Sideslip

by Ted White

  “Very interesting outline. And what has happened in Russia? Does Stalin—”

  “Stalin died in 1953,” I interrupted. “Khrushchev later denounced him as a dictator, the regime was liberalized a bit, and after Khrushchev was bounced it’s gotten even more liberalized. But that’s still not much. Besides, they’ve got that ideological struggle with China. ...” I seemed to sense relief at hearing of Stalin’s death; they practically jumped out of their chairs when I mentioned China.

  “You—you mean China became communist?” said Morgan. “Mao was able to do it, eh? He’s always claimed he could have, that it was just the Angels’ arrival that stopped him. Fantastic.”

  “If true.” It was the one I’d dubbed Tweedledum. He roused himself from the chair, tipping it forward with a sharp thock. He turned his colorless, depthless eyes intently upon me. “It is an inconsistent statement. If Japan were crushed at the end of this Great War, how could a victorious China possibly have been taken over by that raggle-taggle of an army? Think! They had to retreat thousands of miles at one point. Preposterous. This gentleman is not telling us the truth, I think.”

  I was tired. My body felt weak, exhausted. I was in no mood to argue ancient history with someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You overlook something,” I said. “The exhaustion of China by the war, the venality of many in the Kuo-mintang regime, and the presence in the U.S. State Department of a number of worthies who were convinced Mao’s army was just a band of ‘Agrarian Reformers’ . ; . By 1949, Chiang was settled on Formosa, and Mao was settled in Peking, the ruler of all China.”

  Tweedledum did not appear satisfied by my explanation, but muttered something on the order of “let it pass for now.”

  “Actually,” I went on, “there isn’t much more to the general outline than that. To go into anything in more detail, I’d have to start from 1938 and work up from there.”

  Morgan appeared satisfied. “Very well, let us begin at the beginning; we shall have to hope for the best.”

  “Speaking of that, when is the beginning? I still haven’t found out.”

  “It was the evening of October 30, 1938, about 11 p.m. in New York time. The Angels proved that they had something of a sense of humor in picking that time. The whole east coast had been in a panic for several hours beforehand.” He looked at me expectantly. “Now, before I go on, perhaps you can guess what it was that caused it? It might serve as an interesting bit of data, to verify both our stories—and both our worlds, for that matter.”

  I had to think for a minute. The date didn’t mean much to me; I don’t remember dates that well anyway. But then I recalled the random thought which had come

  to me when I’d first been told about the Coming of the Angels.

  “Not—not the night of the Welles broadcast?”

  Morgan nodded, a pleased look on his face.

  I thought for a moment about that one. Orson Welles had presented a phony newscast of a Martian invasion, based on H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, and he’d taken in a lot of rather dense listeners. People actually panicked over the broadcast, and there were a lot of red faces the next morning.

  “That’s a pretty remarkable coincidence,” I said.

  “No coincidence,” said Morgan. “Or rather, let us say, a fortuitous one. No doubt they were planning their arrival for about that target date. They simply seized upon the moment to their advantage.

  ‘The Angels have made remarkably few mistakes. Their annunciation was quite thoroughly planned and most businesslike.”

  “How did they actually accomplish it?” I asked.

  Morgan looked about to answer, when Tweedledum cut in.

  “Enough of this. I do not believe that you are telling us the truth. You seem to believe that you can feed us impossible lies about your world and that we will be naive enough to swallow them. Now you are trying to stall us while pumping what information from us you can. We want to know of your present-day weaponry, the troop strengths and their dispositions, for the various countries, and a run-down on the political leaders. First, weapons.”

  Morgan shrugged at me, as if to say, “What can you do when you have a cretin for a superior officer?” and then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as if dismissing the whole situation from his mind.

  “It’s you who are planning the takeover, isn’t it,” I asked them. “Trying to convince me that was the Technocrats’ idea. You want to make sure you don’t run into something you can’t handle.”

