It was about eight feet by ten, carpeted with curved white-painted walls lined with the glitter of screens, dials, instrument faces, more levers and gadgets than the cockpit of a Navy P2V. The man in gray was sitting in one of two contoured bucket seats in front of an array of colored lights. He flashed me a quick glance, hit a button at the same time. A soft humming sound started up; there was an indefinable sense of motion, in some medium other than space.
"Close, but I don't think they saw us," he said tensely. "At least there's no tac-ray on us. But we have to move out fast, before he sets up a full-scale scan pattern." He was looking into a small, green-glowing screen, the size of a flight-deck radarscope, flipping levers at the same time. The scanning line swept down from top to bottom, about two cycles per second. I'd never seen one like it. But then I'd never seen anything like any of what had happened in the last few minutes.
"Who are they?" I said. "What are they?"
He gave me a fast up-and-down look. "For the moment, suffice it to say they're representatives of someone who seems to have taken a dislike to you." He flipped a switch and the lights dimmed down almost to nothing. On a big screen, six feet square, a picture snapped into sharp focus. It was the platform, hovering above the choppy water about fifty feet away, receding. The view was as clear as though I were looking out through a picture window. One of the men in white was playing a powerful beam of bluish light across the waves. My boat was gone. There was nothing in sight but a few odds and ends of gear, bobbing on the black water.
"You dropped off his tracer cold," the man in gray said. "He won't like that very well—but it couldn't be helped. By picking you up, I've put myself in what one might call an impossible position." He eyed me as if he were thinking over how much more to tell me.
"After what's already happened, that's not a word I'd use lightly," I said. "What are you—FBI? CIA? Not that they'd have anything like this." I nodded at that fantastic control panel.
"My name is Bayard," he said. "I'm afraid you're going to have to take me on trust for a while, Mr. Curlon."
"How do you know my name?"
"I've been following them," he nodded at the screen. "I've learned a number of things about you."
"Why did you pick me up?"
"Curiosity is as good a word as any."
"If you were tailing them, how did you manage to get here first?"
"I extrapolated their route and got ahead of them. I was lucky; I spotted you in time."
"How? It's a dark night, and I was showing no lights."
"I used an instrument which responds to . . . certain characteristics of matter."
"Make that a little plainer, will you, Bayard?"
"I'm not being intentionally mysterious," he said, "but there are regulations."
"Whose regulations?"
"I can't tell you that."
"So I just ask you to drop me at the next corner, and go on home and have a couple of drinks as if nothing had happened. By tomorrow the whole thing will seem silly—except for my boat."
He stared at the screen. "No, you can't do that, of course." He gave me a sharp stare. "Are you sure you're not holding something back? Something that would shed some light on all this?"
"You're the man of mystery, not me. I'm just a fisherman—or was until today."
"Not just any fisherman. A fisherman named Richard Henry Geoffrey Edward Curlon."
"I didn't think there was anyone alive who knew I had three middle initials."
"He knows. He also knows something that makes you important enough to be the object of a full-scale Net operation. I'd like to know what it is."
"It must be a case of mistaken identity. There's nothing about me to interest anyone except a specialist in hard-luck cases."
Bayard frowned at me. "Do you mind if I run a few tests on you? It will only take a minute or two. Nothing unpleasant."
"That will be a nice change," I said. "What kind of tests, for what purpose?"
"To find out what it is about you that interests them," he nodded at the screen. "I'll tell you the results—if any." He took out a gadget and ran it over me like a photographer checking light levels.
"If the word hadn't already been overworked," he said, "I'd call these readings impossible." He pointed to a green needle that wavered, hunting around a luminous dial, like a compass at the North Pole. "According to this, you're in an infinite number of places at the same time. And this one—" he indicated a smaller dial with a glowing yellow arrow, "says that the energy levels concentrated in your area are of the order of ten thousand percent or normal."
"Your wires are crossed," I suggested.
"Apparently," he went on thinking out loud, "you represent a nexus point in what is known as a probability stress pattern. Unless I miss my guess, a major nexus."
"Meaning what?"
"That great affairs hinge on you, Mr. Curlon. What, or how, I don't know. But strange things are happening—and you're at the center of them. What you do next could have a profound effect on the future of the world—of many worlds."
"Slow down," I said. "Let's stick to reality."
"There is more than one reality, Mr. Curlon," Bayard said flatly.
"Who did you say you were again?" I asked him.
"Bayard. Colonel Brion Bayard of Imperial Intelligence."
"Intelligence, eh? And Imperial at that. Sounds a little old-fashioned—unless you're working for Haile Selassie."
"The Imperium is a great power, Mr. Curlon. But please accept my word that my government is not inimical to yours."
