Zone Yellow

Chapter 14

It was an unexceptional-looking little booth, walled off’ in the center of a big, garage-like space, with banks of tightly-wound M-C coils or their equivalent packed up against the walls and across the ceiling. Inside, there were padded benches, the wrong size and shape for human anatomy. Swft made a few adjustments and converted a couple to flat, bunk-like affairs that would fit anybody.

“I must caution you, gentlemen,” he announced, as soon as he’d gotten Smovia and the baby comfortably settled, while Helm and I shifted for ourselves, “that you will experience, shall I say, ‘unusual’ sensations during the transfer, which lasts for only a few milliseconds of subjective time. Feel free to cry out if you wish, but do not move.” He stepped outside and closed the door on us.

I had a few hundred important questions I needed to ask, but before I could decide to go after him, the unusual sensations started up. It was almost indescribable: it included an uneasy sensation up under the ribs, in the solar plexus area, and a hot-needles feeling on the backs of my hands and the top of my thighs. It wasn’t painful, but was by far the most horrible sensation I ever experienced, worse than nausea and pain combined. I hung on and wished it would go away. I thought of looking at Smovia and Helm to see how they were taking it, but it was just a thought: the thought that I was in over my head and death was next. But after a while it faded out and left me feeling slightly confused but OK.

Smovia was already on his feet. Helm was slumped, out cold. Smovia slapped the backs of his hands and got him up, groggy but functioning. I said:

“What was that all about, doctor? What kind of sensation was that?”

“Something quite outside the realm of medical science as we understand it today,” he told me.

Helm made a gargling sound and said, “And I died. I know I was dying. But you’re still here, Doc, so I guess―Well, you could be dead, too. Where are we?”

“We’re in a transfer booth in General Swft’s out-station,” I reminded him.

“Where is he?” Smovia demanded, not unreasonably.

“He just stepped out, right before the feeling,” I informed him.

Helm lurched toward the door. I told him to hold on.

“Presumably,” I said, “we’ve been transferred to a receiving booth in the Ylokk capital. We’d better go slowly.”

“Happened too fast,” Helm supplied. “We came in here, and just as I got settled, zap! I was dying.” He looked at me appealingly.

“I really was,” he insisted. “I could feel myself adrift-, I know it was a change-over to another level of being. Death.”

“Not quite,” I corrected. “It was another kind of change-over. We moved across the continua to another A-line. We’re still alive, don’t worry.”

“Ja da, for all del,” the lad agreed, nodding. “But we crossed plenty of alternate A-lines in the shuttle, and nobody died―or felt like it.”

“We were protected by the circuitry of the shuttle,” I explained to him and myself. “This time we were exposed to the subjectively accelerated entropic flow, unshielded, something we usually experience at a much slower rate. This movement is associated in our deep minds with death, hence the horrible sensation.”

He looked around. “I notice Swft isn’t here,” he stated. “Damned rat probably abandoned us here to die.”

“He just stepped out,” I reassured him for some reason. Just then the enemy general stepped back in.

“Gentlemen,” Swft said abruptly, “I have deposited us in an abandoned warehouse near the Complex. The streets are dark, and few passersby should be here. We must step out cautiously―after I have scanned our surroundings, of course.” He slithered into one of the curiously-shaped chairs before a panel containing three ranks of small repeater screens, all of which were dark. He seemed to be satisfied, though, and got up and opened the exit door.

“Take care,” Swft cautioned. “There may be a slight disorientation, due to a small error of closure in the en tropic gradient. Allow me.” He didn’t wait for assent, but stepped out, and we followed him.

The bells were so close, they must be, I decided, inside my head. Clong! Cuh-long! Ong-ong! I grabbed my skull with both hands and tried to back away from the din, but it only got louder, closer, surrounding me, driving me to desperation. “Stop it!” I yelled, and willed the noise to stop.

“Stop!” a great voice boomed out. I got my eyes open against the weight of the clangor and saw Swft, sleek, handsome, a figure of dignity and nobility, to whom I was privileged to say, “The noise! It’s driving me―” I couldn’t say any more with the big spike driving into my chest. I saw that we were in a deserted street with pole lights and brick facades, and a vile odor of rotting flesh. Dead rats lay everywhere.

“Easy, Colonel,” the General ordered me. I tried, and the pain, along with the noise, began to fade.

“It’s your heart you’re hearing,” he was telling me. “Ordinarily, your auditory cortex suppresses awareness of it. Relax, now, and just let it fade away.”