  “Weapons, Mr. Archer. Or must we be more persuasive than Mr. Morgan seems to have been?” The voice was cold, distant, inexorable . . . and vastly cruel.

  “Well, we’ve come up with a dandy improvement on the slingshot. It’s man-sized, and we fling five-star generals at the enemies. The stars are honed razor-sharp, and inflict considerable damage on any so unfortunate as to—”

  Tweedledee, the nervous one, arose, as did Dum, and they both drew weapons from their pockets. I heard Jack Morgan sigh, as if in deep sorrow at such brainless folly.

  The men kept their distance from me and, without a word, motioned me to get up and move towards the wall. There was a closet there, and they silently motioned me to open it.

  It wasn’t a closet. It was only six feet high, and three feet by three feet. I got the message. It was probably adjustable; preset for my rather outsized proportions. I would not be able to stand up; I would not be able to lie down, or even to sit. It was going to end up as a pretty dull day after all.

  I was motioned inside. I weighed my chances. But these boys were pros. They were too far from me to try anything, and they looked dangerous. I stooped to enter. The door shut behind me. Instantly I pushed backward against the door with all piy strength, hoping to catch them by surprise. But the door had already locked, and all I got for my effort was a short stab of pain up my back.

  Time did not pass perceptibly. I was caught in an endless hallucinatory “now” that was forever the minute the door closed behind me.

  The inclosure was totally black. The only hint I had of time’s passage was the occasional colored display before my straining eyes.

  Sleep was impossible in my cramped position. After shifting about I found I could arrive at a sort of numbed trance state that cancelled out some of the pain from the hunched-up position I was forced to assume. But I could not make my mind fade out into unconsciousness, to real sleep. Time crushed in on me the way the walls of my prison did, and never ended.

  Eventually my mind began losing inner coherence; it babbled to me in a growingly insane tempo of random words. The strain on my back and feet and neck was translated into nonsense syllables that spoke directly to my mind, and everything spun backwards into pain and darkness and meaningless sounds. . . .

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I must’ve slept, but I had no way of knowing how long. The mind plays funny tricks on you sometimes. I can remember times when I had to be up in the morning at six-thirty, and at six-twenty-five I would wake, look at my watch, and go back to sleep for another five minutes. At six-thirty I would again awaken and get up. But in those five minutes I’d had time to dream a dream I’d have sworn took hours.

  The mind’s funny that way.

  When they opened the door again I had no way of knowing whether it was only an hour or two later, or whether I’d somehow passed days in my stupor. Worse, I couldn’t remember, had it been daytime or nighttime when I’d recovered from that gassing here? I’d lost all connection with the flow of time—I was cut off and floundering.

  Maybe that seems insignificant to you, but me, I’ve lived all my life to the watch and the calendar. I’m not that hung up on it, and I’m not one of those nuts who has to be somewhere at exactly the proper moment, no leeway—I don’t worry about things like that.

  For me it’s a matter of orientation, of knowing where my feet are planted. I like to know that it’s four-thirty p.m., Tuesday.

  Once already I’d suffered this feeli
ng of disorientation —when I’d found myself in this world. That was a physical disorientation. Now it was temporal. My metabolism was crossed up. Was it day or night? Was it the day after I’d arrived in this godawful place, or days later? When was I?

  I know that somehow I slept, because I woke up, jarringly, when the door opened.

  I’d been braced against it, collapsed as best I could manage, in that torture-closet, and when the damned door opened, I fell out.

  I hit heavily on my left hip. I tried to roll with it, to absorb the worst of the impact. Hell, I’d made a death-defying dive from a broken window safely, hadn’t I?

  I didn’t roll with it. I felt every jolting pound of impact, squarely on my hip, the jar running up my back during the fractional moment before my shoulder hit, and my head snapped to one side and hit the carpet.

  The carpet was my only blessing. It wasn’t thick, but it helped a little. And that was all I had to be grateful for.

