“It’s following my trail!” Roger gulped. “And in five minutes, it will be sneaking up behind me!” He rose to all fours, scuttled forward a few yards, watching the alien creature move rapidly away on flickering tentacles. Darting from cover to cover, he followed it—his only chance, he knew, to stay ahead of it. Approaching the boulder, he saw a tiny glint of light from a vertical line, like a luminous spider’s web, extending from the ground upward.
“It’s the Aperture!” he gulped in relief. “I hate to reopen the conversation with the art fancier, but it’s better than trying to explain to that vegetable how I happened to steal his bike.”
Cautiously, Roger edged closer to the luminous filament, saw it widen, close around him as swiftly as a bursting soap bubble, then as swiftly open out again and vanish behind him.
* * *
He was standing in darkness, under a sky criss-crossed by glowing arcs, like a Fourth of July display. The air was filled with thunder, punctuated by pops, bangs, and stuttering detonations.
“It’s a celebration,” Roger guessed, noting that he was standing ankle deep in cold water. “I wonder what the occasion is?” He groped about him, discovered that he was in a muddy, steep-sided ditch higher than his head. A faint glimmer of light reflected from the damp wall of the cut a few feet ahead. He sloshed to it, turned a right-angle corner, and was facing a sand-bagged, timber-braced doorway. Inside, three men sat at a table made of stacked boxes, holding cards. The light came from a candle stuck to a board.
“Hey! You better get inside, buddy!” one of the men called. He was a sallow, thin-faced youth in a mustard-colored jacket, open at the neck. “Big Otto’s due to hit any second now!”
“Blimey, mate,” a second man, wearing suspenders over wool underwear, said, slapping a card down on the table. “Don’t yer know the ruddy schedule?”
The third man, a stout fellow in a gray-green uniform jacket, placed a card on the table and puffed smoke from an enormous pipe.
“Ach, a new gesicht!” he exclaimed heartily. “Bist du vieleicht ein poker player?”
“Ah—not just now,” Roger responded, entering the murky chamber hesitantly. “Say, I wonder if you fellows can tell me where I am? My, uh, car broke down, you see, while I was on my way to apply for a new job . . . ”
Hearty laughter interrupted Roger’s explanation.
“New job,” the man with the suspenders echoed. “That’s a’ot one, chum!”
“Good to meet a guy with a sense o’ humor,” the man in mustard agreed. “What’s your outfit, pal?”
“You are a funny man,” the stout player stated solemnly. “You would abbreciate a yoke. Warum does ein Huhn cross the strasse?”
“Outfit?” Roger queried. “I’m afraid I don’t have one.”
“Wiped out, huh? Too bad. Well, you can doss down here . . . ” His voice was drowned by an ear-splitting shriek followed instantly by an explosion that rocked the underground room. The joke-teller reached to flick a smoking fragment of shell casing from the table.
“To come on s’ ozzer seite!” he said triumphantly. “Also, vun man says to s’ ozzer man, ‘Who vass dass lady I zaw you viss last nicht?”
“What’s going on?” Roger blurted, slapping at the mud spattered across his face by the blast.
“The usual Jerry bombardment, o’ course, chum. Wot else?”
“Jerry bombardment? You mean—Germans? Good Lord, has a war started?”
“Oh-oh, shell shock,” the thin-faced man said. “Too bad. But maybe it’s better that way. You get a little variety.”
“Where am I?” Roger persisted. “What is this place?”
“You’re in good hands, buddy. This is the Saint Mihiel Salient; just take it easy. The shelling will be over in another couple minutes, then we can talk better.”
“The Saint Mihiel Salient! B-but that was in World War One!”
“World War what?”
“One. Nineteen eighteen.”
“Right, chum. September twelfth. Lousy day, too. I could of picked a better one to be stuck in.”
“But—that’s impossible! It’s nineteen-eighty-seven! You’re two wars behind!”
“Crikey—’e’s flipped his cap proper,” the suspendered man commented.
“Blease! I didn’t finish my yoke!” the stout man complained.
“Could it be—is it possible—that the Aperture is some sort of time machine?” Roger gasped.
