The Shield of Time

VI

The phone woke him. He turned over, shoved his head under the pillow, and tried to deny its existence. The phone kept buzzing. Koskinen blinked, mouthed a curse, reached out and switched it on.

A dark woman looked from the screen. He gaped, not easily remembering her or where he was. “Good morning,” she said, with a smile that went no deeper than her lips. “Good afternoon, rather. Late afternoon. I thought you’d been sacked in long enough.”

“Huh?” Slowly, in bits and pieces, recollection came back. He’d nearly fainted after the screen was off. They took the unit from him and led him here and gave him a tranquilizer—He looked around at a small, not unpleasant room with bath. There was only one door, and no window…a ventilator grille…yes, he was underground, wasn’t he? In Zigger’s inverted castle.

“I wan’t to talk with you,” the woman said. “I’ve ordered dinner.” Her smile widened. “Breakfast, to you. The guard’ll come fetch you in fifteen minutes. Up, fellah!”

Koskinen crawled from bed as the screen blanked. His clothes were gone, but a closet wall retracted to show several excellent new outfits. A needle spray forced some of the stiffness from his muscles. There was no logic to the fact that a green blouse and gray slacks should cheer him a little. By the time an armed man opened the door, he was ready and famished.

They took the glideway into the luxury section. He was waved through a door which closed behind him. Across a soft, tinted floor, he looked at a suite of several rooms. Some good pictures hung on the walls. The viewall was playing a color abstraction which was too intellectual for his taste, but he was gladdened to recognize Mozart on the taper. The furnishings were low-legged, Oriental, centered about a pedestal that upheld a lovely piece of uncut Lunar crystal. How much had that cost? he wondered.

The woman sat before a table. A white tunic set off her pale brown skin. She waved a hand with a cigarette in it. The other held a cocktail. “Sit down, Pete.” Her voice was husky, with a trace of Southern accent. She was a quadroon, he guessed, and probably part Creole.

“How do you know my name?” he asked. Then: “Oh. Sure. Stupid of me, papers in my wallet.”

“And a quick check with the news service,” she nodded. “You got a fine welcome home, didn’t you?”

He seated himself across the table. A servitor rolled hi and asked nun what he wanted. He realized that he and the woman were the only humans present—though doubtless the guard waited outside, and there might well be an alarm buzzer or a tattler mike in her massive silver bracelet. “I…I don’t know,” he said. “Uh…what was that thing the other day?…a Tom Coffins.”

She grimaced. “You need education, I see. Oh, well, it’s your palate. Smoke?”

“No, thanks.” He wet his lips. “Wh-wh-what did the news have to say about me?”

“Not one thing,” she answered, looking straight into his eyes. “As far as the phone or the picture papers know, you’re still relaxing at the Von Braun Hotel in Philly. However, we’ve not been able to contact any of your shipmates.”

“I know,” he said bleakly. “I only hope MS has them, alive. The Chinese killed Si Twain, you know.”

“What?” She sat upright.

“It was on the news,” he faltered. “Last night.”

“It wasn’t today,” she said. “Today’s story said he died in an accident and anything you heard about a murder was due to a hysterical—” The sensuous mouth grew as harsh as Zigger’s. “What’s the truth?”

He summoned defiance. “Why should I tell you?”

Her manner softened again, with the mercurialness that had already bewildered him. “Look, Pete,” she said, low and rapidly, “you’re caught in something tremendous. I spent the day making empirical tests on that gadget of yours. I know a few things it can do, and that alone is enough to drive Zigger wild. We haven’t any mind drugs here, but we do have nerve machines, and even uglier stuff. No—” she raised a slender hand—“I’m not threatening you. I wouldn’t do such a thing to anybody, for any reason. But Zigger would. I’m warning you, Pete. You’ve had the course. There’s no choice but to level with…with me, at least.”

“If I do, what then? MS won’t thank me.”

“We can get you away from them, if you really don’t think they will forgive you. The Crater does give value for value received, after its own fashion. Okay, what happened to Twain?”

The servitor brought his drink. He snatched it and drank blindly. The account stumbled out of him.

