by Rick Cook
Then he felt a lot better.
* * *
Back at the base the people were feeling worse as the minutes ticked by.
The general wasn’t happy, Ozzie Sharp wasn’t happy, the squadron commander wasn’t happy and unhappiest of all was the young captain who ran the base’s rescue operation.
"We got on his last known position quickly and flew an expanding spiral search," the captain explained. "Then we did it again with a different aircraft and crew. We have had aircraft on top almost constantly. There is no voice communication and no transponder signal."
"What about the Russians?"
"They say they haven’t seen any sign of him."
"And you believe them?"
"It’s credible," Ozzie Sharp said. "The Russians returned to their base with all their missiles still on their wings." No one bothered to ask how he knew.
The general grunted. Then his head snapped up and he transfixed the young captain with a steely-eyed stare.
"Why the bloody hell can’t you even find the area where he went down?"
"Sir, this is a very unusual situation. He had sent his wingman back, so we don’t have as much information as we normally do." The captain thought about explaining how well they were doing to have gotten this far in the few hours since the missing pilot’s wingman had broken out of the dead zone. Then he caught the general’s eye again and decided not to.
"Have your crews found anything unusual?" Sharp asked. "Any unusual readings or problems with your instruments?"
"None, sir. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing in that fog but more fog."
The expression on Sharp’s face made the general seem mild by comparison.
"We’re going over the area again," the captain offered quickly. "But so far there’s no sign of Major Gilligan or his plane."
"Nothing on the transponder?" the general asked.
"Nossir," the officer said.
"Captain, I thought this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen."
"It isn’t, sir."
It’s as if he dropped off the face of the earth, the captain thought. But it was bad form to say something like that.
Major Gilligan drifted through the fog and tried to figure out what the hell had happened to him. He didn’t have the faintest idea where he was, but increasingly he doubted it was anywhere near Alaska. There was still fog all around him, but when the sun broke through it was bright, warm and too high in the sky, totally unlike anything he had experienced in Alaska.
He could hear the sound of surf off to his left. Surf usually meant land of some kind, so that was as good a direction as any. Besides, the fog seemed to be marginally thinner that way.
Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan began paddling grimly toward the sound of the waves.
Twenty-six: GILLIGAN’S ISLAND
Gilligan saw the land almost as soon as he broke out of the fog bank. One minute he was paddling along surrounded by whiteness and the next he was out under sunny skies with only an occasional puff of fleecy white clouds. Behind him the fog looked like a wall.
Ahead of him he could see a shore fringed with trees, and hills behind. Between him and that shore waves beat on a reef, making the noise that had drawn him here.
Gilligan studied the situation as best he could sitting in his raft. Fortunately the current wasn’t strong here and the tide was high. He thought about trying to find a channel, but he decided that would cost him more energy than he could afford. So he picked the best-looking spot and paddled toward it.
It took perhaps an hour for Gilligan to negotiate the reef and another forty-five minutes or so to cross the lagoon behind it. As he crossed the lagoon, Gilligan had a chance to admire "his" island. It was worth admiring, he had to admit. The black sand beach was smooth and unmarred. The trees behind it were tall and tropic green. The place looked like a travel poster.
A travel poster for a deserted island, he thought. There was no sign of footprints, tire tracks, roads or trails. The detritus along the tide line included not one beer can, plastic jug or bottle.
Reflexively he scanned the sky for contrails. There were very few places in the world where you could not see jet tracks in the sky, but apparently this was one of them. Except for the clouds and the fog on the water behind him there was nothing in the sky but the bright tropical sun.
Wherever I am, with scenery like this there’s sure to be a Club Med or something close by.
After pulling his raft up on the beach above the tide line, Gilligan stripped off his life vest, arctic survival suit and G-suit, stowed his gear, checked his radios again and started off down the beach. Either this place was as deserted as it looked or it wasn’t and he stood a better chance of finding either people or food if he stayed on the beach.
After almost an hour of walking he found nothing to show that the place was or ever had been inhabited. He had stopped twice to empty the sand out of his boots. Finally he tied the laces together and slung them around his neck so he could walk barefoot through the fine black sand.
Crabs skittered across the beach, gulls wheeled over the water and an occasional brightly colored bird flashed through the trees. But there was not a single sign of human life.
Damn it, he thought, scanning the sky again. Places like this just don’t exist anymore. He looked down the long, pristine stretch of beach. And if they do, I want to retire here!
He had been walking perhaps half a mile barefoot when he found a place where a boat had pulled up. Not a boat, he corrected, an amphibious tractor. The signs were clear enough. The place where it had come out of the water had been washed away by the tide, but he could clearly see where it had pulled up above the tide line and then the tread marks where it had churned over the soft sand and in among the trees between the tread marks was a furrow as if the vehicle had not retracted its rudder. Following the line he could even see where several branches had been broken off in its passage.
Gilligan paused and considered. An amphtrack implied military. Even in backwaters like this civilians didn’t own them. That meant there was an element of risk in meeting the tractor and its crew. On the other hand, there was also the possibility of rescue.
