Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 15

He was on a wide, flat and bitterly cold desert at midnight. There was a harsh white moon shining on the flat rocks and glistening in the sand. Then, behind him, he heard the keening, turned to run again. It was a wild ululating cry. He made it to the top of the rise, looked back. The first of the sucker-mouthed lizards came into view, then others. A hundred. A thousand. Hundreds of thousands and millions after that. A sea of alien faces. Then he began to scream-

He woke.

The reality was not much better than the nightmare. He was strapped firmly in a chair, his hands tied together with some plastic-covered wire that ensured they would remain together, a hasty handcuffing but an effective one. Behind him and to either side were vacii guards with their guns drawn. In front, another vacii paced. When it saw the flutter of Salsbury's eyelashes and realized he was awake, it slipped into the chair opposite him and stared with those mad crimson eyes.

“How did you get in,” it asked, the voice a thin, hissed guttural whisper.

When he refused to answer, the guards shifted uneasily. He tested the wire and found it was as tight as it had seemed at first, much too tight. He thought, still, if he saw the worst coming, he might just be able to break it. It would require all his strength and some of that adrenalin chemical from the interior of his liver. What the wire would do to his wrist while he strained to break it would not be pleasant, but it would be preferable to death. And death might be exactly what the vacii had in mind. He thought about what he had done to their fellows since he had arrived in this probability line, and he wondered how strong their revenge motivations were. Then he remembered the 810-40.04 had said vacii were nearly emotionless; he felt just the slightest bit better.

“Pleasse make it eassier on yoursself,” the vacii said.

“I broke in,” he said. They did not seem to know of the violation of the prober chamber, and he was not about to tell them.

“How?” the inquisitor asked.

“Through the front door. When the guard wasn't looking, I-”

The inquisitor dispensed with such lies simply by refusing to listen to them. He stood and paced in front of Salsbury, sucker mouth working, puckering, then going flaccid and loose like the pendulously lipped mouths of drunkards, then puckering again. There was a faint, unpleasant odor to the alien that Salsbury had noticed on other vacii, and which had been stronger in the ventilation shafts. It was the odor of fish, of slimy things that laid in mud flats and sunned themselves. “There iss no guard on the door. There iss no way you could have gotten in except by palm-printing the lock. And your printsss would surely not be on file!”

Salsbury said nothing.

The inquisitor pointed to the weapons next, the gas pellet gun and the micro-bombs in the rucksack which they had opened and gone through. It wanted to know where he had obtained such things.

“They aren't mine,” Salsbury said.

The bony hand slapped him hard. The question was repeated,

“I found them here,” he said.

He was slapped again. His head trembled, as if his neck had turned to jelly. There was a ringing in his ears; colored lights did sloppily choreographed dances behind his eyes. “I made them,” he said next.

“How?” Even filtered through the alien voice box and the sucker mouth, there was scorn in the words.

“With my tools. In my basement.”

“You are very foolissh. We haven't the devicess to make you talk here. But on One Line, there are such thingss.”

He turned to the other vacii guards and instructed them. The straps were yanked loose, and Salsbury was hustled to his feet without any ceremony. The guards took him into the corridor, down to the end of it where another alien lounged against the wall, chewing on a bright orange stick, his eyes heavily lidded. The tallest of Salsbury's two guards slapped its hand, knocked the orange stick away and said something in sharp native vacii The new alien shrugged and led them into the room.

It was a high-ceilinged place full of machinery dotted with lights that bunked and scopes that pulsed, complex and at once interesting. In the center of the floor there was a platform upon which a sled stood, a six foot long slab of glistening metal with four seats bolted to it.

One of the guards prodded Salsbury in the back with a pistol barrel “Get on cart.” It sounded as if it would take any excuse possible to break Salsbury up a little. He stepped onto the platform as directed, then turned abruptly, three feet above the guard now, and smashed a foot into the vacii's face. The thing toppled backwards, gurgling, the gun out of its hands.

