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  I lowered Von Heinen to the wet ground, pulled the Harling from its holster, told his wife to stay at his side and went up to open the nearest doors.

  At first I thought the cavernous stables were empty, but farther down I found three motorcars, all decked out with the flags of Von Heinen's rank. A Feldmarschall, he was. And he had come to the villa in style, though I was afraid that he wouldn't leave it in the same fashion. Not this time at least.

  Going back to where the woman stood beside the unconscious man, I slipped the pistol back into its holster, jerked him up, pulled him across my shoulder, took a deep breath, and said, "Go on. Get in the first car."

  With resignation on her pretty face the young countess preceded me along the front of the stable to where the cars were parked.

  "Can you drive?" I asked.

  "No."

  "I don't believe you," I said. "Get in front. Are the keys in it? Don't lie again."

  "Yes, they are."

  I dumped Von Heinen in the back seat, climbed in beside him.

  "Okay, let's go."

  The motorcar started at once, which was a pleasant surprise, considering the state of the art of motorcars in this Line.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "Shut it off."

  She did as I ordered while I jumped out of the car, grabbed up a large tarpaulin that lay on the stable floor a few feet from where the car was parked.

  "Now let's go."

  The motor started again, though it coughed a couple of times first. She shifted into gear and slowly pulled out of the stable into the driveway that led back around the villa's main house.

  "Head toward Beaugency for the moment," I said, and then had the strangest feeling that I was being watched. I peered back over my shoulder out of the car's rear window, and for a moment I thought I saw a figure standing in the stable, back in the deepest part of the shadow. It seemed to be a man, but beyond that I could tell nothing about him. I reached for the Harling, but when I looked again, I could see nothing. The figure, if it had ever been there, was gone now. Perhaps it was just my fatigued mind playing tricks on me. I wasn't sure.

  "What is it?" Countess von Heinen asked.

  "Nothing. Go on. Drive slowly." I forced myself to try to forget about the figure, but I still felt uneasy about it, though it was a strange sort of unease I can't quite define. "Be careful," I went on, "and don't do anything foolish. You've only got a few inches of stuffing between you and the barrel of this pistol. I'd hate to make a big hole in your lovely back."

  "I know," she said slowly. "I'll do as you say."

  "I'm sure you will."

  We passed the main house where Kearns had casually dumped the bodies of the two sentries who had once occupied the staff car he now drove. I wondered where he was, and I didn't mourn the dead Imperials. If I were going to mourn anyone, it would be Sir Gerald Asbury and Land, who had been cut apart by a submachine gun inside that big house, and Starne, who lay dead in another universe near Sir Gerald, and a British sergeant and three other men dead in the river and men who . . . Hell! I didn't have time to mourn anyone. Not yet. I had to stay alive now and try somehow to get Von Heinen back across the British lines to Kar-hinter.

  We had no more than hit the main highway outside the villa's grounds when I saw Imperial German troop movements in the direction of the city. Battered veterans of last night's fighting, moving back to regroup and refit and wait for replacements. They looked tired, but they didn't look beaten.

  "Turn around," I ordered.

  "Here?"

  "Now!"

  She slowed the car, made a U-turn in the road and headed north.

  "The first road you come to off to your left, take it."

  "Where are we going?"

  "How the hell should I know?"

  10

  Contact and Report

  For most of the morning we traveled west in the falling rain, the feeble windshield wipers hardly allowing Sally vision to drive. We stayed on back roads, little more than muddy ruts between farm lands that had lain fallow as war swept back and forth across this part of France. The ruins of a village here and there, a pile of cold embers that had once been a house, a series of bomb and shell craters and sodden, abandoned trenches, and little else. It was my intention to stay far enough north of the current German lines to avoid much investigation.

  Only once were we stopped by a roadblock: two gaunt, tired soldiers in Imperial gray, soaked to the skin by the night-long rain, manning a barricade across what once might have been a paved road, but was now hardly more than a muddy path.

  "Go slow," I told my driver, wondering what the sentries would think of a lone woman dressed in a robe driving an Imperial staff car that flew the banner of a Feldmarschall. We'd see. "Smile and wink at them, but don't let them look too closely in the back seat. And remember, if anything goes wrong, neither you nor your husband will live to talk about it."

  "I understand," Sally replied coldly.

  Then I pulled the tarp over the still unconscious Von Heinen and myself, pushed the pistol against the back of the driver's seat and waited, the air under the tarp hot and damp, smelling of hay and horseshit.

  "Halt, bitte," I heard a distant voice say. It may have had an Austrian accent; I wasn't sure.

  "Guten Morgen, Zugsführer," Sally von Heinen answered.

  "Guten Morgen, Fräulein," the Imperial sergeant replied.

