Zone Yellow

Chapter 10

I had shown Helm how to operate the scanner, which I asked him to do. I went to the main panel to twiddle things there.

“The blue meter,” he called. “It jumped!” I reassured him that was to be expected: it measured the entropic displacement between the shuttle and the external environment. Other readings were equally routine, until I came to the big one: temporal gradient. It read too high.

“There’s over a thousand-year discontinuity,” I stated.

“How?” he demanded. “If you mean―”

“I do,” I confirmed. “We’re marooned on a level where Charlemagne died just recently, back on the Zero-zero line.”

“A rescue mission will never find us here,” Helm said. He was peering out the open hatch at the shifting mists. “But neither will they,” he added, more cheerfully.

I was staring, too. As a wisp of fog shifted I saw a shape, something that didn’t belong in that landscape: a boxy, ornately decorated coach that needed only four handsome black geldings hitched to it to make an appropriate equipage for a queen. One door stood open, affording a glimpse of a purple satin interior.

“Stand fast,” I told Helm. “I’m going to maneuver over next to it.” I got into the pilot’s seat, started up the terrain drive. Our shuttle had air-traction―it moved easily in spite of the mud, and I backed and filled until I could pull us alongside the carriage and match openings with it. Helm called, “Another inch, sir. There, that’s perfect.” I glanced up and saw a wavering pink aureole along the hatch where the two vehicles were in contact.

I went back, and he was looking curiously into the interior of the luxurious though primitive vehicle. There was a white-wrapped bundle on the seat. A wail came from it.

“Djaveln!” Helm blurted. “A baby!”

I stepped across into the coach, the physical contact with our shuttle creating an entropic seal that held back the external environment. The pink halo rippled, but held. It was temporal energy leakage from the imperfect temporal seal. I picked up the soft, blanket-wrapped bundle and looked at the face of a baby Ylokk. It was short-snouted, toothless and big-eyed. The grayish-tan pelt on the forehead was downy, and one small, chubby hand groped aimlessly. I was hooked. Helm was right behind me, and stumbled back when I stepped backward.

“Sir!” he exclaimed. “This odd conveyance. It’s like the State Coach―it’s more than it seems!”

I had already noticed the unobtrusive folding panel in the seat-back. Helm reached past me and opened it, revealing a fully-instrumented field-model console that could be nothing but a shuttle panel.

“The rats!” Helm blurted, at the sight of my bundle. “Why in the world did they abandon a baby here?” He was fingering the brocaded armorial bearings worked on the corner of the white blanket. “Obviously the child of a person of consequence,” he said almost formally. As a loyal subject of the Swedish monarchy, he was very respectful of rank―even infant rank. I was moved more by the pup-appeal of a baby mammal, the same impulse that makes female dogs adopt newborn kittens, and a lady cat suckle baby rats. Anyway, we both knew we had to do something.

“If we leave him here, he’ll just die,” Helm said solemnly.

“No question about it,” I agreed. “But we’re not really set up to care for infants. No formula, no diapers, and especially no know-how.”

“We’ll have to take him home!” the lieutenant blurted. I handed him the kid.

“Swell,” I agreed. “Where’s home, and how do we get there?”

He looked hard at the small control panel. “Colonel,” he started confidently, but continued in a more subdued tone, “can’t we―can’t you, sir, dope out the instruments and figure out how to return this thing to its point of origin? There must be a way…”

“Let’s find it,” I suggested. He began opening drawers and lifting things to look under them. Over the simple panel, which lacked most of the instruments essential to navigation in the Net, I spotted a small screen that looked right somehow. An adjacent manual trigger with a curious symbol caught my eye. I tripped it, and the screen went red, then pink, and finally resolved into a spider-web pattern that had to be pay dirt. Helm said so, sounding as if he’d just found his fondest wish under the Jul tree. “It’s a map!” he told me happily. I was less pleased: I realized it was mainly a chart of Zone Yellow, with the rest of the Net only vaguely indicated.

“Easy,” I cautioned him. “We don’t know the scale. But that big nexus to the right of center is likely the Ylokk home base.” I studied the pattern of faint intersecting lines, trying to match it up with my knowledge of the familiar Net charts of the Imperium, and the position of the black dot in the Zone on Manfred’s big map. There was a tangled area off to the left lower corner, cut off by the edge of the screen. The lines there were snarled, many ending abruptly, some turning back on themselves.

“That’s the most detailed map of the Blight I ever saw,” I told Helm, pointing to the chaotic patch. “These fellows aren’t entirely backward in their Net technology. That alone is worth the trip.”

“But, sir, the Prince!” Andy blurted. “We have to return him home!”

“The Net specialists back in Stockholm Zero-zero will have a better chance of determining this buggy’s PO than we do,” I pointed out.

“Sir!” Helm blurted. “The, ah, carriage. We couldn’t have come to this precise line by pure accident! They must have wanted us to find it!”

“Or somebody did,” I amended. “Presumably someone concerned about the welfare of the baby.”

“It hadn’t been there long,” Helm realized aloud. “It had a clean diaper.”

“True,” I concurred. “It seems we and this infant arrived at the same locus almost simultaneously. You’re right: that’s not likely to be purely a coincidence.”

“Who?” Helm pondered. “Who’d want to maroon a baby―a royal baby―in a place like this? And why do it in a way that ensured the poor tyke’d be rescued?”

“Rescued?” I queried, without thinking. “He’s still stuck here, just like us.”

“But surely, sir…” Helm stammered, then straightened his back with a visible resolve. “But you know how, sir―we have the machine―and even the old coach―you said it’s a shuttle, too!” He was warming to the idea. “We can use it. If necessary,” he added.

