The Chronocide Mission

20. ROSZT AND KAYNOR

Roszt and Kaynor also realized their time had run out, but they knew better than to leave Rochester immediately. Egarn had taught them more thoroughly than he realized. To leave a motel room without checking out would attract attention. To check out in the middle of the night would attract attention. Whatever the cost, they must avoid attracting attention.

Inskel, having seen them park their car four blocks from the DuRosche mansion, had no difficulty in picking them up there with the large len and following them to their new motel, and a terse order from Egarn arrived at their room almost as soon as they did. They ignored it. They were certain they had escaped cleanly. No one could have noticed them or their car in the dark, and just to be certain, they had driven several blocks with their lights off before they took a circuitous route to the motel. They saw no point in altering a routine they had complete confidence in.

And they were exhausted. They awoke at six the next morning and quickly packed their suitcases. Kaynor walked Val while Roszt went to the office to check out. When Kaynor returned, he put dog and suitcases in the back seat and drove the car to the office at the front of the motel to wait for Roszt.

It was almost seven o’clock by then, a popular time for checking out, and Roszt had to wait in line. He exchanged pleasantries with the clerk—they had enjoyed their stay, he murmured, and hoped to return soon—pocketed his change and the receipt, and strolled out to the waiting car like a man without a worry to his name, not to mention a possible murder or two.

The car rolled down the motel’s drive to the street, waited for traffic to clear, and then drove off. In the new workroom, Egarn finally felt able to relax. He had acquired enough of a feel for the city to know the two scouts would soon be on the network of expressways that ringed and bisected Rochester, and these would take them away from the city as rapidly as they cared to drive. Inskel made the necessary adjustments and followed their flight with the len.

A far more dramatic scene was occurring in the restaurant adjoining the office of the motel they’d just left. Alida’s friend Connie, the petite brunette, was a waitress there, and she passed the door just as Roszt strolled out to the car. She had read every description of the fugitives she could find, and somehow this character seemed to fit —whammo! And there was the second character waiting for him in the car! She set plates of food down on an unoccupied table and dashed outside. While Kaynor was waiting for traffic to clear, Connie hastily scribbled a license number on her order pad.

She hurried back inside. The restaurant’s hostess, appalled by this breach of discipline, raised her voice a full fifty decibels above the husky whisper with which she greeted guests. “Connie!”

Connie murmured something about an emergency and dashed to the pay telephones in the lobby. When she returned, the manager was waiting for her in a towering fury. If the food was refused because it was too cold to eat, he thundered, she would pay for it herself.

Connie smiled, a martyr to a noble cause, and went to apologize to her customers.

Bob had been living and sleeping by the telephone ever since Janie’s funeral. He sat in a daze for a moment, staring at the license number and car description he had scribbled, and then he got out a list of numbers and began to make calls.

So it was that cab drivers’ radios all over Rochester suddenly received Code J reports with a license number and a description of the car just seen leaving the Fortley Motel with the two wanted men and a large black dog. Vehicles with citizen band radios heard something similar. So did truckers.

It was a motorcyclist with a CB radio who first spotted the car. He had just exited Interstate 490. The car was a short distance behind him, and when he glanced back at the highway, he saw it. He couldn’t verify the license number, but it was the correct make and year with two men in front and a large, black dog hanging its head out of a rear window. He passed on the information, which was immediately relayed on all the networks.

The driver of a semi-trailer picked up the car next as it took the interchange to Interstate 590 and headed south. “Do tell!” he breathed. “My very first Christmas present of the year!” He reached for his microphone.

Roszt and Kaynor were astute observers—they had to be, to accustom themselves to an utterly strange civilization—and they knew how traffic normally moved. As 590 threaded its way through pleasant, open country, they suddenly decided they didn’t like the behavior of the large truck that was following them. It moved out as though to pass, and Kaynor was conscious of the driver’s scrutiny as the truck’s cab pulled even with them. Then, for no reason at all, it dropped back again. Now it was following far more closely than normal in scattered traffic.

After a few seconds of that, Kaynor began watching for an exit. A sign ahead of them announced East Henrietta Road, Highway 15A, and he flipped his turn signal. Then he scowled. The driver of the truck had turned on his signal the moment he saw Kaynor’s. They exited onto East Henrietta and drove slowly to give the truck a chance to pass—it was a five-lane road, and traffic was scattered.

The truck remained close behind them.

