The Shield of Time

VII

The guard who escorted him waved Koskinen through the double door. The echoing concrete bleakness of the laboratory brought his isolation sharply back. Zigger and Vivienne were already there. The boss was asking her:

“You sure he didn’t say nothing to you? Ever? Like maybe he was running a little show of his own in low-level somewhere, that he could of ducked out to take care of?”

Her mouth curled. “Don’t be more moronic than you have to, Zigger. How could a hophead like Bones run anything except errands?”

“He’s not a hophead.”

“He’s addicted to brain stimulation, isn’t he?”

“That’s not dope.”

“I say it is.”

Zigger lifted a hand as if to cuff her. She faced him rigidly. “How do you expect to locate Bones—that way?” she asked. He let the hand fall, turned about with a growl, and saw the newcomers.

“Argh! There you are!” The browless eyes glittered close to Koskinen. “C’mere. Grab him, Buck.” One of the three guards present seized Koskinen’s arms from behind. The grip was painful. Koskinen might have managed to break loose and get revenge, but the other two, and their master, had guns.

Zigger took a pair of channel pliers off the workbench. “I want you to understand something, Pete,” he said, almost conversationally. “You’ve been caught. Nobody outside the Crater has any notion where you are. You’re property. My property. I can do anything I feel like with you, and there won’t be one damn thing you can do about it.” The pliers closed on Koskinen’s nose. “I can haul your beezer out by the roots, right now, this minute, if I want to.” The jaws tightened until tears were stung from Koskinen’s eyes. Zigger grinned voluptuously. “You got worse places than that to get squeezed,” he said. “Or if I don’t want to do any harm, I’ll hook you into a nerve machine. That hurts maybe more. I’ve watched guys in it. When we’re finished with you, we’ll run you through the grinder. I keep cats, and you know what fresh meat costs.”

As if with an effort, he tossed the pliers back. He had begun to sweat a little, and his voice wasn’t as light as intended. “That’s what I can do to property. Now, Vee, fix him up the way I told you.”

Vivienne’s face had gone altogether blank. She took a thick steel disc some three inches in diameter, suspended from a light chain, and hung it around Koskinen’s neck. Picking a spotweld gun off the bench, she closed the links. He felt the heat on his skin, even through the asbestos paper she used to protect him. When she was done, he wore a locket he could not remove without cutting tools.

Zigger had explained while Vivienne worked: “This is to make sure you behave. You’re gonna be helping our lady scientist with that force screen of yours. Showing her how it works, making more like it, maybe improving it some. So maybe you got ideas about getting the gadget on your back and switching the screen on, someplace where a laser can’t get at you. Well, forget that. This here is a fulgurite capsule with a radio detonator. If I hear you’re acting funny, I’ll go press a button and blow your head off.”

“Look out for stray signals, then,” Koskinen snapped.

“Don’t worry,” Vivienne said. “The detonator is coded.” She finished her job and released the chain, leaving the asbestos in place while the weld cooled.

“Let him go, Buck,” Zigger said. Koskinen stumbled as his arms were released, rubbed his sore nose and scowled at them all.

Zigger beamed. “No hard feelings, Pete,” he said. “I had to show you the bad side first. Now I can show you the good side. Care for a smoke? A happy pill? Got ’em right in my pocket here.”

“No,” Koskinen said.

“As long as you’re a prisoner, you’re property.” Zigger said. “But the boys here aren’t no property. They stick around because they know a good deal when they see one. I’d like to have you join us, Pete. From your own free choice, I mean.

“Now don’t look so horrified. I’m not a crook. You got to realize that. I’m a government myself. Sure. I make rules, and collect taxes, and take care of my people. What else is a government, huh? What’d Washington ever do for you that I can’t do better? You want money, good food, good housing, fun and games? You can have ’em, right here, starting today, if you want. You wouldn’t live in the Crater your whole life, neither. Change your face and you can go anywhere. I keep some mighty nice apartments, hunting lodges, villas, yachts, whatchamacallit, here and there around the world. I’ll have a lot more once we’ve got those shields of yours ready. A whale of a lot more. Use your imagination, boy, and see what we might get us in the next few years. Want in on the game?”

