The Corridors of Time

by Poul Anderson

  ‘Judas!’ he said weakly. ‘I hope not!’ But her nearness and her touch were, even then, exhilarating. He began to recover his self-possession.

  ‘How the deuce is that done?’ he asked. Echoes bounced hollowly around his voice.

  ‘Shh! Not so loud.’ Storm glanced at her color disc. ‘No one is here at present, but they may come from below, and sound carries damnably well in these tunnels.’

  She drew a breath. ‘If it will make you feel better, I shall explain the principle,’ she said. ‘The plug of earth is bound together by an energy web emanating from a network embedded in these walls. The same network blankets any effects that might occur in a metal detector, a sonic probe, or some other instrument that could otherwise detect this passage. It also refreshes and circulates the air through molecular porosities. The tube I used to lift the plug is merely a control; the actual power comes likewise from the network.’

  ‘But—’ Lockridge shook his head. ‘Impossible. I know that much physics. I mean – well, maybe in theory – but no such gadget exists in practice.’

  ‘I told you this was a secret research project,’ Storm answered. ‘They achieved many things.’ Her lips bent upward – how close to his! ‘You are not frightened, are you, Malcolm?’

  He squared his shoulders. ‘No. Let’s move.’

  ‘Good man,’ she said, with a slight, blood-quickening emphasis on the second word. Releasing him, she led the way down.

  ‘This is only the entrance,’ she said. ‘The corridor proper is more than a hundred feet below us.’

  They spiraled into the earth. Lockridge observed that his own stupefaction was gone. Alertness thrummed in him. Storm had done that. My God, he thought, what an adventure.

  The passage debouched in a long room, featureless except at the further wall. There stood a large box or cabinet of the same lustrous, self-closing metal as Storm’s belt and a doorway some ten feet wide and twenty high. Curtained? No, as he neared, Lockridge saw that the veil which filled it, flickering with soft iridescence, every hue his eyes could see and (he suspected) many they could not, was immaterial: a shimmer in space, a mirage, a sheet of living light. The faintest hum came from it, and the air nearby smelled electric.

  Storm paused there. Through her clothes he saw how the tall body tensed. His own pistol came out with hers. She glanced at him.

  ‘The corridor is just beyond,’ she said in a whetted voice. ‘Now listen. I only hinted to you before that we might have to fight. But the enemy is everywhere. He may have learned of our place. His agents may even be on the other side of this gate. Are you ready, at my command, to shoot?’

  He could only jerk his head up and then down.

  ‘Very well. Follow me.’

  ‘No, wait, I’ll go—’

  ‘Follow, I said.’ She bounded through the curtain.

  He came after. Crossing the threshold, he felt a brief, twisting shock, and stumbled. He caught himself and glared around.

  Storm stood half crouched, peering from side to side. After a minute she glanced at her instrument, and the pistol sank in her hand. ‘No one,’ she breathed. ‘We are safe for the moment.’

  Lockridge drew a shaky lungful and tried to understand what sort of place he had entered.

  The corridor was huge. Also hemicylindrical, with the same luminous surfacing, it must be a hundred feet in diameter. Arrow straight it ran, right and left, until the ends dwindled out of sight – why, it must go for miles, he realized. The humming noise and the lightning smell were more intense here, pervading his being, as if he were caught in some vast machine.

  He looked back at the door through which he had come, and stiffened. ‘What the hell!’

  On this side, though no higher, the portal was easily two hundred feet wide. A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951, 4952. … Only the auroral curtain was the same.

  ‘No time to waste,’ Storm tugged at his sleeve. ‘I shall explain later. Get aboard.’

  She gestured at a curve-fronted platform, not unlike a big metal toboggan with low sides, that hovered two feet off the floor. Several backless benches ran down its length. At the head was a panel where small lights glowed, red, green, blue, yellow— ‘Come on!’

  He mounted with her. She took the front seat, laid her gun in her lap, and passed her hand across the lights. The sled swung around and started left down the corridor. It moved in total silence at a speed he guessed to be thirty miles an hour; but somehow the wind was screened off them.

