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	"A Connecticut Yankee in the Archon's Court"
Contact author			Chapter 3				Last Updated: 2005-10-14

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Backward to Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Ricochet in Time

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Prof. G. Santayana¹, "Phil 103: Philosophy of Conflict", Alliance Army Officer Academy

OSS Safe House
Hancock, Vermont
United States of America
Alliance for Democracy
April 21, 1998

"All right, let's go over this again from the American Revolution." She sounded more interested than the last few bored people who had no interest in history or the interesting little differences between her world and Frank's. The sudden attacks of hysteria when Frank realized he wasn't in his own world anymore were coming less often now. But he could still momentarily freeze in shock at finding another trivial difference; like that Otto's was the biggest fast-food chain in the Alliance, and it sold hamburgers, hot dogs, beer, tacos and burritos.² She was straightening her pens and paper now, giving him a few seconds before starting with a prepared list of questions.
This had been going on for over two weeks now. After a few days of badgering and good-cop/bad-cop interrogation, somebody high up had apparently given orders to ease off. Now it was just repetition and filling in the blanks. Too bad hypnosis hadn't gotten much, at least nothing they told him about afterward. And they hadn't pumped him full of truth drugs, although who knows what had happened while he was unconscious. At least his back wasn't hurting anymore.

So far, they'd established a history showing that the first noticeable divergence between this "timeline" and Frank's had occurred around the time of the American Revolutionary War. Even with an interest in military history, Frank was only able to recall that South Africa had come under British rule sometime later than 1783. No Boer War, or Anglo–Zulu War and Rorke's Drift here though. No Cecil Rhodes either, at least not the same way. Shaka Zulu never put together a Zulu Nation — the Draka must have rolled over the area before he came to power. "Crown Colony of Drakia" didn't ring a bell for Frank, so both he and they were now reasonably sure that something had happened around the establishment of British rule in southern Africa that had led to his world being different from theirs.
But it was World War II that had fascinated Frank. All those hours of watching black-and-white documentaries on the History Channel, and only the beginning of it matched what had happened here in the Eurasian War. After the Blitzkrieg of Poland and Fall of France, events careened off into nonsense as far as he was concerned. The Adolf Hitler in this world looked completely different — the first time they had showed him a picture, he hadn't known who he was looking at.
The Protracted Struggle since the Eurasian War was a division of the world even more profound than the Cold War. Some of the interviewers actually seemed envious of Frank's Western Bloc vying for the balance of power with the Evil Empire, the non-aligned Third World up for grabs and China biding its time. That reference to Reagan's cliché had made everybody else smile, even if nobody there but Frank knew about "Star Wars," the movie or the orbital defenses. As the century drew to a close, Kremlin-watchers in Frank's America speculated that Gorbachev had avoided a massive collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s only by talking "glasnost" and practicing more repression, an explicitly two-faced variant of Mao's "Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom" campaign earlier in China. What was holding them together in competition with the West's construction of a network of missile-killer satellites was a mystery; probably ignorance at the "man in the street" level of the West's superiority in economy and technology. It couldn't last forever though. An intel briefing that Frank had been to, over a month ago now, had indicated that Muslim/ethnic unrest was rising again in the Caucasus and areas bordering Iran. Gorbachev was probably going to have to send in the troops again, just as he had in Poland to squash Solidarity and bring the Warsaw Pact back into a tight orbit around Moscow. Same old kind of Russian, just younger to start with.

Frank's parents' attitudes about Russians had been born of personal experience. His mother's family had left Poland between the two world wars, from an area now within the Ukraine. His father's story was more complicated, Ukrainians that had fled the Russian Revolution to eventually end up in an ethnic enclave in Belgrade before the next war broke out; those of his family who hadn't been killed by Nazis had ended up in labor camps. After the war, Frank's father had parlayed a pre-war technical education into a living as an architect in Austria, then come to America and brought the remainder of his family over. But when the others still demanded more from him besides passage and initial living expenses in America, he had lost his temper, changed his name from Karzonyk to the more American-sounding Carson, moved from New York City to Connecticut and refused contact with his relatives for several years. His mother's strong hold on her Polish heritage meant that Frank had a Pole's near-instinctive distrust of Germans or Russians, although he couldn't speak more than a few words of her home language. Explaining all this to the interrogators the first few days hadn't been easy, but they seemed to understand fleeing Europe and still having an ethnic grudge. But his parents had insisted that Frank be American, giving him the name Francis John Carson, and only using their barely mutually intelligible European tongues at home for parental arguments.

