by Shield (Lit)
Not Mars, though, he thought in his despair. Mars had killed men too: with unbreathable ghostly atmosphere, hunger and thirst and cold and strangeness. But beauty had abided in those deserts, moving forests, stark mesas—and foremost in the great serene Martian minds, which had joined with humans to follow knowledge. I used to get homesick out there for Earth. For what I missed, now that I think about it, was stuff like green grass and trees, sunlight, on my bare skin, wind ruffling a lake, Indian summer, snow, and the people who belonged to such country, the people I knew as a kid. This isn 't Earth. Wish me back to our Mars, Sharer-of-Hopes.
The taxi hovered near the unlit circle while the driver used his phone. Identifying himself? Rumor said that the more powerful chieftains in such places had means to shoot down intruders. Kosk-inen didn't know. Few upper-level civilians had any real information about the Craters. Koskinen knew only that during the initial postwar reconstruction there'd been too much radioactivity at the bombsites for habitation. As it diminished, the poorest elements of society moved near because such land was cheap or even free. The hardiest went into the craters themselves, finding hideouts where they recruited their strength and from which, hi time, they exacted tribute from the low-level dwellers of entire cities. The police, who had enough to do elsewhere, seldom interfered unless things got completely flagrant, and sometimes not then. Any social order was better than none, and the crater barons did impose a structure of sorts on the slums.
The driver switched off. A radio telltale glowed on his panel. He followed the beacon to a landing. Several shadowy forms closed in. The driver emerged and talked for a while. They opened the door and wrestled Koskinen out.
He looked around. They were on a small concrete structure which jutted from the crater bowl about halfway between the rim and the invisible bottom. Its flat roof made a landing platform. Gloom sloped upward on every side, with the faintest vitrification shimmer, until it ended where a series of watch-towers squatted against the surly red haze. A glowlamp in one man's hand revealed half a dozen hard faces, helmeted heads and leather-like jackets, gun barrels aimed inward at the stranger. Two picked Koskinen up and bore him along; the others fanned out on guard. The mugger and the taxi driver went on ahead, while someone else was deputed to flit the vehicle away.
Koskinen lay passive in his shell, aching with tiredness. They carried him through a door at the bottom of the structure, down a ramp, and so into a plastic-lined, fluoro-lit tunnel. A flatbed gocart stood there, onto which his escort got with him. It drove rapidly downward. Before many minutes the passage opened into a much larger tunnel, perhaps a subway which had survived the bomb blast and afterward had been refitted. They must have their own power system here, Koskinen thought, ventilation, heating, every necessity—including, no doubt, food and ammunition for a long siege. The gocart passed others, mostly carrying hired workmen who bobbed their heads respectfully to the warriors. It passed steel doors where machine gun emplacements were built into the walls, and finally stopped at an even more heavily fortified checkpoint. From there the party took a side passage, on foot.
But this was astonishing: a glideway hall, as elegantly decorated as the Von Braun's had been. An open door revealed a suite of darkly shining luxury and taste. Beyond, an intersecting corridor led them past less elaborate but perfectly adequate living quarters, then by a sprawling machine shop and a closed door on which was lettered ELECTRONICS—and eventually through a thick double portal into a concrete-block room where the guards set Koskinen down.
He got to his feet. That took a little doing; he must move his center of gravity about until he tilted the rigid force shell onto its broad flat "base." Glancing around, he saw the guardsmen place themselves along the walls, guns trained on him. A workbench held standard laboratory apparatus. Nearby were a telephone and the armored pickup of a monitor screen. This is where they test anything dangerous, he decided.
After what seemed a long time, the inner door opened again and let two people in. The guardsmen nodded in salute. Koskinen forced down the exhaustion that made his brain seem full of sand and looked closely at the newcomers.
The man was big, middle-aged, with a kettle belly and a bald pate. He scarcely even had eyebrows. His face was pink and jowly, a blob of a nose, a gash of a mouth. But he moved with a briskness that bespoke muscles. He was gorgeously clad in iridescent blue; rings glittered on his fingers. The spitgun at his hip looked well-worn.