Kaynor flipped on his turn signal again as they approached Highway 252, Jefferson Road. The truck’s signal came on at once. Kaynor slowed until the intersection traffic light was about to change; then he made his turn. The big truck slipped through behind them on the red light, ignoring horn blasts from outraged drivers on Jefferson. Before it could gather speed, Kaynor mashed his accelerator, and the car shot ahead.

They quickly left the truck far behind. Jefferson Road spanned a long stretch of suburbs south of Rochester. They passed commercial buildings with a scattering of motels; then neat modern structures used for light industry intermixed with a variety of restaurants.

The nosy trucker was no longer in sight by the time they reached the shopping malls and plazas that clustered around the intersection of Jefferson Road and West Henrietta, Highway 15. The overpass took them over West Henrietta, and then, leaving the shopping plazas behind, they emerged in open country with occasional old houses that had shoddy commercial enterprises cluttered around them. Traffic continued light. They passed another semitrailer plodding along in the right lane— and it pulled out and followed them.

Roszt had noticed a look of startled recognition on the driver’s face as they passed. It suddenly dawned on him that such vehicles might have radios, just as police cars did, and the enormity of their predicament became clear to him at once. They should have avoided heavily traveled roads where trucks were to be found. He spoke to Kaynor, who swung into the left turn lane. They made the turn, and an impressive complex of buildings loomed ahead of them. Roszt caught the name of the road, Lowenthal, and took their map of Rochester from the glove compartment.

The semitrailer followed them, but Kaynor quickly outdistanced it. They reached the buildings, which were fronted by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and turned right. They passed an odd, domed structure and then the vast brick building of the Rochester Institute of Technology. There were several stop signs, but these were to assist traffic exiting from parking lots, and there was no traffic. Kaynor sped through them without stopping and followed curving Andrews Drive to its junction with East River Road. By the time they reached it, Roszt had found their location on the map. If they turned south on East River Road, he thought, they could follow it out of the Rochester area.

The semitrailer was overtaking them. From the south came the sound of a police car approaching, and Kaynor’s quick eyes caught the flashing light. Reacting instantly, he made a screeching turn to the north, away from the police car, and drove with the accelerator on the floor.

East River Road, which lay along the east bank of the Genesee River, had only two lanes. There was a steel guard rail along the river and sharp drop to the water just beyond it, but the bank was so overgrown with trees and shrubs that the river was almost invisible. Fortunately there was no traffic. They sped easily along the edge of the Institute of Technology’s grounds, but only the dog Val was enjoying the chase. Kaynor kept the accelerator on the floor, but the police car was gradually overtaking them.

Roszt released his seat back and climbed into the rear of the car beside the dog. From his pocket he took a small tube— Egarn’s weapon. He steadied it on top of the rear seat and fired once. The beam bored a hole through his own rear window and through the right side of the police car’s engine. It also blew the right front tire. The car swerved off the road. There was nothing there for it to collide with, so the officer probably was not injured. At least, Roszt hoped not.

He returned to the front seat. They had reached busy Jefferson Road again, and there were both left-turn and through lanes. Miraculously the light turned green just ahead of them, and they roared through the intersection and entered the town of Brighton.

A short distance beyond, a railway bridge loomed on their left, and the road climbed abruptly to the railway tracks. At the top, they bumped over the tracks and were momentarily airborne when the road suddenly dipped down again.

Just ahead of them, a police car blocked the road, lights flashing. The officer stood beside it, weapon in hand. Beyond him, on the right, was a large building with a paved—but empty—parking lot. Several small boys were playing there with radio-controlled cars. Given a choice between hitting the police car or running down officer and children, Kaynor didn’t hesitate. As the car landed, he twisted the wheel to the left.

The heavy growth along the river had resumed again, but there was a break just beyond the parked police car. They bounced wildly out of control, cleared the guard rail, shot through the gap in the trees, soared over a motor boat that was moored to the bank, and hit the water with an enormous splash.

In the new control room, Egarn sat with his face buried in his hands.

Word quickly reached the campus and the row apartments, and friends of Janie’s who had access to transportation headed for the river bank. By the time they began to arrive, the motor boat had been moved, and a truck with a winch was waiting to pull the car out. A diver was in the water; he had located the car and was attaching a cable. There were crowds of gawkers on both river banks. The students stood together, Alida and Jeff among them, and Detective Fred Ulling, who had been working on Janie’s case and also on the Johnson break-ins, came over to talk with them.

