At the Narrow Passage Read online

  The gas was slowly drifting up around us, pale white in the light from the parlor, drifting down the corridor terribly slowly as a predawn breeze blew in from the open door behind us.

  There was a second man in the parlor, wearing only the underclothing he had been sleeping in, and his eyes were still dazed by sleep when I jumped into the doorway -- no more than a blur to his eyes -- and put a bullet in his chest and another into his stomach. His dying gurgle was a deep, bass rumbling and his slow-moving hand tried to grab for the pistol that lay a few feet from where he fell across a heavy oaken table, his blood terribly red against the old, dark wood.

  I felt almost sorry for the man. He had probably never even had a chance to see me.

  There was a crashing from the front of the house as Kearns kicked open the door, cautiously sprayed the entrance hall with submachine-gun bullets, then came on in, yelling for blood. He had already left two men dead behind him.

  Land and I met him in the huge living room, an oak-paneled, fireplaced stadium of a room.

  I cut out my augmentation and signaled for the others to do the same. The world shifted back into normal time and I felt a sudden, brief weakness. A human body can't operate like that for very long.

  "Where are the rest of them?" Kearns' muffled voice asked through his mask.

  "Damned if I know," I said.

  We split up, moved through the house, Kearns and Land searching for the remaining bodyguards, I for the stairs that would lead up to the second floor.

  It didn't take me long to find them. Big as they were, they were hard to miss even in the dark.

  Right at that moment I should have augmented again, but I didn't. I was too confident, I suppose.

  I dropped my rifle on the sofa in the enormous hall at the base of the stairs, pulled a flashlight from its clip on my belt with my left hand, the heavy Harling with my right. I flashed the light up the huge, broad stairs -- and stumbled back as a pistol bullet cut along my left ribs.

  "Halten Sie!" a voice called from the darkness above me.

  I flashed the light up, saw a naked man standing at the head of the stairs, and shot him down. The heavy Harling slug seemed to lift him upward and throw him backward.

  I was reeling back, cursing the pain in my side, thinking that somehow I ought to know the man who even now was tumbling down the stairs, smashing against the rungs of the banister, grabbing for a handhold on them, stopping his fall, reaching for the pistol that had tumbled down the stairs with him.

  Holding the light on him and trying to forget about the pain in my side, I went up the stairs two at a time and realized who he was. Count Albert von Heinen.

  He lay still when I reached him, blood oozing from a wound in his stomach, looking up at me, fire and hatred in his eyes, foul German curses on his lips.

  Out of my own pain I hit him across the mouth with the back of my left hand, still holding the flashlight, and wondered how many of his teeth I was breaking.

  "Shut up!" I told him.

  Somewhere a woman was screaming, sbrilly, hysterically.

  Mathers?" Kearns yelled from the darkness below.

  "Von Heinen's up here," I yelled back, pulling my gas mask off my face, letting it hang by its straps around my neck. "I shot him, but he's still alive. Watch him. I'm going on up."

  I heard Kearns' heavy feet on the stairs below, but I didn't look back. I went on up to the room at the head of the stairs where the light shone and a woman screamed.

  The door was standing open, and the woman was too terrified to try to stop me.

  She stood with her back against the wall near a rumpled bed that was virtually surrounded by mirrors. She was as naked as Von Heinen, short, beautifully rounded, with the dark skin and dark eyes of the people of Mediterranean France. Lovely as she was, she certainly wasn't the count's blond American wife.

  "Don't move," I told her and then repeated it in both German and my broken French.

  She didn't, other than to sob hysterically, her hands at her throat, making no move to cover her exposed body.

  There was no one else in the room, but then I hadn't expected there would be.

  I slipped the flashlight back into my belt, crossed over to where the woman stood rooted in fear, grabbed her hands away from her throat, and slapped her twice with all the force I could muster.

  " Set ruhig, stille!" I told her. "Wo ist Gräfin von Heinen?"

  "Here!" a voice said in English from behind me.

  I spun, looked into the barrel of an Imperial automatic, calculated my chances if I went into augmentation now, shrugged and let the Harling drop from my fingers. I wasn't worried.

  Sally Beall von Heinen was a beautiful woman, dressed in a thin, revealing gown that hid very little of her and I could not help wondering why the hell Von Heinen wanted to bundle with the sobbing girl near me when he had a wife like this one.

  Heavy feet had come up the stairs at a run, were now slamming down the hallway. Countess von Heinen turned, found herself facing Kearns' tommy gun, faltered for a moment, fired wildly, hitting nothing.

  I jumped, my fist coming down heavily on her right arm, grabbing her waist with my left arm, pulling her to the floor. I didn't need augmentation for this.

