At the Narrow Passage

by Richard Meredith

  "Aaaaaccchhh," the pilot groaned slowly, floating forward from the impact of Sally's foot. I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around to face me, threw my right fist into a face that had not yet registered the shock of the violent action. I put my left fist into his stomach, my right into his face again as he folded. Then he was unconscious on the soft green ground before he realized that he was being attacked. I cut out the augmentation.

  "He's out," I said, bending over him, quickly running my hands over his body to see if he carried a weapon, which I doubted. "Nothing," I told Sally, then dragged him a few feet away from the craft and made him as comfortable as possible. They'd come after him soon, very soon, I feared.

  When I got into the skudder Sally had already found the clothing that he had brought for us, standard civilian-type clothing from Sally's Line or one very near it. It didn't matter much to me how we were dressed since I had no idea what kind of costumes we'd find at our destination.

  While I was dressing, Sally said, "Oh, Eric, I hope that we're doing the right thing."

  "No more than I do."

  "Are you sure you can find Mica's Paratime?"

  "Sure?" I asked as I buttoned up the shirt brought for me. "No, I'm not sure, but I've got a fair idea; at least I do if Latham's book was true."

  "What exactly do you mean?" she asked. "You never have really explained it to me."

  "Okay, just a minute," I said, sitting down in the pilot's seat, feeling back under the control panel to where the energy pistol was supposed to be within reach of every skudder pilot. You never know what you might run into when you flicker across the Lines.

  I found the cold metal butt, the stud that released the weapon. Click! The pistol snapped into my hand. I drew it out, looked at it for a moment. Standard-issue energy pistol. Full charge. You could do a hell of a lot of damage with that baby if you wanted to. I might want to. I slipped it into my belt, feeling more like a man than I had for a good long while and feeling a hell of a lot more confident of our ability to get away with our scheme. It's funny what a weapon can do to a man.

  "Sit down there," I gestured toward the seat beside me, studying the familiar skudder controls. "Keep a watch on our friend out there. If he wakes up, we'll get out of here in a hurry."

  "Okay, but tell me what you're going to do."

  "Well, you've read Martin Latham's book, haven't you?"

  "The Greatest Lie? Of course."

  "You remember how he found the Albigensians?"

  "Yes, he left his own Paratime and went West as far as he could."

  "Okay, that's the key. I've read that part three or four times," I said, "and I remember it pretty well. Latham had a standard four-man skudder just like this one. He got it out of the skudder pool, so I'm pretty sure that when he did, the power cells were at full charge. They always are. He removed the governor and deactivated the telltale, but other than that, the skudder he used was exactly like this one."

  "Uh-huh," Sally grunted.

  I reached under the control panel again, fumbled, then found what I wanted and pulled at two wires. They broke free from their connections.

  "Our telltale's off," I said. "They can't trace us by it now. It's just a safety device, so it's not hidden." I smiled to myself. "I'm not going to bother the governor. That's a job for a licensed mechanic -- or an engineer like Latham. But we don't need to remove it anyway. We don't have nearly as far to go as Latham did, and we don't need top speed -- I hope."

  "Oh?" Sally said.

  "Well, to get back to what I was saying: A skudder of given mass with a probability generator of a given maxmum potential can only go so far on a set of full power cells, governor or no."

  "Oh, I see," Sally said, beginning to follow me. "You can tell how far Latham went from the amount of power he used. All you have to do is find his starting point, right?"

  "Right," I said. "Now I don't know exactly where Latham started. He didn't give the Paratemporal coordinates, but I've got a pretty good idea, to within a few dozen Lines, anyway."

  "What do we do then?" Sally asked.

  In answer to Sally's question I flipped back the covering panel of the skudder's miniature computer and began tapping on the exposed keys.

  A four-man skudder's computer is a simple-minded beast, not much more than an electronic slide rule, really, but given the right data, it can give you fairly quick and accurate answers. I just hoped that I was giving it the right data.

  The Line where Latham had been working was a long way East, much farther East than the Eden Line where we were now -- on the other side of my Homeline, I believed. The place where he had finally come to rest was a very long way West. We were now somewhere in between, though exactly where, I didn't know for sure yet. The computer would give me that too in a few moments, based on the skudder's power consumption since leaving the only Line whose coordinates I was sure of, the Line from which Sally and I had originally come, RTGB-307.

  A few minutes later I was satisfied with the approximate number of Lines that Latham had crossed before he ran out of power. Yes, it was a hell of a long way West.

