The good old stuff, p.46
The Good Old Stuff, page 46
“They want that land in Wolf Valley, for a temple farm,” she said slowly. “I know that would be bad, but—”
“Too late,” Xentos told her.
“Styphon’s House is determined upon our destrruction, as a warning to others.” He turned to her father. “And it was on my advice, Lord, that you refused them.”
“I’d have refused against your advice. I swore long ago that Styphon’s House should never come into Hostigos while I lived, and by Dralm neither shall they! They come into a princedom, they build a temple, they make a temple farm, and make slaves of the peasants on it. They tax the prince, and force him to tax the people till nobody has anything left. Look at that temple farm in Sevenhills Valley.”
“Yes, you’d hardly believe it,” Chartiphon said. “They make the peasants on the farms around cart in their manure, till they have none left for their own fields. Dralm only knows what they do with it.” He puffed at his pipe.
“I wonder why they want Wolf Valley.”
“There’s something there that makes the water of those springs taste and smell badly,” she considered.
“Sulfur,” Xentos said. “But why do they want sulfur?”
Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police, crouched in the brush at the edge of the old field and looked across the brook at the farmhouse two hundred yards away, scabrous with peeling yellow paint and festooned by a sagging porchroof. A few white chickens pecked disinterestedly in the littered barnyard; there was no other sign of life, but he knew that there was a man inside. A man with a rifle, who would use it; he had murdered once, broken jail, would murder again.
He looked at his watch; the minute hand was squarely on the nine. Jack French and Steve Kovac would be starting down from the road above where they had left the car. He rose, unsnapping the retaining-strap of his holster.
“I’m starting. Watch that middle upstairs window.”
“I’m watching,” a voice behind assured him. A rifle action clattered softly as a cartridge went into the chamber. “Luck.”
He started forward across the weed-grown field. He was scared, as scared as he’d been the first time, back in ‘52 in Korea, but there was nothing to do about that. He just told his legs to keep moving, knowing that in a few moments he wouldn’t have time to be scared. He was almost to the little brook, his hand close to the butt of his Colt, when it happened.
There was a blinding flash, followed by a moment’s darkness. He thought he’d been shot; by pure reflex, the .38special was in his hand. Then, all around him, a flickering iridescence of many colors glowed, in a perfect hemisphere thirty feet across and fifteen high, and in front of him was an oval desk or cabinet, with an instrument panel over it, and a swivel chair from which a man was turning and rising. Young, well-built; wore loose green trousers and black ankle boots and a pale green shirt; a shoulder holster under his left arm, a weapon in his hand.
He was sure it was a weapon, though it looked more like an electric soldering iron, with two slender metal rods instead of a barrel, joined at the front in a blue ceramic knob. It was probably something that made his own Official Police look like a kid’s cap pistol, and it was coming up fast to line on him.
He fired, holding the trigger back to keep the hammer down on the fired chamber, and threw himself down, hearing something fall with a crash, landing on his left hand and his left hip and rolling, until the nacreous dome was gone from around him and he b jumped hard against something. For a moment, he lay still, then rose to his feet, letting out the trigger of the Colt.
What he’d bumped into was a tree. That wasn’t right, there’d been no trees around, nothing but brush. And this tree, and the others, were huge, great columns rising to support a green roof through which only stray gleams of sunlight leaked. Hemlocks, must have been growing here while Columbus was conning Isabella into hocking her jewelry.
Come to think of it, there was a stand of trees like this in Alan Seeger Forest. Maybe that was where he was.
He wondered how he was going to explain this.
“While approaching the house,” he began aloud and in a formal tone, “I was intercepted by a flying saucer, the operator of which threatened me with a ray pistol. I defended myself with my revolver, firing one round—” No. That wouldn’t do, at all.
He swung out the cylinder of his Colt, ejecting the fired round and replacing it. Then he looked around, and started in the direction of where the farmhouse ought to be, coming to the little brook and jumping across.
