AFTER THE FACT Read online

  Muscular, hairy forearms protruded from rolled-up shirtsleeves. The half-dozen pockets of the man's Banana Republic bush vest were stuffed with electronic cables, small tools, pencils, notebooks, and what looked to Jerry like camera accessories.

  The young woman with him looked vaguely oriental, as if the name Chen might fit her. Her straight black hair, or most of it, was tied up in an expensive-looking scarf. She wore jeans and a tucked-in shirt, with large dangling earrings that were perhaps intended to show that she didn't really belong on a construction crew.

  At twenty yards or so, before either of the pair had given any sign of noticing him, Jerry paused in his approach. He was making a last effort at trying to figure out just what the hell they might be doing, so that his first attempt at conversation would not appear too stupid.

  They had the Onstot cabin triangulated with their machines, and they were either photographing it or making surveyor's measurements of it. Or maybe they were doing something that required both processes. A couple of passing tourists gazed at the workers in ignorant admiration, and passed up a close look at the Onstot cabin, being anxious not to interfere with whatever kind of special work was going on.

  The setup reminded Jerry vaguely of the laser systems that construction crews sometimes used to make sure that things were kept exactly level or exactly perpendicular. At least two of these devices could have been cameras, and all three of them had what must be their battery power-packs on the lower shelves of their tripods.

  Jerry in his years of engineering studies had never seen anything like it. But he had to give up for the moment on trying to figure it out. He resumed his advance.

  Though the man was facing directly away, it was he who made the young woman aware of Jerry's presence. As if he might have received some extrasensory warning, the dark-haired man lifted his eyes suddenly from his instrument and turned around to look at the new arrival. A moment later he raised a hand in an abrupt gesture, signaling his helper that they were through for the moment with whatever they had been doing.

  Jerry strode forward, armed with his most intelligent smile. "Dr. Pilgrim?"

  "Yes." As on the phone, the voice had the precision of an actor's, slightly and indefinably accented—James Mason would come close, thought Jerry, who was something of an old-movie buff. "Yes," Pilgrim continued. "And you will be Jeremiah Flint." He appeared genuinely pleased to see his visitor, and not to resent the interruption of his work.

  The doctor's handshaking grip was firm but brief. Then he turned his head toward his assistant. "Jan, let that go for now. Come and say hello. It may be that our computer problems are on the verge of solution."

  Jan Chen approached. Jerry took his first good look at her through a fragrance of lilacs; the bushes flanking the Onstot cabin door were in full spring bloom. She walked with a grace that suggested a model's training; her eyes were as black as her hair, but her skin glowed like old ivory. It hardly seemed to matter that her face was a long way from Jerry's ideal of classic beauty.

  "I see you found our messages," she said to him in a voice in which he could find no accent at all. She shook his hand in a business-like way. "Sorry that neither of us could meet you in person at the hotel—either hotel."

  "That's quite all right. I was glad to come up here and meet you on site. This will give me a chance to see what kind of work you're doing."

  Pilgrim was frowning at his watch. "Now that you are here, Mr. Flint—may I call you Jerry?"

  "Sure. Of course. I was wondering what you were doing with these devices that—"

  "Now that you are here, I think it will be best if we spend as much of the afternoon as possible in our discussions. Therefore we had better break this off—Jan, let us pack up the equipment immediately."

  The young woman nodded, murmured something in agreement, and turned away to begin folding one of the tripods. Pilgrim seemed to have another of them already folded—he had got it taken down with what seemed to Jerry altogether unlikely speed. The battery pack and everything else stayed neatly in a bundle with the tripod when its long legs were collapsed. Jerry was unable to catch a manufacturer's name, if such a thing was showing, before the device had been snapped inside a cloudy plastic cover.

  Jerry volunteered to carry one of the three machines, and equally burdened, the three headed out through the main gate of the village to the hilltop parking lot through which most visitors approached.

