Trying to understand how somebody who could expect to live seventy years would take that sort of chance -- with a body the contemporary medicine men could heal only imperfectly or not at all -- how, in spite of that, they could take that first step out the door of the plane, helped me some in dealing with the trip through the Gate. Not that I ever understood why those people jumped: 20ths don't have the brains of a sow, that's well known.
But even they don't actually enjoy it. What they did was sublimate the universal fear of falling into another part of the brain: the part that laughs. Laughter is an interrupted defense mechanism. They'd interrupt their fear of falling so well they could pretend to themselves that jumping out of an airplane was fun.
With all that, I'm convinced that even the most experienced of them had to hesitate at the door. They might have done it so many times they no longer noticed it, but it was there.
It's the same way with me. Nobody watching would have seen me break stride as I came to the end of the bridge and stepped into the Gate. But that moment of gut-clutching fear was there.
The trip through the Gate is different every time. It is instantaneous, and it's plenty of time to go insane. It is a zone of simultaneity where I become, for a time too short to measure or remember and too long to endure, all the things that have ever been. I encounter myself in the Gate. I create myself, then create the universe and emerge into my creation. I fall downtime to the beginning of the universe and then bounce back to a time else when. That time turns out to be the dead past, come alive again, re-animated for me and the snatch team.
I could devote a billion words to the experience of stepping through the Gate and not come close to the actuality.
At the same time, what happened is that I stepped through. Simple. One foot in the dead future, the other in the living past (with my ass on the line: one cheek in the land of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the other in the Last Age -- or my face in the fifties and my fanny in Tomorrowland).
These two feet of mine were connected by legs. Yet they were some thousands of miles apart in space and billions of years apart in time.
One of the feet was not even my own, but that's neither here nor there.
I shall simply say I stepped through. It should be taken to mean I went through a terrifying ordeal that I had become used to, to the point that I managed to convince myself it was routine.
I stepped through the Gate.
I emerged in the lavatory of the Lockheed Constellation in 1955, and immediately had to duck as two members of the snatch team threw a screaming woman over my head. Her scream cut off when her head went through the Gate. It would finish in the far future and by then it would probably be a dilly. The situation was simply not going to make sense to the poor dear. Greetings! Your descendants are proud to welcome you to Utopia!
I stepped out of the lav as two more snatchers dragged a bulky man in a torn gray suit toward the door. He struggled feebly; probably stunned at low power. It didn't take long to see not much was going right with this snatch. For one thing, the passengers were rebelling.
Of course, we expect hysteria, eventually. No snatch is going to come off without some screaming and the involuntary release of a few pints of urine. If I got snatched, I'd probably piss, too.
But it struck me that the mayhem stage of this snatch had arrived ahead of schedule.
There were still too many conscious goats against a handful of snatchers.
It was easy to distinguish the snatch team members from the goats. The snatchers were all dressed like stewardesses. In 1955, on this airline, that meant pert little caps and skirts reaching halfway between knees and ankles and precarious, high-heeled shoes.
They also wore blood-red lipstick. They looked like vampires.
1955. I had to take their word for it. When you've been to as many times as I have the styles blur. They all look weird: But I had no reason to doubt the date. Outside, down below us in the world, cars were sprouting tail fins. Chuck Berry was recording Maybellene. Phil Silvers and Ed Sullivan were on the vidscreens, which were being called television sets.
Nashua would win the Preakness this year and the Brooklyn Dodgers would win the World Series. I could have been a rich woman in 1955 if I could have found a way to get a bet down. Tomorrow's newspapers, for instance: Constellation Crashes In Arizona Desert ...
Wanna bet? But this little section of 1955 was not a healthy place to be. Even without the chaos the snatch operation had become, this airplane did not have much flying time left.
I shook my head to clear it. Sometimes that works. I get vague for a few seconds after a trip through the Gate. I forced myself to concentrate on what needed doing this second, and the next, and the next ...
Jane Birmingham was hurrying down the aisle. I snagged her arm. Things were falling apart around her and I guess the last thing she needed was to have the boss show up to joggle her elbow.
"It's a mess back there," she said, gesturing to the curtain separating first-class from tourist. I heard shouts and screams of a struggle.
"We were shorthanded when we went in on them," Jane was still explaining. "Pinky discovered her gun was missing not too long after we took off. We tried to locate it quietly; didn't work. I had to start the snatch. I let Pinky look while we started caulking the folks up front." She looked away from me, then dragged her eyes back. "I know I shouldn't have done that, but -- "
I waved it away.
"We'll sort it out later," I said.
"I don't know what went wrong from there. Shorthanded, I guess. Plus, we were all on edge. When we faced them down a fight got going. Kate's down and out. Some big bastard got past -- "
"Never mind. Toss her out with the goats."
There was no way to tell for sure what started the brawl I'd been on snatches where the goats got out of hand. It's a surreal experience, pointing a weapon at a twentieth-century native and telling him what you're going to make him do. Some 20ths have no more sense of survival than a stalk of broccoli. They'll walk right into a gun. They don't believe death can happen to them, especially the young ones.
Then there are their odd political ideas. They are often obsessed with the explanation they 'deserve,' the things they have a 'right' to, the decent treatment we 'owe' them.
Very weird stuff. Me, I'll do anything somebody with a gun tells me to do, and say please and thank you. And kill him instantly if he gives me a chance.
"How many are still awake back there?" I asked.
"When I left, maybe twenty."
"Get 'em to work, quick. Where's Pinky?"
"Tearing up the seats in tourist."
I followed her back. Things had quieted a little. There were maybe a dozen passengers still awake, forty or fifty snoozing in uncomfortable positions. Lilly Rangoon and another woman whose name I couldn't recall were facing the conscious ones. who huddled in the back of the plane. I could smell their fear. The two snatchers were facing them, one on each side of the aisle, stunners held in two hands and steadied on seat backs.
"Okay, folks," Lilly bawled in a voice like a drill sergeant. "I want you to shut the fuck up. Calm down and listen! You, shithead, pipe down before I cram my foot up your ass sideways. Is that your wife, mister? You got two seconds to shut her fucking mouth before I blow you both away. One ... that's better.