At the Narrow Passage (28 page)

"I guess we'll find out soon," I replied.
The pilot now opened the hatch, gestured for Sally to climb in, offered
her his hand. "I've got clothes in here for you."
"Good," I said, keeping a false smile on my face.
"Must be nice here," he said as Sally placed one foot on the lip of the
hatch, hoisted herself in with both hands.
For a moment the pilot's eyes strayed from Sally's bare buttocks to the
cabin and the blissful, idyllic panorama that surrounded it. And that
was exactly what I wanted.
I could see Sally in the hatchway out of the corner of my eye as she pulled
herself erect, then slowly, carefully turned so that she was facing outward,
then lashed out with her foot to the back of the unconcerned pilot's head.
I switched into combat augmentation and was satisfied that everything
worked perfectly. The world slowed to my senses; sounds grew deeper and
shifted toward the bass; light shifted toward the red.
"Aaaaaccchhh," the pilot groaned slowly, floating forward from the impact
of Sally's foot. I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around to face me,
threw my right fist into a face that had not yet registered the shock of
the violent action. I put my left fist into his stomach, my right into his
face again as he folded. Then he was unconscious on the soft green ground
before he realized that he was being attacked. I cut out the augmentation.
"He's out," I said, bending over him, quickly running my hands over his
body to see if he carried a weapon, which I doubted. "Nothing," I told
Sally, then dragged him a few feet away from the craft and made him as
comfortable as possible. They'd come after him soon, very soon, I feared.
When I got into the skudder Sally had already found the clothing that he
had brought for us, standard civilian-type clothing from Sally's Line
or one very near it. It didn't matter much to me how we were dressed
since I had no idea what kind of costumes we'd find at our destination.
While I was dressing, Sally said, "Oh, Eric, I hope that we're doing
the right thing."
"No more than I do."
"Are you sure you can find Mica's Paratime?"
"Sure?" I asked as I buttoned up the shirt brought for me. "No, I'm not
sure, but I've got a fair idea; at least I do if Latham's book was true."
"What exactly do you mean?" she asked. "You never have really explained
it to me."
"Okay, just a minute," I said, sitting down in the pilot's seat, feeling
back under the control panel to where the energy pistol was supposed to
be within reach of every skudder pilot. You never know what you might
run into when you flicker across the Lines.
I found the cold metal butt, the stud that released the weapon. Click!
The pistol snapped into my hand. I drew it out, looked at it for a moment.
Standard-issue energy pistol. Full charge. You could do a hell of a lot
of damage with that baby if you wanted to. I might want to. I slipped it
into my belt, feeling more like a man than I had for a good long while
and feeling a hell of a lot more confident of our ability to get away
with our scheme. It's funny what a weapon can do to a man.
"Sit down there," I gestured toward the seat beside me, studying the
familiar skudder controls. "Keep a watch on our friend out there. If he
wakes up, we'll get out of here in a hurry."
"Okay, but tell me what you're going to do."
"Well, you've read Martin Latham's book, haven't you?"
"
The Greatest Lie
? Of course."
"You remember how he found the Albigensians?"
"Yes, he left his own Paratime and went West as far as he could."
"Okay, that's the key. I've read that part three or four times," I said,
"and I remember it pretty well. Latham had a standard four-man skudder
just like this one. He got it out of the skudder pool, so I'm pretty sure
that when he did, the power cells were at full charge. They always are.
He removed the governor and deactivated the telltale, but other than that,
the skudder he used was exactly like this one."
"Uh-huh," Sally grunted.
I reached under the control panel again, fumbled, then found what I wanted
and pulled at two wires. They broke free from their connections.
"Our telltale's off," I said. "They can't trace us by it now. It's just
a safety device, so it's not hidden." I smiled to myself. "I'm not going
to bother the governor. That's a job for a licensed mechanic -- or an
engineer like Latham. But we don't need to remove it anyway. We don't have
nearly as far to go as Latham did, and we don't need top speed -- I hope."
"Oh?" Sally said.
