Rogue Princess

Chapter 4

THEY TOOK the moaning Kaalund away, and presently an-other detective came in and picked up the hand-grip on the other end of Godwin's handcuff. This was a smaller man, black-haired and flat-faced, who introduced himself as Niels Kirdlavik.

"Is that an Eskimo name?" said Godwin.

"Yes."

"Are you Sven's regular relief on this job?"

"Yes."

"What's gonna happen next?"

"Do not know."

"Do they know what's wrong with Sven yet?"

"Do not know."

The man was not a sprightly conversationalist. Presently, another detective and a couple of uniformed cops came in and poked around the room. They gathered up the remains of the gumdrops and retrieved the empty bags that had contained the first two lots from the waste-basket. The detective asked Godwin a lot of questions that brought out the stories of the three bags of gumdrops, though Godwin refrained from telling about the message capsules.

Godwin finally asked, "Was he poisoned? How is he now?"

"He vas. Ve think it vas meant for you, whom it vould have killed qvick, but he is so big it vill not hurt him much. He vill be back to vork in a couple days."

"Who's trying to poison me?"

"That is vat ve are trying to find out. It might have been your last visitor, or any of the people who prepared and brought the lunch."

Godwin did not know of any motive for Thomsen's trying to murder him—though never having met the man he was in no position to judge. The name of Werner von Wittelsbach had entered his mind at once. The man did have a motive, even though a screwy one. But while Godwin hesitated to tell about this, the detective bustled out.

The afternoon was dull. In answer to his loud protests the hospital personnel finally dug a battered book in English out of their library: The Theory & Practice of Chicken Fanning, by John II. Pappakostas, N. Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2097, 347 pp., $49.50.

Claude Godwin groaned and covered his eyes with his free hand.

Next morning he was awakened by a tug on his wrist and Kirdlavik's voice: "Hey, Mr. Godvin, vake up! The doctors is examine you to see if you can go out!"

Examination showed that the effect of the drug that had kept him unconscious during his transportation to Greenland had wholly worn off. Kirdlavik unlocked his handcuff long enough for him to dress.

"Where am I going?" he asked.

"To the palace; they got a room there for you."

"Yesterday, Gram" said I could visit the lab where Bruun's got his parachron. Why couldn't I stop there on my way?"

"I vill see." Kirdlavik spoke Danish into the telephone, then said: "You may." While the policeman had been telephoning, Godwin slipped the seeming chocolate-bar into his pants pocket.

When Godwin had finished dressing and had eaten his breakfast, still anther detective arrived to take the place of Kirdlavik, who was yawning from his all-night vigil. Otto Malling, a tall thin knobby man with faded blue eyes and a handlebar mustache proved more communicative than the dourly silent Kirdlavik and started off with a lecture on the beauties of Greenland in general and the Junianehaab region in particular: "... and you must take a ride out to the Oster-Bygt where is the ruins of the houses Eric the Red and his people made when they came here in 982..."

GODWIN was not overly impressed by Julianehaab, where the bicycles outnumbered the automobiles, though it did have a quaint, old-fashioned air with its field-stone houses with small windows and steeply gabled roofs. The taxi purred up a winding street towards an academic-looking group of buildings.

"The University of Greenland," said Malling. "The laboratory is this building separate from the rest. You understand, I suppose, that the parachron is a secret yet; you must not talk about it to anybody except those like Doctor Bruun who know already."

"If it's so important, wouldn't the news leak out?"

Malling shrugged. "Plenty of rumors is floating about, but so long as nobody knows exactly, no harm is doing."

Malling showed his identification to the uniformed cop at the front door of the laboratory building. Inside, they waited in a small front office, where Malling exchanged chaff in Danish with a girl secretary. Presently two men entered: Karl Bruun and an older man with a white goatee introduced as Viggo Bruun. Both Bruuns had their sleeves rolled up and were dirty from tinkering; they wiped their hands on pieces of waste and shook hands.

Godwin said, "The gumdrops were superb."

"Good," said the elder Bruun. "You wish to see the parachron, do you not?"

He led the way through featureless concrete halls to an automatic elevator where another policeman stood guard. On the second floor of the building he led them from the elevator to a. large room at whose door stood still another gendarme.

"Why all the cops?" asked Godwin. "Even if this machine works—I mean, in spite of the fact that it works, I don't see why the secrecy."

Bruun said, "It is Anker Gram's doing; he has all sorts of profound political plans connected with the parachron. Besides, he thinks some criminal might destroy the machine lest it be used to view his crimes in the past. This machine should eliminate crime and clear up a lot of mysteries like the Aarestrup fraud."

The elder Bruun led them into a laboratory room littered with the usual clutter of wires, tubing, electric cables, glassware, stands, clamps, meters, old copies of technical magazines, and ash-trays made of discarded scientific apparatus. In the middle of the room, on a massive bench, stood the parachron, a thing somewhat like a television set without its cabinet, but much larger. Besides the viewing screen facing the door, the machine bore on top a gadget with a parabolic reflector, something like a small radar antenna.