  Now, assuming that this skudder had come from Sally's Homeline, from our base at the Butt of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides which was still Kar-hinter's base of operations, and assuming that it had started out with full power cells -- which I was sure it had, regulations required it -- it had come exactly X number of Lines. X from Y, being Kar-hinter's base of operations, left Z number of Lines and our present location. Our location then, after a little more figuring using the computer, was A number of Lines to the Temporal West of the Line from which Latham had supposedly started his trip, plus or minus a dozen Lines to allow for my own errors. All this meant that we had about B number of Lines to cross to reach the place where Latham had run out of power -- Mica's Homeline.

  Okay, then, if my memory and assumptions were valid, and I hoped to all the gods that I knew that they were, we had enough power in the cells to make a round trip, plus. Very good, I thought, since we'd probably have to do a lot of maneuvering to find the exact Line we were looking for.

  I sat back at last, dug a pack of cigarettes out of the skudder's supply compartment, and smiled a big smile at Sally.

  "Are we ready?" she asked.

  "We are now if we'll ever be." I glanced out through the skudder's dome. "Our friend's still out."

  "You hit him pretty hard."

  "Yeah. Okay, brace yourself. I'm not the world's best pilot, but I can manage."

  My hands slowly went to the controls. I cut on the probability generator, watched dials show the gradual rise of power, heard the hum that filled the air grow in intensity, become a whine, an almost physical sensation. While the probability potential grew, I adjusted other controls. Initially I set the controls just a little short of where I expected Mica's Homeline to be, planning to stop and recon the Lines before plunging all the way in. I still wasn't sure enough of what we were getting ourselves into to jump all the way in at once. "Caution preventeth a fall . . ." or something like that.

  "Ready?" I asked.

  "I guess."

  "Here goes."

  I hit the activating switch.

  "We're on our way," I said.

  Flicker.

  Fortunately we had both eaten before the skudder came, but even at that we began to feel hunger before the trip was into its second half. We'd just have to wait it out. There wasn't much in the skudder to eat besides emergency rations, which I didn't want to break open short of an emergency, and we didn't dare stop anywhere. Not for a long while yet.

  More than once I had a strong desire to bring the skudder out of probability into, well, "reality" to see what kinds of worlds we were passing through now. By the middle of the trip we had gone beyond the Lines known to the Kriths, and we were now in largely unexplored Lines, unexplored by the Kriths and Timeliners, at least, though I assumed that Mica's people had been there, were probably there in force, though keeping themselves hidden from most of the local
s as they were on Sally's world, But, well, I didn't want to cause an incident by coming out in some place where our kind was unknown, where we might be taken as alien invaders or something, maybe smeared with thermonukes or shot with arrows or whatever kinds of weapons they might have.

  So we waited and watched the dials indicate the passage of time and Paratime as the master destination dial said we were slowly nearing the place where I had determined that we would come out for the first time.

  We didn't speak much, Sally and I. There wasn't too much left to say now. We just waited and held hands and felt scared and hoped that Mica or somebody would be waiting for us with open arms.

  The automatic destination settings terminated. The final cross-Line jump flickered. I held the energy pistol in my hand, safety off, held my breath and . . .

  We came out.

  I don't know what we expected, but what we found wasn't it. It was like nothing we had hoped or expected to see here, in a part of the Lines where we had expected to encounter a high and complex civilization of cross-Line travelers.

  Oh, there had been a high degree of technology here once, but now . . .

  The transparent dome of the skudder gave us a 360 degree view of the countryside surrounding us, if it could be called by so generous a term as "countryside." The sky above us was blue-black, sprinkled with a smattering of the brighter stars, and in that sky hung an enormous, bloated sun whose corona beamed brightly around it. It was broad daylight, yet the sky was more than halfway dark, and I knew that this Earth had very little left of its atmosphere, more than the Moon, but not enough to support human life or much of any other kind of life as we know it.

  Before us a rocky, gray-brown plain stretched toward the horizon, then abruptly ended two or three miles away in a huge pile of rocks, a chunk of the Earth lifted up and tilted skyward, revealing a thousand centuries of geological evolution, though at the moment that didn't interest me very much.

  In the other directions the view was essentially the same: gray-brown stone and earth; waterless, airless, lifeless rock, a world that was totally dead, that might have always been dead, that might have never known life and men, though I doubted it. I had seen worlds like this before, though I don't believe I had ever seen one so totally devastated.

  A skudder's hull, the result of millions of man-hours of research and labor, is impervious to most forms of radiation except visible light, which is allowed to pass through the dome. So I wasn't too worried when the counters on the outer hull went wild, measuring a nuclear radiation level a million times or more higher than it should have been.

  "God, haven't they had a war here!" I said.

  "What is this place, Eric?" Sally gasped, her voice filled with fear.

  "The where is exactly the place where we started," I said slowly. "It's the Parawhen that matters." I paused. "There's been a war here, Sally. One hell of a war. This planet's good and dead. Let's get the hell out of here. We've still got a way to go."

