Poul Anderson: The Corridors of Time

Lockridge drew a shaky lungful and tried to understand what sort of place he had entered.

The corridor was huge. Also hemicylindrical, with the same luminous surfacing, it must be a hundred feet in diameter. Arrow straight it ran, right and left, until the ends dwindled out of sight—why, it must go for miles, he realised. The humming noise and the lightning smell were more intense here, pervading his being, as if he were caught in some vast machine.

He looked back at the door through which he had come, and stiffened. “What the hell!”

On this side, though no higher, the portal was easily two hundred feet wide. A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951, 4952. . . . Only the auroral curtain was the same.

“No time to waste.” Storm tugged at his sleeve. “I shall explain later. Get aboard.”

She gestured at a curve-fronted platform, not unlike a big metal toboggan with low sides, that hovered two feet off the floor. Several backless benches ran down its length. At the head was a panel where small lights glowed, red, green, blue, yellow—“Come on! ”

He mounted with her. She took the front seat, laid her gun in her lap, and passed her hand across the lights. The sled swung around and started left down the corridor. It moved in total silence at a speed he guessed to be thirty miles an hour; but somehow the wind was screened off them.

“What the jumpin’ blue blazes is this thing?” he choked.

“You have heard of hovercraft?” Storm said absently. Her eyes kept flickering from the emptiness ahead to the colour disc in her fingers.

A grimness came upon Lockridge. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I know this is nothin’ like them.” He pointed to her instrument. “And what’s that?”

She sighed. “A life indicator. And we are riding a gravity sled. Now be still and keep watch to our rear.”

Lockridge felt almost too stiff to sit, but managed it. He set the rifle on the bench beside him. Sweat was clammy along his ribs, and he saw and heard with preternatural sharpness.

They glided by another portal, and another, and another. The gates came at variable intervals, averaging about half a mile, as near as Lockridge could gauge in this saturating cold illumination. Wild thoughts spun through his head. No Germans could ever have built this, no anti-Communist underground be using it. Beings from another planet, another star, somewhere out in the measureless darkness of the cosmos—Three men came through a gate that the sled had just passed. Lockridge yelled at the same moment that Storm’s indicator turned blood red. She twisted about and looked behind. Her mouth skinned back from her teeth. “So we fight,” she said on a trumpet note, and fired aft.

A blinding beam sprang from her pistol. One of the men lurched and collapsed. Smoke roiled greasy from the hole in his breast. The other two had their guns unfastened before he was down. Storm’s firebolt passed across them, broke in a coruscant many-coloured fountain, and splashed the corridor walls with vividness. The air crackled. Ozone stung Lockridge’s nostrils.

She thumbed a switch on her weapon. The beam winked out. A vague, hissing shimmer encompassed her and her companion. “Energy shielding,” she said. “My entire output must go to it, and even so, two beams striking the same spot could break through. Shoot!”

Lockridge had no time to be appalled. He brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted. The man he saw was big but dwindling with distance, only his close-fitting black garments and golden-bronze Roman-like helmet could be made out, he was a target with no face. Briefly there jagged across Lockridge’s memory the woods at home, green stillness and a squirrel in branches above. . . . He shot. The bullet smote, the man fell but picked himself up. Both of them sprang onto a gravity sled such as was parked at every gate.

“The energy field slows material objects too,” Storm said bleakly. “Your bullet had too little residual velocity, at this range.”

The other sled got moving in pursuit. Its black-clad riders hunched low under the bulwarks. Lockridge could just see the tops of their helmets. “We got a lead on them,” he said. “They can’t go any faster, can they?”

“No, but they will observe where we emerge, go back, and tell Brann,” Storm answered. “A mere identification of me will be bad enough.” Her eyes were ablaze, nose flared, breasts rising and falling; but she spoke more coolly than he had known men to do when they trained with live ammunition. “We shall have to counterattack. Give me your pistol. When I stand to draw their fire—no, be quiet, I will be shielded—you shoot.”

She whipped the sled about and sent it hurtling toward the other one. The thing grew in Lockridge’s vision with nightmare slowness. And those were actual men he must kill. He kicked away nausea. They were trying to kill him and Storm, weren’t they? He knelt beneath the sideshield and held his rifle ready.

The encounter exploded around him. Storm surged to her feet, the energy gun in her left hand, the Webley barking in her right. Yards away, the other sled veered. Two firebeams struck at her, throwing sparks and sheets of radiance, moving toward convergence. And a slug whined from some noiseless, stubby-barrelled weapon that one of the black-uniformed men also held.

Lockridge jumped up. In the corner of an eye he saw Storm, erect in a geyser of red, blue, yellow flame, hair tossed about her shoulders by thundering energies, shooting and laughing. He looked down upon the enemy, straight into a pale narrow countenance. The bullet gun swivelled toward him. He fired exactly twice.

The other sled passed by and on down the corridor.

Echoes died away. The air lost its sting. There was only the bone-deep song of unknown forces, the smell of them and the flimmer in a gateway.

Storm looked after the sprawled bodies as they departed, picked her life indicator off the bench, and nodded. “You got them,” she whispered. “Oh, nobly shot!” She threw down the instrument, seized Lockridge and kissed him with bruising strength.

Before he could react, she let him go and turned the sled around. Her color was still high, but she spoke with utter coolness: “It would be a waste of time and charges to disintegrate them. The Rangers would still know quite well that they met their end at Warden hands. But no more than that should be obvious: provided we get out of the corridor before anyone else chances along.”

Lockridge slumped onto a bench and tried to comprehend what had happened.

He didn’t come out of his daze until Storm halted the sled and urged him off. She leaned over and activated the controls. It started away. “To its proper station,” she explained briefly. “If Brann knew that the killers of his men had entered from 1964, and found an extra conveyance here, he would know the whole story. This way, now.”

They approached the gate. Storm chose a line from the first group, headed 1175. “Here you must be careful,” she said. “We could easily get lost from each other. Walk exactly on this marker.” She reached behind her and closed fingers on his. He was still too shocked to appreciate that contact as much as he knew, dimly, he would otherwise.

Following her, he passed through the curtain. She let him go, and he saw that they were in a room like the one from which they had entered. Storm opened the cabinet, consulted what he guessed might be a timepiece, and nodded in a satisfied way. Taking out a pair of bundles done up in a shaggy, coarse-woven blue material, she handed them to him and closed the cabinet. They went up the spiral ramp.