Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed more or less by Highroller.

Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet. The Empire of Time by

Crawford Kilian

Chapter One

The intertemporal shuttle between Earth/ 2015 and Beulah/1804 was an old subway train. For decades, its three cars had carried passengers on the old IRT line up and down Manhattan; now they sat on a hundred-meter strip of track in a tunnel in Flushing, on the basement level of the New York Transferpoint Building. Twice every hour, the I-Screen was turned on at the end of the runnel, and the three cars rumbled through the screen toward an identical tunnel on Beulah. The cars were painted in Agency blue and white, and defaced by emigrants'

graffiti, scratched, chalked, inked, and sprayed on every surface: LOIS & BILL, JAN. 27, 2015. BACKSLIDERS RULE. AID is NO HELP. 1804 OR

BUST. The Agency for Intertemporal Development did not care; these were, after all, the parting shots of people who would no longer be a nuisance.

Jerry Pierce was one of the few passengers coming uptime on the shuttle, but over a hundred people were waiting on the shuttle platform for the trip back. Some were emigrants, dressed in blue-and-white Agency-issue fatigues and clutching their shabby luggage. Most, however, were Trainables on official business: civil servants, technicians, and scholars. Some ostentatiously wore flickreaders pushed up on their foreheads, like sunglasses, as if their civilian clothes and attaché cases were not enough to proclaim their privileged status.

The shuttle came through the Screen and screeched to a halt. Pierce was the first one off. He announced nothing. In his dusty buckle shoes, knee breeches, and tailcoat, he looked like a visiting endochronic—

possibly a senior bureaucrat in President Jefferson's administration, traveling to the twenty-first century to beg favors from the Agency. He ignored the Trainables' patronizing smiles—and the emigrants' sullen stares— as he handed his suitcase to a porter and shot his cuff, flashing his wrist ID.

"Seventy-second floor, please. Apartment 72006."

"Yes, sir!" The porter was impressed. All apartments above the seventieth floor were reserved for top Agency staff. Pierce tipped the porter and started down the long platform to the escalators. As he took his fifth step, time seemed to stop. Pierce's perceptions heightened and intensified, as if he had Just undergone some impossible quintupling of sensory-input synthesis. He could pick out individual conversations amid the gabble and shuffle of a hundred people, but everyone was speaking so slowly that their words made no sense. A dozen different scents swirled around him. Pierce noted that exactly nine small tiles were missing from the abstract mosaic that covered the tunnel walls. He was aware of the temperature difference between his ankles and his face, and estimated it correctly at 2°C. The holoposters set into the walls blazed mindlessly at him:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT DOOMSDAY?

THERE'S A FUTURE FOR YOU in THE COLONIAL POLICE!

LEVY'S RYE—THE TOAST OF TWELVE CHRONOPLANES WHAT

ARE YOU DOING ABOUT DOOMSDAY?

Nothing moved.

Pierce was frightened, but observed the phenomenon with an Agent's Trained dispassion. Here was a "freeze" —an occupational hazard of Trainable Agents after years of psychoconditioning. Its onset meant the Trainable's usefulness was nearing its end.

Almost twenty years, he thought I must be due for it. But this is just the first freeze; I could go for years without experiencing another one. I'm thirty-five; another two or three years left, anyway. An image of a cabin on the California coast, or on Thel or Ahania or even all the way back to Tharmas, flashed through his mind—a cabin with apricot and cherry trees around it: The stereotypical retirement for a used-up Agent. He would go mad with boredom. But some Agents went a whole lifetime without freezing. Wigner. Well, he's only thirty-nine, and he's got himself insulated. The bastard could spend half his time frozen solid in his office, and no one would know.

The freeze was wearing off. Down the platform, Pierce saw a young man approaching him, and worried. Had he noticed anything? The freeze could not have lasted more than a second or two; the young man could not have noticed.

Pierce recognized him at once, though they had never met. The young man was a tall, heavyset, shaggy blond and tailored denims and a white silk shirt; an agate bolo tie glinted under his short beard. He was Philon Richardson, a Trainable Climber from Los, born 985 BC in Thrace, of Dorian stock. Tested four years ago at age sixteen, and brought uptime with his equally Trainable sister for his education. Took his Trainer's family name, as did most Climbers. Under Philon's foppish appearance was still a hint of the arrogant warrior-thug he would have become if the Agency had not tapped him: a barbarian princeling, carousing in the ruins of Nestor's palace. Instead, he had become a twenty-first-century organization man—an errand boy now—but he was destined to wield more power with his fichewriter than his father ever dreamed of wielding with a sword. Still, it was interesting that anything at all was left of Philon's background. The psychoconditioners knew then-job.

They greeted each other with a nod. Accustomed to high-speed data acquisition through the flickreader, Trainables found normal speech tedious; among themselves they spoke elliptically, or else imbued normal speech with irony and ambiguity. On this occasion, as relative strangers surrounded by a crowd of unTrainables, courtesy dictated the latter form of speech.

"Good morning, Mr. Pierce. Welcome home."

"Good morning, Philon. Thank you; it's good to be back." They strolled through the crowd to the escalators. The only lingering effect of the freeze, so far as Pierce could tell, was a slight euphoria.

"Wigner must be eager to see me."

"Very eager, Mr. Pierce."

"Too bad. I was hoping to catch up on my sleep before reporting in." Philon smiled sympathetically and made amiable small talk: the clammy New York winter weather, the latest Agency gossip, the nasty new flu virus that had slipped in from one of the Paleolithic chronoplanes and taken 150,000 lives in the past month, mostly in the slums of Rio, Sao Paulo, and Asuncion. Pierce said little, nodding absently. They ascended the escalator to the Transferpoint Concourse, a circular roofed plaza 250 meters in diameter. The main exit led outside to New York, Earth/2015. The other exits, spaced around the plaza's circumference and marked by glowing holoposters, led to: New-York, Beulah/1804; Vikingshaven, Eden/1180; Port Palisades, Ahania/107; Chronoport, Los/965 BC; Ishizawa City, Albion/8127 BC; Glaciopolis, Ore/12,165 BC; Simpsonville, Luvah/22,233 BC; Johnson Station, Urthona/26,991 BC; Hudson Valley, Vala 34,468 BC; Welcome, Thel/47,114 BC; Lindsay City, Thannas/70,787 BC.

There were, of course, no shuttles to Ulro/2239 or Urizen/3571. The dead worlds uptime were visited only through special I-Screens by highly trained scavengers who darted into the ruined cities seeking clues to the nature of Doomsday.

Thousands poured through the Concourse. Philon and Pierce ignored them as they headed for the elevators to the upper floors of the Transferpoint Building. They stepped alone into the VIP elevator, and Philon inserted a key into the control panel. He pressed 112: Operations Division, Wigner's floor. The doors sighed shut, and Pierce sank into one of the easy chairs, stretching his long legs. He smiled tiredly at Philon, who smiled back and remained standing.

"You're new with the Agency, aren't you?"

"That's right, sir. I've been with the Director's Office about a month now. It's a good place to work."

"And how long have you been on Earth?"

Philon's smile faded a little. To continue normal speech in private was proper enough between one of Pierce's rank and one of Philon's, but it was rude to ask about what should already be known.

"Three years. My sister and I were Tested in '06 and brought uptime in

'07. She's interning now in a hospital in Montevideo. As I suppose you know." He had spelled it all out—a counterinsult.

"How does she like it? Better than being the property of some asshole in a bronze jockstrap, hey?"

Philon watched the floor numbers flashing above the door. "Hmm," he replied. He did not like having his endochronic background thrown in his face. Such rudeness was to be expected from Backsliders, un-Trainables who were being crowded off Earth to make room for Climbers like himself, but for a Senior Field Agent to talk this way was too much. Pierce was wryly aware of the reasons for his deliberate discourtesy. Philon reminded him of himself at twenty: an apprentice hatchetman, pleasantly aware of his elite status but not yet experienced enough to begin to doubt the value of his job. Something else about the young Dorian also bothered him, but he couldn't identify it. A slight kinesic tension, a glint of hostility in the respectful smile. He had seen it many times, usually in men preparing to try to kill him. But in Philon such tension made no sense. Let it pass: an aftereffect, no doubt, of the freeze. The door opened, and Pierce stood up.

"After you, Philon."

"That's all right, I'm going on up to one twenty-one. Glad to have met you, Mr. Pierce. I hope we'll meet again soon." Pierce waved a vague good-bye, and walked into Wigner's outer office. For some reason, he did not entirely relax until the elevator doors had closed behind him. Floor 112 had for Pierce a pleasant air of lived-in luxury: good teak tables with coffee rings marring their elegant surfaces; some early Booth cartoons, originals, tacked on official bulletin boards; thick Danish carpets a bit overdue for cleaning. Two dozen clerks, men and women, were running floods of data through the flickertube terminals evenly spaced around the large main office. The meter-square screens shimmered with a dozen colors, like high-speed kaleidoscopes. The clerks were dressed in overalls, chitons, jeans, brocade robes; their only common denominators seemed to be youth and a passion for houseplants, which adorned the terminals like ivy on gravestones.

Holograms glowed on most walls and partitions: second-century Rome from the air; the scrub forests of the Dogger Plain, where the Thames and Rhine merged and flowed north to the Norwegian Bight on Tharmas; a twelfth-century Buddhist monk in Kyoto, all jolliness and wrinkles; a Paleo-Indian band celebrating a good hunt in an Albionese Arizona swamp. The pictures had all been taken by the staff of Floor 112, while vacationing; working Field Agents had no time for travelogue holography. There were no windows on Floor 112. The Operations Division was interested only in the worlds downtime whose affairs it guided, and in the worlds uptime whose fate it sought to escape.

Pierce walked up to Judy Willems, Wigner's staff coordinator.

"Married yet?" A running gag between them, and all the greeting he needed to give her.

"Not yet." A dazzling smile. She was twenty-four and very good-looking. No lipstick or breast powder —she needed no cosmetics—and her dark tan and thick yellow hair were nicely set off by her warm-gold sarong.

"Pooped?"

"Mph."

"Dinner tonight?"

"My place or yours?" Another running gag.

"Mine. The squalor you live in makes me want to wash dishes and scrub floors."

"Atavist! When?"

"Oh—1930ish."

"Why not earlier?"

"You won't be through until 1800; you have an all-day appointment with Dr. Suad."

"Oh boy. How can Wigner send me out again when I've just got back?

What's up?"

She shrugged. "Something to do with Colonials. I don't know the details." He could tell, though, that she knew enough to make her nervous.

"Christ. Rather deal with endos." He shrugged too. "Tell him I'm here." Eric Wigner's office, at first glance, could have belonged to an Agency Librarian (Grade 6). It was windowless, rather small, and cluttered with computer cartridges, microfiche cards, and the inevitable houseplants; Wigner seemed to be particularly fond of piggyback plants, grape ivy, and maidenhair fern. Then one noticed his century-old rolltop desk, the shelves filled with genuine hardcover books (including a first edition of 1984), the battered couch covered with real leather, and realized that one was indeed dealing with the Agency's Permanent Deputy for Operations, a man who could found or topple empires, and often did.

Pierce walked in, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed on the couch.

"What is this shit?"

Wigner tilted back in his swivel chair and put his slippered feet up on the desk. He grinned through his bushy gray mustache. He was a middle-sized man, bald, pink-cheeked, and physically unimpressive. Pierce was some fifteen centimeters taller, and had the physique of a racing-shell oarsman, but there was no question who was boss.

"It's always the same shit," Wigner replied. He chose normal speech, and even inflated it slightly. "When I heard about this problem, Jerry, I asked myself: Who among my many fine Senior Field Agents has the brains, the guts, the determination for this arduous and demanding assignment? Those were my exact words. And of course the answer was you."

"How so?"

"In a minute. Tell me about Brother Thomas." Pierce pulled a cassette from his breast pocket and scaled it across the office. Wigner caught it with startling quickness.

"All on tape. The meeting went pretty well. Domestic politics: he wanted to switch some Agency funds from medicare to highways and transport. A lot of his people are unhappy about equal medical treatment for Black and Indian kids. They really resent it when Testing time comes and we take just as many Blacks and Indians as whites—"

"Some of whom will later come back to Beulah as Trained administrators."

"They do hate to see those Blacks using flickreaders and telling 'em not to pee in the soup."

"You brought Jefferson around?"

"Not really sure. The money stays in medicare, but we agreed—I agreed—to ease up on our antislavery campaign. That may have been just what he was after in the first place. Very complicated man, Mr. Jefferson. Pity we couldn't have Tested him in his teens. Never saw a more obvious wasted Trainable."

Wigner shrugged. "They can maintain slavery as long as they like, for all I care. Just so they sell us the Trainable slaves at age sixteen." He snorted. "The only reason we bitch about slavery is because people here on Earth expect us to. Domestic politics."

Pierce noticed a new snapshot on Wigner's desk and sat up for a closer look. It was a cheap Polaroid 3-D photo, not a real hologram, that showed Wigner and Napoleon Bonaparte sitting at a little table in a formal garden. Both men were squinting amiably into the sun, and the photographer's shadow had fallen across the table.

"When was that taken?"

"Yesterday," Wigner replied innocently.

"On Beulah without informing me?"

"Well—you were busy with Jefferson, and something came up—I just popped back for the weekend. Yes, I should've notified you."

"What's Boney want now?"

"We're helping him raid London next month. He wants a freer hand."

"I thought the Brits were coming round."

"Some are. Cabinet's split. Boney's raid should bring Pitt down. But he wants to establish a proper beachhead and take over."

"Does he, now?"

"Endos are like babies—testing, testing. Well stage the raid our way, and in return we get complete control of the French schools—"

"And the Brits will finally allow us to Test their kids."

"Mm. Think of the valuable personnel we've lost through their pigheadedness."

"From Pitt's point of view, well do to them what they did to the Scots—co-opt their best people and turn the whole country to our purposes."

"You're too fair. A blind man has no point of view." Wigner gestured to the hologram on the wall behind him. "Pitt's seen that picture, but he doesn't understand that it makes his petty nationalism pointless." The hologram, a meter on a side, was a view of Ulro taken by a drone space probe. The continents—North America, Europe, part of Africa—were pinkish-brown and sharply outlined against the dirty gray of the empty ocean basins. Everything looked very clear, because there was almost no atmosphere on the Earth of the twenty-third century. In the hologram, noon was about on the meridian of London. In its ruined streets, the temperature would be close to 100°C. A thin, fierce CO wind 2

would be hissing over the fused rubble. Pierce knew what it was like in that London; he had been there once, and elsewhere on Ulro four other times.

Wigner, meditating, filled his pipe and lit ft.