Verkan Wall watched the landscape flicker outside the almost invisible shimmer of the transportation field. The mountains stayed the same, but from one timeline to another there was a good deal of randomness about which tree grew where. Occasionally the re were glimpses of open country and buildings and installations, the Fifth Level bases his people had established. The red light overhead winked off and on, and each time it went off, a buzzer sounded. The dome of the conveyer became a solid iridescence , and then a cold, inert metal mesh. The red light came on and stayed on. He was picking up the sigma-ray needler from the desk in front of him and holstering it when the door slid open and a lieutenant of Paratime Police looked in.
“Hello, Chief’s Assistant. Any trouble?”
In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor transposition field was impenetrable from the outside, but in practice, especially when two conveyers going in opposite paratemporal directions interpenetrated, it would go weak, and outside objects, sometimes alive and hostile, would intrude. That was why Paratimers kept weapons at hand, and why conveyers were checked immediately on emergence; it was also why some Paratimers didn’t make it home. “Not this trip. My rocket ready?”
“Yes, sir. Be a little delay about an aircar for the rocketport.” The lieutenant stepped inside, followed by a patrolman, who began taking the transportation record tape and the photo-film record out of the cabinet. “They’ll call you when it’s in.”
He and the lieutenant strolled outside into the noise and color of the conveyer-head rotunda. He got out his cigarette case and offered it; the lieutenant flicked his lighter. They had only taken a few first puffs when another conveyer quietly materialized in a vacant space nearby. A couple of Paracops strolled over as the door opened, drawing their needlers. One peeped inside, then holstered his weapon and snatched a radio phone from his belt; the other entered cautiously.
Throwing away his cigarette, he strode toward the newly arrived conveyer, the lieutenant following.
The chair was overturned; a Paracop, his tunic off and his collar open, lay on the floor, a needler a few inches from his outstretched hand.
His shirt, pale green, was dark with blood. The lieutenant, without touching him, looked at him.
“Still alive,” he said. “Bullet, or sword-thrust?”
“Bullet; I can smell nitro powder.” Then he saw the hat lying on the floor, and stepped around the fallen man. Two men were coming in with an antigrav stretcher; they and the patrolmen got the wounded man onto it. “Look at this, lieutenant.”
The lieutenant glanced at the hat. It was gray felt, wide-brimmed, the crown peaked with four indentations.
“Fourth Level,” he said. “EuropoAmerican.”
He picked it up, glancing inside. The sweatband was lettered in gold, JOHN B. STETSON COMPANY. PHILADELPHIA, PA and, hand-inked, Cpl. Calvin Morrison, Penna. State Police, and a number.
“I know that outfit,” the lieutenant said. “Good men, every bit as good as ours.”
“One was a split second better than one of ours.” He got out his cigarette case. “Lieutenant, this is going to be a real baddie. This pickup’s going to be missed, and the people who’ll miss him will be one of the ten best constabulary organizations in the world on their timeline. They won’t be put off with the sort of lame-brained explanations that usually get by on EuropoAmerican. They’ll want factual proof and physical evidence. And we’ll have to find where he came out. A man who can beat a Paracop to the draw won’t sink into obscurity on any timeline. He’s going to kick up a fuss that’ll have to be smoothed over.”
“I hope he doesn’t come out on a next-door timeline and turn up at a duplicate of his own police post, where a duplicate of himself is on duty.
With identical fingerprints,” the lieutenant said. “That would kick up a small fuss.”
“Wouldn’t it?” He went to the cabinet and took out the synchronized transposition record and photo film. “Have that rocket held; I’ll want it after a while. But I’m going over these myself. I’m going to make this operation my own personal baby.”
Calvin Morrison dangled black-booted legs over the edge of the low cliff and wished, again, that he hadn’t lost his hat. He knew exactly where he was, he was on the little cliff, not more than a big outcrop, above the road where they’d left the car, but there was no road under it now, nor ever had been. And there was a hemlock four feet at the butt growing right where the farmhouse ought to be, and no trace of the stone foundations of it or the barn. But the really permanent features, the Bald Eagles to the north and Nittany Mountain to the south, were exactly as they should be.
