"What good will that do?"
"Damned if I know, but it can't hurt."
My hands fell to the radio controls and I switched to the Krithian/Timeliner emergency broadcast frequency, thinking that was probably what Kar-hinter would be using. It was.
". . . Eric. Please respond if you are receiving me."
"I hear you," I said into the microphone, satisfied that the voice on the other end was that of Kar-hinter.
"Eric," the Krith answered at once. "Please do not be a fool. You do not know what you are getting into."
"I have a fair idea," I said. "Listen, Kar-hinter, your false memories didn't take. I saw through them. We know now that there's no Cross-Line Civilization, and we can assume that all the rest of it is lies, too."
"You listen to me, Eric," Kar-hinter snapped back, anger in his voice, a very human-sounding anger. "We have already sent patrols into the worlds where the Paratimers claim to live, their world of origin and all."
"And where's that?" I demanded.
"Here, Eric. Here, and there is no human life here, not for a hundred Lines in either direction."
"Another lie," I said flatly. "There's someone on this Line using radio, Kar-hinter. I just picked up their carrier.
"I said human, Eric. The Paratimers are not human."
24
Kar-hinter, Kearns, Tracy, and Death
Eric, this is Tracy," said another voice from the radio's loudspeaker, a voice which I recognized. "What Kar-hinter is saying is true, old boy. I've seen them the way they really are and they aren't human beings."
"You're crazy," I said because I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"No, it's true," Tracy's voice said. "We've been making recons into these Lines ever since we picked up you and Sally from Staunton, and we've found out the truth about the Paratimers. They have a base somewhere on this Line -- and, for God's sake, Eric, they aren't people."
"Eric," Kar-hinter's voice said, "you know that there is someone using radio here. They will probably pick up our signals if we continue to talk by radio. We do not have sufficient force to defend ourselves from an attack on their own ground. I suggest, then, that we cease using radio and meet outside the skudders to discuss this further."
"How can I believe anything you say?" I asked.
"You can believe me, can't you, Eric?" Tracy's voice asked.
"I don't know what to believe anymore," I replied.
"We are going to turn off our radio equipment," Kar-hinter said. "We will dress in survival suits and leave our skudder. We will wait for you midway between our craft and yours. We will be unarmed. Please, Eric, give us -- and yourself -- a chance."
There was a click and the carrier of their transmitter died away.
For a long while I sat there silently before the transceiver, gazing blankly at its controls. What the hell am I going to do now? I kept asking myself, and I really didn't have any answers.
"It's a trap, isn't it, Eric?" Sally asked at last.
"Probably," I said, "but Tracy . . ."
"Who's Tracy?"
"A friend of mine. I've known him for a long time. He was with us the night we kidnapped you."
"Oh, yes," she said, "the one who was wounded in the leg."
I nodded. "I don't think he'd lie to me," I said. "At least not intentionally."
"Do you think they're forcing him?"
"Maybe. No, I don't think so." Tracy wasn't the sort of man who was easily forced to do anything. "I don't know. Damn it, I just don't know!"
We were silent for a while longer.
The hatch of the other skudder opened, and three of its four occupants, clad in emergency survival suits, stepped out onto the barren, radioactive earth of this world. Two of the figures were probably human from their size and proportions. The third was tall, built like a Krith, built like Kar-hinter. The three slowly advanced across the scorched ground and finally stopped about halfway to our skudder. There they stood and waited. Assuming that one of the men was Tracy, who was the other? Pall? If so, who was still inside the skudder? Maybe my old buddy Kearns. Or maybe it was the other way around. Did it matter? I'd learn soon.
"What are you going to do?" Sally asked.
"I'm going out there," I answered, finally making up my mind.
"But . . ."
"I have to go," I said, cutting her off. "There's too much that we don't know. None of this makes any sense at all, and I've got to find out why."
I got up and walked back to the rear of the skudder, to where the locker containing the survival suits was kept.
"You stay in the skudder," I told Sally. "I'll leave the probability generator on, and I'll set the destination controls for your own Line. If anything happens, well, all you'll have to do is press one switch and the skudder'll take you home. I think we've still got the power to do that."
"Please don't go, Eric," Sally said as I opened the locker and pulled out one of the four survival suits.
"I've got to go," I said. "If what Mica and his people said is true, we ought to be in one of their Lines now. I really don't think that my figures were that far off."
"But you could be wrong."
"I could be, yes, but for some reason I'm convinced that I'm not. There's something going on here that they haven't told us about. Maybe what Tracy said is true. Maybe the Paratimers aren't human."
"That's not true, Eric," Sally said slowly. "Mica's as human as you are. I know."
I slowly turned to look at her. That's right, I told myself, visualizing Mica, naked and pale white, lying atop my Sally. Human or not, I hated him for a moment.
