CHAPTER SIX

When I woke up, the sun was rising over my left arm. Over my right arm, chest and most of my back sprawled Sylvia, her eyes closed tight in sleep. Chester and Dorothy were already up and were busy setting fire to a small bunch of twigs and leaves. I rolled over carefully, so as not to wake Sylvia, and sat up. “Morning.”

“Indeed,” Chester grouched. “Any other comments or observations you’d care to make?”

“Sorry,” I said pleasantly. “I should know better than to try to talk to you before you’ve had coffee in the morning. What’s the fire for?”

“I’m planning to be rescued by a brown bear in a ranger’s cap,” Chester explained.

“We’re making coffee,” Dorothy volunteered.

“That would help,” I admitted. I got up and stretched my cramped bones. “Where did we get the coffee to make?”

“I always carry onetime cups,” Dorothy said. “When you work in a circus you travel a lot.” She finished her project of erecting a forked stick over the fire and carefully set a can of water in the fork.

“You lug around the water too?”

“I fetched the water,” Chester said. “There’s a stream down there,” he pointed, “and a pile of empty tin cans by the stream. Modern man strikes again. ‘By their works ye shall know them.’ Ancient Latin saying. The Latins were an uncivilized tribe who conquered the world but left behind no tin cans to mark their passage.”

“They would have if they’d had the cans to leave behind.”

“Cynic.”

“You’ll feel better after you’ve had your coffee.”

Dorothy opened her shoulder bag and took out four flat, round disks of paper. She squeezed the sides, and the disks popped out into plastic cups. “Can you take the can off the fire?” she asked.

“Sure,” I told her. “But I don’t know if I can pour it.” I rolled my jacket around my hands and took the can of boiling water carefully out of the fork.

“Just set it down,” Dorothy said. “Chester wanted to boil the water before we use it for sanitary reasons. The cups are self heating.”

When the tin was cool enough to pour from, Dorothy filled the cups. About five seconds later each of them was boiling again.

Sylvia sat up. “Coffee!” she said. “Is our ten-minute rest over?”

Chester groaned.

After coffee we went down to Chester’s stream to wash. It was too cold and shallow for serious bathing, but a few splashes in the face did as much as the coffee to wake me up. Then we gathered together for a council meeting.

“Well,” I said to Chester, “what next?”

“We need a plan,” he announced.

Dorothy asked, “Why?”

Chester groped in the air in front of him for words to express his thoughts. “If you’re lost in the woods and you’re not very careful to go in a straight line, you’ll go around in a big circle until you starve to death. A plan is our way of going in a straight line. Almost any plan, as long as it’s consistent.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “Pick a plan.”

“Let’s consult the I Ching for a plan. That’s what it’s best at.”

“Fine,” I agreed. “Go ahead. It’s your turn anyway.”

“What’s an Itching?” Sylvia asked.

I explained as best I could. She volunteered to give me her birth date and rising sign if it would help, and I explained some more.

Chester squatted on the earth and threw his coins. “A lot of moving lines: many changes. There. Let’s see. Ken under K’un. Fifteen: Modesty. Changing to sixty: Limitation.” He slid the tube out of his pocket and squinted toward the sun. “Yes. Well, well, well.”

“What is it?” Dorothy asked.

Chester put his viewing tube away and stood up. “We must continue, that’s all. It’s all in how you interpret it.”

“I’ll bite,” I said. “How do you interpret it?”

“Enough talk. Onward! Come on, let’s get going.”

“Okay. Okay. Don’t push.”

Dorothy strode up to Chester, who was taking the lead along the trail. “Very good,” she said. “Tell me, have you ever considered becoming a ringmaster?”

“I dreamed about Adolphus last night,” Sylvia told me. “He’s fine, and well, and we will find him.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

“She has this affinity,” Dorothy said. “One time she dreamed that Adolphus was badly frightened, so she woke up in a panic and ran over to the animal tent. A snake had broken loose and was in Adolphus’s stall. The poor beast was so frightened that it couldn’t even whinny. She just picked the snake up and put it back in its cage. Eight feet of python.”

