Assignment in Nowhere

Chapter Eight

At the Albergo Romulus, Olivia and I had adjoining rooms well up under the eaves, with ceilings that slanted down to a pair of dormer windows opening onto a marketplace with a handsome Renaissance fountain, the incessant flutter of pigeons’ wings, and a day and night shrilling of excited Italian voices. We were sitting at the small table in my room, eating a late breakfast of pizzas, washed down with a musty red wine that cost so little that even the local begging corps could afford to keep a mild buzz on most of the time.

“The two men I’m interested in were born somewhere in northern Italy about 1850,” I told Olivia. “They came to Rome as young men, studied engineering and electronics, and in 1893 made the basic discovery that gave the Imperium the Net drive. I’m gambling that if Baum managed to get himself born, and in the nineties was writing something pretty close to what he did in my world—and in the Zero-zero A-line too—then maybe Maxoni and Cocini existed here too. They didn’t perfect the M-C drive, obviously—or if they did, the secret died with them—but maybe they came close. Maybe they left something I can use.”

“Brion, did you not tell me that ail the worlds that lie about your Zero-zero line are desolate, blasted into ruin by these very forces? Is it safe to tamper with such fell instruments as these?”

“I’m a fair shuttle technician, Olivia. I know most of the danger points. Maxoni and Cocini didn’t realize what they were playing with. They stumbled on the field by blind luck—”

“And in a thousand million other worlds of might-have-been they failed, and brought ruin in their wake…”

“You knew all this when we left Harrow,” I said shortly. “It’s my only chance—and a damned poor chance it is, I’ll admit. But I can’t build a shuttle from scratch—there’s a specially wound coil that’s the heart of the field-generator. I’ve installed ’em, but I never tried to wind one. Maybe—if there was a Maxoni here, and a Cocini—and they made the same chance discovery—and they wrote up their notes like good little researchers—and the notes still exist—and I can find them—”

Olivia laughed—a charming, girlish laugh. “If the gods decree that all those ifs are in your favor—why then ’tis plain, they mean you to press on. I’ll risk it, Brion. The vision of the Sapphire City still beckons me.”

“It’s the Emerald City, where I come from,” I said. “But we won’t quibble over details. Let’s see if we can find those notes first. We’ll have plenty of time then to decide what to do with them.”

n hour later, at the local equivalent of a municipal record center, a tired-looking youth in a narrow-cut black suit showed me a three-foot ledger in which names were written in spidery longhand—thousands of names, followed by dates, places of birth, addresses, and other pertinent details.

“Sicuro, Signore,” he said in a tone of weary superiority, “the municipality, having nothing to hide, throws open to you its records—among the most complete archives in existence in the Empire—but as for reading them…” he smirked, tweaked his hairline mustache. “That the Signore must do for himself.”

“Just explain to me what I’m looking at,” I suggested gently. “I’m looking for a record of Giulio Maxoni, or Carlo Cocini—”

“Yes, yes, so you said. And here before you is the registration book in which the names of all new arrivals in the city were recorded at the time identity papers were issued. They came to Rome in 1870, you said—or was it 1880? You seemed uncertain. As for me…” he spread his hands. “I am even more uncertain. I have never heard of these relatives—or friends—or ancestors—or whatever they might be. In them, you, it appears, have an interest. As for me—I have none. There is the book, covering the decade in question. Look all you wish. But do not demand miracles of me! I have duties to perform!” His voice developed an irritated snap on the last words. He strutted off to sulk somewhere back in the stacks. I grunted and started looking.

Twenty minutes passed quietly. We worked our way through 1870, started on 1871. The busy archivist peered out once to see what we were doing, withdrew after a sour look. Olivia and I stood at the wooden counter, poring over the crabbed longhand, each taking one page of about two hundred names. She was a fast reader; before I had finished my page, she had turned to the next. Half a minute later she gave a sharp gasp.

“Brion! Look! Giulio Maxoni, born 1847 at Paglio; trade, artificer—”

I looked. It was the right name. I tried not to let myself get too excited—but my pulse picked up in spite of the voice of prudence whispering in my ear that there might be hundreds of Giulio Maxonis.

“Nice work, girl,” I said in a cool, controlled voice that only broke twice on the three words. “What address?”

She read it off. I jotted it down in a notebook I had thoughtfully provided for the purpose, added the other data from the ledger. We searched for another hour, but found no record of Cocini. The clerk came back and hovered, as though we’d overstayed our welcome. I closed the book and shoved it across the counter to him.

“Don’t sweat it, Jack,” I said genially. “We’re just making up a sucker list for mailings on budget funerals.”

“Mailings?” He stared at me suspiciously. “Municipal records are not intended for such uses—and in any event—these people are all long since dead!”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “A vast untapped market for our line of goods. Thanks heaps. I’ll make a note to give you special treatment when your time comes.”

We walked away in a silence you could have cut into slabs with a butter knife.

