The marshals spread out quickly. Three of them rushed the goons that held Harry and took them into custody.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the U.S. attorney said. As she continued the litany, Victoria gave Harry a look of pure hate.
At last the smile he’d been holding back broke loose and filled his face.
Arleigh came over to his side. “You don’t know how difficult it was to do that work in only a couple of minutes,” he said. “And then I had to move the thing a couple of centimeters to find out where it was—where you were. Then I had to go over and pick up the marshals, only they weren’t ready yet.”
No one seemed to be paying much attention to them at the moment. The marshals were putting the cuffs on the goons.
“Never mind that now,” Harry said. “Just get us out of here.”
Arleigh’s eyes widened, then he shook his head. A moment later the room turned dark—just as Harry heard the U.S. attorney shout: “Stop!”
Then the room reassembled itself as the broad plaza in front of the Christian Science cathedral, complete with a bone-chilling wind scraping across Harry’s face and the Prudential building towering overhead.
Harry met with Elsie Hays a few days later in the regional office of the Bureau of Alien Technology.
“Wilkes still wants to charge you with tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, and smuggling,” Hays said.
“If it weren’t for me, she never would have been able to bring charges against anybody,” Harry said, feeling bold in the face of uncertainty.
“That’s what we told her,” Elsie said. “We explained how you provided the means to activate the transit device while it was sitting in Dickinson’s office.”
“Am I going to need a lawyer?”
“No, I don’t think so. She’s going to be busy enough taking care of Dickinson. He’s the one who’s going to need the lawyer—and for quite some time to come. Besides, we need your testimony to make the case against him, so you’re getting immunity.”
“And MRI?” Harry asked.
“Their stock is going through the basement even as we speak,” said Elsie. “And the SEC is considering suspending trade in it.”
“I guess without an import license, Mass-Rik Imports doesn’t have much of a future.”
“True,” Elsie said. “And that leaves us with one small unfinished piece of business.”
“The device.”
“The device. Except that it’s already too late.”
“Too late?”
“I already got rid of it.” Elsie’s face wrinkled up with concern, but Harry was quick to continue. “I gave it to the boys in the lab at MIT. I told them to move as much of their equipment as they could carry to someplace safe, then have a party with the thing.”
The concern in Elsie’s face was replaced with distress.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I suppose we can get Mr. Dean to retrieve the device for us—just like he did before.”
“I doubt it,” Harry said. “It’s probably not working by now. They said the first thing they were planning to do was strip it down to its component parts. By now, they’re probably up to their armpits in Rik technology.”
“That’s quite a dilemma,” Elsie said. “It’s not what our policy is at all.”
“No, it certainly isn’t,” Harry said. “But I think Victoria’s father was right. I don’t think your policy makes a whole lot of sense. One reason we weren’t ready for the 21st century is that too many people hid from reality. And Rik technology is reality. If we don’t prepare for it now, as fast as we can, we’re going to go the same way as Naverly Tol. And that means making the leap from where we are now to where the Riks are as quickly as we can.”
Harry reached into his pocket and switched his think-man on. The reassuring sound of the system booting up filled his ears. Elsie’s eyes had grown wide and her jaw seemed to hang just a little bit loose.
“Victoria and her father wanted to exploit the changes the Rik brought us,” Harry continued. “That’s bad enough, but what you’re trying to do is worse. You want to stop the change. And not only is that unwise, it’s damn near impossible. Next time, it won’t be Victoria’s father, but there will be a next time and it will be someone. If you aren’t ready for it when that happens, maybe we aren’t any better than the Tolians. But I, for one, don’t plan on spending my future working for chefs in the desert digging up grubs for the salad.”
He searched the menus for some good background music.
“Now, if we’re all finished, I’d like to get back home. I have a travel guide article I need to write.”