We went along silently for a time, while I practiced looking at Sylvia with a new respect. Then the trail intersected an asphalt road.

“Civilization,” Chester declared.

I shrugged. “It’s just a road.”

“Yes, but there’s a tire over there. Civilization.”

“Hist!” Sylvia said. “Someone comes—I hear clinking.”

“Clinking?”

A second later I could hear the clinking. Then the clinkers came into view.

Six men in leather pants and iron suits walked around the corner.

“Spanish conquistadors!” Chester said.

“Italians,” I volunteered. “Fourteenth-century Italian knights.”

“The Queen’s Guards!” Dorothy exclaimed. “We’re home!”

“They’re not the Guards, Dorothy,” Sylvia said. “And I think they’re drunk.” They were indeed weaving and staggering down the road toward us.

“Ars grabbis!” the one in the lead shouted, seeing us. He turned back to his companions. “Leavis protamis! Hic! Yatta lo fraturntitti up.”

“Too too papilarus,” one of his companions agreed, leaning against a tree.

“Bashmire!” another exclaimed.

We stood by the side of the road, unsure whether we should stay or run, laugh or cry, as the horseless knights approached. Chester raised his hands “Welcome good friends,” he called.

“Congratulations,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “That’s three assumptions in as many words. I think you’ve set a record.”

“Shut up,” Chester whispered back.

“Grap fikker toom?” the lead tinman called. “Grabul fram?”

I stepped forward. “Every other Thursday,” I told him. “Except when the lead guitar is sick. Three cents a yard, wrapped.”

The six of them clanked to a stop about ten yards away. They spent ten or fifteen seconds eyeing us the way some people look at hamburger, then went into a huddle.

“I don’t like this,” I told Chester.

“You shouldn’t have insulted them,” he said. “Girls, stand behind us.”

“How could they have been insulted if they didn’t understand what I said?”

“It’s your attitude,” Chester explained.

One of the tinmen kept breaking out of the huddle, turning around to glare at us, and then going back. I felt like the center in an unfriendly football game. Or, possibly, the ball.

There was a cracking sound behind me, and I looked around to find Dorothy trimming the twigs off a good-sized branch. “Do you know anything about quarterstaff buffeting?” she asked.

“I’ve seen Robin Hood in the movies,” I said. “And a couple of those Japanese cut-em-ups. But I’ve never tried it myself.”

“In my youth,” Dorothy said, coming alongside us with her six-foot chopstick, “I was women’s champion of New Lincolnshire.”

“Do you remember much of it?” I asked.

She glared at me. “That was four months ago.”

“Sorry. I guess I’d better do something about arming myself.” I searched around for a club. The first hunk of wood I picked up had been lying there too long; it broke in half when I lifted it. The second, a hefty three-foot section, was fresh and sturdy.

“Is that not a mite short?” Dorothy asked me.

I told her, “The Romans conquered the world with three-foot swords.”

“I presume they had edges and points,” she said.

“I’ll do my best without,” I said. “Or would you like to sharpen this?”

“Don’t fight before a battle,” Chester said firmly. “It would seem that Dorothy can take care of herself. If anything starts, watch out for Sylvia.”

“I think you missed the point of the story I told earlier,” Dorothy said. “Sylvia can take care of herself better than any of us.”

Sylvia stood, slim and defenseless, by the side of the road. I had gotten into this to take care of her and I was going to do my best. I moved over until I was between her and the opposition. She might be able to take care of herself better than any of us, but she wasn’t going to have to prove it if I could help it.

Chester stood with his hands in his pockets and looked annoyed. “I don’t think they like us,” he said.

The six of them broke off the huddle and turned to face us in squad formation. The leader, in left middle position, raised his hand. “Huggem squamish aye lipto!” he called. He pointed to the two girls. “Huggem squamish!” he repeated, making a beckoning motion. He pointed to Chester and me. “Backem rapish,” he said, with a go-away gesture.

With a further series of words and obscene gestures he indicated that he wanted the girls to do with as he and his men had read about in all those nasty books back in the barracks. Chester and I should just go away. Otherwise they’d simply kill us and take the girls anyway.