"Well, to get back to what I was saying: A skudder of given mass with
a probability generator of a given maxmum potential can only go so far
on a set of full power cells, governor or no."
"Oh, I see," Sally said, beginning to follow me. "You can tell how far
Latham went from the amount of power he used. All you have to do is find
his starting point, right?"
"Right," I said. "Now I don't know exactly where Latham started.
He didn't give the Paratemporal coordinates, but I've got a pretty good
idea, to within a few dozen Lines, anyway."
"What do we do then?" Sally asked.
In answer to Sally's question I flipped back the covering panel of the
skudder's miniature computer and began tapping on the exposed keys.
A four-man skudder's computer is a simple-minded beast, not much more
than an electronic slide rule, really, but given the right data, it can
give you fairly quick and accurate answers. I just hoped that I was giving
it the right data.
The Line where Latham had been working was a long way East, much farther
East than the Eden Line where we were now -- on the other side of my
Homeline, I believed. The place where he had finally come to rest was
a very long way West. We were now somewhere in between, though exactly
where, I didn't know for sure yet. The computer would give me that too
in a few moments, based on the skudder's power consumption since leaving
the only Line whose coordinates I was sure of, the Line from which Sally
and I had originally come, RTGB-307.
A few minutes later I was satisfied with the approximate number of Lines
that Latham had crossed before he ran out of power. Yes, it was a hell of
a long way West.
Now, assuming that this skudder had come from Sally's Homeline, from
our base at the Butt of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides which was still
Kar-hinter's base of operations, and assuming that it had started out with
full power cells -- which I was sure it had, regulations required it --
it had come exactly
X
number of Lines.
X
from
Y
,
being Kar-hinter's base of operations, left
Z
number of Lines and
our present location. Our location then, after a little more figuring
using the computer, was
A
number of Lines to the Temporal West
of the Line from which Latham had supposedly started his trip, plus or
minus a dozen Lines to allow for my own errors. All this meant that we
had about
B
number of Lines to cross to reach the place where
Latham had run out of power -- Mica's Homeline.
Okay, then, if my memory and assumptions were valid, and I hoped to all
the gods that I knew that they were, we had enough power in the cells to
make a round trip, plus. Very good, I thought, since we'd probably have
to do a lot of maneuvering to find the exact Line we were looking for.
I sat back at last, dug a pack of cigarettes out of the skudder's supply
compartment, and smiled a big smile at Sally.
"Are we ready?" she asked.
"We are now if we'll ever be." I glanced out through the skudder's dome.
"Our friend's still out."
"You hit him pretty hard."
"Yeah. Okay, brace yourself. I'm not the world's best pilot, but I
can manage."
My hands slowly went to the controls. I cut on the probability generator,
watched dials show the gradual rise of power, heard the hum that filled
the air grow in intensity, become a whine, an almost physical sensation.
While the probability potential grew, I adjusted other controls. Initially
I set the controls just a little short of where I expected Mica's Homeline
to be, planning to stop and recon the Lines before plunging all the way
in. I still wasn't sure enough of what we were getting ourselves into
to jump all the way in at once. "Caution preventeth a fall . . ."
or something like that.
"Ready?" I asked.
"I guess."
"Here goes."
I hit the activating switch.
"We're on our way," I said.
Flicker.
Fortunately we had both eaten before the skudder came, but even at that
we began to feel hunger before the trip was into its second half. We'd
just have to wait it out. There wasn't much in the skudder to eat
besides emergency rations, which I didn't want to break open short of
an emergency, and we didn't dare stop anywhere. Not for a long while yet.
More than once I had a strong desire to bring the skudder out of probability
into, well, "reality" to see what kinds of worlds we were passing through
now. By the middle of the trip we had gone beyond the Lines known to
the Kriths, and we were now in largely unexplored Lines, unexplored by
the Kriths and Timeliners, at least, though I assumed that Mica's people
had been there, were probably there in force, though keeping themselves
hidden from most of the locals as they were on Sally's world, But, well,
I didn't want to cause an incident by coming out in some place where our
kind was unknown, where we might be taken as alien invaders or something,
maybe smeared with thermonukes or shot with arrows or whatever kinds of
weapons they might have.
