Time Was

by Steve Perry

  The guy was here now, and that didn’t figure into Janus’s scenario.

  The ice was translucent, not transparent: Only the black boot soles pressing flat against the ice could be seen. Janus’s silver air bubbles began to congeal on the ice’s surface, and he stiffened, then decided they were too light for the guard to see. Janus’s boots, suspended from the ice by crampon spikes, should be similarly invisible.

  The man’s shadow fell across the ice.

  Janus flinched and looked around, then he realized he cast no shadow in his otherworld.

  The black soles turned, and Janus saw the unmistakable outline of a gun fall across the ice.

  It looked thin—but that could be a trick of the light; thin and long like a rifle, not a gun you’d use to hunt anything out on this ice. In winter there were only ducks and geese out on the marsh. Any hunter worth the price of his ammo would use a shotgun to hunt.

  The outline turned again: Janus saw, unmistakably, the shadow of a protrusion above the barrel, thicker than the barrel, that began above the pistol grip and ran no more than a quarter of the barrel’s length, where it flared out in a bell. A scope.

  Only rifles had scopes. Shotguns didn’t even have ordinary sights.

  The bootprints started walking in front of him. Janus followed them, walking upside down beneath the man, a pace behind him.

  From the way the bootprints stopped, made half-turns to each side, and from the way the shadow of the rifle swept in an arc along Janus’s glowing ice, back and forth, Janus knew for certain this was a guard.

  The bootprints kept on—Janus stalking the stalker. He found them moving in a curve toward some point. Every five steps the prints would stop, the long compound shadow of the rifle and scope would sweep along the ice like a shadow searchlight across a glowing sky, then the bootprints would continue. Janus gradually became sure.

  His mouth twisted.

  Hunting me.

  Janus followed the bootprints in their curve, certain they were heading for his second exit hole. They were waiting for him to come up.

  Good God! And I think of myself as an intelligent person. He’d cut the hole in his idiosyncratic way. He had his own ways by now.

  He had cut his exit hole near the ice divers’ drying shed a quarter-mile away. He hoped they hadn’t found the shed, but they’d guess it wouldn’t be far from the hole. They’d know he would freeze into a statue unless he could get inside shelter quickly once he came up. The water was never colder than twenty-eight degrees, but the wind above on the lake gave a chill factor of sixty below zero on this ice. That was the rate at which he would turn into an ice statue unless he dried off within a very few minutes of surfacing. How in God’s name could he get out of this? He had only the Anaconda .44 Magnum pistol and the speargun; they each had guns, he presumed. He didn’t doubt there was another guard up there, maybe more. They’d know it wasn’t safe for only one of them to try to take him.

  Janus trailed along beneath the guard’s bootprints and the gun’s searching shadow. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You against them? But not here, Janus thought.

  Dinoflagellates twinkled above him. He walked shod in silver on the glowing pearl of the ice.

  And marring his pearl: black bootprints, and the shadow of a gun.

  They were at the exit hole. He’d sunk an Ikelight below it for safety. The clouds overhead were thick, perhaps they had noticed his light, even so deep? Was it too strong, the Ikelight? No. They’d just been lucky. But if he survived this he wouldn’t use the Ikelight any more if an assignment involved ice-diving. There’d be more chance of becoming lost beneath the ice, but it would be better than this: one single-shot speargun against the rifle.

  Ahead he saw more shadows by his entrance hole.

  Another pair of black bootprints.

  The prints Janus was following reached the other set and they faced each other, conferring. Shadows now of two guns, two scopes.

  Two men with rifles waiting at his exit hole. Odds were they knew his single tank couldn’t carry much more than forty minutes’ worth of air.

  I’m dead, Janus thought.

  He could feel a tug when he tried to breathe and had a spasm of fear. Sucking at the air as the tank emptied was like trying to breathe through a pillow pressing tighter and tighter against his face.