Dorothy turned her staff sideways and hefted it. The soldiers seemed to think this was very funny.

“Rape and looting,” I said to Chester. “That’s all these army types think about, rape and looting. It’s disgraceful.”

“Lack of team athletics,” Chester commented. “They ought to play more volleyball.”

“Aren’t you going to arm yourself?” I asked him.

“I am armed. Legged too, for that matter. If things look bad, remember that we can probably outrun them. They must be carrying easily thirty pounds of armor each.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I assured him.

The troops decided that we weren’t going to leave peacefully and resigned themselves to chopping us apart. The ends each leveled pikes at us, and the rest of the line drew their swords. Three and a half feet of single-edge, badly tempered steel. They started advancing slowly, keeping in line.

“Michael,” Sylvia asked, “are they serious?”

“I would say so,” I told her. No use lying about something she’d find out in three or four minutes anyway.

“And would you say they’re trained soldiers?”

“Well, at any rate they’ve practiced a bit. Don’t worry,” I said, spreading artificial confidence, “we’ll take care of them.”

“I’m not worried,” Sylvia assured me. “I just didn’t want to hurt them if there was any chance they’d go away and leave us alone.”

“What?” I said. But I was suddenly too preoccupied to demand a further explanation of her comment. The line of tin-clad infantry broke into a trot and swept down at us.

We stood there, frozen for a long moment, and then all hell broke loose. All hell, in this case, was mostly Sylvia. I felt her hands on my shoulders, pushing up. And then her feet. And then she had launched herself at the lead soldier like a snow leopard taking a sheep.

With a startled cry, the commander brought his sword up to defend himself from this unexpected attack. Sylvia pulled knees and shoulders together into a tight, spinning ball of trained muscle and then snapped out. The commander’s sword whistled as he pulled it down to meet this new threat, but too late. With all the momentum of her leap, Sylvia’s arms and shoulders met the ground and acted as springs to transfer the energy to the other tip of her body—her legs, which with piston-like speed drove forward and up to their point of impact. Her feet met the commander’s chin with a sound like a pistol shot, and his head snapped back, instantly breaking his neck. He flew backwards and crash landed; an inert body covered with a pile of tin cans.

Sylvia sprang to her feet and stood over his body like a goddess: slim, lithe, innocent, beautiful and terrible as uncaged lightning; and there was an unholy look in her eyes.

By this time, line had met line, and the battle was engaged. One of the pikemen tried to push Dorothy aside so she wouldn’t be hurt and could be saved for later sport. With a left-hand twist of her staff she knocked the pike up, and then brought the staff under and in. It caught the pikeman right below the cuirass and drove deep into a sensitive spot. He dropped to the ground, clutching himself and gasping for breath.

A swordsman came at me, and I parried his lunge with my club. He swung a few more times, but I held him off easily. I couldn’t get at him and he seemed satisfied to stand there swinging at me. Then I realized: every time I parried his swing a chip flew off my club. In another minute he would have cut it in half; this would never do. I lunged at him, forcing him to take a step backward. He yammered some invective and changed his tactics, thrusting point-first at my chest. I just barely caught the point on my club. He pulled back, and the club was almost yanked out of my hand.

He was as startled as I was: the point of his sword had driven tightly into the club and wouldn’t pull free. “Yargha!” he yelled, jerking the sword from side to side. But now I had the advantage—for as long as that sword stayed stuck. He could only hold the sword by the hilt, but I had the leverage of the whole club. I grabbed the club at both ends and twisted. He struggled fiercely to hold on to the sword as it twisted in his hands. With a sudden heave, which cost me my balance, I yanked the sword from his grasp and fell backward. Club and sword flew over my head and into the brush. My opponent drew a long, spade-shaped dirk from its scabbard and lunged at me. I rolled and kicked, catching him across the knee, then scrambled to my feet to avoid his next rush. He didn’t make one. With his mouth opened in a vast O, and his face turned flour-white, he slowly toppled to the ground, his leg stiffly thrust before him. He was no longer aware of my presence. I had broken his kneecap, and he could think of nothing beyond his own pain.

