The Corridors of Time

by Poul Anderson

  The shaft he wanted came into sight, its opening an oblong in the blank wall, its depth whistling with forced air. The soldiers led Lockridge past.

  Their energy guns were drawn, but not aimed at him. Prisoners never gave much trouble. He stopped short. The blade of his hand hewed into the Adam’s apple on his right. A helmet jerked back, a body went to all fours. Lockridge spun to the left. He threw a shoulder block, his full weight behind. The guard toppled backward. Lockridge got a grip on him and hurled them both into the shaft.

  Downward they tumbled. An alarm shrieked. That many-eyed machine which was the building had seen the unusual. In a voice nearly human, it cried what it knew.

  Featureless, walls converging on a bottomward infinity, the tube fled by. Lockridge clung to the Ranger, arm around the throat, fist pounding while they fell. The guard went loose, his mouth slackened in the bloody face and the gun left his fingers. Lockridge fumbled at his belt controls. Where the furious hell—?

  Door after door whizzed upward. Twice, energy bolts sizzled from them. And now the bottom leaped at him. He found the plaque he wanted and pushed. Unbalanced force nearly tore him from his grip on the Ranger. But they were slowed, they were saved from that bone-spattering impact, they were down.

  The base of the shaft fronted on another hallway. An entry stood opposite, to show a room whose sterile white made the rainbow shimmer of a time gate all the more lovely. Two guards gaped across leveled weapons. A squad was dashing down the passage.

  ‘Secure this man!’ Lockridge gasped. ‘And let me by!’

  He was in uniform, with potent insignia. The castle had not seen details. Arms snapped in salute. He sprang into the anteroom.

  Around him, the air woke with Brann’s voice, huge as God’s. ‘Attention, attention! The Director speaks. A man dressed as a guardsmaster of the household has just entered the temporal transit on Sublevel Nine. He must be captured alive at any cost.’

  Through the gate! The twisting shock of phase change made Lockridge fall. He rolled over, his bare head struck the floor, pain burst through him and for an instant he lay stunned.

  The fear of the mind machine brought him awake. He hauled himself erect and onto the gravity sled which waited.

  Half a dozen men poured through the curtain. Lockridge flattened. Pale stun beams splashed on the bulwarks around him. He lifted a palm and covered the acceleration control light. The sled got into motion.

  Away from the Rangers, yes. But they were on his pastward side. He was headed into the future.

  The wind rasped in his lungs. His heartbeat shook him as a dog shakes a rat. With his last reserves, he mastered panic enough to risk a look aft. The black shapes were already dwindling. They milled about, uncertain, and he remembered. Storm Darroway, seated by a fire in a wolf-haunted forest: ‘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.’

  I served you, Koriach, he sobbed. Goddess, help me!

  As from far away, echoing down the vibrant whiteness of the bore, he heard Brann’s command. The guards assumed formation. Their gravity units raised them and they gave chase.

  The corridor reached on beyond sight. Lockridge saw no gate ahead, only emptiness.

  The sled halted. He flailed the control panel. The machine sank inert. The flyers swooped near.

  Lockridge jumped off and ran. A beam struck the floor behind, touched his heels and left them numb. Someone shouted victory.

  And then the Night came, and the Fear.

  He never knew what happened. Vision went from him, hearing, every sense and awareness; he was a disembodied point whirled for eternity through infinitely dimensioned space. Somehow he knew of a presence, which was alive and not alive. Thence radiated horror; the final horror, the negation of everything which was and had been and would be, cold past cold, darkness past darkness, hollowness past hollowness, nothing save a vortex which sucked him into itself, and contracted, and was not.

  He was not.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Again he was.

  First he was music, the most gentle and beautiful melody that ever had been, which with a drowsy delight he knew for Sheep May Safely Graze. Then he was also a scent of roses, a yielding firmness under his back, a body at peace with itself. He opened his eyes to sunlight.

  ‘Good mornin’, Malcolm Lockridge,’ said a man. ‘You are with friends,’ said a woman. They spoke Kentucky English.

