At the Narrow Passage
Page 26
I gasped for breath, felt myself shaking in reaction to the violence that had just taken place, and looked at the three bodies close to me. Only Tracy's body was human, some part of my mind thought, and he had trusted the Kriths. It had cost him his life. I knew that I could never trust them again. Never. Nor ever believe anything that they said.
I shook my head sadly, bitterly, returned the energy pistol to the pocket of my survival suit and turned back toward the skudder where Sally waited -- and had crossed no more than half that distance when I saw the other skudder, no, sautierboat, come sailing across the hills, its externally mounted machine guns firing -- at me.
25
"They Are Almost Human"
There was very little protection out there. The nearest was thirty or forty feet away -- the skudder -- and I ran toward it. The aim of the machine gunner in the boat was fortunately lousy and I crossed the distance without getting myself killed.
Sally started to open the hatch for me, but I waved to her to keep it closed. I wanted to meet the men in that sautier-boat, but I wanted to be alive when I did it.
I walked a few steps away from the skudder, waved my hands above my head, gesturing that I surrendered.
The gunner in the boat must have got my message, for the firing ceased and the craft came to earth a few yards from my skudder. I stood silently waiting, hoping that whoever came out looked like me and not like the things Tracy had described.
While the sautierboat settled and its hatch began to open, I let one of my hands slip back toward the pocket that held the energy pistol. I wasn't that confident yet. Maybe . . .
The hatch was fully open now, and a figure clad in something that was probably a radiation protection suit climbed out, a long, ugly-looking weapon in his hands. Two more followed him, both as well armed.
The helmets that covered their heads and faces protected them from my view pretty well while they were in the shadow of the boat, but when they walked forward, speaking in some language that I had never heard before and knew wasn't Albigensian, and the late afternoon sunlight shone directly on and through their transparent helmets, I could see their faces -- and I knew that at least Tracy hadn't been lying to me.
The faces, well, they were almost human, but almost wasn't good enough. Their eyes were too big and their noses too flat and somehow their mouths weren't in the right place and their jaws were hinged wrongly and there was an unmistakable tinge of blue to their skins. And there was something menacing about them that was more than just their appearance.
Sally must have seen them too, for she screamed, but she still had the presence of mind to open the hatch and yell, "Get in!"
All at once my energy pistol was out and firing, so close to my body that I felt the terrible backwash of its heat even through the insulation of the survival suit. And three submachine pistols were screaming and chattering in the space between the two craft, and the whole universe tried to come apart at the seams.
Something smashed through the fabric of my survival suit below my left thigh, and my leg suddenly became a column of mush that didn't want to hold me up and I felt the salty taste of blood in my mouth as I bit through my lower lip. But my energy pistol kept firing, and light and heat and flame filled the air, and the three alien figures before me, scant feet away, stopped coming forward, stopped firing at me, and fell apart screaming.
Then a woman's arms, impossibly strong, were pulling me backward, upward into the skudder's open hatch, and I tried to help, pulling with my arms and somehow together, Sally and I, we got my uncooperative body into the skudder as the machine gun on the sautierboat turned around and began to blast into the skudder's open hatch.
"Hit the switch!" I screamed, and Sally must have understood me. She stumbled across the skudder's deck under a hail of bullets and hit the activating switch on the skudder's control panel.
WHAM!
I aimed the energy pistol through the open hatch, held the firing stud depressed, searing at the metal hull of the sautierboat, til . . .
Flicker!
"Get the hatch closed," I gasped.
Flicker.
"Are you hurt badly?" Sally cried.
Flicker.
"My left leg," I said, but all I remember after that is . . .
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
26
Out of Probability
The machine-gun bullets from the sautierboat must have penetrated the skudder's hull, must have damaged the craft, for within a few minutes red warning lights began to flicker on in the craft's control panel. I don't remember it. Sally told me about it later.
She cut away enough of the survival suit to get to my leg, shattered by a bullet, and she was at least able to stop the bleeding, though she was afraid to try to do anything more with the radiation level within the craft still dangerously high.
When I finally came out of the grayness, hours later, I saw the danger lights, and I struggled to sit up.
"Eric," Sally asked, "what do those lights mean?"
"The probablity generator," I said. "It's . . ." Another light flickered on, and a dial swung into a red danger area.
"Open the hatch!" I cried.
"What?"
"Open the hatch. Now!"
Sally did, and I pulled myself across the deck, trying to ignore the pain that told me that I ought to lie down and die.
"What are we going to do?"
"This damned thing's going to blow up. Help me to the hatch. We're going to jump."
She didn't ask any more questions. She just helped me.
"Get me to my feet."
Painfully, more painfully than I like to remember, I came up, standing on one leg. Sally supported me on the other side. We stood in the hatch for a moment.
"I'm going to count," I said. "When I get to five, jump. Exactly on five and together, or we won't even end up in the same Line."
"Okay," Sally managed to say.
"One."
Flicker.
"Two."
Flicker.
"Three."
Flicker.
"Four."
Flicker.
"Five. Jump!"
We jumped.
Don't ask me to try to tell you what it was like -- leaping out of a probability field into "reality." It didn't kill us. And that in itself is something of a minor miracle. We both were battered, and Sally's right arm was broken were she fell on it, and a couple of my ribs were cracked, but we lived through it, and that's about all that matters now. We lived.
27
"Something's Got to Be Done"
The rest isn't too important.
We found ourselves in a wood, but one that showed the works of man, tree stumps cut by power tools and footpaths, and off in the distance we could hear the sounds of surface vehicles on a paved road.
We took off our survival suits, and Sally, little more than half-conscious, made her way to the road and stopped one of the vehicles and asked for help in English and was more than surprised when the vehicle's driver answered in the same language. She told him, convincingly, I suppose, and with great presence of mind, that we were the survivors of the crash of an aircraft -- she didn't say "airplane," though that is the word Here and Now -- and that we had made our way through the woods this far.
The vehicle's driver, a kind, generous man, took us to a hospital where we spent the next few days, groggy and only halfway aware of our surroundings.
After a while, though, I learned that we had made it back to a Line that didn't seem to be too far from Sally's own world, but in this one the American rebels had won their war for independence nearly two hundred years ago.
The fact that our crashed aircraft has not been found has led to some questions from the American authorities, but we both claim to be British subjects -- which is almost true -- but that has created other problems that we haven't solved yet.
Now, well, now we are in a hospital in a world that doesn't suspect the existence of the parallel worlds and the
almost unbelievable menace of two equally alien and non-human forces approaching each other across those Timelines, nearing the inevitable clash that might well mean the end of human life on all the Lines.
We're here, stranded, and there's no one to listen to us.
But it can't end this way. By all that's holy, it can't! Something's got to be done. Someone's got to be told. Someone, somehow, must stop this hell before it destroys billions upon billions of human beings across the Lines and all the magnificent civilizations we've built.
And if nobody else will do it, I guess it'll be up to Sally and me.
But damned if I know how.
FROM FAR IN THE
FUTURE COMES A HIDEOUS
WARNING OF DESTRUCTION.
But the message is not clear, and the result is a mad
scramble to change the present -- all possible pres-
ents -- in order to avoid the future. For the recipients
of the message are not humans but Kriths, lizardlike
beings from a parallel Timeline.
Using machines that move sideways in time, a band of
dedicated mercenaries and Krith leaders cut a wide
swath through countless Timelines. It is a brutal and
bloody struggle that has no end -- until one of their
strongest fighters begins to ask questions the Kriths
would rather not answer.