Maxoni had lived at number twelve, Via Carlotti, fourth floor, number nine. With the aid of a street map purchased from an elderly entrepreneur in a beret and a soiled goatee who offered us a discount on racy postcards, which I declined with regret, we found it—a narrow alley, choked with discarded paper cartons, vegetable rinds, overflowing garbage barrels, and shoeless urchins who dodged madly among the obstacles, cheerfully exchanging badinage which would have made Mussolini blush. Number twelve was a faded late Renaissance front of rusticated granite wedged between sagging, boarded-up warehouses no more than a hundred or so years old. Maxoni, it appeared, had started his career in the most modest quarters available. Even a century ago, this had been a slum. I pushed open the caked door, stepped into a narrow hall reeking of garlic, cheese, decay, and less pleasant things.

“It looks terrible, Brion,” Olivia said. “Perhaps we’d best make enquiries first—”

A door opened and a round, olive face set in cushions of fat looked out, and launched into a stream of rapid Italian.

“Your pardon, Madam,” I replied in the courtly accents I had learned from the Roman Ambassador to the Imperial court. “We are but foreigners, visiting the Eternal City for the first time. We seek the apartment where once our departed relative dwelt, long ago, when the gods favored him with the privilege of breathing the sweet air of sunny Italy.”

Her jaw dropped; she stared; then a grin the size of a tenlira pizza spread across her face.

“Buon giorno, Signore e Signorina!” She squeezed out into the hall, pumped our hands, yelled instructions back into her flat—from which a mouth-watering aroma of ravioli emanated—and demanded to know how she could serve the illustrious guests of fair Italy. I gave her the number of the apartment where Maxoni had lived, ninety-odd years before, and she nodded, started up the narrow stair, puffing like the steam-engine that we had ridden across Europe for two days and nights. Olivia followed and I brought up the rear; admiring the deposits of broken glass, paper, rags and assorted rubbish that packed every step and landing, with a trail winding up through the center worn by the feet of centuries of tenants. I would have given odds that the bits Maxoni might have contributed were still there, somewhere.

At the top, we went along a narrow hall, past battered-looking doors with white china knobs, stopped at the one at the end.

“There is a tenant, Signore,” the landlady said. “But he is away now, at his job in the fish market that I, Sophia Gina Anna Maria Scumatti, procured for him! Believe me, if I hadn’t given him an ultimatum that the rent must be paid or out he’d go, he’d be sleeping now, snoring like a serviced sow, while I, Sophia Gina—”

“Undoubtedly the Signora has to endure much from ungrateful tenants,” I soothed. I had a hundred lira note ready in my jacket pocket—the same oddly cut jacket that had been in the closet at Gunvor’s house. I fished the bill out, tendered it with an inclination of the head.

“If the Signora will accept this modest contribution—”

Mama Scumatti’ puffed out her cheeks, threw out her imposing bosom.

“It is my pleasure to serve the guest of Italy,” she started; I pulled the bill back.

“…but let it not be said that I, Gina Anna Maria Scumatti, was ungracious—” Fat fingers plucked the note from my hand, dropped it into a cleavage like the Grand Canyon. “Would the Signore and Signorina care to enter?” She fumbled a three-inch key from a pocket, jammed it into a keyhole you could have put a finger through, twisted it, threw the door wide.

“Vidi!”

I looked in at a collapsed cot snarled with dirty blankets, a broken-down table strewn with garishly colored comics, empty coffee cups, stained, finger-greased glasses, and a half-loaf of dry-looking bread. There was a bureau, a broken mirror with racing tickets tucked under the frame, a wooden Jesus dangling on the wall, and an assortment of empty wine and liquor bottles bearing the labels of inferior brands, scattered about the room. The odor of the place was a sour blend of unlaundered bedding, old socks, and a distillery infested with mice.

I looked at Olivia. She gave me a cool smile, turned to our hostess.

“May we go in?”

Sophia Gina wrinkled her brow at me. “My sister would like to go inside and… ah… commune with the spirit of our departed progenitor,” I translated freely.

The black, unplucked eyebrows went up. “But, as the Signore sees, the room is occupied!”

“We won’t touch a thing; just look at it. A very emotional moment for us, you understand.”

A knowing look crept over the round face. She gave Olivia, still wearing her makeup and rings, an appraising once-over, then looked me in the eye; one eyelid dipped in an unmistakable wink.

“Ah, but naturally, Signore! You and your… sister… would of course wish to commune—in private. Another hundred lira, please.” She was suddenly brisk. I forked over silently, trying to look just a little hangdog.

“I dislike to hurry the Signore,” the concierge said as she shook the second note down into the damp repository. “But try to finish in say two hours, si? There is the chance that Gino will be back for lunch.” An elbow the size and texture of a football dug into my side. Two fat, broken-nailed hands outlined an hourglass in the air; two small black eyes rolled; then Mama Scumatti was waddling off, a hippo in a black skirt.

“What said the fat scoundrel?” Olivia demanded.

“Just admiring your figure,” I said hastily, “let’s take a look around and see what clues we can turn up.”

Half an hour later Olivia stood in the center of the room, still wrinkling her nose, hands on hips, a lock of hair curling down over her damp forehead.

“ ’Twas a hopeless quest from the first,” she said. “Let’s be off, before my stomach rebels.”

