Keith Laumer - Zone Yellow

“Enemy territory?” I asked him. He made a curt shush! ing motion, and kept going. Finally, he stopped in wider space where a cross-corridor intersected. He hesitated a moment, then did a hard left. He’d gone about three of his silent steps when a rat bigger than him leapt from the passage to the right, missed its first pass at him with a curved dagger, and rounded on me. Swft heard a sound and turned quickly. By then, the big rat was on top of me, not using the knife, but snapping his incisors too close to my throat for comfort. I got my right arm clear and socked him hard in the short ribs; he folded over, then fell, threshing on the smooth tiled floor. I stepped on the hand that was holding the nasty-looking knife until I heard bones crack. Swft was beside me.

“Incredible! You’ve bested one of the Three Hundred, our elite guard force. That simply does not happen!” He was looking at me with what I’m pretty sure was an astonished expression.

“You’re in a big hurry,” I commented. “Too big to waste time jawing over nothing. He had a glass gut.”

“Indeed!” Swft confirmed. “We must hurry to Her Highness’s side!”

“Pretty careless of you, General, to go off and leave your baby princess behind. But you knew what you were doing, didn’t you? Just another of your cagey maneuvers. I put her in that ‘orifice’ of yours and she disappeared.”

Swft hurried to the nearest wall, groped, and presto! a secret panel opened. Inside, I saw sunlight on a grassy patch among giant trees; old trees with smooth, purplish bark and chartreuse leaves.

“This,” Swft announced, “is disaster!” He stuck his pointy face into the opening and slid inside. I was right behind him, and a good thing, too, because the panel closing behind me almost caught my foot.

Swft was out on the grass, bent over almost double, sniffing at the ground. He looked up at me.

“Timing, as I told you, was of the utmost importance, but now―the necessity to change my plan of action in order to recover Her Highness renders all that nugatory.”

“Where are we now?” I asked him. It seemed like a nice, peaceful spot, not a part of any line in the Zone.

“This,” the rat-like alien told me, as if making an announcement of public interest, “is the Terminal State.”

“Is that anything like a state of confusion?” I inquired, with my usual inappropriate impulse to crack a joke. But he took it seriously.

“Quite the contrary,” he informed me. “This phase is―or should be―one of perfect entropic parity; no strife, no difficulty can be long sustained at this level. It is the hope of every Ylokk some day to attain to this level of being. To burst in, as we have done, is our ultimate taboo. I adjusted the transfer device to extrapolate along the prime axis―the most likely direction of the Ylokk future, to its ultimate state. I expected to find an idyllic civilization, existing in flawless harmony with its environment. Instead―this: a wilderness. I am undone!”

“Then why’d you do it?” I came back fast, before he started to develop the idea it was all my doing.

“I had no choice,” he said brokenly―or anyway, his voice cracked on the words. “It is the only phase that affords undoubted access to the phase where you so rudely dumped Her Highness.”

“Somebody must have programmed that orifice of yours,” I pointed out, “presumably you. Either you’re a blundering fool, or you’re still up to something devious. I think you’d better level with me. I hope the kid’s all right, but I thought she’d wind up with Smovia, wherever he had gotten to.”

“Not quite,” Swft demurred. “You see, it was my intention to transfer our little group to a position inside the Palace, by-passing the Two-Law bandits’ cordon. I went first in order to alert our friends and to thwart any enemies who might be present at the point of exit. When no one appeared, I came back by the lone route, to find you alone. Most distressing.”

“Sure, you thought I’d enjoy seeing my friends disappear into that shoebox, and I’d love being trapped with a yelling baby in a cell with, no window. And a minute ago you said―” I let it go.

“I assumed you’d follow directly,” he explained. “The actual aperture is sustained for only a fraction of a minisecond, you know.”

“No I don’t know,” I corrected. “And where are Andy and the doc now?”

“That, I fear, will require some study,” Swft told me. “They’re quite safe, I feel sure; though doubtless somewhat distressed to find themselves adrift in the entropic pool. We’d best retrieve them at once.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

He ignored the irony and shook his head in agreement. “We’d best get cracking,” he suggested. “One does tend to lose one’s sanity if immersed in the Pool for more than a few microseconds.” He rummaged inside his overcoat, took out a complicated gadget, and began running some kind of test sequence, I guessed, from the pattern of flashing LEDs on his hand-calculator-cum-remote-control. I went over to observe, enjoying the feel of the springy turf underfoot.

“Somebody’s been here recently,” I told him. “The grass has been moved lately.”

“Of course,” he mumbled, deep in his manipulations. “Ah, yes,” he said in a satisfied tone. “We―” Before he could finish that, we heard a crackling in the brush, and a young rat-girl of about ten stepped out of the underbrush into the open. I could tell she was female, though I’m not sure just how. She was dressed in a plain white smock-like garment, and had a rather sweet expression on her rodent face. She had only a short snout; she was almost pretty.

“Hello, Uncle Swft,” she said, paying no attention to me at first. Then she gave me a shy glance, and her buck-toothed grin was quite charming. She took a quick, impulsive step toward me, and paused.

“You’re not Unca Mobie,” she said, as if reproving herself. “You’re not Candy,” she added. “So you’re Unca Null!”

“No, dear,” I replied, “I’m certainly not candy.”

Just then Swft spoke up. “I fear, my good child,” he said rather stiffly, for someone talking to a cute little girl, “that I do not recall our meeting. How do you know my name, may I ask?”

“Unca Mobie” (it sounded like) “said you’d come here sometime.” That seemed to be that.

Swft looked at me. “Must be a town nearby,” he offered. “Child seems well cared for. Her family must live nearby.” He looked at her sharply. “Where do you live, little girl?” he asked.

She waved a slim hand. “Here,” she said, as if that were obvious.

“Surely you have a house,” Swft corrected her. “Your family: where are they?”

“Unca Mobie there,” she said, pointing. “He’s taking a nap.”

“Oh,” Swft said, only half sarcastically, “we wouldn’t want to disturb Unca Maybe’s nap, would we?”

“No. Unca Mobie\” the girl corrected him sharply.

“Let’s go meet him,” Swft said gruffly, and started past her, back the way she’d come from. She caught at his arm. He flung her off.

I objected, and took her strange little hard-fingered hand. “He’s a little upset,” I told the girl. “His plans have gone awry.” She smiled. Swft gave me a haughty look.

I felt myself start to slip into the curious awe-and-reverence feeling that occasionally afflicted me out here in the Zone, but pushed it back. I realized it was the pressure of the local mind-set tending to displace my accustomed paradigm. Swft was just a lost, bewildered rat, not a great personage persevering in the face of daunting odds. “Take it easy, General,” I suggested. “Be nice to the kid. She’s as scared as you are.”