by John Barnes
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Have a more pleasant day, then, sir.”
I hung up and sat down heavily on the bed. “My house is dead. Brain killed and the building totaled,” I explained to Helen. “I suppose we can call and get the police report on our way home. We’ll have to cut this trip short.”
“Did they say whether anyone had broken in or it might have been teenagers joyriding your house?”
That was a common problem. There were groups of kids who were very adroit at killing the brain, holding a party, and then setting a fire before they left, just before the cops got there.
“No, they didn’t. I suppose I could have asked for the suspected cause. Couldn’t be joyriders, though, not with a recording going up to the last three minutes—the whole point of what they do is to stretch out the time between killing the brain and abandoning the house. I guess I could call them back and ask them now. The most likely thing, unfortunately, is that it will turn out to be something that makes no sense—based on what’s been happening in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Well, it sounds like we really do have to get back there. Was there much of sentimental value?”
“Some pictures of me when I was a boy. The family heirlooms, the photos of my ancestors and that stuff, everything of any sentimental value, was all in the safety deposit box at my bank. All my work materials were in the office at school. The house mostly just was a place to sleep and eat. And it was all insured, anyway. It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that I’m not looking forward to the volume of paperwork I know I’ll have to cope with, and I’m really not looking forward to dealing with that while I’m also coping with a new job where I commute out every week. And of course I’m kind of worried about what connection this might have with everything else that’s been happening. There are all sorts of things to worry about, of course, and I am worried about dealing with all of it, but I’m not really that upset. It’s not like I lost that Studebaker Skyjump—that, I would miss.”
McMoore himself was on the job—I don’t know if he didn’t sleep or had just taken over another shift—and as soon as we explained what the problem was, he was on top of it. He packed us up, put us in a limousine that seemed to have unusually thick oddly colored windows and reassuringly thick metal plates discreetly placed around the inside, drove us to the boat shed over in Cholon, and escorted us to the jump boat, not neglecting to search it thoroughly for people and devices and to hang around while I did readouts and made sure it had been on no further joyrides. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, so we shook hands with McMoore, cast off, pulled out of the boat shed, and told the Skyjump to take us home. I didn’t feel fit to fly.
What followed was something like a two-hour dream, as we called from the high part of the trajectory for the police report and were told that there was no official cause yet, came down outside Auckland harbor, got the cab, and eventually found ourselves standing and staring at the place where my driveway ended in a crater.
It was about eight or nine feet deep at the deepest point, perfectly circular, and my house would not have fitted within it; the four corners of the foundation looked at each other across that gulf. The sandy soil seemed to have fused in places, as if by tremendous heat, and all the facing neighbors’ windows were boarded up; there were char marks on their roofs where sparks or the flash had ignited shingles, and the aluminum siding on the two nearest neighbors’ houses had warped, the white paint turning brown in spots.
My house had vanished in a moment of tremendous heat, but there had been no explosion—all the damage was caused by radiated heat, and the wave of superheated air. The police report said there had been a thunderclap, as if the burning house had disappeared so suddenly that the air had rushed back inaudibly.
All the grass and trees in the yard were scorched and dead.
We stood on the blackened lawn and stared, for many long minutes; our luggage was in a pile beside us, and the cab had long since gone on its way. No one came out to talk to us; perhaps because none of them had a window facing our way through which they could see, but more likely it was just a matter of the human desire not to stand too close to bad luck. After a long time, Helen said, “Do you suppose there’s anything known to exist in everyday life, anywhere, that could make this happen?”
“Not that I know about. And it’s the kind of thing they might have mentioned when I was an undergrad in physics.”
“Was it intended, perhaps, to get you?”
“Could have been, I suppose, but you’d think that someone who could summon a completely unknown physical force with this much energy would be capable of ringing my doorbell, or even just phoning, and finding out if I was home, first.” I shook my head. “A couple days ago, things made sense.”
“It will be at least a couple days before they begin to make any sense again,” a voice said behind us. We turned and found that Geoffrey Iphwin was there, as was a beautiful old real Rolls-Royce, with a real human driver at the wheel. Just behind and ahead of it, two small armored cars had parked. “Right now I don’t think I can give you an explanation that will make any sense to you, at least not sense that you could use for anything, and part of the problem is that I don’t begin to understand everything myself. But if you will come along, I can pretty well assure your safety—at least as well as I can assure mine—and after that perhaps we can begin to fight back, and force the world to make a little more sense, eh?”
