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.”
There was another pause. “And she killed him,” Stubb said softly.
Free nodded. “I won’t tell you what she told me about it. She was lying, and I could always tell. Hell, I raised her, and that’s the truth. I think she took him to the house because he—I—told her the portable gizmo was still there, built into a wall; and that when they were alone, I explained everything to her. After that she must have known she would never get her father back as long as I—Free—refused to go back.
“If you’re wondering where the general is now, let me assure you he’s gone. Not vanished because I’m here, but gone to a better time, taking his portable gizmo with him. He deduced the location of Free’s ‘ticket’ you see, and carried the one he’d brought from nineteen forty-two through it.
“And now we’ve come to what Miss Garth calls the payoff. I don’t know who you four are, but I know I’ll let you live with me when the time comes. I know you’ll fight to save my house, the house that was my base for so many years, and fight pretty well from what Kip told me. And that you’ll try to find me when you think I may be in trouble, though all of you have troubles enough of your own. The message I left for the general I used to be—I wired a calendar clock to turn on the radio and one of your neat little tape recorders, by the way—said you should get your greatest desires. I did it because I’ve learned we all have to get them before we can have better ones.”
Stubb said, “I don’t think we have them yet. At least I don’t.”
Free nodded. “I’m about to give you one, I hope. There are two doors out of this High Country, you see. One is the one you came through. The other is the gizmo. I’m offering all of you a chance to go back, to fold yourselves in upon your earlier selves and live new lives, if you want them.”
“Yes!” Candy shouted. The witch threw herself at Free’s feet, as Stubb nodded and rose from where he sat.
Barnes said, “Swee’ pea—”
“Mr. Free—or rather, the person we call by that name—has concealed a talisman. The acaryas do so at times, putting by their unearthly crowns and orbs to walk among mortals. Now he lacks strength to take it up again. But if we could find it …”
“You mean this,” Barnes said. “You’re serious.”