"Nowadays, that's something. How is it you speak American without an accent?"
"I was born in Ohio. But let's leave that aside for the moment. I've bought some time by whisking you out from under his nose, but he won't give up. And he has vast resources at his disposal." I still had the feeling he was talking to himself.
"All right, you've bought time," I prompted him. "What are you going to do with it?"
Bayard pointed to a dial with a slim red needle that trembled over a compass face. "This instrument is capable of tracing relationships of a high order of abstraction. Given a point of fixture, it indicates the position of artifacts closely associated with the subject. At the moment, it indicates a distant source, to the east of our present position."
"Science, Mr. Bayard? Or witchcraft?"
"The wider science ranges, the more it impinges on the area of what was once known as the occult. But after all, occult merely means hidden."
"What does all this have to do with me?"
"The instrument is attuned to you, Mr. Curlon. If we follow it, it may lead us to the answers to your questions. And mine."
"And when we get there—then what?"
"That depends on what we find."
"You don't give away much, do you, Colonel?" I said. "I've had a long day. I appreciate your picking me off my boat before she went under—and I suppose I owe you some thanks for saving me from another taste of that nerve-gun. But the question-and-no-answer game is wearing me down."
"Let's reach an understanding, Mr. Curlon," Bayard said. "If I could explain, you'd understand—but the explanation would involve telling you the things I can't tell you."
"We're talking in circles, Colonel. I suppose you know that."
"The circle is tightening, Mr. Curlon. I'm hoping it isn't a noose that will choke us all."
"That's pretty dramatic language, isn't it, Colonel? You make it sound like the end of the world."
Bayard nodded, holding his eyes. In the varicolored light from the instrument panel, his face was hard, set in lines of tension.
"Precisely, Mr. Curlon," he said.
The moon rose, painting a silver highway across the water. We bypassed Bermuda, saw the light of the Azores in the distance. Two more hours passed, while the ocean unrolled under us, until the shore of France came into view dead ahead.
"The proximity sensors are registering in the beta range now," Bayard said. "We're within a few miles of what we're looking for."
He moved a lever and the moonlit curve of the shore dropped away under us. It was swift, noiseless, smooth. We leveled off at a height of a couple of hundred feet over tilled fields, swung over the tiled rooftops of a small village, followed a narrow, winding road that cut through a range of wooded hills. Far ahead, a wide river glittered against the black land.
"The Seine," Bayard said. He studied the illuminated chart that unrolled on a small screen before him, with a red dot in the center that represented our position.
"The indicator is reading in the red now. Not much farther."
Ahead, the river curved between high banks. At the widest point, there was a steep, tree-covered island.
"Does any of this look familiar to you?" Bayard asked. "Have you ever been here before?"
"No. It doesn't look like much. A river, and an island."
"Not just an island, Mr. Curlon," Bayard said. "Take a closer look." There was a note of suppressed excitement in his voice.
"There's a building," I said. I could make it out now: a massive pile of stone, topped by castellated towers.
"A rather famous building—known as Chateau Gaillard," Bayard said. He glanced at me. "Does the name mean anything to you?"
"I've heard of it. Pretty old, isn't it?"
"About eight hundred years." All the while we talked, the shuttle was gliding in across the river, toward the stone walls and towers of the fortress. Bayard adjusted levers and we stopped, hanging in empty air about fifty feet from the face of the high wall. There was ivy growing there, and in the spaces between the dark leaves the stone looked as old as the rocks below.
"We're within five hundred feet of the center of resonance," Bayard said. "It's somewhere below us." The wall in front of us slid upward as the shuttle dropped vertically. There were narrow loopholes in the stonework, between weathered buttresses that gripped the rockface like talons. We leveled off at the base of the wall.
"Our target is some twelve feet below this point, and approximately sixteen feet to the north-northeast," Bayard said.
"That puts it somewhere in the foundations," I said. "It seems we're out of luck."
"You're about to have another unusual experience," Mr. Curlon," Bayard said. "Hold on to your equanimity." He flipped a switch. The view on the screen faded into a sort of luminous blue, the color of a gas flame, and about as solid-looking. He moved the controls, and the ghost-wall slid upward. The line of rubble that was the surface slid past, like water rising over a periscope, and the screen went solid blue, with clearly defined stratum lines running across it at an angle. There were a few embedded stones, a darker shade of blue, like lumps of gelatin floating in an aquarium, some gnarled roots, pale and transparent, pieces of broken pottery. The screen went darker, almost opaque.
"We're into the solid rock now," Bayard said in a tone as calm as if he were pointing out movie stars' homes. We stopped, and I felt a few million tons of the planet pushing in at me. It gave me a strange, insubstantial feeling, as if I were nothing but a pattern drawn in smoke, like the gaseous granite just beyond the thin hull.