Which, as it happens, was all right with me.

The three remaining heroes had all rushed Chester, who stood there, nonchalantly, his hands in his pockets. When the first one was about to reach him, he pulled his gas lighter out of his pocket and gushed two feet of flame from his outstretched arm. The flame formed a protective semicircle in front of him, as his hand weaved the lighter in an intricate pattern. The three tinmen stopped, startled, and poked gingerly at the flame with their weapons.

Dorothy, swinging her staff like a great baseball bat, floored the left-most one with her first blow. Sylvia leaped on the middle one from behind and pressed her thumbs into the sides of his neck, cutting off the blood to his brain. After three seconds he dropped, unconscious.

I took one bare-handed step toward the one man left standing with no clear idea of what to do about him. He looked around and saw the four of us closing in; Chester flipping the lighter on and off like a serpent’s tongue licking in and out. After a moment’s indecision he dropped his pike, turned and fled.

Dorothy looked around at our felled foes lying silent on the ground or writhing and moaning in the grass. “Shall we,” she asked, hefting her six-foot twig, “put them out of their misery?”

“Dorothy!” Sylvia, looking very petite and innocent, sounded shocked. I remembered a quote about the female of the species, and tried to decide which of these two it most applied to.

“Let us walk, casually but rapidly, away from this scene of carnage,” Chester suggested. “After all, they may have friends.”

“Great idea,” I agreed.

We headed down the asphalt in the opposite direction from that our vanquished foe had taken.

* * * *

We had abluted at a convenient pump by an empty house, ministered as best we could to our surprisingly few bruises and scrapes, and were a few hours away from the battleground when the sound of pursuit came first to our —Sylvia’s —ears. “Quick, off the road!” she exclaimed. “A galloping beast comes behind.”

“What sort of beast?” Chester asked.

“One with hooves,” she said.

“Just one?”

By this time we could all hear it: one horse clattering toward us. We clumped together on the side of the road, figuring one horse meant one man and we could handle one man.

As the rider approached, I had a very strong sense of deja vu. A brown range pony at full gallop, carrying a lean man in tan buckskins. The rider leaning forward in his lightweight saddle, on tightly cinched stirrups, as if to urge the mount onward; reins lightly held in one hand with the other resting on the extra large saddlebags behind. I had seen this all before.

Then I knew where. It was a scene out of American history: The Pony Express, starring Gary Cooper. I told Chester.

“Oyho! Oyho!” the rider yelled as he drew even with us. “Make way! In the name of the Empress! The Overland Mail!” And then he was past.

“It may well be a scene out of history,” Chester remarked, staring at the retreating back, “but I’m afraid it isn’t American history. He could probably tell us a fascinating story if we dragged him off his horse. Ah, well.”

We trudged on.

“Where,” Dorothy asked in what I was coming to recognize as her argumentative voice, “are we going?”

Chester shrugged. “You pick a place.”

There was no reply.

It was about time, I decided, for one of my famous funny stories. “Did I ever tell you,” I inquired at random, “of the time we held an orgy on the Flushing local, and the lutist got a string caught in the....”

“I was there,” Chester reminded me dourly.

“What’s a flushing local?” Sylvia demanded.

“Look,” I said. “Isn’t that something in the road ahead?”

“How are you punctuating that?” Chester asked suspiciously.

“There,” I insisted. “Look. It’s a car.”

When we were close I saw that the object was a car only in so far as form follows function. It had once been a car: a black, four-door gangster model, complete with running boards and spare tire mounted in the fender. It was now a hulk. Tires rotted off, headlights and windows broken, fenders and bumpers rusted through; the car was slowly going back to the earth from which it was mined.

On top of the car hulk a man, wrapped in a white sheet, sat cross-legged and stared serenely off at the horizon. He managed to subtly convey the impression that he’d been there as long as the car.

“Look,” Chester said. “A guru.”

Dorothy looked. “He’s dirty,” she said. “Is that why you call him ugh-aroo?”

“I think he’s a Grand High Exalted Muckamuck in the KKK,” I suggested.