Still if anyone knew, she would. She had been Mica's mistress; she had lived with him; if he weren't human, she would know it.
But what's human? I asked myself. And if Mica were, suppose, just suppose for a minute, some kind of alien being disguised as a man, well, what outside of moral scruples would prevent him from making love to a human woman if he wanted to and had the proper equipment? I mean, in situations where women -- or other men -- weren't available, men have been known to have sexual relations with creatures that certainly aren't human or even sentient. Everyone's heard stories of farmboys and their cows and chickens and sheep. I felt a little sick. Okay, maybe . . .
"I have to go out there, Sally," I said slowly. "You can't talk me out of it. Please, just do as I say."
I pulled the survival suit over my clothing, jerking the straps tight. After tucking the helmet under my arm, I went back to the front of the skudder's cabin, adjusted the controls to return Sally to her own Timeline if anything happened to me.
"Just push that button," I told her, then led her back to the rear of the craft again.
"Be careful, Eric," she said as I helped her into a similar survival suit. When the skudder's hatch was opened, the interior would be liberally dosed with deadly radiation. In fact, the skudder would probably not be safe for an unprotected human being without some serious decontamination once the hatch had been opened in this world.
"I'll be careful," I said, slipping the energy pistol into one of the suit's capacious pockets. "I'm taking this pistol along just in case.
"Come back, Eric," Sally said. "I won't know what to do if you don't."
"If I don't, then get the hell out of here. Do what you can to . . . Well, just get home and hide."
I kissed her and then clamped the helmet down over my head, sealed it, and then turned toward the hatch.
"Good luck," Sally's voice said through the muffled speaker of her own helmet as she sealed it.
"Thanks, sweetheart."
The hatch opened before me, and I leaped down to the dry, burned, barren soil of this Earth. The hatch closed behind me. I walked toward the place where Kar-hinter, Tracy, and the other man waited for me.
I don't suppose that I thought about very much while I crossed those seventy-five feet of space between us. There wasn't much that my mind could do, except wonder. But the time for asking idle questions was over. I want
ed some hard answers.
"I am glad you came to us, Eric," Kar-hinter said when I was within range of his voice as it came from the speakers of his survival helmet.
"I want the truth now," I said in reply. "I know that you've been lying to me."
"I will admit that there is no Cross-Line Civilization, as such, Eric," Kar-hinter said slowly. "It was a lie, but one that we told because we had to."
"And the Contratime communications business?" I asked.
"That also is untrue," Kar-hinter said just as slowly. "The truth is much more fantastic."
I ignored his last statement for the moment and looked at the two men with the Krith. One of them was Tracy. And the other was our old companion, Kearns, the same inexplicable expression on his warrior's face. Then was the fourth one, the one in the skudder, Pall?
"They both know," Kar-hinter was saying.
"I won't ask you why you lied," I said. "I don't want to hear it now."
"But you must hear it, Eric," Kar-hinter said. "It is . . ."
"It's another lie!" I yelled. "And I don't want to hear any more lies from you! Tracy, who are the Paratimers?"
"I don't really know," Tracy replied. "They're from the West, a hell of a damned long way to the West. They do have a base here, but it looks like it's just one of many they have in these Lines. There are more of them farther West, but we don't know much about them yet."
"You said they aren't human," I said. "How do you know?"
"We raided one of their bases about a week ago. We captured some of them alive."
"Then what are they if they aren't human?" I asked.
Tracy spread his hands to show his ignorance.
"They are as different from you as we are, perhaps more so, considering," Kar-hinter said. "The ones you have seen have been surgically modified to look like men."
"Then what do they really look like?" I asked, still looking at Tracy.
"Well, they look something like us," he replied. "At least they're humanoid, except, well, they're almost hairless and their skin had a kind of almost bluish tint to it, and they have six fingers on each hand, and their eyes have pupils like a cat's. But, well, they're mammals. We caught one of their women, and there's no doubt about that. They're more -- more like us in looks than the Kriths are, but, well, Eric, they don't think the same way. I can't explain it. They're alien, Eric, I mean real damned alien and I think they hate us more than we could ever understand. I -- I can't really explain it. You've got to be with one of them, the way they really are and not pretending to be people, to know what kind of things they are." Then he seemed to run out of words to say the things he wanted to say.
"I find all this pretty hard to believe, Tracy," I said.
"I do too, Eric, but, well, it's true. I'm not lying to you."
"Do you think that one of them could make love to a human woman?" I asked.
"Yes, I suppose it's possible," Tracy said after a moment of thought. "I mean, they're physically capable of it. They're built a lot like us."
"That much?"
Tracy nodded.
"What do they want here?"
"I don't know. I wish I did."