The woman was pleasanter to watch. She was about thirty, Koskinen guessed, tall, a splendid figure and a supple gait. Blue-black hair fell almost to her shoulders. Her face was squarish, with lustrous brown eyes, broad nose, full and sullenly curved lips. Her complexion was a cafe-au-lait that made everyone else look bleached; the white lab coat she wore above an expensive red tunic heightened the effect.
Okay, Koskinen thought with a prickle along his scalp, here's the boss in person. What'd the kidnappers call him, Zigger?
The man walked slowly around him, felt the outlines of the field, pushed him over and studied how he fell and how he regained his feet. Waving his underlings out of ricochet range, he fired a few bullets and watched them drop straight down from the point where they struck. The woman leaned against the workbench and regarded the performance without stirring. At the end, she picked a notepad from among the apparatus, scribbled, and held the page before Koskinen's eyes.
He read, in an unexpected copperplate: "This looks like something we need. Are you interested in selling?"
He shook his head. "Let me go!" he cried.
She frowned and wrote for him: "Make letters with your fingers. Deaf and dumb alphabet. So." She illustrated a few.
Deaf and dumb——? Oh, yes, such tricks doubtless did survive among those who couldn't afford neuroprosthesis. Koskinen spelled out awkwardly: "You cannot get at me and the police are looking for me. Better let me go."
The woman conferred with Zigger. He seemed shaken. She told him something that surprised him, but he gave orders to a guard, who went out. The woman wrote for Koskinen: "Obviously you have air renewal in there, but I don't see any other supplies. You could be walled up and left to starve. Better come out and talk to us. Zigger keeps his word—when it's convenient." She threw the boss, who was reading over her shoulder, a feline grin; he reddened but made no comment. "He's a bad man to cross, though."
Br'er Rabbit and the brier patch! Koskinen thought in a leap of excitement. "Please do not brick me in," he spelled on his fingers. If they do, I can expand the field and break down any masonry they can erect—and maybe escape!
"Okay. Starving's too slow anyway," the woman answered laconically.
The guard returned with a bulky long-barreled object cradled in his arms. The woman wrote: "Do you recognize this?''
Koskinen shook his head. He couldn't see the thing very well.
"A laser gun. It amplifies radiation by stimulating atoms to re-emit in a highly collimated beam. Call it a heat ray."
Oh, yes, Koskinen thought. The will drained out of him. I've heard about those.
"I expect that since your force field or whatever it is lets light go back and forth, it will also let infrared by," wrote the woman. "The first shot will be into your foot.''
The guard brought the weapon to bear. Koskinen switched the shield off and fell forward on his hands and knees.
VI
The phone woke him. He turned over, shoved his head under the pillow, and tried to deny its existence. The phone kept buzzing. Koskinen blinked, mouthed a curse, reached out and switched it on.
A dark woman looked from the screen. He gaped, not easily remembering her or where he was. "Good morning," she said, with a smile that went no deeper than her lips. "Good afternoon, rather. Late afternoon. I thought you'd been sacked in long enough."
"Huh?" Slowly, in bits and pieces, recollection came back. He'd nearly fainted after the screen was off. They took the unit from him and led him here and gave him a tranquilizer—— He looked around at a small, not unpleasa
nt room with bath. There was only one door, and no window ... a ventilator grille . . . yes, he was underground, wasn't he? In Zigger's inverted castle.
"I wan't to talk with you," the woman said. "I've ordered dinner." Her smile widened. "Breakfast, to you. The guard'll come fetch you in fifteen minutes. Up, fellah!"
Koskinen crawled from bed as the screen blanked. His clothes were gone, but a closet wall retracted to show several excellent new outfits. A needle spray forced some of the stiffness from his muscles. There was no logic to the fact that a green blouse and gray slacks should cheer him a little. By the time an armed man opened the door, he was ready and famished.
