LYONS: With respect, magic isn’t the same thing as omnipotence, Senator. It’s a hereditary skill set, really, that’s all. Anyhow, our fellow who we Sent back there, his language skills are first-rate and he’s a tremendous athlete and good at problem-solving, but he’s not much of a schmoozer and he doesn’t have the skills that would assist in a jailbreak. So the witch Sent him back here, but said she didn’t want to hear from DODO again unless we could get her husband out of jail. If we’d had somebody who specialized in picking locks or was a general escape artist or whatever, we could have Sent that person back. We didn’t have anyone like that, so we had to try bribing the prison guard, but we did not succeed.
EFFINGHAM: Bribe them with what? According to this document, you can’t take anything back in time with you.
LYONS: That’s correct.
EFFINGHAM: So what did you try to bribe him with?
LYONS: Um. Mel—Dr. Stokes—she went back because. She was willing to try. Bribing him with. What she brought with her.
EFFINGHAM: Her body?
LYONS: Yes.
EFFINGHAM: You’re saying she
[REDACTED]
LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: The utter failure of this effort led us to conclude we needed an actual sex worker, or at least somebody capable of passing as one.
SENATOR EFFINGHAM: I yield, Madame Chairwoman.
CHAIRWOMAN ATKINSON: I recognize Senator Villesca.
SENATOR VILLESCA: Colonel Lyons, I hope you appreciate that prostitution is illegal in this great country of ours, except in certain rural parts of Nevada.
LYONS: The prostitute would be plying her trade in sixteenth-century Balkan territory, sir. Or possibly his trade, based on Dr. Stokes’s reception. Anyhow, we haven’t found one yet.
VILLESCA: You’re saying you want to use taxpayer money to recruit prostitutes.
LYONS: That’s not a typical example, sir. We need people with specific skill sets like masons and soldiers and people with specific athletic abilities, and we need people who can blend in—like I said, schmoozers. Actors. Whatever it takes.
GENERAL FRINK: Madame Chairwoman, if I may?
ATKINSON: Proceed.
FRINK: With all due respect, Senator Villesca, it’s not like taxpayer money has never been used to hire prostitutes before. I know you’re aware of that.
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(NEXT DAY)
GENERAL FRINK: . . . an ongoing theme in the last few days’ deliberations has been the need for wisdom and discretion in future DODO operations. Senator Hatcher has reminded us of the need to avoid any future incidents such as the one in which Les Holgate sacrificed his life for his country. Senator Cole has expressed concern that a fully functional Chronotron may lead us into taking risks we might not otherwise consider. With Senator Effingham, we’ve had an illuminating discussion of the importance of learning from the wisdom of experienced professional historians. Finally, Senator Villesca has spoken with great passion and eloquence of the need to maintain moral standards that we can all be proud of. It is for all these reasons that I am pleased to introduce Dr. Blevins of Harvard University as the new acting head of the Department of Diachronic Operations. He replaces Lieutenant Colonel Lyons, who is being reassigned to command of DODO’s “boots on the ground” operational unit, and who will henceforth report to Dr. Blevins. Though the academic world knows Roger Blevins as a peerless scholar, those of us with security clearances are aware of his long service to his country as
[REDACTED]
SENATOR HATCHER: . . . even for one of your distinguished credentials, this is an important career transition, Dr. Blevins, and so I would like to be the first to congratulate you. Frankly, I am pleased to see that you are being moved off of the Advisory Board. I myself am on more advisory boards than I can even remember, and not one of them ever asks me for advice.
DR. BLEVINS: I’ve had similar experiences, Senator, and this is why I took the unusual step of establishing an office within DODO headquarters in Cambridge, and spending time there on a regular basis. I’ll now hand that off to Dr. Rudge, who I most certainly will be asking for advice on a regular basis.
HATCHER: How do you see that facility developing as we transition out of the CRONE phase? What does it look like in a year? Two years?
BLEVINS: As a very special hybrid of tech start-up, liberal arts college, and Special Forces base. Our present thinking suggests we’ll need about a dozen kinds of specialists, divided into classes, such as tracker, fighter, entertainer, and so on. All of them will need immersive training in the language and ethos of whatever DTAP they go to. Meaning we also need to hire people to train them in those things—manners, customs, how to put on and take off clothes, fighting styles. All of that falls under the heading of the Diachronic Operative Resource Center, whose acting director will be my student, Dr. Melisande Stokes.
SENATOR EFFINGHAM: The budget and head count envisioned for DORC are impressive.
BLEVINS: The personnel expenses add up as quickly as the technical expenses. That’s why the budget is as large as it is. We obviously can’t outsource any of these services, given that there is evidence that the governments of [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are already engaged in this kind of training program. Whoever works for us has to be kept very close to the mothership, as it were, and that kind of loyalty doesn’t come cheap.
EFFINGHAM: How do you know that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are ahead of us in this?
BLEVINS: That’s classified, Senator, even for the purposes of this hearing.
EFFINGHAM: Be that as it may, I question whether a linguistics student with no management experience is equipped to manage a department of that size.
BLEVINS: Yes. Most of the day-to-day burden of HR, facilities, and so on will fall under the Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department for which we have been fortunate to recruit a very able manager in Macy Stoll. With those managerial and administrative tasks out of the way, Dr. Stokes will be free to concentrate on the historical and linguistic research that is her specialty.
HATCHER: Well, I’m in no position to assess the technical requirements and their associated costs—I’ll leave that to my honored colleagues on this hearing committee with more expertise in this field, such as Senator Effingham—but having compiled different staffs, for different purposes, over the years, I certainly feel capable of assessing your personnel hiring goals. So I will be submitting my opinion that the budget you seek is tied into your laying down very clear goals for who exactly you wish to hire, and why. That includes reports on all potential witches you’d be working with in other DTAPs. Can you do that for me?
BLEVINS: I’ll see to it that Dr. Stokes writes up something specific, as soon as she has calmed Ms. Karpathy.
HATCHER: Out of curiosity—a curiosity I suspect is shared by other members of this panel—how exactly does one calm Ms. Karpathy?
BLEVINS: It always seems to help to listen to her spend a few uninterrupted minutes besmirching the reputations of certain people, with Colonel Lyons being a particularly frequent target of abuse.
HATCHER: Is it accurate to describe her, then, as a truculent and abusive team member?
LIEUTENANT COLONEL LYONS: If I may, Madame Chair, it is accurate to describe her as the only witch available to us at the present moment. That pretty much trumps any other description.
GENERAL FRINK: What Colonel Lyons is trying to say, Senator, is that unlike politicians, her job security does not depend on other people’s approval.