Highway of Eternity (2 page)

He paused, studying his empty glass. Then he sighed and looked up again. “The trouble is, we haven't much time. This is Friday night, and they're planning to blow it Sunday morning, around dawn, when everyone is off the streets.”

Boone whistled softly. “You cut it fine.”

“I couldn't help it. You were hard to locate. When I learned you were heading for Singapore, I cabled every hotel where you might stay. Now, if we're going to do anything, we have to move fast.”

“Tomorrow—Saturday,” Boone agreed.

“Make it tomorrow evening. They're holding some kind of media thing on the last day of the old hotel during the day. Television and press will be all over the place. We'll go in when it quiets down.”

He stood up and collected the glasses, going back to the well-stocked bar. “You're staying with me, of course,” he said.

“I figured on it,” Boone answered.

“Good. Then we'll have one more drink and maybe do a bit of reminiscing on old times. After that, I'll show you to your room. We'll forget the box until tomorrow evening.”

2

Hopkins Acre: 1745

David had roamed the fields since early afternoon, accompanied by his favorite setter, enjoying the quiet satisfaction of being alone in a beautiful and ordered world.

Out of the stubble at his feet a grouse came storming up. Automatically, the gun came to his shoulder and his cheek was against the stock. The sights lined on the bird, and he jumped the barrel sharply to the left. “Bang!” he said and knew that if a shell had been in the chamber and he'd pulled the trigger, the bird would be tumbling to the ground.

The setter came galumphing back from chasing the bird and set himself on the ground in front of David, looking up and laughing in his way, as if to say, “Aren't we having fun!”

It had taken a long time for the setters of Hopkins Acre to adapt. They had been bred to flush the birds and bring the dead ones back. They had not understood this new procedure. But it was different now, after many generations of setters. They no longer expected the crack of the gun or to find dead birds.

So, he asked himself for the thousandth time, why did he carry the gun? Was it fondness for the feel of its weight and the way it fitted to his shoulder? Or was it to reaffirm to himself that he was a truly civilized creature, though of a line with a long history of cruelty and brutality? But that would be an unjust pose. He would not kill the sheep, but he ate the mutton. He was still a carnivore, and a carnivore was a killer still.

It had been a good day, even without the birds, he reminded himself. He had stood upon the hill and gazed down on the straw-thatched houses of the village where the tillers of soil and husbandmen of the sheep and cattle lived. In the pastures he had seen the animals, sometimes quite alone and sometimes with a boy and dog keeping watch. He had encountered the grunting hordes of swine in the heavy woods, wild as deer and rooting for fallen acorns. But he had not ventured close. Even now, he could find no fellowship with the happy clods who worked the land. He had seen the colors of the woods changing in autumn and had breathed the chill air. He had come down to the brooks that flowed through the woods and had drunk from them, watching the darting shadows of trout.

Earlier, he had caught sight of Spike playing some ridiculous game, hopping carefully in erratic patterns. David had watched him, wondering once again what manner of creature Spike might be.

Tiring of his game, Spike had taken off, moving toward a patch of woods, but bounding in a random pattern which had more grace and spontaneity than the restricted hopping of the game. The sun of the autumn afternoon had glinted off his globular body, with the sharp points of his spikes spearing the sunbeams and scattering them in sparkles. David had called out to Spike, who apparently had not heard him and had finally disappeared into the woods.

The day had been full, David told himself; now the shadows lengthened and the chill deepened. It was time to be turning home.

There would be a saddle of mutton on the board tonight. Emma, his older sister who was married to Horace, had told him so and had warned him to get home on time.

“Do not be late,” she told him. “Once done, mutton cannot wait. It must be eaten warm. And be careful of that gun. I don't know why you take it. You never bring home anything. Why don't you bring back a brace or two of grouse? They would be tasty eating.”

“Because I do not kill,” he told her. “None of us ever kill. It's been bred out of us.”

Which was not true, of course.

