The Gate of Time

by Philip José Farmer

  ‘That’s all right,” O’Brien said, “but where are we going?”

  “How’s your arm?” Two Hawks said.

  O’Brien groaned and said, “I’m bleeding to death. I ain’t going to make it, lieutenant.”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad,” Two Hawks said. He stopped the car and examined the wound in the brightness of a flashlight he had found in a box under the panel. As he had thought, the wound was shallow. There was still a little flow of blood, which was, however, easily stanched with a handkerchief. He bound it around the arm and resumed driving.

  O’Brien’s reactions had puzzled him until recently. The sergeant had been a good soldier, very competent, cheerful, and courageous. But ever since he had realized that they were out of their native universe, he had changed. He felt as if he were going to die. And this, Two Hawks thought, came from a sense of utter dislocation. He was cut off forever from the world in which he had been born and lived. He was an alien in a place he did not understand. He was suffering from a homesickness the like of which no man had ever experienced. It was literally killing him.

  Two Hawks knew how he felt, although he was sure he did not suffer to the same degree. In the first place, he had learned to live with a similar feeling on his native Earth. A child of two cultures, never wholly in phase with either and not believing fully in the values and mores of either, he, too, had been a stranger. In the second place, he was basically more flexible than O’Brien. He could survive the shock of transplantation, rally, and even thrive if things went right. But he was worried about O’Brien.

  9

  Two hours later, after being lost a dozen times, they came out on the main highway, the kadziiwa’ road. A half-mile away was a large number of soldiers. Even as Two Hawks watched them, they took a man from a car and marched him off to a tent at one side of the road.

  “Checking for spies and deserters,” Two Hawks said. “All right; we’ll go around them.”

  That was not so easy. They had to cut across a shallow creek a mile away. They drove through slowly without getting stuck only to be stopped five minutes later by a stone fence which seemed to run to both horizons. By then, dawn had come. The car paralleled the fence for a mile and a half, which finally run out. However, a dense grove of trees and a broad creek further barred them.

  Two Hawks drove the vehicle into the stream, which was about thirty yards wide. They plowed ahead for ten yards with the water beginning to seep from under the doors. Then the car stopped, its wheels spinning. Nothing after that could get it out of the mud.

  “We’ll hoof it,” Two Hawks said. “Maybe it’s just as well the car got stuck. If we’d gone on, and the water got too deep, the boiler might’ve blown up.”

  “Now you tell me! Let’s get to hell out of here!”

  They traveled over the farm country paralleling the highway. Four days later, the paved portion ran out. From there on, the road was dirt.

  The two ate from food stolen from the peasants. Two days passed. They had a chance to steal a car, an internal-combustion type, and they took it. They made thirty miles that day, cutting along the side of the road, blowing their horn at the refugees in their path. Then, hearing of a check station ahead, they turned on to a narrow dirt rural road. When they had run out of gas, they continued on foot.

  “The nation of Itskapintik is to the north,” he told O’Brien. “The last I heard, it was neutral. We’ll cross the border and throw ourselves on whatever mercy they have.”

  “I don’t like the way you said that,” O’Brien said. “What kind of people are they?”

  “Basically, Indians with a lot of white genes. They speak a language belonging to the Nahuatl family, something like the Aztec speech of Mexico. They’re much like the Aztecs, in fact. They came out of Asia about the same time as the Iroquois, both pushed out by a powerful Amerind nation that later conquered half of northern Asia.

  “The Itskapintik defeated another tribe, half-white, half-Amerind, that had just finished terrorizing eastern Europe. The Iskapintik slaughtered half of them and enslaved the rest.”

  “They’re pretty rough, huh?”

  “I got that impression. For instance, it was only fifty years ago that they quit sacrificing people at religious ceremonies. And their slaves are not only treated as sub-humans but have no chance of becoming freemen, as they do among the Hotinohsonih.”

  “Then why are we going there?”

