Alternities (53 page)

Shan answered for Wallace. “No, not if they’ve existed ever since Dr. Eden’s Time Zero. But when they show up suddenly at zero plus five billion years, it is a different question. Doesn’t anyone have any ideas?”

Surprisingly, it was Brandenburg who stepped to the fore to answer. “Dr. Eden spoke of the theoretical context for his contribution,” he said slowly. “The rest of the answer may he in the historical context. How much do you know about the time into which you were born, Miss Scott?”

“Not enough to see what you see.”

“I am something of a student of history, Miss Scott,” he said. “And I have the advantage of having lived through those years. Let me try to paint you a picture of the world before the Split.

“What I remember most of all is the fear and the ferment of the post war years. By 1950 the Soviet Union had tested its own fission bomb, and the U.S, was beginning a crash program to build a fusion weapon. Real estate ads offered homes ‘a safe fifty-eight miles from Washington.’ The first round of McCarthy hearings, about Communists in the State Department, were in full swing. Truman was under constant attack for being soft on communism.”

“Wrongly,” Davis opined.

“Your opinion. It did look like we were trying to give Europe to the Russians, the Marshall Plan notwithstanding,” said Brandenburg. “We had demobilized so quickly that there were a hundred and seventy-five Russian divisions facing no more than fifteen Allied divisions, some of which were armed with fifty-year-old Italian rifles. We had put dozens of ships into mothballs, junked thousands of aircraft.

“Then in June the Korean War started, and we jumped in with both boots, perhaps in part to prove Truman’s manhood. But the pressure kept coming, and so did the problems. In the span of one week that November, Truman survived an assassination attempt, lost two key allies—Tydings and Lucas—in the Senate elections, and learned that the Chinese had entered the war on the side of the North Koreans.”

“My mother was already pregnant with me by then,” Shan realized aloud.

Brandenburg nodded. “The last moments of the Common World. At Thanksgiving MacArthur was still talking about having the boys home by Christmas. Over the next three weeks, the Chinese handed us the worst military defeat of our history, routing a 300,000-man army, and Truman started talking out loud about using the bomb. On Christmas Day, he declared a state of national emergency and ordered the military to call a million veterans back to active duty.”

“Jesus,” Wallace said. “I’m amazed you got through it.”

“That’s your history, too,” Brandenburg said. “I remember Tydings saying it would be a miracle if the U.S, and Russia avoided war. Well, perhaps it was.” He looked around the table. “Of all the times in our history when we might have used a helping hand, I would point to that one as when we were most needy.”

Bayshore pounced. “Why? The U.S, and the USSR didn’t have more than fifty atomic bombs between them in 1950,” he said skeptically. “No intercontinental missiles. No megaton-yield H-bombs. No hair-trigger warning systems. We were in more danger in 1960 than 1950.”

“Oh, I concede that there have been crises since then where more was at stake,” Brandenburg said agreeably. “But 1950 was the beginning of the new era of superpower nuclear conflict. It was a cusp—the last time we still had a real choice about which direction we were going to take. If the Split had come in 1960—even our 1960, much less Mr. Wallace’s—the odds would have been against any alternity surviving the next thirty years. We barely got through Norfolk without calling down the fire ourselves.”

Bayshore was still resisting. “You’re saying that some power took pity on us and gave us a few extra chances to survive?”

“I am content with that answer. You’re free to find your own.”

The director’s mouth twisted into a wry expression. “No slight intended to my gathered friends, but what makes us worth all that trouble?”

“We’re not in a position to judge how much ‘trouble’ it was,” Eden said.

“Or to judge worth, for that matter,” Shan interjected.

Eden continued, “To an intelligence capable of such instrumentalities, it may have been no more trouble than snipping off the terminal bud of a growing plant to encourage it to branch.”

“They’re not miracles to God, in other words.”

“If you wish.”

Bayshore looked from face to face in search of an ally. He found expressions ranging from somber to numb. “All right.” he said resignedly. “All these ifs and maybes make fine dinner conversation, but we have a problem right here. What do we do about Indianapolis?”

“We take the gate house away from them,” Davis said simply.

“Yes,” Brandenburg agreed. “But that’s not enough.”

“No?”

“Dr. Eden expressed a belief that the channels were not meant to function as bridges. I agree. This gift only works if each alternity believes that it’s the only one, and acts accordingly. We have to think that we only get one chance. Otherwise we might take risks we have no right taking.”

“That particular cat’s out of the bag,” Wallace said. “We know. You know. You can’t undo that. Besides, we’re not your enemies. We’re more like brothers.”

Brandenburg stiffened. “It seems to me that you and your people chose the sides.”

“We should work together. We believe in the same things—”

“Not from the evidence I’ve seen.”

Wallace patiently tried to explain. “You don’t understand where the Russians have us. You could be the difference. You could help us push them back.”