“Is anyone in the car?” Jeff asked.

“No. Talk about your ironic endings! Now I suppose we’ll have to drag the river for those characters.”

Someone noticed a large, black dog cowering in the shrubbery. It had been in the water; the mob of people obviously frightened it, but it seemed reluctant to leave. Alida said, “I wonder if that’s their dog.”

She called it. The dog backed away warily. When one of the students tried to grab it, it ran off.

Finally the winch went into operation. The car was hauled to the surface. Water poured from open windows on both sides. The winch hauled it up the bank and onto the road. There was no one in the car. There seemed to be nothing of interest in it except two ordinary-looking suitcases with disgustingly ordinary, soggy contents.

People had begun to drift away. The dramatic event had turned into a non-spectacle. Jeff said, “The bodies will be a mile downstream before they get their equipment here. Shall we go?”

Alida nodded.

In the new workroom, the large len showed the river bank. More people came, looked, and went away. Afternoon waned into evening, and then darkness set in. Those in the room were not watching with hope but because there was nothing else they could do. The small len showed Gevis, the peer and prince, and even an assortment of Lantiff watching the large len intently in the old workroom, but Arne couldn’t see what it was they found so interesting.

Traffic on East River Road diminished as the niot wore on, and the road was poorly lighted. The scene on the len had become murky when Egarn suddenly cried out. Two dark shapes hauled themselves out of the water. The dog Val was there to greet them, leaping about them excitedly. Both of them embraced the dog. Then they set off on foot.

They followed East River Road as far as Genesee Valley Park, fading into the shadows whenever a car approached. Once in the park, they avoided roads until they reached the old Barge Canal. Then they took the Joseph C. Wilson Boulevard through the University of Rochester campus. Beyond Elmwood Avenue, they angled toward the back of the campus, which ran along the edge of Mount Hope Cemetery. With the dog trotting patiently on their heels, they walked the length of a downward sloping parking lot. The land on their right gradually rose to a steep bluff with the cemetery far above them. On the left were the dark campus buildings.

As the cemetery boundary curved eastward, residence halls loomed on their right, a few of the windows still lighted. Directly ahead was another parking lot, and a cinder walk ran steeply up to the residence halls. They followed the walk until, midway to the top of the slope, a dirt path branched off and angled along the side of the bluff. The path took them to the hole in the Mount Hope Cemetery fence they had located long before. They crawled through it and set out across the cemetery.

Eerie shapes confronted them wherever they looked. On their right were regimented tombstones where Rochester’s Civil War veterans were buried in orderly ranks below the statue of a Civil War soldier. Roszt and Kaynor had puzzled over the statue’s message on an earlier visit: “On fame’s eternal camping ground, their silent tents are spread, and glory guards with solemn round, the bivouac of the dead.” Beyond this area, a tall pillar topped with the statue of a fireman marked one dedicated to Rochester’s fire fighters.

They threaded their way eastward and then north, dim shadows more ghostly than the ghosts that surrounded them. Exhaustion was evident in every halting stride—even the dog was exhausted—but they moved as quickly as they could until they had left the more open southern part of the cemetery far behind them. They staggered along a sheltered, wooded drive until the land dipped downward into the picturesque dell and they reached the boarded up chapel and crematorium.

It was one of the refuges they had prepared long before by hiding food, blankets, toiletries, and a change of clothing there. Now they simply pulled one of the plywood window coverings open far enough to admit them—they had already loosened it. The dog was lifted up to the window. Then Roszt climbed in and turned to help Kaynor. The board was pulled into place after them. Because they had left the padlock on the door intact, the casual passerby or even the cemetery’s employees, would think the building empty and safely locked.

They changed their clothing. They ate and fed the dog. Then they wrapped themselves in blankets and fell asleep at once huddled on either side of the warm dog.

Their peril had been enormous. It still was. Their escape, however skillfully managed, was only temporary. Egarn knew they wouldn’t be safe until they were far from Rochester. He also knew they would never get out of the city unless they got rid of the dog. “Two men with a large black dog” was a tag anyone could remember and apply. Probably that was why they had been followed so easily. They were marked men as long as Val was with them. They would have to get rid of the dog and separate.

It was cruel to them and to the dog, but it had to be done. Egarn wrote a message, explaining this. Inskel transferred it, landing it a mere three feet from the sleeping men’s heads. Then he adjusted the large len to show an outside view of the old building, spectral in the moonlight.