I dusted off my hands, grimy from groping on the backs of shelves and under furniture. “We’ve looked in all the obvious places,” I said. “But what about the unlikely spots? We haven’t checked for loose floorboards, secret panels, fake pictures on the wall—”

“ ’Tis a waste of time, Brion! This man was not a conspirator, to squirrel away his secrets in the mattress! He was a poor young student, no more, living in a rented room—”

“I’m thinking of little things he might have dropped; a bit of paper that could have gotten stuck in the back of a drawer, maybe. Nobody ever cleans this place. There’s no reason something like that couldn’t still be here, even after all these years.”

“Where? You’ve had the drawers out, rooted in the base of the chest, lifted that ragged scrap of rug, probed behind the baseboard—”

She trailed off; her eyes were on the boxed-in radiator set under the one small window. The wooden panels were curled, split, loose-fitting. We both moved at once. Olivia deftly set aside the empty Chianti bottles and the tin can half full of cigarette butts. I got a grip on the top board, lifted gingerly. The whole assembly creaked, moved out.

“Just a couple of rusty nails holding it,” I said. “I’ll lever it free…”

A minute later, with the help of a wooden coat hanger lettered “Albergo Torino, Roma,” I had eased the housing away from the wall, revealing A rusted iron radiator, a few inches of piping, enough dust devils to fill a shoe box—and a drift of cigarette butts, ticket stubs, bits of string, hairpins, a playing card, paper clips, and papers.

“It was a good idea,” I said. “Too bad it didn’t pan out.” Silently, I replaced the cover, put the bottles and ashtray back. “You were right, Olivia. Let’s get back out in the street where we can get a nice wholesome odor of fresh garbage—”

“Brion, look!” Olivia was by the window, turning the blank scrap of paper at an angle to catch the sun. “The ink has faded, but there was something written here…”

I came over, squinted at the paper. The faintest of faint marks were visible. Olivia put the paper on the table, rubbed it gently over the dusty surface, then held it up to the mirror. The ghostly outline of awkward penmanship showed as a grey line.

“Rub it a little more,” I said tensely. “Careful—that paper’s brittle as ash.” She complied, held it to the mirror again. This time I could make out letters:

Instituzione Galileo Mercoledi Giugno 7. 3 P.M.

“Wednesday, June 7th,” I translated. “This just might be something useful. I wonder what year that was?”

“I know a simple formula for calculating the day on which a given date must fall,” Olivia said breathlessly. “ ’Twill take but a moment…”

She nibbled at her lip, frowning in concentration. Suddenly her expression lightened. “Yes! It fits! June 7, 1871 fell on a Wednesday!” She frowned. “As did that date in 1899, 1911—”

“It’s something—that’s better than nothing at all. Let’s check it out. The Galileo Institute. Let’s hope it’s still in business.”

A dried-up little man in armbands and an eyeshade nibbled a drooping yellowed mustache and listened in silence, his veined hands resting on the counter top as though holding it in place as a barrier against smooth-talking foreign snoopers.

“Eighteen seventy-one. That was a considerable time in the past,” he announced snappishly. “There have been many students at the Institute since then. Many illustrious scientists have passed through these portals, bringing glory to the name of Galileo.” An odor of cheap wine drifted across from his direction. Apparently we had interrupted his midmorning snort.

“I’m not applying for admission,” I reminded him. “You don’t have to sell me. All I want is a look at the record of Giulio Maxoni. Of course, if your filing system is so fouled up you can’t find it, you can just say so, and I’ll report the fact in the article I’m writing—”

“You are a journalist?” He straightened his tie, gave the mustache a twirl, and eased something into a drawer out of sight behind the counter, with a clink of glass.

“Just give me the same treatment you’d accord any humble seeker after facts,” I said loftily. “After all, the public is the owner of the Institute; surely it should receive the fullest attention of the staff whose bread and vino are provided by the public’s largesse…”

That got to him. He made gobbling sounds, hurried away, came back wheezing under a volume that was the twin to the municipal register, slammed it down on the counter, blew a cloud of dust in my face, and lifted the cover.

“Maxoni, you said, sir. 1871… 1871…” he paused, popped his eyes at me. “That wouldn’t be the Maxoni?” His natural suspicious look was coming back.

“Ahhh…” a variety of sudden emotions were jostling each other for space on my face. “The Maxoni?” I prompted.

“Giulio Maxoni, the celebrated inventor,” he snapped. He turned and waved a hand at a framed deguerrotype, one of a long, sombre row lining the room. “Inventor of the Maxoni churn, the Maxoni telegraph key, the Maxoni Improved Galvanic Buggy Whip—it was that which made his fortune, of course—”

I smiled complacently, like an inspector who has failed to find an error in the voucher files. “Very good. I see you’re on your toes here at the Institute. I’ll just have a look at the record, and then…” I let it trail off as Smiley spun the book around, pointed out a line with a chewed fingernail.

