The Corridors of Time

4

“Yes, of course I lied to you,” Storm said.

The campfire guttered high, sparks showered, light danced dull on smoke and picked her strong-boned features out of darkness in Rembrandt hints. Beyond and around, the night crowded close. Lockridge shivered and held his hands toward the coalbed.

“You would not have believed the truth before you saw,” Storm went on. “Would you? At the very least, time would have been lost in explanation, and I had already been much too long in the twentieth century. Each hour multiplied my danger. If Brann had thought to guard that Danish gate—He must believe I was killed. There were several other women in my party, and some were mutilated beyond recognition in the fight with him. Nevertheless, he could have gotten wind of me.”

Exhausted by reaction, Lockridge said merely, “You are from the future, then?”

She smiled. “So are you, now.”

“My future, I mean. When?”

“About two thousand years after your era.” Her humour faded, she sighed and looked into the gloom that lay back of him. “Though I have been in so many ages, I am woven into so much history, I sometimes wonder if any of my spirit remains in the year I was born.”

“And—we’re still in the same place as we entered the corridor, aren’t we? But in the past. How far?”

“By your reckoning, the late spring of 1827 B.C. I checked the exact date on a calendar clock in the foreroom. Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through—so we would not be separated by weeks.” Briskly: “If such should ever happen, go back into the corridor and wait. Duration occurs there too, but on a different plane, so that we can rendezvous.”

Nearly four thousand years, Lockridge thought. On this day Pharaoh sat the throne of Egypt, the sea king of Crete planned trade with Babylon, Mohenjodaro stood proud in the Indus valley, the General Grant Tree was a seedling. Bronze was known to the Mediterranean world but northern Europe was neolithic, and the dolmen of the knoll had been raised only a few generations ago by folk whose slash-and-burn agriculture exhausted the soil and forced them to move elsewhere. Eighteen hundred years before Christ, centuries before even Abraham, he sat camped in a Denmark which those people who called themselves Danes had yet to enter. The strangeness seeped through him like a physical cold. He fought back the sense and asked:

“What is that corridor, anyway? How does it work?”

“The physics would have no meaning to you,” Storm said. “Think of it as a tube of force, whose length has been rotated onto the time axis. Entropy still increases inside; there is temporal flow. But from the viewpoint of one within, cosmic time—outside time—is frozen. By choosing the appropriate gate, one can step out into any corresponding era. The conversion factor—” she frowned in concentration, “—in your measurements, would be roughly thirty-five days per foot. Every few centuries there is a portal, twenty-five years wide. The intervals cannot be less than about two hundred years, or the weakened force-field would collapse.”

“Does it go clear up to your century?”

“No. This one extends from circa 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2000. It is not feasible to build them much longer. There are many corridors of varying lengths throughout the space-time of this planet. The gates are made to overlap in time, so that by going from one passage to another a traveller can find any specific year he wishes. For example, to go further pastward than 4000 B.C., we could take corridors I know of in England or China, whose gates also cover this year. To go futureward beyond the limits of this one, we would have to seek out still other places.”

“When were they . . . invented?”

“A century or two before I was born. The struggle between Wardens and Rangers was already intense, so the original purpose of scientific research was largely shunted aside.”

Wolves gave voice in the night. A heavy body went crashing through underbrush and a savage, yelping chorus took up pursuit. “You see,” Storm said, “we cannot wage total war. That would cost us Earth, as it cost us Mars—a ring of radioactive fragments encircling the sun—I sometimes wonder if, at the last, engineers will not go back sixty million years and build great space fleets, for a battle that wiped out the dinosaurs and left eternal scars on the moon. . . .”

“You don’t know your own future, then?” Lockridge asked with a crawling along his nerves.

The dark head shook. “No. When the, the activator is turned on to make a new corridor, it drives a shaft equally far in both directions. We ventured ahead of our era. There were guardians who turned us back, with weapons we did not understand. We no longer try. It was too terrible.”

The knowledge of mysteries beyond mysteries was not to be endured. Lockridge fled to practicality.

“Okay,” he said. “I seem to’ve enlisted in a war on your side. Do you mind tellin’ me what the shootin’s for? Who are your enemies?” He paused. “Who are you?”

“Let me continue to use the name I chose in your century,” Storm said. “I believe it was a lucky one.” She sat brooding a while. “I do not think you could really grasp the issue of my age. Too much history lies between you and us. Could a man from your past really feel what the basic difference is that divides East and West in your time?”

“I reckon not,” Lockridge admitted. “In fact, quite a few of our own don’t seem to see it.”

“At that,” Storm said, “the issue is the same. Because there has really only been one throughout man’s existence—distorted, confused, hidden behind a thousand lesser motivations, and yet always in some fashion the clash between two philosophies, two ways of thought and life—of being—the question is forever: What is the nature of man?”

Lockridge waited. Storm brought her gaze back from the night, across the low fire to him, stabbingly intense.

“Life as it is imagined to be against life as it is,” she said. “Plan against organic development. Control against freedom. Overriding rationalism against animal wholeness. The machine against the living flesh. If man and man’s fate can be planned, organised, made to conform to some vision of ultimate perfection, is not man’s duty to enforce the vision upon his fellow man, at whatever cost? That sounds familiar to you, no?

