Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 41

"Yes, with an ax. My ax. You'll see him, of course. I apologize, Doctor. I don't usually lose control."

"Perfectly normal and healthy, Mister Bainbridge. You don't have to tell me about the shooting if you don't want to. I'm a doctor, not a policeman."

"My rifle fell over and discharged," Emery said. "The bullet creased my side-I don't think that's too bad-and hit..." Looking at the wounded woman, he ransacked his memory for a suitable name. "Hit Tamar in the leg. I should explain that Tamar's an exchange student who's been staying with us." Tamar had been Solomon's sister, and King Solomon's mines had been somewhere around the Horn of Africa.

"She's from Aden. She speaks very lithe English, I'm afraid. I know first aid, and I'm doing all I can, but I thought I ought to call you."

"She's conscious?"

"Oh, yes. She's sitting up and eating right now. The bullet hit the outer part of her thigh. I think it missed the bone. It's still in her leg. It didn't exit."

"This just happened?"

"Ten minutes ago, perhaps."

"Don't give her any more food, she may vomit. Give her water. There's no intestinal wound? No wound in the abdomen?"

"No, in her thigh as I said. About eight inches above the knee.""Then let her have water, as much as she wants. Has she lost much blood?"

Emery glanced at the dead woman. It would be necessary to account for the stains of her blood as well as Tamar's. "It's not easy to estimate, but I'd say at least a pint. It could be a little more."

"I see, I see." Ormond sounded relieved." I'd give her a transfusion if I had her in the hospital, Mister Bainbridge, but she may not really need one. At least, not badly: How much would you say she weighs?"

He tried to remember the effort involved in lifting her. He had been excited, of course-high on adrenaline. "Between ninety and a hundred pounds, at a guess."

Ormond grunted. "Small. Small bones? Height?"

"Yes, very small. My wife calls her pet.i.te." The lie had come easily, unlooked for. "I'd say she's about five foot one. Delicate."

"What about you, Mister Bainbridge? Have you lost much blood?"

"Less than half as much as she has, I'd say."

"I see. The question is whether your intestine has been perforated-"

"Not unless it's a lot closer to the skin than I think it is, Doctor. It's just a crease, as I say. I was sitting down, she was standing up. The bullet creased my side and went into her leg."

"I'd wait a bit, just the same, before I ate or drank anything, Mister Bainbridge. You haven't eaten or drunk since it happened?"

"No," Emery lied.

"Good. Wait a bit. Can you call me back in two hours?"

"Certainly. Thank you, Doctor."

"I'll be here, unless there's an emergency here in town, someplace I can get to. If I'm not here, my wife will answer the phone. Have you called the police?"

"Not about this. It's an accident, not a police matter."

"I'm required to report any gunshot wounds I treat. You may want to report it yourself first."

"All right, I can tell the officer who investigates my son's death."

"That's up to you, but I'll have to report it. Is there anything else?"

"I don't think so."

"Do you have any antibiotics? A few capsules left from an old prescription?"

"I don't think so."

"Look. If you find anything you think might be helpful, call me back immediately. Otherwise, in two hours."

"Right. Thank you, Doctor." Emery hung up.The snow water was boiling on the stove. He turned off the burner, noting that the potful of packed snow had become less than a quarter of a pot of water. "As soon as that cools off a little, I'm going to wash your wound and put a proper bandage on it," he said.

She smiled shyly.

"You're from Aden. It's in Yemen, I believe. Your name is Tamar. Can you say Tamar?" He spoke slowly, mouthing the sounds. "Ta-mar. You say it." He pointed to her.

"Teye-mahr." She smiled again, not quite so frightened.

"Very good! You'd speak Arabic, I suppose, but I've got a few books here, and if I can dig up a more obscure language for you, we'll use it-too many people know Arabic. I wish that you could tell me," he hesitated, "where you really come from. Or when you come from. Because that's what I've been thinking.

That's crazy, isn't it?"

She nodded, though it seemed to him she had not understood.

"You were up in s.p.a.ce in that thing. In the ziggurat." He laid splits of wood on the blazing kindling. "I've been thinking about that, too, and you just about had to be. How many were there in your crew?"

Sensing her incomprehension, he pointed to the dead woman, then to the living one, and held up three fingers. "This many? Three? Wait a minute."

He found a blank page in his journal and drew the ziggurat with three stick figures beside it. "This many?"

He offered her his journal and the pen.

She shook her head and pointed to her leg with her free hand.

"Yes, of course. You'll need both hands."

He cleaned her wound as thoroughly as he could with Q-Tips and the steaming snow-water, and contrived a dressing from a clean undershirt and the remaining tape. "Now we've got to get the bullet out.

