The Nick Of Time Part 11

Usually when they said the same thing at the same time, they thought it was cute. It was a sign of how close they were and how similar their thinking was. Now they just glared at each other.

"Frank--"

Mihalik turned and stalked off through the swirling mist. "Frank--"

He whirled and glowered at her. "I don't even want to talk about it."

"Well, what are we going to do?"

"I said I didn't want to talk about it." He turned around again and marched through the dimness.

Cheryl watched him anxiously for a few seconds. This wasn't like him, she knew. He seemed really afraid.

The palely loitering fog didn't cause Mihalik much terror, and neither did the absolute lack of other things to look at, the absence of the sky, the ground, the horizon, everything. Yet he had never experienced such mad, paralyzing horror before. There was no terror, but the horror was tremendous.

till, he had been trained, expensively trained -- to shrug off fear.

Mihalik took a deep breath and shrugged off the fear. The horror was still there, though.

He shrugged off the alarm, the dread, and the panic, too; but the horror hung right in there. "Here's where I start to earn my money," he thought, but deep inside he had no real relish for it. The horror grew out of the beginning of the hint of the idea that he wasn't a real hero, after all. One cruel part of his mind nagged him: "A real hero wouldn't have felt that horror. He wouldn't even have recognised it. He would have stepped right into this nothingness the way you step into a warm bath. But no! You're horrified!

You're so horrified you can't think straight! And you aren't thinking straight, are you? You don't even trust yourself to talk to Cheryl. What, do you think she's not afraid? She didn't have your training. A real hero would be concerned for her first, but you--" The cruel voice in Mihalik's head was prepared to go on like that throughout eternity. In fact, it did go on just like that for as long as Mihalik continued to draw breath. What made him truly a hero was that he stopped paying attention to it. After a while.

There was something about this place -- this nonplace -- that was hard on your nerves, besides the obvious loneliness and unreality of it all. There was tension in the air, a hovering, penetrating potential for yet more horror. Mihalik had felt that sort of thing before, but never to this numbing degree. It was like walking into a dentist's waiting room after hours, or when you know you don't have to have any work done on your own teeth. Still, just the whine of the drill or the sight of it clipped up into its resting position is enough to give you a quick jolt of alarm. The drill sits there like the most patient viper in the world, and you feel an inverted thrill stab through you, starting somewhere near your groin and clawing up toward your heart. The difference was that you could turn and walk away from the dentist's office; here, you could turn and walk, but there didn't seem to be any direction at all labeled "Away."

"Frank--"

Mihalik jumped, startled. "Don't sneak up on me like that," he said.

"I'm sorry," said Cheryl. She put her hand on his arm. She wondered if he was quivering with worry or chill. "What are you doing?"

Mihalik laughed sardonically. "Oh, nothing much," he said. "Just killing time. That's a joke, Cheryl.

What we ought to be doing is saving time, I guess. I mean, we have no time to lose, right?"

For a moment, Cheryl couldn't tell if Mihalik's time puns were a good sign or bad sign. Because she was a hopeful, cheerful sort of young woman, she concluded at last that things were getting better by the minute, because at least her beloved Frank was no longer stumbling witlessly around in the clinging fog.

He was bantering with her. That was a good sign; soon they'd put their heads together and a.n.a.lyze the situation and list the positive and the negative points and figure their options and come to a mutuallyagreeable decision. Then it would be simply a matter of putting their plan into effect -- that was Frank's part, of course; he was the truly dynamic one of the team. Cheryl believed (though she would never have spoken it aloud to him) that she had a deeper understanding of the ways of the world in general, and that she was quicker to adapt to changing conditions; but she did not hesitate to award her boyfriend all honors in the action department.

But not just yet. While she watched, Mihalik's smile, which had never really progressed further than causticness, slipped back into what was very clearly a grimace of distress. Mihalik himself slipped down into the wafting coils of yellowish mist.

He was sitting up to his neck in the stuff, with just his handsome head visible. "Well," he said, letting out a sigh, "here we are."

Now Cheryl was beginning to get impatient. "That's great, Frank," she said standing over him with her hands on her hips, one foot tapping invisibly, enunciating her irritation in case it hadn't come through in her tone of voice. "Here we are: that's your contribution."

He shrugged. "Let's hear yours," he said.

Cheryl opened her mouth, realized she didn't have anything further to add to "Here we are," and closed her mouth again. Her foot continued to tap, but it slowed down bit by bit.