Frank was now in a world without gray. The Domination and Alliance glared at each other across the borders and up in space with no middle ground. The entire world was one or the other. The knowledge that neither the United States nor Domination had ever lost a war before was no help. He was stuck on one side, the better side as far as his keepers would let him discover. All that they let him find out about the Domination recalled visions of Nazi Germany's Final Solution, just without the ovens and gas chambers. A Master Race living off the labor of billions of European and Asian slaves. That they'd taken India in 1976 showed that they were just waiting for any weakness in the Alliance, to drag it down piece by piece or all at once, if the remaining members ever weakened their resolve.
Frank dragged his attention back to the woman facing him from the other side of the kitchen table. The OSS had found that the homey atmosphere in this room worked best at getting Frank's cooperation. There were surely hidden microphones and cameras, but only the one visible agent in the room with him, and he could see another one standing out on the back porch watching the grassy "yard" that suddenly sloped up into dense pine trees. The woman facing him was made up a little, but not too pretty. A stab of guilt at what he was about to think of anyway, while not knowing what was going on with Anne or Nicky…

"He's daydreaming again." Randolph Kustaa stated, looking at Frank Carson's slightly glazed expression in the image on the monitor.
"Ayup, but she's the best we have at getting him to come up with more details. Starting with the Revolution is just to get him thinking about history. It's amazing what little details he keeps coming up with when we get to the 1940s, this World War Two of his." the alienist³ pointed out.
"So are you convinced yet?"
"He's either the best at a consistent delusion I've ever seen and belongs in a padded cell, or he's a poor bastard a long way from home. But I'm leaning towards the poor bastard hypothesis more and more. He may need a padded cell either way if he keeps reacting so strongly to incidents in daily life. And that's my professional opinion."
Randolph Kustaa turned his chair away from the bank of monitors, the big central one set for one of the kitchen cameras. The recorders would get it all anyway; somebody would analyze every vocal nuance and eye movement. With enough time to adjust to the accents, the voice recognition systems were now doing an excellent job of generating a real-time transcript, displayed on the lower portion of the monitor screen. But his nominal second-in-command, an alienist specializing in defector debriefings, remained watching intently, occasionally making comments on a separate channel. This was starting to get boring to Randy, even though this wasn't the typical defector debriefing. Not that there were many defectors from the Domination nowadays.
Unfortunately, the problem seemed to be preventing would-be Citizens from taking their knowledge the other way, if they felt they had been mistreated in the Alliance. All the Alliance had to do with some people was appeal to their sense of belonging, their love of freedom for all. But a few didn't have it, just a love of money, or desire for power over others regardless of the cost in human dignity. Randy didn't and couldn't understand such people. They were traitors. Traitors to the whole human race. Randy excluded the Draka from humanity, just as he was able to include all the serfs under the Domination's yoke in with the Alliance in his mind. Even if he had had to pretend to be a Citizen to perform his missions sometimes, it was with a shrieking desire to kill every one of them always lurking in the back of his mind. The darkness of the room, lit by flickering monitors as they brought up views selected by the comps as worthy of human attention, slipped into a dark night off the coast of France punctuated by searchlights and a repeated hollow sound…

"There, he's doing it again." The alienist's finger tapping on the glass covering brought Kustaa's attention back to the central monitor.
Randy started, then quickly forced himself to stay in the chair as the past was dispelled. "What, daydreaming like me?"
"No, that hesitation. He's being very careful about some subjects. Maybe he really did have a security clearance like he claims. There's a range of subject matter that he just doesn't want to talk about. Mostly military capabilities that don't match ours at all."
"You can tell that from what they're talking about now?"
In the kitchen, Frank and the woman were reviewing a long but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stop a Communist insurgency in eastern Indochina, which Frank called Vietnam.
"It's when he talks about electrodetectors and anti-aircraft missiles mostly. He likes talking about military history, things he said he learned in books and from watching documentaries, but there's stuff he says he knew from his job that he's careful about revealing. The stuff he thinks isn't important is sometimes wildly different from our criteria, like all that about 'hackers' and a perscomp 'virus' yesterday. I wonder what kind of fireworks we'll see when the report with that in it gets read at headquarters."
"You think we should turn up the heat again?"
"Oh, no, no, no! In my professional opinion, any kind of strong persuasion would be counter-productive. He's still in a state of shock and denial internally. Little things keep setting him off. His scenario of being in a totally fabricated setting just to extract secrets from him is a little far-fetched, but almost reasonable given the history he's described. I found a reference to 'Potemkin village' in a history of Czarist Russia, rather curious that he believes a bunch of Communists would try to trick an American using one."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Give him what he asked for. A supervised tour of the places he says he knows: his hometown in Connecticut, New York City, Long Island, Albuquerque, and that place in the Mojave Desert." The alienist ticked them off on his fingers.
Randy racked his brain to supply the name, "Um… You mean Crummville. The Navy won't like that. That's their major inland weapons test range."
"Just show him the town, not bring him to a secret weapons test. Remember that he claims to have worked there, but calls it China Lake. What I'm trying to do is trigger some more recall, and get him to accept our world. Either he's going to fall down a screaming loony, or he'll cave in and tell us everything he knows."
Randy sighed. "Odds?"
"Fifty-fifty. Either he will or he won't. You know how the social sciences are." The alienist smirked.
"Well, the alternative is the rubber hoses, and that certainly isn't called for yet. This guy doesn't know anything about the Draka projects we've mentioned."
"You're right. Same reaction to both the real code names and the red herrings, even when we had him hooked up to body response recorders.⁴ If he was bringing disinformation, he wasn't given anything we're interested in."
"OK. Let's give Frank a vacation. Give me a few days to set up some escort teams and sweep the locations."
The alienist nodded. "He'll last a bit longer. We're all getting itchy here, but so is he. All he's seen so far is the inside of our tiltrotor, whenever he wasn't sedated. He's probably never been in the Vermont woods in his life. If I were telling the truth about a different history, I'd want to confirm it for myself by visiting places I knew before I spilled my guts. And if he isn't, I'm sure you action heroes will stop him."