“Here it is, right here. His original registration in the College of Electrics. He was just a lad from a poor farming community then. It was here at the Institute that he got his start. We were one of the first, of course, to offer lectures in electrics. The Institute was one of the sponsors of the Telegraphic Conference, later in that same year…” He rattled on with the sales pitch that had undoubtedly influenced many an old alumnus or would-be patron of the sciences to fork over that extra bundle, while I read the brief entry. The address in the Via Carlotti was given, the fact that Maxoni was twenty-four, a Catholic, and single. Not much help there…

“Is there any record,” I inquired, “as to where he lived—after he made his pile?”

The little man stiffened. “Made his pile, sir? I fear I do not understand…”

“Made his great contribution to human culture, I mean,” I amended. “Surely he didn’t stay on at the Via Carlotti very long.”

A sad smile twitched at one corner of the registrar’s tight mouth.

“Surely the gentleman jests? The location on the Museum is, I think, well known—even to tourists.”

“What museum?”

The gnome spread his hands in a gesture as Roman as grated cheese.

“What other than the museum housed in the former home and laboratory of Giulio Maxoni? The shrine wherein are housed the relics of his illustrious career.”

Beside me, Olivia was watching the man’s face, wondering what we were talking about. “Pay dirt,” I said to her. Then:

“You don’t have the address of this museum handy, by any chance?

This netted me a superior smile. A skinny finger pointed at the wall beside him.

“Number twenty-eight, Strada d’Allenzo. One square east. Any child could direct you.”

“We’re in business, girl,” I said to Olivia.

“Ah… what was the name of the paper you… ah… claim to represent?” the little man’s voice was a nice mixture of servility and veiled insolence. He was dying to be insulting, but wasn’t quite sure it was safe.

“We’re with the Temperance League,” I said, and sniffed loudly. “The Maxoni questions were just a dodge, of course. We’re doing a piece entitled: ‘Drinking on Duty, and What it Costs the Taxpayer.’ “

He was still standing in the same position, goggling after us, when we stepped out into the bright sunshine.

The Maxoni house was a conservative, stone-fronted building that would have done credit to any street in the East Seventies back home. There was a neglected-looking brass plate set above the inner rail beside the glass-paneled door, announcing that the Home and Laboratories of the Renowned Inventor Giulio Maxoni were maintained by voluntary contributions to the Society for the Preservation of Monuments to the Glory of Italy, and were open 9—4, Monday through Saturday, and on Sundays, 1—6 P.M. A card taped to the glass invited me to ring the bell. I did. Time passed. A dim shape moved beyond the glass, bolts rattled, the door creaked open, and a frowzy, sleep-blurred female blinked out.

“It’s closed. Go away,” said the voice like the last whinny of a dying plow horse. I got a foot into the narrowing space between the door and the jamb.

“The sign says—” I started brightly.

“Bugger the sign,” the blurry face wheezed. “Come back tomorrow—”

I put a shoulder against the door, bucked it open, sending the charming receptionist reeling back. She caught her balance, hitched up a sagging bra strap, and raised a hand, fingers spread, palm facing her, opened her mouth to demonstrate what was probably an adequate command of Roman idiom—

“Ah—ah, don’t say it,” I cautioned her. “The Contessa here is unaccustomed to the vigor of modern speech. She’s led a sheltered life, tucked away there in her immense palazzo at Lake Constance…”

“Contessa?” A hideous leer that was probably intended as a simper contorted the sagging face. “Oh, my, if I only would’ve known her Grace was honoring our little shrine with a visit—” She fled.

“A portal guarded by a dragon,” Olivia said. “And the fair knight puts her to rout with but a word.”

“I used a magic spell on her. You’re promoted to Contessa now. Just smile distantly and act aloof.” I looked around the room. It was a standard entry hall, high-ceilinged, cream-colored, with a stained-glass window shedding colored light across a threadbare, once-fine rug, picking up highlights on a marble-topped table in need of dusting, twinkling in the cut-glass pendants of a rather nice Victorian chandelier. A wide, carpeted stairway led up to a sunlit landing with another stained-glass panel. A wide, arched opening to the left gave a view of a heavy table with pots of wax flowers and an open book with a pen and inkpot beside it. There were rows of shelves sagging under rows of dusty books, uncomfortable looking horsehair chairs and sofas, a fireplace with tools under a mantel on which china gimcracks were arranged in an uneven row.

“Looks like Maxoni went in for bourgeois luxury in a large way, once he got onto the buggy-whip boom,” I commented. “I wonder where the lab is?”

Olivia and I wandered around the room, smelling the odor of age and dust and furniture polish. I glanced over a few of the titles on the shelves.

Experiments with Alternating Currents of High Potential and High Frequency by Nikola Tesla caught my eye, and a slim pamphlet by Marconi. Otherwise the collection seemed to consist of good, solid Victorian novels and bound volumes of sermons. No help here.

The dragon came back, looking grotesque in a housecoat of electric green—a tribute to Maxoni’s field of research, no doubt. A layer of caked-looking makeup had been hastily slapped across her face, and a rose-bud mouth drawn on by a shaky hand. She laced her fingers together, did a curtsey like a trained elephant, gushed at Olivia, who inclined her head an eighth of an inch and showed a frosty smile. This example of aristocratic snobbishness delighted the old girl; she beamed so hard I thought the makeup was going to crack like plaster in an earthquake. A wave of an economical perfume rolled over me like a dust storm.

