At the Narrow Passage (10 page)

I tuned back to Sally von Heinen.
"Who were those men?" I asked her slowly, coldly.
"What men?" she asked, her face showing nothing but hatred for me.
"Those men who tried to rescue you and the count."
"How should I know?" she asked. "I don't even know where we were."
"Shit!"
"What do you mean, Eric?" Tracy asked.
"There shouldn't have been anybody there but our people," I said,
"in that Line. According to Kar-hinter, there wasn't supposed to be another
human being alive within a hundred miles -- and the surviving natives of
the Line don't have spotlights, rifles, and combat augmentation."
"Then you mean they were Timeliners?"
"You got any other ideas?"
"No, but --
Timeliners
, Eric?"
"It has to be. I don't know who or why, but -- hell, you've heard stories
of renegades who steal skudders and go off plundering backward Lines.
Maybe it was some of them."
"I've only heard stories."
"I know, but who else could it have been?"
Sally might have had something like a smug expression on her face.
I couldn't be sure, but before I could question her, Kearns pulled
the staff car up next to the skudder and jumped out, leaving the motor
running, but without headlamps burning.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Get out," I said to Countess von Heinen.
She did, but carefully, facing the deadly little Imperial pistol that
Kearns now carried, the same gun she had tried to kill him with back in
her husband's bedroom.
I helped Tracy over the hatch and lowered him down to Kearns. Holding
Tracy with one arm, the other leveling the pistol at Sally, Kearns helped
the injured man into the back seat of the car.
"You wait there, ma'am," Kearns said, then turned to assist me with the
groaning count.
We would have got him out of the skudder -- but we ran out of time.
A dozen yards up the slope toward the villa the air shimmered for a moment,
sparkling like arcing electricity; then a shape formed out of the
shimmering, a flattened egg of metal and glass -- a skudder that didn't
look like any skudder I had ever seen before.
I thought about going into augmentation, but didn't know whether my body
could take it again just yet. I'd wait and see.
Pushing the count's wife back toward our skudder, Kearns jerked up his
diminutive pistol and fired into the developing shape.
"Get back in there," I yelled to the woman, crouching in the open hatch,
leveling my Harling at the new craft.
Our bullets, roaring loudly in the predawn stillness, ricocheted off the
flattened egg. A hatch opened and first one, then two weapons began to
answer ours.
"Get Tracy," I yelled to Kearns, who stood midway between our skudder
and the motorcar.
"I'll never get him back in," Kearns gasped.
"Get in the car then," I yelled suddenly. "Get out of here."
"You're mad."
A bullet rang shrilly as it struck the metal base of our skudder.
I thought about the energy pistol that ought to be stashed inside our
craft and wondered if I could get it.
"Do it," I yelled back to Kearns at the same time. "Turn on your lights,
make all the noise you can. Maybe they'll follow you."
"Crap!"
"Go on!"
Cursing again, Kearns jumped into the car, snapped on the electric
headlamps, and finally, firing across the hood as he did, he started
the motorcar into motion.
"Stay right where you are," I said to Sally.
Turning back to the count, I saw that his eyes were open at last.
"
Sprechen Sie
-- Hell, do you speak English?"
He nodded weakly.
"Then listen very carefully. I will kill you and your wife on the spot
unless you both do exactly as I say."
"Very well," he gasped.
"Can you sit up?"
He struggled awkwardly, but finally was able to pull himself up into a
half-sitting position.
I turned to look out the hatch. The woman was still standing where I had
told her to, perhaps fearful of the pistol I carried, but more likely
just wary of the rifle fire from the strange skudder that was aimed at
the dwindling taillights of the German staff car.
Then something happened that I couldn't quite believe at first. The thing
that I knew to be a skudder, knew to carry the men who had attacked us
on that Timeline a dozen universes away, rose slowly from the ground,
turned in the direction of the staff car, and began flying a few feet
above the ground.
A skudder that flew? I had always been told that it was impossible.
