“You’re Colonel Doctor Jane Stone from the Gamebird Project, aren’t you? You came after Hal … that is, Dr. Harold Kenmore, didn’t you?”
Her reply, though weak of voice, was perfectly clear.
“Yes, but who are you? I don’t think you’re of this time, but then I know you’re not of mine, either.”
“You’re right. Dr. Stone,” he replied, “but it’s a longer tale than you have time left to hear. Suffice it to say that I was sent here by the man you knew as Kenmore to break the connection of that box to your world, lest someone like you came into this world. Needless to say, I was almost too late.”
She tried to snort a scornful laugh, but ended moaning with agony, then after a moment said, in a weaker voice yet, “Cut that cable through if you wish, whoever you are, but it will do you no good now. The lab has a firm lock on the coordinates of this console and can project through another if this one fades out, disappears from the scanning instruments.
“You say Kenmore sent you? Well, why didn’t the traitor come himself?”
“For one thing, Dr. Stone, it’s a long, hard journey and he is a very old man,” said Bass. “Perhaps you are unaware of just how much he has aged since you saw him last.”
“How much can anyone age in two months, man? Talk sense. Where is Kenmore? Where is that other traitor, Em-mett O’Malley?”
“Hal thought something like this, and he once told me about it. Dr. Stone. Time must be different in your world from time in this one. Your two months there has been more than a hundred and fifty years here. As for O’Malley, the evidence is that he’s dead, killed in a battle several years ago. Even had they both been alive and you had gotten out of here and sought them out, you’d hardly have recognized them, either of them. They lost most of their longevity boosters, you see, and . . .”
He fell silent when he realized that he was speaking to a corpse. Colonel Doctor Jane Stone was dead.
Sitting on the ground between the old tower keep and the hall stables in the bright sunlight, with a sack containing the effects and clothing of the late Colonel Doctor Jane Stone atop it and the silvery disk leaning against it, the console did not look one whit so imposing as it had in the benighted subterranean room. Moreover, the greenish glow had faded so much with exposure to the sun as to be almost invisible.
A party of the galloglaiches had hoisted the heavy, bulky device up to the first floor of the tower, while another group painfully pried up the disk on which it had rested. Bass meant to deliver both to the archbishop in York; if he didn’t want them, maybe Pete Fairley could make use of the metal alloys and wire. Recalling another thing that Hal had told him of that sinister world from which Hal, O’Malley, and the dead woman had come, Bass and Nugai had stripped her to the very skin, then poked and probed at her cooling flesh until they had found what they sought—a tiny metallic disk implanted just under the skin of one inner thigh.
After giving the corpse to the galloglaiches to bury, he ordered the walls rebuilt in the archway. With the walls once more firmly in place, he reset the royal seals in the fresh mortar, then went out to order the organization of transport for his wife and son, her household, and the other-world items down to York. He had now successfully carried out yet another mission for King Arthur. He wondered where the next one would take him, and he was beginning to wish that Hal and the monarch would find another errand boy before loneliness bred of protracted separation completely soured his relationship with Krystal.
Harold, Archbishop of York, sat in the study cum alchemical laboratory of his palace facing the newly returned Duke of Norfolk across the width of a heavy, much-scarred table. The top of that table was cluttered, end to end, with the effects of the late Colonel Doctor Jane Stone. Directly before the cleric lay an opened case containing row upon row of small green-and-yellow capsules. Beside it, a similar case held two transparent ampoules and four hypodermic syringes.
The old, old man shook his white-haired head yet again. “I do not understand, Bass. I can understand why she might have brought the four dozen booster capsules, since they can be very useful as general antibiotics and she had no idea just what kind of a world she was projecting into. But why in God’s holy name she brought along enough longevity serum for four initial dosages, I cannot imagine?”
“Will they help you, Hal?” asked Bass.
The archbishop nodded slowly, his lips turning upward in a faint smile. “Oh, yes, my good friend, the capsules would prolong my life … if I choose to take them, that is. An intravenous injection of an eighth to a fourth of an initiaJ dosage of the serum will do even more, serving to partially reverse the effects of aging already present in the body. It was to obtain the lab equipment and supplies to make this that poor Emmett O’Malley attempted to project the drug and chemical laboratory building from the Gamebird Project into this world and ended in what appeared total failure but actually succeeded in bringing you and the others here, years ago. Youth, the appearance at least of youth, meant so much to Emmett. It doesn’t to me.
“So, no, Bass, I’ll most likely just keep these longevity treatments and booster capsules as I did my own supply, years agone, for medical emergencies. Most of these other items she brought along are weapons of one sort or another, some of which I may be able to teach you the use of. You might want her canteen, too—it’s unbreakable to the extent that I doubt even an arquebus ball would hole it.
“The thick brownish disks in the tubes are food concentrates spiked heavily with vitamins, minerals, and a powerful stimulant. A soldier such as you are may find them helpful, on occasion.”
Bass fingered one of the disks—about the circumference of a dime and some four millimeters thick—dubiously; it did not look or feel or smell very appetizing to a well-fed man, but if he were hungry, now . . . “What do you do with these, Hal—chew them first or swallow them whole?”
“Either, Bass, though chewing them probably puts the stimulant into the bloodstream more quickly. They taste far better than you would suspect from sniffing them, incidentally. You should drink at least a pint of fluid after taking one.
“I think it best that I keep her writers, Bass. An archbishop stands less likely to be accused of witchcraft than do you. That is the same reason I’m keeping a number of other items for which I really have little or no use. But 1 am turning a couple of the heat-stunners over to you, along with an admonition to use them with due circumspection. Til give you a supply of the power units—one size fits all the weapons, from the largest to the smallest—and I’ll show you how to change them; never throw an expended one away, Bass, for a few days of exposure to strong sunlight will recharge them.”
“I have a favor to ask of you, Hal,” said Bass, “a very personal one. I’d like to park my wife and her household and my little son out on your estates, where Buddy Webster is, until the weather has warmed up enough to make Norwich Castle a little more habitable.”
The archbishop displayed still-strong, though yellowed, teeth in a broad smile. “It will be my very own pleasure to have the delightful Dr. Krystal Kent Foster guesting at the estates for as long as she and you wish, Bass. I have always enjoyed her conversation, and it will be far easier for me to journey out to the estates for a few days than to find enough time for the long trip up to the Border Country. Why don’t you plan to have her live there until you get back from Ireland?”
“Until I get back from Ireland?” shouted Bass. “Since when am I going to Ireland, dammit? Please, Hal, please tell me this is just a sick-humorous joke, please\ Because if it’s not, it’s going to be your job to tell Krystal the when and where and, most importantly, the why of it all. What good am I to anyone in Ireland, Hal? Why, I can’t even speak the language.”
“You are a proven superlative military strategist and tactician, friend Bass,” replied the archbishop soberly. “ln addition, you are a fine warrior, personally brave, considerate of those under your command, and you therefore inspire loyalty. War leaders of your caliber are a rare and a precious treasure to monarchs, you must understand, living gems, as it were. And as you or I might loan a relative a bauble he admired, so is King Arthur loaning you—your unmatched abilities, that is—to his cousin King Brian VIII for a particular mission.”