“You’re going too fast—” Preston began, panicky.
“Quiet, laddie!”
“Hold on, troops.” Margie spoke with deceptive ease. Prestin caught hold of the door handle strapping. From the corner of his eye he saw Alec turn and crouch on the floor, the rifle raised. His hand pressed a lever beneath the armrest and a hole abruptly appeared between the rest and the side of the car. Alec thrust the rifle through and peered carefully down the telescopic sight.
“All set, Margie,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Margie put the anchors on.
In a chaotic bewilderment of jumbled sensations, Prestin was rapidly aware of being flung forward, wrenching his arm; of seeing Macklin cradled in the front seat straps; of Margie stiff-armed like a Grand Prix driver at the wheel; of Alec pressing the rifle trigger again and again, and hissing between his teeth in time to the soft coughing of the rifle.
He flung a glimpse back through the rear window as the Jensen hurtled around the bend. Just before the road shoulder came between him and the scene, he saw the blood-red Lancia sprawling forward in reaction to the viciousness of Margie’s braking. He saw the side of the car as the bend took them, saw the side windows shattering, saw the tires blowing, saw the car veering and lurching. It swayed across the lines between the lanes, staggering into the northbound lanes, smoke belching from the engine.
“That clobbered her!” said Alec with deep satisfaction.
“She’ll come out alive, the cat; she has nine times nine lives.” Margie spoke, Prestin guessed with a hysterical reaction, as one expert of another.
“That’ll hold her up for an hour or so, at the least.”
A bunched group of cars fled past going north.
“If those cars—” began Prestin.
“They’ll see her in time, if she’s still on the road.” Macklin chuckled. “She’s probably right over in the far ditch.”
“Hoo, boy!” said Alec, as though speaking of a football match. “Did you see the way she spun! There was a mite of smoke about, too. With any luck the Lancia’s a complete write-off.”
“Next time she’ll armor-plate the side of her new car.” Margie laughed shortly, a sardonic bark of sound in the speeding car.
“But this time the old bend trick worked again.” Alec began to take his express rifle to pieces, cleaning out the bore with loving care. His strong down-bent face carried deeply-engraved pleasure-lines. This was a man who could channel his mind onto one objective at a time, Prestin realized; a useful man to have around.
Margie raised the flaps over the rear tires. She settled back, letting the car drift along. “I’m still thirsty and peckish.”
“Yes, Margie. But we’d better keep going for a spell. Then we can all relax.” Macklin carried that casual habit of command well. “I don’t give the Contessa more than an hour before she’s after us again. They must have been monitoring the roads out of Rome—”
“I didn’t see any signs that they were,” said Margie.
“Nor me. They could have picked up my radio call to you. Yes, that could be it. Was the party a success?” he finished, apparently at random.
“So, so.” Margie shrugged her shoulders and the emerald green cloak slipped down a little. “Fabrizzi was there. Such a bore.”
“Now, just a minute!” Prestin said heatedly. He still felt keyed up—you’d have to be a cod’s head on a slab not to be shaken, he supposed—but he’d been in tight situations before where he’d felt calm, collected and able to plan his next moves. This situation had thundered along and tumbled him willy-nilly like a chip in a raging sea, so that he had to keep trying to grasp a hint of reality here, a fragment of normalcy there. With nodal points existing all over, how could he know when anything—anyone—would abruptly vanish? He couldn’t. He said, “I thought back there, at the bend, that we were coming up to a nodal point. I thought that’s what you meant.”
“No, laddie. We aren’t that desperate yet.”
“But I am! You sit calmly talking of parties and here I am—”
Margie laughed. “Doesn’t he know anything, Dave?”
“Not much.” Macklin laughed too, a gentle sound of friendly mirth. “The story is very simple, Bob. But The Montevarchi rather fouls it all up.”
“The cat!” put in Margie Lipton characteristically.
“She and we want the same thing—”
“Oh, yes,” Prestin said with some scorn. “I gathered that. You both want me.”
Alec clicked a metal part of the rifle and chuckled.
“Hole in one, son.”
“So?” demanded Prestin, wondering why he did not feel righteous indignation at their treatment of him. He wasn’t a side of beef, was he? “Suppose I don’t want to be had?”
“Remember the Trug, that’s what I say.” And Alec went back to his polishing and oiling.
The car murmured smoothly along the road. The sun shone. The air-conditioners freshened the interior and dissipated the last of the gunfire smoke. Macklin found a roll of mints and offered them around. They all sucked solemnly. Finally Prestin couldn’t stand it any longer.
“If you’re not going to tell me—”
“There isn’t much to tell. There’s this place Irunium.” Macklin’s face suddenly lost the laugh-lines; it grew grave and a little remote. “I’ve never been there. It is a wonderful country—wonderful and terrible. There is vast wealth there, so vast the old pot of gold at the end of the rainbow dreams would come true a millionfold.”
“Fairy tales yet.”
“And Trugs, son.”
“You must be familiar with the theory of the dimensions? That our dimension is paralleled by an infinitude of other dimensions, other universes, all existing continuously with us and able to be interpenetrated, provided one has the right key? It’s an old theory now, and one that has excited the imaginations of man ever since the possibilities of dimensional travel became feasible—”
“Feasible!”
“Everything has been kept very hush-hush, as you would expect. We here on this Earth are at a nexus of other worlds which do not approach us in idealogy, culture, scientific or technical attainment, or in many of the everyday devices we take for granted.”
“What’s all that supposed to mean?” Prestin said. He had heard of the dimensional theory, of course—any intelligent man who kept up with the literature had. There had been a case in the papers, a few years back, of a gang of skylarkers being arrested on the steps of an Underground station in London, all dressed up for a safari. Nothing came of it, though. At first they’d said they were going to another dimension; afterwards they produced the bottles. They were fined for being drunk and disorderly and told to go cool off. He’d remembered it, though. He’d thought, at the time, what fun it would have been…
Macklin went on. “It means this: unless there are other dimensions lying near us, peopled by advanced or very advanced races who—for their own reasons—do not wish to allow us to communicate with them, we can go across through the nodal points into other worlds. Irunium is the nearest at the moment.”
“At the moment?”
“They change, laddie, they change. We hear stories of other races and other people trying to cross, some in fact even crossing. We’ve been trying to communicate with other dimensions. But the Contessa needs money and jewels and they are to be found in profusion in Irunium. Consequently, she wants Porteurs to work for her—”
“She wants me to slave for her, is that it?”
“Slave? Well, I suppose you could call it that. You wouldn’t like it, that I can guarantee.”
“She,” said Margie, “is a cat whose father and mother were only nodding acquaintances.”
“We’d better pull in at the next cafe,” said Macklin. “A coffee will do us all good.”