At the Narrow Passage (15 page)

"I'm afraid that you have the advantage of me, sir," I said with the
same fake cordiality.
"Yes, in more ways than one," he said, his smile shifting to one of
satisfaction, "but please forgive me. I am called Mica."
"Are you in charge here?" I asked.
"Yes, in some respects I am," Mica answered, the cold, bitter smile
returning to his lips. "Why do you ask?"
"Just wondering."
Mica nodded to me, then turned to Sally.
"You must be exhausted, my dear," he said. "Go on to bed. You can fill
me in on the background tomorrow." Without waiting for her to answer,
Mica gestured to one of the men with him, who took Sally by the arm
and led her off through the trees beyond the hangar. From the look on
Sally's face the man was an old friend; she was home now, safe among
those she knew and trusted.
"Scoti," Mica said, "take Captain Mathers to his quarters. G'lendal can
check him, if that will satisfy her inquisitive urges, but I will wait
until after breakfast to talk with him." He looked at me again. "It has
been a very long day for us all, do yoń not agree, Captain Mathers?"
I nodded, but didn't speak. It was a rhetorical question anyway.
Pointing with a pistol toward a path that led into the woods in a
direction opposite from the one that Sally had taken, Scoti told me to
get moving. A second man followed close behind, a flashlight and another
pistol pointed at the back of my head.
"Do you know where we are, Mathers?" Scoti asked.
"I have a pretty good idea."
"And do you know what this place is?"
"Your base, I suppose."
"Our major base in this Paratime."
I walked on, waiting for him to say something more, but apparently he
had decided that there was little point in talking about it now. Time
for that later, maybe.
"Take the next path to your right," Scoti said after a while.
In the darkness I could hardly see the path until I was on it, but Scoti
had apparently known where it was long before we neared it. I had the
feeling that Scoti knew his way around here pretty well -- and that I
would be a damned fool if I thought I could escape from him in the dark.
"Okay, hold it," Scoti said.
I stopped, looked in front of me. The man with the flashlight
stepped around Scoti and me and illuminated a small structure in the
darkness. It was a concrete cube, perhaps four feet high, concealed
in clumps of bushes and trees that grew high above it, dark, heavy,
towering long-leaf pines. In the side of the concrete structure was a
metal door. The flashlightman opened the door by pressing his hand in
a shiny spot and stood back, waiting.
"In," Scoti said, gesturing with his pistol as the door opened.
Ducking down, almost on my hands and knees, I entered the dark opening
that immediately became lighted as my presence triggered some kind of
mechanism. A staircase led downward from the door to a landing fifteen
or so feet below. Beyond the landing I could see nothing.
"Go on," Scoti said, "but not too fast."
I went down the stairs, straightening up as soon as the ceiling got to
a decent height, and at the bottom waited for Scoti and the other man.
Now I was standing at one end of a pale-green corridor that extended
as far as I could see, finally dwindling in the distance to a vanishing
point. Every few feet a bluish-white light burned in the ceiling, more
than sufficient to illuminate the corridor. Off in the distance I heard
or felt the operation of machinery, but what kind I could not even guess.
There was a door every fifteen or twenty feet on both the right and left,
each carefully labeled with characters of an alphabet that I had never
before come across in all my cross-Line travels, and I was struck again
by the fact that I was dealing with people whose existence was not even
suspected by Timeliners and Kriths. If I ever got out of it, wouldn't
I have a report to turn in!
"Move," Scoti said, "straight ahead."
Since Scoti's gun looked as mean and ugly as ever, and since my head
still hurt like hell and since I didn't know what else to do anyway,
I moved as I was told, down the corridor to whatever it was that Scoti
and Mica had in mind for me.
At regular intervals, which I guessed to be about a hundred feet apart,
other corridors branched off this one to the right and left at 90 degrees.
These other corridors were painted the same pale, hospital green and
seemed to extend to the underground horizon. This was an enormous place
here under the earth.
When we came to the third intersection, Scoti told me to turn left and
keep going. I did, counting my paces as I walked.