“Her Grace wishes to see the laboratories where Maxoni did his great work,” I announced, fanning. “You may show us there at once.”

She shouldered in ahead of me to get a spot nearer the duchess and with much waving of ringed hands and trailing of fringes, conducted us along a narrow hall beside the staircase, through a door into a weedy garden, along a walk to a padlocked shed, chattering away the whole time.

“Of course, the workrooms are not yet fully restored,” she uttered, hauling a key from a baggy pocket. She got the lock open, stopped as she groped inside, grunted as she found the light switch. A yellowish glow sprang up. Olivia and I stared in at dust, lumpy shapes covered with tarpaulines, dust, heaped cartons, dust, grimed windows, and more dust.

“He worked here?”

“Of course it was not so cluttered then. We’re short of funds, you see, your Grace,” she got the sell in. “We haven’t yet been able to go through the items here and catalogue them, dispose of the worthless things, and restore the laboratory to its original condition… “ She chattered on, unabashed by Olivia’s silence. I poked around, trying to look casual, but feeling far from calm. It was in this shed—or a near facsimile—that Maxoni had first made the breakthrough that had opened the worlds of alternate reality. Somewhere here, there might be… something. I didn’t know what I was looking for: a journal, a working model not quite perfected…

I lifted the corner of the dust cover over a heaped table, glanced at the assortment of ancient odds and ends: awkward, heavy-looking transformers, primitive vacuum tubes, bits of wire—

A massive object at the center of the table caught my eye. I lifted the cover, reached for it, dragged it to me.

“Really, sir, I must insist that you disturb nothing!” my guardian hippo brayed in my ear. I jumped, let the tarp fall; dust whoofed into the air. “This is just as the professor left it, that last, fatal day.”

“Sorry,” I said, holding my face in what I hoped was a bland expression. “Looks like a collection of old iron to me.”

“Yes, Professor Maxoni was a bit eccentric. He saved all sorts of odd bits and pieces—and he was forever trying to fit them together. He’d had a dream, he used to tell my departed Papa—when he was alive, of course—the professor, I mean—and Papa too, of course—”

“Your father worked for Maxoni?”

“Didn’t you know? Oh, yes, he was his assistant, for ever so many years. Many’s the anecdote he could tell of the great man—”

“I don’t suppose he’s still living?”

“Papa? Dear Papa passed to his reward forty-three—or is it forty-four…?”

“He didn’t leave a journal, I suppose—filled with jolly reminiscenses of the professor?”

“No—Papa wasn’t what you’d call a lit’ry man.” She paused. “Of course, the professor himself was most diligent about his journal. Five big volumes. It’s one of the great tragedies of the Society that we’ve not yet had sufficient funds to publish.”

“Funds may yet be forthcoming, Madam,” I said solemnly. “The Contessa is particularly interested in publishing just such journals as you describe.”

“Oh!” The painted-on mouth made a lopsided 0 to match the exclamation. “Your Grace—”

“So if you’d just fetch it along, so that her Grace can glance over it…” I left the suggestion hanging.

“It’s in the safe, sir—but I have the key—I know I have the key, somewhere. I had it only last year—or was it the year before…?”

“Find it, my good woman,” I urged. “Her Grace and I will wait patiently here, thrilling to the thought that it was in this very room that the professor developed his galvanic buggy-whip.”

“Oh, no, that was before he took this house—”

“No matter; the journals, please.”

“Wouldn’t you rather come back inside? The dust here—”

“As I said, we’re thrilling to it. Hurry back…” I waved her through the door. Olivia looked at me questioningly.

“I’ve sent her off to find Maxoni’s journals,” I said. She must have noticed something in my voice.

“Brion, what is it?”

I stepped to the table, threw back the cover. The heavy assembly I had moved earlier dominated the scattering of articles around it.

“That,” I said, letting the note of triumph come through, “is a Moebius-wound coil, the central component of the M-C drive. If I can’t build a shuttle with that and the old boy’s journals, I’ll turn in my badge.”

The workshop I rented was a twelve-by-twenty space under a loft opening off a narrow alleyway that wound from the Strada d’ Allenzo to a side-branch of the Tiber, a trail that had probably been laid out by goats, back before Rome was big enough to call itself a town. The former occupant had been a mechanic of sorts. There were rusty pieces of steam-engine still lying in the corners, a few corroded hand tools resting among the dust-drifts on the sagging wall shelves at one side of the room, odds and ends of bolts and washers and metal shavings trodden into the oil-black, hard-as-concrete dirt floor. The old fellow who leased the premises to me had grumblingly cleared away the worst of the rubbish, and installed a large, battered metal-topped table. This, plus the Moebius coil, which I had bribed the Keeper of the Flame into letting me borrow, and the journals, constituted my lab equipment. Not much to start moving worlds with—but still, a start.

Olivia had gotten us rooms nearby, cheaper and better quarters than the Albergo Romulus. There was a small hot plate in her room, charcoal-fired; we agreed to husband our meager funds by having two meals a day in, and the other at one of the small neighborhood pasta palaces where the carafes of wine were put on the table as automatically as salt and pepper back home.

