The Whenabouts of Burr (7 page)

THE U.S.S. Prince Martin
, the largest lighter-than-air craft currently in operation in the World, has been reported passing over the Sphinx, a famous statue on the outskirts of the city of Cairo in Egypt.

The
Prince Martin
, commissioned two years ago July and named, with his Democratic Majesty's permission, after his eldest son, Martin, Prince of Texas, is now attempting to break the world's record for cruising non-stop around the World.

This epic flight was begun 27 days ago at Washington Naval Base in Virginia. The current World Record of 107 days was set in April-August, 1896 by the dirigible
Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin
, under the able command of its builder Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and staffed by men and officers of the Balloon Command of the Prussian Army.

Continued on page 12

“We're somewhere else!” Swift said fervidly, dropping into one of the wooden chairs scattered around the shop.

“
Tempora mutantur
,” Ves said softly.

“I mean, actually,” Swift said. “It's like—it—it defies simile. I mean, entirely somewhere else. But we must have a common past somehow.”

Ves nodded. “Post Revolutionary, I assume. We must tread carefully in this strange water. We are unfamiliar with the mores, morals, religion, and politics of this place; let us be careful not to get stung. They seem more, ah, rigid here.” He pointed to the cartoon on the editorial page of the
Times-Gazette
. It showed a large, heavily muscled man swinging a pick in the general direction of a railroad spike. The drawing was in a curious blocky, square style, and the caption read: “No time for play, AMERICA IS BEING BUILT BY THE SWEAT OF MY BROW.”

“Your apparel, gentlemen,” the tailor announced, coming out of his back room cubbyhole. “Is it the seventh?”

“No,” Ves told him. “The eighth.”

“Ah well,” the tailor said, brandishing the two suits before him like shields. “One so loses track of time in the press of events.” He seemed quite recovered from his attack of vexation over the monster sewing machine. ‘Try these on. I'll warrant they'll fit like new skin.”

Ves and Swift put on their new suits, with the tailor hovering about them, fussing and fitting. When the three of them were satisfied with the garments' appearance, Ves took the flat coin case from the pocket of his old jacket. “How much do we owe you?” he asked.

“The suits with alterations are seven-fifty apiece,” the tailor said. “I can allow you fifty cents apiece for the material from your old garments. That would make it fourteen dollars.”

“You accept gold?”

The tailor stared at him. “You mean dust? Haven't seen any since I left Upper California ten years ago.”

“Coins,” Ves said. “Eagles d'or.”

“Gold eagles? Gladly. Don't see many of them these days, either.”

Ves produced the coins and handed the tailor two. The tailor stared at them, then looked suspiciously at Swift, then Ves. “Joke?” he said. “It's not funny, you know. I'm as loyal as the next man.”

“Something wrong?” Ves asked.

“You sure you're foreigners?”

“Word of honor, we've never been here before in our lives.”

“Where'd you get the coins?”

“They were given to us in a transaction.”

“You know about Aaron Burr?”

“Who?” Ves asked.

“The gentleman whose picture's on the face of these coins. Aaron Burr.”

“What about him?”

“He's a traitor. Was, I should say. President Hamilton had him tried for treason about eighty years ago, and he fled to Mexico. Hamilton sent the army in to hunt him down. That's how we ended up being at war with Spain and France, and an ally of Great Britain, so soon after fighting the Revolution. The War of 1814, we call it. Burr disappeared into Mexico.”

“But that was”—Ves did some fast mental arithmetic— “eighty-three years ago. What has that got to do with our loyalty? Excuse our ignorance.”

“There are a group of malcontents in this country,” the tailor said, looking cautiously about as though he expected one of them to jump out from behind a rack of suits. “Jacobins, you know. They call themselves Burrites. They want a popular democracy—direct election of the President every four years. That sort of thing. You know what it says over the Hamilton Monument: ‘The People are Turbulent and Changing.' No, of course you don't. Those are the Burrites: turbulent and changing. It is not respectable to talk about Aaron Burr. It is suspect. Alexander Hamilton never liked Aaron Burr. They almost fought a duel once. And to have a gold coin with Burr's face on it is unpatriotic. It's almost immoral. It's a peculiar thing to do for a prank.”