They took the glideway into the luxury section. He was waved through a door which closed behind him. Across a soft, tinted floor, he looked at a suite of several rooms. Some good pictures hung on the walls. The viewall was playing a color abstraction which was too intellectual for his taste, but he was gladdened to recognize Mozart on the taper. The furnishings were low-legged, Oriental, centered about a pedestal that upheld a lovely piece of uncut Lunar crystal. How much had that cost? he wondered.
The woman sat before a table. A white tunic set off her pale brown skin. She waved a hand with a cigarette in it. The other held a cocktail. "Sit down, Pete." Her voice was husky, with a trace of Southern accent. She was a quadroon, he guessed, and probably part Creole.
"How do you know my name?" he asked. Then: "Oh. Sure. Stupid of me, papers in my wallet."
"And a quick check with the news service," she nodded. "You got a fine welcome home, didn't you?"
He seated himself across the table. A servitor rolled hi and asked nun what he wanted. He realized that he and the woman were the only humans present—though doubtless the guard waited outside, and there might well be an alarm buzzer or a tattler mike in her massive silver bracelet. "I... I don't know," he said. "Uh . . . what was that thing the other day? ... a Tom Coffins."
She grimaced. "You need education, I see. Oh, well, it's your palate. Smoke?''
"No, thanks." He wet his lips. "Wh-wh-what did the news have to say about me?"
"Not one thing," she answered, looking straight into his eyes. "As far as the phone or the picture papers know, you're still relaxing at the Von Braun Hotel in Philly. However, we've not been able to contact any of your shipmates.''
"I know," he said bleakly. "I only hope MS has them, alive. The Chinese killed Si Twain, you know."
"What?" She sat upright.
"It was on the news," he faltered. "Last night."
"It wasn't today," she said. "Today's story said he died in an accident and anything you heard about a murder was due to a hysterical——" The sensuous mouth grew as harsh as Zigger's. "What's the truth?"
He summoned defiance. "Why should I tell you?"
Her manner softened again, with the mercurial-ness that had already bewildered him. "Look, Pete," she said, low and rapidly, "you're caught in something tremendous. I spent the day making empirical tests on that gadget of yours. I know a few things it can do, and that alone is enough to drive Zigger wild. We haven't any mind drugs here, but we do have nerve machines, and even uglier stuff. No—" she raised a slender hand— "I'm not threatening you. I wouldn't do such a thing to anybody, for any reason. But Zigger would. I'm warning you, Pete. You've had the course. There's no choice but to level with . . . with me, at least."
"If I do, what then? MS won't thank me."
"We can get you away from them, if you really don't think they will forgive you. The Crater does give value for value received, after its own fashion. Okay, what happened to Twain?"
The servitor brought his drink. He snatched it and drank blindly. The account stumbled out of him.
She nodded, carefully, struck a fresh cigarette and puffed for a while with her eyes narrowed in thought. At length: "Yes, obviously last night's account was the right one, and now MS has clamped a lid on the truth. I begin to see the overall picture. Your expedition innocently brings this thing back from Mars, never dreaming what it implies. The men zoom off to their respective homes. They mention the thing to their friends. MS, which has been keeping tabs on them as it routinely does on everything unusual, gets the word within hours. They see the possibilities involved. They've got to lock away this machine and everyone who knows anything about it, at least until they can figure out what to do. So they take most of your shipmates into custody.
"But the Chinese have spies of their own, agents, sleepers, scattered around the world. Everybody knows that. And ... the Chinese ring was probably on the qui vive about this returning expedition. After all, the previous trips had shown the Martians to have a considerable technology, even if it is utterly unlike anything we've imagined on Earth. The Boas might well bring back something revolutionary. Especially since your announced purpose was to make an intensive study of the Martian civilization. The Chinese could have worked agents into strategic positions far in advance. You know, people who became close friends of the spacemen's families, that sort of thing. So they got the word almost as soon as MS did. It became a race to capture expedition members."
Enfeebled as he was from sleep following total nervous exhaustion, and no food, the liquor hit Koskinen like a fist. "Not much use," he blurted through sudden fog. "I had the only unit on Earth. And the only full knowledge about it. Y' see, I was the one who developed it. With Martian help, certainly. But the other guys, they had their own projects."
