think of himself as a coward but his hand rested in the gun pocket as he turned and peered into the gloom.

          The raider had returned to pilfer the stores.

          From the looks of the place the man must have spent the last few winters here, or had invited his friends in with him.

          A third lantern rested on the floor near the door and he would have knocked that one over if he had stepped sideways in the darkness. A box of matches lay ready beside it. An incredible number of empty food cartons were stacked along a wall together with a collection of water cans, and he wondered why the man hadn't hauled the boxes outside and burned them to be rid of an untidy mess. Chaney counted the cans and boxes with growing wonder and tried to guess at the many years separating Arthur Saltus from his own recent arrival. _That_ reminded him to look at his watch: five minutes before nine. He had the uneasy suspicion that the TDV had sent him askew once again. A plastic bag had been opened--as Saltus had reported--and a number of winter garments were missing from the racks. Several pairs of boots were gone from their shelves. The bundle of mittens was broken open and one had fallen to the floor, unnoticed in the darkness.

          But there was no spilled food on the floor despite the litter of cartons and cans; every scrap had been taken up and used. Nor were there signs of mice or rats.

          He whirled to the gun rack. Five rifles had been taken plus an undetermined number of the Army-issue automatics. He supposed--without count--that an appropriate amount of ammunition had gone with them. Major Moresby and Saltus would have accounted for two of the rifles.

          The tiny metal objects on the workbench were the insignia Moresby had removed from his uniform, and Saltus had explained the reason for their removal in combat zones. The empty boxes had contained reels of tape, nylon film, and cartridges; the one remaining larger box was his bullet-proof vest. The map revealed the usual layer of dust. The radio was now useless--unless the supply of batteries had survived the intervening years.

          Years: time.

          Chaney picked up both lanterns and walked back to the room housing the TDV. He crossed to the far wall and bent down to read the calendar and clock. Each had stopped when the power line went out.

          The clock read a few minutes of twelve noon, or twelve midnight. The calendar 'stopped measuring time on 4 Mar 09. Only the thermometer gave a meaningful reading: 52 degrees.

          Eight and one half years after Arthur Saltus lived his disastrous fiftieth birthday, ten years after Major Moresby died in the skirmish at the fence, the nuclear power plant serving the laboratory failed or the lines were destroyed. They may have destroyed themselves for lack of replacement; the transformers may have blown out; the nuclear fuel may have been used up; any one or a hundred things could have happened to interrupt transmission. The power was gone.

          Chaney had no idea how long ago it had failed: he knew only that he was somewhere beyond March 2009.

          The outage may have happened last week, last month, last year, or at any time during the last hundred years. He hadn't asked the engineers the precise date of _his_ target but had assumed they would fling him into the future one year following Saltus, to reconnoiter the station. The assumption was wrong--or the vehicle had strayed once more. Chaney ruefully concluded that it didn't matter, it really didn't matter at all. The ill-starred survey was nearly finished; it _would_ be finished as soon as he made a final tour of the station and went back with his report.

          He carried the lanterns back to the shelter.

          The radio took his attention. Chaney dug out a sealed carton of batteries and fitted the required number into the conversion unit. The band selector was swept over the military channels and back again, without result. He turned up the gain to peak and held the instrument to his ear but it refused to give him even the airy whisper of dead air; the lack of hiss or static told him that the batteries had not survived the passage of time. Chaney dismissed the radio as of no further value and prepared himself for the target.

          He was disappointed there was no note from Katrina, as he'd found on the field trial.

          The bullet-proof vest went on first. Arthur Saltus had warned him of that, had shown him the valued protection of that: Saltus lived only because he'd worn one.

          Because he didn't know the season of the year--only the temperature--Chaney donned a pair of boots and helped himself to a heavy coat and a pair of mittens. He picked out a rifle, loaded it as Moresby had taught him to do, and emptied a box of cartridges in his pocket. The map was of no interest: the probes into Joliet and Chicago had been hastily cancelled and _now_ he was restricted to the station itself. Check it out quickly and jump for home base. Katrina had said the President and his Cabinet were awaiting a final report before concluding a course of remedial action. They called it "formulating a policy of positive polarization," whatever that was.

          A last tour of the station and the survey was ended; that much of the future would be known and mapped.

          Chaney slung a canteen of water over his shoulder, then stuffed a knapsack with rations and matches and hung it from the other shoulder; he didn't expect to be outside long enough to use either one. He was pleased the aged batteries didn't work--that was excuse enough to leave radio and recorder behind--but he fitted film into the camera because Gilbert Seabrooke had asked for a record of the destruction of the station. The verbal description offered by Saltus had been a depressing one. One last searching examination of the room gave him no other article he thought he would need.

          Chaney licked his lips, now dry with apprehension, and quit the shelter.

          The corridor ended and a flight of stairs led up to the operations exit. The painted sign prohibiting the carrying of arms beyond the door had been defaced: a large slash of black paint was smeared from the first sentence to the last, half obliterating the words and voiding the warning. Chaney noted the time, and set the two lanterns down on the top step to await his return. He fitted the keys into the twin locks and stepped out hesitantly into the open air.

          The day was bright with sunshine but sharply chill. The sky was new, blue, and clear of aircraft; it looked freshly scrubbed, a different sky than the hazy polluted one he had known almost all his life. Patches of light frost clung to the protected spots not yet touched by the sun.

          His watch read 9:30, and he guessed the time was about right--the bright morning outside was still new.

          A two-wheeled cart waited in the parking lot.

          Chaney eyed the crude apparition, prepared for almost anything but that. The cart was not too skillfully made, having been put together with used lumber, an axle, and a pair of wheels taken from one of the small electric cars Saltus had described. Strands of machine wire had been employed to hold the four sides together where nails failed to do an adequate job, and to fasten the bed to the axle; the tires were long rotted away and the cart rode on metal rims. No skilled carpenter had fitted it together.

          The second object to catch his eye was a heaped mound of clay in the adjoining area that had once been a flower garden. Unusually tall grass and weeds grew everywhere, partially obscuring a view of the station and almost blocking sight of the yellow mound; the grass grew high around the parking lot, and beyond it, and in the open 'spaces surrounding the buildings across the street. Weeds and grass filled the near distance as far as the eye could see, and he was reminded of the buffalo grass said to have grown here when Illinois was an Indian prairie. Time had done that--time and neglect. The station lawns had long gone unattended.

          Moving warily, stopping often to scan the area around him, Chaney approached the mound.

          When he was yet a distance away he discovered a faint trail running from the edge of the lot, through the garden and toward the mound itself. The next discovery was equally blunt. Alongside the path--almost invisible in the high grass--was a water channel, a crude aqueduct made from guttering ripped from some building and twisted into shape to serve this purpose. Chaney stopped short in surprise and stared at the guttering and the nearby mound, already guessing at what he would find. He continued the stealthy approach.

          He came suddenly into a clearing in the rampant grass and found the artifact: a cistern with a crude wooden lid. A bucket and a length of rope rested beside it.

          Chaney slowly circled the cistern and the clay that had come from the excavation, to stumble over yet another channel made of the same guttering; the second aqueduct ran through the weeds and grass toward the lab building--probably to catch the run-off from the roof. The clay mound was not fresh. Struck with an overwhelming curiosity, he knelt down and pried away the lid to find a cistern half filled with water. The walls of the pit were lined with old brick and rough stone slabs but the water was remarkably clean, and he looked to see why. Filters made of screenwire torn from a window were fitted over the ends of each gutter to protect the cistern from incoming debris and small animals. The gutters themselves were free of leaves and trash, and an effort had been made to seal the joints with a tarry substance.