"Might as well rest here for a while," said Mihalik. "Gather our strength while we can. We never know what danger we may have to face soon. Let's just take five here. Smoke 'em if you got 'em."

"Dangers, Frank? What dangers? There isn't anything here at all, dangerous or otherwise."

He looked up at her through half-closed eyes. "Cheryl," he said, "I agree with you that there isn't anything here at all. That doesn't mean, however, that something dangerous might not show up here at any moment."

The notion dismayed her; she hadn't thought of that. Once again, she'd underestimated Mihalik's grasp of the situation.

My! People Come and Go So Quickly Here Before they could carry the discussion any further, a patch of the fog a hundred yards away began to swirl about in an unusual and unnatural way. It twisted slowly upward, spiraling and climbing, and more fog rushed in along the ground to replace the fog that was rising toward the -- sky. There wasn't any sky, of course, but you can't get away from thinking of overhead as "sky." The fog was forming a small cyclonic cloud, growing denser and rotating faster every second. The whirling cloud was soon a broad wall of dirty yellow, no longer a mist or haze but something resembling a miniature tornado. Yet the tornado was upside-down, thicker near the ground and tapering up into a conical spinning spindle of vapor. The base of the tornado spread outward toward Mihalik and Cheryl. When the diameter of the bottom was about twenty or thirty yards, the tall, tenuous point began to fall back into the centre. What had been a rapidly turning cone became a disk, then a rotating sphere.

"It's slowing down, Frank," said Cheryl. The sphere was indeed coming to a gradual stop; now it looked like a solid ball of churning gases ten feet high.

Mihalik got up and began to walk toward it. "I've got to investigate it, Cheryl, honey," he said. "It's the only phenomenon we've got here."

She nodded, understanding that he was duty-bound. "Be careful, Frank," she murmured.

Before he crossed half the distance between them and the ball, it disappeared. It popped just like a soap bubble, with a vaguely metallic, ringing, echoing sound. The ball vanished, blowing away the curling yellow mists that hung nearby; in its place were four people. There was one tall beautiful woman speaking to three uniformed men. The woman wore brown trousers and black leather riding boots, a beige turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pushed up over her elbows, and she carried a riding crop tucked under one arm. She had a great ma.s.s of black hair that had been carefully coined at some time in the past, but now it was disheveled and awry and every few seconds she ran a hand through it to no great effect. She was tall and slim with a marvelous figure, and her face was beautiful in a theatrical kind of way. She reminded Mihalik of Elizabeth Taylor about the time she made Cleopatra. She was evidentlyvery disturbed about something, because every few seconds she'd underscore her angry words with a slash of the riding crop, and the three uniformed men looked from her face to the ground with unhappy expressions. The woman pointed in the direction of Mihalik and Cheryl, and then she led her three aides through the once again innocent mist.

"Excuse me," said Mihalik, when the woman and her three underlings pa.s.sed without noticing them.

The woman and the uniformed men went on by. It was as if the time traveler had not even spoken.

Cheryl stepped in front of the woman. "I'm sorry to bother you," she said, "but we're new here and we were wondering--"

One of the men grabbed Cheryl and literally tossed her out of the way. She stumbled and fell, then bounced right back to her feet. She ran after the small party and put her hand on the shoulder of the man who'd thrown her. She spun him around and slapped him sharply across the face. "Who the h.e.l.l do you think you are?" cried Cheryl.

"Who is this?" asked the woman with the riding crop.

By this time, Mihalik had caught up. He turned on the man who'd treated Cheryl so roughly. "I'm going to give you three seconds, pal," he said angrily, "and then if I haven't heard one h.e.l.l of an apology, I'm going to deck you. One. Two. Thr--"

"Who are they?" shouted the woman. Her tone reminded Cheryl of nothing so much as the Queen of Hearts yelling "Off with their heads!"

"--ee." And then Mihalik decked the uniformed man with one terrific straight right to the chin.

"Nice," said one of the other uniformed men.

The one on the ground got slowly to his feet, rubbing his chin and glaring at Mihalik. "That was a mistake," he said in a low, ominous voice. Mihalik laughed.

"Silence!" cried the woman. There was silence. "Arthur, you and Miguel restrain this man. Reilly, if your face isn't hurting too much, do you think you can handle the woman?" Reilly's expression was by turns humiliated, furious, and hateful. He nodded. "Good. Now, who the h.e.l.l are you and what are you doing here?"

