Alternities Read online

  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 doz
en 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.

  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 Guar
d 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.