It took me four hours of shifting sharp-edged rock fragments before I pushed aside the last slab and poked my head out into the open air beside the old stone wall rising up from a tangle of untrimmed shrubbery. I climbed out and breathed some fresh night air and tried to shake off the feeling that I was dreaming the whole thing. The Occam principle told me that the simplest explanation was that I was strapped into a jacket in some quiet rest home, living out a full-fledged delusional system. But if I was dreaming it, the dream was still on. Ten feet from the hole I'd crawled out of, I found a set of booted footprints which led a few yards to the imprint of a set of skids. That would be where the major's shuttle had been parked—if there had been a major, and he had a shuttle, and it had been parked.
And while I was still following that one through, I got the proof I'd been wanting: The man called Lujac stepped out from black shadows and for the second time I felt the bone-crushing agony of the nerve-gun sweep over me.
I came to lying on the floor in front of the control panel of a shuttle with my arms clamped behind me. It wasn't Bayard's machine, but there was no mistaking the sweep of unfamiliar dials and the big pink-glowing screen, or the hum that went between my bones until it rose out of the audible range. On the screen, things were happening. The old walls rising on the left of the screen flickered and sank down into heaps of rubble, with weeds poking out from between the stone slabs. The weeds withered and the rubble blackened into cokelike ash, then glowed blue and slumped into puddled lava. The river was rising, it welled out over its banks and became an oily black sea that stretched away to a row of volcanic cones that shed red light on the far horizon. Green slime crawled up on the rocks that showed above the surface. It changed into moss that grew into toadstools fifty feet high that jostled and thrust for footing. The water receded, and new plants swarmed up out of the sea; a vine-thing like writhing snakes threw itself over the jungle and tiny black plants sprang up along its tendrils, eating at it like acid. Broad leaves poked out from under the rotted vegetation and wrapped themselves around the black vine-eaters. I saw all this through a sort of purple haze of pain that did nothing to brighten the nightmare.
Animal life appeared: Strange creatures with deformed limbs and misshapen bodies like melting wax statues posed among the cancerous plants. The leaves grew huge and curled and fell away, and scaly, deformed trees rose up, and all the while the creatures didn't move. They swelled, twisted, flowed into new shapes. A forty-foot lizard was locked in the clutch of a plant with rubbery, spike-studded branches that wound around the bossed hide until the hide grew its own spikes that impaled the thorn tree, and it shriveled and fell away and the lizard dwindled into a crouching frog-thing that bloated into a stranded tadpole the size of a cow and sank into the ooze.
For a while, night glowed like day under a radioactive moon; and then the ground dissolved and the shuttle was hanging in black space, with the glare of the sun coming from behind to illuminate the undersides of the dust and rock fragments that arched up and over in a pale halo that must have dwarfed Saturn's rings. Then land appeared again: a dusty plain where small plants sprouted and grew thicker and turned into tangled underbrush dotted with small, cancerous trees. They grew taller and developed normal bark and green leaves, and slowly the atmosphere cleared and the moon was riding high and white in a dark sky full of luminous clouds.
Lujac switched off and the sound of the drive dwindled down to a low growl and died. He pointed the nerve-gun at me, gestured toward the exit. I made it to my feet, stepped out onto a trimmed green lawn beside a high stone wall that was the same one we'd started from. But now there was ivy growing there, and lighted windows, up high. There were flowerbeds along the base, and a tended path led off down the slope toward the moonlit water of the river below. The trees were gone, but other trees grew in places where there had been no trees. Across the river, the lights of a town glowed, not quite where the town had been before.
We went along the path to a broad, paved walk, rounded the front of the building. Light blazed from a wide entry with glass doors set in the old stone. Two sharp-looking troopers in white jodhpurs snapped to and passed us into a high marble hall. Nobody seemed to think there was anything exceptional about a prisoner in cuffs being gun-walked here. We went along a corridor to an office where neat secretaries sat at typewriters with only three rows of keys. A lean, worried-looking man exchanged a few words with Lujac, and passed us into an inner office where Major Renata sat at a desk, talking into a recorder microphone. He twitched his sharp mouth into a foxy smile when he saw me and motioned Lujac out of the room.