“Halt!”

The second guard, the taller of the two, swung the barrel of his needle weapon around. Salsbury launched himself from the platform, came down on the alien before he could fire. He knocked the wind from the creature, managed to grind a knee into its stomach before he got up. Then, when success seemed so close at hand, the heavy-lidded clown who had been chewing on the drug stick brought a chair down on his back, slamming him forward into the cart platform and unconsciousness.

When he came to this time, he was strapped into one of the chairs on the cart, and the cart was moving. Yet it wasn't moving. It seemed, instead, that things moved around the cart while the vehicle itself remained stationary. There were flickerings of light and darkness, of color, of different shades of white walls. Salsbury snorted, cleared his head, and blinked his eyes until they were no longer watery. When he could see well, it was plain that it was the cart that remained still and the surroundings that flickered, swept past, changed. They seemed to be jolting from one room to another, one identical platform to another without moving.

He realized, quite suddenly, what was happening. They were teleporting him from one probability line to another, from one bubble to another, heading back toward what the inquisitor had termed One Line. That would be the world where the vacii had invaded from out of the skies, the line from which they had spread to conquer counter-Earths.

Even as these thoughts pounded through him, he began to think once again of escape. The scenery about them abruptly stopped moving. They were in a gray, metal-walled chamber on another platform. The guards stood, unstrapped him, ushered him down onto a cold metal floor.

They had arrived.

In One Line.

In the vacii starship.

And if he was going to make one more try for freedom, he did not have long in which to work.

He was ushered into a steel corridor, farther along to a room apparently used as sleeping quarters, judging from the vast rows of vacii type beds. The guards placed him in a hammock, produced more wire and tied his ankles together, his hands were already bound. They left, then, closing the door. He could hear them talking in their hooting language. Moments later, there was the sound of one pair of broad feet slapping down the corridor. The other guard, it seemed, had been left behind to watch over their human charge.

Salsbury tensed, strained his hands away from each other, testing the wire yet again. It made deep grooves in his skin, made his fingers swell fat and red. He relaxed, collected his strength, and tried again; this time with everything he had, tapping the super strength and the adrenalin. The wire bit into his wrists and hands, gouging the flesh. Blood welled up and ran down his hands, dripped from his fingertips. For a moment, he was ready to give up, call it quits and spend the rest of his time nursing his wounds. Then he remembered Lynda back in the basement. Very soon, the vacii would use some brain-washing techniques on him and make him reveal how he had gotten into the installation. Then they would go for Lynda. He bit his lower lip and strained even harder against his bonds. There was a wrenching, a snap, and the wire broke in two places.

Though he wanted to moan and gibber at the pain in his wrists, he tried to keep from making any noise that would draw the attention of the guard beyond the thick door. With blood-slicked fingers, he removed the remainder of the wire and freed his ankles. He stood, swaying, and walked quietly about the room until he was confident he had full use of his blood-starved feet again. His hands would be weakened due to the slashes that bubbled blood, but there was nothing to be done for that at the moment.

When he had full control of his limbs and felt the dizziness in his head reach a low ebb, he turned his concentration to getting out of there. This was no easy task. There were no windows, no doors except that through which they had come and beyond which the vacii guard waited.

Think, think! he told himself. You have damnably little time!

The first guard would return with a superior, or with orders to take the human elsewhere for interrogation. He had to act while there was still only a single vacii to contend with.

He found a chair in the far corner, one that was magnetized to the deck. He pulled it loose, hefted it, tried a few practice swings. It made his wounded wrists ache, but there was no lighter and effective weapon to be had. When he was certain he knew what he wanted to do, he went beside the door and, puffing his lungs full of vacii-scented air, bellowed a chilling, spine-cracking scream.

The portal slid open, and the alien rushed in, waving its pistol. It saw Saisbury too late. The chair connected with its scaly scalp; it crumpled under the blow like a paper cup under the heel of a young boy trying to make it pop.

