Whatever had happened while they were all out cold, Doc's madness had deserted him and he spoke clearly and intelligently.
"They started here about a hundred years back, trying to transmit matter. They began with a pair of small metal balls. Light gray metal balls. They got them to travel a few centimeters. And they went on from there."
While he listened, Ryan moved around the room. The walls were certainly a changed color and the air tasted different. Not flat and dead as in the Redoubt. Was all this possible? Had the fog been a luci-gas? Was this all some chem dream?
"They wanted to use it for military purposes. But the big war stopped that good. By then they'd set up a network of these Redoubts, each with gates. Send and receive, and some big mistakes. Horrible things did happen."
He stopped as though his mind was lodging on unbearable memories. Ryan reached to open the door, but Doc waved a hand to stop him.
"Not yet. Nearly done. Gates can be set as this one was. But all codes are now lost, lost forever. So it's a gamble whereand whenyou get out."
"But... some of these gates must have been destroyed in the fighting," said Ryan. "What would have happened if the controls had been set for one of those? Then what?"
"Most in the wilderness areas were destroyed. As to your question, I suppose that possibility represents the final frontier!"
And he laughed.
"You crazy bastard," spat Hun, moving toward him with her fist clenched.
"Leave him be," ordered Ryan, stopping her.
"Let's go see where we are."
"I am obliged, Mr. Cawdor," Doc said, relapsing once more into the archaic way of speaking. "Most of all I would dislike having to strike a lady. Next I would dislike being struck by one."
The door opened easily.
Opened onto a room of the same scale as the one back at the Redoubt. Any of Ryan's doubts were dispelled when he saw a table knocked over on its side and two of the shelves slipping lopsidedly. A long crack ran down the wall, deep enough to insert a hand.
In the next room, the consoles whirred and lights danced, but there was an undertone of grinding and Ryan could smell a frail scent of smoldering. Of a fire that slumbered somewhere within the machinery that surrounded them. He could see all eight of his group reflected in the smeared metal of the door that he knew would open on a blank passage. To the right of it there was a green lever in the down position, with the word Closed printed beneath it.
Ryan grasped the lever and pushed it up to the Open position. It moved easily, as though it swam in a greased slot. For a moment nothing happened, then the grinding of gears, and then the door began to slide back.
Everyone yelled at once.
The moment that the thin sheet of filthy water came gushing through the widening crack at the edge of the door, the shouting began. Water immediately flowed about their feet, carrying innumerable wriggling creatures with scaly skins and ferocious rows of tiny teeth.
"Shut it!" shouted J.B., but Ryan had already thrown the lever down again.
It seemed to take forever, but the door finally hissed shut, and the water stopped.
"It's fuckin' hot, Ryan," said Henn, kicking with his boots at one of the reptiles that had fastened onto the sole of his boot.
"It came all the way from top to bottom." Krysty's shocked voice said it all. The Redoubt where they had finished up was under water. Maybe under shallow water, maybe under whole fathoms.
"There is a thirty-minute automatic reset on the gates," said Doc. "If we make haste we should... should be back in the Redoubt in the Darks."
They splashed through the filth of mud and water, crushing the seething life as they moved. There was a step into the actual trans-mat chamber and the slime had not penetrated it. They all stepped in, and J.B. reached to close the door.
"Hold on. If we're goin' to pass out," said Ryan, "I guess it's better if we sit down first."
They sat in a ring, Krysty opposite Ryan. Their eyes met and he winked at her. He enjoyed the hint of a smile on her full lips. And she was a mutie!
The door closed and once again darkness clawed its way over Ryan's mind, blanking it out.
The moment of wakening was less painful, the headache gone, but the feeling of disorientation was still as strong. It was as if every atom in his body had been juggled around and clumsily reassembled.
Ryan opened his eye.
The walls were brown glass. By the texture it looked armored. It was not possible to guess its thickness.
"Come on, people," Ryan said. "Doc? You know how to reset this machine?"
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Cawdor. But I must repeat that it is a random element. All instructions and codes are gone these many, many years. I can alter the setting and then it will be in the laps of what gods we worship."
"I worship this," said Okie, holding up her M-16.
As he checked that everyone had recovered, Ryan wondered yet again about Doc's range of knowledge. Lots of it could have come from some hoard of old books or vids. There was no other sensible explanation. But he knew so much. Spoke as if he'd been here before. Been here a hundred years ago!
They were back in the clean, antiseptic anteroom. Ryan tugged the door open, hearing the faint whisper of sound that told him that it was air locked.
He pulled harder and it swung open.
The master control room now held a dozen or more of the squat, muscular Indians.
Okie reacted fastest, and Ryan winced at the stream of bullets that burst past him, knocking down five or six of the attackers in a welter of blood.
"Don't' fire!" screamed Doc's voice. "Damage anything and we'll never jump again!"
Ryan reached for his heavy panga, drawing it from its stitched leather sheath, thrusting at the face of the nearest of the Indians. It cleaved through the open mouth, splintering teeth as it did so, and lodged itself in the cervical vertebrae at the back of the man's neck. Blood gushed, hot and salt, into Ryan's face, nearly blinding him. But the man was down and done, screams bubbling through the choking flood of scarlet.
Around him the most desperate battle raged. Okie used her gun like a club, smashing one man across the side of the head, kicking him hard in the groin as his hands went to grab her.
Henn and Finnegan had both drawn their knives, automatically fighting back to back, the steel of their blades making a deadly web that snared any of the Sioux who tried to get within it.
J.B. had his delicate knives, one in each hand, the thin blades opening up hideous gashes like lips in the stomach of the man attacking him. As the man reeled away, crying like a scalded kitten, Hun used her own broad-bladed dagger to slit his throat. Blood from the jugular pattered onto the concrete floor, making it slick and treacherous.
Krysty ducked and weaved against a taller Indian, her hair seeming to foam back and forth in the man's face, blinding him. But she did not carry a long-bladed knife, and she was in desperate trouble. Meanwhile Ryan punched a grinning face, knocking it away from him, and raised the panga as he closed on Krysty's attacker.
The impact jarred Ryan's arm. But the steel was honed enough and weighted enough to hack clean through the skin and flesh and bone of the neck. The head, eyes staring, tongue moving, rolled and bounced among the fighters' feet, while the body gradually slumped to the floor as though reluctant to submit to death.
"Thanks," she panted, trying to back away to join Doc near the door through to the gateway.
"Anytime."
Henn was staggering, blood streaming from a cut along the side of his thigh, with Finnegan holding off a pair of the Indians, each armed with a triangular ax.