Gordon R. Dickson (48 page)

"Ever fly a sailplane, Private
Mahn?"

"As a matter of fact, yes,
sir."

"How about drive a
hydroplane?"

"Yes sir."

Debrow shifted uneasily in the seat
he had taken behind one of the desks. I was beginning to feel a little trapped.

"How are you on reading Sanskrit?"

"Sir?"

"I said, can you read
Sanskrit?"

"No sir."

"All right," I said, with
inner relief, "take him back, Doc."

"Sir?" said Debrow, almost
a little timidly, after Private Mahn had left. "I'm afraid I don't
understand "You will, in due course."

He sat back without saying anything
more. The seven more enlisted men on duty there came through and I managed to
send them all back after getting each one to admit he didn't know how to do
something or other.

"Mr. Despard," began
Debrow, after the final one had left. "That's all the men on duty here.
Does that mean—"

"It means this situation is a
good deal more serious than I thought. Are you armed, Major?"

"No sir."

"That's unfortunate. Well,
we'll have to do what we can. I'll stay here. Will you go quietly to the
personnel door we came in by, and stand just inside it. Lock it if you can, and
listen for any sounds you can hear on the other side. If anyone tries to force
it open, let them; but stand back out of sight and when they're through, go for
help."

"Yes sir. But for Christ's
sake, Mr. Despard, what's supposed to be going on here?"

"I can't tell you quite yet.
I've my duty to Paula—to the Empress—to think of," I said. "Get going
now. I'm going to step off into the shadows just outside this office and be
ready to warn you if anyone who shouldn't comes from the other end of the
building."

He went. I took the Old Man by the
hand and followed the Major out, moving off to where the shadows hid us from
him, but where we would be in line to intercept Doc, coming back from returning
the last soldier to his post. From where we were, I could see the thin line of
daylight showing around the personnel door, blocked out now and then by an
uneasily shifting body standing just this side of it. Eventually, this occultation
ceased, and a second or two later, Doc emerged alone from the dimness in front
of us.

"All set," he said under
his breath.

"All taken care of?" I
asked.

He nodded.

"The lieutenant?"

"I saved him until next to
last."

"All right. The Major's over by
the personnel door."

"Was. I've taken care of him,
too. He was the last of them."

I wanted to ask how many of them
were dead, but the words stuck in my throat. It was a lifesaver to have a young
timberwolf like Doc for a friend, but it was a little illogical to demand he be
wolf and harmless at the same time.

"How about the aircraft?"
I asked.

"The first one you looked at, I
didn't touch," Doc answered. "The rest are set to blow any time you
want."

"All right. I've got to see if
we can get the hangar doors open easily. Otherwise, you may have to blow a hole
in them—"

"No sweat there either. They're
supposed to be electrically operated, but there's a chain block-and-tackle type
dingus to use if the power's off. Can you fly that thing, Marc?"

"I can fly it. Or rather, I can
tell it to fly itself and it will."

"Just checking," he said;
and I could barely see his grin in the gloom.

"I don't blame you. I would
too," I told him. I was very tired, suddenly. "Why don't you rig the
other planes to destruct as soon as we're safely out of here, and I'll move the
one we're taking up to this side of the doors? Then you open the door, hop in,
and we'll move."

"Right."

He moved off. I turned on my
flashlight and led the Old Man toward the aircraft Doc had specified as
untouched. We climbed in, shut the door, and I depressed one of the keys.

"Ready."

"Move up slowly on the ground
to the inside of the doors to this building. Or—to put it another way—move
slowly forward along the ground and I'll tell you which way to turn and when to
stop."

The craft stirred and seemed to
slide rather than roll forward.

"Left," I told it.
"Left maybe ten degrees. Now maybe five degrees more. All right, straight
ahead... stop!"

We halted just inside the hangar
doors. I opened the door of the craft and waited. In a moment, there was a
faint, rattling sound to be heard through the opening; and the big doors slid
apart to either side of the opening they guarded, and bright sunlight blinded
us.

"That's good enough!" I
called softly into the brilliance after a moment. But the doors had already
stopped parting with just enough room for us to go through. I heard a faint
thud and Doc was in the cabin, shutting the aircraft door behind him.

"All set," he said.

"Go!" I told the craft,
"Straight ahead, out on the ground through this opening, take off and
climb to three thousand meters. Head west"

It slid forward through the doors
into the full sunlight. Without any run, it leaped suddenly skyward. There was
a sound like a paper bag popping below and behind us. I glanced back and down
to see smoke coming from the open doorway of the hangar building, dwindling
rapidly to toy size below us. A second later, we were up where the roads looked
like thick pencil lines and the landscape was starting to move backwards beneath
us toward the sun half way up in the clear sky.

"That takes care of everything,
I guess," Doc said. He came forward and pushed the Old Man off the seat
next to mine—a move the Old Man took without complaint. It was surprising what
the Old Man would take from Doc, nowadays. Almost as much as Sunday used to
take from Ellen. Doc seated himself where the Old Man had been.

"Need any help flying, or
anything like that?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Then I'll get some
sleep," he said, imperturbably. "This gadget's better than a locked
door. No one's going to break in and surprise you in the middle of the
air."

He curled up in the seat, closed his
eyes, and dropped off.

I was not so lucky.

29

The aircraft out of the future did
not seem to need any serious attention. I asked it for a map of the country,
and it was displayed on the screen in front of me. On the map, I picked out the
general area of our community, asked to have it enlarged for me, and so
continued zeroing in and enlarging until I could identify our destination to
the craft. Once this was done, I simply told it to take us there and land by
the summer palace-which I described-and my duties were done. I would have
liked, then, to curl up and sleep like Doc; but I could not. I could not even
imitate the Old Man, who was half-dozing, opening his eyes every so often to
blink at me, as if to make sure I was still there.