Randy gave him a pained smile, and got up to make some phone calls. This project was starting to get bigger than he could handle. Somebody with a sense of humor in Donovan House had already assigned the code name "HOPSKOTCH" to Frank Carson, and "MAVERICK" to the entire project of finding out how he had gotten here, and if any use could be made of it — probably as a weapon against the Domination. Saying MAVERICK did seem to open doors quickly when asking for things from OSS HQ, and if he managed to keep his seat on this bucking bronco, Randy Kustaa might be able to ride it to something useful in his career.

---

Frank was up early again. Somehow being away from everything he knew as daily life made it easier to sleep, and out here in the woods they encouraged him to go to bed early. No job except full-time talking with a succession of interviewers, and free time devoted to trying to learn more about this strange new world through virtual books and a holographic (!) TV. None of the usual worries, but a whole host of different ones.
He got a cup of coffee from the pot always on the kitchen stove — it looked electric but only the contents of the pot ever got hot⁵ — and walked outside towards the lake. One of the anonymous guards followed at a discreet distance, leaving parallel tracks in the dewy grass. His gun appeared to be an assault rifle with a laser sight, but Frank had been warned not to handle any weapons or risk being shot. The guard was wearing a helmet with sensors and communications gear, and occasionally murmured into a microphone before his mouth while constantly peering about with god-knew-what in his vision.
Nobody had ever asked Frank directly about it, but he had been here before. At least, what looked like here. Back when he was a college student in New York City, attending the prestigious Mechanic's Union. It had been the summer of his freshman year.

That first year of college had been a revelation for Frank. Going in with the pride at being number 3 in the academic standings in the hometown high school, Bishop Carroll, then learning he could go to The City and essentially get a free ride at the ultra-selective Mechanic's Union. It was the best scholarship offer he had gotten, and he jumped on it. Everybody attending Mechanic's Union paid no tuition, just for books and living expenses. For Frank, that had meant a long train commute every day from Connecticut, rather than finding housing in The City. And he had gone from being big fish in a small pond, to plankton in a pond of about the same size — and all the fellow plankton seemed to be "getting it" academically while he wasn't. Going on probation after the disaster of the first semester was Frank's wake-up call. His grades were better in the spring semester, but still in the basement. He was going to spend every minute that he could studying, even during this summer job. The parting words of the probation committee chairman had seared themselves into his memory: "You should spend your summer thinking about how well you're going to do here at Mechanic's in the fall. If you don't do a lot better, we'll give your spot to somebody who meets our high standards."
Working as an electronics counselor was going to be pretty easy for Frank. He already knew a lot of basic electronics at a practical level. The kids were pretty good, and his previous summer jobs had included two years as a day camp counselor-in-training. The kids were just going to assemble kits anyway. Frank's problems were grasping theory, and his personal life; both were a disaster.
Even with an interest in electronics, Frank had always been impatient to get results, and skipped through the articles about building something until he could find the parts list and wiring diagram. Go out and buy the parts, put 'em together, play with it a bit. Frank knew where to buy things in local shops or the City, how to put them together, and how to make some simple substitutions. But the theory of "why" a circuit worked defeated him. It still did, at Mechanic's, along with calculus and college-level physics and chemistry. There had been signs while still in high school that a reckoning was coming. Once subjects got past simple practical applications, and into theory, Frank started becoming lost. His high standing in the high school graduating class would have been better if his grades hadn't started slipping in the last semester, as all the advanced and accelerated classes he was in started getting into college-level material.
Bishop Carroll was an all-male Catholic high school, and Frank was a shy smart kid, a "nerd" in later slang. He was a decently fast runner in grammar school, but not good enough for the high school track team. Too skinny and awkward to play football or even basketball or baseball without getting hurt. He hung out with the other smart kids in the advanced and accelerated classes, and had managed to avoid both being beaten up by the jocks, or assaulted by the fags. Most days he scurried right home to do his homework, except when there was marching or concert band practice. The only girls Frank got to see were those imported from the nearby public schools, who were cheerleaders or "flags" with the marching band. It was his bad luck to live in a neighborhood with no girls within 5 years of his age. And even though Frank had been in the band all 4 years, they didn't allow mixing with the girls at practices. The girls even had a separate bus when the band went to parades or away games for the football team. Frank would later joke that his dad had gone to more high school dances, doing his bit for the Parent's Council as a chaperone, than he had. Frank had ignored the prom. He simply didn't know any girls that he could invite.
Some of that changed when Frank got the job as electronics counselor for Camp Teeloswago. The owners lived in Connecticut most of the year, only a few miles from Frank's house. They spent the summer months up in Vermont, running the camp. It was mostly for spoiled nouveau-riche kids, with a few charity cases thrown in when the owners could afford it. Sleep-away camp for 8 weeks. Not much different from the camp Frank had gone to twice as a camper about 9 years earlier. But this time Frank was a counselor, and he had to watch the kids in a cabin when he wasn't teaching them how to solder without burning holes in each other. Another big difference was that as a camper, Frank had been 10 and 11 years old, and more concerned with shooting a rifle at a paper target than even looking at girls. This time, there were girl campers in the same camp, not across the lake, and therefore female counselors, some of whom were sure to be around his age. Frank hadn't been sure about calling them "girls" or "women" at first. And especially not some of the other dirty names he'd heard…

