At the Narrow Passage (30 page)

things
they are." Then he seemed to run out of
words to say the things he wanted to say.
"I find all this pretty hard to believe, Tracy," I said.
"I do too, Eric, but, well, it's true. I'm not lying to you."
"Do you think that one of them could make love to a human woman?" I asked.
"Yes, I suppose it's possible," Tracy said after a moment of thought.
"I mean, they're physically capable of it. They're built a lot like us."
"That much?"
Tracy nodded.
"What do they want here?"
"I don't know. I wish I did."
"Listen, Eric," Kar-hinter said. "We are now in the Albigensian Lines.
Much of what the one who called himself Mica told you is true. The
Albigensians
were
a highly developed people. They may have developed
skudder travel independently. But they encountered these
others
.
What do you think caused all this destruction?" His hand gestured
sweepingly around.
"War," I said bitterly.
"Damned right it was war," Kearns said. "War with the bluies. The
Albigensians fought back, but they were wiped out. The war destroyed
dozens of Lines before it was over and those blue bastards had won.
Damn it, Mathers, you've got to make a choice. Now! Maybe you don't trust
Kar-hinter. I don't know whether I do. But for God's sake, man, the Kriths
never did anything like
this
."
"Eric," Kar-hinter said when I turned back to look at him, "given time,
I could perhaps explain
our
motives to you, but now we do not have
the time and you have stated an unwillingness to listen. But we, both
mankind
and
Krith, are on the verge of war with these aliens. You
must decide which side you are on. That of mankind or that of the
blue-skinned aliens."
"He's right," Tracy said. "Eric, whatever else the Kriths are, and I think
I know now, they aren't half as bad as -- as these others."
"I don't know that."
"Damn it, man, look at this world!" Kearns said.
"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other
people's word for things. I'm going to find out for myself."
"You'll get yourself killed in the process," Kearns said.
"It's my life."
"Your life belongs to the Timeliners," Kar-hinter said, a sharp coldness
to his voice that I had never heard before.
"The hell you say!" I yelled. Then, more calmly, "I'm sorry, but I can't
take your word for anything any longer. I'm leaving." I started to turn
away.
"Stay, Eric, we are not finished yet," Kar-hinter said in that same tone.
"Hold still, Mathers," Kearns snapped and when I turned back I saw that
he held an energy pistol in his hand.
"I thought you were supposed to be unarmed," I said.
"Don't be a fool," Kearns said in disgust.
The look on Tracy's face inside the helmet was blank astonishment. He had
not known that Kearns was bringing a gun. "Wait," he finally managed to
say. "We told him . . ."
"To hell with what we told him," Kearns said. The pistol in his hand
slowly came up, then leveled at my stomach. "You've talked yourself into
this, Mathers, you damned, bloody, human fool."
Three things happened at once. I threw myself to the earth, rolling,
grabbing toward the energy pistol in the pocket of my survival suit.
Kearns' energy pistol rasped, sending a jet of hell through the
radioactive air where I had been standing. Tracy threw himself against
Kearns, knocking him off his feet. They both went down together.
As I rolled, I tugged the pistol out of my suit, but before I could aim
and fire, the air was lighted by another energy blast, this one from
a pistol in the hand of Kar-hinter. That was the first time in my life
that I had ever seen a Krith hold a weapon -- that I knew of.
Tracy's survival suit blackened, burst into flames, for it was he that
Kar-hinter was aiming for. Tracy's screams were loud in the near silence
of this dead world, but he died quickly.
Yet even before Hillary Tracy died, Kar-hinter joined him. My pistol
fired, poorly aimed, but aimed well enough, and the clothing covering
Kar-hinter's chest flamed and disintegrated, as did the living flesh
under it.
Even while all this was happening, I was able to see out of the corner
of my eye the fourth figure emerging from the skudder. Whether it was
man or Krith I couldn't tell. I was rolling to my knees, swinging the
pistol around at Kearns, who was coming up, throwing Tracy's body aside.
I fired. My beam seared off the top of Kearns' helmet, and the top of
his head and bone and blackened brain burst out.
