Читать книгу THE BETTER PART OF VALOR - Morgan Mackinnon - Страница 27

Chapter 20

Once it had become apparent Dr. Leigh and their somewhat shaken friend would be staying in the present for the foreseeable future, Cresta cornered George Montoya and asked if he would shepherd the Colonel out to some men’s shops and get him some clothes to wear. He couldn’t wear Danny Convers’s sweat suit forever. Money would not be a problem once Dr. Sanford made a call this morning to Secretary of Internal Development, Rick Berstem.

“Good morning, Secretary. Yes, we have some results. Unexpected…results. You may want to come over to the bullpen at Langley for a reconnaissance meeting. No, I think that’s a pretty good description of it. Listen, we have a…subject out of time. The one we talked about from eighteen seventy-five? Yes. I’m not sure what the hell happened but now we need to talk to Doctor Leigh, see what she’s found out, and formulate a game plan. Yes. Well, right now he needs some clothes, so I require a charge card sent over ASAP with…I don’t know, let’s set a five thousand-dollar cap on it and see where that takes us. Put it in George Montoya’s name and have a messenger bring it over. Okay? Well, you’re a Secretary, and it’s your job to do things we peons don’t get paid enough to do. Ha ha. (Sanford loved that line.) I’ll have some bourbon ready when you get here. Noon? Fine.”

She had to give it to Jim Sanford. He quickly outlined for the Secretary the circumstances as they were known. The CATE device had apparently activated the retrieve feature prematurely without any input from the traveler. Cresta was certain she had not activated the feature because on the day in question, she hadn’t even taken the retrieval device with her. It was locked in her trunk at Orchard House in Ireland, so there was no way it could have been accidentally tripped. It would be the job of the engineering team to take the mother mechanism apart, test the components, and reassemble it so it didn’t happen again.

In the meantime, they had a subject out of his own time, one who had not been prepped in advance. Cresta estimated about two to three months of contact, getting to know the subject, and letting him get to know and trust her in return before she began explaining she was from another time and how he fit in. Instead the subject was jerked from 1875 to 2002 with no warning and no immediate way to go back to 1875.

When the presentation was turned over to her, the questions Rick Berstem had were what is he like, how hard will it be to explain this to him, and what reactions should they watch for.

“I had a list of bullet points for this presentation I put together last night, but I think I would rather just forget about that and give you a cold start here. I have been observing the subject…say, could we get rid of the term ‘subject’? It makes our Irish friend sound like a lab rat. I began observation from the first encounter with Keogh, pretending I was going to miss my ship. He was gentlemanly, polite, discreet, and gallant. He is obviously fond of women. With my agreement, he acted as my escort for most of the journey. When I was cold, he wrapped me in his greatcoat. Chivalrous. I believe my first clinical observation would be Knight in Shining Armor Syndrome. He fits it perfectly. Even after someone saw him coming out of my cabin one morning with his boots in one hand and jacket in the other, when that peeping tom suggested we had been frolicking around together, Mister Keogh nearly challenged the fellow to a duel, all over my perceived reputation. That protectiveness continued when I was nearly raped in Dublin.” She ignored the expressions of her audience. “When I failed to find my relative in Dublin, Mister Keogh not only saved me but invited me to his family home.

“Second clinical observation would be depression. As many young boys do, he looked to his father for guidance. His father died while Keogh was young, the senior Keogh a gentleman farmer but with a brother who had been hanged in seventeen ninety-eight for his Nationalist activities. One of Keogh’s elder brothers took over the role of father, but our friend never found the encouragement and direction he was looking for. Instead, he wound his dreams around a character in a book about an orphan in the Irish Dragoons who finds glory and purpose as a soldier of fortune. Young Keogh did the same, going off to fight in the Papal wars at the age of twenty. He sold his sword to the Union in eighteen sixty-two. I have noticed a pattern in that every one of the generals Keogh served as a staff aide-de-camp became father figures to him. He went to a Confederate prison with one of them because he would not leave the General by himself. A second General became ill and died in Keogh’s arms. It was said he wept bitterly. Now he is midthirties, and I’m not sure he ever did find the father he was searching for.

“What has happened here is that the young Keogh made his life’s choices when he was barely out of adolescence, and now, he feels if he alters them, he will be surrendering his ideals which are truth, valor, and honor. He does not understand choices can be redirected without losing one’s identity or integrity.