"I'll tell you, if you'll get your G.o.dd.a.m.n hands off me," said Mihalik. The woman nodded at Arthur and Miguel; they let Mihalik go. Reilly, however, still held on to Cheryl. "We're scientific explorers. We're time travelers who've been sent across time from one universe to another. Through some cosmic accident, we ended up here. We don't know where we are, and we don't know how we got here, and we don't have any idea how to get back where we came from."

The woman with the riding crop nodded. "That sums it up rather precisely, thank you. You're n.o.body." She looked at her aides. "Bring them along. We can't let them just wander around here." She turned and strode off through the mist. The uniformed men put their hands on Mihalik again and shoved him along after her.

"Well," said Cheryl, turning to Mihalik, "what do you think? Is she a good witch, or a bad witch?"

Mihalik gave her a sour expression. "Very funny, Cheryl," he said. He looked to the side, at Arthur or Miguel. "Do you want to tell me what's going on?" he asked.

"No," said one military man.

Mihalik turned to the other, who had one hand around Mihalik's upper arm, and the other hand firmly around Mihalik's elbow, "What about you?"

"My name is General Arthur Scott Leidecker. I've been in Her Majesty's service since the age of nine, when my parents were killed in a mysterious accident. I've risen through the ranks from private, the only one of Her Majesty's generals to do so. I know the names of all the men in my command, just as Caesar did. I think it was Caesar. Maybe it was Alexander or Belisarius. I know all the names, but I get the faces confused sometimes. It doesn't really make any difference, though; I have plenty of colonels and majors and other officers, and they all have clipboards with rosters. The men have a genuine affection for me, they'd follow me anywhere. They call me 'The Old Fogeater.' In the coming battle Her Majesty has graciously granted me the honor of guarding her right flank, and everyone agrees that's her best side. I'm counting on my men, on my military brilliance, and the blessings of Almighty G.o.d to lead us to a greatvictory that will end this stalemate once and for all. I foresee an irresistible breakthrough that will crush the enemy and push our lines forward far beyond the present position, adding greatly to the domain and glory of Her Majesty, Queen Hesternia, who commands my loyalty and my love."

Mihalik didn't speak for a moment. He had been taken aback by Leidecker's life story. "I don't care about any of that," he said at last with some bitterness. "I want to know where we are, and how we're going to get out of here."

"You aren't anywhere, senor," said Miguel, the other general. "That's the whole point. You're where there is neither time nor s.p.a.ce. You're between universes. You're on the battleground where the fate of those universes is decided. As for getting out of here, no one gets out of here. You can't get out of here because you can't get into the universes from here."

"We got into here from there," said Cheryl.

"You couldn't have," said Miguel simply.

"Well, now we know one important thing," said Mihalik. "We can forget about learning anything from these two idiots." He felt both Arthur and Miguel tighten their grips on him. He wanted more than anything to clip them on the jaw as he had Reilly. He suspected that he'd get his chance eventually.

"I can see that she's a busy woman and everything," said Cheryl to Reilly, "but do you think we could have a word with Her Majesty? I'm sure she could straighten this out quickly."

"It'll get straightened out quickly, all right," said Reilly viciously. "We'll just execute you. We don't have to consult Her Majesty about that, either. We're generals."

"They're going to execute us, Frank," said Cheryl.

"I heard him; don't pay any attention. He's just the kind of impotent son of a b.i.t.c.h who likes to frighten girls. I'll think of something."

"I know you will, Frank," said Cheryl. They smiled at each other while the generals forced them on at Hesternia's quick pace.

For a battlefield, this zone of twilight had its pluses and minuses. It was big and flat and dry. You didn't have to worry about the enemy riding down on you from some hillside, or picking off your men from some Devil's Den of a stronghold. That's because there was no topography at all. None. On the negative side, there seemed to be two obvious things that were necessary for the great battle: Hesternia's troops and the enemy's troops. No doubt they had some way to get around this detail, but the answer wasn't obvious to Mihalik.

When the Music Stops, Find the Nearest Army and Join It Mihalik ticked off their choices on his fingers: one, they could join; or two, they could die. It was about as simple a problem as he'd ever faced: it could be solved with only one decision. "Well, Cheryl,"

he said as he sat in the mist with her, "what do you think?"

