The Corridors of Time

3

Lockridge stirred. “Shall we—”

“Hush!” Storm’s hand chopped at his words. From the glove compartment she took a small thick disc. Colours played oddly over one face. She shifted it about, her head bent between sable wings of hair to study the hues. He saw her relax. “Very well,” she muttered. “We can proceed.”

“What is that thing?” Lockridge reached for it.

She didn’t hand it over. “An indicator,” she said curtly. “Move! The area is safe now.”

He reminded himself of his resolution to go along with anything she wanted. That seemed to include not asking silly questions. He got out and opened the trunk. Storm unlocked a suitcase of her own. “I assume you have full camp gear in those packsacks,” she said. He nodded. “Take yours, then. I will carry my own. Load both guns.”

Lockridge obeyed with a sharp, not unpleasant prickling in his skin. When the frame was on him, the Webley bolstered at his side and the Mauser in his hand, he turned about and saw Storm closing her suitcase again. She had donned a sort of cartridge belt like none he had ever seen before, a thing of darkly shimmering flexible metal whose pouches appeared to seal themselves shut. Hanging on the right, as if by magnetism, was a slim, intricate-barrelled thing. Lockridge did a double take. “Hey, what kind of pistol is that?”

“No matter.” She hefted the disc of colours. “Expect odder sights than this. Lock the car and let us be gone.”

They entered the plantation and began walking back, parallel to the road, hidden from it by the ordered ranks of pines. Afternoon light slanted through a sweet pungency and cast sunspeckles on the ground, which was soft with needles underfoot. “I get you,” Lockridge said. “We don’t want the car to draw attention to where we’re headed, if somebody happens by.”

“Silence,” Storm ordered.

A mile or so beyond, she led the way to the road and across. There a harvested grain field lay yellow and stubbly, lifting toward a ridge that cut off view of any farmhouse. In the middle stood a hillock topped by a dolmen. Storm slipped agilely through the wire fence before Lockridge could help and broke into a trot. Though her pack was not much lighter than his, she was still breathing easily when they reached the knoll, and he was a little winded.

She stopped and opened her belt. A tube came out, vaguely resembling a large flashlight with a faceted lens. She took her bearings from the sun and started around the hillock. It was overgrown with grass and brambles; a marker showed that this relic was protected by the government. Feeling naked under the wide empty sky, his pulse thuttering, Lockridge looked at the dolmen as if for some assurance of eternity. Grey and lichen-spotted, the upright stones brooded beneath their heavy roof as they had done since a vanished people raised them to be a tomb for their dead. But the chamber within, he recalled, had once been buried under heaped earth, of which only this mound was left. . . .

Storm halted. “Yes, here.” She began to climb the slope.

“Huh? Wait,” Lockridge protested. “We’ve come three-quarters around. Why didn’t you go in the other direction?”

For the first time, he saw confusion on her face. “I go widdershins.” She uttered a hard laugh. “Habit. Now, stand back.”

They were halfway up when she stopped. “This place was excavated in 1927,” she said. “Only the dolmen was cleared, and there is no further reason for the scientists to come. So we can use it for a gate.” She did something to a set of controls on the tube. “We have a rather special way of concealing entrances,” she warned. “Do not be too astonished.”

A dull light glowed from the lens. The tube hummed and quivered in her grip. A shiver went through the brambles, though there has no wind. Abruptly a circle of earth lifted.

Lifted—straight into the air—ten feet in diameter, twenty feet thick, a plug of turf and soil hung unsupported before Lockridge’s eyes. He sprang aside with a yell.

“Quiet!” Storm rapped. “Get inside. Quick!”

Numbly, he advanced to the hole in the mound. A ramp led down out of sight. He swallowed. The fact that she watched him was what mostly drove him ahead. He went into the hill. She followed. Turning, she adjusted the tube in her hand. The cylinder of earth sank back. He heard a sigh of compression as it fitted itself into place with machined snugness. Simultaneously, a light came on—from no particular source, he saw in his bewilderment.

The ramp was simply the floor of a barrel-vaulted tunnel, a little wider than the door, which sloped before him around a curve. That bore was surfaced overall with a hard, smooth material from which the light poured, a chill white radiance whose shadowlessness made distances hard to judge. The air was fresh, moving, though he saw no ventilators.

He faced Storm and stammered. She put away the tube. Harshness left her. She glided to him, laid a hand on his arm, and smiled. “Poor Malcolm,” she murmured. “You will have greater surprises.”

“Judas!” he said weakly. “I hope not!” But her nearness and her touch were, even then, exhilarating. He began to recover his self-possession.

“How the deuce is that done?” he asked. Echoes bounced hollowly around his voice.

“Shh! Not so loud.” Storm glanced at her colour disc. “No one’s here at present, but they may come from below, and sound carries damnably well in these tunnels.”

