by Ian Wallace
She squeezed twice: a signal to listen. Gazing out the window, she spoke low: “We are decoying those men back there, they are enemies. I do not know their tactical plans. But I know what they are up to strategically. If they make contact, pretend to be friendly. Now, please, engage me in small talk.”
I said low, but penetratingly so they would just be .able to hear: “I have gone a long way out of my way to meet the Honorable Althea Candless. My reason is a reason of personal admiration. Does Miss Candless care to comment?” And as I spoke, gradually it came clear in my own mind that I almost meant it: this made it easier to carry along…
A notion hit me. Delicately I fingered the minds of the two glowerers behind us. It checked. In my sort of Gaulois, I suggested to Miss Candless: “Est-ce que vous parlez Gaulois?”
Her eyes widened. Then: “Oui. Pourquoi?”
“Parce-que ces gens là, ils ne comprennent pas Gaulois.”
“Est-ce vrai? Comment vous savez ça?”
“Je sais ça. Aussi, ils sont Moskoviques.”
“Eh.” She slumped a little. “Alors, c’est confirmé.”
“Si. Mais aussi alors, nous pourrons done parler Gaulois. Ils seront soupçonneux, confus; mais aussi, ils ne vont pas comprendre.”
There was a little silence, during which my delicate mind-reach tasted their unrest. Then she remarked in Gaulois: “It is almost incredible that they would have sent agents to Kebec who do not speak Gaulois.”
Already the window view was marvelous: mountain foothills were speeding by. I said quietly: “Suppose you tell me what is up.”
Our physical relationship was curiously intimate: still her right hand gripped my arm, but also my right hand was on hers, and her left hand was on mine—and all this was disconcertingly pleasing.
She told me quietly in Gaulois: “Moskovia plans to tamper with our hydroelectric power leads in such a way as to aggravate the Kébecois to the point of unanimous armed secession-and-aggression. Never mind how I have caught on to the general nature of the plot; it is sufficient for you to know that I know about it, and know little else about it. I want you to diagnose the plot and kill it.”
“Your Nordian Bureau of Investigation can’t handle this, Minister Candless?”
“There are sufficient reasons for bypassing that bureau, Mr. Sagittarius.”
In the back of my mind was a small trouble, why and how she would have found me six centuries in her own future and reached out to deflect me inside of Mercury from a solar suicide in order to use me for this. But I squeezed her hand and told her: “You can count on me, Miss Candless. Now that you know these men are Moskovians, what do you think their plans may be?”
She pondered. She said presently: “Perhaps if we confront them and involve them in conversation, something may come through.”
I warned: “Of course, they may be decoys—”
“You have learned somehow that they are Moskovians who do not understand Gaulois. Can you not use your methods to learn more?”
I frowned. “This is an ethical inhibition that I have. I will go so far as to taste an adversary’s abilities and limitations; but I will not use this unfair method to probe his purposes and motives.”
“Oh, là! You are delicately ethical! May I consequently assume that my own purposes and motives are safe from unfair scrutiny?”
Without speaking, I put the answer into her mind directly.
She slumped a little, relaxing. “Thank you. That was most convincing—”
Whereupon the bus took off from the freeway into the sky with the thrust of a four-engine jet; and in the sky, this remarkable bus leveled out and homed on the northland.
Still Althea sat relaxed beside me, her wide mouth semismiling. My right hand had an urgency to reach across her and grasp and caress her forward-thrust left shoulder. Repressing it, I suggested: “Perhaps my first step should be to challenge those guys back there.”
She frowned. “Apart from the consideration that you would tip our hand, they might kill you.”
I grinned at that! “I seem to recall, Miss Candless, that suicide is just the ticket for me.” I went serious, puzzled suddenly: “How did you know? How did you interrupt? Why me?”
Her frown deepened. “Please do not ask such questions now. In due course, we will tell you—”
“We?”
Her frown seemed absolutely painful; convulsively she freed her hands from mine and clasped them knuckle-white in her lap. “I am Minister of Power. Obviously I am not entirely alone—”
I asserted: “I am going to challenge those two types.”