At first we seemed to be the only ones in the vast, subterranean burrow,
but when we had gone a hundred feet or so down the branch tunnel, a door
opened before us. A pale blond young man stepped out, nodded to Scoti and
the other man, and walked down the corridor in the direction from which we
had just come. The fact that he was stark naked except for a wide green
belt and a cap of the same color on his head aroused no comment from my
captors and seemed to cause the young man no embarrassment. I shrugged.
We stopped for traffic at the next intersection. A man and a woman, both
blacks, were coming down the corridor that crossed ours. They wore short,
white, sleeveless gowns that reached to their knees. They stopped when
they saw us, raised their hands in greeting.
"Good morning, Sol-Jodala," Scoti said.
"Good morning to you, Scoti, and to you, Nardi," the man said with a
clipped accent that sounded British but wasn't. "A prisoner?"
"Yes," my captor said. "A Krithian Timeliner working with the British."
"Not the man who kidnapped Sally and the count?" the woman asked,
her voice almost identical to the man's.
They all seemed to act as if I weren't there or at least couldn't
understand them even though they were speaking English.
"The same," Scoti answered.
The two peered at me for a moment with an animal-in-the-zoo-behind-bars
look, then seemed to realize that I was a human being who was aware of
them, nodded abruptly and turned back to Scoti.
"How is Sally?" the man asked.
"The poor girl's exhausted," he said, "but other than that she's okay.
A few hours' rest will fix her up."
"We just looked in on the count," the woman said. "We believe that he will
pull through. The crisis seems to be past."
"I'm glad to hear that," Scoti replied.
"Excuse us, please," the man said. "Morning meditations, you know."
Again that pseudo-British accent, but it seemed natural.
"Of course," Scoti said. "Good day, Sol-Jodala."
"Good day," they answered together.
As they turned and started down the corridor, the oddness of it all struck
me. The whole time they had not looked at each other or even seemed to
recognize the existence of each other, yet they had alternated in speaking,
first one, then the other, and now as they walked away I saw that their
steps, the swinging of their arms, every motion was perfectly synchronized.
Odd, I thought.
"Let's go," Scoti said. "It's not much farther."
Two intersections or so later we finally stopped. The door before which
Scoti told me to halt was no different from any of the others and labeled
in the same unintelligible alphabet.
Scoti fished a small metal cylinder out of his pocket, peered at one end
of it while he twisted a movable band, then seemed to be satisfied and
pressed the cylinder against a small white disk on the door. The door
hummed and began to swing open.
For half an instant I had my chance. When Scoti stepped back to allow
the door to open, it came between us. I stood more beside than in front
of the other man and he was watching the door, not me, his gun lax in
his hand. Augmentation or no, I'm sure that I could have grabbed the
gun from him, shot Scoti before he realized what was happening and then
the second man. But what if I did? Killing or escaping from these two
just wouldn't have done me a whole hell of a lot of good. In less time
than it took to think of it, I decided to play along with my original
plan. I'd do as they said and pretend to accept whatever they wanted
me to accept, and with my Krithian training and conditioning I believed
that I could fool any lie-detection equipment anyone ever made or ever
would make. Okay. Play it safe.
"In," Scoti said to me. Then to the other man, "Nardi, you keep an eye
on him. I'll go tell G'lendal he's here, and then I'm going to get some
rest. I don't think I've slept in three days."
To my surprise Nardi spoke. I had almost come to think he was mute.
"Okay," he said. "You look beat."
"I am," Scoti said. "See you later." Then he turned to me. "Watch it,
Mathers. I know you're no fool, but don't even think about acting
like one."
"Thanks for the advice," I said and stepped through the open doorway,
wondering just what was waiting for me inside.
The room was not small and ill-lighted and fitted out with torture devices
as I had expected. Just the opposite. The room was a good twenty by twenty
feet, pleasant and comfortable-looking. The furniture consisted of a bed,
two easy chairs, a sofa, two unusual-looking lamps, two low tables,
three landscapes on the wall, and a device that looked like some kind
of intercom. Off to the left a door opened into what appeared to be a
bathroom and another door led into a closet. A rather comfortable dungeon,
I thought.
"Sit down, Mathers," Nardi said, gesturing toward the chairs and
sofa. "Just take a load off your feet until G'lendal gets here."