  My eyes had automatically snapped open, then clenched shut again. After the unrelieved blackness of the closet, the light was like a glaring searchlight. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about my arms, my legs, dead weights which refused to obey my commands, leaving me helpless on that floor like a huge sack of potatoes.

  “Well, Mr. Archer,” came a cold and distant voice. I tried opening my eyes again, a thin squint this time. “I trust you’ve enjoyed your respite in our guest room? As you can see, we are not unhospitable. And now, perhaps you would care to return our hospitality?”

  It was Tweedledum, of course. Behind him, an expression of worry on his face, was Morgan.

  It was pretty obviously the old trick they’d used in the Korean War, except of course that for these men there had been no Korean War. One interrogator is brutal, the other is friendly. The friendly one eventually gains the prisoner’s confidence, and pretty soon the prisoner is spilling his guts.

  And Morgan was pretty convincing in his nice-guy role. I had the feeling that it was quite possible that he did regret the unpleasant measures that Tweedledum had decided were necessary in my case. Morgan was the kind of guy that I might be expected to warm to.

  I decided to start acting more chummy with Morgan. Neither of them appeared to be armed, but then again, they hadn’t before. And neither of them was getting close enough to me for me to take any direct action, even if I was capable of any. But if I could get one of them to leave . . .

  “Mr. Morgan, your hired hand here has a marvelously magnetic personality. He’s a great walking advertisement for your cause. You can tell him for me that I wouldn’t tell him Marv Throneberry’s batting average last year, much less anything he really wanted to know.”

  I had a pins-and-needles feeling in my arms and legs now, and I could, moving carefully, raise myself to a sitting position.

  Morgan moved forward, a puzzled expression replacing the earlier one. Marvelous Marv, without the Mets in this world, must’ve dropped from sight completely. “Well, Mr. Archer,” he said, reaching down a hand to me, “it may be true that my associate, Mr. Prather, was a little hasty in his conclusions, and I can see how you each might, ahh, rub each other the wrong way. But I would like for us to come to some amicable agreement. We realize that you can’t necessarily tell us anything about how the weapons of your world are made, but it would satisfy us just to know what they were. It is extremely important to us. Surely it cannot do your world any harm? We can’t do anything about the Angels’ energy shields or their hellish bombs. In fact, at the time the Angels first came, we could do little enough at all, since all we really had was manpower. I speak of Russia and her cause, of course.”

  Refusing his help, I made my way to an easy chair, and leaned back, shuddering. “When is it?” I asked. “Tell me that.” When he shook his head and looked question-ingly at his watch, I added, “How long have I been here? When is today?”

  “Oh,” he said. He smiled. ‘Today is Wednesday, the first of August. It’s about five-thirty, p.m.”

  I ran that one through my computerlike brain. I’d arrived late afternoon, Tuesday. It was less than twenty-four hours later. That seemed least plausible of all.

  “Mr. Archer . . .” Morgan began again.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m tired of your line, okay? And The Happiness Boy over there gives me a case of the rampant clams every time I look at him.

  “Who the hell are you, with your talk about ‘amicable agreements,’ and all that crap, when you’ve kept me

  locked in your damned neat little torture rig for the last who-knows-how-many hours. I’ve been drugged, gassed, and for all I know knocked on the head a couple of times all in the space of one day. I’ve had nothing to eat, and very little to drink. I need the use of a bathroom. My body aches, and I could sleep around the clock. And you expect me to sit here and chatter with you about the arms placements of a world which, for all practical purposes, does not even exist for you.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Archer,” Morgan said. He gave an abashed chuckle. I was growing heartily tired of his everpresent chuckle. “Actually, we have prepared a meal for you. Alma!”

  A swinging door opened on the other side of the room, and a young woman pushed in a cart with a dinner prepared and laid out on it. I gave my attention first to the food.

