The Gate of Time

by Philip José Farmer

  “Where do you think they’re taking us, lieutenant?”

  O’Brien sounded weak and nervous. Two Hawks replied that he did not know. Privately, he supposed that they were being taken to an interrogation station. He hoped fervently that civilization had softened the old Iroquois methods of dealing with prisoners. Not that being “civilized” necessarily meant that subtle or brutal torture was out of consideration. Look at the “civilized” Germans of his own world. Look at the Russians. Look at the Chinese. Look at the American whites in their dealings with the red man. Look at anybody, preliterate or civilized.

  After an estimated fifteen minutes of travel, the wagon stopped. O’Brien and Two Hawks were roughly helped down. Ropes were put around their necks, and they were led up a long flight of steps, down a long hall, down another, then down a curving staircase. Two Hawks said nothing; O’Brien cursed. Abruptly, they were halted. A door swung open on squeaky iron hinges; they were pushed through a doorway. Again halted, they stood in silence for a while. Their blindfolds were removed, and they were blinking at the bright illumination of an electric lamp.

  When his vision had come back, Two Hawks saw that the room was of polished granite. Its ceiling was far above; the light came from a huge lamp on a wooden table. Several men stood around them. These wore tight-fitting black uniforms; on the left breast of each jacket was a misshapen death’s head. And, unlike any he had seen so far, these men had completely shaven heads.

  He had been right. He and O’Brien were here to be interrogated. Unfortunately, they really had nothing to tell. The truth was so incredible that the questioners would not believe it. They would think that it was a fantasy concocted by Perkunishan spies. They could not think otherwise, any more than a man of this world, caught in a similar situation in Two Hawks’ Earth, would be believed by either Allies or Germans.

  Nevertheless, there came a time when Two Hawks told the truth, unbelievable or not. O’Brien was the lucky one. Weakened by the malaria, he could not endure much pain. He kept fainting until the inquisitioners were satisfied that he was not faking. They dragged him out by his heels, his head hobbling on the smooth greasy-looking stone. Then they devoted their full energies and ingenuity to Two Hawks. Perhaps they were especially vindictive because they believed him to be a traitor. He was obviously not a Perkunishan.

  Two Hawks kept silent as long as possible. He remembered that the old Iroquois of his Earth had admired a man who could take it. Sometimes, though rarely, they stopped the torture to adopt a man of great courage and endurance into the tribe.

  After a while he began wondering how his ancestors could have been so tough as to keep silent, even to sing and dance or yell insults at their tormentors. They were better men than he. To hell with the stoicism and with the defiance! He began to scream. This did not make him feel better, but it at least permitted him some expression and release of energy.

  The time came when he had babbled his story five times, insisting each time that it was true. Six times he fainted and was revived with ice-cold water poured over him. After a while, he did not know what he was doing or saying. But at least he was not begging for mercy. And he was cursing them, telling them what low worthless despicable creatures they were and vowing to cut their guts out and loop them around their necks when he got a chance.

  Then he began screaming again, the world was one red flame, one red scream.

  When he awoke, he was in pain. But it was more like the memory of pain. The memory hurt enough but was far preferable to the actual agony inflicted on him in that stone chamber. Still, he wished he could die and get the exquisite hurt over with. Then he thought of the men who had done this thing to him, and he wished he would live. Once on his feet, give him a chance to escape, and he would somehow kill them.

  Time passed. He awoke to find his head being held up and a cooling drink going down his dry throat. There were several women in the room, all clad in long black robes and with white bands around their foreheads. They shushed his croaked questions and began to change some of the bandages in which he was swathed. They did so gently but could not avoid hurting him. Afterwards, they applied soothing lotions and put fresh bandages on.

  He asked where he was, and one answered that he was in a nice safe place and no one was ever going to hurt him again. He broke down and cried then. They looked to one side as if embarrassed, but he did not know if they were embarrassed by the show of emotion or by what had been done to him.