Viggo Bruun continued, "We think that is all foolishness. This is science; we should' take it around the world to solve the great historical problems, and not waste time in political maneuvers and tracking down petty pickpockets. "

"If you had to track them down," said Otto Malling, "you would not take such a yolly attitude about them."

"Perhaps not, my friend," said Bruun. "But if this works that way a lot of you fellows will be out of jobs, because a crew with a parachron can visit the scene of every crime and get all the evidence to convict right there."

"If the lawyers don't have the machine outlawed, because it makes it too hard for their clients to make an honest living by robbery," said Malling.

BRUUN turned back to Godwin. "Some day, maybe, we can take the parachron down between Latitudes Thirty and Forty North and really find out something about history; meanwhile Anker Gram says no, and he is the boss."

"You mean," said Godwin, "you gotta lug the machine around to the places where the things actually happened? You can't just sit here in Greenland and twiddle knobs and see the Battle of Waterloo?"

"That is right; you cannot. Actually, the magneto-gravitic matrix precesses about three degrees to the West per century, so the impressions of the Battle of Waterloo would be—let me see—" (he glanced at a wall map) "—about where the southwest tip of England is now." Bruun sighed, a far-away look in his eyes. "If I can only live long enough to get it down to the latitude of Alexandria and photograph the lost books in the Library ..."

"How ja get the pix Grain says prove I'm descended from that King Harold?"

"We flew the parachron in one of the whaling helicopters down to the middle of the Atlantic, between fifty and fifty-five North, and fifty and fifty-five West. The whole life-history of King Harold and his immediate descendants is there. It is quite a job, because if you start shooting on a stormy day the wind makes the helicopter—how would you say—wobble about, so the pictures wobble too."

"Look, Dr. Bruun. I'm no scientist, just a dumb actor, but I know a little about probability, and it sure doesn't stack up that I should be the guy to get—uh—involved with the Princess Karen, and at the same time to be the eldest whatsit descendant of this old king. That's too much like drawing two pat royal flushes in a row."

Bruun smiled faintly. "You cannot argue with facts, my friend. Would you like to see the parachron in operation?"

'You bet!"

Bruun turned to the machine. "Karl, put the quintode tube back in. You see, Mr. Godwin, you can't see much right here, except the neighborhood of Bergen about the year 420 A.D., or the Oslo region about 320. And they are not very impressive."

Karl Bruun replaced the tube that had been taken out of the machine, the windows became opaque and the room dark except for the faint glow of vacuum-tubes inside the jungle of rods and wires and condensers. Viggo Bruun twirled knobs until a ghostly light appeared on the viewing screen; then a blizzard of flickers and. flashes like a television set out of tune.

The image cleared. Godwin found himself looking at a rugged landscape with a body of water in the distance.

"Bergen Fjord," said the elder Bruun.

As the scientist turned more knobs, the antenna on top revolved, and the image on the screen swept around, in a panorama. The image was black-and white, surprising to Godwin who had been brought up on color in photography, cinematography, and television.

Bruun said: "We are about the tenth of June, 421 A.D. As I remember, there is a man who goes close by here ..." The image jerked as he made an adjustment, "'There he is! Take a good look."

A MAN WAS walking across the view. Though Godwin could not judge his size well without familiar objects to compare him with, he got the impression of a short man. He was dark and shaggy, clad in rough woolens: a kind of kilt wrapped around him under the armpits and reaching to his knees and a shawl over his shoulders. He bore a bag on his back and gripped a staff in his free hand. As Godwin watched, the man passed out of sight.

"Very few people in Norway and Sweden at that time," said Bruun. "You have to hunt hard to find one. Mostly they were a miserable lot of Lapp-like folk living along the shores and digging clams. The big migration of Nordics from Jutland had not yet started."

"How far back can you go? To the age of the dinosaurs?"

"Oh, my, no! In the theory you can go back twelve thousand years, the time required for the matrix to precess clear around the earth. In practice the image gets fuzzy when you try to go back more than five thousand. There is one nice view a little older than that ..."

The scene shifted, and Godwin was looking at a huge herd of bison drifting through snow-covered woodland.

"That is near modern Upsala," said Bruun. "If we go on back and eastward all we see is Russian and Siberian forest—hundreds of years and thousands of miles of it."

Godwin asked, "How about those movies of my ancestors? Got any here?"

"Yes."

Viggo Bruun spoke in Danish to his son. The parachron was switched off. There were clicks and whirrings in the dark, and a motion-picture image sprang into life on one concrete wall.

"This," said Viggo Bruun, "is the first reel of the Harold of Wessex series. That is King Harold marrying Aldyth. It wobbles a little because of the wind the day we photographed it."

The scene—black-and-white like the direct view, and badly lighted— showed a man and woman in early-medieval costume standing before a man in ecclesiastical garb. The first man was a tall, broad-shouldered clean-shaven fellow with a crown on his square-cut blond hair.

