Alternities (3 page)

The answers was no. Worse, through some sort of chemical trickery, seconds after the paper tore the entire sticker changed color from pale blue to a dramatic red to announce the tampering.

No, his contact would be in the streets somewhere—a roof, an alley, a shadowed doorway—waiting and hoping. Not that the streets were any safer. In the time it had taken to cover a dozen blocks, Wallace had hidden from three patrolling police jeeps and heard, but not seen, a helicopter skimming low over the rooftops.

As he neared his destination, Wallace slowed from his trot to a more deliberate pace. The tavern was dark, the front door sealed. Cupping his hands around his eyes, he peered through the lightest pane of the stained-glass window.

He glimpsed a shadowy human shape, an ominous motion. Reflexively he flinched, turning and scrambling away. A fraction of a second later there was a muffled roar, and the heart of the door blasted outward, glass and wood splinters scattering over the sidewalk and beyond into the street. Wallace was caught by the fringe of the technicolor shower, but with no bare skin expose to its assault.

“How do you like that?” demanded a voice from inside the bar. “Come on, try again and get some more!”

The voice was familiar to Wallace, and not at all threatening, despite its owner’s best intentions.

“O’Brien, you are one jumpy son of a bitch,” Wallace bellowed back, letting the tension go in a rush. “You goddamn bastard, you can fuckin’ forget a tip from now on.”

Long-necked and slender, like one of the bottles displayed on walls of his tavern, Terry O’Brien advanced out of the shadows to the shattered door, shotgun hanging limply in his hands. He looked hard at Wallace, then swallowed just as hard.

“Sorry,” he said, then caught himself. “Say, you shouldn’t be here. It’s not my fault—”

“Not your fault? You’re the one holding the artillery,” Wallace said pointedly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Three times in a month I’ve been broken into,” O’Brien said, examining the wreckage. “They said we might be out for forty-eight hours. I wasn’t going to leave it and come back to nothing.”

“No, you’d rather break it up yourself,” Wallace said. He stole a quick glance down both side streets and a peek back over his shoulder.

There was no movement, no sign that the shotgun blast had been heard. “Since you’re open for business, how about pouring me one to help me settle the nerves you jangled?”

O’Brien nodded sheepishly and unlocked what was left of the door.

“Listen, Terry,” Wallace said, following him to the bar. “I was sleeping one off in my hotel room, and when I woke up everybody’d gone into hiding. You’re the first person I’ve seen all afternoon. What’s going on? Where is everybody?”

“The mayor closed down center-city this morning,” O’Brien said, reaching for a glass. “Black Label, isn’t it?”

“Make it a shot and a chaser.”

“Right. Anyway, I guess the barricades went up at five this morning. They kept all the commuters out and then chased out the night owls and the locals, checking cards on everyone at the barricades. I guess Rizzo’s boy’s did a pretty good job—you’re the first person I’ve seen all day, except for the boys in the jeeps.”

A worried look crossed O’Brien’s face. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he added, scratching his chin. A large dragon ring on his left hand glinted in the light. “If they come through and see that mess, they’ll know I’m here. They’re going to give me a hard time, I know it. You, too.”

“You didn’t say what this is all about,” Wallace said. “Is it the Brats?”

O’Brien nodded. “I saw the mayor on TV an hour ago. He said that they’d caught three of them and were looking for more. They were going to blow a bugbomb from the clock tower at the Reading Terminal. Can you imagine what that would have done, with the traffic through that station, all those commuters carrying it back out into the suburbs? Sick, sick, sick—”

That settled it. The drop was dead. His contact had either been unable to enter the city or been thrown out with the rest. Nothing to do but return to the gate house and leave the drugs there. Someone else could complete the delivery when the restrictions were lifted.

“I guess I’d better go on back to the hotel,” Wallace said draining the beer glass. “Doing business here is hard enough. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Why don’t you stay?” O’Brien said, anxiously twisting his ring. “I’ll feed you on the house.”

Wallace demurred with a shake of his head. “I’d better go.”

“I’d better put this away,” O’Brien said, reaching for the shotgun.