I started my research program by reading straight through all five journals, most of which were devoted to bitter comments on the current political situation—the capital had just been moved to Rome from Florence, and it was driving prices up—notes on some seemingly pointless researchers into magnetism, the details of a rather complicated but strictly Platonic affair with a Signora C., and worried budgetary computations that enlisted my fullest sympathy.

Only in the last volume did I start to strike interesting passages—the first, tentative hints of the Big Secret. Maxoni had been experimenting with coils; winding them, passing various types and amounts of electric current through them, and attempting to detect results. If he’d known more modern physics, he’d never have bothered, but in his ignorance, he persevered. Like Edison trying everything from horsehair to bamboo splints as filaments for his incandescent bulb, Maxoni doggedly tried, tested, noted results, and tried again. It was the purest of pure research. He didn’t know what he was looking for—and when he found it, he didn’t know what it was—at least not in this world. Of course, there had been no Cocini here. I didn’t know what the latter’s role had been back in the Zero-zero world line. It would be an interesting piece of reading for me when I got back—if I got back—if there were any place to get back to—

I let that line of thought die. It wasn’t getting me anywhere. The last volume of the journal yielded up its secrets, such as they were—a few scattered and fragmentary mentions of the coil-winding, and a line or two regarding strange manifestations obtained with the goldleaf electroscope when certain trickle currents were used.

A week had gone by, and I was ready to start the experimental phase. There were a few electrical supply houses in the city, mostly purveyors to the Universities and research institutes; electricity was far from the Reddy Kilowatt state in this world. I laid in a variety of storage batteries, oscillators, coils, condensers, vacuum tubes as big and clumsy as milk bottles, plus whatever else looked potentially useful. Then, at Olivia’s suggestion, I let her mesmerize me, take notes as I repeated everything my subconscious had retained of the training I’d had in Net Shuttle technology—which turned out to be twice as valuable as Maxoni’s notes.

They were pleasant days. I rose early, joined Olivia for breakfast, walked the two blocks to the shop, and toiled until lunch, recording my results in a book not much different from the ones Maxoni had used a century earlier. This was not a world of rapid change.

Olivia would come by at noon or a little after, looking fresh and cool, and healthier now, with the Roman sun giving her face the color it had lacked back in Harrow. The basket on her arm would produce sandwiches, pizzas, fruit, a bottle of wine. I had a couple of chairs by this time, and we’d spread our lunch on the corner of my formidable workbench, with the enigmatic bulk of the coil lying before us like some jealous idol in need of placating.

Then an afternoon of cut and fit and note, with curious passersby pausing at the open door to look in and offer polite greetings and shy questionings. By the time a month had passed, I was deferred to by all the local denizens as a mad foreigner with more than a suggestion of the sorcerer about him. But they were friendly, often dropping off a casual gift of a bottle or a salami or a wedge of pungent cheese, with a flourish of Roman compliments. Each evening, by the time the sun had dropped behind the crooked skyline across the way, and the shop had faded into deep shadow hardly relieved by the single feeble lamp I had strung up, my eyes would be blurring, my head ringing, my legs aching from the hours of standing hunched over the table. I would solemnly close the door, attach the heavy padlock, ignoring the fact that the door was nothing but a few thin boards hung from a pair of rusted hinges held in place by bent nails. Then walk home past the shops and stalls, their owners busy closing up now, up the stairs to the flat for a quick bath in the rust-stained tub down the hall, then out with Olivia to the evening’s treat. Sitting at the wobbly tables on the tile floors, often on a narrow terrace crowded beside a busy street, we talked, watched the people and the night sky, then went back to part at the flat door—she to her room, I to mine. It was a curious relationship, perhaps—though at the time, it seemed perfectly natural. We were coconspirators, engaged in a strange quest, half-detectives, half researchers, set apart from the noisy, workaday crowd all around us by the fantastic nature of the wildly impractical quest we were embarked on. She, for reasons of romantic fulfillment, and I, driven by a compulsion to tear through the intangible prison walls that had been dropped around me.

My estimate of Olivia’s age had been steadily revised downward. At first, in the initial shock of seeing Mother Goodwill unmasked, I had mentally assigned her a virginal fortyishness. Later, bedizened in her harlot’s finery—and enjoying every minute of the masquerade—she had seemed younger; perhaps thirty-five, I had decided. Now, with the paint scrubbed away, her hair cut and worn in a casual Roman style, her complexion warm and glowing from the sun and the walks, her figure as fine as ever in the neat, inexpensive clothes she had bought in the modest shops near our flat, I realized with a start one day, watching her scatter bread crumbs for the pigeons behind the shop and laughing at their clumsy waddle, that she was no more than in her middle twenties.

She looked up and caught me staring at her.

“You’re a beautiful girl, Olivia,” I said—in a wondering tone, I’m afraid. “What ever got you off on that Mombi kick?”

She looked startled, then smiled—a merrier expression than the Lady Sad-eyes look she used to favor.

