Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“All set,” he said under his breath.

“All taken care of?” I asked.

He nodded.

“The lieutenant?”

“I saved him until next to last.”

“All right. The Major’s over by the personnel door.”

“Was. I’ve taken care of him, too. He was the last of them.”

I wanted to ask how many of them were dead, but the words stuck in my throat. It was a lifesaver to have a young timberwolf like Doc for a friend, but it was a little illogical to demand he be wolf and harmless at the same time.

“How about the aircraft?” I asked.

“The first one you looked at, I didn’t touch,” Doc answered. “The rest are set to blow any time you want.”

“All right. I’ve got to see if we can get the hangar doors open easily. Otherwise, you may have to blow a hole in them—”

“No sweat there either. They’re supposed to be electrically operated, but there’s a chain block-and-tackle type dingus to use if the power’s off. Can you fly that thing, Marc?”

“I can fly it. Or rather, I can tell it to fly itself and it will.”

“Just checking,” he said; and I could barely see his grin in the gloom.

“I don’t blame you. I would too,” I told him. I was very tired, suddenly. “Why don’t you rig the other planes to destruct as soon as we’re safely out of here, and I’ll move the one we’re taking up to this side of the doors? Then you open the door, hop in, and we’ll move.”

“Right.”

He moved off. I turned on my flashlight and led the Old Man toward the aircraft Doc had specified as untouched. We climbed in, shut the door, and I depressed one of the keys.

“Ready.”

“Move up slowly on the ground to the inside of the doors to this building. Or—to put it another way—move slowly forward along the ground and I’ll tell you which way to turn and when to stop.”

The craft stirred and seemed to slide rather than roll forward.

“Left,” I told it. “Left maybe ten degrees. Now maybe five degrees more. All right, straight ahead... stop!”

We halted just inside the hangar doors. I opened the door of the craft and waited. In a moment, there was a faint, rattling sound to be heard through the opening; and the big doors slid apart to either side of the opening they guarded, and bright sunlight blinded us.

“That’s good enough!” I called softly into the brilliance after a moment. But the doors had already stopped parting with just enough room for us to go through. I heard a faint thud and Doc was in the cabin, shutting the aircraft door behind him.

“All set,” he said.

“Go!” I told the craft, “Straight ahead, out on the ground through this opening, take off and climb to three thousand meters. Head west”

It slid forward through the doors into the full sunlight. Without any run, it leaped suddenly skyward. There was a sound like a paper bag popping below and behind us. I glanced back and down to see smoke coming from the open doorway of the hangar building, dwindling rapidly to toy size below us. A second later, we were up where the roads looked like thick pencil lines and the landscape was starting to move backwards beneath us toward the sun half way up in the clear sky.

“That takes care of everything, I guess,” Doc said. He came forward and pushed the Old Man off the seat next to mine—a move the Old Man took without complaint. It was surprising what the Old Man would take from Doc, nowadays. Almost as much as Sunday used to take from Ellen. Doc seated himself where the Old Man had been.

“Need any help flying, or anything like that?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then I’ll get some sleep,” he said, imperturbably. “This gadget’s better than a locked door. No one’s going to break in and surprise you in the middle of the air.”

He curled up in the seat, closed his eyes, and dropped off.

I was not so lucky.

The aircraft out of the future did not seem to need any serious attention. I asked it for a map of the country, and it was displayed on the screen in front of me. On the map, I picked out the general area of our community, asked to have it enlarged for me, and so continued zeroing in and enlarging until I could identify our destination to the craft. Once this was done, I simply told it to take us there and land by the summer palace-which I described-and my duties were done. I would have liked, then, to curl up and sleep like Doc; but I could not. I could not even imitate the Old Man, who was half-dozing, opening his eyes every so often to blink at me, as if to make sure I was still there.

Instead, I just sat, watching the empty, clean sky and the slowly moving landscape far below. There was no sound of passage inside the plane and I felt like a fly trapped under an overturned water glass.

As long as we had been working to escape, my mind had been clear and sharp and purposeful. But now, the effect of the body adrenalin began to die out in me, leaving me feeling empty, dull, and ugly. The thought of the soldiers on guard who had undoubtedly died so the three of us could go free came back to my mind whether I wanted to think of them or not. God knows I had never wanted to be the cause of anyone’s death, particularly now, since I had found that at least part of myself could blend with the rest of the universe. It was, in fact, that specific, blendable part of myself that I now felt I had betrayed, misused like a fine-edged tool put to some wrong purpose.

But what else could Doc and I and the Old Man have done, I kept asking myself? We had to escape, and the only route open to us lay over the dead or incapacitated bodies of at least some of Paula’s warriors.

Did it? a jeering little voice in the back of my mind nagged at me.

All right, I told myself, what other way was there?

You tell me. You’re the man who can see patterns.

I couldn’t see one here that didn’t involve violence.

Then you’re not much good, are you?

Leave me alone, I told it. Get out of my head.

How can I leave you alone? I’m you. You’re stuck with me.

There’s a way out, I thought. And I became very cold when I thought it.

You haven’t got the guts. And even if you did, what about Ellen and Marie and all the rest you’d be leaving for Paula to take her revenge on? You want their deaths on your conscience, too?

Paula—I forced myself to think of Paula instead. But that brought no relief either. Her image summoned up another sort of sick feeling inside me. Because I had been attracted to her. I actually had. The fact that she had challenged me with her unavailability had been a cloak for the fact that I wanted her anyway, had wanted her, in fact, from the moment I had first seen her getting out of her helicopter looking like a page out of a fashion magazine in a world now vanished forever. Having her would have been almost like getting that world back again.

Of course, I had known she had dressed like that deliberately, that the whole matter of her entrance on the scene had been cool-headedly calculated to produce the effect on all of us that it had. But knowing this didn’t alter the emotional leap I had felt. Seeing her like that, I had been lifted out of the raw and dusty reality of my present into a gilded dream of a memory. I had suddenly been reminded of the tawdriness of the little world I was about to defend with my life. I had felt suddenly embarrassed by the workaday plainness of the two women who shared my life with me, and my handful of loyal friends. They were like coarse brown bread compared to angel food cake. They were like flat homebrew beer compared to champagne.

I had been attracted to Paula all right—from that moment. I could have convinced myself I was in love with her, given time. Given enough time, time enough to hang myself with, I could even have gradually forgotten my duty to go back and finish what I had begun with the time storm. Maybe, I thought now, there had been the thought of not returning in the back of my mind all along. So that when I raged at the possibility of Paula not being able to get her army—and me—across to Europe this fall, I was really raging against the delay of the excuse that being on the other side of the Atlantic would have given me, the excuse to put off escaping from Paula if and when word came that Porniarsk had succeeded in accomplishing the very large task I had set him to do.