Both decisions were right decisions, but both were made too late. As Wallace slipped down off his stool, a shadow flashed across the side windows and brakes screeched. Cursing silently, he dove to the floor as the police came fast through the door.

But O’Brien stood frozen behind the bar, shotgun half-raised, earnest words of explanation dying in his throat. The badges did not wait for explanations. The first through had a pistol in hand and opened fire. His partner, hard on his heels, joined in when he had a clear line. O’Brien wobbled in place, his blood spattering as the bottles on the wall behind him shattered. Then his knees buckled and he collapsed out of sight behind the bar.

Shit shit shit shit shit
, Wallace cursed as he cowered, eyes squeezed shut against sights he did not care to see, on the tavern floor.
Just what I needed—to be grabbed in the middle of a Brat roast with a bag of glass bullets under my shirt—you might as well just shoot me now—

On the day that Wallace qualified as a runner, Jason March—then an acquaintance, now a friend—had straight-facedly handed him a small blue-covered booklet bearing the title the 1—A’S HANDBOOK. The booklet contained a single page bearing two rules. The first was,
Don’t Get Caught
. The second was,
See Rule #1
.

No official document put it that bluntly, but the truth was that the Guard expected its runners to slip in and out from Home to their destinations and back with minimum exposure. Most of the danger to runners was considered to be in the maze itself, where haste or carelessness or, sometimes, simple bad luck could make yours the one in every two hundred or so transits that came up on the board as OVERDUE, RU (Reason Unknown).

Beyond that, there was exposure on any run that went beyond the gate-house walls, and Wallace had a cover in all three alternities for which he was qualified. In Red Philadelphia, he was Robert Wallace, a salesman for an out-of-town food distributor. In Yellow Britain, he carried credentials as a construction inspector for the City of London. In Blue Indianapolis, he passed as a legal courier—on those rare occasions when he was allowed outside the gate house.

But unlike what the Guard set up for a full-time mole, Wallace’s covers were tissue-thin, consisting of little more than the contents of his wallet. It was Wallace who had to make the cover real, to give it dimension. Only by projecting credibility could he head off the telephoned query, prevent the background check. He was the first and only line of defense, and the papers he carried were mere props.

He had gotten good advice on covers, thankyouverymuchJason. Every time he came to Red, every minute spent softening, he was Robert Wallace. He knew him, knew that young, glib, hard-drinking salesman well enough to know that he would be terrified by the violence, intimidated by the brush with Authority.

“Jesus Christ, sweet Jesus Christ,” he began to babble as he lay on the floor. “What’s going on? You shot Terry. I don’t understand what’s happening—”

As he spoke, the first officer, a hard-faced white man with thinning black hair, was moving cautiously around the end of the bar to make certain that O’Brien was no longer a threat.

“Shut up, you,” the second officer snapped.

Twisting his head toward the voice, Wallace received a jolt. Advancing on him was the boogeyman from an Indiana boy’s nightmare—a nigger with a gun. The officer was short for a badge but well-muscled, a charcoal troll in uniform. The namestrip above his pocket read CHAMBERS.

Wallace had seen the mixed couples passing unnoticed in Yellow London, knew that in Red something called an equal access law was eliminating the Negro schools, had heard that in Blue the Indianapolis hospitals allowed Negro doctors to treat patients of any race. Far more important, he understood from talking with Jason, who had made some thirty runs to Alternity White, that it was the closed doors of racism which had turned America’s major cities into war zones and brought General Betts’ martial-law government to power.

But Wallace had also grown up with a mother who explained to her son that there were no blacks in town “because they wouldn’t be happy here,” with a father who worried aloud about the wisdom of teaching black soldiers to kill and then letting them loose in society. The mixed signals—new and old, information and programming—had left him not knowing what he thought was right, and preserved childhood fears intact.

“ID and pass,” Chambers demanded. “Where are they?”

“In—in my wallet.” Wallace’s voice was trembling; the line between feigned terror and the genuine article had blurred. “In my pants pocket. On the left.”

“This one’s dead,” announced the first officer.

Chambers grunted in answer. Letting Wallace look down the barrel of his pistol close enough to catch the stink. Chambers fumbled for the leatherette wallet and extracted the Guard-manufactured identity card and travel pass.