  ‘What the jumpin’ blue blazes is this thing?’ he choked.

  ‘You have heard of hovercraft?’ Storm said absently. Her eyes kept flickering from the emptiness ahead to the color disc in her fingers.

  A grimness came upon Lockridge. ‘Yes, I have,’ he said, ‘and I know this is nothin’ like them.’ He pointed to her instrument. ‘And what’s that?’

  She sighed. ‘A life indicator. And we are riding a gravity sled. Now be still and keep watch to our rear.’

  Lockridge felt almost too stiff to sit, but managed it. He set the rifle on the bench beside him. Sweat was clammy along his ribs, and he saw and heard with preternatural sharpness.

  They glided by another portal, and another, and another. The gates came at variable intervals, averaging about half a mile, as near as Lockridge could gauge in this saturating cold illumination. Wild thoughts spun through his head. No Germans could ever have built this, no anti-Communist underground be using it. Beings from another planet, another star, somewhere out in the measureless darkness of the cosmos —

  Three men came through a gate that the sled had just passed. Lockridge yelled at the same moment that Storm’s indicator turned blood red. She twisted about and looked behind. Her mouth skinned back from her teeth. ‘So we fight,’ she said on a trumpet note, and fired aft.

  A blinding beam sprang from her pistol. One of the men lurched and collapsed. Smoke rolled greasy from the hole in his breast. The other two had their guns unfastened before he was down. Storm’s firebolt passed across them, broke in a coruscant many-colored fountain, and splashed the corridor walls with vividness. The air crackled. Ozone stung Lock-ridge’s nostrils.

  She thumbed a switch on her weapon. The beam winked out. A vague, hissing shimmer encompassed her and her companion. ‘Energy shielding,’ she said. ‘My entire output must go to it, and even so, two beams striking the same spot could break through. Shoot!’

  Lockridge had no time to be appalled. He brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted. The man he saw was big but dwindling with distance, only his close-fitting black garments and golden-bronze Roman-like helmet could be made out, he was a target with no face. Briefly there jagged across Lockridge’s memory the woods at home, green stillness and a squirrel in branches above…. He shot. The bullet smote, the man fell but picked himself up. Both of them sprang onto a gravity sled such as was parked at every gate.

  ‘The energy field slows material objects too,’ Storm said bleakly. ‘Your bullet had too little residual velocity, at this range.’

  The other sled got moving in pursuit. Its black-clad riders hunched low under the bulwarks. Lockridge could just see the tops of their helmets. ‘We got a lead on them,’ he said. ‘They can’t go any faster, can they?’

  ‘No, but they will observe where we emerge, go back, and tell Brann,’ Storm answered. ‘A mere identification of me will be bad enough.’ Her eyes were ablaze, nose flared, breasts rising and falling; but she spoke more coolly than he had known men to do when they trained with live ammunition. ‘We shall have to counterattack. Give me your pistol. When I stand to draw their fire – no, be quiet, I will be shielded – you shoot.’

  She whipped the sled about and sent it hurtling toward the other one. The thing grew in Lockridge’s vision with nightmare slowness. And those were actu
al men he must kill. He kicked away nausea. They were trying to kill him and Storm, weren’t they? He knelt beneath the sideshield and held his rifle ready.

  The encounter exploded around him. Storm surged to her feet, the energy gun in her left hand, the Webley barking in her right. Yards away, the other sled veered. Two firebeams struck at her, throwing sparks and sheets of radiance, moving toward convergence. And a slug whined from some noiseless, stubby-barreled weapon that one of the black-uniformed men also held.

  Lockridge jumped up. In the corner of an eye he saw Storm, erect in a geyser of red, blue, yellow flame, hair tossed about her shoulders by the thundering energies, shooting and laughing. He looked down upon the enemy, straight into a pale narrow countenance. The bullet gun swiveled toward him. He fired exactly twice.

  The other sled passed by and on down the corridor.