“Horace would kill,” she told him, tartly. “If there were need of food, Horace would kill. And once he had brought it home, I would dress and cook it.”

She had been right, he thought. Horace, that dour and practical man, would kill if there were need of it, though not for simple fun; Horace never did anything for the fun of it. He must have a reason to assign to everything he did.

David had laughed at Emma's worries. “The gun can't do me harm,” he told her. “It's not even loaded.”

“You'll load it when you put it back on the rack,” she said. “Timothy will insist you load it. If you ask me, our brother Timothy is a little gone.”

They all were a little gone. He and Timothy and perhaps, in a different way, Horace and Emma. But not his little sister, Enid. She, of all of them, was the free spirit and the thinker. She thought longer thoughts, he was sure, than any of the rest of them.

So, remembering the mutton that could not wait and must be eaten warm, he headed for home with the dog, done now with fun and laughter, trailing sedately behind him.

Topping a knoll, he saw the house from a distance, set in a green rectangle of lawn among the tawny fields. Heavy growths of trees, many of them resplendent in their autumn foliage, ran all around the perimeter of the park, in the center of which stood the house. A dusty road which was now no more than a double cart track ran in front of the park, a road that ran from nowhere to nowhere. From the road, the access entrance ran up to the house, flanked by rows of towering poplars that through the years had become the worse for wear and which, in a little time, would die away and fall.

Trailed by the faithful dog, David went down the knoll and across the brownness of the autumn fields, finally coming up to the entrance road. Ahead of him lay the house, a sprawling two-storey fieldstone structure, with its mullioned windows turned to subdued fire by the setting sun.

He climbed the broad stone stairs and struggled momentarily with the heavy and reluctant latch on the massive double door before one of the doors swung smoothly open on well-greased hinges. Beyond the foyer lay the extensive drawing room, lit only by a brace of candles set upon a table at its farther end and beyond it the many-candled brightness of the dining room. From that second room came the subdued murmur of voices, and he knew the family already was foregathering for the evening meal.

He walked into the drawing room and turned to the right to come into the gun room, filled with shadows made alive by the flickering of a single candle set upon a bar. Going to the gun rack, he broke the shotgun and fished out of a pocket in his hunting coat the two shells he carried, clicking them into place and closing the breech with a single motion. That done, he put the gun in its place and turned around. Standing well inside the gun room was his sister, Enid.

“Did you have a good day, David?”

“I didn't hear you come in,” he said. “You walk like thistledown. Is there something that I need to know before I walk into the lion's den?”

She shook her head. “No lion tonight. Horace is almost human, as close to human as he ever gets. We had word today: Gahan is coming in from Athens.”

“Gahan I have no liking for,” said David. “He is so intensely scholarly. He lords it over me; makes me feel useless.”

“And me as well,” said Enid. “Maybe the two of us are useless. I don't know. If you and I are useless, I enjoy being useless.”

“So do I,” said David.

“Horace likes Gahan, though, and if his coming makes Horace livable, we'll gain from the visit. Timothy is ecstatic. Gahan told Horace he would be bringing Timothy a book—probably a scroll—written by Hecateus.”

“Hec—well, whatever the name may be. I've never heard of him. If it is a him.”

“A him and a Greek,” said Enid. “Hecateus of Miletus. Fifth or sixth century. Scholars are of the opinion that Hecateus was the first man to write serious historical prose, using a critical method to separate out the myth content of history. Gahan thinks the scroll he has is an unknown book, one that had been lost.”

“If it is,” said David, “that's the last we'll see of Timothy for some time. He'll lock himself in the library, have his meals brought in. It'll take him a year to mull his way through it. He'll be out from underfoot.”