“That's what we thought,” Ves said. “But they can always be melted down. They
are
gold, after all.”

“I'll think of something to do with them,” the tailor said conspiratorially. “Here's your change.”

CHAPTER TEN

“The New York Public Library,” Ves said. “That's where I'll go. You'd be surprised how much of a private detective's investigating is done in a library. Of course, I doubt whether that beautiful building with the stone lions in front exists in this, ah, world; but they must have a library.”

“What are we going to do in the library?” Swift asked. “I've never been very big on this esoteric research stuff. We have GS sevens for that. How's library research going to help us find the Constitution?” He and Ves were strolling leisurely up Madison Avenue, and had just reached the corner of Twenty-Seventh Street.

“We're looking for a pattern,” Ves said, “and until we have enough of the pieces, we won't be able to see it. Until we have enough of the pieces, we won't even be able to tell for sure which are the right pieces. All we can do is collect pieces and try to fit them in. Eventually we'll be able to tell which pieces belong, and which don't.”

“I wish I was taping that,” Swift said. “I'd love to play it back to you.”

“Besides,” Ves said, “I believe in synchronicity.”

“What does that mean?” Swift asked.

“It means if something happens, it was supposed to. All events have a direct cause and an effect—that's linear; but they all are also interrelated like a bunch of threads in a tapestry. We found this place, so we were supposed to come here. That being so, we won't merely be dropped off here, but will continue on. Whatever the story of the theft of the Constitution, we are now a part of it. Whether we will win or lose I cannot tell, but we will make an ending to the story, not just leave it in the middle.”

“Is that what it means?” Swift asked. “That's a heavy load for one word to carry.”

“That is what I believe,” Ves said stiffly. “My personal philosophy, developed over a lifetime of watching events play themselves out. You'll see.”

“If that's true,” Swift said, “if some higher power is causing this sequence of events, why bother doing anything at all? Why not just check into some decent hotel and wait for events to catch up to us?”

“There is such a thing as free will,” Ves said. “If we use our free will to opt out of the situation, then the situation will pass us by.”

“All I can say about your philosophy is that I don't understand it,” Swift said. “But then I don't understand Kant, Schopenhauer, Kahlil Gibran, Dylan, or Rod McKuen, either. What I want now is to go to bed; a good fifteen hours' sleep. When I wake up, maybe I won't feel as if I was dreaming.”

“You
have
been up for a while,” Ves said. “Why don't we find a bed for you while I hunt up the library.”

Lodging at the Gouverneur Morris, a plain but respectable hostelry on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, across the street from where the Empire State Building stood in their world, cost thirty cents a night, bed and breakfast. Swift made use of the bed while Ves went off to discover the New York Public Library. The room clerk had located it for him at 42nd and Fifth—same place—and had assured him that it was open until ten p.m., “for the instruction and entertainment of shopgirls, and others who are unable to use the facilities during the day”. When he returned at about ten-thirty, he didn't bother waking Swift, but merely collapsed in the next bed.

“What did you discover?” Swift asked him, over the prepaid breakfast the next morning.

“Same building, pretty much,” Ves said. “You know the lions?”

“The ones out front?”

“Right.”

“What about them?”

“Bison.”

“What?”

“There's a pair of bison flanking the steps in this world. Very attractive, too. I spent my time reading history texts. High school stuff.”

“What about it?” Swift asked, munching a hot biscuit.

“Everything's the same, far as I can tell, until about eighteen hundred. Who's the fourth president of the United States?”

“Let's see: Washington, Jefferson, ah, Adams, ah, Jackson… Jackson?”

“That's the advantage of being a naturalized citizen,” Ves said. “You have to know all that stuff.”

“I thought you were born in Baltimore,” Swift said.

“I was, but my father was born in Carrara. He had to learn the names of all the presidents in order to get his papers. He thought that all Americans had to know the presidents, the amendments to the Constitution, all the states in alphabetical order, and all that sort of stuff. When he found out the school didn't make me memorize that stuff, he made me.”

