The technician lay at my feet, his blood splattered over me and the deck, and he was very still, and I hated very much that I had had to kill him.
The banging on the hatch had stopped, but a voice called, a different voice that I thought I recognized as Scoti's: "Mathers, we know you're in there. Come out and . . ."
"Come get me," I yelled back, switched to another frequency, and delivered one last frantic message into the microphone.
Outside, through the transparent dome, I could see a cluster of men in the hangar's open doors. Scoti came out from under the bulk of the craft, running and gesturing for the other men to clear out of the hangar. I only caught a brief glimpse of the weapon he held in his hand. But that was enough. He had showed it to me once before and told me a little about it. An R-4 power pistol. If I had been a praying man, I would have delivered my most heartfelt prayer at that moment. But all I could do was wait. There wasn't a damned thing else I could do.
Now the space in front of the hangar was vacant except for Scoti, who knelt with left elbow on left knee, left hand around right wrist, sighting across the barrel of the weapon he carried. I saw the muzzle flash . . .
And I saw the universe explode. And I felt heat and flame and blinding light so bright that I could not see it. And that was all for along, long time.
18
Voices
The world is a very unpleasant place to be in when your face is a mass of raw flesh and your eyes won't open because they're sealed shut with blood and both your legs are broken and you've got internal injuries that are leaking blood into places where there shouldn't be blood and you're lying on a bed of broken glass and twisted metal and some damned fool is shaking the universe like a baby crib.
I couldn't see, but I could hear, and I really didn't want to do that, but I didn't have the strength to fight it.
"Is he dead?" a voice asked.
"No, but he ought to be," answered another voice, maybe Scoti's. "Don't worry. He won't last long."
"What about Joal?" That voice might have been Mica's. I'm not sure.
"He's dead. Mathers shot him in the face."
"Bastard. Kick him once for me."
He did. In the ribs. I passed out again.
The next time I heard voices the universe was holding a little more steady and the bed was just lumpy rocks rather than broken glass, but it would be hard for me to say that I was more comfortable. Maybe a little less painful.
"He needs a doctor," someone said from above.
"Screw the doctor," Scoti spat. "Let the bastard bleed to death."
"Okay."
"Have they found Sally yet?"
"I don't know."
"If he killed her . . . If he killed her . . ." Then Scoti's voice came close, right up to what used to be my ear.
"Mathers, can you hear me?"
There wasn't much I could do to let him know. I couldn't even groan.
"Listen to me, bastard," Scoti said. "If you hurt Sally, I'll see that you live. You'll live so that I can slowly take you apart piece by piece. I mean slow, damn it!"
I think he kicked me again, but I couldn't really be sure.
I was somewhere between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness when I heard a voice yelling, "Scoti, look up there!"
"What is it?" Scoti yelled back, his voice dwindling as he moved away from me.
"Airships," the other voice, or one of the other voices, said. "British airships."
"Call Mica! Full alert!"
I heard running feet and yelling voices, but everyone seemed to have forgotten about me, and that was okay. I just wanted to be left alone to die in peace.
There was a strange chill in the air, an alienness, an unknown quantity that I couldn't identify but knew was more than the feel of shock and pain, and all around me was the stillness you only find in a nightmare. I thought maybe I was dead and had gone to hell.
A voice was speaking to me, and the voice was that out of a nightmare, a masculine voice with a familiar ring to it, but my mind could not place the voice. It was saying, "Stay alive, Eric. For God's sake, man, hang on just a little while longer. They're coming to help you. The pain won't last long. You can stand it, Eric. I did."
And then the voice was gone, and I floated down into a painful darkness, but I knew that I would try to hang on. Help was coming, the voice had said.
Later, how much later I don't know, but later I heard the whine of airship motors and another, different whine that ceased abruptly with a clap of air and it might have been the probability generator of a skudder -- sautierboat -- the other Paratime craft that had been in the hangar, because it was gone later. Then I heard small-arms fire from outside the hangar and a voice that yelled, "Fall back into the . . ." And the chatter of a machine gun that cut off the voice and the sudden rasp of an energy pistol that had not been made on this world and a voice yelling in Shangalis, and I went black again.
* * *
Someone was bending over me, holding my head up, putting something to my mouth that was cold and wet and very welcome. I think I also got an injection of something, but I didn't feel the prick of the needle.
"Eric, Eric, can you hear me?"
It was a voice that I ought to remember. I thought I knew who it was. Sally? No, it wasn't Sally. She had a soft contralto voice. And this voice wasn't soft. It was harsh and rasping, and there was a British accent to it that was too pronounced to be real.
