Alternities (7 page)

But he could not stop wishing that he was young enough to make a transit of his own to Blue or Yellow, and, just once, see the world as it might have been.

Wallace’s appearance at the gate control complex caused a sensation.

“Red Section, this is gate control,” the gate monitor was saying into his telephone as Wallace came through the double doors. “Your lost sheep is back. Right. I’ll tell him.”

Replacing the phone, the monitor stared quizzically at Wallace. “Jesus Christ, Rayne, what happened to you? Looks like you were the runt in a dogfight.”

“Make it a gunfight, and you’ve about got it. Want to log me in?”

“Already logged.”

“Then I’m on my way upstairs for some body work,” Wallace said, displaying the still-oozing laceration on the heel of his hand. “Tell Red I’ll be over for a debrief as soon as I get sewed up.”

“Sorry,” the monitor said. “They already want you in D-8.”

Wallace flashed an annoyed expression. “All right. Could you—”

“Done.” As Wallace moved past the gate control station, the monitor pushed another button on his phone. “Medical Services, this is gate control. Runner needs a house call at Debrief 8.”

There were two men waiting for Wallace in D-8—Charles Adams, his Red Section supervisor, and an Ops Division referee Wallace had seen occasionally but did not know. It was hard to say which of them looked more unhappy.

Adams gestured at a chair, then switched on a recorder. “Transit summary, please.”

Wallace’s concern deepened. The usual opening was a more casual, “What happened?” or “How’d it go?” The referee’s presence made a difference, of course, but there was more than that in Adams’ voice.

“I found the gate house abandoned and sealed. When I tried to complete the run, I found that there was a general evacuation because of the Brats. Before I could get back to the gate house, I was picked up. I escaped, taking out the patrol that picked me up.”

“So they made you.”

“No. If they made me as anything, it was as a Brat who got away. Which reminds me,” Wallace added, unbuttoning his shirt to expose the pouch. “The clock’s got about an hour to run on this, so we can save the AVs.” But as he removed the pouch, there was the telltale grating sound of a broken vial. “Some of them, anyway,” he said apologetically.

“When you came up overdue, I sent Volcker across,” Adams said stiffly. “He saw that the station had been evacuated, retrieved the station log, and came back. Which is what you should have done. Why didn’t you?”

“That’s not my job,” Wallace said defensively. “I don’t even know where to look for the station log.”

“In the pickup locker. That’s where Volcker found it.”

“Is that procedure?” He looked to the referee. “I never heard of that.”

The referee said nothing.

“I had a pouch to deliver,” Wallace continued. “And I thought you’d want to know what was going on.”

“The station logs told us,” Adams said.

Wallace’s brow furrowed. “They did?”

“Why so puzzled?”

“If they had time to update the logs, they’d have had time to send back an alert.”

“They tried,” the referee said, breaking his silence. “Apparently she didn’t get through.”

Another name for the engraver—

“She who?”

“Brenda Hilley.”

“She wasn’t a runner,” Wallace said with a flash of anger. Station staff were almost always delivered to their assignments by ferrymen, rather than being trained as runners themselves. It was simple economy of resources, good runners were too valuable to tie down in a field station. “She had no business trying a transit.”

“No one there was a runner,” the referee said. “Somebody had to try.”

“Is that procedure, too?”

At that moment the doctor arrived. He clucked and fussed over the seeping laceration on Wallace’s hand, frowned at the abrasions and bruises on Wallace’s torso, the tenderness in the abused shoulder.

“This man should come upstairs with me right now,” he pronounced. “He needs stitches. X-rays, a full exam, and, I would guess, a good night’s sleep. You can have him back in the morning.”

“We’re not finished here.” Adams protested.

“I see no notable head injuries,” the doctor said dryly. “And looking at him, I find it hard to believe that he’s going to forget what happened.”

Adams opened his mouth to argue, but the referee stayed him with a touch on the arm. “Do what needs doing. Dr. Glass. And assign him a room for overnight. But Charlie or I’ll want to talk to him again yet tonight.”

Glass frowned, then nodded. “All right. I’ll call you when I’m done with him.”

