The Shield of Time

XI

Nathan Abrams was not a tall man, and he was getting somewhat bald and plump. The bathrobe swirled almost ludicrously about his pajamaed legs as he turned in his pacing. But Koskinen had never before seen so great an anger on so tight a leash.

A little hoarse with talking, he sat back and listened to his host. “Good Lord,” Abrams said through his teeth, “I had some notion of how much rottenness there is around, but when the thing comes out in the open like this, it’s past time to fight!”

“Using what for weapons?” Trembecki asked.

Abrams’s hand chopped in the direction of the shield unit. “There’s that, to start with.”

“Take quite a while to produce enough and organize a group.”

“And meanwhile Dave—” Leah Abrams’s voice wavered. As if to give herself something to do, she began putting food on the plates. “I’m sorry,” she said to Koskinen and Vivienne. “You must be starved.”

In spite of everything, Koskinen’s look and mind turned to her. He had naturally known about Dave’s sister, but she was only fifteen when the Boas departed. He had not expected to find someone slim and supple, gray eyes, freckles dusted faintly across a piquant nose, reddish-brown hair falling softly to her shoulders, a dancer’s way of walking. She must have considerable backbone too, he thought. Abrams had not yet told his wife about this meeting, he didn’t know if she could stand it, but his daughter had come along as a matter of course.

Besides, it was good of her to remember about breakfast. He was starved. Still he hesitated, while Abrams stood and fought himself. The girl seemed to read his thought. “Go ahead,” she urged. “You needn’t pretend that our troubles have spoiled your appetite. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll have a bite myself.”

Vivienne smiled. “You’re too tactful for your own good. But thanks, Miss Abrams.”

“Lean, if you don’t mind. We’re in the same army now.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Trembecki said.

“What do you mean, Jan?” Abrams demanded.

“Well—”

“I wasn’t proposing anything rash, you know. We want Dave back first of all, and everyone else from the ship. We’ve got to proceed cautiously. But sooner or later, maybe we’ll have to—” Abrams broke off.

Trembecki finished for him hi a brutal tone: ’ Tight against our own government?”

“Well…against Marcus, at least. This puts the capper on everything I’d known about the man previously. I tell you, he’s a power maniac, and he’s got to be stopped.”

“Let’s drop the swear words, Nat,” Trembecki said. “Neo-fascism doesn’t come out of nowhere, any more than Caesarism does. That’s what we’ve got now, Caesarism, modified only slightly by the fact that it arose in a republic more sophisticated than Rome was. But it arose as the answer to a very real need, survival in the thermonuclear age. You don’t want to overthrow Caesar if the price is a civil war that weakens us for the barbarians.”

“I wasn’t thinking of any such nonsense!”

“It was implicit, though, Nat. In a subtler form, perhaps: less an outright revolt than a disruption of a precarious balance of social forces. Which could mean economic chaos. When that happens—when a society fails to provide for its own internal needs—the way is open for total dictatorship. The popular will demands a strong man then. Freedom isn’t worth seeing your children starve. Not to most people, anyhow.

“Marcus has millions of admirers precisely because you and your kind have failed to solve problems like foreign enmity, overpopulation, maldistribution, educational lag, and social vacuums. If now the American upper classes fall out among themselves, with even the mildest analogue of the Marius-Sulla rivalry, the failure will grow worse yet. Maybe Marcus could be destroyed, but he’d have successors who’d destroy us in turn. No, quite apart from all the practical difficulties in the way of our doing something big and melodramatic, we’ve got responsibilities that won’t let us.”

“You weren’t so shy about consequences when you helped take Krakow from that warlord,” Abrams said bitterly.

“I was a good deal younger then,” Trembecki sighed, “and in any case the issues were simpler.”

Leah leaned over and whispered to Koskinen and Vivienne: “He’s from Central Europe, did you know? Dad found him running a city in Poland and persuaded him to come work in the States.”

Koskinen regarded Trembecki with increased respect. The war and postwar years had been bad enough in America. But at least no foreign troops had invaded, to run amok and add to the chaos after the missiles destroyed their homeland. If, besides surviving and restoring order, this man had found time to become educated—

“Don’t get me wrong,” Trembecki said. “I don’t propose tamely to turn over this thing for Marcus to slap a ‘security’ label on and find ways to misuse. Frankly, I don’t know how far we ourselves can be trusted with it. You’re a decent man, Nat, and I suppose I am, but General Atomics isn’t our private empire. With the best intentions in the world, given this kind of power, it could become something it shouldn’t be.

“Leaving that aside, though, you’re disqualified from doing much precisely because you are so influential. Your actions are all too public for you to get involved in any elaborate conspiracy. You’re simply going to have to stick to the aboveboard approach. Whatever you do clandestinely has to be a very, very minor part of your total activity, and amount to little more than keeping in touch with whoever is being active.”