"Listen, Eric," Kar-hinter said. "We are now in the Albigensian Lines. Much of what the one who called himself Mica told you is true. The Albigensians were a highly developed people. They may have developed skudder travel independently. But they encountered these others. What do you think caused all this destruction?" His hand gestured sweepingly around.
"War," I said bitterly.
"Damned right it was war," Kearns said. "War with the bluies. The Albigensians fought back, but they were wiped out. The war destroyed dozens of Lines before it was over and those blue bastards had won. Damn it, Mathers, you've got to make a choice. Now! Maybe you don't trust Kar-hinter. I don't know whether I do. But for God's sake, man, the Kriths never did anything like this."
"Eric," Kar-hinter said when I turned back to look at him, "given time, I could perhaps explain our motives to you, but now we do not have the time and you have stated an unwillingness to listen. But we, both mankind and Krith, are on the verge of war with these aliens. You must decide which side you are on. That of mankind or that of the blue-skinned aliens."
"He's right," Tracy said. "Eric, whatever else the Kriths are, and I think I know now, they aren't half as bad as -- as these others."
"I don't know that."
"Damn it, man, look at this world!" Kearns said.
"I have only your word," I said, "and I'm sick and tired of taking other people's word for things. I'm going to find out for myself."
"You'll get yourself killed in the process," Kearns said.
"It's my life."
"Your life belongs to the Timeliners," Kar-hinter said, a sharp coldness to his voice that I had never heard before.
"The hell you say!" I yelled. Then, more calmly, "I'm sorry, but I can't take your word for anything any longer. I'm leaving." I started to turn away.
"Stay, Eric, we are not finished yet," Kar-hinter said in that same tone.
"Hold still, Mathers," Kearns snapped and when I turned back I saw that he held an energy pistol in his hand.
"I thought you were supposed to be unarmed," I said.
"Don't be a fool," Kearns said in disgust.
The look on Tracy's face inside the helmet was blank astonishment. He had not known that Kearns was bringing a gun. "Wait," he finally managed to say. "We told him . . ."
"To hell with what we told him," Kearns said. The pistol in his hand slowly came up, then leveled at my stomach. "You've talked yourself into this, Mathers, you damned, bloody, human fool."
Three things happened at once. I threw myself to the earth, rolling, grabbing toward the energy pistol in the pocket of my survival suit. Kearns' energy pistol rasped, sending a jet of hell through the radioactive air where I had been standing. Tracy threw himself against Kearns, knocking him off his feet. They both went down together.
As I rolled, I tugged the pistol out of my suit, but before I could aim and fire, the air was lighted by another energy blast, this one from a pistol in the hand of Kar-hinter. That was the first time in my life that I had ever seen a Krith hold a weapon -- that I knew of.
Tracy's survival suit blackened, burst into flames, for it was he that Kar-hinter was aiming for. Tracy's screams were loud in the near silence of this dead world, but he died quickly.
Yet even before Hillary Tracy died, Kar-hinter joined him. My pistol fired, poorly aimed, but aimed well enough, and the clothing covering Kar-hinter's chest flamed and disintegrated, as did the living flesh under it.
Even while all this was happening, I was able to see out of the corner of my eye the fourth figure emerging from the skudder. Whether it was man or Krith I couldn't tell. I was rolling to my knees, swinging the pistol around at Kearns, who was coming up, throwing Tracy's body aside. I fired. My beam seared off the top of Kearns' helmet, and the top of his head and bone and blackened brain burst out.
Kearns should have died instantly. Any normal man would have, but he didn't. His body kept moving, rising upward, coming awkwardly to its feet, the energy pistol still in its hand and firing wildly. I blasted again, and Kearns' half-headless corpse, now missing an arm, nothing left but a cauterized stump, staggered backward and fell to the earth, its legs still kicking.
I only know of one kind of higher creature that can live with its head blown away and that only because it has three brains and can go on living for a while without its head-brain. And I realized that there was a lot that I had never suspected about the Kriths -- and I realized that the blue-skinned Paratimers weren't the only ones who could make use of plastic surgery. Kearns had no more been a human being than Kar-hinter. He had just looked more like one.
At the time I wasn't thinking about these things very much, though. I was thinking about the fourth figure who was running across the barren soil toward me, a seven-foot figure of a man with an energy pistol in his hand, aiming at me.
Perhaps I had the advantage of anger and adrenalin over Pall -- for that is who it must have been. Perhaps he hadn't had the time to take it all in, time to prepare himself to kill. I had. And the weapon in my hand was surprisingly steady as it came up and fired, almost on its own, into the middle of the man's torso.
Pall stopped, then staggered backward, his chest and abdomen flaming, and finally fell forward on his face, still thirty feet from me. I didn't know whether he was dead or not, but it he weren't, he wouldn't last long in this environment.
At the Narrow Passage Page 25
