He replaced the phone. “I’ve sold ten tickets, at one million dollars apiece, to attend the Coleridge lecture. We’ll make the jump tomorrow evening at eight. There’ll be a catered briefing session at six-thirty for our ten guests, and naturally for that we ought to have a recognized Coleridge authority.”
“Me.”
“You. You’ll give a brief speech on Coleridge and answer any questions the guests may have concerning him or his contemporaries or his times, and then you’ll accompany the party through the jump and to the Crown and Anchor Tavern—along with a few competent guards who’ll make sure no romantic soul attempts to go AWOL—take notes during the lecture and then, back home again in 1983, comment on it and answer any further questions.” He cocked an eyebrow sternly at Doyle. “You’re being paid twenty thousand dollars to see and hear what ten other people are paying a million apiece for. You should be grateful that all our efforts to get one of the more prominent Coleridge authorities failed.”
Not too flatteringly phrased, Doyle thought, but “Yes,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “But what about your… original purpose, the thing science failed to do, the reason you found these gaps in the first place? Have you abandoned that?”
“Oh.” Darrow didn’t seem to want to discuss it. “No, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m working on it from a couple of angles these days. Nothing to do with this project.”
Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “Are there any gaps, uh, downstream of us?”
For no reason Doyle could see the old man was beginning to get angry again. “Doyle, I don’t see—oh, what the hell. Yes. There’s one, it’s forty-seven hours long in the summer of 2116, and that’s the last one, chronologically.”
“Well.” Doyle didn’t mean to provoke him, but he wanted to know why Darrow apparently didn’t intend to do what seemed to Doyle the obvious thing. “But couldn’t this… thing you want done … be done very easily, probably, in that year? I mean, if science could almost do it in 1983, why by 2116…”
“It’s very annoying, Doyle, to give someone a cursory glance at a project you’ve been working hard at for a long time, and then have them brightly suggest courses which, as a matter of fact, you considered and dismissed as unworkable long ago.” He blew smoke out between clenched teeth. “How could I know, before I got there, whether or not the world in 2116 is a radioactive cinder? Hah? Or what sort of awful police state might exist then?” Exhaustion and brandy must have undermined a lot of Darrow’s reserve, for there was a glisten in his eyes when he added, “And even if they could and would do it, what would they think of a man from more than a century in the past?” He crumpled his paper cup, and a trickle of brandy ran down his wrist. “What if they treated me like a child?”
Embarrassed, Doyle instantly changed the subject back to Coleridge. But that’s it, of course, he thought—Darrow’s been the captain of his own ship for so long that he’d rather sink with it than accept the condescension of a life preserver tossed from some Good Samaritan vessel, especially a grander one than his own.
Darrow too seemed eager to steer the conversation back to business.
The sky had begun to pale in the east when Doyle was chauffeured by another driver to a hotel nearby, and he slept until, late in the afternoon, a third driver arrived to take him back to the site.
The lot was now planed flat as a griddle, and all the tractors were gone; several men were at work with shovels and brooms cleaning up horse dung. The trailer was still there, looking adrift now that its telephone and power cables had been removed. Another trailer, big enough to be called a mobile home, was pulled up alongside it. As Doyle got out of the car he noticed pulleys and lines at intervals along the fence top and a collapsed tarpaulin lying at the base of the fence all around the perimeter. He grinned. The old man’s shy, he thought.
A guard opened the gate for him and led him to the new trailer, the door of which stood open. Doyle went inside. At the far end of the walnut-panelled and carpeted room Darrow, looking no more tired than he had last night, was talking to a tall blond man. Both men were dressed in the pre-Regency style: frockcoats, tight trousers and boots; they wore them so naturally that Doyle momentarily felt ridiculous in his polyester-cotton suit.
“Ah, Doyle,” said Darrow. “I think you already know our chief of security.”
The blond man turned around and after a moment Doyle recognized Steerforth Benner. The young man’s once-long hair had been cut short and curled, and his wispy moustache, never very evident, was now shaved off.
“Benner!” Doyle exclaimed, pleased, as he crossed the room. “I suspected you must be connected with this project.” His friendship with the young man had cooled off in the last month or two, since Benner’s DIRE recruitment, but he was delighted to see a familiar face here.
“Colleagues at last, Brendan,” said Benner with his characteristic wide smile.
“We jump in a little less than four hours,” resumed Darrow, “and there are a lot of things to get done first. Doyle, we’ve got a period suit for you, and those doors at that end are changing rooms. I’m afraid you’ll be supervised, but it’s important that everyone dress the role from the skin out.”
“We’re only going to be staying four hours, aren’t we?” Doyle asked.
“It’s always in the realm of possibility, Doyle, that one of our guests might run off, despite the efforts of Benner and his boys. If one does, we don’t want him to be carrying any evidence that he’s from another century.” Darrow snapped his hand up, as though physically fielding Doyle’s next question. “And no, son, our hypothetical escapee wouldn’t be able to tell people how the war will turn out or how to build a Cadillac or anything. Each guest will swallow a capsule, just before we go, of something I think I’ll call Anti-Transchrono Trauma. ATCT. What it will actually be, and please don’t start yelling yet, Doyle, is a fatal dose of strychnine in a capsule set to dissolve after six hours. Now when we get back they’ll have their entire GI tracts pumped full of an activated charcoal solution.” He smiled frostily. “Staff is exempt, of course, or I wouldn’t be telling you this. Each guest has agreed to these conditions, and I think most of them have guessed what they mean.”
And maybe they haven’t, Doyle thought. Suddenly the whole project looked like lunacy again, and he imagined himself in court, some day soon, trying to explain why he hadn’t informed the police about Darrow’s intentions.
“And here’s a speech you can make at the briefing,” Darrow went on, handing Doyle a sheet of paper. “Feel free to change it or rewrite it entirely—and if you could have it memorized by then I’d be very pleased. Now I imagine you two would like to compare notes, so I’ll get busy in my trailer. Staff won’t be permitted to drink at the briefing, but I don’t see any harm if you have a couple right now.” He smiled and strode out, looking piratically handsome in the archaic clothes.
When he was gone Benner opened a cupboard that proved to be a liquor cabinet. “Aha,” he said, “they were ready for you.” He pulled down a bottle of Laphroaig, and in spite of his worries Doyle was pleased to see that it was the old 91.4 proof kind, in the clear glass bottle.
“God, pour me some. Neat.”
Benner handed him a glass of it and mixed a Kahlua and milk for himself. He sipped it and grinned at Doyle. “I think a bit of liquor is as essential as the lead sheathing; you wouldn’t catch me standing in the path of all that radiation without some hooch under my belt.”
Doyle had been about to demand a phone to call the police with, but this brought him up short. “What?”
“The tachyon conversion process. Didn’t he explain how the jump will work?”