“Everybody learns that in school,” Swift said.

“Name all the states in alphabetical order,” Ves challenged. “I'll give you a hundred dollars if you get it right the first time; you give me five dollars a mistake. Debt payable on return to our own time—place—whatever.”

“We'll have to try that sometime,” Swift said, looking thoughtful. “What about the presidents?”

“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams (that's John Quincy), Jackson, van Buren, and now we're up to about 1840. That's the way I remember it.”

“How do they remember it here?” Swift asked.

“That's the question. The litany here goes: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Pinckney, Clinton, Schuyler, King—”

“Isn't there a Schuyler now?” Swift asked.

“Most of the names seem to repeat,” Ves told him. “I would say that a small group of aristocrats have the Presidency all sewed up. They share it among themselves. I also think that if I said that in public, I'd be arrested. The presidency seems to be a figurehead office, but there's a lot of ceremony surrounding the figurehead, and one does not publicly insult him. Everything's more autocratic and repressed here. Have you noticed the signs?”

“What signs?”

Ves pointed to the wall, where a small framed sign showed an eye inset into the triangular tip of a pyramid, over the motto:

MINISTRY OF PUBLIC SAFETY
OUR EYES ARE EVERYWHERE
GUARDING YOUR RIGHTS

“Those signs are everywhere,” Ves said.

“Swell,” Swift said. “What else did you find out?”

“The Civil War,” Ves said. “They didn't have one.”

“No Civil War? What about slavery?”

“There was a big slave revolt in 1844, probably secretly backed by a group of Northern businessmen. It was crushed, and the surviving revoltees—is that a word?—were deported to Africa. I don't know whether slavery is practiced here now or not. If so, it would seem to be limited to the Southern states. New England doesn't need slavery, they have the Irish.”

“Is that a crack?” Swift demanded.

“Don't be silly,” Ves said. “I know you're Irish. There was a famine in Ireland a few years ago, and a couple of hundred thousand Irish came over here on indentures, and are now working in the mills. There are also a lot of Russians here, but the Tsar is not pleased.”

‘Then why did he let them go?”

“They tip-toe out. There's a big movement here to free the poor oppressed Russian peasants. It seems to be officially sanctioned. Relations between His Democratic Majesty and His Imperial Majesty are definitely strained.” Swift munched reflectively on a muffin. “His Democratic Majesty… It just doesn't sound right. We're in a parallel universe, you know? I read about that in a book once, but I thought they were kidding.”

“They were,” Ves said.

“The way I figure it,” Swift said, waggling his spoon and splattering cocoa about the tablecloth, “there's our world, and there's this world, kind of side-by-side in the fourth dimension—or no, I guess it would be the fifth dimension—either they had parallel evolution, or they were the same until about eighteen hundred and then split apart.”

“Then how come it's eighteen ninety-seven here?” Ves asked.

“How should I know,” Swift explained,

“And what about the coins?”

“What coins?”

“The gold coins. Like the two I bought the suits with, or the one I've got right here”—he fished it out of his pocket. “Eagle d'or, it says. Mexico, it says. Aaron Burr, it says. Aaron Burr was never emperor of Mexico in this world. If there are parallel time tracks, there must be a whole bunch of them. Besides, if that character was the Alexander Hamilton, he died sixty years ago in this world.”

Swift shrugged. “If there are two, why not twenty? Why not twenty thousand? As a matter of fact, if there are two, there are probably an infinity of them. Stretching out as far as the eye can see, if the eye could stand somewhere to watch. Somewhere Aaron Burr shoots Alexander Hamilton, somewhere Alexander Hamilton shoots Aaron Burr, somewhere they both get it; somewhere they both miss, probably a few where one of the bullets ricochets and kills one of the seconds; somewhere the boat that takes them to Weehawken tips over, and one or both of them drown; somewhere Hamilton and Burr never met, somewhere they were lifelong friends. I could continue.”