That flash and momentary darkness could have been subjective; put that in the unproven column. He was sure the strangely beautiful dome of shimmering light had been real, and so had the oval desk and the instrument panel and the man with the odd weapon.
And there was certainly nothing subjective about all this virgin forest where farmlands ought to be.
He didn’t for an instant consider questioning either his senses or his sanity; neither did he indulge in dirty language like “incredible,” or “impossible.”‘ Extraordinary; now there was a good word. He was quite sure that something extraordinary had happened to him. It seemed to break into two parts: (One), the dome of pearly light and what had happened inside it, and, (Two), emerging into this same-but-different place.
What was wrong with both was anachronism, and the anachronisms were mutually contradictory. None of (One) belonged in 1964 or, he suspected, for many centuries to come. None of (Two) belonged in 1964, either, or at any time within two centuries in the past. His pipe had gone out; for a while he forgot to relight it, while tossing those two facts back and forth. Then he got out his lighter and thumbed it, and then buttoned it back in his pocket.
In spite—no, because—of his clergyman father’s insistence that he study for and enter the Presbyterian ministry, he was an agnostic.
Agnosticism, to him, was refusal either to accept or reject without factual proof. A good philosophy for a cop, by the way. Well, he wasn’t going to reject the possibility of time machines; not after having been shanghaied out of his own time in one. Whenever he was, it wasn’t the Twentieth Century, and he was never going to get back to it.
He made up his mind on that once and for all.
Climbing down from the low cliff, he went to the little brook, and followed it to where it joined a larger stream, just as he knew it would. A blue jay made a fuss at his approach. Two deer ran in front of him. A small black bear regarded him with suspicion and hastened away. Now, if he could find some Indians who wouldn’t throw tomahawks first and ask questions afterward ...
A road dipped to cross the stream. For a moment, he accepted that, then caught his breath. A real, wheel-rutted road! And brown horse-droppings in it; they were the most beautiful things he had seen since he came into this here-and-now. They meant that he hadn’t beaten Columbus here, after all.
He’d have trouble giving a plausible account of himself, but at least he could do it in English. Maybe he was even in time to get into the Civil War. He waded through the ford and started west along the road, toward where Bellefonte ought to be.
The sun went down in front of him. By now, the big hemlocks were gone, lumbered off, and there was a respectable second growth, mostly hardwoods. Finally, in the dusk, he smelled turned earth beside the road. It was full dark before he saw a light ahead.
The house was only a dim shape, the light came from narrow horizontal windows near the roof. Behind, he thought he could make out stables and, by his nose, pigpens. Two dogs ran into the road and began whauffwhauffing in front of him. “Hello, in there!” he called.
Through the open windows he heard voices, a man’s, a woman’s, another man’s. He called again. A bar scraped, and the door swung in. A woman, heavy-bodied, in a dark dress, stood aside for him to enter.
It was all one big room, lighted by one candle on a table and one on the mantel and by the fire on the hearth. Double-deck bunks along one wall, table spread with a meal. There were three men and another woman beside the one who had admitted him, and from the corner of his eye he could see children peering around a door that seemed to open into a shed annex.
One of the men, big and blond-bearded, stood with his back to the fire, with something that looked like a short gun in his hands. No it wasn’t, either; it was a crossbow, bent and quarrel in place.
The other men were younger, the crossbowman’s sons for a guess; they were bearded, too, though one’s beard was only a fuzz. They all wore short-sleeved jerkins of leather and cross-gartered hose. One of the younger men had a halberd and the other an axe. The older woman spoke in a whisper to the younger; she went through the door, pushing the children ahead of her.
He lifted his hands pacifically as he entered. “I’m a friend,” he said. “I’m going to Bellefonte; how far is it?”
The man with the crossbow said something. The man with the halberd said something. The woman replied. The youth with the axe said something, and they all laughed.
“My name’s Calvin Morrison. Corporal, Pennsylvania State Police.”
Hell, they wouldn’t know the State Police from the Swiss Marines. “Am I on the road to Bellefonte?”