She nodded, carefully, struck a fresh cigarette and puffed for a while with her eyes narrowed in thought. At length: “Yes, obviously last night’s account was the right one, and now MS has clamped a lid on the truth. I begin to see the overall picture. Your expedition innocently brings this thing back from Mars, never dreaming what it implies. The men zoom off to their respective homes. They mention the thing to their friends. MS, which has been keeping tabs on them as it routinely does on everything unusual, gets the word within hours. They see the possibilities involved. They’ve got to lock away this machine and everyone who knows anything about it, at least until they can figure out what to do. So they take most of your shipmates into custody.

“But the Chinese have spies of their own, agents, sleepers, scattered around the world. Everybody knows that. And…the Chinese ring was probably on the qui vive about this returning expedition. After all, the previous trips had shown the Martians to have a considerable technology, even if it is utterly unlike anything we’ve imagined on Earth. The Boas might well bring back something revolutionary. Especially since your announced purpose was to make an intensive study of the Martian civilization. The Chinese could have worked agents into strategic positions far in advance. You know, people who became close friends of the spacemen’s families, that sort of thing. So they got the word almost as soon as MS did. It became a race to capture expedition members.”

Enfeebled as he was from sleep following total nervous exhaustion, and no food, the liquor hit Koskinen like a fist. “Not much use,” he blurted through sudden fog. “I had the only unit on Earth. And the only full knowledge about it. Y’ see, I was the one who developed it. With Martian help, certainly. But the other guys, they had their own projects.”

She leaned back on the couch, relaxing like a big cat, giving him only the softest of nudges. “Why didn’t MS grab you before anyone else, then?”

“Prob’ly didn’t get the full story at once. And maybe had some trouble finding me. I’d said I was going to Minneapolis, but at the last minute changed my mind, thought I’d look over the Atlantic supertown. They came fast, anyhow. With the Chinese on their heels.”

“I take it you were escaping from the Chinese when our boys came upon you?”

“And MS. Also MS.” Koskinen finished his drink. “Tried to kill me, MS did.” She opened her eyes wide and let them glow at him. He felt he must make himself clear to her, and went through the story.

“I see,” she murmured at the end. “Yes, they’re a hard-boiled outfit in their own right. How well I know.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “But you need food now.”

The servitor brought in soup, rolls, authentic butter. She let him eat a while before she chuckled and said, “By the way, I forgot you still don’t know my name. I’m Vivienne Cordeiro.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he mumbled. As his head cleared and strength returned, so did wariness. He cursed himself for giving away so many potential trump cards. Though he must admit she had helped him understand a situation that had seemed a fever dream. “Are you a physicist?”

“Of sorts,” she nodded. “Institute kid like you—according to your news biography. They didn’t pick me up, however, till I was fifteen.” A darkness flitted across her face. “A good many things had happened before then. But no matter now. I run the technical section here. Crater bosses also need someone who understands things like energetics and information theory.”

Koskinen said, “You realize the shield unit is still in an early, experimental stage. You’d need a big laboratory and several years to develop the potentialities. Especially the potentialities that no one has yet guessed.”

“True. But Zigger could make excellent use of the thing even as is. Let’s talk about it. Not in any detail—I doubt if I could follow the math—but in generalities.” Koskinen hesitated. “I already know a good bit,” she reminded him.

He sighed. “Okay.”

“First, is this a Martian machine?”

“Not exactly. I told you the Martians and—well, I—invented it together. They had the field theory but didn’t know much practical solid state physics.”

“Hm-hm. That means MS can’t simply send a spaceship there and demand the full plans. According to all previous reports, the Martians won’t play ball with anyone who isn’t simpatico with the humans they’ve decided to like; and it’s no use trying to pretend you are if you aren’t, because they know; and the Russians found out the hard way before the war that they can detonate your atomic weapons in your own magazines. Of course, with the American government having the only spaceships these days, nobody else can get to Mars either. This game will be played out here on Earth.

“So what is your invisible screen? A potential barrier?”

Surprised, he nodded. “How did you guess?”

“Seemed reasonable. A two-way potential barrier, I suppose, analogous to a mountain ridge between the user and the rest of the world. But I’ve determined myself, today, that it builds from zero to maximum within the space of a few centimeters. Nothing gets through that hasn’t the needful energy, sort of like the escape velocity needed to get off a planet. So a bullet which hits the screen can’t get through, and falls to the ground. But what happens to the kinetic energy?”

“The field absorbs it,” he said, “and stores it in the power pack from which the field is generated in the first place. If a bullet did travel fast enough to penetrate, it’d get back its speed as it passed through the inner half of the barrier. The field would push it, so to speak, drawing energy from the pack to do so. But penetration velocity for the unit I’ve got, at its present adjustment, is about fifteen miles per second.”

