The old man shrugged, saying, “The American people of the first half of the twentieth century would not have, certainly, but by the waning years of that century, they were, if no more placid in basic nature, at least far easier to manage and to delude with distortions of facts and outright lies. Almost all the information-disseminating agencies had by then become nothing more or less than mouthpieces of government; very few really privately owned corporations were left, so nearly everyone worked for some level of government— federal, state or municipal. But I am not a true historian, Bass, and I must admit to having ignored current events, except in those instances which touched upon my several specialities, as did far too many of us until it was far too late.
“Anyway, O’Malley and I surreptitiously studied archaic languages, customs, and skills, late-medieval and Renaissance histories of Europe, horsemanship, and weapons skills; those
pursuits we could not conceal from the rest of the staff we passed off as hobbies or physical exercise.
“From the past experiences, O’Malley and I fully expected to wind up in Italy or France of the Renaissance, so we hyp-notaped ourselves full of Latin, several dialects of French and Italian, Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque. In addition, I added CMd Middle German and Flemish, white O’Malley assimilated Erse, Gaelic, and what little was by then known of such tongues as Frisian and Breton.
“With the announced purpose of taking up jewelry-making, I began to purchase cut gemstones and gold, then spent many an evening casting golden disks of ounce and half-ounce weights. Since Emmett’s work at Gamebird was involved with various aspects of metallurgy, he could and did get away with doing much of his private experimentation on the job until, at length, he had mastered a formula for producing a really fine stainless steel that would hold a keen edge indefinitely and that, moreover, could be wrought from raw ores or cast iron with abysmally primitive facilities.”
“So that’s how Tara steel originated,” Foster guessed aloud, tapping the hilt of his dirk.
The churchman nodded. “Yes, true enough, but that’s getting a bit ahead of my tale, Bass.
“Emmett and I laid our plans with exceeding care, Bass, for although the Dictator’s government could and did treat favored persons such as ourselves infinitely better than the vast bulk of the population, no one—from the highest to the lowest—was really deemed trustworthy; secret police agents and informers swarmed everywhere and the treatment of suspects when arrested was harsh to the point of savagery. Both of us had, unfortunately, had some close exposure to both the cult of the informer and the atrocious handling of those informed upon, you see. It had been those episodes that first had drawn us two together and had placed us in the proper frame of mind to plan our ultimate defection from a world we had begun to find unbearable. But I’ll go into no details; even after all these long years, it still hurts to talk of it.
“Emmett had only been in his mid-twenties when he first received the longevity treatment and was still a very handsome, very personable, young-looking man, so he found it quite easy to cultivate a close, very personal relationship with one of the upper-echelon staff members, Jane Stone. Within a few months, she was regularly inviting him to observe testing of the projector and actively encouraging him to study its proper utilization. At the end of twelve months of this, he felt that he knew enough to enable us to use the projector as we had planned. There was no thought of including Dr. Stone in our escape, for all that Emmett had become somewhat attached to her, since we both knew that in addition to her scientific function, she also was a colonel in the secret police and in charge of the entire secret network at Gamebird.
“Obtaining period clothing would have been impossible, but the styles of that day called for trousers to be skin-tight, which we thought might look enough like trunk hose to suffice. Emmett had, in pursuing his ‘hobby,’ manufactured two broadswords and two long daggers and had openly presented me with a set upon the occasion of the Dictator’s last birthday. We had practiced in their use until we both were highly proficient swordsmen.