She waved a slim hand. “Here,” she said, as if that were obvious.
“Surely you have a house,” Swft corrected her. “Your family: where are they?”
“Unca Mobie there,” she said, pointing. “He’s taking a nap.”
“Oh,” Swft said, only half sarcastically, “we wouldn’t want to disturb Unca Maybe’s nap, would we?”
“No. Unca Mobie\” the girl corrected him sharply.
“Let’s go meet him,” Swft said gruffly, and started past her, back the way she’d come from. She caught at his arm. He flung her off.
I objected, and took her strange little hard-fingered hand. “He’s a little upset,” I told the girl. “His plans have gone awry.” She smiled. Swft gave me a haughty look.
I felt myself start to slip into the curious awe-and-reverence feeling that occasionally afflicted me out here in the Zone, but pushed it back. I realized it was the pressure of the local mind-set tending to displace my accustomed paradigm. Swft was just a lost, bewildered rat, not a great personage persevering in the face of daunting odds. “Take it easy, General,” I suggested. “Be nice to the kid. She’s as scared as you are.”
“You don’t understand, Colonel,” he told me in a voice that was tight with anxiety, or whatever it was tight with. “We are in a most perilous situation. To be candid, I have attempted an experiment. I have transferred us across the Yellow Line, into the zone of the hypothetical; to a phase not yet realized in the Skein. This”―he paused to look around at the towering forest all around―”is a state of affairs that would come into realization, if the vectors implicit in a great victory of the Jade Palace should, as I hope, eventuate, and are permitted to evolve in a virgin matrix―”
I cut that off. “It’s your idea of Utopia, is that about right?” I suggested. He shook his head in affirmation.
“No child should be wandering unattended in this howling wilderness,” he complained, “the parameters of which are not to be guessed. I have no idea what horrors may lie beyond this forest. Therefore,” he continued, “I have, it is clear, missed the target, and deposited us in some Phase yet undreamt of, a phase without causal linkage to the entropic fabric!”
“Sounds bad, General,” I remarked. “Every time we try to make a step forward, we slip back two.”
“Not quite,” he muttered.
“Relax,” I advised the general. “This is no howling wilderness’; this is a nice stand of virgin timber. The kid obviously lives nearby. Let’s go talk to her folks.”
Swft was staring at the girl―not really a girl, I had to remind myself: a rat-pup, not human. She glanced at me with an impish expression, and put a ratty hand on Swft’s arm.
“Please do as Unca Swft says,” she pled. “I know Candy will be glad to see you.”
“I wonder,” I commented to the general, “how this kid knows your name.”
She supplied the answer: “Unca Mobie said when Unca Null came, Unca Swft would be with him.”
She turned and stepped back into the shade of the woods. Swft followed her, and I trailed him. It was dark in there among the great trees. There was no real trail, just a slightly trodden-down strip that meandered among the mossy boles. I stepped along briskly so as not to lose contact with Swft.
We kept this up for maybe half an hour and I was getting impatient, when there was a lessening of the gloom, and suddenly we stepped out into full sunlight. It was a clearing, a hundred yards, almost square, with a small cabin―or “hut” might be a more accurate term―with a trickle of smoke coming from a chimney that seemed to be made of clay.
The rat-girl was at the door already, and Swft drew back, staying in the shadows. I did, too. The girl was still tapping on the door; it opened suddenly, and an old rat―no, a man, thin and whiskered―stood there. He grabbed her and pulled her inside.
I started across to the rescue, but Swft spoke up. “Wait, Colonel. I think it’s all right.”
“That old devil grabbed her!” I protested. “Probably hasn’t seen a female in years!”
“A female of the Noble Folk would hardly be of prurient interest to a humong,” he pointed out. I had to concede that, and slowed to a walk.
Swft fell in beside me. “Colonel Bayard,” he said, sounding formal, or in some mood that made him speak my name solemnly. “Colonel,” he repeated, “I fear you are about to be confronted with a shocking phenomenon. Brace yourself for a surprising revelation.”
The old man reappeared in the doorway. “Sure, I’m all set,” I replied casually. “But how the devil did a human get here?”
“He passed across an entropic discontinuity,” Swft told me, as if he knew. “This resulted in a temporal reduplication―”
“Sure.” I cut him off. “Skip all that part and get directly to the big surprise.”
The old―or at least middle-aged―fellow in the doorway was staring at me as if―I don’t know “as if” what. Anyway, he brushed past the little rat-girl and sort of stumbled up to me.
“Colonel,” he said clearly, in spite of a frog in his throat, and then lapsed into what sounded like the high-pitched Ylokk speech. But Swft didn’t seem to understand any better than I did.
“Tala sakta,” Swft said, in Swedish: he’d been cagey about that one. “Var god och lysna,” he added, meaning “Shut up and listen.”
I was studying the haggard man’s face, which seemed slightly familiar, somehow. He had unevenly hacked whiskers, and deep lines around his eyes, which were blue, and sort of reminded me of―
“Candy! Candy!” Minnie was repeating, tugging at his hand.
“ ‘Unca Andy,’ ” I said, trying out the sound. Then, “Lieutenant Helm! Report!”
The old fellow tried to straighten out of his slouch and almost succeeded. He got his mouth closed and brought his right arm up in what I guess was a try at a hand salute. “Colonel Bayard,” he croaked, “sir, I have the honor to report that Doctor Smovia is safe and well.”
“Unca Mobie!” Minnie yelped, and ran into the hut. I just then realized what I’d decided to call her. Disney never drew a rat.
I took Andy’s arm, which was wirier than I remembered it.
“What’s happened, Andy?” I asked him.
There were tears in his eyes now. “It really is you, sir!” he blurted, and turned and blundered back inside. “Finally!” he added as he disappeared.
“I warned you, Colonel,” Swft said. I nodded, and followed Helm into the dim interior. A fire on a stone hearth shed a faint and flickering glow on a bare interior of peeled logs, and Helm bending over a cot where another battered middle-aged man was lying, twisting his head to watch me come in.
“I can’t believe it!” he croaked in English, then in Swedish, “Jag trar inte!”
Helm was shushing him, at the same time helping him to sit up. He was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, dressed in a ragged, grayish shirt, but I recognized that fanatical look in his eyes. It was young Doc Smovia.
“What’s happened to you fellows?” I burst out, then, in a more controlled tone, “it’s been awhile, Doctor. What’s happened?”
“We climbed through that hole,” Smovia said hesitantly, in English. “We came out in a forest. Reminded me of the foothills north of Stockholm. Nobody there. We yelled and got nothing but echoes. The hole we’d crawled out of was gone. It had been about a three-foot fall, and we walked back and forth through where something should have been. Nothing. I make it nine years; the lieutenant says ten. We started by keeping a record of the days, but we lost our tally-board in a fire. Nearly lost the house. We tried counting the seasons, but they seem different here; winters are very mild; perhaps the greenhouse effect is further developed.”