Keith Laumer - Assignment in Nowhere

I twisted, caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall, dark figure in a long, full-skirted coat with the collar turned up, pushing past through the sparse pedestrian traffic.

“It was—him!” Olivia’s voice was tight with strain.

“All right, maybe it was,” I said soothingly. “Take it easy, girl. How sure are you—”

“I’m sure, Brion! The same terrible, dark face, the beard—”

“There are plenty of bearded men in Rome, Olivia—”

“We have to go—quickly!” She started to get up. I caught her hand, pulled her gently back.

“No use panicking. Did he see us?”

“I—think—I’m not sure,” she finished. “I saw him, and turned my face away, but—”

“If he’s seen us—if he is our boy—running won’t help.

If he didn’t see us, he won’t be back.”

“But if we hurried, Brion—we need not even stop at the flat to get our things! We can catch the train, be miles from Rome by daylight—”

“If we’ve been trailed here, we can be trailed to the next town. Besides which, there’s the little matter of my shuttle. It’s nearly done. Another day’s work and a few tests—”

“Of what avail’s the shuttle if they take you, Brion?”

I patted her hand. “Why should anyone want to take me? I was dumped here to get rid of me—”

“Brion, think you I’m some village goose to be coddled with this talk? We must act—now!”

I chewed my lip and thought about it. Olivia wasn’t being soothed by my bland talk—any more than I was. I didn’t know what kind of follow-up the Xonijeelian Web Police did on their deportees, but it was a cinch they wouldn’t look kindly on my little home workshop project. The idea of planting me here had been to take me out of circulation. They’d back their play; Olivia was right about that…

“All right.” I got to my feet, dropped a coin on the table. Out in the street, I patted her hand.

“Now, you run along home, Olivia. I’ll do a little snooping, just to satisfy myself that everything’s okay. Then—”

“No. I’ll stay with you.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “If there is any rough stuff, you think I want you mixed up in it? Not that there will be…”

“You have some madcap scheme in mind, Brion. What is it? Will you go back to the workshop?”

“I just want to check to make sure nobody’s tampered with the shuttle.”

Her face looked pale in the light of the carbide lamp at the corner.

“You think by hasty work to finish it—to risk your life-”

“I won’t take any risks, Olivia—but I’m damned if I’m going to be stopped when I’m this close.”

“You’ll need help. I’m not unclever in such matters.”

I shook my head. “Stay clear of this, Olivia. I’m the one they’re interested in, but you could get hurt—”

“How close are you to finishing your work?”

“A few hours. Then some tests—”

“Then we’d best be starting. I sense danger close by this night. ’Twill not be long ere they close their noose.

I hesitated for just a moment, then took her hand. “I don’t know what I’ve done to earn such loyalty,” I said. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

We went to the flat first, turned on lights, made coffee. Then, with the rooms darkened, took the back stairs, eased out into a cobbled alley. Half an hour later, after a circuitous trip which avoided main streets and well-lit corners, we reached the shop, slipped inside. Everything looked just as I’d left it an hour earlier: the six-foot-square box, its sides half-slabbed up with boards, the coil mounted at the center of the plank floor, the bright wire of my half-completed control circuits gleaming in the gloom. I lit a lamp, and we started to work.

Olivia was more than clever with her hands. I showed her just once how to attach wire to an insulator; from then on she was better at it than I was. The batteries required a mounting box; I nailed a crude frame together, fitted the cells in place, wired up a switch, made connections. Every half hour or so, Olivia would slip outside, make a quick reconnaissance—not that it would have helped much to discover any spy sneaking up on us. I couldn’t quite deduce the pattern of their tactics—if any. If we had been spotted, surely the shop was under surveillance. Maybe they were just letting me finish before they closed in. Perhaps they were curious as to whether it was possible to do what I was trying to do with the materials and technology at hand…

It was well after midnight when we finished. I made a final connection, ran a couple of circuit checks. If my research had been accurate, and my recollection of M-C theory correct, the thing should work…

“It looks so… fragile, Brion.” Olivia’s eyes were dark in the dim light. My own eyeballs felt as though they’d been rolled in emery dust.

“It’s fragile—but a moving shuttle is immune to any external influence. It’s enclosed in a field that holds the air in, and everything else out. And it doesn’t linger long enough in any one A-line for the external temperature or vacuum or what have you to affect it.”

“Brion!” She took my arm fiercely. “Stay here! Risk not this frail device! ’Tis not too late to flee! Let the evil men search in vain! Somewhere we’ll find a cottage, in some hamlet far from this scheming…”

My expression told her she wasn’t reaching me. She stared into my eyes for a moment, then let her hand fall and stepped back.

“I was a fool to mingle dreams with drab reality,” she said harshly. I saw her shoulders slump, the life go from her face. Almost, it was Mother Goodwill who stood before me.

“Olivia,” I said harshly, “For God’s sake—”

There was a sound from the door. I saw it tremble, and jumped for the light, flipped it off. In the silence, a foot grated on bricks. There was a sound of rusty hinges, and a lesser darkness widened as the door slid back. A tall, dark silhouette appeared in the opening.

“Bayard!” a voice said sharply in the darkness—an unmistakably Xonijeelian voice. I moved along the wall. The figure advanced. There was a crowbar somewhere near the door. I crouched, trying to will myself invisible, reached—and my fingers closed around the cold, rust-scaled metal. The intruder was two yards away now. I straightened, raised the heavy bar. He took another step, and I jumped, slammed the bar down solidly across the back of his head, saw a hat fly as he stumbled and fell on his face with a heavy crash.

“Brion!” Olivia shrieked.

“It’s all right!” I tossed the bar aside, reached for her, put my arms around her.

“You have to understand, Olivia,” I rasped. “There’s more at stake here than anyone’s dream. This is something I have to do. You have your life ahead. Live it—and forget me!”

“Let me go with you, Brion,” she moaned.

“You know I can’t. Too dangerous—and you’d halve my chances of finding the Zero-zero line before the air gives out.” I thrust my wallet into her cloak pocket. “I have to go now.” I pushed her gently from me.

“Almost… I hope it fails,” Olivia’s voice came through the dark. I went to the shuttle, lit the carbide running light, reached in and flipped the warm-up switch. From the shadows, I heard a groan from the creature I had stunned.

“You’d better go now, Olivia,” I called. “Get as far away as you can. Go to Louisiana, start over—forget the Mother Goodwill routine…”

The hum was building now—the song of the tortured molecules as the field built, twisting space, warping time, creating its tiny bubble of impossible tension in the massive fabric of reality.

“Goodby, Olivia…” I climbed inside the fragile box peered at the makeshift panel. The field strength meter told me that the time had come. I grasped the drive lever and threw it in.