He studied the marks carefully. Although he was no expert, he knew that the amphibious tractors of the U.S. Marines drove through the water on special treads with extra-deep cleats. Soviet equipment used regular treads and either propellers or water jets. But the sand was much too fine and soft to give him any clue. He could only see that something big and not wheeled had come this way.
What the hell, this is the era of glasnost. We’re all supposed to be friends these days. He sat down on a tree root and put his boots on. Then he checked his pistol. Still, it never hurts to be careful.
Cautiously, Major Mick Gilligan set off into the forest in pursuit of the vehicle.
The trail was surprisingly difficult to follow. The amphtrack had not torn up the forest floor as much as he expected. There were no clear tread marks and in many places broken branches offered clearer indications than the tracks. Still, you can’t move something that big through a wooded area without leaving a plain trail.
Except for the breeze in the trees and an occasional bird or animal call, the woods were silent. There was no sound of an engine, which made Gilligan even more cautious. But there were no voices, either. Perhaps they were too far ahead for him to hear.
Gilligan was a pilot, not a woodsman. He had to divide his attention between trying to follow the trail, trying not to walk into a tree and trying to scout ahead. So it wasn’t surprising he stepped into the clearing without seeing Patrol Two standing in the trees on the other side.
Then the dragon rider shifted. Gilligan caught the motion and looked up. Then he stared-first at the weapon and then at the wielder.
The bow was nearly as tall as she was and the limbs were of unequal length. Gilligan remembered seeing something like that when he had been stationed in Japan and he had gone to a demonstration of traditional Ja
panese archery. But the person carrying it was anything but Japanese.
To Gilligan she looked like something out of a Robin Hood movie. She wore thigh-high boots of soft brown leather, tight breeches that bloused out at the thigh and a fleece-lined vest over a close-fitting tunic. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was, and slender. Her hair was cornsilk blonde and freckles dusted her nose. The eyes were pure, pale blue and very, very serious. The arrow in her bow was aimed straight at his midriff.
"Uh, hi," Gilligan said.
Twenty-seven: ENCOUNTER
Karin studied the stranger carefully without shifting the aim of the arrow. He was a big man, broad shouldered and apparently well muscled, although it was hard to tell through his clothing. He wore a drab green coverall with straps, pockets and strange black runes scattered over it. The thing in his hand was black and shiny and he handled it like a weapon, although Karin had never seen its like.
In all their patrolling, the dragon riders had never seen a human in this place. Indeed, they had been told there were only two humans among the enemy and they never left their castle. Where did this one come from?
He didn’t act like one of the enemy, she thought. In fact he seemed more confused than hostile. Still better to be safe, so she simply nodded to him without moving the bow.
"I’m Major Michael Gilligan, United States Air Force. I, ah, had a little trouble back there and I need to contact my unit." He stopped, as if expecting a response. "Um, I don’t suppose there’s a phone around here anywhere?"
"Air Force? You are a flier then?"
"Yes, ma’am. Only, as I say, I had a little trouble and came down in the water."
"And your mount?"
"Down at sea."
The poor man’s dragon had drowned! To Karin, who had only narrowly avoided the same fate, the tragedy was doubly poignant.
"I’m very sorry," she said, lowering her bow. "I am called Karin and I too am a flier."
Slowly and with exaggerated care, the man put the black metal thing in a pouch under his armpit. "Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Ah, about that phone… ?"
"I do not think you will find one here," Karin told him, not quite comprehending what a "phone" was.
"I kind of figured that," he said. "Where are we, anyway?"
"I am not quite sure," she admitted. "I think it is the western shore of the main island in the Bubble World."
"Bubble World?" he asked blankly.
"The World between the Worlds. I do not pretend to understand it, but our wizards say that it is connected at one end to our World and at the other end to the World from whence came the Sparrow."
"Sparrow? Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m just plain confused."
"Of course! You must be from the other World, the Sparrow’s World." She smiled. "This must all be very strange to you, I know."
"Yes, ma’am!" he said fervently. "It certainly is that."
"Well, come back to my camp then and we can talk. Oh, and stop calling me ma’am. I am neither a witch, a wizard nor an elder and I am called Karin."
He looked at her in a way Karin found rather pleasant. "No ma’am-I mean, Karin-you are definitely not an old witch!"
This, Major Mick Gilligan told himself firmly, has gotta be a hallucination. He was probably lying in a hospital bed somewhere drugged out of his skull after being fished out of the Bering Sea. He wondered if his nurse looked anything like Karin.
Still, he thought, hallucination or not, I’ve gotta play it like it’s real. So far it hadn’t been too bad. Stuck on a deserted island with a beautiful girl, even a beautiful girl who thought she was William Tell. No, that wasn’t half bad for a hallucination.
"My camp is just over there," Karin said, pointing toward an especially thick clump of trees.
"Where’s your vehicle?" Gilligan asked.
"No vehicle, only Stigi and myself," Karin told him as they stepped into the camp.
"But we’ve been following…" Gilligan began.
