The Empire Of Time Part 4

The jet finally departed a little after dawn. It was an old Hyushin, less than half full though it would be the only transcontinental flight of the day. Every Agency airline was a money-loser, of course. Ore, for example, had a Colonial population of seventy-two million, plus five or ten million endos. Scattered in urban cl.u.s.ters and small towns, the Colonies would stagnate without some fast transport.

Across Pennsylvania and Ohio there was little to see but a thin subglacial forest, mostly scrub pine. Countless lakes, most of them small, interrupted the woods, and there was still plenty of snow. For a time Pierce could glimpse Lake Warren -what would eventually be the Great Lakes was now a single immense inland sea, its icy surface blazing in the spring sun.

The forest thickened near the Mississippi, with a raw, logged-off stretch around a lumber town here and there. There were a few roads-local transport was usually by helicopter or river-going hovercraft.

The plane made half a dozen stops between Glaciopolis and Little St. Louis, the largest city in the Midwest. The settlement hadn't changed much since Pierce's last visit-it remained a sprawl of tractvilles around the domed core. But there was an unmistakable brown haze mantling it. Smog. He made a mental note to report the matter when he got back. Colonials! Give them a pristine new world and they wrecked it in half a generation.

The prairies looked almost exactly like those of Earth, an infinite plain geometrized into megafarms. Under the spring snow, the first of the year's three wheat crops was beginning to sprout. Though the land looked thickly settled, there were in fact fewer farmers than loggers on Ore. Those immense wheatfields were tended by a few lonely men and women and their automated equipment Pierce looked out the window for a while, dozed, then turned to the newsfiches he had picked up in Glaciopolis. The New Ore Times was typically Colonial, from its punny t.i.tle to its trivial content. Most of the paper was reprinted from uptime media; by the time Pierce waded through all two hundred pages, he had absorbed most of yesterday's Earth news but learned little of local events. Dropping the 'fiche in the recycle bin under his seat, he turned to another paper. It was the same, a ma.s.s of trivia-horoscopes, gossip, recipes, comics, warmed-over news items from Earth.

The sheer consistency of the two papers interested him, however. He read the rest of his newsfiches with a scholar's detached attentiveness. In three minutes he was through.

There was virtually no hard news about Ore. Commissioner Gersen's name was mentioned often, but only in stories obviously ground out in some press secretary's office. He could find no local criticism of the Colonial administration, a remarkable state of affairs on any downtime world, where public b.i.t.c.hing was a popular pastime. Pierce felt the scholar's detached pleasure in a hypothesis confirmed-a media fog was operating. It was less obvious than outright censorship, but just as effective, as the Agency had reason to know. Pierce wondered why this one had been created, and by whom. If his Briefing had not been blocked, he suspected, there would be no need to wonder.

The glaciated Rockies lay smothered under storms. West of the Deseret Sea, he could see little sign of settlement, though brushfires indicated the locations of endo tribes, which set them to drive game into convenient hunting grounds. Just like Colonials, Pierce thought, always quick to seize a short-term gain even at the cost of a long-term disaster.

Once past the Sierra Nevada, the plane flew over inhabited country again. The foothills sloped down to the countless farms and ranches of the Nuevo Sacramento Valley. The Dyushin began dropping quickly, and as they descended over the Alcatraz Valley Pierce was surprised to see it dotted with truck farms and summer cottages, none of which had been there during the Secessionist business in '12.

He glimpsed Little Frisco, a hamlet existing only for its Transferpoint to Earth, and then they started their descent into the airport in the dunes east of Farallon City. In a thousand years or so, melting glaciers would flood this beautiful, bleak coastal plain and roll through the Golden Gate Pa.s.s into the Alcatraz Valley. Until that tune, the Farallon Coast would be one of the loveliest places on all the chronoplanes.

Waiting in the brown-and-gold arrival lounge was a solidly built, impa.s.sive man with tranquil blue eyes and shiny pink skin. Pierce walked directly up to him and extended his hand. "Harry McGowan, I presume."

Commissioner Gersen's Director of Security Services smiled faintly, then nodded. "Very pleased to meet you, sir." McGowan had a Rhodesian accent, which had to be an affectation; the whites had been out of Zimbabwe for a generation, and McGowan himself had been on Ore for over ten years. "Hope you had a good flight."

"Mm, fine."

"If it's no inconvenience, the Commissioner would like to speak with you before you go on to Los Alamitos."

