Keith Laumer - Zone Yellow

I was staring, too. As a wisp of fog shifted I saw a shape, something that didn’t belong in that landscape: a boxy, ornately decorated coach that needed only four handsome black geldings hitched to it to make an appropriate equipage for a queen. One door stood open, affording a glimpse of a purple satin interior.

“Stand fast,” I told Helm. “I’m going to maneuver over next to it.” I got into the pilot’s seat, started up the terrain drive. Our shuttle had air-traction―it moved easily in spite of the mud, and I backed and filled until I could pull us alongside the carriage and match openings with it. Helm called, “Another inch, sir. There, that’s perfect.” I glanced up and saw a wavering pink aureole along the hatch where the two vehicles were in contact.

I went back, and he was looking curiously into the interior of the luxurious though primitive vehicle. There was a white-wrapped bundle on the seat. A wail came from it.

“Djaveln!” Helm blurted. “A baby!”

I stepped across into the coach, the physical contact with our shuttle creating an entropic seal that held back the external environment. The pink halo rippled, but held. It was temporal energy leakage from the imperfect temporal seal. I picked up the soft, blanket-wrapped bundle and looked at the face of a baby Ylokk. It was short-snouted, toothless and big-eyed. The grayish-tan pelt on the forehead was downy, and one small, chubby hand groped aimlessly. I was hooked. Helm was right behind me, and stumbled back when I stepped backward.

“Sir!” he exclaimed. “This odd conveyance. It’s like the State Coach―it’s more than it seems!”

I had already noticed the unobtrusive folding panel in the seat-back. Helm reached past me and opened it, revealing a fully-instrumented field-model console that could be nothing but a shuttle panel.

“The rats!” Helm blurted, at the sight of my bundle. “Why in the world did they abandon a baby here?” He was fingering the brocaded armorial bearings worked on the corner of the white blanket. “Obviously the child of a person of consequence,” he said almost formally. As a loyal subject of the Swedish monarchy, he was very respectful of rank―even infant rank. I was moved more by the pup-appeal of a baby mammal, the same impulse that makes female dogs adopt newborn kittens, and a lady cat suckle baby rats. Anyway, we both knew we had to do something.

“If we leave him here, he’ll just die,” Helm said solemnly.

“No question about it,” I agreed. “But we’re not really set up to care for infants. No formula, no diapers, and especially no know-how.”

“We’ll have to take him home!” the lieutenant blurted. I handed him the kid.

“Swell,” I agreed. “Where’s home, and how do we get there?”

He looked hard at the small control panel. “Colonel,” he started confidently, but continued in a more subdued tone, “can’t we―can’t you, sir, dope out the instruments and figure out how to return this thing to its point of origin? There must be a way…”

“Let’s find it,” I suggested. He began opening drawers and lifting things to look under them. Over the simple panel, which lacked most of the instruments essential to navigation in the Net, I spotted a small screen that looked right somehow. An adjacent manual trigger with a curious symbol caught my eye. I tripped it, and the screen went red, then pink, and finally resolved into a spider-web pattern that had to be pay dirt. Helm said so, sounding as if he’d just found his fondest wish under the Jul tree. “It’s a map!” he told me happily. I was less pleased: I realized it was mainly a chart of Zone Yellow, with the rest of the Net only vaguely indicated.

“Easy,” I cautioned him. “We don’t know the scale. But that big nexus to the right of center is likely the Ylokk home base.” I studied the pattern of faint intersecting lines, trying to match it up with my knowledge of the familiar Net charts of the Imperium, and the position of the black dot in the Zone on Manfred’s big map. There was a tangled area off to the left lower corner, cut off by the edge of the screen. The lines there were snarled, many ending abruptly, some turning back on themselves.

“That’s the most detailed map of the Blight I ever saw,” I told Helm, pointing to the chaotic patch. “These fellows aren’t entirely backward in their Net technology. That alone is worth the trip.”

“But, sir, the Prince!” Andy blurted. “We have to return him home!”

“The Net specialists back in Stockholm Zero-zero will have a better chance of determining this buggy’s PO than we do,” I pointed out.

“Sir!” Helm blurted. “The, ah, carriage. We couldn’t have come to this precise line by pure accident! They must have wanted us to find it!”

“Or somebody did,” I amended. “Presumably someone concerned about the welfare of the baby.”

“It hadn’t been there long,” Helm realized aloud. “It had a clean diaper.”

“True,” I concurred. “It seems we and this infant arrived at the same locus almost simultaneously. You’re right: that’s not likely to be purely a coincidence.”

“Who?” Helm pondered. “Who’d want to maroon a baby―a royal baby―in a place like this? And why do it in a way that ensured the poor tyke’d be rescued?”

“Rescued?” I queried, without thinking. “He’s still stuck here, just like us.”

“But surely, sir…” Helm stammered, then straightened his back with a visible resolve. “But you know how, sir―we have the machine―and even the old coach―you said it’s a shuttle, too!” He was warming to the idea. “We can use it. If necessary,” he added.

“I don’t know, Andy,” I told him candidly. “We’re in stasis here. We seem to experience subjective time, because that’s how our nervous systems are wired. But how much time? The chronometer back in the shuttle said a year. What’s a year? A concept of the human imagination―”

“Sir!” Helm broke in. “It’s the time required for a single revolution of the earth around the sun! We didn’t imagine thatl”

“Sure we did,” I corrected him. “It’s still just an idea; maybe the idea fits a natural phenomenon pretty closely, or maybe that’s another fantasy. The question hasn’t yet been resolved by the philosophers.”

“But sir―everybody knows―”

“For ages everybody knew the earth was flat,” I reminded him, “and that the sun revolved around it.”

“But they were wrong!” Helm pointed out, as if he’d made a telling point.

“Wrong? Any damn fool can look out across the sea, or a prairie, and see it’s flat. And you just watch: the sun travels across the sky every day, and it rises over the horizon in the east just when it has to if it keeps traveling back under the earth all night. You’re denying the obvious!”

“I see your point, sir. But we have the instruments that don’t have any subjective bias; they show what’s really happening.”

“Jack up the drive wheels on a ground-car, and race the engine,” I suggested. “The speedo will say you’re doing eighty or ninety.”

“Really,” he corrected, “it just says the wheel the sensor is attached to is spinning. But that’s a real phenomenon. The meter isn’t imagining it.”

“Which shows us how much human interpretation, based on preconceptions, goes into our understanding of even the most basic observation, Andy.”

“Well,” the young fellow started, “it doesn’t really matter…”

“That’s right. What we have to do is decide on a course of action, and do it. Actually, I have to make the decision. I can’t fob the responsibility off on a junior officer.”