Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Do whatever Sherman tells you, the time capsule message had said. The time capsule Sherman admitted he had cooked up in collusion with the Big Computer.

But what choice did I have? I had to feel as if I understood something first, and I'd stopped feeling that along about ... well, about the time I snapped the neck of that poor suffering drone. This is the nicest thing I'd done for anyone in a long time, I had thought then.

Sherman said we had to go back and interrupt the meeting between Smith and Mayer.

And we had to put on a hell of a show for them.

Well, P.T. Barnum could have learned a thing or two from us. The Gate often causes a lot of local weirdness when it arrives in the past. There are three dozen kinds of suppressors to cancel out these effects when we want to arrive in, say, the middle of a library. Sherman had Lawrence turn them all off, with the result that if we'd been planning to go to Times Square on New Year's eve we'd have been the noisiest show in town. Then we threw in a lot of extra razzle-dazzle to make them nervous.

I improvised from there. I think even Sherman might have been surprised when I cast him as a walking torture machine. But then, there were surprises all around that night. I, for instance, had pretty much believed it was important to get the whole stunner. But Sherman had other ideas.

"You didn't tell me the whole truth," I told him, as soon as we'd made it back through the Gate.

"I told you as much as I had," he said. "Now we go to my fall-back position. And in the meantime, our friends are suffering some disorientation."

He was right. Both Smith and Mayer were looking stunned. I thought Mayer was going to be sick.

There's not much you can do; they're either going to deal with the trip, or they're going to go crazy. It wasn't long until I was fairly sure they'd both be okay. When I thought Mayer would understand me, I knelt beside him and looked the bastard in the eye. "Okay. Do we have to bring your daughter in here, or will you tell me what I need to know? Let me remind you that I haven't go t much time to mount an operation, wherever or whenever you tell me to go to."

He looked dubious, but still slightly dazed.

"You wouldn't send me back?"

"What's the point? Sherman says he has something up his sleeve, anyway, but I want to go back and get the rest of that stunner."

"It's not necessary," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I never had it. The man who sold it to me had already gutted the machine."

"What did he do with the guts?"

Mayer was looking nervous. I don't blame him. Most of what I'd done in his office had been an act, but I think he'd swallowed at least some of it, and damn if I didn't feel like a dangerous person just then.

"The man was an artisan," Mayer said. "He operated a roadside souvenir stand, selling silver and jewelry. He told m., that when the ... the stunner stopped producing the pleasant tingling sensations, he broke up the insides and incorporated the more interesting parts into belt buckles and rings."

He moved away from me slightly. I don't blame him. I knew I had to either knock his head off, or laugh.

"I only said I knew where it was," he said. "I do. It is scattered al l over the continent.

And it is utterly harmless."

I laughed.

"Doc," I told him, "you've just shut down the Operations division of the Gate Project. I'm out of a job."

It seemed like the proper time to die.

It wasn't, not quite yet, but I began planning it.

There was the matter of Mayer's daughter, and my promise to him. I pressed the emergency assembly alarm on Lawrence's console. For a while, nothing happened. Then I got a tired voice.

"Yeah, what the hell is it?"

"Mandy, is that you?"

"Who the hell else would it he? Who the hell else would sit end the ready-room with three corpses that are a hell of a lot happier than I am, just on the off chance that my fearless leader would need me, when I could have been on my way to dreamland hours ago? How many hours have we got, by the way?"

"Mandy, are you drunk on duty?"

"Drunk? Drunk? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does a-"

"Good for you, Mandy. We have about twenty-four hours before we softly and suddenly vanish away. Are you still on duty? Or have you resigned?"

I thought she might have gone to sleep. Then she spoke.

"What's it to you?"

"I've got a goat here who wants to see his daughter. She's in the holding pen. I'll have the BC warm her up, if you'll run him over there."

Mandy Djakarta, the toughest operative I'd ever known, began m cry.

"God, l love a happy ending," she sobbed.

Mandy showed up soon to take Mayer away. I was left with Smith, Lawrence, Sherman, and Martin Coventry, who came in with Mandy. Bill was eyeing Lawrence, the last surviving member of the gnomish control team. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, then I looked at it from Smith's twentieth-century eyes and knew that Bill was squeamish at Lawrence's appearance. Lawrence ignored Bill totally, did not deign to acknowledge his existence. For just a second I felt closer to Lawrence than I had since ... since he'd fallen apart and been tied down to his console. Who was this lousy 20th to judge us? At the same time, I identified with Bill. I felt the same way he did, had felt that way all my life. This is you in a couple years, Louise ...

At least I didn't have to face that anymore.

"Will you be needing me for anything else, Louise?" Lawrence asked. The implication was clear. I was about to tell him to go ahead and turn himself off.

"For a short time, Lawrence, if you please," Sherman said.

"Okay. But when the crunch is about ten minutes away, I'm signing out. I've given it a lot of thought, and I decided I'd rather die than ... whatever's going to happen. Better to live and die, than never to have lived at all. Does that make any sense, Sherman?"

"It does. I respect it. Please hang on for me."

Bill had been coughing a lot. The wonder was no blood was coming up. He'd been breathing our air for half an hour before Martin came up with a gas mask that would give him pure oxygen.

Sherman took the four of us out on the balcony overlooking the derelict field. Bill looked out at the detritus of our operations; it was easy to see he was impressed. "

"Lawrence's choice has been a popular one," Martin told me. "I believe I have had the shortest tenure on the Council, which is a notoriously transient body. They're all dead."

"Even Phoenix?"

"Even he. In a sense, I suppose I am the Council."

"That should simplify ... Hey, just how many people are left?"

Sherman looked thoughtful, which meant he was interfacing with the BC. The BC answered for him, from thin air, which startled Bill.

"Discounting the three hundred million wimps, which are technically alive, and the two hundred thousand goats in suspended animation ... the population of the Earth now stands at two hundred and nine. Correction: two-oh-sigh-correction, two-oh-seven."

"I get the picture," I said. "So Mandy was probably the last operative I had left."

"In a sense," the BC said. "She has taken a drug that is invariably fatal, but which will give her six hours of pure pleasure."

"Good for her," I said.

Bill hadn't heard us. He was looking at the sky. I use the word "sky" in the figurative sense; it was over our heads, so it had to be the sky. But I know it wasn't what he was used to seeing when he looked up.