Poul Anderson - Shield

by Shield (Lit)

  "You've just revised the entire concept of energy storage, you know," she said absently, "killed a dozen major industries and brought twenty new ones into existence. But as for the field, or screen, or shield, or whatever name you prefer——what is it? A region of warped space?''

  "You can call it that if you want to, though strictly speaking, 'warped space' is a tautology at best, a meaningless noise at worst. I could show you the math——" Koskinen stopped short. He oughtn't. Not to this gang of criminals!

  She relieved him by sighing; "I'd never understand. What little I ever knew about tensors has rusted away long ago. Let's keep this practical. I noticed today that you have a thermostatic unit built into the apparatus. You'd need it, obviously, since air can't get in or out of the screen. And you have some kind of oxygen recycler like nothing I ever saw."

  "That's mostly derived from Martian technology," he admitted. "Exhaled carbon dioxide and water vapor circulate over a catalytic metal sponge surface which bleeds a little energy from the accumulator for a chemical process. Except for the small equilibrium concentration that your body needs, they're formed into solid carbohydrate and free oxygen. Trace exhalations like acetone—stinks—get converted to radicals attached to the carbohydrate.

  "On Mars we included a unit that took care of organic wastes as well and reclaimed all excreted water. So then you only needed to take food along, and you could stay out on a field trip for weeks. But it was a heavy thing, that unit, and the principle was elementary, so we left it behind."

  "I see," Vivienne nodded. "How could you work, though, immobilized inside a barrier field?"

  "We traveled on flatbed wagons or Martian sandsleds, drawn in a train by the electric tractors we'd taken along. Remote control robots did most of the actual specimen gathering. Toward the end, though, our engineers built a few of what we called walkies. One-man platforms with legs and hands, controlled by the rider, who could then go just about anywhere. In case of trouble, the shield could be expanded to enclose the machine as Well as the man.

  "Of course," Koskinen added thoughtfully, "it was a makeshift. There's no reason why a shield can't be designed that'd fit a man like a thermsuit, only better, so he could walk and manipulate directly. It'd be a question of using a good many small generators, each responsive to the wearer's posture and motion. The total field at any instant would be the vector sum of the separate fields. However, that'll take a lot of engineering to do."

  "That's not the only possibility," she said with rising excitement. "Spaceships, aircraft, even ground cars that haven't any hulls; just a potential shell generated when you need it. Vary the shape —turn your spaceship into your dome house— start really exploiting the minerals in the asteroid belt! A new kind of motor: push your ship forward by changing its energy potential. Why, you might be able to travel near the speed of light— if a faster-than-light drive isn't lurking somewhere in your spacewarp equations. A new way to get atomic energy, I'll bet; if you can hold the molecule in a degenerate state, you should be able to do the same for the nucleus. Perhaps you'll be able to convert any kind of matter into energy. No more fuel costs, no limit to the available power! Oh, Pete, your shield is only the beginning!"

  He remembered where he was, jarringly, and said with returning grimness: "It may be the end, with so many factions snatching after this thing."

  The light died in her. She leaned back. "Yes," she said in a flat voice. "That's very possible. Virtual invulnerability . . . yes, people have ripped each other apart for lesser prizes, haven't they?"

  The servitor brought in a roast turkey with trimmings. Vivienne shook herself, as if she were cold. She flashed Koskinen a quick white smile. "I'm sorry, Pete," she said. "I didn't mean to talk shop so soon. Let's forget it for a while. I'd like to get acquainted with you as a person." Her voice dropped. "Your kind of guy isn't any too common these days. Not anywhere in the world."

  They talked till far into the night.

  VII

  The guard who escorted him waved Koskinen through the double door. The echoing concrete bleakness of the laboratory brought his isolation sharply back. Zigger and Vivienne were already there. The boss was asking her:

  "You sure he didn't say nothing to you? Ever? Like maybe he was running a little show of his own in low-level somewhere, that he could of ducked out to take care of?"

  Her mouth curled. "Don't be more moronic than you have to, Zigger. How could a hophead like Bones run anything except errands?"

