Alternities (2 page)

Lost, he thought. Completely lost.

Above the door was a stone entablature with the legend 483 THE CAMBRIDGE 483 appearing in relief The building was ten stories of red brick and white stone, like a layer cake, decorated with black wrought-iron balconies and topped by a greenish mansard roof perforated by dozens of windows. Endicott had never seen it before.

Where the hell am I?

He looked both ways down the wide street. There were no cars parked along the curbs, save for one streamlined oddity half a block away. There were no trolley tracks. A panel truck with a squashed, bulldoglike cab trundled past on a side street, its exhaust a mixture of sweet and foul.

Everything looked wrong. Endicott did not know Philadelphia well. But he did not think this could be Philadelphia, even though it was impossible to think it could be anything else. Where was the burned-out half-collapsed shell of City Hall, its walls braced by yellow scaffolds while the plebians debated restoration? Where was the Ritz-Carlton, the mansarded Union League, the massive Academy of Music, or any of the Broad Street landmarks?

Tentatively, he started walking toward the corner. The street signs at the corner said MASSACHUSETTS AVE and MARLBOROUGH ST. When he looked north, he saw a long, low bridge spanning a broad, smooth-surfaced river. The Delaware? Could he have wandered that far? What had happened last night?

Belatedly, he noticed the bright yellow box chained to the lamp post across the street. He hastened across, but stopped short when he was close enough to read the decal atop the newspaper vending machine. THE MORNING GLOBE, it said. THE BEST OF BOSTON.

He denied the sight at first, then busied himself trying to manufacture explanations for the box being in Philadelphia. Even explanations for his being somewhere other than Philadelphia. Even for being in Boston. Until he looked closer and saw something which made a joke of any explanation he could hope to create.

Endicott sank to his knees on the sidewalk, clutching the top edge of the box with both hands for support. There were no coins in his pocket, but he did not need them. He stared through the scratched glass at the front page of the Boston
Globe
for Monday, August 22, 1966, stared with disbelief at the small headline tucked in a box at the top:

He was not in Philadelphia. He was not even in what he would have called Boston. He was somewhere that could not be, where things that he knew to be false were apparently true. And for the first time in his life he felt the horrible touch of desperate insecurity that comes from questioning whether there really were any rules to the game.

The moment Rayne Wallace passed through the Philadephia gate, he knew something was wrong. The station staff should have been expecting him, should have had the maze of corridors and rooms which was the gate house fully lit.

But the space Wallace emerged into was in total darkness. His senses jangling, he dropped into a crouch, clutched his courier pouches tightly, and froze there, waiting for the gate to return and the ethereal light it radiated to show him where he was. There must have been a focus shift, he thought. This isn’t the Burgundy Theater. The floor’s carpeted and the room feels too small.

Minutes later—excruciating, interminable minutes—the gate reappeared. By its cold fire he saw that the focus had shifted to the bedroom of what had once been, according to the numerals stenciled in black on the flocked wallpaper. Suite 1232. Still in the hotel, he thought. Okay.

The suite was empty of furniture, deserted, silent. The door to the cavelike corridor stood permanently open, bolted to the wall with a metal strap. Moving lightly, Wallace glided out into the gloom. He did not need light to find his way down to the field station on the first floor—he knew the old hotel by heart, every turn and doorway, every stairwell and guideplate.

He knew it better than anyone except another runner would, and only runners belonged in the gate house. If someone else was there, something would have to be done to remove them.

There was a small chance that the lights being off was an innocent accident, a matter of carelessness or mistiming. But there had been enough trouble in Red over the last year that Wallace thought otherwise. Something was seriously wrong.

He hesitated, unsure of what was expected of him. The gate was open, the disruption of his passage past. He could go back the way he had come, back to Home and the Tower, and report the focus shift, the anomalous transit.

For a brief moment, he considered doing exactly that. But he had never missed a delivery in nearly two years as a runner, and the two courier pouches he carried—an endomorphic one slung over his left shoulder and a thinner version strapped to his belly—tugged at his sense of pride.

The first was full of documents and interrogatories intended for the station staff. The other contained a dozen or more vials of vaccine intended for a team of moles working the Washington-Boston axis, protection against the latest round of viral terrorism by Les Miserables.

Besides
, he thought as he continued on,
what the hell could I tell the Section now? I’ve got to go downstairs, at least, and find out what I can
.

The hallway was as dark and deserted as the suite had been, carrying forward the illusions of a bankrupt hotel sitting empty while its owners tried to find some way to get it out of receivership and finance remodeling into office space.

It was an illusion which suited the Guard’s modest operation in Red, and which dovetailed nicely with the depressed financial climate of the downtown area. And if increased gate traffic or an improving economy some day stretched the credibility of the cover story. Red Section staffers were prepared to convert the Bellevue Stratford into a members-only club.

Wallace took the back way down, twenty-four flights of concrete and steel stairs descending into a black pit. Fingers gliding lightly on the handrail, he took the steps as quickly as he could in silence. After a few flights, his breathing was louder in the confined space than the sounds made by his foam-soled shoes.

When he reached the final landing and the solid wood door which led to the field station offices, Wallace hesitated, wishing he were armed. Though he was qualified with the Guard’s basic .25 caliber automatic, he did not have one with him. It was impossible to bring a metal object of any size through the gate, as the energy flux had a nasty habit of grounding itself through the metal, with spectacular but unpleasant results.

