The Doomfarers of Coramonde (30 page)

He left as soon
as he could, saying he had to catch a plane. But he had plenty of time, and
used it getting drunk at the airport. On his way to the departure gate, he
noticed a newspaper headline: VIOLENCE AT ANTIWAR RALLY.

He rethought
his problems as his plane shot toward Philadelphia. The disorienting effects of
his departure from combat were taking hold now. He saw subjectively that he’d
left it behind, survived. Did he ever want to leave again? His mind skittered
over the incredible events of that twenty-four hours or so in Coramonde.

Undermining
doubts of his own sanity began to intrude again. He put them aside; he and
Pomorski had discussed the incident many times in private. He had no doubt that
it had happened. As far as Gil knew, the others had never mentioned those
occurrences to anyone outside the Nine-Mob. Even if they did, who’d believe?
No, the facts of the incident were safe from exposure, due simply to human
nature.

As time
intervened between them and that episode, the other members of
Lobo’s
crew
had found it harder and harder to recall. The memory retreated into unreality
for them, and then into a sort of forgetfulness, as if it were slowly being
eradicated from recollection.

Not to Gil,
though. He remembered it all vividly and had the feeling that there was a
reason for it, though he didn’t know what it might be. He suspected that it was
because he was destined to return to that other world, but the unequaled relief
of being yanked from war and sent home made him reconsider. He shrugged; he would
spend some time not thinking about it, come un-wired and get back to it later.

There was time.

Flora
MacDonald, nee Gilbert, held back her words, but tears welled in her eyes,
tears that had nothing to do with the charcoal smoke of the barbecue. Across
the picnic table sat her eldest son Gil, home from Vietnam, slightly more
recognizable in casual clothes at their backyard party. She’d been amazed at
his appearance when he’d walked unannounced into the house a week ago and
thrown it into happy bedlam, with unfamiliar creases in his face and the
upright saber on his right shoulder. And in days thereafter, more and more
changes had become evident.

Even now he sat
staring into space, lost in thought, unconsciously taking ice cubes from his
finished drink into his mouth and methodically breaking them with his teeth,
sucking cool moisture from them. She thought about this automatic use of a
source of water against heat and dehydration, and lost control of her tears.

Changes. The
second night home he’d rolled from bed with a single terrified scream,
“Incoming!” The revelation had kept her awake until dawn.

Then there were
his frequent differences of opinion with his younger brother Ralph. Three years
separated them, like as many centuries or continents.

She sobbed
silently, thinking of the talks that always seemed to devolve into arguments,
with Ralph emotional and intense and his older brother quietly expository.
Gil’s service had put the two irreconcilably in different camps with some
unseen barrier between them, their mother and father standing helplessly to one
side.

Gil turned his
head, musing broken. “What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised at the tears.

She shook her
head, not trusting to reply. “I’m going to clean up the kitchen,” she managed,
and retreated from the patio. There were numerous survivors among the
afternoon’s hot dogs and hamburgers. Ralph had tried a new approach to their
old argument, the war, using inductive reasoning. Gil had challenged the chain
of logic and the row resulted in Ralph’s screeching away on his Honda, taking
fury out on the gears.

Gil’s father
made fresh drinks for himself and his son, Piña Coladas of which he was rather
proud, and they sat to watch the sun go down.

“You know
what’s bothering her of course, don’t you?” he said.

“I can’t seem
to help it;
we
can’t seem to. I don’t know, it’s as if Ralph and I are
screaming at each other, and neither of us can hear.” He rubbed his eyes with
thumb and forefinger. “None of it’s the same anymore. I’ve changed. Don’t fit.
Ain’t tuned in.”

“Give it time.
Rest as long as you like. Start college, or get yourself organized some other
way. You did say you were thinking about school, didn’t you?”

Gil took a long
pull on his drink. “Once I did. I dunno, maybe I still do. I’m not going back
to being assistant something-or-other. It was almost a relief that Sandy got
engaged while I was gone; I couldn’t talk to her any more than to Ralph.”