  "He's not a hophead."

  "He's addicted to brain stimulation, isn't he?"

  "That's not dope."

  "I say it is."

  Zigger lifted a hand as if to cuff her. She faced him rigidly. "How do you expect to locate Bones —that way?" she asked. He let the hand fall, turned about with a growl, and saw the newcomers.

  "Argh! There you are!" The browless eyes glittered close to Koskinen. "C'mere. Grab him, Buck." One of the three guards present seized Koskinen's arms from behind. The grip was painful. Koskinen might have managed to break loose and get revenge, but the other two, and their master, had guns.

  Zigger took a pair of channel pliers off the workbench. "I want you to understand something, Pete," he said, almost conversationally. "You've been caught. Nobody outside the Crater has any notion where you are. You're property. My property. I can do anything I feel like with you, and there won't be one damn thing you can do about it." The pliers closed on Koskinen's nose. "I can haul your beezer out by the roots, right now, this minute, if I want to." The jaws tightened until tears were stung from Koskinen's eyes. Zigger grinned voluptuously. "You got worse places than that to get squeezed," he said. "Or if I don't want to do any harm, I'll hook you into a nerve machine. That hurts maybe more. I've watched guys in it. When we're finished with you, we'll run you through the grinder. I keep cats, and you know what fresh meat costs."

  As if with an effort, he tossed the pliers back. He had begun to sweat a little, and his voice wasn't as light as intended. "That's what I can do to property. Now, Vee, fix him up the way I told you."

  Vivienne's face had gone altogether blank. She took a thick steel disc some three inches in diameter, suspended from a light chain, and hung it around Koskinen's neck. Picking a spotweld gun off the bench, she closed the links. He felt the heat on his skin, even through the asbestos paper she used to protect him. When she was done, he wore a locket he could not remove without cutting tools.

  Zigger had explained while Vivienne worked: "This is to make sure you behave. You're gonna be helping our lady scientist with that force screen of yours. Showing her how it works, making more like it, maybe improving it some. So maybe you got ideas about getting the gadget on your back and switching the screen on, someplace where a laser can't get at you. Well, forget that. This here is a fulgurite capsule with a radio detonator. If I hear you're acting funny, I'll go press a button and blow your head off."

  "Look out for stray signals, then," Koskinen snapped.

  "Don't worry," Vivienne said. "The detonator is coded." She finished her job and released the chain, leaving the asbestos in place while the weld cooled.

  "Let him go, Buck," Zigger said. Koskinen stumbled as his arms were released, rubbed his sore nose and scowled at them all.

  Zigger beamed. "No hard feelings, Pete," he said. "I had to show you the bad side first. Now I can show you the good side. Care for a smoke? A happy pill? Got 'em right in my pocket here."

  "No," Koskinen said.

  "As long as you're a prisoner, you're property." Zigger said. "But the boys here aren't no property. They stick around because they know a good deal when they see one. I'd like to have you join us, Pete. From your own free choice, I mean.

  "Now don't look so horrified. I'm not a crook. You got to realize that. I'm a government myself. Sure. I make rules, and collect taxes, and take care of my people. What else is a government, huh? What'd Washington ever do for you that I can't do better? You want money, good food, good housing, fun and games? You c
an have 'em, right here, starting today, if you want. You wouldn't live in the Crater your whole life, neither. Change your face and you can go anywhere. I keep some mighty nice apartments, hunting lodges, villas, yachts, whatchamacallit, here and there around the world. I'll have a lot more once we've got those shields of yours ready. A whale of a lot more. Use your imagination, boy, and see what we might get us in the next few years. Want in on the game?"

  Koskinen remained silent.

  Zigger slapped his back. "Think it over, Pete," he said jovially. "Meanwhile, work hard and be good. So long." He went out. The guards followed him. The door closed behind them.

