The Shield of Time

XVII

There was morning in the sky when Koskinen and Vivienne stepped forth. Stars lingered to the west, but eastern spires were outlined against a climbing brilliance. The avenue lay still, an occasional groundcar sliding between great walls. The air felt unutterably cool and fresh.

“I suppose we are heading for Zigger’s place,” Koskinen said.

“Nowhere else to go, is there?” Vivienne responded.

“And then we’ll try to get in touch with Abrams?”

“We can try,” she said skeptically, “but if his lines aren’t tapped by now, I miss my guess.

“And you know,” she added, “there was some truth to the arguments those Equal people presented, at least as Jan reported them to me. Giving this thing to the Protectorate and expecting any real improvement is like asking a drug addict to cure himself with aspirin.”

“Who else should we give it to?” he asked wearily.

“I don’t know…I don’t know. There’s a taxi.”

The driver pushed the door button for them and they got in. “Syracuse,” Vivienne said. “I’ll give you the exact address when we get there.” That would be only the first of their stops, as they changed from car to car. The driver punched his controls, and Koskinen saw again a sunrise over the waters.

The blankout panel began to close off the front of the cab. “No,” Vivienne said. “Stop. Retract that thing.”

The driver looked surprised, but obeyed. “I…I like to watch the view in front, too,” she said lamely. Since that was nothing but a sky, turning from silver to blue as the sun mounted, Koskinen doubted the driver was convinced.

Wait! She had leaned forward to give her order. Recollection struck into Koskinen. He reached around her back and snapped open her purse. “What the devil?” she exclaimed, and tried to twist about. His right hand stopped her with a grip on the arm. He pulled the detonator out and let her go. She crouched away from him, half angry and half afraid. “What’s got into you, Pete?”

“I’m sorry, Vee,” he said. “Please don’t have any hard feelings. But the situation’s changed again. From now on I want to make my own decisions.” He dropped the case in a pocket of his blouse and sealed the flap.

“You could have asked me for it.”

“Yes, and you might have said no. After all, you refused to use it once already. I’m grateful to you for that. But I’ve been too passive. It’s high time I became my own boss.”

She let out a long breath. Muscle by muscle she relaxed. The smile she gave him was slow and warm. “You’re toughening fast, I see,” she murmured.

He flushed. “Have to, I suppose.” With returning unease he noticed how the driver watched them in his rearview. Why hadn’t Vee wanted the privacy panel shut?

The call screen told Koskinen why, two minutes later. “Attention all vehicles! Attention all vehicles! This is an hourly announcement from the Bureau of Military Security. Two criminals are at large, foreign agents whose arrest is of the utmost importance. They may be riding in a public—”

Vivienne’s gun was already out of her purse and aimed at the driver’s head. “Not a move, asco,” she ordered. “Don’t let your hands go anywhere near that transmission switch.”

“—considered extremely dangerous,” the crisp voice said. In the screen Koskinen saw his own face, from the tape that had been made during his second call, and a photograph of Vivienne that had been gotten somewhere. “If you see these persons, you are required by the National Defense Act to—”

“I thought you looked…sorta familiar,” the driver stammered. “What’s going on? What do you want?”

“You won’t get hurt if you cooperate,” Vivienne said.

“Look, I got a wife and kids. I—please—”

Koskinen glanced out the window and down. At this speed, the densest part of town had been left behind. The land was still dominated by roofs, but they belonged to relatively small buildings and traffic was light.

“You can’t get nowhere in this car,” the driver said frantically. “Not in any car. If they really suspect you’re in a car, Control’ll take everything past the police checkpoints.”

“That’s rather extreme,” Koskinen said. “I should think it’d tie up traffic from now till midnight. They haven’t done it yet, have they?”

Vivienne threw him a haggard glance. “They haven’t exhausted all their other leads yet, either,” she said. “Sooner or later, though, they’ll try a mass car check. If they get word of what just happened at the Zodiac—and they will; there’re MS customers in the place—they’ll pretty quickly deduce what’s happened. And then their logical move will be to try and trap us in our escape vehicle. The driver’s right. We’d better get out of this hack while we can.”

“But—I mean, how—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know…Wait. Yes. Stop at that playground yonder.”

They slanted down, went off Control, touched an old and cracked street, and halted at the curb. The playground stretched vacant and the houses opposite—peak-roofed, narrow-windowed, with peeling stucco fronts, obviously prewar survivals—hardly showed more life at this hour. Vivienne opaqued the windows and suggested Koskinen bind and gag the driver.

“I’ll use my own clothes for that,” Koskinen said, “and wear his. Somebody may remember what I had on at the Zodiac.”