This wasn't the same man I'd known back at Key West, I saw that now. It was his twin brother, better fed, better bred, but with the same kind of mind behind the same sly face. Not a man I'd ever really take a liking to.
"You led me quite a chase, Mr. Curlon," he said. "It's unfortunate that events fell out as they did; I had hoped to handle matters more subtly. You understand that I require certain information from you as the first order of business. Let's begin with the matter of Colonel Bayard's involvement. When did he first contact you, and what was his proposition?"
"Where is he now?"
"Never mind that!" Renata rapped. "Don't be confused by any false sense of misguided loyalty, Mr. Curlon. You owe him nothing! Now—answer my questions fully and promptly, and I give you my assurance that you will be in no way held accountable for his crimes."
"Why did you sink my boat?"
"It was necessary. You will be reimbursed, Mr. Curlon. As a matter of fact, you are an extremely lucky man. When this matter is finished up to the satisfaction of, ah, Imperial authorities, you'll find yourself in a most comfortable situation for the rest of your life."
"Why me?"
"I'm acting on instructions, Mr. Curlon. As to precisely why you were selected for this opportunity, I can't say. Merely accept your good fortune and give me your cooperation. Now, kindly begin by telling me precisely how Bayard contacted you and what he told you of his plans."
"Why not ask him?"
"Mr. Curlon, please limit your comments to answering questions for the present. Later, all your questions will be answered—within the limits of Imperial security requirements, of course."
I nodded. I was in no hurry. What came next probably wouldn't be as much fun.
"I know about your good intentions," I said. "I've met your lieutenant, the fellow with the nerve-gun."
"It was necessary to insure there'd be no unfortunate accident, Mr. Curlon. You're a powerful man, possibly excessively combative. There was no time for explanations. And you've suffered no permanent injury. Oh, by the way: where did Bayard secrete the shuttle?"
"You mean the amphibious car he picked me up in?"
"Yes. It's Imperial property, of course. By helping me to recover it, you'll be reducing the charges against Bayard."
"He must have parked it out of sight."
"Mr. Curlon. . . " Renata's face tightened. "Perhaps you don't understand the seriousness of your situation. Cooperate, and your rewards will be great. Fail to cooperate, and you'll live to regret it."
"It seems you're always offering me a proposition, and I'm always turning it down," I said. "Maybe you and I just weren't meant to get together, Renata."
He took a breath as though he were about to yell, but instead he thumbed a button on his desk, savagely. The door opened and a couple of the armed troops were there.
"Place this subject in Class Three quarters, MS block," he snapped. He favored me with a look like a poison dart. "Perhaps a few days of solitary contemplation will assist you in seeing the proper course," he snapped, and went back to his paper work.
They marched me along halls, down steps into less ornately decorated halls, down more steps, along a passage with no pretensions of elegance at all, stopped before a heavy iron-bound door. A boy with blond fuzz on his chin opened up. I stepped through into the dim light of a shielded bulb and the door closed behind me with a solid sound. I looked around and put my head back and laughed.
I was back in the underground room I'd started from all those hours before.
It was the same, and yet not quite the same. The floor was swept, and the litter of dust and rusty junk was gone. But the tapestry was still on the wall, more complete now than it had been.
I prowled around the room, but aside from a chair and a cot, I didn't find anything that hadn't been there before. I rapped on the walls, but no sliding panels opened up on hidden stairways with daylight showing at the top of them. I looked at the tapestry, but it didn't tell me anything. The central figure was a tall, red-bearded man with a bow slung at his back, a sword at his side. His horse was pawing the air with one hoof and the hounds were leaping up, as if they were eager to be off. I knew how they felt. I was ready to travel myself. But this time there was no convenient tunnel waiting to be dug out. It was too bad Renata hadn't tossed Bayard in the same VIP cell. Maybe he'd have had another trick ring up his sleeve. I looked at the one wedged on my little finger and felt a prickling along my scalp line at the thoughts I was thinking. I wondered if I was missing some angle that was too obvious to see, but if I was, it was still invisible.
