The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  Paul swallowed, although there was no more liquid left in the cup or in his mouth. He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t imagine what kind of question he might reasonably ask. Instead, he held out the empty cup.

  “More?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  She plucked it out of his hand, and turned toward the door. “I’ll only be a couple of minutes,” she said. “You’re all right...aren’t you?”

  He nodded again, and then looked away, because, for some reason, he could no longer meet her gaze. She looked at him hard, studying him carefully for the first time.

  “It must be about dawn,” she said, inconsequentially. Then she added: “Your name’s Paul.” Her tone was neutral.

  He looked back at her.

  Her voice had changed completely when she said: “Paul who?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The wrangling had reached such a pitch of frustration and pointlessness that Lindenbaum was glad when the telephone at his side began to bleep. He didn’t wait for the aide to pick it up, but snatched it up himself. For the call to have been put through to the conference room it had to be important.

  “Yes,” he said, incisively. He let his voice identify himself.

  Diehl, who was sitting back from the argument, trying to balance out his seething anxiety with a feeling of contempt for those who couldn’t help showing their fear and frustration, saw the president’s face change as the caller said his piece. Before a quarter of a minute had passed he knew that it was something bad. He sat up straight. One by one, the others realized that something was on, and closed down the chatter.

  “Who the hell is this?” said Lindenbaum, not loudly, but with a hint of a snarl. Diehl knew immediately that something weird was happening. It wasn’t the kind of question the president should have needed to ask. What was more, the president obviously didn’t get an answer. When he laid the receiver down his face was dark with gathering fury.

  Lindenbaum’s eyes roamed the faces that were silently watching him, and finally settled on Diehl’s. “How does it happen,” he said, “that at a time like this some crazy can reach me on a top security line?”

  Diehl did his best to look surprised, but in truth he was not. He was growing used to things happening that had never happened before, and which ought not to happen, from a logical viewpoint.

  “What did he say?” he asked, quietly.

  “He said that there’s a fleet of goddam spaceships somewhere beyond the moon.”

  Diehl blinked. Someone down the other end of the table laughed, but stifled the laughter very quickly.

  “That’s crazy,” someone said.

  Diehl was busy trying to work it out—not how, but why.

  “If that’s supposed to distract our attention from the immediate problem,” said Marcangelo, slowly, “it’s the weirdest play I ever heard of.”

  Lindenbaum was still staring at Diehl, waiting for some kind of an answer.

  “I don’t know how they do it,” said Diehl. “But someone scrambled a warning call to Wishart, and now they’ve hooked into your priority line. They can do things with telephones that we can’t, and they knew exactly when Heisenberg was due out. Why play practical jokes?”

  “Is there a radio telescope still functioning, anywhere in the Reunion?” asked the president. “Or even in Australia, come to that?”

  “There hasn’t been a radio telescope in use since the war,” replied the Secretary of State, as if mystified that the question should have been asked.

  “Is there an instrument that can be made to work?”

  No one could answer that.

  “He says that we can prove it,” added Lindenbaum, by way of explanation. “We can tap into their communications. He told me the frequency...but he says we’ll need more than an ordinary receiver. A radio telescope.”

  “It has to be a hoax,” said the Secretary of State. There was a murmur of agreement.

  “It’s been tried before,” said Diehl, ruminatively. “But it’s too far-fetched to work. Unless we can get proof. Or unless we can fake proof.”

  Lindenbaum looked at him as if he had gone mad. Then comprehension dawned. “It would never work,” he said. “We aren’t going to be able to keep control by inventing an imaginary emergency. No one would believe us.”

  Most of the faces around the table still had not yet caught on to what Diehl was suggesting, although the more Machiavellian minds were tracing it through.

  “If you’re going to tell lies,” said Diehl, “you might as well tell bold ones. And this is one hell of a lie.”

  “It’s crazy,” said the president.

  “And what if it’s true?” put in Marcangelo.