  He did not stay awake long but fell into a sleep from which he awoke two days later. He felt as if he had been drugged; his head was as thick as the taste in his mouth. He managed to get out of bed that evening and to walk up and down the long hall outside his room. Nobody interfered, and he even talked—or tried to talk—to some of the other patients. Shocked, he returned to his tiny room. O’Brien was in the other bed. Weakly, O’Brien said, “Where are we?”

  “In the Iroquoian version of the booby hatch,” Two Hawks said.

  O’Brien was too drained of strength to react violently. He did succeed in talking, however. “How come we’re here?”

  “I suppose our torturers, the Iriquois Gestapo, concluded we had to be insane. We stuck to our story, and our story could not possibly be true. So, here we are, and lucky at that. These people seem to have preserved the old respect for the crazed. They treat them nicely. Only, we’re prisoners, of course.”

  O’Brien said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it. I think I’m going to die. What they did to me. . . and being on this world, I...”

  “You’re too mean and ornery to die,” Two Hawks said. “Where’s your fighting Irish spirit? You tough mick, you’ll make it all right. You just want some sympathy.”

  “No. But promise me one thing. When you get the chance, find those bastards and kill them. Slowly. Make them scream like they made us scream. Then kill them!”

  Two Hawks said, “I felt like you did. But I’ve discovered something about this world. There aren’t any Geneva conventions. What happened to us happens to any prisoner if the captors feel like torturing him. If we’d fallen into the hands of the Perkunishans, we’d have gotten the same treatment or worse. At least, we aren’t crippled for life or permanently scarred. From now on, we’ve got it made. We’re being treated like kings. Like captive gods. The Iroquois regard the insane as possessed by divinity. Maybe they don’t really believe that any more, but the basic attitude still exists.”

  “Kill them!” O’Brien said, and he fell asleep again.

  By the end of the following week, Two Hawks was almost back to normal. The third-degree burns were still healing, but he no longer felt as if he had been flayed alive and every exposed muscle and nerve beaten in a mortar. He met the director of the asylum, Tarhe. Tarhe was a tall thin man with a huge nose and the eyes of a gentle eagle. In addition to being the chief administrator, he was also the head latoolats. This word meant, literally, he hunts, and was the generic term for the Iroquoian equivalent of psychiatrist.

  Tarhe was a kindly man and a scholar. He gave Two Hawks permission to use his library, in which Two Hawks spent hours each day learning about this world, or Earth 2, as he was beginning to call it. There were books in every major language and many in the minor tongues and over a hundred volumes of reference material. There was also a multilingual dictionary which Two Hawks used frequently. His education leaped ahead like a hare with a fox on its trail.

  Occasionally, Tarhe called him in for brief therapeutic sessions. Tarhe was a busy man, but he considered Two Hawks’ case a challenge. As time went on, he allotted an hour a day to his patient, although for Tarhe it meant losing an hour of sleep or of study for himself.

  “Then you think that I had some experience on the western front that was so terrible that my mind snapped?” Two Hawks said, “I retreated from reality into the fantasy world of this Earth I claim to be from? I found this world unendurable?”

  Two Hawks grinned at Tarhe and said, “If that is true, why would O’Brien have exactl
y the same psychosis? The same down to every minute detail? Don’t you find it strange, indeed incredible, that we could agree on a thousand details of this fantasy world?”

  Tarhe said, “He found your psychosis attractive enough to want to get into it. No wonder. He obviously depends upon you a great deal; he would feel shut out, absolutely alone, if he were not in this... this Earth 1.”

  Tarhe did not use the term psychosis or anything like it. His word, translated literally, meant “possession”. It was used because a latoolats treated the insane as if they were actually possessed by a demon or an evil ghost. The demons, however, were dealt with scientifically; they had been categorized. One of Tarhe’s medical books gave a list of one hundred and twenty-nine types of evil spirits. Two Hawks was supposed to have been taken over by a teotya’tya’koh (literally, his body is cut in two).