Sylvia, as usual, took direct action. “Hello,” she said, walking over to the side of the wreck. There was no response. “Please, sir, could you tell us where we are?”

The head riding above the pyramid of sheet slowly turned until the beard was facing Sylvia, then stopped. “You,” it declared calmly, “are here.”

“Aha,” I said. “One of those; I knew it.”

“Here,” Chester offered, stepping forward. “Let me.” He stood in front of the car and raised his hand, palm upward. “Greetings. Will you enlighten us?”

Whitesheet stared down at Chester for a long moment. “Impossible,” he declared.

Sylvia displayed patience. “Good sir,” she said, standing on tiptoe and smiling brightly, “will you tell us what we will find further down the road?”

Whitesheet nodded. “Yes.” We waited.

“Perhaps,” I suggested after three or four minutes had passed, “we should....”

“That way,” Whitesheet said, flopping an arm out to his left, “lies madness.”

Sylvia stared along a parallel to the pointing finger and considered the vista. “But,” she noted, “there’s no road.”

“Most who seek manage to find their way. On the other hand,” he raised his other hand, “over there be dragons. Or, at least, dragon.”

He was indicating the direction we were heading. “Oh!” Sylvia exclaimed. “Fierce, up-tight, fire-breathing dragons?”

“One young dragonette, her furnace barely stoked, and her brood of hatchlings.’”

“Thank you,” Sylvia said.

“Dragons?” I asked Chester.

“Unicorns?” he replied.

During all of this Dorothy had been staring at the car-sitter with an expression of earnest curiosity. Finally she could no longer contain it. She rose. “You,” she said, gesturing so that there could be no mistake as to whom she meant. “What are you doing up there?”

His head turned with the steady sweep of a radar beacon until his unblinking gaze was full on Dorothy, then stopped. “I,” he stated in a voice that would brook no disagreement, “am the rightful King of France, with a strong claim on the thrones of Spain, Portugal, England, the Holy Roman—or, if you prefer, Austro-Hungarian— Empire, Italy, Greece, Mexico, the Duchies of Herzegovina, Faulkenberg, Ruritania, Alba, Courland, Bosnia, and others too numerous to mention. I have been done out of my heritage; and am going to sit right here until I get it back. My faithful minions are, even now, preparing the way.”

Chester snorted. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

The radar gaze turned to him. “If I must. I am a student of the Mysteries of the East. After much meditation and study, I had perfected the technique of levitation; and while I was up here, five feet off the ground, somebody stuck an old car under me.”

“That,” Chester agreed, “is better.”

I laughed. “Which are we to believe?”

“All three.”

“Three?”

The radar eyes burned into mine from under bushy brows. “I came out here to do a character bit in a television commercial. The rest of the crew never showed up, and I’m staying till they do. At triple time. I’ve been here nine years now.”

“Three,” I agreed.

“Come on,” Chester said, herding us around the car.

“Goodbye,” the prince/guru/actor called as we walked down the road. “Watch out for dragon.”

It was around the next bend. There was a clearing to the left of the road that was full of round, flat-top stones and had been roofed over with some sort of tenting material. The hatchlings were squatting, one to a stone, and clutching small slates. A strange squeaking sound that filled the air proved to be the four-foot upright alligators writing on the slates with hunks of chalk.

In front of the group, at the far end of the clearing, eighteen feet of prime lady dragon paced back and forth, whipping a large tail in great arcs behind. “I said the next slide, please,” she called out in a vibrato soprano bellow.

A small, harassed-looking man fiddled with a large black box in mid-clearing. “I’m trying, I’m trying,” he replied nervously.

“Constantly,” dragonette agreed. “Ah!” she sighed, breathing out just the tiniest wisp of flame, “there.” After a clicking sound from either the man or the projector, a large picture was cast partly on her and mostly on a backdrop behind her.

Nobody had noticed us standing at the back edge of this outdoor classroom, and I thought it better to keep it that way. “What now?” I whispered to Chester. “Hide here until they go away—or, maybe until I wake up?”

