“Sir?” said Debrow, almost a little timidly, after Private Mahn had left. “I’m afraid I don’t understand “You will, in due course.”
He sat back without saying anything more. The seven more enlisted men on duty there came through and I managed to send them all back after getting each one to admit he didn’t know how to do something or other.
“Mr. Despard,” began Debrow, after the final one had left. “That’s all the men on duty here. Does that mean—”
“It means this situation is a good deal more serious than I thought. Are you armed, Major?”
“No sir.”
“That’s unfortunate. Well, we’ll have to do what we can. I’ll stay here. Will you go quietly to the personnel door we came in by, and stand just inside it. Lock it if you can, and listen for any sounds you can hear on the other side. If anyone tries to force it open, let them; but stand back out of sight and when they’re through, go for help.”
“Yes sir. But for Christ’s sake, Mr. Despard, what’s supposed to be going on here?”
“I can’t tell you quite yet. I’ve my duty to Paula—to the Empress—to think of,” I said. “Get going now. I’m going to step off into the shadows just outside this office and be ready to warn you if anyone who shouldn’t comes from the other end of the building.”
He went. I took the Old Man by the hand and followed the Major out, moving off to where the shadows hid us from him, but where we would be in line to intercept Doc, coming back from returning the last soldier to his post. From where we were, I could see the thin line of daylight showing around the personnel door, blocked out now and then by an uneasily shifting body standing just this side of it. Eventually, this occultation ceased, and a second or two later, Doc emerged alone from the dimness in front of us.
“All set,” he said under his breath.
“All taken care of?” I asked.
He nodded.
“The lieutenant?”
“I saved him until next to last.”
“All right. The Major’s over by the personnel door.”
“Was. I’ve taken care of him, too. He was the last of them.”
I wanted to ask how many of them were dead, but the words stuck in my throat. It was a lifesaver to have a young timberwolf like Doc for a friend, but it was a little illogical to demand he be wolf and harmless at the same time.
“How about the aircraft?” I asked.
“The first one you looked at, I didn’t touch,” Doc answered. “The rest are set to blow any time you want.”
“All right. I’ve got to see if we can get the hangar doors open easily. Otherwise, you may have to blow a hole in them—”
“No sweat there either. They’re supposed to be electrically operated, but there’s a chain block-and-tackle type dingus to use if the power’s off. Can you fly that thing, Marc?”
“I can fly it. Or rather, I can tell it to fly itself and it will.”
“Just checking,” he said; and I could barely see his grin in the gloom.
“I don’t blame you. I would too,” I told him. I was very tired, suddenly. “Why don’t you rig the other planes to destruct as soon as we’re safely out of here, and I’ll move the one we’re taking up to this side of the doors? Then you open the door, hop in, and we’ll move.”
“Right.”
He moved off. I turned on my flashlight and led the Old Man toward the aircraft Doc had specified as untouched. We climbed in, shut the door, and I depressed one of the keys.
“Ready.”
“Move up slowly on the ground to the inside of the doors to this building. Or—to put it another way—move slowly forward along the ground and I’ll tell you which way to turn and when to stop.”
The craft stirred and seemed to slide rather than roll forward.
“Left,” I told it. “Left maybe ten degrees. Now maybe five degrees more. All right, straight ahead... stop!”
We halted just inside the hangar doors. I opened the door of the craft and waited. In a moment, there was a faint, rattling sound to be heard through the opening; and the big doors slid apart to either side of the opening they guarded, and bright sunlight blinded us.
“That’s good enough!” I called softly into the brilliance after a moment. But the doors had already stopped parting with just enough room for us to go through. I heard a faint thud and Doc was in the cabin, shutting the aircraft door behind him.
“All set,” he said.
“Go!” I told the craft, “Straight ahead, out on the ground through this opening, take off and climb to three thousand meters. Head west”
It slid forward through the doors into the full sunlight. Without any run, it leaped suddenly skyward. There was a sound like a paper bag popping below and behind us. I glanced back and down to see smoke coming from the open doorway of the hangar building, dwindling rapidly to toy size below us. A second later, we were up where the roads looked like thick pencil lines and the landscape was starting to move backwards beneath us toward the sun half way up in the clear sky.
“That takes care of everything, I guess,” Doc said. He came forward and pushed the Old Man off the seat next to mine—a move the Old Man took without complaint. It was surprising what the Old Man would take from Doc, nowadays. Almost as much as Sunday used to take from Ellen. Doc seated himself where the Old Man had been.
“Need any help flying, or anything like that?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Then I’ll get some sleep,” he said, imperturbably. “This gadget’s better than a locked door. No one’s going to break in and surprise you in the middle of the air.”
He curled up in the seat, closed his eyes, and dropped off.
I was not so lucky.
29
The aircraft out of the future did not seem to need any serious attention. I asked it for a map of the country, and it was displayed on the screen in front of me. On the map, I picked out the general area of our community, asked to have it enlarged for me, and so continued zeroing in and enlarging until I could identify our destination to the craft. Once this was done, I simply told it to take us there and land by the summer palace-which I described-and my duties were done. I would have liked, then, to curl up and sleep like Doc; but I could not. I could not even imitate the Old Man, who was half-dozing, opening his eyes every so often to blink at me, as if to make sure I was still there.
Instead, I just sat, watching the empty, clean sky and the slowly moving landscape far below. There was no sound of passage inside the plane and I felt like a fly trapped under an overturned water glass.
As long as we had been working to escape, my mind had been clear and sharp and purposeful. But now, the effect of the body adrenalin began to die out in me, leaving me feeling empty, dull, and ugly. The thought of the soldiers on guard who had undoubtedly died so the three of us could go free came back to my mind whether I wanted to think of them or not. God knows I had never wanted to be the cause of anyone’s death, particularly now, since I had found that at least part of myself could blend with the rest of the universe. It was, in fact, that specific, blendable part of myself that I now felt I had betrayed, misused like a fine-edged tool put to some wrong purpose.
But what else could Doc and I and the Old Man have done, I kept asking myself? We had to escape, and the only route open to us lay over the dead or incapacitated bodies of at least some of Paula’s warriors.
Did it? a jeering little voice in the back of my mind nagged at me.
All right, I told myself, what other way was there?
You tell me. You’re the man who can see patterns.
I couldn’t see one here that didn’t involve violence.