Koskinen remained silent.

Zigger slapped his back. “Think it over, Pete,” he said jovially. “Meanwhile, work hard and be good. So long.” He went out. The guards followed him. The door closed behind them.

Vivienne struck a cigarette, sat down on a stool and smoked in short ferocious puffs. Koskinen wandered about the room. The bomb was a lump at the base of his throat. He glanced at the monitor screen. Someone was watching him, of course, from elsewhere in this warren. He felt like making an impolite gesture at the watchman, but decided not to. The shield unit lay on the bench. He fiddled nervously with the controls.

After a while, Vivienne stirred. “Well,” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry about that thing,” she said. “I got my orders. I can get away with a lot, but a direct order from the boss—”

“Sure,” he said.

“As for the rest…what he did…I suppose Zigger’s no worse than the average gang baron. Probably not even much worse than any other government. He’s right about being a government, you know.”

“They don’t practice torture in Washington,” he muttered.

“I’m not so sure,” she said bitterly.

He glanced at her, surprised. She hadn’t said much about her past, for all the talking they had done. He gathered that she came from a well-to-do family and had gotten an education commensurate with her intelligence at a private school; that was interrupted by the war, and she had had a few bad years afterward, first in the refugee hordes and then as a semi-slave in a guerrilla band, until the police wiped them out and turned her over to the Institute. It gave her room, board, medical treatment, psychiatric help, and training in science. “I should think you’d be the last person to preach anarchism,” he said.

“Or archism, for that matter.” Her smile was stiff. “I’ve been on the receiving end of both conditions.” With a slight shake, as if to drive off her thoughts: “About Zigger. He was in a tough mood. Worried about Bones disappearing.”

“Who?”

“Neff’s pal. Remember, there were two guys in that restaurant? Neff went out to the fake taxi and captured you. Bones tailed you to the door.”

“Oh, yes. The runt. I remember.”

“He went back into town yesterday. He was supposed to report hi by nightfall—Zigger had a job for him—but he hasn’t shown yet and they can’t find any trace of him out there.”

“Violence?”

“Maybe. Though Zigger’s people are more apt to dish that out than take it. Bones might have run afoul of a boy pack, of course, or even a raiding party from New Haven Crater. We’ve been fighting a sort of war with them for control of Yonkers low-level—Oh, the devil with this.” Vivienne ground out her cigarette. “Everything’s so sickening. Why doesn’t the official government get off the dollar and clean out these pest holes?”

“I suppose they will in time,” Koskinen said. “There’ve been too many other things to handle first, though. Maintaining the Protectorate takes so much money and energy that—”

“Don’t talk to me about the Protectorate!” she burst out.

He gaped at her. She broke into a shiver. Her eyes, close to tears, looked past him and past the wall. The nails bit into her palms.

“Why, what’s wrong?” he ventured, and took a step toward her.

“If I believed in God,” she said through her teeth, “I’d think he hated us—our country, our whole tribe—and saddled us with the Norris Doctrine so we’d maintain our own damnation and save him the trouble!”

“Huh? But…I mean, Vee, what else would you do? Do you want to fight a third thermonuclear war?”

Echoing in the back of his head were the words they had made him memorize in his current affairs class at the Institute:

“—the future security of the United States. Therefore, from this moment henceforth, no other national state shall be permitted to keep arms or armed forces beyond what is needed for internal policing. Any attempt to manufacture, assemble, recruit, or otherwise prepare forces suitable for aggressive action, shall be an act of war against the United States, and the individuals responsible shall be arrested and tried as war criminals by an American military court. In order to prevent the secret accumulation of such forces, the United States will exercise an unlimited right of inspection. Otherwise national sovereignty will be fully respected and the United States guarantees the integrity of all national frontiers as of the date of this Proclamation. The United States recognizes that nations may adjust such frontiers by mutual agreement, and that the people of any nation may change their form of government by lawful or even revolutionary means. However, the United States reserves to itself the right of judgment as to whether any given change is consonant with its own security, and shall not permit changes which it deems potentially dangerous to its own and the world’s future.”