“I refuse,” Chester told me, “to be a figment of your dream. That lacks imagination. Besides, I know who’d get the best part.”

“The question,” I said. “I asked you a question; the least you can do is answer it.”

“Yes. Well. I think the best thing we can do is walk quietly by. The only one in a position to notice us is Madam Teacher, and she’s too busy.”

“Interesting theory, friend,” I said. “Would you care to be the first to make the experiment?”

“Come on, you’ve been a teacher. You know that you have to ignore petty problems so as not to disrupt the class. It would be better to be seen crossing by Teach up there than found hiding by the kids.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just hope it’s not near lunch break.” The four of us bunched together and proceeded to calmly (ha!) and quietly walk by the back of the clearing.

“This,” dragon lady was saying, tapping the picture with a ten-foot pole, “is a famous illustration of one of the great stories of Dragonpast. Can any of you hatchlings tell me what it is?”

I looked as we passed. For a moment the shadings of light and shadow created a pattern that canceled the projection. Then my eye adjusted to the shade, and the picture was clear. It was the classic view of Saint George and the Dragon. You know the one: George on a rearing horse, his armor gleaming gold, about to plunge his lance into coils and coils of cowering dragon.

“I know,” a hatchling squeaked like a row of freight cars braking. “That’s the picture of Ethyl the Martyr and the Man in the Tin Suit.”

“That’s right, Marflagiggle. Very good. Now squat back down and I’ll tell you the story.”

We crept by. When we passed out of sight of the reptilian schoolroom we broke into a relieved, but hasty, trot. The last thing I heard as we ran into the distance, was “It was then that Ethyl realized that things were getting out of claw. She....”

After jogging for not quite as long as it seemed, we stopped for a while to breathe hard. “I guess I’ll have to get married,” I said when I had enough wind back to pretend I hadn’t lost it. “With stories like this to tell,” I explained to the puzzled stares, “it would be a shame not to have grandchildren to bore with them. ‘Come sit on my knee, little girl, and Gramps will tell you about the time he audited a class of dragons.’”

“You desire little girl grandchildren?” Sylvia asked.

“The ones that sit on my knee had better be little girls,” I explained.

Sylvia giggled. “All right, Gramps, I’ll sit on your knee; but this time keep your hands to yourself.”

“You learn fast,” I told her. “Either that, or you have un-plumbed depths.”

“We carry different cultures,” Sylvia said, brushing her long hair back from her face. “Sexual mores, for example.... It might be fun for you to plumb my depths.”

Chester, who was busy rubbing Dorothy’s back and explaining about his fetish, suddenly stopped and peered off into the distance; a gesture that was becoming as common with us as with grouse, and for similar reasons. “What,” he complained, “now?”

A large dust cloud approached at a measured pace. “Can you hear anything?” I asked Sylvia. “Hoofbeats?”

She shook her head. “Just some strange rumbling, grinding sound. It’s been getting closer for the past few minutes.”

“It must be coming from whatever’s raising the dust then. Not horses. Cars or trucks?”

Now I heard it faintly in the distance. A steady, low rumbling that you seemed to hear as much with your feet as your ears. A sound associated with volcanoes and natural calamity. But not quite that. It was a noise that my body was familiar with, though my mind refused to identify. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the vibrations beneath my feet.

“A strange sound,” Chester said. “One is tempted to say the gods are angry, but one will resist.”

“Tanks!” I yelped.

“What for?”

“No, tanks. Big things with treads and guns. Named after generals.”

“Ah,” Chester said. “If they’re ours they’re named after generals. Hum. If it isn’t one thing, it’s an army.”

I started to clamber up a tree to get a better look, but just then the dust cloud parted and the first monster rolled out.

“Must have come onto paved road,” Chester commented.

“It won’t be paved after they’ve gone over it,” I said, stretching out on a low fork in the tree. “Those things rip hell out of even the best laid plans. I’ve seen them powder a new stressed-concrete highway. Each one of them weighs twenty-five or thirty tons.”

“What kind are they?” Chester asked. “Or, at least, whose are they?”

I climbed up a few more notches and stuck my head out. “Oh, wow!”