I think we ought to for your sake anyway-it will have carried cloth into the wound, maybe even tissue from the other woman."

Breaking the plastic of a disposable razor furnished him with a small but extremely sharp blade. "I'd planned to use the pen blade of my jackknife," he explained as he helped her roll over, "but this will be better."

He cut away what remained of her trouser leg. "It's going to hurt. I wish I had something to give you."

Two shallow incisions revealed an edge of the mushroomed carbine bullet. He fished the pliers out of the hot water with a fork, gripped the ragged lead in them, and worked the bullet free. Rather to his surprise, she bit her pillow and did not cry out.

"Here it is." He held the bullet where she could see it. "It went through your friend's breastbone, and I think it must have gotten her heart. Then it was deflected downward, most likely by a rib, and hit you. If it hadn't been deflected, it might have missed you altogether. Or killed you. Lie still, please." He put his hand on her back and felt her shrink from his touch. "I want to mop away the blood and look at that with the flashlight. If this fragmented at all, it didn't fragment much. But if it did, we want to get all of the pieces out, and anything else that doesn't belong." Unable to stop himself, he added, "You're afraid, aren't you?

All of you were. Afraid of me, and of Brook too. Probably afraid of all males."He found fibers in the wound that had probably come from her trousers and extracted them one by one, tore strips from a second undershirt, and tied a folded pad made of what remained of it to the new wound at the back of her thigh. "This is what we had to do before they had tape," he confided as he tightened the last knot. "Wind cloth around the wounded leg or whatever it was. That's why we call them wounds. If you were wounded, you gar bandages wound around you-all right, you can turn back over now." He helped her.

The flames were leaping high in the fieldstone fireplace. He took the metal fragments out of his shirt pocket and showed them to her, then pointed toward it.

She shook her head emphatically.

"Do you mean they won't burn, or they will?" He grinned. "I think you mean they will. Let's see."

He tossed the smallest sliver from the ladder into the fire. After a second or two, there was a burst of brilliant light and puff of white smoke. "Magnesium. I thought so."

He moved his chair next to the bunk in which she lay and sat down. "Magnesium's strong and very light, but it burns. They use it in flashbulbs. Your ziggurat, your lander or s.p.a.ce station or whatever it is, will burn with a flame hot enough to destroy just about anything, and I'm going to burn it tomorrow morning.

It's a terrible waste and I hate to do it, but that's what I'm going to do. You don't understand any of this, do you, Tamar?" He got his journal and drew fire and smoke coming from the ziggurat.

She studied the drawing, her face thoughtful, then nodded.

"I'm glad you didn't throw a fit about that," he told her. "I was afraid you would, but maybe you were under orders not to disturb things back here any more than you could help."

When she did not react to that, he took another leaf bag from under the sink; to his satisfaction, it was large enough to contain the dead woman. "I had to do that before she got stiff," he explained to the living one. "She'll stiffen up in an hour or so. It's probably better if we don't have to look at her, anyway."

Tamar made a quick gesture he did not comprehend, folded her hands, and shut her eyes.

"Tomorrow, before the storm lets up, I'm going to drag her back to your s.p.a.ce station and burn it." He was talking mostly for his own benefit, to clarify his thoughts. "That's probably a crime, but it's what I'm going to do. You do what you've got to." He picked up the Sako carbine. "I'm going to clean this and leave it in the other cabin on the way, and throw away the bullet. As far as the sheriff's concerned, my gun shot us both by accident. If I have to, I'll say you bit my face while I was tending your wound. But I won't be able to shave there anyhow, and by the time they get here my beard may cover it."

She motioned toward his journal and pen, and when he gave them to her produced a creditable sketch of the third woman.

"Gone," he said. "She's dead too. I'd stuck my thumbs in her eyes-she tried to kill me-and she ran.

She must have fallen through the hole in the floor. The water down there was pretty shallow, so she would've hit hard. I think she drowned."

Tamar pointed to the leaf bag that held the dead woman, then sketched her with equal facility, finishing by crossing out the sketch.

Emery crossed out the women in the ziggurat as well, and returned the journal and the pen to Tamar.

"You'll have to live the rest of your life here, I'm afraid, unless they send somebody for you. I don't expect you to like it-not many of us do-but you'll have to do the best you can, just like the rest of us."Suddenly excited, she pointed to the tiny face of the lion on his pen and hummed, waving the pen like a conductor's baton. It took him a minute or more to identify the tune.

It was "G.o.d Save the Queen."

Later, when she was asleep, he telephoned an experimental physicist. "David," he asked softly, "do you remember your old boss? Emery Bainbridge?"