  Vivienne struck a cigarette, sat down on a stool and smoked in short ferocious puffs. Koskinen wandered about the room. The bomb was a lump at the base of his throat. He glanced at the monitor screen. Someone was watching him, of course, from elsewhere in this warren. He felt like making an impolite gesture at the watchman, but decided not to. The shield unit lay on the bench. He fiddled nervously with the controls.

  After a while, Vivienne stirred. "Well," she said.

  He didn't answer.

  "I'm sorry about that thing," she said. "I got my orders. I can get away with a lot, but a direct order from the boss——"

  "Sure," he said.

  "As for the rest. . . what he did ... I suppose Zigger's no worse than the average gang baron. Probably not even much worse than any other government. He's right about being a government, you know."

  "They don't practice torture in Washington," he muttered.

  "I'm not so sure," she said bitterly.

  He glanced at her, surprised. She hadn't said much about her past, for all the talking they had done. He gathered that she came from a well-to-do family and had gotten an education commensurate with her intelligence at a private school; that was interrupted by the war, and she had had a few bad years afterward, first in the refugee hordes and then as a semi-slave in a guerrilla band, until the police wiped them out and turned her over to the Institute. It gave her room, board, medical treatment, psychiatric help, and training in science. "I should think you'd be the last person to preach anarchism," he said.

  "Or archism, for that matter." Her smile was stiff. "I've been on the receiving end of both conditions." With a slight shake, as if to drive off her thoughts: "About Zigger. He was in a tough mood. Worried about Bones disappearing."

  "Who?"

  "Neff's pal. Remember, there were two guys in that restaurant? Neff went out to the fake taxi and captured you. Bones tailed you to the door."

  "Oh, yes. The runt. I remember."

  "He went back into town yesterday. He was supposed to report hi by nightfall—Zigger had a job for him—but he hasn't shown yet and they can't find any trace of him out there.''

  "Violence?"

  "Maybe. Though Zigger's people are more apt to dish that out than take it. Bones might have run afoul of a boy pack, of course, or even a raiding party from New Haven Crater. We've been fighting a sort of war with them for control of Yonkers low-level—— Oh, the devil with this." Vivienne ground out her cigarette. "Everything's so sickening. Why doesn't the official government get off the dollar and clean out these pest holes?"

  "I suppose they will in time," Koskinen said. "There've been too many other things to handle first, though. Maintaining the Protectorate takes so much money and energy that——"

  "Don't talk to me about the Protectorate!" she burst out.

  He gaped at her. She broke into a shiver. Her eyes, close to tears, looked past him and past the wall. The nails bit into her palms.

  "Why, what's wrong?" he ventured, and took a step toward her.

  "If I believed in God," she said through her teeth, "I'd think he hated us—our country, our whole tribe—and saddled us with the Norris Doctrine so we'd maintain our own damnation and save him the trouble!"

  "Huh? But... I mean, Vee, what else would you do? Do you want to fight a third thermonuclear war?"

  Echoing in the back of his head were the words they had made him memorize in his current affairs class at the Institute:

  "——the future security of the United States. Therefore, from this moment henceforth, no other national state shall be permitted to keep arms or armed forces beyond what is needed for internal policing. Any attempt to manufacture, assemble, recruit, or otherwise prepare forces suitable for aggressive action, shall be an act of war against the United States, and the individuals responsible shall be arrested and tried as war criminals by an American military court. In order to prevent the secret accumulation of such forces, the United States will exercise an unlimited right of inspection. Otherwise national sovereignty will be fully respected and the United States guarantees the integrity of all national frontiers as of the date of this Proclamation. The United States recognizes that nations may adjust such frontiers by mutual agreement, and that the people of any nation may change their form of government by lawful or even revolutionary means. However, the United States reserves to itself the right of judgment as to whether any given change is consonant with its own security, and shall not permit changes which it deems potentially dangerous to its own and the world's future."

  Congress, the Supreme Court, and subsequent Presidents had elaborated the Norris Doctrine until the theory was a lawyer's paradise, Koskinen reminded himself. But the practice was simple enough for anyone to understand. The Americans maintained the last military services on Earth, and brought them to bear whenever the President decided the national interest required action. The day-to-day details of inspection, intelligence operations, evaluation of data, and advice to the executive, were in the hands of the Bureau of Military Security.