  He sat up. They had laid him on a couch in a maple-paneled room. There was little decoration, except for a screen where colors played through soft strange shapes, but the proportions were so right that nothing else was needed. Beyond an unclosed doorway he saw a garden. Flowers grew along graveled walks and willows shaded a lilypond from the heat of high summer. On the far side of a turf-green lane stood another house, small, bedecked with honeysuckle, simply and sweetly curved.

  The man and woman stepped close. They were both tall, somewhat past their youth but still with backs erect and muscles hard. Their hair was bobbed below the ears and held by intricately ornamented bands. Otherwise they wore nothing except a pocketed band on the left wrist. Lockridge saw that he was equally nude. He felt for his own bracelet purse. The woman smiled. ‘Yes, your diaglossas are there,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you’ll want anything else.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Lockridge asked in wonder.

  They grew grave. ‘You won’t be with us long, I’m sorry to say,’ the man replied. ‘Call us John and Mary.’

  ‘And this is … when?’

  ‘A thousand years afterward.’

  With a mother’s compassion, the woman said, ‘You’ve been through nightmare, we know. But we hadn’t any other way to turn back those devils, short o’ killin’ them. We healed you, soma and psyche, while you slept.’

  ‘You’ll send me home?’

  Pain crossed her tranquility. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right away, in fact,’ said John. ‘We have to.’

  Lockridge got off the bed. ‘I didn’t mean to my own home. Europe, in the time of the Wardens.’

  ‘I know. Come.’

  They walked out. Lockridge fumbled for understanding. ‘I can see why you don’t let anyone in from the past. So what am I to you?’

  ‘Destiny,’ said John. ‘The ghastliest word a man can speak.’

  ‘What? You – I – my work’s not finished?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Mary, and caught his hand.

  ‘I must not tell you more,’ said John. ‘For your own sake. The time war was the nadir of human degredation, and not least because it denied free will.’

  Lockridge strained to hold onto the calm they had somehow instilled into him. ‘But time is fixed. Isn’t it?’

  ‘From a divine view, perhaps,’ John said. ‘Men, though, are not gods. Look into yourself. You know you make free choices. Don’t you? In the time war they rationalized every horrible thing they did by claimin’ it was bound to happen anyway. Yet they were themselves, directly, responsible for more tyranny, more death, more hate, more sufferin’ than I can stand to count up. We today know better than to look into our own future, and we only go in secret, as observers, to the poor damned past.’

  ‘Except for me,’ Lockridge said with a flick of anger.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s a wrong we’ve got to do, to prevent a greater wrong.’ John gave him a steady look. ‘I console myself by thinkin’ you’re man enough to take it.’

  ‘Well—’ Wryness touched Lockridge’s lips. ‘Okay. I certainly am glad you interfered there in the corridor.’

  ‘We won’t do so again,’ said Mary.

  They came out onto the lane. This seemed a fair-sized town, homes stretching off among high trees. A machine tended one lawn. Folk were about, handsome people with unhurried gait. Some were nude, others evidently felt a light tunic was more comfortable in the warmth. A couple of adults passing near bowed with unservile respect to John.

  �
�You must be an important man,’ Lockridge remarked.

  ‘A continental councilor.’ Love and pride lay in Mary’s tone.

  Several children whooped by. They shouted something which made John grin and wave.

  ‘Uh … me bein’ here … you’ve kept that quiet?’ Lockridge asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Mary answered. ‘The fact of your comin’ is known. We prepared ourselves. But the – call them the time wardens – never released details. For your own sake. Someone might’ve told you too much.’ In haste: ‘Not necessarily awful. But a sense o’ destiny makes a slave.’

  I’ve somethin’ crucial ahead o’ me, Lockridge thought. They don’t want me to know how I’m goin’ to die.

  He wrenched free of that by seizing on a word. ‘Time wardens! Then my side did win.’ With a look around, a breath of woodland odor, a sense of cool turf underfoot: ‘Sure. I should’a guessed. This is a good place.’

  ‘I think,’ said John, ‘you’d do well to remember what one of our philosophers wrote. All evil is a good become cancerous.’