          Chaney put down the rifle and bent to study the cistern in wonder. It was already recognizable.

          Like the cart, it had not been fashioned by skilled hands. The shape of the thing--the lines of it--were easily familiar: the sides not quite perpendicular, the mouth not evenly rounded, and the shaft appearing to be larger near the bottom than at the top. It was odd, amateurish, and sunk without a plumb line--but it was a reasonably faithful copy of a Nabataean cistern and it might be expected to hold water for a century or more. In this place it was startling. Chaney replaced the lid and climbed to his feet.

          When he turned around he saw the grave.

          It shocked him. The site had been concealed from him until now by the high growth of the garden, but again a faint path led to it from the clearing at the cistern. The mound above the grave was low, aged, and covered by a short weedy grass; the cross above it was nailed together and coated with fading white paint. Dim lettering was visible on the crossarm.

          Chaney moved in and knelt again to read it.

                    _A ditat Deus K_

          The gatehouse door had been loosed from its hinges and taken away--perhaps to build the cart.

          Chaney peered warily through the opening, alert for danger but dreading the possibility of it, then stepped inside for a closer examination. The room was bare. No trace remained of the men who had died there: bone, weapon, scrap of cloth, nothing. Some of the window glass had been knocked out but other panes were intact; the screenwire had been taken from two of the windows. An empty place.

          He backed out and turned to stare at the gate.

          It was shut and padlocked, effectively blocking admittance to all but a determined climber, and an effort had been made to repair the damage done to it. Chaney noted all that in a single glance and went forward to study the additional stoppers--the added warnings. Three grisly talismans hung on the outside of the gate facing the road: three skulls, taken from the bodies of the men who'd died in the gatehouse so long ago. The warning to would-be trespassers was strikingly clear.

          Chaney stared at the skulls, knowing the warnings to be as old as time; he knew of similar monitions which had guarded towns in Palestine before the Roman conquest, monitions which had been used as late as the eighteenth century in some of the more remote villages of the Negev.

          He saw no one in the area: the entrance and its approaches were deserted, the warning well taken. Weeds and waist-high grass grew in the ditches and the fields on either side of the road leading to the distant highway but the grass had not been disturbed by the passage of men. The blacktopped road was empty, the white line down the center long since weathered away and the asphalt surface badly damaged by the years. An automobile using that road now would be forced to move at a snail's pace.

          Chaney photographed the scene and quit the area.

          Walking north with an easy stride, he followed the familiar route to the barracks where he'd lived that short while with Saltus and Moresby. The site was almost passed over because it was covered by a tangle of weeds and grass; no buildings rose above the jungle.

          Forcing his way through the tangle--and flushing from its nesting place a quick, furry thing he tardily recognized as a rabbit--Chaney stumbled upon the burnedout base of a building nearly lost in the undergrowth. He couldn't recognize it as his own barracks, nor point to the location of his small room if it _had_ been the barracks; only the long narrow rectangle of the foundation suggested the kind of dwelling it was. Chaney peered over the wall. A narrow band of frost lined the cement blocks at the groundline on the north side, pointing up the chill in the air. Patches of blue wildflowers grew in the sunlight and--much to his surprise--other patches of wild, red strawberries sprouted everywhere along the sunnier side of the foundation. He thought to glance at the sky, measuring the progress of the sun and the season, then stared again at the strawberries. It _should_ be early summer.

          Chaney photographed it and went back to the street. An abandoned place. He continued north.

          E Street was easily identified without the need of the rusted sign standing on a pole at a corner. He stayed alert, walking cautiously and listening hard for any sound around him. The station was quiet under the sun.

          The recreation area was harshly changed.

          Chaney crept silently in the entrance and across the broken concrete patio to the rim of the swimming pool. He looked down. A few inches of dirty water covered the bottom--residue from the rains--together with a poor collection of rusted and broken weapons and an appreciable amount of debris blown in by the wind: the pool had become a dumping ground for trash and armament. The sodden corpse of some small animal floated in a corner. A lonely place. Chaney very carefully put away the memory of the pool as he'd known it and backed away from the edge. The area now seemed unkempt, ugly, and not a scene to be compared with more pleasant times.

          He left quickly, bearing north and west. The far corner was a mile or more away as he remembered the map of the station, but he thought he could walk the distance in a reasonable time.

          Chaney found the motor pool before he'd progressed a half dozen long blocks. Less than twenty cars littered the great blacktopped lot, but not one was operable: they had been wantonly stripped of parts and many of them were no more than burned-out shells. The hood of every vehicle was propped open, and the batteries taken; not one of the small motors was left intact to provide him with an idea of the plant. Chaney poked about the lot because he was curious, and because Arthur Saltus had told him about the little electric cars. He wished he could drive one. There were no trucks on the lot nor had he seen one anywhere on the station, although a number of them had been working the post during his training period. He supposed they had been transferred to Chicago to meet the emergency--or had been stolen when the ramjets overran the statioii

          Chaney emerged from the lot and stopped abruptly on the street. It may have been an illusion brought on by tension, but he thought he glimpsed movement in the high grass across the street. He slipped the safety on the rifle and walked to the curb. Nothing was visible in the heavy undergrowth.

          There were no holes in the fence at the corner.

          The burned and rusted shell of a truck occupied a place that had once been a hole, but now that truck was a part of the repaired fence. Barbed wire had been strung back and forth across the opening, pulled taut over, under, and through the wreck itself in such fashion that the truck became an integral part of the barrier; yet other strands of wire were laced vertically through the fencing, making it impossible for even a small boy to crawl through. He went along the fence to examine the second hole. It had been repaired and rebuilt in as thorough a manner as the first, and an old cavity in the ground had been filled in. The barricade was intact, impenetrable.

          Everywhere the weeds and grass grew tall, actually concealing the lower third of the fence from a man standing only a few feet away. Chaney was not surprised to find the same gruesome talismans guarding the northwest corner; he had expected to find them. The skeletal owners of the skulls were missing, but nowhere on the station had he seen a human body--someone had buried them all, friend and foe alike. The three skulls hung at the top of the fencing, glaring down at the plain below and at the rusted railroad beyond.

          Chaney turned away.

          He prowled through the high grass, looking for anything. Arthur Saltus had found no trace of the Major but yet Chaney could not help himself; he searched for any trifle that would indicate the man's presence on the scene. It was impossible to give up Major Moresby without some effort, some attempt to place him there.

          From somewhere in the distance the shrill, playful shout of a child pierced the morning.

          Chaney jumped with astonishment and nearly lost his footing on a chunk of metal buried in the grass. He turned quickly to scan the corner of the station he thought empty, then searched backward over the route he'd traveled from the motor pool. The child was heard again-- and then a woman's voice calling to it. Behind him. Down the slope. Chaney felt an eager, mounting excitement as he spun about and ran to the fence. They were out there beyond the fence.

          He found them at once: a man, a woman, and a child of three or four years, trudging along the railway tracks in the middle distance. The man was carrying nothing but a stout stick or club, while the woman was toting a bag. The youngster ran along behind them, playing some game of his own devising.

          Chaney was so glad to see them he forgot his own danger and yelled at the top of his voice. The rifle was a burden and he dropped it, to wave both hands.

          Ignoring the barbed wire, he climbed part way up the fence to show himself and gain their attention. He shouted again, and beckoned them to come toward him.

          The result left him utterly dumbfounded.