  In German, she asked him to let her pass, please. She was really in a great hurry. Her husband was expecting her by one o'clock this afternoon.

  "Wie heissen Sie, bitte?" the sergeant asked politely.

  "Gräfin von Heinen," Sally answered simply. She was playing it straight. She knew she had to.

  "Graf von Heinen! Möge er lange leben!," the sergeant said patriotically. "Jawohl! Vorwärts, bitte, gnadige Frau."

  "Danke," Sally said, forcing friendliness I suspected.

  And that's all there was to it.

  As we pulled away from the sentry post I began making plans. Before too much longer we would have to find a place to hide the car, a place of comparative safety where I could leave the count and his wife for a few minutes and try to contact Kar-hinter and bring him up to date. He was going to have to get in and pick us up soon, or the whole thing would have been so much wasted effort and wasted British blood.

  That much settled in my mind, I turned my attention back to Sally and tried to get her to talk, but she was unwilling to speak to a man who had kidnapped her, shot her husband and God-alone-knew how many other Germans who were her allies.

  At last I sat back in the rear seat, checked Von Heinen's bandage, wondered how long he would last, pulled a soggy cigarette from an inside pocket, lit it, felt my bladder demanding to be emptied, wondered how much longer I could stay awake, and looked across Sally's shoulder at the ravaged French countryside.

  And I thought about the world in which I now found myself, a world very, very remote from the one in which I had been born.

  As I said before, I am from a Europo-Macedonian Line and this one was a Romano-British Line, Anglo-European Subsector; to be exact RTGB-307. Our Timelines, Sally von Heinen's and mine, had split a long, long time ago. In my world Alexander III of Macedonia, called "the Great," had created the first and greatest world empire, an empire that before his death at the age of sixty-one had spanned all the civilized world and had survived its founder by more than a thousand years.

  In the world of Sally Beall von Heinen, Alexander had died young and his empire had never really come into being. In her world the Greeks had gradually declined in power and influence, leaving only a great cultural heritage. A little Italian village on the Tiber River had picked up the pieces of the Greek world, adding a few ideas of their own, and from that built an empire, one not so great as my Alexander's had been, or quite so enduring, but a great one nevertheless.

  The empire of this city called Rome flourished and grew, a new religion called Christianity had sprung up, the empire had fallen -- ever read a f
ellow named Gibbon? -- and the Western world slowly devolved into barbarism.

  I guess we Greeks never really had a chance without Alexander. Funny.

  Anyhow, ten centuries or so after the collapse of Rome, the nations of Europe had formed and Western civilization reached a peak it had not known for a thousand years; ships sailed from Europe to India, China, Nippon, and eventually -- there was an explorer named Columbus in these Lines -- the two unknown continents to the west; here they're called North and South America.

  Nations rose and fell; empires were carved out of the New World and the Old.

  By about the beginning of the eighteenth century after the birth of the Jewish Messiah they call Christ, Europe consisted of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, and assorted nations of lesser importance. Britain, France, and Spain had come out as the greatest of the European colonial powers, though by this time Spain was already in decline and France was no real match for England on the high seas.

  Britain took most of France's North American colonies away after establishing some of its own, battled with Spain, but never really got too much of a foothold in South America, looked east to China, India and south to Africa.

  There is a crucial historical period in the Anglo-European and Anglo-American Subsectors in the latter years of the eighteenth century, local time. That was when the American colonists attempted to throw off what they called British Imperialism, for Britain was then the center of a burgeoning empire, threatening to surpass anything this world had ever seen before.

  In many Lines the North Americans succeeded and the United States of America -- as it is called in most Lines -- was born. In many others they failed. This was one in which they had failed, Sally's world.

  By 1775 the American Rebellion was in full swing in Sally's world, and for a while it also seemed possible that the American rebels could beat the British and gain the independence they wanted. And they probably would have, in her world, had it not been for a certain Major Patrick Ferguson, a British officer, who invented a new kind of weapon -- one that loaded from the breech, rather than from the muzzle. It was a rather crude weapon at first, and for a while it seemed that Ferguson would get no help from the British lords -- but in one of those curious twists of history that create the Lines of Time, aid was given him, resources were put at his disposal, and Ferguson went on to develop his breechloader.

  By late 1780 the weapon was perfected, even beyond Ferguson's earlier dreams, a weapon with a rifled bore that could fire faster and more accurately than anything anyone had ever used before. It was a gun that could put the American rebel marksmen to shame. And it did.

  By the summer of 1781 shiploads of the new Ferguson breechloaders were crossing the Atlantic, with men trained to use them. For once the innate conservatism of the generals was broken, and the bloody art of warfare leaped forward a hundred years.

  In the next two years the Americans were on the run, their foremost leaders dead; Washington, a hero who made a valiant last stand at Yorktown, had died as he had lived. Half the American Congress was captured, tried for treason, hanged in the streets of Philadelphia.

