"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 us 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.
But the rifles had never arrived, for some reason that was never explained
to me. The Krithian weapons supervisor Kar-hinter seldom took the time
to explain anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. And we who were
supposed to test the rifles in combat, we two Timeliner officers leading
a company of American colonials, had sat in our dugout and waited and
killed time and told dirty stories and played cards and drank gin when
we could get it and shivered through the winter.
Now it seemed that the Kriths had given up playing this particular
game with us and were going to pull us out of here and give us another
assignment. I wondered whether it would be in this Timeline.
In a way I hoped it would be in another Line. I'd lost the little finger
and part of the ring finger of my left hand during a fracas the autumn
before, and I would have liked to have an opportunity to get new ones
grafted on. But you can't do things like that in a Timeline as backward
as this one was.
At last I finished with my face and splashed away the remaining soap,
inspected myself for cuts, found that I had been luckier than usual and
hadn't cut myself -- I never had got used to shaving with a razor. I dried
my face on a more or less clean towel Tracy had thrown on my bunk and
drank about half the steaming cup of tea, scalding my tongue.
"How soon's the colonel supposed to be here?" I asked.
"Don't know. Anytime, I suppose."
"No time for breakfast?"
"I doubt it."
I shrugged and then found my jacket, a tight-fitting woolen garment
of the same sickening green as the pants, distinguished only by the
captain's bars on its collar.
"Hand me my pistol, will you, Tracy?" I asked as I buttoned my jacket.
Taking the pistol belt from the peg where it hung, Tracy handed it to me.
It was an awkward belt to wear and the pistol in the holster was big and
ugly and efficient. The seven-shot, .62 caliber Harling revolver was
the standard sidearm for Brittish officers There and Then, and it was
a damned big pistol. I had grown to like the feel of it on my hip and
hoped that whatever our next assignment was, I would be allowed to carry
it. A .62 caliber slug is big and messy, especially when propelled by
the 200 grains of powder in the standard issue cartridge. It certainly
wasn't a sporting weapon. It had been designed to do just one thing --
kill men, and that it did very well.
"How do I look?" I asked Tracy.
"Halfway human."
"That's an improvement, I take it?"
Tracy nodded.
"Any more tea?" I asked.
"Yes, I think so. Want me to look?"
"No. I'll . . ."
"'Tention!"
The voice was Tracy's. He was sitting so that he could see the dugout's
"door" and could see the figure who was shoving the blanket aside and
stepping into the man-made cave.
As I snapped to my feet and turned, I saw him too. Colonel Woods.
"As you were," Woods said gruffly.
I relaxed, said, "Good morning, sir."
"Morning, Mathers, Tracy," the colonel replied in the clipped fashion
that I suppose was natural to him.
Woods held the flap open until the other two men accompanying him came into
the dugout. As I expected, one of them wore captain's bars and the other
was a lieutenant. Our replacements.
Colonel Woods quickly made the introductions. The captain was a tall,
slender Floridian named David Walters. The lieutenant was a shorter,
stockier man named Carl Boland. He was a Virginian, the same as I was
supposed to be.
"Spot of tea, Colonel?" Tracy asked once the three newcomers had seated
themselves at the table -- in the three chairs. I guessed that left the
box for me and Tracy would just have to stand.
"No. Just had a cup," Woods answered. "No time, anyway. Must get back
to headquarters."
Walters and Boland accepted Tracy's offer, and he began to rummage around
for two fairly clean cups.
"Sorry to come in on you so abruptly, Mathers," Colonel Woods went on
to say. "Orders y'know."
"Yes, sir. Of course."
"You and Tracy will have till noon to get your gear together and introduce
Walters and Boland to your men. A signaler will come then to accompany you
to brigade headquarters."
"Brigade, sir?" I asked.
Woods nodded, shrugged, then pulled a mimeographed sheet of paper from
his pocket and handed it to me. "Orders just came round this morning."
The orders were quite explicit. We were relieved of our commands as of
0900 and were to report to brigade at 1300.
"Brigade is sending a man round for you," Woods said. "Understand that
HQ's been moved or some such. You'll have to wait for him."
"Yes, sir." Odd, I thought. Were we going to brigade at all? Probably not,
but Woods wouldn't know that. He would never really know what became of us.
I knew for a fact that Woods wasn't a Timeliner; he was exactly what he
was supposed to be. He knew nothing, suspected nothing of the existence
of the Kriths or of the fact that men from other universes were here
helping him and his British Empire wage war against the Holy Romans.
Nor did either Walters or Boland seem to be other than what they claimed.
They gave no indications, and we Timeliners have a thousand secret ways
of letting other Timeliners know of our presence.
No, it appeared that the Kriths had given up on this one rather minor
aspect of their master plan for this Line. They had something else in
mind for Tracy and me. We'd learn what that was soon enough, I suspected.
