Zone Yellow

Chapter 15

When I woke, I was cold, stiff, and aching in most places. Sitting up was no fun. I was dizzy, and had a pain in my stomach.

I looked around the bare room; it didn’t look any different. I went over and tried to remember just what Swft had done to open his secret passage to nowhere. I remembered he’d had a little trouble reaching the magic spot with his stubby arms. I scanned the joints in the stonework up just under the ceiling and thought I saw a slightly discolored spot. I felt over it, and the light, the source of which I couldn’t make out, dimmed. I quit messing with the wall. Things were bad enough without being in the dark. I felt a little disappointed in myself. I’d really done a swell job: I’d handled things just right. I’d gotten myself separated from my troops and locked in a cell that could become dark at any moment. That reminded me of the shaft we’d entered by. I recalled that it was near the middle of the chamber, and looked up. Apparently my recollection was wrong, because there wasn’t any panel there or elsewhere. Double swell.

Just then a door that hadn’t been there a minute ago opened beside me and Swft walked in.

“Sorry to have been delayed,” he remarked casually. He glanced at me inquiringly and asked, “Where are the other fellows―and Her Highness?” sounding more curious than worried.

“They went in the hole after you,” I told him.

“Nonsense,” he replied crisply. “It’s only…” He waved a hand in the direction of the hole. “One could hardly, ah . . . As you saw, it’s not large enough to hold two humongs, and besides that, it’s empty.”

“It held you all right,” I pointed out.

He nodded agreement; at least he’d finally gotten that gesture sorted out. “But of course, I, that is, one must know―” He broke off. “Dear me,” he continued. “I fear, my dear Colonel, that something really quite unfortunate has occurred.”

“Tell me about it,” I urged. He half sat, half coiled beside me.

“You see,” he began.

“No, I don’t.” I cut him off.

“This is a very special entryway to the Map Room,” he started again. “This room is, of course, protected by multiple entropic barriers. The entry here threads its way tortuously through a most complex suture, or pattern of sutures to be quite precise, and only those knowing the formula can negotiate it. Only one person besides myself knows the equations. Your associates, I fear, are now lost in an unreachable phase of space/time/vug. This is horrible.”

“You can save the crocodile tears,” I told him. “You seem to forget you invited me in there, and I don’t recall you whispering any secrets to me.”

“I would have, dear fellow,” he assured me. “The first key is simply the familiar quadratic equation.”

“I never did get it straight whether the 2A was under just the minus 4AC, or the square root of B squared, too.”

“No need to fret,” he told me. “We’ll be using another route.”

“What about Lieutenant Helm and Doctor Smovia?” I demanded.

“Perhaps,” he mused, “if I direct the Master Computer to analyze the disturbance-pattern in the Grid at the moment of their entry…”

“Where’s this Master Computer?” I asked him.

He said, “Follow me closely, Colonel, and I shall escort you there. It’s not far.” He went back out the door, which was still there, and I was right on his heels, wondering if I had missed something important. That didn’t comfort me, but it did make me take careful note of the route we were following, along a smooth-paneled corridor with flush ceiling lights and a crack in the stone floor. To lay a trail, I started dropping bits of the requisition form I found in my pocket. Swft went silently along, not quite stealthily, but making no uhnec-essary sounds.

“Enemy territory?” I asked him. He made a curt shush!ing motion, and kept going. Finally, he stopped in wider space where a cross-corridor intersected. He hesitated a moment, then did a hard left. He’d gone about three of his silent steps when a rat bigger than him leapt from the passage to the right, missed its first pass at him with a curved dagger, and rounded on me. Swft heard a sound and turned quickly. By then, the big rat was on top of me, not using the knife, but snapping his incisors too close to my throat for comfort. I got my right arm clear and socked him hard in the short ribs; he folded over, then fell, threshing on the smooth tiled floor. I stepped on the hand that was holding the nasty-looking knife until I heard bones crack. Swft was beside me.

“Incredible! You’ve bested one of the Three Hundred, our elite guard force. That simply does not happen!” He was looking at me with what I’m pretty sure was an astonished expression.

“You’re in a big hurry,” I commented. “Too big to waste time jawing over nothing. He had a glass gut.”

“Indeed!” Swft confirmed. “We must hurry to Her Highness’s side!”

“Pretty careless of you, General, to go off and leave your baby princess behind. But you knew what you were doing, didn’t you? Just another of your cagey maneuvers. I put her in that ‘orifice’ of yours and she disappeared.”

Swft hurried to the nearest wall, groped, and presto! a secret panel opened. Inside, I saw sunlight on a grassy patch among giant trees; old trees with smooth, purplish bark and chartreuse leaves.

“This,” Swft announced, “is disaster!” He stuck his pointy face into the opening and slid inside. I was right behind him, and a good thing, too, because the panel closing behind me almost caught my foot.