  Puzzled, Lockridge followed him in silence. They came after a while to an area walled off by a hedge. John touched a leaf and the branches parted. Behind lay a torpedo-shaped vehicle which the three of them entered. The forward cabin was a transparent bubble, with no controls visible. Aft, through a doorway, Lockridge saw – machines? Shapes? Whatever they were, they had no clearly understandable form, but seemed to follow impossible curves to infinite expansions and regressions.

  John sat down. Silently, the carrier lifted. Earth fell away until Lockridge overlooked the eastern seaboard entire beneath a darkened sky. Mostly the land was green – how long had men needed to repair the work of the Rangers? – but southward a complex of buildings spread across miles. They were tasteful, the air was clean around them, and he identified parks. ‘I thought the Wardens didn’t build cities,’ Lockridge said.

  ‘They didn’t,’ John replied shortly. ‘We do.’

  ‘Man also needs the nearness of his fellows,’ Mary explained.

  Lockridge’s disturbance was interrupted by the sight of a silvery ovoid lifting over the horizon. He estimated distances and thought, Good Lord, that thing must be half a mile long! ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Pleiades liner, ’John said.

  ‘But, but they couldn’t reach the stars … in Storm’s era.’

  ‘No. They were too busy killin’ each other.’

  The vehicle picked up speed. America vanished in the ocean’s unchangeable loneliness. Lockridge started to ask more questions. Mary shook her head. Tears blurred her eyes.

  The time was short until Europe hove into view. In some fashion, as it moved down, the carrier did not batter its way through the air. Lockridge would have welcomed noise, to get his mind off his pastward future. He strained ahead. They were still so high that the coast unrolled like a map.

  ‘Hey! You’re aimin’ for Denmark!’

  ‘We must,’ John said. ‘You can go overland to your destination.’

  He stopped and hovered in sight of the Limfjord. The country was mainly woods and pastures. Lockridge saw a herd of graceful spotted beasts, were they from another planet? But near the head of the bay stood a town. It wasn’t like the one he had just left, and that gladdened him a little. He had never liked the idea of the world blanketed with dead uniformity. Red walls and copper spires reminded him of the Copenhagen he had known.

  Okay, he told himself, whatever I’ve still got to do, I reckon it’ll be in a good cause.

  ‘I wish we could show you more, Malcolm,’ said Mary gently. ‘But here we leave you.’

  ‘Huh? Where’s your corridor?’

  ‘We’ve found a different means,’ John said. ‘This machine’ll carry us.’

  Fire crawled among the shapes aft. Blackness sealed the cabin. Lockridge took heart. He needn’t really be doomed. This couple might only feel sorry for him because he had some fighting left to do. At the least, he’d soon see Auri again. Not to mention Yuria and her cousins; what a party that would be! And afterward Storm. …

  The transition ended. John’s countenance had tautened. ‘Get out quick,’ he said. ‘We can’t risk bein’ spotted.’ The machine fell to a shockless landing. He gripped his passenger’s hand. ‘Fare you well,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Oh, fare you well,’ cried Mary to Lockridge, and kissed him.

  The door slid back. He jumped out. The carrier rose and vanished.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  That summery land he had glimpsed was a thousand years unborn. He stood in a wilderness as thick as any the Tenil Orugaray had known. These trees were mostly beeches, though, tall and white, their branches bare against a darkening sky. Fallen leaves rustled dryly in a chill wind. A raven flapped overhead.

  He winced. What kind of friends had those people been, to dump him here naked and alone?

  They had to, he thought.

  Still, damnation, no purpose was served by his starving. So somebody must live nearby. He peered through the dusk and found a trail. Narrow and obviously seldom used, it wound off among brush and tree trunks toward the bay. He selected the diaglossa for this milieu by experiment and struck off with a briskness that was largely to warm himself.

  A glow broke through the woods, opposite the last embers of sunset. Hunter’s moon, he decided. Auri must have been awaiting him for a good three months. Poor lonely kid. Well, they had to study her anyhow, and he’d be there as soon as he could find transportation—

  He stopped. The cold sank teeth into him. Far off he had heard the baying of hounds.

  Well, was that anything to scare a man? Why the devil was he so jittery? He got moving again.