"Well, must be shoving off," Woods said abruptly, rising. He offered his
hand to me. "Been nice knowing you, Mathers, Tracy. You'll both get good
reports from me."
"Thank you, sir," I said, shaking his hand.
After briefly clasping Tracy's hand, Woods turned, ducked out under the
flap that covered the dugout's door and vanished.
I turned back to my replacement.
"Well, Walters," I asked, "ready for me to show you around a bit?"
3
Kearns
Long before noon I had completed all the introductions, said all my
good-byes, and packed what gear I had.
After a trip to the latrine, Tracy and I sat down on the bunks that had,
a few hours before, been ours, and waited for the man to come who was to
lead us to "brigade headquarters," whatever that might be this time.
Walters and Boland, after saying their good-byes to us, had gone to
mess, so Tracy and I were alone when the sergeant came into the dugout,
snapped to attention and saluted.
"Captain Mathers, sir?" he asked.
I nodded. "This is Lieutenant Tracy."
"I'm Sergeant Kearns, sir." Then he paused, his face relaxing. "Are we
alone?"
"Yes, we are."
As I answered, Kearns deliberately placed the tip of his right thumb
against the tip of his right ring finger. It was one of
our
signals.
I replied by performing the same gesture with my left hand, though since
most of my left ring finger was missing, I used the middle one. Tracy
signaled with a similar gesture.
"
Ca kasser a Shangalis?
" Kearns asked, which loosely translated means:
"With your permission, I shall speak in Shangalis." It was actually an
abbreviated form of the complete sentence "
Retam ca kasser a rir nir
paredispo Shangalis?
"
"
Swen ro
," I replied.
The man who had called himself Kearns smiled, sat down on one of the
vacant bunks and dug into his pocket for a cigarette.
"You don't mind if I smoke, do you?" he asked, still speaking Shangalis.
"No, not at all," I replied in the same language, the language that some
believe to be the native tongue of the Kriths; I doubt it, though. There
are too many Indo-European roots in the language, too many
human
words.
It's probably something the Kriths picked up far to the Temporal East and
carried with them as they moved West. At least it looks that way to me,
but I'm certainly no language expert. I'm just a hired gun, but men who
know more about such things than I do have come up with that theory,
and since the Kriths have never denied it, I assume that it might well
be true.
"Care for a smoke?" Kearns asked, offering the pack to me.
"Might as well," I answered, accepting the offered pack and knocking one
of the brown-paper cylinders out into my hand.
Then I looked up abruptly, peering into Kearns' eyes. It wasn't a
local
brand, and by local I mean from this universe. It was a Toltec-Line weed,
from a long way East.
"I assure you that it's okay, Mathers," Kearns said suddenly, when he
realized that I was staring at him. "I just got in this morning, and I'm
supposed to be leaving as soon as I take you to the meeting place. Only
you two will see them."
I suppose that it was none of my business, Kearns' having brought in
Outtime cigarettes. That wasn't my responsibility. The Kriths were
running the show, and if they wanted to let Kearns do it, then it was
their business. I told myself to forget it.
While I passed the pack on to Tracy and then lit my own cigarette, I took
the time to study unobtrusively this man who had come to take us to our
meeting with the Kriths. He was tall and slender, what they called wiry
in build, though quite strong-looking. He was rather dark, but there
seemed to be enough north European blood in his veins to prevent anyone
from wondering whether he really belonged in the British Army. And then
there were some far more exotic types fighting in the trenches of France
under the Union Jack: Amerinds from the Indian Nations of middle North
America; dark-skinned Punjabis from East India; South Sea Islanders
from the Polynesian Colonies and the Aussie Commonwealth; and a host
of others. No, Kearns, whatever he was other than European, would go
unnoticed among the motley crew that fought for the British Empire.
His face was made of sharp angles, craggy planes like a half-finished
piece of sculpture, and bore what appeared to be the scars of battles
fought a long, long When from Here and Now. Still, there was something
more to that face than just its simple ugliness, something strange and
remote, something that seemed even more remote than just the cultural
differences between him and me, though I could not guess from what Line
he had originally come. I can't say that I instantly disliked the man,
but there was something about him that put me on edge, and it was not
until a very long time afterward that I even began to have an inkling
of what it was.
"What's this all about, Kearns?" I asked, still speaking Shangalis.
"Damned if I know," he answered. "They just told me to come in and get
you two."
"Where are we going?" I asked. "I mean, where are you supposed to take us?"
"The village a ways back," he said. "If you're both ready, we can go now."
"I suppose I am. Tracy?"
"Righto."
"Sorry," Kearns said as he rose to his feet, "but you'll have to carry
your own gear. I wasn't allowed to bring anyone else to help."
"Okay," I said, hefting the haversack that carried all my worldly
possessions, fifty pounds of nothing very much. A Timeliner learns to
get along with very little more than himself and the clothes on his
back. "Let's go."