I don't really know why a jet engine or an antigrav couldn't be used in
conjunction with a skudder, but that was supposed to be one of the laws
of the energies that allow passage across the Lines. Something about
the nature of a probability field and its interaction with other forms
of energy. It just wasn't supposed to be possible for a skudder to do
anything but skud. But apparently what I had been told was wrong. I was
seeing a skudder fly, though I couldn't determine what kind of propulsion
it was using.
You know, I think that was the first time I had ever really had a doubt
about the omniscience of the Kriths. But just the first.
Once I got over my astonishment I felt relief. It was a weak ruse --
the staff car -- but it seemed to be working. The men in the alien skudder
must have assumed that we had all been able to get into the motorcar and
they were going after it. I hadn't expected it to work at all, much less
this well -- the
whole
skudder chasing down the dirt road after the car.
"Stay where you are, Countess," I said, then gestured for the count to come
after me.
"I don't know that I can do it, old boy," he said in excellent,
British-accented, if gasping, English.
"You'd better,
mein Herr
, or I'll blow the top of your head off."
Before leaving the skudder, I went to its controls, opened an obscure
panel and adjusted a dial and pushed a red button. You don't just leave
inoperative Outtime devices lying around in a world where your presence
is supposed to be unknown. We had about five minutes to get out of range
before the skudder destroyed itself.
I reached under the control panel, pulled out the energy pistol that was
hidden there and shoved it into my belt; then I clambered out of the hatch,
dropped to the ground beside the woman, said, "Help me. Both your lives
depend on our getting away before your friends come back. If they come
back, I'll kill you both before they get me. I promise."
I don't know whether I really meant it. I'm not very good at killing in
cold blood, but I suppose I thought I would do it at the time. Maybe I
would have. But they believed me and that was the important thing.
The woman seemed to feel some repugnance at touching the man who was,
technically at least, her husband, but she did, struggling with his
weakened body to the best of her ability. We finally got him to the
ground, where he stood, leaning against the side of the skudder, gasping
for breath.
"That wound's going to start bleeding again," I said, "but I don't suppose
we can do much about that." I paused. "We're going to the stables up there."
I pointed with my Harling. "There'd better be motorcars in there."
"I don't think he can make it," the woman said.
"He will if he wants to see the sun rise," I said, noticing the beginning
of a glow along the horizon in the east. It was going to~ be daylight
in a few minutes. Again time was running out. That seemed to be a habit
of mine.
"Let's go," I said, supporting one side of the wounded man, while his
wife supported the other. Together we staggered toward the stables,
our feet slipping in the mud.
The destruction of the skudder, which took place before we were halfway
to the stables, was unspectacular, even in early dawn. There was a flash
of light and a subdued roar as the metal base and probability generator
it housed were consumed. The paraglas dome crystalized and shattered and
fell in tiny fragments onto the slag. There wasn't enough left for anyone
ever to be able to tell what it had been, no one from this Line at least.
We went on, the three of us, toward the stables.
I had had little time to think of my own wound, but I became increasingly
aware of it and of the exhaustion of my body from running under augmentation
as we carried the man between us. With probing fingers of my free hand
I found the flayed flesh, raw and burning when I touched it, the dried,
crusted blood under the sodden fabric of my shirt. As I had thought,
it was only a superficial wound and though it might hurt me some, unless
it got infected, it wasn't going to be any real trouble. I'd worry about
infection later. Once I was sure I was going to live long enough to have
an infection.
It was halfway to broad daylight when we finally reached the stables. Von
Heinen had lost consciousness again and the last few yards I had,
somehow carried him alone, keeping both my eyes on his young wife,
suspecting that she would take the first opportunity I gave her to run
like hell. I didn't give her the opportunity, so she didn't.
I lowered Von Heinen to the wet ground, pulled the Harling from its
holster, told his wife to stay at his side and went up to open the
nearest doors.
At first I thought the cavernous stables were empty, but farther down
I found three motorcars, all decked out with the flags of Von Heinen's
rank. A Feldmarschall, he was. And he had come to the villa in style,
though I was afraid that he wouldn't leave it in the same fashion. Not
this time at least.