So we waited and watched the dials indicate the passage of time and
Paratime as the master destination dial said we were slowly nearing the
place where I had determined that we would come out for the first time.
We didn't speak much, Sally and I. There wasn't too much left to say now.
We just waited and held hands and felt scared and hoped that Mica or
somebody would be waiting for us with open arms.
The automatic destination settings terminated. The final cross-Line jump
flickered. I held the energy pistol in my hand, safety off, held my breath
and . . .
We came out.
I don't know what we expected, but what we found wasn't it. It was like
nothing we had hoped or expected to see here, in a part of the Lines
where we had expected to encounter a high and complex civilization of
cross-Line travelers.
Oh, there had been a high degree of technology here once, but now . . .
The transparent dome of the skudder gave us a 360 degree view of the
countryside surrounding us, if it could be called by so generous a
term as "countryside." The sky above us was blue-black, sprinkled with
a smattering of the brighter stars, and in that sky hung an enormous,
bloated sun whose corona beamed brightly around it. It was broad daylight,
yet the sky was more than halfway dark, and I knew that this Earth had
very little left of its atmosphere, more than the Moon, but not enough
to support human life or much of any other kind of life as we know it.
Before us a rocky, gray-brown plain stretched toward the horizon, then
abruptly ended two or three miles away in a huge pile of rocks, a chunk
of the Earth lifted up and tilted skyward, revealing a thousand centuries
of geological evolution, though at the moment that didn't interest me
very much.
In the other directions the view was essentially the same: gray-brown
stone and earth; waterless, airless, lifeless rock, a world that was
totally dead, that might have always been dead, that might have never
known life and men, though I doubted it. I had seen worlds like this
before, though I don't believe I had ever seen one so totally devastated.
A skudder's hull, the result of millions of man-hours of research and
labor, is impervious to most forms of radiation except visible light,
which is allowed to pass through the dome. So I wasn't too worried when
the counters on the outer hull went wild, measuring a nuclear radiation
level a million times or more higher than it should have been.
"God, haven't they had a war here!" I said.
"What is this place, Eric?" Sally gasped, her voice filled with fear.
"The
where
is exactly the place where we started," I said slowly.
"It's the Parawhen that matters." I paused. "There's been a war here, Sally.
One hell of a war. This planet's good and dead. Let's get the hell out of
here. We've still got a way to go."
The probability generator was standing by. All I had to do was spin
the destination dial for a few Lines ahead, hit the actuating switch
and flicker.
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
"I . . . I've never seen anything so horrible. How did it happen, a war
like that, I mean?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't even want to know. Don't worry.
We'll find Mica's Line.
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
We came out in a world that was different, but not very much. The sky was
more like a sky, bluer but not as blue as it should have been. The Earth
was desolate, the same dead gray-brown, and the radiation level was almost
as high, and we were just a few hundred yards from the edge of an enormous
crater that still glowed in its depths, down in the hot shadows.
"Not again," Sally gasped.
"Parallel war," I said. "Maybe not as bad as the other, but just as total
as far as human life is concerned."
"What is this, Eric? Could we possibly be near Mica's Paratime? He never
told me about anything like this."
"Maybe he was ashamed of what his relatives had done," I said, feeling
a growing apprehension. "We'll go on."
But as I glanced at the controls and the dials and the computer read-out,
I saw that we were very nearly smack on top of where I thought Mica's
Homeline should be. Well, I thought, maybe his Line is an island in all
this destruction. That's possible. It's happened before. But we'd better
go a little slower.
Flicker.
The next Line was almost identical, except that the nearest crater was
a mile away and the radiation level in the vicinity of the skudder was
a few roentgens lower.
Flicker.
It was as if we were back in the first Line we had seen. The atmosphere
was blasted away, and a naked sun blistered the naked rock of a dead,
naked Earth. The radiation was high enough to scare me even inside
the skudder.