Those ought to buy me about four minutes
, Wallace thought, watching the policeman’s face.
Food jobber from Mercer, hah
.

But the questions Wallace was expecting didn’t come. “Arms behind your back, Mr. Wallace,” Chambers said. A moment later, a plastic strap was tight around Wallace’s wrists, the meek little ratcheting sound of the catch a misleading measure of the quickcuff’s strength.

Some protest seemed in order, even if it was guaranteed to have no good effect. “I don’t understand what I did wrong—”

“Up, Mr. Wallace,” Chambers said. “You’re going for a ride.”

What had saved him so far, Wallace thought as he tried to keep his balance on the narrow seat in the back of the speeding jeep, was that his captors weren’t detectives. They were foot soldiers in an urban war, trained more for obedience and rote thoroughness than curiosity.

But the questions they hadn’t asked would be asked eventually. The courier pouch was still strapped to his midriff. They would find it, and they would defeat its lock and open it. There was no chance of it going undiscovered until the six-hour chemical timer ran down and reduced the contents of the bag to dust.

And then they would draw the obvious, completely wrong, conclusion that he was one of the Brats.

Which was fine as far as the Guard was concerned, but less promising for Wallace. True, Rizzo didn’t have quite enough of a free hand to carry out his oft-stated solution to the terrorism problem—which would involve disemboweling Wallace with a power drill and then mounting his head on a spike outside police headquarters.

But if Wallace’s future wasn’t completely black, it was certainly bleak. The Guard had rescued more than one runner from an ordinary criminal offense, paying the bail in manufactured money so that he could escape to Home. But there would be no bail for a Brat terrorist.

The jeep took another hard, high-speed turn, and Wallace slid clumsily sideways on the seat until he was directly behind the driver. As he squirmed back into an upright posture, he concluded that getting out of the jeep would be no problem. Chambers was dutifully keeping an eye on him from the front passenger seat, but Wallace was confident he could throw himself over the side of the vehicle at any time.

But that was no answer. They’d either end up scraping him up off the pavement or shooting him down in the street. Only marginally better outcomes than ending up in Rizzo’s little Home for the Criminally Suspicious—Short-Term Boarders Only. He had to get the jeep stopped and the two badges distracted.

Wallace had archived one idea when they put him in the jeep, under “There’s Gotta Be a Better Way, But…” With each passing block, every foot farther from the gate house and closer to police headquarters, it seemed more and more certain that better ways were in short supply.

Roll the dice
, Wallace thought.

The jeep was slowing to round a corner, and Chambers was looking away as he reached for the radio. Now—

In one quick motion, Wallace pulled his knees up to his chest, then drove his feet against the back of the driver’s seat. The hinged seat back pitched forward, jamming the badge hard against the steering wheel.

The jeep, already turning, lurched sharply left as the driver fought to free himself. The struggle pitted the strength of the driver’s arms against the power in Wallace’s legs. Chambers was not a factor. The black was fighting his own battle—against inertia, against being catapulted from the vehicle.

Wallace had the edge, but even more, he knew both the rules and objectives of the contest. For two long seconds, he held the badge helpless against the wheel as the jeep continued to turn, curling left toward a solid barrier of storefronts. Then, with a massive jolt, the jeep struck the curb and leapfrogged it, front wheels wobbling in midair.

The shock separated both Chambers and Wallace from their perches. Wallace tried to transform his graceless jouncing exit into a controlled backflip, but he had lost his leverage too soon. He came down awkwardly, twisting his right ankle and falling hard to his knees and then his side. A moment later, its driver still frozen behind the wheel, the jeep drove itself self-destructively into the wall, metal screeching, masonry cracking, glass tinkling.

Rolling over, Wallace struggled to his feet and ran. He felt painfully slow, naked to the bullet he was sure was coming, awkward and helpless with his hands bound behind him. But he ran without looking back, his mouth set in a tight line, his thoughts an evolving refrain:
one more step, one more step—one more block—one more chance—

Though Wallace’s heart was racing, his steps felt leaden, as though his feet were churning through mud. The distance between his hunched shoulders was a hundred yards, a target any junior marksman could hit. The city blocks grew longer even as he ran them.