At the Narrow Passage

  GREETINGS FROM THE YEAR 4000 A.D. WE

  HAVE BEEN WAITING UNTIL THE LAST POS-

  SIBLE MOMENT, BUT WE CAN WAIT NO

  LONGER. WE ARE ALL DOOMED.

  THERE IS A CIVILIZATION ON THE FAR SIDE

  OF THE GALAXY, TOTALLY ALIEN TO ALL

  THAT IS HUMAN AND KRITH. THEY HAVE

  BEEN BIDING THEIR TIME. BUILDING A

  GREAT ARMADA -- AND WE ARE ALL BUT

  DEFENSELESS AGAINST THEIR WEAPONS.

  ALL THE WORKS OF OUR MUTUAL CIVILI-

  ZATIONS SHALL PERISH UNLESS . . .

  The message ends there. It's never completed -- only

  repeated endlessly, picked up by a huge transmitting

  station on the moon in one of the Timelines. It will

  continue to repeat itself until the day, some two thou-

  sand years from now, when the world is destroyed --

  unless we can change the future now.

  "Breathless adventure."

  -- Library Journal

  "An attention-holding and entertaining book."

  -- Fort Worth Press

  AT THE NARROW

  PASSAGE

  RICHARD C. MEREDITH

  THE TIMELINER TRILOGY

  BOOK ONE

  This book is dedicated to the memory of H.

  Beam Piper and to the Paratime Police, to

  Verkan Vail, to Tortha Karf, to Hadron Dalla,

  and to all those who guard the multiple worlds.

  AT THE NARROW PASSAGE

  Copyright © 1973 by Richard C. Meredith

  ISBN: 0-872-16552-3

  Contents

  1. France, Line RTGB-307, Spring, 1971 9

  2. Change of Command 13

  3. Kearns 21

  4. Kar-hinter 24

  5. The Lines of Time 38

  6. Up the Loire 47

  7. The Villa 57

  8. Ambush 68

  9. Pursuit 74

  10. Contact and Report 83

  11. The Cabin 95

  12. Captive 105

  13. Staunton 114

  14. The Greatest Lie 129

  15. Of Mica, Sally, and G'lendal 141

  16. Of Democracy, Sautierboats, and Guns 150

  17. "Red Mobile to Red Leader" 162

  18. Voices 171

  19. Recovery 175

  20. With Sally in Eden 183

  21. Across the Lines 196

  22. Dreams and Nondreams 209

  23. The Western Timelines 215

  24. Kar-hinter, Kearns, Tracy, and Death 226

  25. "They Are Almost Human" 235

  26. Out of Probability 237

  27. "Something's Got to Be Done" 239

  At the narrow passage there is no brother, no friend.

  -- ARABIAN PROVERB

  Some billion years ago, an anonymous speck

  of protoplasm protruded the first primitive

  pseudopodium into the primeval slime, and

  perhaps the first state of uncertainty occurred.

  -- I. J. Good, Science, February 20, 1959

  1

  France, Line RTGB-307, Spring, 1971

  It was spring in France when I contracted to kidnap Imperial Count Albert von Heinen and his wife.

  It was a spring that had been too long in coming, and the bitter winter that had come before it had frozen all of western Europe and brought the war to a virtual standstill until the weather, in its own fickle way, finally began to warm and allowed us to return to the bloody games we were being paid to play.

  The trenches in which we lived were very old and deep and muddy and cold when those first spring days came suddenly, almost unexpectedly, and though warm breezes blew across France, the trenches still remained cold, down deep in them, and it seemed that they would never dry out.

  Trenchfoot was rampant. Most of us who hadn't come down with frostbite or pneumonia or one of the other diseases of the trenches that winter, finally gave in to that disgusting flesh rotting that I guess has been feared by foot soldiers as long as men have fought wars.

  At least I had been lucky so far. We had a small stove in our dugout -- the one I shared with Tracy and two subalterns -- and I had kept my boots and socks more or less dry most of the time, and even though my feet stank a good deal more than I liked, they hadn't begun to rot. I was grateful for that, though that was just about all I was grateful for. Maybe I was getting a little bitter even then.

  Above the intricate mazes of trenches, beyond our most remote lookout post, on the broken, muddy surface of the ravaged earth, the barbed wire still hung just as it had all winter, now rusty and even more forbidding than when we had first strung it the autumn before. Fragments of clothing -- Imperial gray, they had once been -- here and there a high-crested Prussian helmet, a rusting rifle with a broken bayonet, the barren, whitened bones of Imperial horses enduring the rain and snow and frigid winds that had blown across France during the winter. These were the silent, solemn reminders of the few foredoomed Imperial attacks that had taken place since the first winter snows came down and locked us into our positions.

  At first the Germans had not seemed willing to admit that a British colonial division had set up housekeeping just a few miles from Beaugency. That was too damned close to their staff headquarters!

  And during the first winter storms, and during the lulls between them, the Sixty-fourth Imperial Hussars, mostly on foot because of the terrain, had thrown a few feeble, bloody attacks at our lines. They had failed, as their commanders must have known they'd fail, but the attacks had been in the grand Prussian style, if for no other reason than to appease and glorify His Imperial Majesty, Franz VI, by the Grace of God, Emperor of the Romans.

