At the Narrow Passage Read online

  "How do we get across the German lines?" I asked. "You make it sound awfully simple."

  "For you, it shall be," the Krith said. "Just after dark the British right flank will launch an attack against the German positions east of Beaugency and sweep toward the city. By midnight the whole British right will be entangled with the Germans. Then, just before you start up the river, a squadron of airships, laden with fire bombs, will proceed across the British right toward Beaugency. It is a suicide mission, I will admit" -- Sir Gerald bit his lower lip but did not comment -- "but it should do well in putting the city, or a good portion of it, to flames." Kar-hinter paused, smiled, belched. "Then, Eric, with all this going on to your right, with the Imperials so preoccupied with the battle, you should be able to pass up the river in the darkness and confusion with little difficulty."

  Finally Sir Gerald could contain himself no longer.

  "I must protest, sir!" he exclaimed.

  "You have protested before, Sir Gerald," Kar-hinter said calmly. "You have protested straight to Buckingham Palace."

  "I bloody well have!" Sir Gerald almost yelled. "And mucking little good it's done. But, sir" -- he addressed the naked, alien Krith as a superior officer -- "I just cannot condone sacrificing hundreds or thousands of British lives, not to mention a whole squadron of airships, just to allow a handful of men to -- to . . ."

  "Sir Gerald," Kar-hinter said firmly, his tail lashing sharply behind him, "please restrain yourself. You have registered your complaints."

  Sir Gerald muttered something else under his breath and then was silent.

  "When you reach the villa," Kar-hinter went on as if Sir Gerald had never spoken, "you will kidnap the count and his wife."

  "And then what do we do with them?" I asked.

  "There will be a skudder waiting for you," Kar-hinter said slowly.

  "Now wait a minute," I said. "You told us that cross-Line movement had been forbidden."

  "Yes," the Krith said, "for the Baltic plant. But this action will not be direct interference, so to speak. You will take Von Heinen and his wife cross-Lines to a designated place where there will be an interrogation squad waiting for them. They will probe the count and his wife, and then you will return them to this Line and release them. They will be conditioned to believe that they escaped from you -- and no one will be the wiser for it."

  "I don't understand it," Tracy said. "Cross-Lining in the Baltic is forbidden, but it isn't here. Why?"

  Tracy should have known better than to even ask.

  "Because it is," Kar-hinter said firmly. "You will do as you are told within your contracted terms."

  "Why the bloody hell can't you just skud them or whatever it is you do right into the villa?" Sir Gerald asked angrily.

  "It must be done as I have outlined it, Sir Gerald. This is the only way it may be allowed. There are reasons that I would find impossible to explain to you."

  I could well understand Sir Gerald's mystification. Countless times in the past I had run up against the same sort of thing from the Kriths. I don't suppose we can ever understand their reasons for doing things the way they do them. They just don't think the same way we do.

  Kar-hinter looked at Tracy and then at me, scratching himself thoughtfully. "There is one final matter to settle, gentlemen," he said. "Your present contracts are about to expire, and they certainly do not cover an operation of this nature. I have new contracts which I beg you to consider. You are the best men available for this job, and I would consider it a personal honor should you accept."

  With this he pulled two sheets of paper from a folder lying on the table and handed one to Tracy and the other to me.

  I read over my copy quickly and smiled to myself when I came to the part about the pay and the benefits offered for this job. All things considered, it was one of the best contracts the Kriths had ever offered me.

  When I looked up, I saw that Tracy was smiling too.

  "I take it that you accept?" Kar-hinter asked.

  Without replying I signed my name on the bottom of the contract, thumbprinted it, and handed it back to Kar-hinter. Tracy did the same.

  "Thank you," Kar-hinter said with a nonhuman smile-thing on his face. "That will be all for the time being. Food will be brought to you shortly. I suggest that you rest now. There are bunks ready for you in the back room. At nightfall the remainder of your party will arrive, and we will go into the plans in more detail. Do you have any further questions now?"

  "I have one," Kearns said, speaking for the first time.

  "Yes, Ronald?" Kar-hinter asked.

  "When do I leave?"

  "When Eric, Hillary, and Sir Gerald leave," Kar-hinter answered slowly. "You shall accompany them to Beaugency. You are to be their skudder pilot."

  Kearns just smiled, nothing more, as if he had known all along that he would be going with us.

  Kar-hinter then nodded politely to Sir Gerald, to the rest of us.

  "You will excuse me, gentlemen," be said. "I have work to do. I shall be back by dark." He left the room with the black-uniformed Pall at his heels.

  Then we waited for our meal.

  5

  The Lines of Time

  I suppose that Kar-hinter's intention in giving us so much wine was to make us sleepy, to force us to rest some before the activities of the coming night. Though, of course, that might not have been his intention at all. You can only guess at what a Krith's purposes really are.