"Of course."

They walked out into the main mall of the terminal, busy with travelers and officials. Pierce was grimly pleased to see the number of plainclothes Colonial Police stationed strategically around the mall. He did not know what was going on, but it was clear that something unpleasant was taking place here on Ore.

Located just off the mall was a small office suite used by the airport administrators, who had been evicted today to make room for Gersen and a high-ranking Copo in uniform. Bengt Gersen was a large, powerful-looking man of forty-five whose Habsburg chin gave him a somewhat bovine expression. As he rose from his chair to shake Pierce's hand, Gersen's paunch jutted out oddly under his maroon blazer. Pierce, recognizing the bulge as one that would be made by a personal computer, looked for the thin scar behind Gersen's ear where the speakout terminal would be implanted. Finding it, he felt a grudging respect for Gersen: not every unTrainable was bright enough or quick enough to handle a personal computer's whispering advice.

The Copo was Colonel Li Shih, a very handsome Canadian-born Chinese of medium height. He wore his gaudy uniform with grace, and smiled as he was introduced to Pierce.

"Mr. Pierce," said Gersen, "let me say at the outset how pleased and honored we are by your agreeing to investigate this situation."

"You're very kind, Commissioner. I hope I shall be of some use."

"We have every confidence in your branch of the Agency. I'm sure you'll have the saboteurs apprehended very quickly."

"If there are any." Pierce smiled.

Gersen looked surprised. "You did read my report to your superior?"

"Thoroughly."

"We feel the evidence is overwhelming," Colonel Shih said.

"More than overwhelming," snapped McGowan. "b.l.o.o.d.y irrefutable."

Pierce raised an eyebrow at him. McGowan leaned forward in his chair.

"Think about it, Mr. Pierce. Their methods are very subtle, but the pattern's there when you look. The boffins keep reporting bugs in their instrumentation, odd delays in tests, unexpected results that send them back to their blackboards, or- whatever they use. Little things, but they all add up to the impression that the project isn't worth following up on, that the basic theory's wrong, that the project's too expensive-that sort of thing. Christ, they even worry about ecological effects. As a result, we dropped several projects before we smelled smoke."

"Forgive me, but all this sounds terribly subjective to me," Pierce replied.

"Then let me give you some very objective facts, Mr. Pierce," McGowan retorted. "Item: the 3,4-hyper-pyrase program. A solid fuel for the Gnat micromissile. They couldn't develop the fuel to more than thirty percent of theoretical efficiency. Sc.r.a.pped the whole program last summer."

"Item: the ZOMBI long-range detection system. Six years' work on that one, Mr. Pierce. By now it ought to be able to spot a tennis ball a light-year away, and tell you what color it is. In practice we're lucky if it can find Jupiter on a clear night.

"Item: high-temperature superconductors. We know they had them uptime, but after four years' effort we can't begin to duplicate them." He paused. "Shall I go on?"

"Thank you, but you've made your point. These projects-and the others mentioned in the commissioner's report-are all pretty remote from one another, aren't they? Have there been any WDS people working on all these projects?"

"In some cases, but not all," McGowan said. "When a project is shelved, its people usually move to another one. On the long-term projects, the senior people almost never transfer, but the juniors certainly do. And of course everyone socializes and talks shop. I believe that's called the interdisciplinary approach," McGowan added contemptuously.

"So this supposed sabotage could be caused by a handful of scientists moving from project to project."

"Theoretically," Shih responded. "Mr. McGowan asked us to correlate personnel shifts with aborted projects, but we came up with nothing very solid."

Gersen cleared his throat "As I'm sure you're aware, Mr. Pierce, the Weapons Development Site is off limits to unauthorized individuals, but movement within the Site is quite easy, despite its size. That's the policy the scientists demanded, and I'm not criticizing it, not for a moment. But it does mean that a small group- even a single individual-could gain access to all the projects thus far affected."

Pierce said nothing for a moment "Have you any suspects, Mr. McGowan?"

"Plenty. Too many."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Pierce asked, rapidly becoming interested.

"We've a very mixed bag down there. Lots of Climbers, lots of odds and sods from Earth. Mob of Mexican Indians from Beulah, some Romans from Ahania, a few Arabs, a mad Greek or two. And of course we've got Anita IKosi. All of 'em are Trained, of course, so there shouldn't be any questions about their loyalty..."

"You flunk otherwise?"

