The Prometheus Project Part 27

"No, he just kept quiet and let us take it for granted!" I grasped her by the shoulders. "Chloe, if we arrive in Earth orbit and find that Novak's ship is no longer there, you and I are going to have to stop Khorat."

"Stop him? How?"

"Take over the ship!"

"Take over the ship?" she echoed. "The two of us? But there are . . . how many Ekhemasu aboard?"

"It doesn't matter. We know where that small-arms locker is-and I can get into it."

"But . . . what if some of the crew have already drawn hand weapons by then? I'll bet Thramoz, at least,

will have."

"So what? Chloe, the Ekhemasu are descended from a million generations of herbivorous herd animals.

I've seen it, even in Thramoz: put them in a combat situation, and their chromosomes will tell them to

run-or, if there's no place to run, freeze up in the hope that if they hold still the predators won't notice them."

"You're serious, aren't you?" she asked quietly.

"d.a.m.ned right I'm serious! Khorat has gone 'round the bend. He's ready to charge off into

interdimensional chaos even though he knows he can't get back. It's up to us! Are you with me?"

Chloe stared at me, and at first I saw the same thing I'd seen in her since the day we'd met in the pa.s.sageway and seen each other's new faces: a drawing of shutters, behind which her thoughts seemed to

be racing furiously. But then, abruptly, all that was gone and, despite everything Nafayum had done, the old Chloe was back. All my fire and fury drowned in her smile.

"Yes, Bob. Yes. I'm with you. But first . . ." Her arms went around my waist and drew me close, with

more strength than I'd known she possessed. "Bob, I can't wait any longer. I need you, Bob, and we may

not have another chance. Please take me!"

To say I was stunned would be an understatement. "Chloe," I said weakly, "we've talked about this for G.o.d knows how long . . . and the same arguments still apply-"

"I know, my love. And I don't care anymore!" Before I knew what was happening, her left arm snaked

around my neck and drew my head down, and she kissed me with a fierce hunger.

There is, I truly believe, nothing so overwhelming as instant, unantic.i.p.ated eroticism. Everything else was forgotten as I responded to her kiss.

We finally broke apart to catch our breath. She backed off a step, smiled roguishly, and drew me by the

hands. "Come."

I let her lead me to her cabin through the empty pa.s.sageway-the Ekhemasu were otherwise occupied.

As soon as we were inside, she poured us drinks of the Ekhemasu attempt at gin.

I didn't need alcohol at that point. But I was willing to abide by whatever rituals she wanted to impose. I

tossed off the drink, then took her in my arms.

I had never known what lovemaking could be, before experiencing her. * * *

I awoke with a horrible combination of headache and nausea, not unlike a migraine. But it wasn't a migraine, because it began to recede as soon as I managed to swing my legs out of the bed and get shakily to my feet.

Chloe was gone. The cabin was empty.

I got back into my clothes, stumbled to the hatch and, with gradually increasing steadiness, made my

way aft to the observation lounge. It, too, was empty. So I started forward, toward a hatch I had never entered, nor been invited to enter.

I'd seen the Ekhemasu open it by placing one of their three-digited hands on a pad on the bulkhead

beside it. I a.s.sumed it was coded for those alone-and, even among them, probably for authorized personnel only. But, for lack of anything else to try, I pressed the pad. To my surprise, the hatch slid silently open. I stepped through into the control room.

It was dimly lit by the glow of instrument panels, and by the stars and the cloud-swirled blue globe that shone in the hemispherical viewscreen that enclosed the forward end. Two figures were silhouetted against that cosmic panorama. One was an Ekhemar who, as I approached closer, I recognized as Khorat. The other was easier to identify-effortless, in fact, as there was only one other human aboard.

"So we're already entering Earth orbit," I said, for I knew that blue globe.

Khorat turned to face me. "Ah, you are awake. Yes, we have arrived. And Novak has departed-barely ahead of us. We are positioning ourselves to proceed on the same temporal . . . vector."

I wasn't really listening to him, for Chloe had also turned, and our eyes met. We stared at each other

wordlessly, and her face reflected more conflicting emotions than I'd thought a human soul could

contain.There were so many things I could have said . . . but I said nothing. For among all the storm of thoughts in my head, one rose like a whitecap above a raging sea: the Mickey she'd put in my drink must have been prepared beforehand. It was easy, looking back clear-eyed, to see how she'd slipped it in-her back had been to me as she'd poured-but it had to have been already there.

"Prepare for temporal displacement," Khorat said quietly.

Something happened to the universe in the viewscreen. It was difficult for the mind to grasp just what that something was. But then it was over, and the stars went out. But in an indescribable way it was as

though they had never been, or were antic.i.p.ated in the future, for we had entered a realm in which time had a different meaning.

We were committed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

The characteristics of the s.p.a.ce we were in didn't grow less weird with familiarity. The strange, subliminal sense that things had happened, or been said, before did not go away. Sound had a hollow, wavering quality, and motion took place as though in a series of rapid photographic frames. And the viewscreen was difficult to look at. It wasn't even blackness; it was just nothing.

But to tell the truth, I hardly noticed the eeriness, for my thoughts were in a whirl. My bewildered anger and hurt over Chloe's betrayal-Why? I longed to cry out to her, but of course I couldn't in the control room-was almost canceled out by despair at the knowledge that it was too late to stop Khorat in his crazy quest, for we had been plunged irrevocably into the past. I felt adrift, cut off from both my time and my love.

It was too much. There seemed nothing adequate to say. So I settled for, "How fast are we going backwards in time?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"d.a.m.n it, Khorat, you know what I mean! At what rate are we going into the past? What's the time right now in our universe?"

"The question cannot be answered with precision, as we have no referents." Khorat indicated the nothingness in the viewscreen. "As I mentioned previously, there are innumerable dimensions-as I must refer to them-in which temporal displacement can take place. While one can theoretically drop into any one of them that is attainable at all, it is safest to progress through them one at a time. We have, I believe, completed those translations." Khorat glanced at an Ekhemar seated at a nearby computer station, and received a gesture of confirmation. "If our theoretical projections of the ratio of displacement are correct, then for each unit of subjective time that pa.s.ses within the field encompa.s.sing this ship, we are receding into the past by slightly in excess of seventeen thousand of those units."

I did some quick mental arithmetic: a little less than two years per hour. . . .

Chloe had clearly done the same calculation, and gone an additional step beyond it. "So Renata is looking at a trip of about three and a half days, to reach the period she's after."

"Actually, over four of your days, or one of ours. Remember, her temporal displacement is proceeding at

a significantly lesser rate than ours. This gives us ample time to . . . overtake her."

"How long?" I demanded.

"Once again, I cannot give you a precise answer, as we do not know the exact rate of her

displacement . . . or of our own, come to that. But theory predicts that this ship and hers should become

mutually contemporaneous between not less than seven nor more than nine subjective hours from now."

"But," I protested, "how can we tell when it's happened? I mean, her ship is in another dimension, right?

So how will we be able to detect it?"

"By its gravitational potential. You see, we have sensors based on the gravity waves which, I believe,

your world's mainstream science still regards as hypothetical at best."

"Yeah," I said shortly. My patience with being patronized had been wearing thinner and thinner. "We've heard of these devices. I understand they're very bulky."