  Suspecting that Tarhe was too intelligent and too basically incredulous to believe in the existence of ghosts and demons, Two Hawks questioned him. Tarhe replied with a smile and some carefully chosen ambiguous phrases. They satisfied Two Hawks that Tarhe used the terms only to conform to the scientific terminology of his profession. There may have been a time when the categorizations were literal and not figurative, but men like Tarhe no longer put credence in them. However, the belief in demons was a living force among the common people and the priests of the state religion. It might be dangerous to publicly profess disbelief. So, Tarhe went along with public opinion.

  The amazing thing was that the principles of treating the mentally sick were much the same as those used by the Freudian practitioners of Earth 1. The Iroquoian explanations for the genesis and cure of warped minds might be different, but the therapy was similar.

  “How do you account for our ignorance of your language?” Two Hawks said to Tarhe.

  “You’re an intelligent man. Your teotya’tya’koh is cunning. It decided to go all the way into this dream world. So it made you forget your native tongue. Thus, you are even more secure from being forced back into this world.”

  “You have a rationalization for everything I say,” Two Hawks said. “In fact, you rationalize so much, one might think you were the patient and I the doctor. Have you ever considered, even for one second, that I might be telling the truth? Why not conduct an experiment to determine this; take a truly scientific nonprejudicial approach? Question O’Brien and myself separately about our world. We could have agreed on a story in its broad outlines. But if you delve into it, break it down to very minor details—oh, about a thousand things: language, history, geography, religions, customs, etcetera—you’ll find an absolutely astonishing agreement.”

  Tarhe removed his glasses and polished them.

  “That would be a scientific experiment. It’s true you couldn’t create an entire language in all its complexities of sound, structure, vocabulary, and so forth. Or agree on details of history, architecture, and so on.”

  “So why don’t you test us?”

  Tarhe replaced his glasses and looked owlishly at Two Hawks.

  “Some day, I may. Meanwhile, let’s work on your possession, find out how the demon managed to invade you. Now, what were your feelings—not thoughts -- when I contradicted you a moment ago?”

  Two Hawks was furious at first, then he began to laugh. After all, he could not blame Tarhe for his attitude. If he were in his place, would he believe such a story?

  Much of Two Hawks’ time was taken up with the routine of the asylum. There were the daily sweatbaths, so long and hot that if a demon were inhabiting his body, it would have been too uncomfortable to remain. There were daily religious ceremonies, during which the priests from a nearby temple tried to exorcise the demons. Tarhe absented himself during these; apparently, he had had trouble concealing his impatience with priests. He must have felt that they were wasting time that could be better spent. It was an indication of the power of the Iroquois church that he dared not interfere with it. Two Hawks made some inquiry about the state religion and found that it was indigenous. It was based on the primitive religions of the Iroquois and had been formalized and put into writing some four hundred years ago by a prophet, Kaasyotyeetha. The founder of the religion had made the vaguely pantheistic belief into a monotheistic one. And he had incorporated various concepts and creeds of the Western European religion into the new faith. However, all the borrowings had an Iroquoian flavor.

  There was, however, religious toleration in the nation of Hotinohsonih.

  In his leisure time, Two Hawks went to the library or practised conversation with the patients and staff. He intended to escape some day and would thus have to know this world well if he were to operate effectively. A children’s book, printed by a house in ‘Estokwa, gave him an outline of Earth 2’s prehistory and history. The planet was now in the terminal stage of an ice age, just entering a warm period. This was a good thing for Europe, otherwise all of the northern half and part of the southern would be under a permanent icecap. The lack of a Gulf Stream to heat up the continental climate had made a big difference in man’s technological development and in his expansion. A good part of the Scandinavian peninsula and of northern Russia was icebound most of the year. The lack of horse and camel also seemed to have slowed man’s travel and communication.

  Over the course of several thousand years, large migrations of Amerinds (generally referred to by Westerners as anthropophagi) from central Asia and Siberia had wandered into Europe and conquered or been conquered. The conquerers had usually been absorbed into the defeated peoples, who had then regained their national identity and integrity.

