I didn't answer, but then it seemed that I didn't need to. From the thing on the table she carried a bunch of thin wires to where I sat, laid them across the back of the chair and began attaching the wires to my skin with a silvery-looking tape. One to each temple. One to each side of my neck. One on each shoulder. One above my heart. One just above my navel. One on each hip. One to the inside of each thigh. Even though her motions were smooth and professional, the touch of her woman's fingers excited me.
After she was finished, G'lendal stood behind me for a moment, tinkering with the lie-detection device. Nardi sat on the bed across the room watching me disinterestedly as if this were something he had seen a number of times before and wasn't too excited by.
"Now hold still just a moment," the black-skinned girl said.
Then something cold touched my left shoulder. There was a hissing sound and a sudden moistness entering my flesh.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Don't be alarmed," she said -- I wasn't. "It was just a mild relaxer. I know better than to try to use any of the so-called truth serums on you Timeliners."
"Okay."
"Now I'm going to ask you a few questions," she said. "You can answer them any way you like. Right now you don't have to tell the truth unless you want to."
I'm sure that G'lendal knew that my training and conditioning, independent of my now inoperative augmentation circuits, could fool the lie detector, but she was going to try anyway. Okay, I thought, let's play your silly game.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Thimbron Parnassos." My mind and body automatically gave the device a truthful response. But then it would have if I'd said Hieronymus Merganthaler.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-three." Truthful response.
"When were you born?"
"2294 as we figure it at home. 1938 local time."
Truthful response.
"Where were you born?"
"Sibyl, North Ionnia." Truthful response.
"Please equate that with some location in this Paratime."
"West Cheshire, England, near Hoylake." Truthful response -- which it was.
Then -- I supposed at the time that the sensation I felt in my mind was caused by the drugs she had injected me with. I still find it almost impossible to describe the feeling. It was, maybe, as if the top of my skull had been painlessly opened and someone were tickling my brain with a feather or maybe a very gentle puppy were sniffing at my gray matter. It was not really an unpleasant sensation, but it was one that I did not understand and that disturbed me.
"How long have you been in the hire of the Kriths?"
G'lendal asked.
"Fourteen years."
"And what is your present position?"
"Mercenary soldier, absolute rank roughly equal to that of a colonel in the British Army."
"What do you think of the Kriths?"
"In twenty-five words or less?" I asked.
"In as many as it takes."
"Okay. Personally, I don't care for them. I mean, as individuals. There's something about them that I just can't bring myself to like. But what they're doing is good. It isn't just altruism -- I'd suspect that. They're looking out for themselves, but to do that, they've got to help us humans. They're acting in their own rational self-interest to prevent their destruction by alien invaders two thousand years from now -- and they're saving mankind in the process. How's that?"
"That's fine."
"How many words?"
"I didn't count."
The feathery tickling inside my head had now become a plucking: a chicken, gently at first, then with more force was pecking at my brain in search of kernels of corn. I didn't like it.
"Have you ever had doubts about their intentions?"
"Yes." Truthful response.
"Please explain."
"Well, I think anyone at some time or other will have a few doubts about anything he believes. It's only human. And I've had some vague, random doubts, but there's never been any real reason for them. Everything the Kriths have ever told me has been, sooner or later, supported by objective fact."
"Everything?"
"Yes, everything I can think of."
"What about the Cross-Line Civilization in the far Temporal East?"
"What about it?"
"Tell me about it."
Suddenly I had a strange sensation of disassociation, as if I had left my body for an instant and were now standing or sitting to the rear of it looking at my own back. For less than a heartbeat I saw the chair in which I sat, the back of my injured head, my own naked shoulders, the wires from G'lendal's lie detector trailing across the chair to where they were taped to my body. Then it was over, and all I felt was a vague swimming in my head.
"What about it in particular?" I was asking. "There's a lot of ground to cover when you start talking about fifty Lines that have blended into a single civilization."
"No," G'lendal said suddenly. "Forget about it. We'll go on to something else." She paused for a moment. "Why did you and your companions kidnap Count von Heinen and his wife?"
"For information."
"What kind of information?"
"About nuclear weapons. We wanted Von Heinen so that we could probe him about . . ."
It happened again. This time more definitely and for a longer period of time. I -- the consciousness of me -- was sitting in a chair -- no, on the sofa beside the lie detector, watching the dials and meters and glancing frequently at the back of my head. There was another consciousness there with me, but I could tell nothing about it, other than the fact that it was there.