"Those are Earls Edwin and Morcar, who made all the trouble," said Bruun. "The little fellow at the right of the scene ..."

"Say," said Godwin, "that Harold guy looked all right; he'd have made a good actor."

"Quite a heroic character, but you ought to see the other Harold he fought against, King Harold Sigurdson of Norway. There was a legendary character in real life! Now the wedding is over and they are going in to the wedding-feast ..."

As the film ground on, Godwin remarked: "It just occurs to me this'll put the costume-movie out of business. You could dub in the sound. Who'll pay to see an actor playing Lincoln when he can see Lincoln himself?... Say, this damn thing doesn't give a guy any privacy at all!"

"That is right. With the parachron you can really find out who is descended from whom." After a further pause Bruun said, "Here are a few sequences of the Battle of Hastings, to give continuity."

Looking at the confused and dust-obscured scene, Godwin said, "We could put on a better battle in Hollywood. Look at those extras just standing around! Half of 'em aren't earning their pay."

"Let me remind you that this is the real thing, my friend."

"Well, then your King Harold needed a good director. Maybe the costume-movie has a future after all, if this is what the real thing looks like. But I'll say one thing: the censors wouldn't let us show guys' guts and gore spilled all over the place tha way this does. Oh-oh, there's your King Harold all haggled up!"

"He is dead. Now," said Bruun, "we come to the birth of Harold Haroldson ..."

It occurred to Godwin that now was the time to secrete the chocolate-bar in the parachron. But he could not do it, even if he could get away with it. Though he was not a scientist, the thought of destroying a valuable scientific discovery, the life-work of this nice old bird Bruun, was repugnant to him. He would even rather marry Karen.

The reel came to its end. Bruun threw the switch that let daylight into the room again, saying, "We have all the rest, showing the birth of Harold Haroldson's eldest son Stigand Haroldson, and his eldest son Godwin Stigandson, and so on. We can establish that the senior branch is the Godwin family of York and follow them down to the nineteenth century when birth-records became general and genealogists preserved the pedigree of your family. Shall we have lunch now?"

GODWIN was surprised at the speed with which time had flown. After lunch the Bruuns excused themselves and Godwin asked Malling, "What do we do now?"

"Whatever you like, so long as I get you to the palace by seventeen hundred. You must be there in time for the bethrothal banquet tonight."

"The what?"

"Has nobody told you? The king is giving a party, your engashment to Princess Karen to announce; all the bigwigs will be there."

"Well, how about, visiting that oyster-bug or whatever you called it?"

"The Oster-Bygt? Sure, we got time enough." Malling gave directions to the taxi-driver, who drove them out of Julianehaab along a narrow winding road.

Godwin wished people would leave him alone long enough to think. Despite the assurances of the Bruuns, he was still not convinced that the British throne was kosher; those movies could have been faked.

Then he realized that he still carried the so-called chocolate-bar in his pants pocket. If the thing were a time-bomb, it might go off any minute and splatter him and Malling all over southern Greenland.

"What makes you so pale?" said

Malling solicitously. "Are you not feeling good?"

"I—I'm all right, thanks," said Godwin, tensing his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering.

He would have to get rid of the thing, but in an inconspicuous manner, and in such wise that when and if it did go off it would not kill anybody. It wouldn't do to throw it out of the cab ...

They reached the Oster-Bygt and got out to look at a singularly unimpressive group of ruins: a little clump of what once had been houses of raw fieldstone, unmortared, of which now only a few stretches of thick wall remained. Wire fences surrounded them and a policeman paced back and forth.

"The settlement of the great Eric Thorvaldson," said Malling reverently. "We keep the cop there to stop American tourists from carrying the houses away as souvenirs, stone by stone."

"Let's walk down to the shore," said Godwin.

THEY CLIMBED ever the rocks, hampered by being handcuffed together. When they came near the sluggish sea Godwin threw the chocolate-bar as far as he could.

At Malling's questioning look he said: "That was a piece of candy in that bag von Wittelsbach left with me; I figured it might have been poisoned too."

"You should not have thrown it away! We needed it to examine!"

"Too late now; let's go back."

As the taxi purred off on the road back towards Julianehaab, a terrific roar split, the air behind them. The shock made the little automobile quiver, and the air was filled with the cries of startled gulls. Craning his neck, Godwin saw a tall geyser of water settling back into the sea a few meters off-shore.

Malling ordered the taxi-driver to turn around again and return to the parking-lot at the Oster-Bygt. He hurried down to the shore, where the uniformed policeman was already standing, looking out to the sea. There was nothing to be seen. At last Malling returned to the cab, saying, "Maybe, Mr. Godwin, it is just as well you threw that thing away when you did!"

"Why don't you pinch Werner von Wittelsbach before he poisons or blows up somebody else?"

Malling looked unhappy. "I should like to. But it is not easy without very good proof, and we do not know that the candy-bar was what exploded. That young man is a—how do you say—protégé of Thor Thomsen, who works closely with Herre Gram ... So you see ..." The detectives spread his hands helplessly.