  The probability generator was standing by. All I had to do was spin the destination dial for a few Lines ahead, hit the actuating switch and flicker.

  Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.

  "I . . . I've never seen anything so horrible. How did it happen, a war like that, I mean?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't even want to know. Don't worry. We'll find Mica's Line.

  Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.

  We came out in a world that was different, but not very much. The sky was more like a sky, bluer but not as blue as it should have been. The Earth was desolate, the same dead gray-brown, and the radiation level was almost as high, and we were just a few hundred yards from the edge of an enormous crater that still glowed in its depths, down in the hot shadows.

  "Not again," Sally gasped.

  "Parallel war," I said. "Maybe not as bad as the other, but just as total as far as human life is concerned."

  "What is this, Eric? Could we possibly be near Mica's Paratime? He never told me about anything like this."

  "Maybe he was ashamed of what his relatives had done," I said, feeling a growing apprehension. "We'll go on."

  But as I glanced at the controls and the dials and the computer read-out, I saw that we were very nearly smack on top of where I thought Mica's Homeline should be. Well, I thought, maybe his Line is an island in all this destruction. That's possible. It's happened before. But we'd better go a little slower.

  Flicker.

  The next Line was almost identical, except that the nearest crater was a mile away and the radiation level in the vicinity of the skudder was a few roentgens lower.

  Flicker.

  It was as if we were back in the first Line we had seen. The atmosphere was blasted away, and a naked sun blistered the naked rock of a dead, naked Earth. The radiation was high enough to scare me even inside the skudder.

  Flicker.

  The sky was almost blue. The earth was brown and barren, though here and there I saw the stark skeletons of what had once been trees, and a brown ash covered the earth that might have once been grass long ago. The radiation level was still far too high to allow any kind of life that I knew.

  Flicker.

  Blue sky, brown earth, radiation levels that perhaps men could survive if they were buried deep under the ground.

  My heart was sinking, and there was a lump where my throat should have been. I was beginning to believe that my assumptions were pretty far wrong. Maybe Latham . . .

  "There just could be someone alive here," I said. "Mica's people could even have an outpost here."

  I flicked on the skudder's radio, scanned the frequencies from the lowest up to the edges of microwave. Nothing. If there were anyone alive here, he wasn't using radio. I can't say that I was too surprised.

  "We'll go on," I said.

  Flicker.

  Things were about the same on the next Line. The radiation level was a little lower, a few notches; men would have had a better chance of surviving here than on the last Line; Mica's people would be more likely to have an outpost, if we were anywhere near their Lines, which I had begun to seriously doubt now, though, according to my figures, we ought to be right about there.

  The radio was dead. The air was silent. No one answered my transmissions.

  We went on.

  Flicker.

  In the next Line the sky looked normal enough, though no clouds were visible. The earth, as far as we could see, was brown and gray, scorched grasses and burned trees and nothing much else. The radiation level was lower still, but high enough to kill an unprotected man almost instantly.

  Out of a hope that I knew now to be foolish I cut the radio's receiver on again, slowly scanned the frequencies -- and nearly fainted when I picked up a carrier at 104 MHz.

  "What is it?" Sally gasped when she saw the expres-sion on my face, realized that the buzz from the receiver meant something.

  "There's somebody here," I said.

  "Paratimers?"

  "I don't know. It could be locals who survived the war, or it could be Paratimers. No Krith or Timeliner has ever come this far to my knowledge."

  "Talk to them."

  "I'll try." Then I realized something and said, "I don't know the language. Albigensian, I mean. You talk."

  "Okay, what do I say?"

  "Just tell them who we are and why we're here."

  "Okay. Show me what to do."

  "Well, you just . . ."

  Ahead of us and to the right, maybe a hundred and fifty feet or a little more, the air shimmered and flickered for a moment, then a solid object materialized out of the nothingness, a squashed sphere that was unmistakable: a Krithian skudder.

  I did not doubt for a moment who it was. I merely wondered how he had followed me so easily. What had I overlooked?"

  "Eric!" Sally cried.

  "Easy."

  "Who is it?"

  "I can make a guess. The skudder pilot said that Kar-hinter had something to tell us. I guess he's come to tell us what it is."

/>   "Oh, God, Eric, and we were so close."

  "Don't worry."

  "But they'll have guns."

  "I've got one, too," I said. "There are no guns mounted on their hull. There's never been a reason for it before now."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "Well, as I see it, we've got three choices. We can try to call for help, but I don't know how much good that'll do or how soon. I'd hate to have to count on it. Two, we can run, but I don't know how much good that'll do either. If Kar-hinter could follow us this far, I suppose he could keep on following us until he caught us. Or, three, we can talk to Kar-hinter and see what he wants with us."