"Sometimes," he finally said, "I think the historic chronoplanes are more trouble than they're worth. Too stable, too backward—nothing but raw materials and Trainable manpower. Can't even colonize much—start getting endo revolts… Imagine a chronoplane between 1920, 1950? Get Fermi and Oppenheimer working on the Doomsday problem." Pierce laughed briefly. "If they were Trainable." Wigner grinned around his pipe. "Levelheaded Jerry!"

"What's all this Colonial business?"

"You've talked to Judy. Mm. When were you last on Ore?"

"Two years ago—as you should know. That Secessionist mob in the Colonial Police. Routine."

"Let's hope this is too. The Commissioner there— Gersen—has sent me a report on suspected sabotage at the Weapons Development Site. He wants us to check it out."

"Sabotage the WDS? Who? Culties?"

"Nobody colonizes Ore unless they're screened-out loyals."

"Knotholers—any illegal I-Screens detected?" Wigner shook his head. "Probably just poor administration. Or—"

"Domestic politics."

"Yup. After all, unTrainables administering Trainables…" Wigner looked sour. Pierce nodded; it was an old irritation. Colonies were governed by and for unTrainables. The WDS was too vulnerable, and too dangerous, to be placed on Earth. Problems were inevitable. Wigner picked up a microfiche in a pink Top Secret envelope and handed it to Pierce. "Take a look; tell me what you think." Pierce inserted the 3x10 cm microfiche in his flickreader and switched it on. The fifty-five-page memorandum took him less than thirty seconds to read and assimilate. He gave it back to Wigner, who dropped the microfiche in his desktop shredder.

"Well, well," said Pierce.

"Mm. Go take some Briefing and Conditioning and head downtime to Ore in the morning."

"Now look, Eric. I deserve a rest after six weeks among the rednecks. Is the situation that urgent?"

"It is."

"Why?"

"Now, come on, Jerry." Wigner spoke in the soft murmur his subordinates knew well. His words had a certain rote quality; he had repeated this often. "Doomsday is still on schedule, just seventy-four years away. We still don't know what will-cause it. If it turns out to be an alien attack, Earth must be able to defend itself."

"I don't need the whole sermon."

"Of course not." They both knew that Pierce's conditioning had been reinforced by Wigner's cueing. That conditioning would make him miserable if he remained on Earth for even an extra day.

"Is it too early for a drink?" Pierce asked.

"Ah. Gives me an excuse to show off the Napoleon brandy I brought back."

"Nice change from Tom Jefferson's white lightning." Sitting in the small, disordered office surrounded by houseplants, the two men sipped brandy from styrofoam cups. "Well, it's not bad" said Wigner, "but it's certainly not all it's cracked up to be."

"Give it another century."

"Let's discuss your trip. If you catch the first jet tomorrow from Kennedy—"

Pierce shook his head. "I'd rather shuttle back from here to Glaciopolis, and fly across to Farallon City."

"Waste of time. There's only one transcontinental flight a day on Ore. Even with the best connections, you'll have a three-hour wait at the Glaciopolis airport."

"Doesn't matter. It'll let me see what sort of changes the Colonials are making. From Farallon City I can take the noon flight to Los Alamitos." Wigner shrugged. "Suit yourself. I'll have Gersen's staff advised, and you can meet him in Farallon before you fly down."

"Good. I assume this is not a covert investigation."

"No. It's a small world at Los Alamitos. Any new face is sure to attract attention. You could fake it fairly well as a scientist, of course, at least for a few days. But the cover would keep you pinned down to one project. So just be your normal inquisitive self, and see everything." He stood up, ending the interview. "Break a leg, Jerry."

"Thanks, Eric." They shook hands; Wigner held on a moment longer than he needed to. Pierce felt a small glow of affection. Wigner liked most people only as they were useful to him and to the Agency. It was somehow touching to find a hint of personal fondness coming through. Back at Judy's desk, Pierce found his documents already prepared: a new Senior Official's visa for his intertemporal passport, an Agency credit card, and part of his medical papers.

"You get the rest of Medical Doc when you finish B&C," she told him.

"New routine."

"Fine. Is Dr. Suad ready for me?"

She whispered into her ringmike, then looked into space for a moment as the answer whispered back through the receiver hidden in her ear. "All set. Have a good session. See you tonight."

They gave each other a friendly kiss, and Pierce headed for the elevator. On Floor 130, he stepped into a very different atmosphere. It looked something like a doctor's waiting room, circa 1955 U.S., complete with contemporary magazines: Life, The Saturday Evening Post, a Collier's special issue describing a Third World War that never happened. Suad enjoyed collecting such things, and on his Agency salary he could afford to. The nurse-receptionist, however, clashed with the decor. He was a burly young man in hospital-green linen blouse and brown corduroy slacks. He sat behind a little sliding window, flickreading. Pierce reached silently through the window and picked up the microfiche envelope. It displayed a glossy, lurid photo of two gladiators disemboweling each other in the Colosseum, under the title Blood-Slaves of Caesar, by Proculus Gratianus as told to Bert Schwartz.

Pierce laughed. "Shame on you, reading this crap." The nurse whipped off the flickreader and grinned sheepishly.

"Oh, uh, hi, Mr. Pierce."

"Lost in a fog of carnography." Pierce shook his head in mock horror.

"Isn't there enough perversion in these old magazines your boss is so fond of?"

"Those? Never even look at 'em."

"Is that so?"

"They're—you know—unTrainable media."

"Ah."

The nurse had already pushed a button on his desk intercom, and Dr. Suad appeared quietly through a side door. He was stocky, with coarse black hair to his shoulders and heavy, cleanshaven jowls—an affectation now that beards were fashionable. Pierce wished he had his whiskers again; they had been sacrificed in deference to the style of Jefferson's era, which was selfconsciously rigid about resisting twenty-first-century fashions.

"Hello, Mr. Pierce. How do you do, sir?" A firm, dry handshake. "How are we today?" Always formal, as befitted a B&C man; flippancy in a brainwasher would be intolerable.

"Dr. Suad. I am very well, thank you." Pierce had very nearly blanked out his memory of the freeze, and no hint of dishonesty appeared in his voice. He offered Dr. Suad a slight tilt of the head, for even Senior Field Agents must defer to this man and his colleagues. "I believe we have a great deal to do today."

"Yes."

"Well, let's get on with it."

"Of course." Suad invited him into the darkened room behind. It was furnished sparely: a narrow water bed covered with an institutional-blue sheet; a light Finnish armchair; a teak cabinet and matching wardrobe. Three walls were painted flat white; on the fourth, behind the head of the bed, was a computer terminal.

"Please make yourself comfortable, Mr. Pierce." Pierce stripped off his clothes and hung them in the wardrobe. For almost three minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, hyperventilating. Meanwhile, Suad punched a code on the computer keyboard; it replied at once by slapping a sheaf of microfiche cards into the hardcopy hopper. Pierce stretched out on the bed, his body seeming gaunt in the dimness. He had removed his wig, revealing a short mat of brown-black hair on a long, narrow skull.

Suad ignored him for the moment. He wore a flickreader, and fed microfiche cards into it with the same impassive efficiency his nurse had used in devouring Blood-Slaves of Caesar. After the machine had devoured the last card, he removed his flickreader and took a hypospray pistol from the teak cabinet. He loaded it with six cartridges and pressed its flat muzzle against Pierce's arm.

"Yes, a long session, Mr. Pierce."

Pierce said nothing. Suad lowered a flickertube over Pierce's face; the tube would transmit data directly from the computer.

"Count to ten, please."

"One . . two . . three…" Pierce was out.

Briefing required suspension of consciousness. This was high-speed Training, and a conscious mind would only impede the process. What would take seven or eight days to absorb by flickreading—or two or three years for an unTrainable to read and comprehend—Pierce would learn in four hours. The flickertube was focused on the inside of his eye, and transmitted information as fast as the optic nerve could carry it. Since Suad had given him 100 ccs of buffered nikethamide, that was very fast indeed. The spectrum of RNA catalysts which preceded the nerve stimulant would ensure that each datum was recorded in retrievable form. The flickertube went on, but from Suad's point of view nothing could be seen but a rapidly shifting blur of colors around Pierce's eyes: green, yellow, red, purple, green, red, blue, green. Every time Pierce blinked, the tube cut out for an instant.

Unhurriedly, Suad taped electrodes to Pierce's temples, throat, wrists, and ankles. He hummed tunelessly as a readout bank came to life on the computer wall, quantifying Pierce's physiological status. The computer flashed a long prescription, and a few seconds later a small plastic box glided out of a chute and onto a shelf in the cabinet. Suad opened the box, withdrew the fifteen cartridges it contained, and loaded them into his pistol. He began to inject them in carefully timed sequence, keeping constant watch on the computer dials that recorded the changes induced by the drugs. He saw nothing unexpected or untoward.

An hour passed. Suad sprayed solvent on a small area beneath Pierce's left nipple. A patch of what looked like skin suddenly dissolved, revealing a plastic ring, three centimeters in diameter, embedded between two ribs. Suad peered into the ring with a modified otoscope. The ring was the mouth of a cylinder, seven and a half centimeters long, sealed at the other end. Suad inserted a smaller version of a regular hypospray cartridge into the cylinder, where it fit very snugly. Another spray; the ring was once again hidden under a pseudoderm patch.

Still humming, Suad left the room. He slouched into an easy chair in the waiting room and picked up one of his beloved old magazines, a Galaxy from the early '50's. The cover and pages had been preserved with a compound related to pseudoderm.

"Pretty slow afternoon," his nurse remarked.

"Mm-hm."

Two other Agents came in for B&C during the afternoon, but they were relatively routine jobs, finished before Pierce was even half through. When Pierce did begin to stir, Suad was waiting beside his bed. There was one last injection, a mild tranquilizer. Suad removed the electrodes, swung the flickertube back into the computer wall, and waited.

"Four… five…" Pierce blinked awake. He sighed, then sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He snorted, coughed, scratched at the sticky patch an electrode had left on one wrist.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

"Mm-hm. You're not an Alpha-class Trainable for nothing, Mr. Pierce. There might be, mm, three other people in the whole Agency who can equal you for receptivity to B&C."

Suad deliberately fumbled with the hypospray pistol, letting it slip from his fingers. Pierce moved off the bed like a striking snake, and caught the pistol before it had fallen half a meter.

"Hyped reflexes," Pierce remarked casually, handing back the pistol. Suad nodded. "Grade Twelve reflexes and tripled sensory-input synthesis."

Pierce strode to the wardrobe and slid open the door, just a little too hard.

"Why?"

"I couldn't say, Mr. Pierce. I just fill prescriptions."

"Have you ever had hyped reflexes, Dr. Suad?"

"Of course. In med school. Grade Four, for a few hours." Pierce smiled wryly as he pulled on his stockings and knee breeches. He gave Suad a half-second's eye contact, reminding him of what they both knew: Pierce was a natural Grade 4.

"Well, Dr. Suad, on some slow afternoon you ought to ask your nurse to hype you up to Nine or Ten." He yanked his shirt on, and tied the stock with irritable, abrupt gestures. "It's miserable. You're always hungry, but food tastes—metallic. Sometimes there's a hell of a ringing in your ears. You fidget all the time."

"Mm-hm. Well, remember to do your breathing exercises; they should help reduce the fidgeting."

He ushered Pierce into the waiting room. It was empty; the nurse had gone home. Suad and Pierce shook hands, a little relieved to be out of each other's company; then Pierce took the elevator down to his residential floor.

Why Grade 12? And why the tripled SIS? Pierce was sourly aware that B&C had put him in a condition closely resembling this morning's freeze: everything had once more become painfully sharp and clear. Vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch (heat, pressure, texture), balance—all were focused uncomfortably tightly, and it would take time to adapt When his tripled SIS was eventually cleared, the world would again seem drab and insubstantial until he had adapted. His sense of smell seemed especially sharp: he could detect six different perfume residues in the elevator, mixed with the characteristic body odors of perhaps ten or twelve men and as many women. There was a whiff of marijuana, and a trace of flatulence.

You don't get Grade 12 and tripled SIS unless you need them, he reflected. (Would the elevator never reach his floor?) Wigner must be expecting trouble. What kind of trouble could there be?

A stroboscopic memory of the last time he'd had Grade 12, a good five years earlier: a winter night in Gaul, on Ahania, with snow thick on the ground. The tent of an obstreperous Roman general, four guards outside dying swiftly and silently, the snow squeaking a little as they fall into it. Inside the tent, the general quick enough to reach for his gun but dead before his fingers can close around the butt; his boy lover, too terrified to shriek, peeping out of the blankets still warm from the general's body. He gasps as Pierce turns the pistol toward him and the flechettes strike. What the hell kind of trouble could there be? He reviewed his Briefing, or started to, as the elevator door finally slid open on his floor.

— I've been blocked. He rumbled for his door key, let himself in, and stripped off his clothes. Why blocked? Maybe Judy would know. He felt a bit shaky. Blocked Briefing; tripled SIS; Grade 12. Pierce shivered with the chill of fear, mixed pleasantly with anticipation. I'm too old for this Special Operations commando crap—Christ, thirty-five, had my first freeze, I'm no kid any more. But they don't think I'm too old, and the adrenalin trip is as sweet as ever and sure to improve, because I've been loaded and cocked and I'm going to Ore to zap a bad guy. He remembered the euphoria he'd felt in Gaul stealing through the snowbound camp to the tent with the eagerness of the trysting lover. Breathing exercises. He stood naked in the middle of his modestly furnished living room, breathing in a rhythm designed to metabolize the adrenalin, relax the muscles. After a minute or two he calmed down, laughed aloud at himself, and headed for the shower.

Chapter Two

Pierce's earliest memories were of the mid-'80s, when he was three or four. The Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Taos: its high windows cracked and boarded over, the parking lot full of squatters' tents and squatters'

trash; the broad stamps of the cottonwoods that once screened the lot from the road. He would clamber up on a stump, run recklessly around the edge, and then run on to the next one, until his mother lost patience and dragged him into the lot and through the doors that no longer opened automatically. The aisles were interestingly dirty, the half-empty shelves spooky in the dim light Market guards, usually Anglos, wore bolstered revolvers and carried handcuffs at their belts; one of the guards once gave him a stick of gum. His mother's ration book had a green plastic cover, dull and cracked, with interesting stamps inside: blue ones with an eagle on them, green ones with a smiling man, red ones with a rocket. Those were very early memories, from the first austerity years. Another memory, a painful one, from the late '80s: coming home from the Piggly Wiggly—now Federal Foodstuffs Dispensary 1207—with his mother. Each of them carried a small shopping bag with the week's rations—flour, synthetic sugar, soy bacon, cabbage—and in his bag was a special treat, a chocolate bar his mother had paid three stamps for. A gang of Hispano kids, just a couple of years older than Jerry, jumped them, snatched the shopping bags, and sprinted off. One of the boys was Pete Gomez, who lived in the condominium next door. He was big for his age, and he knocked Jerry's mother off her feet.