Going back to where the woman stood beside the unconscious man, I slipped
the pistol back into its holster, jerked him up, pulled him across my
shoulder, took a deep breath, and said, "Go on. Get in the first car."
With resignation on her pretty face the young countess preceded me along
the front of the stable to where the cars were parked.
"Can you drive?" I asked.
"No."
"I don't believe you," I said. "Get in front. Are the keys in it?
Don't lie again."
"Yes, they are."
I dumped Von Heinen in the back seat, climbed in beside him.
"Okay, let's go."
The motorcar started at once, which was a pleasant surprise, considering
the state of the art of motorcars in this Line.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Shut it off."
She did as I ordered while I jumped out of the car, grabbed up a large
tarpaulin that lay on the stable floor a few feet from where the car
was parked.
"Now let's go."
The motor started again, though it coughed a couple of times first. She
shifted into gear and slowly pulled out of the stable into the driveway
that led back around the villa's main house.
"Head toward Beaugency for the moment," I said, and then had the strangest
feeling that I was being watched. I peered back over my shoulder out of
the car's rear window, and for a moment I thought I saw a figure standing
in the stable, back in the deepest part of the shadow. It seemed to be
a man, but beyond that I could tell nothing about him. I reached for
the Harling, but when I looked again, I could see nothing. The figure,
if it had ever been there, was gone now. Perhaps it was just my fatigued
mind playing tricks on me. I wasn't sure.
"What is it?" Countess von Heinen asked.
"Nothing. Go on. Drive slowly." I forced myself to try to forget about
the figure, but I still felt uneasy about it, though it was a strange
sort of unease I can't quite define. "Be careful," I went on, "and don't
do anything foolish. You've only got a few inches of stuffing between
you and the barrel of this pistol. I'd hate to make a big hole in your
lovely back."
"I know," she said slowly. "I'll do as you say."
"I'm sure you will."
We passed the main house where Kearns had casually dumped the bodies
of the two sentries who had once occupied the staff car he now drove.
I wondered where he was, and I didn't mourn the dead Imperials. If I were
going to mourn anyone, it would be Sir Gerald Asbury and Land, who had
been cut apart by a submachine gun inside that big house, and Starne,
who lay dead in another universe near Sir Gerald, and a British sergeant
and three other men dead in the river and men who . . . Hell! I didn't
have time to mourn anyone. Not yet. I had to stay alive now and try
somehow to get Von Heinen back across the British lines to Kar-hinter.
We had no more than hit the main highway outside the villa's grounds
when I saw Imperial German troop movements in the direction of the city.
Battered veterans of last night's fighting, moving back to regroup and
refit and wait for replacements. They looked tired, but they didn't
look
beaten
.
"Turn around," I ordered.
"Here?"
"Now!"
She slowed the car, made a U-turn in the road and headed north.
"The first road you come to off to your left, take it."
"Where are we going?"
"How the hell should I know?"
10
Contact and Report
For most of the morning we traveled west in the falling rain, the feeble
windshield wipers hardly allowing Sally vision to drive. We stayed on
back roads, little more than muddy ruts between farm lands that had lain
fallow as war swept back and forth across this part of France. The ruins
of a village here and there, a pile of cold embers that had once been a
house, a series of bomb and shell craters and sodden, abandoned trenches,
and little else. It was my intention to stay far enough north of the
current German lines to avoid much investigation.
Only once were we stopped by a roadblock: two gaunt, tired soldiers
in Imperial gray, soaked to the skin by the night-long rain, manning
a barricade across what once might have been a paved road, but was now
hardly more than a muddy path.
"Go slow," I told my driver, wondering what the sentries would think of a
lone woman dressed in a robe driving an Imperial staff car that flew the
banner of a
Feldmarschall
. We'd see. "Smile and wink at them, but don't
let them look too closely in the back seat. And remember, if anything
goes wrong, neither you nor your husband will live to talk about it."
"I understand," Sally replied coldly.
Then I pulled the tarp over the still unconscious Von Heinen and myself,
pushed the pistol against the back of the driver's seat and waited,
the air under the tarp hot and damp, smelling of hay and horseshit.
"
Halt, bitte