At the Narrow Passage (25 page)

"I am glad you have accepted it," Kar-hinter said. "Eric is not an
unpleasant jailer, I trust."
Sally looked at me, but did not reply.
"At least there is no open enmity," Kar-hinter said. "I had even hoped
that pehaps you were lovers by now. Eh, Eric?
"We get along," I said.
"Ah, but you sleep in separate beds, I think," the Krith said.
"Does it matter to you?" I asked, knowing that there was an angry,
resentful edge to my voice. What business was it of his?
"I only want you to be satisfied, Eric," the alien said. "And you, Sally,
do you still consider me a monster and Eric a traitor to mankind?"
"I've seen nothing yet to change my opinion of either of you," she said
coldly. I wondered how much of it she really meant.
"You are doing a poor job of converting her, Eric."
"Is that my job?"
"No," Kar-hinter said. "Her conversion is of no importance to me.
She can believe what she wishes. I only want to see you happy, Eric,
rewarded, so to speak, for what you have done for us."
"Us?" Sally asked.
"Ah, yes, must I explain every plural pronoun I use?"
He was as close to being angry as I had ever seen him -- him or any
other Krith.
"By
us
," Kar-hinter was saying, "Sally, I mean allied mankind
and Krith. We are partners in our own salvation."
"I wish I could believe that," Sally said.
"Do you really?" Kar-hinter asked. "That would be a beginning, at least."
"Kar-hinter," I said "let's cut out this verbal fencing for a minute."
"Of course, Eric."
"I want to make a request."
"Anything that is within my power to grant is yours, the Krith said.
"I Want you to take Sally and me to the Cross-Line Civilization."
"Why, Eric?" He didn't seem surprised at my request, but then did anything
ever seem to surprise him?
"Well, that's one of the cornerstones of the Paratimers' arguments against
the Kriths," I said. "They say that the Cross-Line Civilization is one
of the Great Lies, the other one being the Contratime signals. Well,
if we could show Sally that the Cross-Line Civilization does exist,
she would accept that
she
is the one who has been lied to."
"But, frankly, Eric, it is of no importance to me what
she
thinks is
true or false."
"It's important to me."
"I see." Kar-hinter paused for a moment. "And you, Eric, why do
you
want
to see the Cross-Line Civilization?"
"I just told you."
"Did you? Or, Eric, might it be that you too have begun to believe her
and her Paratimers? Is
she
converting
you
, Eric?"
"Does it matter?" I asked. "If we can visit the Cross-Line worlds,
neither of us would have any reason to doubt."
"But it does matter, my dear Eric," Kar-hinter said slowly, spreading his
manlike hands. "You know as well as I that skudders are scarce this far
West and must be used only for work of vital importance to the master
plans. We just cannot call up a skudder every time we want to take a
pleasure trip, especially one so long as the one you propose."
"Surely you could arrange it if you tried," I insisted.
"I could, Eric, I believe, but only if I were convinced it would be worth
the while. I am not, not for
her
. She does not matter to me or to the
plan."
"Do I?" I asked slowly, playing what I supposed was my trump card.
"Of course you do, Eric. You are becoming one of our most valuable
operatives."
"Then would you arrange such a trip to convince me?"
"Are you that near to defection?"
"I don't know," I said slowly, being more honest with him than I had been
before and on purpose. "I don't want to know." I paused, then said to him:
"I admit that I've been pretty shaken by some of what has hapopened. The
Paratimers were awfully convincing. And I do have some doubts, not many,
but some, and I don't like them. I want absolute certainty that I'm doing
the right thing, that I'm fighting on the right side. And you can give
me that certainty if you'll just take us to the Cross-Line worlds. If you
don't . . . Well, I don't mean to be threatening, Kar-hinter, but if you
don't, I'll wonder why. And I'll suspect that maybe you didn't take us
there because you couldn't, because there's really no such place."
"Quite a speech, Eric," Kar-hinter replied at last. "I did not know that
it had gone this far with you."
For the first time I felt fear of Kar-hinter and the whole Krithian
machine. What if Sally were right? What if Kar-hinter were really the
monster she believed he was? It would be the easiest thing in the world
for him to bring in a squad of men and wipe us out here and now. No one
would ever know, and my doubts would never have an opportunity to spread
if he killed us both now. I wonder if my fear showed.