“Gentlemen, it is this personal trait we will struggle with the most. Myles Keogh is going to feel he must fulfill his destiny as he saw it previously, and any deviation to that destiny will mean failure. In other words, he is likely to make the decision to march to his death for a hopeless, unnecessary battle fought by a madman who valued blind loyalty and glory over all else, including human life.

“There are a couple other things I think I should mention. The first one I’m going to talk about because it may cause us some reticent behavior in the present. Our Mister Keogh is a highly sexed individual. It radiates off him. The problem with that is, he made certain other decisions as an adolescent in order to conform with his life as a soldier of fortune. Because of that long-ago book about the Irish Dragoon, he is convinced he should avoid marriage and family and consign himself to loneliness the rest of his life. That translates to sexual frustration because a soldier doesn’t have a lot of access to women, and that results in more depression. So far, he’s managed it, I think, one way or the other, but my point here is that he does not approve of indiscriminate sex. He is Catholic, so his faith would rule out an arrangement or affair with what I will refer to as a nice girl. We expect him to produce a child for us with, I hope, a nice girl. He won’t marry her because he doesn’t ascribe to marriage. So what to do?

“At present, I am not sure. I hope to keep him in this time long enough for him to understand how society has changed in this regard and how he would not be ruining his entire life by, you know, dating a nice girl, and…but I’m going to be going against standards he’s lived with all his life.”

If Rick Berstem hadn’t noticed how Cresta’s professional tone suddenly veered off into teenage girl, Jim Sanford had. He thought they had the gist of the issue, but she would have to be the one to find a way to integrate Keogh with his mission.

She also had two more things with regards to the questions Berstem asked at the beginning of her talk.

“You asked how he will react to the explanations. We’ve already talked to him. I think he was receptive. He has a college education, majored in Classics, and his writing and grammar are impeccable, so he’s obviously very bright.”

For reactions, she would have predicted he would listen to them calmly and then, just as calmly, ask what the next steps would be. As a commander of cavalry, a man had to be, if nothing else, coolheaded and despite a reputation for being reckless with his own life, Keogh had always made careful levelheaded decisions when it involved the lives of his men. Her predictions were right on.

“What I propose to do with him right now is to get him acclimated to time here and then take him on a road trip. Take him to some Civil War battlefields where he saw action and perhaps to the Little Bighorn where he will die. I’ll have to make that call later, but it might be enough of a psychological kick in the pants to get him to understand what’s at stake here.”

“Cresta? You said there was one other thing. What’s that?”

“Oh, yes. Well, Myles and I had dinner at the Captain’s table on the City of Paris the fifth night out. Seated at the table was a gentleman I will describe as a snake-oil salesman who called himself Master of Illusion. Think of Terry-Thomas with a handlebar moustache. He never gave a name and seemed to be quite fond of drinking, smoking, playing cards, and propositioning young ladies who frequented the after-hours gentleman’s only club. He never told me his real name, but he made several hints during my conversation with him that suggests he had knowledge of the future. For instance, one day, he and I were having a drink in the reading and writing lounge, and he said it would be such a shame this April crossing if the ship were to encounter an iceberg and sink. He also made references to flying.”

Sanford asked her a question. “What if the whole conversations were what-ifs? I could sit here today and joke about an igloo on Mars, and maybe in two hundred years, humans will have igloos on Mars.”

There was a brief pause as Cresta opened her journal and checked her notes. “There were other anachronisms as well. First, he mentioned how fond he’d been of the Brownings and then told me Robert Browning was the first one to record his voice on an Edison wax cylinder and that’s true…except Browning did that right before he died in eighteen eighty-nine. Another thing is that the Master of Illusion mentioned King’s Dominion. The theme park didn’t open until nineteen seventy-five.”

There was a quarter now being displayed in her palm. “He sure wasn’t joking about this. He gave it to me right before he vanished. No, it is not mine. I have kept this quarter secreted in my corset since then. I took nothing modern with me to the past other than my makeup kit, my retrieval device, and my notebook, but I knew I would have to bring this back. I can’t make you believe that, and you don’t have to, but here it is.”

Sanford and Berstem looked a little shaken.

“What’s your gut feeling?”

She handed the quarter to Sandford. “I’ll let you worry about this, but it seems to me there may be someone else out there who is out of his time. Or someone who may not belong on Earth at all. He virtually disappeared. Said some odd things like me not being too hard on the Captain because we’d need each other before the end. Freaked me out then and it still does. Before the end of…what?”