McGowan looked uncomfortable. "Let's say I beg to differ with the usual faith in Training. Everyone likes to think that it's all or nothing, you've got Trainability or you don't. Well, maybe so when it comes to pumping in raw data. But what about emotional att.i.tudes, cultural values? You can take some savage out of the jungle and teach him physics, but can you really teach bun loyalty? Teamwork? Excuse me, but I b.l.o.o.d.y well doubt it."

Gersen looked embarra.s.sed. "With all due respect, Mr. McGowan, I think you may be overstating the case. We can all agree that there is a likelihood that, among twenty-five thousand Trained scientists, there are some disaffected persons who may be engaging in sabotage. Now-"

"I don't agree." Pierce allowed the hint of a sneer to creep into his voice. Gersen paused. They all looked at him.

"First of all, Mr. McGowan's views on Training are comparable to a blind man's opinion of Pica.s.so. Secondly, it is just as easy to Train people's emotions as it is to Train their intellects. But it is also highly illegal, as you all should know. Agency regulations state that any Trainee who demonstrates disloyalty, or refuses to freely accept Earth values, is automatically Cleared of Training and returned to his home culture. There have been several cases where this procedure was invoked. So Mr. McGowan is groundlessly impugning the loyalty of WDS personnel.

"And if there are no grounds for suspecting those persons," Pierce went on, "the sabotage theory falls apart. The alternative theories may be less dramatic, but are more likely."

"Such as?" asked Shih quietly.

"Sloppy administration. Poor project supervision. Too much money. The WDS gets all the funding it asks for-sometimes even more-and anyone with a plausible idea can usually get backing. We support a lot of schemes that turn out to be harebrained, in the hope that some of them just might work out after all."

"Do you favor any of these... alternative theories?"

"No, Colonel; I try to keep an open mind. If I find evidence of real sabotage, I will of course take appropriate measures. But I do not expect to find such evidence."

He looked at his watch.

"My plane leaves in five minutes. Thank you for arranging this meeting, gentlemen. I'll be in touch."

He stood up, shook hands with each of them, then left the office. As he walked out, he found himself swearing. Each of the men in the room wanted to kill him; at least, their bodies and faces conveyed that message. He would discount that- such paranoid thoughts having been inspired by several people in the last twenty-four hours-except that he had, after all, been attacked by a cat's-paw last night.

What was more, he had wanted to kill them. It had taken a conscious effort to keep from pulling his pistol and murdering them all. Pierce was not upset by that impulse, but he wondered very much why he had been Briefed to have it.

Chapter Five.

Los Alamitos stood about where Santa Monica did fourteen thousand years uptime, but it was well inland and sheltered from the sea by a five-kilometer strip of dunes, chaparral, and scrub pine. With its adobe houses and quiet streets, it reminded Pierce of Taos in the '80s. It did not look like a research center, despite the tedious functionalism of some of the larger buildings. After his long trip, Pierce felt very much at home here, where virtually everyone was Trainable.

Eugene Younger, Director of the WDS, met him on the tarmac of Oppenheimer Field. Younger wore baggy khaki trousers, a red flannel shirt, and a leather jacket -a red baseball cap was shoved into his hip pocket He was tall, slim and tanned, with a graying brown beard and a receding hairline, though he was only twenty-five.

"So you're Pierce," he said as Pierce stepped off the plane. "I'm Gene. Where to?"

"Everywhere."

"Good. The chopper's on the other side."

As they walked around the terminal building, Pierce decided he liked Younger. Many Trainables, including Pierce, were insulated by their status and developed an impenetrable reserve; it was a way of coping with being very young and very powerful. Younger, though, seemed unashamedly boyish, unclouded by cynicism. Whereas Pierce walked in a controlled glide, Younger bounced.

The helicopter was a two-man Merwin Pipit that lifted almost noiselessly into the air. Younger flew it with elegance.

"Lots of changes in five years," he remarked as they climbed.

"It's grown," Pierce agreed. He had been here at the WDS only once before, in '10, when a previous Director had been coping with hostile endos. "Still smoggy."

"d.a.m.ned inversion layer. The L.A. Basin's impossible on every chronoplane."

