The Gate of Time

by Philip José Farmer

  Two Hawks wondered why Dzikohses had not chosen a more hidden place for their rest. He listened to Dzikohses talk to some of his men—he was understanding at least half of the speech by now—and decided that this was a trysting place. Scouts came back to report that there were no hostiles in the neighborhood. However, cannon made thunder some miles away.

  Two Hawks examined a big room which must have been the study of the master of the mansion. There were books on the shelves and on the floor, some destroyed by a bomb. A huge globe of Earth lay on the floor by the table from which it had been hurled by the explosion. He replaced it upright on the table. His heart beating hard, he verified his suspicions and cleared up some of the mysteries.

  There were Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, their outlines not quite those he had known. He spun the globe so it rotated eastward. The Pacific Ocean turned slowly by.

  He sucked in his breath, aware that O’Brien, his jaw hanging down, was standing by him.

  “What the hell?” O’Brien said, and then, “Mary, Mother of Christ!”

  There was Hawaii. Beyond it, a chain of islands starting where Alaska should be, running southeastward gently and ending in a large island where the plateau of Mexico should be. The Rockies and the Sierras. Rather, their islanded peaks. A few dots in the east were the tops of the Alleghenies. Everywhere else, water.

  Central America was all blue. South America was another chain of islands, larger than those in the northern hemisphere, the Andes.

  Two Hawks, sweating more than the heat was responsible for, studied the western hemisphere for a few minutes. Then he spun the globe around to the eastern hemisphere. He bent over to read, or to try to read, the names printed thereon. The alphabet, like that on Ilmika’s calendar, was undoubtedly based on Greek. There was a familiar enough alpha and beta, but the gamma faced to the left. And the digamma and koppa were still being used. Moreover, there were no capitals. Rather, all the letters were capitals.

  O’Brien groaned and said, “I’m going to throw up. I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Where in hell are we?”

  “Throwing up might make you feel better,” Two Hawks said, “Afterwards, you’ll have to face the truth just the same.”

  “Which is?”

  “You ever read much science-fiction?”

  “Naw. That goofy stuff.”

  “Better for you if you had. You might have a more flexible mind. This situation might not be so hard for you to grasp. Or to accept. Because, like it or not, you have to accept. Or go crazy.”

  “I’m going crazy. Oh, my God, where’s America? Where’s Chicago?”

  His voice was shrill. The others in the room stopped talking to look curiously at him.

  “Ever heard of parallel universes?” Two Hawks said. “I know you have because I’ve seen you read comic books that had just such a concept.”

  O’Brien looked relieved. “Yeah, I did. Only... hell, you telling me we’re in a parallel universe? A universe that’s at right angles to ours?”

  Two Hawks nodded and smiled at O’Brien’s “right angles”. This term was no explanation, only a method of description to make the reader better comprehend. Rather, make him think he was comprehending the incomprehensible. But if the term helped O’Brien get an anchor on reality, allayed his panic, he could keep it. Any anchor was better than none.

  O’Brien said, “Then that funny feeling we got back in the Hiawatha...? That was because we were going through a... kind of a... gate?”

  “You can call it a gate. The point is, the science-fiction fantasy has become for us a reality. There are parallel universes. I’d like to deny it just as much as you. But there’s no denying this. Somehow, we’ve passed into another universe. We’re on Earth, but not the one we knew.”

  O’Brien turned the globe to the western hemisphere. “And this Earth is one where North and South America are under water?”

  He shivered and then crossed himself.

  Two Hawks said, “I’ve known for some time that things that couldn’t be nevertheless were. Those people”—he indicated the others in the room—“speak a language that is definitely Iroquoian.”

  He pointed at the blonde, Ilmika. “And her speech, believe it or not, is English. A species of English, anyway. She calls it Ingwinetalu or Blodland spraech.”

  “You must be kidding? I thought she was a Swede or maybe a Dutchman. English?”

  Two Hawks spun the globe back to the eastern hemisphere.

  “On our Earth, the ancestors of the Amerind, the so-called American Indian, migrated in prehistoric times from Siberia to North America and on to South America. Group after group came over and may have taken over ten thousand years to do it. The Eskimo, the most Mongolian of what was essentially a Caucasian-Mongolian mixture, was the last to arrive.