“I think,” she said, “that he is being led astray, that he is becoming mired in history and philosophy. He is looking for the basic errors we humans made and he thinks that he will find the roots of them in the first few thousand years of human history. He has found a few, of course, but one does not need to study history to be aware of them: the problem of surpluses, the profit motive, and the war motive which arises from one man or tribe having more than another man or tribe may have; or the need of huddling—the need of men and women to huddle in tribes, nations, and empires, reflecting that terrifying sense of insecurity that is part of the human psyche. You could go on and on, of course, but I think Timothy is deluding himself. The meaning that he seeks is a deeper meaning and it is to be found otherwhere than in history.”

He asked, quite seriously, “Enid, do you have some idea? Even a faint idea?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Perhaps never. All I know is that Timothy is looking in all the wrong places.”

“Maybe we should be going in to dinner,” he suggested.

“Yes, I think we should. We can't keep the others waiting. Emma has been in a tizzy that you would be late. Timothy has been sharpening the carving knife. Nora, out in the kitchen, has been in a flutter. The mutton's almost done.”

He offered her his arm and they went across the drawing room, carefully threading their way between the shadowed, half-seen furniture.

“Oh, there you are!” cried Horace when they came into the dining room. “I have been wondering where you were. The mutton cannot wait, you know. Here, you must, each of you, have a glass of this port. It is quite the best I have tasted in years. It is really excellent.”

He poured and stepped around the table, handing each of them a glass. He was a squat man, short and powerful of body, and with the appearance of excessive hairiness. His hair and beard were so black that the blackness seemed to shade into blue.

“You seem in excellent spirit,” David said to him.

“I am,” said Horace. “Gahan will be here tomorrow. I suppose Enid told you that.”

“Yes, she did. Will he be alone or will someone else be with him?”

“He didn't say. There was reception trouble. Interference of some sort. That is something that has not been perfected. Teddy, back in the Pleistocene, thinks it has to do with stresses in the duration alignment. Maybe something to do with directional anomalies.”

Horace knew nothing about the problem, David told himself. He might have some slight knowledge of time techniques, but certainly no grasp of the theory. However, on any stated subject, he was an instant expert and could talk convincingly and authoritatively.

Horace was about to expand further on the matter, but was interrupted when Nora came in from the kitchen, bearing in triumph the platter of mutton. She placed it in front of Timothy and went bustling back into the kitchen. The rest of them found their places at the table and Timothy began the carving of the saddle, making an occasion of it, plying knife and fork with his customary flourish.

David tasted the port. It was excellent. Occasionally, on certain small matters like the selection of a good bottle of port, the law of averages, unassisted, would make Horace right.

They ate in silence for some time. Then Horace judiciously wiped his mouth on his napkin, stuffed the cloth back into his lap, and said, “For some time I have been worried about our twentieth-century outpost in New York. I don't trust this Martin fellow. I've been trying to raise him for the last few months and the blighter does not answer.”

“Maybe he has gone away for a while,” suggested Emma.

“If he were going,” said Horace, “as our security man, he should have kept us informed. He has this woman, Stella, with him. If he's not there, at least she could answer.”

“Maybe she went with him,” said Emma.

“She shouldn't have gone. The post should be manned at all times.”

“I would think,” said David, “that it might be poor policy for us to keep too persistently trying to get in touch with him. As a measure of security, we should keep our communications to a minimum.”

“We are the only ones in this time segment,” said Horace, “who have time capability. There is no one monitoring.”

“I wouldn't bet on that,” David told him.

“What difference does it make?” asked Emma, forever the timid keeper of the peace. “There is no reason for us to be sitting here arguing about it.”

“This Martin almost never talks with us,” Horace complained. “He never tells us anything.”

Timothy laid his knife and fork down on his plate, making more of a clatter than was necessary. “Despite the fact,” he said, “that we know nothing of this man and do not entirely trust him, he still may know what he is doing. You are making something out of nothing, Horace.”

“I met the man and Stella,” said David, “when I went to twentieth-century New York several years ago to run down some books that Timothy wanted. That was the time,” he said to Timothy, “when I brought back the shotgun and rifle for your collection.”