They swept north to the mountains, then east. Most of the WDS was centered in Los Alamitos, but test ranges and special facilities were scattered clear across southern California to the Colorado. The terrain was green and brown, broad gra.s.slands interrupted by dense stands of oak and pine. Rivers and creeks glinted in the sun, and there were many lakes and marshes- all fed by the storm track that would eventually move north as the glaciers receded. Pierce recognized the installations they pa.s.sed over: Nuclear Weapons Fabrication, Laser Research, the immense elliptical antennas of the ZOMBI station. After a long empty stretch, they approached the Mojave Verde Missile Facility, the center for s.p.a.ceflight research and development.

The Facility, larger than it had been five years before, was a sprawling grid of streets and buildings separated from the launching pads and missile-a.s.sembly center by a low ridge. Some kilometers away, Pierce saw smoke on the hills.

"So the endos are back."

"No trouble now. No real trouble, that is."

"Ah?"

"They steal a lot. Even inside the Facility. Don't ask me how they get through the wire and the detection system. But at least they don't kill." He grinned at Pierce, mischievously. "We caught one a few weeks ago. Told him we'd call back the Deathwalker if they didn't quit raiding us, and sent him back to Klasayat."

"Klasayat!" Pierce was both pleased and mortified. Five years ago, the Gra.s.slanders had been a serious nuisance, and their leader, Klasayat, had shown great skill in conducting a guerilla war with stolen weapons. Likable, troublesome people. Pierce had regretted having to direct their extermination. Oddly enough, they had liked him too. They had called him Jerry Missanan'kaa, the Deathwalker-high praise. But how had any of them escaped the spectrum of plagues he had spread across their territory? Professionally, Pierce was embarra.s.sed; personally, he was glad. He rarely had the chance to respect his opponents.

"I guess I'll have to finish them off once and for all."

"Don't bother. They keep us on our toes. And Klasayat's days are numbered. Their last women died almost a year ago; his boys will be drifting off pretty soon."

Cold consolation; Pierce hated a sloppy kill.

A small jet fighter appeared out of nowhere and circled the Pipit like a hawk intercepting a dragonfly. Younger murmured a code phrase into his throat mike; the jet turned away and vanished into the sun.

"Very touchy about intruders," Pierce observed.

"Too touchy. We inherited most of the old military paranoia. Not much to be paranoid about-most of the s.p.a.ce projects are pure research. Unmanned probes to the outer planets, radio astronomy, that kind of thing." He looked mildly embarra.s.sed. "Anita IKosi was working here for a while, but Seamus Brown asked to have her transferred." Brown was the supervisor of the Facility, and a very, very good rocket engineer.

Pierce looked puzzled.

"Internal politics. She began demanding too much for her pet project-research into hypermagnetic fields for radio astronomy."

"Project Sherlock." Pierce recognized the name from his Briefing. It made him tense, though he didn't know why. But in Younger he could discern no tension, only the annoyance of an administrator compelled to expedient measures despite himself.

"Right. It was costing a fortune. Seamus Brown's still supporting the project, but he cut the h.e.l.l out of the budget." He looked at Pierce and shrugged. "I could please Anita and disrupt everyone else, or move her. Temporarily. So that's what I did. There's no lack of work here for a genius."

The Pipit curved away from the skeletal gantries of Mojave Verde, back toward the coast. Pierce could see other installations: the Inst.i.tute for Ulronic Studies, where scavenged items were examined and puzzled over; the Biotronics Lab, where cyborgs were built and dismantled; the Materials Research Unit; and the Intense Fields Station, where even gravity sometimes faded or tilted.

"I see one big change since '05," said Pierce.

"Yes?"

"You're doing basic research all over the WDS, not just building weapons."

"That's no secret-but we don't publicize the fact."

"Why?"

"Suppose the British were warned in 1910 that the Germans would one day attack them with long-range bombers and guided missiles. What sort of defenses could the Brits have come up with? Dirigibles against V-2s? Their best bet would be to push pure science, and screw the secret weapons for a few years until they'd learned something. Without anyone saying so out loud, that's what we've decided. Oh, the weapons stuff goes on, but no one's very interested."

"Pacifists?"

Younger laughed delightedly. "No, no, they want really nasty weapons, not just death rays. They'd like to build movable black holes you could drop a planet into, but we don't know enough to do that yet. So all the brightest people are in basic research."

"You're all saboteurs!"

"In a way. But Gersen's famous memo is a pile of s.h.i.t. He's a bright man, for an unTrainable, but he and his people see conspiracies when it's just home-style entropy at work. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d has got us twitching, though."

"The memo's increased his influence here?"

"Yes, unfortunately. And it was already considerable."

"Why?"