I saw Helm, slumped against a light-pole, gagging.

“It’s going to be all right, Andy,” I tried to say. Doc Smovia staggered into my field of vision, green-faced, hugging the baby, who was still sleeping peacefully. The noise was gone as if it had never been. My chest felt all right, too. I steadied Smovia and took the infant and passed her to the general. Andy was blinking at me. “Colonel!” he gasped out. “Where . . . where . . . did―?”

“It’s all in our minds, Lieutenant,” I reassured him. “ ‘Error of closure,’ His Excellency called it.”

Smovia seemed back to normal. He looked a little pale in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, but then everybody looks dead in that light. It wasn’t just him: the whole street had that same wan, dirty-yellow look, just like I felt. The scene was as horrible as the stench.

“You mentioned a warehouse, Excellency,” I said, feeling not quite sure what that meant.

“Of course.” He indicated an open door in a corrugated-metal wall beside us. “We have only just emerged,” he explained. “You were a bit confused, but you followed me when I came out, the coast being clear. By the way,” he went on, “I know the idiom ‘the coast is clear,’ but find it most obscure. What is its derivation?”

“Is that a big issue right now, sir?” I wondered aloud, fighting the paradigm. The general actually looked a little scruffy, I noticed. He was an ugly fellow, if you tried to see him as human, which he wasn’t, so I tried to regain the rat’s-eye view I’d had for a moment, and succeeded so well that I had to move over against the wall, for security, as a surge of agoraphobia hit me. Andy and Smovia were already there, huddled against the sheet-metal door. I wanted desperately to please the general.

The feeling faded, and he was just an overgrown rat in a dowdy raincoat, standing in a deserted street, sniffing the foul air and twitching his whiskers.

“This way,” he squeaked. “Hurry!”―and started off without looking to see if anyone was following. We got ten feet before a whistle shrilled, and somebody yelled. Swft did a hard left turn into a narrow air space between age-blackened brick walls, and we followed. Our feet crunched on trash underfoot. After a few yards, the cramped alley opened into an eight-foot-square air shaft.

“Now what?” Andy expressed my thought precisely. Smovia stayed close to the wall and cautiously edged around to the far side, looking back down the alleyway.

“There are―people―there,” Smovia managed to utter. “We’re trapped!” he accused Swft, who stooped and lifted a square manhole cover.

“We must descend, quickly,” he said urgently, and started down. Ten seconds later I assisted Smovia down the last few rungs, he being burdened once again with the baby. We were now trapped in a slightly larger space than the air shaft above. Swft replaced the cover and we were in total darkness. At least there was no stench here.

“We came here,” I reminded the Ylokk, “to do a little job of world-saving. How do you intend to manage that from this coal cellar?”

“No, merely a utility space,” he corrected me offhandedly. “Kindly observe―closely.” He went to the nearest of the rough stonework walls, reached up as high as he could reach, and began to grope over the surface with his long-fingered hands. A stone nearby slid aside; at the same time a dim light sprang up, revealing a narrow crawl-space. He motioned me in impatiently.

I stood fast. “What’s all this hocus-pocus?” I wanted to know first. “Why didn’t you drop us right at our destination, whatever that is?”

“ ‘The Map Room,’ we call it,” he supplied. “Alas, our transfer method is not yet fully perfected. It lacks absolute precision with reference to the first three dimensions. Vug-wise, though, and temporally it’s quite accurate.” He broke off his speech and went headfirst into the hole without waiting for my response. I looked at Helm and Smovia. The doc gave a little shrug and started into the hole. I hauled him back, just as Helm burst out:

“Why should we trust that rat?”

“Because Doctor Smovia has the baby,” I told him, and he ducked his head and went in. That was a little pushy of him, but I let him go. Smovia handed me the baby and without waiting for permission, followed Helm. This time, burdened with the infant, I got to the opening just as his feet disappeared inside. I groped, but he was gone and so was the opening. That left me and one peacefully sleeping rat-pup, alone in a cell.

Baby began fretting again. I patted her and tried to come up with a brilliant idea. The best I could do was reflect that Swft would hardly have abandoned his precious princess for good. That gave me another idea. I took her over and put her gently inside the hole that had swallowed up Andy and the doc. It wasn’t wide enough for my shoulders. Smovia and Andy were slim fellows, so they’d gotten in easily. I knew I couldn’t make it in there; no way out for me. But Swft would be back, and before I’d grown a full beard.

I stretched out on one of the S-shaped benches as well as I could and went to sleep before I had figured out just what to do with my feet.