In Era 11, one of the most backward ones, she found the planet she wanted. In more sophisticated probability frames, it had been turned into a rest planet for Agents. It was uninhabited in all frames except the basic three. The best aspect of it was that it was not the last place they’d look for her. Anticipating her reaction, they would look at once in the last place. It was neither the best nor the worst, thus a median chance in several billion.
She drifted low across the springtime face of the planet and selected a place where a crystal stream came down across rocks to form a pool beside a slant of lush green grass. She tucked the ship between the mighty roots of a fairyland tree so tall that clouds brushed its crown. This was a planet on which one felt elfin. Small and wild and free. The vastness of the trees and the boulders and the utter stillness were the artifacts of magic.
She opened the purloined crypt and laid her fingers against the marble coldness of Andro’s cheek. All body functions were suspended She moved quickly and lightly as she prepared the twin injections that would bring him slowly up to the threshold of life once again. The tips of the needles had to be heated before she could put them into the vein on his inner arm.
She made the injections and then laid her head against his broad chest. It was like listening to a stone. It was the coldness of death and she felt small and afraid. With no circulation of the blood, with the blood itself as still and hard as the red veins in marble, it took a long time for the effect to spread from the point of innoculation.
The heart, at last, gave a slow thud. She counted to thirty before she heard the next thud. Each time the interval decreased by a full second. Body warmth began to return. When he took his first fluttering, shallow breath, she straightened up and smiled down at him. There was color in his face again.
With the help of the small attractor she unhooked from her belt, she lifted him effortlessly and carried him through the port and placed him on the fresh-scented grass at the edge of the deep blue pool.
Then, motivated by a force that was strange to her, she used the cleansing chamber of the ship, webbed fresh garments for herself in a brighter color than ever before.
Chapter Three
Revolt on Simpar!
The slip towers glowed, grew misty and indistinct. The City of Transition gave a delicate shrug of raspberry shoulders and slipped from Era 6 to Era 4. The risk of thus hastening the deviation from plotted culture line was great. But the Director felt that coordination could better be obtained within the target era than from outside. As yet no method of direct communication between eras had been devised. Field Team reports could be received at Transition and orders could go out only if the city were in the era which ex-Agent Calna had made so critical.
Sarrz felt lost. The Director had stepped in to handle direct coordination of Field Teams. Sarrz was left without a function. Though it irked him, it did give him a chance to review the entire picture. As with all directing heads in Socionetics, Sarrz had a good background in Symbolic Probability. With the idle and aimless feeling of mental doodling, he decided to equate the index of probability of the loss of further space-time frames.
He took the small table which held the computor and swung it around within easy reach. He put it on alphabetic scale and ignored, as he fed in the data, the glow of the ‘insufficient data’ light. He had the direct loss of one era, the pending loss of a second, plus areas of disturbance in three more.
He read off the index and it startled him. He cleared the computor and tried again. Same result. He sat and listened to the quickening thud of his heart. The index of probability of all sister space-time frames being lost was almost grotesquely high, so high that complete data would have to be within itself improbable in order to level off the result based on incomplete data.
The inference was that some outside factor was at work, some unequated factor. There was a parallel in astronomy. Find the deviation and then look for the cause.
Suddenly Sarrz realized that this matter was of highest importance. The Director must be informed, and at once.
He reached for the switch that would enable him to communicate with the Director.
And that was the way they found him. His heart had stopped as his fingertips had touched the switch.
Animal caution did not desert Andro as he recovered consciousness. He neither stirred nor opened his eyes. He remained quite still and concentrated on bringing all senses up to peak awareness. Hearing — the soft rush and babble of water, a crackling stir, as of wind in leaves. Scent — the spiced smell of brush and forest and wild places. Touch — brush of grass against his arm. Warm air against his body. He remembered the deepness of the burn wounds. He concentrated his sensory attention on the wounded areas and could find no message of pain from the scorched nerve ends. He increased the depth of his respiration and could not detect the quick knives that had stabbed him with each breath as he stood in the blue shadows of the alley.
He remembered those who had joined him, and who had lost. Grief was deep and slow and still. Daylya and all the others. His fault. And born of impatience. Had he waited, grown a bit stronger, planned more thoroughly...
His ear picked up the whisk of grass against an approaching foot. Fingertips touched his chest over his heart. He opened his eyes just enough to see the figure outlined against the sky, bending over him. The equation was simple. Once all your allies are dead, all who remain are enemies.
Andro struck with clenched fist, with a roll that brought the heavy muscles of shoulder and back into the blow. He rolled onto hands and knees and jumped up onto his feet, weaving a little from weakness. He stood under a strange sky near the mightiest tree he had ever seen and looked down on the crumpled unconscious figure of a woman. She wore a toga-like garment of lime yellow, a wide belt from which small unknown devices dangled. Her hair had the clarity and purity of the white fall of water into the deep blue pool a few yards away. On the angle of her jaw was the spreading stain of the force of the blow. He stood and waited and listened for others. There was no sound but the water and the wind. He bent over and fingered her jaw clumsily. The bone did not feel loose and broken under his fingers.
It was then that he remembered his wounds. He looked at his side, and found a strange thing. The skin was clear, firm, healthy over the wounds, and he would have thought he had dreamed the wounds were it not for the untanned pallor of the new skin.
He looked at the woman again, and he frowned. The alley floor had given way under him and he had fallen into darkness. The woman was connected with that phenomenon in some way. At the moment she was helpless. Yet the devices on the belt she wore were a promise that she might not remain helpless. He rolled her over and looked for a place to unhook the belt. It seemed to have no fastening and it fitted too tightly around her slim waist to be slipped down over her hips. He contented himself with unhooking the small devices. He could not guess their uses. Yet they had a gleam that spoke of efficiency, utility. There were six of them. He carried them carefully in his cupped hands and placed them behind a stone. It taxed his strength to tear a strip from the hem of the lime yellow toga. With the strip he bound her hands tightly behind her, placing the knot out of the reach of her fingers. As he tightened the knot, his right arm extended, he saw that the tattoo was gone from his upper arm. It was replaced with another area of that pallid healthy skin.