The Empire of Time (The Chronoplane Wars Book 1) Page 5

  “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 slim 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 Orc, 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 over-bearing 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 Ilyushin, less than half full though it would be the only transcontinental flight of the day. Every Agency airline was a money-loser, of course. Orc, 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 Orc. 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 Orc 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 Ilyushin 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 time, 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 Orc 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 termin
al, 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-hyperpyrase 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 !Kosi. All of ’em are Trained, of course, so there shouldn’t be any questions about their loyalty . . .”

  “You think 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 him 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 sweating. 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. Wit
h 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.