“To make a long and tedious story short, Bass, after almost twenty years of trial and error, success and failure, in which a veritable host of experimental animals either disappeared completely or met singularly messy deaths, an apparently effective process was developed. I won’t try to explain it to you, because I don’t think you’d understand even the basics of it. The government put a great deal of hope in the Project, and, as time wore on, brought much pressure to bear upon Dr. Fox, the director, to adapt the process to humans. Fin-nally, Fox acquiesced.
“The first volunteer came back dead and mutilated, but analysis of the clothing in which his returned body was clad showed that he had lived—and had died—in western France during the middle years of the thirteenth century. Adjustments were made in the process and a second volunteer, one who spoke medieval French, was projected. He, too, was dead upon his return, with a stiff parchment placard nailed to his forehead. The language was a corrupt dialect of Low Latin and, when translated, read: I am a dead spy.”
The third volunteer was a young man but recently assigned to Gamebird. Lenny Vincenzo had been a prodigy of sorts, and at only twenty-five years of age already held several doctorates in widely diverse fields. Dr. Fox did not want to use and possibly lose him, but government pressure was intense, the fates of the first two subjects had scared off most prospective volunteers, and, above all, Lenny was eminently qualified, being steeped in late-medieval and Renaissance cultures and speaking early variants of French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.
“So, Lenny was dressed in recreations of fifteenth-century attire, entrusted with a few pounds of gold, and projected.”
Harold paused to take a long draft of ale. “Lenny never came back. The device which had been implanted under his skin to allow the projector to home in on and retrieve him did return, tucked just in the proper place under the sloughing skin of a decomposing cadaver, which lacked head, hands, and feet.”
“Then how could you say it wasn’t your boy?” asked Foster.
“The blood type was wrong,” answered the old man. “As were many other factors. At the government’s order, the whole affair was hushed up, but the director knew, and so too did some of the senior staffers, of which, by that time, I was one. And it was then that Dr. Emmett O’Malley and I decided to do as Lenny had done.”
“But why, Hal? You have relative immortality, you’ve just said you were some kind of big mucketymuck in a project that was being supported by your government. So why would you want to run off to another time? Romanticism?” Foster was honestly puzzled.
“Romanticism? Hardly that.” The Archbishop smiled fleetingly. “Not in my case, at any rate. Though,” he added thoughtfully, “there may well have been an element of romanticism in Emmett’s behavior. But then the Celts always have been the master dreamers of Western civilization, the inveterate champions of lost causes.
“Bass, the America from which you were snatched was still a democracy governed by popularly elected men and women, was it not?”
“Yes,” said Foster.
“It did not long stay such, Bass; had you and the others remained you would most likely have witnessed the beginning of the change. In 1988, the brother of an earlier President was elected for his second term, for all that the vast majority of the electorate actively hated him. There were long, loud cries of foul play and fixes, but on every level those whose voices were the loudest and most influential met, invariably, with singularly unpleasant and usually fatal ‘accidents.’ In 1991, our dictator-in-all-but-name was successfully assassinated, only to be succeeded, not by the Vice President, but by his own nephew.
“Thereafter, there were no more popular elections, on any level. Governors were chosen by the President, and they, in turn, appointed the rulers of the cities and counties. Senators chose their successors and the House of Representatives was dissolved as superfluous.”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” demanded Foster, “what in hell were the American people doing? They’d never sit still for that kind of takeover.”