“Why would we want to?” Brandenburg asked coldly. He turned to Eden. “Doctor, what happens if the cathedral is destroyed?”

“I couldn’t hazard a guess. Not without more than second-hand data and blue-sky models.”

Brandenburg closed his notebook. “Yes. That’s fair,” he said. “First things first. Mr. Bayshore, it’s time to move on the gate. How long before Group 10 can be ready?”

“They’ll be in position for tonight, if we need them,” he said, then added a warning. “There may not be many of the Guard left to round up by then. Unless they’re stacking them three deep inside, it looks like they’ve got some sort of move of their own underway.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Brandenburg said. “I want the gate in our hands by morning.”

Bayshore nodded and stood. “Yes, sir. Dr. Eden, Rayne—grab your things. You, too, Shan,” he added in an obvious afterthought. “The Indianapolis Express leaves in ten minutes.”

Long before the Asylum evacuation was called, Walter Endicott knew what he wanted from the Tower.

It had been a long road back to Boston. The planning and scheming that had returned him at long last to this place had begun years earlier. It was he who had placed the idea of leaving this alternity in Robinson’s mind, he who had pointed out what a loyal fifth column might achieve in the service of its commander.

Endicott remembered the conversation, in an Atlantic City hotel room, three weeks after the election. “Best of all is to rule in heaven, don’t you think?” he had said to the President that day. “There are better places than this, Peter. Why not pick one and take it for our own? Why scratch and fight for table scraps here?”

Robinson had said little at the time, but it was barely the dawn of his presidency. The lessons of the limits of power, the weight of the chains forged out of past mistakes, had yet to be learned.

Soon enough Endicott began to see signs that his suggestion had been taken to heart. The Guard growing like a wild weed, to serve the king in his new kingdom. A new emphasis on first-strike weapons, so that there might be a dramatic exit. Rathole, by which the king’s favored courtiers might blindly accompany him on his journey.

I die and am born again, exalted. I shall not want.

The flaw, annoying and aggrieving, was that Robinson had transmuted the “we” into an “I.” Like a parasitic playwright, Robinson had taken Endicott’s idea and built it into a powerful script in which he was the only actor of substance. Endicott’s sole thanks was to be written in as a supporting role.

Though Endicott remained first among the courtiers, true power-sharing eluded him. Blinded by the courtesies and the other symbols of status, Endicott learned too late that Robinson never truly consulted others in his decisions, never suffered the insecurities which would lead him to meaningfully solicit opinions and advice.

But in seeming to, Robinson had a powerful tool for collecting information and controlling people. And Endicott had been one of those controlled—with comforts and confidences, garnished with an illusion of responsibility.
I need a friend in the Senate, someone I can count on
—But it could have just as easily been another.

Outwardly gracious, Endicott had never crossed Robinson on any matter of substance. He carefully negotiated the traps laid for him by those who coveted what they wrongly thought he had. And he bode his time with stoic patience, waiting for the right moment to introduce a bit of anarchy into the play.

And now that moment had arrived. There are many worlds, Endicott thought. I will find a new one.

Tackett’s gnomes tried to make Endicott a prisoner of the ninth floor, locked up in storage with the round-faced men and thick-lipped boys, the wire-haired wives waiting uncomfortably in line for the toilet. The gnomes took him for one of them, one of the bleating sheep herded to Boston with no more grasp of events than an animal on its way to be butchered.

To be lumped with them was an insult, but Endicott could not concern himself with insults. To be penned with them was a strait-jacket, a strangling hand on his throat. But the gnome supervising the warren had already gone deaf to special pleadings long before Endicott arrived.

“I’m sorry. Senator. I can’t allow any green badges to leave the floor without word from above.”

“I’m sorry. Senator. Yes, the director is in the building, but he’s not available.”

“I’m sorry, Senator. I don’t know where to reach the President.”

Then Robinson made a brief visit to the ninth floor to lance the boil of anxiety which had been growing all day. Looking composed and almost cheerful, the President climbed atop a desk to address the evacuees.

“I know you all have questions which aren’t being answered,” he said in a voice that carried to the far corners of the room. “I’m afraid that all of us upstairs have been too busy doing to do much explaining. I can tell you that the Soviet Union has not backed down from its threatening posture, but neither have they launched any attacks on our forces.

“We’re ready to defend ourselves and to respond to any hostilities, though I hope we won’t need to. But if fighting does come, I promise that you and your families will be safe. Please continue to cooperate with the NRC staff, as you already have so magnificently. Your prayers and your patience are both invaluable to me in this crisis.”

Endicott fought his way forward to catch the President by the elbow before he could exit the room.

“A minute,” he insisted. “We need to talk.”

“Of course,” Robinson said, leading him through the checkpoint and into the corridor outside. “What is it, Walter?”

“I gave you all this,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Everything that’s about to be. The Tower wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. I don’t like being locked up here like a stranger and a security risk. There aren’t any secrets that need to be kept from me.”