I pushed the stone and got ready for nothing to happen. For five seconds, nothing did. Then air whooshed around me and the shuttle winked into existence, with the door open and the soft light gleaming from inside.
I stepped into the shuttle and sat in the chair facing all those dials, packed in the panel like chrome and glass anchovies. I tried to remember which ones Bayard had used, and a trickle of sweat went down the side of my face when I thought about all the things that could go wrong if I made a mistake. But thinking at a time like this was a mistake. It would be too bad if I cross-controlled and stalled out in the middle of the solid rock, but chances like this didn't come along every day. I pushed the half-phase switch and the walls faded to electric blue. The first lever I pushed did nothing that was visible. I worked another one and had a short heart attack when the shuttle started to sink through the floor. I moved it the other way and moved up like a balloon rising through dense blue fog. Seconds later, I popped through the surface. I was behind a dense clump of trees, just a few feet from the spot where I'd seen the runner-marks. Just a few feet, and at the same time, in some way I wasn't ready to try to put into words yet, as far away as you could get. And that brought me to the question of my next move.
For the moment, I was in the clear. If my operating the shuttle had registered on any meters in the vicinity, it wasn't apparent. The obvious thing for me to do was to return the machine to half-phase, get off the premises as fast as I could, and forget about a stranger named Bayard and his story of a probability crisis coming that would turn the world into bubbling chaos.
On the other hand, I was sitting on a device which, according to its previous owner, was something out of the ordinary, even among the men in the white Imperial uniforms. And those same high-powered operators owed me a few things, including one boat of which I'd been rather fond. I had an advantage now; they didn't know where the shuttle was, where I was. And I could watch them, without being seen.
There was just one catch: It meant operating a machine that was more sophisticated than a jet fighter, and potentially more dangerous. I'd watched Bayard at the controls; I had a rough idea of how he had maneuvered it. The big white lever marked DR-MAIN was the one that started everything working. It had a nice feel to it under my hand: smooth and cool, a lever that wanted to be pulled.
I was still sitting there, looking into the screen and thinking these thoughts when lights came on over a side entry fifty feet along the wall. The door opened and Major Renata stepped out, carrying a briefcase and talking over his shoulder to a harassed-looking adjutant with a notebook. My reaction was automatic: I punched the half-phase switch and the scene faded out to the transparent blue that meant I was invisible.
A big, boxy staff-car pulled up along the drive and Renata and four others got in and the car pulled away. I remembered the controls Bayard had used to maneuver on half-phase. I tried them; the shuttle glided away as smoothly as oil spreading out on water. I followed the car down the winding drive through parklike grounds, past a gate where a sentry yawned as I slid by two feet from him, across a bridge and through the village. On the open highway, he opened up, but I had no trouble staying with him.
I trailed the car for half an hour, until it pulled through a gate in a wire fence around a small grassed airstrip. Renata got out and his aides scuttled around, readying a big, fabric-covered prop-driven airplane with wings the size of barn roofs. There were handshakes and some heel-clicking from a couple of Germanic-looking fellows; then Renata and one other climbed in and the plane taxied out and headed into the wind.
I'd spent the time looking over the controls, and was ready when the plane revved up and started its run. It took me three tries to match my rate of ascent to the airplane's, but I managed it, then maneuvered into a spot a quarter of a mile astern. So far, it had been easy; all I'd had to do was steer. For all I knew, the instruments were indicating ten different critical overloads, but I'd worry about that when I had to. The theory of a shuttle was a complex thing, but straight-line operation was simple enough.
