The Shield of Time

XX

She shook him awake. “Uh,” he said, straggling through many thick layers. “Oh…ugh…Yeh. You wanna rest?” He knuckled his eyes. The lids felt gritty. “Damn me. I should have let you sleep first.”

“That’s not the trouble,” she said. Her expression was intent in the glow light. “They’ve brought machinery.”

“Oh.” Koskinen stuck his head out of the shelter. Floodlamps had been erected, hiding the night in glare. Two movable cranes loomed dinosaurian over the barrier. Their treads had ripped the turf to pieces. Laborers accompanied them.

Koskinen looked at his watch. “Quarter to five,” he said. “Took ’em quite a while to fetch that stuff, eh?”

“But what will they do?”

“Didn’t I explain this possibility? What we’ve got here weighs too much to be carried off by hand. They figure to lift us by machines instead.

Probably put us in a stratoship and take us someplace more convenient for them.”

“But Pete—” She leaned against him. He laid an arm around her waist. After a minute he sensed the fear draining from her. “You don’t seem worried,” she said.

“Lord, no,” he laughed.

The hooks came down. Chains were attached, harnessing the invisible shell. A foreman waved his crew back. The crane arms began slowly rising.

“Okay,” Koskinen said. “Class dismissed.” He hunkered down by the generator and turned the adjustment knob.

The barrier field expanded a foot, irresistibly. Chains broke in pieces and whipped across the yard. The cranes swayed. Koskinen retracted the field. “I think I could knock those monsters over by extending our roof upward,” he said, “but why risk hurting the operators?”

“You know something?” Vivienne said shakily. “You’re wonderful.”

The confusion outside settled down again. The workers left with their cranes; the agents resumed guardian positions outside the circle of floodlighting. Marcus stepped into it, alone.

“Koskinen,” said his voice from the minicom, as the younger man switched it back on.

“Yes?” Koskinen stayed where he was. He didn’t want to confront Marcus again.

“Pretty good trick, that. Do you plan to keep on resisting?”

“Yes.”

Marcus sighed. “You leave me no choice.”

Koskinen’s vocal cords seized up on him. He waited listening to his heart.

“I hate to do this,” Marcus said. “But if you don’t come out, I’ll have to use an atomic bomb.”

Koskinen heard Vivienne’s gasp. Her nails dug into his wrist. “You can’t,” he snarled. “Not without a Presidential order. I know that much law.”

“How do you know I don’t have an order?”

Koskinen passed a dry tongue across his lips. “Look,” he said, “if you can get the President to okay such a thing, you can a lot easier get him to come here and give me his personal assurance you aren’t trying to grab all the power there is before the power you’ve got slips away from you. If he’ll do that, I’ll come out.”

“You’ll come out when you’re told, Koskinen. This minute.”

“In other words, you don’t have any Presidential authorization and you know you can’t get it. Now who’s breaking the law?”

“Military Security has the legal right to use the nuclear weapons in its arsenals, on its own initiative, in case of dire national emergency.”

“What’s so dire about us? We’re only sitting here.”

Marcus looked at his watch. “Quarter past five,” he said. “You have two hours to surrender.” He walked quickly, stiff-legged, from the light.

“Pete.” Vivienne shuddered against Koskinen. “He’s bluffing, isn’t he? He can’t. Not for real.”

“I’m afraid he can,” Koskinen said.

“But how can he explain it afterwards?”

“Trump up some story or other. There won’t be any evidence left, you know. Plenty of fireball atoms travel fast enough to penetrate this shield, not to mention radiant heat. Obviously his men here are a hand-picked core, loyal to him rather than to the Constitution. Every would-be dictator recruits such a gang, according to all the sociology I ever studied. So they’ll support his yarn. Sure, he can get away with it.”

“But he’ll lose the generator too!”

“That’s better than losing his position, and his chance for a still higher position. Besides, he may figure that his tame scientists now have clues which’ll let them work out the secret in time.”

“Pete, there isn’t any secret! We took care of that. Why haven’t you told him?”

“Because I was afraid, I still am, that he’d fire that bomb at once. We, right here, with a working potential barrier machine, we’re the only immediate proof that he’s a liar and traitor who’s outlived his. day. No one can make a unit overnight, you realize. The first handmade prototypes can’t be ready for days at best. If he acts fact, knowing the situation, Marcus’s gang still has a chance to hunt down the people we contacted, and brand everything as an anti-Protectorate conspiracy. But that’s provided the rest of the government believes him and backs him. Which they won’t as long as we’re able to testify.”

“I see,” she said. After a moment, for no reason he could guess, she switched off the glow globe. The blaze outside was softened as it diffused through the shelter entrance, until it touched her with highlights and embracing shadows. “We can only wait, then,” she said.

