Of Beginings and Endings Read online

  Of

  Beginnings and Endings

  Robert Adams

  PROLOGUE

  Wind howled and wailed about the stone walls and lofty spires of ancient Eboracum—once called Jorvik, now called York. The day preceding had been as bright and sunny and balmy as a summer's day might be, but in the night this toothed storm had blown in from Thule by way of the North Sea, temperatures in the environs of the episcopal city had dropped precipitately, and so much water had been dumped, that the streets had begun, by wan daybreak, to run as swiftly if not as deep as the current of the river.

  Within the complex of buildings which constituted Yorkminster, in a sizable chamber which still seemed cramped and cluttered due to the high shelves packed with jars, caskets, boxes, amphorae, vials, flasks, bowls, trays, kettles, small caldrons, bags and cases of a plethora of sizes, shapes and descriptions, a cowled and robed man sat before a heavy, slate-topped table. Deep in thought, he occasionally roused himself sufficiently to scribble notes and reminders to himself with a quill on a sheet of fine vellum.

  Wool clothing lined with silk, old-fashioned trunkhose, and ankle-high shoon of quilted doeskin were not enough to keep the chill from his old bones this dank, dismal day, so he had had a fire laid and lit on the hearth and also had fired a small brass brazier nearby on the tabletop over which to warm his hands from time to time.

  And old his bones truly were, this man now called His Grace Harold, Archbishop of York. A new-come stranger, knowing nothing of him, would have seen the high-ranking churchman and probably have guessed his age to be about late sixties or early seventies—venerable enough for these times in which most men, even those of noble and exalted rank, considered themselves fortunate, lucky, and blessed by God to see fifty winters—and that stranger would have been wrong, very, very wrong. In the natural, the expected order of things, creatures are born in their present and live on into a future until their demise; this old man, however, was come into this world he presently occupied not only full-grown but more than a half-century old—although, due to an artificially produced longevity drug he had, he then looked no more than thirty to forty years of age.

  Born in A. D. 1968, Harold Kenmore had been employed as a research scientist in a government-sponsored and -operated project in a facility called Gamebird by the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century. More than a decade earlier, he had been one of the members of the team of scientists which had at last developed a means to retard the effects of aging of the human body. Therefore he ranked quite high in his profession and even owned the grudging respect and regard of the military bureaucrats in charge of the Gamebird Facility.

  Part of the work of the Gamebird Project was the attempt to find or develop a means of time travel; previous generations had so far depleted that world of fuels and raw materials that even the vast expenses of the possibly impossible would be considered justified if said expenditures would only result in an avenue whereby the virgin resources of past times might be plundered to the benefit of the impoverished present.

  A decade and a half of work resulted in a device that, while expending horrendous amounts of precious energy, would project inanimate objects somewhere out of sight and retrieve most of them undamaged. However, living animals all seemed to come back dead, many of them terribly mutilated and/or decomposing as well. Even so, so critical were the needs for fossil fuels and certain ores become that the government brought inexorable pressure to bear on the project directors so that, against their better and more informed judgment, a series of human experiments were then commenced.

  The first man projected was dead when retrieved, but thorough examination of his corpse and clothing established that he had been in thirteenth-century France or, possibly, Savoy. Therefore, the second human volunteer had been steeped in mediaeval Romance languages, garbed in recreated thirteenth-century European attire, and projected. His body, hideously maimed and dead, had been near-naked when retrieved, with a piece of parchment nailed to its forehead with a legend stating in Low Latin, "I am a dead spy.''

  For all that a tight lid of secrecy had existed from the very beginning and had been screwed down even more tightly as the human experiments had progressed, still word of the disasters had gotten out somehow, and volunteers of the proper calibers had become virtually nonexistent. But the governmental pressure had not slacked off at all, and so, when one of the most promising of the younger scientists, Dr. Lenny Vincenzo, had volunteered to be the third projectee, the project directors had felt that they had to accept him, had to use him, had to make the sacrifice and send him to his virtually certain death.

  A real prodigy, holding, despite his youth, several advanced degrees, Dr. Vincenzo had not required as much preliminary hypno-education as had either of his ill-fated predecessors, which fact had allowed them to move faster—though not nearly so fast as the impatient government might have wished.

  After a retrieval device had been surgically implanted under the skin of one thigh, Vincenzo had been, at his request, dressed in late-fifteenth-century clothing, provided with reproductions of period coins in copper, brass, silver, and gold, then projected. He had never been retrieved. A rotting cadaver, the retrieval module properly placed under the sloughing skin of one thigh, had indeed arrived back at Gamebird, lacking head, hands, feet, and external sexual organs . . . but it had not been the body of Dr. Lenny Vincenzo; the blood type and a host of other tests had proved that. And since, without the nodule on which the equipment in the lab could home in, there was no way of trying again to retrieve the young man, he was completely lost somewhere in past time.

  The project director, still under unbearable pressure from the increasingly threatening government, realizing the young man's irretrievable loss and suffering deep pangs of guilt over his part in so dooming him, had suicided, publicly and very messily. He had been replaced by a Dr. Jane Stone, who, in addition to holding scientific degrees commensurate to the position, was a lieutenant colonel in the government security service.