          The adult members of the family looked around with some surprise, stared up and down the tracks, across fields, and discovered him at last clinging to the fence alongside the talismans. They stood motionless, frozen by fear, for only a tick in time. The woman cried out as though in pain and dropped the bag; she ran to protect the child. The man sprinted after her--passed her-- and caught up the child in a quick scooping motion. The stick fell from his hands. He turned only once to stare at Chaney hanging on the fence and then raced away along the tracks. The woman stumbled--nearly fell--then ran desperately to keep pace with the man. The father shifted his small burden to one shoulder, then used his free hand to help the woman--urging her, hurrying her. They ran from him with all the speed and strength they possessed, the child now crying with consternation. Fear ran with them.

          "Come back!"

          He clung to the prickly fence and watched them out of sight. The billboard and high grasses hid them, shut them off, and the childish crying was hushed. Chaney hung there, his fingers curling through the holes of the fencing.

          "Please come back!"

          The northwest corner of the world stayed empty. He climbed down from the fence with bloodied hands.

          Chaney picked up the rifle and turned away, plowing a path through the weeds and grass toward the distant road and the cluster of buildings at the heart of the station. He lacked the courage to look back. He had never known anyone to run from him--not even those beggar children who had squatted on the sands of the Negev and watched him pry into the sands of their forgotten history. They were timid and mistrustful, those Bedouin, but they hadn't run from him. He walked back without pause, refusing to look again at the stripped automobiles, the recreation area with its pool-sized midden, the burned out barracks and the attending wildflowers--refusing to look at any of it, not wanting to see anything more of the world that had been or the new one discovered today. He walked with the taste of wormwood in his mouth.

          Elwood Station was an enclosed world, a fenced and fright-inducing world standing like an island of dogged isolation amid the survivors of that violent civil war. There _were_ survivors. They were out there on the outside and they had fled from him--on the inside. Their fears centered on the station: _here_ was the devil they knew. _He_ was the devil they'd glimpsed.

          But the station had a resident--not a visitor, not a raider from beyond the fence who plundered the stores in the wintertime, but a permanent resident. A resident devil who had repaired the fence and hung out the talismen to keep the survivors away, a resident christian who had dug a grave and erected a cross above it.

          Chaney stood in the middle of the parking lot.

          Before him: the impenetrable walls of the laboratory stood out like a great gray temple in a field of weeds. Before him: a mound of yellow clay heaped beside the Nabataean cistern stood out like an anachronistic thumb, with a single grave hard by. Before him: a two-wheeled cart made of reclaimed lumber and borrowed wheels.

          Somewhere behind him: a pair of eyes watching.

SIXTEEN

          Brian Chaney took the keys from his pocket and unlocked the operations door. Two lanterns rested on the top step, but no bells rang below as the door swung. A rush of clammy air fell through the doorway to be lost in the crisp, cleaner air outside. The sun rode high--near the zenith--but the day stayed chilly with little promise of becoming warmer. Chaney was thankful for the heavy coat he wore.

          Quiet sun, clean sky, unseasonably cold weather: he could report that to Gilbert Seabrookc.

          He propped the heavy door open by shoving the cart against it, and then went below for the first armload of rations. The rifle was left beside the cart, all but forgotten. Carton after carton of foodstuffs was hauled up the stairs and piled in the cart, until his arms were weary of carrying and his legs of climbing; but medicines and matches were forgotten and he made another trip. A few tools for himself were included as a tardy afterthought. Chaney very nearly overestimated himself: the cart was so heavily loaded after the last trip that he had difficulty moving it from the doorway, and so a few of the heavier boxes had to be left behind.

          He left the parking lot, pushing the cart.

          It cost him more than three hours and most of his determination to reach the northwest corner of the fence the second time that day. The load moved fairly well as long as paved streets served him but when he left the end of the street and struck off through the high grass on his own back trail, progress was miserable. The cart was only slightly easier to pull than push. Chaney didn't remember seeing a machete in the stores, but he wished for a dozen of them--and a dozen bearers to work in front of him hacking a trail through the weedy jungle. The load was back-breaking.

          When at last he reached the fence he fell down and gasped for breath. The sun was long past noon.

          The fence was assaulted with a crowbar. The task seemed easier where the fencing had been patched over the remains of the truck; it was not as stout there, not as resistant to the bar as the undamaged sections, and he concentrated on that place. He ripped away the barbed wire and pulled it free of the truck shell, then pried out the ends of the original fencing and rolled it back out of the way. When it was done his hands were bleeding again from many cuts and scratches, but he had forced an opening large enough to roll the cart through beside the truck. The wall was breached.

          The heavy cart got away from him on the downward slope.

          He ran with it, struggling to halt the plunge down the hillside and shouting at it with an exhausted temper but the cart ignored his imprecations and shot down through tall grass that was no barrier at all--now--until at last it reached the plain below and flipped end for end, spilling its load in the weeds. Chaney roared his anger: the Aramaic term so well liked by Arthur Saltus, and then another phrase reserved for asses and tax collectors. The cart--like the ass, but unlike the collector-- did not respond.

          Laboriously he righted the cart, gathered up the spill, and trudged across the field to the railroad.

          The dropped walking stick was a marker.

          His small treasure was left there for finding, laid out along the railroad right-of-way for the frightened family or any other traveler who might pass that way. He put the matches and the medicines atop the largest carton and then covered them with his overcoat to protect them from the weather. Chaney spent only a little while scanning the distances along the tracks for sight of a man--he was certain his shouting and his cursing would have frightened away anyone in the area. As before, he was alone in an empty world. From somewhere in the timber he heard a bird calling, and he would have to be content with that.

          In the late afternoon hours when the thin heat of the sun was beginning to fade he pulled the empty cart up the hill and through the gaping hole in the fence for a last time, stopping only to retrieve the crowbar. Chaney didn't dare look back. He was afraid of what he might find--or not find. To suddenly turn and look, to discover someone already at the boxes would be his undoing--he knew he would behave as before and again frighten the man away. But to turn and see the same untenanted world again would only deepen his depression. He would not look back.

          Chaney followed his own trail through the verdant grass, seeking the beginning of the paved road. Some small animal darted away at his approach.

          He stood at the edge of the parking lot, looking at the abandoned garden and thinking of Kathryn van Hise. But for her, he would be loafing on the beach and thinking of going back to work in the tank--but only thinking of it; perhaps in another week or so he'd get up off his duff and look up train schedules and connections to Indianapolis, if they still existed in an age of dying rails. The only weight on his mind would be the reviewers who read books too hastily and leaped to fantastic conclusions. But for her, he would have never heard of Seabrooke, Moresby, Saltus--unless their names happened to be on a document coming into the tank. He wouldn't have jumped into Joliet two years ahead of his time and found a wall; he wouldn't have jumped into _this_ dismal future, whatever year _this_ might be, and found a catastrophe. He would have plodded along in his own slow, myopic way until the hard future slammed into him--or he into it.

          He thought he was done here: done with the aborted survey and done with the very quiet and nearly deserted world of 2000-something. He could do no more than tell Katrina, tell Seabrooke, and perhaps listen while they relayed the word to Washington. The next move would be up to the politicians and the bureaucrats--let them change the future if they could, if they possessed the power.

          His role was completed. He could tape a report and label it _Eschatos_.