“Good idea. You are becoming a fine outlaw.” She waited while he swapped garments. Afterward he found some cord in the tool compartment, with which he did a thorough job of securing the prisoner on the rear floor.

“Somebody will get curious and investigate, sometime today,” he assured the man. “You’ll excuse me for hoping it won’t be for a few hours.”

“Oh, oh,” said Vivienne, standing beside the taxi. “Man coming.”

Koskinen emerged and locked the doors. A burly person in mechanic’s coveralls halted his slouching walk and said, “Trouble, bud? Maybe I can help.”

“Thanks,” Koskinen said, “but the company wants me to report direct in case of breakdowns. Also, my fare has to get on her way. Where’s the nearest tube?”

The mechanic regarded him sharply. “No tubes this far out.”

“Oh.” Koskinen laughed. “I’m fresh from Los Angeles. Still feeling my way around. Where’s a monorail station?”

“I’m headed there myself.”

Koskinen was pleased at how readily he answered questions about the west coast, where he had never been either. It took the mechanic’s mind off the generator, which he probably assumed belonged to the lady. The man couldn’t afford to travel, with wages as low as they were, “thanks to them machines. I’m lucky to have a job at all. If that there Antarctic colony had only worked out the way they talked about, I’d’ve gone like a shot. Chance to be my own boss.”

“Expensive, though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s the catch. Need shelter against the cold. That costs money. So only the big companies or the government can build. So nobody can go who’s not on their payroll. And everybody has to live cheek by jowl because one big shelter costs less than a lotta little ones. Right? I decided I might as well stay here, the way the colony worked out in practice.”

Too bad, Koskinen thought. Americans were free men once.

Luckily there were no taxis waiting at the station—if this poor decayed suburb rated any such service. Koskinen entered a phone booth and pretended to call one for Vivienne. The mechanic boarded the train which had just come in. As it started again, Vivienne led Koskinen in a run and mounted a car further down.

“This is aimed our way, all right,” she panted, “but we don’t want our friend to know that. It’s a small miracle that he didn’t recognize us from the bulletins. The next time he sees one, he probably will remember.”

Koskinen nodded. They took a seat. There were only a few sleepy, drably-clad fellow passengers, and he doubted if the coach was ever filled. Employment had dropped far below transportation capacity.

You know, he thought, people like this aren’t really restricted to three choices, crime, the dole, or a dull and meaningless job. With modern power tools as cheap as they are, with small machines as well, with biological fuel cells to furnish low-cost energy, with the food-growing techniques developed for extraterrestrial bases—a family could become self-sufficient. Home industries could revive, not so much competing with the big automatic factories as ignoring them. And that trend would eventually force the economy as a whole to use automation rationally.

The brief excitement died in him. I can’t be the first to daydream along those lines. I can already see why nothing like it has been tried. Big business, big labor, big government wouldn’t sit still for such a development. They’d clamp down with zoning laws, regulations, taxes, anything that came to hand, because a nation of independent men would spell the end of their power…My! I seem to’ve gotten cynical at the same astounding rate Vee thinks I’ve gotten tough. But I can’t help it, I can sense the wrongness in society today, as clearly as I can sense it in a badly designed engine.

That reminded him. “How are we going to get to our destination?” he asked Vivienne. “Control can stop anything we’d likely be able to hire or steal.”

“Yes. Except—” She stared out the window. The suburb was giving way to open fields, where dew flashed in the young sunlight.

“I’ve gotten an idea,” she said. “The World War One Centennial Commission has built a lot of replica machines. They’re for reenacting battles as the appropriate dates roll around. Makes a nice 3D spectacle, and gives idle people something to play with—but the planes and guns and ground-cars are honest working reproductions. Between assignments they’re occasionally used in advertising stunts, or as a demonstration for history classes, or what have you. Well, a batch of the airplanes is kept right in this area.”

“Huh?”

“They haven’t any autopilots. So they can flit about freely. That’s no traffic hazard. As slow as they are, anybody’s radar can spot them in ample time to dodge, and Control routinely compensates for bigger swerves than that. What matters to us is that the police can’t take over a vehicle from a distance if it doesn’t have an autopilot. Also, no one except the persons immediately concerned pays much attention to where those planes go. They don’t file flight plans or any such thing.”

“My God.” Koskinen pulled his jaw back into place.

“Zigger and I visited out there one day last year. I know the layout. If you can figure out some way to steal one, the theft won’t be noticed for days. I could be wrong, of course. What do you say?”

He realized that she had made a final surrender of leadership to him. It was a heavy burden. He swallowed and said, “Sure. We’ll try.”