The Empire Of Time Part 8

"Not now. The Boskopoids on the other chrono-planes died out, but you and your family have managed to escape."

"The same thing will happen to us, in a century or two. There's too much pain and death, Jerry; we can't escape it. We can only conceal its effects on us by deluding others or robbing them of their memories. You're not the first person to learn our secrets."

Pierce's earlier suspicion was confirmed. Now he might as well learn as much as he can. "How far can you send and receive?"

"The distance varies. Perhaps ten kilometers, with someone I know. Two or three with someone I don't."

"How did you get into contact with s.h.i.+b and his men? Did you know them?"

"No, but I knew Chloe and Eugene. I felt her death, like hearing a scream, and then his."

"You were staying with Gordon Cole?"

"Since yesterday. I knew he was working for the Agency, and he seemed to expect something important to happen. When he invited me to stay with him, I knew he was afraid I might be hurt if I didn't."

"He knew about your abilities?"

"I told him a little, when I had to."

Pierce found a chocolate bar in his coat pocket, and shared it with her. "You complicate matters very interestingly." He smiled. "Gersen has a program; Wigner has a program. But neither program takes you into account That makes it all more fun."

"Fun! You see me as a means of helping you kill Gersen, and you call that fun." d.a.m.n the woman, and d.a.m.n himself for his schoolboy's veneration of her! She was not yet twenty-two, but she somehow mantled herself in a queen's reserve.

Well, he would have to serve her, even if it meant bullying her.

"Of course it's fun. It might as well be, since I've got to kill him in any case, and

enjoying the deed will help me succeed.""You've got to do it?"He explained his blocked Briefing, his desire to kin Gersen, s.h.i.+h, and McGowan at the Farallon City airport. "Wigner knows enough about Project Sherlock to want it stopped. I'm just executing his orders."

"Whatever they may be."

"Whatever they may be."

Anita became silent. Five kilometers below, the brown fields of spring rolled by under broken clouds. On the eastern horizon, the white teeth of the Sierra Madre glittered against the sky.

"But the project is impossible."

Pierce looked at her.

"The technology is beyond us. To create a usable magnetic lens, the generators must be perfectly aligned-perfectly. A discrepancy of twenty-five meters- between generators millions of kilometers apart-would mean the mother s.h.i.+p, the receiver, would get a hopeless mess. We're nowhere near that sort of precision."

"Yet you kept pus.h.i.+ng the project."

"Until I saw how serious the problems were. I wouldn't have let Seamus Brown take me off Sherlock if I'd felt we were close to a solution. But I missed something," she went on, "something about it that makes it a weapon." She shrugged. "I feel worse about being stupid than about being chased by the Copos."

"Well. Whatever Sherlock may be, neutralizing Gersen should stop it."

"You're very confident."

"Of course."

"And how will you... neutralize him?"

"That will be determined by circ.u.mstances, and my Briefing."

Anita looked over at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes. She embarra.s.sed him, made him feel like a teenager caught playing cops-and-robbers when he should have outgrown such games. Under this embarra.s.sment he resented her. Who was she to question his mission? She was a kind of superhuman, but she might also become a hindrance.

If that chain of thought had additional links, he was unaware of them. He began the descent to Nuevo Sacramento.

Chapter Seven.

Pierce gave Nuevo Sacramento's Air Traffic Control a false identification and received permission to land. He taxied the Cessna right to the terminal building. They jumped out and walked quickly inside. At this lat.i.tude, away from the coast, winters were long, so even on this sunny April afternoon there was a chill in the air.

The terminal was not very crowded, and no one took much notice of them as they walked on through. A young Copo stood by the doors to the road, watching them approach. He moved to intercept them, but his relaxed expression indicated that this was only a routine check.

"Excuse me, sir-ma'am. May I see your IDs, if you don't mind?"

"Of course." Pierce showed his Intertemporal pa.s.sport. The Copo's eyebrows lifted a little, but his manner did not warm from civility to courtesy. He did not seem to recognize in Pierce anything but a senior bureaucrat from Earth.

"Welcome to Nuevo, Mr. Pierce. Hope you have a nice visit Sure picked a good day. And your ID, ma'am?"

"I haven't any. It's really annoying. All my cards were lost this morning, and I can't think where I left them."

The Copo looked concerned. "Sorry to hear that, ma'am. If you can't produce your ID, I'll have to ask you to come in to our office for fingerprinting. Just a formality, you understand. Then we can issue you a temporary ID for your visit here."

A cab pulled up outside, and a frumpy young couple shuffled in. The cab stayed at the curb, its driver immersed in a carno comic.

I'm sorry," said Pierce, "but we're really pressed for time. Well be here just for a couple of hours-then we're off again back to Little St Louis."

"Well, sir, I'm afraid I don't make the regulations. Now, if you'll come this way -" He gestured down the long concourse to an unmarked door. Pierce reached out, gripped the man's outstretched wrist, and flung him off balance. The Copo hit the floor head first, his mouth and nose spraying blood across the gray vinyl floor.

Anita gasped and began to sag, until Pierce grasped her shoulders and guided her smoothly through the doors. Rapid footsteps sounded behind them-bystanders going to the Copo's aid.

They were outside, half running across the sidewalk to the cab. The driver lifted his sallow face from his comic and gaped at the muzzle of Pierce's pistol."Hey, whatcha doin'?""Out.""Hey, watcha daint?""Out of the cab-now"

"Huh?" "Oh, h.e.l.l." Pierce shot him on low impact and opened the door. The driver, eyes rolled up in his head, fell heavily onto the oily asphalt. Anita got in and slid over to make room for Pierce behind the wheel. He started the engine and pulled sedately away from the curb. The driver lay face up on the road, his comic fluttering beside him.

