Sideslip

by Ted White

  “Captain,” I shouted. “There’s only one thing to do, before they knock us to pieces with those cannon!”

  “You are right.” The tall dusty figure of Kordamon had risen from the nearest pile of rubble. “We shall have to surrender.”

  “The hell you say,” I shouted again. “Get your men together, Thomas. We’re going to attack!”

  A rather ragged cheer went up.

  “But—but they—” A stray shot ricocheted off a stone by Kordamon’s foot; somehow it seemed to steady him. “Very well, as you say then, let’s attack!”

  Capt. Thomas had grouped his hundred and more men near the entrance.

  “Now,” I said to them as they prepared to go outside, “we’re outnumbered maybe two or three to one, but you’re highly trained men and they are—by the way they’ve fought so far—just a crowd of amateurs. Their tactics are all back-assward. They seem to have a good opinion of themselves, though, so when we start knocking them around it should help to shake them up even more.

  “Okay, when I give the word, let’s get out there and after those tanks. We can use them to fire up and down the avenue at the rest of them. Right?”

  Another cheer went up; it might have been a little less ragged than the first one, but not much.

  “Give the word, sir,” Capt. Thomas said, eagerly.

  “NOW!” I yelled, and dashed out the door with the hundred yellowjackets behind me.

  The ominous chatter of a machine gun opening up gave me the first inkling it might not be so easy. But we reached the scattered line of cars halted in front of the building, with few casualties.

  To the south on Sixth the attackers seemed to be nothing but an undisciplined mob, armed with pistols and a variety- of rifles. They were firing sporadically but caused little damage.

  In front of us, the tanks’ cannons went off again, but the shots were aimed at the building, and though there were some injuries from shrapnel and flying rock, it was not enough to stop us.

  “Get going before they depress their sights,” I yelled, and charged across the street.

  Well, we got to the tanks and we took them over, and we fired them at the mob to the south and dispersed it.

  But to the north, there was trouble. We were still outnumbered by something like two to one, and the more disciplined rifle fire was starting to take a heavy toll of us.

  Street fighting is always the dirtiest and the roughest part of a war. There’s no place to hide once you’re outdoors, and the ricochets are more dangerous than the actual fire.

  This actually put us at a disadvantage, because the jolters we were using didn’t cause ricochets. We were taking the worst of it.

  Somehow, though, we cleared them off 52nd Street and started a kind of enfilading fire from both sides of Sixth Avenue. It was a touchy thing for a while, and would have been much worse except that the Nazis were apparently determined to fight us straight on. They were refusing to play it smart and take up substantial positions inside the buildings, where they could have played merry hell with us by sniping from the upper windows.

  Then the cavalry came to the reseue, in the form of a half dozen fliers apparently dispatched from Welfare— we never did find out in the confusion how they’d gotten dispatched to help us when the fighting there had been if anything more desperate than ours.

  But there they were, laying down a good heavy barrage of good old sensible machine gun fire, and the Nazis started melting away. I found I was a little disgruntled, though—we’d been winning, hadn’t we? We’d already turned the tide.

  Still, it was certainly good to see them. There were only about 40 effectives left among my yellowjackets, but I picked myself up and they followed me forward into the demoralized line of black uniforms.

  Hand to hand, it was even tougher. The Nazis were well trained physically—it had been a big thing with them during the Second World War, I remembered. Always made it as hard for you as possible.

  It was too close for firing. We clubbed at each other with rifle butts and stinger handles, jabbed with bayonets and barrels.

  The first man I got to, I smashed in his skull with an overhand swing of my jolter, then grabbed his rifle.

  It was a strange-looking cross between a Springfield ’03 and an M-1, with the heavy wood and barrel of the older rifle and the automatic bolt action of the M-1. And it had a sturdy bayonet on it. I hefted the piece once, glanced around to see the yellowjackets closing solidly with the shattered line of Nazis, then moved forward again myself.