Salsbury put the chair down, took his own gas pellet pistol from the vacii, and went out into the starship without a single damned idea about what he was going to do next

The ship was a maze of passageways and rooms. He crept through alcoves and empty chambers, leaving the corridors whenever the sound of approaching vacii feet grew too loud for comfort. Ten minutes after he left the room where he had been imprisoned, there was a soft moaning noise through the ship communications network. It sounded very much like a siren. Then a vacii announcer began hissing, screeching.

Ahead, doors began to open in the hallway. It was a search alert.

They had discovered he was missing.

He pressed into a recession in the wall where a window-a circular port, really-gave view to the Earth of One Line. He saw white, irregular humps of buildings. He had never seen the exterior of a vacii construction, but there was no doubt in his mind that that was exactly what these shapes were. This meant the starship was the center of a sprawling complex; even if he did manage to get outside, there was going to be a great deal more ground to cover before he was safe.

Leave the ship

He was startled by what he was thinking. His only chance of returning to his own probability line, to Lynda, was to remain in the ship and find that room with the teleportation cart. Yet even as he considered that, he realized how impossible it was. With a full-fledged search now begun, he had no chance whatsoever of reaching the teleportation chamber, of crossing the probability lines. He had no choice but to get out of there.

Quickly

A vacii charged by, wide feet pounding the deck, skidded as it caught sight of Salsbury from the corner of its eye. Salsbury brought up the needle pistol which he had also secured from the guard, filled the alien full of narcotics. It went down, rolling over and over until it came to rest against the wall twenty feet farther along.

Behind, there was shouting, excited keening. They knew exactly where he was.

He looked at the window, trying to decide if he could get through it. But it was much too small. Then he became aware that the port was actually set into a pressure door; the seam split the metal, a thin, darker crack against the uniform gray. He searched for a handle and found a set of three studs. The first made nothing visible happen. The second started a humming sound and made the deck tremble underfoot. The third stopped the humming and swung the door outward, noiselessly.

A spray of needles clattered against the wall next to him, making angry bee noises. One ricocheted into his hand. He plucked it out before much of the yellow fluid could seep into him, threw it away, fired a few shots down the corridor to force the vacii to take cover. Then, turning, he leaped out of the starship onto bare ground, ran for the shadows between two humped white buildings. A city of the things towered on all sides.

He slid against a rough wall, breathing hard, and wished he could shrink to mouse size or smaller. The alarm would spread from the ship throughout the entire connected complex. In moments, vacii would be pouring out of these buildings just as they had come out of the rooms of the ship in search of him.

Looking back to the starship, he saw the long curve of its flank for the first time, a dully gleaming mass of metal quite huge and formidable. There were vacii at the portal now, looking out to be certain he was not waiting nearby to ambush them. He fired a round of narcodarts. The first alien, leaning out, took the full charge and kicked outward, unconscious before it hit the earth.

Slipping on the now wet ground, Salsbury moved back along the building, staying with the shadows like a cockroach again, slithering, holding the narcotics pistol out to his side. Behind him were the sounds of heated pursuit.

He turned a corner, hurried across a stone-floored courtyard where his shoes made agonizingly loud sounds, and darted into the gaping mouth of another dark alleyway. He rested there, looking the way he had come, then the way he had chosen to go. Neither looked promising. The pursuers were surely gaining. If he listened, he could hear them shouting questions to one another. But the way ahead was uncertain. He might be heading for a dead end, or circling back to the ship. The last possibility sunk into his chest like an arrow. Frantically, he tried to remember how the alleys had turned, how he had come across the courtyard. Would he bumble into the search party, fall into their arms through his own stupidity?

It was a distinct possibility.

For the first time, he fervently wished he were iron Victor, moving according to program without a worry in the world.