“What? Wow, what?”

“They’re Tigers. I saw one once at a base armory museum in Germany. The biggest and heaviest tanks ever made. Fifty tons. There won’t be enough road surface left to ride a bicycle on. Hitler couldn’t use them as much as he wanted because they ruined the roads for trucks and there wasn’t anything big enough to transport them in. One of his secret weapons.”

“Hitler?” Chester asked.

“Well, the Wehrmacht.”

“What,” Dorothy asked, “are you two talking about?”

“Later,” Chester said. The rumbling and clanking was quite loud now, and the tanks were only a few hundred yards away. I could feel the tree I was in start to shake. “Those are Nazi tanks? I think we’d better get out of here.”

“The war’s been over since we were wee tads,” I reminded him.

“Where you and I come from,” Chester said. “Where the girls came from, it never happened. But here....”

“I get your point,” I said, dropping out of the tree. “I think I saw a swastika on the turret of that monster in front. Let’s split.”

“Halt!” boomed a loudspeaker, blasting the air around us. “You have been seen. Do not attempt to escape!” A sudden explosion cracked in my ears past the pain threshold, and flame belched from the turret of the lead tank. Two seconds later a concussion blast rumpled the earth behind us in counterpoint as the shell landed, and a heat wave enveloped us and passed on. “If you attempt to run you will be destroyed.”

“They’ve made their point,” Chester said.

“What’s happening?” Sylvia asked, a high edge of panic in her voice. “What are those things?”

“They’re machines with men inside them,” Dorothy said perceptively in a grim voice. “We can’t get at them while they’re in the machines, so we’ll have to be nice until they get out.”

Single-minded woman. I agreed with her, reserving the hope that there’d be something we could do when they got out. Even these bloodthirsty girls would have little chance against machine guns. I decided that at the first chance, I’d better explain the function and capability of various hand weapons.

“Throw down your arms.”

Chester called back, “We don’t have any.”

“Resistance is futile. You will be well treated and placed in internment camps for the duration.”

The duration of what? I wondered. Us? The behemoths drew closer. For the first time, I regretted having been circumcised.

“If we scatter and run,” Chester said, “they couldn’t get all of us.”

“I’d bet you on that if I thought I had any chance of collecting,” I told him.

“Look!” Dorothy said. “Strangeness upon strangeness. What do they do?”

We looked. We stared. At the rear of the column of tanks, the dust cloud had been cloven in the air, as though cut with an axe, and half of it removed. To the left, the dust swirled and eddied as the tanks behind made finer particles of the chewed-up asphalt that the lead Tigers had converted the road into. To the right, nothing but clean air. As we watched, the vertical line of intersection, precise as a razor cut, moved steadily forward and left. “Godfrey!” I exclaimed brightly, “No dust.”

“More,” Chester said. “No tanks.”

“No road!” Sylvia exclaimed.

I brought my eyes to ground level. Sure enough; where the razor edge passed it showed a different world: a fresh, unspoiled meadow, with a leaping brook and long, green grass. And the razor edge was approaching, shaving off tank after tank as it came.

“I think we’re seeing a moving blip,” Chester said. “The border between one probability world and another.”

“It would be nice if we could get to that meadow world before those tank things get to us,” Sylvia said, displaying a British capacity for understatement.

“There seem to be two levels, or maybe more,” Chester said. “Light waves travel to and from the meadow world, but more material objects, like tanks, go somewhere else. It would be nice if our somewhere wasn’t their somewhere, wherever it is.” We were all huddled together and, somehow, holding hands.

“Attention! Attention! You will immediately stop using your new secret weapon, or you will be destroyed completely. Immediately! I will count to five.”

“It isn’t ours!” I yelled. “Honest it isn’t.”

“One.”

Another tank blipped out, but I could see that there’d be several left by five. I chose some curse words and aired them gently, stringing them together into strands of futile disgust.

“Two.”

“Scatter and run like hell,” Chester commanded urgently. “It’s our only chance. I’m sorry, girls, you picked a pair of errant knights. I hope, Michael, that your prayers are heard.”