          The mound of yellow clay claimed his attention and he followed the gutter through the grass to the cistern, wanting to photograph it. He still marveled at finding a Nabataean artifact thrust forward into the twenty-first century, and he suspected Arthur Saltus was responsible: it had been copied from the book he'd lent Saltus, from the pages of _Pax Abrahamitica_. With luck, it would trap and hold water for another century or so, and if he could measure the capacity he would probably find the volume to be near ten _cor_. Saltus had done well for an amateur.

          Chaney turned to the grave.

          He would not photograph that, for the picture would raise questions he didn't care to answer. Seabrooke would ask if there'd been an inscription on the crossarm, and why hadn't he photographed the inscription? Katrina would sit by with pencil poised to record his verbal reading.

                    _A ditat Deus K_

          Down there: Arthur or Katrina?

          How could he tell Katrina that he'd found her grave? Or her husband's grave? Why couldn't _this_ have been the final resting place of Major Moresby?

          A bird cried again in some far off place, pulling his gaze up to the distant trees and the sky beyond.

          The trees were in new leaf, telling the early summer; the grass was soft tender green, not yet wiry from the droughts of midsummer: a fresh world. Gauzy clouds were gathering about the descending sun, creating a mirage of reddish-gold fleece. Eastward, the sky was wondrously blue and clean--a newly scrubbed sky, disinfected and sterilized. At night the stars must appear as enormous polished diamonds.

          Arthur or Katrina?

          Brian Chaney knelt briefly to touch the sod above the grave, and mentally prepared himself to go home. His depression was deep.

          A voice said: "Please. . . Mr. Chaney?"

          The shock immobilized him. He was afraid that if he turned quickly or leaped to his feet, a nervous finger would jerk the trigger and he would join Moresby in the soil of the station. He held himself rigidly still, aware that his own rifle had been left in the cart. Oversight; carelessness; stupidity. One hand rested on the grave; his gaze remained on the small cross.

          "Mr. Chaney?"

          After the longest time--a disquieting eternity--he turned only his head to look back along the path.

          Two strangers: two _almost_ strangers, two people who mirrored his own uncertainty and apprehension.

          The nearer of the two wore a heavy coat and a pair of boots taken from the stores; his head and hands were bare and the only weapon he carried was a pair of binoculars also borrowed from the stores. He was tall, thin, lanky--only a few inches less than Chaney's height, but he lacked the sandy hair and muscular body of his father; he lacked the bronzed skin and the silver filling in his teeth, he lacked the squint of eye that would suggest a seafarer peering into the sun. He lacked the buoyant youthfulness. If the man had possessed those characteristics instead of lacking them, Chaney would say he was looking at Arthur Saltus.

          "How do you know my name?"

          "You are the only one unaccounted for, sir."

          "And you had my description?"

          Softly: "Yes, sir."

          Chaney turned on his knees to face the strangers. He realized they were as much afraid of him as he was of them. When had they last seen another man here?

          "Your name is Saltus?"

          A nod. "Arthur Saltus."

          Chaney shifted his gaze to the woman who stood well behind the man. She stared at _him_ with a curious mixture of fascination and fright, poised for instant flight. When had she last seen another man here?

          Chaney asked: "Kathryn?"

          She didn't respond, but the man said: "My sister."

          The daughter was like the mother in nearly every respect, lacking only the summer tan and the delta pants. She was bundled in a great coat against the chill and wore the common boots that were much too large for her feet. A pair of binoculars hung around her neck: he felt closely observed. Her head was bare, revealing Katrina's great avalanche of fine brown hair; her eyes were the same soft--now frightened--delightful shade. She was a small woman, no more than a hundred pounds when free of the bulky boots and coat, and gave every appearance of being quick and alert. She also gave the appearance of being older than Katrina.

          Chaney looked from one to the other: the two of them, brother and sister, were years beyond the people he had left in the past, years beyond their parents.

          He said at last: "Do you know the date?"

          "No, sir."

          Hesitation, then: "I think you were waiting for me."

          Arthur Saltus nodded, and there was the barest hint of affirmation from the woman.

          "My father said you would be here--sometime. He was certain you would come; you were the last of the three."

          Surprise: "No one else, after us?"

          "No one."

          Chaney touched the grave a last time, and their eyes followed his hand. He had one more question to ask before he would risk getting to his feet.

          "Who lies here?"

          Arthur Saltus said: "My father."

          Chaney wanted to cry out: how? when? why? but embarrassment held his tongue, embarrassment and pain and depression; he bitterly regretted the day he'd accepted Katrina's offer and stepped into this unhappy position. He climbed to his feet, avoiding sudden moves that could be misinterpreted, and was thankful he hadn't taken a picture of the grave--thankful he wouldn't have to tell Katrina, or Saltus, or Seabrooke, what he'd found here. He would make no mention of the grave at all.

          Standing, Chaney searched the area carefully, looking over their heads at the weedy garden, the parking lot, the company street beyond the lot and all of the station open to his eye. He saw no one else.

          Sharp question: "Are you two alone here?"

          The woman had jumped at his tone and seemed about to flee, but her brother held his ground.

          "No, sir."

          A pause, and then: "Where is Katrina?"

          "She is waiting in the place, Mr. Chaney."

          "Does she know I am here?"

          "Yes, sir."

          "She knew I would ask about her?"

          "Yes, sir. She thought you would."

          Chaney said: "I'm going to break a rule."

          "She thought you would do that, too."

          "But she didn't object?"

          "She gave us instructions, sir. If you asked, we were to say that she _told_ you where she would wait."

          Chaney nodded his wonder. "Yes--she did that. She did that twice." He moved back along the path by way of the cistern and they carefully retreated before him, still uncertain of him. "Did you do this?"

          "My father and I dug it, Mr. Chaney. We had your book. The descriptions were very clear."

          "I'd tell Haakon, if I dared."

          Arthur Saltus stepped aside when they reached the parking lot and allowed Chaney to go ahead of him. The woman had darted off to one side and now kept a prudent distance. She continued to stare at him, a stare that might have been rude under other circumstances, and Chaney was very sure she'd seen no other man for too many years. He was equally certain she'd never seen a man like him inside the protective fence: that was her apprehension.

          He ignored the rifle resting in the cart.

          Brian Chaney fitted the keys into the twin locks and swung the heavy door. His two lanterns rested on the top step, and as before a rush of musty air fell out into the waning afternoon sunlight. Chaney paused awkwardly on the doorsill wondering what to say--wondering how to say goodbye to these people. Only a damned fool would say something flippant or vacuous or inane; only a damned fool would utter one of the meaningless cliches of _his_ age; but only a stupid fool would simply walk away from them without saying anything.

          He glanced again at the sky and at the golden fleece about the sun, at the new grass and leaves and then at the aging mound of yellow clay. At length his gaze swung back to the man and woman who waited on him.

          He said: "Thank you for trusting me."

          Saltus nodded. "They said you could be trusted."

          Chaney studied Arthur Saltus and almost saw again the unruly sandy hair and the peculiar set to his eyes-- the eyes of a man long accustomed to peering against the sun-bright sea. He looked long at Kathryn Saltus but could _not_ see the transparent blouse or the delta pants: on her those garments would be obscene. Those garments belonged to a world long gone. He searched her face for a moment too long, and was falling head over heels when reality brought him up short.

          Harsh reality: she lived _here_ but he belonged back there. It was folly to entertain even dreams about a woman living a hundred years ahead of him. Hurtful reality.

          His conscience hurt when he closed the door because he had no more to say to them. Chaney turned away and went down the steps, putting behind him the quiet sun, the chill world of 2000-plus, the unknown survivors beyond the fence who had fled in terror at sight and sound of him, and the half-familiar survivors within the fence who were sharp reminders of his own loss. His conscience hurt, but he didn't turn back.

