“OUT OF MY way, Sammis.” Even when he was trying to keep it down, Odin Thor’s voice boomed. He twisted the bosses on the gauntlets to activate the microcircuitry.
When I looked at Odin Thor, I wished I’d never found Ydris. The gauntlets were too powerful for his ego. Bad enough for me, and I’d survived his damned ConFed Marines with no illusions of justice.
“They won’t work very well in here, Odin Thor.” I used both his last names to irritate him. Dangerous, but he lost most rudiments of logic when he was angry. “Or too accurately.”
“Don’t you ever say anything straight out, runt?” All of Colonel-General Augurt Odin Thor looked ready to assault me. Which would have been fine, except that was the moment Wryan walked into the travel hall, or what there was of it we had built.
“Dr. Relorn …” Odin Thor was all charm again, bowing low, almost from the waist. “I was about to depart to see if I could localize the latest manifestations of the Frost Giants. The ones that young Sammis here tracked across the cluster.”
“You are so determined, Colonel. Do you think that it is necessary? Especially when we have no effective way of neutralizing individual Giants?”
“Madam, we know who the enemy is. That enemy has just destroyed another timediver’s innocent family.”
“What will you do once you find all the Frost Giants, Odin Thor?” I interjected.
“Keep track of them until we can destroy them. They’ll be a threat until we do.”
I wanted to know how Odin Thor could keep track of anything when he couldn’t find his way across a room under the now. Instead, I asked, “Do you remember what happened the last time?”
Wryan shook her head, but I ignored her. This one wasn’t going by logic.
“That was years ago!” snapped Odin Thor.
“Not to the Frost Giants. Barely an instant for them.”
Wryan looked even more distressed, and I knew why.
“So we’re going to cower in our half-built city and our half-built tower and hope they leave us alone? Hope they don’t freeze another poor family with their curiosity? Can I tell my people that the great Doctor Relorn and her intrepid scout, who can avoid the Giants, wish to run and hide and leave them to face the terrible freezings? That you two have no wish even to track the Giants to warn them?”
“What are you going to do, great Odin Thor? Track them all over the galaxy until they get tired and turn on us again?”
Wryan was making motions behind Odin Thor’s back for me to shut up, but it wouldn’t make much difference. He was going to do what he was going to do, and we’d end up picking up the pieces again.
“Don’t you understand?” By now he was bellowing.
Deric had dashed in from supervising the time-warping of the wall stones in the adjoining hall. Another young-looking diver who carried a youngster in a sack upon her back stood frowning in the archway.
“Understand what?” asked Wryan calmly.
“That the Giants are our enemy. That they will threaten us as long as they roam free through the galaxy.”
By now, half a dozen divers had popped in, and, unfortunately, out. Word would be through the community within the afternoon, if not within instants.
I could see the handwriting on the wall, and it was written in blood. Mine and Wryan’s especially.
Sighing loudly, I got their attention. Once again, it was my mess, a mess that I should have seen coming sooner.
The travel hall was silent, too silent.
“Why don’t we discuss it at a full meeting of all the timedivers tonight? It affects everyone, and everyone should have a say in it.”
“Great idea, Sammis!” boomed Odin Thor. His voice was not quite mocking. “What time?”
“After dinner … whenever you want …”
“I’ll let you know.” And the colonel-general was off, on foot. He couldn’t afford the embarrassment of planet-sliding, since he still had little enough directional sense. He was smiling every step of the way.
Wryan looked over at me sadly. “You know what will happen.”
“Got any better ideas, Doctor?”
“Do you?”
“Just one.”
She did not ask, but continued to look at me sadly.
“Finding something that destroys Frost Giants before they destroy us.”
“Ignorance rules again.”
“Always has. Probably always will.”
“How long will it take you to find something?” Wryan seldom wasted time on formalities or useless commentary.
“That’s simple enough. Until I do or until there’s nothing left unfrozen on Query.”
“And now?”
