“Notice the pattern,” Bayard said. “The big figure in the center is wearing a cloak trimmed in ermine tails—a symbol of royalty. My guess is that’s Richard himself.” He looked around the room, bent and picked up the genouillère. The metal was dark with age, but there was no rust on it now.
“What happened here had an effect on the fabric of the continuum itself,” Bayard said. “Reality is being reshaped as the Net tensions resolve themselves. There are fantastic powers in balance, Mr. Curlon, ready for a touch to send them tumbling one way—or another.” His eyes held on mine. “Someone is working to upset that balance. I think we can take it as axiomatic that we must oppose him.”
As he finished speaking, a bell clanged from the shuttle. Bayard leaped to the panel, hit the switches.
“There’s a tracer locked on us at close range!” he snapped. “They followed us here! The energy discharge must have given them a fix to home on.” The familiar humming sound started up, but this time it had a groaning note, as if it was working under an overload. I smelled hot insulation, and smoke curled up from behind the panel.
“Too late,” Bayard said. “He’s holding a suppressor beam on us. We can’t shift out of identity with this line. It looks like we’re trapped!”
A deep thrumming sound started up somewhere. I could feel it vibrating through the floor of the room. Dust floated from the cracks in the walls, rose from the floor. A metal ornament made a soft thump falling off the bench.
“He’s right above us,” Bayard said. “He doesn’t have half-phase capability; he’ll use a force probe to dig his way down to us.”
“All right,” I said. “Let him. Two against two is fair odds.”
“I can’t take the chance,” Bayard said. “It’s not just you and me—it’s the machine. It’s unique, a special model. And if what I’m beginning to suspect is true, letting it fall into Renata’s hands would be a major disaster.”
“Renata?” I started to ask all the questions, but Bayard pulled a ring from his finger, handed it to me. “This is a control device governing the half-phase unit. With it, you can hold the machine clear until he’s gone. You’ll know, when the red light goes off—”
“Where will you be?”
“I’ll meet him, try to steer him away from you. If he has any suspicion of what’s happened, he’ll be able to detect the shuttle, and grapple it.”
“I’ll stay, Bayard,” I said. “I have a bone to pick with Mr. Renata.”
“No—there’s no time to argue! Do as I ask, Curlon, or he’ll take both of us!” He didn’t wait for an answer; he stepped out of the shuttle and the entry snapped shut behind him. His image appeared on the screen.
“Now, Mr. Curlon!” his voice came through the speaker. “Or it will be too late for both of us!”
A crack had already appeared in the wall he was facing. The time for talk had all run out. I pressed the stone set in the ring and heard a soft click! and felt space twist between my bones.
A soft, high-pitched whine started up, went up and off into the supersonic. Bayard’s outline turned transparent blue, like the wall behind him. To him, the shuttle was invisible now.
“Good man,” he said. His voice had a whispery quality but it was clear enough. He turned and faced the wall. A section of it bulged and fell in. A beam of dazzling light played through the opening. A man stepped through. It was Renata, the foxy man I’d left unconscious on the dock at Key West a couple of short lifetimes ago; there was no doubt about it: the sharp eyes, the narrow jaw, the slick black hair. But now he was in a swank white uniform that he wore as if he’d been born to it. But it was his face that bothered me most. I’d hit him hard, but there was no mark on him to prove it. He looked around the room, then at Bayard.
“You seem to be a long way from home, Colonel,” he said, in a casual drawling voice—nothing like Renata’s throaty whine.
“About the same as you. Major,” Bayard said.
“Why did you come here—to this particular spot? And how did you get in? I see no entrance from the outside—other than the one I used.”
Bayard glanced at the broken wall. “Your tactics seem a little rough for use in an interdicted area. Major. Are you acting on orders—or have you gone in business for yourself?”
“I’m afraid for the present you’ll answer the questions, Colonel. You’re under arrest, of course. Where have you left your shuttle?”
“I lent it to a friend.”
“Don’t fence with me, Bayard. It dropped completely off my screens less than half a minute ago—just as it did earlier, in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems you have equipment in your possession unknown to Imperial Intelligence. I shall have to ask you to lead me to it.”
“I can’t help you.”
“You realize I must use force, if necessary. I can’t permit the subject Curlon to slip out of my hands.”
“I’m afraid you already have.”
The little man half turned his head. “Lujac,” he called. Another man came in through the hole in the wall. It was the fellow who’d used the nerve-gun on me. He had it in his hand now.
“Level three,” the major said. Lujac raised the gun and pressed the firing stud on the side. Bayard staggered and doubled over.
“Enough,” the little man said.
“Colonel, you’re in considerable difficulty: absence from your post of duty without leave, interference with an official Net operation, and so on. All this will be dealt with in due course—but if you’ll cooperate with me now, I think I can promise to make it easier for you.”
“You don’t know… what you’re doing,” Bayard got the words out. It wasn’t easy; I knew what he was going through then. “There are forces… involved…”
“Never mind what’s involved,” the major snapped. “I don’t mean to let the man slip through my fingers. Speak up, now! How did you do it? Where is he hidden?”
“You’re wasting… your breath,” Bayard said. “You know damned well you can’t break my conditioning. Face it, Major; he got away from you. What are you going to do about it?”
“Don’t be a fool, Bayard! You know the Imperium faces a crisis—and you’re well aware that I’m acting on orders from a very high ranking official! You’re throwing away not only your career, but your life, if you oppose me! Now—I want an explanation of why you came to this spot, what you expected to accomplish here—and where you’ve sent the man I want!”
“I’ll bet you do,” Bayard said. “Try and get it.”
“Let me deal with the swine,” Lujac said, and took a quick step forward, but Renata waved him back.
“I’m taking you in to Stockholm Zero-zero,” he told Bayard. “You’ll face a firing squad for this night’s work—I promise you that!” He put cuffs on him and they went out through the hole in the wall. Half a minute later the red telltale light went off, meaning Renata’s shuttle was gone. I flipped the switch that shifted me back to full-phase identity, waited for the color to come back into things, then stepped out and switched the machine back to half-phase. It shimmered like a mirage and winked out. The air was still swirling from that when the tunnel mouth exploded. When the dust cleared, it was packed solid with broken rock. The major had taken the precaution of closing the route behind him.
Chapter Four
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.