  "Have you been here before?" Jan Chen asked him.

  "No, first time for me." His school tour, long years ago, had never got this far from Springfield.

  "For me too. But I have long been an enthusiast of Abraham Lincoln, and to be here where he lived is exciting." Despite her rather stilted turn of phrase, Jan sounded animated; this meant something to her. She turned to point back into the village, indicating one direction after another. "He was a boarder there, at the Rutledge tavern. And a clerk over there. And a storekeeper and postmaster down there. His first claim to fame was as a frontier wrestler in these parts."

  Jerry caught at a name. It brought back vague memories of someone's poem. "Ann Rutledge? She was supposed to be Lincoln's girl friend, wasn't she?"

  "Many think so—but we can't be sure." They had come to a stop in the parking lot, and Pilgrim had unlocked the side door of a new van and was beginning to stow equipment inside. Meanwhile his assistant was starting to glow with an inner excitement, which Jerry recognized as that of the true enthusiast unleashed upon a favorite subject. She went on to discuss in detail the lack of any real evidence connecting young Lincoln with the innkeeper's daughter.

  Dr. Pilgrim, meanwhile, apparently bursting with his own brand of cheerful energy, stowed the last bit of gear in the van and slid shut the wide side door. "I would like to suggest, Jerry, that I ride back to Springfield with you. I presume you have a car. We will meet Jan there, unload our equipment, and continue our discussions in the office."

  Jerry found the rush to get the gear packed away not too surprising; a lot of companies had proprietary secrets they were reluctant to reveal, at least until you were contracted to secrecy. Probably this equipment was something like that. Jerry knew a momentary regret that he was not riding back with Jan. That would almost certainly make it a more pleasant trip—but possibly a less productive one. And Pilgrim was definitely the man he had to talk to, to find out as soon as possible if this job offer could possibly be as good as Mr. A. Pilgrim had made it sound.

  After waving Jan on her way in the van, he and Pilgrim started trudging side by side down the winding, forest-lined drive that led to the highway and to the small motel parking lot where Jerry had left his car.

  "Interesting equipment you were using up there," Jerry remarked in a bright tone, opening conversation.

  Pilgrim gave a little shrug. "Not really mine, in any proprietary sense. I have learned to use it, that is all." The words were said in a deprecating tone, as if to imply he might not be capable of learning more. "I am not really a technologist. The fact of the matter is, the Foundation needs help in several technical areas."

  "I see. What were you doing up there today, if you don't mind my asking?"

  Pilgrim might not have heard the question. "Your own role, Jerry, if we are able to come to an agreement, would be—largely—in the area of computers. Of course, we might ask you to do another little job or two also. Specifically, I should like to establish a network comprising several of the newer Macintosh machines. They would be connected by modem with a larger computer, one of the new "parallel" devices, and possibly with several other machines as well. The Macintoshes are in the Foundation's office in town, where we are going now."

  Jerry's only experience with parallel processing was course work, but he had found that course work intensely interesting. But what could an historical research project need with that kind of raw power? Intriguing. Maybe this job would be better than it had sounded over the phone.

  "Then I would be working here, in the Springfield area, full time. Is
that it?"

  "Yes—allowing for the occasional field trip elsewhere. You would work here during the coming summer, putting in as much time as your school schedule allows. The Foundation will pay all of your living expenses while you are in Springfield—or on any field trip we might require you to undertake—plus modest salary. And it will guarantee in writing that, provided your job performance is satisfactory, it will pay all your further expenses toward your doctorate in computer science."

  "That sounds like a great deal."

  Pilgrim, looking straight ahead through the windshield, nodded minimally. "Indeed. All this, of course, contingent upon our agreement that you are the right man for the job."

  "Of course. I should warn you that microcomputers aren't really my specialty. I have worked some with Macs, though."