Swft was out on the grass, bent over almost double, sniffing at the ground. He looked up at me.

“Timing, as I told you, was of the utmost importance, but now―the necessity to change my plan of action in order to recover Her Highness renders all that nugatory.”

“Where are we now?” I asked him. It seemed like a nice, peaceful spot, not a part of any line in the Zone.

“This,” the rat-like alien told me, as if making an announcement of public interest, “is the Terminal State.”

“Is that anything like a state of confusion?” I inquired, with my usual inappropriate impulse to crack a joke. But he took it seriously.

“Quite the contrary,” he informed me. “This phase is―or should be―one of perfect entropic parity; no strife, no difficulty can be long sustained at this level. It is the hope of every Ylokk some day to attain to this level of being. To burst in, as we have done, is our ultimate taboo. I adjusted the transfer device to extrapolate along the prime axis―the most likely direction of the Ylokk future, to its ultimate state. I expected to find an idyllic civilization, existing in flawless harmony with its environment. Instead―this: a wilderness. I am undone!”

“Then why’d you do it?” I came back fast, before he started to develop the idea it was all my doing.

“I had no choice,” he said brokenly―or anyway, his voice cracked on the words. “It is the only phase that affords undoubted access to the phase where you so rudely dumped Her Highness.”

“Somebody must have programmed that orifice of yours,” I pointed out, “presumably you. Either you’re a blundering fool, or you’re still up to something devious. I think you’d better level with me. I hope the kid’s all right, but I thought she’d wind up with Smovia, wherever he had gotten to.”

“Not quite,” Swft demurred. “You see, it was my intention to transfer our little group to a position inside the Palace, by-passing the Two-Law bandits’ cordon. I went first in order to alert our friends and to thwart any enemies who might be present at the point of exit. When no one appeared, I came back by the lone route, to find you alone. Most distressing.”

“Sure, you thought I’d enjoy seeing my friends disappear into that shoebox, and I’d love being trapped with a yelling baby in a cell with, no window. And a minute ago you said―” I let it go.

“I assumed you’d follow directly,” he explained. “The actual aperture is sustained for only a fraction of a minisecond, you know.”

“No I don’t know,” I corrected. “And where are Andy and the doc now?”

“That, I fear, will require some study,” Swft told me. “They’re quite safe, I feel sure; though doubtless somewhat distressed to find themselves adrift in the entropic pool. We’d best retrieve them at once.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He ignored the irony and shook his head in agreement. “We’d best get cracking,” he suggested. “One does tend to lose one’s sanity if immersed in the Pool for more than a few microseconds.” He rummaged inside his overcoat, took out a complicated gadget, and began running some kind of test sequence, I guessed, from the pattern of flashing LEDs on his hand-calculator-cum-remote-control. I went over to observe, enjoying the feel of the springy turf underfoot.

“Somebody’s been here recently,” I told him. “The grass has been moved lately.”

“Of course,” he mumbled, deep in his manipulations. “Ah, yes,” he said in a satisfied tone. “We―” Before he could finish that, we heard a crackling in the brush, and a young rat-girl of about ten stepped out of the underbrush into the open. I could tell she was female, though I’m not sure just how. She was dressed in a plain white smock-like garment, and had a rather sweet expression on her rodent face. She had only a short snout; she was almost pretty.

“Hello, Uncle Swft,” she said, paying no attention to me at first. Then she gave me a shy glance, and her buck-toothed grin was quite charming. She took a quick, impulsive step toward me, and paused.

“You’re not Unca Mobie,” she said, as if reproving herself. “You’re not Candy,” she added. “So you’re Unca Null!”

“No, dear,” I replied, “I’m certainly not candy.”

Just then Swft spoke up. “I fear, my good child,” he said rather stiffly, for someone talking to a cute little girl, “that I do not recall our meeting. How do you know my name, may I ask?”

“Unca Mobie” (it sounded like) “said you’d come here sometime.” That seemed to be that.

Swft looked at me. “Must be a town nearby,” he offered. “Child seems well cared for. Her family must live nearby.” He looked at her sharply. “Where do you live, little girl?” he asked.

She waved a slim hand. “Here,” she said, as if that were obvious.

“Surely you have a house,” Swft corrected her. “Your family: where are they?”

“Unca Mobie there,” she said, pointing. “He’s taking a nap.”

“Oh,” Swft said, only half sarcastically, “we wouldn’t want to disturb Unca Maybe’s nap, would we?”

“No. Unca Mobie\” the girl corrected him sharply.

“Let’s go meet him,” Swft said gruffly, and started past her, back the way she’d come from. She caught at his arm. He flung her off.

I objected, and took her strange little hard-fingered hand. “He’s a little upset,” I told the girl. “His plans have gone awry.” She smiled. Swft gave me a haughty look.