“Not with an audience,” Ves said. “But I get your point. So where does that leave us?” He ticked off on his fingers: “One: there are an infinite number of parallel universes; two: a device exists to travel from one to another of these universes—or at least to a parallel Earth, we shouldn't be so cavalier with the word ‘universe'—hidden in the wall of a steam room; three: there may be many more of these devices; four: Alexander Hamilton, for reasons of his own, is hunting for Aaron Burr among these parallel earths; five: someone has stolen the Constitution of the United States and left an almost exact duplicate in its place which; six: probably came from one of these alternate worlds and is a genuine Constitution.”

“That would explain it,” Swift agreed. “But how did he get it out of the vault?”

“How should I know?” Ves explained. “Find him and we'll ask.”

“How?”

“Research. Find out about the entrances—these things in the walls—if there is more than one. Find out who set them up, who controls them, and who has access to them. Then find out the person from this group who has suddenly acquired a Constitution. Research and simple police work.”

“Simple,” Swift said. “And you're going to do this in the library?”

“It's a place to start,” Ves said. “In the mass of public documents and newspapers will be the clue we need, if we know where to look.”

“Where do we look?” Swift asked.

“I don't know yet,” Ves admitted. “Finished with breakfast?”

Swift swallowed the last fragment of muffin and stood up. “I'll follow your lead, Ves,” he said. “But you'll have to do the leading. I don't know anything about this kind of research. I wouldn't know what to look for if it bit me.”

“I'll think of something,” Ves promised.

The library was still closed when they got there: the sign on the door said eleven a.m., but the clock on the corner building across Fifth Avenue said five minutes past ten. “Better set our watches to local time,” Swift said, pulling back his sleeve.

Ves grabbed his arm. “Cautiously!” he said. “We don't know whether wristwatches are in use here.”

“Right.” Swift did some subtle gyrations to hide his wrist from people while he reset the watch. “We have almost an hour. What shall we do with it?”

“Let's go over there,” Ves said, indicating the corner building across the street. “There's an interesting shop on the Forty-Second Street side. At least the window looked fascinating at ten last night.”

“I've noticed that,” Swift said. “Shop windows always look infinitely more fascinating when the shops are closed.” They crossed Fifth and Forty-Second Street, dodging horse-drawn omnibuses, produce carts, heavy wagons, and hansom cabs, all of which seemed to have developed a maniacal desire to move through the traffic-lightless intersection in less time than the others. “Wow,” Swift said, as he practiced deep breathing on the far corner, “never again will I yearn for the peaceful days before the automobile.”

Santesson
Fils
, the store called itself. The window was a four-foot by four-foot square, and contained “Everything you have always coveted but seldom seen.” There was an ancient astrolab with cabalistic symbols; a model Greek trireme with removable decks and tiny sailors manning the oars; a pair of huge brass binoculars with an identification plate in Turkic; a great headdress with many turkey and eagle feathers and a printed card saying: TO OUR BROTHER WALKS-SLOWLY-THROUGH-THE-RAIN, IN RECOGNITION OF HIS MANY SERVICES TO THE SIOUX NATION; a globe of some other world, mostly ocean; a large book, bound in leather, with an Arabic title and a locked flap across the front; a smaller book of architectural renderings of St. Augustine's
City of God
; the corpus of a small, prehensile mammal; a silver, castellated ring with a smoky green stone and a secret compartment; and a variety of intricate mechanisms of no apparent use.

The inside of the shop was small, jumbled, and even stranger than the window. All available nooks, crannies, cubbyholes, and all flat surfaces were covered and filled with books. And on top of the books were piled books, upon which were balanced more books. Interspersed among the books were objects of strange and unique interest. There was a gadget that looked like a two-foot high Ferris wheel, strung with buckets, levers, wires, and cogs, turning at a slow but steady rate. The plaque said:
PERPETUAL MOTION MECHANISM: PERFECTED BY Nathanial McCormick in 1856.

There was a large, elaborate jar of the sort that the forty thieves hid themselves in (one to a jar). There was a box from which extended a mechanical arm, jointed to a mechanical hand, which held a pen. There was the proprietor: a medium-high, rather broad, unkempt man in his forties, jacketless, vest unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, peering over a pamphlet at a desk in the rear of the room and ignoring his intruders with a majestic indifference.