She drew a breath. “If it will make you feel better, I shall explain the principle,” she said. “The plug of earth is bound together by an energy web emanating from a network embedded in these walls. The same network blankets any effects that might occur in a metal detector, a sonic probe, or some other instrument that could otherwise detect this passage. It also refreshes and circulates the air through molecular porosities. The tube I used to lift the plug is merely a control; the actual power comes likewise from the network.”

“But—” Lockridge shook his head. “Impossible. I know that much physics. I mean—well, maybe in theory—but no such gadget exists in practice.”

“I told you this was a secret research project,” Storm answered. “They achieved many things.” Her lips bent upward—how close to his! “You are not frightened, are you, Malcolm?”

He squared his shoulders. “No. Let’s move.”

“Good man,” she said, with a slight, blood-quickening emphasis on the second word. Releasing him, she led the way down.

“This is only the entrance,” she said. “The corridor proper is more than a hundred feet below us.”

They spiralled into the earth. Lockridge observed that his own stupefaction was gone. Alertness thrummed in him. Storm had done that. My God, he thought, what an adventure.

The passage debouched in a long room, featureless except at the farther wall. There stood a large box or cabinet of the same lustrous, self-closing metal as Storm’s belt and a doorway some ten feet wide and twenty high. Curtained? No, as he neared, Lockridge saw that the veil which filled it, flickering with soft iridescence, every hue his eyes could see and (he suspected) many they could not, was immaterial: a shimmer in space, a mirage, a sheet of living light. The faintest hum came from it, and the air nearby smelled electric.

Storm paused there. Through her clothes he saw how the tall body tensed. His own pistol came out with hers. She glanced at him.

“The corridor is just beyond,” she said in a whetted voice. “Now listen. I only hinted to you before that we might have to fight. But the enemy is everywhere. He may have learned of our place. His agents may even be on the other side of this gate. Are you ready, at my command, to shoot?”

He could only jerk his head up and then down.

“Very well. Follow me.”

“No, wait, I’ll go—”

“Follow, I said.” She bounded through the curtain.

He came after. Crossing the threshold, he felt a brief, twisting shock, and stumbled. He caught himself and glared around.

Storm stood half crouched, peering from side to side. After a minute she glanced at her instrument, and the pistol sank in her hand. “No one,” she breathed. “We are safe for the moment.”

Lockridge drew a shaky lungful and tried to understand what sort of place he had entered.

The corridor was huge. Also hemicylindrical, with the same luminous surfacing, it must be a hundred feet in diameter. Arrow straight it ran, right and left, until the ends dwindled out of sight—why, it must go for miles, he realised. The humming noise and the lightning smell were more intense here, pervading his being, as if he were caught in some vast machine.

He looked back at the door through which he had come, and stiffened. “What the hell!”

On this side, though no higher, the portal was easily two hundred feet wide. A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951, 4952. . . . Only the auroral curtain was the same.

“No time to waste.” Storm tugged at his sleeve. “I shall explain later. Get aboard.”

She gestured at a curve-fronted platform, not unlike a big metal toboggan with low sides, that hovered two feet off the floor. Several backless benches ran down its length. At the head was a panel where small lights glowed, red, green, blue, yellow—“Come on!”

He mounted with her. She took the front seat, laid her gun in her lap, and passed her hand across the lights. The sled swung around and started left down the corridor. It moved in total silence at a speed he guessed to be thirty miles an hour; but somehow the wind was screened off them.

“What the jumpin’ blue blazes is this thing?” he choked.

“You have heard of hovercraft?” Storm said absently. Her eyes kept flickering from the emptiness ahead to the colour disc in her fingers.

A grimness came upon Lockridge. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I know this is nothin’ like them.” He pointed to her instrument. “And what’s that?”

She sighed. “A life indicator. And we are riding a gravity sled. Now be still and keep watch to our rear.”

Lockridge felt almost too stiff to sit, but managed it. He set the rifle on the bench beside him. Sweat was clammy along his ribs, and he saw and heard with preternatural sharpness.

They glided by another portal, and another, and another. The gates came at variable intervals, averaging about half a mile, as near as Lockridge could gauge in this saturating cold illumination. Wild thoughts spun through his head. No Germans could ever have built this, no anti-Communist underground be using it. Beings from another planet, another star, somewhere out in the measureless darkness of the cosmos—Three men came through a gate that the sled had just passed. Lockridge yelled at the same moment that Storm’s indicator turned blood red. She twisted about and looked behind. Her mouth skinned back from her teeth. “So we fight,” she said on a trumpet note, and fired aft.

A blinding beam sprang from her pistol. One of the men lurched and collapsed. Smoke roiled greasy from the hole in his breast. The other two had their guns unfastened before he was down. Storm’s firebolt passed across them, broke in a coruscant many-coloured fountain, and splashed the corridor walls with vividness. The air crackled. Ozone stung Lockridge’s nostrils.