She leaned back on the couch, relaxing like a big cat, giving him only the softest of nudges. "Why didn't MS grab you before anyone else, then?"
"Prob'ly didn't get the full story at once. And maybe had some trouble finding me. I'd said I was going to Minneapolis, but at the last minute changed my mind, thought I'd look over the Atlantic supertown. They came fast, anyhow. With the Chinese on their heels.''
"I take it you were escaping from the Chinese when our boys came upon you?"
"And MS. Also MS." Koskinen finished his drink. "Tried to kill me, MS did." She opened her eyes wide and let them glow at him. He felt he must make himself clear to her, and went through the story.
"I see," she murmured at the end. "Yes, they're a hard-boiled outfit in their own right. How well I know." She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "But you need food now."
The servitor brought in soup, rolls, authentic butter. She let him eat a while before she chuckled and said, "By the way, I forgot you still don't know my name. I'm Vivienne Cordeiro."
"Pleased to meet you," he mumbled. As his head cleared and strength returned, so did wariness. He cursed himself for giving away so many potential trump cards. Though he must admit she had helped him understand a situation that had seemed a fever dream. "Are you a physicist?"
"Of sorts," she nodded. "Institute kid like you —according to your news biography. They didn't pick me up, however, till I was fifteen." A darkness flitted across her face. "A good many things had happened before then. But no matter now. I run the technical section here. Crater bosses also need someone who understands things like energetics and information theory."
Koskinen said, "You realize the shield unit is still in an early, experimental stage. You'd need a big laboratory and several years to develop the potentialities. Especially the potentialities that no one has yet guessed."
"True. But Zigger could make excellent use of the thing even as is. Let's talk about it. Not in any detail—I doubt if I could follow the math—but in generalities." Koskinen hesitated. "I already know a good bit," she reminded him.
He sighed. "Okay."
"First, is this a Martian machine?"
"Not exactly. I told you the Martians and— well, I—invented it together. They had the field theory but didn't know much practical solid state physics."
"Hm-hm. That means MS can't simply send a spaceship there and demand the full plans. According to all previous reports, the Martians won't play ball with anyone who isn't simpatico with the humans they've decided to like; and it's no use trying to pretend you are i
f you aren't, because they know; and the Russians found out the hard way before the war that they can detonate your atomic weapons in your own magazines. Of course, with the American government having the only spaceships these days, nobody else can get to Mars either. This game will be played out here on Earth.
"So what is your invisible screen? A potential barrier?"
Surprised, he nodded. "How did you guess?"
"Seemed reasonable. A two-way potential barrier, I suppose, analogous to a mountain ridge between the user and the rest of the world. But I've determined myself, today, that it builds from zero to maximum within the space of a few centimeters. Nothing gets through that hasn't the needful energy, sort of like the escape velocity needed to get off a planet. So a bullet which hits the screen can't get through, and falls to the ground. But what happens to the kinetic energy?"
"The field absorbs it," he said, "and stores it in the power pack from which the field is generated in the first place. If a bullet did travel fast enough to penetrate, it'd get back its speed as it passed through the inner half of the barrier. The field would push it, so to speak, drawing energy from the pack to do so. But penetration velocity for the unit I've got, at its present adjustment, is about fifteen miles per second."
She whistled. "Is that the limit?"
"No. You can push the potential barrier as high as you like, until you even exclude electromagnetic radiation. That would take a much larger energy storage capacity, of course. For a given capacity, such as my unit has, you can expand the surface of the barrier at the price of lowering its height. For instance, you could enclose an entire house in a sphere centered on my unit, but penetration velocity would be correspondingly less—maybe only one mile a second, though I'd have to calculate it out to be certain."
"One mile a second is still plenty," she said, impressed. "How is the energy stored?"
"Quantum degeneracy. The molecules of the accumulator are squeezed into low states. The pressure is maintained by a regenerative sub-field within the accumulator, which is, however, responsive to momentum transfer through the main barrier shell."