I was back in the underground room I’d started from all those hours before.
It was the same, and yet not quite the same. The floor was swept, and the litter of dust and rusty junk was gone. But the tapestry was still on the wall, more complete now than it had been.
I prowled around the room, but aside from a chair and a cot, I didn’t find anything that hadn’t been there before. I rapped on the walls, but no sliding panels opened up on hidden stairways with daylight showing at the top of them. I looked at the tapestry, but it didn’t tell me anything. The central figure was a tall, red-bearded man with a bow slung at his back, a sword at his side. His horse was pawing the air with one hoof and the hounds were leaping up, as if they were eager to be off. I knew how they felt. I was ready to travel myself. But this time there was no convenient tunnel waiting to be dug out. It was too bad Renata hadn’t tossed Bayard in the same VIP cell. Maybe he’d have had another trick ring up his sleeve. I looked at the one wedged on my little finger and felt a prickling along my scalp line at the thoughts I was thinking. I wondered if I was missing some angle that was too obvious to see, but if I was, it was still invisible.
I pushed the stone and got ready for nothing to happen. For five seconds, nothing did. Then air whooshed around me and the shuttle winked into existence, with the door open and the soft light gleaming from inside.
I stepped into the shuttle and sat in the chair facing all those dials, packed in the panel like chrome and glass anchovies. I tried to remember which ones Bayard had used, and a trickle of sweat went down the side of my face when I thought about all the things that could go wrong if I made a mistake. But thinking at a time like this was a mistake. It would be too bad if I cross-controlled and stalled out in the middle of the solid rock, but chances like this didn’t come along every day. I pushed the half-phase switch and the walls faded to electric blue. The first lever I pushed did nothing that was visible. I worked another one and had a short heart attack when the shuttle started to sink through the floor. I moved it the other way and moved up like a balloon rising through dense blue fog. Seconds later, I popped through the surface. I was behind a dense clump of trees, just a few feet from the spot where I’d seen the runner-marks. Just a few feet, and at the same time, in some way I wasn’t ready to try to put into words yet, as far away as you could get. And that brought me to the question of my next move.
For the moment, I was in the clear. If my operating the shuttle had registered on any meters in the vicinity, it wasn’t apparent. The obvious thing for me to do was to return the machine to half-phase, get off the premises as fast as I could, and forget about a stranger named Bayard and his story of a probability crisis coming that would turn the world into bubbling chaos.
On the other hand, I was sitting on a device which, according to its previous owner, was something out of the ordinary, even among the men in the white Imperial uniforms. And those same high-powered operators owed me a few things, including one boat of which I’d been rather fond. I had an advantage now; they didn’t know where the shuttle was, where I was. And I could watch them, without being seen.
There was just one catch: It meant operating a machine that was more sophisticated than a jet fighter, and potentially more dangerous. I’d watched Bayard at the controls; I had a rough idea of how he had maneuvered it. The big white lever marked DR-MAIN was the one that started everything working. It had a nice feel to it under my hand: smooth and cool, a lever that wanted to be pulled.
I was still sitting there, looking into the screen and thinking these thoughts when lights came on over a side entry fifty feet along the wall. The door-opened and Major Renata stepped out, carrying a briefcase and talking over his shoulder to a harassed-looking adjutant with a notebook. My reaction was automatic: I punched the half-phase switch and the scene faded out to the transparent blue that meant I was invisible.
A big, boxy staff-car pulled up along the drive and Renata and four others got in and the car pulled away. I remembered the controls Bayard had used to maneuver on half-phase. I tried them; the shuttle glided away as smoothly as oil spreading out on water. I followed the car down the winding drive through parklike grounds, past a gate where a sentry yawned as I slid by two feet from him, across a bridge and through the village. On the open highway, he opened up, but I had no trouble staying with him.
I trailed the car for half an hour, until it pulled through a gate in a wire fence around a small grassed airstrip. Renata got out and his aides scuttled around, readying a big, fabric-covered prop-driven airplane with wings the size of barn roofs. There were handshakes and some heel-clicking from a couple of Germanic-looking fellows; then Renata and one other climbed in and the plane taxied out and headed into the wind.
I’d spent the time looking over the controls, and was ready when the plane revved up and started its run. It took me three tries to match my rate of ascent to the airplane’s, but I managed it, then maneuvered into a spot a quarter of a mile astern. So far, it had been easy; all I’d had to do was steer. For all I knew, the instruments were indicating ten different critical overloads, but I’d worry about that when I had to. The theory of a shuttle was a complex thing, but straight-line operation was simple enough.
It was a three-hour flight over rolling farmland straight into the rising sun, then out across water that had to be the English Channel. The plane began letting down toward a city that had to be London, circled a field a few miles out from the center of the city, landed and taxied up to a small operations building with RBAF-NORTHOLT lettered across it. I had a bad few seconds when the pavement washed up around me like muddy water, but I managed to level the shuttle out a foot above the pavement.
Renata climbed down, and a car pulled out and collected him. By now I was getting used to the capabilities of my little machine; I didn’t bother with the gate, just slid across through the fence and fell in behind the car as it picked up speed along a broad parkway that led straight toward the towers of the city.
It was a fast twenty-minute trip. Renata’s car, with a few touches of a siren that sounded like a ghost wailing through the audio pickup, cleared traffic, making speed through narrow, twisting streets, crossed the Thames on a bridge with a fine view of the House of Commons, swung into a stone-walled courtyard behind a big, grim fortress. Renata stepped out and headed for a small door under a big wrought-iron lantern, and I followed him through the wall. The sun winked out and I was in a wide, well-lit corridor lined with open doors where people in uniform did what people do in government offices. Renata took a sudden corner, and I over-corrected, found myself in solid rock that must have been five feet thick. By the time I’d manuevered back into the open, he was out of sight.
For the next hour, I cruised through the building like a mechanized ghost, looking into big offices with ranks of filing cabinets and desks under banks of flourescents, into smaller offices with deep carpets and solemn-looking bureaucrats admiring their reflections in the picture windows, into storerooms, a message center. I tried the lower levels, found dead-record storage, a mechanical equipment room, a small theater, and lower still, some grim-looking cells. There was nothing for me there. I took a shortcut through a wall and was in an eight-foot-square room with rusty manacles and a hole in the floor for plumbing. It had everything a medieval dungeon needed except a couple of human skeletons chained to the wall.