Gene Wolfe - Free Live Free

“Do you know what I wanted? The old frontier. To see what this country was like before they chopped down all the trees and paved it over. The wanting got so strong sometimes I knew I’d do it sooner or later, and the more we got on the man who called himself Free, the clearer it was that he looked like me. My full name’s Samuel Benjamin Whitten, by the way. Buck’s just a nickname.”

“You’re Buck,” Barnes said. “You owned the Flying Carpet.”

Free nodded. “We needed someplace where we could meet people without leading anybody to the old military compound at the airport, which was where we kept our files and some sensitive equipment, like the portable gizmo. I bought the Flying Carpet and staffed it with people I felt I could trust to look the other way whenever something a little odd happened.”

Barnes said, “May I ask a question, sir? When I was in the Flying Carpet, I met a musician called Binko. Was he one of the people you brought out of the past?”

Free shook his head.

Stubb said, “Ozzie mentioned him when he was telling Madame S. and me what happened to him. I asked him about the music. That seemed to be another clue.”

“I suppose it was,” Free admitted. “I knew I’d be hearing a lot of whatever band I hired, so I hired a band I liked.”

Candy opened her eyes again. “You still haven’t got to the payoff. Are you ever?”

The witch darted a glance at her. “What do you mean? Do not question the Master!”

“Really. Listen, he didn’t bring us up here so he could tell you about Hitler or talk about matches with Jim or music with Ozzie. So why did he? And why did he have the people down below—that’s him too, don’t forget—do stuff to us? When we were in the little plane, Jim told me they tried to give all of us more than we could handle, and I was the only one who could handle it. Why do that and send us up here?”

Free said, “I wanted to answer your questions first, Miss Garth. I felt I owed you that. Now your questions have come around to the matter I wanted to talk with you about, and I admit I’m glad they have.”

He paused. “Do you remember what I told you about going back to nineteen forty-two to be debriefed? I had gone ten years forward and gathered what information I could about nuclear fission, then returned.”

All four nodded.

“The gizmo—the men who actually developed it called it a space-time singularity induction coil, so you can see why I say gizmo—couldn’t be controlled with pinpoint accuracy then. I had left for fifty-two on August eighteenth, nineteen forty-two. I returned May thirtieth.”

Candy sat up straight, her china-blue eyes wide open. “Holy God! There were two of you?”

Free shook his head. “No, though I didn’t realize that at first. I was debriefed by the people on High Country before I was sent down, of course. They told me when the debriefing was over.” Free paused again. “They also told—ordered me, in fact—not to tell anyone on the ground.

“I wasn’t taken to Washington for further debriefing, as I had expected, but flown down to Langley Field and released. I spent a day there wondering whether I dared phone Buffalo.”

Candy asked, “And did you?”

“Yes. I called our plant and asked to speak to the president of the company, after swearing to myself that if I answered, I would hang up. Kip came on the line and asked in her most business-like manner what I wanted. I said something along the lines of ‘Are you in charge, Miss?’ She recognized my voice and said—these were her exact words, I’ll never forget them—‘It’s you, Daddy! We were all so worried.’”

“My God,” Candy said softly.

“I questioned her and learned that I had gone into my office about an hour before the time our shuttle plane must have appeared in the sky of forty-two. No one had seen me since. I told Kip where I was and said that I had been called away on urgent Government business, that I would be back soon, but that I would be going to work in Government full time within a month or so.”

“So you went to work for this Donovan when he asked you.” Stubb made a circular motion with one hand. “It seems to me that when you went to fifty-two again and came back, you’d get stuck in a loop.”

“That’s what we thought,” Free said. “So I didn’t go. There was no point in it, after all; the people in High Country already had everything I’d learned about the bomb. When August eighteenth rolled around, the shuttle plane flew me down again for debriefing by Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Donovan. I told them I had just returned, and in a sense it was true.”

“Kip never suspected?”

“She knew something had happened,” Free said. “When I came back from Virginia, came back in that second June of my nineteen forty-two, she told me how good I looked. I was prominent enough in Buffalo then that they had quite a few pictures of me on file at the paper. I got them to let me examine them.”

Candy asked, “And you looked the way you had a couple of years back?”

“You’re a very clever woman, Miss Garth. No. That was what I expected, but it wasn’t what I saw. Younger, yes, but different too. Stronger. I don’t know.” He hesitated. “Better. That’s really all I can say. When I went into the plant, some of the problems we’d been having, things that had worried me for months, seemed simple. I saw where we might get a local substitute for the high silicon sand we’d imported from the Philippines before Pearl Harbor, for example. I think now that what happened was that my two selves had merged, and that the coming together made a single self that was stronger than either.” He stamped one foot, and all of them jumped a bit. “Plywood,” he said. “Each ring on a tree is a year’s growth. When you make plywood, you peel those rings apart, then glue them back so the grains cross. What you get is a piece of wood that’s stronger than both were in the old trunk.”

Stubb said, “What if one of the layers were rotten, General? Wouldn’t the plywood be rotten too?”

Free nodded.

“General, I’m going to tell you something you won’t like to hear. When I was living in your house, you told me you had a ticket that would take you back to the High Country. But you told me too that it was too late for you to use it. You weren’t senile, or at least I don’t think you were, not really. But you were a very old man.”

Free nodded. “You’re telling me I’m going to die, Mr. Stubb. Every man does. Unlike other men, I know how I’ll die as well. It’s the simple truth.”

“Wait just a minute!” Candy exclaimed. “You said Kip had reported to you. I heard you. That means there were two of you then.”

Free did not reply. A long moment passed. At last Stubb said, “No, it doesn’t. She reported after the Ben Free we knew was dead.”

“Miss Garth, I think that when I went to your time, to this time now, Ben Free wasn’t there. How long did you—did all four of you—live with him?”

“Three nights, Master,” the witch said. “After the third, the house was partly torn down.”

“I think he must have gone to some other time, although I have no idea what that time might be. To the Lewis and Clark expedition, I hope. Decades later, old and sick, he came back and discovered what he told Mr. Stubb: that it was too late.

“And when he came back I disappeared, as far as Kip and the rest were concerned. Kip thought Free had done it, and she must have been frantic. We had people monitoring the papers and the television news fulltime, as you can imagine. When one of them spotted Free, Kip threw caution to the winds. She assigned an agent to watch the house, and she and Robin questioned a woman in the neighborhood and got your names. She got the FBI to put a mail cover on all of you, and when they found that Mr. Barnes here was answering lonelyhearts ads, she had Robin write to him. Eventually she had all four of you under surveillance. Then Free returned to his house, and she got him.”