  Ha!

  Well, during that bitter winter, suffering more from the weather than from the activities of the Imperials, the Second, Fourth and Ninth New England Infantry had sat on its collective ass a few miles southwest of Beaugency in our old, much-used trenches, a few hundred yards south of the River Loire and a mile to two from a battered little village whose name I don't know to this day.

  But, as I said, spring had finally gotten around to coming, spring of the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-One, by the Christian calendar used locally, the thirty-second year of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, they said. And with spring had come a renewal of the fighting and the end of my current contract with the Kriths.

  Cannon had begun firing from the vicinity of Beaugency, the German equivalent of our two-and-a-half, three- and four-inch howitzers, from the Imperial artillery battalion that sat there. And big guns fired back from the south, British four-inchers answering the Germans.

  Rifle and machine-gun fire crackled intermittently along the lines. Now and again there was the muffled roar of a hand grenade or a mortar shell lobbed into either our trenches or theirs. And occasionally a German or a British head would be foolish enough to show itself above the trenches and would promptly get itself blown apart, steel helmet or no steel helmet.

  Off to the east, nearly every morning an hour or so after dawn, a flight of British airships moved north, bombers for the most part, bound for the Imperial encampments in the area of Fontainebleau, the railyards that led to Paris and what industry still functioned in the French city. They would unload their crude bombs on Fontainebleau and then return home, those of them that hadn't been blasted apart by Imperial antiairship guns.

  At times we hoped that some of the airships might even get as far as Paris itself, to begin bombing the Imperial household that we had heard was setting up spring quarters in what had once, long years before, been the capital of France, the City of Lights. But we knew, when we stopped to think about it, that our -- the British -- airships
stood a snowball's chance in hell of getting much beyond Fontainebleau. Between that city and Paris the Germans had ring after ring of antiaircraft guns that could knock down the fastest airship that the British Empire could put into the sky.

  German-occupied Paris would hold out, and would keep on holding out until the British infantry marched right up to the gates of the city and took it from the Holy Roman Emperor, and that was a thing that in the spring of 1971 seemed very unlikely, no matter what the Kriths did to help. Well, short of nuclear weapons, that is, but I damned well knew that the Kriths weren't going to put nuclear weapons into the hands of the British. Hell, the British didn't even know there was any such thing -- at least that's what I believed then,

  As I said, it was spring of 1971 and I was a captain of the British Infantry, American Colonial Forces of His Britannic Majesty, King George X. More exactly, I was the commanding officer of Company B, Fourth Virginia Infantry.

  My name then was Eric Mathers and I was supposed to have been from the city of Victoria, Province of Virginia, in the British North American Colonies, sometimes known collectively as New England. The men under me, colonials themselves, believed it, but that wasn't surprising since the Kriths had given me a damned good schooling in what Virginia was like in this Timeline, or at least the area of North America that they call Virginia here, which isn't exactly the same geographical area as your Virginia. I spoke and acted like any other good Virginian, a loyal subject of George X and the British Empire.

  The truth was somewhat different. I had never been in their Virginia in my life. I was simply a mercenary soldier in the pay of the Kriths, but that made me no less a good soldier for King George. The interests of King Geoege and the Kriths happened to coincide, which was damned fortunate for George and his empire. So it seemed at the time, at least.

  But then I was pretty ignorant in those days.

  2

  Change of Command

  On the morning when all this began to change I was late rising. I didn't do that very often -- sleep late -- but a group of us had consumed a great quantity of gin the night before and my head ached like hell and I was halfway sick to my stomach and, as they say, RHIP -- Rank Hath Its Privileges. I was exercising those privileges, what there were of them, when Tracy came stumbling into the dugout, urging me to get the hell out of bed and into my uniform.

  I waved him away sleepily, but threw back the cover and gingerly put my feet on the burlap-covered earthen floor, carefully testing the ability of my legs to support me.

  "Blast it all, Eric," said Lieutenant Hillary Tracy -- whose real name was Darc HonGlazz, but that was in another world. "Get your arse out of that bloody bed. The muckin' colonel's coming round."

  Yes, Tracy really talked that way. Well, of course, it was customary, almost necessary for us to mimic the speech of the British we served under, but I thought Tracy was carrying it a little too far.

  "Cheerio, old son," I mumbled, mimicking Tracy more than the British, and discovered to my surprise that I could stand up.

  I glanced once around the dugout, saw nothing that was new, wished vainly for a hot bath, and then reached for my pants, which hung on a peg driven into the earthen wall beside my bunk.

  The dugout that had been the home of Tracy, myself, and two other officers for the past four and a half months was small and dark and damp, a cave hacked out of the French soil a year or two earlier by another band of British soldiers when they had held this area before. When the Imperial Germans had taken the trenches from us the previous spring, I supposed some of their officers had lived here, though it didn't look as if they had done much to improve it. They had just existed here until fall, when we had come in and driven them back out again. I wondered whether Germans or British would be living here after the next big offensive or counteroffensive or countercounteroffensive or whatever the hell the next battle would be called at headquarters. That's the kind of war it was.

