The Shield of Time

III

First you protect your eyeballs. They can freeze.

Koskinen buried his face in the crook of his left arm. Darkness enclosed him, weightlessness and savage cold. His head whirled with pain and roarings. The last lean breath he had drawn in the car was still in his lungs, but clamoring to get out. If he gave way to that pressure, reflex would make him breathe in again. And there wasn’t much air at this height, but there was enough that its chill would sear his pulmonary system.

Blind, awkward with a hand and a half available to him, aided only by a little space experience with free fall—very little, since the Franz Boas made the crossing at one-fourth gee of nuclear-powered acceleration—he tore the paper off his shield unit. He and it would have different terminal velocities, but as yet there was so tenuous an atmosphere that everything fell at the same rate. He fumbled the thing to him. Now…where was that right shoulder strap? The unit was adjusted incorrectly, and he couldn’t make readjustments while tumbling through heaven…Panic snatched at him. He fought it down with a remnant of consciousness and went on groping.

There!

He slipped his arm through, put his head over against that biceps, and got his left arm into the opposite loop. The control panel flopped naturally across his chest. He felt about with fingers gone insensible until he found the master switch, and threw it. In one great gasp he breathed out and opened his eyes.

Cold smote like a knife.

He would have screamed, but his lungs were empty and he had just enough sense left not to try filling them. Too high yet, too high, he thought in his own disintegration. Got to get further down. How long? Square root of twice the distance divided by gee—Gee, Elkor, I miss you. Sharer-of-Hopes, when you sink your personality into the stars these nights do you include the blue star Earth? No, it’s winter now in your hemisphere, you’re adream, hibernation, hiber, hyper, hyper-space, is the shield really a section of space folded through four extra dimensions, dimens, dim, dimmer, OUT!

At the last moment of consciousness, he turned off the unit.

He was too numb to feel if there was any warmth around him. But there must be, for he could breathe again. Luckily his attitude wasn’t prone, or the air-stream pounding into his open mouth could have done real damage. He sucked greedily, several breaths, before he remembered to turn the field back on.

Then he had a short interval in which to fall. He saw the night sky above him, not the loneliness and the wintry stars of the stratosphere, which reminded him so much of Mars, but Earth’s wan sparks crisscrossed by aircar lights. The sky of the eastern American megalopolis, at least; that lay below him still, though he had no idea what archaic city boundaries he had crossed. He didn’t see the stratoship. Well, naturally. He’d taken the crew by surprise when he jumped, and by the time they reacted he was already too far down for them to dare give chase.

Suddenly he realized what he hadn’t stopped to think before—he was over a densely populated area. At his speed he was a bomb. God, he cried wildly, or Existence, or whatever you are, don’t let me kill anyone!

The city rushed at him. It swallowed his view field. He struck.

To him it was like diving into thick tar. The potential barrier made a hollow shell around his body, and impact flung him forward with normal, shattering acceleration until he encountered that shell. Momentum carried him a fractional inch into it. Then his kinetic energy was absorbed, taken up by the field itself and shunted to the power pack. As for the noise, none could penetrate the shield. He rebounded very gently, rose to his feet, shaky-kneed, stared into a cloud of dust and heard his own harsh breath and heartbeat.

The dust settled. He sobbed with relief. He’d hit a street—hadn’t even clipped a building. There were no red human fragments around, only a crater in the pavement from which cracks radiated to the sidewalks. Fluoro lamps, set far apart, cast a dull glow on brick walls and unlighted windows. A neon sign above a black, shut doorway spelled UNCLE’S PAWN SHOP.

“I got away,” Koskinen said aloud, hardly daring to believe. His voice wobbled. “I’m free. I’m alive.”

Two men came running around a corner. They were thin and shabbily dressed. Ground-level tenements were inhabited only by the poorest. They halted and gaped at the human figure and the ruined pavement. A bar of purulent light fell across one man’s face. He began jabbering and gesturing, unheard by Koskinen.

I must have made one bong of a racket when I hit. Now what do I do?

Get out of here. Till I’ve had a chance to think!

He switched off the field; His first sensation was warmth. The air he had been breathing was what he had trapped at something like 20,000 feet. This was thick and dirty. A sinus pain jabbed through his head; he swallowed hard to equalize pressures. Sound engulfed him—machines pounding somewhere, a throb underfoot, the enormous rumble as a train went by not far away, the two men’s shouts, “Hey, what the devil, who the devil’re you—?”

A woman’s voice joined theirs. Koskinen spun and saw more slum dwellers pouring from alleys and doorways. A dozen, two dozen, excited, noisy, gleeful at any excitement in their gray lives. And he must be something to see, Koskinen realized. Not only because he’d come down hard enough to smash concrete. But he was in good, new, upper-level clothes. On his back he carried a lumpy metal cylinder; the harness included a plastic panel across his chest, with switches, knobs, and three meters. Like some science fiction hero on the 3D. For a second he wondered if he could get away with telling them a film was being shot, special effects and—No. He began to run.

