At the Narrow Passage (22 page)

"Go on."
"Yeah. This -- this is your power amplifier tuning. The meter should
register fifty percent when you're ready to transmit. This is . . ."
In five minutes I thought I could operate it. Maybe the technician had
given me the wrong information about the radio set, but I doubted it.
He was too scared -- and one VHF transceiver is pretty much like another
when you get the basic idea of what it is supposed to do.
My worry was about the type of modulation this set was using, FM.
And the Kriths mostly used AM in the VHF ranges. Why, I don't know,
but they did. And if I transmitted an FM signal into an AM receiver,
even if I were exactly on frequency -- well, they wouldn't get much out
of it on the receiving end. I just hoped that the Kriths had planned
for an eventuality like this and would be able to demodulate my FM signal.
"Sit down over there and stay quiet," I told the technician and began
flipping switches.
Less than a minute later lights and meters said that I was ready to
transmit. And if I were correct in remembering the Krithian emergency
frequency and if the set were really transmitting and if . . . Hell,
worrying isn't going to do any good. Just try.
"Red mobile to red leader," I said into the microphone in Shangalis.
"Red mobile to red leader. Do you hear me, Kar-hinter?" Then I realized
how foolish all that was and decided to give it to them straight. "If
anybody's listening, this is Eric Mathers, Timeliner, under Kar-hinter's
supervision. I have been captured by invaders from another Timeline. I am
held prisoner in a place called Staunton somewhere in West Florida. Lock
in on my signal and triangulate. Inform Kar-hinter at once and tell him to
get here fast. I've come across the biggest thing we've ever seen. . . ."
That was the gist of my message. I repeated it three times, then switched
to another frequency and did it again.
I was on my fourth frequency when I heard the banging on the hatch.
"Who's in there?" a muffled voice called from outside. "What's going on?"
The technician looked at me for an instant, then back at the hatch.
"Stay still," I told him -- but that didn't do any good. He was a brave
man, that technician, to be as scared as he was and still do what he did.
Still looking directly into the barrel of my pistol, he jumped at me,
a yell of pure hatred on his lips. I fired. There wasn't much else I
could do. And then his face wasn't much of a face anymore.
The technician lay at my feet, his blood splattered over me and the deck,
and he was very still, and I hated very much that I had had to kill him.
The banging on the hatch had stopped, but a voice called, a different
voice that I thought I recognized as Scoti's: "Mathers, we know you're
in there. Come out and . . ."
"Come get me," I yelled back, switched to another frequency, and delivered
one last frantic message into the microphone.
Outside, through the transparent dome, I could see a cluster of men
in the hangar's open doors. Scoti came out from under the bulk of the
craft, running and gesturing for the other men to clear out of the
hangar. I only caught a brief glimpse of the weapon he held in his
hand. But that was enough. He had showed it to me once before and told
me a little about it. An R-4 power pistol. If I had been a praying man,
I would have delivered my most heartfelt prayer at that moment. But all
I could do was wait. There wasn't a damned thing else I could do.
Now the space in front of the hangar was vacant except for Scoti, who
knelt with left elbow on left knee, left hand around right wrist, sighting
across the barrel of the weapon he carried. I saw the muzzle flash . . .
And I saw the universe explode. And I felt heat and flame and blinding
light so bright that I could not see it. And that was all for along,
long time.
18
Voices
The world is a very unpleasant place to be in when your face is a mass
of raw flesh and your eyes won't open because they're sealed shut with
blood and both your legs are broken and you've got internal injuries
that are leaking blood into places where there shouldn't be blood and
you're lying on a bed of broken glass and twisted metal and some damned
fool is shaking the universe like a baby crib.
I couldn't see, but I could hear, and I really didn't want to do that,
but I didn't have the strength to fight it.
"Is he dead?" a voice asked.
"No, but he ought to be," answered another voice, maybe Scoti's.
"Don't worry. He won't last long."
"What about Joal?" That voice might have been Mica's. I'm not sure.
"He's dead. Mathers shot him in the face."
"Bastard. Kick him once for me."
He did. In the ribs. I passed out again.