Kearns should have died instantly. Any normal man would have, but he didn't.
His body kept moving, rising upward, coming awkwardly to its feet,
the energy pistol still in its hand and firing wildly. I blasted again,
and Kearns' half-headless corpse, now missing an arm, nothing left but
a cauterized stump, staggered backward and fell to the earth, its legs
still kicking.
I only know of one kind of higher creature that can live with its head
blown away and that only because it has three brains and can go on living
for a while without its head-brain. And I realized that there was a lot
that I had never suspected about the Kriths -- and I realized that
the blue-skinned Paratimers weren't the only ones who could make use of
plastic surgery. Kearns had no more been a human being than Kar-hinter.
He had just looked more like one.
At the time I wasn't thinking about these things very much, though.
I was thinking about the fourth figure who was running across the barren
soil toward me, a seven-foot figure of a man with an energy pistol in
his hand, aiming at me.
Perhaps I had the advantage of anger and adrenalin over Pall -- for that
is who it must have been. Perhaps he hadn't had the time to take it all
in, time to prepare himself to kill. I had. And the weapon in my hand
was surprisingly steady as it came up and fired, almost on its own,
into the middle of the man's torso.
Pall stopped, then staggered backward, his chest and abdomen flaming,
and finally fell forward on his face, still thirty feet from me. I didn't
know whether he was dead or not, but it he weren't, he wouldn't last long
in this environment.
I gasped for breath, felt myself shaking in reaction to the violence that
had just taken place, and looked at the three bodies close to me. Only
Tracy's body was human, some part of my mind thought, and he had trusted
the Kriths. It had cost him his life. I knew that I could never trust
them again. Never. Nor ever believe anything that they said.
I shook my head sadly, bitterly, returned the energy pistol to the
pocket of my survival suit and turned back toward the skudder where
Sally waited -- and had crossed no more than half that distance when I
saw the other skudder, no, sautierboat, come sailing across the hills,
its externally mounted machine guns firing -- at me.
25
"They Are Almost Human"
There was very little protection out there. The nearest was thirty or
forty feet away -- the skudder -- and I ran toward it. The aim of the
machine gunner in the boat was fortunately lousy and I crossed the
distance without getting myself killed.
Sally started to open the hatch for me, but I waved to her to keep it
closed. I wanted to meet the men in that sautier-boat, but I wanted to
be alive when I did it.
I walked a few steps away from the skudder, waved my hands above my head,
gesturing that I surrendered.
The gunner in the boat must have got my message, for the firing ceased
and the craft came to earth a few yards from my skudder. I stood silently
waiting, hoping that whoever came out looked like me and not like the
things Tracy had described.
While the sautierboat settled and its hatch began to open, I let one
of my hands slip back toward the pocket that held the energy pistol.
I wasn't that confident yet. Maybe . . .
The hatch was fully open now, and a figure clad in something that was
probably a radiation protection suit climbed out, a long, ugly-looking
weapon in his hands. Two more followed him, both as well armed.
The helmets that covered their heads and faces protected them from my
view pretty well while they were in the shadow of the boat, but when
they walked forward, speaking in some language that I had never heard
before and knew wasn't Albigensian, and the late afternoon sunlight
shone directly on and through their transparent helmets, I could see
their faces -- and I knew that at least Tracy hadn't been lying to me.
The faces, well, they were almost human, but
almost
wasn't good enough.
Their eyes were too big and their noses too flat and somehow their mouths
weren't in the right place and their jaws were hinged wrongly and there
was an unmistakable tinge of blue to their skins. And there was something
menacing about them that was more than just their appearance.
Sally must have seen them too, for she screamed, but she still had the
presence of mind to open the hatch and yell, "Get in!"
All at once my energy pistol was out and firing, so close to my body that
I felt the terrible backwash of its heat even through the insulation of
the survival suit. And three submachine pistols were screaming and
chattering in the space between the two craft, and the whole universe
tried to come apart at the seams.
Something smashed through the fabric of my survival suit below my left
thigh, and my leg suddenly became a column of mush that didn't want
to hold me up and I felt the salty taste of blood in my mouth as I bit
through my lower lip. But my energy pistol kept firing, and light and
heat and flame filled the air, and the three alien figures before me,
scant feet away, stopped coming forward, stopped firing at me, and fell
apart screaming.