It was a three-hour flight over rolling farmland straight into the rising sun, then out across water that had to be the English Channel. The plane began letting down toward a city that had to be London, circled a field a few miles out from the center of the city, landed and taxied up to a small operations building with rbaf-northolt lettered across it. I had a bad few seconds when the pavement washed up around me like muddy water, but I managed to level the shuttle out a foot above the pavement.
Renata climbed down, and a car pulled out and collected him. By now I was getting used to the capabilities of my little machine; I didn't bother with the gate, just slid across through the fence and fell in behind the car as it picked up speed along a broad parkway that led straight toward the towers of the city.
It was a fast twenty-minute trip. Renata's car, with a few touches of a siren that sounded like a ghost wailing through the audio pickup, cleared traffic, making speed through narrow, twisting streets, crossed the Thames on a bridge with a fine view of the House of Commons, swung into a stone-walled courtyard behind a big, grim fortress. Renata stepped out and headed for a small door under a big wrought-iron lantern, and I followed him through the wall. The sun winked out and I was in a wide, well-lit corridor lined with open doors where people in uniform did what people do in government offices. Renata took a sudden corner, and I over-corrected, found myself in solid rock that must have been five feet thick. By the time I'd maneuvered back into the open, he was out of sight.
For the next hour, I cruised through the building like a mechanized ghost, looking into big offices with ranks of filing cabinets and desks under banks of fluorescents, into smaller offices with deep carpets and solemn-looking bureaucrats admiring their reflections in the picture windows, into storerooms, a message center. I tried the lower levels, found dead-record storage, a still, some grim-looking cells. There was nothing for me there. I took a shortcut through a wall and was in an eight-foot-square room with rusty manacles and a hole in the floor for plumbing. It had everything a medieval dungeon needed except a couple of human skeletons chained to the wall.
I slid through the wall and was in a hollow in the masonry with rough steps leading up. It didn't look like a much-traveled way. I followed the route, found an intersecting passage above. It led to another. The walls of the old building were riddled with hideaways, it seemed. I found exits into a dozen rooms, a hidden door into the gardens at the bottom. But none of this was getting me any closer to Renata.
Back on the upper level, I checked out more VIP offices, and in the tenth or twelfth one found my quarry, sitting on the edge of a chair across from a big-shouldered, gray-haired man with career military written all over him. He didn't look pleased.
". . . difficult to explain to the Baron just how it was this subject was able to appear and disappear at will," he was growling. "No one outside Operation Rosebush was aware of the existence of the sub-HQ at the chateau. Yet Bayard was found there; and later, the subject pops up—from nowhere! This is an unacceptable report, Major." He slammed a piece of paper to the desk in front of him and stared at Renata with less than a friendly look.
"My report is factual, Colonel," the little man said. He didn't seem to be much intimidated by the eyebrow treatment. "The fact that I have no hypothesis to offer in explanation doesn't alter my observations."
"Tell me more about the security arrangements you made for holding the subject," the colonel rapped.
"The man is under close guard in a maximum security cell under the chateau," Renata said crisply. "I'll stake my career on that."
"Better not," the colonel said.
Renata shifted in the chair. "Would the colonel care to explain?"
"He's gone. Half an hour after your departure, a routine check showed the cell empty."
"Impossible! I—"
"You're a fool, Renata," the colonel snapped. "The man had already demonstrated that he had unusual resources at his command. Yet you persisted in dealing with him in a routine way."
"I followed service procedures to the letter," Renata came back. Then a thought hit him. "What about Colonel Bayard? He's not. . . ?"
"He's here. I've taken the precaution of cuffing him to his bedstead, and posting two armed guards in the room with him."
"He must be questioned! His conditioning will have to be broken—"
"I'll make that decision, Major! Bayard enjoys a rather special status with top headquarters—"
"Break him, Colonel! He'll confirm what I've told you—and I think he can also offer an explanation of this subject's apparently miraculous powers!"
The colonel picked up a cigar, rolled it between his fingers, then snapped it in two.