The next time I heard voices the universe was holding a little more steady
and the bed was just lumpy rocks rather than broken glass, but it would
be hard for me to say that I was more comfortable. Maybe a little less
painful.
"He needs a doctor," someone said from above.
"Screw the doctor," Scoti spat. "Let the bastard bleed to death."
"Okay."
"Have they found Sally yet?"
"I don't know."
"If he killed her . . . If he killed her . . ." Then Scoti's voice came
close, right up to what used to be my ear.
"Mathers, can you hear me?"
There wasn't much I could do to let him know. I couldn't even groan.
"Listen to me, bastard," Scoti said. "If you hurt Sally, I'll see that you
live. You'll live so that I can slowly take you apart piece by piece.
I mean slow, damn it!"
I think he kicked me again, but I couldn't really be sure.
I was somewhere between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness
when I heard a voice yelling, "Scoti, look up there!"
"What is it?" Scoti yelled back, his voice dwindling as he moved away
from me.
"Airships," the other voice, or one of the other voices, said.
"British airships."
"Call Mica! Full alert!"
I heard running feet and yelling voices, but everyone seemed to have
forgotten about me, and that was okay. I just wanted to be left alone
to die in peace.
There was a strange chill in the air, an alienness, an unknown quantity
that I couldn't identify but knew was more than the feel of shock and
pain, and all around me was the stillness you only find in a nightmare.
I thought maybe I was dead and had gone to hell.
A voice was speaking to me, and the voice was that out of a nightmare,
a masculine voice with a familiar ring to it, but my mind could not
place the voice. It was saying, "Stay alive, Eric. For God's sake, man,
hang on just a little while longer. They're coming to help you. The pain
won't last long. You can stand it, Eric. I did."
And then the voice was gone, and I floated down into a painful darkness,
but I knew that I would try to hang on. Help was coming, the voice
had said.
Later, how much later I don't know, but later I heard the whine of airship
motors and another, different whine that ceased abruptly with a clap of
air and it might have been the probability generator of a skudder --
sautierboat -- the other Paratime craft that had been in the hangar,
because it was gone later. Then I heard small-arms fire from outside
the hangar and a voice that yelled, "Fall back into the . . ." And the
chatter of a machine gun that cut off the voice and the sudden rasp
of an energy pistol that had not been made on this world and a voice
yelling in Shangalis, and I went black again.
* * *
Someone was bending over me, holding my head up, putting something to
my mouth that was cold and wet and very welcome. I think I also got an
injection of something, but I didn't feel the prick of the needle.
"Eric, Eric, can you hear me?"
It was a voice that I ought to remember. I thought I knew who it was.
Sally? No, it wasn't Sally. She had a soft contralto voice. And this
voice wasn't soft. It was harsh and rasping, and there was a British
accent to it that was too pronounced to be real.
"Eric, for God's sake, old man," the voice said. "What is this?"
"Get Sally," I somehow managed to say to that voice that I ought to
recognize, but didn't yet.
"Who?"
"Sally. Back in the woods. Save Sally. Don't let them get her."
"Don't let who get her?"
"
Them, them.
Don't let
them
get her.
But who
they
were I wasn't sure, and I'm not sure to this day.
This time when I awoke the bed was softer still, but it was moving upward,
lurching, and I wanted to vomit all over the place because I didn't want
to be moving. Not now. Not ever.
"Get us some altitude," the strange/familiar voice said.
"I'm doing the best I can," another voice answered, another one that had
something to do with me, my past, that I ought to know. "This damned thing's
no fusion rocket, you know."
"I know, but get us out of here. They're going to bring up their big guns
soon."
"I know. We'll make it. How's Mathers?"
"Pretty bad. He must have been in that skudder we found."
"How in God's name did he live through that?"
"He's too mean to die."
"What about the girl?"
"I gave her a shot. She's still out."
"She ought to have some clothes on."
"I didn't bring a change. How was I to know?"
"Well, cover her up with something."
"Does that bother you, her being naked?"
"Yeah."
"I enjoy looking at her."
The other voice grunted and then said, "Man, is Kar-hinter going to be glad
to get these two back."
"I am too."
"I know."
