The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford

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СКАЧАТЬ capital of the United States, thirty years after the Treaty of Reunion.

      Diehl, by contrast, was a tall, thin man with a pale face that hid behind a short-trimmed, white-flecked beard and moustache. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and looked for all the world like a clerk. In fact, though, he was the head of the President’s security forces—effectively the master of the secret police.

      “Well?” said Diehl. “How did it happen?”

      “Somebody knew.”

      “That’s impossible.”

      Marcangelo shrugged. “They were there and waiting. They had the cage cut open before Heisenberg revived. They’d be clean away if Sheehan hadn’t managed to call in before he was chloroformed.”

      “The report says that he got in a shot at the man cutting the bars, and missed.”

      Marcangelo shrugged again. “As far as I can tell, he did what he could.”

      “But only one car was sent out. And they missed Heisenberg. It seems to me that the police fouled it up left, right and centre.”

      “They have the whole north side sealed off. The car can’t get out, and neither can Heisenberg. Maybe the police did fall down, but where were your men? Somebody knew that he was going to wake up tonight, and we didn’t even know that it was possible to predict that. You didn’t manage to pick Wishart up?”

      Diehl frowned, in a way that suggested mild petulance rather than outright anger. “He wasn’t there,” he said. “He’s gone underground.”

      “So he knew.”

      Diehl shook his head. “I don’t think so. The tap on his phone picked up a peculiar garbled hum just about the time it must have happened. Wishart answered it, but what was said was blotted out somehow—scrambled. I think that was the first Wishart knew. That call warned him to get out. Somebody else got Heisenberg out of the stadium: someone who knows how to scramble a call on a tapped phone.” Marcangelo looked at the thin man steadily. “And you have no idea who?”

      “Have you?” retorted Diehl.

      “It seems that everyone’s fouled up,” said Marcangelo, mildly. “Recriminations aren’t going to help. We have to find him, that’s all. It should only be a matter of time.”

      “It should,” echoed Diehl, grimly.

      “If he’s still alive,” added Marcangelo, with a lightness of tone that was obviously false.

      “If?”

      “A car crashed through one of the barriers about fifteen minutes ago, heading north. The barricade wasn’t strong enough—it was a minor road. Two cars went after it. While trying to shake them off it went into a bad skid and came off the road. Before the police got to it, it went up. Not just the petrol tank—the officer in the first car said there must have been a bomb. It turned the car into a heap of slag.”

      “The car that was used to get Heisenberg away?”

      “We don’t know.”

      “How many bodies?”

      “Apparently, none. It was quite some explosion.”

      Diehl’s face seemed as white as chalk in the bright electric light. In the silence which fell Marcangelo could hear the faint throb of the heating system. Even in the coldest night the Manse was kept warm. It was President Lindenbaum’s official residence, but tonight the president was out of town. A helicopter was bringing him back to deal with the emergency.

      “The police need support, Nick,” said Marcangelo, his voice still level and natural. “Castagna could do with a couple of hundred of your men, at least, to run a dragnet through the north side.”

      “I’ll tell Laker to put our agents on the street,” replied Diehl, almost absent-mindedly, as if he were still preoccupied with what Marcangelo had told him about the car that had crashed the barrier. “We’ll raid every house where we know of any connection with Wishart’s organization. Laker and Castagna can co-ordinate the operation. If he is dead, you know, it could simplify our problems considerably.”

      Marcangelo shook his head decisively. “It might simplify them, but it would make them a damn sight more difficult. We need Heisenberg. We could hold on by sheer brute strength, and maybe weather the storm, but we’d lose control in the long run, and the country—maybe the world—would go slowly to hell. More than half the workforce are followers of Heisenberg in some sense or other. Their hopes of what might happen when he returns are all that’s keeping the economy staggering along. We could handle the initial shock if we were to lose him, but we’d never put the pieces together again well enough to stop the rot that’s sending us slowly into a new dark age. Without Heisenberg, we’ll lose everything.”

      It was a speech that Marcangelo had made many times before. It was a position he’d taken up some years previously, and he was convinced of its truth. The capital was now the only city in the States with more than a million inhabitants. Since the eastern seaboard had been bombed out, together with most of the south-west, the USA had been in the grip of a slow decline.

      The population was stabilizing again now that the last of the plagues had shot its bolt, but there were millions who existed only as silver statues locked in time—escapists, mostly carrying plague or already dying from radiation poisoning. The city still lived and maintained a front of technological civilization, but elsewhere the population was moving back to the rural areas as agriculture became a labor-intensive business again. There was still fuel for tractors, but only because the plagues had left such big reserves. Within another generation, the farmers would be using horses again, and cars would disappear from the roads. The loss wasn’t irremediable, but if the backsliding were to be halted and reversed there would have to be some very powerful motivating force to mobilize and co-ordinate the efforts of the people.

      Only Paul Heisenberg could provide that motivation, because Paul Heisenberg, thanks to the accident of fate that had made him the first time-jumper, had become the focus of the hopes of countless people—even people who could not jump themselves. Only Paul Heisenberg could stem the steady drain of escapists, who set off for an uncertain future rather than stay in a derelict present, because it was in his name that most of them jumped. It was the future he had talked about (though never explicitly described) in his book that gave the jumpers something to aim for, and the evidence even suggested that it was faith in his holy word that permitted most jumpers actually to project themselves into stasis. It was not that there was anything special about his words—it was faith itself that seemed to be important—but faith in Paul Heisenberg’s crazy doctrine of metascientific speculation was the most widespread and powerful faith left in the western hemisphere.

      Marcangelo knew that Diehl didn’t see things the same way. Diehl wasn’t really a long-term thinker, and his imagination extended no further than commonplace political expediency. What Diehl cared about was power, and it didn’t particularly matter to him whether the world was going headfirst down to hell or not, just as long as he could stay on top of it all the way. So far, Lindenbaum had always taken the same line as Marcangelo, but now that the situation had come to a head, things might change very quickly indeed.

      “If Heisenberg were to get out,” said Diehl, pensively, “and Wishart were to get hold of him....”

      “He can’t,” said Marcangelo. “All of Wishart’s strength is south of the river. You’ve СКАЧАТЬ