  But in fairly recent times, during the past 800 years, several of the later invaders had succeeded in imposing their language and some cultural traits on the white aborigines. The area of Czechoslovakia of Earth 1 was here called Kinukkinuk. The Algonquian word for this state had originally meant mixture and had referred both to the differing dialects of the various conquerors and also to the fact that the Amerinds had miscegenated with the white natives.

  This reminded Two Hawks of Hungary of Earth 1, where a semi-Mongolian people, speaking a Uralic tongue, had defeated the whites, imposed their language upon the whites, and then had been absorbed, losing their racial identity. Here, the Huns had never been heard of.

  The Finnish speakers had been diverted eastwards, invaded and settled down in Japan, known on Earth 2 as Saariset. The Japanese, repelled when they had tried to conquer the islands, had turned instead to the area of what Two Hawks’ planet knew as southern China. Northern China was inhabited by a Mongolian-type people speaking an Athabaskan tongue similar to Navaho and Apache.

  India, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia were similar to the countries of Earth 1. But there were differences. Some of the northern Indian rajahdoms spoke Turkic, and Arabic was prevalent in the southern part.

  Asia Minor presented an alien picture. The Turkey of Earth 1 spoke Hittite. Palestine used a Semitic tongue derived from colonists from Crete. Hebrew was unknown. The rest of Asia Minor, except for Arabia, spoke Indo-Iranian dialects.

  The Akhaiwoi (a Hellenic tribe) had conquered the Italic peninsula and given it its present name of Akhaivia. They had built up a civilization that could be compared favourably in some respects to the Athenian culture of Earth 1, although lacking in others.

  Egypt had its own Greek dialect. The other North African states spoke Berber, Iberian, or Greek. Unlike the semidesert North Africa of Earth 1, these nations had very fertile soil and a large population.

  The Germanic peoples had begun invading Britain and Ireland at an early date. Succeeding waves of Germanics, Celtics, and even Baltics came so fast and furious that Britain became known as Blodland (Bloodland). The Ingwine finally established themselves in Blodland, and their speech developed into something like the Old English of Earth 1. But then the Danish and Norwegian raids and invasions began. They were on a scale that far surpassed those of Earth 1. In fact, half of Denmark migrated to Blodland over a period of a hundred years and settled down
there.

  Danish kings ruled for a long time. Under them, Iceland, Ireland, Norland (Scotland), Blodland, Grettirsland (Normandy), and south Scandinavia became known as the Six Kingdoms and had remained so until modern times. All of the six states spoke dialects of a common language, Ingwinetalu. This could be described as an archaic and creolized English with an enormous stock of Norse loanwords and a lesser amount of Semitic Cretan, Etruscan Rasna, and Greek loanwords.

  The French and Latin words were missing, and oh, what a difference their lack made to the language! Learning Ingwinish was for Two Hawks learning a foreign tongue.

  Perkunisha, the Baltic-speaking nation, consisted of Earth 1’s Germany, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and the Algonquian speakers of Earth 1’s Czechoslovakia, Kinukkinuk.

  The Perkunishans seemed to be the Germans of Earth 2 as far as their industry, science, philosophy, and aggressiveness were concerned. Thirty years ago they had begun this planet’s first World War I. They had seemed on their way to the complete conquest of Europe and North Africa when a plague (the Black Plague?) had decimated Europe. Now, their armies powerful with a new generation and a militarily superior technology and a superman ideology, the Perkunishans were trying again. This time, it looked as if they might succeed.

  Two Hawks saw what a difference the lack of a United States of America made in this world. Europe could not call upon them for aid against the Central European aggressors.

  7

  Sergeant O’Brien, despite his convictions that he was going to die, got better. Soon he was on his feet and doing simple exercises. Two Hawks was working out with him in the gymnasium one day when an orderly told him he had a visitor. Two Hawks felt apprehensive, wondering if the secret police had come for him. He followed the orderly to the visitors’ room. He was ready to kill if he had to and then to make an escape. If he was killed instead, so much the better. He was not going through that torture again.