  Within his own lifetime, Dr. Harold Kenmore had seen his country of birth change from a republic ruled over by popularly elected representatives to a dictatorship in all but name—tightly regimented, savagely policed; even the most intimate aspects of every citizen's life were spied upon, lest the unhappy, deprived, and brutally downtrodden people rise in revolt against the family dynasty which had stolen away their freedoms and the country. Therefore, despite his relatively privileged status, Kenmore was not at all happy with his present life, there and then . . . nor had he been the only such man on the project.

  Dr. Emmett O'Malley had been another such. Younger than Kenmore and so not really remembering the United States of America that once had been, he still knew of the experiences of friends and even relatives who had suffered cruelly at the callous hands of the dictatorship's minions and therefore had become willing to risk as much as his life to escape.

  A third of this water had been Dr. Lenny Vincenzo, and no matter what others in the project or the government might wonder or guess or suppose or suspect, Kenmore and O'Malley knew. Their true, though short-term, friend and colleague Leonard David Vincenzo had not only escaped, he had used the Gamebird Project and the dwindling energy supplies of the hellish government itself to speed him on his way to freedom. Even thinking of what the brave, desperate young scientist had done was a heady experience for Kenmore and O'Malley.

  However, subsequent to the loss of Vincenzo and the suicide of the responsible director, his successor had suspended human-type projections, though still sporadically experimenting with certain attempts to reverse the activity of the equipment and bring things from past to present, skipping from year to year, century to century, geographical loc
ation to geographical location; the success of her experiments had been spotty at best.

  But hope springs eternal in the human breast. Desperately certain that somehow, someway, sometime they could and would find or make a way to gain access to the locked and guarded facility, learn how to operate the requisite devices, and thus project themselves to a somewhere, sometime that they could not imagine could possibly be worse than life under the existing regime, the two conspirators took up the study of history. After some time, they at length agreed upon northwestern Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. This done, they began studying books, tapes, and period maps and began to use the easily available hypno-study system to acquire languages and skills of various archaic sorts, passing off their interests and courses of study as just harmless hobbies.

  Meanwhile, being very careful, fully realizing the deadly danger of it all, Dr. Emmett O'Malley—young-looking (the longevity process having more or less frozen his age at mid-twenties), handsome, with a well-developed gift of the blarney—entered into a sexual liaison with Colonel Dr. Jane Stone, thereby eventually gaining access to the projection labs and knowledge of the equipment therein contained.

  In addition to using his own lab to surreptitiously compound longevity booster capsules disguised as headache remedy and taken a few at the time back to his quarters, there to be hidden away, Harold Kenmore had hypno-trained himself in antique jewelry-making methods, signed out on loan a quantity of bulk gold, silver, and copper, and set up a small workshop in a corner of his bedroom. There he actually had made some jewelry, and those who saw it had praised his skills, but he had also cast the precious metals into coin shapes and into plain finger rings of varying weights. He also had hypnoed a course in costume design and had fabricated complete sets of clothing to his and Emmett's measures in fashions of the times they were contemplating.

  One of Emmett's degrees was in the field of ferrous metallurgy, and to this he added hypno-courses in depth and breadth, seeking and at last developing a way to fabricate superior steel from crude pig iron and certain common elements under very primitive conditions. He had proved this theory by fashioning two broadswords and a brace of daggers, plus several smaller knives.

  From the very outset of the preparations for their private scheme, their forlorn hope of escape from the hateful, hate-filled madhouse of their world, the two men had seemingly become fanatics in the category of physical exercises of all sorts, and so few if any of their peers and keepers considered it odd that they at last took up fencing, too, proceeding—aided, of course, by hypno-study—from footwork to foil, then epee, then saber. At length, they began to fence with the broadswords; in the beginning of this, they used these weapons alone, and as they became more adept at handling the heavy, ill-balanced blades, they began to try fencing Florentine, with a dagger in the left hand.

  All these disciplines, manufactures, and studies took time, of course, sandwiched in as they perforce were between the necessities of work, the Gamebird routines of endless meetings, conferences, evaluations, and the like, not to mention the time necessarily consumed by Emmett's torrid affair with Colonel Dr. Jane Stone. It took time, years passed, but then Harold and Emmett had the time, for their longevity-treated bodies aged only minutes while those not so treated aged days and weeks. Lenny Vincenzo had been gone from their world for almost five years before the two men decided that the time at last was ripe for their escape to they knew not what.

  Over the years of increasingly harsh and regimented dictatorship, most once-honored holidays of all natures had been abolished and the average worker labored six-day, seventy-two-hour weeks, week after week, for twelve months of every year, paid less and ever less real income, the purchasing power of which at the best proved never enough to buy the needed amounts of the increasingly scarce and dear necessities of life. Not even the slightest surcease was available. Use of tobacco was illegal. Though rigorously discouraged and under constant surveillance, religious practice was allowed on one day each work week. Uses of alcohol, hallucinogenics, or narcotics invariably brought lengthy stays in government labor and reeducation camps if used other than under a physician's orders or, preferably, his direct supervision. Those adjudged insane or unable to work due to injury or physical impairment were killed. Only the elite—bureaucrats, military, higher echelons of police and overlapping internal intelligence departments, valued people sequestered away in certain government research projects such as Gamebird, or a very few others—were allowed to lead lives of anything save endless drudgery, malnourishment if not outright starvation, hopelessness, and unceasing terror.