This place, it had to be the same. The trees and the lake, they looked just like Camp Teeloswago. The buildings were different though. Instead of log cabins tucked under large pine trees in the flat part of the narrow valley, and a large main house serving as the dining hall and kitchen, there was just the one large lodge house. No rifle range, no stables, no row of rowboats and canoes. No barn-like building where he had a room for electronics.
That barn, right next to the stables, had been where Frank had lost his virginity to Linda. To this day, Frank wasn't sure what had lured Linda into sleeping with him: attraction or pity. The other counselors for Frank's cabin had heard about his lack of experience, candor brought on by drinking cheap wine on a night off duty. They had told him to seek out Linda, said she had "put out" for Andy last year. Frank had broken through his shyness at the camp, figuring that nobody there knew him, so he could be more extroverted and make friends if it was only for 8 weeks. He tried his newfound charm on Linda. It had worked somehow. Linda usually brought along her fat friend Eleanor though, forcing Frank to find ways to ditch her. The time they had bicycled to the next town on a day off, they had actually managed to lose Eleanor for a while. Frank actually thought he was getting somewhere with Linda in the grass by the side of the road until Eleanor had showed up again, hitching a ride after her bicycle had broken. Frank's disappointment had somehow convinced Linda to get together that night, the First Time in Frank's book.
The lake was the same, and the name of the town, Hancock. And the bigger town down the road through the hills, Middlebury. But much of the rest was different.

