The Nick Of Time Part 9

Mihalik was once more alone. He picked up the wooden bowl and ate ravenously. Every bite caused him renewed pain.

He measured out the days by the meals: there was a bowl of gruel in the morning, and a thin stew of fish or mutton at night. The bowls were always brought by the same taciturn guard. Twice a day Mihalik pleaded for an audience with his captors, for a chance to prove that a terrible mistake had been made.

All he earned for his troubles was sly, s.a.d.i.s.tic laughter from his jailer.

As the days pa.s.sed, Mihalik's mind began to weaken. Entombment in the dark, fetid cell alone might have driven a man mad; the horror of the iron mask multiplied his sense of hopelessness. In the beginning, he counted on Cheryl's resourcefulness to rescue him; she was the only person who might know who and where he was. When no rescue came, he guessed that she too was a captive, or dead. He believed that he was a prisoner of Dr. Waters's enemies, the Temporary Underground; as his sanity wavered, he began to suspect that Madame de Romiers had led him into this trap, that Cheryl had abandoned him, and that both women were secretly in the employ of the rebels.

"You think I am Anne of Austria?" he shouted into the darkness. There was no reply but the startled squeaking of a rat. "How can I be the Queen? Look, I'm not even a woman!" It did no good.

Mihalik plotted his escape, but each idea died in frustration. He had no weapon with which to overpower the guard; he could not escape for long, dressed in the grimy, tattered dress of one of the Queen's own ladies; even if he did elude the rebels, he was trapped in this false past with no means of returning to his own time and reality.

At last, when the hysteria had given way to a quiet, calm acceptance that was beyond despair, Mihalik was told that he would be given an audience with the King's minister. Cardinal Richelieu himself.

The guard's manner had changed dramatically; he now addressed Mihalik as "Your Majesty," even though it was clear from the bits of beard that stuck out beneath the hideous iron mask that the prisoner was not a woman. Mihalik was conducted by four armed guards from the damp dungeon in the Bastille to the cardinal's apartments in the palace.

"Ah," said Richelieu, when the soldiers had left the room, "it is good that we have this talk."

"Talk?" cried Mihalik. "I want to know what's going on. I demand that you remove this mask. I demand that you release me."

Richelieu studied Mihalik in silence for a long moment. He was dressed in his red robe and red skullcap; he looked like Charlton Heston with a pasted-on beard. One long bony forefinger stroked hiscarefully trimmed mustache. "Very few people make demands of me and live to witness the results," he said at last. His voice was very soft.

Mihalik felt no fear; he wondered why that was. "Your Eminence," he said, "either I am the Queen, in which case I may speak as I like; or else I am not the Queen, in which case you've made a monstrous error that will prove dangerous for you."

The cardinal smiled. "And in that event, I would be wise to hide my blunder. In an iron mask, in the deepest, darkest pit in the kingdom. Or in an unmarked grave almost anywhere. It seems that it would be well for you to be the Queen. What have you to say now?"

"I say that I am not the Queen. I am not even a woman. Have your guards no eyes? Look, I'm a man!" Tearing the material of the filthy dress, Mihalik presented his most persuasive argument.

Richelieu said nothing while he considered the matter. "Perhaps that seems to you like adequate proof," he remarked dryly. "But I must disagree, monsieur; it is no defence. I have known the King too long and too well. I am aware of his, ah, predilections, and the fact that the Queen may not be a woman does not startle me so much as you may have hoped."

That remark upset Mihalik. He didn't know what to say. The interview was rapidly degenerating into the irrational, but that was nothing new for time travel. "I take it, then. Your Eminence believes me to be the Queen. And that you have a double to take my place. Is your double also a man?"

The Cardinal seemed vexed. "No," he admitted.

"Don't you think that Louis XIII, however unusual his predilections, will discover the change in his royal wife?"

Richelieu uncovered his chilly smile again. "The Queen may be the King's consort, but that does not mean that Their Majesties really do, ah, consort. If you understand my meaning. Our secret may go unguessed for quite a long time."

Mihalik had the strangest feeling that he was dealing not with a fictionalized version of a historical personality, but with a shrewd and clever agent of the Temporary Underground. It was an unlikely notion, but it wouldn't go away. "I know for certain that I'm not the Queen. That means if Your Eminence has planted yet another duplicate on the throne, there is a third woman -- the genuine Queen -- running around. Did you capture her, too? Is she in another cell, with another iron mask hiding her face?"