Instead, I just sat, watching the
empty, clean sky and the slowly moving landscape far below. There was no sound
of passage inside the plane and I felt like a fly trapped under an overturned
water glass.

As long as we had been working to
escape, my mind had been clear and sharp and purposeful. But now, the effect of
the body adrenalin began to die out in me, leaving me feeling empty, dull, and
ugly. The thought of the soldiers on guard who had undoubtedly died so the
three of us could go free came back to my mind whether I wanted to think of
them or not. God knows I had never wanted to be the cause of anyone's death,
particularly now, since I had found that at least part of myself could blend
with the rest of the universe. It was, in fact, that specific, blendable part
of myself that I now felt I had betrayed, misused like a fine-edged tool put to
some wrong purpose.

But what else could Doc and I and
the Old Man have done, I kept asking myself? We had to escape, and the only
route open to us lay over the dead or incapacitated bodies of at least some of
Paula's warriors.

Did it?
a jeering little voice in the back
of my mind nagged at me.

All right, I told myself, what other
way was there?

You tell me. You're the man who can
see patterns.

I couldn't see one here that didn't
involve violence.

Then you're not much good, are you?

Leave me alone, I told it. Get out
of my head.

How can I leave you alone? I'm you.
You're stuck with me.

There's a way out, I thought. And I
became very cold when I thought it.

You haven't got the guts. And even
if you did, what about Ellen and Marie and all the rest you'd be leaving for
Paula to take her revenge on? You want their deaths on your conscience, too?

Paula—I forced myself to think of
Paula instead. But that brought no relief either. Her image summoned up another
sort of sick feeling inside me. Because I had been attracted to her. I actually
had. The fact that she had challenged me with her unavailability had been a
cloak for the fact that I wanted her anyway, had wanted her, in fact, from the
moment I had first seen her getting out of her helicopter looking like a page
out of a fashion magazine in a world now vanished forever. Having her would
have been almost like getting that world back again.

Of course, I had known she had
dressed like that deliberately, that the whole matter of her entrance on the
scene had been cool-headedly calculated to produce the effect on all of us that
it had. But knowing this didn't alter the emotional leap I had felt. Seeing her
like that, I had been lifted out of the raw and dusty reality of my present
into a gilded dream of a memory. I had suddenly been reminded of the tawdriness
of the little world I was about to defend with my life. I had felt suddenly
embarrassed by the workaday plainness of the two women who shared my life with
me, and my handful of loyal friends. They were like coarse brown bread compared
to angel food cake. They were like flat homebrew beer compared to champagne.

I had been attracted to Paula all
right—from that moment. I could have convinced myself I was in love with her,
given time. Given enough time, time enough to hang myself with, I could even
have gradually forgotten my duty to go back and finish what I had begun with
the time storm. Maybe, I thought now, there had been the thought of not
returning in the back of my mind all along. So that when I raged at the
possibility of Paula not being able to get her army—and me—across to Europe
this fall, I was really raging against the delay of the excuse that being on
the other side of the Atlantic would have given me, the excuse to put off
escaping from Paula if and when word came that Porniarsk had succeeded in
accomplishing the very large task I had set him to do.

Yes, it had all been there, hidden
inside me, the impulse to throw away the golden light I had found for the
gaining of an enameled tin ring. How purely tin, I had finally discovered when
I had seen her in her tent that dawn, and she had directed me to sign the
letter she had written for me.

At that moment, the last piece of
her personal pattern had clicked into place for me; and I was forced to see her
as she innately was. I had thought that there must be at least a touch of
something Napoleonic under the display brightness that was her surface. After
all, she conquered the larger part of the North American continent. She had a
government, a standing army, and more accumulated resources than any other
half-dozen communities in the world combined. Above and beyond this, she had an
Alexandrian dream of conquering the whole world. There must, I thought, be
something there that was unique and powerful.

But there was not. When I had
stepped into her tent that morning, when I saw her appearance and the letter
she had for me to sign, her pattern had been completed for me; and I realized
that what I was looking at was an individual who momentarily, at least, had
gone irrational under the pressures of defeat and disappointment. With the
evidence of that irrationality, everything about her had fallen into place. She
was neither Napoleonic nor Alexandrian. She was a borderline psychotic who had
fallen into a chain of circumstances which allowed her to ride forward
triumphantly on the crest of a mounting wave—as long as everything went her
way. While luck was with her, she appeared to be inspired by genius. But when
things went wrong, she had 110 plan.

Literally.

Those who were on her side were
people. Those who were not were rag dolls to be thrown at the wall or have the
sawdust ripped out of them if she was in a temper. She could wade in blood up
to her elbows and it would not matter; because, of course, it was not real
blood. It could not be real blood, because it belonged to those who were
against her. That was the psychotic side of her; that was what had hit me like
a swinging barn door in the face when I had stepped into her tent.

All the communities who had given in
to her on her way here were composed of real people, of course. But Capitol had
chosen to refuse her. Therefore, its population were not real people and she
told her soldiers to kill them. But some of her soldiers had not distinguished
between those she wanted killed and those she did not, and so obviously those soldiers
were not real people either. Therefore, she would have Marc Despard find them
and kill them. But Marc Despard would know that the idea to kill had come from
her in the first place, which might make him think wrong things about
her—things no real person would think. Therefore, it should be arranged so that
it looked as if the soldiers' punishment were Marc's own idea, and then later
she would use some new soldiers to kill him for doing such a thing. Then
everyone would be happy again; because there would be nobody left but people
who agreed with her. Real people.