routine, “Search continuing, no results,” and the date. They continued to go through the motions of communicating, but because they had heard nothing from Egarn, they probably thought he was no longer watching. Now their search was at a standstill. Egarn’s workroom was shrouded more deeply in gloom each dae.
The loyal team of helpers, most of whom never saw the workroom’s interior and had little notion of what went on there, sensed that things were going badly. They connected Egarn’s distress with the fact that supplies were running low. The food seemed to get worse with each succeeding meal, and Fornzt was in despair. Every time he used the last of something, he knew he was one step closer to the last of everything. Some of the outside sentries went on regular foraging missions—they thought they weren’t needed at the ruins because no outsider had been sighted anywhere in Midlow since the Lantiff left—but they rarely found anything. Old Marof, the one person who could have helped them, had died shortly after the destruction of Midd Village from illness and perhaps a broken heart.
Then Arne arrived, and everyone brightened. Egarn’s confidence in Arne was shared by all of them. Arne would take care of everything. First and foremost, he would refill their empty larder. If Egarn’s distress had to do with something else, Arne would repair that, too.
He knew where each village had kept its reserves of flour and tubers—or, if he didn’t, he knew how to find them. He had been ranging all across the Ten Peerdoms emptying these underground storage bins, many of which were buried under the villages’ charred remains, and he had sent a huge pack train east for the use of those still fighting the Lantiff. Now he plundered the reserves of Midlow for Egarn’s team and quickly restocked Fornzt’s shelves.
He did more than that. The Lantiff, on their murderous swoop through the Ten Peerdoms, appropriated the horses, drove off all the animals they could use for meat, and removed every scrap of food they could find. No- namers of the conquered peerdoms, with their lasher supervisors, were left to fend for themselves. Except for the lack of meat, this was no problem. No-namers were accustomed to producing their own vegetables and tubers and growing grain for the entire peerdom. Now they would have to thresh and grind the grain by hand, but they had plenty of time for it because they no longer had to perform the peerdom’s heavy labor.
Egarn’s team likewise had long been without meat, but Arne quickly corrected that. He knew where to look for stray animals, and the day after his arrival, beef and mutton returned to Fornzt’s menu, and a row of carcasses hung in a room in the depths of the ruins where the temperature was always cool. Arne also found a suitably remote place where meat could be dried and smoked.
With the food problem resolved, Arne next set about tightening the security system—the sentries thought they had the entire peerdom to themselves, and they had become inexcusably lax. Not until that had been taken care of did Arne turned his attention to the workroom—and discover that the Great Secret was a shambles.
“It is Roszt and Kaynor,” Egarn said. “They haven’t found the Johnson, and they have stopped looking.” Neither Egarn nor any of the others could understand why
Later Arne pressed Inskel for the details. In theory, the system should have worked at least occasionally, but it had never worked at all. Even in tests, the instrument rarely sucked up the small objects it was aimed at. Much more frequently it snatched things they didn’t want. They had failed to retrieve any of Roszt and Kaynor’s messages. The messages they sent went somewhere, but they never arrived at Roszt and Kaynor’s motel room. Neither Egarn nor Inskel could understand this.
Arne sat for an entire day alternating his gaze between the non-activity of Roszt and Kaynor on the len and the mammoth contraption that sent or drew people and objects through time. Gevis, the former assistant schooler who was so valuable both as Egarn’s assistant on historical matters—he had made himself virtually an authority on life in the 20th century, Egarn said—and as Inskel’s assistant with the machines, sat beside Arne, answered his questions, and discussed what he had seen Roszt and Kaynor doing before they suddenly seemed to quit.
Finally Arne went to Egarn. Could it be possible, he asked, that Egarn’s machine didn’t work accurately with such a small thing as a message because of its enormous size? A smaller machine might be much more precise with small objects.
Egarn and Inskel stared at him. Then they stared at each other.
“The size of the machine shouldn’t make any difference,” Egarn said slowly. “None at all. On the other hand—”
“It wouldn’t be much trouble to build a smaller machine and find out,” Inskel said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”
And so he did. It took several daez, after which the three of them, Inskel, Egarn, and Gevis, had a nightmarish problem in calibrating it and matching its settings to those of the large machine, but finally they succeeded, and when Roszt and Kaynor next left a report on their table, the small machine deftly plucked it out of the past.
The jubilation of those in the workroom was tempered by the soberness with which Egarn read the message. “They couldn’t find the right Johnson,” he said. “They broke into all those Johnson homes and businesses, and they went everywhere making inquiries about Johnsons, and they failed to find a single clue. I never thought they would have to keep it up for so long. The police aren’t fools, and eventually all those Johnson burglaries stopped being a coincidence, and now everyone in Rochester is talking about them and speculating about what they are trying to find. Newspapers all over the state have picked up the story and published artists’ drawings of what the burglars are supposed to look like. The pictures aren’t much like Roszt and Kaynor, but the publicity has frightened them. They also are afraid that the next time they mention the name Johnson, someone will scream for the police. They are waiting for the uproar to die down and trying to disguise themselves. They have bought new clothes, and they are growing mustaches and combing their hair differently. They want to know if I can suggest anything else.”
“Why couldn’t they find the right Johnson?” Arne asked.
“They haven’t run across any trace at all of a Honsun Len or of a Johnson who has anything to do with lens.” Egarn added despairingly, “I must have sent them too far back in time. Of course they wouldn’t be able to connect a Johnson with the Honsun Len if no Johnson has thought of it yet. I might try to send them to a later time, but it would be risky. I would have to bring them here again and then send them back.”
Arne tenaciously held to the point he thought most important. “But what is the right time?”
“I don’t know,” Egarn said.
“Before you do anything else, perhaps you should find out,” Arne suggested.
“The only way to be certain would be to go there and do the kind of investigation they’ve been doing.”
In the end, it was Gevis who suggested a practical solution. While watching Roszt and Kaynor’s fruitless search, he had been wondering if there were anything in that place and time for them to find. The answer seemed simple enough to him. If the Honsun Len inventor hadn’t yet arrived in Rochester, Roszt and Kaynor ought to look for him elsewhere. As for identifying him, why couldn’t they use Inskel’s new machine to suck up a city directory or a telephone directory from some future time?
They first asked Roszt and Kaynor to prepare a list of their Johnsons with a summary of what they’d learned about each. It took the scouts three daes, and it filled an entire notebook. They left it on the table for Inskel to snatch.
The next step was to steal a directory that would give them a list of Johnsons living in Rochester at a future date. Telephone directories often were left lying about where they could be picked up easily. Unfortunately, a telephone directory provided only an unadorned list of names, and sucking up a city directory proved to be a complicated manipulation.
They carefully set their instruments to visit the Local History Room of the Rochester Public Library several sikes after Roszt and Kaynor had been there. The only result was that librarians unaccountably found the floor cluttered with books the next morning. The small machine lacked the power of the large one, and pulling a book from a crammed shelf of books proved difficult. They visited the library again three sikes later and managed to abstract a copy of the 1940 directory. Either the books were shelved out of order or they were searching the wrong stack. Again they leaped forward in time and finally scored a success. Egarn found himself opening—with trembling fingers—a Rochester City Directory ten sikes in Roszt and Kaynor’s future.