Congress, the Supreme Court, and subsequent Presidents had elaborated the Norris Doctrine until the theory was a lawyer’s paradise, Koskinen reminded himself. But the practice was simple enough for anyone to understand. The Americans maintained the last military services on Earth, and brought them to bear whenever the President decided the national interest required action. The day-to-day details of inspection, intelligence operations, evaluation of data, and advice to the executive, were in the hands of the Bureau of Military Security.

Vivienne didn’t answer Koskinen’s question.

“We’re not perfect,” he said, “and, well, it’s no fun being a cop…and it’s made us unpopular…but who else could be trusted with the job?”

She looked at him, then, and said: “MS tried to kill you.”

“Well…okay, they did.” Argument stiffened his opinions. “They wouldn’t have if…I mean, I’d rather have been cleanly shot than gone to some Chinese torture chamber…or come here, you know!”

“They killed my husband,” she said.

He fell silent.

“Want to hear the story?” she asked without tone, turning her gaze from him again. “After my graduation I got a foreign service job, assistant science attache, and drew an assignment to Brazil. Janio was an engineer there. Sweet and a little bit crazy and very young—oh, how young! Not much less than me in years, actually. But Brazil didn’t get hit very hard in the war, and he’d scarcely seen anything of the aftermath. He hadn’t been poisoned, as I’d been, and with him I finally began to feel clean again. We used to go bird-watching on the river…

“There was this hothead conspiracy. MS had vetoed a plan to mine some uranium deposits in the Serra Dourado, on the grounds that they didn’t have inspectors enough to make sure that some of the stuff wasn’t smuggled out and turned into bombs—”

Her voice trailed off. “Well, they don’t,” Koskinen said. Helpless before her emotion, he thought vaguely of turning the conversation into safer channels. “Inspection is a highly technical job. There aren’t many qualified men available. And even one country is such a big place. How do you think the Chinese, for instance, keep that network of agents and agitators going? The Chinese government disowns the organization officially, and the whole world knows they support it clandestinely, and there’s nothing we can do because we haven’t got people enough to govern China ourselves.”

“Uh-huh,” she said dully. “In China there’s at least a fairly honest and fairly competent government, however much they hate us behind those bland smiles. Most other places, we just prop up a bunch of corrupt do-nothings, because we know they won’t make trouble…and never mind whether their people have a life worth the effort of living. Oh, yes, we talk non-interference in foreign internal affairs; but in practice—I’ve been in the diplomatic service, I tell you. I know.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Thanks for that apology, Pete. You remind me of Janio, a little…Oh. What happened. Those mines would have given work to a lot of hungry paupers. Some nuts decided to overthrow the Brazilian government, establish a new one that wasn’t a puppet, and talk back to the Yankees. The conspiracy flopped. An amateur job. MS and the Brazilian secret service caught everybody. Including Janio, who was not one of them. I should know that too, shouldn’t I? My own Johnny! I knew where he spent his time. But he had been angry about the Serra Dourado business, along with a lot of other things. He was a proud guy, and he wanted his country to go her own way. He’d spoken his piece—what does our First Amendment say?—and it’s true that some of his friends were in the plot.

“They brought us to Washington for trial. I wasn’t arrested myself, but I came along, of course. There were interrogations under drugs. I thought that would clear Johnny. Instead, someone I’d never met before swore in court that he’d seen my husband at some of those meetings. I called him a liar under oath. I knew Johnny’d been with me on several of those exact dates. You know the funny little associations that fix something in your memory. We must have been camped on that Amazon island the weekend of the 23rd because we saw twenty-three macaws fly by, emerald green in a pink sunrise, and he said the gods were providing me with a calendar because they also thought I was beautiful…That sort of thing.