  There were four bunks, little more than field cots; a table; three folding chairs; a box that served as the fourth chair; a rickety wooden table that the Germans had built the spring before; an old, battered, cracked potbelly stove of prehistoric British origin; three carbide lanterns; innumerable sandbags; and four footlockers. The dugout's single entrance was covered by a moldy, moth-eaten old blanket that still, somehow, carried the Imperial German insignia. The ceiling was supported by rotten boards, beer-barrel staves, a hodgepodge of bits and pieces of wood placed there to support the soggy earth above. Below, the cold, damp, half-muddy floor was covered with burlap sacking, some British, some Imperial, and even some that might have been of native French origin. Come to think of it, that might have been the only thing in the dugout, save for the earth itself, that was French. But then, there was very little of France left anywhere after thirty-two years of war.

  But the dugout was home. All the home that Tracy and I had anywhere. We were both Timeliners.

  "Hurry it up, Eric," Tracy said. "The colonel's aide just rang up to say that the colonel is coming round with our replacements."

  "Replacements?" I asked, coming awake at last, activating certain artificial, circuits of my body that would bring me to a level of awareness known to few men.

  "Bloody well right," Tracy said in all seriousness.

  "Oh, cut it out," I said. My head was still aching.

  "Cut out what, old boy?"

  "That bloody damned accent."

  "We've got to stay in character."

  "You're overdoing it."

  Tracy snorted through his broad nose but didn't reply.

  "Now what's this about replacements?" I asked, finally pulling on my trousers, British issue, heavy woolen winter uniform, a dull, sick olive that was as unpleasant a color as I could think of that morning.

  "That's all I know, old boy," Tracy said. "The aide just said that the colonel was coming round with our replacements first thing."

  "Then where are we going?"

  "Haven't the foggiest."

  I found a poplin shirt that was relatively clean, though perhaps not neat enough to suit the colonel, but since it was the best I had, it would have to do. I pulled it on, stuffed it into my pants and said to Tracy, "I can't say that I'm too surprised."

  "No, I'm not either," Tracy answered, finally sitting down on his bunk and fumbling for a cigarette. "Our contracts are about up anyway, y'know."

  "Well, this assignment's been a waste of time," I said, more to myself than to Tracy.

  Tracy nodded a vague reply, struck a match, lit his cigarette, said, "Aren't you going to shave, old boy? You look absolutely ghastly."

  I peered at my face in the fragment of mirror that hung on the earthen wall between our bunks, frowned, nodded. "You're right. I guess I'd better."

  I wished desperately for an antihangover, but that hadn't been invented here yet. I'd just have to suffer, though I cut back on my awareness circuits so that I didn't feel quite so uncomfortable.

  "There's hot water on the stove," Tracy said. "Tea too. Want some?"

  "Yes, if you don't mind."

  "Righto."

  I would have preferred something stronger than tea, but then tea doesn't smell on your breath as strongly as gin, and I rather doubted that there was very much gin left after the night before anyway, considering the way we'd put it away.

  I fumbled in my footlocker, found my razor and soap while Tracy poured me a cup of tea and brought it and a basin of steaming water over to me. He sat them on my bunk.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "I do wonder where we'll be going now," Tracy said as I worked up some lather in my shaving mug.

  "Your guess is as good as mine."

  I smeared my face liberally with lather, stropped my razor a few times across the belt, and then began scraping the stubble off my chin. Being fair and blond doesn't prevent me from having a very heavy, very tough beard that's hideously difficult to remove after a bad night.

  Outside the dugout, through the yard of earth that separated u
s from the surface and through the tunnel that connected us to it, I heard the roar and whine of the big howitzers firing from our rear. A shell or two passed over us, headed for the Imperial trenches a few hundred yards away. It wasn't much, just a few rounds to let the Imperials know that the British Army was awake and still as nasty as ever.

  "Anything else going on this morning?" I asked Tracy.

  "Nothing much, so far as I know. Heard that there was a bit of action along the river about dawn. A German patrol coming down, I suppose. Lost their way and stumbled into the Ninth's trenches."

  "Any prisoners?"

  "Not so far as I know. Didn't ask."

  "Doesn't matter."

  I scraped away at my chin and speculated about the news that Tracy had awakened me with. So we were being replaced. Well, it was about bloody time that the Kriths realized that we were wasting our time in these filthy trenches. We had muddled along for four and a half months now, Tracy and I, waiting for the weapons to arrive that we were supposed to show our men how to use. Some new rifle, I understood. Something that would give the British a little more firepower, a little more accuracy. Nothing very startling, mind you. Nothing too much in advance of the current local technology, just enough for everyone to believe that it was a British development, a weapons breakthrough that would help, maybe, to change things, to turn the tide of history against the Holy Roman Empire, as Ferguson's breechloader had turned the tide of history against the American insurrectionists nearly two hundred years before -- a pivotal point in this Timeline's history.