The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online

“Yes?… Get off this line and get me Lament. Quick.” He drained his cup and refilled it. “Been living for three days on coffee, brandy and candy bars,” he remarked to Doyle. “Not bad, once your stomach gets—Tim? Drop the efforts for Newnan and Sandoval. Well, radio Delmotte and tell him to turn around and take him right back to the airport. We’ve got our Coleridge man.”
    He replaced the phone. “I’ve sold ten tickets, at one million dollars apiece, to attend the Coleridge lecture. We’ll make the jump tomorrow evening at eight. There’ll be a catered briefing session at six-thirty for our ten guests, and naturally for that we ought to have a recognized Coleridge authority.”
    “Me.”
    “You. You’ll give a brief speech on Coleridge and answer any questions the guests may have concerning him or his contemporaries or his times, and then you’ll accompany the party through the jump and to the Crown and Anchor Tavern—along with a few competent guards who’ll make sure no romantic soul attempts to go AWOL—take notes during the lecture and then, back home again in 1983, comment on it and answer any further questions.” He cocked an eyebrow sternly at Doyle. “You’re being paid twenty thousand dollars to see and hear what ten other people are paying a million apiece for. You should be grateful that all our efforts to get one of the more prominent Coleridge authorities failed.”
    Not too flatteringly phrased, Doyle thought, but “Yes,” he said. Then a thought struck him. “But what about your… original purpose, the thing science failed to do, the reason you found these gaps in the first place? Have you abandoned that?”
    “Oh.” Darrow didn’t seem to want to discuss it. “No, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m working on it from a couple of angles these days. Nothing to do with this project.”
    Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “Are there any gaps, uh, downstream of us?”
    For no reason Doyle could see the old man was beginning to get angry again. “Doyle, I don’t see—oh, what the hell. Yes. There’s one, it’s forty-seven hours long in the summer of 2116, and that’s the last one, chronologically.”
    “Well.” Doyle didn’t mean to provoke him, but he wanted to know why Darrow apparently didn’t intend to do what seemed to Doyle the obvious thing. “But couldn’t this… thing you want done … be done very easily, probably, in that year? I mean, if science could almost do it in 1983, why by 2116…”
    “It’s very annoying, Doyle, to give someone a cursory glance at a project you’ve been working hard at for a long time, and then have them brightly suggest courses which, as a matter of fact, you considered and dismissed as unworkable long ago.” He blew smoke out between clenched teeth. “How could I know, before I got there, whether or not the world in 2116 is a radioactive cinder? Hah? Or what sort of awful police state might exist then?” Exhaustion and brandy must have undermined a lot of Darrow’s reserve, for there was a glisten in his eyes when he added, “And even if they could and would do it, what would they think of a man from more than a century in the past?” He crumpled his paper cup, and a trickle of brandy ran down his wrist. “What if they treated me like a child?”
    Embarrassed, Doyle instantly changed the subject back to Coleridge. But that’s it, of course, he thought—Darrow’s been the captain of his own ship for so long that he’d rather sink with it than accept the condescension of a life preserver tossed from some Good Samaritan vessel, especially a grander one than his own.
    Darrow too seemed eager to steer the conversation back to business.
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    The sky had begun to pale in the east when Doyle was chauffeured by another driver to a hotel nearby, and he slept until, late in the afternoon, a third driver arrived to take him back to the site.
    The lot was now planed flat as a griddle, and all the tractors were gone; several men were