"You have come at last to the flaw in my scheme; but so long as the two of you are kept out of sight, all will be well. I cannot bring myself to end the life of the Queen, and I am not sure at this moment which of you that is. So you will have to grow content with my hospitality. I trust things have not been too terrible in the Bastille. I intended that this talk should have cleared away my doubts, but I see now that my hopes were in vain." He clapped his hands twice, and a guard entered the chamber. "Convey this lady back to her cell, and pay no heed to her ravings. She is quite mad, the poor creature."

The guard put a rough hand on the prisoner's arm. "Stop!" cried Mihalik in a panic. "I'm not the Queen! You've got to listen to me!"

"To the Bastille," said the cardinal. He had already lost interest in the matter, and was examining some papers on his desk.

We Meet the Enemy, and He Is Them The guard released Mihalik's arm. "I am not what I seem," murmured the guard.

"Oh, really?" said Mihalik. "Neither am I."

"I've come to rescue you. I've come to take you back to the twenty-first century."

Mihalik's heart beat wildly. "Thank G.o.d!" he said. "Can we get me out of this dress and this iron mask?"

"No, we don't have a minute to spare. They'll take care of the mask back in our time. Right now we have to get away from the palace; that won't be difficult because I have the cardinal's safe conduct."

"What about Cheryl?" asked Mihalik. "I haven't heard anything about her since I was captured."

"Who?" asked the guard.

"Cheryl. I was beginning to imagine she'd left me here holding the bag." "I don't know anything about any Cheryl. I was just sent to get you."

Mihalik walked alongside his rescuer, through the foul muddy streets of seventeenth-century Paris.

"Victory is almost in our grasp," said the guard.

"Hooray for us. You know, no one has ever really told me what this war is all about. What is the Agency fighting for? What are the Underground terrorists fighting for? I don't know. Power? That doesn't make sense, not the way they're going about it. What good is the past to them, anyway?"

"n.o.body answers my questions, either," said the guard. "Mostly it's like a great big game of hide-and-seek down all the alleyways of time. But I think we're working on some way to make the present more responsive to changes in the past."

That chilled Mihalik. He didn't want anybody -- neither the Agency nor the Underground -- to experiment with altering the present. It was an immensely disturbing notion. "I hate to admit this," he said, "but sometimes it seems to me that the Agency is doing the wrong thing. Sometimes I think that there isn't much to choose from between the two sides. The Agency may be just as sinister as the Temporary Underground."

The guard stopped suddenly in the street. "Say," he said calmly, "what did you say your name was?"

"Mihalik. Frank Mihalik."

"I don't know any Frank Mihalik," said the guard. He drew his rapier. "I was sent here to recover Brother Fortunati, but it looks like I've stumbled on an Agency spy."

"Oh, h.e.l.l," said Mihalik. "Would you really kill me like this? Would you leave me here dressed like this, with this G.o.dd.a.m.n mask on my head?"

"We have no pity in the Temporary Underground. That is a weakness and a luxury. We've come to expect that from hors like you."

"Say what?"

"Hors. From hora, the Latin word for 'hour.' It's a contemptuous name we have for you people who believe in time."

"Oh. Well, why don't you just leave me here? I can't hurt anybody or interfere with your plans, stuck in this storybook."

"I can't do that. I have to--" The guard was silenced by a crashing volley of thunder. Mihalik looked up; the sky was bright and cloudless. The guard seemed to be frightened by the noise, and he was now cowering on the ground in terror.

'What's wrong, man?" asked Mihalik. "You're behaving like a superst.i.tious savage." Then he saw that the guard was not writhing in fear, after all; he was writhing because three gaping holes had been blown through his body. The man's blood pumped out upon the mossy cobblestones and trickled away toward the Seine. The guard stopped writhing.

"Come, Chauvet," called Athos. Mihalik turned and saw his four companions -- the Three Musketeers themselves and Cheryl. They carried primitive firearms. Of course, thought Mihalik; that's why they're called musketeers. They understood that in certain circ.u.mstances, rapiers made little sense.

"We persuaded Juvin not to abandon you," Athos said.

Mihalik gave Cheryl a hurt and puzzled look from within the iron mask.

"Dr. Waters sent a courier to fetch me," she explained, a bit fl.u.s.tered. "We thought you were dead, that the cardinal had disposed of you days ago. Then we got a message from one of our spies in the Cardinal's Guard, one of the men who delivered you to the palace from the Bastille. We came to your rescue as soon as we heard the news."

"I'm so glad," said Mihalik coolly. He didn't want to have anything more to do with the time war or anything connected with it. He wanted to find his way back to his own crummy world, where at least the Agency and the Temporary Underground didn't exist.