"So you might turn against us," Kar-hinter was saying slowly, but without
antagonism. "I would not want that to happen, Eric. Perhaps I should not
have given you this woman."
"She has nothing to do with my doubts at this point," I said. "Can you
convince me that what I am doing is right?"
"As I said, Eric, skudders are hardly available for pleasure cruises,
but perhaps this is important enough. I will see what I can do. I will
return tomorrow and tell you." He rose from the chair where he had sat.
"I will leave now. Good night, Eric, Sally."
The not-quite-human smile on Kar-hinter's face faded into a look of
intense concentration, and then he flickered out of existence, and
Sally and I sat there quietly, looking at the place where he had been
and wondering what he would do tomorrow when he returned.
21
Across the Lines
Kar-hinter appeared simultaneously with the skudder, both arriving
in the middle of the garden before the cabin just a short while after
noon on the day following his visit. The Krith waved for the skudder
pilot and the black-uniformed Pall to remain in their seats and walked
quickly up the path toward the cabin, smiling broadly in an almost human
fashion and waving to Sally and me. We had just come out after hearing
the unmistakable whine of the skudder's probability generators.
"Eric," he called, "I have been able to arrange the transportation for the
two of you. We shall leave at once for the East. Are both of you ready?"
I looked at Sally.
"I didn't bring anything here with me," she said, "and there's nothing
I want to take." She paused. "But, well, I would like to comb my hair
and put on some makeup."
Since she had resigned herself to being nude while in Eden, Sally had
taken to using body makeup from one of the Europo-Minoan Lines that
was supplied by the cabin. Not that I thought she really needed it;
her face and body looked fine without it.
"Very well," Kar-hinter said, still smiling as broadly. "There is clothing
for you both in the skudder. I do hope that you have eaten."
"Yes," I said. "We just finished lunch."
"Good," the Krith said. "It is a long trip."
"So we've been told," Sally said, her voice suddenly doubtful, as if she
were feeling the same sort of fear that I had felt the night before,
as if she suspected that Kar-hinter was now arranging to have us both
killed before we could express our doubts to anyone else.
"Hurry, then," the Krith said to Sally. "Fix yourself and we shall go."
She went back into the cabin, almost seeming fearful of leaving me alone
with Kar-hinter.
* * *
It wasn't long before we entered the skudder and began the trip across
the Lines.
The small skudder was crowded with the five of us in it, though neither
the pilot nor Pall spoke, and Pall hardly even moved. Pall, if you weren't
looking at him, was easy to ignore.
After a while you can almost become adjusted to just about anything,
even the mind-wrenching, stomach-twisting sensation of skudding across
the near infinity of parallel universes. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
At least I seemed to become more adjusted than usual as the trip lengthened
from minutes to hours and still we moved.
Sally, Kar-hinter and I talked very little after the first few minutes.
Despite the adjustment, talking in a skudding craft seemed to be more
trouble than it was worth.
There were two bundles of clothing for us, brightly colored, nearly
transparent, form-fitting sleeveless shirts and knee-length pants,
pointed shoes, and peaked caps. Kar-hinter assured us that these were
the height of sartorial splendor in the first of the Cross-Line worlds
that we were about to visit.
To pass the time, Kar-hinter had provided us with a stack of magazines
from Sally's native Line, some of which I suppose she found interesting.
I was left to boredom. A large thermal bottle of coffee sat on the floor
between us and after our stomachs had more or less adjusted to the
flickering, we each, Sally and I, had a cup.
What happened after my first cup of coffee seemed unimportant at the
time, but in retrospect it loomed much larger, and I later thought it
might be the key to the whole sequence of events.
When I finished my cup of coffee, I set the cup carefully on the floor
beside me, picked up one of the magazines, a cheap colonial picture
magazine devoted mostly to news, gossip, and rumor about the British
nobility, pictures of castles and of peers of the realm, subtle hints of
what lord was sleeping with whose wife in articles written for a child's
mentality. My eyelids began to grow heavy in the middle of a story about
a party held by the Earl of Something and attended only by the Duchess
of Whatsit (she was the complete guest list) and how neighbors and
servants later claimed that they saw them dancing in the nude in the
earl's garden to the music of the fifty-piece orchestra the earl had
hired. I never did find out what happened after the nude dance, but I
have a good imagination. I put the magazine down and saw that Sally was
nodding too. This didn't strike me as unusual: the skudder trip had now
become dull and uninteresting, and sleep would be the best thing for us
both until we got to our destination. I shifted into a more comfortable
position, closed my eyes and thought about as little as I could until
a warm, comfortable drowsiness slowly settled over me.