  Vivienne didn't answer Koskinen's question.

  "We're not perfect," he said, "and, well, it's no fun being a cop ... and it's made us unpopular ... but who else could be trusted with the job?"

  She looked at him, then, and said: "MS tried to kill you."

  "Well... okay, they did." Argument stiffened his opinions. "They wouldn't have if... I mean, I'd rather have been cleanly shot than gone to some Chinese torture chamber ... or come here, you know!"

  "They killed my husband," she said.

  He fell silent.

  "Want to hear the story?" she asked without tone, turning her gaze from him again. "After my graduation I got a foreign service job, assistant science attache, and drew an assignment to Brazil. Janio was an engineer there. Sweet and a little bit crazy and very young—oh, how young! Not much less than me in years, actually. But Brazil didn't get hit very hard in the war, and he'd scarcely seen anything of the aftermath. He hadn't been poisoned, as I'd been, and with him I finally began to feel clean again. We used to go bird-watching on the river....

  "There was this hothead conspiracy. MS had vetoed a plan to mine some uranium deposits in the Serra Dourado, on the grounds that they didn't have inspectors enough to make sure that some of the stuff wasn't smuggled out and turned into bombs——"

  Her voice trailed off. "Well, they don't," Koskinen said. Helpless before her emotion, he thought vaguely of turning the conversation into safer channels. "Inspection is a highly technical job. There aren't many qualified men available. And even one country is such a big place. How do you think the Chinese, for instance, keep that network of agents and agitators going? The Chinese government disowns the organization officially, and the whole world knows they support it clandestinely, and there's nothing we can do because we haven't got people enough to govern China ourselves."

  "Uh-huh," she said dully. "In China there's at least a fairly honest and fairly competent government, however much they hate us behind those bland smiles. Most other places, we just prop up a bunch of corrupt do-nothings, because we know they won't make trouble . . . and never mind whether their people have a life worth the effort of living. Oh, yes, we talk non-interference in foreign internal affairs; but in practice—I've been in the diplomatic service, I tell you. I know."

  He sighed. "I'm sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt." />
  "Thanks for that apology, Pete. You remind me of Janio, a little. . . . Oh. What happened. Those mines would have given work to a lot of hungry paupers. Some nuts decided to overthrow the Brazilian government, establish a new one that wasn't a puppet, and talk back to the Yankees. The conspiracy flopped. An amateur job. MS and the Brazilian secret service caught everybody. Including Janio, who was not one of them. I should know that too, shouldn't I? My own Johnny! I knew where he spent his time. But he had been angry about the Serra Dourado business, along with a lot of other things. He was a proud guy, and he wanted his country to go her own way. He'd spoken his piece—what does our First Amendment say?—and it's true that some of his friends were in the plot.

  "They brought us to Washington for trial. I wasn't arrested myself, but I came along, of course. There were interrogations under drugs. I thought that would clear Johnny. Instead, someone I'd never met before swore in court that he'd seen my husband at some of those meetings. I called him a liar under oath. I knew Johnny'd been with me on several of those exact dates. You know the funny little associations that fix something in your memory. We must have been camped on that Amazon island the weekend of the 23rd because we saw twenty-three macaws fly by, emerald green in a pink sunrise, and he said the gods were providing me with a calendar because they also thought I was beautiful. .. . That sort of thing.

  "So they found him guilty. And shot him. And I was charged with perjury. But they gave me probation. Scientists are valuable and so forth. One evening, a year or so later, I met a business executive with high government connections at a party in Manhattan. He got so drunk that he spilled to me why Johnny had been orbited. The PI exam had shown he was 'a strongly potential insurrectionist.' That is, he might someday get fed up with being shoved around in his own country, and do something about it. Better kill him now. 'Before he helps build a bomb, or finds one of the big missiles still hidden here and there with all records on them lost. He could kill millions of us,' the executive said. My Johnny!