She said low: “I have asked you to help. I must permit you to use your own methods.”
I pondered. I left my seat (noticing through the window that we were air-flirting with snowcapped crests) and wove my way back up the aisle (in this rough-banging flight) toward the two small triggermen who were watching me tight-lipped. Dropping into the seat across the aisle from them, I lilted: “We seem to be almost alone as travel companions. I am Pan Sagittarius. Care to give me your names?”
Both of them looked Gallic. The one nearest me, whose thin mustache topped a full-lipped narrow mouth, answered in thick Anglian: “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Sagittarius. I am Stephen Foster; that is Winston Churchill.”
I glanced at Churchill, whose nose and lip were long: he glowered at me. I said cheerfully: “It would be useless to deny that my companion is the Honorable Miss Althea Candless. Tell me, Mr. Foster: are you guarding her—or are you shadowing her?” Althea, I side-eye noticed, was back-watching us with some alarm.
Foster stroked one side of his mustache with an index finger; and then he replied: “I suggest, Mr. Sagittarius, that you mind your own business.”
I leaned toward him. “Mr. Foster—if you were planning to sabotage the hydroelectric power lines in such a way as to turn the Kébecois violently against the rest of Nordia, what method would you use?”
His handgun snapped out, aimed at my heart.
I spread hands, smiling: “Excuse me, sir, for saying irritating things. Pray forget it.” And I went back to Althea.
Settled beside her, I told her mind directly: “There is no doubt about it, Miss Candless—they are the ones.”
Her mind responded: “Mr. Sagittarius, are you clinging to your ethos about tapping their minds?”
“I won’t tap their minds—but I am willing to shoot them a shot of security and trust before I try to diddle them.”
“Do that, Mr. Sagittarius. Do that.”
The result of the sharp shot was that the four of us were now playing bridge around a big table centered in the bus as it statelily descended and effortlessly lit on the surface of a swift river perhaps a quarter-mile wide that flowed more or less centered in a gently rolling valley rimmed several miles away by mountains. The fixed bus seats had unaccountably vanished, having been replaced by nicely upholstered movable furniture. The driver, putting guidance on automatic, had left his post long enough to serve drinks, then had returned: from here on, drinks would be dummy-duty.
I was dummy, but we weren’t ready. I stood thoughtfully in the stem, nursing my drink, alternately watching the faces of the players and the scene that drifted by at about (one estimated) ten knots as the bus-flyer-boat thrust smoothly upriver.
Althea was playing a slam bid in no trump. Her play was leisurely: not uncertain, always correct; not psychic, but inductively logical: when twice she finessed, each time she knew it would work to a probability of about 99 percent; it was not that her thought processes were slow—I dared finger her mind on this impersonal point; she was clicking like a binary calculator (quinary would be silly for bridge)—but rather that she felt leisurely, she was in no hurry. The Moskovians gloomed over their hands, played mechanically and correctly, seemed perfectly patient.
There were some elements of the situation that simply didn’t add up. In the first place, this was no random bus that we had caught at a corner on Fifth Avenue, Montvrai: it w
as a rather highly adaptive bus. In the second place, Althea’s complacency with the weirdities of bus performance practically constituted proof that this washer bus, that she was anticipating everything; on the other hand, the Moskovians who were presumably her shadowing enemies appeared in their gloomy way equally complacent and unsurprised. Again: I had shot security into their minds and engaged them in bridge obviously in the hope that they would inadvertently leak something of their intentions; and since I knew next to nothing about what was going on, I had left it to Althea to lead the conversation; but Althea had appeared perfectly happy with the bridge and with my company, and there had been no leading conversation. Perhaps, though, Althea was patiently feeding their security, just as she was patiently leading her cards (just now, the guys had their quota of one trick, she had eight): soon she might begin sliding in conversational come-ons. Another thought: what was I doing here? maybe not detective work at all; maybe, once she had the tactics figured, she planned to use me for the strong-arm stuff—although it did seem that she could have found a strong-arm with less trouble right here on Erth in her own time…
She pulled the lead card for the thirteenth trick from dummy (South); West (Churchill) sloughed; but instead of dropping her card, Althea (North) debated with herself, slowly tapping the long pearl-manicured fingernails of her left hand with the card back. This hesitation could have nothing to do with play, there was only this one card to drop and we all knew what it had to be—a good ten of diamonds. I stared at the card back, and so did the Moskovians. Outskirts of a city were beginning to be evident along both riverbanks…
Althea laid the card face down in front of her, tapped it for a moment with both hands, then intently inspected the faces of her two adversaries one by one. Insolently they returned her stare. She dropped her head, gazed at her card, and said with bell-clarity: “Tomorrow, I gather, the device will be positioned in the master synapse leading out of the generator plant beside Scandia Falls. If you will give me all the facts, the card I play will be the nine of diamonds, and East will turn out to have the ten. Look at your card, East: is it a worthy investment?”