“Maybe your Brazilian friend, that you phoned the whole story to, maybe he’ll be able to get action in time.”

“Maybe. He’s had to go through a lot of bureaucratic channels if he’s accomplished anything so far. And his own government has him on the ‘suspicious’ list because he knew Johnny. Still, he is a journalist. He should know more ropes than most people.”

“How about that Senator you mentioned? The one you said is a libertarian.”

“Hohenrieder? Yes, I told him too, as well as sending him a set of plans. But it wasn’t him I talked to, of course. A secretary, who looked skeptical. Maybe he wiped the tape at once. Hohenrieder’s office must get a lot of crank calls.”

“Still, maybe the guy did pass this one on to his boss. So there’s your Brazilian journalist certainly trying to tell the President of the U.S. what’s going on, and Senator Hohenrieder possibly trying, and maybe a few of the others, who’ve simply gotten our standard message, have put two and two together and are also trying. They may succeed at any minute.”

“Cut out that fake cheerfulness, darling,” she said. “I’m perfectly well able to face the fact that they probably won’t succeed before 0715. Marcus may be in jail by noon; but we’ll never know.”

“Maybe not,” he admitted reluctantly. After a second: “We’re better off than we were in the Zodiac, anyhow. This won’t hurt. You won’t feel a thing.”

“I know. In a way, that scares me worst. Life has so suddenly begun to matter again.”

“Do you want to go out to them?” he asked. “I can switch off the barrier for half a second and you can run out.”

“Lord, no!” Her vehemence put life back in them both. She laughed unsteadily and groped about for a cigarette.

“I love you, you see,” he floundered.

“And I think I love you. So is there a way to—”

“Maybe not. Not when I realize you may be dead in a hundred minutes. I wouldn’t be able to forget that. I wouldn’t know how to forget, how to do anything right. I’d rather love you the way I do understand, talking, or simply looking at you. Can you see, Veevee?” he said in his wretchedness.

“I think so,” she answered at last, infinitely gently.

“And there may, after all, be another time for us,” he said, attempting to sound eager. Then I’ll be asking you!”

He did not know why pain crossed her face. But she smiled and nestled beside him. They held hands. Afterward he remembered that the talking had been mostly his, about what they would do in their future together.

The first sunlight tinged the sky. They went outside to watch, careless of heat ray snipers, looking past the guards who still stood in shadow, even past the ugly long cylinder that had been wheeled on a cart next to the barrier field. “Sunrise,” Koskinen said, “trees, flowers, the river, but mostly you. I’m glad I came back to Earth.”

She didn’t reply. He could not keep from looking at his watch. The time was 0647.

A bullet spray chewed holes in the house wall. Koskinen jumped. The Security car which had been hovering on guard sped away. A gleaming needle swept after it. Guns flashed fire. The car staggered and fell downward. Koskinen didn’t see it strike, but smoke puffed up above the trees.

The slender craft returned. “That’s Air Force!” Koskinen screamed. “The insignia, see, Air Force—”

A man in uniform came running and dodging through the flowerbeds. An MS agent dropped to one knee and shot at him with a submachine gun. The soldier hit dirt just beneath the bullet stream. His arm chopped through an arc. Koskinen saw the grenade coming. Instinctively, he thrust Vivienne behind him. Not even sound penetrated the barrier. But at least, he realized with nausea, he had spared her a view of the agent’s death. The others scattered from sight.

No-one man pelted over the torn grass. Marcus! His face was twisted out of humanness; slaver ran from his mouth. He reached the bomb and fumbled with its nose. A soldier dashed from behind a willow tree and fired. Marcus went on his belly. The soldier approached, turned him over, shook a helmeted head and looked warily around. Marcus’s dead eyes glared at the rising sun.

There was no more fighting that Koskinen saw. He held Vivienne close, wondering why she sobbed. An Army platoon deployed around the potential shell. He read nothing on their young faces except amazement.

A grizzled man led three or four junior officers and a couple of civilians around the house and onto the patio. Four stars gleamed on his shoulders. “Koskinen?” he said into his minicom. He stopped, peering uncertainly at the two behind the barrier.

“Yes?” Koskinen remembered to switch on his own transmitter. “Hello?”

“I’m General Grahovitch. Regular Army—” a contemptuous glance at Marcus’s corpse—“Special Operations office. Here by Presidential command. We only came to investigate, but when we landed, these birds opened fire. What the devil is the situation?”

“I’ll explain,” said Koskinen. “One minute, please.” He unwrapped Vivienne’s arms from around his neck, sprang into the shelter and turned off the generator. As he came out, the dawn wind blew across him.