She whistled. “Is that the limit?”

“No. You can push the potential barrier as high as you like, until you even exclude electromagnetic radiation. That would take a much larger energy storage capacity, of course. For a given capacity, such as my unit has, you can expand the surface of the barrier at the price of lowering its height. For instance, you could enclose an entire house in a sphere centered on my unit, but penetration velocity would be correspondingly less—maybe only one mile a second, though I’d have to calculate it out to be certain.”

“One mile a second is still plenty,” she said, impressed. “How is the energy stored?”

“Quantum degeneracy. The molecules of the accumulator are squeezed into low states. The pressure is maintained by a regenerative sub-field within the accumulator, which is, however, responsive to momentum transfer through the main barrier shell.”

“You’ve just revised the entire concept of energy storage, you know,” she said absently, “killed a dozen major industries and brought twenty new ones into existence. But as for the field, or screen, or shield, or whatever name you prefer—what is it? A region of warped space?”

“You can call it that if you want to, though strictly speaking, ‘warped space’ is a tautology at best, a meaningless noise at worst. I could show you the math—” Koskinen stopped short. He oughtn’t. Not to this gang of criminals!

She relieved him by sighing; “I’d never understand. What little I ever knew about tensors has rusted away long ago. Let’s keep this practical. I noticed today that you have a thermostatic unit built into the apparatus. You’d need it, obviously, since air can’t get in or out of the screen. And you have some kind of oxygen recycler like nothing I ever saw.”

“That’s mostly derived from Martian technology,” he admitted. “Exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor circulate over a catalytic metal sponge surface which bleeds a little energy from the accumulator for a chemical process. Except for the small equilibrium concentration that your body needs, they’re formed into solid carbohydrate and free oxygen. Trace exhalations like acetone-stinks—get converted to radicals attached to the carbohydrate.

“On Mars we included a unit that took care of organic wastes as well and reclaimed all excreted water. So then you only needed to take food along, and you could stay out on a field trip for weeks. But it was a heavy thing, that unit, and the principle was elementary, so we left it behind.”

“I see,” Vivienne nodded. “How could you work, though, immobilized inside a barrier field?”

“We traveled on flatbed wagons or Martian sandsleds, drawn in a train by the electric tractors we’d taken along. Remote control robots did most of the actual specimen gathering. Toward the end, though, our engineers built a few of what we called walkies. One-man platforms with legs and hands, controlled by the rider, who could then go just about anywhere. In case of trouble, the shield could be expanded to enclose the machine as Well as the man.

“Of course,” Koskinen added thoughtfully, “it was a makeshift. There’s no reason why a shield can’t be designed that’d fit a man like a thermsuit, only better, so he could walk and manipulate directly. It’d be a question of using a good many small generators, each responsive to the wearer’s posture and motion. The total field at any instant would be the vector sum of the separate fields. However, that’ll take a lot of engineering to do.”

“That’s not the only possibility,” she said with rising excitement. “Spaceships, aircraft, even ground cars that haven’t any hulls; just a potential shell generated when you need it. Vary the shape—turn your spaceship into your dome house—start really exploiting the minerals in the asteroid belt! A new kind of motor: push your ship forward by changing its energy potential. Why, you might be able to travel near the speed of light—if a faster-than-light drive isn’t lurking somewhere in your spacewarp equations. A new way to get atomic energy, I’ll bet; if you can hold the molecule in a degenerate state, you should be able to do the same for the nucleus. Perhaps you’ll be able to convert any kind of matter into energy. No more fuel costs, no limit to the available power! Oh, Pete, your shield is only the beginning!”

He remembered where he was, jarringly, and said with returning grimness: “It may be the end, with so many factions snatching after this thing.”

The light died in her. She leaned back. “Yes,” she said in a flat voice. “That’s very possible. Virtual invulnerability…yes, people have ripped each other apart for lesser prizes, haven’t they?”

The servitor brought in a roast turkey with trimmings. Vivienne shook herself, as if she were cold. She flashed Koskinen a quick white smile. “I’m sorry, Pete,” she said. “I didn’t mean to talk shop so soon. Let’s forget it for a while. I’d like to get acquainted with you as a person.” Her voice dropped. “Your kind of guy isn’t any too common these days. Not anywhere in the world.”

They talked till far into the night.