Fear rose in Lockridge. He was getting very near the moment beyond which his future was unknown. Brann stiffened. Sweat, pallor, a pulse in the throat—what was the stranger so nervous about?
“No,” Lockridge said feebly. “Please. I’ve seen what happens.”
He had to give a reason for his flight which would not make Brann too wary to watch for Storm’s gate and lead his troop through it. But the terror in his guts was real. He had indeed seen that darkened part of the Long House.
“Have no fear,” Brann said with a touch of impatience. “The process will not go deep unless something suspicious emerges.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Lockridge rose and backed away.
“You must take my word. And, perhaps, my apology.” Brann gestured.
The door opened. Two guards came in. “Take this man to Division Eight and have the section chief call me,” Brann said.
Lockridge stumbled from the room. Remote as the heaven they watched from, the saint’s eyes followed him out.
The men in black led him down an empty hallway. Sound was muffled, footfalls came dull, and never a word was spoken. Lockridge drew a breath. Okay, boy, he thought, you know you’re goin’ to make it as far as the time corridor. His dizziness left him.
The shaft he wanted came into sight, its opening an oblong in the blank wall, its depths whistling with forced air. The soldiers led Lockridge past.
Their energy guns were drawn, but not aimed at him. Prisoners never gave much trouble. He stopped short. The blade of his hand hewed into the Adam’s apple on his right. A helmet jerked back, a body went to all fours. Lockridge spun to the left. He threw a shoulder block, his full weight behind. The guard toppled backward. Lockridge got a grip on him and hurled them both into the shaft.
Downward they tumbled. An alarm shrieked. That many-eyed machine which was the building had seen the unusual. In a voice nearly human, it cried what it knew.
Featureless, walls converging on a bottomward infinity, the tube fled by. Lockridge clung to the Ranger, arm around the throat, fist pounding while they fell. The guard went loose, his mouth slackened in the bloody face and the gun left his fingers. Lockridge fumbled at his belt controls. Where the furious hell—?
Door after door whizzed upward. Twice, energy bolts sizzled from them. And now the bottom leaped at him. He found the plaque he wanted and pushed. Unbalanced force nearly tore him from his grip on the Ranger. But they were slowed, they were saved from that bone-spattering impact, they were down.
The base of the shaft fronted on another hallway. An entry stood opposite, to show a room whose sterile white made the rainbow shimmer of a time gate all the more lovely. Two guards gaped across levelled weapons. A squad was dashing down the passage.
“Secure this man!” Lockridge gasped. “And let me by!”
He was in uniform, with potent insignia. The castle had not seen details. Arms snapped in salute. He sprang into the anteroom.
Around him, the air woke with Brann’s voice, huge as God’s. “Attention, attention! The Director speaks. A man dressed as a guardsmaster of the household has just entered the temporal transit on Sublevel Nine. He must be captured alive at any cost.”
Through the gate! The twisting shock of phase change made Lockridge fall. He rolled over, his bare head struck the floor, pain burst through him and for an instant he lay stunned.
The fear of the mind machine brought him awake. He hauled himself erect and onto the gravity sled which waited.
Half a dozen men poured through the curtain. Lockridge flattened. Pale stun beams splashed on the bulwarks around him. He lifted a palm and covered the acceleration control light. The sled got into motion.
Away from the Rangers, yes. But they were on his pastward side. He was headed into the future.
The wind rasped in his lungs. His heartbeat shook him as a dog shakes a rat. With his last reserves, he mastered panic enough to risk a look aft. The black shapes were already dwindling. They milled about, uncertain, and he remembered Storm Darroway, seated by a fire in a wolf-haunted forest: “We ventured ahead of our era. There were guardians who turned us back, with weapons we did not understand. We no longer try. It was too terrible.”
I served you, Koriach, he sobbed. Goddess, help me!
As from far away, echoing down the vibrant whiteness of the bore, he heard Brann’s command. The guards assumed formation. Their gravity units raised them and they gave chase.
The corridor reached on beyond sight. Lockridge saw no gate ahead, only emptiness.
The sled halted. He flailed the control panel. The machine sank inert. The flyers swooped near.
Lockridge jumped off and ran. A beam struck the floor behind, touched his heels and left them numb. Someone shouted victory.
And then the Night came, and the Fear.
He never knew what happened. Vision went from him, hearing, every sense and awareness; he was a disembodied point whirled for eternity through infinitely dimensioned space. Somehow he knew of a presence, which was alive and not alive. Thence radiated horror: the final horror, the negation of everything which was and had been and would be, cold past cold, darkness past darkness, hollowness past hollowness, nothing save a vortex which sucked him into itself, and contracted, and was not.
He was not.
16
Again he was.
First he was music, the most gentle and beautiful melody that ever had been, which with a drowsy delight he knew for Sheep May Safely Graze. Then he was also a scent of roses, a yielding firmness under his back, a body at peace with itself. He opened his eyes to sunlight.
“Good mornin’, Malcolm Lockridge,” said a man. “You are with friends,” said a woman. They spoke Kentucky English.
He sat up. They had laid him on a couch in a maple-panelled room. There was little decoration, except for a screen where colours played through soft strange shapes, but the proportions were so right that nothing else was needed. Beyond an unclosed doorway he saw a garden. Flowers grew along gravelled walks and willows shaded a lilypond from the heat of high summer. On the far side of a turf-green lane stood another house, small, bedecked with honeysuckle, simply and sweetly curved.
The man and woman stepped close. They were both tall, somewhat past their youth but still with backs erect and muscles hard. Their hair was bobbed below the ears and held by intricately ornamented bands. Otherwise they wore nothing except a pocketed band on the left wrist. Lockridge saw that he was equally nude. He felt for his own bracelet-purse. The woman smiled. “Yes, your diaglossas are there,” she said. I don’t believe you’ll want anything else.”
“Who are you?” Lockridge asked in wonder.
They grew grave. “You won’t be with us long, I’m sorry to say,” the man replied. “Call us John and Mary.”
“And this’ is . . . when?”
“A thousand years afterward.”
With a mother’s compassion, the woman said, “You’ve been through nightmare, we know. But we hadn’t any other way to turn back those devils, short o’ killin’ them. We healed you, soma and psyche, while you slept.”
“You’ll send me home?”
Pain crossed her tranquillity. “Yes.”
“Right away, in fact,” said John. “We have to.”