The Corridors of Time (3 page)

They sat down to akvavit and tall beer chasers. ‘You know an awful lot about this country,’ he said. ‘Are you Danish yourself?’

‘No. I have an American passport.’

‘By ancestry, then? You don’t look it.’

‘Well, what do I look like?’ she invited.

‘I’m blessed if I know. A sort of mixture of everything, that came out better’n any of the separate parts.’

‘What? A Southerner with a good word for miscegenation?’

‘Now come off it, Storm. I don’t go for that crap about would you want your sister to marry one. Mine has the sense to pick
the right man for herself regardless of race.’

Her neck lifted. ‘Still, race does exist,’ she said. ‘Not in the distorted twentieth-century version, no. But in genetic lines.
There is good stock and there are scrubs.’

‘M-m-m – theoretically. Only how do you tell ’em apart, except by performance?’

‘One can. A beginning is being made in your current work on the genetic code. Someday it will be possible to know what a man
is fit for before he is born.’

Lockridge shook his head. ‘I don’t like that notion. I’ll stick with everybody bein’ born free.’

‘What does that mean?’ she scoffed. ‘Free to do what? Ninety per cent of this species are domestic animals by nature. The
only meaningful liberation is of the remaining ten in a hundred. And yet, today, you want to domesticate them too.’ She looked
out the window, to sunbright waters and skimming gulls. ‘There is the civilization suicide you spoke of. A herd of mares can
only be guarded by a stallion – not a gelding.’

‘Could be. But a hereditary aristocracy has been tried, and look at its record.’

‘Do you think your
soi-disant
democracy has a better one?’

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be a decadent aristocrat. I just can’t afford to.’

Her haughtiness dissolved in laughter. ‘Thank you. We were in danger of becoming serious, were we not? And here come the oysters.’

She chatted so brightly through the meal, and afterward up on the throbbing deck, that he hardly noticed how adroitly she
had turned the talk away from herself.

They drove off at Nyborg, on across Fyen, through Hans Christian Andersen’s home town of Odense – ‘But the name means Odin’s
Lake,’ Storm told Lockridge, ‘and once men were hanged here, in sacrifice to him.’ And at last they crossed the bridge to
the Jutish peninsula. He offered to take the car, but she refused.

The land grew bigger when they swung northward, less thickly populated, there were vistas of long hills covered with forest
or with blooming heather, under a dizzyingly high sky. Sometimes Lockridge glimpsed
Kaempehoje,
dolmens surmounted by rough capstones, stark in the lengthening light. He made some remark about them.

‘They go back to the Stone Age, and I hope you remember,’ Storm said. ‘Four thousand years and more ago. Their like may be
found all down the Atlantic coast and on through the Mediterranean. That was a strong faith.’ Her hands tightened on the wheel;
she stared straight before her, down the flying ribbon of road. ‘They adored the Triune Goddess, they who brought those burial
rites here, Her of Whom the Norns were only a pallid memory, Maiden, Mother, and Hellqueen. It was an evil bargain that traded
Her for the Father of Thunders.’

Tires hissed on concrete, the split air roared by open windows. Shadows lay deep in the folded uplands. A flight of crows
winged from a pinewood. ‘She will come again,’ Storm said.

Lockridge had begun to expect such passages of darkness through her. He made no reply. When they turned toward Holstebro,
he checked the map and realized with a clutch at
his throat that they didn’t have far to go – not unless she meant to skate across the North Sea.

‘Maybe you’d better brief me now,’ he suggested.

Her face and voice were alike uninterpretable. ‘There is little to tell you. I have already reconnoitered. We need expect
no trouble at the tunnel entrance. Further along, perhaps —’ Intensity flashed forth. She gripped his arm so hard that her
fingernails pained him. ‘Be prepared for surprises. I have not told you every detail, because the attempt to understand would
engage too much of your mind. If we meet an emergency, you must not stop to wonder, you must simply react. Do you see?’

‘I – I reckon so.’ It was good karate psychology, he knew. But— No, damnation, I’m committed. Crazy, stupid, quixotic, whatever
you want to call me, I’m on her side – with no more advance warnin’ than this – whatever happens!

The blood raced in him. His hands felt cold.

Not far beyond Holstebro, Storm turned off the pavement. A dirt road snaked west among fields that presently gave way on the
right side to a timber plantation. She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the engine. Silence flowed across the world.

Lockridge stirred. ‘Shall we —’

‘Hush!’ Storm’s hand chopped at his words. From the glove compartment she took a small thick disc. Colors 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 holstered 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-barreled thing. Lockridge did a double take. ‘Hey, what
kind of pistol is that?’

‘No matter.’ She hefted the disc of colors. ‘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. Gray 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
was 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 color disc. ‘No one is 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 spiraled 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 further 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 realized. 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
!’