But there’s nothing to do about it, Wallace thought as he pushed the door open, so no point to wishing—

There was no gate monitor at the desk, but by then Wallace would have been surprised if there had been. He worked his way cautiously toward the front of the building, passed through a second door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and came out in the high-ceiling, Greek-columned lobby.

A few steps away was the entrance to the research annex, formerly the Hunt Room restaurant. There should have been a dozen analysts in the annex, slaving over tables filled with newspapers and books being screened before being taken through the gate. The books and papers were there, but the analysts were not.

Nor could Wallace find any sign of the stationmaster or his staff in the complex of field offices. The entire station seemed deserted, but, curiously, not abandoned. There was no more than the usual disorder, most of which was purposeful camouflage anyway. It looked for all the world that everyone had simply decided not to come to work that day.

Except that a gate house was never, ever, left unattended.

Checking the Broad Street entrance, Wallace found the doors locked securely. He could see what seemed to be a paper sticker plastered across the crack between the doors on the street side, like a butterfly bandage across a laceration. He could not have opened the doors without tearing it. The building had been sealed Emptied and locked up.

What’s the matter, Joel?
he asked the stationmaster in absentia.
Forget to pay the taxes?

Whatever the reason, Wallace was determined not to let it stop him. Though he hadn’t been directly briefed, he knew the importance of the drugs he was carrying. Three North Coast agents had already come down with the Widowmaker virus, and two were near death. Everyone else in the dirty zone was in hiding, breathing triple-filtered air in safe houses, waiting out the bug’s three-week viability.

There was precious little the local medical community could do to protect the healthy or ease the pain of those already infected. That was why the biological terrorism of the nihilists who called themselves Les Miserables was so effective.

Bastards! The Soviets have got to be supplying them—and sitting back and laughing
—

But the Rho 7 antiviral reagent Wallace carried could do much. A gift from the advanced medicine of Alternity Yellow, at worst Rho 7 would put the Guard’s agents back in the field. At best it might clean out Barnes and Nilsson before their lungs were so severely damaged that death seemed the better choice.

No, he had to complete the run. He could not miss the contact. If he couldn’t find another way out, he’d just have to break one of the seals and risk whatever fallout that act engendered.

Leaving the station pouch in one of the safe deposit boxes behind the front desk, Wallace went looking for a way out. The street entrances to the one-time pub in the basement were locked up tight, and the hotel’s service and delivery doors were sealed as well. Every possible exit on the ground level was stickered, locked, or both.

But when he climbed the stairs to the second floor, Wallace found an escape. In a room overlooking the cantilevered hotel marquee, Wallace removed a tight-fitting sheet of black-painted plywood from the window frame and found only a few jagged fragments of glass poised to keep him from leaving.

He also found a street unnaturally quiet. No trolleys crawled along the tracks down the center of Broad Street. There was no traffic on either sidewalk as far as City Hall Square, no doorman across the street at the Gentleman’s Cafe, no purring cab at the Ritz-Carlton’s taxi stand.

Odd as that was, it was a relief to Wallace. It meant that what happened had been citywide, that the gate house hadn’t been singled out. And the most obvious answer to what had happened was something Wallace could deal with: the Brats bringing the terror to yet another city.

If they had blown a bomb here, it would be the first for Philadelphia. There had been numerous threats, most of them bluffs, a few real but thwarted by the hard-nosed city police—who were good enough at their business to have forced the Guard to take extra precautions with operations here.

An evacuation was the only answer that made sense, though it didn’t explain why someone hadn’t come through the gate to Home with word—even the fastest evacuation would have to take hours. But that puzzle could be worked out later. For now, there was a pouch of antivirals that needed delivering, all the more so if Wallace’s call was right.

Mindful of the razor-edged glass, Wallace eased himself out onto the stone sill and then down to the marquee, which groaned distressingly when his weight was added to it load. Crouching, he paused to scan once more for unwelcome witnesses.

None were obvious, though that was far from saying none were present. It’s hard to hide in an empty city, Wallace thought, swinging his legs over the edge and dropping to the sidewalk a dozen feet below. Best to get this done fast.

Terry’s Spirit World was a curiosity, even a miracle—a direct successor, one of few, of the thousands of nineteenth-century wood-shack saloons which once dotted Philadelphia street corners. It had survived three fires, two neighborhood renewals, a bankruptcy, and Prohibition.

A dozen names had appeared above its doors: Honagan’s Licensed Tavern, Mario’s, and The Iron Mug, among the most enduring. But for all its history, Terry’s Spirit World was now nothing more than a quiet drinkery occupying the ground floor of a three-story brick Colonial revival.

A few tourist occasionally tottered in to see the collection of antique and foreign liquor bottles which gave it its name or to taste a cheese steak off the time-seasoned iron griddle. But for the most part, Terry’s served a neighborhood clientele of sedate middle-aged men who complained into their whiskey about life but otherwise minded their own business.

Wallace had been in Terry’s several times before, as part of the process runners called softening—making their face well enough known to be ignored. But he did not expect to see the inside of the bar today. En route from the hotel, he had experimented with one of the police stickers to see if they could removed intact.