“I have no regrets,” Sylvia said, squeezing our hands.

Dorothy grimaced. “If this is it, I regret not having a chance to find out what the dirk is happening.”

“Three.”

“Goodbye, Adolphus,” Sylvia murmured. She pulled her hand free, and I realized how tightly I’d been holding it. “Goodbye, dear love,” she whispered to me, and darted off toward the woods. I filed that away to think about later—if there was a later.

“Ciao!” Chester yelled, galloping away.

“See you around,” I called, and was running.

Dorothy dropped to the ground and started squirming toward the lead tank.

BAROOM!

Something kicked against the back of my head, and a large tree cracked to my left. The earth dropped from under me and then rose up to hurt my knees. I ran several more steps before I realized that I was crawling.

BAROOM!

The earth came to meet me, and I tasted grass. A heavy chattering and roaring surrounded me. The scene had a quality of unreality, and I made a note to congratulate the theater manager on the excellence of his sound system. I hadn’t heard heavy machine guns sound so real or so close since I qualified with fifties in the army.

BAROOM!

Something splatted against my face and shoulder. Why was I making those funny motions with my arms and legs? Oh, yes; I was running. But I was prone on the ground and my legs were kicking air. That would never do. I twisted around and climbed to my feet. Something soft and sticky ran down my face.

BAROOM!

A large hole opened to my right, and dirt sprayed out, stinging the side of my face like a thousand wasps and knocking me down....

I sat. For some time I sat, staring at a purple haze in front of me. Then I turned my head and stared at the purple haze to my left I decided to lie down. Everything was quiet. I was deaf, I decided. Or dead. Or both.

[Are you all right?] Silly [Can you hear me?] Question. Silly question. [Oh, Michael!] Was someone out there? A vortex spread before me, beckoning and drawing me closer. At the bottom lay oblivion and the fall was eternal, and the thought was sweet.

Something stung the arm that was of my body. The vortex receded and I cried.

Something stung my arm, and my body again was me, and it hurt, and I screamed. And I woke.

“Michael, oh dear Michael, oh precious Bear,” the litany went. I opened my eye and then my other eye and tried to focus.

Awareness flooded back to me. The pain receded, blocked off by what I recognized as chemical means. My face felt sticky all over, warm and sticky; but it was being wiped. Being wiped? I made an effort to focus past my nose and saw Sylvia’s face above me, framed in a halo of pink light. “Angel,” I said.

“What? I didn’t understand, love. Say again.”

I made an effort to coordinate. “Angel,” I said. “Framed in a halo of light. But I think I’m alive.”

“Yes. You were going into shock. It’s lucky I’m a trained nurse and had my aidpack with me. Lie still for a minute.”

“I didn’t know you were a nurse. How long was I out? It felt like days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”

“I’m a nurse because it’s my second job in the circus. Dorothy was too. You were unconscious for under a minute. I ran back to you the second that machine disappeared. The moving line hasn’t reached us yet. About another,” she squinted at the road, “thirty seconds.” She wiped my eyes and the blood-halo disappeared. “I gave you a strong dead-pain dose so you can walk—I pray. We must move aside in case we go to the same world the Tiger machines did.”

Sylvia planted her feet and pulled at my arm. I tried to gather my legs under me and push up. In a few seconds, I was on my feet and finding out how hard it is to balance when you have no sense of feeling. “Lean on me,” Sylvia said, “we’ll go faster.”

“Don’t be subtle,” I said, swaying. “If I don’t lean on you, we won’t go at all. Did Chester and Dorothy make it?”

Sylvia looked at me for a long moment, considering. “I don’t know the idiom,” she said. “Look.”

I looked. Across the clearing lay two bodies. One was—had been—Chester: clothing shredded, legs mashed and head twisted to an angle that life would not allow. The other body was unrecognizable. “Later,” I said, “I shall be sick. Then I’ll probably spend some time crying. I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything.”

“You’re crying,” Sylvia said gently.

“I guess I am.” I smiled weakly.

Something twisted my inside, whipped me around, and socked me in the solar plexus.

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