  “But on this Earth, the Amerind had no Americas to migrate to. So he turned inwards and became a force to reckon with in the Old World. That is, Asia and Europe.”

  He ran his finger over the map of Europe and stopped at the peninsula of Italy. The mauve color which overlay it extended through part of northern Yugoslavia and also covered Sicily. He read aloud the large title which evidently applied to the whole area.

  “Akhaivia! Achaea? If Achaea, then the ancient Greeks may have come down, for some reason, into the peninsula of what we call Italy in our world, instead of into the Hellenic peninsula!”

  He looked at Greece. It was titled Hatti.

  “Hittites?” he said aloud. “On our Earth, they conquered a part of Asia Minor, nourished for a while, contemporary with the Mycenaean Greeks, and then disappeared. What happened here? They invaded a country which the Greeks had bypassed, being shunted for some reason to the west. And the Hittites conquered the Pelasgians and gave their name to our Hellas?”

  He continued talking aloud, partly to help O’Brien understand what had happened.

  “I don’t know the details and will have to guess at part of the outline. But I’ll bet that the Iroquoians, and maybe other Amerind tribes, invaded eastern Europe and settled down. If they did so at an early date, they may have altered the course of the Indo-European migrations from the Motherland somewhere in Germany or Poland. The invasions resulted in bumping the various people—the Hittites, Hellenes, Italics, Germanics, and so forth—one country westward. Or something like that.

  “Hmm! Wonder what happened to the Italics: the Sabines, Voluscans, Samnites, and the Latins? Were they bumped westwards? Or had they settled Italy before the Achaeans, only to be conquered and eventually absorbed by them?”

  He placed his finger on a light green area covering approximately the area of Rumania and southern Russia. Hotinohsonih? House builders? Iroquoia? Sure! And that big cross there, ‘Estokwa, would be our Earth’s Odessa. Probably the capital of Hotinohsonih. ‘Estokwa? Paddle? It could be, though I don’t know why a place would be named after a spatula or ladle. But then I don’t know its history.

  “I think we’re headed for ‘Estokwa, probably because the blonde, Ilmika Thorrsstein, is an important person. I’ve gathered from their conversation that her father was the Blodland ambassador to the nation of Dakota, our Hungary. Dakota? Could it be that Dakota is Siouian- speaking?”

  He grinned and laughed and said to O’Brien, “Doesn’t that make you feel a little more at home to know there’s a state of Dakota here?”

  He pointed at a river which ran from the north southward towards ‘Estokwa and into the Black Sea. “This’ll make you feel even more like home. Our Dnester is their ‘Ohiyo’, that is, ‘a beautiful river’. And if I remember correctly, our Ohio River comes from an Iroquois word meaning beautiful. How’s that strike you, O’Brien? Dakota and Ohio! Maybe things aren’t so bad after all.”

  O’Brien smiled faintly and said, “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, Lieutenant. But it’s going to take more than a couple of familiar names to get me over this shock. I still don’t believe it.”

  Two Hawks said, “You m
ight as well get with it.” He pointed at a pale red area which covered approximately the Holland, Germany, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia of his world.

  “Perkunisha. Sounds as if the word came from the Lithuanian Perkunis, the chief god of the ancient Lithuanians. And I’ve heard Dzikohses refer to the enemy as Pozosha. It could be his pronunciation.of Borussia, another name for the Old Prussians who spoke a language related to Lithuanian.”

  He looked over the rest of the map of Europe (Eozope in Iroquoian). The northern half of the Scandinavian peninsula was in white—snow? -- and a phantom polar bear was placed just above the lower border of the snowfield. He whistled and gave the globe a half-turn.

  It was as he had suspected. The Gulf Stream was indicated. But, undiverted by the North American continent, which was sunk under the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream swung widely westward. It turned towards the west until it struck the cordillera of large and small islands formed by the unsubmerged parts of the Rockies. It traveled parallel with the string of islands and then met the Japanese current.

