Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 3
Outside the door Obo led Redfern through the gathering slaves. They kept their clothes on and headed fast in the opposite direction, a way Redfern had never gone. At an arched doorway a Honshi barred their way.
Obo waved the spear at him and said swiftly, “Special orders.” Then, as the Honshi wavered, he pushed the spear in.
They rushed up the corridor.
The rock-cut walls gradually gave way to hard-packed earth. The corridors branched and rebranched. A smell of mustiness, of disuse, grew stronger. Four or five other people in gray tunics joined them. One gave Obo a pack, which he immediately slung on his back. Later a pack was handed to Redfern, and Obo said: “Gait says one of his men couldn’t make it. Killed yesterday. You’ll take his place.”
They entered a square room into which six tunnel mouths opened. Twenty or so people jammed in, carrying packs, with spears and swords and, so Redfern saw, some with rifles.
He didn’t know any of them, and felt himself very much of an intruder. But he wanted out of this ghastly hellhole of a mine in Irunium, and he’d take his chances along with these people. One or two looked at him with a sharp and quizzical glance, as though they thought he might be a Valcini spy.
A man said in a crackly voice, “Where’s Tony? The Honshi will be after us soon.”
“I’ll die before I go back!” shouted an old woman whose presence surprised Redfern until a man put an arm around her, hushing and comforting her. So that was one reason why they’d asked him: he was young and strong and unattached.
A commotion began at one of the tunnel mouths. Four people had run in, the leader a young man waving a pistol. His face, thin and with a sharply pointed nose and narrow mouth, showed his excitement. A haze of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and his light sandy coloring, gave him a fresh boyish look.
The girl with him had been tightened up into the same excited expectancy. Her brown hair shone under the lights and her pleasant, cheerful round face with its snub nose and saucy expression contained an inner radiance of absolute determination. She stared around eagerly. A bright scarlet flower nestled behind her ear.
“That’s Tony, and the Porteur, Val,” Obo said. He glared at the other two men. One was a fat Valcini. The other a man wearing a gray shirt and slacks. “But those two—”
Tony propelled the Valcini and the other man in with his pistol. “Val thinks it’s here, right enough!” he shouted. The crowding people fell silent. Here, they all knew, lay their fate. “These two Valcini must be dealt with—”
“Hold on!” interrupted the other man violently. “I’m not a Valcini! I’m just an engineer—”
Then the people, swaying and moving in the square room, blocked Redfern’s vision and the man suddenly stopped speaking. The girl, Val, the one they called a Porteur, suddenly shouted in triumph. She pointed down a narrow mine shaft that seemed abandoned and crumbling. A rope hung down into the darkness.
“Down there,” Obo said to Redfern. “Our way into another world! Our escape, away from all this!”
One after another, the men and women, shouldering their packs, slid down the rope. Some carried lights and these flashed and sparked, hurling scurrying shadows on the walls and ceiling. The girl sat at the lip of the shaft and stared down. Her face puckered as she concentrated. A gathering of power fused in her face and all the immaturity, all the round cheerfulness, all the saucy piquance had gone as though her face had never held any other expression than this taut hypnotic gaze.
The lights slithering down the shaft spurted and then, weirdly, one after the other, died. It was like throwing lighted matches into a pool.
“We’re getting away from this accursed place,” whispered Tony. “The Valcini, the Honshi, all the vermin! We’re getting away through a Gate into a new, fresh, clean world—a world where we can set up our own people, get back home, begin a new life!”
Obo pushed Redfern toward the shaft. Tony was speaking savagely to the two Valcini, waving his gun, exalted.
Redfern heard something about Gates through the dimensions, about finding a new world, a world better than this one. He grasped the rope, rough and prickly even to his callused hands. He was not one of these people, yet he was prepared to jump down an abandoned mineshaft and trust in them. The last thing he heard was Tony shouting, “We don’t want your scum defacing our new world!”
He fell down the shaft.
The lights above whirled away. His shoulder struck the wall painfully. The rope sizzled past. He struck bottom.