"Jerry, are you all right?" his mother asked shakily as she pulled herself up. Her skirt was torn at the hem.

"Yeah. But they took my chocolate bar. I want my chocolate bar, Ma."

"And I want my groceries, goddamn it."

But Mrs. Gomez denied everything, screamed at them, threatened. Pete wasn't around at all the rest of the day. Next morning, Pete told Jerry they'd eaten the chocolate and bacon, and scattered the rest around an empty lot.

"Dumb bastard," sneered Ramiro Espinosa, who was thirteen or fourteen. "Coulda sold that stuff for plenty." The next week they were ambushed again. Jerry tried to fight, but Pete knocked him flat. This time, his mother cried; they had no more stamps until the end of the month.

In 1990, the Ethnic Integrity Act imposed de jure residential segregation, and the Chavez family had to move into an all-Hispano district. Jerry's mother married a police sergeant, and things improved. But one night in 1992, his stepfather was run off the road near Arroyo Hondo. He died a week later. After that they lived on a pension, while Jerry grew up enough to enter high school and begin worrying about the draft. The Venezuelan war was technically over, but a thousand Americans a month were still dying in the Pacification Zones, American "consultants" in Canada were being sniped at. The Polish revolt was still on, threatening to spread into a general European war.

"Why not take this new Trainability test?" his high-school counselor suggested as Jerry neared sixteen. "Looks like a pretty promising field. If you've got the talent for it, you're sure to get a commission in the service. Sure beats foot-slogging." To Jerry, who was big, healthy, and athletic, it sounded good.

Training was only a few years old then, a half-understood technique that enabled those with the talent to absorb and retain incredible amounts of information in a very short time. Only about one person in six or seven had potential Trainability, though, and Testing wasn't yet mandatory. Trainables had to be spotted in midadolescence, when the talent matured, and Training had to begin almost at once. Those who postponed it for more than a year or two usually lost the ability; the best they could get from Training was higher reading speed. But Trainables had already made enough of an impact on society to be unpopular. A seventeen-year-old Trainable and a desktop computer could process as much information in a day as a whole platoon of un-Trainable clerks could manage in a month. One precocious fifteen-year-old girl, starting with five-hundred dollars borrowed from her father, had taken just two years to make six million dollars in the commodities market. A nineteen-year-old Italian—one of the first to acquire a medical degree through Train-tag—had spent a mere six months absorbing the entire world literature on cancer research and was then able to isolate twelve separate cancer-triggering mechanisms and identify the means for neutralizing ten of them. A year later, brushing up on the literature inspired by his own findings, he found the neutralizes for the remaining two.

These were not universally admired achievements in a world already overpopulated and on the edge of economic collapse. But the Trainables seemed unstoppable. Most of them found immediate work in administering the vast, rickety social structures that sheltered the rest of mankind. Their sheer knowledge kept the food growing, the trains running, the turbines spinning. Even the worldwide antiTrainable riots of

'92 failed to stop the takeover. Wars were endemic all over the planet; famine had become permanent in South America, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Over 6.2 billion people, half of them under twenty-five, were struggling for bare subsistence. "It is us or catastrophe," a Trainable French diplomat warned the UN in 1995.

A year after passing his Trainability test—with an Alpha-18, one of the highest scores ever recorded in the United States—Jerry became a (T)-Colonel in the U. S. Army. He held the equivalents of four master's degrees, and was working on three Ph.D.s. Thanks to the Civil Emergency Act of 1995, his powers far exceeded those normal for his rank. The Continental Army Command was the chief arm of government in most areas of the United States, and Jerry found himself, at age seventeen, the de facto dictator of eastern Oregon and all of Idaho. He had no illusions, however, about his probable future. "It is us and catastrophe," he often said to himself. The system was breaking down, and only a Trainable could really know how swift the process was. In a year, or two, or five, the real die-off would hit. He took an adolescent's glum relish in private debates with fellow Trainables: would it be a nuclear war, with an inevitable attendant destruction of the ozone layer? A wild mutant virus, natural or man-made, spreading unstoppably through the world's undernourished billions? A poisoning of the seas? A blend of all these?

He carried out his job with the impersonal pleasure of a skilled craftsman and viewed his successes with ironic detachment. Why, after all, seek to preserve the lives of the doomed? Why shoot the robber who must die soon in any case? He could moralize as well as anyone, but under all the cant about law and order and making the system work he recognized in himself only one real motive: personal stubbornness. He would shoot looters and jail refugees because he had the power to do so, and the will. He would protect his people because doing so was a challenge, a test of his new skills. He liked the work, but knew it couldn't last.

Of course, he as well as everyone else was taken completely by surprise when the crisis ended in the fall of 1998 with the accidental discovery of an emergency exit for all mankind.

That October, a graduate physics student named Richard Ishizawa—one of the last unTrainables in the United States to be granted a Ph.D.—set up a novel hypermagnetic array in Cave 9 of the Fermi Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. It should have created a field capable of deflecting an extremely high-energy particle beam in any desired direction with very little energy loss. Ishizawa hoped to produce a focused beam of unprecedented intensity with which quarks might be flushed out of the subatomic underbrush more easily than earlier techniques permitted.

His experiment should have worked perfectly, as was later determined by very hard detective work, on the future chronoplanes of Ulro and Urizen, Ishizawa had indeed produced his field and found his quarks. He later died in a food riot in 2007, during the last convulsions of the old social order.

On Earth, however, a microcircuit failed, as Ishizawa himself discovered very quickly. As a result of that failure, a very different field was created, and the vacuum in Cave 9 abruptly filled with air, leaf debris, and soil particles. Ishizawa had opened the first I-Screen, and the TV

monitor in Cave 9 gave him a fine view of an eighteenth-century Illinois forest.

Every other project at Fermi lab stopped dead. A security cloak fell over the Laboratory, and urgent, discreet calls went out to other physicists, to chemists, botanists, astronomers, and anthropologists. Cautiously, they followed Ishizawa through the Screen into what was first called a

"topological singularity," then a "temporal incongruity." A lover of the poetry of William Blake, Ishizawa called his new world Beulah— and was astonished when Beulah turned out to be Earth in the summer of 1787, when Blake was still very much alive.

A kind of hysteria struck the Fermi lab scientists and spread to the government—then to other governments. Pierce learned of the discovery in November, when most Trainables did, and he kept close track of developments. This was easy, since most Trainables had already lost their loyalties to national authorities and routinely informed one another of important events their governments were trying to keep secret. By Christmas, I-Screen theory was well advanced, but it was not to progress much further for a generation. The theory was simple, but its implications had literally changed history. At the point of the initial big bang, cosmologists speculated, every particle in the universe had undergone singular forces so intense that it had oscillated in time. A single cosmos transformed itself into a series, each cosmos virtually identical except for its chronoplane, or location on the time line. Ishizawa's major contribution to this theory was to predict the

"Heisenberg cascade"—the effect of subatomic particles' being in different places or carrying different energies, on different chronoplanes. In a few cases, a cascade would produce detectable differences between chronoplanes. There might, Ishizawa speculated, be species on Beulah that were unknown to Earth. Furthermore, persons important in the history of Earth might never have lived on Beulah. Ishizawa did not know, and never lived to learn, that his failed microcircuit itself resulted from just such a Heisenberg cascade.

His theory also predicted that proper modulation of the I-Screen would reveal other chronoplanes. Such modulations, on a trial-and-error basis, were carried out. But most tests produced nothing but the land of field Ishizawa had been trying to produce in the first place. Gradually, however, other chronoplanes were located—twelve altogether, falling at more and more widely scattered points in the past Each was given a name from Blake's poetic mythology.

However, Ishizawa never lived to see them all. While several teams were probing the past, he sought the future. After a six-week search, he died discovering Ulro, then at 2215 AD. The I-Screen was operating in an ordinary lab when it opened on Ulro, and the vacuum on the other side imploded the whole room. Before the array collapsed, killing the Screen, enough radiation came through to contaminate the whole building. But a shielded VTR tape was retrieved, giving Earth its first glimpse of Doomsday: the ruins of what was clearly the Fermi Accelerator Laboratory, blazing under the Sun in a black, airless sky. Four months of secret preparation went into the next probe to Ulro, at the end of which a robot tank was finally sent through. After a four-day round trip to Evanston, the tank returned to the Batavia ruins and fired a canister of tapes and photos through the I-Screen. The vehicle itself was too radioactive to return.

Scientists now entered the field of genuine futurology and tried to determine, from evidence as ambiguous as an oracle's warning, just what was going to happen to cause that cataclysm. Once the manned tank probes ventured into the future, they learned a few things very quickly. Doomsday had occurred on April 22, 2089. Something had struck a world with a population of only three billion, most of whom were Trainables. They were living in a world commonwealth of peaceful but regimented societies that had emerged, after the turn of the millennium, from the wreckage of the unTrainable order. These societies were technically far ahead of the 1990s, and the broken bits of their technologies were as tantalizing and mysterious as a cassette tape would have been to Leonardo da Vinci.

But the people of Ulro without doubt had been ignorant of the I-Screen, and of the existence of the chronoplanes. This crucial fact offered Earth at least a fighting chance of avoiding Ulro's fate.

So I-Screens were secretly set up elsewhere on Earth and they opened onto Ulro—and, a little later, onto Urizen in the late thirty-third century. At a high cost in lives and equipment, the nature of the cataclysm became clearer.

On Doomsday, an intense beam of energy more than three-thousand kilometers in diameter had struck the planet's dayside at the equator off the west coast of South America and then traveled west across the Pacific. The beam had probably remained stationary, while the planet rotated beneath it. The ocean had been vaporized under that beam, and a gigantic flower of superheated steam and pulverized rock had risen a thousand kilometers before it blossomed in space. As the beam traveled, the flower became a curtain, a wall of vaporized water, soil, and stone that followed the beam around the planet and gradually drifted into space in what must have been a gloriously beautiful white spiral. No one would have lived long enough to see it., however. All life on the surface must have perished within hours of the beam's first impact, for the shock wave it generated smashed and buried virtually everything on the planet under an atmospheric tsunami of debris.

The beam traveled seventeen times around the world before abruptly and inexplicably disappearing. By that time the entire atmosphere and all surface water had been blown into space. Somehow the Van Allen Belt had vanished, allowing a steady downpour of ionizing radiation to reach the surface. Violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions had broken out everywhere as the crust rebounded under the dead ocean floors. The vast, irregular trench cut by the beam soon filled with magma, like blood clotting in a wound. Meteorites, most of them quite small, began to lunarize the dead planet.

On Urizen, over a thousand years after Doomsday, volcanic outgasing had begun to replace the lost atmosphere with a tenuous envelope of CO2

and water vapor. In the polar regions, there was enough winter precipitation to sustain a few colonies of tough lichens whose spores had somehow survived. In a million centuries, life might arise again in the Earth's shallow new seas—or it might not.

Telescopes set up on Ulro and Urizen revealed the existence of a dead colony on the Moon, and documents indicated that on Doomsday a manned base had also existed on Mars, but these outposts had evidently not long survived. Manned space probes might have been sent out, but were not. Too much evidence existed to suggest that Doomsday had been caused by alien intruders, who might still be in the neighborhood. Attracting their attention might lead to their discovery of the downtime chronoplanes.

Other Doomsday theories postulated less sinister mechanisms: collision with an antimatter planetoid, a "macroflare" ejected from the sun or a scientific experiment gone hideously wrong. Each had its exponents, but nothing was certain except that on two chronoplanes, life had been expunged on April 22, 2089.

Of necessity secrecy was finally dropped altogether. What had been discovered was brought before the moribund United Nations, and in less than a year the UN had dissolved itself and the International Federation had been established in its place. As the first world government, the IF

held extraordinary powers; not only did it rule the nations of Earth, it extended its power into the other chronoplanes. The IF held one purpose paramount: discovering the nature of Doomsday and, if possible preventing its occurring on Earth and the downtime chronoplanes. If Doomsday were found to be inevitable, the IF would carry out the evacuation of Earth and, eventually, the other chronoplanes in an organized retreat.

This overriding mission guided all IF policy. Elite teams, more idolized than the old astronauts ever were, made scavenge jumps into the future, bringing back the shattered toys and tools of their great-grandchildren. Gigantic scientific efforts were launched to force-grow a technology equal or superior to that of the next century. As a result, there was an instant shortage of useful labor. Trainability Testing became mandatory for every adolescent on Earth, and teams began to ransack the downtime worlds for Trainables among the endochronics. At the same time, Earth's hungry unTrainables began to pour into the sparsely populated worlds of the past, building new cities, plowing virgin soil, drilling for oil and digging for minerals to sustain the garrison world that Earth was fast becoming. Pierce quickly became involved. The Agency for Intertemporal Development was one of the IP's first creations, and it needed plenty of Trainables. His first assignment was in late '99 as chief of a Testing and Recruitment team in the Caucasus on Luvah, where they ambushed Paleolithic tribes with tranquilizing darts, Tested the adolescents, and carried off those with Trainability. It was hard work, because the first scouts on Luvah—as on other chronoplanes—had accidentally spread a variety of twentieth century viruses that wiped out sixty percent of Luvah's endos in less than three years. Pierce's T&R team found more corpses than live bodies in the caves and campsites they prowled.

Those, of course, had been the bad old days, when Earth was still learning to cope with its new discoveries and millions died because of ignorance or accident. But with AID's growing expertise, Earth had come through the first decade fairly well; almost two billion emigrants had colonized the past, and millions more were going through the I-Screens every day. They fished the teeming glacial seas of Vala and Thel; logged the endless redwood forests of Luvah and Urthona; grazed a million head of cattle on the Sahara grasslands of Albion and Ore. And every day, a thousand Trainable endos, Climbers, came uptime to help prepare Earth against Doomsday.

Jerry Pierce advanced through the ranks quickly in those years, becoming something of a legend in the Agency. He would have been even more famous if the Agency hadn't been so reticent about his activities. After all, who but Pierce had directed the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, four centuries ahead of schedule? Who but Pierce had negotiated the oil-rights treaties between Petroleos Mexicanos and the Mayans? Who but Pierce had garroted an obscure Mongol chieftain named Temujin, before the man could become a problem?

And who but Pierce always carried a couple of chocolate bars, and dutifully wrote to his mother twice a month?