  He whistled again. Here was a factor far more significant in the history of this world’s Europe than the presence of the Amerindian.

  He said, “It’s hot here now. But I bet it doesn’t last long, and it’ll be a hell of a long cold winter.”

  Two Hawks went to the shelves and looked through several books. He found an atlas with more detailed maps than the globe. Moreover, the accompanying text and the titles on the maps were bilingual, Greek and Iroquoian. The Greek was difficult for him, since it varied from the Homeric and Attic and also seemed to have loanwords from languages totally alien to him. But he could read it easier than he could the Iroquoian.

  He spoke to O’Brien, who was looking over his shoulder. “I wondered why I saw no horses. What’s more, we’re not going to find any camels in this world. Nor tobacco, tomatoes, turkeys, and I could go on and on.”

  “How come?”

  “Horses, the horses we knew on our Earth, originated on the North American continent. Then they spread to the Old World, only to become extinct later on in the Americas. They were reintroduced there by the Spaniards. The camel family had its genesis in America, too. It traveled to Asia, and in America most of the species died out, except for the llama, alpaca, and guanaco. And now you know why nobody knew what you wanted when you tried to borrow a cigarette.”

  “Hey!” O’Brien said. “Rubber! That’s why those armored cars were traveling on wood-and-iron wheels. No rubber!”

  “You won’t be able to eat chocolate here, either.”

  “What a hell of a world!” O’Brien said. “What a hell of a world!”

  “We’re here. We might as well make the best of it.”

  He stopped talking because a number of strangers had come into the room. There were twenty, most of them dark-skinned and dark-haired, but a few had coloring pale as O’Brien’s. They were in light green uniforms and brown leather knee-length boots. Their trousers were skin-tight and piped with gold thread along the seam. The coats were swallow-tailed, loose around the chest and sleeves, with four large button-down pockets. Their helmets were conical, like Chinese coolie hats but curving downward in the back to protect the neck. The officers wore symbolic feathers of steel affixed to the helmet front. All carried breech-loading single-shot rifles and slightly curving swords about four feet long. All were beardless.

  Their commanding officer talked for a while with Dzikohses. He looked frequently at the Americans. The officer, a kidziaskos (from the Greek chiliarchos), suddenly frowned. He left Dzikohses and strode to the fliers. He demanded that Two Hawks hand over his gun. Two Hawks hesitated, then shrugged. He had to comply. After making sure that the safety of the automatic was on, he handed the gun to the officer. The kidziaskos turned it over and over and finally stuck it in his belt.

  Dzikohses and his guerrillas left; the fliers and Ilmika Thorrsstein were escorted from the house by the soldiers. Again, they marched by night and slept as well as they could during the day. Apparently, the enemy had overrun this area but did not have a tight control as yet. The party avoided all Perkunishan patrols but could not get away from the swarms of huge mosquitoes. All were forced to apply a thick coating of the stinking grease every day.

  Two days after they had separated from the guerrillas, O’Brien began to suffer from chills, fever, and sweating. Two Hawks thought the sergeant had malaria. The medico with the troops confirmed his diagnosis.

  “For God’s sake, don’t they have any quinine?” O’Brien said. “You’d think that in a country where they have malaria, they’d...”

  “There isn’t any,” Two Hawks said. “It was unknown on our Earth until after South America was discovered. So...”

  “What’d they do before Columbus? They must’ve had something!”

  “I don’t know. Whatever they had, it wasn’t very effective.”

  He did not tell O’Brien that malaria had been a great killer in the Mediterranean region of their Earth. In fact, it still took a large annual toll. He was worried, not only for O’Brien but for himself.

  The malaria parasite could kill a man if he got no medical aid, especially since the parasite of this world might be even more deadly than those of his.

  The soldiers made a rude stretcher from two branches and a blanket. The sergeant was placed on it; Two Hawks took one end of the stretcher and a soldier the other. The troops relieved each other at fifteen-minute intervals, but Two Hawks had to stay at his task until his hands could lock themselves around the branches no more, his legs were like stone, and his back felt as if it would unhinge at the next step.