I took her hand and held it, cool as it was. “You and I go over the possibilities.” I leered a little bit.
That got a faint smile. “Not those possibilities …” She took her hand back.
“If you say so, but we really need a good physicist to talk with, assuming there’s one alive somewhere. Who would know?”
“Jerlyk or Mellorie—they were with the university.”
We touched hands and slid undertime, under the clinging black surface of the now, slipping sideways and out toward the half-built settlement on the hilltop below Mount Persnol. Thor was probably trying to calculate the directionality of his planet slide. Sooner or later, he’d come booming in with an energy swathe half a world wide. Not that more than a handful of our timedivers could sense the energy flows. But his dives, like him, were so violent that I winced whenever he broke out near me.
While I could detect Wryan in the undertime, as usual, there was no sense of feeling, no sense of movement, until we lanced back into the now, right in the middle of a cloudburst.
“Should have looked first,” I sputtered.
Wryan let go of my hand and dashed through the muddy street and into a half-completed cottage. I followed, since the building did have a roof and the rain was pelting down in big, cold drops.
No one was working there, although several tools had been carefully laid out.
Wryan looked around, studying the footprints in the dust. “They were working earlier.”
“Odin Thor?”
“Looks like it.”
That was worse than I had thought, because he’d already organized at least some of the divers and was probably holding an informal meeting of his own right now. “Let’s try to slide to Jerlyk’s. Don’t really want to wander through this rain.”
Wryan took my hand this time, and we dipped under the now and finally emerged on Jerlyk’s front stoop. I was shaking a bit. Even after all my practice, sometimes the little dives, where you’re trying to hit a small point in the now, were still more tiring than the long ones in a different system. And, of course, no one had ever been able to backtime or foretime in our own system. That was one of the problems in dealing with the Frost Giants. They could and we couldn’t. They had all time, and we had the now.
MY STOMACH JITTERED as I chewed through the marinated buffalo steak. Greffin was still a superb chef, not that we saw him much, but he only had to prepare one meal. The duplicator, and an idea of Mellorie’s, made eating his creations possible at any time.
Mellorie—somehow, coming from her it made sense. She had simply asked whether the duplicator could only duplicate what was put in it, or if a duplicated pattern could be retrieved later.
I could have bashed my head on the wall. With that question, the reasons for the settings and the fact that some duplicators on Muria were linked to the lattice crystal memory banks made instant sense.
Jerlyk retrieved—stole, if you will—some blank crystals, and Wryan helped him and Mellorie in setting up a couple of master duplicators. We couldn’t steal more than two initially, because of the effort required. While setting up a closet-sized fusion plant wasn’t impossible, that was just the first step. You still had to do wiring and all the time-consuming details to put the infrastructure together.
But … if Wryan or I wanted to visit Mellorie’s cottage, she and Jerlyk were happy to punch a button and provide us with one of Greffin’s best meals, hot as the moment it was duplicated.
Wryan had done the honors just before we ate, insisting it was her turn.
So we sat there, at the cottage table, alone, since, with the construction of additional cottages, Kerina and Hadron had moved out and left the place to us. Derika had left even earlier.
“You’re worried about the meeting tonight?” Wryan asked.
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course. What are you going to say? It’s your meeting.”
That bothered me, too. I’d come up with the meeting because the divers and the ConFeds had to face reality together, but I had the feeling that Wryan and I were the only ones who cared about reality. So what could I say?
I took another sip of citril and another mouthful of the buffalo steak. Finally, I looked at the cabinets behind and above Wryan’s shoulder. “I guess that I’ll say what I said to Odin Thor.”
“They won’t like it.” Her tone was not critical, just gentle, reminding me of the facts.
I knew they wouldn’t like what I had to say. So we finished eating in silence.
Wryan and I arrived in the travel hall early, waiting to see who would appear. Gerloc and Amenda were already there, along with Mellorie and Jerlyk. In a corner, by himself, was Verlin. As soon as he saw me, Verlin popped out of sight.