  “Not really with the idea of throwing ourselves on their mercy. We’ll try to cut across the country, hide from them, travel at night. Our goal will be Tyrsland, Earth 1’s Sweden. Perkunisha has declared war against Tyrsland, but it’s not made any belligerent moves against it. If we could get there, we could arrange to be transported to Blodland. We’d be important men there; we’d really have something to live for.”

  “Sweet Mother of Christ! I’d give my right eye to live in a place where they speak English.”

  “I don’t want to discourage you.” Two Hawks said. “But you’d have to learn it all over again. However, it would be easier for you than Iroquoian.”

  They had been cutting across the back-country, using rural roads as guides but keeping parallel with them. Only at night, when the roads were deserted, did they take to them. Even then, Two Hawks did so reluctantly. But walking on fields of wheat or meadows or through the woods slowed them down so much that they had to chance the swifter means of travel now and then. Fifteen days after leaving ‘Estokwa, they came across a main highway, going north. From the hilltop, he could see that the great river of refugees had not diminished. At this point there were no soldiers evident, so he decided that it would be safe to mingle with the traffic.

  For two days they trudged along on the fringe of the column, finding that they could make better time this way. The dawn of the third day, they heard cannonfire to the west. By nightfall, the rattle of small firearms came from a distance. The next day, Hotinohsonih troops appeared. They were reinforcements from the south, headed for the northwest where a battle raged. Two Hawks and O’Brien went back into the middle of the refugee column to make themselves inconspicuous. Besides, the reckless speed of the military vehicles on the side of the road made travel there dangerous.

  The fourth day, at noon, the refugees were diverted eastward at a crossroads. Two Hawks said, “The Perkunishans must have taken the road up ahead. They’re really advancing.’

  “I always thought the Iroquois were mighty warriors.” O’Brien said. “But they don’t seem to be doing any better than the Russians.”

  Two Hawks was a little irritated, as if criticism of the Hotinohsonih was, in a way, a criticism of him. He knew that O’Brien always thought of him as an Indian and that, although never outwardly disrespectful, he had his private opinions.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Two Hawks said. “The Perkunishans may be winning, but they’re paying a hell of a higher price for it than the Germans did. War’s a little different here. There aren’t any Geneva Conventions, you know. What a nation does with its prisoners of war is strictly its own business. The Perkunishans have found out from previous experience that the Iroquois don’t make good slaves. They either keep on trying to escape or get killed trying.

  “So Perkunisha has declared a no-quarters war. No prisoners except when one is needed for information. And they torture to get that information. The Hotinohsonih know this; they fight to the death. And when they retreat, they kill their own wounded if they aren’t able to carry them out. As a result, the invaders are getting a much stiffer resistance than they otherwise would. But their superior technology and their strategy of bypassing pockets of defenders behind to be mopped up later accounts for their present speed. Plus the fact they’re willing to suffer high casualties.

  “You see, Perkunisha wants to conquer as much territory as possible before winter comes. This land occupies the same area as southern Russia of Earth 1, without the relatively mild climate. Because of the weak Gulf Current, Europe is subarctic cold in wi
nter. That’s another reason why we have to get to Tyrsland before the snows come. We don’t want to get caught in the open country then; we’d freeze to death in short order.”

  O’Brien shivered and said, “Brother, what a world! If we had to go through a ‘gate’, why couldn’t we have been lucky and found a nice warm and peaceful world?”

  Two Hawks smiled and shrugged. There might be such a ‘parallel’ Earth, but if so, they were not in it. They had to live in the one luck had dealt them.

  A few minutes later, they passed a car stuck in the soft earth on the side of the road. Three men were trying to push it out. Two Hawks said, “Did you notice the woman at the wheel? She had a scarf around her hair, and the face was pretty dirty. But I’ll swear it was Ilmika Thorrsstein.”