  Lindenbaum just shook his head in bewilderment.

  Diehl picked up his own phone, and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Get me the University,” he said. “I want to talk to the closest thing to an astronomer they have on the staff.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Ronnie,” said Rebecca, the urgency of panic in her voice, “we have to get him out. To the Movement. Somewhere safe. The police will be looking for him.”

  Ronnie was still trying to disengage himself from the clutches of sleep. He was a heavy sleeper, and even Paul Heisenberg’s name had not served to jerk him out of it.

  “Where is he?” he muttered, rubbing his right eye and shivering because of the cold.

  “Someone dropped him at the door, about three. I don’t know who brought him; I couldn’t see his face. You slept through the whole thing. Kit and Linda must have heard the buzzer, and Andy too, but none of them budged. I took him to my room, made him a drink, and talked to him...you know the way. It took me the best part of an hour, but when I realized.... Ronnie, it’s him. Can’t you get that into your head? Heisenberg.”

  “It can’t be,” said Ronnie, sufficiently awake to be skeptical. “How would he get out of that iron cage?”

  “I don’t know. But he did. Somebody brought him. Come and see him for yourself.”

  Ronnie fumbled for his trousers, seeming to take an infinite amount of time getting them on and zipping them up. His adrenalin was working now and the implications were slowly unfolding in his mind. If it was Paul Heisenberg....

  He followed Rebecca down the stairs to the half-landing, and threw open the door to Rebecca’s room. He took a long, long look at the person on the bed, comparing the face to the memory of all the old photographs he’d seen of Paul Heisenberg. Blond hair, a face just a little too effeminate to be handsome—a pretty face...those were the images that he called to mind, and compared to the real face before him.

  Paul stood up, a little unsteadily, and said: “Take it easy. It’s all right.” The words sounded hollow and absurd.

  Ronnie’s mouth went dry, and he stood quite still, losing his opportunity to deliver one of history’s great quotable lines. Eventually, he said: “We’ve got to get to a phone. Call Max Gray...someone in the Movement. If we could get you to the University we could hide you. But they’ll be all over town by now, looking for you.”

  “The one who brought me here,” said Paul, “said he would try to come back.”

  “Was he one of Wishart’s men?”

  “Wishart?” The name struck a chord in Paul’s mind that was almost the equal of the one struck by his own name.

  “Wishart—the Movement....” Ronnie trailed off, realizing that Paul could not and did not know the first thing about the Movement. “It’s a kind of political party,” he said. “The organization of your followers, the ones who have any organization at all. They’ll know what to do...if we can only get you across the river.”

  “We don’t have a car,” said Rebecca, from the doorway. “We’d never get him past the police if we had. They’ll have to come here, if we can hide him until morning.”

  Ronnie looked from Paul to Rebecca, and then back again, feeling an urgent need to act but not knowing quite what to do.

  “I’m going to
phone,” he said. “I know who’ll give me a number where I can reach Wishart or Gray. Stay here. Don’t worry.”

  He turned, and he ran.

  Paul wondered how he was supposed to follow the advice to avoid worrying. He sat down again on Rebecca’s bed, and said: “I’m sorry.” Rebecca seemed to be on the point of bursting into tears.

  Ronnie, meanwhile, raced up the steps from the basement door and into the street. The car was already turning the corner, and its headlights picked him out immediately. It wasn’t a police car, but the moment he saw it he was afraid. He began to ran, but then the thought occurred to him that it might be the man that had brought Heisenberg to the house, returning to collect him. He hesitated in his flight, and the car drew up alongside him. The back door was flung open, and a tall man reached for him. A flashlight flickered on, and the beam sought his face. He put up his arm to shield his eyes, and ran again, this time as fast as he possibly could, howling:

  “Police! Police!”

