“How did you do it?” Shain demanded.
“We searched the city. I found him myself, and killed him. It was your wish.”
“You did well. Tonight we shall celebrate your victory... and... and the death of the best of my three sons, the death of the only one fit to be Emperor.”
Always, in a limited world, the machines grew more powerful. Machines were a form of inbreeding. Man turned his attentions onto his own pleasures and comforts and the machines grew, giving sage electronic attention to the complexities of equations with a thousand variables. And man grew softer within his limitations.
But now, with multiple realities waiting to be merged, the machines were of little help. Properly guided, the machines had indicated the possibility of multiple space-time frames, had assisted in finding a way to reach them. But once reached, it was once again up to man to work with hands and eyes and heart to achieve that unity which would weld twenty-five conditional realities into one world.
The Agents were recruited from those who, in less pressing times, would be termed malcontents, would be difficult to control, manage. All of them were, in one sense atavistic.
The Agent was man. His tools were provided by the machines. And no tools in history equaled the golden pyramidal agent ships. They were the extension of the Agent, the way the stone ax fitted the horny palm of the Neanderthal. On SL drive they could span the galaxy in a mouth. The webbed forces, interlocked and convoluted like the surface of a brain, shimmered constantly along the five planes of the ships. They were very close to being invulnerable. They could dive into a planet crust, protecting the Agent in much the way an insect would be protected while held in the palm of an iron fist as the fist was driven into loam. They could move in any direction except time, and at speeds beyond contractive effects. Yet it was the Man and not the Ship.
Calna entered Era 4 at the galactic rim. She was lost. It took long hours of feeding data into the computors to arrive at exact position. Since exact position was only exact in relation to any known object, she calculated her speed in relation to Zeran’s sun in the invisible distance. She established course corrections. The ship flickered once and was gone. Twenty hours later the alarm brought her out of deep sleep a hundred million miles from Zeran. She had set the protective web so that light was bent around the tiny ship. She risked observation, in three-second intervals, returning to objective invisibility each time. She knew that she could be detected only by a chance intersection of her path from the galactic rim. It was a risk she had to take.
She stretched the weakness of sleep from her body and tried to think clearly. She was afraid. She suspected weakness in herself that implied an eventual failure. The rescue of Andro was, in Sarrz’ terms, weakness. Emotionality. In all probability it would make her reactions predictable. And so she had to fight for a cold objectivity. What made it most difficult was that thoughts of Andro made her heart pound and her face flush. Agents were taught to consider the peoples of backward frames as pawns to be moved at will, sacrificed for the sake of socionetic gambits. But she thought of Andro in the way of a woman rather than an agent. Yet, even if she were to rescue Andro and take him out of reach of the Field Teams who were undoubtedly waiting, what would he think of her? What would he see in this strong-bodied woman of a more mature culture? This woman with the grey-bright eyes and the hair like ripened grain in a September sun.
She remembered the harsh and shameful joy with which she had seen the death of the woman, Daylya whose beauty had been like a warm cry in the night.
Andro was, above all else, a strong proud man. He would not react kindly to being aided by a woman who, in all except brute muscle, equaled or surpassed his own strength.
The possibility that they had already killed him was like the first rasp of the knifeblade against her throat. She knew how she would plan it were she in charge of those attempting to intercept her. She would make the path to Andro’s black and quiet tomb very simple. And escape impossible. By a focus of power five other Agent ships could hold her ship in stasis. She sensed that they were waiting.
She knew the exact location of Andro’s body. It was in a crypt in the small room of the highest tower in a frozen city abandoned for half of time. The body would be hard and tough as granite. If there were some way to snatch it up on the run...
Anything could be transferred from planet to ship providing the proper field were built around the item to he transferred. A field was created by a tiny generator no larger than a plum. It could he set to create a field a foot across, or five miles across. But it had to be placed in position.
The item could he received inside the ship, or received within any given range of the ship She made her plan. If was dependent on deceiving them through apparently descending to land near the crypt. Their reaction times would be trigger-fast. It would be close, and with no possibility of fumbling.
She boldly dropped the ship’s screens and streaked toward the dark side of Zeran. She came down through the blackness with her view screens adjusted so that the ruined city stood out as though bathed in a great light. The adjusted generator lay in the small disposal port. The port switch was hooked in with the computor which in turn was hooked up with the aiming screen. She waited without breathing, her hands on the lower panel, fingertips moist on the controls. The interval of drop was to be twenty seconds. The instant she heard the click, she chopped the ship into SL drive and winked away into space She felt for a fractional part of a second the drag of the focused power of the other Agent ships. It was as though, for that moment, her ship flew through molten lead. For the moment there was nothing for her to do. She had set the ship to come out of SL at exactly twenty seconds from the moment of the drop. The port was ready and skin-gravity set to hold any air that would escape, heat screen ready to combat the cold of space.
She put her hand on the main port control. The moment she felt the tiny, twisting dislocation that meant the end of SL, she tripped the control and the port yawned. The receiving area was set outside the open port. With the suddenness of an explosion the entire top of the tower appeared in the receiving area, swung over and thudded against the ship. Using the top panel she slipped ship and tower into Era 20 to give her a few more moments of grace.
The rough stone of the tower was flat against the open port. Using the hand blower she crumbled a hole through the stone, exposing one corner of the black crypt. She widened the hole, caught the crypt with the focused beam of the attractor, angled it through the port. Ignoring the crumbled stone that had drifted in, she shut the port and tried to flee.
The ship did not move. She cried out, and fought the controls. Her hands flashed across the panels as she tried combinations of controls. Higher and higher rose the thin whine of the ship’s screens, fighting the holding force. She applied all power to a straight SL drive, feeling the heat rising within the ship. The ship grew hotter and she waited, her jaw set, until she could scent the acrid odor of the scorched tendrils of her hair. Then, with one fast motion, she cut off everything in the ship. The pursuers were in the position of a man who runs to break down a door when the door opens just before his shoulder touches it. Calna’s ship gave a tiny lurch and she was ready to take advantage of it. She slipped to Era 1, and immediately to Era 25, and applied full SL drive the moment the new frame had been attained.
The ship whipped off into freedom, and she laughed aloud with a note of hysteria. She used a completely random pattern of slip and direction, taking no chances, working for long hours on the twin panels until she knew that pursuit was impossible. She knew the danger of awakening Andro in too unfamiliar an environment. The chance of madness was too great.