          The time was near sunset on an unknown day.

          It was the longest day of his life.

SEVENTEEN

          The briefing room was subtly different from that one he'd first entered weeks or years or centuries ago.

          He remembered the military policeman who'd escorted him from the gate and then opened the door for him; he remembered his first glance into the room--his lukewarm reception, his tardy entrance. He'd found Kathryn van Hise critically eyeing him, assessing him, wondering if he would measure up to some task ahead; he'd found Major Moresby and Arthur Saltus playing cards, bored, impatiently awaiting his arrival; he'd found the long steel table positioned under lights in the center of the room--all waiting on him.

          He had given his name and started an apology for his tardiness when the first hurtful sound stopped him, chopped him off in mid-sentence and hammered his ears. He had seen them turn together to watch the clock: sixty-one seconds. All that only a week or two ago--a century or two ago--before the bulky envelopes were opened and a hundred flights of fancy loosed. The long journey from the Florida beach had brought him twice to this room, but this time the lantern poorly illuminated the place.

          Katrina was there.

          The aged woman was sitting in her accustomed chair to one side of the oversized steel table--sitting quietly in the darkness beneath the extinct ceiling lights. As always, her clasped hands rested on the tabletop in repose. Chaney put the lantern on the table between them and the poor light fell on her face.

          Katrina.

          Her eyes were bright and alive, as sharply alert as he remembered them, but time had not been lenient with her. He read lines of pain, of unknown troubles and grief; the lines of a tenacious woman who had endured much, had suffered much, but had never surrendered her courage. The skin was drawn tight over her cheekbones, pulled tight around her mouth and chin and appeared sallow in lantern light. The lustrous, lovely hair was entirely gray. Hard years, unhappy years, lean years.

          Despite all that he knew a familiar spark within him: she was as beautiful in age as in youth. He was pleased to find that loveliness so enduring.

          Chaney pulled out his own chair and slid down, never taking his eye off her. The old woman sat without moving, without speaking, watching him intently and waiting for the first word.

          He thought: she might have been sitting there for centuries while the dust and the darkness grew around her; waiting patiently for him to come forward to the target, waiting for him to explore the station, fulfill his last mission, end the survey, and then come opening doors to find the answers to questions raised above ground. Chaney would not have been too surprised to find her waiting in ancient Jericho if he'd gone back ten thousand years. She would have been there, placidly waiting in some temple or hovel, waiting in a place where he would find her when he began opening doors.

          The dusty briefing room was as chill as the cellar had been, as chill as the air outside, and she was bundled in one of the heavy coats. Her hands were encased in a pair of large mittens intended for a man--and if he bent to look, he would find the oversize boots. She appeared bent over, small in the chair and terribly tired.

          Katrina waited on him.

          Chaney struggled for something to say, something that wouldn't sound foolish or melodramatic or carry a ring of false heartiness. She would despise him for that. Here again was the struggle of the outer door, and here again he was fearful of losing the struggle. He had left her here in this room only hours ago, left her with that sense of. dry apprehension as he prepared himself for the third--now final--probe into the future. She had been sitting in the same chair in the same attitude of repose.

          Chaney said: "I'm _still_ in love with you, Katrina."

          He watched her eyes, and thought they were quickly filled with humor and a pleasurable laughter.

          "Thank you, Brian."

          Her voice had aged as well: it sounded more husky than he remembered and it reflected her weariness.

          "I found patches of wild strawberries at the old barracks, Katrina. When do strawberries ripen in Illinois?"

          There _was_ laughter in her eyes. "In May or June. The summers have been quite cold, but May or June."

          "Do you know the year? The number?"

          A minute movement of her head. "The power went out many years ago. I'm sorry, Brian, but I have lost the count."

          "I don't suppose it really matters--not now, not with what we've already learned. I agree with Pindar."

          She looked her question.

          He said: "Pindar lived about twenty-five hundred years ago but he was wiser than a lot of men alive today. He warned man of peering too far into the future, he warned of not liking what would be found." An apologetic gesture; a grin. "Bartlett again: my vice. The Commander was always teasing me about my affair with Bartlett."

          "Arthur waited long to see you. He hoped you would come early, that he might see you again."

          "I would have liked-- Didn't anyone _know?_"

          "No."

          "But why not? That gyroscope was tracking me."

          "No one knew your arrival date; no one would guess. The gyroscope device could not measure your progress after the power failed _here_. We knew only the date of failure, when the TDV suddenly stopped transmitting signals to the computer _there_. You were wholly lost to us, Brian."

          "Sheeg! Those goddam infallible engineers and their goddam infallible inventions!" He caught himself and was embarrassed at the outburst. "Excuse me, Katrina," Chaney reached across the table and closed his hands over hers. "I found the Commander's grave outside--I wish I had been on time. And I had already decided not to tell you about that grave when I went back, when I turned in my report." He peered at her. "I _didn't_ tell anyone, did I?"

          "No, you reported nothing."

          A satisfied nod. "Good for me--I'm still keeping my mouth shut. The Commander made me promise not to tell you about your future marriage, a week or so ago when we returned from the Joliet trials. But you tried to pry the secret out of me, remember?"

          She smiled at his words. "A week or so ago."

          Chaney mentally kicked himself. "I have this bad habit of putting my foot in my mouth."

          A little movement of her head to placate him. "But I guessed at your secret, Brian. Between your manner and Arthur's deport-ment, I guessed it. You put yourself away from me."

          "I think you had already made up your mind. The little signs were beginning to show, Katrina." He had a vivid memory of the victory party the night of their return.

          She said: "I had almost decided at that time, and I _did_ decide a short while afterward; I _did_ decide when he came back hurt froth his survey. He was so helpless, so near death when you and the doctor took him from the vehicle I decided on the spot." She glanced at his enfolding hands and then raised her eyes. "But I was aware of your own intentions. I knew you would be hurt."

          He squeezed her fingers with encouragement. "Long ago and far away, Katrina. I'm getting over it."

          She made no reply, knowing it to be a half-truth.

          "I met the children--" He stopped, aware of the awkwardness. "Children they are not--they're older than I am! I met Arthur and Kathryn out there but they were afraid of me."

          Katrina nodded and again her gaze slid away from him to rest on his enveloping hands.

          "Arthur is ten years older than you, I think, but Kathryn should be about the same age. I am sorry I can't be more precise than that; I am sorry I can't tell you how long my husband has been dead. We no longer know time here, Brian; we only live from one summer to the next. It is not the happiest existence." After a while her hands moved inside his, and she glanced up again. "They were afraid of you because they've known no other man since the station was overrun, since the military personnel left here and we stayed within the fence for safety. For a year or two we dared not even leave this building."

          Bitterly: "The people out there were afraid of me, too. They ran away from me."

          She was quickly astonished, and betrayed alarm.

          "Which people? Where?"

          "The family I found outside the fence--down there by the railroad tracks."

          "There is no one alive out there."

          "Katrina, there _is_--I saw them, called to them, begged them to come back, but they ran away in fear."

          "How many? Were there many of them?"

          "Three. A family of three: father, mother, and a little boy. I found them walking along the railroad track out there beyond the northwest corner. The little fellow was picking up something--pieces of coal, perhaps--and putting them in a bag his mother carried; they seemed to be making a game of it. They were walking in peace, in contentment until I called to them."

          Tersely: "Why did you do that? Why did you call attention to yourself?"

