She wasn’t being funny.
The time belt was pretty much the same as all the others he’d worn, but it had no settings. “This is designed for projects like this,” she told him. “The computer simply reads in the requirements directly to the belt, and when you activate, you’ll go forward to the spot. Then just take note of your surroundings, find a good spot to stick the belt that you’ll remember and will be likely to get to in a pinch, and take it off. The rest is automatic as far as the identity is concerned.”
“Yeah, but how do I know when I reach this trip point or whatever it is?”
“We’ve done the figuring. You’re overage for this, and the process of assimilation really accelerates as you get older. We’re going to put you in a year before you first arrived on the main line, to avoid any problems with a potential takeover again. That would be too confusing. May the ninth will be the day you’ll wake up, and that’s the key. You would be assimilated now in just twelve days. This is the tricky part, which we’ll try and help you with. You must use your belt again on May fifteenth. Any time on that day during daylight hours. By nightfall, it’ll be too late and we’d have to come and get you. We will if we must, of course.”
He nodded. “I see. So I come back to the belt and activate it again and wind up back here?”
She nodded. “Try and keep enough presence of mind to do it yourself. Keep thinking of Dawn and the children. Hate Eric, or us, if you must. But if we have to come and get you, all sorts of things might go wrong.”
“O.K. I’m ready,” he told her. “Farewell, Ron Moosic,” she responded. He pressed activate.
Michael O’Brien awoke in his own quarters at precisely six A.M. He always had, ever since he’d been in the Marine Corps.
O’Brien had been in the corps all his life, since graduating from high school in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, many years before. He loved it, even though the only time he’d ever been in a combat situation, he’d had the shit blown out of him within three hours.
He grabbed the bars atop the bed, pulled himself up and around, and eased effortlessly out into his wheelchair. He was proud to be self-sufficient, and if you wanted to make him mad, you simply had to show pity or try and help him do something he was perfectly capable of doing himself.
He was also proud that they didn’t just discard good men with good brains and skills anymore, just because they were handicapped in the service of their country. No, with a massive perimeter stretching around half the world, anybody who could do a desk job to free some other for the hot areas was retained. It was only fair, of course, particularly for the ones like himself who’d paid the price for being where he was ordered to be.
Sure, he felt depressed sometimes. Here he was, thirty-three years old and pretty good looking, if he did say so himself, with no feeling below the waist. None. And no movement or control, either. It was bad enough to be in diapers again, but much worse to know he’d never again make love to a woman or ever father a child. But he was tough, Irish-tough, and full of life and the will to live. If nothing else, his deeply felt Roman Catholic religion made suicide the immoral way out, but his Marine religion, just as strong, made it the coward’s way out. Nope, let the little Reich boys cry in their beer and either end it all or be finished off by their own as useless. He was living proof of the real difference between Americans of all types and the enemy.
He shaved and gave himself a change and a sponge bath, then pulled on his uniform and got back into the chair. Staff Sergeant O’Brien, ready for duty, sir!
Ron Moosic expected the disability joker or something similar. He knew how much time hated these things, and him in particular, it seemed. Still, he liked O’Brien, whose general background and religion matched his own, and he liked the man’s spirit and outlook.
He didn’t as much care for the world that O’Brien inhabited, a world with two great empires, one run from Berlin and the other from Washington, both bristling with nuclear missiles, both higher tech than his own time had been, thanks to a longer war and nearly unremitting tension since, and both less than democratic.
Of course, he still preferred America, which stretched by force from what used to be Canada to Tierra del Fuego. The country itself was heavily rationed and on a permanent wartime footing; the standard of living of the average citizen was well below what he expected, but far better than the lot of the Latin Commonwealths, which were essentially run by American military decree. Still, Presidents ran for election, and so did Congress, and there was still a Constitution worded much the way he remembered it. In fact, there were a couple of amendments there that hadn’t been there in his time, including a sexual equality one—and, in fact, women as well as men had to serve, and at all levels, including combat. And, of course, the seventy-two states took some getting used to.
And yet, oddly, there was still a Wicomico Group, by that name, and it was still run as a cooperative venture between the War Department and the State Security Bureau, the latter having far more sweeping powers, including many inside the country, than the NSA he’d known.
It was, in fact, a bit unsettling that his old bosses had become what the NSA’s old critics once feared—a sort of electronic secret police.
Private ownership of automobiles was banned, of course, but at 0715 sharp the van pulled up to take him to work a few miles to the south of his apartment complex. It was a special van, outfitted for handicapped people. No wonder those in the service were intensely loyal.
The day was pretty much routine. The place looked as secret and as disguised as ever; the entrance was just as tough to get through, and the interior central hall, which he’d last seen in shambles, was remarkably intact. About the only really strong change was that it was a bit drabber, with everybody in some sort of service uniform and everything a dull military gray, including his central admissions desk, from which he monitored the entry areas and also dispensed information and clearances through his computer keyboard.
The security chief was a cold fish named Sorban, and all of the SSB men and women seemed like the kind of folks who enjoyed robbing widows and kicking little children, but that was routine to O’Brien and he mostly ignored them or even cracked jokes about them as only somebody on the inside would dare.
At 1630 he was relieved and rolled back out through what they all called The Gauntlet to the lot where the vans and buses were waiting. All in all, a very routine day, but for Moosic something of a surprise, not that so much was different but that so much was the same. Indeed, Dr. Aaron Silverberg headed the project, although even on O’Brien’s level they knew only the general details of what went on below.
He wondered if Silverberg was the same sort of fellow as the one he’d known. Certainly he was in the same position, so much would have been the same. It would be interesting, he thought, to see the subtle differences in the familiar.
Back at his apartment complex, he considered his options. He could go over to the club, but he tended to eat too little and drink too much when he did that. Besides, tonight was a dance night.
Not that he was inactive. There was a wheelchair basketball team he was on that was pretty good, and a local Handicapped Service Organization social club that was nice, but he decided he just wanted to relax this night. He went inside, wheeled into the elevator, and went up to his floor, then down the hall to his door. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed himself in, the door sliding out of the way to accommodate him and his chair. He stopped just inside the door and cursed. He always left a light on so he wouldn’t have to fumble—whoever had built this place had done a lot for the handicapped, but hadn’t done much for light switches near the door—and yet it was fairly dark in the room. Bulb burnt out, he thought; then he began to tense. It was too dark. He always left the drapes open, and they were closed. The maid, perhaps? But she never had done that before…