  Echoes died away. The air lost its sting. There was only the bone-deep song of unknown forces, the smell of them and the flimmer on a gateway.

  Storm looked after the sprawled bodies as they departed, picked her life indicator off the bench, and nodded. ‘You got them,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, nobly shot!’ She threw down the instrument, seized Lockridge and kissed him with bruising strength.

  Before he could react, she let him go and turned the sled around. Her color was still high, but she spoke with utter coolness: ‘It would be a waste of time and charges to disintegrate them. The Rangers would still know quite well that they met their end at Warden hands. But no more than that should be obvious: provided we get out of the corridor before anyone else chances along.’

  Lockridge slumped onto a bench and tried to comprehend what had happened.

  He didn’t come out of his daze until Storm halted the sled and urged him off. She leaned over and activated the controls. It started away. ‘To its proper station,’ she explained briefly. ‘If Brann knew that the killers of his men had entered from 1964, and found an extra conveyance here, he would know the whole story. This way, now.’

  They approached the gate. Storm chose a line from the first group, headed 1175. ‘Here you must be careful,’ she said. ‘We could easily get lost from each other. Walk exactly on this marker.’ She reached behind her and closed fingers on his. He was still too shocked to appreciate that contact as much as he knew, dimly, he would otherwise.

  Following her, he passed through the curtain. She let him go, and he saw that they were in a room like the one from which they had entered. Storm opened the cabinet, consulted what he guessed might be a timepiece, and nodded in a satisfied way. Taking out a pair of bundles done up in a shaggy coarse-woven blue material, she handed them to him and closed the cabinet. They went up the spiral ramp.

  At the end, she opened another turf trapdoor with her control tube and closed it again behind them. The concealment was perfect.

  Lockridge didn’t notice. There was too much else.

  The sun had still been well above the horizon when they entered the tunnel, and they couldn’t have been inside more than half an hour. But here was night, with a nearly full moon high in the sky. By that wan radiance he saw how the mound-side now covered the dolmen, up to the capstone, with a rude wooden door beneath. Around him, grasses nodded in a chill, moist breeze. No farmlands lay below; the knoll was surrounded by brush and young trees, a second-growth wilderness. To the south a ridge lifted that looked eerily familiar, but it was covered with forest. Old, those trees, incredibly, impossibly old, he had only seen oaks so big in the last untouched parts of America. Their tops were hoar in the moonlight, and shadows solid beneath.

  An owl hooted. A wolf howled.

  He raised his eyes again and saw this was not September. That sky belonged to the end of May.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Yes, of course I lied to you,’ Storm said.

  The campfire guttered high, sparks showed, light danced dull on smoke and picked her strong-boned features out of darkness in Rembrandt hints. Beyond and around, the night crawled close. Lockridge shivered and held his hands toward the coalbed.

  ‘You would not have believed the truth before you saw,’ Storm went on. ‘Would you? At the very least, time would have been lost in explanation, and I had already been much too long in the twentieth century. Each hour multiplied my danger. If Brann had thought to guard that Danish gate — He must believe I was killed. There were several other women in my party, and some were mutilated beyond recognition in the fight with him. Nevertheless, he could have gotten wind of me.’

  Exhausted by reaction, Lockridge said merely. ‘You are from the future, then?’

  She smiled. ‘So are you, now.’

  ‘My future, I mean. When?’

  ‘About two thousand years after your era.’ Her humor faded, she sighed and looked into the gloom that lay back of him. ‘Though I have been in so many ages, I am woven into so much history, I sometimes wonder if any of my spirit remains in the year I was born.’

  ‘And – we’re still in the same place as we entered the corridor, aren’t we? But in the past. How far?’

  ‘By your reckoning, the late spring of 1827 B.C. I checked the exact date on a calendar clock in the foreroom. Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through – so we would not be separated by weeks.’ Briskly: ‘If such should ever happen, go back into the corridor and wait. Duration occurs there, too, but on a different plane, so that we can rendezvous.’