More back-and-forth. They weren’t talking Pennsylvania Dutch, he was sure of that. Maybe Polish; no, he’d heard enough of that to recognize, if he couldn’t understand, it. He looked around, while they argued, and saw, in the far corner left of the fireplace, three images on a shelf. He meant to get a closer look at them. Roman Catholics used images, so did Greek Catholics, and he could tell the difference.
The man with the crossbow laid his weapon down, but kept it bent and loaded, and spoke slowly and distinctly. It was no language he had ever heard before. He replied just as distinctly in English. They all looked at one another, passing their hands in front of their faces in bafflement. Finally, by signs, they invited him to sit down and eat, and the children, six of them, trooped in.
The meal was roast ham, potatoes and succotash. The eating tools were knives and a few horn spoons; the men used their sheath knives. He took out his jacknife, a big switchblade he’d taken off an arrest he’d made. It caused a sensation, and he had to demonstrate it several times. There was also elderberry wine, strong but not particularly good. Then they left the table for the women to clear, and the men filled pipes from a tobacco jar on the mantel, offering it to him. He filled his pipe and lighted it , as they did theirs, with a twig at the fire. Stepping back, he got a look at the images.
The central figure was an elderly man in a white robe, with a blue eight-pointed star on the breast. He was flanked, on one side, by a seated female figure, exaggeratedly pregnant, crowned with a grain, and holding a cornstalk, and, on the other, by a masculine figure in a male shirt, with a spiked mace. The only really unusual thing about him was that he had the head of a wolf. Father-god, fertility-goddess, war-god; no, this gang weren’t Catholics, Greek, Roman or any other kind. He bowed to the central figure, touching his forehead, and repeated the gesture to the other two. There was a gratified murmur behind him; anybody could see he wasn’t any heathen. Then he sat down on a chest against the wall.
They hadn’t re-barred the door. The children had been chased back into the shed after the meal. Nobody was talking, everybody was listening.
Now that he remembered, there had been a vacant place at the table.
They’d sent one of the youngsters off with a message. As soon as he finished his pipe, he pocketed it, and unobtrusively unsnapped the strap of his holster. It might have been half an hour before he heard galloping hoofs down the road. He affected not to hear; so did everybody else. The older man moved over to where he had put down his crossbow; his elder son got the halberd and a rag as though to polish the blade. The horses clattered to a stop outside, accoutrements jingled. The dogs set up a frantic barking. He slipped the .38 out and cocked it.
The youngest man went to the door. Before he could touch it, it flew open in his face, knocking him backward, and a man—bearded face under a high-combed helmet, steel breastplate, black and orange scarf—burst in, swinging a long sword. Everybody in the room shouted in alarm; this wasn’t what they’d been expecting, at all. There was another helmeted head behind the first man, and the muzzle of a short musket.
Outside, a shot boomed and one of the dogs howled.
He rose from the chest and shot the man with the sword. Half-cocking with the double action and thumbing the hammer the rest of the way, he shot the man with the musket. The musket went off into the ceiling. A man behind caught a crossbow quarrel through the forehead and pitched forward on top of the other two, dropping a long pistol unfired.
Shifting the Colt to his left hand, he caught up the sword the first man had dropped. It was lighter than it looked, and beautifully balanced. He tramped over the bodies in the doorway, to be confronted by another swordsman outside. For a few moments they cut and parried, and then he drove his point into his opponent’s unarmored face and tugged his blade free. The man in front of him went down. The boy who had been knocked down had gotten hold of the dropped pistol and fired it, hitting a man who was holding a clump of horses in the road. The older son dashed out with his halberd, chopping a man down. The father had gotten hold of the musket and ammunition, and was ramming a charge into it.
Driving the point of the sword into the ground, he holstered the .38special; as one of the loose horses dashed past, he caught the reins and stopped it, vaulting into the saddle. Then, stooping, he retrieved his sword, thankful that even in a motorized age the State Police insisted on teaching their men to ride. The fight was over, at least here. Six attackers were down, presumably dead. The other two were galloping away. Five loose horses milled about, and the two young men were trying to catch them. The older man, priming the pan of the gun, came outside, looking around.