“But your country’s great enemy is only one manifestation of a thing that was born before history: that spoke through the laws of Draco and Diocletian, the burning of the Confucian Willow Books, Torquemada, Calvin, Locke, Voltaire, Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Arguellas, the Jovian Manifesto, and on and on. Oh, not clearly, not simply—there was no tyranny in the hearts of some who believed in supreme reason; and there was in others, like Nietzsche, who did not. To me, your industrial civilization, even in the countries that call themselves free, comes near to an ultimate horror; yet I use machines more powerful and subtle than you have dreamed. But in what spirit? There is the issue of battle!”

Her voice dropped. She looked into the forest walling this meadow. “I often think,” she said slowly, “that the downward turn started in this very millennium, when the earth gods and their Mother were swept aside by those who worshipped skyward.”

She shook herself, as if to be rid of something, and continued in a level tone, “Well, Malcolm, accept for now that the Wardens are keepers of life—life in its wholeness, boundedness, splendour, and tragedy—while the Rangers would make the world over in the machine’s image. It is an oversimplification. I can perhaps explain better to you later on. But do you find my cause unworthy?”

Lockridge regarded her, where she rested like a young wildcat, and said with a surge that drove out all terror, remorse, and aloneness: “No. I’ll go along. I already have.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. “If you knew what the token meant, not only in words but in your blood, I would leap over the fire to you for that.”

What does it mean? he wanted to ask. Dizzyingly: A man might hope. But before he could speak, Storm grinned and said: “The next few months should be interesting for you.”

“Good Lord, yes!” he realised. “Why, any anthropologist would give his right—uh—eye to be here. I still can’t believe I am.”

“There are dangers,” she warned.

“So what is the situation, anyway? What do we have to do?”

“Let me begin at the first,” Storm said. “As I told you, the struggle between Rangers and Wardens cannot be fought in our own time on any major scale. Instead, it has moved largely into the past. Bases are established at strategic points and—no matter now. I know the Rangers have a stronghold in Harald Bluetooth’s reign. Though the Asia religion was already one of Sky Father, still, the introduction of Christianity was another advance for them, laying the foundation for centralised monarchy and the eventual rationalistic state. Thence came the men we met.”

“Huh? Wait! You mean you people change the past?”

“Oh, no. Never. That is inherently impossible. If one tried, he would find events always frustrated him. What has been, is. We time travellers are ourselves part of the fabric. But let us say that we discover aspects of it which are useful to our respective causes, we get recruits, build up strength for the final contest.

“Well. In my time, the Rangers hold the western hemisphere, the Wardens the eastern. I led a party into the twentieth century and overseas to America. We could not build anything important by ourselves without being observed by enemy agents, who are much more numerous in your age than ours are. But our plan was to organise a company whose ostensible purpose was something unremarkable, to pose as ordinary citizens of the era. We picked yours because that was the first century in which such items as we needed—transistors, for instance—could be obtained locally and hence inconspicuously. In the guise of a mining enterprise in Colorado, we produced our underground installations, manufactured an activator, and drove a new passage.

“The plan was to strike through it, emerging in our own time, in the Rangers’ heartland. But the moment the corridor was finished, Brann came down it with an overwhelmingly superior force. I do not know how he got word. Only I escaped. For more than a year, then, I wandered about in the United States, seeking a way of return. Every futureward corridor would be guarded, I knew, the Rangers being so strong in the Early Industrial civilization. Nowhere could I find a Warden.”

“How’d you live?” Lockridge inquired.

“You would call it robbery,” Storm said.

He started. She laughed. “This energy gun, which I had with me, can be set to do no more than stun. There was no problem in gathering some thousands of dollars, a few at a time. I was desperate. Can you blame me so very much?”

“I ought to.” He looked at her in the firelight. “But I don’t.”

“I didn’t think you would,” she said softly. “You are such a one as I hardly dared hope I could find.

“You see, I needed a helper, a bodyguard, someone to make me appear otherwise than a woman travelling alone. That is too conspicuous in all past ages. And I had to go pastward.

“I ascertained there was no guard on this Danish corridor. It was the only one I dared attempt with a gate open on those decades. Even so, you saw how near we came to destruction.

“But now, here we are. There is a Warden base in Crete, where the old faith is still strong. Unfortunately, I cannot simply call them to come fetch us. The Rangers are also active in this milieu—it is, as I said, a crucial one—and they might too likely intercept the message and find us before our friends can. But once we have reached Knossos, we can get an armed escort, from corridor to corridor until I have reached home. You will be dismissed in your own era.” She shrugged. “I left a good many dollars hidden in the United States. You may as well have them for your trouble.”

“Skip that,” Lockridge said roughly. “How do we get to Crete?”

“By sea. There has long been trade between these parts and the Mediterranean. The Limfjord is not far away, and a ship from Iberia, which is under the religion of the megalith builders, should call sometime this summer. From Iberia we can transship. It should take no longer, and is less hazardous, than following the amber route overland.”

“M-m-m . . . okay, sounds reasonable. And I suppose we have enough metal on us to buy passage. Or do we?”

Storm tossed her head. “If not,” she said haughtily, “they will not refuse to carry Her Whom they worship.”

“What?” Lockridge’s mouth fell open. “You mean you can pose as—”

“No,” she said. “I am the Goddess.”