The Shield of Time

V

It wasn’t far to the Crater. The taxi left the Control beam and slanted down on manual. Koskinen saw a circle of darkness, below and ahead, carved from the wan light-haze and street-web of the surrounding slum. He could make out a few buildings silhouetted on the rim, one or two windows aglow but otherwise black. Several miles away rose the Center he had seen while on foot, tier after tier climbing zenithward like a luminous fountain; and a couple of skyscrapers were also visible, where worldwide enterprises found housing. He could even see the firefly traffic stream yonder. It might as well all have been on another planet.

Not Mars, though, he thought in his despair. Mars had killed men too: with unbreathable ghostly atmosphere, hunger and thirst and cold and strangeness. But beauty had abided in those deserts, moving forests, stark mesas—and foremost in the great serene Martian minds, which had joined with humans to follow knowledge. I used to get homesick out there for Earth. For what I missed, now that I think about it, was stuff like green grass and trees, sunlight, on my bare skin, wind ruffling a lake, Indian summer, snow, and the people who belonged to such country, the people I knew as a kid. This isn’t Earth. Wish me back to our Mars, Sharer-of-Hopes.

The taxi hovered near the unlit circle while the driver used his phone. Identifying himself? Rumor said that the more powerful chieftains in such places had means to shoot down intruders. Koskinen didn’t know. Few upper-level civilians had any real information about the Craters. Koskinen knew only that during the initial postwar reconstruction there’d been too much radioactivity at the bombsites for habitation. As it diminished, the poorest elements of society moved near because such land was cheap or even free. The hardiest went into the craters themselves, finding hideouts where they recruited their strength and from which, hi time, they exacted tribute from the low-level dwellers of entire cities. The police, who had enough to do elsewhere, seldom interfered unless things got completely flagrant, and sometimes not then. Any social order was better than none, and the crater barons did impose a structure of sorts on the slums.

The driver switched off. A radio telltale glowed on his panel. He followed the beacon to a landing. Several shadowy forms closed in. The driver emerged and talked for a while. They opened the door and wrestled Koskinen out.

He looked around. They were on a small concrete structure which jutted from the crater bowl about halfway between the rim and the invisible bottom. Its flat roof made a landing platform. Gloom sloped upward on every side, with the faintest vitrification shimmer, until it ended where a series of watch-towers squatted against the surly red haze. A glowlamp in one man’s hand revealed half a dozen hard faces, helmeted heads and leather-like jackets, gun barrels aimed inward at the stranger. Two picked Koskinen up and bore him along; the others fanned out on guard. The mugger and the taxi driver went on ahead, while someone else was deputed to flit the vehicle away.

Koskinen lay passive in his shell, aching with tiredness. They carried him through a door at the bottom of the structure, down a ramp, and so into a plastic-lined, fluoro-lit tunnel. A flatbed gocart stood there, onto which his escort got with him. It drove rapidly downward. Before many minutes the passage opened into a much larger tunnel, perhaps a subway which had survived the bomb blast and afterward had been refitted. They must have their own power system here, Koskinen thought, ventilation, heating, every necessity—including, no doubt, food and ammunition for a long siege. The gocart passed others, mostly carrying hired workmen who bobbed their heads respectfully to the warriors. It passed steel doors where machine gun emplacements were built into the walls, and finally stopped at an even more heavily fortified checkpoint. From there the party took a side passage, on foot.

But this was astonishing: a glideway hall, as elegantly decorated as the Von Braun’s had been. An open door revealed a suite of darkly shining luxury and taste. Beyond, an intersecting corridor led them past less elaborate but perfectly adequate living quarters, then by a sprawling machine shop and a closed door on which was lettered ELECTRONICS—and eventually through a thick double portal into a concrete-block room where the guards set Koskinen down.

He got to his feet. That took a little doing; he must move his center of gravity about until he tilted the rigid force shell onto its broad flat “base.” Glancing around, he saw the guardsmen place themselves along the walls, guns trained on him. A workbench held standard laboratory apparatus. Nearby were a telephone and the armored pickup of a monitor screen. This is where they test anything dangerous, he decided.

After what seemed a long time, the inner door opened again and let two people in. The guardsmen nodded in salute. Koskinen forced down the exhaustion that made his brain seem full of sand and looked closely at the newcomers.

The man was big, middle-aged, with a kettle belly and a bald pate. He scarcely even had eyebrows. His face was pink and jowly, a blob of a nose, a gash of a mouth. But he moved with a briskness that bespoke muscles. He was gorgeously clad in iridescent blue; rings glittered on his fingers. The spitgun at his hip looked well-worn.

The woman was pleasanter to watch. She was about thirty, Koskinen guessed, tall, a splendid figure and a supple gait. Blue-black hair fell almost to her shoulders. Her face was squarish, with lustrous brown eyes, broad nose, full and sullenly curved lips. Her complexion was a cafe-au-lait that made everyone else look bleached; the white lab coat she wore above an expensive red tunic heightened the effect.

Okay, Koskinen thought with a prickle along his scalp, here’s the boss in person. What’d the kidnappers call him, Zigger?

The man walked slowly around him, felt the outlines of the field, pushed him over and studied how he fell and how he regained his feet. Waving his underlings out of ricochet range, he fired a few bullets and watched them drop straight down from the point where they struck. The woman leaned against the workbench and regarded the performance without stirring. At the end, she picked a notepad from among the apparatus, scribbled, and held the page before Koskinen’s eyes.

He read, in an unexpected copperplate: “This looks like something we need. Are you interested in selling?”

He shook his head. “Let me go!” he cried.

She frowned and wrote for him: “Make letters with your fingers. Deaf and dumb alphabet. So.” She illustrated a few.

Deaf and dumb—? Oh, yes, such tricks doubtless did survive among those who couldn’t afford neuroprosthesis. Koskinen spelled out awkwardly: “You cannot get at me and the police are looking for me. Better let me go.”

The woman conferred with Zigger. He seemed shaken. She told him something that surprised him, but he gave orders to a guard, who went out. The woman wrote for Koskinen: “Obviously you have air renewal in there, but I don’t see any other supplies. You could be walled up and left to starve. Better come out and talk to us. Zigger keeps his word—when it’s convenient.” She threw the boss, who was reading over her shoulder, a feline grin; he reddened but made no comment. “He’s a bad man to cross, though.”

Br’er Rabbit and the brier patch! Koskinen thought in a leap of excitement. “Please do not brick me in,” he spelled on his fingers. If they do, I can expand the field and break down any masonry they can erect—and maybe escape!

“Okay. Starving’s too slow anyway,” the woman answered laconically.

The guard returned with a bulky long-barreled object cradled in his arms. The woman wrote: “Do you recognize this?”

Koskinen shook his head. He couldn’t see the thing very well.

“A laser gun. It amplifies radiation by stimulating atoms to re-emit in a highly collimated beam. Call it a heat ray.”

Oh, yes, Koskinen thought. The will drained out of him. I’ve heard about those.

“I expect that since your force field or whatever it is lets light go back and forth, it will also let infrared by,” wrote the woman. “The first shot will be into your foot.”

The guard brought the weapon to bear. Koskinen switched the shield off and fell forward on his hands and knees.