Robert Adams - Castaways 6 - Of Beginings and Endings

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PROLOGUE

Wind howled and wailed about the stone walls and lofty spires of

ancient Eboracum-once called Jor-vik, now called York. The day

preceding had been as bright and sunny and balmy as a summer's day

might be, but in the night this toothed storm had blown in from Thule

by way of the North Sea, temperatures in the environs of the episcopal

city had dropped precipitately, and so much water had been dumped, that

the streets had begun, by wan daybreak, to run as swiftly if not as

deep as the current of the river.

Within the complex of buildings which constituted Yorkminster, in a

sizable chamber which still seemed cramped and cluttered due to the

high shelves packed with jars, caskets, boxes, amphorae, vials, flasks,

bowls, trays, kettles, small caldrons, bags and cases of a plethora of

sizes, shapes and descriptions, a cowled and robed man sat before a

heavy, slate-topped table. Deep in thought, he occasionally roused

himself sufficiently to scribble notes and reminders to himself with a

quill on a sheet of fine vellum.

Wool clothing lined with silk, old-fashioned trunkhose, and ankle-high

shoon of quilted doeskin were not enough to keep the chill from his old

bones this dank, dismal day, so he had had a fire laid and lit on the

hearth and also had fired a small brass brazier nearby on the tabletop

over which to warm his hands fronj time to time.

And old his bones truly were, this man now called His Grace Harold,

Archbishop of York. A new-come stranger, knowing nothing of him, would

have seen the high-ranking churchman and probably have guessed his age

to be about late sixties or early seventies-venerable enough for these

times in which most men, even those of noble and exalted rank,

considered themselves fortunate, lucky, and blessed by God to see fifty

winters-and that stranger would have been wrong, very, very wrong. In

the natural, the expected order of things, creatures are born in their

present and live on into a future until their demise; this old man,

however, was come into this world he presently occupied not only full-

grown but more than a half-century old-although, due to an artificially

produced longevity drug he had, he then looked no more than thirty to

forty years of age.

Born in A.D. 1968, Harold Kenmore had been employed as a research

scientist in a government-sponsored and -operated project in a facility

called Gamebird by the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first

century. More than a decade earlier, he had been one of the members of

the team of scientists which had at last developed a means to retard

the effects of aging of the human body. Therefore he ranked quite high

in his profession and even owned the grudging respect and regard of the

military bureaucrats in charge of the Gamebird Facility.

Part of the work of the Gamebird Project was the attempt to find or

develop a means of time travel; previous generations had so far

depleted that world of fuels and raw materials that even the vast

expenses of the possibly impossible would be considered justified if

said expenditures would only result in an avenue whereby the virgin

resources of past times might be plundered to the benefit of the

impoverished present.*

* Read Castaways in Time Signet Books, 1982

A decade and a half of work resulted in a device that, while expending

horrendous amounts of precious energy, would project inanimate objects

somewhere out of sight and retrieve most of them undamaged. However,

living animals all seemed to come back dead, many of them terribly

mutilated and/or decomposing as well. Even so, so critical were the

needs for fossil fuels and certain ores become that the government

brought inexorable pressure to bear on the project directors so that,

against their better and more informed judgment, a series of human

experiments were then commenced.

The first man projected was dead when retrieved, but thorough

examination of his corpse and clothing established that he had been in

thirteenth-century France or, possibly, Savoy. Therefore, the second

human volunteer had been steeped in mediaeval Romance languages, garbed

in recreated thirteenth-century European attire, and projected. His

body, hideously maimed and dead, had been near-naked when retrieved,

with a piece of parchment nailed to its forehead with a legend stating

in Low Latin, "I am a dead spy.''

For all that a tight lid of secrecy had existed from the very beginning

and had been screwed down even more tightly as the human experiments

had progressed, still word of the disasters had gotten out somehow, and

volunteers of the proper calibers had become virtually nonexistent. But

the governmental pressure had not slacked off at all, and so, when one

of the most promising of the younger scientists, Dr. Lenny Vincenzo,

had volunteered to be the third projectee, the project directors had

felt that they had to accept him, had to use him, had to make the

sacrifice and send him to his virtually certain death.

A real prodigy, holding, despite his youth, several advanced degrees,

Dr. Vincenzo had not required as much preliminary hypno-education as

had either of his ill-fated predecessors, which fact had allowed them

to move faster-though not nearly so fast as the impatient government

might have wished.