  Still, if that was his idea, it worked. Three glasses of strong wine on an empty stomach -- for I hadn't eaten all day -- had almost put me to sleep when a mess steward came in with three tins of beef hash, bread, and tea. It wasn't a particularly tasty meal, but it was nourishing and filling, and I felt much better after eating, and even sleepier.

  As Kar-hinter had said, there were beds in the back room of the house, old metal-framed beds, worn and rusty, but supporting thick down mattresses. It had gotten quite warm by afternoon, and the golden French sunlight streamed in between the boards that covered the windows, illuminating the motes of dust that swam in the air like galaxies of stars.

  Tracy and Kearns fell asleep almost at once, and I lay back, half-dozing as the afternoon came and slowly passed, moving toward night, not at all concerned about what Kar-hinter had planned for us. I had been through worse often enough not to be concerned. What would happen would happen. You can call it Greek fatalism, if you like.

  I don't know where Sir Gerald went. Shortly after Kar-hinter and Pall left, the general got into his staff car, saying that he would be back before dark, and drove off. I sort of suspected that he was going somewhere to make another complaint about the Krithian plans, but I doubted that it would do any good. Apparently the plans for the British attack against the fortified German positions had come straight from the top, the General Staff or maybe from the king himself. I was sorry that it had to be that way -- so many lives expended just to get us into the villa where Von Heinen was staying, but it had to be that way. There wasn't a damned thing I could do about it, and I didn't think that Sir Gerald could do any more.

  So I rested and half slept and did something that was midway between remember and dream. Fragments of images, half-forgotten events, a girl's name, a glimpse of a childhood a long way and a long When from Here and Now. A blond Greek boy who was big for his age and had a way of getting into more trouble than he should have. At least I considered myself Greek, even if my blood was half-Saxon and I had been born on an island that is called Britain in a lot of Lines.

  And I remember how my father had been hanged for treason by the governor of North Ionnia and a girl named Kristin had been raped by a gang of the governor's bullies and how I joined an underground student group in college and nearly got myself hanged before the general revolution broke out -- backed by the Kriths, thought I didn't know that until later -- and how the Kriths, when it was all over and we had won, asked me if I wanted to join the Timeliners. My family was dead. Kristin had committed suicide. Why the
hell not?

  And I remembered another girl named Marissa in one of the Carolingian Lines and how she had died terribly slowly and terribly painfully and how I had made the man who killed her die even more slowly and more painfully because I had loved her and would have quit the 'Liners and married her and settled down if it hadn't been for that goddamned war.

  And I thought about the month I had once spent in one of the Rajaian Timelines -- trying to forget about it all. That was a hedonistic Line where machines did the work of men and left people with nothing to do but spend their lifetimes in pursuit of pleasures of one sort of another. And while I was there, I had tried just about all of them, except for some that were even a little too perverted for me. Like the three girls and the trained monkey and the goat who all got together and . . . Well, never mind that.

  But what I thought about mostly, for some reason, was the Kriths, who and what they were, and why. My thoughts weren't in any kind of order, but I'll try to present them as if they were. Maybe you can understand a little bit of it.

  Who exactly are the Kriths? Friend, I don't know. I'm not even sure that they know themselves. They come from some Line a long, long way to the T-East, so far across the Whens that men hadn't even evolved on Earth. Whether the Kriths were even natives of Earth I don't know, but I sort of doubt it. Or if they are they came from a Line that branched off from ours millions of years ago, back when the first mammals were developing, for there are some fundamental differences between them and the mammals of our Lines that would take millions of years to produce. More likely, I thought, they came from another planet, a lot of Whens closer than a sixty-or-seventy-million-year old split.

  Kriths are totally unable to do anything with machines. This is a fact -- or at least I thought it was then -- and I'd seen it proved countless times. They could never have developed spaceships, but with their built-in Line-skudding ability they could easily have come across someone who had developed spaceships, men or some other beings, and in those come to Earth. Hell, I know that doesn't sound much more likely than their having evolved here. So let's drop the subject. I don't know When and Where they came from, but they are. And the fact that they are is very important. Maybe one of the most important things in all the universes.

  Let me tell you about that. Given a nearly infinite number of universes -- at least I'm told that the number is nearly infinite, if that means anything, all beginning back when the first universe was created, if it ever was created. But the Lines are there, stretching East and West further than any Krith has ever gone, extending almost forever. I've seen a few hundred of them myself, but that's nothing, absolutely nothing. But to get back to the point I was trying to make: Given an almost infinite number of Timelines, just about anything is possible. Even Kriths.

  The Kriths have a nervous system that isn't very much like ours. Oh, they have a brain, of course, three of them in fact. One is for, well, thinking, conscious thoughts like those you and I think. The second is for involuntary actions, the general running of the body, and it's located somewhere in the chest area so that a Krith can go on living for a hell of a long time with its head blown off, and I've seen it happen. Of course without his head a Krith isn't good for very much, but that's the way things are.

