Gridlock and Other Stories Part 7

"It'll have to do. Grab his arms. I'll take the legs."

"No."

"No?" she asked, perplexed.

"No. Not until you hand over that firepower."

I could see indecision flash across her face.

"Look, Jane, you are going to have to trust me. You haven't got any choice.""You'll see me safely away?"

I nodded. "I don't know why I believe such an obviously ridiculous story --" She opened her mouth to say something. I held up my hand and she closed it again. " -- I know, you have a Buck Rogers ray gun. So hand them over or I take a walk."

She bit her lower lip, but held out her hand with the two lasers in it. I took them. They were warm to the touch. I hesitated.

"These emit anything that might disagree with my gonads?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Both beamers are well shielded."

I slipped the guns into my belt in back, hiding them under my jacket. "Fine, let's get rid of Mr.

America here."

The Neanderthal was heavier than he looked. He was barely five feet tall, but chunky. We half carried-half dragged him through deserted back yards and trash-strewn alleys. When we finally lowered the body at the edge of the ditch, I stood up and puffed from the exertion.

"Strip him!" Jane said, working to loosen the leather belt he wore. There were a dozen or so pouches on the belt and she quickly sorted through them.

"What have you got there?" I whispered as I worked to peel his pants off.

"Equipment kit," she whispered back. She pulled each strange mechanism out of its pouch, examined it, and then put it back. About the time I had managed to remove the Dalgir's shirt she found what she was apparently looking for. It looked like a tear gas pen -- you know, the kind they advertise in all the men's magazines.

"Okay," I said as I stripped the last of the clothing off the body. "What now?"

The Dalgir lay obscenely exposed in the moonlight, and not because he was naked. It had more to do with the hole in his chest.

"Roll him face down into the ditch and then get back," she said, pulling on gloves from her purse.

She held the tear gas pen gingerly in her gloved hands.

"What is in that thing?"

"A specially mutated bacteria. Get any of it on you and you'll be dead of what appears to be an advanced case of leprosy in a matter of hours."

That was enough warning for me. I backpedaled until I was a good fifty feet away, carrying the bundle of clothing with me. She bent over the body and did something with the pen. What she did made a certain amount of sense ... in a gross way.

How does one solve the problem of introducing a strain of man-eating germs into a corpse? You cannot very well ask the victim to swallow a pill. However, we sometimes forget the mouth is only one of two openings to the alimentary ca.n.a.l. Jane used the second.

She quickly rejoined me, carefully pulled off the gloves, and buried them in the center of the charred clothing that she tied in a bundle. She leaned down and stuffed the bundle into the storm sewer.

"Let's go back for the beer. The others will be getting worried." As she turned to leave, the lightcaught her face. I could see droplets of perspiration on her forehead in spite of the chill wind that blew around us.

"What about...?" I thrust my thumb over my shoulder toward the irrigation ditch.

"In eight hours there will be no trace of our departed Dalgir. Now we have to report."

"How?" I asked. "I'm afraid my subs.p.a.ce radio is broken at the moment. "

She laughed a high nervous giggle. Reaction was setting in. "Then we'll just have to rely on Ma Bell. We'll use the phone in the rooming house."

The debate was still going hot and heavy. I lugged the beer into the kitchen while Jane went to the telephone in the hall. She carried it to the length of its cord into the bathroom and shut and locked the door. I stationed myself outside on guard duty. With my ear half pressed against the wall, I could barely make out her side of the conversation. Not that it did me a lot of good.

When she spoke, it was in rapid-fire gibberish that somehow reminded me of an orchestra tuning up for the big concert. After a few minutes in which she did most of the talking -- to judge by the short silences coming through the wall -- she said good-bye in English and hung up.

I was waiting for her when she unlocked the door and stepped into the hall.

"Well?" I whispered.

"They're sending a shuttle to pick me up. It will arrive tomorrow after sundown."

"Where?"

"The Mogollon Rim north of Payson."

"I know the area. One of my uncles has a cabin outside Christopher Creek at the base of the Rim."

"Then you'll take me there? I do not dare use my car. They may have managed to put a tracer on it."

"You're out of luck. The whole North Country is knee deep in snow this time of year. My Jag was never designed to play snowmobile. We'll have to find a Jeep."

Tony Minetti chose that time to head for the bathroom.