  Jan and the van were long out of sight by the time they had walked down to Jerry's car. On the drive back into town Jerry, by invitation, held forth on the various computer projects in which he'd already been involved. They made a fairly impressive list for someone of his age; he'd had to work his way through most of college, and most of the work he'd done had involved computers in one way or another.

  He wasn't sure though, how much of it Dr. Pilgrim understood. The man in the front passenger's seat sat listening and nodding thoughtfully, and for the most part appeared to be keenly interested. But he didn't really say anything that would offer good evidence of his understanding. It wouldn't be the first time that Jerry had tried to inform a highly intelligent but non-technical audience about his work, only to discover later that hardly anything he'd said had been understood. There were computer people, who could understand, and then there was the rest of the human race.

  In a few minutes they were back in town, where Pilgrim began giving navigator's directions. Presently, only a couple of blocks from Jerry's hotel, they were driving into a large square whose center was occupied by a hulking stone building of antique design, obviously preserved or restored. Several signs informed the visitor that this was the Old State Capitol.

  Guess who, thought Jerry to himself, must have done something or other in the Old Capitol. Any lingering suspicion he might have entertained that Lincoln was not the chief industry in Springfield had by now vanished under a barrage of commercial signs. You had the Lincoln This, the Lincoln That, the Railsplitter Something Else. A few people, just to be different, had dedicated their enterprises to Ann Rutledge.

  At Pilgrim's direction Jerry now turned into a lane of traffic that dove sharply into a fluorescent cave right under the Old Capitol, where signs informed him of several levels of modern parking. Here, in one of the reserved sections, Jan stood waiting for them beside the van.

  In a couple of minutes the three of them had unloaded the equipment from the larger vehicle and were carrying it upstairs to the surface.

  They emerged on a broad sidewalk, facing the Old Capitol across the street. The buildings lining the perimeter of the square were mostly of brick, two or three stories tall. Approaching one of these, Pilgrim used a key on an inconspicuous door set back slightly from the sidewalk, and led the way up some indoor stairs. The plastic-covered tripods now and then knocked lightly against stairs or walls. At the top of the first flight Jan unlocked the door to a modest suite of offices. There was no sign on the door to indicate who occupied them. Nothing fancy, Jerry thought, carrying his burden in. Except maybe for some of the computer stuff.

  These rooms might last have been modernized in the 1960s. In the first room were a couple of desks and a few battered tables. On some tables near the windows, a couple of instruments similar to the ones Pilgrim had been using at New Salem were mounted on shorter tripods, lenses aimed out through the windows in the direction of the Old Capitol building across the street. There were also three of the new Macintosh computers in the room, one with a color screen, and quite a bit of cabling.

  "Did you arrange this setup?" Jerry asked, gesturing at the computers, when the equipment they had brought in with them had been stowed in a closet.

  "No, I am a user only. And I am afraid there will be no chance for you to consult directly with the engineer who arranged this system—if that is the right term for what has been done here." Moving energetically from one table to another, Pilgrim had started flipping switches. Now Jerry saw that there were four Macs, the last one almost hidden in a corner. One after another each sounded a musical chime-note as it came to life.

  "As you can see," Pilgrim added, "part of the system is optical—would you like to take a look?"

  More than ready to get involved, Jerry went to the eyepiece of one of the tabletop units—it looked something like a cross between a surveyor's instrument and a telescopic camera. The image it presented was one of the most peculiar he had ever seen—it looked like a clear, somewhat magnified optical picture of the granite of the Old Capitol, overlaid slightly off-center with a computer reproduction of itself.

  He turned away from the eyepiece and looked around. "I don't quite get it."

  "The Foundation's object, Jerry, is historical research. The capital building there, for example, was taken down stone by stone a few decades ago, and then reconstructed in situ. There are of course slight differences between the positions in space of its stone blocks now, and the positions occupied by those same blocks in, say, the year eighteen fifty-nine. With the center of mass of the earth itself as reference—excuse me." A phone at the far side of the office had begun to ring, and Pilgrim gestured to Jan Chen that he wanted to answer it himself.

