The Corridors of Time (19 page)

Brann had stopped prowling. He stood utterly still for a minute, before he asked, ‘What is the precise geographical location
of that corridor?’

Lockridge told him. ‘After my story,’ he said, ‘I wonder why the Wardens didn’t go back a few months and warn her.’

‘They can’t.’ Brann replied absently. ‘What has been, must be. In practical terms: a Koriach, even more than a Director like
myself, has absolute authority. She does not divulge her plans to anyone she does not choose. For fear of spies, this one
probably told no person except the few technicians she took along. Time enough to do that when the corridor was ready. Now,
with so little advance notice and so much to occupy them elsewhen, there is no time to organize a substantial force of Wardens
capable of operating efficiently in the past. Such as could be sent have doubtless been baffled by the uncertainty factor;
they emerged too early or too late. That is, if any were sent at all. She has rivals who would not be sorry to lose her.’

He considered Lockridge for a while that grew. Finally, slowly, he said: ‘Assuming your account true, I am grateful. You shall
indeed be returned and well rewarded. But first we must establish your bona fides with a psychic probe.’

Fear rose in Lockridge. He was getting very near the moment beyond which his future was unknown. Brann stiffened. Sweat, pallor,
a pulse in the throat – what was the stranger so nervous about?

‘No,’ Lockridge said feebly. ‘Please. I’ve seen what happens.’

He had to give a reason for his flight which would not make Brann too wary to watch for Storm’s gate and lead his troop through
it. But the terror in his guts was real. He had indeed seen that darkened part of the Long House.

‘Have no fear,’ Brann said with a touch of impatience. ‘The process will not go deep unless something suspicious emerges.’

‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’ Lockridge rose and backed away.

‘You must take my word. And, perhaps, my apology.’ Brann gestured.

The door opened. Two guards came in. ‘Take this man to Division Eight and have the section chief call me,’ Brann said.

Lockridge stumbled from the room. Remote as the heaven they watched from, the saint’s eyes followed him out.

The men in black led him down an empty hallway. Sound was muffled, footfalls came dull, and never a word was spoken. Lockridge
drew a breath. Okay, boy, he thought, you know you’re goin’ to make it as far as the time corridor. His dizziness left him.

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.

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.’