For a moment he couldn’t understand where he was. Then, immediately, he was falling again in a white smother. Cold struck through to him cruelly. He was tumbling head over heels, plunging down a snow slope with clouds and sheets of snow billowing all about his helpless body.
The cold shattered him.
Someone grabbed his arm, hauled him up. Men and women, shouting, screaming, surged about.
Overhead a leaden ominous sky hung lowering over them. Snow whirled down. The cold was so intense he felt his body curling and shriveling. Snow smothered everything.
“Where the hell are we?” a man shouted.
“This world—it’s not the world we expected!” Someone screamed in his ear. “We’ve got to stop them coming through. Tell Val!”
Upslope a body abruptly materialized from nothing.
Tony fell asprawl into this new world, colliding with those who were trying to climb up, bringing them all down in a white avalanche.
“We’ll freeze to death here! There’s no shelter!”
Frantically Redfern looked about. Surely, surely, for the love of God, he was back in New York! He must be. The cold struck him far more cruelly than he remembered from that last night in Manhattan; and yet he must be back home. He just had to be!
And yet all around him stretched bleak nothingness. No lights, no traffic, no buildings and skyscrapers, no New York. Instead a waste of white emptiness and a howling, searing wind and a billowing, never-ending blizzard howled down on him like flaying knives in the hands of demons from the frozen levels of hell.
Men tried to climb back up the slope, slipped and fell.
Val appeared, tumbled down, sat up with snow on her hair and her face. She stared about, appalled.
“What happened?”
Val’s face broke. “We can’t go back!” she screamed, looking back up the slope. “Hundreds of Honshi guards—Valcini—they burst in as I jumped! We’ve got to stay here!”
“But we can’t! We’ll freeze to death!”
“Freeze here—or go back to be shot or tortured to death! Which?”
IV
Scobie Redfern’s teeth chattered. His skin felt numbed and flayed off his bones, his breath steamed out like an ancient steam loco riding a savage grade. Men and women around him were breaking out their bundles and taking out coats, blankets, scarves, anything to wrap around themselves against the freezing air and swirling snow.
Something—everything—had gone disastrously wrong.
“We’ve got to get back!”
Tony stared back up the snow slope, his face a misery of despair. Val clung to him, panting, her face taut and white and panicky.
“We can’t! There were Honshi and Valcini—they’ll cut us down!”
A large-bodied man with a short but intensely black and thick beard shouldered across. He dragged a blanket around his shoulders, already white beneath a burden of snow. His eyes showed hatred and cunning and anger.
“Is there another Gate, Val? For Arlan’s sake! Be quick, girl!” He spoke English thickly, accented.
She shook her head sickly, shivering. She clasped her arms around herself, shuddering.
“There might be, Gait! They tend to cluster—but the cold! The cold! I can’t sense—can’t think…”
Tony gripped one arm, the strong bearded man the other. They shook her, pleading. And all the time the breath poured in white clouds from their mouths and noses and the cruel cold cut into them like flaying knives.
“I’ll try!” she screamed. “Let me sense!”
They stopped shaking her. Other people crowded around, shaking and shivering and frightened. The snow blew in sheets over them so that their eyebrows grew white and their eyelids kept blinking away the clinging crystals.
A woman upslope of the main mass screamed. She pointed. Peering through the thickly whirling flakes, Redfern saw Honshi appearing from nowhere. Their flat faces, crowned by the tall helmets with their enigmatic scraps of swinging hair, showed a frog-eyed fright at this unexpected whiteness.
Gait snarled deep in his throat and threw up his rifle. His blanket slipped off in a white smother. Savagely he fired. The Honshi scattered. A Valcini group came through, their fawn slacks and shirts as much protection against the cold as the gray tunics of the escapers. Gunfire broke out. Blood stained the snow.