Then a woman's arms, impossibly strong, were pulling me backward, upward
into the skudder's open hatch, and I tried to help, pulling with my arms
and somehow together, Sally and I, we got my uncooperative body into the
skudder as the machine gun on the sautierboat turned around and began to
blast into the skudder's open hatch.
"Hit the switch!" I screamed, and Sally must have understood me.
She stumbled across the skudder's deck under a hail of bullets and hit
the activating switch on the skudder's control panel.
WHAM!
I aimed the energy pistol through the open hatch, held the firing stud
depressed, searing at the metal hull of the sautierboat, til . . .
Flicker!
"Get the hatch closed," I gasped.
Flicker.
"Are you hurt badly?" Sally cried.
Flicker.
"My left leg," I said, but all I remember after that is . . .
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
26
Out of Probability
The machine-gun bullets from the sautierboat must have penetrated the
skudder's hull, must have damaged the craft, for within a few minutes
red warning lights began to flicker on in the craft's control panel.
I don't remember it. Sally told me about it later.
She cut away enough of the survival suit to get to my leg, shattered by
a bullet, and she was at least able to stop the bleeding, though she was
afraid to try to do anything more with the radiation level within the craft
still dangerously high.
When I finally came out of the grayness, hours later, I saw the danger
lights, and I struggled to sit up.
"Eric," Sally asked, "what do those lights mean?"
"The probablity generator," I said. "It's . . ." Another light flickered on,
and a dial swung into a red danger area.
"Open the hatch!" I cried.
"What?"
"Open the hatch. Now!"
Sally did, and I pulled myself across the deck, trying to ignore the pain
that told me that I ought to lie down and die.
"What are we going to do?"
"This damned thing's going to blow up. Help me to the hatch. We're going
to jump."
She didn't ask any more questions. She just helped me.
"Get me to my feet."
Painfully, more painfully than I like to remember, I came up, standing
on one leg. Sally supported me on the other side. We stood in the hatch
for a moment.
"I'm going to count," I said. "When I get to five, jump. Exactly on five
and together, or we won't even end up in the same Line."
"Okay," Sally managed to say.
"One."
Flicker.
"Two."
Flicker.
"Three."
Flicker.
"Four."
Flicker.
"Five. Jump!"
We jumped.
Don't ask me to try to tell you what it was like -- leaping out of a
probability field into "reality." It didn't kill us. And that in itself
is something of a minor miracle. We both were battered, and Sally's right
arm was broken were she fell on it, and a couple of my ribs were cracked,
but we lived through it, and that's about all that matters now. We lived.
27
"Something's Got to Be Done"
The rest isn't too important.
We found ourselves in a wood, but one that showed the works of man,
tree stumps cut by power tools and footpaths, and off in the distance
we could hear the sounds of surface vehicles on a paved road.
We took off our survival suits, and Sally, little more than half-conscious,
made her way to the road and stopped one of the vehicles and asked for help
in English and was more than surprised when the vehicle's driver answered
in the same language. She told him, convincingly, I suppose, and with
great presence of mind, that we were the survivors of the crash of an
aircraft -- she didn't say "airplane," though that is the word Here and
Now -- and that we had made our way through the woods this far.
The vehicle's driver, a kind, generous man, took us to a hospital
where we spent the next few days, groggy and only halfway aware of our
surroundings.
After a while, though, I learned that we had made it back to a Line that
didn't seem to be too far from Sally's own world, but in this one the
American rebels had won their war for independence nearly two hundred
years ago.
The fact that our crashed aircraft has not been found has led to some
questions from the American authorities, but we both claim to be British
subjects -- which is almost true -- but that has created other problems
that we haven't solved yet.
Now, well, now we are in a hospital in a world that doesn't suspect the
existence of the parallel worlds and the almost unbelievable menace of
two equally alien and non-human forces approaching each other across
those Timelines, nearing the inevitable clash that might well mean the
end of human life on all the Lines.