  That wasn’t his only problem. He had lost great quantities of body heat the whole time he was underwater. Not just from the exhaustion; the water, with a specific heat exactly one thousand times greater than air, had been conducting warmth away from his body twenty-five times as rapidly as air would at this temperature, Fahrenheit twenty-eight. The lake had been leeching heat from him—heat of energy, of strength and redemption, of life itself—while he was under.

  He had only a very small reserve.

  The shivering and the coldness he felt in his hands were signs his extremities had already fallen below ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. His body’s thermoregulatory system had turned on its defense mechanisms and he’d begun to shiver.

  Damn!

  Heavy shivering increased the body’s basal heat production five to seven times. The vasoconstriction called gooseflesh meant his skin had begun sealing itself tighter to keep body heat in, stop blood flow to his periphery, where heat evaporated faster, and preserve it around his core organs. These were signs his body was chilling toward death, had gone through its heat and fallen onto its last reserve.

  It was getting damn cold under here.

  His blood temperature was dropping too fast.

  Time was running out on him.

  They knew it.

  He knew it.

  All God’s chillun knew it.

  All they had to do was wait him out. Perhaps that was why they were both at the hole now, anticipating his return.

  He couldn’t think of alternatives. He could walk to some spot of shallow ice by a tide island and break his way out easily enough—and freeze to death. More than air, he needed to get into that drying shed, which his heater had been warming since he began this assignment, where hot liquid was waiting in a thermos, where his cache of Just-In-Case weapons was sitting, and—most important—where his two-way radio waited, powered by a portable generator that had maybe thirty minutes’ worth of juice left.

  If his core temperature—the deep tissue areas of his body, as opposed to his extremities—had fallen only two degrees Fahrenheit below normal, to ninety-seven degrees, or thirty-six Celsius, as he thought of it, then Janus had already begun to die of hypothermia. When his deep tissues reached thirty-four degrees Celsius his brain would begin to go, and at thirty-two Celsius his heart.

  In the wind above, that could happen within minutes. Even if he could manage to kill them within two minutes of his exposure to the air, there was a chance there might be damage to his brain.

  Janus stood upside down, opposite the guards standing above him. All they had to do was wound him badly and everything would go haywire—even if he killed them. In his current situation, even a mere scratch could prove instantaneously fatal. He had to kill them; all they had to do was hit him. And he was wildly outgunned. Janus, fumbling in the cold, removed his tricut point from his speargun and took a stempoint from his bandolier. He could take one shot, but then he would have to reload. There were, after all, two of them.

  Janus looked at his timer. Seven minutes of oxygen left. His cheeks inside the mask were collapsing as he sucked air like a baby straining at an empty bottle. It took precious effort not to panic.

  A pair of bootprints stood near the hole. Janus’s heart beat intensely: Near enough?

  He walked underneath the man and knelt, inverted directly below him. He studied the boot soles. Rubber. Really meant for mud. Not bad for ice, but Janus’s spikes would have the edge on traction.

  Where there was an ice break like his exit hole, water usually bled around it for several feet. The weight of the ice pressing down on the entire lake kept forcing water slightly up, like a pressu
re valve giving. Helpers would spread sand by the hole if they were backing up an ice diver so that they wouldn’t slide in. But Janus had no backup crew; he hadn’t prepared the ice with sand. Immediately next to the hole, then, he could hope for a slight slick on the surface, over and beyond the slipperiness of the ice.

  Was the man close enough?

  As Janus watched, the bootprints stepped closer, and the gun shadow swung in the arc he knew. The guard was scanning: His gaze was raised.

  Janus dug his spikes into the ice and reached out of the water.

  The guard, from the corner of his eye, saw something black move out of the water and seize his ankle: Janus’s suited arm and mitt. Before the guard could fire, Janus pulled him across the slick ice and into the hole.

  To Janus, it was as if he had pulled the man, upside down, into a cloud of air bubbles that lived in his world. The guard fought like a great fish hauled on a line from the depths but he weighed nothing. Janus held on to him and tottered away from the hole, carrying him at arm’s length. Even under water the guard’s gun fired twice, but he couldn’t aim. The thousands of bubbles this manfish had brought with him moved upward to the ice and rolled about, trapped against the frozen surface of the lake. The guard gasped and struggled exactly like a fish in air, except that he kept seeming to want to fly upward out of Janus’s hands.