  She was standing by, smiling brightly, and Jerry turned to her. He asked: "It sounds like you're somehow able to determine exactly where each stone was in the past?"

  Across the room, Pilgrim was frowning and muttering at whatever the phone was telling him. Jan shook her head. "I'm not the one to ask about what can be done with the computers and sensing devices. Ask me something about the dates of the Old Capitol there, or about Lincoln, and I can tell you a few things."

  "Sounds interesting. I probably will. You're the resident historian then."

  "That is really Dr. Pilgrim. I am only an assistant." No accent in her speech, no, but a certain overprecision, noticeable more at some times than others, that made Jerry wonder if she might have been born in another country. She went on: "this whole area around Springfield is just so fascinating to me, Lincoln being something of a specialty of mine. Naturally I was very pleased to be able to come here and work on this project."

  "You have a degree in history, then?"

  "Last year, from USC. And you?"

  Jerry started talking about TMU, and the joys and problems of living in Chicago. Jan, it turned out, was originally from San Francisco. The struggles involved in surviving student life and planning their careers gave them enough in common so that there seemed no danger of running out of things to talk about. Jerry had been ready to plunge right in, tracing cables, starting to figure out the existing network that had been set up with the optical devices and the computers; but talking to Jan instead was, for the moment, quite satisfactory. Certainly it would have been impolite to cut her off, when she was so obviously interested in his background and what he might be going to do here, for the Foundation.

  At some point Jerry became aware that Pilgrim, his hand over the phone receiver, was clearing his throat in an urbane effort to get their attention.

  "Jan, Jerry, I am sorry. But it appears now that certain dull details of administration are going to keep me occupied for the next couple of hours at least." He frowned at the gold watch strapped to his hairy wrist. " 'Time flies like an arrow.' " The way he said the phrase made it sound like a quote, though Jerry had no idea what it might be from.

  Pilgrim went on: "Jan, I would suggest that you spend the remainder of the afternoon conducting Jerry on a small tour of Springfield. With emphasis of course on the sites where we shall be working. Make use of the expense account; take him to dinner also. Sooner or later I will catch up with you. You might also even show him where he
will lodge should we come to agreement on the terms of his employment." Pilgrim smiled suddenly, favoring Jerry with an unexpectedly bright and winning look. "As of now that seems a distinct possibility."

  THREE

  Two minutes after Pilgrim had given them his blessing, Jerry and Jan were out on the street, Jan fitting on an expensive-looking pair of sunglasses whose effect was to turn her from a mod archaeologist into a tourist. Before leaving the office she had also picked up a purse, which presumably contained the plastic tools that would let her make use of the expense account.

  "The sites we plan to work on this summer," she announced, "all have something to do with the life of Abraham Lincoln, as you may have guessed by now."

  "I'm not surprised to hear it," Jerry admitted.

  "What to see first?" Jan pondered, looking around the square, where modern shops and vehicles surrounded and contained the time warp of the Old Capitol. "I think the Lincoln Home, that's only a few blocks away. Then we should have plenty of time to drive out to the cemetery before it closes and take a look at his tomb. It's only a couple of miles, just on the edge of town."

  "Whatever you say," Jerry agreed. The more he listened to this lady's voice, the more he enjoyed hearing her talk.

  They started walking. A block before they reached Lincoln's Home ("the only house he ever owned", as Jan enthused) they passed into a restored historical area of the city. Here the streets had been closed off to motor vehicles, and were lined by wooden sidewalks. Spacious yards of neatly mowed grass, looking unnaturally perfect, surrounded sizable frame houses that Jerry could believe had been built during the nineteenth century.

  One of those houses, on the northeast corner of Eighth and Jackson, and marked with appropriate signs, was their destination. Lincoln's home was open to visitors on payment of a small fee. Jan insisted that the fee should be on the expense account.