Frank walked to the edge of the water, the still surface reflecting a perfect inverse of the surrounding hills in the early morning light. The sun wouldn't rise over the hills for several hours yet, but it colored the sky. Frank put the coffee mug down on the narrow sandy lake shore, then raised his arms and prepared to scream, as loud and as long as he could. Maybe letting out his anguish would fix things. "Primal Scream therapy," he'd heard it called. A slight cough from the guard made him stop.
"Not going swimming, are you?"
"Uh… No. Just stretching."
Embarrassed, Frank made a production of swinging his arms back and forth. He grinned sheepishly, picked up the coffee mug, and started walking back to the house. The chill of the morning was seeping into his clothes now. He'd been here in June through August as a camp counselor, and there had been a thin sheet of ice on the edge of the stream feeding the lake one morning back then. Now in mid-April, it was definitely freezing overnight, and cold late into the day. During the summer, the camp had even set up their own time zone because the sun took so long to climb over the steep hillside on the south side of the narrow east-west valley.
There was just no safe way to release the tension he was feeling. All these eyes on him, the cameras that he was sure were there, all the questions. Screaming out loud might help, but it was sure to bring lots of people running and even more questions. Couldn't they see he was reaching his limits? Even without rubber hoses or other overt physical torture, they were bringing him close to a breaking point. If they were Russians, they were either being very bold or very stupid by bringing him to a place he recognized. Soon after arrival, before they had begun exhaustively covering his entire life, he had recognized the place but not the building, and told a little lie. He had simply told them he had worked two summers at one camp, instead of one each at two. Would they figure it out? Not if he kept sticking to his story. Although how they seemed to know nothing about his life bothered him. They were good at confirming and trying to hold him to what he'd told them earlier, but never volunteered anything he hadn't told them already. It was just inconceivable that a bunch of Russians, all speaking English with such good American accents, could have bought a summer camp and removed all the buildings and facilities he had known without leaving a trace.
What if this wasn't really Hancock, Vermont, U. S. of A.? What if it was somewhere in Russia? He knew nothing of his trip here, still under sedation. They said he had been flown here in a tiltrotor. The first military ones were still in operational testing for the Air Force where Frank had come from, although the Marines and Navy already had a few in service. They had let him listen to the radio a few times. He knew it was possible to get AM reception from Boston here, not FM, and he was sure the laws of physics hadn't changed. The radio programs had been full of incomprehensible news items and strange music. The holographic TV was completely alien — his world was still struggling with several incompatible two-dimensional formats and an infant digital high-definition one. The virtual book reader, or reader goggles⁶, was a toy on the cutting edge of technology in his world, but apparently a common consumer item here that used cartridges, called dataplaques, instead of wireless downloads. His inquiries about an Internet had produced blank stares or laughter, with dismissals that sounded like paranoid security run amuck. All consistent, but not like anything from his world.
Some of their questions had been about what sounded like classified project names to him, "Stone Dogs" and "New America" in particular. But aside from that, the words had meant nothing to him. And without equipment or training, he couldn't be sure, but none of the people questioning him had noticeably responded or ever followed up when he had thrown out project names he knew like "Timber Morion" and "Jovial Consul,"⁷ things he was sure Russians would have at least returned to eventually. Either those highly classified projects were already an open book to these people, or they had a totally different agenda.
What if all this were real, then? Even if nobody knew how he got here, including himself, there were amazing opportunities for a clever man. All the things that nobody had thought of here. Could he become rich selling off his knowledge of another history? Or the music or technology that hadn't been created in this world? But wait; there were two sides here. Was the Alliance the best place for him to be? And did he have a choice?
His head swirling with questions more piercing than the usual OSS interrogation, Frank trudged back to the house, retracing his steps across the grass. Beyond the trees, a cock crowed at the farm further down the road to Middlebury. Another day, more questions.

---

"No, no, NO! Impossible! There's no way it could have happened like that!" The bearded man behind the desk bellowed, shook his head violently, and put his hands up to his ears as if to ward off further heresy. "There is no conceivable way that a retired sports player could provoke such civil unrest in a major city of the United States only a few years ago!"⁸
From his chair facing the desk, Frank drawled "Listen, Professor, I lived through it. I know what I saw."
"Ach, you're wasting my time! You're obviously a madman, and I never should have let the University talk me into coming out here…" The sociology professor stood up, and began collecting his books and papers. His interview with Frank had swiftly degenerated, as he had come in wanting to prove a theory that a more democratic United States would have had fewer postwar problems with racism than the Alliance. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened, but most of the visitors had held themselves in check much better, apparently briefed to restrain their disbelief of Frank's recollection of history.

Frank threw "Fine with me, buddy!" at the professor's back, as the portly academic tried to flee the study without dropping his documents. Frank settled back in the armchair facing the desk that the departing visitor had barricaded himself behind. An obnoxious and obvious power play, as most of the previous visitors had been willing to conduct their interviews either in the kitchen or other similar casual settings. No walking in the woods or sitting on the porch though, apparently the guards felt somebody could have the lodge under surveillance, so anything said outside must be carefully considered. Frank tried to relax in the chair, but he could hear the professor yelling at somebody in another room about going back to civilization. This interview had been scheduled for the entire morning, and it had apparently ended over 2 hours early. If the guy wasn't calmed down, it looked like Frank would get some rare daylight free time. Two hours, that should be plenty of time to climb up to the top of the southern ridge and back, if they let him; it was a steep 300 feet or so, but with lots of trees and rocks for hand holds. Frank had never climbed more than a few yards up the hill while here as a counselor, had never seen what the camp looked like spread out below. The good food and exercise in the well-equipped gym (probably set up for both the agents and the Draka) had certainly reduced his tummy since he had arrived, and the activity had probably kept his tension at a tolerable level. He really wanted to see how good a shape he was in now, and a hill climb would be just the thing. Jogging up and down the access road was starting to get old. And he needed to burn off some energy now, that guy had made him a little mad. Judging from the yelling he still heard coming from somewhere else in the building, the feeling had been mutual.