"Your young friend lost hope several times," said Aramis with a serene smile. "As the King's Musketeers, we require proof before we give our friends up, but perhaps customs are different among your countrymen."

Mihalik frowned at Cheryl, but she still could not see it. "Were you really so quick to leave mebehind?" he asked.

She looked as if she was ready to cry. She did not answer.

"May I ask you something?" said Porthos. "Why are you barefoot and wearing that hideous iron mask and that disgustingly filthy gown?"

Mihalik laughed bitterly. "It's just a custom where we come from," he said. "I'm the April Fool."

A Mind Unused to Activity Stirs Uneasily Mihalik and Cheryl were fetched by a tall handsome young man in the blue and silver uniform of the Agency. He looked absurdly out of place among the foppishly costumed Musketeers at the Hotel de Treville. His name was Private Brannick, and he had black hair and steely eyes, and it didn't seem to bother him at all that he was out of place. "You get used to that, shuttling up and down the catwalks of time," he said.

"But doesn't your appearance cause problems?" asked Cheryl. "Don't the natural residents of the past notice you? Doesn't that change history sometimes?"

Private Brannick shrugged. "It might," he admitted. "It would, I mean, if this were the real past; but this isn't the real past. Didn't you realize that?"

Mihalik had realized no such thing. "How could this not be the past?" he asked. "How can you go back in time to anything other than the past? I mean, it has to be the past, by definition."

Private Brannick laughed indulgently. "The Three Musketeers never truly lived, you know. You've just had a little vacation. Ask Dr. Waters to explain it all to you. It's just like a holoshow, with better-than-usual special effects."

"Vacation!" cried Mihalik. Brannick had pried off the iron mask, to Mihalik's great relief, but Brannick had brought no spare uniform or change of clothes. Cheryl was in her musketeer outfit, and Mihalik was in his tattered and beslimed gown. No one seemed to be taking his recent torment seriously, and he felt like busting this Brannick guy in the face.

"Now, now," said the Agency man, "Dr. Waters warned me about your irrational spells. We'll just slip out of sight here, and fling ourselves back to the present."

"To your present, you mean," said Cheryl. "We'll still be stuck in this wrong universe."

"It doesn't seem wrong to me," said Brannick. "It doesn't even seem wrong to these French guys. It seems wrong only to you, so I think we can safely say that if anything is wrong around here, it isn't the universe's fault. I'd say even you two were beginning to fit in rather well. If you'd just start thinking of our world as 'right,' everybody would be happy."

"You know," said Mihalik thoughtfully, "this whole situation reminds me of something else. A book or a film or something."

They ducked behind an arras, and Private Brannick performed some operation with some bit of equipment. Almost instantly they were thrown forward more than three centuries to Dr. Waters's laboratory in the Agency Building. There was no one to greet them this time.

"It reminds me of something, and it's nagging me," insisted Mihalik. "I wish I could think of what.

Something very obvious."

"Dr. Waters will want to meet with you after dinner. It's now about noon. You can refresh yourselves and rest until then. I think Dr. Waters will send someone for you when he's ready."

"Thanks," said Cheryl. Private Brannick nodded and left the quiet laboratory.

"It will come to me," said Mihalik.

"Whatever are you muttering about?" asked Cheryl.

"I want to get this G.o.dd.a.m.n dress off. Let's go down to our quarters. I need a bath, too."

"I'll say," she said.

An hour later, when both had showered and changed into the official Agency uniform, Cheryl went into her room and closed the door to take a nap, and Mihalik lay on his bunk and stared at the soundproof ceiling. He was desperately tired, but his body wanted to fade away into pleasant dreams, and his mind was too agitated. The circ.u.mstances were tantalizingly familiar. It irked Mihalik that hecouldn't put his finger on it; it was like trying to wrestle a popcorn hull from between his teeth. The more he thought, the farther the answer seemed to be. His mind's tongue just wasn't strong enough. The popcorn hull stayed lodged.

At last, Mihalik's exhausted body won out and he fell asleep. He had a disturbing dream. "Good," he told himself, "maybe my unconscious mind is working on the problem even while I'm asleep." He saw himself in a small rickety boat buffeted by the strong current of some vast, dark river. It is the Orinoco. It is the Kasai, before it joins the Congo above Kinshasa. It is Tinker's Creek, behind my grandmother's house, and I am still a boy. There are shinning fish in the depths, their hungry eyes bulging at me, their fat lips osculating like the kisses of faithless mermaids. The water is cool and inviting, and my brow is so hot.