My next memory was that of Kar-hinter shaking my shoulder, saying,
"Eric, wake up. We are nearly there."
I shook myself, forced my eyes to open, and felt for an instant a great
sense of impending doom that I was now sure was unjustified.
Can I say that things looked any different when I awoke? No. The skudder
was exactly the same. My empty coffee cup still sat on the floor where I
had put it. The magazine, its pages open, was exactly where I had laid
it. Sally sat in the seat across from me, leaning against the wall, sleeping.
Kar-hinter, the skudder pilot and Pall were as they had been, looked the
same in every detail. Nothing had changed. Or had it? I felt that something
had, but I could not say what and chalked it up to my imagination.
"I must have fallen asleep," I said, rubbing my face, feeling my hands
on my cheeks, knowing that I was doing exactly what I was doing, but
still somehow unsure of it.
Actually, even now, I'm not sure how much of this sensation of unreality
I felt at the time and how much of it has entered my memories since the
events -- which I have gone over in my mind so many times that I have
probably lost the original memory under layers of, well, remembering
the memories.
"Awaken Sally," Kar-hinter said. "We will be there in less than five
minutes."
"Okay," I said, fully awake now.
I shook Sally's shoulder. Her eyes blinked open; she looked up at me,
shook her head, yawned, and nearly smiled.
"We're almost there," I said.
"Oh, good," she said. "I was having the most pleasant dream."
"Momentarily you shall have a most pleasant reality," Kar-hinter said.
I became aware of the flickering of the skudder's probability field as
it slowed and then stopped, and bright late-afternoon sunlight flooded
the interior of the craft through the transparent dome.
"Everybody out," the skudder's pilot said, rising from his seat,
then pushing a button that caused the craft's hatch to open.
"I hope that your sleep has been sufficient," Kar-hinter said as he rose.
"We will be here several hours, and you will have little opportunity to
rest before we leave."
"We're fine," I said.
"Good," Kar-hinter replied. "Come. We are expected."
The place where the skudder had come to rest was a shallow circular
depression in a wide field composed of what I thought to be concrete,
though the substance was blue-green in color and I discovered upon
disembarking from the craft that it was soft under my feet. The field
extended perhaps a hundred yards in all directions, pitted every few
dozen feet with other depressions and in perhaps a third of them sat
skudders like our own, though some were brightly decorated with designs
that I didn't recognize.
On our left the field terminated in a broad green meadow which was
apparently a landing field for another type of craft: fragile-looking
teardrops of metal and glass that I tentatively identified as some type of
antigrav aircraft. To our right the field gave way to a gray concrete slab
upon which rested a slim golden tower that reached into the sky perhaps a
hundred feet. On the top of the tower sat a transparent globe maybe ten
feet in diameter or a little larger. I don't know what it was. Beyond
the tower was another grassy field across which a number of people were
strolling and playing a game that looked similar to the golf of Sally's
Line. Beyond the field was the city.
It was a fairyland of towers and turrets and minarets and bright flags
and streamers waving in the breeze, bridges and catwalks of spun glass
connecting the towers, sparkling in the sunlight. Here and there in the
air above them were the teardrop aircraft.
Two men and two women waited outside the craft, smiling, but not speaking
until we had climbed down to the blue-green field and had taken in our
surroundings. Then Kar-hinter said, "Eric Mathers, Sally von Heinen,
please allow me to introduce our guides. Dylla, Jocasta, Dicton,
and Hallacy."
The first two were women and the other two men, all with the rich earthy
features of south Europe, the kind of Latin beauty you can find in some of
the Roman statues that still exist in Sally's Line. There was a similarity
about them, as if they were all of a single family, brothers and sisters,
though I never really knew for sure. They all smiled in reply, offered
their hands and welcomed us to Calethon I in flawless, idiomatic English
of Sally's Line.