“Say, buddy, you better get out of the doorway,” the thin-faced man suggested. “There’s one more big fellow due before it lets up, and—”
“That desert!” Roger blurted. “It wasn’t Arizona! It was probably ancient Arabia or something!”
” ‘E’s raving.” The suspender-wearer rose from his seat on an ammunition box. “Watch ‘im, mates. ‘E might get violent.”
“Fantastic!” Roger breathed, looking around the dugout. “Just think, I’m actually back in the past, breathing the air of seventy-odd years ago! Outside, the war is raging, and Wilson’s in the White House, and nobody’s ever heard of LSD or television or miniskirts or flying saucers—”
“Look, chum, in about ten seconds—”
“You fellows have a lot of excitement to look forward to,” Roger said envyingly. “The war will be over in November; try to keep your heads down until then. And afterwards there’ll be the League of Nations—that was a failure—and then Prohibition—that didn’t work out too well, either—and then the stock market crash in twenty-nine—remember to sell your portfolios early in the year. And then the Great Depression, and then World War Two—”
“Grab him! For ‘is own good!”
As the players rose and closed in, Roger backed away. “Now, wait just a minute!” he protested. “I’m not crazy! It’s just that I’m a little confused by what’s happened. I have to be going now—”
“You don’t hear yet s’ punchline!” the stout man protested.
“You’ll get y’er bloody ‘ead blowed off!”
“Duck, buddy!”
A loud whistle filled the air as Roger broke away and splashed out into the muddy trench. As the sound of the descending shell rose higher and higher he looked both ways for shelter, then dived for the Aperture, saw rainbow light flare about him—
* * *
He was sprawled on the grassy bank of a small creek, in full sunlight, looking at a brutal caricature of a man crouched on the opposite side.
4
The map-ape stood all of eight feet tall, in spite of a pronounced stoop; its hands looked as big as catchers’ mitts. The shaggy red-brown pelt was matted with dirt, pink scars crossed the wide face, the bronzed, sparsely haired chest. The wide lips drew back on broken, blackened teeth; the small eyes flicked restlessly from Roger to the surrounding woods, back again.
“Oops,” Roger murmured. “Wrong era. I’ll just nip back through and try that again . . . ”
As he stepped back, the ape-man advanced, splashing down into the stream. Roger forced his way back in among tangled brambles, searching frantically for the glint of light that indicated the exit.
“Maybe it was over more to the left,” he suggested, beating his way in that direction. The giant was halfway across the stream now, yelling in indignation at the touch of the water. “Or possibly to the right . . . ” Roger clawed at the vines that raked at him like clutching hands. The monster-man emerged from the water, paused to shake first one foot and then the other, then came on, growling ferociously. Roger broke clear of the thicket, skittered away a few feet, and stopped to watch the dull-witted brute entangle itself in the thorny creepers.
“Keep cool, now, Tyson,” he counseled. “You can’t afford to lose track of the bolthole. Just hover here while that fellow wears himself out, then scoot right in and—”
With a bellow, the ape-man lunged clear of the snarled vines, a move that placed him between Roger and his refuge.
“He—he’s probably scared to death,” Roger theorized. “All I have to do is act as though I’m not afraid, and he’ll turn tail and run.” He swallowed hard, adjusted a fierce glint in his eye, and took a hesitant step forward. The result was instantaneous. The creature charged straight at him, seized him with both hands, lifted him clear of the ground. Roger’s last impression was of blue sky overhead, seen through a leafy pattern of foliage that whirled around and down and burst into showering lights that faded swiftly into blackness.
CHAPTER THREE
1
He awoke in near-darkness. A pattern of dim light filtered through coarse matting to show him a low ceiling which merged with a wall of water-worn stone. A wizened, bristly-whiskered face appeared, staring down at him. He sat up, winced at the ache in his head; the face retreated hastily. This specimen didn’t appear to be vicious—but where was the scar-faced Gargantua?
“Better lie quiet,” the old man said in a cracked, whispery voice. “Ye’ve had a bad bump.”
“You speak English!” Roger blurted.
“Reckon I do,” the man nodded. “Bimbo had ye, using ye for a play-purty. Ye was lucky he happened to be in a good mood when he found ye. I drug ye in here when he was through with ye.”