  His boot kicked Janus in the face, and Janus’s mouthpiece wrenched out but Janus held his breath, keeping the guard above him like a weight lifter pressing a barbell over his head, going for a world record—until he saw the guard take heavy gasps of water and go inert. The gun finally slipped from the man’s grip. Janus let him go and got his mouthpiece back in. He was so cold he was dizzy—his stomach and chest felt like frozen lead. The guard’s body, like a slow balloon, floated up in space and hung among the starfish.

  Beneath his feet Janus saw, in flashes, the bootprints of the other guard appearing and disappearing on the ice. Janus pulled desperately on the scraps of air in his regulator, but the pillow was pressing tighter and tighter across his face. He tried to prepare, but the cold was reaching his brain and slowing it down.

  This guard must have seen the first go under, perhaps seen where all the bubbles the first one brought in coagulated, because suddenly there was a terrible noise inside Janus’s head, inside it, all around it, and from the center of the bubble mass he saw a streak of bubbles fly through the ice as fast as a tracer bullet in wartime night.

  The guard, panicked, was shooting at the ice.

  Janus moved away from the bubbles as shot after shot punched through, each bullet marked by a brilliant silver bubble trail that bent in the water after a few yards and arced in all directions.

  Janus pushed himself away from the eruptions.

  The bullets followed.

  This guard had quickly learned to distinguish where Janus’s bubbles were beneath the ice.

  Janus held his breath and moved. The bubble he had breathed a second ago bounced down his side and reached the ice. A second later a bullet burst up through it, angled in the water, and almost caught him. He saw the trail of bubbles it made go past his eyes.

  Janus made a sharp right. Inadvertently some air left the regulator and reached the ice. A bullet came up through it instantly.

  Janus guessed, and made a quick dodge backward. He was right—four bullets pulled up through the ice in the direction he had been going. The guard had seen the track of the bubbles and was leading him. He was a better hunter than the one Janus had just killed. Janus’s air was nearly gone and he was freezing: He couldn’t keep this up much longer.

  He held his breath and angled—no bullets. The guard must be changing clips. To fire so quickly the gun must be a semiautomatic.

  Janus crouched, let out one breath, pushed the shaking bubble with his hands, and sprang away from it. The second it hit the ice a bullet lanced it, probing for him.

  Janus moved in a circle, trying to get his little speargun into position to fire. Each time he breathed he shoved the bubble from him and danced a different way to the side. The bullets came up through them, the water shook with the sound, but he was not hit. Janus fought to watch the bootprints with one eye and the bullets with the other. His mask limited his field of vision dangerously. Janus circled, working to get the open entrance hole between him and the bootprints.

  A bullet, perhaps an hysterical shot, came through the ice almost at Janus’s feet.

  The guard was close to the hole now, on the other side from Janus. The last few shots he had been pivoting—Janus would see the heels disappear as the man rose to his toes in the pivot. The ice, Janus imagined, must now be awash from the fountains of water that had sprung up whenever the bullets plunged through the ice. The man was not trying to move on the slick ice but was wisely holding still, turning, then aiming his weapon. Janus doubted that, unless he was an ice diver, the guard knew his boots could be seen—and he could see nothing of Janus but the ghosts of bubbles.

  Janus blew breath out, pushed the bubbles behind him and to the left, leaped with his ten-pound weight a long moon-leap sideways from the boots so that at last he had the open water of the exit hole between him and the guard. Thunder, water vibrations; bullets whizzed like bees through his bubbles as they touched ice. Janus landed kneeling. Through the shining surface he saw, as if beneath him, blue sky and the gray parka of the guard, aiming a long brown stick toward the water. The water magnified everything, so that Janus saw the guard, shimmery but large; saw the gun fire and kick; saw him as clearly as if he, Janus, knelt on a rock, and looked at a six-foot-long fish just beneath him in the clearest water.

