They were pleasant days. I rose early, joined Olivia for breakfast, walked the two blocks to the shop, and toiled until lunch, recording my results in a book not much different from the ones Maxoni had used a century earlier. This was not a world of rapid change.
Olivia would come by at noon or a little after, looking fresh and cool, and healthier now, with the Roman sun giving her face the color it had lacked back in Harrow. The basket on her arm would produce sandwiches, pizzas, fruit, a bottle of wine. I had a couple of chairs by this time, and we’d spread our lunch on the corner of my formidable workbench, with the enigmatic bulk of the coil lying before us like some jealous idol in need of placating.
Then an afternoon of cut and fit and note, with curious passersby pausing at the open door to look in and offer polite greetings and shy questionings. By the time a month had passed, I was deferred to by all the local denizens as a mad foreigner with more than a suggestion of the sorcerer about him. But they were friendly, often dropping off a casual gift of a bottle or a salami or a wedge of pungent cheese, with a flourish of Roman compliments. Each evening, by the time the sun had dropped behind the crooked skyline across the way, and the shop had faded into deep shadow hardly relieved by the single feeble lamp I had strung up, my eyes would be blurring, my head ringing, my legs aching from the hours of standing hunched over the table. I would solemnly close the door, attach the heavy padlock, ignoring the fact that the door was nothing but a few thin boards hung from a pair of rusted hinges held in place by bent nails. Then walk home past the shops and stalls, their owners busy closing up now, up the stairs to the flat for a quick bath in the rust-stained tub down the hall, then out with Olivia to the evening’s treat. Sitting at the wobbly tables on the tile floors, often on a narrow terrace crowded beside a busy street, we talked, watched the people and the night sky, then went back to part at the flat door—she to her room, I to mine. It was a curious relationship, perhaps—though at the time, it seemed perfectly natural. We were coconspirators, engaged in a strange quest, half-detectives, half researchers, set apart from the noisy, workaday crowd all around us by the fantastic nature of the wildly impractical quest we were embarked on. She, for reasons of romantic fulfillment, and I, driven by a compulsion to tear through the intangible prison walls that had been dropped around me.
My estimate of Olivia’s age had been steadily revised downward. At first, in the initial shock of seeing Mother Goodwill unmasked, I had mentally assigned her a virginal fortyishness. Later, bedizened in her harlot’s finery—and enjoying every minute of the masquerade—she had seemed younger; perhaps thirty-five, I had decided. Now, with the paint scrubbed away, her hair cut and worn in a casual Roman style, her complexion warm and glowing from the sun and the walks, her figure as fine as ever in the neat, inexpensive clothes she had bought in the modest shops near our flat, I realized with a start one day, watching her scatter bread crumbs for the pigeons behind the shop and laughing at their clumsy waddle, that she was no more than in her middle twenties.
She looked up and caught me staring at her.
“You’re a beautiful girl, Olivia,” I said—in a wondering tone, I’m afraid. “What ever got you off on that Mombi kick?”
She looked startled, then smiled—a merrier expression than the Lady Sad-eyes look she used to favor.
“You’ve guessed it,” she said, sounding mischievous. “The old witch in the Sorceress of Oz—”
“Yes, but why?”
“I told you: my business. Who’d patronize a Wise Woman without warts on her chin?”
“Sure—but why haven’t you married?” I started to deliver the old saw about there being plenty of nice young men, but the look on her face saved me from that banality.
“Okay, none of my business,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to get personal, Olivia…” I trailed off, and we finished our walk in a silence which, if not grim, was certainly far from companionable.
Three weeks more, and I had assembled a formidable compilation of data—enough, I told Olivia when she came to the shop at ten P.M. to see what had kept me, to warrant starting construction of the secondary circuits—the portion of the shuttle mechanism with which I was most familiar.
“The big job,” I said, “was to calibrate the coil—find out what kind of power supply it called for, what sort of field strength it developed. That part’s done. Now all I have to do is set up the amplifying and focussing apparatus—”
“You make it sound so simple, Brion—and so safe.”
“I’m trying to convince myself,” I admitted. “It’s a long way from simple. It’s a matter of trying to equate a complicated assemblage of intangible forces; a little bit like balancing a teacup on a stream of water, except that I have a couple of dozen teacups, and a whole fire department’s worth of waterworks—and if I threw full power to the thing without the proper controls…”
“Then what?”
“Then I’d set up an irreversible cataclysm—of any one of a hundred possible varieties. A titanic explosion, that keeps on exploding: an uncontrolled eruption of matter from another continuum, like a volcano pouring out of the heart of a sun—or maybe an energy drain like Niagara, that would suck the heat away from this spot, freeze the city solid in a matter of minutes, put the whole planet under an ice cap in a month. Or—”
“ ’Tis sufficient. I understand. These are fearsome forces you toy with, Brion.”
“Don’t worry—I won’t pour the power into it until I know what I’m doing. There are ways of setting up auto-timed cutoffs for any test I run—and I’ll be using trickle power for a long time yet. The disasters that made the Blight, happened because the Maxonis and Cocinis of those other A-lines weren’t forewarned. They set her up and let her rip. The door to Hell has well-oiled hinges.”
“How long—before you’ll finish?”
“A few days. There isn’t a hell of a lot to the shuttle. I’ll build a simple box—out of pine slabs, if I have to—just something to keep me and the mechanism together. It’ll be a big, clumsy setup, of course—not compact like the Imperial models—but it’ll get me there, as long as the power flows. The drain isn’t very great. A stack of these six volt cells will give me all the juice I need to get me home.”
“And if the Xonijeel were right,” she said softly, “if the world you seek lies not where you expect—what then?”
“Then I’ll run out of steam and drop into the Blight, and that’ll be the end of another nut,” I said harshly. “And a good thing too—if I imagined the whole Imperium—”
“I know you didn’t, Brion. But if, somehow, something has… gone wrong…”
“I’ll worry about that when I get to it,” I cut her off. I’d been plowing along, wrapping myself up in my occupational therapy. I wasn’t ready yet to think about the thousand gloomy possibilities I’d have to face when I stepped into my crude makeshift and threw the switch.
It was three evenings later, and Olivia and I were sitting at a window table in one of our regular haunts, having a small glass of wine and listening to the gentle night sounds of a city without neon or internal combustion. She’d been coming by the shop for me every evening lately; a habit that I found myself looking forward to.
“It won’t be long now,” I told her. “You saw the box. Just bolted together out of wood, but good enough. The coil’s installed. Tomorrow I’ll lay out my control circuitry—”
“Brion…” her fingers were on my arm. “Look there!”
I twisted, caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall, dark figure in a long, full-skirted coat with the collar turned up, pushing past through the sparse pedestrian traffic.