She thumbed a switch on her weapon. The beam winked out. A vague, hissing shimmer encompassed her and her companion. “Energy shielding,” she said. “My entire output must go to it, and even so, two beams striking the same spot could break through. Shoot!”

Lockridge had no time to be appalled. He brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted. The man he saw was big but dwindling with distance, only his close-fitting black garments and golden-bronze Roman-like helmet could be made out, he was a target with no face. Briefly there jagged across Lockridge’s memory the woods at home, green stillness and a squirrel in branches above. . . . He shot. The bullet smote, the man fell but picked himself up. Both of them sprang onto a gravity sled such as was parked at every gate.

“The energy field slows material objects too,” Storm said bleakly. “Your bullet had too little residual velocity, at this range.”

The other sled got moving in pursuit. Its black-clad riders hunched low under the bulwarks. Lockridge could just see the tops of their helmets. “We got a lead on them,” he said. “They can’t go any faster, can they?”

“No, but they will observe where we emerge, go back, and tell Brann,” Storm answered. “A mere identification of me will be bad enough.” Her eyes were ablaze, nose flared, breasts rising and falling; but she spoke more coolly than he had known men to do when they trained with live ammunition. “We shall have to counterattack. Give me your pistol. When I stand to draw their fire—no, be quiet, I will be shielded—you shoot.”

She whipped the sled about and sent it hurtling toward the other one. The thing grew in Lockridge’s vision with nightmare slowness. And those were actual men he must kill. He kicked away nausea. They were trying to kill him and Storm, weren’t they? He knelt beneath the sideshield and held his rifle ready.

The encounter exploded around him. Storm surged to her feet, the energy gun in her left hand, the Webley barking in her right. Yards away, the other sled veered. Two firebeams struck at her, throwing sparks and sheets of radiance, moving toward convergence. And a slug whined from some noiseless, stubby-barrelled weapon that one of the black-uniformed men also held.

Lockridge jumped up. In the corner of an eye he saw Storm, erect in a geyser of red, blue, yellow flame, hair tossed about her shoulders by thundering energies, shooting and laughing. He looked down upon the enemy, straight into a pale narrow countenance. The bullet gun swivelled toward him. He fired exactly twice.

The other sled passed by and on down the corridor.

Echoes died away. The air lost its sting. There was only the bone-deep song of unknown forces, the smell of them and the flimmer in a gateway.

Storm looked after the sprawled bodies as they departed, picked her life indicator off the bench, and nodded. “You got them,” she whispered. “Oh, nobly shot!” She threw down the instrument, seized Lockridge and kissed him with bruising strength.

Before he could react, she let him go and turned the sled around. Her color was still high, but she spoke with utter coolness: “It would be a waste of time and charges to disintegrate them. The Rangers would still know quite well that they met their end at Warden hands. But no more than that should be obvious: provided we get out of the corridor before anyone else chances along.”

Lockridge slumped onto a bench and tried to comprehend what had happened.

He didn’t come out of his daze until Storm halted the sled and urged him off. She leaned over and activated the controls. It started away. “To its proper station,” she explained briefly. “If Brann knew that the killers of his men had entered from 1964, and found an extra conveyance here, he would know the whole story. This way, now.”

They approached the gate. Storm chose a line from the first group, headed 1175. “Here you must be careful,” she said. “We could easily get lost from each other. Walk exactly on this marker.” She reached behind her and closed fingers on his. He was still too shocked to appreciate that contact as much as he knew, dimly, he would otherwise.

Following her, he passed through the curtain. She let him go, and he saw that they were in a room like the one from which they had entered. Storm opened the cabinet, consulted what he guessed might be a timepiece, and nodded in a satisfied way. Taking out a pair of bundles done up in a shaggy, coarse-woven blue material, she handed them to him and closed the cabinet. They went up the spiral ramp.

At the end, she opened another turf trapdoor with her control tube and closed it again behind them. The concealment was perfect.

Lockridge didn’t notice. There was too much else.

The sun had still been well above the horizon when they entered the tunnel, and they couldn’t have been inside more than half an hour. But here was night, with a nearly full moon high in the sky. By that wan radiance he saw how the mound-side now covered the dolmen, up to the capstone, with a rude wooden door beneath. Around him, grasses nodded in a chill, moist breeze. No farmlands lay below; the knoll was surrounded by brush and young trees, a second-growth wilderness. To the south a ridge lifted that looked eerily familiar, but it was covered with forest. Old, those trees, incredibly, impossibly old, he had only seen oaks so big in the last untouched parts of America. Their tops were hoar in the moonlight, and shadows solid beneath.

An owl hooted. A wolf howled.

He raised his eyes again and saw this was not September. That sky belonged to the end of May.