The Shield of Time

XVIII

The planes were stored three miles from the nearest train stop. Koskinen and Vivienne walked there, after buying breakfast and two lengths of rope at the supermarket, as well as some pills to compensate for sleeplessness. Most of the way they followed a narrow, crumbling street lined with the mean houses of a moribund village. Trucks, occasional cars, go-carts with bubble canopies whirred past them. But there were only a few other pedestrians—chiefly women, though some unemployed and sullen men—and nobody paid the strangers much attention. One man indicated where to turn, baffled that anyone went to the hanger on foot but too apathetic to ask why. Evidently, Koskinen thought, the general indifference to life these days was working against Marcus’s bulletins about him. Nobody bothered to be alert, or even to notice what the strangers looked like.

The side street petered out in a lane which crossed an enormous stretch of vacant lot.

“Ugh,” said Vivienne. “Weeds and brambles where homes stood once, before the firestorm. It gives me the crawls.”

“Eh?” Koskinen blinked at her. The grasses rippled silvery green. Somewhere a bird was singing. Instead of dust he smelled moist earth. “But this is lovely.”

“Ah, well.” She squeezed his arm. “I’m a city girl at heart.”

“Why is the hangar way out here, anyway?”

“Land’s cheap that nobody else wants.”

The building and airstrip stood in the middle of the field, surrounded by a twelve-foot electrified fence. Radar alarms would alert the village police if anyone tried to land an unauthorized aircar here. So a watchman wasn’t needed, and there was no activity scheduled for today. Koskinen looked around with care. None of the houses he saw were so close that he was likely to be noticed.

He made a noose in one rope and, after several tries, threw it around the top of a fencepost. “Okay, Vee,” he said, and helped her don the shield generator. She turned it on. He used the second rope to lash himself to the outside of the potential barrier, and passed the lariat’s end through a loop in that harness. Awkwardly, then, he shoved her against the fence and pulled them both up hand over hand, the invisible shell between him and the charged mesh. He sweated to think what would happen if he touched it. He might survive the shock, but not the aftermath of the alarms that were sure to go off.

At the top he hung on one-handed while he knotted lasso and harness together. Taking the lasso’s end in his teeth, he untied himself and crawled over the shell of force until he could leap. He fell clear of the fence on the inside. The impact was jarring. When he had his breath back, he hauled on the lariat until Vivienne in her invisible cocoon tilted over the top of the wires. Then he swayed back and forth like a bellringer, until she bumped the fence and rebounded through a considerable arc. At the far end of one such swing, she cut off the screen field and fell clear of the harness that had bound it. Nevertheless, she landed so close to the fence that his heart stopped for a moment.

She picked herself up. “Okay, we’re in.” Actual laughter sounded beneath the wind. “Koskinen and Cordeiro, Cat Burglars by appointment to His Majesty Tybalt I, King of the Cats. C’mon, let’s swipe us some transportation.”

They crossed more weeds and the tarmac airstrip to the hangar. Vivienne would have shot out the lock if necessary, but the door opened for them as they neared. The space within was huge and dim. Koskinen gaped about at the machines. Somehow they made him feel he had wandered into a more ancient past than even the, towers on Mars. You see, he told himself, this is my past. My great-grandfather must have ridden in a car like these.

This is my planet. Anger gathered in him. I don’t like what they have done to her.

He suppressed emotion, got some tools off a workbench, and busied himself. In an hour he had chosen his vehicle. The nameplate called it a De Havilland 4 day bomber, a big two-winged machine, two open cockpits, less dash than the Spads or Fokkers but a certain unpretentious ruggedness that pleased him. Between an operator’s manual and his Mars-taught feeling for tightness, he deduced how to fly it. They rolled it out onto the strip, fuelled it from a pump, and turned off the radar sentinels.

“Take the rear seat and use the auxiliary controls to start her,” he told Vivienne. “I showed you how. I’ll crank the propeller.”

She regarded him with a sudden intensity. “We might crash, or get shot down, or anything, you know, “she said.

“Yes.” He shrugged. “That’s been understood right along.”

“I—” She took his hands. “I want you to know something. In case I don’t get another chance to tell you.”

He looked into the brown eyes and waited.

“That detonator,” she said. “It’s a fake.”

“What?”

“Or I should say, the detonator works but the bomb doesn’t.” Her laugh caught in her throat. “When Zigger told me to make that thing for you…we’d been talking half the night, you and I, remember?…I couldn’t do it. There’s no explosive in that capsule. Only talcum powder.”

“What?” he whispered again.

“I didn’t tell them at Abrams’s place. They’d have substituted a real bomb then, and I’d never have been able to trigger it but someone else might have. Now—Well, I wanted you to know, Pete.”

She tried to withdraw her hands, but he caught them and wouldn’t let go. “That’s the truth, Vee?”

“Yes. Why should you doubt me?”

“I don’t,” he said. He rallied his entire courage, drew the detonator from his pocket, and snicked off the safety. She watched him through tears. He pressed the button.

With a whoop, he tossed the object into the weeds, kissed her with inexpert violence, stammered something about her being his crewmate and Sharer-of-Hopes and much else, kissed her again, and lifted her bodily to the rear cockpit. She nestled among the machine guns there and took the stick in a dazed fashion. He swung the heavy wooden propeller down with more strength than he had known he had.

The engine coughed to life. Exhaust fumes grew pungent in his nose. He sprang onto the lower wing and thence to the front seat. Vivienne relinquished her own controls. Koskinen spent a minute listening to the engines and noting the many vibrations. It seemed right to him. He taxied forward, accelerating. The plane left earth with a joyous little jump unlike anything he had ever felt before.

Vivienne had shown him their destination on a map. He found he could follow the landmarks without much trouble at this leisurely pace. Elkor’s training of nerves and muscles made piloting simple after the first few minutes.

The plane was a roaring, shuddering, odorous, cranky thing to fly. But fun. He had never before been so intimate with the air. It howled around his windshield, lashed his face, thrummed in the struts, sang in the wires, and bucked against the control surfaces. Ridiculous, he thought, that he should draw so much life and hope from a primitive machine, or even from learning that the woman with him had never been willing to help with his murder. But that was the way he felt. And the landscape below had grown altogether fresh, open, fair; this was a wealthy district, where houses were big and far between, separated by woods and parklands. The Hudson gleamed, between hills that were infinitely many hues of green, under a blue sky and scudding white clouds. There must be an answer to his dilemma—in such a world!

There was. He saw it with wonder. After a very long while he looked upward. “Dream well, Elkor,” he called.