  The tall security man gave chase, the beam of the torch playing on Ronnie’s back as he fled. There was a terrible prickling sensation in Ronnie’s spine as he realized that he might be shot dead, but no warning sounded and no gunshot was fired. The only noise was the noise of heavy footfalls and the dying echoes of his warning shout.

  He drew in breath to shout again, but he never got the chance. The flashlight crashed into the side of his head as soon as the man behind came close enough to use it as a club. Ronnie slipped on the ice-caked road and fell heavily. As he was hauled to his feet he heard a dull thud as a heavy shoulder was applied to a recalcitrant door.

  The security men knew the house, but they didn’t know how to get into it; they were trying to smash their way through the front door, which hadn’t been unlocked since the University took over the block. Ronnie was hauled back to the car, but not very roughly. They had no idea, yet, that Paul Heisenberg was in the house, and hadn’t jumped to any conclusions when they caught him outside. He looked up and down the street at the darkened windows. No new lights showed, and there was no sign of activity. No one wanted to get involved.

  Ronnie wanted to yell again, this time to spread the news instead of the warning. He wanted to tell the world that Heisenberg was back, and that he was one step ahead of Diehl’s cowboys, but he had the sense to keep quiet. When they spread-eagled him over the bonnet of the car and began the questions he pretended that he was more shaken than he was, too much pained to give reasonable attention. He mumbled and muttered “nos” and “don’t knows” with convincing uncertainty, knowing that it couldn’t last. When they found evidence inside that Rebecca had been entertaining a visitor....

  They brought the others out of the house. Peering back over his shoulder Ronnie saw three. Only three: no Paul, and no Rebecca.

  In spite of himself, he began to laugh.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Diehl slammed the phone down, the muscles of his face taut.

  “We’ve got him,” he said. “Flushed him out of a house in the suburbs. Nowhere to run. Castagna’s got a hundred and fifty men converging, and my men are right on his tail. He can’t get away now.”

  Lindenbaum nodded, without looking particularly relieved. The problems wouldn’t stop with Heisenberg’s apprehension. The game had yet to be played.

  The meeting had broken up, or broken down. The various members of the inner circle had jobs to do, and arrangements to make. Some of them, no doubt, would already be making plans to desert the ship if it began to sink. Most would be trying to make sure that it didn’t sink. Lindenbaum, rather to his own surprise, was slowly discovering that he didn’t care as much as he ought to. He had always thought of himself as a fighter—had always been a fighter, or he couldn’t have been where he was today—but now that the long-expected crisis was at his door he found that he was just a little too tired to attack the problems with the right degree of desperation. Instead of rejoicing with Diehl, he could only think: Suppose someone screws it up again? Suppose we can’t take him—or can’t hold him—even now?

  “He’s not going to be in a co-operative frame of mind,” he said. “This whole chase scene is going to make us look bad, from his point of view. It doesn’t do our image any good at all.”

  Diehl shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. At least we stopped him reaching Wishart.”

  “Unless it was Wishart’s people that got him out.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Diehl, flatly.

  “Then who was it?”

  “We’ve been through all that. It was whoever hooked into your phone. I don’t know who, but not Wishart. They warned Wishart to get out, and they tried to spring Heisenberg...but if it was the Movement, I’d know about it. Believe me.”

  “How can I believe you? What the hell’s the alternative, if it wasn’t Wishart? The Australians? Phantoms from the old Communist bloc? Aliens from outer space?”

  “The phone call was just to show us they can do it,” said Diehl, with a confidence that was only partly assumed. “The message meant nothing...just a comic line to stick a finger in your eye. I think it’s someone a damn sight closer to us than Wishart. We ought to face that possibility.”

  Lindenbaum glared at him, half-angry and half-contemptuous. “And how did they know he was going to come out tonight?”

  That was the question that stopped all the theories. But Diehl had figured out a way to sidestep even that.

