Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (22 page)

Like any scientist, he had not wasted the opportunity. He had absorbed as much of what the cone creatures had to offer as possible. Once he had learned the ways of his new form, Peaslee had set about reading from the many books of the Great Library. These books were written in the odd curvilinear handwriting of the Great Race, copied, they claimed, from actual accounts penned by prisoners from various times. Books which revealed the distant past and the future of the Earth were read to him by the fantastic machines of the Great Race in a stilted, mechanical imitation of English. Though this openness might seem a dangerous policy, the Great Race assured him that all memories of these events would be removed from his consciousness by mechanical hypnosis before his return to his own time, and would only remain in the indelible record of his unconscious mind, irretrievable to his conscious self. And so Professor Peaslee read about Earth’s future and past.

He read of the proliferation of atomic weapons which would be the primary armament of the human world, created at the close of a second world war. The bored speech of the machine recited the tale of the destruction of the democratic countries a century and a half later as resources dwindled and populations soared. The books remained purposely vague, and often failed to talk about the most basic facts of the future or the past. Peaslee, however, could not resist the call of the machines and stayed for hours listening to their droning cadence, addicted to the terrible possibilities the books promised for the future. This was how Peaslee learned that his new form knew nothing of fatigue or sleep, remaining in the library at all hours, day and night; Peaslee’s surrogate body went without rest, absorbing the facts of things to come.

Peaslee set about writing a memoir of his own times for the Great Race, a task to which the cone creatures took with great industry, copying his written English remembrances into their own odd curvilinear hieroglyphs, fascinated by his simple recollections of the early twentieth century. Peaslee was quite open with the members of the Great Race as they asked him endless questions with their droning machines. The inquiries were both mundane and unpredictable; the council of the Great Race was interested in all aspects of human existence in Peaslee’s native time.

Occasionally the vast gulfs of time which separated the library and the age of humanity on Earth were revealed in strange questions of the council, which hinted at events that had not yet occurred in Peaslee’s age. Questions about such unusual-sounding things as “The Apollo Program,” “The Bikini Atoll Tests,” and “The Iron Curtain” revealed the general ignorance of the creatures about the twentieth century, or at least about the common human lifespan. Peaslee learned of many of these odd-sounding things in the antiseptic books of the library. Most took place years or even decades after Peaslee left his time, and some were almost beyond belief. Peaslee, surrounded by the unbelievable, believed it all without question...at first.

He seemed to be subjected to more scrutiny than the other captives of the Great Race. The cone creatures quietly prodded him with various implements to extract increasingly specific facts about his native time. Often he could assure them that such events never occurred, or that he had no knowledge of them. Some were so specific they beggared his imagination. The council questioned him about personal acquaintances and titles of books he had read, or trips he had taken and the amount of time he had spent working on a specific topic, their questions growing more and more baroque as time passed. Soon it dawned on Peaslee that something was different about his captivity. The other wards from various epochs on Earth were never subjected to same the sheer multitude of questions.

During the second year of his captivity things shifted once more. The questions grew in complexity, and the council seemed to have hundreds of them on hand at all times. Often it was all Peaslee did all day, answering endless questions which the council assured him were mundane. He read from the library all night to forget his interrogations.

It was only when they began to ask about his son, Wingate, that Peaslee began to question the morality of the creatures. Initially, he had been so enamored by the aliens’ culture that he had failed to look beyond the wonders of their physical world. Now the creatures seemed much more sinister. When they began to repeat the terrible question Peaslee was not sure what to make of it. They asked it over and over again, as if they had not yet asked it, as if they had forgotten it had been put to him a thousand times before. The question terrified him, and clearly illuminated the vast differences between humanity’s and the Great Race’s conception of time. They seemed to understand very little about the human mind, and thought, perhaps, that Peaslee was just being obstinate. They asked a question he could not answer, the same terrible question in that mechanical voice:

“Why does your offspring Wingate Peaslee exist in the ruins of this library in your time designation 1943?”

Peaslee tried to explain that he could not know what happened in 1943 yet—for him the year was 1912—much less understand what his son (in his mind still a toddler!), would be doing in that year, which seemed impossibly distant to him. The question made him frantic. The seeming impossibility of the facts behind this question made Peaslee first begin to doubt the Great Race’s information. Something so basic and close to him as his son assigned a role in time like a puppet, without reason, made his mind rebuke all the books of the Great Library, or at least look at them with a new kind of skepticism. The council seemed unsure of Peaslee’s lectures on the human condition. As the years wore on the terrible question became less and less frequent, but still was asked from time to time, as though Peaslee was simply hiding the fact and might blurt it out if surprised.

Other, stranger questions began to surface in its stead. Did he know a man named Thomas Arnold? Alan Barnsby? Arthur Jermyn? Had he ever heard of a group called the Ahnerebe? Had he ever read a book called
Observations on the Several Parts of Africa
? Or heard of a place that some called Thule?

His questioning continued long after other captives were left to their own devices. The more he cooperated, it seemed, the more he was allowed access to the Great Library. Still, there were places he was not allowed to venture, even under the watchful eye of his captors. The deeper portions of the library, accessible by the huge ramps which the cone creatures used as stairs, were off-limits to all but a select few.

