Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Sam knelt by her and held her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to hurt you. The lights were coming down the hill. I couldn’t let them swarm over me again.”

“I know,” Victoria said. “I had nightmares about them.”

“I didn’t see them the first time,” Sam went on. “I saw a path, wide, easy, glowing. I knew it led to ... to ... I don’t know what I thought it led to. It terrified me and I wanted to get on it, follow it home, all the time thinking it would kill me if I did. Then I saw the Indian, and I knew he knew the way. I know that Indian. He does know the way.”

“We can’t be separated,” Victoria said. “Farley was separated from us. He must be in there somewhere, lost, maybe he fell over the gorge. Maybe they drove him over the gorge. . . .”

“Sh.” Sam’s hand tightened on her arm. “Maybe he just came out somewhere else, like we did.”

Victoria looked around. Everywhere it was the same, dead trees, no signs of life, and the bitter wind that tore through her jacket. “The fire’s gone, the wall I made is gone. My pack. We can’t put anything at all down and expect it to stay. We can’t leave each other even a second, or one of us might vanish.”

Sam nodded. “It’s too damn cold,” he said slowly. “Every time we’ve gone in and out, it’s been different. Different climates, different scenery. Times.” He stopped and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “We’re yo-yoing back and forth in time! That’s it, isn’t it! Come on, once more.”

Victoria’s ears were hurting from the cold and her toes were starting to go numb. “We should count our steps or something,” she said. “The wall won’t be there, no point in making another one. But we have to know how to get out again.”

Sam nodded, and hand in hand they started forward. There was no sense of transition, nothing to indicate change, but one moment they were in the frozen air, and then the air was balmy and sweet smelling, not from a rain forest this time, but from thick lush grasses that crowded down the hillsides, and from tangled vines, creepers, dense bushes that made nearly impenetrable thickets to their right. The river was there, not a furious roar of a cascade, but rushing waters singing over rocks.

“Here they come,” Sam muttered. “Out!”

The lights were coming in an elongated cloud, head-high, straight down the hill toward them. They took several steps, and the lights were no longer there. They had crossed the boundary.

They made a fire and huddled close together. “We need shelter,” Sam said finally. “The moon’s going down. While there’s still enough light we have to arrange something.” By the time the moon vanished over the mountains in the west, Sam had made a lean-to with the mylar space blanket from his pack, attaching it from bushes to the ground, and Victoria had gathered armloads of grass that made their mattress. They wrapped Victoria’s jacket around their legs, and Sam’s around their torsos, and after a long time they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

“We can’t stay here!” Victoria cried late the next afternoon. They had bathed in the clear river, had portioned out their scant rations, had hunted for berries to supplement their food, and now the sun was setting and she was hungry and tired.

Sam was standing just beyond their marker stones, facing the hill. Together they had explored the hill, the valley, the entire area repeatedly. They had crossed and recrossed the barrier without effect; nothing had changed.

“It’s not evil, not malevolent,” Sam said softly. “This must be what happened to the others who disappeared. They weren’t killed at all, just put out somewhere else, away from harm.”

They would starve, Victoria thought dully. Grazing animals would find this a paradise, but not humans.

“Once more,” Sam said abruptly and started up the hill again. Victoria didn’t follow this time. There wasn’t anything up there, nothing in the valley. It didn’t show itself by daylight, she thought, and suddenly realized that the only times anything had happened, there had been brilliant moonlight. She started to call Sam to tell him, but he was nearly to the top out of hearing.

When Sam came back it was twilight. “Think of the power!” he said exultantly. “It’s showing us what we can have. How many of those who vanished realized what was being offered? They probably came out and ran as far and as fast as they could and died out there on the desert, or in the cold, or of starvation. But the power’s there, down in that valley, waiting for anyone who has nerve enough to accept it. It’s ours, Victoria! Yours! Mine!”

He wasn’t hungry, he said, wasn’t tired, just impatient. “There’s a secret we haven’t learned yet, about how to call it, how to make it manifest itself. We’ll learn how to summon it.”

He began to stuff things back into his pack. “Come on. I’m going to wait for it this time down in the valley. Hurry up before it gets too dark.”

“It won’t be there,” Victoria said. “It’s never there until after the moon is up. Both times the moon was up.”

“Coincidence. Come on. The point is we don’t know why it decides to come and when it will decide again. I intend to be there when it does, with you or alone.”

They climbed the hill in the deepening, silent dusk, shadows moving among shadows.

“Unlimited power,” Sam said hoarsely. “Omnipotent. It can move back and forth in time the way you cross a street.”

But it was not omnipotent, Victoria protested silently. It was stopped by the invisible barrier. It had no power to control, only to observe. An observer, she thought, that’s what it was, no more than an observer. It came only when the moon cleared the cliffs that were the eastern boundary of the valley, not when it wanted to. She had been able to get out in the right time, the right place once; it could be done again, if only she could remember how she had done it then. They were descending the hill now; it was a gentle slope, covered with waist high grass, no rocks, nothing to impede their progress. They might have been out for an evening stroll—if only she were not so hungry and so tired.

“You want to think of it as some kind of mechanism,” Sam went on, “subject to the same laws and limitations that restrict all the machines you’re used to. It isn’t like that. It’s an intelligent being, a godlike being, testing us, for some reason we can’t begin to grasp.”

Each time they had talked about it, he had refused to hear anything she said. Now she shrugged and they finished their walk into the valley.

“Where was it?” Sam demanded. “Exactly where?”

“I don’t know. Everything is changed again. The center I think, but I don’t know. Remember, we can’t believe anything we see or feel in here. Your Indian, my Reuben, the dog, none of it was real.”

He was no longer listening. He considered the valley for a few moments, selected a spot and spread his blanket on the ground.

“Here,” he said. “We’ll wait here. Don’t speak now. Just concentrate on it, call it. Okay?”

Helplessly Victoria sat down also. The Indian and Reuben were the clues, she thought. “Sam, before we start concentrating, just tell me one thing. When your Indian was guiding you, why were you zigzagging?”

“We were making our way among the rocks and boulders,” Sam snapped. “Now just shut up, will you? Go to sleep if you can.”

“But . . .”

Sam caught her wrist in a tight grip and she became quiet. After a moment he released her and they sat side by side in silence.

But there weren’t any rocks or boulders then, she had started to say. Not for her, she corrected. They had been together and still had seen different worlds.