He motioned, and Wallace followed. They made the trip through the busy corridors to the infirmary in silence. But after the door to the treatment room closed out the rest of the world. Glass turned a quizzical grin on his patient.

“I can guess how you got beat up. What’d you do to get on the hot seat?”

Sitting bare-chested on the edge of the examining table, Wallace shook his head in frustration. “Hell if I know. Who was that with Adams, anyway?”

An eyebrow climbed skyward in surprise. “Ron Hastings. Section liaison for the director. Troubleshooter. You didn’t know?”

“No,” he said glumly. “And I wish I still didn’t. How about some aspirin?”

“About six?”

“That’ll do for a start.”

Sewed up, shot up, scrubbed down, and changed out of the shreds of his Red Section clothes, Wallace felt almost human. He could tell that his shoulder, already stiff and balloonlike with swelling, was going to get worse before it got better. But the rest of his injuries were easily shrugged off.

It wasn’t as easy to shrug off the feeling that he was in deep trouble with Adams, who had reappeared with his typewriter-sized tape recorder within minutes of being called. By then Wallace had had a chance to rerun the transit in his head. He reached the same conclusion this time as he had before—he hadn’t done anything wrong.

But Adams was snapping and snarling from the first word, as he had been downstairs even before Wallace began his report. It was as though he’d brought some standing grievance into the room with him, one he could only work out by nailing Wallace to the wall.

Every question was an accusation. Wallace had violated transit rules. When Wallace pointed out there were no rules covering the situation he had found, Adams declared he had violated “accepted procedure.” When Wallace argued that he had
followed
accepted procedure, Adams pronounced that he had failed to use “commonsense good judgment.”

He could not win. Adams was not debriefing him—he was building a case against him, before he’d even heard the whole story. Bat the tenor got worse, not better, after the whole story was told. When Adams heard about O’Brien, he raged over losing one of three folly softened drops in the city. When he heard about Chambers, it became almost impossible to talk to him.

After an hour of it, it dawned on Wallace that Adams wasn’t really talking to him at all. He was performing for the tape recorder, doing everything possible to color in his favor the impression anyone who reviewed a transcript would form.

That made a little more sense, but not enough. Finally Wallace reached out and switched off the recorder. “What’s with you, Charlie? I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“I’ve never had a runner do this to me before.”

“Come off it. The only sweetheart runs are the ones that don’t leave the gate house,” he said, thinking of the work of the low-status ferrymen, who backpacked documents forty pounds at a time between the outstations and home. “What’s really going on here? Are you up for review or something?”

Adams stared coldly at Wallace. “For your information, Ops is thinking about closing down Red Section.”

“Because of my run?”

“No,” Adams said, relaxing fractionally. “I was told two days ago. They’ve sent a proposal upstairs to the director. They don’t think they’re getting enough out of Red for the trouble and manpower. There’s a lot of talk about it being too dangerous.”

“So that’s why Hastings was there. Well, I know a lot of people who wouldn’t cry if they did close Red.”

“Including yourself, I take it.”

“It
is
a mess over there.”

“So you can be proud when it happens. We’ll get you a T-shirt that says ‘I killed Red Section.’ ”

“Charlie, are you worried about your job?”

“Damn right I am.”

“Well, hell, Charlie, don’t take it out on me. Anyway, they’ll find a place for you.”

“A place at the bottom of somebody else’s pecking order.”

Wallace sighed. “You know, if you’d just said something up front, I could have helped. I don’t suppose you want to spin those reels backward and start over?”

“No,” Adams said, reaching for the machine. “Next time stay put and let us handle the problem.”

Ruthann Wallace surveyed the living room in dismay. It was impossible to impose order on a house containing a three-year-old. Eventually she would believe that firmly enough to stop trying.

At least there was some point to cleaning here in the Block, she thought as she started gathering up Katie’s detritus. She had lived in more than one home where all you could accomplish by keeping the contents tidy was reveal the fundamental shabbiness of the surroundings.