But this was absolutely bizarre! I was riveted on the tableau. East (Foster) studied his card; then he muttered, “I thought it was a fixed deck—”
“The deck,” declared Althea, “is not fixed. But you must take my word that I can fix it now. Is it a worthy investment?”
West stared at East; East stared at Althea’s card back. East murmured: “What is your understanding of the bet, Miss Candless?”
“Fifty thousand on this hand.”
My guts contracted: I did not remember nearly so much, and I had half of the bet automatically…
Slowly East nodded. He told his card: “The device is pocket-size but transistor-complex and potent. It will affect the pulsations along the power leads in such a way that the secondary static fields will set the brains of Kébecois but no others into a passion of total activity against the Nordian state. Because the station at Scandia Falls is the primary for Kebec, its pulses will sympathetically communicate themselves to leads from all other sources into Kebec.”
Althea frowned: “Not enough. When is it to be placed?”
Gazing at her, West grinned for the first time: the bus was pervaded by the pall of the grin. “We can lie about the time, Madame—and how will you know?”
Althea’s eyes rose to mine; her brows were high, her lips were parted a little; between us there was some sort of subliminal communication. She replied slowly, keeping her eyes on mine: “Mr. Sagittarius will know whether you are lying.”
My role was starting to come clear; I was in her service, she had to establish the ethics; but, God—twenty-five thousand? Suddenly I grinned: if I was in her service, I was on her expense account! Promptly I shot into West and East conviction that I would know; and I monitored both their minds to that limited extent…
West and East were surveying each other: their mouths were persimmoned.
East agitated one brow. West lowered one brow.
East demanded: “Knowing the timing, will you try to stop the action?”
Althea responded coldly: “I am a loyal minister of Nordia.”
Staring at his card, East asserted: “Give or take half an hour, two thirty a.m. local time.”
“Why that timing?”
“The device is preset. It activates at one forty-five, it conks out unless triggered before three fifteen.”
Instantly Althea exposed her card—the nine of diamonds.
Frowning heavily, East dropped the ten and took the trick. Then he picked up the nine and the ten, inspected both sides, thumb-flicked the edges, handed them to West—who inspected, thumb-flicked, dropped the cards, gloomed.
I wasn’t going to bother picking them up. I had caught cue from Althea and psychokinetically changed the spots.
Althea scribbled two IOU’s and handed them to East and West.
We were full into the city, sailing smoothly under a bridge with more bridges ahead of us. It was a thick city, in places a towered city. I did not know of any such city this far north in Nordia. This paradoxical city was called Scandia…
Althea engaged my eyes: hers were troubled. She said distinctly, ignoring the Two: “The driver will assign quarters here. They will be in one location, I in another, you in another; none of us will know where the others are, it is best that way. Pan, now you know all I know. Prevent it, Pan, prevent it—”
My quarters I found without much difficulty, following the driver’s curt directions: a room near the top of the tallest hotel in this city named Scandia. And the hotel was tall, more than thirty stories. As I peered out my top-floor windows, it seemed to me that no building in Scandia except one was nearly as tall.