He heard the last of our conversation.

"Jeep?" he asked. It was then that I remembered that Tony had an old relic of the Second World War that he kept parked in front of his apartment six blocks away.

"Yeah," I said. "I promised Jane I would drive her up to Payson tonight. She just remembered that her Aunt Agatha was expecting her for the holidays. How about it, Tony? Can we borrow your Jeep?"

He bit his lip. "I don't know, man. You're talking about my pride and joy." He wrinkled his nose.

"Boy, you smell like a brewery!"

"Spilled some beer on myself." I took a deep breath and made the ultimate sacrifice. "I'll let you borrow my XKE." Tony had cast a lecherous eye on my car for as long as I had known him."It's a deal, man!"

We exchanged keys with me wondering if I was making the mistake of my life. Jane and I headed for my bedroom and began digging in the closet for some warm clothes. Coming originally from Michigan, I had an ample supply.

When we were outfitted for snow -- Jane in my blue B-9 parka over her coat and me in my heavy leather jacket and boots -- we slipped out the back way. Joel Peterson was screaming something about parallel universes while the crowd around him booed in unison.

As I stepped out into the cold dark on the back porch, I could not help smiling. If they only knew!

Arizona -- land of parched, overheated deserts and a dozen different kinds of poisonous insects, snakes and lizards. Where rain does not fall for six months at a time and the natives huddle in air-conditioned warrens for a quarter of the year, dashing outside only long enough to dodge from one cool hidey-hole to another. Right?

Half right.

That is a pretty accurate picture of the southern desert. The northern part of the state, on the other hand, is blanketed with high mountains and lush forests. Driving down from Detroit on the Interstate, I was amazed to discover the amount of variation in climate that can be found in a hundred-mile stretch. It made for interesting driving.

Except now I was driving like a madman into the high country in a forty-year-old jeep whose canvas top had never been meant to withstand a dozen years of desert sun. Two gaping holes ducted a freezing slipstream of air in to overpower the ancient heater. Jane and I were nearly blue with cold as the wan yellow headlights flashed across the dilapidated log walls of my uncle's hunting cabin.

I pulled off the road into the high snowdrifts surrounding the cabin. The Jeep's transfer case growled in protest as we slithered and bulled our way the last hundred feet. It almost sounded grateful as I turned the key, allowing the wheezing old engine to finally rest. I left the lights on to show the way to the porch, with me breaking trail and Jane stumbling after.

It was three A.M.

I got the door open and ushered her inside before going back to turn off the headlights. When I returned to the cabin, she had set up something that gave off a pearly white glow on the kitchen counter.

I glanced at it and recognized one of the devices we had gotten off the Dalgir's body. I headed for the fireplace and began stacking wood against the blackened grate. Within five minutes, cheerful tongues of flame were licking at the wood.

"Get over by the fire," I told her. "I'll go out back and get the generator started."

My boots made soft crunching noises as I made my way through the virgin snow to the shed out back of the cabin. By the time I had plowed a path to the shed -- actually an old outhouse that had been expanded and converted for storage -- I was panting from the unaccustomed exertion and high alt.i.tude.

In spite of the cold, beads of perspiration trickled down my back between my shoulder blades. I took off my fur-lined jacket and hung it on a nail in the generator shack.

I checked the gas and oil in the old, rusty generator using a flashlight I had picked up in the cabin.

Crossing my fingers, I pulled on the starter rope. For once, it caught with a roar on the first try. I fiddledwith the choke until the inevitable case of hiccups pa.s.sed. Throwing the large knife switch on the spider web draped wall; I listened for the sound of the generator coming on line.

When I got back to the cabin, the fire had taken some of the nip out of the air and the lights were burning brightly. I began to unlace my boots. It had been a h.e.l.luva night and I was dead tired. Jane was puttering around in the bathroom, doing I had no idea what. With the water turned off for the winter to keep from bursting a pipe, the bathroom was one of the less functional rooms in the cabin.

I busied myself with the fire until I heard soft steps behind me.

"Well, what do you think?" she asked.

I turned around. "What do I think about what? ... " I asked, catching my breath.

She stood on the Navajo rug in front of the fire and posed like a model out ofMademoiselle . She had made dramatic changes in her looks. Her hair was neatly combed, no longer standing out at right angles to her head. Her c.o.ke bottle gla.s.ses were gone to reveal a pair of sensitive eyes that were now violet. They had been brown. She had done something to her face too. What, I could not be sure. It was a bit rounder and softer than it had been.