I tried to will the eyes I looked through down at the hands of the body I wore, but before I could tell whether I was having any luck . . .
I was back in my own body.
"What the hell are you doing to me?" I demanded, leaping out of the chair and turning to face G'lendal.
"I'll stop," she said, her face just barely showing shock.
Her hand snapped a switch.
"It's off now," she said, looking directly back into my eyes.
"What is that thing?"
"I can't tell you," G'lendal said. "I'm sorry. Please sit back in the chair, and I'll remove the electrodes."
I did as she' said and a moment later felt her fingers on my temples and then sudden pull of hair as she jerked the tape away.
"It's a kind of mind probe, isn't it?" I asked.
"No, not really," she answered, pulling the electrodes from my neck.
But it was, I was sure. Not the kind of mind probes we used. Ours recorded the electromagnetic fields of the brain, interpreted them into words and symbols, recorded them on paper and tape, analyzed them with computers. Her machine, though, I thought, did something more direct. It actually entered the mind and dug for what it wanted, and in that way maybe it could bypass my conditioning. So it seemed to me at the time, anyway.
When G'lendal had finished removing all the electrodes she had taped to my body, she packed all her gear carefully in the case and turned to me one final time, saying, "For now, that will be all, but I will probably want to talk with you again."
I shrugged. I was in no position to argue with her, even if I'd felt so inclined. And, in truth, I didn't think I'd mind seeing her again at all.
"Good day, then, Eric," she said, and, with Nardi following her like a faithful dog, she left the room.
I was left alone, wondering what was going to happen next.
As it turned out, very little happened until the next day.
14
The Greatest Lie
When I awoke the next morning, it took me a few moments to orient myself and remember the bizarre series of events of the day before that had led me to captivity in this place called Staunton, somewhere under the earth of a place called Florida Here and Now.
It wasn't until I sat up that I noticed the tray of food sitting on a table beside the bed and the clothing draped across the end of the bed. Well
, someone was thinking about me.
First I dressed in slacks and sport shirt of the local Line and then ate the still warm and rather conventional, by local standards, breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee, orange juice, toast and jelly that had been provided for me.
Then I lay back on the bed and waited to see what was next. I had a long wait.
Since there wasn't much of anything else to do, I lit a cigarette and picked up the three books that had been left in the room. After looking at the inviting cover of Paradise in Paratime and deciding that G'lendal was even better looking than the lovely girl on the cover, I put it aside for The Greatest Lie.
The author, a fellow named Martin Latham, claimed to have been born in one of the Romano-Carolingian Lines where the Kriths had made their presence known quite some time ago. He told a little about his own Line -- all of which seemed to be true since I had been there or to one very close to it -- and then went on to tell how he discovered the "Lie," as he called it.
Since the "Lie" was one of the things that was stressed over and over again the whole time I was at Staunton, I might as well tell you about Latham's so-called discovery of it as well as I can remember it. I wish I had a copy of the book, and I'd give you this verbatim, but I don't. But it went something llke this:
Latham showed an early inclination toward mathematics and technology. He had the soul of an engineer, but the mind of a pure research scientist and was ripe for the picking by the Kriths.
By the time he had finished the equivalent of secondary school the Kriths and their agents had already approached him about joining the Timeliners, with Academy instruction and training in skudder engineering. Latham jumped at the chance. And entered the Krithian Academy nearest his Homeline. While he was there, he showed such an amazing ability that he was allowed to do something almost unprecedented in the Academy: He took a "split major" in engineering -- advanced electronics and skudder engineering -- and graduated with honors in both fields.
The Kriths put him to work at once in one of their vast engineering labs in some unspecified, uninhabited Line. Latham loved his work. When he wasn't working on skudder design or tinkering with the most sophisticated electronic gear in all the Lines, he was spending his spare time reading anything he could put his hands on related to his fields and ultimately became interested in contratime communications. He requested that he be allowed to study the works of the Indus Line scientists who had actually established the contratime link that had informed the Kriths of the future menace of alien invasion. He was refused.
The story gets rather complicated and filled with cloak-and-dagger overtones along in here, but to simplify it, Latham's interest grew as he was more strongly refused the data he wanted. After a while he pretended that he had lost interest, though by this time he had become determined to learn everything he could about contratime communications, no matter what it took. Several years passed before he was able to lay his hands on the data he wanted.