  The guard would see him just as clearly, too.

  Before the guard could swing his gun and shoot through the hole, Janus fired. The speargun’s stempoint, nine times larger than a .45 Magnum round, hurled up out of the water into the guard’s stomach, glanced off the inside of his ribs, and—with the one-ton stainless cable holding it to the stem—the five-inch blade swung like a clock hand inside the man’s tissues, from eleven o’clock to five o’clock, slicing through half the organs in his body.

  Janus saw the print of the guard suddenly on the ice. One cheek and the side of his nose were pressed against it, enlarged, like a child’s against a store window, and his rifle was trapped beneath him.

  Janus straightened and walked around the hole. The guard lay under his feet. The ice turned pink: The icewater on the surface had diluted the blood.

  Janus looked up. The guard lay, arms stretched above his head, like a ballet dancer.

  Janus no longer felt anything when he killed. Gore no longer startled him.

  God, it was so hard to breathe; he sensed his reason going. Get out. Janus stepped over the hole into the other world. The suit ascended.

  Hooking his inflated legs over the edge, then drawing his floating body out with short pulls of the spikes, Janus lay, suited, in the water beside the hole, looking at sky. He ripped his mask aside and breathed.

  Janus pressed his suit valve down, deflated it.

  He stood up, slowly.

  The enormous weight of his body returned as the Earth’s pull reasserted itself. He had not weighed more than ten pounds during the last thirty minutes, and now he weighed one hundred and seventy. It was like being yoked with cannonballs. The extra fifty pounds of his tank was a crushing weight on his back.

  Janus looked down at the water and felt dizzy, looked up at sky and felt confused—out of his element.

  The guard lay next to him in a red pool already partly frozen. Janus put down his pistol. He would hide the man in the water.

  As soon as the Anaconda left Janus’s hands he heard someone say, “Hold it right there.”

  Idiot!

  Why had he thought there’d be only two guards? Hover-cars moved fast and furiously, could cover half a mile in a few seconds. The sound of shooting must have been heard for miles along the ice! They probably fired up the first of the hover-cars before he’d even escaped the comp
ound. Oh, you moronic horse’s ass!

  The ice was forming white crystals around Janus’s suit. The skin on his face tightened: Ice crystals were covering it. He had to dry off.

  He was preparing himself to turn and face them down—he thought now only in terms of them because to think otherwise could be lethal at this point—and had just begun to pivot when he saw a thin leather strap come flying down across his field of vision. He managed to get his hand up in time to prevent the strip from constricting around his throat.

  Janus spun around, his would-be strangler holding tight, and saw that there was, indeed, a fourth guard. This one had a pistol and was trying to aim at Janus’s head but there was too much movement right now for the guy to get off a good shot. Any hit right now would just be lucky, even though the guy could take Janus with it if he was quick enough, which he wasn’t, but that was all right with Janus because right now he was dominated by pain both from within and without, and pain changed his world, put a cloud around him that he couldn’t see through, preventing him from acting in accordance with logic and experience and training.

  For a moment, as the thin leather strap cut into the flesh of his hand, Janus was feeble and clouded and clumsy and ripe for death.

  Standing stock-still, a target on a shooting range.

  But the other guard, the kid with the gun, was too slow and the moment went by.

  Janus’s brain began to clear. You’re the best there is! he raged at himself. Maybe you’re getting too old for much more of this shit, but right now you are STILL THE BEST THERE IS and you have to do something NOW!

  He hit those words hard in his mind because the kid with the pistol was moving around, trying to get a decent aim again, and so what if his mind was clearing up, a bullet could crush clear tissue as well as cloudy, and the Strangler behind him was strong, almost as strong as Janus, and he had to use that to advantage somehow, had to do something extraordinary, something remarkable, unique and awe-inspiring, that was all, nothing to it, and he had to do it in the next five seconds.