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.”
Two Doors
“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.
“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.”