Chapter Three

The February evening fell in a flutter of wet snow that melted as it hit. New York glowed golden in the deepening grayness. For kilometer after kilometer, the highrises of Queens and Brooklyn blazed like pillars of fire. In some of the apartments, workers were just getting home, stripping off their clothes with sighs of relief, savoring the aroma of lamb chops or mastodon steak. After dinner, the Trainables could look forward to a pleasant evening of polychannel holovision; there was regular cine vision for the un-Trainables.

Most of the apartments were empty, though lights inside burned brightly. The custom was wasteful, of course, but it was good for morale. After the austerity years, lights had become as compulsive a luxury as the animal protein everyone ate in too-great quantities. Besides, lighting only the occupied flats would have made the city look like the ghost town it had become. Most New Yorkers had long since moved to the suburbs of the past, where even the humblest home squatted on a huge lot whose lawn took all weekend to mow. Not all the residents had gone willingly: two out of five were drafted emigrants who cursed the perfect weather of Tharman Egypt or Urthonan Brazil and yearned for the stink and uproar of Flatbush Tower's eighty-fifth floor.

The city streets were wet and quiet when computer programmer Eusebio Macapagal walked into a bar a few blocks from the Transferpoint Building, where he had just left work. Two men in rain ponchos followed him in. They watched him put away a big steam-table supper and a couple of liters of beer. They nodded to each other.

In the Transferpoint, there was a brief surge of traffic as the afternoon shift left and the evening shift came on. Most were Agency people, moving with easy confidence. At work, they sat in offices adorned with Doomsday plaques and holographs of Ulro, and composed memofiches to one another: we need seventy-five thousand Chinese farm workers on Vala by the end of next month; the Caliph of Baghdad has become a liability and must be removed; the World Anthropological Association has protested the Agency's treatment of endochronics on Los, and we must prepare a counterpropaganda campaign; we are calling a conference to discuss the rising Colonial birthrates. Each memo initiated an action, changed a million lives, founded or toppled an empire.

Austerity's children, they dressed soberly, even dully. The men tended to prefer checked tweed slacks, pleated white shirts, and blue or maroon blazers; the women, paisley-print sarongs or kilts and tunics. An occasional fop in embroidered denim strutted by, swinging his attache case.

UnTrainable emigrants, en route downtime, of course wore Agency fatigues, but those returning to Earth on official business had taken pains to dress distinctively. A tall Black man glided across the Concourse in a gaudy yellow caftan, talking quietly with a Colonial Police officer. The Copo wore dress uniform: white tricorn with moa plumes, gold brocade jacket, and azure breeches tucked into knee boots. Such visitors affected a composure they rarely felt; anyone rude enough to make eye contact with a Colonial would probably find cold resentment glaring back at him. Macapagal and the two men in ponchos entered the Concourse and strolled about for a time, window shopping on the commercial mezzanine above the main floor. One of the men spoke quietly to Macapagal, who nodded absently.

Upstairs, on an Agency pistol range, Philon Richardson fired six flechettes into a five-centimeter bull's-eye. He studied the shot group for a moment, then ejected the empty clip from his Mallory .15, reloaded, and did it again. The pistol made an almost inaudible spitting sound. On a still-higher floor, Wigner sipped sherry and studied the billiard table in his study. He loved the endless calculations, the estimates, the sheer precognition needed to put the balls where he wanted them, when he wanted them there, with the speed and spin he wanted. He was very good, but he played only against himself. His apartment was silent except for his good-tempered humming. He lived alone.

Pierce, wearing a beige corduroy Mao suit, took the elevator to Judy's apartment. His body was growing accustomed to the demands Dr. Suad had placed on it, and he found he could tune out most of the unwanted sensory input. Thank God.

Judy welcomed him with a hug. "Hi. I've missed you."

"Missed you too. Dinner smells good."

"It'll be awhile yet. Make yourself comfortable and I'll get you a beer." She turned on her heel and headed for the kitchen.

"Thanks." He removed his clothes and placed them in the wardrobe by the door. Trainables went about naked whenever possible. Returning to the room, he walked over to the holoprojector and riffled through the wall projections until he found a new one. The Mendocino cliffs on Ahania. He put it on two of the walls and the ceiling. The view was from the top of the black cliffs; waves smashed against the empty shore while gulls wheeled against the raw blue sky of early spring. Along the edge of the cliffs, grass and wildflowers bent in the wind from the sea. He muted the surf to a distant hiss.

"Put the salt on," Judy called from the kitchen, and Pierce touched a button on the air conditioner. It was a close-to-perfect illusion, even to Pierce's heightened senses.

She returned carrying two steins of Lowenbrau, and they snuggled together on the couch to watch the waves break.

"You picked my new favorite. I hardly ever put on Pompeii or Macchu Picchu any more. But I can watch this for hours and hours."

"It's very pleasant I still haven't spotted the recycle splice."

"It's a ten-minute cycle. Cost a fortune."

"Worth every cent," Pierce commented, then remembered something he had left in his pocket and went to the closet to retrieve it. " I brought you a present," he announced, and handed her a small square locket on a fine gold chain. "Bought it from a goldsmith in Philadelphia."

"It's beautiful! Thank you, love." She put it around her neck and turned to let him fasten the clasp. The gold sparkled against her tanned skin. Pierce slouched farther down on the couch, enjoying the warmth of her body next to his, enjoying the wind in his hair and the sun on his face.

"Well, love, how's life?"

"Very slow. Very quiet No big actions, nobody coming home hurt We're all dying of boredom."

"Eric's had me hyped to Grade Twelve, and blocked most of my Briefing."

She sat up, both surprised and concerned. "But you're going on a Colonial job."

"I am."

"Then—"

"Beats me. I suppose IT! learn why when I need to."

"But what's the sense of blocking an Agent for a Colonial mission?"

"Maybe there's more Secessionism in the air."

"On Ore?" She laughed. "Don't be silly—not with all those loyal scientists."

"Mm. Let's play chess."

"Sure."

They played quickly as old adversaries who could still outwit each other now and then. Pierce was surprised to beat her in twenty-five moves.

"I'll get my revenge after dinner," she threatened. "Between worrying about you and worrying about the meal, I can't concentrate."

"Nobody loves a whiny loser." Pierce grinned. "Let's eat." As he expected, Judy had put together a good meal: hot-and-sour soup, tomato beef chow fun, green beans with pork and rice. Over coffee, Pierce described the cuisine he had been served at Monticello. "Corn bread, salt pork, and carrots. That was for guests. The old boy's got a freezer full of gourmet food, but they like to cling to their pioneer image in front of visitors."

After dinner they played some more chess, and Judy did indeed take her revenge by letting Pierce outsmart himself. He spent more time watching her than watching the board: she was tense and distracted.

"Now what's the matter," he finally asked after resigning the last game.

"Hm?"

"You know. You're all knotted up about something."

"It's you, Jerry. I'm afraid you'll come home hurt."

"Well see. Not to worry." He put his arm around her shoulder and tried to comfort her.

Comforted, but not completely satisfied, Judy led him toward the bedroom.

They made love, gently and slowly. Any intensity would prove to be too much for Pierce's overtuned body. His fingers and skin read her body, and the message was still' there in her pulse and muscle—she was nervous and frightened, but excited as well, and not just by him. Afterward, he relaxed in her arms, enjoying the smell of her hair. "I froze this morning," he confided to her.

She suddenly became very still, worried.

"I was getting off the shuttle from Beaulah. I froze. Just for a second."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Oh, Jerry. Did you tell Eric?"

"No. Not Suad, either. But Suad must know. You can't ever keep secrets from him. And if he knows, Eric knows."

Judy sat up, pulled away from Pierce, and turned to face him. "And they're sending you out anyway—"

"One last run. Waste not, want not Then I can go rusticate and catch up on my reading."

"If you freeze again, at a bad time, you could get killed." Pierce shrugged. "If I trip over my own feet, I could get killed, too."

"Are you scared," she asked.

"Sure." Pierce pushed the covers back and moved to the edge of the bed.

"What was it like?"

"Don't be morbid. Besides, it's time I left."

"Stay over, this once." She did not mean it.

"No thanks." He could not stand anyone else in bed with him while he slept The very thought made him edgy.

Judy got out of bed and put on a simple black kimono. Pierce dressed, watching her watching him. She was just beginning to thicken, to lose her lean, hard dancer's waist and flat belly. He was sad to see her beginning to age. Then he realized she was studying him the same way. He laughed.

"How'd we get so old, love? We're the whiz kids, aren't we?"

"Not any more, Jer. We're not kids playing games any more." She walked him to the door, her arm around his waist, her head against his shoulder. He confirmed what he had suspected: she was upset, frightened, yet detached. He was in danger; she knew it, but wasn't warning him except through the smell and texture of her skin, the pattern of her eye movements, the subtle tensions of a body under too much control.

"See you soon." He smiled, kissing her lightly as she opened the door.

"Bye, Jerry."

The door closed, and he stood alone in the quiet corridor. Then he walked slowly toward the elevators, past several intersecting corridors. Nearing the last intersection, he smelled orange blossoms, and had a whiff of beer. On one side of the intersection, he realized, someone was waiting to kill him. Which side? Left— the orange-blossom scent was stronger there. How many? Only one? Yes.

Pierce stepped into the intersection, catching a glimpse of the man out of the corner of his eye. A pistol glinted and sighed; a flecherte kissed the air over Pierce's head as he dropped, spun to face the man from a sprinter's crouch, and leaped.

The man was short and thickset, with an impassive expression on his round brown face. In a fair fight he might have been a dangerous opponent, but this 'was not a fair fight The man stank of orange blossoms—he had been doped with hypnine to slow his reflexes. Before the man could correct his aim, Pierce broke his wrist The pistol fell to the carpeted floor, Pierce kicked it down the hall and extended the kick into the man's groin.

The man groaned, tried to say something, then collapsed. Pierce gripped him by the shirtfront and swung him head first into the wall. About three seconds had elapsed since the flechette was fired. Pierce went through his attacker's pockets, found nothing. The pistol was equally anonymous, a cheap plastic job with a rough finish intended to mask fingerprints. Pierce sighed and turned on his ringmike.

"Eric? Jerry. Sorry to bother you at home, but some fellow's just tried to kill me."

"Where are you?"

"The hundred and twenty-second floor, Southwest, Corridor J. There's no ID on him, and he's full of hypnine."

"Cat's-paw. Okay, call Security to come sweep him up. Ate you all right?"

"Thought you'd never ask. Yeah. Adrenalin high on Grade Twelve reflexes is rough, though."

"Of course."

The unconscious man had been mugged, doped, and parked in the corridor with orders to fire at someone resembling Pierce. The real killer was far away; his cat's-paw would not even remember being accosted, let alone how his wrist came to be broken. Pierce felt sorry for the man, doubtless an innocent citizen whose life had been so casually appropriated without his consent.

"Who would want me dead?" Pierce murmured into, the mike.

"Don't know, Jerry."

Pierce wished he could see Wigner. Over the earphone his boss's voice sounded untrustworthy, but it was hard to be certain.

"What am I getting into tomorrow? "

"You seem to be in it already. Don't worry, Jerry. Your subconscious will let you know what you need to know when you need to know it. Damned safer this way."

"I know. I know."

Pierce meant it He trusted Wigner; he always had.

Chapter Four

One never called them Backsliders. Emigrants, pioneers, settlers, redeployed developmental and support personnel—but never Backsliders. They called themselves that, but Homebodies and Climbers had to maintain a genteel courtesy toward the people they deported. Pierce often wondered why these people resented being moved. Downtime, the air was clean, the water sweet. Fortunes were being made in hundreds of industries. Yet they resented it. In '09, seventy thousand Calcuttans died in the Ten-Week Riot against the transfer of half the city's population to Ahania. The received wisdom in the Agency was that the emigrants morale rose as their new homes began to resemble their old ones in squalor and misery. Much philosophizing was heard in Agency offices about the perversity of human nature.

At 0545, scarcely six hours since the cat's-paw —identified as Eusebio Macapagal, a Trainable-Gamma employee of the Agency—had attacked him, Pierce felt rested and alert His B&C helped induce optimum sleep sequences, reducing his normal seven hours' requirement to four. Pierce woke, dressed, packed, and dropped to the Concourse in twenty minutes. At this hour, the plaza was nearly empty.

His documents got bun through Intertemporal Customs at once past a long line of sleepy emigrants. He rode the escalator down into a tunnel just like the one to Beulah. The platform was already crowded with emigrants. They huddled on the benches that ran the length of the tunnel, or sprawled on the cement floor amid their luggage.

They smelled. They jabbered, coughed, spat, smoked, pissed in the trash cans, laughed, wept, whined, snarled. They wore fatigues; Pierce wore a brown duffel coat over a brown-and-white sweater and tan slacks. They fell silent as he picked his way through the crowd, then joked about him once he had passed.

Pierce did not mind—this oral abuse was only the equivalent of the graffiti they were allowed to spray on the shuttle cars. He found an empty space between an old woman snoring on the platform, using a suitcase for a pillow, and a young couple. The young man clutched a blue vinyl folder that held their emigration orders, IDs, immunization records, credit cards, and travel tickets. He was probably nineteen; the girl, obviously his new wife, seemed to be a year or so younger.

With a grunt and a yawn, Pierce hunkered down. He turned to the young couple and smiled. He had a lovely smile, bright, humorous, and infectious, and he knew it. The couple, expecting to ignore him and to be ignored in turn, were surprised and subtly flattered.

"Hi. My name's Jerry. Where are you two bound for?" Shaking his hand, the man responded cordially. "I'm Pete, and this is Jenny. My wife. We're s'posed to be going to Nueva Merida. Uh, what about you?"

"Business trip to the west coast. Nueva Merida, huh? I hear it's a great town." Pierce looked over at Pete's wife. "You two going to settle there?"

"Well—Jenny's brother lives there," Pete answered. "He offered me a job on his fishing boat. Guess it beats just being sent any old place."

"Sounds good. Things are booming all around the Gulf. Fishing, oil, farming—you name it. You'll make out fine."

"I sure better." Pete sighed. "Then we can go buy a little island somewheres, and me and Jenny can live there and not have to worry about AID or Doomsday or nothin'."

Jenny looked scared; Pierce was obviously no emigrant and therefore was a Trainable. But Pete was emboldened by his nearness to Ore, as well as by Pierce's friendliness.

"Sorry to leave Earth, huh?" Pierce asked.

"Hell. I had a good job with the New Haven City Schools—custodian's aide. And Jenny was doin' real good in vocational school, doin' Homecraft. But just 'cause we got married, bam, okay, kids, here's your walking papers." He waved the vinyl folder. "They wouldn't even let Jenny finish school. You know, we was too honest. Shoulda got married secretly."