In the new workroom, everyone felt as exhausted as Roszt and Kaynor had been. All except Garzot went to bed and to sleep.

Garzot awakened them with a shout. The scene on the len was unchanged except for a black figure that stood statue like in front of the building. While they stared, another figure appeared. Then another.

They turned to the small len. Gevis was sending Lantiff into the past. One at a time they positioned themselves beneath Egarn’s large instrument, Gevis pulled the cord, and they vanished—to appear on the large len in front of the old building where Roszt and Kaynor slept.

Before those in the new workroom had fully grasped what was happening, there were six Lantiff gathered around the chapel door. One of them applied Egarn’s weapon to the lock. As the lock fell away, the others charged the door. They rushed inside the building before Garzot could adjust the len to follow them.

He refocused on a scene of ghastly horror. Roszt and Kaynor were dead, their throats cut. The dog had been stabbed repeatedly. All three had died before they could wrest themselves from the fog of exhausted sleep.

Lantiff were searching the bodies with care. The well-filled money belts, Egarn’s weapons, the odds and ends Roszt and Kaynor had carried in their pockets were placed in a neat pile at the far end of the room. Suddenly the pile disappeared. On the small len, they saw Gevis beginning to sort through the dead men’s possessions.

“He uses the machine more skillfully than I do,” Inskel said bitterly. “What will happen to the Lantiff? He can’t bring them back. Not for a long time.”

“Why would he bother?” Egarn demanded. “Lantiff are soldiers and therefore expendable.”

The large len followed the Lantiff as they hurriedly left the cemetery by the route Roszt and Kaynor had followed to reach it. Dawn was approaching when the six black-cloaked figures moved quickly through Genesee Valley Park. By the time it became light, they had found themselves a hiding place in thick shrubbery along the river some distance north of where Roszt and Kaynor had made their plunge. As soon as they were settled there, Gevis dispatched a quantity of rations to them. The Lantiff ate; then they lolled about as though waiting for their next assignment.

“We were terribly, terribly wrong,” Egarn said brokenly. “I said the Lantiff couldn’t survive in the past, but of course they can—as long as Gevis provides them with whatever they need. Not that it would matter to the Peer of Lant either way. She can send another six, or sixty, or six thousand if she wants to. She has them to spare, and they are dedicated to dying for their peer.” He turned away wearily. He had tears in his eyes. “It was a miserable death for two gallant men.”

“I was the one who didn’t think,” Arne said angrily. “I easily could have cut the machines to pieces as I left. Instead, I killed a few Lantiff—as if any number of dead Lantiff made any difference. I will go back and do it now.” He asked Inskel, “Is it possible to get through that tunnel again?”

“No,” Inskel said. “It would be an enormous task to clean it out—and dangerous. The cleared dirt would have to be carried back through the tunnel, and now that the ceiling has been disturbed, it might keep on collapsing. The Lantiff would hear you coming and be waiting for you. It would be better to use our escape route and fight your way back down the stairway—but you couldn’t do that, either. There are too many Lantiff.”

“None of us were thinking,” Egarn said. “It happened so quickly, and we never dreamed a traitor would show the Lantiff how to use the machines. This is the end of everything. We have failed utterly—unless I go back myself and try to finish what Roszt and Kaynor started.” He broke into sobs. “But I am so tired—and what chance would I have against an army of Lantiff?”

“Send me,” Arne said. “I have fought armies of Lantiff before.”

“No. You would be helpless.”

“No more than the Lantiff. You can send me what I need.”

“No.” Egarn shook his head. “The Lantiff’s task would be different from yours. All they would have to do is keep you from carrying out your mission. They could arrive in the night, cut your throat, and then hide—as we saw. They don’t need training for that. You would have to resume the search for the right Johnson and keep him from inventing his len. Look how difficult it was for Roszt and Kaynor despite their sikes of study. The Lantiff would kill you before you learned to find your way around the city.”

“We can’t simply quit,” Arne said stubbornly. “Even if I don’t know enough to do it, I still have to try.”

Egarn straightened up and squared his shoulders. “You are right. The task has become impossible, but we can’t quit. We will go together. We will arrive in Rochester—in one of the parks or the cemetery—as soon as it is dark. Unlike the Lantiff, I will be able to talk to people. I can show you how to behave, and after watching Roszt and Kaynor for so long, I know the city well. So we will have some important advantages. We can find a motel room to work from, and I know exactly what we must do next.”