Then he saw the dragon.
Stigi was only average size for a cavalry mount-which is to say he was eighty feet long and his wings would probably span as much when fully extended.
An eighty-foot wingspan on an airplane wouldn’t have impressed Gilligan particularly. Eighty feet of bat wings on a scaled, fanged monster who looked ready to breathe fire at any second was very impressive.
Gilligan’s jaw dropped and he licked his lips. "That’s, that’s a…"
"That is Stigi," Karin supplied, strolling over to the monster and patting its scaly shoulder just in front of its left wing.
The dragon raised its head about ten feet off the ground and regarded Gilligan with a football-sized golden eye.
"Does it fly?"
"Of course he flies," Karin said. "How else would we get here?"
"Hoo boy," said Major Mick Gilligan. "Oh boy."
Karin’s camp was well off the beach, in a fold in the ground well-shaded by trees. The dragon took up a good half the space, but there was still room for a small fire and a simple canopy made with something like a shelter half.
"This is pretty cozy," Gilligan said as he looked around.
"I am a scout," Karin explained. "There is always the possibility of being caught away from my base and having to forage. So," she shrugged, "we are prepared."
"There aren’t many places we can land away from our bases," Mick told her. "If something goes wrong we have to bail out."
"Bail out?"
"Use our ejection seats."
"Ejection seats?"
He looked over at the dragon. "Yeah, I guess you don’t have much call for those."
"Now," Karin said, settling herself on a log by the fire, "what happened to you, Major?"
"It’s Mick, as long as we’re on a first-name basis."
Karin frowned prettily. "I thought you said your name was Major."
"No, that’s my rank. My first name’s Michael, but everyone calls me Mick."
"Ah," Karin said. "When Stigi and I are in the air we are called Patrol Two."
"That’s like a call sign. I was Eagle One on my last mission."
"What happened to you?"
Gilligan sighed. "Kind of a long story. Basically we were getting some peculiar-ah, indications-from an area out over the ocean and they sent us out to look. My wingman and I found something, but we couldn’t communicate with our base. I sent him back and went on in for a closer look. There was a little tussle and I came out on the short end."
It was Karin’s turn to sigh. "That is more or less what happened to me. I was out on single patrol, near the great fog bank where this World connects to yours, when I was attacked from behind. I managed to avoid the attacker and I even got a shot off at it, but in the maneuvering Stigi sprained his wing."
"Sprained it?"
"Our dragons seldom hurt themselves so, but this is a strange place and things are not exactly as they are in our world."
"They’re not as they are in our world, either," Gilligan said, looking over at Stigi. The dragon’s head was resting on the ground but one unwinking yellow eye was fixed on Gilligan.
"What jumped you, another dragon?" he asked as he turned so he didn’t have to look at the dragon looking at him.
Karin frowned. "Something strange. It was all gray and roared as it came. I did not get a good look at it."
Uh-oh, Gilligan thought. Gray and roaring and came at her from behind. Hoo boy.
To cover himself he asked the first non-personal question that came to mind. "You keep talking about different worlds. What do you mean?"
"There is our World, where magic holds sway. There is your World, where I gather magic works poorly or not at all?" He nodded and she went on. "And there is this World, where both the things of our world and the things of your world work after a fashion. But this World is new. Some say it was created by our enemies."
"Your enemies?"
"Powerful wizards who command legions of non-living beings," Karin explained. "It is said they prepa
re war against both your world and ours. But surely you know this?"
"All we know is that there’s something funny going on out over the ocean. We thought maybe it was someone from our world. That’s why I was sent to investigate."
The dragon rider frowned. "If that is all your people know then surely you must return to bear word to them."
"That’s my plan."
Karin sighed. "I wish I could contact my base, but my communications crystal stopped working just before I was attacked. I am sure my squadron commander would know what to do."
"You seem to be doing all right," Gilligan said, looking around the camp site.
Karin smiled. She had a wonderful smile, Gilligan noticed. Then she sobered. "Thank you, but I feel so inadequate. I have been a rider for just two seasons. I have never been in combat before. In that time there has been no one to fight."
"I know the feeling," Gilligan told her. "I’ve been in for ten years, I’ve got about 1800 hours in F-15s and I’ve never been in combat either." He had missed Iraq because he’d been in the hospital with hepatitis, but he didn’t tell her that.
Karin looked astonished. "Ten years and never a battle?"
"We’ve been at peace all that time," Gilligan said. Well, more or less. "Actually we’ve been at peace for almost twenty-five years and we haven’t had a major war in nearly fifty."
"Forgive me, but if that is so then why do you maintain fighting fliers?"
"Because for most of that time we’ve been close to war. My nation and another great nation were ready to go to war at a moment’s notice."
"Yet you did not? You must be remarkably peace-loving in spite of it."
Gilligan grinned mirthlessly. "Not peace-loving. Scared. We got too good at it. We developed weapons that would let us destroy cities in an eyeblink. Weapons we had no defenses against. All of a sudden a major war didn’t look real cost effective."