I would slip into the coffee brown river but I know that to do so is death; still I tease myself with the idea and it is exciting. I may yet leap in or some person may push me.

Yes, there are other people in the boat. There is a woman, a slim beautiful woman with auburn hair and eyes the color of the veldt gra.s.ses after the rainy months. She tempts me with unfinished smiles, but I am strong and brave and trust no one, because this is a dream and even my best friends have screwed me up in dreams. She is Cheryl, yet in some sinister way I know she is an ally of the water creatures who wait for my living flesh.

There are men. I can't count them. There are many men, and they pay no attention to me at all. They are not friends. Are they waiting for me to die? They must desire Cheryl, they must want me to fall overboard, yet none of them approaches me. It is Cheryl who glances at me with heavy-lidded eyes. She would tell me how cool the water is, how it would take away this fever, make me whole again.

There: I have learned that I am not now whole. What is wrong? A fever. I have a fever, a terrible fever, and I am not in my right mind. Of course I'm not, I'm dreaming. No, even for a dream I am not thinking clearly. Otherwise, how could I imagine the gentle, devoted Cheryl could ever suggest such things, that she could ever threaten horror and death? Cheryl is all that is good and clean in the world, the only unspoiled, generous spirit I have known, the only person I can love without reservation. And that includes Dr. Waters (the real Dr. Waters), who, after all, even in our own universe, cares more for the results of his scientific inquiries than for the safety of his volunteers. Yes, I love Cheryl, and it is my duty to guard her and keep her safe from these men and from whatever dwells in the reeking and filthy water, so I go to her and she is glad. She comforts me. She puts her cool white hand on my brow.

What is this fever? What does it mean? I feel very weak suddenly; Cheryl whispers to me, but it does no good. I have no strength at all, and if the men came now I could not defend myself or Cheryl. I must not think about that; I have enough experience with dreams to know that if I think something must not happen, it will certainly hap-- Mihalik awoke, thrashing weakly on his bunk. His head ached and he felt feverish. There was an awful taste in his mouth. "Cheryl!" he cried.

She hurried from her room to his. She sat beside him and stroked his hair. "There, there," she murmured. "It was only a dream."

"I know that," said Mihalik impatiently, "but it was important. Fever has something to do with what I was trying to remember before. And traveling. A girl and a group of men."

"It's almost time to see Dr. Waters."

"d.a.m.n it, I won't be able to rest until I think of it."

"Just take it easy, honey," said Cheryl. "Forget about it for now. We'll talk about it later."

"Easy for you to say. You don't have the fate of our whole universe resting on your shoulders.

Whatever's on the tip of my tongue is the key to this phony reality. I'm sure of it."

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Screen Private Brannick arrived to escort them to Dr. Waters's suite, where the head of the Agency was just finishing his dinner. They joined him at the table and were each served a delectable tangerine ice and a gla.s.s of Dr. Pepper. A large platter strewn with barbecued rib bones stood in the middle of the table, and there were white cardboard containers of fried dumplings and moo shu pork with one leftover pancake.A cobalt blue c.o.c.ktail shaker was half filled with liquor, and a martini gla.s.s stood neglected by Dr.

Waters's hand, empty but for a pearl onion. Dr. Waters looked benignly from Cheryl to Mihalik. Private Brannick stood shifting his weight a few feet away, trying to be inconspicuous.

"Well, now," said Dr. Waters.

"There's a lot we have to talk about," said Mihalik. He had felt a certain quality growing in him lately, a kind of daring, forthright recklessness that was pleasurable but risky. He had always been a good follower, he had always prided himself on his tremendous skill at being second in line. If someone else would break the ground, if someone else would send back instructions, Mihalik was the very best there was at being runner-up. He had been the first to travel through time only because he thought that Dr.

Waters had solved every problem, had, in effect, blazed the trail. Mihalik fully expected merely to obey orders and do nothing on his own initiative; the way things had turned out, though, it had taken him a little while to find this new inner strength. It made him feel clever and tough and powerful. It excited Cheryl, too, and he liked that.

"What do we have to talk about?" asked Dr. Waters, puzzled.

"We have to talk about getting back to our universe," said Mihalik.

"Tedious, Frank," said Dr. Waters. "Don't be tedious."

"It's the most important thing on our minds," said Cheryl.

"Anybody want the last of the moo shu pork?" asked Dr. Waters. Obviously he didn't want to talk about their dilemma.

"Look, sir," said Mihalik, banging his fist on the table, but not heavily, "you sent us back to Louis XIII's France for some reason of your own, just like--"