I felt myself start to slip into the curious awe-and-reverence feeling that occasionally afflicted me out here in the Zone, but pushed it back. I realized it was the pressure of the local mind-set tending to displace my accustomed paradigm. Swft was just a lost, bewildered rat, not a great personage persevering in the face of daunting odds. “Take it easy, General,” I suggested. “Be nice to the kid. She’s as scared as you are.”

“You don’t understand, Colonel,” he told me in a voice that was tight with anxiety, or whatever it was tight with. “We are in a most perilous situation. To be candid, I have attempted an experiment. I have transferred us across the Yellow Line, into the zone of the hypothetical; to a phase not yet realized in the Skein. This”―he paused to look around at the towering forest all around―”is a state of affairs that would come into realization, if the vectors implicit in a great victory of the Jade Palace should, as I hope, eventuate, and are permitted to evolve in a virgin matrix―”

I cut that off. “It’s your idea of Utopia, is that about right?” I suggested. He shook his head in affirmation.

“No child should be wandering unattended in this howling wilderness,” he complained, “the parameters of which are not to be guessed. I have no idea what horrors may lie beyond this forest. Therefore,” he continued, “I have, it is clear, missed the target, and deposited us in some Phase yet undreamt of, a phase without causal linkage to the entropic fabric!”

“Sounds bad, General,” I remarked. “Every time we try to make a step forward, we slip back two.”

“Not quite,” he muttered.

“Relax,” I advised the general. “This is no howling wilderness’; this is a nice stand of virgin timber. The kid obviously lives nearby. Let’s go talk to her folks.”

Swft was staring at the girl―not really a girl, I had to remind myself: a rat-pup, not human. She glanced at me with an impish expression, and put a ratty hand on Swft’s arm.

“Please do as Unca Swft says,” she pled. “I know Candy will be glad to see you.”

“I wonder,” I commented to the general, “how this kid knows your name.”

She supplied the answer: “Unca Mobie said when Unca Null came, Unca Swft would be with him.”

She turned and stepped back into the shade of the woods. Swft followed her, and I trailed him. It was dark in there among the great trees. There was no real trail, just a slightly trodden-down strip that meandered among the mossy boles. I stepped along briskly so as not to lose contact with Swft.

We kept this up for maybe half an hour and I was getting impatient, when there was a lessening of the gloom, and suddenly we stepped out into full sunlight. It was a clearing, a hundred yards, almost square, with a small cabin―or “hut” might be a more accurate term―with a trickle of smoke coming from a chimney that seemed to be made of clay.

The rat-girl was at the door already, and Swft drew back, staying in the shadows. I did, too. The girl was still tapping on the door; it opened suddenly, and an old rat―no, a man, thin and whiskered―stood there. He grabbed her and pulled her inside.

I started across to the rescue, but Swft spoke up. “Wait, Colonel. I think it’s all right.”

“That old devil grabbed her!” I protested. “Probably hasn’t seen a female in years!”

“A female of the Noble Folk would hardly be of prurient interest to a humong,” he pointed out. I had to concede that, and slowed to a walk.

Swft fell in beside me. “Colonel Bayard,” he said, sounding formal, or in some mood that made him speak my name solemnly. “Colonel,” he repeated, “I fear you are about to be confronted with a shocking phenomenon. Brace yourself for a surprising revelation.”

The old man reappeared in the doorway. “Sure, I’m all set,” I replied casually. “But how the devil did a human get here?”

“He passed across an entropic discontinuity,” Swft told me, as if he knew. “This resulted in a temporal reduplication―”

“Sure.” I cut him off. “Skip all that part and get directly to the big surprise.”

The old―or at least middle-aged―fellow in the doorway was staring at me as if―I don’t know “as if” what. Anyway, he brushed past the little rat-girl and sort of stumbled up to me.

“Colonel,” he said clearly, in spite of a frog in his throat, and then lapsed into what sounded like the high-pitched Ylokk speech. But Swft didn’t seem to understand any better than I did.

“Tala sakta,” Swft said, in Swedish: he’d been cagey about that one. “Var god och lysna,” he added, meaning “Shut up and listen.”

I was studying the haggard man’s face, which seemed slightly familiar, somehow. He had unevenly hacked whiskers, and deep lines around his eyes, which were blue, and sort of reminded me of―

“Candy! Candy!” Minnie was repeating, tugging at his hand.

“ ‘Unca Andy,’ ” I said, trying out the sound. Then, “Lieutenant Helm! Report!”

The old fellow tried to straighten out of his slouch and almost succeeded. He got his mouth closed and brought his right arm up in what I guess was a try at a hand salute. “Colonel Bayard,” he croaked, “sir, I have the honor to report that Doctor Smovia is safe and well.”

