The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Alice said, “What do we do now, Dick? If we stay here to look for them, we’ll not be able to get on the Rex.”

Burton stifled the impulse to tell her not to point out the obvious to him. She was still simmering; no sense in making her boil again.

“Monat and Frigate can hole up today and sneak out tonight and steal another boat. It would be futile to try to catch them. No, we’ll try to get aboard the paddle wheeler. But those two will come along some day, and when they do . . .”

“We’ll tear them apart?” Kazz said.

Burton shrugged and spread his palms upward.

“I don’t know. They’ve got the advantage. They can either drop dead on us or lie to us. Until we get to the tower …”

Alice spoke then, her eyes dark with accustomed reverie:

“If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly

I did turn as he pointed; neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So much as gladness that some end might be.

“For, what with my world-wide wandering. What with my search drawn out thro’ years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

With that obstreperous joy success would bring-

I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

“There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my, lips I set And blew, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’ ”

Burton grinned savagely. “Browning would have thought … must think . .. that this world is even stranger than the setting of his outre poem. I appreciate your sentiment, even if he said it first, Alice. Very well, we will go to the Dark Tower.”

“I don’t know what Alice was talking about,” Kazz said. “Any­way, just how’re we going to get on that boat?”

“If King John has room for us, I’ll offer him our treasure trove, our free-grails. That should appeal even to the ungreediest heart.”

“And if he doesn’t have room?”

He was silent for a moment. That tickle in the back of his brain, that feeling that he had overlooked some linkage between agents, had returned while Alice was speaking. And now he saw, or thought he saw, the means for scratching the itch, the kind of chain binding the agents together.

How did they recognize each other? Monat was no problem; he did not need identification. But what kind of secret signal would the human agents use to identify each other?

If they possessed a Neanderthal’s ability, they could see the negative signal, lack of a sign, in their colleagues’ foreheads. Suppose, though, they did not have this ability? Spruce had been surprised when he found out about Kazz’s optical talent. Though he had not said so, his manner had indicated that he had never heard of such a thing. Evidently, machines were used to detect and translate the symbols into whatever meaning they had. That would probably be done in the PR bubble or whatever HQ was.

If, then, they could not see the symbols with the naked eye, they would have another means of identification.

Suppose, just suppose, that there was a cutoff date. A period of time at which no more people from Earth were resurrected, not, at least, on this planet. According to Monat, Frigate, Ruach, and Spruce, that cutoff date had been 2008 A.D.

What if that was not the true date? What if it were earlier than 2008 A.D.?

He had no idea what the true date would be, though he had never met anyone, except the agents, who claimed to have lived past 1983 A.D. From now on, he would question every late-twentieth-centurian he met. And if 1983 was the latest at which anybody had died, then he would be fairly certain that that was the cutoff point.

So … perhaps the Ethicals had contrived a fiction which would enable them to identify each other instantly. That was that they had lived during 2008 A.D. And, of course, there would be a fixed story about events from 1983, or whatever date it was, to 2008.