  Of the American generals only Anthony Wayne, "Mad Anthony," survived, to lead his battered, decimated troops across the Appalachians, where he held out for two more long, bloody years before he was finally pinned against the western Virginia hills and shot as a traitor, still cursing the British with his infamous eyes.

  With the death of Mad Anthony Wayne the American cause collapsed, and Britain was again the supreme ruler of North America east of the Appalachians.

  France, which had lent aid to the American rebels, feared an invasion by the British, but the lords in London, worn out by the warm America, let the French peasants punish the government.

  The Peasants' Rebellion in France might have succeeded, very nearly did succeed, and failed only because the British, seeing that they had much to gain by supporting the French monarchy, finally came to the aid of the embattled Louis XVI, and with the still-further improved Ferguson breechloaders the redcoats shot down the French rebels as they had shot down the American rebels.

  Its continental position secure with the first years of the 1800's, the crown sitting firmly on the head of the King of England, Parliament subdued and reduced in power, Britain went on to expand its holdings in North America, sweeping as far west as the Mississippi River and down into Mexico to the isthmus of Panama. Indochina was British, as were North Africa, South Africa, and the islands of the Pacific. Britain was supreme on land and sea.

  About this time, following years of decline, the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by Franz III, found a rebirth, a growth in wealth and importance on the continent of Europe as the Germans and their kindred finally united under their emperor. The specter of republicanism, which had haunted both Britain and France for so long, never bothered the Holy Roman Emperor. Republicanism was a dead issue in this world -- the American Rebellion and the Peasants' Rebellion in France had proved that.

  By the end of the nineteenth century most of the world was divided between four empires -- British, Spanish, Holy Roman and Nipponese -- and so it was into the twentieth -- and the final clash between the British Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, in which I was now embroiled.

  Well, I'm no historian, despite the ambitions of my youth. My facts and places and dates may be a bit confused, and I admit that even what I have told you is very sketchy, but basically that is how the world I was in had come to be the way it was.

  By noon, fatigue and the pain in my side were beginning to get the better of me. I knew that I could not go much farther without some rest, and I knew that I needed to talk with Kar-hinter.

  At last, miles from any village or even any farm, I ordered Sally to pull off the road, drive back along a cow-path as far as she could get the car and stop.

  It had finally stopped raining by now, though as yet we hadn't seen the sun. Still the day was getting quite warm.

  "What are you going to do now?" Sally asked as she climbed out of the car.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it of the fog that filled it, the cotton that seemed to be stuffed behind my eyes.

  "Are you going to shoot us and bury us here?" she asked.

  "Don't be stupid!"

  "What's stupid about that?" she asked, standing outside the car, her hands on her hips, the robe she wore somehow making her look smaller than she was, a child dressed up in mommy's clothing. "You'll never get us to wherever you were trying to take us. So if you're going to save your own neck, you're going to have to kill us and go on without us."

  "I'm not planning on that."

  "Then what are you going to do?"

  "Arrange for someone to pick us up," I told her sharply. "Now you untie those lengths of rope from the tarp in the back seat of the car." When she did not move, I made a motion toward the pistol in my holster and said, "Go on!"

  The girl went back to the car, and I stood there watching her, almost admiring her, thinking that she reminded me a little of Kristin or the way Kristin would have been if she had lived to be Sally's age. She had only been seventeen when she died. I tried not to think about her.

  Sally pulled the tarp out, untied several lengths of rope, and brought them to me. She turned around, placed her hands behind her back, and waited silently while I tied them.

  "Sit down," I told her, then knelt and tied her feet. "I'm going to have to gag you, y'know."

  "I know. Don't tell me you're sorry. I don't want to hear it."

  "Okay. Look, that robe you've got on, well, it's probably going to get warmer this afternoon. You'll be miserable if you leave it on."

  "You want me naked, is that it?"

  "I don't give a damn what you've got on," I said angrily. "I was just thinking about your comfort."

  "Thanks!"

  "Look, you've got that gown on under it. That's something."

  "Not much." She paused. "Hell, take it off. You can rape me with the robe on if that's what you're aft
er."

  "I'm not going to rape you."

  "Why not?"

  "Oh, shit, woman!" Then I paused, looked at her, laughed. "I'm too damned tired, for one thing."

  I knelt beside her, untied the rope, waited until she had unbuttoned the robe, and helped her slip it off. Then I retied her hands, carefully avoiding looking at her. She had the kind of body that was hard not to look at.

  Then I took a fairly clean handkerchief from my pocket, knotted it, slipped the knot into her mouth, and tied it in place with another length of rope. Finally I pulled her back to where she could lean against a tree in what looked like a fairly comfortable position.