  The medico gave O’Brien water and two large pills, one red, one green, every hour. Whatever the ingredients, they had little effect. O’Brien continued to chill, burn, and sweat in turn for four hours. Then the attacks ceased, as could be expected. Although he was weak, he was forced to rise and walk, with Two Hawks supporting him. The officer made it plain that he wanted no lagging. Two Hawks urged O’Brien to keep going. The officer would have no compunctions about killing a possible spy who was holding them up. His main concern evidently was in getting the Blodland woman through the enemy and to the capital city.

  After four days of travel, during which O’Brien became sicker and weaker, they came to their first village. They walked during the daytime hours the last 12 hours. The enemy must not have advanced very near to this point. Here Two Hawks saw the first railroad and locomotive. The locomotive looked like an engine circa 1890, except that the huge smokestack was shaped like a demon’s face. The cars of the train were painted scarlet and covered with good luck signs, including the swastika.

  The village was the terminus for the line. Thirty houses and stores were parallel with both sides of the tracks. Two Hawks gazed curiously at the houses and the people who ran out to greet them. The buildings reminded him of the false-fronted structures seen in Western movies. However, each had a wooden and brightly painted carving of a tutelary spirit in front of it and also one like a ship’s figurehead near the top of the false front. The men wore heavy boots and shirts of cloth or cowhide or deerskin. The shirts hung outside their belts. The women wore bead-fringed, low-cut blouses of cloth and ankle-length skirts. Small stone carvings or sea shells were sewn in various patterns on the skirts. Both sexes had long hair falling to the shoulders; the German-helmet haircuts of the guerrillas and the soldiers, Two Hawks thought, must be military requirements.

  There were a few old men and women, all of whose faces and hands were tattooed in blue and red. He supposed that this skin decoration had been a universal custom among the Hotinohsonih. Something, possibly the influence of the white West European nations, had caused the tattooing to die out.

  The officer politely asked the Thorrsstein woman to step aboard a passenger car. He was not so polite to the two Americans. He shouted at them to go three cars back. Two Hawks pretended not to understand, since he did not want his captors to know he was gaining fluency in their tongue. Some so
ldiers shoved the two toward the car. Two Hawks, assisting the chattering shaking sergeant, went up the steps and into the mobile prison.

  The car was bare of furniture and crowded with wounded soldiers. Two Hawks found a place for O’Brien to stretch out on the wooden floor. Then he looked for water for O’Brien, but discovered that it was available only in the next car. A man with an arm in a bloody sling and a bloody bandage around his head accompanied Two Hawks. The wounded man held a long knife in his good hand and promised to cut Two Hawks’ throat if he so much as looked like he meant to escape. He did not leave the side of the prisoners during the rest of the long trip to ‘Estokwa.

  This took five days and nights. Many times, the train was shifted to a sidetrack to allow trains loaded with soldiers to pass westwards. During one day, nobody in the hospital car had water.

  O’Brien almost died that day. But the train finally stopped near a creek, and the bottles and canteens were refilled.

  The car was jammed, hot, noisy, and malodorous. A man with a badly gangrened leg lay next to the sergeant. His stench was so nauseating that Two Hawks could not eat. The third day, the soldier died and was buried four hours later in the woods near the tracks while the locomotive puffed impatiently on a spur.

  Surprisingly, O’Brien improved. By the time they got to ‘Estokwa, the fever, chill, and sweating were gone. He was pale, weak, and gaunt, but he had beaten his sickness. Two Hawks did not know whether the recovery was due to the Irishman’s basic toughness, the pills which the medico had continued to dose him with, or a combination of the two. It was also possible that he had been afflicted with something besides malaria. It did not matter; he had health again, even if only a precarious one.

  6

  The night the train arrived in ‘Estokwa, a rainstorm was lashing the city. Two Hawks could see nothing through the windows except lightning flashes, nor was he allowed to get a better look after being escorted off the car. His eyes were bound, his hands tied behind him, and he was taken through the rain to a wagon. He knew it was enclosed because he could hear the water fall on the roof, and his back was up against a wall. He sat on a bench on one side of the cabin and O’Brien, also blindfolded, sat on the other.