          "Because I was lonely! Because I was sick and hurt at sight of an empty world! I yelled out because those people were the only living things I'd found here, other than a frightened rabbit. I wanted their company, I wanted their news! I would have given them everything I owned for only an hour of their time. Katrina, I wanted to know if people were still living in this world." He stopped and took tighter rein on his emotions. More quietly: "I wanted to talk to them, to ask questions, but they were afraid of me--scared witless, shocked by sight of me. They ran like that frightened rabbit and I never saw them again. I can't tell you how much that hurt me."

          She pulled her hands from his and dropped them into her lap.

          "Katrina--"

          She wouldn't look up at once, but steadfastly kept her gaze on the tabletop. The movement of her hands had left small trails in the dust. He thought the tiny bundle of her seemed more wilted and withdrawn than before: the taut skin on her face appeared to have aged in the last few minutes--or perhaps that age had been claiming her all the while they talked.

          "Katrina, please."

          After a long while she said: "I am sorry, Brian. I will apologize for my children, and for that family. They dared not trust you, none of them, and the poor family felt they had good reason to fear you." Her head came up and he felt shock. "Everyone fears you; no one will trust you since the rebellion. I am the only one here who does not fear a black man."

          He was hurt again, not by her words but because she was crying. It was painful to watch her cry.

          Brian Chaney came into the briefing room a second time. He was carrying another lantern, two plastic cups, and a container of water from the stores. He would have brought along a bottle of whiskey if that had been available, but it was likely that the Commander had long ago consumed the whiskey on his successive birthdays.

          The old woman had wiped her eyes dry.

          Chaney filled both cups and set the first one on the table before her. "Drink up--we'll drink a toast."

          "To what, Brian?"

          "To what? Do we need an excuse?" He swung his arm in an expansive gesture which took in the room. "To that damned clock up there: knocking off sixtyone seconds while my ears suffered. To that red telephone: I never used it to call the President and tell him he was a dunce. To us: a demographer from the Indiana Corporation, and a research supervisor from the Bureau of Standards--the last two misfits sitting at the end of the world. We're out of place and out of time, Katrina: they don't need demographers and researchers here--they don't have corporations and bureaus here. Drink to us."

          "Brian, you are a clown."

          "Oh, yes." He sat down and looked at her closely in the lantern light. "Yes, I am that. And I think you are almost smiling again. Please smile for me."

          Katrina smiled: pale shadow of an old smile.

          Chaney said: "Now _that_ is why I still love you!" He lifted his cup. "To the most beautiful researcher in the world--and you may drink to the most frustrated demographer in the world. Bottoms up!" Chaney emptied the cup, and thought the water tasted flat--stale.

          She nodded over the rim of her cup and sipped.

          Chaney stared at the long table, the darkened lights overhead, the stopped clock, the dead telephones. "I'm supposed to be working--making a survey."

          "It doesn't matter."

          "Have to keep Seabrooke happy. I can report a family out there: at least one family alive and living in peace. I suppose there are more--there has to be more. Do you know of anyone else? Anyone at all?"

          Patiently: "There were a few at first, those many years ago; we managed to keep in touch with some survivors by radio before the power failure. Arthur located a small group in Virginia, a military group living underground in an Army command post; and later he contacted a family in Maine. Sometimes we would make brief contact with one or two individuals in the west, in the mountain states, but it was always poor news. Each of them survived for the same reasons: by a series of lucky circumstances, or by their skills and their wits, or because they were unusually well protected as we were. Their numbers were always small and it was always discouraging news."

          "But _some_ survived. That's important, Katrina. How long have you been alone on the station?"

          "Since the rebellion, since the Major's year."

          Chaney gestured. "That could be--" He peered at her, guessing at her age. "That could be thirty years ago."

          "Perhaps."

          "But what happened to the other people here?"

          She said: "Almost all the military personnel were withdrawn at the beginning; they were posted to overseas duty. The few who remained did not survive the attack when the rebels overran the station. A very few civilian technicians stayed with us for a time, but then left to rejoin their families--or search for their families. The laboratory was already empty in Arthur's year. We had been ordered underground for the duration."

          "The duration. How long was that?"

          The sharp old eyes studied him. "I would think it is ending just now, Brian. Your description of the family outside the fence suggests it is ending now."

          Bitterly: "And nobody around but you and me to sign the peace treaty and pose for the cameras. Seabrooke?"

          "Mr. Seabrooke was relieved of his post, dismissed, shortly after the three launches. I believe he returned to the Dakotas. The President had blamed _him_ for the failure of the survey, and he was made the scapegoat."

          Chaney struck the table with a fist.

          "I _said_ that man was a dunce--just one more in a long line of idiots and dunces inhabiting the White House! Katrina, I don't understand how this country has managed to survive with so many incompetent fools at the top."

          Softly-spoken reminder: "It hasn't, Brian."

          He muttered under his breath and glared at the dust on the table. Aloud: "Excuse me."

          She nodded easily but said nothing.

          A memory prodded him. "What happened to the JCS, to those men who tried to take Camp David?"

          She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to close off the past. Her expression was bitter. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff were executed before a firing squad, a public spectacle. The President had declared a business moratorium on the day of the execution; government offices closed and the children were let out of school, all to witness the spectacle on the networks. He was determined to give the country a warning. It was ghastly, depressing, and I hated him for it."

          Chaney stared at her. "And I have to go back and tell him what he's going to do. What a hell of a chore _this_ survey is!" He hurled the drinking cup across the room, unable to stifle the angry impulse. "Katrina, I wish you had never found me on the beach. I wish I had walked away from you, or thrown you into the sea, or kidnapped you and ran away to Israel--anything."

          She smiled again, perhaps at the memory of the beach. "But that would have accomplished nothing, Brian. The Arab Federation overran Israel and drove the people into the sea. We wouldn't have escaped anything."

          He uttered a single word and then had to apologize again, although the woman didn't understand the epithet. "The Major certainly jumped into the beginning of hell."

          She corrected him. "The Major jumped into the end of it; the wars had been underway for nearly twenty years and the nation was on the brink of disaster. Major Moresby came forward only in time to witness the end for us, for the United States. After him, the government ceased to be. After twenty years we were wholly exhausted, used up, and could not defend ourselves against anyone."

          The old woman spoke with a dry weariness, a long fatigue, and he could listen to her voice and her spirit running down as she talked.

          The wars began just after the Presidential election of 1980, just after the field trials into Joliet. Arthur Saltus had told her of the two Chinese railroad towns blown off the map, and suddenly one day in December the Chinese bombed Darwin, Australia, in long-delayed retaliation. The whole of northern Australia was made uninhabitable by radiation. The public was never told of the first strike against the railroad towns but only of the second: it was painted an act of brutal savagery against an innocent populace. Radioactivity spread across the Arafura Sea to the islands to the north, and drifted toward the Phillipines. Great Britain appealed to the United States for aid.

          The re-elected President and his Congress declared war on the Chinese Peoples' Republic in the week following his inauguration, after having waged an undeclared war since 1954. The Pentagon had privately assured him the matter could be terminated and the enemy subdued in three weeks. Some months later the President committed massive numbers of troops to the Asian Theater: now involving eleven nations from the Phillipine Republic westward to Pakistan, and to the defense of Australia. He was then compelled to send troops to Korea, to counteract renewed hostilities there, but lost them all when the Chinese and the Mongolians overran the peninsula and ended foreign occupation.