He ran in little mincing steps over to the site where my house had been, his eye seeming to catch and stop at the many places where the sand had been baked into little fused pockets by the intense heat, and now reflected the late-afternoon sun with a sort of soft brown shine. He looked back at us, his expression mild and soft. “If you want entirely out of all of this, I can just write out a check for enough to get you a new house, give you some time and money to resettle, and probably but not definitely, make it clear enough so that you’ll be left alone. But I’m afraid if you want to press on, there’s not much alternative—you’re going to be in danger, and you’re in for the duration.”
“Can’t you even tell us what the sides are?”
Iphwin shrugged. “The Reichs and their governments are mostly on the other side. Is that good enough?”
“Good enough for me,” Helen said, with surprising vehemence, and then I noticed I was nodding vigorously.
“All right, then,” Iphwin said. “I’m afraid you will have to come with me, then. At the moment the other side is moving much, much faster than I anticipated they would. I do apologize—my underestimating them is what has allowed them to do these things to you, and it’s also why I shall have to bring you further and deeper into the situation, much sooner than I would have preferred. And I’m also afraid that you won’t be happy when you find out how many of the shocks you are feeling, or are going to feel, are very much my fault. I really do deeply hope that when it all becomes clearer, you will be able to forgive me.”
We threw our bags into his car. When Helen had been shooting she had seemed bigger and stronger, and now she struggled more than I’d have expected to move her suitcase. Iphwin took us back to the harbor, where his people had already gassed and serviced the Skyjump. By dark, we were a very long way north, in one of the guest suites in the Big Sapphire, surrounded by the sea just north of Surabaya, unpacking and trying to figure out where life would take us next.
Unpacking didn’t take me long—all I had was what I had taken for a weekend, and the clothes I had emergency-ordered would be delivered here Monday while I was working. Helen had stopped for some more things from her place, but it didn’t take her twenty minutes to pack or unpack—she was pretty typical of female academics, not much on clothes. When we were all done, it was only seven at night, we should theoretically have just been sitting down to our second dinner in Saigon, and there was absolutely nothing to do.
Naturally we decided to put on the headsets and see if we could find any of our friends in the VR chat room. I coul
d tell immediately that tonight was going to be all right, because not only was everyone there, but I drew Bogart and Helen drew Bergman again. The first thing I did, of course, was get rid of the stupid cigarette that made it hard to breathe or taste anything, and the second thing I did was corner Paul Henreid, grab his lapels, and tell him to buzz off and keep his eyes off my girl if he wanted to leave the place alive. Then I stopped by the piano and told Sam I wanted a selection from the classics, and he settled into a nice Debussy piece, dreamy and romantic, instead of the corny old thing’ he usually played. As far as I was concerned, I had saved the picture.
I sat down at the table to find everyone babbling at once. “Suppose I asked whether anybody here could tell this story coherently?” I said, pulling my chair up.
Helen really did wear Ingrid Bergman well; she turned to me with a calm stare, paused a moment, and said, “Well, then you would be disappointed with the answer. But at least everyone here agrees that it started with Terri. And the good news is, if we can make sense out of it, we can probably get some idea of how we got released from jail.”
Terri was being pretty moderate, for Terri—she was being Yvonne, of whom Claude Rains had once said, “All by herself, she may constitute an entire second front.” She leaned back in an angly, awkward way that would have told anyone at once that that body was being worn by a teenager, and said, “You might know that since I have to go to the special American expat school and since my father is a rich man, I don’t get out much. In fact I usually can only go to regular school events or to parties at my parents’ friends’ houses. I get real bored a lot of the time, because there’s only so much homework you can do, and only so much chat room time. Plus of course I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of nosy.
“And then the thought occurred to me that Eric—he’s a buddy of mine at school that has this crush on me, but thank god I’m not that desperate, but he’s really sweet and will do almost anything for me—Eric had given me a neat little program that would track people’s real net addresses while they were in the chat room, so I could see who I was really talking to, and I had had it running for months. And so ... well, gee, I just think, anybody having a romantic holiday in the Far East, and all... oh, I wanted to know just what you guys were up to. I know you told me where you’d be staying and I know you told me all about it, but for some reason the signal broke up right when you said it, or I was distracted, or something. And that was why I tried tracing you, figuring you’d be doing something romantic. I hope you don’t mind being spied on.”
My first thought was, Why not? everyone else does, but I swallowed that comment—I figured it might embarrass her—and said, “Considering the result, we ought to thank you.”
“Well, it was weird, because the geographic coordinates it gave were for somewhere in—”
The world froze.
“Signal just broke up,” I said. “Where did you say?”
“It broke up on my end too,” she said. “Your coordinates—”
The world froze again.
“Did you—?”
“It happened to all of us,” the Colonel said, “which I think is pretty strange. Try saying it very slowly, Terri; maybe somebody is censoring the net, even though that’s supposed to be impossible. I’m sure that if they could the—”
For the third time, the world froze.