  Dusk thickened into night. Twigs crackled and stabbed as he blundered half blind from side to side of the path. The wind grew louder. Even more close, the dogs gave tongue. And was that a horn he heard? Must be, with such a clang; but the notes were an ugly snarl.

  Probably bound along this same trail, he thought. Let’s wait…. No. He broke into a trot. For some reason he didn’t want to encounter that pack.

  A part of him, above the growing unease, tried to understand why. If the Wardens reserved wild areas, that fitted their philosophy. If they hunted for sport, what of it? Yet this region was so blasted desolate. Auri’s home woods had teemed. Here he had seen nothing but trees and bushes and one carrion bird, heard nothing but wind and the unnaturally rapid approach of dogs.

  The moon swung higher. Shafts of light pierced between trunks turned ghostly gray, to speckle the ground with shadow. Deeper in, the gloom was absolute. More and more he felt as if he were in flight down an endless tunnel. He began to breathe hard. Howling echoed, the horn blew again, he sensed hoof-beats drum through the cold earth.

  Ahead of him, the forest opened. Hoarfrost glinted on heather and the Limfjord lay black and silver-streaked under flickering stars. Lockridge heard himself sob with relief.

  But suddenly the hounds yelped and yammered, the horn rang shrill, and the gallop became thunder. Knowledge stabbed: They’ve got my scent! Uncontrollable, the fear rose up and took him. He ran, with horror at his back.

  Closer the pack clamored. A woman screamed like a wildcat. He broke into a dazzle of moonlight. A mile away, next the shore, he saw a black mass and a few tiny yellow glimmers. Houses — He tripped, into whins that raked him bloody.

  The fall shocked out a little panic. He’d never make that shelter, if shelter it was. The dogs would be on him in minutes. Storm, he wept, darlin’, I’ve got to get home to you. The memory of her breasts against him gave him the courage to double back.

  To the forest edge … up a tall tree … stand on a branch, hug the bole, become another shadow, and wait!

  Down the trail and out onto the heath came the hunt.

  Those were not dogs, that score of wolfish monsters, roaring forth under the moon. Those were not half a dozen horses, they were much too huge and narwhal horns sprouted from their heads. The lunar light was so icily b
rilliant that he could see dark, clotting wetness on one point. They were human who rode, two women and four men in Warden uniform. Long fair hair blew wild with their speed. And that shape was also human, slung naked with a rent belly across one saddlebow.

  A man winded his trumpet almost beneath Lockridge. Such dread came upon the American that he was near losing his hold, he knew only that he must run, run, run — Subsonics! flashed through his last sane part, and he clutched the tree till the bark bruised him.

  ‘Ho-yo, ho-yo!’ The leading woman shook her spear aloft. Her face was unbearably akin to Storm’s.

  Forth they galloped, until the hounds lost the scent and cast about with angry snufflings. The riders reined in. Through wind and beasts, Lockridge heard them shout to each other. One girl pointed eagerly at the woods. She knew what the quarry had done. But the rest were too drunk with motion to go beating the bush. After a while they all lined out eastward across the waste.

  Could be a trick, Lockridge thought. They figure me for comin’ down, as I’ve got to, and they’ll be back to catch me then.

  The horn sounded anew, but already so far off that most of its mind-destroying effect was lost. Lockridge slid from the tree. They might not expect him to make for yonder hamlet immediately. He wouldn’t have that much coolness left him, if he were some ignorant slogg.

  Where did he get that word? Not from his diaglossa, which held so carefully little truth about this half of the world. Wait. Yes. Storm had used it.

  He filled his lungs, pressed elbows to ribs, and started running.

  Moonlight flooded the earth, the heather was frost-gray and the waters gleamed, surely they would see him but he could only run. Bushes snagged and scratched, the wind blew straight against him, but he could only run. Naught else was left in all the world, unless to wait for fang and horn and lance. Did terror, or something put in his veins by John and Mary, lash him to the pace he made? This part of his flight was no dream eternity; he reached the shore in one sprint.

  The settlement was a mere huddle of huts. Though their walls were concrete and their roofs some glistening synthetic, they were more cramped and poor than those of the Neolithic. Through ill-fitting shutters and doors trickled those gleams he had seen.