“I don’t know, Andy,” I told him candidly. “We’re in stasis here. We seem to experience subjective time, because that’s how our nervous systems are wired. But how much time? The chronometer back in the shuttle said a year. What’s a year? A concept of the human imagination―”

“Sir!” Helm broke in. “It’s the time required for a single revolution of the earth around the sun! We didn’t imagine thatl”

“Sure we did,” I corrected him. “It’s still just an idea; maybe the idea fits a natural phenomenon pretty closely, or maybe that’s another fantasy. The question hasn’t yet been resolved by the philosophers.”

“But sir―everybody knows―”

“For ages everybody knew the earth was flat,” I reminded him, “and that the sun revolved around it.”

“But they were wrong!” Helm pointed out, as if he’d made a telling point.

“Wrong? Any damn fool can look out across the sea, or a prairie, and see it’s flat. And you just watch: the sun travels across the sky every day, and it rises over the horizon in the east just when it has to if it keeps traveling back under the earth all night. You’re denying the obvious!”

“I see your point, sir. But we have the instruments that don’t have any subjective bias; they show what’s really happening.”

“Jack up the drive wheels on a ground-car, and race the engine,” I suggested. “The speedo will say you’re doing eighty or ninety.”

“Really,” he corrected, “it just says the wheel the sensor is attached to is spinning. But that’s a real phenomenon. The meter isn’t imagining it.”

“Which shows us how much human interpretation, based on preconceptions, goes into our understanding of even the most basic observation, Andy.”

“Well,” the young fellow started, “it doesn’t really matter…”

“That’s right. What we have to do is decide on a course of action, and do it. Actually, I have to make the decision. I can’t fob the responsibility off on a junior officer.”

He was nodding in agreement. “I didn’t mean, sir…” He trailed off.

I told him I knew, and maneuvered away from the coach. It was finished in shiny black lacquer and looked brand new. There were solid rubber tires on its high, spoked wheels.

“It’s a fake,” I told Helm. “It was apparently intended to give us the idea we were looking for an A-line with a backward transportation technology. But that’s synthetic lacquer and rubber. Let’s find out what they were trying to conceal.” I maneuvered back to match openings again, tighter, this time. The pink aureole sprang up. I stepped back inside, ducking my head under the low brocaded ceiling.

“Sir,” Helm spoke up. “This could date from the nineties, when those two Italian fellows built the first, ah, shuttle. Maybe they wanted to disguise the machine―”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Maybe. If so, this is a museum piece we have to take back home. In the meantime, I’m going to check it out.” I got back out and climbed up to the elevated driver’s seat. With no horses, the thing had to have a drive mechanism. It did. I called Helm up and showed him the controls concealed under the curved dashboard, which really was a functional barrier to the dirt thrown up by horses’ hooves. I traced the connections and found a compact energy cell and a power lead to the left hind wheel. I touched the “go” lever and the high vehicle rolled smoothly forward a few inches.

“I was thinking, sir,” Helm contributed as soon as he had climbed up beside me, still holding the sleeping infant. “Maybe whoever owns this buggy was running a few minutes behind schedule. They intended to phase in before we found the pup, and missed their coordinates just enough to let us get here before them.”

“That’s a possibility,” I acknowledged. “But why would they leave the baby here, then decoy us here to find it, then come dashing to the rescue before we had time to react to the setup?” I wasn’t expecting an answer, but went on silently pondering the question. Somebody, the Ylokk security boys, or another player not yet on the board, had gone to a great deal of trouble to waylay us. There was a reason for it, no doubt.

I told Helm to sit tight and be ready to drive, and went back down and got back in the shuttle.

I kind of hated to abandon the gleaming black coach in null-time; any museum in the Imperium would swap its collection of Jurassic dinosaurs for it. But I recorded the locus and told Helm to come down and strap in. Smovia had slept through finding the baby. I let him sleep. Poor fellow; he’d been on his feet ever since I’d brought Swft to him, at least twenty-four hours subjective, and I was planning to double-cross him.

“Andy,” I addressed the lad gently, “I can try something, but I don’t know what the result will be. This is a desperate expedient that’s never been used in the field. It will either start us moving normally again, or eject us violently onto another entropic level. How do you vote?”

“ ‘Vote,’ sir?” He sounded shocked. “It is my duty, sir, to follow the colonel’s orders, sir…”

“All right,” I agreed. I didn’t want to upset him. “We’ll do it. Try to relax and get some sleep.”

I went forward to the console and pulled out the component trays, disconnecting the safety locks to do so. The theory was straightforward enough: even in an entropic vacuole, energies are flowing. Not the normal entropic and temporal energies of the problyon flux, but more esoteric if equally potent forces little noticed in a normal continuum. The insidious ninth force, for example, which causes the laws of “chance” to operate; and the tenth, which is responsible for the conservation of angular momentum, and which causes dust-grain-sized comets a light-year from the sun to execute a smart elliptical U-turn and head back Solward from out where Sol is simply the brightest star in sight. If I cross-controlled, applying control pressure tending to shift the shuttle from its present A-line, and at the same time cranked in entropic pressure tending to reverse our A-entropic motion, the two forces would be placed in direction opposition: the irresistible force would meet the irresistible force, and the shuttle would be squeezed like a watermelon seed until it popped out―or blew up.

I felt a little shaky. In the Net labs, we’d once tried a small-scale experiment involving only a single neutron, and it had blown the entire wing off into the realms of unrealized potential. But I didn’t have any other ideas. It was only a moment’s work to reverse the wave-guides and connectors to set it up: then I had to throw the drive―full gain lever to see what would happen. The simple gray plastic knob looked pinkish―an entropic aureole indicating the leakage from the leashed energies of the universe. I threw the lever. The world blew up.