The Corridors of Time (4 page)

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 color 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 rolled 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-colored
fountain, and splashed the corridor walls with vividness. The air crackled. Ozone stung Lock-ridge’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-barreled 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 the thundering energies, shooting and laughing. He looked down upon the enemy, straight into a pale narrow
countenance. The bullet gun swiveled 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
on 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.

‘Yes, of course I lied to you,’ Storm said.

The campfire guttered high, sparks showed, light danced dull on smoke and picked her strong-boned features out of darkness
in Rembrandt hints. Beyond and around, the night crawled 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 humor 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 forcefield 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 time, so that by going from one passage to another a traveler 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 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,
organized, 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!’