  It was hot and sweaty, and dusty from the shelling of the building. I closed and grappled with a dozen men. moving forward steadily, as the Nazis lost their nerve and fell back, in more and more hasty retreat.

  A shot creased me in the left arm but didn’t do more than sting briefly. I kept fighting.

  A bayonet slashed across my shoulder blades and I turned to deal with whoever had tried to get me from behind.

  And looked at myself!

  6' 6". 270 pounds. Face like a battlefield at the end of the war, just like me.

  It was me. It was Ron Archer—the Ron Archer from this world.

  But a Ron Archer with steel-cold eyes and a sneer on his lips I’d never used.

  A Ron Archer wearing a black uniform, swastika arm-band, swastika medal on the chest, swastika emblem on the hat, swastikas on the buttons of his shirt. Ron Archer in the uniform of a Nazi major . . .

  The Ron Archer I would have been if the Angels had taken over my world. But I didn’t have much time to think about it.

  His sneer straightened for a moment after I turned, and a puzzled look came over his face.

  “Son of a bitch, they were right! I thought they were joking!” he said. “You are me! They brought you over from . . . somewhere else! And now you fight with the Angels!”

  He dipped his bayonet-tipped M-1 Springfield.

  “We don’t need to fight,” my voice said to me, an undertone of arrogance in it I’d never used. “We . . . we’re like brothers,” he said, and then he laughed.

  The laugh echoed strangely, and I looked about.

  The battle was almost over; the Nazis were in full retreat now. Only Ron Archer was left, among a street full of dead and wounded bodies.

  Only Ron Archer . . . and Ron Archer. The private dick and the Nazi major.

  I saw Kordamon approaching us, then stopping to stare at us in amazement, looking back and forth between us almost comically.

  “Brothers!” The major shouted with laughter, then broke off when he saw that I was not laughing. “You and I, we’re more than brothers!”

  “Yes,” I said, slowly, wondering what was to happen when we got over our shock. “I forget who told me,” I said, shaking my head to clear it, “but whoever it was, back when I first was brought here, said that we were actually one and the same person, assuming you were here at all, still alive.”

  “The same. You say that strangely.”

  “I mean the same. There was no you-and-I. We did not exist separately. There weren’t two of us standing at the foot of Dad’s bed when he died. That was both of us together, me-not-you, you-not-me.”

  The other Ron Archer dropped his rifle;, it clattered on the pavement.

  “It was that choice the Angels made—up until then, when we were thirteen, there was no ‘we.’ There was only ‘I,’ no matter which of us says it.”

  A kind of horror filled the other Ron Archer’s cold eyes, and then his eyes narrowed as he in turn looked about him at the wreckage of after-battle.

  What there was left of the fight had moved up towards Central Park. Only the dead and wounded were left near us, and four or five yellowjackets who had joined Kordamon to stare at us in wonderment.

  “Just one thing,” I said. “How did you happen to get on the Nazi side?”

  He laughed: “Not hard to understand, no, not at all.” He laughed again. “You would have done the same thing in my place. . . And he laughed a third time.

  I didn’t. />
  Because I didn’t want to believe he was right. But he was a major—he must have been with them a long time. And he wasn’t acting like me; there was a subtle overtone of evil.

  I had been holding my rifle slackly. Archer suddenly lashed out and took it before I realized what he was doing. (“My hands, my speed,” I thought, in one part of my mind.)

  Before I could do anything he had fired a burst at Kordamon and the yellowjackets. Their force-fields still not back in operation, they had no choice but to duck. As if paralyzed in will, they did not attempt to fire at us.

  He and I grappled then for the weapon a moment, and then it spun away out of our grasp, clattering onto the pavement several yards away.