          She said tiredly: "The President was re-elected in 1980, and again for a third term in 1984. After Arthur brought back the terrible news from Joliet, the man seemed unable to control himself and unable to do anything right. The third-term prohibition was repealed at his urging, and some time during that third term the Constitution was suspended altogether 'for the duration of the emergency.' The emergency never ended. Brian, that man was the last elected President the country ever had. After him there was nothing."

          Chaney said bitterly: "The meek, the terrible meek. I hope he is still alive to see this!"

          "He isn't, he wasn't. He was assassinated and his body thrown into the burning White House. They burned Washington to destroy a symbol of oppression."

          "Burned it! Wait until I tell him _that_."

          She made a little gesture to hush him or contradict him. "All that and more, much more. Those twenty years were a frightful ordeal; the last few years were numbing. Life appeared to stop, to give way to savagery. We missed the little things at first: passenger trains and airliners were forbidden to civilian traffic, mail deliveries were cut back to twice a week and then halted altogether, the news telecasts were restricted to only one a day and then as the war worsened, further restricted, to only local news not of a military nature. We were isolated from the world and nearly isolated from Washington.

          "Our trucks were taken away for use elsewhere; food was not brought in, nor medicines, nor clothing, nor fuel, and we fell back on the supplies stored on station. The military personnel were transferred to other posts or to points overseas, leaving only a token crew to guard this installation.

          "Brian, that guard was compelled to fire on nearby townspeople attempting to raid our stores: the rumor had been spread that enormous stockpiles of food were here, and they were desperately hungry."

          Katrina looked down at her hands and swallowed painfully. "The twenty years finally ended for us in a shocking civil war."

          Chaney said: "Ramjets."

          "They were called that, once they came into the open, once their statement of intent was publicized: Revolution And Morality. Sometimes we would see banners bearing the word RAM, but the name soon became something dirty--something akin to that other name they were called for centuries: it was a very bitter time and you would have suffered if you had remained on station.

          "Brian, people everywhere were starving, dying of disease, rotting in neglect and misery, but those people possessed a leadership we now lacked. Ramjets had efficient leadership. Their leaders used them against us and it was our turn to suffer. There _was_ revolution but little or no morality; whatever morality they may have possessed was quickly lost in the rebellion and we all suffered. The country was caught up in a senseless savagery."

          "That's when Moresby came up?"

          A weary nod.

          Major Moresby witnessed the beginning of the civil war when he emerged on his target date. _They_ had chosen the same date for the outbreak of the rebellion--they had selected the Fourth of July as _their_ target in a bid for independence from white America and the bombing of Chicago was intended to be the signal. Ramjet liaison agents in Peiping had arranged that: Chicago--not Atlanta or Memphis or Birmingham--was the object of their greatest hatred after the wall. But the plan went awry.

          The rebellion broke out almost a week earlier--quite by accident--when triggered by a riot in the little river town of Cairo, Illinois. A traffic arrest there, followed by a street shooting and then a wholesale jail delivery of black prisoners, upset the schedule: the revolt was quickly out of control. The state militia and the police were helpless, depleted in number, their reserve manpower long since spent overseas; there was no regular army left standing in the United States except for token troops at various posts and stations, and even the ceremonial guards at national monuments had been removed and assigned to foreign duty. There was no remaining force to prevent the rebellion. Major Moresby climbed out of the vehicle and into the middle of the holocaust.

          The agony went on for almost seventeen months.

          The President was assassinated, Congress fled--or died while trying to flee--and Washington burned. They burned many of the cities where they were numerically strong. In their passion they burned themselves out of their homes and destroyed the fields and crops which had fed them.

          The few remaining lines of transportation which were open up to that moment ceased entirely. Trucks were intercepted, looted and burned, their drivers shot. Buses were stopped on interstate highways and white passengers killed. Railroad trains were abandoned wherever they stopped, or wherever the tracks were torn up, engineers and crews were murdered wherever they were caught. Desperate hunger soon followed the stoppage of traffic.

          Katrina said: "Everyone here expected the Chinese to intervene, to invade, and we knew we could not stop them. Brian, our country had lost or abandoned twenty million men overseas; we were helpless before any invader. But they did not come. I thank God they did not come. They were prevented from coming when the Soviet turned on them in a holy war in the name of Communism: that long, long border dispute burst into open warfare and the Russians drove on Lop Nor." She made a little gesture of futility. "We never learned what happened; we never learned the outcome of anything in Europe. Perhaps they are still fighting, if anyone is left alive to fight. Our contact with the Continent was lost, and has never been restored to our knowledge. _We_ lost contact with that military group in Virginia when the electricity failed. We were alone."

          He said in wonder: "Israel, Egypt, Australia, Britain, Russia, China--all of them: the world."

          "All of them," she repeated with a dull fatigue. "And our troops were wasted in nearly every one of them, thrown away by a man with a monumental ego. Not more than a handful of those troops ever returned. We were done."

          Chaney said: "I guess the Commander came up at the end--seventeen months later."

          "Arthur emerged from the TDV on his target date, just past the end of it: the beginning of the second winter after the rebellion. We think the rebellion _had_ ended, spent and exhausted on its own fury. We think the men who assaulted him at the gatehouse were stragglers, survivors who had managed through the first winter. He said those men were as surprised by his appearance, as he was by theirs; they might have fled if he had not cornered them." Katrina laced her fingers on the tabletop in familiar gesture and looked at him. "We saw a few armed bands roaming the countryside that second winter. We repaired the fence, stood guard, but were not again molested: Arthur put out warnings he had found in the book you gave him. By the following spring, the bands of men had dwindled to a few scavengers prowling the fields for game--but after that we saw no one. Until you came, we saw no one."

          He said: "So ends the bloody business of the day."

EIGHTEEN

          Katrina peered across the table and sought to break the unhappy silence between them.

          "A family, you said? Father, mother, and child? A healthy child? How old was he?"

          "I don't know: three, maybe four. The kid was having himself a fine time--playing, hollering, picking up things--until I scared off his parents." Chaney still felt bitter about that encounter. "They all looked healthy enough. They _ran_ healthy."

          Katrina nodded her satisfaction. "It gives one hope for the future, doesn't it?"

          "I suppose so."

          She reprimanded him: "You _know_ so. If those people were healthy, they were eating well and living in some degree of safety. If the man carried no weapon, he thought none was needed. If they had a child and were together, family life has been re-established. And if that child survived his birth and was thriving, it suggests a quiet normalcy has returned to the world, a measure of sanity. All that gives me hope for the futare."

          "A quiet normalcy," he repeated. "The sun in that sky was quiet. It was cold out there."

          The dark eyes peered at him. "Have you ever admitted to yourself that you could be wrong, Brian? Have you even thought of your translations today? You were a stubborn man; you came close to mocking Major Moresby."

          Chaney failed to answer: it was not easy to reassess the _Eschatos_ scroll in a day. A piece of his mind insisted that ancient Hebrew fiction was only fiction.

          They sat in the heavy silence of the briefing room, looking at each other in the lantern light and knowing this was coming to an end. Chaney was uneasy. There had been a hundred--a thousand--questions he'd wanted to ask when he first walked into the room, when he first discovered her, but now he could think of little to say. Here was Katrina, the once youthful, radiant Katrina of the swimming pool--and outside was Katrina's family waiting for him to leave.