  He hesitated for several minutes, then decided that her presence might be a lucky break. Maybe she was heading for Itskapintik because her position as daughter of the Blodland ambassador would ensure her good treatment and even a return to her country. She would want to take Two Hawks and O’Brien with her. After all, that had been her original intent, and he could think of no reason why she should have changed her mind.

  He walked boldly up to her. For a minute, she seemed puzzled. Then she recognized him. Incredulity was succeeded by a smile of joy. “Can we go with you?” he said.

  She nodded and said, “This seems too good to be true.”

  He did not waste any more time. The two Americans went to the rear of the car and helped the other three men. After the vehicle had regained the harder dirt, Two Hawks and O’Brien got into the front seat beside Ilmika. The others, who turned out to be members of the British embassy at ‘Estokwa, rode in the rear. Ilmika drove the steamer as fast as she could without endangering the pedestrians. She used her horn frequently to warn them out of the way, and if they did not dodge quickly enough, swung onto the shoulder. It was just such a maneuver that had trapped her in the mud ten minutes before Two Hawks came along.

  While they rode, he told Ilmika what had happened. She knew, of course, that the Blodland agents had been killed but she had supposed that the Perkunishans had succeeded in abducting the two otherworlders. She was now on this road because her original avenue of escape had been cut off. The Perkunishan fleet had broken into the Black Sea, defeated the Hotinohsonih navy and the small contingent of Blodland ships. They controlled the waters and the air of the Black Sea. The small dirigible on which she had planned to take the two to Pahlavia (Turkey) had been destroyed. So she had fled towards Itskapintik.

  They drove all day and night, and dawn found them much farther northward but also out of fuel. They had no luck trying to get more from the army vehicles that passed them. Of the twenty, not one stopped in response to their signals.

  “It’s a long way, but we’ll have to walk,” Ilmika said. “If I can get into contact with an officer, I might be able to get another car.”

  She did not sound hopeful. It was evident that the Hotinohsonih were too occupied with the battle to the northwest to spare time or material, even for the Lady Ilmika Thorrsstein. And they had walked no more than four miles, when they got evidence that the soldiers were too busy taking care of themselves to bother with them.

  A score of troopers a half-mile ahead ran from a wood and cut across the road. The refugees near them abandoned their carts and ran after them. Word passed back along the column and with it panic. The road suddenly became a litter of vehicles and no people.

  Forty yards ahead of them, the earth blossomed into a pillar of upflung dirt and smoke. The people who had just deserted the highway were unhurt, but the next shell exploded near a group who had not heard the news in time. They were tossed in every direction.

  Two Hawks and the others had flung themselves in a small ditch when the first shell landed. They hugged the earth while a second, third, and fourth, running down the road, deafened them and covered them with dirt. A severed foot landed by Two Hawks’ head. He took one look and then drove his face into the grass. The fifth shell stunned and half-buried them, but no one was hit. The sixth exploded a little further down; the seventh struck the ditch and killed a number of men, women, and children.

  Then the cannonade ceased. Two Hawks raised his head. Across the road was a burnt-out wheat field and beyond it a sloping hill. Over the top of the hill came five armored cars. Two carried long- snouted cannons; the others were armed with weapons that looked from this distance like the barrels of machine guns. Two Hawks knew that machine guns had not been invented yet. In fact, this was one of the items he had intended to explain to the Blodlandish. But he did not like their looks, although the cannons would have been enough for him to decide on flight. He rose with the others and dashed across the blackened stubble of the wheat field on his side of the road. He had seen the Iroquois troops take cover in a copse of trees about a quarter-mile to the northwest. They would be the object of attack by the armored cars, so there was no use trying to hide there. He led the others southeast across the field toward a distant line of half-burned trees that probably hid a stream. By the time the refugees had reached the middle of the field, the Perkunishans had crossed the road. They fired a few rounds at the group, which kept on running. Glancing behind him, Two Hawks could see the bullets throw up fragments of earth. The rate of fire amazed him. He was sure that the cars had some sort of rapid-fire weapon. His reading had not indicated the existence of such a gun, but it was evident that it must have been developed secretly and only now revealed.