I did as he said, realizing that despite the sleep I had got in the
skudder, I was still pretty well worn out.
"You wouldn't have a cigarette on you, would you?" I asked.
Nardi, still standing in the center of the room, reached into his breast
pocket, pulled out a partially crumpled pack of cigarettes, Players,
local origin, and a book of matches. He tossed them on the sofa beside me.
"Go ahead," he said.
"Thanks. You want one?"
"No," he answered, sitting down on the bed, keeping his eyes on me.
"Who's this G'lendal, anyway?" I asked.
"She's our chief interrogator."
"Interrogator?"
Nardi smiled. "Oh, don't worry. We don't use rubber hoses and thumbscrews.
She'll just ask you a few questions and see how you react to them."
"And if I don't react right?"
"Look, fella, Scoti didn't bring you here to torture you. Tomorrow,
I guess, Mica will explain the whole setup to you. If you listen to
reason and if G'lendal believes you, then you'll probably be put on
probation. If not . . . well, if you're too damned hardheaded to see the
truth when it's shown to you, that's your tough luck." He paused.
"But as for right now all G'lendal's going to do is feel you out."
On the table beside the sofa where I sat was an ashtray and three worn
books stacked on top of each other. I picked them up and glanced at their
paper covers. The top one showed the picture of a Krith, a particularly
ugly and unpleasant-looking Kirth at that, and the book's title was
The Greatest Lie
, by Martin Latham, subtitled
How Uncounted Human Beings
Have Been Duped by the Kirths into Assisting Them in Their Conquest of
Paratime
. The back cover, embellished with a full-length portrait of a
naked Krith standing over a huddled man, went on to say something like:
"Here, for the first time in a single volume, is Martin Latham's full
story of the Krithian plot to conquer humanity. How their lies are created
and how men are led to believe them. How Krithian lies are reinforced
by distortions of reality. What some men will do in the name of Krithian
domination . . ." and so on like that.
The second book was smaller than the first and not as badly worn. On its
cover were only four words in letters at least an inch and a half high:
What Is a Krith?
Good question. I'd like to know the answer to that one myself.
The final volume showed a full-color holograph of a beautiful nude
woman standing against a background of Eden-like surroundings. It was
called
Paradise in Paratime
and was subtitled
Rewards for the Ultimate
Treason
.
Propaganda, all of it. And I realized that I was just beginning to
encounter it. These people obviously believed, or wanted to believe, that
the Kriths -- and we Timeliners too -- were a menace, and I knew that
I was going to be pelted with it until I yielded or at least appeared
to yield. I supposed that reading these books would be a part of my
indoctrination. Okay, I'd read them.
Even though the cover of
Paradise in Paratime
intrigued me the most,
I put it aside for
The Greatest Lie
. That one looked like the chief
propaganda work -- and as I later found out it was virtually the bible
of the Paratimers -- so I figured I'd better read it first and try to
get my own lies in order.
I hadn't got beyond the title page when the door opened.
G'lendal, too, was a very pleasant surprise. I had expected a middle-aged,
stocky, hard-faced policewoman type. She was anything but that.
At least twenty years old, but certainly no older than twenty-five,
G'lendal was a diminutive ebony statue of Aphrodite straight from one
of the more sensual cults of my own Line. About five feet tall, skin
the color of black satin, hair long and black as interstellar space, a
figure only partially hidden by the shimmering gown she wore, a figure
whose proportions would have been impressive on a woman a foot taller
than she was.
God, she's beautiful, I thought. Maybe the most beautiful woman I've
ever seen in my life.
In her hand she carried a black case about the size and shape of a large
overnight case.
"Good morning, Nardi," she said smiling.
"Hello, G'lendal," he replied, stumbling over his words as if he were
as stunned by her as I was. "This is Eric Mathers."
I stood up.
"Good morning, Eric Mathers," she said, smiling, setting the case on the
floor beside one of the chairs. "That's not your real name, is it?"
There was no trace of an accent in the American English she spoke.
"No," I said as she sat down in the chair and I returned to the sofa.
"That's a name the Kriths gave you," she said. "There aren't any Kriths
here. You can be honest with me. In fact, you must."
I looked at her for a long while without speaking.