Furious with himself for his confusion, he continued down the backstreet, his feet sucking wetly on soggy earth. There was a shout to his left as he passed another alley mouth feeding into the one through which he was running. Surprised, he tried to increase his speed, succeeded only in slipping on a patch of mud. He went down hard on his hip, cracking his head against the side of a building. He saw stars a moment, then decided he had no time for astronomy. He pushed to his feet just as the vacii who had shouted came up behind him, still hollering. He rolled to avoid being shot, pumped a dozen needles into the alien. The thing went down gagging.

Salsbury went on, trying to move in a straight line, away from those chasing him.

Five minutes later, he came to another courtyard, ran into it before he saw the detachment of vacii guards exiting from a side street on the other side. There was a fountain between him and the aliens, spouting dark water. The noise of it covered the sound of his pounding feet, but they saw him anyway, as he was the only other moving object in the plaza. He tried to wheel around, made the turn too sharply, and fell again. He came to his feet as he finished the roll, his left arm numb from the impact with the pavement. He ran back into the passageway from which he had come, went half a block and turned into an alley.

Behind and in front, there were the sounds of pursuit. They were closing in from all sides; he had only minutes left.

He came to another intersection of byways, made the wise decision not to cross it until he knew whether there were vacii on the crossing street. He leaned against the wall and looked cautiously around the corner. He was immediately glad he had not acted hastily. There were half a dozen vacii to his left, waving lights over the dark walls and in various nooks and clefts in the strange construction material that formed the compound.

Behind there was the sound of vacii drawing nearer. Then, far down the alley from the direction in which he had come, there was a play of other torches. The even, warm light cast irregular shadows off jutting sections of compound walls. Salsbury was trapped. He could not go forward without being seen; to go back meant facing an even larger squad than the one ahead. He had not expected it to end like this.

In fact, he refused to let it end like this. He looked up the irregular wall of the building across the narrow street and made up his mind what to do. Dropping the needle gun, the other weapon in his holster, the rucksack on his back (also recovered from the dead vacii guard) he ran across the alley, reached up and groped until he found an indentation deep enough to crook fingers in. Painstakingly, he moved up the wall, for once worrying more about speed than quiet.

When he hooked his fingers over the flat roof of the two story building, the search party that had been following him was directly below. The vacii stood talking with members of the other search party that had been scouring the connecting alleyway. They whined and wheezed and cackled, finally split up again, each continuing down its own corridor. When Salsbury could no longer hear the slapping of their feet and only an occasional screech of their conversation, he risked kicking up over the rest of the wall and rolling onto the roof.

He stretched out, catching his breath, and looked at the stars which shown so brightly overhead. After a moment, there was a nagging in his mind that something was terribly wrong. In an instant, he saw what it was.

There were two moons.

One of them was the size and color of the moon as he had been used to it, the moon of the Earth he had come from. The second, hanging close to it was about half as large and of a shimmering greenish tint much darker than the regular moon. He watched them for a long time, fascinated. This was, of course, an alternate probability and would have differences-like the two moons. That was a strange and somehow delightful difference. But he wondered what the other deviations would be like. Perhaps, even if he escaped the vacii compound, he would find this Earth uninhabitable, a desert, a no-man's-land. Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed it yet.

When he grew tired of frightening himself, he went across the roof to the far edge and looked at the top of the next building. It was two stories, but it was four feet away. He tensed, jumped the gap easily, landed on his toes to keep from making excessive noise. The rest of the escape was boring. He moved from roof to roof, almost like an automaton. He could not move in a straight line, for not all the buildings were two stories, and he could not leap to the side of a ten story structure and expect to hold on. At last, he reached the end of the complex. Beyond was the wall of a valley, sloping upward, crowded with the dark, looming shapes of pine trees. It looked much like a virgin forest.