  “Why, goddamit?” I muttered, as he closed with me for a second, trying to get wrestling holds on me which I broke as soon as he touched me. “You said it—we don’t need to fight, not us”

  “The hell you say,” Archer growled at me, gasping for breath as he backed away for a moment. I tried to wipe the sweat off my face as he went on. “I want out of

  here, and I want out of here right now. You think 1 want the Angels stirring around inside my skull? They can do it, you know. Turn me into a gutless wonder like you, fighting for them, for their rotten yellowjackets, for their rotten women.”

  I stepped forward at that, involuntarily.

  “I can’t let you go, you know.”

  “Then I’ll kill you,” he said, and aimed a lightning-fast kick at my groin.

  I barely managed to sidestep him—he was fast, as deceptively fast as I was, and for the first time I sensed how demoralizing that speed would be to someone not expecting it. It almost unsettled me.

  But there were two sides to that. . . .

  He settled into a knife-fighter’s pose, and I sighed. Karate had made it to the States despite the Angels.

  I matched his pose and instantly lashed out a feint with my right hand. He barely parried it—and my left hand, heel like a knife, thudded into his neck.

  He grunted and shook his head and sent his right hand, fingers out and stiff, right into my solar plexus.

  It was the hardest blow I’ve ever taken, and I stepped back for a moment, observing with some satisfaction as I did that he took the chance to rub his neck where I had clouted him.

  Talk about an even match . . .

  Now he clenched his fists and came at me boxer-style. We feinted at each other with tentative rights and lefts, slipping each other’s punches easily.

  Then I landed one on his jaw and got tagged back solidly on the cheek. For a while we stood there, then, toe to toe and slugging it out, grunting and sweating with the effort, no thought of self-protection, just a couple of goons trying to beat each other down with brute force.

  I threw punches harder than I’d ever thrown in my life, and took blows' I’d never dreamed could be thrown, as we plastered each other on face, jaw, arms, chest, stomach, mercilessly, almost tirelessly.

  Even match.

  Gasping deeply for breath now, we stood away from each other at last. I wheezed out, “Pretty good fight, huh?”

  He looked at me with pure hate in his eyes.

  He glanced to the ground for a fraction of a betraying second, but too late I realized that he was looking for the rifles lying nearby.

  I charged at him, but he had stooped and picked up the piece before I could get to him. Before he could raise it to get at me with the bayonet, though, I had closed with him again, one hand on the barrel, forcing it back down and away.

  He twisted it away from me, one hand on the rifle, hugely enfolding it at the trigger like a pistol, while his other hand made for my throat and he attempted to jab me in the groin with a knee.

  I avoided the knee and went for his throat with my free hand. The rifle was pointing straight up now, but away from both of us. Our hands at each other’s throats were getting us nowhere.

  I broke my hold on his throat and grabbed for the rifle, and he did the same.

  We stood like that for a moment, all four hands on the rifle, holding it as if it were a baseball bat and we were about to choose sides.

  But he was more desperate than I, and slowly he began forcing the muzzle downward, until the bayonet was almost touching my shoulder.

  Then he fired the rifle. The shock of the recoil jarred my hands off the barrel, and the bullet creased my shoulder. Stung with rage, I grabbed the rifle barrel before he could fire it again and forced it back up, away from me. The next shot went off into the air, and I was prepared for the recoil.

  He kept firing into the air as I forced the rifle back, and I began to feel the heat of the barrel in my hands. Enraged, I suddenly slammed the rifle away from me, slapping the side of his head with the flat of the bayonet.

  He gave the rifle one last twist, trying to get it away from me, and his finger convulsively pulled the trigger one last time.

  It blew the left side of his head into red and grey fragments.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was like standing inside a homemade jungle gym.

  The matter-displacer was a jerry-built affair that looked like a steel tinkertoy; to me it was a meaningless collection of bars and wires and vacuum tubes.

  One of the Technocrats called to me, “About three more minutes, Mr. Archer! One of our meters is giving us a little trouble.”