" Honey, you know it wouldn' of worked," Jenny objected. " Anybody our age gets married, they know about it."

"Well, live together, then."

Jenny gasped; the boy blushed at his own gaucherie. Pierce was amused by the growing priggishness of the younger generation.

"They'd probly learn ‘bout that too," Jenny mumbled. "My folks sure would, anyways," she added with a nervous giggle.

"Just not fair. Know what my IQ is?" Pete asked. "One twenty-two. My counselor told me when I turned sixteen and I was goin' in for Testing. Heck, I was smarter than lots of kids, but that flickertube—wow, I could never make any sense of that in a million years."

"Well, only about twelve percent are Trainables," Pierce observed. "It's just one of those things you're born with, like your blood type."

"Sit under the dumb thing for fifteen minutes and that's all, kid, thank you, and kiss your future goodbye."

"Petey, honey, please." Jenny was embarrassed, but her husband listened to her no more than he did to Pierce.

"Just not fair."

"You're kidding me." Pierce grinned. "Your wife was studying to be a domestic servant in some rich family's house, and you were holding a janitor's broom for him. On Ore you'll own your own house in less than a year. And you'll be making more money in a month than you'd make in a year if you stayed here."

Pete turned a level gaze on him.

"Sure. And I can sit in front of the cinevision every night and watch blinkies like you tell each other what to do about duds like us." Blinkies—a new term of insult. They coined a few more every week. Pierce shrugged, smiled faintly, and turned away. So much for the screened loyals who were the only ones allowed to settle on Ore.

"Attention, please. Attention, please." A pleasant female voice came over the PA system and made everyone sit up and start fussing with their belongings. "Emigrants to Ore, please board cars two, three, four, and five. Nonemigrant passengers, please board car one only. Line up at the orange turnstiles and board the shuttle promptly when they open. Thank you—and have a good time."

Some of the emigrants cheered, sarcastically; most lined up silently. Pierce discovered he was the only nonemigrant, a situation that was not unusual.

Shuttles were necessary because I-Screens demanded a great deal of power and broke down within a few minutes unless carefully maintained. For a shuttle trip, the Screen was on for only fifteen seconds, and as many people as possible had to be hurled through in that time. After thousands of trips, Pierce was as intrigued as ever by the process and remained standing at the front of the empty car, looking out the window toward the end of the runnel.

Ten meters down the track, they came to a wall, its tiled mosaic interrupted by a circular metal band half a meter wide and glinting a dull gold. The circle, six meters in diameter, curved just under the tracks. As Pierce watched, the golden circle brightened. A chime sounded somewhere outside, and the mosaic within the circle disappeared. In its place, a soap-bubble film swirled for an instant before it, too, vanished, revealing a tunnel that was the mirror image of this one. A puff of wind gusted against the window as air pressures equalized. The shuttle banged forward through the circle; the only sensation was the thin click of the car going over the suddenly joined rails where the two tunnels merged. The shuttle stopped, having traveled about sixty meters, and the doors opened. Six burly Immigration officers in blue-and-white uniforms paced the platform. They wore sidearms, Pierce observed with surprise.

"Arright, arright, people," the leader bellowed, "give us five lines facing this way. Come on, hustle! We ain't got all night." Thirty seconds before, they had been emigrants; now they were immigrants. As they milled about on the platform, many looked back down the tunnel. The I-Screen was gone. There was no mosaic on this side; blank concrete and fourteen thousand years divided them from Earth. Pierce saw Pete and Jenny, caught their eye, and waved good-bye.

.Pete looked down. Jenny waved back, smiling uncertainly. The Immigration sergeant glanced at Pierce's documents and saluted.

"Need a hand with that bag, sir?"

"No thanks."

"Fujimura—get upstairs and hold a cab for this gentleman." The sum Japanese nodded and sprinted upstairs; Pierce was graciously grateful to the sergeant.

The Concourse here was much less impressive than the one uptime. The plaza was a forest of pillars, with bare concrete underfoot and overhead. The shops and restaurants made little effort to attract customers, having an assured clientele. Most of the shuttle entrances were sealed, since this was a minor Transferpoint on Ore, and saw mostly immigrant traffic from Earth. Over the main entrance, a garish sign fluoresced in blue on white: WELCOME TO ORC— ARSENAL OF HUMANKIND!

Local Time: 0347 EST 8 Feb 2015 AD

Absolute Time: 0347 EST 7 Apr 12,165 BC

Rent-a-Car from Hertz-Avis

Pierce paused at an all-night fichemonger's to pick up some novels and a dozen local papers and magazines. Slipping them into his duffel coat, he went outside into a raw, blustery night Fujimura stood shivering beside a cab, an ancient Chevy Scooter.

"Thanks for your trouble." Pierce smiled, handing the Immigration man a ten-dollar tip. "You fellas have breakfast on me." The sleepy cabby drove him to the jetport, about where La Guardia Field once was on Earth. The roads were slippery; there was a freezing wind roaring south from the dying glaciers of New England. They drove through kilometers of drab houses—"Two-Family Ranchettes," the brochures called them—with big, unkempt yards and double-glazed windows. This neighborhood could be part of any Western Colony on any chronoplane, Pierce reflected.

He had a three-hour wait at the jetport. After breakfast, finding little to interest him in the jetport terminal, he rented a privacy booth for an hour and read: Dickens, Lessing, Stacton. Really, all this waiting was a waste of time. But it gave him time to think about what he had seen so far. The changes he had noticed this morning were not pleasant The young immigrant's surliness: sloppy screening had allowed him onto a very sensitive chronoplane. The Immigration officers: rude and overbearing to everyone but himself, and wearing sidearms. The few people about, both at the Transferpoint and in the terminal, seemed angry and apathetic. Many cast cold looks at him after he left his booth and waited in the departure lounge. Pierce was used to being disliked, but the obviousness and intensity of that dislike were new and striking. Had they all forgotten why they were here? And, thinking that, he realized he had seen virtually no Doomsday posters.

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 clusters 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 title 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 mass 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 bitching 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 Pass 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, impassive 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. "Bloody 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. Scrapped 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 attitudes, 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 bloody well doubt it."

Gersen looked embarrassed. "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 Picasso. 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."

"Damned 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 grasslands 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 passed 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 spaceflight 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-assembly 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 Grasslanders 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 embarrassed; 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 space projects are pure research. Unmanned probes to the outer planets, radio astronomy, that kind of thing." He looked mildly embarrassed. "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 hell 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 Institute 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 shit. 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 bastard has got us twitching, though."

"The memo's increased his influence here?"

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

"Why?"

"Gersen's a parallel power to me. Most of oar funding comes directly from the International Federation, administered by AID. But the Colonies invest in us, too, and Gersen's their broker."

"Of course." Pierce recalled several WDS projects initiated by Colonial governments: Thel wanted to create ice-free harbors north of 45°; Los wanted better seismic predictions and improved storage batteries.

"So Gersen influences events here."

"Very much so. Even some of my senior people owe him favors; when he wants something, they help him get it."

"Such as?"

"Usually it's lubrication for some colonial project— more people, Improved computer access, that sort of stuff. Gersen retains a lot of clout among the Colonial bureaucrats, because he can make Trainables do his bidding."

"His politics?"

"Impeccably bland."

"I doubt it," Pierce said as the Pipit whirred softly down to the roof of the Holiday Inn in downtown Los Alamitos. Younger looked sharply at him.

"The son of a bitch is up to something," said Pierce. "I don't know what, but it's probably treasonous."

"Strong talk."

Pierce did not reply. He pulled his suitcase out from behind the seat and clambered down onto the helicopter pad. Then he leaned back into the Pipit. "I want the full records of every Colonial research project, past and present. Dossiers on everyone connected with those projects, including the Colonial liaison people. Oh, and dossiers on every Copo on Ore, past and present. Okay?"

Younger nodded. "When?"

"By 1900 hours."

"No pain."

"One more thing. I want four absolutely reliable people from your own Security team—not from McGowan. One here on the roof, one roving the hotel, two outside my room. Get 'em in place as soon as possible."

"It's that serious?"

"Yes."

"They'll be on their way in five minutes."

"Good. I may want to see you again sometime tonight, but for sure we should meet tomorrow morning."

"When?"

"When we decide which projects to suspend and whom to put under arrest."

Younger grinned and waved good-bye. The Pipit lifted off as Pierce headed downstairs to his room. He began visualizing its layout and approaches, the points in neighboring buildings which overlooked it. The room was not as protected as he would have liked, but it would do. It had to. To change rooms would involve trusting unTrainable hotel employees, and Pierce now trusted no such person on Ore.

Younger was as good as his word. The four guards—one woman, three men—arrived almost as soon as Pierce did. They were calm, relaxed, nondescript, and they listened well. Pierce assigned them to their stations and took a catnap until the first of several messengers arrived with cartons of microfiches. Though facsimile transmissions direct to his room could have been arranged, they might have been monitored. The afternoon wore into evening as Pierce flickread through thousands of documents, pausing only for a perfunctory supper. He read them in no particular order, knowing his subconscious would file and organize everything. By 2200 hours, he knew a very great deal about every WDS

project ever funded by Colonial governments; he was familiar with the records of every scientist and technician associated with those projects and he had reviewed the records of every Colonial Police officer on Ore since the Copos had been established here.

Several items interested him. First, the involvement of Anita IKosi in Project Sherlock. She was, of course, one of the most renowned scientists on any chrono-plane. Together with the fifteen other members of her family, she was justification enough for the entire Testing and Recruitment Program, for the IKosis were all Trainables, even those who were already adults when Tested. They were Boskopoids, big-brained ancestors of the Bushman peoples from Luvah, and in the decade since their discovery they had made a dozen major contributions to science. If Anita IKosi was interested in Sherlock, there had to be value in the project If she had been removed, the pressure on Younger must have been intense. Intense enough to make him prefer the scandal that would erupt if the removal were publicized.

Pierce had no doubt about the chief source of that pressure: Seamus Brown. Judging by his thick file, Brown was a complex man: four marriages and any number of sexual liaisons; membership both in scientific societies and in some crank groups. Though he privately dismissed the alien-invader Doomsday theory, he publicly exploited it to sustain IF funding of his missile programs. Did not drink or smoke. Played squash once a week with Harry McGowan, among others, but made insulting remarks about McGowan to Trainables. Ran the Missile Facility with a heavy hand, and generally got results.

Project Sherlock itself was clever, but seemed nothing special. Using a hint or two found in some Ulronian documents, a team led by Anita IKosi had developed a modified hypermagnetic generator and had four of them installed in a Daedalus missile. After launch, the missile was to be placed in stationary orbit whereupon the generators would be turned on and dispersed. In theory that would create a very large field—a kind of magnetic lens millions of kilometers in diameter, capable of focusing electromagnetic radiation from the most distant galaxies—and of picking up any artificial radio signals originating within a thousand light-years. That capability, presumably, had ensured approval for the project; radio astronomy had flourished for years thanks to public fear of alien invaders. But Pierce saw nothing notable in Sherlock, apart from some technical details and the fact that it was prodigiously expensive. Politics again. Someone— probably Seamus Brown, possibly others as well—was using the project for private purposes. Pierce did not waste time spinning theories about Sherlock; the facts would come to light in due course. The Copo files yielded much more interesting information. Three years ago, Pierce had exposed a Secessionist network in the Colonial Police here. Most of its members had been older men, former officers in the armies of Earth who had preferred rustication downtime to alcoholic retirement in Arizona, the Balearics, or the Crimea. UnTrainables, of course, and still soaked in their smelly little nationalisms, they had concocted a few imaginary grievances and begun to plan a coup. Once they were in control of Ore, they had deceived themselves, the International Federation would treat them as a sovereign state and agree to relax Agency policies in exchange for continued immigration and trade. That was a persistent fantasy among Colonials, one that had provided plenty of work for Agents like Pierce.

The plot had been as thickheaded as its authors, and Pierce had had no trouble rounding up all two hundred conspirators before they could take any action. A few had been sent to penal colonies, but most had been cashiered and kicked off Ore to less sensitive worlds. The Copos as a force were in disgrace and had been replaced in the WDS by Site Security, a Trainable corps.

Six months later, however, Gersen had established a Copo Special Reserve, and within a year almost a hundred of the former Secessionists had enlisted. They had drifted back to Ore by one means or another: with official pardons, under assumed identities, perhaps even through the illegal I-Screens used by knotholers. The Special Reserves had been moved quietly about since then, and in the past six months most had been based in Farallon City, engaging in little more than small-arms training. To Pierce, they looked like the nucleus of a putsch. A suicidal putsch, since AID's armed forces could crush the combined Colonies in a day, pouring men and machines onto every chronoplane from a hundred I-Screens. He put down his flickreader, got up from his armchair, and walked in slow, controlled steps up and down the room, automatically avoiding the windows. He wanted very much to smash something. It was not the putsch that infuriated him; it was the gross incompetence that had allowed it to get this far. In the old days, when he had been a T-Colonel, he had known everything, everything, that went on in his district. It had been said with little exaggeration that if two hookers exchanged political opinions at midnight in the ladies' room of the sleaziest bar in Mountain Home, Pierce would know it by morning.

But now Trainable slovenliness had encouraged this threat to one of the most important installations on twelve chronoplanes. Trainables had allowed disgruntled settlers to colonize; they had ignored Gersen's formation of a private Copo army of convicted traitors; they had ignored a media fog clumsy enough to be spotted by any Trainable at a glance; and they had allowed unTrainables to exert influence on WDS scientists, even on a IKosi. Incredible!

The scandal would be massive. Pierce took some consolation in that. There would be questions asked in the IF Assembly. AID was overdue for a purge and a tightening up, and this mess would provide ample justification. Wigner might even let some of the details leak to the media.

— Wigner knows already.

The thought slipped away, almost like a dream forgotten in waking, and Pierce had to fight to get it back.

Wigner knows already, or knows a lot. That's why I'm blocked, because Gersen's boys might pick me up. And that's why I wanted to kill Gersen and Shih and McGowan—because once I've got the goods on them, they'll need killing.

Pierce had a headache. After speaking briefly with one of the guards in the hall, he went to bed. Why, then, did Gersen ask the Agency to intervene? What's with all this sabotage crap?

He slept poorly, and rose early. In the early dawn, Los Alamitos was still and lovely, its broad streets empty except for an occasional Copo patrol car. The Santa Monica Mountains, crested with snow, glowed pink in the first rays of the sun. It was a beautiful world. They all were. Pierce dressed and went out to dismiss his guards. Then he walked downstairs to the parking basement, where Younger had left a Toyota sedan for his use. A quick check showed no one had tampered with it. He drove out, headed for Younger's home.