“Ah-ha,” Abrams pounced. “You admit there has to be a conspiracy.”

“No. Maybe there does. Maybe not. This has happened so fast. I haven’t had time to think.”

“You won’t get much time, either,” Vivienne reminded him bleakly.

“With Marcus on the trail…true,” the Pole nodded. “I don’t see how we can hide you for any great length of time. However big a household this is, it’s still not an organization. And that’s what you need, an organization with intelligence agents, hideouts, an Underground Railway—yet one that can be trusted.”

Abrams snapped his fingers. “The Egalitarians!”

“Hm?” Trembecki gave him a startled look. “You mean Gannoway?”

“I don’t know. But we can check on him, maybe.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Leah said, “but if it has anything to do with the Egalitarians, why, it sounds very hopeful. I’ve been to plenty of their meetings, and talked to a lot of them, you know. Dad, those are good people.”

“Perhaps,” Trembecki grunted. “Are they effective people, though?”

“Gannoway himself is a tough bird,” Abrams mused, “still…we may have something here. It’s taking a devil of a risk at best, but—” ruefully—“what isn’t?”

Trembecki nodded with a renewed briskness. “I’ll start some wheels turning, at least. We’ll collect what information we can, evaluate, and decide what to do. It should be safe to keep our young friends here for a little while. The sooner we get them to a really secure place, though, the happier I’ll be.”

“All right. Let’s get started.” Abrams turned to Koskinen and Vivienne. “I’m sorry to rush off like this, but you can understand why. We’ll talk in more detail later. Meanwhile, Lean will take care of you.”

Trembecki went over to the shield generator, which Koskinen had demonstrated in the course of relating his story. The secretary picked it up with needless care, held it for a space before his eyes, clicked his tongue, and walked from the room. Abrams followed.

“Do finish eating,” Leah urged. “I’ll see about your rooms and stuff. Be right back.”

Koskinen fell heartily to eating. In combination, the stimulant, food, shelter, sense of power and competence in those he met, had restored him considerable cheer. “I think,” he said around a mouthful, “we’re on the homestretch.”

“Really?” Vivienne only picked at her meal. He saw the exhaustion still in her and wanted to soothe it away. But his tongue knotted.

“Sorry,” she said after a while. “I guess I’ve been kicked around too much to start believing in Santa Claus all over again.”

“If Papa Abrams put on a white beard and went, ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ would that help?” he ventured.

She grinned wearily, leaned over and patted his hand. “You mean you’ve even got patience with self-pity? You’re a phenomenon, Pete.”

Leah’s footsteps sounded lightly on the flags. Koskinen rose and looked at the girl as she neared. He wondered confusedly if it was right to be so conscious of her grace, so soon after—

“Finished here?” she asked. “Good, come along with me. You’ll want to wash and then sleep, I suppose.”

“Not sleep,” Koskinen said, “with fifty milligrams of stim inside me.”

“I’d forgotten that. Well, if you like, I’ll be glad to give you the grand tour of the place, or any other entertainment I can.”

“You’re being too kind.”

Leah grew grave. “You were Dave’s shipmate, Pete. He talked a lot about you, in the short time he was here. And you’ve done some magnificent things, for him and for all of us.”

“No, really.”

“Not just that filthy Crater, but perhaps even the Chinese underground, wiped out…because of you.” The long hair swirled past her cheeks as she shook her head in wonder. “I still can’t quite believe it.”

“That was an accident. I mean, I was only running away, and—”

“Come on.” She took him firmly by the arm. Vivienne followed a little behind, silent.

A glideway and escalator took them upstairs. Koskinen had thought his hotel room and Vivienne’s Crater place were sumptuous, but his suite here revised his standards. He pottered about for half an hour making himself presentable. In the course of undressing he noticed the chain still around his neck. Have to get that taken off, he thought, but forgot about it again.

Putting on a lounge suit that felt almost as silky as a Martian cloakleaf, he returned to Lean in the solarium. “Come outside till Vivienne arrives,” she suggested. “It’s such a gorgeous day.”

They strolled over the terrace to the parapet. Leah leaned against it and gazed out across the Sound. A breeze fluttered her hair and shook a few plum blossoms down over her. Vee has paused at this same spot, Koskinen remembered.

He drew a lungful of untainted air. “You’re right about the outdoors today,” he remarked. “Sometimes that seemed to be what we missed the most on Mars. Earth’s weather, every kind of it.”

“But they have weather there too, don’t they?”

“Yes. Nothing like ours, though. Days so clear that space itself didn’t seem to exist between you and the horizon, then night falling at once, no dusk, just suddenly the stars appearing like fireworks, and so cold you could hear the rocks groan as they contracted. Or a dust storm, thin enough for the sunlight to shine through, making diamond sparkles across those old, old crags. Or the spring quickening, when the polar cap melted and the bands of forest came to life again, those grotesque little trees raising their tendrils toward the sun and unfolding yard-long leaves that took on a hundred different colors, greens, russets, golds, blues, and danced as if for joy—” Koskinen shook himself. “Excuse me. For a minute if almost seemed as if I were back there.”