  Three more minutes . . . and back to the real Time-Life Building, President Johnson, a world where the only time you saw angels was in store windows at Christmas, a world with the New York Mets, a 20¢ subway fare, a war in Vietnam, a world with our spaceships going to the Moon, to Mars, to Venus.

  I stood there and waited, and I wondered what I had gotten out of the whole deal. Not much, really. A few memories, a story I’d never get anyone to believe ... a little more experience.

  Give me five years, I figured, and it would all have faded to a distant dream—a dream, and a faint ache.

  Why did things have to work out this way, I wondered—why couldn’t I at least have a story-book ending and get the Martian Princess?

  Why should I? I could look back over the events of the last month and a half, and realize just how little I had been the master of my fate. I’d been a catalyst: I’d come onto the scene and caused all kinds of upheavals and changes, but I had nothing to show for it myself.

  I could look over the whole business, now, and see the patterns in it. From the Technocrats’ forbidden experiments, to the intense petty rivalries of the undergrounds, the way in which my own importance had snowballed. . ..

  I’d wondered why they’d all wanted me. It was simple: the Technocrats wanted me because I was part of their experiment. The Commies wanted me because I was important to the Technocrats. The Nazis wanted me because everyone else wanted me. And the Angels regarded me simply as some sort of troublemaker.

  But I wasn't really that important. The Technocrats could get along without me, and I had no real value to the others. What they really wanted was an invention based upon the theories of a kindly little old man named Albert Einstein.

  And I wondered about that. “We are still very much in the experimental stage,” Dupree told me. “We are taking grave chances with your life in allowing you to risk the machine again.”

  But why not? After all, what use was I here? I’d stirred up the antheaps, but I had nothing to contribute, now that things were rolling again.

  I’d been of real value only in that one battle against the Nazis on Sixth Avenue, and later, after the mopping-up, it became clearer what a desperate cast of the dice the Nazis had made. They had persuaded a splinter group of the Communists to throw in with them on one final bid, to capture the North American headquarters and spark similar revolts in the other headquarters. Somehow they had realized that the worldwide deliberations in progress concerning the future of Earth were turning against them—they were not going to be included in that future, in spite of the Kordamons and their efforts.

  It was of course a foolish attempt past words
to describe—the Angels would have returned in force if Hitler had succeeded, and this time they would probably have been very hard to convince indeed that Earth really deserved other than colonial status. We*d gained Earth’s freedom on what amounted to whimsical reasons anyway.

  , . . But Earth was free now, and the Nazis and Communists had made their last try, and they’d lost.

  Everything was just fine now.

  I tagged along on still more conferences, day after day, a fifth wheel invited along because Sharna said she wanted me and because I had, after all, had something to do with things as they were now.

  And they finally began hammering out something that they were pretty sure would work. It wasn’t what I’d have thought of back when Sharna first told me Earth had won, not by a long shot. But I had to admit they had something.

  There would be a United Nations sort of arrangement, yes, and they would make sure it had the kind of power to enforce its decisions that the nations back on my Earth had been unwilling to cede to it.

  But there were vast problems that a United Nations composed entirely of Earthmen simply could not handle, not with that heritage of a generation and a half under Angel domination. The administrative talent just wasn’t there yet; all the work for twenty-eight years had been done by the Angels—for their own purposes, true, but it had been done, and by them rather than by Earthmen.

  There really was only one way out of it. Some countries could carry on their own affairs: the United States, most of Europe, Canada, Japan, and a scattering of other lands—Uruguay, the Scandinavian countries, Liberia, Australia, and New Zealand, a few others. These had had a stronger tradition of more or less democratic rule. The tradition and the talent was there already; they had an older generation to tap that had not yet quite forgotten what it had been like to be free.

  But the rest of the world—almost all of Africa, most of South America, India, China—simply was not ready. Those countries that could probably make it on their own would have their hands full for years making their own countries viable again and capable of participating in the United Nations world government.