“You’ve guessed it,” she said, sounding mischievous. “The old witch in the Sorceress of Oz—”

“Yes, but why?”

“I told you: my business. Who’d patronize a Wise Woman without warts on her chin?”

“Sure—but why haven’t you married?” I started to deliver the old saw about there being plenty of nice young men, but the look on her face saved me from that banality.

“Okay, none of my business,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to get personal, Olivia…” I trailed off, and we finished our walk in a silence which, if not grim, was certainly far from companionable.

Three weeks more, and I had assembled a formidable compilation of data—enough, I told Olivia when she came to the shop at ten P.M. to see what had kept me, to warrant starting construction of the secondary circuits—the portion of the shuttle mechanism with which I was most familiar.

“The big job,” I said, “was to calibrate the coil—find out what kind of power supply it called for, what sort of field strength it developed. That part’s done. Now all I have to do is set up the amplifying and focussing apparatus—”

“You make it sound so simple, Brion—and so safe.”

“I’m trying to convince myself,” I admitted. “It’s a long way from simple. It’s a matter of trying to equate a complicated assemblage of intangible forces; a little bit like balancing a teacup on a stream of water, except that I have a couple of dozen teacups, and a whole fire department’s worth of waterworks—and if I threw full power to the thing without the proper controls…”

“Then what?”

“Then I’d set up an irreversible cataclysm—of any one of a hundred possible varieties. A titanic explosion, that keeps on exploding: an uncontrolled eruption of matter from another continuum, like a volcano pouring out of the heart of a sun—or maybe an energy drain like Niagara, that would suck the heat away from this spot, freeze the city solid in a matter of minutes, put the whole planet under an ice cap in a month. Or—”

“ ’Tis sufficient. I understand. These are fearsome forces you toy with, Brion.”

“Don’t worry—I won’t pour the power into it until I know what I’m doing. There are ways of setting up auto-timed cutoffs for any test I run—and I’ll be using trickle power for a long time yet. The disasters that made the Blight, happened because the Maxonis and Cocinis of those other A-lines weren’t forewarned. They set her up and let her rip. The door to Hell has well-oiled hinges.”

“How long—before you’ll finish?”

“A few days. There isn’t a hell of a lot to the shuttle. I’ll build a simple box—out of pine slabs, if I have to—just something to keep me and the mechanism together. It’ll be a big, clumsy setup, of course—not compact like the Imperial models—but it’ll get me there, as long as the power flows. The drain isn’t very great. A stack of these six volt cells will give me all the juice I need to get me home.”

“And if the Xonijeel were right,” she said softly, “if the world you seek lies not where you expect—what then?”

“Then I’ll run out of steam and drop into the Blight, and that’ll be the end of another nut,” I said harshly. “And a good thing too—if I imagined the whole Imperium—”

“I know you didn’t, Brion. But if, somehow, something has… gone wrong…”

“I’ll worry about that when I get to it,” I cut her off. I’d been plowing along, wrapping myself up in my occupational therapy. I wasn’t ready yet to think about the thousand gloomy possibilities I’d have to face when I stepped into my crude makeshift and threw the switch.

It was three evenings later, and Olivia and I were sitting at a window table in one of our regular haunts, having a small glass of wine and listening to the gentle night sounds of a city without neon or internal combustion. She’d been coming by the shop for me every evening lately; a habit that I found myself looking forward to.

“It won’t be long now,” I told her. “You saw the box. Just bolted together out of wood, but good enough. The coil’s installed. Tomorrow I’ll lay out my control circuitry—”

“Brion…” her fingers were on my arm. “Look there!”

I twisted, caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall, dark figure in a long, full-skirted coat with the collar turned up, pushing past through the sparse pedestrian traffic.

“It was—him!” Olivia’s voice was tight with strain.

“All right, maybe it was,” I said soothingly. “Take it easy, girl. How sure are you—”

“I’m sure, Brion! The same terrible, dark face, the beard—”

“There are plenty of bearded men in Rome, Olivia—”

“We have to go—quickly!” She started to get up. I caught her hand, pulled her gently back.

“No use panicking. Did he see us?”

“I—think—I’m not sure,” she finished. “I saw him, and turned my face away, but—”

“If he’s seen us—if he is our boy—running won’t help.

If he didn’t see us, he won’t be back.”

“But if we hurried, Brion—we need not even stop at the flat to get our things! We can catch the train, be miles from Rome by daylight—”

“If we’ve been trailed here, we can be trailed to the next town. Besides which, there’s the little matter of my shuttle. It’s nearly done. Another day’s work and a few tests—”

“Of what avail’s the shuttle if they take you, Brion?”

I patted her hand. “Why should anyone want to take me? I was dumped here to get rid of me—”

“Brion, think you I’m some village goose to be coddled with this talk? We must act—now!”

I chewed my lip and thought about it. Olivia wasn’t being soothed by my bland talk—any more than I was. I didn’t know what kind of follow-up the Xonijeelian Web Police did on their deportees, but it was a cinch they wouldn’t look kindly on my little home workshop project. The idea of planting me here had been to take me out of circulation. They’d back their play; Olivia was right about that…

“All right.” I got to my feet, dropped a coin on the table. Out in the street, I patted her hand.