"Eric, for God's sake, old man," the voice said. "What is this?"
"Get Sally," I somehow managed to say to that voice that I ought to recognize, but didn't yet.
"Who?"
"Sally. Back in the woods. Save Sally. Don't let them get her."
"Don't let who get her?"
"Them, them. Don't let them get her.
But who they were I wasn't sure, and I'm not sure to this day.
This time when I awoke the bed was softer still, but it was moving upward, lurching, and I wanted to vomit all over the place because I didn't want to be moving. Not now. Not ever.
"Get us some altitude," the strange/familiar voice said.
"I'm doing the best I can," another voice answered, another one that had something to do with me, my past, that I ought to know. "This damned thing's no fusion rocket, you know."
"I know, but get us out of here. They're going to bring up their big guns soon."
"I know. We'll make it. How's Mathers?"
"Pretty bad. He must have been in that skudder we found."
"How in God's name did he live through that?"
"He's too mean to die."
"What about the girl?"
"I gave her a shot. She's still out."
"She ought to have some clothes on."
"I didn't bring a change. How was I to know?"
"Well, cover her up with something."
"Does that bother you, her being naked?"
"Yeah."
"I enjoy looking at her."
The other voice grunted and then said, "Man, is Kar-hinter going to be glad to get these two back."
"I am too."
"I know."
"Eric and I have been together for a long time."
"Tracy! Look down there!"
"What is -- "
It was just one of those days when the universe wouldn't behave itself.
A great fist came up from below, aimed directly at the bunk on which I was lying, thumping it with such force that I was thrown into the air, out of the bunk, and onto the hard floor beside it. And then the BOOM! so loud and so terrifying that I thought it would shatter whatever was left of the world.
"They blew it up," one of the voices said incredulously. "They blew up the whole damned place."
Then I went down into the darkness.
19
Recovery
It was a long, long while later before I had truly lucid moments. I think I remember a long sequence of nightmares, most of them false, some of them real. I remember strangely gentle hands carrying me out of a
British airship on a stretcher and across a landing field to a horse-drawn ambulance and an unbelievably bumpy ride across an infinite, pitted earth. And I remember a fifty-foot-tall Mica, with skin as white as a parson's blessing, but with eyes that were as dark and empty as interstellar space, and he had an enormous knife that he used to probe my liver and said over and over and over "What did you do with Sally?" And I remember the bright overhead lights of an operating room and a doctor who said, "Easy, Captain Mathers. Rest easy. You'll be asleep soon," in a voice of the archangels, and then he started putting me back together again. And a bomb that kept exploding across the Timelines, wiping out world after world, destroying the whole complex of continua. And somebody swabbing my hot forehead with cotton dipped in alcohol and asking me to sip some kind of liquid and crushed ice through a straw. And then G'lendal, naked and beautiful, her big breasts pointed at me like twin cannon, standing before me and slowly, gradually changing into a naked and hideous Krith with a wide, sneering grin and a hungry look on its face. And a universe that consisted of paper cutouts and a voice that I ought to know telling me that this was reality, all the reality I would ever find.
Then, after a while, I woke up, and the nightmares were over, most of them.
At first I couldn't have said for sure where I was. Oh, it was a hospital room, of course: pale-green walls and a stark white bed and all the other paraphernalia that goes with a hospital, all with the overtones of a second- or third-level technology, just like the world in which I had been and where I still might be.
Above my head and to the right was a cord that I assumed rang for the nurse. I pulled on it, or rather tried to pull on it, and as I fought to wrap my weak fingers around it, I noticed the glucose drip that was plugged into my left arm, the bottle half full of colorless sugar. Finally my hand closed around the cord, and I tugged and thought that off in the distance I heard a bell ring, and then let my arm fall back to the bed and waited to see what would happen.
Five hundred years later, more or less, the door directly opposite my bed opened and a tall, thin man wearing a white smock and rimless glasses came in. I started to try to speak, realized that I wasn't sure what language to use, and waited for him say the first words.
"Oh, you've come around, Mathers," the white-clad man said in Shangalis. He was a Timeliner.
"Yeah," I managed to say.
"You've had Kar-hinter worried," he said.
"I've had me kind of worried, too," I said in short gasps.
"Rest easy now," the man said, coming to the side of the bed, taking my right wrist in his left hand, feeling the pulse while he looked at his wrist watch, saying, "I'm Dr. Conners."
"Where am I?"
"Bakersville, South Africa," Connors answered when he had finished counting the beats of my heart. "You're still on the same Line, though, if that's what you mean. This is a hospital that the British have turned over to us. We're all Liners here."