This window overlooked the river at a mile distance: that river cut the city into a major and a minor half—I was in Scandia Major. It was early evening, there was no smog; my vision followed the river upstream. In the distance I could see the falls: small in the distance—but, judging on my space-judgment, mightier than Yosemite and nearly as mighty as Vespucian Niagara. I could not hear the noise of this falls; I imagined hearing the noise of this falls. I let my auditory mind wander a few miles northward: I heard the noise of this falls.
Still I was almost totally confused. Miss Candless was the Nordian Power Minister. This was the twentieth century: somehow she had located me in the twenty-sixth and plucked me back from a suicide run to help her foil an international plot.
Coolly she had dropped a fifty-thousand-dollar bet at cards in order to get at a truth—and her enemies just as coolly had given her this truth (and it was truth, I had verified the truth-attitude in their minds)—and she had wound it up by assigning me and the conspirators and herself to three sets of quarters (and the driver to a fourth?) with each party ignorant of the others’ locations, expecting me somehow under these conditions to stop these characters before they could mind-bug all Kebec…
Well, I had the facts about the locus and the timing. All I had to do was get out there and stop them. Just how I would stop them wasn’t easy to imagine; but I suspected that I would have to throw ethics to the winds and use my mind-reach.
Not for the first time, it crossed my mind to doubt my centuries-old conviction that the past was unchangeable. Perhaps it depended on whether you were in uptime or in the real vital past. Often and often I had trod uptime, intimately I knew its symptoms and its behavior; well, here I was six centuries earlier than my own actuality—and yet every delicate sign confirmed that I was in germinal actuality, that I was affecting these events, that decisions and actions would have meaning for a future that was in my past…
Obviously, though, the meaning for the future past would have to be limited. Presumably it would not, for example, be possible for me to change this past so drastically as to change recorded history. I recalled a clever explanation of the impossibility of time paradox in a twentieth-century science novel by Isaac Asimov: the tensions of time trends posse
ss a high degree of inertia, they tend to restore themselves after transient detours. In history there was no record of any massive revolt by Kebec, although between Kebec and the rest of Nordia there had been centuries of tautening strain. Since presumably I had not been present in the original twentieth century, evidently this plot, if it had been plotted, had failed without my help. So all I really needed to do, now, was to go down to the hotel’s opulent dining room and have me an opulent dinner and come back up here and go to sleep: the plot would fail anyway, somehow.
Wouldn’t it?
One way or another, I had to follow this through. Despite the temptation to perform a pseudo-scientific experiment by remaining inactive and seeing what might happen, I had to confess that you can’t experiment scientifically on history: it can’t be laboratory-painless, and you have no chance for replication controls…
I noticed hunger. It was about eight, in summer. Light was failing, but I could still see the falls. How much time to get there? Well, it was maybe twenty miles—but the real question was transportation. Could a guy snag a cab? or what else was there?
I shrugged: it was no problem—I could teleport. Just for kicks, I tried it, zeroing in on the Nornian-Gothic roof of that high tower over by the river—the one that seemed second only in stature to my own hotel. A cinch: I was there. Poof: I was back in my room. All was well, then. I had lots of time for dinner…
I frowned: it crossed my mind that even if transportation-time was no problem for me, it would be a problem for the Moskovians—or for Althea. There was no way out: I simply had to discover the realistic human possibilities—now, five and a half hours from H-Hour.
Jerking-to my necktie, and jacketing, and slapping pockets in a key-and-billfold check, I left the room and hit the primitive elevator.
This town of Scandia was thick, her downtown was intersecting canyons of stone and brick buildings—mostly five or ten stories, but some spiking up to twenty or higher. Decidedly I had not looked for such a city north of Montvrai—particularly, as I estimated on a time basis, five or six hundred miles north. Her population could be half a million. She was laid out like an Old World city; indeed, I could not find even a boulevard that was not interrupted in a few blocks by a dead end, with some building—usually a delightful building—plunked right down at street-head. I was looking for taxis, but first I had to learn to recognize them. After a few blocks of twilight prowling, I caught on: a taxi was an ordinary vehicle with three or four or five wheels, any color, any size or shape, but driven by a type wearing a képi.