---

Shifting the knapsack containing some food, drink, and other day-hiking supplies that could be rustled up on short notice, Frank prepared to climb the short but steep slope that abruptly rose from the flat meadow south of the safe house. He looked back at the guard trailing behind to his left, who nodded after apparently seeing nothing amiss in the trees rising before them. Frank had been given an obnoxiously bright yellow jacket with silvery-white reflective stripes, which he suspected had a homing device concealed within as well, and a matching knapsack for his supplies. The anonymous male guard was, as always, in an active camouflage outfit that could be difficult to spot against many backgrounds. But the matte black helmet with opaque visor that he wore spoiled the effect, as did the imposing weapon he carried at the ready. Frank didn't know what the guards' names were, and had been discouraged from asking. At least they didn't treat him like a prisoner, but acted more like they were bodyguards, yet uncomfortable at it. He suspected that if he had been a defecting Citizen, there would have been several guards at all times rather than one, with a lot more attention on making sure he didn't try to run away. Well, this trip outside wasn't running, just hiking, and all within the property's boundaries; those extended beyond the top of the ridge above to keep prying eyes away. Although surprised by Frank's request to hike to the top of the ridge, the speed with which the staff in the house had produced the needed equipment implied that it was a common request from the previous guests. But Frank shuddered again at the thought of how quickly a Domination Citizen of his age was expected to climb this hill. He was also profoundly grateful they had removed the lead "training" weights from the knapsack. With it now at a more comfortable position on his shoulders, Frank began trudging up the slope. He planned to climb to the top before lunch, eat at the top, and then climb back down in an hour or so — a deliberately slow pace on the way back to avoid an accident.

Rynn Wartock lowered the sensor goggles from before her face, and pressed the stud to turn off the recording function. While not as capable as a military-grade sensor helmet, this Citizen-grade item incorporating some refinements inspired by the most recent Alliance military issue was invaluable for hunting bushmen or, in this case, traitors. The Domination's LEO battlestations had spotted elevated activity levels here at the Hancock safe house; mostly extra aircars parked outside and tracks in the wet early morning grass. As the junior Krypteria operative in the Boston consulate, she had gotten the dirty end of the stick. So here she was in Vermont to get a ground-level report on the house. Presumably there were other operatives out at similar locations across the Alliance, but she had no need to know about those, all to make a preliminary determination where Maxine Moorehead was. The renowned Draka researcher on primate physiology had supposedly died several weeks ago in an aircar crash deep in the Amazon while on a permitted scientific expedition. But the Security Directorate was claiming that the remains handed over by the Alliance didn't match the stored genotypes, and some paranoid headhunter (a redundancy? — Rynn grinned) had invoked a standing "deny to the enemy" directive. Why the Alliance might want a monkey body expert was beyond Rynn, but if somebody in Skull House thought Maxine was important enough, or knew something important, orders were orders. So, all the known active OSS safe houses were being investigated; if Maxine's presence were confirmed, then a strike team would come in to do the real dirty work. Rynn's job was just to observe and report back, not too illegal. Although her trespass through the sensors at the property boundary would already qualify as a crime, albeit of the most minor sort for a field operative.
The view from this location was sub-optimal, but the best she could do with a good chance of staying undetected by their active sensors. Some of the activity below was blocked by the bulk of the house, but she had a wide vista that included the aircar parking area and two of the four obvious exits from the main building. Things had just quieted down. About 10 minutes ago, a fat bearded man had stormed out of the house, berated his driver for not being ready to leave at a moment's notice, and then loudly insisted on trying to drive an aircar out of the parking area on his own. In the process, he had dented several others before finally being persuaded to let the driver do his job. Rynn had been amused and baffled by these events, convinced that it was all a diversion, and had missed much of the action while scanning everywhere else in view to see what she wasn't supposed to be looking at instead. She hadn't found anything, and regretted not being sent here with a partner, so one could have watched the show while another looked for the "real" action. Several people were still outside working on the other aircars after the first had left, doing various static tests to ensure there was only easily bandaged cosmetic damage, nothing structural or affecting systems operation. Rynn settled into a less uncomfortable position just below the treetop, and commanded her body into the "watchful waiting" her agoge instructors had awakened from her soon after puberty. Directing her senses to rouse her if the situation below noticeably changed, she reduced her metabolism (and vulnerability to detection) to a fraction of even human norm, and freed her mind to wander between her ears.

