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 von 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 vent 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 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 the 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…”
Chapter Five
“The continuum of multi-ordinal reality is a complex structure, but for purposes of simplicity we can consider it as a bundle of lines stretching from the remote past toward the unimaginable future. Each line is a world, a universe, with its own infinitude of space and stars, separated from its sister worlds by the uncrossable barriers of energy that we know as entropy.