Someone clutched at him. He dodged and fled past the crowd. A halloo rose from them. The shield unit dragged at his shoulders; ten pounds added up like fury when you were exhausted. He threw a glance behind. The street lamps marched in an endless double row, skeleton giants with burning heads, but so far apart that darkness welled around each one. The walls rose sheer on either side. A network of tubeways, freight belts, power lines shut out the sky above, except for a red glow. A train screeched around some corner. He could just see the men who pursued, just hear their yelps.

He pressed elbows against ribs and settled down to running. Surely he was in better shape than these starvelings. And with more to hope for, which also counted. What did they have to look forward to, when machines crowded them from their last jobs and population growth outpaced welfare services? A man couldn’t fight, or even run very well, when the heart had been eroded out of him. Could he?

The street, intended for trucks, came to an intersection and looped above a monorail track. Koskinen heard a nearing wail in the iron. He sprinted into the shadow of the overpass, dodged among its pillars. The train came into sight and bore down on him behind a blinding headlamp. Koskinen sprang, stumbled on the rail, picked himself up, and got across an instant before the locomotive went by. It shook his bones with noise. Dust swirled grittily into his nostrils. He hugged a wall and remembered that he could have made himself invulnerable by throwing the shield switch. But then he’d be immobile too, unless the train knocked him aside…It brawled on past. Behind the freight cars came the passenger section, sallow people glimpsed through dirty windows.

But I meant to break my trail. I’ve got to be out of view before the train is by me. Koskinen groped his way along the wall. The oily wind of the train’s passage buffeted him. He bumped into another column supporting the overpass and fumbled his way back onto the street. Quickly then he ran down its emptiness until an alley yawned on his left. He ducked into that.

The train vanished. He crouched in darkness, but no mob came after him. Not seeing him, they must have given up. Their chase had been mostly from curiosity anyhow.

The alley opened on a courtyard enclosed by four crumbling tenements. Koskinen paused in its shadows to pant. Since there was nothing above the house roofs here except some power lines, he could see the sky-red haze, no stars—and the beautiful, arrogant heights of a Center, half a mile or so away, looming over these mean walls. Traffic hummed and rumbled everywhere around, but no life was to be seen except for one gaunt cat.

Wonder where I am? Could be anywhere between Boston and Washington, I suppose, depending on which direction the stratoship took while it had us netted. Koskinen forced his pulse and respiration down toward normal. His legs were weak but his mind was clearing. This must be a bomb-drop district, hastily rebuilt after the war and never improved since, except for the Centers; and they were towns to—themselves, of course, where nobody could afford to live who didn’t have the skills that an automation economy demanded. The deduction wasn’t much help; there were a lot of bombsites.

What to do?

Call the police? But the police would get an alert about him from Military Security. And the MS men had tried to kill him.

Cold settled back into Koskinen. The fact couldn’t be, he told himself frantically. Not in the United States of America! The country which mounted guard on a sullen world-self-appointed guardian at that; but who else could handle the job?—must be tough. Of course. But it didn’t use agents who were murderers!

Or did it? Perhaps the emergency had been precisely that great. Perhaps, in some way he couldn’t guess, the survival of the United States depended on Peter Koskinen’s not falling into foreign hands. If so, he need only report to MS. They’d apologize for everything, and give him the best of care, and release him when—

Well, when?

Dad and Mother are dead, he choked, and Mars is lost behind this filthy sky. Who have I got?

He remembered Dave Abrams. It was like a thawing in him. Dave had been his closest buddy. Still was, by Existence. And a levelheaded chap. And Dave’s father was on the board of directors of General Atomics, which meant influence comparable to a U.S. Senator’s. Yes, that was the drill. Call Dave. Arrange a meeting somewhere. Work out what to do, and then do it, with powerful friends at his back.

Returning nerve brought Koskinen a consciousness of how hungry he was. And thirsty. As thirsty as the time his air humidifier failed on the expedition along Cerberus Canal…the time he and Elkor traveled to the Philosophers, whose very shape he could no longer quite recall…That had been in the second Earth-year, hadn’t it? Yes. The third year they’d achieved their breakthrough, as Martian and Terrestrial science viewpoints, ways of thinking, fused into a concept of energy phenomena that was new to both planets. In the fourth year they worked out the engineering practice and built portable potential-barrier units for everyone on the Boas. But only this one had been brought home, what with weight restrictions and—Koskinen realized he was maundering. Lightheaded. Let’s find an eatery. Praise luck, he had a well-filled wallet in his pants.