“Unca Mobie!” Minnie yelped, and ran into the hut. I just then realized what I’d decided to call her. Disney never drew a rat.

I took Andy’s arm, which was wirier than I remembered it.

“What’s happened, Andy?” I asked him.

There were tears in his eyes now. “It really is you, sir!” he blurted, and turned and blundered back inside. “Finally!” he added as he disappeared.

“I warned you, Colonel,” Swft said. I nodded, and followed Helm into the dim interior. A fire on a stone hearth shed a faint and flickering glow on a bare interior of peeled logs, and Helm bending over a cot where another battered middle-aged man was lying, twisting his head to watch me come in.

“I can’t believe it!” he croaked in English, then in Swedish, “Jag trar inte!”

Helm was shushing him, at the same time helping him to sit up. He was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, dressed in a ragged, grayish shirt, but I recognized that fanatical look in his eyes. It was young Doc Smovia.

“What’s happened to you fellows?” I burst out, then, in a more controlled tone, “it’s been awhile, Doctor. What’s happened?”

“We climbed through that hole,” Smovia said hesitantly, in English. “We came out in a forest. Reminded me of the foothills north of Stockholm. Nobody there. We yelled and got nothing but echoes. The hole we’d crawled out of was gone. It had been about a three-foot fall, and we walked back and forth through where something should have been. Nothing. I make it nine years; the lieutenant says ten. We started by keeping a record of the days, but we lost our tally-board in a fire. Nearly lost the house. We tried counting the seasons, but they seem different here; winters are very mild; perhaps the greenhouse effect is further developed.”

“You were entropically displaced,” I told him. “Did you fellows build this house?”

“No, we found it here, just as it is, unfinished, empty, abandoned,” Andy said. “We found a town nearby. Everybody seemed content, used to make a gala event out of the first day of gathering. We went along; nice in the woods. Then, one day, a bunch of loud-mouthed strangers showed up, began interfering, telling people they didn’t have to work anymore.”

“At first, people tried to argue with them,” Smovia contributed. “Said they enjoyed the gathering; but the gangs ridiculed them, said they didn’t need to be slaves anymore, that there’d be plenty of new slaves. We got out. We found food in the woods,” he continued, “nuts and berries and mushrooms. But we needed more. We killed a small animal―like a squirrel, or maybe a marmoset. Agile little devils. Took a week, but finally we snared one. Built a fire and cooked it. I had some ether in my kit; that helped get the fire started. Delicious! We’ve eaten pretty well, but, Colonel, it’s been a long time. Andy looks…” He shifted to a lower tone. “―and I do too, I suppose. A pond makes a poor mirror. You have to disturb it to get in position to see your reflection, and…” He fell silent and reached out a callused hand to touch my arm. “You’re really here?” he asked anxiously. “This isn’t just another delusion?”

“I’m as really here as anything I know,” I told him. “Take it easy, boy. We’ll get you out of here.”

“They arrested the doc and me,” Andy put in. “They left poor Baby―she was about three―to shift for herself. After a few days, some of the locals came with Baby, and let us out. We kept out of sight of the gangs, and sneaked out of town, and after a few days we found the house. We had to fix it up a little, and we had sort of resigned ourselves, I guess. Do you really think we can get back home?”

“We had some doozies,” Smovia was mumbling, talking to himself. “Delusions, I mean. Once we saw a parade,” he went on. “Big animals, like elephants, only with shovel-tusks, with gold, purple trappings, and rats in blue uniforms and other rats in red on green―”

“The Imperial Guard,” Swft said. “The Three Brigades. A state review. How―?”

“Once a party of rats came close to us, halooing and beating the brush,” Helm said.

“We thought they were looking for us,” Smovia added, “but they passed by and paid no attention to the smoke coming out of the chimney, so it must have been something else.”

“Not necessarily,” I speculated. “They may have been in another phase, and couldn’t see the house.”

“Doubtful,” Swft supplied. “Although these Two-Law people have taken over the technical complex, they have no one trained in its use.”

“That’s one for our side,” I contributed.

The old fellows had their heads together, discussing something with quiet intensity. Then Helm―I found it hard to think of this haggard middle-aged man as pink-cheeked Lieutenant Helm―went to the little girl-rat and said hesitantly, “Your Highness…” He didn’t seem to know what to say next. She threw herself at him, embraced him and started to cry. “Candy! Candy! I got losted and…” She paused to look at me. “―and Uncanul found me!”

Helm seemed too flustered to speak, and Smovia gently disengaged the girl’s grip and hugged and petted her. It seemed she usually spoke Swedish, which was considerably better than her rather babyish English. That wasn’t surprising, considering that she’d been raised by a couple of Swedes.

“There, Baby, we’re all together now,” Helm comforted her. “It’s all right―and we’ll soon have you home again, now that Uncle Colonel is here.”