          He wanted desperately to ask one more question but at the same time he was afraid to ask: what happened to _him_ after his return, after the completion of the probe? What had happened to _him?_ He wanted to know where he had gone, what he had done, how he had survived the perilous years--he wanted to know if he had survived those years. Chaney was long convinced that he was not on station in 1980, not there at the time of the field trials, but where was he then? She might have some knowledge of him after he'd finished the mission and left; she might have kept .in touch. He was afraid to ask. Pindar's advice stopped his tongue.

          He got up suddenly from his chair. "Katrina, will you walk downstairs with me?"

          She gave him a strange look, an almost frightened look, but said: "Yes, sir."

          Katrina left her chair and came around the table to him. Age had slowed her graceful walk and he was acutely distressed to see her move with difficulty. Chaney picked up a lantern, and offered her his free arm. He felt a flush of excitement as she neared him, touched him.

          They descended the stairs without speaking. Chaney slowed his pace to accommodate her and they went down slowly, one cautious step at a time. Kathryn van Hise held on to the rail and moved with the hesitant pace of the aged.

          They stopped at the opened door to the operations room. Chaney held the lantern high to inspect the vehicle: the hatch was open and the hull of the craft covered by dust; the concrete cradle seemed dirty with age.

          He asked suddenly: "How much did I report, Katrina? Did I tell them about you? Your family? Did I tell them about that family on the railroad tracks? What did I say?"

          "Nothing." She wouldn't look up at him.

          "What?"

          "You reported nothing."

          He thought her voice was strained. "I had to say something. Gilbert Seabrooke will demand _something_."

          "Brian--" She stopped, swallowed hard, and then began again. "You reported nothing, Mr. Chaney. You did not return from your probe. We knew you were lost to us when the vehicle failed to return at sixty-one seconds: you were wholly lost to us."

          Brian Chaney very carefully put the lantern down and then turned her around and pulled her head up. He wanted to see her face, wanted to see why she was lying. Her eyes were wet with threatened tears but there was no lie there.

          Stiffly: "Why not, Katrina?"

          "We have no power, Mr. Chaney. The vehicle is helpless, immobile."

          Chaney swung his head to stare at the TDV and as quickly swung back to the woman. He wasn't aware that he was holding her in a painful grip.

          "The engineers can pull me back."

          "No. They can do nothing for you: they lost you when that device stopped tracking, when the computer went silent, when the power failed here and you overshot the failure date. They lost you; they lost the vehicle." She pulled away from his hard grasp, and her wavering gaze fell. "You didn't come back to the laboratory, Mr. Chaney. No one saw you again after the launch; no one saw you again until you appeared here, today."

          Almost shouting: "Stop calling me Mr. Chaney!"

          "I am . . . I am terribly sorry. You were as lost to us as Major Moresby. We thought . . ."

          He turned his back on the woman and deliberately walked into the operations room. Brian Chaney climbed up on the polywater tank and thrust a leg through the open hatch of the TDV. He didn't bother to undress or remove the heavy boots. Wriggling downward through the hatch, he slammed it 'shut over his head and looked for the blinking green light. There was none. Chaney stretched out full length on the web sling and thrust his heels against the kickbar at the bottom. No red light answered him.

          He knew panic.

          He fought against that and waited for his nerves to rest, waited for a stolid placidity to return. The memory of his first test came back: he'd thought then the vehicle was like a cramped tomb, and he thought so now. Lying on the webbed sling for the first time--and waiting for something spectacular to happen--he had felt an ache in his legs and had stretched them out to relieve the ache. His feet had struck the kickbar, sending him back to the beginning before the engineers were ready; they had been angry with him. And an hour later, in the lecture room, everyone heard and saw the results of his act: the vehicle kicked backward as he thrust out his feet, the sound struck his eardrums and the lights dimmed. The astonished engineers left the room on the run, and Gilbert Seabrooke proposed a new study program to be submitted to Indic. The TDV sucked power from its present, not its past.

          Chaney reached up to snug the hatch. It was snug. The light that should have been blinking green stayed dark. Chaney jut the heavy boots against the bar and pushed. The red light stayed dark. He pushed again, then kicked at the bar. After a moment he twisted around to peer through the plastic bubble into the room. It was dimly lit by the lantern resting on the floor.

          He shouted: "Goddammit, go!" And kicked again.

          The room was dimly lit by lantern light.

          He walked slowly along the corridor in the feeble light of the lantern, walked woodenly in shock tinged with fear. The failure of the vehicle to move under his prodding had stunned him. He wished desperately for Katrina, wished she was standing by with a word or a gesture he might seize for a crutch, but she wasn't visible in the corridor. She had left him while he struggled with the vehicle, perhaps to return to the briefing room, perhaps to go outside, perhaps to retire to whatever sort of shelter she shared with her son and daughter. He was alone, fighting panic. The door to the engineering laboratory was standing open, as was the door to the storeroom, but she wasn't waiting for him in either place. Chaney listened for her but heard nothing, and went on after the smallest pause. The dusty corridor ended and a flight of stairs led upward to the operations exit.

          He thought the sign on the door was a bitter mockery--one of the many visited on him since he'd sailed for Israel a century or two ago. He regretted the day he had read and translated those scrolls--but at the same time he wished desperately he knew the identity of that scribe who had amused himself and his fellows by creating the _Eschatos_ document. A single name would be enough: an Amos or a Malachi or an Ibycus.

          He would hoist a glass of water from the Nabataean cistern and salute the unknown genius for his wit and wisdom, for his mockery. He would shout to the freshly scrubbed sky: "Here, damn your eyes, Ibycus! Here, for the lohg-dead dragons and the ruptured fence and the ice on the rivers. Here, for my head of gold, my breast of silver, my legs of iron and my feet of clay. My feet of clay, Ibycus!" And he would hurl the glass at the lifeless TDV.

          Chaney turned the keys in the locks and pushed out into the chill night air. The darkness surprised him; he hadn't realized he'd spent so many bittersweet hours inside with Katrina. The parking lot was empty but for the cart and his discarded rifle. Katrina's children hadn't waited for him, and he was aware of a small hurt.

          He stepped away from the building and then turned back to look at it: a massive white concrete temple in the moonlight. The barbaric legions had failed to bring it down, despite the damage caused elsewhere on the station.

          The sky was the second surprise: he had seen it by day and marveled, but at night it was shockingly beautiful. The stars _were_ bright and hard as carefully polished gems, and there were a hundred or a thousand more than he'd ever seen before; he had never known a sky like that in his lifetime. The entire eastern rim of the heavens was lighted by a rising moon of remarkable brilliance.

          Chaney stood alone in the center of the parking lot searching the face of the moon, searching out the Sea of Vapors and the pit known as Bode's Crater. The pulsating laser there caught his eye and held it. That one thing had not changed--that one monument not destroyed. The brilliant mote still flashed on the rim of Bode's Crater, marking the place where two astronauts had fallen in the Seventies, marking their grave and their memorial. One of them had been black. Brian Chaney thought himself lucky: he had air to breathe but those men had none.

          He said aloud: "You weren't so damned clever, Ibycus! You missed _that_ one--your prophets didn't show you the _new_ sign in the sky."

          Chaney sat down in the tilted cart and stretched out his legs for balance. The rifle was an unpleasant lump under his spine and he threw it aside to be rid of it. In a little while he leaned backward and rested against the bed of the cart. The whole of the southeast sky was before him. Chaney thought he should go looking for Katrina, for Arthur and Kathryn, and a place to sleep. Perhaps he would do that after a while, but not now, not now.

          The stray thought came that the engineers had been right about one thing: the polywater tank hadn't leaked.

          Elwood Station was at peace.