One of his assignments led him cross-Lines to do some research in an area of the Lines through which skudders had always had some difficulty passing. On his way back to his base he was able to fake a malfunction in his skudder right in the middle of the Indus Lines. The defective skudder was examined by Indus technicians, and Latham was told that it would take some time to effect the repairs -- his "faking" of a malfunction had been done well -- and since no other skudders were available for his use, he would have to lay over for a few days -- which is exactly what he wanted.
Latham managed to have dinner with one of his Indus colleagues and during the course of the dinner, by a stratagem I don't recall at the moment, he was able to steal the engineer's library access card, top-level. The next day Latham plugged into the planet-wide computer library and, pretending to be the engineer whose card he had stolen, asked for full data on the contratime experiments. The library produced a vast amount of data which Latham was given in the form of microdots which he hid on his person.
He secretly returned the library card to its owner, who had not yet discovered its loss, waited until his skudder was ready, and then returned to his base Line.
About half the information he had gotten from the Indus library was in Shangalis, while the remainder, and apparently the most important portion of it, was in the local Indus language. Before he could really get into it, he was forced to learn Indus in secret. This took him nearly a year, and more than once he was almost exposed, but finally Latham learned Indus and went back to his data.
According to his book, it didn't take him long to discover why the data had been kept from him. They were phony! The mathematics, while very complex and involved, led around in a circle and laboriously established nothing whatsoever. The experiments had been performed, the conclusions had been reached and the actual contact with the future had been . . . faked!
At first Latham didn't believe it. He checked and rechecked and re-rechecked his figures. And always came to the same final conclusions.
Stealing equipment from his own lab, he set up some of the experiments that the Indus scientists had performed -- and their ultimate conclusions were validated. The whole theory of contratime communications fell apart. It just wouldn't work. Time was closed, forward and backward. The future could not talk to the past! It was that simple; the whole thing was a tremendous fraud!
Latham was in a quandary. What the hell was he going to do? Go to the Kriths? No, it was their plot, but for what reasons be couldn't even guess. Tell other humans? Who would believe him? And word would eventually get back to the Kriths -- and then what would happen?
Finally, in desperation and fear, Latham stole a four-man skudder from the lab's skudder pool, removed the governor and the telltale from it, set its controls for the T-West and started out, intending to travel as far as the fully charged power cells would carry him, find men who had never been contacted by the Kriths, and tell them the whole story.
His skudder ran out of power in the Romano-Albigensian Lines, as he called them, far to the West of any Line that the Kriths and Timeliners had yet reached. There he found a civilization that had already developed their own skudders independently of the Kriths -- and were moving East. He told them about the Kriths and the Timeliners and the "Lie" and that the Kriths were moving toward them.
The Albigensians began to prepare to meet the aliens -- and save mankind from possible enslavement.
Well, in a large nutshell, that's the way the first part of Latham's book read.
Quite a story, but was any of it true? And if it was true, was that any proof that Latham was right? It seemed far more likely to me, giving it all the benefit of the doubt, that Latham had made an honest mistake -- and had panicked. At least I saw no reason to believe one man whom I had never met, and who might not even exist, when all the evidence of my life pointed in just the opposite direction.
To hell with it, I said to myself, and got out of bed and began to pace the floor aimlessly, only to be interrupted by a peremptory knock on the door.
"Come in," I said, probably unnecessarily.
The door opened and the tall, thin, corpse-white form of the man called Mica entered the room, dressed now in a gray business suit of this Line.
"Hello, Captain Mathers," he said.
I nodded to him, lit the last cigarette in the pack that Nardi had left, and sat down on the end of the bed.
"I hope you slept well," Mica said, "and that your breakfast was agreeable."
"Yeah," I said between puffs of smoke.
"Please," he said, spreading his hands, "don't be angry with us. We are not your enemies unless you force us to be."
"Shit!"
"Come now. We can talk like rational men, can we not?"
"Okay, talk."
Mica was silent for a few long moments, his deep eyes scanning the room, then stopping at the open book on the table. "I see you have been reading Martin Latham's book," he said.
"Yes," I replied, thinking that if I were going to try to fool Mica and his gang i
nto believing that I was swallowing their story I might as well begin now, but very gradually. It had better be believable. I didn't figure they'd be easy to fool.
"What do you think of it?" he asked.
"It's kind of hard to swallow, what I've read of it."
"How much have you read?"
"The first part, Latham's story of how he discovered the 'Lie' and you people."
"Ah," Mica sighed. "It is all quite startling to you, is it not?"
I nodded.
At the Narrow Passage Page 14