“I can’t even say their name,” the Colonel said, “without tripping the censorship program.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We all know you meant the Germans.”
Just as I said “Germans,” there was another freeze; everyone came out of it looking baffled.
“Hmmph,” Helen said. “Well, if nothing else we’ve just learned that some kinds of casual chat are not allowed. I always thought the little freezes were caused by jam-ups somewhere between me and the server, something about having too little bandwidth, but we’re in the Big Sapphire here and there’s no way I could be as short on bandwidth as I usually was in Enzy.”
Everyone nodded, and Terri said, “Okay, let me try to say the name. It looked like you.
“Were right in the middle.
“Of.” She wet her lips and then slowly said. “Ho.
“Chi.
“Minh.
“City.”
I had heard all the syllables clearly and I had no idea what she had said. “That’s strange,” I said. “Actually we were in Saigon.”
“It just broke up,” everyone chorused.
“Sai...” I paused. “Gon.” It seemed to go right through, but now everyone looked very confused.
“I clearly heard you and I wrote it down,” Kelly said, looking at the pad in front of her, “but now I can’t read what I wrote. It looks like S...A...I...G...O...N.”
“That’s right,” I said, “Saigon.” There was another freeze that denoted another system crash.
“If this keeps up, this story may take quite a while to tell,” Roger said.
Terri nodded emphatically. “Well, anyway, what I found out was that you weren’t at your hotel, but in jail, and when I tried getting into the jail’s public information board, it told me you were being held on suspicion of murder. That didn’t sound right, so I called Roger, and I called Kelly. I think Roger sort of took the first steps—”
“Not much more than making some net calls,” Roger said. “My old second in command, Esmé Sanderson, from back when I commanded the”
FREEZE
“before the damned”
FREEZE
“forced us to disband and”
FREEZE
“This is going to be a hard story to get out,” Helen said, “but anyway, Esmé Sanderson had been your second in command, even if you can’t tell us where or when or for what unit, right?”
“Right, and now she’s a cop in Mexico City.”
We had all braced for a freeze when it was obvious that he was going to speak a place name, but that one was apparently not a problem. Who can explain the choices and ideas of a censor? Sykes let his breath out—he really was remarkably splendid when he was wearing Sidney Greenstreet—and said, “Well, there, I thought they’d hit that one but they didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d look into it, and what she told me later was that she had checked up on your case with authorities in Ho
“Chi
“Minh
“City. There, it didn’t make a breakup.”
“But I have no idea what you said,” Helen pointed out. “All right, so she checked up with the authorities.”
“That’s right, and she discovered that you had shot Billie Beard, so she called it to the attention of her supervisor, Jesús Picardin. She says she thought Picardin was going to kiss her when he heard the news; they’d been trying for years to get Billie Beard either into Mexico, where she could be arrested, or busted someplace where they could extradite, but having her dead was even better.”
“I thought Billie Beard was a cop,” I said.
“She is—a bad cop even in a service that’s known for its badness. Probably even her bosses didn’t much care what happened to her anymore. Billie Beard was wanted for nearly everything, nearly everywhere. Real bad piece of work. Even the”
FREEZE
“uh that is I mean her employers, didn’t like her much, and she was wanted for all kinds of things. The world is not at all sorry to see her go. And so Picardin authorized sending the files about Beard to the local authorities, and as soon as those files started to scroll out of the fax machine, your friend Inspector Dong had some very good reasons to stop worrying; he was assured that no matter how the case came out, no one was going to care very much, because the part they did care about was already accomplished.”
“I guess I was the other part of getting you out,” Kelly said. “It happens I went to school with Jenny Schmidt, who is now Jenny Bannon, who is more officially Jennifer H. S. Bannon, Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia to the Court of New Zealand. I thought I knew, from somewhere, that Helen was a
DG citizen, so I confirmed that, then called Jenny and got her on it. She called up their Ambassador—another guy we went to school with, creepy guy we all called Bobo, but very willing to do a favor for a friend—Bobo seemed to know you, Helen, and that helped too. So in a short time he was also phoning the Saigon police.”
“Well, at least that explains how we got released,” Helen said. “Let me try an experiment here. How many of you have heard of the”—
Everyone froze again, except that I clearly heard her—not through the VR, but just because she was in the room with me— say “Puritan Party.”
“All right,” she said. She picked up her pad and slowly read off “Ho...Chi...Minh...City. Now I’ll say it at normal speed, and let’s see what happens. Ho Chi Minh City.”
This time there was no freeze, but the world seemed to wobble a little. “Now someone else try.”
“Saigon,” the Colonel said, and no one froze. “But now that I think of it, from the unit history, I seem to recall that Saigon”