"Renata, what the devil is behind this? What's Baron van Roosevelt planning? How does Bayard tie in—and just how much bearing does Richthofen's sudden illness have to do with it?"
"I'm not at liberty to discuss Baron van Roosevelt's plans," Renata said, and returned the colonel's look with interest.
"I'm still your superior officer," the colonel barked. "I demand to know what's going on under my nose!"
"I showed you my report out of courtesy," Renata stood. "I'll make further report to Baron General van Roosevelt, and no one else."
"We'll see about that, Major!" As the colonel jumped to his feet, a red telephone on his desk clanged. He grabbed it up, listened. His expression changed. He looked around the room.
"Right," he said. "I understand."
I moved the shuttle closer, until half of the desk was inside with me, turned up the audio to maximum. Among the crackling and hissing static, I caught the words from the telephone:
". . . as though you suspected nothing! It will take us another thirty seconds to bring the suppressor into focus. . . "
That was enough for me. I backed off, sent the shuttle out through the side wall, shot through another office where a fat man was kissing a girl, on out through the exterior wall and was hovering over a city park, with hedges, a fountain, winding paths. There was a sharp crackling from the panel, and all my meters jumped at once. The hum of the drive faltered, took on a harsh note. I dropped the shuttle to ground level in a hurry; a power failure in mid-air would be messy. When I tried to head across the park, the shuttle moved six feet and halted with a jolt. The smell of hot wiring was strong now. Flames spouted from behind the panel. I slammed the drive switch off; I was caught but there still might be time to accomplish some denial to the enemy. I switched to full phase, and the color flooded back into the scene on the screen. It took me another five seconds to cycle the door open, jump clear, and thumb the ring switch. The shuttle wavered and faded from view, and dry leaves swirled where it had been a moment before. Then there were white uniforms all around me, closing in with drawn nerve-guns.
The building looked different in normal light. My escort walked me along a white-floored hall, up a wide staircase to a big white door flanked by sentries.
Everything in sight was smooth and efficient, but I could feel the tension in the air: a sort of wartime grimness, with lots of hurrying feet in the middle distance. And in the midst of all that spit-and-polish, a curious anomaly caught my eye: a patch of what looked like yellow toadstools, growing in a corner where the marble floor met the wall.
A fellow with a bundle of silver braid looped under his epaulet popped out of the door and we went in. It was a big office with dark-paneled walls and gold-framed paintings of tough-looking old birds in stiff uniform collars, and a desk the size of a bank vault. I looked at the man sitting behind it and met a pair of eyes that literally blazed with power.
"Well, Mr. Curlon," he said in a voice like the dirge notes on an organ. "We meet at last."
He was a big man, black-haired, with a straight nose and a firm mouth and eyes with a strange, dark shine. He motioned with one finger and the men who had brought me in disappeared. He stood and came around the desk and looked me up and down. He was as tall as I was, which made him over six three, and about the same weight. Under the smooth gray uniform he wore, there was plenty of muscle. Not the draft-horse kind; more like an elegant tyrannosaurus in tailored silk.
"Major Renata made a number of mistakes," he said. "But in the end—you're here, safe and sound. That's all that counts now."
"Who are you?" I asked him.
"I am Baron General van Roosevelt, Chief of Imperial Intelligence—Acting Chief, I should say, during the temporary indisposition of Baron Richthofen." He gave me one of those from-the-neck-up bows and a smile that was like the sun coming through a black cloud. He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed.
"But between you and myself, Mr. Curlon, formalities are unnecessary." He looked me in the eye, and the smile was gone, but a merry glint still burned there. "I need you, Curlon. And you need me. Between us, we hold the destiny of a world—of many worlds—between our fingers. But I'm being obscure—and I don't mean to be." He waved me to a chair, went to a liquor cabinet and poured two drinks, handed me one, and sat behind the desk.
"Where to begin?" he said. "Suppose I start by assuming that Colonel Bayard has told you nothing—that you have guessed nothing. Listen, then, and I'll tell you of the crisis we face now, you and I. . . "