  Nearly four thousand years, Lockridge thought. On this day Pharaoh sat the throne of Egypt, the sea king of Crete planned trade with Babylon. Mohenjodaro stood proud in the Indus valley, the General Grant Tree was a seedling. Bronze was known to the Mediterranean world but northern Europe was neolithic, and the dolmen of the knoll had been raised only a few generations ago by folk whose slash-and-burn agriculture exhausted the soil and forced them to move elsewhere. Eighteen hundred years before Christ, centuries before even Abraham, he sat camped in a Denmark which those people who called themselves Danes had yet to enter. The strangeness seeped through him like a physical cold. He fought back the sense and asked :

  ‘What is that corridor, anyway? How does it work?’

  ‘The physics would have no meaning to you,’ Storm said. ‘Think of it as a tube of force, whose length has been rotated onto the time axis. Entropy still increases inside; there is temporal flow. But from the viewpoint of one within, cosmic time – outside time – is frozen. By choosing the appropriate gate, one can step out into any corresponding era. The conversion factor’ – she frowned in concentration – ‘in your measurements, would be roughly thirty-five days per foot. Every few centuries there is a portal, twenty-five years wide. The intervals cannot be less than about two hundred years, or the weakened forcefield would collapse.’

  ‘Does it go clear up to your century?’

  ‘No. This one extends from circa 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2000. It is not feasible to build them much longer. There are many corridors of varying lengths throughout the space-time of this planet. The gates are made to overlap time, so that by going from one passage to another a traveler can find any specific year he wishes. For example, to go further pastward than 4000 B.C., we could take corridors I know of in England or China, whose gates also cover this year. To go futureward beyond the limits of this one, we would have to seek out still other places.’

  ‘When were they … invented?’

  ‘A century or two before I was born. The struggle between Wardens and Rangers was already intense, so the original purpose of scientific research was largely shunted aside.’

  Wolves gave voice in the night. A heavy body went crashing through underbrush and a savage, yelping chorus took up pursuit. ‘You see,’ Storm said, ‘we cannot wage total war. That would cost us Earth, as it cost us Mars – a ring of radioactive fragments encircling the sun – I sometimes wonder if, at the last, engineers will not go back sixty million years and build great space fleets, for a battle that wiped
out the dinosaurs and left eternal scars on the moon…’

  ‘You don’t know your own future, then?’ Lockridge asked with a crawling along his nerves.

  The dark head shook. ‘No. When the activator is turned on to make a new corridor, it drives a shaft equally far in both directions. We ventured ahead of our era. There were guardians who turned us back, with weapons we did not understand. We no longer try. It was too terrible.’

  The knowledge of mysteries beyond mysteries was not to be endured. Lockridge fled to practicality.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I seem to’ve enlisted in a war on your side. Do you mind tellin’ me what the shootin’s for? Who are your enemies?’ He paused. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Let me continue to use the name I chose in your century,’ Storm said. ‘I believe it was a lucky one.’ She sat brooding a while. ‘I do not think you could really grasp the issue of my age. Too much history lies between you and us. Could a man from your past really feel what the basic difference is that divides East and West in your time?’

  ‘I reckon not,’ Lockridge admitted. ‘In fact quite a few of our own don’t seem to see it.’

  ‘At that,’ Storm said, ‘the issue is the same. Because there has really only been one throughout man’s existence – distorted, confused, hidden behind a thousand lesser motivations, and yet always in some fashion the clash between two philosophies, two ways of thought and life – of being – the question is forever: What is the nature of man?’

  Lockridge waited. Storm brought her gaze back from the night, across the low fire to him, stabbingly intense.

  ‘Life as it is imagined to be against life as it is,’ she said. ‘Plan against organic development. Control against freedom. Overriding rationalism against animal wholeness. The machine against the living flesh. If man and man’s fate can be planned, organized, made to conform to some vision of ultimate perfection, is not man’s duty to enforce the vision upon his fellow man, at whatever cost? That sounds familiar to you, no?