Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“The Great War came and we both went in as officers; Bill, who had that Irish charm, because we had elected him captain of our troop, and me because just about anybody with a degree from Princeton could get a commission then. After the war, Bill left the Army with a hatful of medals and went back to his law practice. I stayed in because I had nothing better to do and had sense enough to see that it was the only way I could keep on flying. In nineteen thirty-seven, I retired as a brigadier general. My father had died, and I wanted to take over the family business. We make glass, by the way; some of the finest crystal in the world.”

Stubb asked, “How old were you?”

“Forty-eight. Don’t ask me how old I am now, because I don’t know. Somewhere between sixty and seventy, I think.

“Anyway, to fill you in on some things I only learned later, Bill had a partner who knew President Wilson and did some globe-trotting and fact-finding for him. Eventually Bill did some of that too. I think Bill himself knew Roosevelt back when; he was practising law in Buffalo, remember. He must have gone to Albany often, and Roosevelt has been mixed up in state politics all his life. Anyway, when Roosevelt decided America should have something like the British Secret Intelligence Service, guess who he picked?”

The witch nodded. Barnes was too rapt to nod. Candy stared at the rectangular panes that made the big cockpit seem almost a small greenhouse; she might have been half asleep. Stubb said, “And Donovan picked you.”

Free nodded. “One among many, of course. The business had been almost shut down by the war, and I had a manager who could take care of what little there was as well I could. I was getting a lot of pressure from the Army to come back, and I knew that if I did, I’d probably end up in charge of a training field in Texas—not exactly my cup of tea. This was the summer of forty-two, by the way.

“High Country had already been built, and the top men in the nation were on her. Donovan felt the Office of Strategic Services ought to have somebody up here too, and I got the job, I think mostly because I’d been one of General Mitchell’s supporters. Supposedly, I was just coming to High Country temporarily, but my confidential orders were to stay as long as I could.”

Barnes said softly, “I wouldn’t have believed something this big could fly.”

“Neither could I,” Free told him. “And if it had been aluminum and steel, it wouldn’t have. It’s a matter of weight, really—the weight-to-lift ratio. The plywood has a layer of cedar on the outside for rot resistance, then alternating layers of balsa and spruce. When they found out it worked, they had Hughes Aircraft build one that was all spruce. You couldn’t get balsa from South America any more, you see. But that one didn’t fly. It was too heavy.”

Stubb said, “You mentioned that plane when we were on the ground.”

“Did I? Sorry, but you have to remember it’s been a few years for me.”

The witch interrupted. “You said it was the occult that led you to what you found. I have waited and waited to hear how that is so.”

“Hitler believed in it,” Free said. “And Hitler had been extremely successful. When he joined the National Socialists, he got membership card number seven—the Nazis literally had only a half dozen members. In a few years he was Chancellor of Germany. In a few more he was walking over the French army, supposedly the best in Europe. Nobody knew then that his luck would run out in Russia and Africa.”

The witch said, “Those with whom he leagued himself destroyed him when he had accomplished their purposes. It is ever so with them—they break their tools.” Almost in a whisper she added, “We went into the death camps too, though only we remember.”

Free said, “They thought Hitler might be able to look into the future, and they thought there might be some way to duplicate that mechanically and reliably. They found out—well, you know what they found out.

“There was a tremendous effort being put into weapons development then, so one of the obvious things was to try to anticipate the result. That was my first real job—to go ten years ahead and grab the best I could and bring it back. I think you can guess what I got.”

Barnes whispered, “Nuclear weapons.”

“Not everything, but a lot. Enough to speed up development to the point that we had an atom bomb in less than three years. But when I’d been flown back here, back to High Country, I’d noticed a lot of the people were gone. I couldn’t ask about that, you understand. The men on that level could have swatted Bill Donovan like a fly. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and went back to my own period.”

“After I’d gone down and been debriefed,” Free continued, “I went back up and through the gizmo again for more. I’d been practically solo the first time—nobody with me but the plane and crew I’d need to get up to High Country again and get back to forty-two. You see, this was the only gizmo there was, and if it hadn’t existed in fifty-two, I’d have had to find another one, or stay where I was until somebody brought me one.

“This time it was going to be different. Besides the plane crew, I had my pick of the available people. I took my daughter Kip and a friend she’d brought in, and half a dozen others. Kip had volunteered to work for Donovan when she learned I had, you see, and if I hadn’t taken her, she might have been sent into Germany or occupied France.

“I also had a small version of the gizmo, a take-down job big enough for a person. That was so that if High Country was gone we could ditch the plane and get back. On the other hand, if High Country or some successor—back then we thought there might be one—was still flying and we wanted to take something big home, we could do that in the plane. And of course the plane was a backup if the portable gizmo didn’t work.

“This time my orders called for me to make a special effort to locate items that would be valuable to our own outfit. We snooped around the electrical stores and got onto tape recorders and some other things. Have I told you about the money?”

Stubb shook his head.

“Well, after the first time, I’d seen that it would be easy to supply myself with all the operating capital I needed. All I had to do was make a fair-sized deposit back in forty-two that nobody but Kip or I could touch. What’s more, I could assure the cooperation of the FBI and the OSS, or any successor organizations, just by leaving messages saying that anyone who used certain code phrases was to get it.”

Candy opened her eyes. “That was how you got my john bumped off his flight. I’ve been wondering about that.”

“Right. Only we couldn’t tell the FBI or the CIA—those were the new people—about the gizmo, so we couldn’t tell them where we came from. But we needed them because it didn’t take long to see that this time we weren’t the only show in town. I’d already begun to suspect the men in High Country were using the gizmo themselves, and that a lot of them were going to periods they couldn’t return from, periods in which High Country did not exist. At first I thought it was one of them.”

Stubb asked, “When did you know it was you?”

For almost half a minute, Free stared out at the night. The snow clouds were breaking up, and the dark, tossing water of the Atlantic showed through the breaks. “There wasn’t any exact time I can put my finger on,” he said at last. “I felt the urge; we all did. We knew the Allies would win—it was in all the history books—so perhaps the call of duty wasn’t as strong as it should have been. And I saw the future we’d built.” He paused again.