She still was not beautiful, but she was far from ugly. In fact, she was quite pleasant looking. As I stood speechless and checked out the changes, I noticed that her figure seemed to have improved as well.

"Like it?" she asked, pirouetting for me.

"What happened?"

"How do they say it on television? My cover is blown so there is no need to continue the masquerade."

Her comment brought me back to reality, a place I had not been in a number of hours.

"Which reminds me. Tell me about parallel universes."

She bit her lower lip and looked worried. "I suppose I do owe you an explanation, Duncan," she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch, patting the cushion next to her. I sat down beside her and caught a whiff of her perfume for the first time.

My heart began to beat faster of its own volition.

"You can begin any time," I said, more to change the subject of my thoughts than anything else.

She cast her eyes down at the floor. "I shouldn't. It's against regulations to discuss paratime with the natives."

"We're both a little bit pregnant in that department aren't we?"

"A little bit..." She looked puzzled for an instant, then her eyes got wide and she laughed. "I confess that I hadn't heard that expression before, but I see what you mean. After tonight, the regulations don't make very much sense, do they?"

"No, they don't."

"I won't bore you with the technical details about temporal energy balances between universes andentropic shock-waves. A good temporist goes to school for twenty years to learn about such things.

Just take it on faith that your concept of parallel universes is an oversimplification of the true situation.

Timelines just cannot be thought of as parallel.

"Energy considerations are our biggest problem. They keep most of the timelines closed to us. And when a volume of low temporal energy does form -- a paratime portal in other words -- it is usually limited to a few square miles of area. A portal's life can be measured anywhere from milliseconds to thousands of years. There is one between my home timeline and the Gestetni Republic, for instance that has been continuously open for over six thousand years. Others come and go intermittently, eventually closing forever as the two timelines drift apart. That is the case with your timeline, Duncan. The portal between our universes opened five years ago. We will remain in intermittent contact for about a thousand years and then go our separate ways."

"So why have you people been skulking about?" I asked.

"Experience has taught us caution," she replied. "Terrible things can happen to a shuttle once it makes the jump 'tween universes, not all of them having to do with the temporal physics of the situation either."

"Such as?"

"Oh, a million things. You can spend an hour in a strange universe and return home to find a hundred years have pa.s.sed ... or that time has run backwards while you were gone ... or that no time at all has pa.s.sed. The flow of linear time can be highly variable from timeline to timeline. We avoid situations where a large mismatch exists, but every paratime operative can expect to age at a different rate than family and friends.

"Then there are the nasty little surprises that people can pull on you. More than once a shuttle has jumped into an alternate history to discover the Earth ruled by powerful barbarians with both the yen and military might for empire. A thousand years ago, one of our shuttles discovered the Dalgiri Empire that way. The discovery cost us three cities, including two on my home timeline. Since then, all of our efforts have been bent toward containing that pack of wild dogs. They controlled eight timelines when we first met them -- twelve now. In the same time we have grown from an alliance of three lines to a confederation of thirty-two. Of course, every time we almost get them boxed, a new portal opens up onto a Dalgiri universe from somewhere else and the battle begins again."

"Like this timeline?"

"No, not yet, Duncan. We have twenty years or so of grace before the Dalgiri get a direct line to your universe."

"So how is it they are here?"

She looked troubled. "A puzzle that must not go unsolved. Either they pa.s.sed through one of our universes on their way here, or they can jump energy barriers of unprecedented magnitude. In either case, it's not good for either of our peoples."

"And what are your plans for us?" I asked.

"To study you for the moment, perhaps establish diplomatic relations later. I really do not know, Duncan. Such decisions are made on a much higher level than mine."

"So in twenty years we are going to play Poland to the Dalgiri's. .h.i.tler and your Churchill?""If not sooner."

"And you've given up your job as a spy to report that the Dalgiri are coming through earlier than expected."

She smiled. "I guess I deserve that. I am not really a spy, you know. At least not in the cla.s.sic sense of the word. I am exactly what I claim to be -- a graduate student working on her thesis in anthropology. Paratime anthropology, that is. But to answer your question: Yes, this is far more important than my information gathering function."