Grant said, “And have they made moral progress, too? Are they better than us, or just cleverer?”
It was a dangerous question. “Hard to say, General. The ones I’ve met, they seem … I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a kind of bonelessness about them. The women in particular seem insolent, almost louche—I’ve heard them swear like infantrymen. But they’re capable of great tenderness and intelligence. The men aren’t dishonorable, but they don’t seem to think much of honor in general, as an abstraction I mean. When I first came here many of them struck me as effeminate or unserious.”
“They struck you that way at first, but not any longer?”
“Well, they have a saying: The past is a different country; they do things differently there. Which I figure cuts both ways. You don’t expect an Irishman to comport himself like a Chinaman, so why should we expect City people to behave just as we do?”
“In matters of custom, surely, but in matters of moral duty…”
“I’m not sure I’m qualified to render judgment in that department. They don’t seem especially better or worse than the rest of us.”
“Not more generous?”
“They’ve been generous to me, certainly. But visitors don’t get into the City for free, do they? The price is paid in gold and silver, and all that gold and silver goes straight to the so-called future, where it lines somebody’s pocket. How they came here is difficult to understand; what they want of us is not.”
“Well.” Grant stood up. “Once again I thank you, Mr. Cullum. Not just for your conduct this afternoon but for your forthright conversation.”
“You have a keen eye, sir, to have spotted the pistol.”
“I saw it briefly and from a distance—more the reach than the gun itself, though I had the impression it was unusual.”
“I only handled it a moment myself. But yes, it was one of theirs.”
“Not a Colt?”
“No, sir—whatever it was, it was not a Colt.”
“That surprises me. Because your employers told me it was a Colt.”
Jesse very carefully said nothing.
“I suppose they were mistaken,” Grant said.
“I suppose they were.”
Jesse shook the president’s hand again and made his exit.
The next morning Jesse was scheduled to ride the perimeter fence. Fence-riding was lonely duty but he enjoyed it, at least when the weather was decent.
The City of Futurity possessed many walls and fences, many boundaries. The most significant and least visible of these boundaries was the Mirror itself, deep underground: a wall (and at times a doorway) between present and future. Then there were the walls that separated Tower One from Tower Two. And surrounding these, the massive concrete wall that enclosed the City itself.
But the City was situated in a much vaster track of land, purchased by proxy and demarked by a fence of steel wire mesh. The fence served multiple purposes. It prevented curiosity-seekers from mobbing the City walls. It kept hucksters and frauds from setting up booths or buildings within sight of guests. It allowed the City to make the land available to visitors from the future as a specimen of “the untrammeled tallgrass prairie”—apparently all such landscapes would be “trammeled” in the years to come. And it enclosed a herd of American buffalo for the same reason: The buffalo were due for a trammeling, too.
The attractions of the City were so great, and the price of admission so high, that it was not surprising that unscrupulous people occasionally attempted to climb or cut the fence. Which meant it had to be regularly inspected and repaired; which meant Jesse was up before dawn, signing out a mechanical cart from the horseless-vehicle barn. By the time the sun breached the horizon he was mounted on a three-wheeled self-propelled vehicle and passing through one of the gates in the City wall and out into the grassland.
The chill of the morning was a reminder that autumn was approaching, but the lingering wisps of ground fog vanished at the first touch of sunlight. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and when he reached the fence the air had grown warm, and grasshoppers flew from the wheels of the cart in brown flurries. From there Jesse followed a pressed-earth trail that followed the fence, humming a tune to himself, stopping occasionally to inspect a dubious weld or a suspicious gopher hole. He was orbiting the City at a radius of roughly a mile, and by noon he had not detected any irregularities worth reporting. He stopped the cart, stood to stretch his legs, pulled off his jacket and hung it on the handlebar of the three-wheeled vehicle. He took a bagged lunch from the carry-box at the back of the cart (a sandwich from the commissary, coffee in a thermos bottle) and ate sitting sidesaddle on the padded seat. It felt good to be out of the labyrinth of the City for a day, away from its tuneless hums and whispers. Out here, only the bugs were humming. His own breath sounded loud in his ears.
He unscrewed the lid of the thermos bottle. The lid did double-duty as a cup. It was made of plastic, the City people’s material of choice for trivial things. The lid was small in Jesse’s large hands, as if he were drinking from a thimble. But the coffee was pleasant and hot.
At this distance the City dominated the horizon. Its towers sparkled like twin escarpments of mica-flecked granite, the wall a varicolored reef at the foot of them. He watched an omnibus full of tourists exit the City on a paved road, headed for the eastern pastures where the buffalo were corralled and Wild West shows were sometimes staged. The paved road paralleled Jesse’s trail at a distance of a few hundred yards, and as the bus passed he saw the passengers peering out. Wealthy people from the future. Men and women with complexions of all hues, sitting companionably with one another as the amplified voice of the driver droned out facts about the prairie. If the tourists noticed Jesse they would have registered only his uniform. Just another City employee, to be ignored—although had they known a little more about him, they might have considered him an artifact almost as interesting as the buffalo. Step up, all you ladies in short pants, you beardless men. Bring your squabbling, spoiled children, too. See the Man from the Past. See the untrammeled syphilitic drifter of the Golden West.
The bus rolled on and out of sight. Jesse savored the silence once more, until the pager on his belt chimed, a sound that never failed to startle him.
The message on the screen was another summons to Mr. Booking’s office.
Jesse sighed and called his shift supervisor to report his position so another man could come out and finish riding the fence. Then he poured out his coffee on the untrammeled prairie, brushed a ladybug off the seat of the motor cart, and drove back to the City.
Booking’s office hadn’t changed, except that the woman who had escorted Jesse to Grant’s room last night, Elizabeth DePaul, occupied one of the spare chairs. She gave Jesse a long, indecipherable stare.
“Have a seat,” Booking said. “President Grant spoke to us about his meeting with you last night.”
Jesse searched his memory for any gaffe or revelation that might have provoked this summons or even cost him his job. He could think of a few likely candidates.
“The president was pleased,” Booking said. “He called you amiable and intelligent. He said he was glad to have had an opportunity to thank you for what you had done for him.”
“That was good of him.”
“Well, we happen to agree. You have a fine record, Jesse. This incident has made us wonder whether you aren’t being underutilized in Tower Two. We think it’s time for you to take a step up.”