The Director lived in Palisades, a beach suburb of Los Alamitos. His rambling cedar house stood on a low cliff above the cold blue sea; along the foot of the cliff, a narrow sandy beach stretched for kilometers without a footprint. The nearest neighbor was half a kilometer away. Pierce interrupted breakfast; Younger brought him into a glass-walled kitchen whose table was set for two. There was a hint of perfume in the air.

"Chloe doesn't like dealing with people this early in the day," Younger said. "In any case, I presume she wouldn't be interested in what you have to say." He smiled, pouring Pierce some coffee.

"And what do I have to say?"

"Let's talk after breakfast." He mouthed: We may be bugged. Pierce nodded. Younger made him a substantial breakfast, and they chatted about the fine weather and lovely view. Then they went outside. Younger led him down a trail to the beach, where the surf thumped and hissed. They walked south, their feet sinking a little into the soft, wet sand.

"Something smells," Pierce said. He told Younger what he had learned.

"It's embarrassing to have a putsch here, of all places," Younger said when Pierce finished. "But it's not, mm, unheard of."

"We put down at least four or five a year. Most are just cultie revolts—death to the Antichrist, whatever. But this one is going to tear the Agency apart."

"But Gersen called the Agency in."

"He may have been afraid we'd eventually get wind of his plans. When suspected of a major crime, admit to a minor one. So he yelled sabotage and thought that might distract us until the putsch was ready."

"They must know they can't possibly win."

"No, they think they can. They think they have a gimmick, something we don't expect and can't counter. Presumably a WDS gimmick." Younger stopped walking. "That means collusion with some of my people."

"Seamus Brown does play squash every week with Harry McGowan."

"Ah."

"I want Brown arrested, right away. And the Site must be sealed off for a day or two. Use just your own Security people, no Copos. Meanwhile, I'll get a message through your I-Screen to Wigner. The Agency will dump a battalion of Gurkhas on Farallon City to handle Gersen's Special Reserves."

They turned and began striding back along the beach. The sun threw their shadows across the advancing foam of the surf.

"Anything else?" Younger asked.

"I'd better talk to Anita IKosi. She may know something about the gimmick."

"I'll call her right away." Younger nodded. Then he pitched forward onto the sand. Pierce saw the yellow tail of a flechette protruding from Younger's back and instantly dropped and began to roll. The shot aimed at him struck his left shoulder instead of his torso. The flechettes were loaded with a fast-acting paralytic drug: Pierce found he could still breathe, with effort, but could not move. He sprawled on his side, looking at Younger death-still a few paces away. A wave washed over Younger, but stopped before reaching Pierce. Withdrawing, the wave turned Younger over so he faced the sky. Younger's chest moved, very slowly.

Pierce heard distant footsteps. Two men, he decided, hurrying down the cliff through the brush. If they were far enough away, his body might be able to metabolize the drug before they reached him. Another wave broke over Younger. With terrible slowness, he was rolled over again, his face resting underwater. Spray blew in Pierce's eyes, but he could not feel it.

After what seemed like a long time, two men in jeans and windbreakers trotted past him and out into the surf. They pulled Younger out of the water and dragged him up the beach. Pierce glimpsed their faces and recognized them as Special Reserve officers who had been part of the Secessionist group.

"Shit. He's dead."

"I was afraid of that. The old man's gonna freak. How 'bout the other one?"

One of them dug a toe under Pierce and flipped him onto his back. Pierce stared helplessly into the clear blue sky of a beautiful spring morning. He felt a few cramps in his hands and feet The drug was wearing off.

The two men looked down at him. One of them, Pierce knew, was a man named Javier Ochoa; the other was Pablo Dietrich.

"Hello, Mr. Pierce," Ochoa said.

"Shoot him again—twice," Dietrich ordered. Ochoa, carrying a long-barreled Smith & Wesson .18, pointed it at Pierce's thigh. The rifle made two little puffing sounds, and Pierce's cramps vanished.

"Oughta hold him till next week," Ochoa grunted.

"No chance. See the way he started to duck? Fast!"

"He's been hyped. In half an hour he'll be good as new." Suddenly Pierce was sitting up and watching the tracks his heels made in the sand as the two men dragged him along the beach. Getting back up the trail to Younger's house was slow work, and Pierce was almost glad he couldn't feel anything.

Ochoa and Dietrich dumped Pierce into an armchair in the living room, and left. Sitting on a couch in front of him, smoking a cigarette was Colonel Shih. He looked at Pierce dispassionately.

Time passed. Pierce heard a dragging noise: they were bringing Younger in. The two men reentered the living room and stood behind Pierce's chair, facing Shih.

"Cuff him." Shih's voice was a soft, unresonant tenor, but the men obeyed instantly and cuffed Pierce's wrists to the arms of his chair. Shih focused at last on Pierce's eyes.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fair." His response came out as a spastic's croak, but at least his vocal cords were working again. His hands and feet hurt.

"I'm very sorry."

"Not at all."

"Do you understand what we have done?"

Pierce nodded.

"Can you tell me your understanding? I will correct you if necessary. But this is a time for frankness."

His mouth still felt thick and clumsy, but he could speak. "You ha'

pa'bolic mikes on us—onna beash."

"Exactly."

"Di'creetly done."

"Thank you." A fault smile.

"You figured I'd seen th'oo sabotage sto'y, and wanted to check. When I said B'own had to be ar—arrested, you shot us."

"Why?"

"Sherlock—Sherlock is the gimmick. Or else the cover for the gimmick. I was supposed to clump around and get in people's hair for a few days. Till you were ready. But I twigged too soon." Pierce fell silent, starting breath exercises to dull the growing pain in his limbs.

"Much, much too soon. Now, tell me about your mission." Pierce did so, including the fact that he had been blocked. Shih nodded and lit another cigarette, then whispered into his ringmike.

"Your block is alarming. It implies Dr. Wigner did not believe our story, and the implications of that are very serious." Shih smoked thoughtfully for a long minute. "You realize we shall have to Clear you. We must find out what went into your Briefing."

Pierce laughed. "Clear me? What's the point? You'd need Trainable technicians to monitor the Clearing, and it would take days—longer than you can afford."

Ochoa could not suppress a snort. Shih looked pained.

"Don't underestimate our resources, Mr. Pierce. We have Trainables who can accomplish it. In fact, they're preparing to do so up at our headquarters in Farallon City. Of course, they'll have to rush. I'm sorry, truly sorry. We wouldn't even consider such a step unless it were absolutely necessary."

"And it is."

"It is."

He was well and truly trapped. Short of some gross error by one or more of them, Pierce could see no way out. They would fly him back to Farallon City and unreel his mind like a ball of kite string in ten or twelve hours. Pierce almost looked forward to the exercise, for Training gave one a taste for strange and dangerous experiences. What would it be like to have his mind dissolved away, like a stain out of fabric? If he survived—was allowed to survive—he would have to learn absolutely everything all over again—how to suck, how to focus his eyes, how to repeat sounds and associate them with things and actions. Pierce had seen new minds grown on Cleared psychopaths; the new mind took longer to develop than the first and was rarely as good.

Shih snuffed out his cigarette and stood up. He was a slim man who carried himself with an aristocrat's easy erectness. "We'll have to carry you out in that chair, Mr. Pierce. I don't want you loose, but I don't want you drugged, either."

Ochoa spoke up with a total non sequitur: "Unlock his cuffs, sir? But—"

"Are you mad?" Shih interrupted. "I said no such thing."

"Well, okay, sir—if you've got him covered," Ochoa said. Then, before Dietrich could stop him, he freed Pierce's left hand and was moving behind the chair to unlock the other cuff.

"Stop him, Dietrich!"

Dietrich, standing on Pierce's left, drew a Mallory .15 and made the mistake of shooting Ochoa rather than Pierce. Pierce jumped up and swung the chair over his head, knocking Dietrich into the far wall. As the gun dropped, Pierce swept it up and fired once at Shih. Then he swung around to get Dietrich before the man could recover.

It was suddenly very quiet in Younger's house. Pierce found Ochoa's keys and unlocked the other cuff. Terribly tired, he collapsed back into the armchair facing Shih, who remained upright on the couch, mouth open, eyes blank. His chest rose and fell as slowly as Younger's had.

"I don't know how that happened," Pierce said hoarsely, "but I'm not sorry. You must be terribly disappointed."

He stood up and left the living room for a quick check of the house. As he had expected, Younger's Chloe lay dead in one of the bedrooms. She had been beaten and strangled. Pierce returned to the living room. He no longer felt tired; he felt very good.

"Colonel Shih, you're in trouble. You of all people ought to know how many capital offenses you've committed in the last hour. I think you'll talk to save yourself, though. So I'm taking you—" A name floated unbidden into his mind: Gordon Cole. "I'm taking you to a place where you can get an antidote for this nasty drug you use, and then well talk." Shih stared past him, blankly. Pierce bent over Ochoa and broke the man's neck with a single sharp blow. Then he did the same to Dietrich.

"I'm sure you wish I'd call in Younger's Security people," Pierce said.

"Then I might bog down in a homicide investigation while you told lies and stalled for time. Well, they'll learn of it, in a while. But first I'm going to peel you like an onion."

He carried Shih out to the Toyota and threw him into the back seat. Then he started back into town. An address, 127 Landau Street, occurred to him, and he realized it had to be Gordon Cole's. Pierce suddenly felt professional respect for Wigner's thoroughness.

A blue Datsun station wagon passed him, going the other way, but when Pierce checked the rearview mirror, he saw the car turning to follow him.

"Guess your reinforcements recognized me," he snapped at his passenger. "I'll have to lose them."

He did so most adroitly. But he knew that within minutes, Copo helicopters would be scanning every street in the city, despite the objections of Site Security. There was no way to ditch the car and proceed to Cole's on foot, not with a paralyzed man slung over his shoulder. There was nothing to do but barge in on Cole and hope that the man had the proper drugs with which to rouse and interrogate Shih. If the Copos moved in, Pierce would try to bring in Site Security; failing that, he would use Shih as a hostage. Failing that—he wished he knew more about Cole. Presumably he was an Agency stringer, supplying information to AID

without actually being on the payroll.

In evading the Datsun, Pierce had spent fifteen minutes dodging up and down strange streets and back alleys. Now he headed straight for the East Side, a residential area.' Most of the traffic was headed downtown at this time of day; even Trainable scientists kept peasants' hours. Landau Street was lined with rambling white prefabs set on endless, identical lawns. Except for a few toddlers on trikes, the area was deserted. Number 127 seemed undistinguished: a broad, empty front lawn, the backyard screened by dense, high hedges, a strip of forest behind. The house itself was a low, sprawling box with curtained windows. Pierce listened for helicopters, scanned the street, then slid smoothly out of the car. He pulled Shih out and carried bun at a trot down to the front door.

Gordon Cole, a medium-sized man with red hair and green eyes, opened the door and helped Pierce lay Shih out on the floor of the spacious living room. Pierce had held on to the handcuffs and locked them on Shih's wrists, behind his back.

"He got a jolt about half an hour ago," Pierce said. "Got anything to wake him up, get him talking?" Shih lay on his side, gazing blankly at Pierce's feet.

"Sure."

"We need to work fast."

"I know."

In less than three minutes, Cole fired a hypospray into Shih's arm. Thirty seconds passed. Shih rolled onto his back, his eyes full of rage.

"Hi," Pierce called. "Now we're going to find out all about Project Sherlock."

Pierce heard a muffled bang under Shih's jacket The man convulsed, once, and was dead Pierce ripped off Shih's jacket and opened his shirt.

"Damn! A built-in self-destruct," he swore. The pseudoderm patch on Shih's chest had been blown away. Pierce saw a blackened hole between two ribs. As they watched, the hole filled with blood and the blood spread across the golden skin of Shih's chest "Damn it. I should have checked."

"No reason to suspect anything like that," Cole replied, a little shakily.

"I thought Agency people were the only ones that use 'em."

"I needed him very badly." Pierce grimaced. "The Copos will be here any minute."

"What's going on, anyway? You here to check out my report?"

"On—?"

"Gersen's misappropriation of funds, of course." Pierce was puzzled. "I'll bite."

"Then why are you here?"

"Gersen sent us a memo about sabotage. Didn't you know?" Cole laughed, a pleasantly boyish sound. "Bravo for Big Bengt. He must've known there was someone like me around, so he decided to muddy the waters."

"Your report wasn't part of my Briefing." Somehow Pierce was certain of that. "What was Gersen up to?"

"Creative accounting. He's switched over a billion dollars from various project budgets into Project Sherlock, all in the past month or so. But he's cooked the books to make them look as if Sherlock's budget was cut. Typical Colonial—he's ripped off most of the Colonial projects to do it. Somewhere in the process, someone has made a couple of hundred million. Really stupid, though—any Trainable could spot the discrepancies, no matter how nicely they're camouflaged. I notified Wigner a couple of weeks ago, but he didn't seem to respond. Until you dropped in, that is."

"It's more than that" Pierce quickly described what he had learned so far. Gordon Cole slouched into a hammock chair, listening so intently he did not notice when Shih's blood began to stain the carpet.

"Next move?" he asked.

"Notify Earth, somehow. McGowan will be guarding the I-Screens."

"I have one. A little message drop. Connects with the physics lab at UCLA on Earth. Using it will black out the whole neighborhood, though."

"The Copos will find us anyway. You might as well encode the message and pop it through. Then we'll disappear for a couple of days." Abruptly, Pierce realized someone else was in the house. An instant later he heard a voice behind him, a soft, musical voice that he recognized at once as that of Anita IKosi:

"You must hurry, Gordon. The Copos are already closing in." Pierce turned, smiled, and bowed. The woman was standing in a doorway that led to a long hall. She nodded absently. Her face was drawn.

"You're sure?" Cole asked.

"Absolutely. A patrol is coming through the woods behind the house, and a police jeep is down the street."

Cole frowned, perplexed. "How do you know?" She was a small woman with peppercorn hair, skin the color of ripe apricots, and the face of a beautiful baby, but she lacked the belly and rump of a modern Bushman. Wearing a plain white sweater and faded jeans, she did not look impressive. Yet there was an absolute certainty in her voice, her folded arms, her immense dark eyes.

"I know." A glance at Pierce. "You are Jerry Pierce."

"Ma'am." He stood stiffly, feeling awkward as a doltish schoolboy. Holovision had conveyed her beauty, but not her dignity, nor her reserve. Anita IKosi was not only a superb physicist, she was that twenty-first-century rarity, a great lady.

"I am here because I know Gordon works for Dr. Wigner." Pierce glanced at Cole, who shrugged.

"When I became alarmed about Project Sherlock, I felt Wigner should be notified. Now we must act quickly. Gordon—tape a cassette and send it through to Earth at once."