He dropped off the roof, crouched in the shadows beside the building and looked across the twenty feet of bare earth, checking the forest for signs of vacii sentries. It was difficult to see, much of anything against the monolithic pitch of that intense growth, but when he was relatively confident there were no guards, he moved out, crossed the barren space quickly, and moved into the trees, effectively disappearing from sight had any vacii happened to look his way now.

The deeper he walked into the wood, the surer he was that the forest was a virgin place, relatively unchanged through several thousands of years, certainly untouched by civilization, even this close the compound. The trees were enormous, towering monsters that blocked the sunlight out during the day so that little or nothing grew beneath them. The floor was unlittered, as perfectly kept as a living room carpet Just a few odds and ends of rock to pick his way around, otherwise easy going.

The land began to rise as the base of the mountain insinuated itself on the gentle hills he had met at first Trying to keep to places where some of the moonlight managed to filter through the heavy blanket of pine needles overhead, he went upward with the land. Once he fell climbing a short rock face and skinned his shin badly. However, the bleeding ceased within moments, and the pain was gone shortly thereafter.

When he reached the top of the valley wall, he sat down and stared over the trees into the alien complex. The starship was the center of it, and for the first time, Salsbury had some idea of the true size of that piece of machinery. He estimated it at three-hundred feet in width and fifteen-hundred feet long. The remainder of the complex was made up of connecting, various-sized buildings which stretched from valley wall to valley wall and two-thousand feet from both ends of the starship.

But being able to look down on it did not make him able to feel superior to it.

He was still seventy-six probability lines away from his own world… Away from Lynda,

Lynda. He thought about her, about the smooth warmness of her flesh, the way they had embraced in the darkness of their room; the way she smiled with her crooked tooth; the ease with which she accepted all of the frightening things about him. He felt a deep, bitter remorse that he might never see her again. For how would he return to the ship? And even if he did accomplish that feat, how would he reach the cart? And once having reached the cart, how would he know the method of operation to return to his own probability line? And, if he got home, would Lynda still be alive? Would the vacii have discovered her behind the second beam projector; would they have sent a detail of sucker-mouthed guards through to kill or capture her?

His thoughts were abruptly wrenched away from Lynda and what problems she might have. Below, at the point where the alien compound took over from the forest, a search party of vacii were entering the trees. In ten or fifteen minutes, they might top the edge of the valley, be right up here on the first slopes of the mountain with him. He stood, took one last look, and started back through the trees, running now that the blanket of needles was thinner and more light seeped through to show him the way.

Half an hour later, he stopped at a formation of rocks that marked the head of a second valley running perpendicular to the first. He had exerted himself to his outside limits; now his breath came hard, and the cold mountain air burned his lungs. He sat down to allow his quivering muscles time to settle and relax, and he leaned his head against a pillow of rocks.

Five minutes later, he woke with a start, cursing himself for letting his weariness overcome him during so dangerous a time. Maybe he was growing even more human than the computer realized, for he was becoming increasingly susceptible to the foibles of a normal man. Then he stopped cursing and wondered what it was had wakened him.

His nose brought him the first clue: a cloying stench of perspiration that was not his, a heavy animal smell like something one might run across at a large zoo on a humid summer day. He brought his head up quickly, though it seemed bolted to his chest, and looked into the coal black eyes of the beast-eyes set two inches deep under a shelved forehead. Its nostrils were wide and black, flared in a pebbly black, as the pug nose which trembled and blew steam at him. The enormous, dark-lipped mouth opened, showing yellow, square teeth. Salsbury guessed this was supposed to be a smile. But he remembered that he had often smiled at a good-looking dinner.

The beast blew steam and blinked.

Salsbury brought his gun out of his holster with a slickness that would have done well against Wyatt Earp. But even as he was depressing the trigger, the beast's stubby-fingered paw flicked at his wrist and knocked the weapon to the ground. He reached for it. The beast grabbed him by the back of the shirt before he could touch the butt, lifted him off the ground and held him at arm's length. He struggled but could not free himself. Sarcastically, he wondered where it would decide to bite first.