“Would you want to return, ever?” she asked quietly.

“Yes. Eventually. We got to be good friends with the Martians, you know.”

“Dave said a little about that too. Is ‘friends’ really the word you want?”

“No. There was something between all of us, the whole crew as well as the Martians. Affection was a major part of it, but somehow so transformed that—I don’t know. You’d have to experience it yourself to have any idea of what I mean. Now that I’ve been away from it for a while, I have some trouble understanding the concept myself.”

“I’d like to try,” she said.

“You ought to,” he said, caught in a sudden uprush of enthusiasm. “There definitely should be women on the next expedition. We could only realize an incomplete rapport, because we ourselves were incomplete. It’ll take the full human unit, man-woman-child, to…to establish a total relationship with the Martians. You see, they don’t communicate just with verbal language. We’ve got plenty of non-verbal communication on Earth, of course, but very little of it has been systematized or developed. What’s a synonym for a grimace? How do you conjugate a wave of your hand? I’m putting it horribly crudely, of course; but what I’m trying to get at is that the Martians look on communication as a function of the whole organism. They have a complete tactile language, for instance, as well as a verbal one, a musical one, a choreographic one, and lots more. And those languages are not equivalent to each other, the way writing is equivalent to speech. They don’t say the same things, they don’t cover the same range of possible subject matter. But when you use several of them simultaneously…can you imagine how complete a view of reality might be approached?

“Only, for that kind of communication there has to be a psychological affinity, a oneness, between the communicators, because it’s so subtle a process. I think we humans learned as much as we could have digested in five years anyway. But next time we ought to go further. And that gets back to the necessity of completing ourselves. I mean by bringing both sexes there, and every age, race, culture we can get.”

“You know,” she said, “I begin to see why Dave liked…likes you so much. You’re a completely unstuffy idealist.”

He glanced away in confusion. “I didn’t mean to preach.”

“I wish you would,” she said. “I want so much to get an idea of what it was like on Mars, what you did and discovered and thought, everything. After all, Dave was there, and we hardly had a chance to get to know him again before—But for its own sake too, I’d like to know. And someday go there myself. Actually, didn’t the experience of the rapport mean more to you than anything you learned from it?” He nodded, astonished at her quick perceptiveness. “Well, I wish for that experience too,” she said. “You’ve already given me back the wonder in life. People have gotten so blase about spaceships and orbital stations and extra-terrestrial bases that I’d forgotten what it really means. But now I’ll see Mars in the sky and think, ‘That little red spark is a world,’ and feel a chill down my spine. Suddenly the limits have been taken away. Thanks for that, Pete.”

It puzzled him how they had begun talking so intimately so soon. I guess it’s that we’re in a stress situation and our personal barriers are down, he decided. And Dave belongs to us both. She’s a lot like him, whom I’ve come to know as well as I know myself. Not too much like him, though, he added sophomorically. Then he forgot the matter. It was trivial beside that with which they spent the better part of the day.

Late in the afternoon Leah came to herself with a shaky laugh. “You’ve got to excuse me, Pete. I’m on the local committee for the World War One Centennial observances. We’re going to re-enact a Liberty Bond rally, if that means anything to you. The whole business looks more foolish than ever, after what you and I have been talking about. But I don’t dare do anything unusual, like cutting out of the meeting. Not now.”

He agreed, thrown unwillingly back to the immediacies, and moped about the place after she was gone. Finally he drifted into an imperial-sized library. A book would at least kill time.

Vivienne sat there reading. She wore a white dress, reminding him of the night she entertained him, and he wondered in a stunned fashion how he could have forgotten about her.

“Oh,” she said in a lackluster tone. “Hello, there.”

“Why didn’t you join us?” he asked. “When you didn’t show, we figured you’d decided to sleep instead.”

“No. I came out on the terrace,” she shrugged. “But you were so deep in conversation I didn’t want to butt in.”

“Vee! We weren’t discussing any…any secrets. How could we have been?”

Her lips twitched ever so faintly upward. “Now why did you suppose I’d think that? Of course you weren’t.”

“Then why didn’t you—”

The smile ceased to be. She looked away from him. “I know when I’m out of my class,” she said, “and frankly, I’ve got too much pride to play—act at the case being otherwise.”

“What are you talking about?” he protested. “Brains? Good Lord, Vee, you can think rings around ninety percent of the human race.”

“Probably. Brains is not what I meant.” Her tone grew jagged. “Look, Pete, I’m not mad at you or anything, but will you please get out of here for a while? And close the door when you go.”