"If they're already coming—?" Cole was agitated.

"Jerry and I will have to distract them."

"You can't. Too dangerous."

"I'll be in worse danger if they capture me without Wigner's learning of Sherlock and the putsch. Go on, quickly, and don't argue." Cole silently obeyed, passing her in the doorway.

Anita looked down at Shih's corpse, then into Pierce's eyes. He realized that she was under a horrible strain.

"We've had a hard day together, you and I," she murmured. Together? Pierce's puzzlement showed, but she did not explain.

"It's going to be even harder before we're finished," she continued.

"We'll have to distract the Copos long enough for Gordon to get his message out. You're armed."

"Badly. This pistol's almost empty."

"We'll get you a better one. But I hope you won't have to use it." She led him out of the house into the huge backyard. Some redwood patio furniture stood near a brick barbecue. The uncut grass stretched a hundred meters behind the house, where the woods began abruptly. Pierce could see men in camouflage uniforms moving through the trees with the quiet deliberation of professionals. They were coming toward the house.

"Let's sit down for a minute," Anita said.

Chapter Six

The Copos' approach was hideously loud to Pierce's heightened hearing. He sat, legs crossed, in an uncomfortable deck chair. The Smith and Wesson's butt grew warm in his pocket as he held it. It was uncharacteristic of him to let anyone else take the lead in a fight, but Anita IKosi evidently knew exactly what she was doing. It became still. Without looking directly at the woods, Pierce could see the men—probably a full squad of ten—were searching for cover just inside the edge of the woods.

Suddenly he noticed a small commotion: thumps, cracklings. Pierce saw some of the Copos collapse.

"They're all out cold," Anita told him. "Quick—go grab a rifle from one of them."

He sprinted across the yard and into the trees. The nearest Copo was then-sergeant, a huge Black man sprawled on his back. Pierce lifted the KG-15 rifle from the man's slack hand. The rifle was fully loaded with a clip of drugged flechettes, but the impact setting was a very lethal 10. A half-second burst from it would have blown Pierce and Anita to pieces. Pierce was about to dispatch the entire squad when he heard Anita call out a single word:

"No."

He sighed and ran back across the yard. She was standing up, but seemed exhausted. When she spoke again, her voice was half-slurred.

"I couldn't stand ten deaths all at once."

"What the hell did you do to them?"

"Like Shih and his men—induced paralysis. They couldn't breathe, and passed out. But I can't… keep doing it. Need rest…" Pierce heard a jeep rolling to a stop out near the front of the house. Dense shrubs stood between Cole's house and its neighbors. Pierce would have to slip through them in order to ambush the men in the street. He pulled Anita with him, and they crawled through until, by gently parting the branches, they could see out to the street.

The Toyota still stood at the curb, but its rear tires were flat. Fifty meters down the street, he could see a Copo armored jeep parked. Its windshield was down,. and a rifle muzzle jutting over the hood was trained on Cole's front door. The jeep's radio buzzed and spluttered. Evidently the jeep's occupants had found the Toyota, disabled it, and then called for assistance. In moments, the area would be crawling with police.

"Can you do anything to those guys?"

She shook her head; her eyes were dull.

He cursed. "We need that jeep. Be ready to run when I bring it up the street."

She did not ask questions or argue. Pierce checked the clip, turned the impact setting to 4, stepped out of the bushes, and opened fire. The Copos were much too slow to react. The KG-15 sprayed ten flechettes per second through the jeep's open windshield. The Copo rifle dropped with a clatter onto the hood.

Crouching low, Pierce raced across the broad, empty lawns to the jeep. He yanked open the driver's door. A young Copo toppled out, four flechettes imbedded in his face. His partner, the sniper, was also unconscious. Pierce considered stashing them in the Toyota. No time. Instead, he dragged both of them into the street and left them there, then jumped behind the wheel, lurched up to Cole's house, and slammed on the brakes. Anita ran out and climbed in. Pierce could hear the sibilant flutter of a helicopter overhead.

"What about Gordon?" Pierce asked, almost breathless.

"He's still encoding the message," she responded.

"Well, he'd better hurry. We're getting out of here." With no real destination yet in mind, Pierce drove to the next intersection and turned left. The jeep's windows were made of one-way glass; they passed several Copos on foot, who waved casually as the jeep rolled on by. A small dog chased them, barking furiously.

"They're in the house," Anita suddenly announced.

"Who?"

"The Copos. Gordon can hear them—pounding on the door, the study door. The cassette's not ready, the Screen isn't on… Oh. OH!" She covered her face with her hands.

"What is it?"

"He's dead. Just like Shih. They must've gotten into the room—Gordon knew he was caught—then a horrible pain in his chest, and nothing. He had a self-destruct."

She began to cry, like a frightened child. Pierce kept driving. He was scared and upset, but also somewhat amused at himself. The most alarming aspect of this business was the report he would have to write when it was all over.

They reached the road out to Oppenheimer Field, and Pierce swerved the jeep onto it. He switched on the radio and listened for a minute to the chatter of messages back and forth, about them. To add to the Copos'

confusion, he contributed a few false reports of his own. He was a good mimic, and each report was relayed in a different voice. Then, to avoid being spotted by RDF, he switched off.

"We've got to get word back to Earth," Anita said unsteadily.

"All the I-Screens will be guarded. Gersen might even shut down all traffic, just to make sure we don't send someone else through." He smiled wryly. "Not that we have much to tell. Wigner will want some hard facts before he sends in the Gurkhas."

"Perhaps we can get something at Mojave Verde, some of my colleagues are still working on Sherlock—"

"No. We're going to Farallon City."

"What? But there's no time—"

"We just have to. I've got to get to Gersen." He knew for sure now that he had to kill Gersen; whatever Sherlock might turn out to be, Gersen's death would stall it. "Trust me, ma'am. I know what I'm doing." He turned on the radio again, this time to a regular broadcast wavelength.

"—repeat, Dr. Eugene Younger, Director of the Weapons Development Site, was murdered early this morning by an employee of the Agency for Intertemporal Development named Gerald Pierce. Colonial Police spokespersons say they have no motive for the brutal slaying, but expect to arrest Pierce at any moment. He is believed to be somewhere in Los Alamitos and should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Police describe him as a white male, mid-thirties, height about one hundred eighty centimeters, weight seventy-five to eighty kilos, short brown hair, cleanshaven, last seen wearing a brown duffel coat Anyone seeing a man meeting this description is urged to contact Colonial Police headquarters. We repeat—"

They were nearly at the airfield, driving fast on the deserted road. As they rounded a curve, Pierce saw a black Ford sedan parked on the opposite shoulder, facing them. A man, obviously a plainclothes Copo, stepped out of the sedan, raised an old-fashioned bullet-ruing .45. Steadying himself against the car door and holding the pistol in both big hands, the Copo fired. The windshield cracked loudly, but held. Pierce steered straight for the man, accelerating.

" Don't kill him! "

"I won't." But even as the Copo dived over the hood of the sedan, and the jeep skidded back into its own lane, Pierce realized he could not—after that command—have killed the man. He glanced at Anita, and met her gaze. There was an excruciating pain in her eyes, and grief; but there was also a power in them to which only an idiot would not defer. The gateway to Oppenheimer Field had been shut. As they approached, three Copos fired on them through the gate's wire mesh, to no effect.

"Hang on," Pierce ordered, and they crashed through the gate. Flechettes spattered on the windows like bugs. A field attendant, with more courage than brains, drove a baggage train across the jeep's path, and Pierce narrowly missed him. Then they were out on the main runway, racing for a row of hangars.

The first hangar was empty; the second held a medium-range Mitsubishi M120 with its starboard engine dismantled. In the third hangar stood a Cessna C60. Pierce drove right inside under its wing and jumped out. The smell of jet fuel was pleasantly strong. Three men in ground-crew coveralls were standing near the hangar's rear wall, staring out over their coffee mugs. They were well away from anything that might be a weapon, but Pierce was taking no chances and shot all three at low impact. They cried out, more in fear than in pain, then collapsed.

"Pull out the chocks," he called to Anita. As she did so, he sprang up the gangway and into the Cessna's tiny cabin. A sour-faced technician was rising from the pilot's seat as Pierce shot her. The seconds ticked away in his mind as he carried her out. It seemed to take a long time before he and Anita were in the cockpit— alone.

She helped him through a hasty preflight checkout, and he started the engines. The Cessna taxied out into the noon sunshine; Pierce steered for the nearest runway. He glanced over at the terminal building. A small crowd had gathered on the observation deck. No doubt quite an uproar was taking place behind the green glass of the control-tower windows. But there were no Copos visible. Pierce studied the white bulb of the radome, which gave the control tower an oddly Russian look. Then he pointed the Cessna down the runway and poured on power. They were in the air very quickly.

"We've made it!" Anita sighed, relieved.

"Not quite. Not yet" He put them into a steep climb as he mentally reviewed everything he knew about the plane he was flying. It was a tough, reliable subsonic, designed for short-range flights and sensible pilots. He was about to stress it badly.

They climbed west, out over the coast, until they reached an altitude of two thousand meters and began to circle. Los Alamitos looked very small, a little geometric space carved out of a green-and-beige wilderness. There was considerable traffic below on the road to Oppenheimer Field, and Pierce could see the regular fluttering glint of a helicopter's rotors as it circled the terminal building. The radome stood out vividly. Pierce tilted the Cessna's nose down and put on power. Anita seemed nervous.

"I've got to blind them," he explained.

Their dive steepened as they accelerated, and the field grew larger again. The helicopter hovered near the terminal, evidently preparing to land. It was a Copo craft.

Anita understood what he planned, and rested a hand on his arm.

"Please—some will be killed."

"Stop me, then, and we'll be killed." She made no response.

The plane had passed the speed of sound as it swept within two hundred meters of the control tower. The shock wave shattered the radome, blew in the control-tower windows, and knocked the helicopter off balance. It slammed into the asphalt and burst into flame. Pierce regained just enough altitude to bring them over the Santa Monica Mountains. The nearest aircraft that could track or catch them were the fighters based at Mojave Verde. By the time they could be alerted, the Cessna would be long gone. He began to relax.

"In real life I'm a mild-mannered reporter for the New Ore Times." He grinned and looked over at Anita. Her face was a nightmare mask of agony.

"Get away, shut them out, get away, get away, they're dying so slowly—" Pierce felt his self-congratulation turn sour. He had to protect this woman, but doing so half destroyed her. They flew on in silence for a few minutes, until she gradually relaxed.

"You'd better tell me more of what's going on," he finally said.

"Oh, shut up." She reached out blindly and grasped his hand. Her breathing was harsh. "I'm sorry. I feel better now. They're out of range. Poor people. Poor suffering people!"

"You seem to be some kind of telepath."

"A clumsy word. It's less than that—and more. I can sense emotions, kinesthesia—especially strong feelings in people I know. And, as you've found out, I can influence others."

"By some kind of direct stimulation of their nervous systems."

"Yes. I did it with Shih and his men. And with the Copos in the forest. But projecting is hard. So hard." She looked half drugged; her eyes were heavy-lidded, her voice slurred. "I can't do any more. Not for a day or two. Need rest."

"But you can still receive?"

"Mm. Yes, oh, yes. We never lose that. Sometimes it's like—like having your eyes taped open in a room full of spotlights."

" We? Others can do this as well?"

"All of us. Everyone in the family."

"The psychologists must know."

"No. We agreed at the very beginning to keep that much secret." Pierce laughed without amusement. "Concealing anything from them is a better trick than reading minds. You realize such a talent can't be kept secret any longer? I'll have to inform the Agency. It's too important."

"Well, well see."

Pierce had an unpleasant suspicion: she might be able to erase his knowledge of her abilities, and might well do so if she could work out a plausible cover story. Well, he had enough to worry about.

"You really are the people of the future, aren't you?"

"Oh my. We've tried so hard to live that down." Pierce recalled that when the IKosis had first been discovered in South Africa on Luvah, they had been identified as Boskopoids, ancestors of the modern Bushmen. Someone had remembered an old essay by an American anthropologist named Eiseley, who had pointed out how closely the Boskopoids had resembled the stereotype of future mankind: big-brained, small-bodied, baby-faced people. The IKosis' talents had strengthened the idea. Their IQs were unmeasurably high; they were all Trainables, even the adults. Pierce was beginning to suspect that the Testing teams had probably been manipulated by the IKosis, since adults were normally never even considered for Testing. For a year or two the popular media had been full of articles about the Boskopoids as Homo superior, despite the unarguable fact that they had died out as a distinct group on all chronoplanes uptime from Luvah.

"No it's true," Pierce insisted. "You're the next step up from us. Your brains, your talents—"

" If you were an educated man, and not merely a Trained one, you wouldn't say that. There's no progress in evolution, only response to change. We're just a mutant strain, and our mutations lead nowhere." Pierce looked confused.

"Our talents, as you call them, are a curse. You've seen what it does to me to be near a wounded or dying person. It's almost more than one can bear. We can even share the feelings of animals—that's why we were grubbers of roots when your people found us. For us, even birth is terrible. The whole family shares the mother's pain—mother and baby share each other's pain. We share our joys, too, and they're very great, but our sorrows…"

They flew in silence for a time, north on an irregular zigzag course into San Joaquin Valley.

"So you knew all about us, right from the first contact with the Testing and Recruiting teams."

"Sooner. We were aware of them a few days before that first visit In fact, we followed the team. We shared their feelings, looked at our world through their eyes. It's hard to describe. But we knew them, we knew what they were looking for, and we knew somehow that we had what they wanted. Then we went away from them, to decide what to do. We went to one of our holy places, a little lake by the Orange River. We thought our gods would tell us what to do. Instead, the holy place seemed just a deserted little lake, and nothing more. The rock paintings we had made there seemed stupid and childish, not sacred."

She paused for a moment. "We were so wretched. Our world didn't mean anything to us, any more, so we had to come to yours." Her voice turned cold and bitter. "And among the many things we've learned since then, we've learned that our sensitivity will vanish in the end and that our descendants will be the luckier for it."

"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 Shib 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."

Damn the woman, and damn 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, Shih, 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 ship, the receiver, would get a hopeless mess. We're nowhere near that sort of precision."

"Yet you kept pushing 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 circumstances, and my Briefing." Anita looked over at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes. She embarrassed him, made him feel like a teenager caught playing cops-and-robbers when he should have outgrown such games. Under this embarrassment 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 latitude, 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 passport. 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, hell." 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 passage. 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 classic 1960s style, it resembled a thousand others on a dozen chronoplanes, right down to the aimless teenagers dawdling outside the shoe boutiques and pornotheques. 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-fashioned 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 documents. UnTrainables being old-fashioned about sex 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 pornotheques!