"What happened?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't tell you," the doctor replied. "But Kar-hinter and two of your friends are outside if you feel up to talking with them."
"Yes, please," I said, then lay back on the bed and closed my eyes and rested and tried to gather what strength was left in my body. But before the doctor left the room, I was forced to ask, "Just how bad am I?"
"You'll be fine. Nothing's missing," Conners said, and for a moment I thought that was all he was going to say. "You had both legs broken and several ribs as well. We also had to replace your liver. Your face was pretty badly cut up, but plastiskin is going to cover the scars. You'll never know the difference. And, well, you ought to be up and walking around within forty-eight hours."
Thank God for the medical science we've picked up across the Lines! I wouldn't have lived if I'd had to depend on the local skills.
"While you were here," Conners went on, "we also replaced your augmentation control center. Apparently it was deactivated."
I nodded.
"And we replaced your missing fingers," he completed.
I looked down at my left hand and saw that I had a full set of fingers on it. The grafting scars were either already healed or very skillfully hidden by plastiskin.
"I'll send your friends in now," the doctor said.
"Thanks."
So I just lay there waiting for Kar-hinter and whoever else was with him to come in and thought and wondered: How was Sally? And, in fact, where was she? Had they really found her and taken her with me? And what had happened to Staunton? Had it really blown up? Or was that just a part of my nightmares? And . . .
The door opened, and Kar-hinter, Tracy, and Kearns came into the room. The alien was naked, of course, and the two men were dressed in British uniforms.
"I told you that he was too mean to kill," Tracy said, smiling. "How are you, old man?"
"Bloody damned poorly," I said, trying to answer Tracy's smile.
"Hello, Eric," Kar-hinter said in his precise English that somehow reminded me of Mica's. "Feeling better, I trust."
"Damned if I know," I said. "I don't feel much of anything right now."
"You must have given them hell, Mathers," Kearns said, a strangely misplaced smile on his face.
"Not as much as they gave me," I told him.
"I don't know," Kearns said. "Tracy and I found at least two bodies that you must have killed."
"That was my limit for the season," I said, wishing they'd get over the small talk and that somebody'd answer some questions for me.
Kar-hinter must have sensed my feelings, for he said, "We have many questions to ask you, Eric, but first we will answer yours."
"Okay," I said weakly. "What about Sally?"
"Count von Heinen's wife?" Kar-hinter asked, something that might have been puzzlement in his voice. I wasn't sure. You can never be sure about a Krith. "She is well. Hillary and Ronald found her when they rescued you. She is now at an interrogation station on an adjacent Line."
Thank God for that, I said to myself. "What happened? From the beginning."
Kar-hinter gave me what passed for a smile, said, "As you know, Hillary and Ronald crossed the Imperial lines to safety on the morning of the raid on the villa. We then established contact with you. When your signal ceased abruptly, we investigated as quickly as possible, found that you and your captives were gone. We assumed that you had been taken by the people in the strange skudder you had fought earlier. We could do nothing but wait until you tried to contact us, though we were following up clues."
"You know who those people are, don't you?" I asked.
"We know now," Kar-hinter replied. "Countess von Heinen gave us that information under the first mind probe."
"Had you suspected?"
Kar-hinter smiled. "Suspected, but nothing more. But, to go on, we had nearly given you up for dead when your message was received at the Butt of Lewis."
"Then you did get my signal?"
Kar-hinter nodded in a very human fashion. "Yes, we have had continuous monitors on all frequencies with recording equipment attached. Computers determined that you were using FM and demodulated accordingly. We came as soon as we could get a fix on your signal."
"How did you get there so fast?" I asked Tracy.
He smiled back at me and said, "Kearns and I were working out of Victoria, Virginia. Kar-hinter sent us there with a couple of platoons of men to investigate a resurgence of Staunton-rumors. He thought that they might somehow be connected with the -- er -- Paratimers who captured you. We didn't know who they were then, of course."
"What about Staunton?" I asked. "Did you get inside?"
Tracy shook his head. "We only got as far as the hangar where we found you. And we were damned lucky to get away from there. We lost most of our men. They blew up the place, y'know."
"I thought they did," I said. "I thought I remembered it," I paused, took a deep breath, then asked, "Was it with atomic weapons? They had quite a stockpile of thermonukes."
"No," Kar-hinter said. "The explosives th
ey used were chemical. Their nuclear weapons did not go off, fortunately for this world. We are in the process of recovering them now. They will be shipped Outtime at once."
I nodded, looked back at Tracy. "How many sautierboats -- skudders were in the hangar?"
"Just the one," Tracy said. "The ruined one you must have been in. Were there others?"
At the Narrow Passage Page 19