"Sorry I had to be so rough," Pierce said.

"Yes, yes. Never mind." She stared at the dashboard. "I've never been this weak

before. I tried to stop the Copo-really tried. And nothing. And I couldn't stop them killing Gordon. It's like being paralyzed."

"Nothing could have saved Gordon."

"If I could have stopped the Copos from breaking in, he'd at least have lived to

get the message out."

Glancing across at her, Pierce saw she was on the edge of a real breakdown. He tried, and failed, to imagine what it must be like to be a IKosi. They all were gentle people, scholars and thinkers as isolated in their new world as they had been in their old one. Now he was escorting her through a very dangerous pa.s.sage. If she were hurt or killed, the repercussions would be immense.

"Do a mantra. Rest," he told her. She nodded and closed her eyes; in a few seconds she grew calmer.

They turned west onto Highway 605, headed for Nuevo Sacramento. There was little traffic at this time of day, except for some trucks and the occasional bracero bus carrying migrant workers. Pierce monitored the cab's CB radio, but heard nothing unusual. In a few minutes there would surely be an all-points bulletin out on them. They would have little chance of getting through Nuevo Sacramento undetected, let alone of reaching Farallon City.

Already they were on the ragged edge of town, a patchwork of marshes, truck farms, housing tracts, and light industry. There seemed to be an abandoned car in every front yard; grubby kids with slingshots sniped at them from the side of the road. Colonials.

"There's a shopping center over by the next off-ramp," Pierce said. "Well ditch the cab there."

They left it in the crowded parking lot and ambled into the covered shopping mall. Built in a cla.s.sic 1960s style, it resembled a thousand others on a dozen chronoplanes, right down to the aimless teenagers dawdling outside the shoe boutiques and p.o.r.notheques. Pierce and Anita walked into the giant department store at one end of the mall; he was glad to see it was a sale day, and the store was crowded with haggard housepersons and their squalling children. The store affected an old-fas.h.i.+oned decor, complete with a pseudo-wooden floor; most of the merchandise was shabby and overpriced junk from Earth.

"Let's buy some new clothes," he suggested, and gave her a couple of hundred-dollar bills. Using a credit card would surely give them away to the databank computers, which by now must be programmed with all their doc.u.ments. UnTrainables being old-fas.h.i.+oned about s.e.x roles as well as about merchandising, there were separate men's and women's clothing departments, complete with changing rooms. Pierce felt rather silly observing such niceties. No wonder they needed p.o.r.notheques!

He bought khaki trousers, a red-and-black-checked flannel s.h.i.+rt, serviceable Swiss hiking boots, an olive-drab jacket, and a black baseball cap. The clothes all looked too new, but at least he now blended in with most of the other males.

Anita met him back on the mall. Her jeans and sweater had been replaced by ugly red-and-green overalls, a red turtleneck sweater, and a black windbreaker. She wore a short Afro wig, and a chromofilm spray had turned her golden skin a rich brown. The chromofilm would break down in a few hours, but right now it made her considerably less conspicuous. When Pierce slouched up beside her, they looked like a typical Colonial farm couple, in town for an afternoon's shopping.

"There's a Copo car in the parking lot," Anita murmured. "They must have spotted the cab."

"Okay. Back into the store."

They sidled through the crowds, found a stairway to the bas.e.m.e.nt, and took it. No one was visible in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but mariachi music bleated from a radio somewhere nearby. They slipped silently through a labyrinth of shelves and cartons. It was lunchtime; no one was around.

An open door led to a loading dock facing a parking area. Pierce considered stealing one of the three trucks standing there unattended, but decided against doing so-the alarm would go out within minutes, and the trucks were too easily identifiable. Beyond the parking area, trees screened this side of the building from the highway. They would have to take their chances on the road.

No one saw them cross the lot and then the highway. There was a hitchhikers' shelter on the shoulder of the westbound side, and Pierce and Anita stood ' beside it, thumbs out. Four or five cars hissed by, including an unmarked Copo Toyota, whose driver regarded them indifferently. More police would be in the area soon.

A bracero bus groaned down upon them. Its yellow paint was camouflaged under a thick crust of dirt, and its dented front b.u.mper carried a Spanish t.i.tle: EL EMPERADOR SIN ROPA. It stopped. The driver was a heavy, apathetic man, clearly no more than the chauffeur for the woman beside him. She rolled down the window and stared at them through mirrored sungla.s.ses. Strands of gray-blond hair had escaped from tinder her old straw hat. She wore a brown wool jacket; her hand, resting on the window frame, was gloved.

"Hi," she said. "You folks lookin' for a ride, or for Work?"

"Both." Pierce smiled.

"You wearin' nice clothes for people need work."

Pierce shrugged and grinned. "Well, yes, ma'am. Just bought 'em. Now we just about broke."

"Is that right. You ain't runaway indents?"

"No, ma'am! Free agents." He considered drawing his pistol and commandeering

the bus, but two more police cars were coming down the highway. Pierce saw no

occasion for dramatics; all they needed, after all, was a ride out of town.

"Well, you better be. I find an indent, he goes back to his boss by special delivery."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Go climb in the back with the others." She turned, slid open a panel between the

cab and the back of the bus. "Dallow! Got a couple more comin' in. You let 'em in. Get 'em settled."

"You bet, Miz Curtice," a young man's voice replied. There was some fuss and

muttering from the unseen pa.s.sengers; Mrs. Curtice silenced it by slamming the panel shut.

"Hurry up," she told them.

"Mighty obliged, ma'am." Pierce smiled again.

They walked to the rear of the windowless bus, where the door was already open