The Shield of Time

VIII

Koskinen awoke. What was that?

Maybe nothing. A dream, from which he’d escaped before it got too ghastly. He had perforce taken a pill to sleep, but that must have worn off by now. The luminous clock said 0415 EDST. Otherwise he lay in total blackness. And soundlessness, apart from the murmur in the ventilation grille. These thick walls effectively insulated every apartment. If an outside noise had roused him, it must have been loud indeed.

He rolled over and tried to doze off again, but instead he grew completely wakeful. What Vivienne had said today, and her tone and expression and whole posture, had disturbed him more than he wanted to admit.

I wouldn’t know the score. Not really. My youth was spent in what amounted to a fancy boarding school. I never encountered outside, day-to-day reality. Not that the professors lied to us, or any such thing. They told us conditions were hard, and that we’d have to buck poverty, ignorance, tyranny, greed, and hate. Butt see now their understanding of the situation was childish. They accepted their political opinions readymade, from official sources, because their work kept them too busy to do anything else.

I might have gone into the world with the rest of my classmates and had my nose rubbed in a few facts. But instead I shipped out to Mars. Now I come home, and the truth confronts me. And not gradually, so I can get used to it and accept it as sad but unavoidable. In one big brutal dose. I want to vomit it up again.

Only what is the truth? he thought wearily. Who’s right? What’s the way out? If any.

He had spent the day in an emotionally stunned fashion, finding some anodyne in drawing up, with Vivienne’s help, the diagrams and specifications for the shield unit. There seemed no choice but to obey Zigger. Though they hadn’t yet completed the job, several more hours would suffice. Lying now in bed, his fists clenched, he thought: I’ve been pushed around too bloody often. Time I started some pushing of my own. But the explosive locket and chain were like a hand around his neck. Maybe sometime, somewhere along the line, he could secretly make a cage to screen out the signal that would touch off the fulgurite. Maybe. Not soon, though. He’d have to bide his time, and watch his chance, and eat dirt—

A dull boom resounded. The floor quivered.

Koskinen sprang out of bed. His heart skipped a beat and began galloping. Hoy-wasn’t that a siren? He found the light switch. In that sudden illumination the room looked altogether bare. He tried the door. Locked, of course. He laid his ear against the panel and could just hear shouts, running feet…yes, certainly a siren, wailing elsewhere in the caverns.

He switched on the phone. It didn’t respond. Were nonessential circuits cut off for the emergency, or had the central been destroyed? Another crash trembled through rock.

Raid! But who?

Zigger. Koskinen broke into a chill sweat. If a desperate Zigger pressed one certain button…He discovered he was trying to snap the chain with his hands. Swiftly, futilely, he searched the apartment for anything that might cut metal. Nothing. He put on some clothes, set his teeth, and paced the floor, waiting.

The racket increased outside. Another explosion came, and another. But he heard no more people go by. The fight must be some ways off, then. He couldn’t do a thing except await events. He tried to recall his parents, and Elkor, and daydreams he had once nourished, but he was too tense. Stupid, he scolded himself. If that bomb goes off, you’ll never know it. The realization did little to calm him.

A louder crash yet. The lights flickered and dimmed. The ventilator fan whirred to a halt.

Koskinen’s mouth felt like Martian dust. He started to the cubby for a drink of water. The door opened. He whirled and crouched back.

Vivienne Cordeiro stepped through, closing the door behind her. She wore a coverall. There was a pistol hi her hand and an ungainly bundle on her back with a cloth draped over it. Her eyes were narrowed, the broad nostrils flared and her mouth bore a tight grin.

“There!” she panted. “Take this.” She slipped the thing off her shoulders. The cloth fell away and Koskinen looked upon the shield unit. “A little heavy for me to run with.”

“What—what—” he staggered toward her.

“Get it on, you clotbrain! We’ll be lucky to escape as is.”

Strength resurged. He heaved the metal up and put his arms through the straps. “What’s happened?”

“Raiding party. Big one, with military equipment. Chinese, according to one guy at a monitor. They lobbed in a couple of small HE missiles from the air, which shook up our ack-ack long enough for them to land. Now they’re blowing their way in past our defenses. We’re equipped to stand off another gang or even a police siege, but not stuff like they’ve got!” She tucked the cloth firmly about his burden. “Into the cubby, now.”

“What?”

She dragged him by the hand. “Everybody knows what you look like. But without those whiskers, you’ve got a fair chance of not being noticed. Quick!” She handed him the depple.

He ran it over his face, recognizing his chin again with a faint shock. Not having a very strong growth of beard, he could expect to be smooth-cheeked for a week or so without further plucking. The desensitizer spray felt cool on his skin.