"You mean 'join or die'?"

"Uh huh."

"Really, Frank, what do you expect? We join."

"Good," said Mihalik. He just wanted to be certain that she agreed with him. He thought too much of her to make important decisions involving her fate without consulting her. She deserved at least that much consideration.

"I wish I knew what we were going to join, though," she said.

"Queen Hesternia's army, I guess," said Mihalik.

"I never thought I'd end up as a foot soldier," said Cheryl. "Things were so pretty back at the 1939 World's Fair. Things were so simple, so innocent. We should have stayed there."

"You know why we couldn't stay there," said Mihalik.

"I used to know, Frank; but I'm forgetting fast. If you think we couldn't stay in that happy, carefree world because our duty was to come here and carry spears for this Hesternia person, well, maybe I should have just minded my own business when they wanted someone to volunteer to come looking for you. I should have just mourned you in my shabby little room in 1996. I didn't have to come looking foryou, Frank. I did it because I love you."

Mihalik chewed his lip for a moment. "You did it because n.o.body else would volunteer, didn't you?"

"Well...."

"n.o.body else did volunteer to try and save me, did they? Not even good old Ray?"

"I'm sure Ray would have, sooner or later. I didn't give him a chance."

"Wait until we get home, wait until I get my hands on those guys...."

They were sitting back to back in the gloom, with Miguel keeping a close eye on Cheryl and Reilly keeping watch over Mihalik. Reilly's jaw was bruised and swollen, and he looked like he was just slavering for an excuse to carve Mihalik up. Leidecker must have been elsewhere with Hesternia. "Forget about your false friends back home, Frank," said Cheryl. "We have to take our problems one at a time.

We have to get out of this mess first."

"You're right again, honey," said Mihalik proudly. "Having you with me is almost as good as having Dr. Waters himself. So we'll tell Her Majesty that we'll be glad to join and follow her orders and help however we can in the battle. I hope that doesn't mean actually lasering other people. I'd never forgive myself if I've gotten you into real danger."

"I'll be all right, Frank, as long as you're with me."

"You've never been in combat, Cheryl. It can be a frightening and ugly experience."

"We'll face it together. If we please her, maybe Queen Hesternia will help us get home."

Mihalik frowned. "None of her generals sounded very hopeful on that score; but like you say, we'll see."

General Leidecker approached them, but Her Majesty was still off somewhere else attending to something. "Good news, fellows," said Leidecker heartily. Reilly and Miguel looked up at him disdainfully, as if he were the last person they wanted to see; neither said anything, though. "The Queen expects the battle to begin very shortly. That means we have to go rally our troops and make our dispositions. We can go anytime we like."

"What about these two?" Miguel jerked his thumb at Mihalik and Cheryl.

"I'm still in favour of pus.h.i.+ng in the boron rods and shutting them down for good," said Reilly with a small tight smile.

Leidecker waggled a finger. "None of that now, Reilly. Her Majesty said that they were to be given a fair chance. She said that I was to make sure you didn't kill them unless they chose to be uncooperative.

She said I was supposed to tell her immediately if you killed them against her wishes."

"You would, too, wouldn't you?" said Reilly with a sneer. "You'd rat. You'd rat on anybody.

Everybody knows it, Leidecker. We all know what you're like; you're not fooling anybody, not even Her Majesty. Don't think she doesn't know about you. She knows, Leidecker. She knows just what you're really like, too."

"Because you told her, I'll bet," said Leidecker.

"Aw, h.e.l.l," muttered Miguel. He had been squatting back on his heels, listening to Leidecker and Reilly bicker. Now he stood and walked up close to Mihalik and Cheryl. "What'll it be? Join or die?"

"We'll join," said Mihalik.

"Fine," said Leidecker, "you can be in my army. I don't think you'd be safe in Reilly's, and I don't think Miguel wants you in his either." Miguel's expression didn't change.

"We'd be proud to be in your army," said Cheryl. "Where is it?"

Leidecker waved an arm vaguely. "Over there," he said. He whipped the arm over his head in a series of loops, faster and faster, and the fog began to rush in around them. Leidecker was making his own little upside-down tornado, and it was spinning so fast that it made both Cheryl and Mihalik dizzy; they had to close their eyes. "Close your eyes," cried Leidecker over the roar of the wind. "It helps sometimes until you get used to this."

"Do you always travel like--"