“Now, you run along home, Olivia. I’ll do a little snooping, just to satisfy myself that everything’s okay. Then—”

“No. I’ll stay with you.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “If there is any rough stuff, you think I want you mixed up in it? Not that there will be…”

“You have some madcap scheme in mind, Brion. What is it? Will you go back to the workshop?”

“I just want to check to make sure nobody’s tampered with the shuttle.”

Her face looked pale in the light of the carbide lamp at the corner.

“You think by hasty work to finish it—to risk your life-”

“I won’t take any risks, Olivia—but I’m damned if I’m going to be stopped when I’m this close.”

“You’ll need help. I’m not unclever in such matters.”

I shook my head. “Stay clear of this, Olivia. I’m the one they’re interested in, but you could get hurt—”

“How close are you to finishing your work?”

“A few hours. Then some tests—”

“Then we’d best be starting. I sense danger close by this night. ’Twill not be long ere they close their noose.

I hesitated for just a moment, then took her hand. “I don’t know what I’ve done to earn such loyalty,” I said. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

We went to the flat first, turned on lights, made coffee. Then, with the rooms darkened, took the back stairs, eased out into a cobbled alley. Half an hour later, after a circuitous trip which avoided main streets and well-lit corners, we reached the shop, slipped inside. Everything looked just as I’d left it an hour earlier: the six-foot-square box, its sides half-slabbed up with boards, the coil mounted at the center of the plank floor, the bright wire of my half-completed control circuits gleaming in the gloom. I lit a lamp, and we started to work.

Olivia was more than clever with her hands. I showed her just once how to attach wire to an insulator; from then on she was better at it than I was. The batteries required a mounting box; I nailed a crude frame together, fitted the cells in place, wired up a switch, made connections. Every half hour or so, Olivia would slip outside, make a quick reconnaissance—not that it would have helped much to discover any spy sneaking up on us. I couldn’t quite deduce the pattern of their tactics—if any. If we had been spotted, surely the shop was under surveillance. Maybe they were just letting me finish before they closed in. Perhaps they were curious as to whether it was possible to do what I was trying to do with the materials and technology at hand…

It was well after midnight when we finished. I made a final connection, ran a couple of circuit checks. If my research had been accurate, and my recollection of M-C theory correct, the thing should work…

“It looks so… fragile, Brion.” Olivia’s eyes were dark in the dim light. My own eyeballs felt as though they’d been rolled in emery dust.

“It’s fragile—but a moving shuttle is immune to any external influence. It’s enclosed in a field that holds the air in, and everything else out. And it doesn’t linger long enough in any one A-line for the external temperature or vacuum or what have you to affect it.”

“Brion!” She took my arm fiercely. “Stay here! Risk not this frail device! ’Tis not too late to flee! Let the evil men search in vain! Somewhere we’ll find a cottage, in some hamlet far from this scheming…”

My expression told her she wasn’t reaching me. She stared into my eyes for a moment, then let her hand fall and stepped back.

“I was a fool to mingle dreams with drab reality,” she said harshly. I saw her shoulders slump, the life go from her face. Almost, it was Mother Goodwill who stood before me.

“Olivia,” I said harshly, “For God’s sake—”

There was a sound from the door. I saw it tremble, and jumped for the light, flipped it off. In the silence, a foot grated on bricks. There was a sound of rusty hinges, and a lesser darkness widened as the door slid back. A tall, dark silhouette appeared in the opening.

“Bayard!” a voice said sharply in the darkness—an unmistakably Xonijeelian voice. I moved along the wall. The figure advanced. There was a crowbar somewhere near the door. I crouched, trying to will myself invisible, reached—and my fingers closed around the cold, rust-scaled metal. The intruder was two yards away now. I straightened, raised the heavy bar. He took another step, and I jumped, slammed the bar down solidly across the back of his head, saw a hat fly as he stumbled and fell on his face with a heavy crash.

“Brion!” Olivia shrieked.

“It’s all right!” I tossed the bar aside, reached for her, put my arms around her.

“You have to understand, Olivia,” I rasped. “There’s more at stake here than anyone’s dream. This is something I have to do. You have your life ahead. Live it—and forget me!”

“Let me go with you, Brion,” she moaned.

“You know I can’t. Too dangerous—and you’d halve my chances of finding the Zero-zero line before the air gives out.” I thrust my wallet into her cloak pocket. “I have to go now.” I pushed her gently from me.

“Almost… I hope it fails,” Olivia’s voice came through the dark. I went to the shuttle, lit the carbide running light, reached in and flipped the warm-up switch. From the shadows, I heard a groan from the creature I had stunned.

“You’d better go now, Olivia,” I called. “Get as far away as you can. Go to Louisiana, start over—forget the Mother Goodwill routine…”

The hum was building now—the song of the tortured molecules as the field built, twisting space, warping time, creating its tiny bubble of impossible tension in the massive fabric of reality.

“Goodby, Olivia…” I climbed inside the fragile box peered at the makeshift panel. The field strength meter told me that the time had come. I grasped the drive lever and threw it in.