Vivienne kept on talking: “I can guess how they did it, the Chinese. They knew approximately where you landed, so they sent a good many agents in to try and pick up your trail. Must have identified Bones in town—everybody in the neighborhood knows who the Crater people are—and put the snatch on him.” She spared a sigh for poor old Bones and the treatment which was doubtless used to make him guide the attack. “Obviously they’re shooting their wad. Every military weapon they’ve stockpiled in this country, secretly, over the years, must be out there. It’s worth it, though. A China equipped with barrier screens could tell MS where to get off, build a nuclear arsenal again, and probably blackmail us out of Asia.”

Koskinen shuddered.

“I can’t take the chance they’ll succeed,” Vivienne said. “Especially since it looks as if they will get in here. I don’t want another war either. So I got my gun and let myself into the lab. What plans we drew today are ashes now.”

“Wait.” Koskinen remembered. He touched his throat.

She laughed, a short humorless bark. “Yes, I thought of that too. There’s a direct passage between Zigger’s suite and mine. He thought he had the only key, but I made myself a duplicate long ago. And I know where he keeps stuff like this. The minute he went out to command the defense, I popped in.” Briefly she drew a small flat case with a button and a safety catch from another pocket. “Here’s the detonator.”

Koskinen snatched for it. She sidestepped him. “No, you don’t. Now let’s go. There isn’t much time.”

She opened the door first and peered into the hall. “Okay. Everything’s clear.” They stepped through. A guard sprawled outside. He had been shot in the head. Vivienne nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Wasn’t any other way to get in. Gimme a hand.” They dragged him into the room and locked the door again with his key.

“Burned your bridges, eh?” Koskinen asked. In this corridor full of explosions, machine gun snarl, smoke and shock, he felt oddly callous about the murder.

“No,” said the woman. “My bridges were burned for me quite some time ago. The day they killed Johnny. C’mon, this way.”

They crossed a glideway which had gone motionless. The air already seemed stagnant and cooling. The sounds of battle grew fainter. Koskinen’s pulse leaped when a squad of guards came loping past, but they paid him no special heed. Vivienne led him on down a side hall with plain, unnumbered doors. “Mostly they’re storerooms,” she said, “but this here…Take the lead. Keep your hand on the switch and be ready to shield yourself when I tell you.”

Beyond the room, another door gave onto a steep upward ramp. Koskinen’s footfalls pattered between bare walls. His breathing was loud in his ears. He felt the strain in thigh and shoulder muscles, caught the sour smell of his own sweat. The lights were few and dim against whitewashed flatnesses.

Rounding a continuous curve, he came to the end without warning. An armored door blocked the passage ahead, where a machine gun pit held two sentries. Their helmets and gas masks made them unhuman. “Hold it, you two!” one called. The gun swiveled toward Koskinen.

“Shield,” Vivienne hissed. He threw the switch. Silence clamped upon him. Vivienne, at his back, drew her gun and fired, full automatic. The first soldier lurched and fell. The machine gun raved, noiselessly for Koskinen. Bullets dropped at his feet. Vivienne continued to fire from behind him. The gunner collapsed.

She ran to the pit, looked at the men, and waved to her companion. He snapped off his shield and joined her. The blood glistened impossibly bright. This killing sickened him, perhaps because he had seen it done. “Did you have to?” he strangled.

Her nod was curt. “They’d never have let us by without a pass. Don’t waste any grief on these bums. They did plenty of assassinations in their day.” She pulled a control switch. “We’ve got to hurry. They probably sent an alarm.”

A motor whirred. The door swung ponderously open. Blackness gaped beyond. Vivienne took a flashlight from one guard’s belt and scrambled over unfinished rock—a short, curved tunnel that roared and echoed with battle noise. Its entrance was camouflaged by a giant boulder. Koskinen halted in the stone’s shadow and looked out.

Three big, lean aircraft hovered against the red sky. He could discern several others on the black surface near the main entrance; they were little more than metallic gleams, seen by lightning-like bursts as ground combat spilled across the crater bowl. Smoke hazed the scene as much as the night did. Koskinen was chiefly aware of confusion. But he distinguished the sounds: bang, crack, staccato rattle, then a rumbling as high explosive went off down in the tunnels.

“The Chinese must be gambling the police will figure this for only another gang clash,” Vivienne said. “If the cops do try to intervene, naturally they’ll be shot down. They haven’t got any stuff to compare with that there. So then MS and the Army will be called in…but that’ll take a little while. The Chinese must hope to be away with their booty—you, for one item—before matters progress that far.”

“Where can we go?” he asked, stupefied at what he saw.

“Away. Come.” She led him over a nearly invisible track that wound toward the rim. He stumbled after her. Now and then he fell, taking cuts and bruises which stung abominably. But the discovery and capture which terrified him didn’t happen. They mounted the crater lip, scrambled down through snags and skeletons of blasted structures, and so into the labyrinth called low-level.