  “He did know,” he replied. “Therefore it can be known—calculated. There must be some way of measuring something that we don’t know about. There are people at the University who’ve been working on the problem for years, trying to figure out how the jump-length can be calculated. Obviously someone managed to find out. They didn’t tell us. But they didn’t tell the Movement, either. If they had, I’d have known about it. This thing surprised Wishart as much as it surprised us—I’m sure of that.”

  “What about that car—the one that crashed the barrier?”

  “Marcangelo’s following that up. They’re going through the wreckage with a fine-toothed comb...everything that they could scrape up from the roadway. I don’t think they’ll find anything significant.”

  Lindenbaum ground out the butt of his cigarette, and promptly lit another.

  “I have a feeling,” he said, “that we’re more out of our depth than you care to think. And prayer isn’t going to help—God’s not on our side this time.”

  Diehl curled his lip. Lindenbaum, staring into space, couldn’t see the small change of expression, but he didn’t really need to. He knew that Diehl didn’t like him, and would seize upon any opportunity to feel contemptuous of him. Diehl was that way about everyone. It was almost a necessary qualification for his post. To be what he was you had to hate the enemy, and in his job, the enemy was everybody and anybody.

  “You’d better get back on the job,” said the president, wearily. “When you get him, tell me. I want to know everything that happens. Don’t use the phone.”

  Diehl nodded, rose to his feet, and went to the door. When it closed behind him, Lindenbaum blew out a cloud of grey smoke and watched it dissipate into the warm air. His gaze wandered for a few moments, and then lingered on the silent telephone. After a few seconds’ hesitation he picked it up and dialed.

  When the call was answered, he said: “If we were attacked from space, could we put up any kind of a defensive show at all?”

  He received the answer that he expected, said: “That’s what I thought,” and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  Hell, he murmured, inaudibly. If it came to a fight we couldn’t even beat the Australians. But who wants to fight for a wrecked world?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Paul, “but I just can’t go any further.” The words came in gasps, punctuated by long pauses. Drawing breath seemed to be a struggle. His face, illuminated by the sky that was growing silver with the dawn, seemed to be ashen grey. Rebecca, too, felt as if she had come to t
he end. There was no more running in her, and soon there would be no more shadows in which to hide.

  They were hiding among the corpses of long-dead cars, in what had once been a salvage-yard but was now no more than a dump. Scavengers had long ago stripped the wrecks of anything that was worth taking, and there was nothing left now but rusted skeletons, crushed and cracked, piled up in rotting heaps. Even the soil was red-brown, too heavily impregnated with metallic oxides to allow anything but a few ragged clumps of squill and a little coarse grass to grow in it.

  They were crouched beside what had once been a transcontinental bus, but which was now no longer solid enough to allow them to crawl inside.

  “Leave me,” said Paul. “You don’t have to run. They don’t want you.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  They could hear the sound of voices calling to one another. The streets around the yard were patrolled, now, and there were men picking their way through it. There was no way out. Rebecca huddled close to Paul, trying to keep away from the jagged shards of rotting metalwork. She wasn’t trying to escape the cold so much as making an ineffectual attempt to protect him from it.

  “Why do they want me?” asked Paul. “What do they want me to do?”

  “Everybody’s waiting for you,” she whispered. “They think you can tell us what to do, because nobody else can. They think you can give them reasons, because nobody else can. The government want you to put your name to their plans...half a dozen other groups would ask you to put your name to theirs. People will listen to you, but they won’t listen to anybody else. It’s as simple as that.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t dare to hurt you. I don’t know what they could do. But there might be fighting, against the Movement There could be a revolution. There are people who hate your name enough to want you dead. I don’t know.”

  Her voice was thin and urgent, and she talked as if talking were the only thing that could hold back the tears. They had been running for nearly an hour, with nowhere to run to and nothing to gain. All the while she had been driven on by the terror of responsibility, by the knowledge that she had been hurled into the vortex of important events without the means to do anything that would seem, at some later time, to be what she ought to have done.