As the daughter of a Faraday Combine factory administrator, Rynn was well acquainted with the potential of hidden damage. Although the Security Directorate and the Combine's own security force tried to emphasize the punishment while concealing the methods of both sabotage detection and sabotage itself, it seemed there was a new ring of saboteurs discovered at the Darmstadt complex every year since the 1960s. Before that, it had been even worse, and the reprisals widespread. Automated inspection of all outgoing products was only recently reliable enough to serve as a final check; placing deliberately damaged items before the serf inspectors hadn't worked to the standards of perfection that sophisticated electronic equipment demanded. It was so easy for a serf to kink a wiring harness, or leave a greasy fingerprint on a metal contact, either accidentally or deliberately, and lower the reliability or service life of an item like her sensor goggles. So far, redesigning the production process to make it serf-proof was an expensive and continuing struggle, but the best thing short of de-serfing the factories or chemo-conditioning them all, that the Domination could do within the current state of affairs. The Militants were right; breeding a new race of serfs had to be the answer. A serf compliant to the wishes of every Citizen without complaint, and to whom the thought of sabotage or any rebellion would be either inconceivable or unshakable anathema. Even the current Archon seemed to go along with the Militant platform here. He had always decried the wrecks that chemo-conditioning made of serfs. In a recent speech to the Assembly he had challenged the Citizenry to match themselves against the challenges of the serfs and the Alliance. Rather that than turning the serfs into mindless zombies, or the Alliance (and probably the entire world) into glowing slag, out of childish frustration at not having their own way immediately. Even though, as Eric von Shrakenberg himself knew full well, this Protracted Struggle had gone on more than 50 years, not a short time even compared to the span since the land-takin'. To compare the conquerors of more than half the world, and much of the territory off-planet, to children — that was a dangerous thing to do. But he was the Commander of the Destiny of the Race, and enough Citizens had turned away from the ravings of the Militants to vote Conservative in the last two elections and keep him firmly in the Archon's office. But all that was a problem for the future, for when the Final War was fought and won. Until then, there was a structural necessity to have a large pool of serfs. There still weren't enough ghouloons, even for the tasks they could do, to close the spectrum of options to the serfs, including Janissary service or less desirable assignments than factory work. A good yet superficial analysis of part of the Domination's situation, she reflected. Suddenly, it had to be folded up and stowed, as a warning blazed across her consciousness.

Renewed activity down below impinged on Rynn's peripheral awareness, jolting her from thoughts of the Domination's problems and glorious future. After a realization that the warning wasn't of something immediately threatening her up in the tree, she damped down the worst of the adrenaline reaction to the stimulus. Sluggishly at first, she raised the goggles back up, verified they were in passive-only mode, and began recording again as she peered down slope. There were two men heading across the grass towards the base of the slope. One was obviously a guard, even her goggles mostly defeated by the chameleon suit, but the other was dressed to draw attention, and it took only a little observation to ascertain he wasn't a Citizen. About to put the goggles away again, Rynn paused as a tidbit from a briefing bubbled up from her memory: "The OSS does some things we can take advantage of. Fo' instance, if a traitor to the Race is being harbored at one of their safe houses, they'll often make the traitor wear brightly-colored garments outside, just to make tracking and pursuit easier if the traitor has a change of heart and wants to escape and evade back to us. Makes a strike team's job just a bit easier, don'ya know." That helpful hint now digested, Rynn took another look at the man in the garish yellow and silver jacket. Definitely no Citizen, the face showed none of the hardness of even an Old Race (as the New Race were beginning to call their unmodified progenitors) Draka. A mustache and mixed black and gray hair, but the face too young — she placed him at an unmodified 35 years old.
A passive detector on the goggles whined in her ear, and she carefully ducked below the leaves to avoid the guard's active scanning beam. When she cautiously returned to her viewing, the man in front had obligingly stopped and turned towards the trailing guard for a few seconds until the guard nodded. Rynn then realized that he probably wasn't a serf either. Either he'd never been tattooed under the right ear, or he'd had a very good surgery to remove it, and any scar. Now her curiosity was piqued — a guarded man at an OSS safe house, not Citizen, not serf, yet treated much like a traitor to the Race. That there was only one guard told Rynn a lot; known procedures for Citizens called for at least two at all times while outside. Well, odds were that Maxine Moorehead wasn't here. There were enough OSS safe houses to keep several vacant even if a dozen Citizens "defected" at once, and they would never hide a Citizen and somebody else in the same place. But maybe the mission orders could be bent enough to find out who this man was, as finding somebody else hadn't been anticipated. Rynn watched and memorized his face in the few seconds more that elapsed before the two passed below the edge of the trees in her view. She mused, "from the knapsack and the way the guard acted, they're planning on climbing up this hill." Rynn stowed the goggles again, and began to climb down the tree. She'd have to scout the slope before they reached her, find a way to dispose of the guard without alarming the house, quickly interrogate that strange man, and get away clean. A good combination of several of the field training exercises they'd put her through.

The End for now…

Forward to Appendices

Footnotes:

