Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“Everything is,” said Anson.

In the darkness of the city Tony plodded on, south and south and south, past looming silent freeways, past gigantic empty office buildings, dead and dark, that were left over from an era that now seemed prehistoric. The computer in his forearm made little soft noises. Steve was guiding him from Santa Barbara, following his progress on the screen and moving him from street to street like the machine he was. A sound like this meant to turn left. A sound like that, right. Eventually he might hear a tone that sounded like this this this, and then he was to take the little package from his backpack and stick it to the wall of the building that was just in front of him. After which he was supposed to move swiftly away from the site, going back in the direction from which he had just come.

The streets were practically deserted, here. Occasionally a car went by; occasionally, one of the floating wagons of the Entities, with a glowing figure or two standing upright in it. Tony glanced at them incuriously. Curiosity was a luxury he had long ago relinquished.

Turn left at this corner. Yes. Right at the next one. Yes. Straight ahead, now, ten blocks, until the mighty pillars of an elevated freeway blocked his way. Steve, far away, directed him with tiny sounds toward an underpass that went between the freeway’s elephantine legs, taking him beneath the roadbed and across to the far side. Onward. Onward. Onward.

Mark, in the car outside the wall, followed the pings coming from Tony’s implant as they converted themselves into splashes of light on the screen on his dashboard. Steve, at the ranch, monitored them also. Anson stood beside him, watching the screen.

“You know,” Anson said hoarsely, breaking a long silence about four in the morning, “this can’t possibly work.”

“What?” Steve said.

Startled, he glanced up from his equipment. Sweat was streaming down Anson’s face, giving him a glossy, waxen look. His eyes were bulging. Knotted-up muscles were writhing along his jawline. Altogether he looked very strange.

Anson said, “The problem is that the basic idea is wrong. I see that now. It’s complete madness to imagine that we could decapitate the entire Entity operation just by knocking off the top Entity. Steve, I’ve sent Tony down there to die for nothing.”

“Maybe you ought to get some rest. It doesn’t take two of us to do this.”

“Listen to me, Steve. This is all a huge mistake.”

“For Christ’s sake, Anson! Have you lost your mind? You’ve been behind the project from the start. It’s a hell of a time for you to be saving stuff like this. Anyway, Tony’s going to be all right.”

“Will he?”

“Look, here: he’s moving along very smoothly, past the Civic Center already, closing in on the building that I think is Prime’s, nicely going about his job, and there’s no sign of any intercept. If they knew he had a bomb on him this close to Prime, they’d have stopped him by now, wouldn’t they? Five more minutes and it’ll be done. And once we kill Prime, they’ll all go bonkers from the shock. You know that, Anson. Their minds are all hooked together.”

“Are you sure of that? What do we know, really? We don’t even know that Prime exists in the first place. If Prime isn’t in that building, it might not matter to them that Tony’s armed. And even if Prime does exist and is sitting right there, and even if they are all hooked together telepathically, how can we be sure what’ll happen if we kill him? Other than terrible reprisals, that is? We’re assuming that they’ll just lie down and weep, once Prime’s dead. What if they don’t?”

Steve ran his hand in anguish through what was left of his hair. The man seemed to be having a breakdown right before his eyes.

“Cut it out, Anson, will you? It’s very late in the game to be spouting crap like this.”

“But is it such crap? The way it looks to me, all of a sudden, is that in my godawful impatience to do something big, I’ve done something very, very dumb. Which my father and my grandfather before me had the common sense not to try.—Call him back, Steve.”

“Huh?”

“Get him out of there.”

“Jesus, he’s practically at the site now, Anson. Maybe half a block away, looks like. Maybe less than that.”

“I don’t care. Turn him around. That’s an order.”

Steve pointed to the screen. “He has turned around. You see those bleeps of light? He’s signaling that he’s already placed the explosive. Leaving the scene, heading for safe ground. So the thing’s done. In five minutes or so I can detonate. No sense not doing it, now that the bomb’s been planted.”

Anson was silent. He put his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed them.

“All right,” he said, though the words came from him with a reluctance that was only too obvious. “Go ahead and detonate, then.”

Tony heard the sound rising through the air behind him, an odd kind of hissing first, then a thud, then the first part of the boom, then the main part of it, very loud. Painfully loud, even. His ears tingled. A hot breeze went rushing past him. He walked quickly on. Something must have exploded, he thought. Yes. Something must have exploded. There has been an explosion back there. And now he had to return to the wall and go through the gate and find Mark and go home. Yes.

But there were figures, suddenly, standing in his way. Human figures, three, four, five of them, wearing gray LACON uniforms. They seemed to have sprung right from the pavement before him, as though they had been following him all this time, waiting for the moment for making themselves known.

“Sir?” one of them said, too politely. “May I see your identification, sir?”

“He’s off the screen,” Mark said, from the car outside the wall. “I don’t know what happened.”

“The bomb went off, didn’t it?” said Steve.

“It went off, all right. I could hear it from here.”

“He’s off my screen too. Could he have been caught up in the explosion?”

“Looked to me like he was well clear of the site when it blew,” Mark said.

“Me too. But where—”

“Hold it, Steve. Entity wagon going by just now. Three of them in it.”

“Behaving crazily? Signs of shock?”

“Absolutely normal,” Mark said. “I’d think I’d better begin getting myself out of here.”

Steve looked toward Anson. “You hear all that?”

“Yes.”

“Entity wagon going by. No sign of unusual behavior. I think the site we blew might not have been the right one.”

Anson nodded wearily. “And Tony?” he asked.

“Off the screen. Allah only knows.”

In the three days after Andy had written the self-canceling pardon for the woman with fluffy red hair, he wrote five legitimate ones for other people who were in various sorts of trouble. He figured that was about the right proportion to keep the guild happy, one stiff per every five or six legits.

He wondered what had befallen her when she showed up at the wall and presented her dandy little exit permit, the one he had written that granted her the right to change her residence to San Diego. The gatekeeper would disagree. And then? Off to a labor camp for trying to use a phony permit, most likely. What a pity, Tessa. But no pardoner ever offered guarantees. They all made that clear right up front. You hired a pardoner, you had to understand that there were certain risks, both for you and the pardoner. And it wasn’t as if the customers had any recourse, did they? You couldn’t hire somebody to do illegal work for you and then complain about the quality of the job. Pardoners didn’t give refunds to dissatisfied customers.

Poor Ms. Tessa, he thought. Poor, poor Tessa.

He put her out of his mind. Her problems were not his problem. She was just a job that hadn’t worked out.