After a retrieval device had been surgically implanted under the skin

of one thigh, Vincenzo had been, at his request, dressed in late-

fifteenth-century clothing, provided with reproductions of period coins

in copper, brass, silver, and gold, then projected. He had never been

retrieved. A rotting cadaver, the retrieval nodule properly placed

under the sloughing skin of one thigh, had indeed arrived back at

Gamebird, lacking head, hands, feet, and external sexual organs . . .

but it had not been the body of Dr. Lenny Vincenzo; the blood type and

a host of other tests had proved that. And since, without the nodule on

which the equipment in the lab could home in, there was no way of

trying again to retrieve the young man, he was completely lost

somewhere in past time.

The project director, still under unbearable pressure from the

increasingly threatening government, realizing the young man's

irretrievable loss and suffering deep pangs of guilt over his part in

so dooming him, had suicided, publicly and very messily. He had been

replaced by a Dr. Jane Stone, who, in addition to holding scientific

degrees commensurate to the position, was a lieutenant colonel in the

government security service.

Within his own lifetime, Dr. Harold Kenmore had seen his country of

birth change from a republic ruled over by popularly elected

representatives to a dictatorship in all but name-tightly regimented,

savagely policed; even the most intimate aspects of every citizen's

life were spied upon, lest the unhappy, deprived, and brutally

downtrodden people rise in revolt against the family dynasty which had

stolen away their freedoms and the country. Therefore, despite his

relatively privileged status, Ken-more was not at all happy with his

present life, there and then . . . nor had he been the only such man on

the project.

Dr. Emmett O'Malley had been another such. Younger than Kenmore and so

not really remembering the United States of America that once had been,

he still knew of the experiences of friends and even relatives who had

suffered cruelly at the callous hands of the dictatorship's minions and

therefore had become willing to risk as much as his life to escape.

A third of this water had been Dr. Lenny Vincenzo, and no matter what

others in the project or the government might wonder or guess or

suppose or suspect, Kenmore and O'Malley knew. Their true, though

short-term, friend and colleague Leonard David Vincenzo had not only

escaped, he had used the Gamebird Project and the dwindling energy

supplies of the hellish government itself to speed him on his way to

freedom. Even thinking of what the brave, desperate young scientist had

done was a heady experience for Kenmore and O'Malley.

However, subsequent to the loss of Vincenzo and the suicide of the

responsible director, his successor had suspended human-type

projections, though still sporadically experimenting with certain

attempts to reverse the activity of the equipment and bring things from

past to present, skipping from year to year, century to century,

geographical location to geographical location; the success of her

experiments had been spotty at best.

But hope springs eternal in the human breast. Desperately certain that

somehow, someway, sometime they could and would find or make a way to

gain access to the locked and guarded facility, learn how to operate

the requisite devices, and thus project themselves to a somewhere,

sometime that they could not imagine could possibly be worse than life

under the existing regime, the two conspirators took up the study of

history. After some time, they at length agreed upon northwestern

Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. This done, they

began studying books, tapes, and period maps and began to use the

easily available hypnostudy system to acquire languages and skills of

various archaic sorts, passing off their interests and courses of study

as just harmless hobbies.

Meanwhile, being very careful, fully realizing the deadly danger of it

all, Dr. Emmett O'Malley- young-looking (the longevity process having

more or less frozen his age at mid-twenties), handsome, with a well-

developed gift of the blarney-entered into a sexual liaison with

Colonel Dr. Jane Stone, thereby eventually gaining access to the

projection labs and knowledge of the equipment therein contained.

In addition to using his own lab to surreptitiously compound longevity

booster capsules disguised as headache remedy and taken a few at the

time back to his quarters, there to be hidden away, Harold Ken-more had

hypnotrained himself in antique jewelry-making methods, signed out on

loan a quantity of bulk gold, silver, and copper, and set up a small

workshop in a corner of his bedroom. There he actually had made some

jewelry, and those who saw it had praised his skills, but he had also

cast the precious metals into coin shapes and into plain finger rings

of varying weights. He also had hypnoed a course in costume design and

had fabricated complete sets of clothing to his and Emmett's measures

in fashions of the times they were contemplating.

One of Emmett's degrees was in the field of ferrous metallurgy, and to

this he added hypnocourses in depth and breadth, seeking and at last

developing a way to fabricate superior steel from crude pig iron and

certain common elements under very primitive conditions. He had proved

this theory by fashioning two broadswords and a brace of daggers, plus

several smaller knives.

From the very outset of the preparations for their private scheme,

their forlorn hope of escape from the hateful, hate-filled madhouse of

their world, the two men had seemingly become fanatics in the category

of physical exercises of all sorts, and so few if any of their peers

and keepers considered it odd that they at last took up fencing, too,

proceeding-aided, of course, by hypnostudy-from footwork to foil, then

e"pee, then saber. At length, they began to fence with the broadswords;

in the beginning of this, they used these weapons alone, and as they

became more adept at handling the heavy, ill-balanced blades, they

began to try fencing Florentine, with a dagger in the left hand.