  She struggled, fought, spat, scratched, clawed for my face, cursed, grabbed for the gun she had dropped, her gown tearing open. I didn't have time to appreciate the view. I threw a fist into her jaw, snapping her head back. She barely moaned as she lost consciousness.

  "You okay?" Kearns asked after he pulled his gas mask off.

  "I'll live," I said, rising to my feet and gingerly touching my injured side. "Von Heinen?"

  "He needs attention, but I've seen men live for days with worse."

  Gunfire rattled from below.

  "Land's found the rest of 'em," Kearns said.

  "Stay here. Watch them."

  I grabbed up the Harling from the floor, jerked out my flashlight, and headed back down the stairs, pulling my gas mask up and switching back into combat augmentation.

  By the time I reached the ground floor the firing had stopped, but I could still hear the low rumble of movement. I ran down another hallway, into a room where a gas lantern sputtered feebly, its glow red. Land leaned against the wall, his uniform dripping blood, his chest a series of ragged holes, a grim, bitter smile on his face. He had lost his gas mask somewhere.

  He feebly pointed toward the four men in the room, sprawled across the bloody beds and floor. One had the top of his head blown away, and another had a great hole where his stomach should have been, and both were very dead. I couldn't see the other two very well, but they weren't moving either.

  I cut out my augmentation and Land quit grinning and slid down the wall, leaving a wide red swash, and then he lay still. I didn't need to feel his pulse to know that he was dead too. I just wondered how he had lived as long as he had, cut apart as he was.

  As I turned and went back toward where Kearns was guarding the count and his wife, I heard a few ragged shots from outside the building, but by the time I had climbed the stairs and pulled my mask off again they had all ceased. I just hoped that the last shots had been fired by our boys.

  Kearns and I found a robe to put on Countess von Heinen, covering her body and the torn gown, and then we tied her hands behind her back. Leaving her to regain consciousness as she would, we carried Von Heinen himself back up the stairs and laid him on the rumpled bed.

  "Put a compress on that to try to stop the bleeding," I told Kearns. "I'll tie her up," pointing to Von Heinen's mistress who was returning to wide-eyed, fearful consciousness after having fainted during the fracas.

  After tying and gagging the dark-haired girl -- I hadn't bothered to find anything to put on her -- I sat her in a corner and began searching for clothing for Von Heinen. We couldn't take him out naked as he was.

  By the time we had finished dressing the count there were sounds coming from below.

  I grabbed my pistol, moved cautiously to the he
ad of the stairs, peered down. There was just enough light in the hallway for me to see three figures, two of them supparting the third between them.

  "Hold it there," I yelled, fairly sure who they were.

  "Eric?" Tracy's voice, muffled and distorted by his gas mask, called back.

  "Up here."

  "It's me, Starne and Sir Gerald."

  "We've got Von Heinen and his wife. Come on up," I told him.

  "Just let me rest, old chap," I heard Sir Gerald say.

  They lowered him to the sofa where I had dropped my rifle earlier -- now it seemed like hours -- and came up the stairs.

  "What about the others?" I asked.

  "Not sure," Tracy answered, loosening his mask. "Dead I think."

  Then I could see his face. He had a nasty gash across his cheek that ended where his mask had covered his mouth and nose. There was a rip down his left leg that looked painful, but not serious. Well, he and three others had wiped out nearly a full company of elite troops.

  "You hurt?" he asked.

  "Side grazed. I'm okay, just got careless. Land's dead, but Kearns doesn't have a scratch on him."

  "He wouldn't."

  We entered the bedroom where Kearns was pulling the German officer's boots on the count's feet.

  "Is he -- " asked the man named Starne who wore a British private's uniform.

  "Stomach wound," I said. "He'll live, long enough at least."

  Then Tracy noticed the naked girl tied and sitting in the corner.

  "Who's she?" he asked, a wicked grin on his face.

  "The Graf's playmate," I said. "They must have been at it when we came busting in. At least they were both naked and . . ."

  "Let's get the hell out of here," Kearns said suddenly, reminding us all of why we were there.

  We did exactly that, though Tracy looked almost wistfully at the dark-haired girl one last time as we started down the stairs.

  8

  Ambush

  It was darker than ever when we carried the unconscious count out of the house. His wife, bleeding at the mouth, was walking with Tracy's pistol pressed into the small of her back. Sir Gerald, limping, assisted by Starne, brought up the rear.

  The earlier drizzle had increased to a steady, soaking downpour, but we hardly noticed it.

  "You're a lucky bastard," Tracy said to Kearns, who was carrying the German across his shoulder fireman fashion.

  "No luck to it," Kearns said. "Just cautious."

  "You didn't sound cautious," I said, "when you hit those two in the staff car."

  Kearns laughed that odd laugh of his. We all laughed, even Sir Gerald. It was over, thank God, and the sudden release of tension brought us all easily to the point of laughter.