He was silent
for a few minutes. He seldom drank anything but beer, and the liquor was
beginning to affect him, bringing on uncharacteristic moodiness. With abrupt
decision he said, “I’m thinking of going away again for a while, Pop.”

“So soon? It’d
break her heart, your mother! Can’t you wait? Save some money? You could travel
during college vacation, do things in style.”

“I don’t mean
that kind of travel, Pop. It’s… impossible to explain.” He didn’t watch his
father’s face, but lit an insect repellent candle and set it on the arm of his
chair, its odor coming to him sharply. At length he spoke, to forestall the
pained speech he expected.

“If I go, I’ll
be gone for a long time. How can I convince you that this isn’t just some crazy
idea? It’s the only thing I can think of that I want to do, that I
care
about.”

“Well, I don’t
know how many parents have said it, but, dammit, if your son is worth his salt
there’ll come a time when you’ve got to say, ‘If it’s what you want—’ Anything
I can do to help? ’Cause I’ve known you a long time, kid, and I know what
happens when you get a notion in that head of yours.”

Whatever their
differences, Gil had to admit that Ralph had kept his car in first-class shape.
The old Chevy had never idled more smoothly or handled better. The day after
his conversation with his father, Gil drove up the New Jersey Turnpike and
changed for the Palisades Parkway. Just after he entered New York State, he
left the Parkway and found the small town in Rockland County where Van Duyn had
told him a man named Morrows, his former assistant, lived.

Gil located
Morrows with a phone directory. It turned out that the man lived in a rented
bungalow. He answered the door with a cautious look in his eye, a pale,
heavyset individual in his midtwenties, with what Gil tagged as a false front
of condescension.

“I’m here to
talk to you about Edward Van Duyn,” Gil said.

Morrows looked
him up and down. “I’ve already told Institute Security and the police
everything I know,” he replied.

“Never said I
was looking for him. He sent me.”

Gil was
satisfied with the effect. Morrow’s eyebrows shot up and the put-on calm
slipped. Regaining composure, he invited Gil in.

The ex-sergeant
was sparing with explanations of his encounter with Van Duyn. He showed the
note he’d brought and requested the two missing components for the original
contiguity machine, the one still at the Grossen Institute. He asked Morrows’
help in using it.

At first
Morrows was skeptical, but details of Van Duyn’s instructions, taken in tandem
with the handwriting of the note, convinced him that this newcomer had indeed
spoken with his former research director since he’d shifted through the
interface between universes in his second-generation machine. Morrows went to
his desk and returned with sheafs of paper.

“Ever since Dr.
Van Duyn left I’ve been working, trying to interpret his data in full. The
equipment works well enough, I suppose, though I haven’t activated it since his
last experiment. He covered the trail of his research so well that I can’t
quite ferret out all the details and variables.”

“You haven’t
tried it?”

Morrows laughed
nervously, as if some embarrassing secret had come to light. “Tried it myself?
Take a chance on a miscalculation that might open a gateway to, say, the heart
of a star? Don’t be asinine. Oh, once I’ve collated all my data, and perhaps
expanded Van Duyn’s findings a bit, and made some preparations and so forth,
then I’ll use the contiguity.” His eyes roamed the shabby little home. Anger
etched his voice.

“Do you think I
like this? Living on assistantship pay without recognition or a future? It’s
just that before I jump off into another cosmos, I want to be sure, that’s all.
Simply a matter of a little more hard information, some more tests.”

Then Gil
understood. Morrows would never use the contiguity. He’d dither uncertainly,
delay one more day or one more week, and in the end he wouldn’t go. Gil
wondered what it would be like to see the apparatus every day, know you could
leave anytime you chose, agonize over dangers and doubts and postpone, forever
postpone.

A living
hell,
he thought.

“If you help
me, Morrows, I’ll add considerably to your information, maybe clarify some of
those variables you’ve got, nail down some unknowns for you.” He knew he could
con this man.

Morrows leaned
forward in his chair, suspicion and condescension forgotten.