David did.

"I've got something here I want to tell you about, David. First, though, I've got to say I can't tell you where I got it. That's confidential-top secret. You've got to accept that. I won't ever be able to tell you.

Okay?"

It was.

"This thing is a little dish. It looks almost like an ashtray." There was a penny in the clutter on the table; he picked it up. "I'm going to drop a penny into it. Listen."

The penny fell with a clink.

"After a while, that penny will disappear, David. Right now it looks just a little misted, like it had been outside in the cold, and there was condensation on it."

Emery moved the dish closer to the kerosene lantern. "Now the penny is starting to look sort of silvery. I think most of the copper's gone, and what I'm seeing is the zinc underneath. You can barely make out Lincoln's face."

David spoke.

"I've tried that. Even if you hold the dish upside down and shake it, the penny-or whatever it is-won't fall out, and I'm not about to reach in and try to pull it out."

The crackling voice in the receiver sounded louder than Emery's own.

"I wish you could, David. It's not much bier than the end of a pencil now, and shrinking quickly. Hold on- "There. It's gone. I think the dish must boil off atoms or molecules by some cold process. That's the only explanation I've come up with. I suppose we could check that by a.n.a.lyzing samples of air above it, but I don't have the equipment here.

"David, I'm going to start a new company. I'm going to do it on a shoestring, because I don't want to let any backers in. I'll have to use my own money and whatever I can raise on my signature. I know you've got a good job now. They're probably paying you half what you're worth, which is a h.e.l.l of a lot. But if you'll come in with me, I'll give you ten percent.

"Of course you can think it over. I expect you to. Let's say a week. How's that?"

David spoke at length.

"Yes, here too. The lights are off, as a matter of fact. It's just by the grace of G.o.d that the phone still works. I'll be stuck out here-I'm in the cabin-for another three or four days, probably. Then I'll drive into the city, and we'll talk."Certainly you can look at it. You can pick it up and try it out, but not take it back to your lab. You understand, I'm sure."

A last, querulous question.

Emery chuckled. "No, it's not from a magic store, David. I think I might be able to guess where it's actually from, but I'm not going to. Top secret, remember? It's technology way in advance of ours. We're medieval mechanics who've found a paper shredder. We may never be able to make another shredder, but we can learn a h.e.l.l of a lot from the one we've got."

When he had hung up, he moved his chair back to the side of Tamar's bunk. She was lying on her back, her mouth and eyes closed, the soft sigh of her respiration distinct against the howling of the wind beyond the log walls.

"Jan's going to want to come back," Emery told Tamar, his voice less than a whisper. "She'll try to kiss and make up two weeks to a month after she finds out about the new company, I'd say. I'll have to get our divorce finalized before she hears. They'll back off a little on that property settlement when she gets back to the city, and then I'll sign."

Tamar's left hand lay on the quilt; his found it, stroking the back and fingers with a touch that he hoped was too light to wake her. "Because I don't want Jan anymore. I want you, Tamar, and you're going to need me."

The delicate brown fingers curled about his, though she was still asleep.

"You're learning to trust me, aren't you? Well, you can. I won't hurt you." He fell silent. He had taught the coyote to trust him; and because he had, the coyote had not feared the smell of Man on the cyanide gun.

He would have to make certain Tamar understood that all men were not to be trusted-that there were millions of men who would rob and rape and kill her if they could.

"How did you reproduce, up there in our future, Tamar? As.e.xually? My guess is artificial insemination, with a means of selecting for females. You can tell me whether I'm right, by and by."

He paused, thinking. "Is our future still up there? The one you came from? Or did you change things when you crashed? Or when you killed Brook. Even if it is, Maybe you and I can change things with some new technology. Let's try."

Tamar sighed, and seemed to smile in her sleep. He bent over her to kiss her, his lips lightly brushing hers. "Is that why the crash was so bad that you could never get the ziggurat to fly again? Because just by crashing at all, or by killing my son, you destroyed the future you came from?"

In the movies, Emery reflected, people simply stepped into time machines and vanished, to reappear later or earlier at the same spot on Earth's surface, as if Copernicus had never lived. In reality, Earth was moving in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, and the galaxy itself in the universe. One would have to travel through s.p.a.ce as well as time to jump time in reality.

Somewhere beneath the surface of the lake, the device that permitted such jumps was still functioning, after a fashion. No longer jumping, but influencing the speed with which time pa.s.sed-the timing of time, as it were. The hours he had spent inside the ziggurat had been but a minute or two outside it; that had to be true, because the prints of his snowshoes coming in had still been sharp when he came out, and Aileen had spent half a day at least there in two hours.