  The third brain isn't really a brain at all; it's more a series of nervous ganglions extending the length of the spine, but well inside the body cavity, pretty well protected. What this setup was first evolved for, I don't know. I can't even guess, but then I have no idea what kind of environment the Kriths evolved in. Maybe it was originally a protection against, well, magnetic fields or something, or maybe it was a means of radio communications -- for they do have that or something like it. As I said, I don't know why it ever started evolving. I just know where it led.

  It led to cross-Lines.

  The Kriths have their own built-in skudder. They can, at will, cross the Timelines from one universe to another.

  Impossible? Damned near, maybe, but not quite. They exist and they do it.

  I don't know whether they evolved intelligence before or after they developed their skudding ability. Maybe they both developed together. I suspect that maybe you can't have the ability to skud without a rational faculty to guide it, but that's only a guess. And sometimes I wonder just how rational the Kriths are. I mean, they can talk and think and act rationally, but they have no mechanical ability at all. They can't even build their own shelters. In other ways they're bright enough, so I don't know. I suppose they had to sacrifice a great deal to develop skudding to the level they they have.

  Anyhow, they did learn to skud, and they began jumping across the Lines, into the parallel universes. I don't know what they found to the East of wherever they started, but to the West they found men.

  At first the Kriths didn't interfere with humans. They just dropped in, so to speak, saw things they liked, and finally found a means of communicating. Shangalis was developed, either by them or by men, and a cross-Line language was born.

  At some point men began to investigate the Kriths' means of skudding, but whether the Kriths prompted them to do it or whether men did it on their own, I don't know. Probably both in different Lines. And eventually men built skudders and the Kriths began to use them with human pilots. When the Kriths used their own built-in mechanisms to cross the Lines, all they could take with them was their own physical bodies. If they wanted to take anything else -- men, machines, - weapons, books, tapes -- they had to have mechanical help. They got it when men built skudders and the Kriths took advantage of them.

  So, a long, long way East of here, cross-Line trading began to take place, cultures of parallel worlds began to mingle, merge, change, and a whole new kind of civilization was built.

  Still, all this doesn't explain much, doesn't explain, for example, why a mercenary soldier from a Europo-Macedonian Line was fighting a war in a Romano-British Line. Let me try to explain that to you.

  Time travel is impossible.

  I mean, travel into the future or the past. A lot of places have tried it, and they have always failed. It simply can't be done. Don't ask me why. I'm not mathematician. It just can't be done.

  However, they tell me there is a way that communications from the future to the past can take place. It's pretty complicated and awfully costly, but it can be done. At least the Kriths have said it can and has been done. But you can judge for yourself.

  A long way East, so the story goes, there's an Indus Line where technology developed early and reached a high level some hundreds of years ago. They had even got so far as building spaceships and exploring the nearer stars. It was there that the first future-to-past communication was attempted. The Kriths were in on it, so I'm told; they helped finance it by bringing in a great deal of Outtime wealth and materials to try the experiment.

  A huge transmitting station was built on the Moon. From what I've been told it was the biggest transmitter ever constructed in any Line, more watts of energy than would be needed to run a dozen high-level-technology worlds. They tell me that the energy of the sun was somehow drained to power the station -- and I don't mean by solar cells or something like that. They tapped the sun and poured its energy directly into the station.

  This transmitter, though, was never connected to a real antenna. All its power was fed into dummy loads, huge chunks of the lunar surface converted into resistors just to drain off the transmitter's power. They set up this monstrous station and burned up half the Moon just to get rid of the power it produced.

  All this was done just to get a standing wave on a huge bank of solid-state devices. A gigantic quasi-modulator was fed by the power, and it just sat there and waited . . . but not for long.

  The idea goes something like this, as well as I can explain it: The signal is generated, and it exists and will continue to be generated and continue to exist for centuries. The quasi-modulator will be -- is -- was waiting for a signal to be fed back to it from the future.

  They tell me that there are certain a
ctivites of subatomic particles that get cause-and-effect backward. A thing, they say, can happen before the cause of it takes place. They go on a to say that if a radio signal is existing in a certain type of solid-state quasi-modulator it can be affected by this backward effect and cause, that a whole chain of these backward effects and causes can happen in this quasi-modulator.

  Now it's like this. Somewhere way in the future they decide it's time to send a message back to the past. They feed this message into the quasi-modulator -- and somewhere down in the subatomic particles, down even below where the radio energy is bouncing around, this effect-before-the-cause chain will begin. The cause has happened, but a nanosecond before that the effect had already taken place; this effect had, even prior to that, been the cause for another effect even another nanosecond before, and so on. Backward through time the effect and then the cause, the effect and the cause, until it finally gets back down the chain of time to the beginning.