He bought khaki trousers, a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt, 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 basement, and took it. No one was visible in the basement, 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 bumper carried a Spanish title: 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 sunglasses. 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 passengers; 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 for them. Anita paused.

"Something's wrong."

"Don't worry. In you go." He followed her into the dim interior of the bus.

—And was knocked sprawling to the cold metal floor. Stunned, he heard the door slam, felt the bus lurch into motion. He was already beginning to recover, to tense for a lashing kick out at his assailant, when hands fumbled at his left wrist.

Very far away, he heard Anita screaming. He was not sure how long she had been screaming; he only knew that he himself had been in agony forever. Somewhere back at the beginning of his life, someone had hit him, and then, a moment later, his hand had been—shot off? burned?

crushed? Pierce wasn't sure, and it never occurred to him to open his eyes and look.

The pain stopped. At least, the agony in his wrist stopped; it took some time for the convulsed muscles in his arm and shoulder to recover. He lay quietly on the floor, doing his breathing exercises automatically. His new clothes were drenched with sweat Someone frisked him, took his pistol.

"Least you ain't no crybaby." It was the young man, Dallow. "And you pack some solemn armament. Here, pass this piece up to Miz Curtice…

Okay, c'mon, sit up." He was pulled onto one of two broad benches running the length of the bus.

Pierce saw a white plastic band around his wrist. An inductance bracelet, of course. And handled by a real pro. There was no point in trying to break it—the plastic was too tough. He looked around. The bus was crowded with adults and children, a typical assortment of indentured workers: Sicilians, Mexicans, Egyptians, Portuguese, some American Blacks. They all wore the bracelets. A few grinned at him, grateful for the entertainment he and Anita had provided. The bus stank of old sweat and fresh urine.

Pierce found himself sitting next to a lean, undersized young Black with a gap-toothed smile and intelligent, crazy eyes. He held a half-meter truncheon with the authority of a field marshal.

"How you head, man?"

"Hurts."

"You got some thick head, man. You the first I ever see start to get up after I hit 'em."

Pierce stood, a little unsteadily, and lifted Anita from the floor. When he held her in his lap, she slumped against him like a sleeping baby.

"Watchoo name, man?"

"Jerry."

"Watchoo woman name?"

"Anita. What's yours?"

The young man shifted the truncheon to his left hand and extended his right. Around the wrist was a fluorescent orange ID strap, wider than the inductance bracelet on the other wrist. Pierce read the strap: DALLOW, WM. C.

Indent. # 0-671-5512 Expiry Date: 1 Jan 20 Property of: Curtice Labor Brokers 702 E. Eisenhower Avenue Nuevo Sacramento, Ore Phone: (603) 771"Call me Dallow. And don't give me no shit. I'm Miz Curtice's chief honcho an' ass kicker. You get along with me, you gonna get along with her and that little wand she got."

Pierce nodded. Anita stirred; Dallow touched her head to see how hard she had been hit, and dislodged her wig. Even in the dim light, her orange skin and peppercorn hair looked strange. Dallow was alarmed; so were the other workers close enough to see.

"What's all this, man? She sick or somethin'? She got funny hair."

"Nothing's wrong with her. She's using chromofilm. Her skin's the same color as her scalp."

"No shit. She got some disease?" Colonials lived in dread of local germs.

"None."

"Watchee want to look Black, then?"

"We didn't want to make it easy for the cops."

"Hunh. What they want with you?"

"I shot a couple of 'em."

"Hunh. Man, you shot 'em good. Har'ly any ammo left in that piece I took off of you." He thought for a moment. "We ain't no special friends of the police. You do what I tell you, you smooth with us."

"Good." Pierce was annoyed at this development. But the bus was moving west toward Farallon City, and that was the important thing.

"We'll cooperate."

Dallow whooped. "Man, we all cooperate with Miz Curtice! Nobody like a taste of bracelet, they can avoid it. 'Sides, she a smooth lady. She got some style."

"How'd you meet her?" Pierce asked.

"Hunh. Like most of these dopies—got my ass kicked downtime to this shithole. They lay on all that good shit, everybody get a job down here, hunh? Sure. Lotta guys like me, they go endo, live in some cave somewheres. Hunh! Some never-never. So I get indented, okay? Least you gets paid steady, work or no work. An' Miz Curtice, she make sure you work. Food in the camps ain't so smooth, but—" He shrugged good-naturedly.

"Indents don't wear bracelets."

"Yeah, well, hunh. You broker sell you contrac', you go where you told. Miz Curtice, she a blackbirder arright, but she smooth, she better'n most. Can't blame her. Lots indents goes AWOL less they got a bracelet. You go AWOL and get picked up, you in bad shape, yotf wish you have a bracelet Getchoo ass pounded good, and then they don' pick up you option, man. You starvin'. Miz Curtice, she make sure her people don't get themself in that fix."

"What about the Copos? Blackbirding's illegal."

"Aw, they smooth, they unnerstan'. What they s'posed to do, bust all the blackbirders? Then we all on the road AWOL again, makin' trouble for everybody. Shit, the Copos got enough trouble without messin' with us." Anita gasped and woke in tears. Pierce cradled her gently and whispered to her in first-century Greek: "All is well, all is well, these people will not harm us." His words sounded more comforting, somehow, in that formal and archaic tongue.

"My arm hurts," she whimpered in English. Then, in Greek: "My arm hurts. Where are we?"

"Whatsat you sayin'?" Dallow growled.

"She's an African," Pierce said. "She likes to talk in Swahili; she taught me how."

"Hunh. Extreme. She teach me? You teach me Swahili, sister?"

"Oh—yes, brother."

"Arright." But Dallow was in no hurry to learn; calmed by knowing that they conversed in an acceptable language, he relaxed and ignored them. The others watched for a while, then withdrew into their own gossip or private fantasies.

"We have been taken captive," Pierce said. "The woman in the cab is a— melanorthis? A slave owner. She's bound for the coast." Anita looked revolted. "What can we do?"

"For now, nothing. At least we're headed in the right direction."

"You tolerate enslavement for the sake of your mission?"

"This is not really enslavement. Where struggle is futile, acceptance is wisdom."

"So self-deception often calls itself."

He said nothing. First-century Greek, he reflected, could sting as well as comfort.

The bus crawled slowly west through the afternoon, stopping only infrequently. During those breaks Dallow watched everyone closely, including the women squatting behind trees.

"Ev'body wanna get in some AWOL time," he commented to Pierce.

"Shit, I gone AWOL plenny. But Miz Curtice don't go for that, unh-unh. She like to show up on time, in place, with ev'body 'counted for. Thataway you gets a good rep with the bosses… Okay, people, le's go, shake it more'n twice you playin' with it!"

"D'you know where we're headed?" Pierce asked as everyone drifted back to the bus.

"We know when we get there. Miz Curtice don' tell us nothin' till we need to know it."

Pierce and Anita were about to climb back in the bus when Mrs. Curtice called them over.

"What's the matter with your skin, girl? You got a disease?"

"No—it's just chromofilm."

"You call me ma'am."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I know it's chromofilm, I got eyes. I mean underneath." The film had already begun to fleck off Anita's cheeks and throat. "You got jaundice or something?"

"That's my natural skin color—ma'am."

"Is that right. What are you, some kinda Jap-nigger cross?" She hesitated. "That's right, ma'am."

"Thought so. I can usually tell." She turned to Pierce. "You come with me, I wanna talk to you. But keep your distance." The bus was parked in a muddy clearing just off the highway; judging by the litter and stink of excrement, it was a regular stop for bracero buses. Mrs. Curtice and Pierce walked slowly around the edge of the clearing, watching where they put their feet. She moved stiffly, and Pierce realized with surprise that she had arthritis and was in considerable pain.

"You didn't buy those clothes, did you?"

"No, ma'am. Anita found this credit card in the ladies' changing room—in the department store? So we figured we might as well use it to get some new clothes. But the card musta been reported, 'cause they nearly nailed us."

"Is that right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can cut the horseshit, bud. You aren't no glorified shoplifter, not packing a goddam Smith and Wesson. And that Jap-nigger girlfriend of yours is so straight I'd like to kick her fat ass." She winced as she stepped over a log.

"Would you like to stop and rest, Mrs. Curtice?"

"No, I would not. Don't change the subject. You're some kind of professional, right?"

"Uh—I won't deny it, ma'am."

"Thought so. You prob'ly work for one of them spic gangsters down in Mexicopolis. You sure as hell ain't a Copo. So what the hell you doin', hitchin' rides on 605 with that funny-lookin' kid?"

"Ma'am, believe me when I tell you with all due respect that it's a lot safer for you if you don't know anything about us."

"Is that right. And maybe it's a lot safer for you." She paused breathing hard. "Copos like to get their paws on you, I bet. Might even be a reward in it."

Pierce said nothing.

"But I pay off the Copos every month; no need to give 'em something extra 'less I need to. Want to get that strap off your wrist?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You've killed people."

"I have."

"Knew it the second I clapped eyes on you. You got than clean-cut crazy look. You kill somebody for me, I let you and your girlfriend go."

"Who's the candidate?"

"A blackbirder on Luvah. Lives in New Monterey, runs a chain of pornotheques with indent girls."

"Well, ma'am, I'd be glad to oblige, but I can't get through an I-Screen without papers."

"I know a knotholer in Little Frisco. Fat little kraut named Klein. He'll send you through."

"Suppose I just went through and disappeared?"

"Suppose you did. We'd sure give your girlfriend one fine working over

'fore we gave her to the Copos. And we'd tip 'em off about you as well, so you wouldn't last very long… Deal?"

"It's a deal." He had no intention of doing Mrs. Curtice's chores for her; he intended to go nowhere but Farallon City and to kill no one but Gersen and McGowan. But he had to oblige Mrs. Curtice until he could get that wand out of her grip. "When do you want this done?"

"Tomorrow. You go through, drive down to New Monterey, and come right back again. This time tomorrow, you and your friend are on your way."

"This knotholer—can you trust him?"

"Sure." Her legs were hurting her. "He knows his stuff. I've used him four, five times. Bastard charges plenty, but he's good. Why, you scared of going through a knothole?"

"Well—"

"Nothin' to be ashamed of. We're all scared of somethin'. But Klein's got good equipment and he knows how to run it. Know what scares me?"

"Ma'am?"

"Drugs. Head drugs. Worst thing you can ever do to yourself is let yourself take anything that works on your mind. I don't care what, grass, speed, enkephalin, DDG. Rather drop dead than let some goddamn blinkie doctor shoot me full of that crap. They make you think they're doin' you a favor—next thing you know, you're doin' them the favors, and you don't even know it. Unh-unh."

They returned to the bus, Mrs. Curtice walking slowly through her pain. It was early evening when they pulled into a migrant workers' camp in the Alcatraz Valley. Dallow and a few others were detailed to pick up supper at the camp's mess hall; Mrs. Curtice silently oversaw the conversion of the bus into a dormitory. Boards were laid across the aisle between the benches; hammocks were slung, bedrolls brought out, the toilet hooked up to the camp sewer. The meal, when it arrived was something resembling chop suey, spooned out of plastic buckets and eaten at battered picnic tables. Other groups, screened by scrub alder but very audible, were camped nearby.

"How are you feeling?" Pierce asked Anita as they shared their supper.

"I'm freezing, but I'm not as upset as I was."

"Good." He watched the children as they ran through the blue twilight, screaming exuberantly. "Just treat this as some kind of horrible holiday. Well be out of here in a day—two at the outside." Mrs. Curtice walked slowly up to them.

"Stand up when I approach you."

They obeyed.

"How you gertin' on? Food okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Pierce.

"Good. I look after my people, they look after me. You Americans?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Figured you was. Still got some spunk and brains. These goddamn greaseballs can't zip their flies without me tellin' 'em how. No responsibility. No initiative. "Patron-dependent groups,' they call 'em. Kids are the worst. The old folks used to work, anyway—they remember how to look busy. Guess how old I am."

"Ma'am, I really couldn't."

"Sixty. No shit. And I can whip every ass in this outfit, arthritis or not. Sixty."

"Hard to believe," Pierce said politely.

"Believe it or not, I saw Nixon get shot in '63.I was eight, goin' on nine, the toughest little bitch in Texas. Never forget that day. My daddy always said that was the end of the good times. Now you look at these young clowns, shit! They never heard of Nixon."

"Uh, you mean Kennedy, don't you, ma'am?"

"Kennedy, Nixon, whoever." She shrugged. "Yeah—Nixon resigned or something, didn't he? See, that's what I mean—it was all downhill after

'63. Look at America now, takin' orders from greaseballs in the IF, shippin'

good citizens downtime to make room for endo blinkies. It's a goddamn plot, you ask me. The same people that got ridda Nixon and Kennedy. It's all a goddamn plot." She shifted her weight. "Well, let's get these people bedded down. Big day tomorrow." She grinned unpleasantly at Pierce. Everyone was locked inside the bus. Pierce found himself cramped between Dallow and Anita. "Where does Mrs. Curtice sleep?" he asked.

"She got a little bunk above the cab. Now shuddup and go to sleep—we make too much noise, she give us all a tingle."

"Dallow—" His voice was a murmur. "How'd you like to be a rich, rich man? Have anything you want?"

"Like it fine."

"We can make you a rich man, Dallow. You could have a big car, a house, your own servants if you want ‘em."

"Unh-hunh. Sure. What I gotta do for all this?"

"Help us get that damn wand away from Mrs. Curtice. That's all." Dallow snorted softly in the smelly darkness. "Man, you mus' think I dumb. What I want to hassle her for, just 'cause you make big promises?" He turned over, and went to sleep almost at once.

"Always trying," Anita whispered in Greek. "Never mind. By the morning I should have my powers back." She paused. "I wish she would go to sleep—her pain makes me uncomfortable. And her anxiety."

"What are you talking about?"

"She is always a little afraid. And there is an—anticipation in her. Not pleasant. It must be about the job she wants you to do. I suppose your regular employers must feel something similar when they send you out on a job."

"Mmm." He rolled over, so that they lay back to back. "Sleep well. This time tomorrow, the whole plan will be stymied."

Despite Mrs. Curtice's liking for quiet, the bus was noisy—children whined, people joked, quarreled, made love. Anita turned and snuggled against him.

"All the fornication makes me amorous." Her small, smooth hand slipped inside his shirt and did a gentle effleurage across his chest.

"No."

"As you wish." Her lips brushed his ear as she whispered: "When I regain my powers, I'll give you a permanent erection, like a IKosi man, and then I'll do things to your senses that the psychologists never dreamed of." She giggled like a little girl.