  It was Basic American Food—slices of roast beef, whipped potato, string beans—exactly the sort of thing that comes in frozen dinners and a thousand greasy spoons. It was also the first solid food I’d seen since I’d been here. The very smell of it started the juices running in my stomach.

  I wolfed the food down, not pausing once until I’d washed the last of it down with the glass of water.

  During my meal, Morgan and the girl had engaged in chitchat, superficial, but friendly enough to put me at my ease and make me feel I was among friends, rather than captors. And I sneaked looks at the girl as I ate.

  She was thin, almost to the point of outright skinniness, but very delicate, very light bones. She had a quick, nervous way of moving that reminded me on the whole of a bird. Her face was birdlike too—thin, pointed, but still attractive in its own fashion. She had little sign of breasts, and boyish hips. Only her backside was at all developed, and that was rather startlingly misplaced on her angular figure.

  Morgan looked up and saw me eyeing her. “We are not quite so inconsiderate of your needs as you must’ve thought. Alma will show you to a bedroom. We will resume our talks in the morning.”

  Prather, or Tweedledum, as I still thought of him, looked up. “You had best be rested, and in a cooperative frame of mind then, Mr. Archer. As you have seen, we are quite capable of using harsh methods to obtain what is necessary.”

  “I noticed,” I said. Yes, indeed. Knock a guy around, then butter up to him. Knock him around again, then some more sweet talk. So far they’d been conservative in their methods. Some pretty strong guys had broken down under intensive treatment of that sort. How long would I last?

  “One last question—?” I asked, as Alma started for the door.

  “Yes?”

  “How is it you know my name?”

  Morgan laughed. For once it was an open, honest laugh. “Why, we picked your pockets, Mr. Archer. The ID you had did not fool us—the description was obviously not you. And your own cards and papers identified you quite adequately. Perhaps you will tell us tomorrow—what is a ‘Diner’s Club Credit Card’? Goodnight, now.”

  Alma led me into a hall. There were other doors along its length, but all were closed. As if reading my mind, she said, “They’re all locked. The way out is locked. And I have no key. So please put all thoughts of escape from your mind.”

  She stopped before a door which was ajar by an inch or so and pushed it open.

  “What’s to stop me from grabbing you and using you as a hostage?” I asked.

  She turned to face me inside the doorway. The room was bright with late afternoon sunlight. Her face seemed to pale, but she said only, “Nothing. But it would do you n
o good. I am not that valuable to them.

  “Besides,” she said, coming closer to me and staring up into my face, “I cannot believe you would be that kind of man—to harm me, I mean.”

  “Ummm,” I said, and pushed in past her.

  The room was small, simply furnished, and air-conditioned. The windows seemed sealed in place. The main piece of furniture was a large double bed. It had been made and turned down. As I stood and looked at it, Alma brushed by me and hurried over to the windows,

  drawing the drapes and muting the light to twilight strength.

  She went back to the door, and closed it, standing with her back against it. We stared at each other for a long and pregnant moment.

  “Do you come with the room?” I asked.

  “If you wish,” she said.

  I let myself down on the edge of the bed. True, I’d eaten a decent meal, and that will do much to restore flagging resources, but . . .

  “You’re a little small for me,” I said.

  “I can easily make up for that,” she said. She came closer. The smile on her face seemed a little lopsided. I wondered what kind of a job this was for her. Did she do this often? Did she think of herself as a temple priestess, propitiating her gods, or simply as a dedicated party worker doing what was asked of her?

  She sat herself on my knees and leaned forward, pushing her small breasts against my chest. She lifted her small birdlike mouth towards my face.

  I felt nothing. I leaned down and kissed her. She let out a low moan, and then opened her lips against mine, darting a thin tongue between my lips and against my tongue.

  I reached behind her, found her zipper, and unzipped her dress. She inclined her shoulders forward and the dress fell off them, leaving her bare above the waist but for a small and padded brassiere. I unhooked it and it too fell to her lap.