The next day
was Sunday. Though he didn’t usually work that day, Morrows went to the Grossen
Institute, Proceeding according to the researcher’s instructions, Gil found an
overgrown dirt side road leading to an unused gate in the fence surrounding the
Institute grounds. The road had been used to bring in heavy equipment to build
a power plant, then ignored and the gate locked. Tall weeds and young saplings
had come in since then, effectively hiding Gil’s car from the main road. He was
thankful for the Chevy’s high clearance in negotiating passage.

The fence was
unimpressive rusting chain link, more to keep out children and the idly curious
than to repel serious invaders. This sleepy town knew little trouble and
conditions required only nonchalant watchfulness against nuisances and vandals,
not alert defense against determined, forceful intrusion, there being small
profit for thieves in the equipment and information available at the Institute.
The Grossen dealt exclusively in the abstract.

Gil waited a
few minutes at the fence, assuring himself that no one was near, and swarmed
over it.

Though the
directors of the Grossen Institute were curious about Van Duyn’s abandoned
apparatus, Morrows’ investigations clearly didn’t have much priority. He’d been
relocated in a converted storage building near the power plant. It had
garage-type doors for deliveries, doors that would fit in with Gil’s plan.

Morrows was
waiting for him and showed him the contiguity apparatus, a square frame of
metal perhaps seven feet on a side, held upright by supports. There was
surprisingly little ancillary equipment: a monitoring console and the tuning
bank. Morrows warmed the device, studying various indicators with a critical
eye. Gil watched and tried to memorize the sequence exactly.

At last the
other mated two cables and threw a switch. The framework instantly contained a
bright scene, a green field with a warm sun overhead and a tree line in the
distance. Gil knew he was looking at Coramonde again.

Morrows threw
the switch back and the view faded. He was sweating and his hands were
trembling badly.

“Okay,” said
Gil, “here’s the scam.”

That evening he
returned home, supposedly from visiting Jack McKinny, a former squadmate in the
LURPs. The next day he cashed in his U.S. Savings Bonds, closed out his bank
account and began a painstaking buying spree, starting with the bookstores.
Deciding and redeciding what to take, he concentrated largely on law, political
science, philosophy and selections in mathematics, psychology and education. He
took everything he could lay his hands on about guerrilla warfare; he added
them to his own collection, manuals he’d felt the U.S. Army would never miss.
Too, he brought works on medicine and agriculture.

It had been his
intention to pick up a quantity of rifles, maybe army surplus or some Belgian
FNs, to take back with him, but the drawbacks stopped him. First there was the
problem of teaching backward peasants to shoot and not freak out at the noise
and blast, something he would have had to do without any other cadre-men to
help, except possibly Van Duyn. He’d worked with Vietnamese Civilian Irregular
Defense Groups, and knew how frustrating that could be.

Then there was
the snag of maintenance and cleaning, tough to impress on members of a nonmachine
culture. Add the bulky haul of ammunition and magazines, cleaning kits, spare
parts, solvent, oil and repair tools, and the whole idea became untenable, not
counting the cost factor. Too, Van Duyn felt a moral imperative not to
introduce firearms on any large scale to Coramonde.

In the end he
took only those weapons he would use himself. The only gun he owned was a
Mauser pistol, a ten-round Waffenfabrik commercial model with the solid-head
“new safety” lever. Chambered for nine-mm cartridges, the pistol had adequate
accuracy and hitting power, though it was a bit old, and would fire the same
standard ammunition as Van Duyn’s Browning. Gil located an old canvas military
holster to accommodate the Mauser, along with a braided lanyard and three
ammunitions pouches for extra clips.

He asked with
exaggerated casualness if his father would care to sell his M-l carbine, trophy
of the war in the Pacific. Mr. MacDonald silently took the carbine down,
fetched clips from a locked drawer and handed them to his son.

Gil’s next
acquisition was a Browning Hi-Power, shoulder holster and extra magazines. At
the same time, he purchased a good deal of nine-mm and carbine ammunition. He
also decided to take his bowie and trench knives.

He spent most
of that week around the house. He found everyday life a trifle unfamiliar. Not
beyond his ability to adjust, just… bland. Nights watching TV didn’t interest
him except that his parents evidently enjoyed it, and he got to talk to them.
He’d never told his mother he was leaving and didn’t know that his father had.
She appeared to know.