"Eric and I have been together for a long time."
"Tracy! Look down there!"
"What is -- "
It was just one of those days when the universe wouldn't behave itself.
A great fist came up from below, aimed directly at the bunk on which I
was lying, thumping it with such force that I was thrown into the air,
out of the bunk, and onto the hard floor beside it. And then the BOOM!
so loud and so terrifying that I thought it would shatter whatever was
left of the world.
"They blew it up," one of the voices said incredulously. "They blew up
the whole damned place."
Then I went down into the darkness.
19
Recovery
It was a long, long while later before I had truly lucid moments.
I think I remember a long sequence of nightmares, most of them false,
some of them real. I remember strangely gentle hands carrying me out
of a British airship on a stretcher and across a landing field to a
horse-drawn ambulance and an unbelievably bumpy ride across an infinite,
pitted earth. And I remember a fifty-foot-tall Mica, with skin as white
as a parson's blessing, but with eyes that were as dark and empty as
interstellar space, and he had an enormous knife that he used to probe my
liver and said over and over and over "What did you do with Sally?" And
I remember the bright overhead lights of an operating room and a doctor
who said, "Easy, Captain Mathers. Rest easy. You'll be asleep soon," in
a voice of the archangels, and then he started putting me back together
again. And a bomb that kept exploding across the Timelines, wiping out
world after world, destroying the whole complex of continua. And somebody
swabbing my hot forehead with cotton dipped in alcohol and asking me to
sip some kind of liquid and crushed ice through a straw. And then G'lendal,
naked and beautiful, her big breasts pointed at me like twin cannon,
standing before me and slowly, gradually changing into a naked and hideous
Krith with a wide, sneering grin and a hungry look on its face. And a
universe that consisted of paper cutouts and a voice that I ought to
know telling me that this was reality, all the reality I would ever find.
Then, after a while, I woke up, and the nightmares were over, most of them.
At first I couldn't have said for sure where I was. Oh, it was a hospital
room, of course: pale-green walls and a stark white bed and all the other
paraphernalia that goes with a hospital, all with the overtones of a
second- or third-level technology, just like the world in which I had
been and where I still might be.
Above my head and to the right was a cord that I assumed rang for the nurse.
I pulled on it, or rather tried to pull on it, and as I fought to wrap my
weak fingers around it, I noticed the glucose drip that was plugged into
my left arm, the bottle half full of colorless sugar. Finally my hand
closed around the cord, and I tugged and thought that off in the distance
I heard a bell ring, and then let my arm fall back to the bed and waited
to see what would happen.
Five hundred years later, more or less, the door directly opposite my bed
opened and a tall, thin man wearing a white smock and rimless glasses
came in. I started to try to speak, realized that I wasn't sure what
language to use, and waited for him say the first words.
"Oh, you've come around, Mathers," the white-clad man said in Shangalis.
He was a Timeliner.
"Yeah," I managed to say.
"You've had Kar-hinter worried," he said.
"I've had me kind of worried, too," I said in short gasps.
"Rest easy now," the man said, coming to the side of the bed, taking my
right wrist in his left hand, feeling the pulse while he looked at his
wrist watch, saying, "I'm Dr. Conners."
"Where am I?"
"Bakersville, South Africa," Connors answered when he had finished
counting the beats of my heart. "You're still on the same Line, though,
if that's what you mean. This is a hospital that the British have turned
over to us. We're all Liners here."
"What happened?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't tell you," the doctor replied. "But Kar-hinter
and two of your friends are outside if you feel up to talking with them."
"Yes, please," I said, then lay back on the bed and closed my eyes and
rested and tried to gather what strength was left in my body. But before
the doctor left the room, I was forced to ask, "Just how bad am I?"
"You'll be fine. Nothing's missing," Conners said, and for a moment I
thought that was all he was going to say. "You had both legs broken and
several ribs as well. We also had to replace your liver. Your face was
pretty badly cut up, but plastiskin is going to cover the scars. You'll
never know the difference. And, well, you ought to be up and walking
around within forty-eight hours."
Thank God for the medical science we've picked up across the Lines!
I wouldn't have lived if I'd had to depend on the local skills.