Redfern felt a cringing nakedness. His fear took a fresh turn; a feeling of intense exaltation, as of a superior order of drunkenness, took possession of him. He saw the Honshi trying to encircle them through the snowflakes and the Valcini upslope firing down. He saw and heard a girl at his side suddenly collapse like a dropped sack, the gurgle in her throat chopped off. He heard the cracks of rifle bullets passing near him. He saw Tony shooting his little popgun up toward the Valcini. He saw men and women falling into the snow.
A man shouted and bent toward the fallen girl. As he bent he must have been hit, for he continued on down until he sprawled limply in the snow, half on the girl. His rifle slipped from a relaxing hand.
Without thinking, Redfern snatched up the rifle. It appeared to be a bolt-action breech-loader in the style of the U.S. Springfield of World War I vintage, a .30 caliber. He lifted it to his shoulder, holding the wooden stock gingerly, feeling the fiery cold bite of the metal. Obo swung up his spear to throw and then jerked up, back, and forward; he dropped the spear and fell headlong into the snow.
“Obo!” shouted Redfern violently. He pressed the trigger.
Clearly he saw a Honshi stumble as though kicked in the stomach and fall in a shower of snow.
He pressed the trigger again and the pin clicked.
Ripping open the bolt again he bent over the dead man. Obo didn’t move. He was dead, too. Cartridges lay in clips in a pouch strapped to a belt around the man’s waist. The speed with which Redfern tore out a reload and slammed the clip into the magazine astounded him. He snapped the bolt shut and started firing upslope. Through the snow he could make out the Valcini firing and he lined up for a quick shot. As he fired the Valcini at whom he aimed vanished.
“They’re going back through the Gate!” howled Gait. He waved his rifle triumphantly. “We’ve beaten them off!”
Surprising himself, Redfern growled: “They’re leaving us here to die!”
“They’ll be after us with full protection,” Gait said.
Val surged forward, her face alight. “There is a nodal point, Gait! I sense it—out there, across the ice!”
Tony clasped a hand to his left arm and blood seeped over his fingers. His thin face looked shrunken with shock.
“We can’t hold out much longer…” he mumbled.
“Lead on, Val! Quickly! Find that Portal before we all freeze to death!”
Val led them out onto the ice and they all began to slip and slither across the ice sheet, where the wind cut away the snow to reveal black ice, hard and treacherous. Only eleven of them made it. The others had been killed in that brief but murderous gun battle.
“I didn’t learn to be a Porteur and then escape from the Contessa to die like this,” Val said staunchly.
Without compunction Redfern took the blanket from the shoulders of the man who lay sprawled across the body of the girl. He unbuckled the ammunition belt and lashed it around his own waist, drawing it up tight. A bayonet swung from the left side, thwacking into his thigh.
He started after the others.
This wasn’t New York. In all the welter of action he knew now that he had to stick with these people.
Irunium was not for him.
The dimension of these people, now, Montrado: that sounded as though it might be, from the little he had heard, the place for him. At least until he could get back to Earth —the real Earth…
Breathing became an agony. His feet slipped on the ice. He caught up with the others and put his left arm around Tony, who sagged back with a surprised and grateful look. Together, they struggled on.
Wind whipped the snow in long jagged lines that scythed into the little party. Up ahead Val plunged on. More than once Redfern had to stop to help a staggering girl, an overloaded man. In a bunch, heads bowed against the bitterness that howled all about them, they trudged across the snow and ice.
He bumped into Gait. People’s faces showed scoured and white, their eyes feverish, their lips filmed with ice. They glared in desperate hope as Val turned slowly, sensing.
Her face showed that deep, fierce determination all mixed up with fear.
Now she stopped. Her body arched, rigidly. She crooned softly to herself. Then she spoke as though from a trance. “It is here! But small, small and difficult! And I am tired…”
“You’ve got to do it, Val!” Gait pleaded. “You’ve got to—” He pushed a woman forward. Her slight body trembled with fear and cold. “Where does it go?”
“I’m not sure—how can I tell?” Val’s eyes opened wider. Her lips parted. Snow drove mercilessly into her upturned face. “It could be—no! No, I do not know—”
“All right, then!” Gait held the woman, comforting her with one thick arm around her waist. “I’ll go first! Put me through and give me a few seconds, then pull me back. Quickly, now, or we are all lost.”