She remembered all too vividly the last place she and Rayne had lived—a second-floor apartment over a family laundry in Bentonville, Indiana. The rickety wooden stairs out back. The canted, weatherworn balcony that scared guests back inside. The humpback ridge down the middle of the kitchen floor where one stalwart beam had resisted sagging.

There had been a hot spot in the middle of the living room floor from a dryer duct somewhere below, usually marked by the curled-up yellow form of Rayne’s cat, Rufus. When they came home each night, they had to throw the windows open to rid the apartment of the smell of bleach, soap, and solvents.

Medford Federal Housing Center—better known as North Block—was a different story. Just five years old, it contained three floors of neat, well-maintained apartments. True, the apartments were small, and the Wallaces occupied one of the smallest—they actually had less space here than above the laundry.

But the layout was intelligent enough that Ruthann barely noticed. And there were amenities. Three rooms had carpeted floors, there was a recirculating air system almost as good as air-conditioning, and they rarely heard their neighbors on either side or above.

None of those features accounted for a waiting list which was, in light of the rate that vacancies were appearing, three years long. For the building was in fact a shelter, the topmost floor fifteen feet underground. The central access core with the community rooms, clinic, and food caches was topped by a six-foot-thick cap of reinforced concrete, angled and sculpted to deflect and diffuse the shock waves of a nuclear air burst as near as a quarter-mile away.

It was a good place to live, friendly, safe. Security was good enough upstairs that most people left their doors unlocked, or even open. The children in a given nexus treated the whole corridor as their playground, and Ruthann had made friends among the mothers in hers.

But sometimes she wished for a window—just a little window, to catch a fresh breeze from, to let in the warmth of the afternoon sun. A window to stand at when Rayne was late and she was bustling about the apartment after Katie could no longer occupy her mind—

In the morning, Wallace was obliged to repeat parts of his story for an audience consisting of Charlie Adams, Ron Hastings and the Red Section chief, an old-line CIA man named Gradison. The place was a Red Section conference room, and this time it was Gradison who led the questioning.

“All right,” Gradison said finally, nearly three hours after they had begun. “I think we have the picture. Wait here, would you, Rayne?”

They left him alone in the room for several minutes, and when the door opened again it was Gradison alone who reappeared.

“Rayne, I’m afraid I’m going to have to lift your Red certification,” Gradison said. “But I want you to know this is not punitive. I’m trying to protect you and our operation there. We don’t know how aware the Philadelphia police are about what happened or how hard they’re going to be looking for you. If it turns out you’re right, that you covered your exposure, then maybe a month from now I’ll be able to bring you back.”

A month from now there may not be a Red Section, Wallace thought glumly. “Do I stay Grade 3, sir?”

“Worried about your checks?”

“My wife will be.”

“All right, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll suspend your papers instead of lifting them. That’ll keep you at G3, at least until we review your case a month from now,” Gradison said, resting his folded hands across his round belly. “But you might want to use that time to work on your certification for one of the other alternities, just in case.”

Sure, Wallace thought. All I have to do is get a tan and learn Arabic for White, or lose five inches and turn slope-eye for Green. “Thank you, sir.”

Gradison grunted. “Just trying to be fair. What happened to you wasn’t your fault.”

It was a grudging vindication, little more than politeness, but Wallace seized on it gladly. “That’s how I see it. I was beginning to wonder if I’d get anyone to agree.”

Gradison grunted again, reaching for the doorknob with sausagelike fingers. “Anyway, you’re released. Call me in a month and I’ll tell you where you stand.”

The Guard’s training and administration center occupied more than half of the Tower’s base section, including all of floors three through ten. With more than three hundred runners, sixty crackers, and twenty instructors on the roster, they needed that much space and more. Compared to the tranquillity which ruled above the fifteenth floor, the hallways in Guard country bustled like downtown sidewalks.

Which meant that there was no way for Wallace to get from the Red Section offices to the runners’ change-out room without crossing paths with any number of fellow Guardsmen. Not eager to talk to anyone, Wallace fended off greetings with nods and the lifted hand.

But in the change-out room, he encountered a face for which different rules applied. “Hey, Jason.”