"As I said, quite a machine," I grunted. "What else will she do?"
Bayard showed me a faint smile and touched the controls. The texture of the rock swirled around us like muddy water with a dim light shining through it. We eased forward about ten feet, and slid out through a wall and were in a small room, stone walled and floored, windowless, thick with dust. It was almost bright here, after the trip through the rock. There were things in the room: the tattered shreds of a rotted tapestry on the wall, a wooden bench, crudely made from rough planks, heaped with dust; some metal plates and mugs ornately decorated with colored stones, pieces of gaudy jewelry, lumps of rusted iron.
"I think maybe we've found something, Mr. Curlon," Bayard said, and now he didn't sound quite so calm. "Shall we step out and have a closer look?"
Bayard did things with his levers and a soft hum I'd forgotten I was hearing ran down the scale, and the scene on the viewplate faded, as if a projector had been switched off. He snapped another switch and a harsh white light glared against the bleak walls, casting black shadows in the corners. The panel slid back and I stepped out after him. The dust was a soft carpet underfoot; the odor of age in the air was like all the musty books in all the forgotten libraries.
"An old storeroom," Bayard said in the kind of hushed voice that went with a disturbed grave. "Sealed up, probably centuries ago."
"It could do with a sweeping," I said.
"The cloth and wood and leather have rotted away, except for the heavier pieces. And most of the metal has oxidized."
I stirred a heap of rust with my foot. A flake the size of a saucer crumbled off. Bayard went to one knee, poked at the corrosion, lifted the curved piece clear.
"This is a genouillère," he said. "A knee guard; part of a suit of chain armor."
He had an instrument like a Geiger counter in his hand, with a pointer on a cable that he aimed around the room.
"There are extraordinary forces at work here," he said. "The Net tension reading is off the end of the scale."
"Meaning?"
"The fabric of reality is stretched to the breaking point. It's almost as if there were a discontinuity in the continuum—a break in the entropic sequence. Forces like these can't exist, Mr. Curlon—not for long—not without neutralization!"
He changed the settings on the gadget he was holding, swung around to point it at me.
"You seem to represent the focus of a strongly polarized energy flow," he said. He came closer, pointed the instrument at my face, waved it down across my chest, stopped with the thing aimed at my left hip.
"The knife," he said. "May I see it?"
I took it out and handed it over. It was nothing much to look at: a wide, thick blade, about a foot long, ground to a rather crude point, with a stubby cross-guard and an oversized, leather-wrapped handle. It wasn't the handiest scaling knife in the world, but I'd had it a long time. Bayard held the metal pointer against it and looked incredulous.
"Where did you get this, Mr. Curlon?"
"I found it."
"Where?"
"In a trunk, in an attic, a long time ago."
"Whose trunk? Whose attic? Think carefully, Mr. Curlon. This may be of vital importance."
"It was my grandfather's attic, the day after he died. The trunk had been in the family a long time; the story was it belonged to a sea-faring ancestor, back in the eighteen hundreds. I was rummaging in it and turned the knife up. I kept it. I don't know why. It's not much, as knives go, but it seemed to fit my hand pretty well."
Bayard looked closely at the blade. "There's lettering here," he said. "It looks like Old French: Dieu et mon droit."
"We didn't come all this way just to study my knife," I said.
"Why keep calling it a knife, Mr. Curlon?" Bayard said. "We both know better." He gripped the hilt of the weapon and hefted it. "It's much too massive for a knife, too clumsy."
"What would you call it?"
"It's a broken sword, Mr. Curlon. Didn't you know?" He offered it to me, hilt first. As I took it, Bayard looked at his dials. "The reading went up into the blue when you took it in your hand," he said in a voice that was as taut as a tow-cable.
In my hand, the hilt of the knife seemed to tingle. It tugged, gently, as if invisible fingers were pulling at it. Bayard was watching my face. I felt sweat trickle down across my left eyebrow. Hackles I didn't know I had were trying to rise. I took a step and the pull became stronger. A vivid blue spark, like static electricity, played across a lump of rusted iron on the bench. Another step, and a faint blue halo sprang up around the end of the knife. From the corner of my eye, I saw that objects all around the room were glowing softly in the gloom. Dust trickled from the bench; something stirred there, rotated a few inches, stopped. I took a step sideways; it pivoted, following me.
Bayard stirred the dust with his finger, lifted a piece of pitted steel about three inches by six, beveled along both edges, with a groove along the central ridge.
"Just a piece of scrap iron," I said. "What made it move?"
"Unless I'm mistaken, Mr. Curlon," Bayard said, "it's a piece of your broken sword."