“Off to tell everyone,” I muttered under my breath.
Sure enough, within moments, divers and even a handful of ConFed forcers and subforcers—probably those living in the ConFed quarters near the half-built tower—arrived.
Then Odin Thor marched through the door and straight toward me.
“We’re all here, Sammis. What do you plan to do about the Frost Giants?”
Everyone looked at me, and I wanted to dive right out from underneath their sight because almost every eye stared accusingly at me, as if I had created the problem. Then again, maybe that was just the way I felt.
Instead of speaking immediately, I took a long look around the room, trying not to swallow too hard as I did so.
“Well?” demanded the man who towered over me.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Colonel Odin Thor. Then I’ll tell you what I recommend we do. And then, all of you can do exactly what you please.” You will anyway, I thought, without voicing it.
Odin Thor looked momentarily puzzled, but said nothing.
Nearly a hundred people clustered around Wryan and me in the big empty hall, and it was so silent you could hear every isolated cough, every foot scuffle.
“First,” I said. “We have not developed or found a weapon which an individual diver can carry that will destroy a Frost Giant. I have found, as you all know, a number of weapons, and I am continuing to search for one which will do the job. In the meantime, I strongly suggest that
we have a group of divers mount a general search of the more likely timepaths to provide a warning if another Giant or group of Giants appear to move our way.
“Right now, all we can do is avoid them. I will continue trying to find the necessary weapons—”
“Is that all?” asked Odin Thor, his voice barely below a bellow. “Is that all?”
I could sense the unrest rippling around the room. They were all looking for a miraculous solution from good young Sammis—the man who had brought them the duplicator, the gauntlets, and some idea of hope. And I didn’t have an answer.
“Is that all?” repeated Odin Thor, his voice not quite mocking.
I looked at him, and my eyes were colder than a Frost Giant. “If you want to drag out the last one or two nuclear devices buried under Westron and invite every Frost Giant in the galaxy to come and attack, be my guest. But don’t blame me.”
There was actually a moment of silence, and I seized it. “I’ve told you what I can do, and what I will do. You have to decide what you want. You know where to find me.”
And I left, diving undertime from where I stood, taking even Wryan by surprise. The damned idiots!
Wryan did not arrive until later.
“Proud of yourself?” she asked, her voice somewhere between dry and bitter.
“No. But we’ve given them damned-near everything, and we don’t have a last miracle in hand. We don’t have that many energy sources, and if we don’t stir things up, we’ll probably have enough time to find an answer. But Odin Thor doesn’t want a good answer; he wants an answer now.”
Wryan sighed, and her shoulders slumped for a moment. “Do you think your departure did any good?”
“I don’t know. I do know that staying would have been worse, because I would have lost my temper.”
Wryan looked at me. “That would have been worse, you think?”
“I don’t think you can hold people’s loyalty through force.”
“You …” she stopped. “Well, it’s done, and we’ll have to see.”
“What happened after I left?”
“Odin Thor delivered a long sermon on the need to bring the fight to the Frost Giants. He said that your first step was absolutely right, that we couldn’t attack an enemy if we didn’t know where they were. Then he went on to suggest that the ConFed techs would develop some ‘traps’ for any Frost Giant who attacked Query.
“Gerloc volunteered to put together the scouting patrols. And Odin Thor reminded everyone that you
might
just find an answer, but that the ConFeds would be ready whether or not you were successful or not.” She smiled wryly. “All in all, he did a masterful job of taking control without directly slamming you, and—”
“In making me look like a spoiled brat,” I finished.
“I didn’t say that.”
I sighed. “I have a lot to learn. But the whole thing just … I don’t know … why do people put up with such falseness?”
“Because, unlike you, Sammis Arloff Olon, most people cannot live without certainty and hope, and Odin Thor is good at appealing to their needs.”
She was right, and there wasn’t much I could say. I just hoped I could find a weapon or a defense before Odin Thor found a nuclear device.