Although there seemed to be no sentries to guard these forbidden passageways, the laws of the Great Race were strict and final, and there was no question what the result of a trespass (unspoken as it was) would be. After careful consideration and some veiled inquiries, however, Peaslee came to believe that such penalties would not apply to him. He was, after all, inhabiting the body of one of their scholars, and could not be expected to understand all the subtleties of their social order. Just as they held his mind hostage, he held their scholar’s body hostage.

Soon, Peaslee’s curiosity overcame his desire to please his captors. Although the library was never deserted, Peaslee chose a time during what seemed to be some sort of political rally to make his foray into the depths of the secret library. It was in his third year. Over a period of weeks, tens of millions of the cone creatures had gathered in the endless city which surrounded the library. Peaslee understood it to be something like an election, but one which also held religious meaning which defied clear explanation. All the Great Race appeared to be drawn to the meeting, and few of those that he knew to be menial workers seemed to be at their regular posts. The Great Library was as deserted as he had ever seen it.

One evening at the height of the rally, with an endless “cheer” of clicking claws filling the night air like the cries of huge crickets, Peaslee, seeing none of the creatures at the opening to the basements, crept down the forbidden slope into the vaults beneath the library. A small, luminescent crystal, clutched in his clumsy, surrogate claw, lit his way. Past a huge, hourglass-shaped opening in the enormous sandstone blocks an unlit hangar-like chamber beckoned. Inside, when he crossed the threshold, the ghostly light of the crystal played across the millions of “books” the Great Race had arranged on hundreds of shelves which lined the room. These tomes were of a uniform design, grey-lidded metal boxes which opened to reveal hundreds of pages of a clear fibrous cellulose which was invulnerable to damage.

Peaslee’s initial disappointment vanished when he realized that he had found the original texts which formed the source of the library above, the “hand”-written recollections of minds snatched from myriad times by the Great Race. Pertinent content from them had been copied into the books which formed the library above, transcribed by calligraphers who translated the various languages into the hieroglyphic scrawl of the Great Race. Peaslee had often wondered why such effort was taken. Why not just stock the library above with the original texts, when machines to translate them were available so readily and worked so well?

The portion of the shelving nearest to the doors concerned later Earth history - Peaslee recognized the looping sigil in the Great Race’s script which represented his species. Peaslee fumbled through the gray binders clumsily, flipping each open in turn, searching for the familiar Latin characters. Soon enough he stumbled upon a dozen binders which had been set aside, written in scrawled, clumsy letters of English:

...so there was nothing to be done. At night the skies burned, lit by the glowing things which turned the war around almost immediately. Enemies became allies, but still nothing seemed to stop them, whatever they were, from over-running first Africa, and then Europe. It went quick, less than two months and Europe was gone. England too. I never thought Speer, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt would sit together at the same table. But they did, for all the good it did them.
Already, the Russo-Japanese front was crumbling; this was late 1945, you see. And the talk from America, that was my home, was that we would not be far behind. Troops piled on troops to stop the advance of the things—there really isn’t any other word I can think of to describe them—but men never came back from the front, and then the president told the world about the Bomb. The atom bomb, like Professor Einstein had worked out

Peaslee watched in horror as the text he was reading disappeared before him, fading out like a lampwick slowly dimmed. For a frantic second, the page remained absolutely blank, and Peaslee feared he had triggered some sort of security device. Then, seconds later, the writing was replaced with new writing, fading in like a magic trick, in an identical hand-written scrawl which read:

...1945. They formed the United Nations, I think. I remember reading about it, anyway, in the New York Post. New York is a big city, like here, which I lived in when the war ended. I was going to fight in the Pacific (that’s an ocean) on islands there to stop Japan (an enemy country) from taking more territory from America (that’s my country), but the war ended abruptly thanks to the A-Bomb. The atom bomb, like Professor Einstein had worked out.

Peaslee’s clawed “hand” flipped to another page and watched it carefully. Over a period of minutes it flickered and changed nine times, its contents shifting, but never settling, often retelling the same events over and over again, but sometimes the narrative was so different that Peaslee could hardly believe what he was seeing. He snatched another random book from the shelves and watched as it too shifted like waves on the ocean.

Dropping the haunted book to the tiles Peaslee fled the vault, terrified at the disorder which was the true basis of the culture above. It seemed even the council of the Great Race knew nothing about the future, the true future, except that it would occur one way or another. Like humans, they were subject to the perils of time. Peaslee realized that the library above was just a placebo, an explanation—a sampling of that the general public were allowed to peruse, which would keep the council in unquestioned authority.

Peaslee had uncovered, to his own dismay, that in many ways the seemingly perfect society of the Great Race was almost exactly identical to that of his native time.

Commander Martin Cook looked tired and disheveled when Arnold entered the spacious room housed in the Department of the Army, Civil Affairs Building on Mercator Avenue. The room and other facilities were on loan from the Chief of Staff, in compliance with orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in D.C. Wild Bill had pulled strings and rubbed elbows to fine effect with some of the top army brass in London, who seemed pleased that the OSS was coming together so easily, despite the fact that army intelligence appeared to be floundering. Besides, anyone in command with a brain knew Donovan had the president’s ear, and the president was a willful, intelligent, and very vengeful man with absolute control over the military.

Unfortunately other matters in North Africa had called Donovan away, and he could not make it to the states for the update on the investigation into Project Parsifal. Cook, eyes bloodshot and hands shaking, appeared in his stead.