Keith Laumer: Assignment in Nowhere

“Doesn’t that hand-tailoring interfere with the circuits?” I asked, as he fussed over the helmet-to-shoulder fit.

“Not at all. The pattern of the weave’s the thing—so long as I make sure the major connecting links are made up fast…”

He settled the fishbowl in place, then touched a stud on a plate set in the chest area of the suit, looked at the meters mounted on a small test panel on the table. He nodded, switched off.

“Now, Bayard,” he said seriously. “Your controls are here…”

It was full daylight now. Dzok and I stood on the grassy bank above the river. He looked worried.

“You’re sure you understand the spatial maneuvering controls ?”

“Sure—that part’s easy. I just kick off and jet—”

“You’ll have to use extreme care. Of course, you won’t feel the normal gravitational effects, so you’ll be able to flit about as lightly as a puff of smoke—but you’ll still retain normal inertia. If you collide with at tree, or rock, it will be precisely as disastrous as in a normal entropic field.”

“I’ll be careful, Dzok. And you do the same.” I held out my hand and he took it, grinning.

“Goodbye, Bayard. Best of luck and all that. Pity we couldn’t have worked out something in the way of an alliance between our respective governments, but perhaps it was a bit premature. At least now there’ll be the chance of a future rapprochement.”

“Sure—and thanks for everything.”

He stepped back and waved. I looked around for a last glimpse of the morning sun, the greenery, Dzok’s transparent shuttle, and Dzok himself, long-legged, his shiny boots mud-spattered, his whites mud-stained. He raised a hand and I pressed the lever that activated the suit. There was a moment of vertigo, a sense of pressure on all sides. Then Dzok flickered, disappeared. His shuttle winked out of sight. The strange, abnormal movement of normally immobile objects that was characteristic of Net travel started up. I watched as the trees waved, edged about in the soil, putting out groping feelers toward me as though sensing my presence.

A hop, and I was in the air, drifting ten feet above the surface. I touched the jet-control and at once a blast of cold ions hurled me forward. I took a bearing, corrected course, and settled down for a long run.

I was on my way.

It was a weird trip across the probability worlds, exposed as I was to the full panoramic effects of holocausts of planetary proportions. For a while, I skimmed above a sea of boiling lava that stretched to the far horizon. Then I was drifting among fragments of the crust of a shattered world, and later I watched as pale flames licked the cinders of a burnt-out continent. All the while I sped northward, following the faint be-beep! of my autocompass, set on a course that would bring me to the site of Stockholm after four hours’ flight. I saw great seas of oily, dead fluid surge across what had once been land, their foaming crests oddly flowing backwards, as I retrogressed through time while I hurled across A-space. I watched the obscene heaving and groping of monstrous life-forms created in the chaotic aftermath of the unleashed powers of the M-C field, great jungles of blood red plants, deserts of blasted, shattered stone over which the sun flared like an arc-light in a black, airless sky. Now and again there would be a brief uprising of almost normal landscape, as I swept across a cluster of A-lines which had suffered less than the others. But always the outre element intruded: a vast, wallowing animal form, like a hundred-ton dog, or a mountainous, mutated cow, with extra limbs and lolling heads placed at random across the vast bulk through which bloodred vines grew, penetrating the flesh.

Hours passed. I checked my chronometer and the navigational instruments set in the wrist of the suit. I was close to my target and, according to the positional indicator, over southern Sweden—not that the plain of riven rock below me resembled the warm and verdant plains of Scania I had last seen on a hiking trip with Barbro, three months earlier.

I maneuvered close to the ground, crossed a finger of the sea that marked the location of Hykoping in normal space. I was getting close now. It was time to pick a landing spot. It wouldn’t do to land too close to the city. Popping into identity on a crowded street would be unwise. I recognized the low, rolling country south of the capital now; I slowed my progress, hovered, waiting for the moment…

Abruptly, light and color blazed around me. I threw the main control switch, dropped the last few feet to a grassy hillside. It took me a moment to get the helmet clear; then I took a deep breath of cool, fresh air—the air of a world regained from twenty-two days in the past.

Down on the road, with the suit bundled under my arm, I flagged a horse-drawn wagon, let the driver ramble on with the assumption that I was one of those crazy sky-diver fellows. He spent the whole trip into town telling me how you’d never get him up in one of those things, then asked me for a free ride. I promised to remember him next time I was up, and hopped off at the small-town post office.

Inside, I gave a rambling excuse for my lack of funds to an ill-tempered looking man in a tight blue uniform, and asked him to put through a call to Intelligence HQ in Stockholm. While I waited, I noticed the wall calendar—and felt the sweat pop out on my forehead. I was a full day later than Dzok had calculated. The doom that hung over the Imperium was only hours away.

The plump man came back, with a thin man in tow. He told me to repeat my request to his superior. I began to get irritated.

“Gentlemen, I have important information for Baron Richthofen. Just put my call through—”

“That will not be possible,” the slim fellow said. He had a nose sharp enough to poke a hole through quarter-inch plywood. It was red on the end, as though he’d been trying.

“You can charge the call to my home telephone,” I said. “My name is Bayard, number 12, Nybrovagen—”

“You have identity papers?”

“I’m sorry; I’ve lost my wallet. But—”

“You place me in a difficult position,” the thin fellow said, with a smile that suggested that he was enjoying it. “If the Herr is unable to identify himself—”

“This is important!” I rapped. “You have nothing to lose but a phone call. If I am on the level, you’ll look like a damned fool for obstructing me!”

That got to him. He conferred with his chubby chum, then announced that he would check with the number I had given him in Stockholm, supposedly that of Herr Bayard…

I waited while he dialed, talked, nodded, waited, talked some more in an undertone, placed the receiver back on the phone with a triumphant look. He spoke briefly to the other man, who hurried away. “Well?” I demanded.

“You say that you are Herr Bayard?” he cooed, fingertips together.

“Colonel Bayard to you, Buster,” I snapped. “This is a matter of life and death—”

“Whose life and death, ah… Colonel Bayard?”

“To hell with that…” I started around the counter. He leaned on one foot and I heard a distant bell sound. The fat man reappeared, looking flushed. There was another man behind him, a heavy fellow in a flat cap and gunbelt, with cop written all over him. He put a gun on me an ordered me to stand clear of the wall. Then he frisked me quickly—missing the slug gun which Dzok had restored—and motioned me to the door.

“Hold on,” I said. “What’s this farce all about? I’ve got to get that call through to Stockholm—”

“You claim that you are Colonel Bayard, of Imperial Intelligence?” the cop rapped out. “Right the first time,” I started. “It may interest you to know,” the thin postal official said, savoring the drama of the moment, “that Herr Colonel Bayard is at this moment dining at his home in the capital.”