  Von Heinen's wife did not speak; she only moved silently, mechanically as we forced her on. I would have expected a woman to yell, scream, go into hysterics as the dark-haired girl had, but Sally von Heinen did just as she was told, but nothing more. Then I reminded myself that she was the daughter of an American rebel leader and had probably been exposed to violence most of her life. In a way I was grateful to her. I think I would have knocked her teeth out had she behaved any differently.

  We were a little more than halfway to the river when we saw the airship. It came down slowly, its propellers softly cutting the air, its engines muffled, its running lights out. We could see it only as a black cigar against the slightly lighter sky. Had it been day, though, we could have seen the Imperial German insignia along her gas bag, the flag of Franz VI that she flew. But that's the way it had been planned. Kar-hinter's plan.

  The airship touched ground a few yards from the river, and men leaped out, driving pegs into the wet earth, hooking cables to them. Other men moved to the rear of the gondola, opened huge cargo doors, slid ramps to the earth, began rolling out a huge squashed sphere.

  All of us, except for Countess Sally von Heinen and her unconscious husband, were familiar with the shape of a skudder, though it must have appeared very alien to her: a huge glasslike bubble mounted on a small, dark base, a craft never designed to move in space, only across the Lines of time.

  "Mathers?" a voice called from the group of men who now stood around the skudder.

  "Natl," I answered in Shangalis.

  "The skudder's ready. Want me to warm her up?" the man asked in the same language.

  I glanced at Kearns in the rain and darkness. He nodded.

  "Yes," I called.

  "You're not Englishmen!" Sally von Heinen said, sudden horror in her voice. Maybe she was used to violence, I thought, but not to being kidnapped by men who spoke a language that was not of her world.

  "We're not," I said. "Go on. Get in." I pointed her toward the skudder.

  In a few moments we were all inside the craft and I pulled the hatch closed behind me. The man outside yelled, "Good luck," and I yelled back my thanks.

  "Have you ever skudded before, Sir Gerald?" Tracy asked in English.

  "No," the injured British general said breathlessly.

  "Then brace yourself," Tracy said, laughing. "You're in for an experience."

  "Everybody ready?" Kearns asked harshly.

  "We're ready," I said, glancing over at the still-unconscious count.

  By this time it dawned on me that his wife had shown absolutely no concern over his condition, but then he had been in bed with another woman when we burst into the villa. And I remembered Kar-hinter's having said that theirs was a marriage of politics. It made a little more sense to me now. Virgin wife? I wondered. And thought that if she were, it was a terrible waste.

  Kearns' hands moved across the controls, making final adjustments, bringing the generators up to full potential, setting the destination indicators for about a dozen Lines to the East, one where gas and bacteriological warfare had nearly extinguished human life in Europe before the Kriths and Timeliners could enter to alter the course of that world's history.

  "Okay," Kearns said. "Here we go."

  An invisible hand came up and grabbed my genitals, jerking down, then snatching at my guts, moving up to stir my stomach with a lumpy club.

  Flicker!

  For an instant I saw lights in the direction of the villa and perhaps men moving there in this next-door world, but I wasn't sure.

  Flicker!

  Total darkness.

  Flicker!

  "It's far more interesting in the daytime," Tracy told Sir Gerald, who was too busy being sick to listen.

  Flicker!

  A dozen times that hand inside my abdomen jerked and pulled and twisted. Sir Gerald once muttered something I couldn't understand and Von Heinen groaned in his unconsciousness.

  Flicker!

  Then it all stopped, and I sat still for a minute trying not to be sick myself. Skudding sometimes got me that way too.

  The night was still as dark as ever, the same clouds lay over this world as lay over the one we had left behind us; the same rain fell; the same trees grew on the same riverbank a few yards away; the same villa stood on the rise above us -- or almost the same villa. The one in this world was not as well cared for as the other, inhabited only by rats and the bones of the very last Earl of Kent and his family who had died of a bitter, flesh-rotting disease as biological war swept across Europe.

  But it wasn't the villa I was looking for. It was rather a prefabricated hut that stood no more than a dozen yards beyond the villa, and beside it a craft that was a larger version of our own craft, but one designed to carry cargo as well as passengers.

  "Everybody out," Kearns said. The skudding didn't seem to bother his stomach.

  I rose to my feet, trying to pull Von Heinen erect. Kearns came back to help me.

  I don't know what it was that bothered me. I can't even now put my finger on it, but I had the strange, uneasy feeling that something was very wrong. Maybe it was the fact that no one had come out of the hut to greet us, but that shouldn't have bothered me. Maybe it was the fact that everything was too quiet, even for Here.
I'm not sure, but I know I felt something.