All these disciplines, manufactures, and studies took time, of course,

sandwiched in as they perforce were between the necessities of work,

the Gamebird routines of endless meetings, conferences, evaluations,

and the like, not to mention the time necessarily consumed by Emmett's

torrid affair with Colonel Dr. Jane Stone. It took time, years passed,

but then Harold and Emmett had the time, for their longevity-treated

bodies aged only minutes while those not so treated aged days and

weeks. Lenny Vincenzo had been gone from their world for almost five

years before the two men decided that the time at last was ripe for

their escape to they knew not what.

Over the years of increasingly harsh and regimented dictatorship, most

once-honored holidays of all natures had been abolished and the average

worker labored six-day, seventy-two-hour weeks, week after week, for

twelve months of every year, paid less and ever less real income, the

purchasing power of which at the best proved never enough to buy the

needed amounts of the increasingly scarce and dear necessities of life.

Not even the slightest surcease was available. Use of tobacco was

illegal. Though rigorously discouraged and under constant surveillance,

religious practice was allowed on one day each work week. Uses of

alcohol, hallucinogenics, or narcotics invariably brought lengthy stays

in government labor and reeducation camps if used other than under a

physician's orders or, preferably, his direct supervision. Those

adjudged insane or unable to work due to injury or physical impairment

were killed. Only the elite-bureaucrats, military, higher echelons of

police and overlapping internal intelligence departments, valued people

sequestered away in certain government research projects such as

Gamebird, or a very few others-were allowed to lead lives of anything

save endless drudgery, mal-nourishment if not outright starvation,

hopelessness, and unceasing terror.

However, within a five-day period-the last two days of an outgoing year

and the first three days of the incoming one-designated the President's

Birthday Celebration, most if not all strictures were eased nationwide.

Government outlets gave away not only free foodstuffs to all comers,

but tobacco, spirits of many sorts, items of footwear and clothing, and

even supplies of hallucinogens. During these wild Days, public

appearances in chemically altered states not only went unpunished but

were aggressively encouraged. Travel, normally very much restricted,

not only was eased during these Days but was free to those with proof

of family elsewhere in the country if the round trip could be

accomplished before the Days had ended. Many, drunk or spacey, went

forth and about in odd attire or none at all, unnoticed and unremarked

by any. There were always some killings and other violence during the

Days, but usually the then-short-handed police ignored the smaller

instances of violence-though they were always quick to put down mobs by

deadly methods. The bodies, however slain, were just collected and

delivered to the nearest rendering plant.

At the Gamebird Project, on the banks of the Potomac River, as at all

the other projects run by the government, the resident workers were,

though comparatively lavishly provided for and kept in luxury,

sequestered, not allowed to leave the complex and grounds save in

supervised groups for very necessary field trips or visits to their

superiors elsewhere. Their families, if they had them, were supported

and housed, but their only contacts with them through the year long

were in the forms of letters (always and thoroughly censored, incoming

and outgoing), videotapes (ditto) and the exceedingly rare vision-phone

call. The Days represented the only chance available to the sequestered

men and women for physical contact with their loved ones, and those

with families invariably took advantage of the opportunity, knowing

that their transportation would be assured and first-class. For this

reason, the population of Gamebird during the Days dropped drastically,

and for most who did stay on at the Project, there was no work and

almost unlimited license. Travel about the various sectors of the vast

complex, usually strictly forbidden without necessity and authorization

from some lofty source, was permitted, while obvious drunkenness and

odd behavior was expected.

For these many reasons, Harold Kenmore and Emmett O'Malley had felt

that their best, indeed their only decent, chance to carry out their

escape scheme would be upon one of the Days. Over their shirts and

trunkhose, they had donned the coveralls issued them for outside work

in cold or wet weather, filling the cargo pockets of these with

precious metals, longevity-booster capsules, food concentrates, and

other small items. Their parka pockets were likewise crammed full, then

they slung on their baldrics, buckled their dagger-belts and slung

their cloaks over all. They slipped their sheathed broadswords into

place in the baldrics, rinsed out their mouths with grain alcohol, and

splashed the rest of the stuff over their clothing before setting out

from their quarters-arm in arm, singing a lewd song, and clutching a

half-empty liquor bottle.

Descending to the lowest level of their part of the complex, they found

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ScannedbyHighrollerandproofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.PROLOGUEWindhowledandwailedaboutthestonewallsandloftyspiresofancientEboracum-oncecalledJor-vik,nowcalledYork.Thedayprecedinghadbeenasbrightandsunnyandbalmyasasummer'sdaymightbe,butinthenightthistoothedstormhadblowninfromThulebywayoftheNorthSea,temp...

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Robert Adams - Castaways 6 - Of Beginings and Endings

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