  However, within a five-day period—the last two days of an outgoing year and the first three days of the incoming one—designated the President's Birthday Celebration, most if not all strictures were eased nationwide. Government outlets gave away not only free foodstuffs to all comers, but tobacco, spirits of many sorts, items of footwear and clothing, and even supplies of hallucinogens. During these wild Days, public appearances in chemically altered states not only went unpunished but were aggressively encouraged. Travel, normally very much restricted, not only was eased during these Days but was free to those with proof of family elsewhere in the country if the round trip could be accomplished before the Days had ended. Many, drunk or spacey, went forth and about in odd attire or none at all, unnoticed and unremarked by any. There were always some killings and other violence during the Days, but usually the then-short-handed police ignored the smaller instances of violence—though they were always quick to put down mobs by deadly methods. The bodies, however slain, were just collected and delivered to the nearest rendering plant.

  At the Gamebird Project, on the banks of the Potomac River, as at all the other projects run by the government, the resident workers were, though comparatively lavishly provided for and kept in luxury, sequestered, not allowed to leave the complex and grounds save in supervised groups for very necessary field trips or visits to their superiors elsewhere. Their families, if they had them, were supported and housed, but their only contacts with them through the year long were in the forms of letters (always and thoroughly censored, incoming and outgoing), videotapes (ditto) and the exceedingly rare vision-phone call. The Days represented the only chance available to the sequestered men and women for physical contact with their loved ones, and those with families invariably took advantage of the opportunity, knowing that their transportation would be assured and first-class. For this reason, the population of Gamebird during the Days dropped drastically, and for most who did stay on at the Project, there was no work and almost unlimited license. Travel about the various sectors of the vast complex, usually strictly forbidden without necessity and authorization from some lofty source, was permitted, while obvious drunkenness and odd behavior was expected.

  For these many reasons, Harold Kenmore and Emmett O'Malley had felt that their best, indeed their only decent, chance to carry out their escape scheme would be upon one of the Days. Over their shirts and trunkhose, they had donned the coveralls issued them for outside work in cold or wet weather, filling the cargo pockets of these with precious metals, longevity-booster capsules, food concentrates, and other small items. Their parka pockets were likewise crammed full, then they slung on their baldrics, buckled their dagger belts and slung their cloaks over all. They slipped their sheathed broadswords into place in the baldrics, rinsed out their mouths with grain alcohol, and splashed the rest of the stuff over their clothing before setting out from their quarters—arm in arm, singing a lewd song, and clutching a half-empty liquor bottle.

  Descending to the lowest level of their part of the complex, they found the guard cubicle completely untenanted, so they just boarded one of the small electric rail cars and let it take them through the tunnel under the width of the river and into the lowest level of the southern segment of the Gamebird Project, wherein was located the experimental time-travel facility.

  In the southern terminal, the guard cubicle was tenanted, but all three
of the guards therein were snoring—one in a chair, two on the floor. Bottles in various stages of emptiness were scattered about the cubicle, and a pungent smell of burning rope hung thickly in the air. Emmett casually helped himself to the key to the lift, and the two scientists ascended swiftly to the level they sought, a little shocked at the ease of it all.

  But that had all ended at the door to the facility itself. The guard on duty there had not been asleep or drunk or other than fully awake and alert. However, he had known Emmett by sight, had been aware of the man's relationship with the director, and had stayed unsuspicious long enough for Emmett to get in sufficiently close to deprive him quietly of consciousness.

  Using the entry card his high-ranking sometime lover had given him, Emmett had let them into the huge room and, after positioning Harold on a silvery, circular plate set in the floor, he had raced about the room, going from one bulky device to the next one, pushing buttons, pulling levers, turning dials, and scrutinizing displays. At length, he had wheeled over a metal-covered console about four feet high by two feet or so square, centered it on the silvery disk, and begun to plug its thick cable into a larger device nearby, while Harold gazed blankly at the jungle of dials, knobs, buttons, gauges, and small levers of varying colors and sizes which covered the top surface.

  Dr. Emmett O'Malley returned to stand beside Kenmore on the disk, and his big, freckled hands moved quickly and surely over the controls. A deep hum that seemed to come from everywhere and from nowhere had begun sometime while O'Malley had been back among the banks of devices and was increasing swiftly in loudness, even as a blue-green glow that did not seem to have a visible source became brighter and greener all about the chamber.

  At almost the last moment in that world, Col. Dr. Jane Stone had appeared from out of the shadows, leveling at them a sonic weapon which could have been their deaths save that Emmett had preset the device to project them immediately, sufficient power had been achieved, and they had winked out of the furious woman's world even as her finger had tightened on the trigger.