“So they found him guilty. And shot him. And I was charged with perjury. But they gave me probation. Scientists are valuable and so forth. One evening, a year or so later, I met a business executive with high government connections at a party in Manhattan. He got so drunk that he spilled to me why Johnny had been orbited. The PI exam had shown he was ‘a strongly potential insurrectionist.’ That is, he might someday get fed up with being shoved around in his own country, and do something about it. Better kill him now. ‘Before he helps build a bomb, or finds one of the big missiles still hidden here and there with all records on them lost. He could kill millions of us,’ the executive said. My Johnny!

“The next day I went down to low-level. Mostly I wanted to get away, lost, killed if I was lucky. But I got picked up by Zigger instead. Kidnap, I suppose, technically; but it didn’t seem to matter much; at any rate, it’s one way of striking back at them.”

Her words faded. She sat quiet, the tall body slumped, until finally she took forth a cigarette and struck it. But after a few puffs she let it burn out between her fingers.

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Koskinen whispered.

“Thanks,” she said roughly. “My turn to apologize, though. I didn’t mean to unload my troubles on you.”

“I suppose any body of men gets…excessive…when it has power.”

“Yes, no doubt. When the power isn’t restricted, at least.”

“And MS can’t very well be restricted, if it’s to do its work. Although the shield effect might make MS unnecessary. You could shield against atomic bombs, given a large enough unit.”

She stirred and looked at him with a hint of life. “Hardly practical,” she said. Her voice was unsteady, now and then she bit her lip, but she found impersonal phrases. “Especially since a bomb could be smuggled in piecemeal, assembled inside the target area. Or there are other nasty weapons, bacteria, gas. Don’t get me wrong, Pete. I hate Marcus and his MS goons as much as anyone has ever hated. But I’m not so naive I think any other country would maintain the peace better. And one way or another, I suppose the job does have to be done; because any sovereign state is a monster, without morals or brains, that’d incinerate half the human race to get its sovereign way.”

“An international organization—”

“Too late now,” she sighed. “Who could we trust?” With a stubborn striving to be fair: “Besides, we do have a society of our own here, a way we prefer to live, the same as Brazil or China has. We won’t surrender that to some world policeman; we can’t, and remain what we are. And yet I don’t see how a world police force could be made workable without a world community. So maybe the Pax Americana is the only answer.”

He stared down at the unit on the bench, remembering how Elkor had blessed it on the day the ship departed. The Martian had endured all the agonies of delayed hibernation so he could bid his humans farewell. “This thing, though,” Koskinen protested. “There must be some way to use it. The majority of people who died in either atomic war were actually not killed by blast or the immediate radiation. Firestorms and fall-out were what got them; later on, anarchy or disease. A shield unit would protect you against those things, as well as gas and—”

“Sure,” Vivienne said. “That’s why Zigger wants to outfit his bully boys with your screens. There’d be no stopping him then. In ten years he’d own low-level from here to California, and a good part of the legitimate world too.”

“And we’re supposed to make them for him?” Koskinen cried.

“And improve them, in tune. If we don’t, he can hire engineers to do so. The job doesn’t look extremely difficult.”

“No…I can’t. I’ve got to get this to the police!”

“Which means to MS,” she said slowly.

“Well—I suppose so.”

“Which means Director Hugh Marcus. What do you imagine he’ll do then—remembering Janio?”

Koskinen stood quietly. She pursued pitilessly, and he did not think it was because she, like him, had suddenly remembered the monitor: “If not Marcus, then somebody else. You simply haven’t thought out the implications. Invulnerability! Give anyone who has power, from Zigger on up through Marcus or the dictator of China…give anyone who has power over other human beings invulnerability, and you free that power from the last trace of accountability. From then on, anything goes.

“I’d rather Zigger got this thing,” she finished. Her mouth was drawn taut. She fumbled out another cigarette and made a stabbing gesture with it. “All he wants, really, is plunder. Not the souls of the whole human race.”