1. Professor Santayana's students often follow this with "and those who have to repeat it didn't look at the answers," partially referring to his habit of sticking to a limited number of exam questions through the years. (back)
2. "Otto's" sells hamburgers, hot dogs (frankfurters), tacos and burritos, but only locations near military bases or important manufacturing facilities are actually open 24 hours a day. Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lt. Col.) Otto Skorzeny was the founder of Otto's. He received a huge monetary bonus for bringing most of the English-speaking paratroops in German service (the 26th Fallschirmjaeger Regiment of the 9th Fallschirmjaeger Division of the Luftwaffe) to England in late 1943, and handing them over to the Alliance for Democracy as volunteers for further military service. After Hitler's death, Skorzeny's prior position in the bodyguard was abolished, and the English-speaking unit assembled to operate against the British was almost used to support last-ditch operations against the Domination instead. Otto took the men on a final full-scale training mission to Norway, then personally flew them to northern England instead of returning to Germany. The Alliance couldn't officially use them against the Domination, but the English-speaking Germans were retrained in the Draka dialect and then used in the same disruptive role they played in OTL Battle of the Bulge. The unit was infiltrated into southern France in 1944, served with distinction in Spain as unacknowledged covert agents among the Draka, and were the last non-OSS Alliance personnel opposing the Draka to be evacuated from continental Europe. During a short stay in a minimum-security POW camp in Arizona in 1946, where they were supposedly "de-Nazified", Skorzeny convinced several in his unit to join him in starting a new business concept in postwar America. His chain of gaily-decorated takeout restaurants began selling "fast food" (assembly-line production of a limited menu) to fill the void created by the American woman's continuing presence in the postwar workplace. Hot dogs were originally called frankfurters on the menu, but lingering anti-Nazi sentiment and boycotts by European refugees led to a quiet name change. Burritos and tacos were later added to the menu to appeal to the substantial Hispanic minority in the United States. Otto's now serves other foods as well, but their core of hamburgers, hot dogs and beer is still popular with military personnel and male industrial workers across the Alliance. The lederhosen or frilly dresses worn by counter personnel were changed in the late 1970s to more practical uniforms, but the jolly "Burgermeister" is still the chain's mascot, and the decor and music are still ersatz Oktoberfest. (back)
3. In the absence of Sigmund Freud on the Alliance/Domination timeline, doctors that practice psychological analysis and therapy are (still) called "alienists." Most of Freud's concepts are present, just named differently after being developed by a wider consensus of practitioners. There is much less emphasis on the importance of sexual jealousy, but this may be due more to lingering prudishness in the Alliance than rejection of the Oedipal conflict. (back)
4. The widespread use of polygraphs ("lie detectors") and similar medical monitoring equipment in interrogations since the end of the Eurasian War has led to very capable medical sensor suites. These are known as body response recorders when combined with a recording function, although computer-assistance analysis capabilities are available in some advanced ones. In a covert setting, a miniaturized version with reduced capabilities would appear to be a watch, to be unknowingly worn by a subject, with short-range wireless transmission to a receiver/recorder. In the overt realm, the sensors are smaller and lighter than OTL, but rarely wireless. Given decades of experience, both the Domination and Alliance are very adept at interpreting sensor readings from subjects, although the New Race Citizens can often control their responses. (back)
5. I'm postulating that the use of room-temperature superconductors will eventually lead to a high-technology induction cooker, where the pot transfers heat directly to the contents without getting hot itself. Such a stove would appear similar to OTL "flat-top" electric stoves; a flat horizontal panel with only circular markings to tell you where the "burners" are. (back)
6. In 1998, "reader goggles" are relatively widespread in the Alliance, but only mass-market periodicals and popular books (e.g. "paperbacks") are distributed in that format. To avoid the security and copyright problems inherent in making the cartridges rewritable or programmable at anything less than an authorized factory, a production system similar to perscomp software is used. Only a few hundred "reader cartridge" writers exist in the Alliance, and almost all are set up for mass production. Alliance reader goggles are more utilitarian than Domination models, as they are designed for lowest-cost mass production, but have a wider range of comfort adjustments and include controls for switching languages when the cartridge is bi- or tri-lingual. Alliance and Domination cartridges are not compatible, and rather than market a converter, both sides find it easier to allow the other's product to be used with their cartridges, although imported cartridges are carefully screened. (back)
7. "Timber Morion" and "Jovial Consul" are purely my own invention, any resemblance to actual classified project code names is coincidental, and could be hazardous to the author's "day job." (back)
8. The event referred to is my own invention, based on several OTL events that recently occurred in Los Angeles. An African-American retired basketball player (with a second career as a second-rate actor) is stopped by the L.A. police for driving slowly and erratically along a freeway shoulder. He is pulled out and beaten when he refuses to leave the vehicle or explain his actions. In the first of several trials linked to the incident, the (all white) officers are all acquitted of police brutality and illegal search & seizure despite a police video recording of the beating and search. A search of the vehicle for drugs had discovered bloody clothing inside linking him to the murder only several hours earlier of his (white) ex-wife and her current (white) boyfriend. L.A.'s African-American community explodes, believing the evidence to be planted and the beating to be police brutality, thanks to a legal defense team exploiting ambiguities in the forensic evidence, mistakes in police procedure and the obvious "race issue." The ensuing riots cause the destruction of much of the low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles through fires, looting, armed street gangs going on rampages including shooting at airliners, and the response of the National Guard and Army after the police are overwhelmed and firefighters refuse to approach the fires without protection. (back)

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