  One more reason for the Perkunishans’ rapid advances. Their firepower must be overwhelming.

  The car swung toward the woods, and soon the racket of battle was hideous. It lasted for perhaps ten minutes. After that, a silence. By then the refugees had passed through the tree-lined creek and had entered a relatively thick and extensive wood. They walked until nightfall, slept several hours, then resumed their flight. Two days afterwards, they came upon a group of dead soldiers. A gully near them concealed a small car—equivalent of a jeep—which was undamaged and had a half-tank of gas. They drove it northward until the fuel ran out and began walking again. A week later, they were somewhere near the Itskapintik border.

  They had heard light rifle fire ahead of them. While Ilmika and a man who had been sick hid behind some trees, the others crawled up the slope of a hill. They were armed with rifles and revolvers taken from the dead who had also provided them with the jeep. Nevertheless, they did not intend to take any aggressive action. They just wanted to determine what the situation ahead was and if they would have to take a wide detour.

  He got to the top of the hill and inspected the fight through binoculars. The skirmish was almost at an end. There were a number of bodies on the ground at various distances outside a stone rampart, all that was left of a farmhouse which had burned. The bodies wore the black and orange uniforms of the Perkunishan infantry. There were seven attackers left, and they were working in closer to the defense behind the wall. Two Hawks watched for a while and saw that only three were still firing from the wall. Then a Perkunishan, crouching behind an overturned wagon near the ruins, threw a grenade. It landed over the wall and in a corner.

  After the explosion, there was no return fire. Still cautious, the Perkunishans continued to hug the ground until they were several yards away. One exposed himself briefly but drew no fire. There was a signal from one, and all rose and dashed towards the wall. Suddenly, smoke from a gun behind the wall rose, and seconds later Two Hawks heard the crack. A Perkunishan fell. Another shot; another crumpled.

  The others were too near the wall to turn to run. They kept on charging but fired as they did so to force their enemy to keep his head down. He, however, paid no attention to the bullets which were bouncing off the stone near his head. He kept on shooting and with deadly effectiveness. Two more staggered; one fell backward and the other ran forward again a few steps after stopping before he too slumped.

  Two Hawks was surprised. He could see the helmet and upper part of the defender’s u
niform. Both were the same type as the Perkunishans’. There was one difference. He wore two broad red stripes on his chest.

  Then the survivors were through a break in the wall. They fired pointblank at him, but if he was struck he gave no indication. He reversed his rifle, swung the stock like a club, and felled the closest man. He disappeared momentarily from Two Hawks’ view, then came up with the body of the man he had struck down held above his head. He hurled the body at the other two and knocked them both down. What he might have done after that, however, was matter for speculation. He seemed to have the upper hand all of a sudden, but one of the men who had been shot down came to life. He rose and fired at the man with the red stripes. The helmet flew off his head, and he dropped.

  A minute later, the three survivors had dragged their enemy out onto the ground. The wounded Perkunishan did not help them but busied himself shedding his coat and tearing off his shirtsleeve. He then bandaged his upper right arm. The other two hauled the body of the enemy to a place beneath a maple tree. From somewhere they had gotten a rope, a section of which they used to tie his hands. They removed the man’s boots and bound his feet together.

  One end of the rope was tied to the man’s wrists and the other thrown over a branch. Two men hauled on the rope, and the captive was borne upright until his bare feet were about eight inches from the ground. His position must have been painful, since all the strain of weight was on his arms, tied behind him, and forced back and up. Despite this, the face of the hanging man was expressionless. He spun slowly at the end of the rope and did not even open his mouth to protest when the soldiers piled wood for a fire below his feet.

  Two Hawks decided to interfere. He admired the big man’s magnificent fight, although this alone would not have been enough to make him attack the soldiers. He was curious about the reasons for the fighting between two groups of Perkunishans.