Like the quenching of a flame, Gait disappeared. Val panted, her body tense and vibrant—then Gait reappeared. He now held his rifle across his body, up and pointing.
“It seems all right!” He shuddered as the cold bit in anew. “Rocks and sun and sand. No snow—”
“Put us through!” yelled Tony from the crook of Redfern’s arm.
Gait vanished. Tony vanished. The thin woman vanished. One by one, the escapers were sent through the dimensions to another world. All Redfern felt as he transmitted was a sudden, quickly over, fragmentary twitch.
Then he was standing in a rocky bowl with the sunshine pouring down, the wonderful, warming, heartening, altogether gorgeous sunshine thawing out his frozen body.
Val came through last. The snow on their blankets and scarves and tunics began to melt, thawed, ran in rivulets of shining water to darken the rocks and dry into nothingness.
Redfern licked his lips. They hurt.
“Water,” he said. “Maybe…”
Gait nodded curtly. “Some of you stay here. You stay, Val. The rest of us will recce.” His English, accented and heavy, coped with the language problem. Some of the others spoke Italian, some French. They did not all, Redfern learned, come from Montrado. They shared the languages used by the Valcini. Getting them all home to their various worlds would pose a problem.
Maybe, Redfern thought with a sour jolt, maybe he never would get back to his own Earth.
He went with Gait and four others, two men and two girls. They climbed a narrow dusty track between the encircling rocks of the bowl until they came out onto the flat top of a boulder that must have been spewed up in a volcanic nightmare in dark primeval days.
“If this is all desert…” Then Gait chopped that off. Away on the horizon, clearly visible in the dry air, stretched a mountain range and, at its foot, green and bright, lay a vast wooded and grassland area, shining and welcoming.
A shout of triumph brought the others up. Val had bandaged Tony’s arm and he seemed in better shape; the bullet had exited from the wound and the bone had not been broken. He carried his arm in a sling with a slightly raffish air.
A girl with red hair and a heavy doughy face looked and started, then relaxed. “For a moment,” she said in a choked voice, “for a moment I thought this was .y own world, Narlingha. If only it had been!”
“We’ll all get back to our own dimensions, Nyllee,” said Gait sturdily, toughly.
“Yes! Oh, yes!” cried many voices.
Redfern caught Val’s eye. She smiled shakily; but a clear thought passed between them, an understanding that it wouldn’t be easy, and that many of these people would never see their own dimensions again.
The small party began the march toward the mountains and the trees.
Gait, strong, undaunted, his black beard thrust ahead, led the way.
The time appeared to be just after noon, for as they walked on Redfern checked the declination of the sun. He was not equipped to define what conditions he should expect in other dimensions; but it seemed logical that gravity and atmosphere and time should parallel. At least, he hoped so. They’d been thrust through into a bitterly cold dimension so, perhaps, they could stumble through into a world of no air, or of multiple suns, or any other catastrophic astronomical combination. After a time he found himself, still half-supporting Tony, marching beside Val.
She smiled at him.
Her round saucy face had regained its cheekiness; her hazel eyes lit on him with a warmth he found very comforting. Beneath the gray tunic her body showed contours that promised litheness and strength. She strode along with a fine free swing.
“You are from the Earth I have heard called Terra?”
He nodded. “And Montrado?”
She lit up as memory sparked her words. “It’s a wonderful world! Full of light and sunshine and clean air; where I live is a beach ten miles long of the most golden, clean, shining sand you can imagine. Oh, I miss Montrado!”
“How’d you get here, then? I mean, to Irunium,” he added.
She made a face.
“A holiday group on the sands… a little ship sailed in, so friendly, so calm. Men jumped out of the ship, came toward us. We struggled; but we were captured.” She drew a breath at this memory, her hazel eyes darkening. “We didn’t understand what was happening. Then, when we were out to sea, we, the ship, the sea—”
