He wore a knee-length tunic of thin, natural-colored wool and a cloak of bright blue. The leather belt around his lean waist held a dagger and a heavy purse of coins bearing the imperial seal of Rome. He kept muttering Latin phrases to himself, testing the heavy syllables on his tongue to regain the natural rhythm of the language. Although he was implanted with a universal translator, he liked to be able to think in the old tongues.
At the last minute before they parted, Trojan had pressed a small pouch into his hand. “Salt,” he said. “For luck… and good eating.”
The worst thing about the past was the food. No matter how much they trained, none of the historians could acquire a taste for the bland, boiled, slightly gamey muck that passed for stews and pottages.
Noel had forgotten to provide himself with a supply of salt. Gratefully he took the pouch and gave Trojan a quick hug.
“Thanks, friend,” he said. “Watch out for arrows.”
“I’ll be on the English side of the battle,” said Trojan in mock exasperation. “The French didn’t use the longbow then, remember? Really, Noel, you are pretty ignorant for a historian.”
“Focused,” retorted Noel. “Specialized. Not ignorant.”
“Ignorant,” said Trojan, but with gentleness. “Fly by the seat of your pants.”
“Intuitive,” retorted Noel. “You should play your hunches more and depend on your experience less.”
“Don’t catch the pox,” said Trojan.
They grinned at each other.
“Get on with it,” muttered the technician Bruthe.
They always had this little ritual of swapping insults and advice before they traveled. Stepping back, Noel watched his friend enter the portal.
It was like watching a man walk away from you down a long hallway into the mist, becoming increasingly indistinct until the mist curled across his shadow and he was gone. The first time Noel had ever seen the time portal, he had been disappointed at the tameness of the effect. He had wanted to see lightning flash, or hear great cracks of thunder as time was rent to let them enter its stream. But no dazzling pyrotechnics happened in time travel. Only the mist and a gentle sense of being sucked away into a fuzzy nothingness that lasted a few short seconds before arrival.
“Your turn, Kedran,” said Bruthe.
Normally Tchielskov performed the portal duties. Noel was fond of the old man, who had taught him how to avoid the slight nausea that crossing the portal could cause, who had taught him to go in thinking in the language he was to shortly be surrounded by so that the actual transition was less of a shock. He had never known the old man to miss travel, but Bruthe-or anyone else in the room-could handle the portal controls. It was just a matter of monitoring; the time computer did all the real work.
Adrenaline built in Noel’s veins. The center of his palms grew moist. He sucked in a deep breath and entered the portal ramp, bouncing just once on his toes and making sure he started on his left foot. It was a mindless, meaningless superstition of his, a way to distract himself as he entered the mist.
Although it appeared to be mist to those watching in the laboratory behind him, in reality it wasn’t a ground cloud of moisture at all. In reality, it was nonreality. Tendrils of gray nothingness dissolved his tangible surroundings. The deeper he walked into it, the more he dissolved. He kept his gaze ahead, knowing better than to watch himself fade.
A frisson of energy rippled through him, making his black hair stand on end. He could hear the pulse of the time wave, and felt it washing over him in an immense, sucking tide.
Normally about now he should be nothing more visible than a vague outline. He was crossing the actual portal, the most dangerous moment of travel, when he was in neither dimension but only between.
His LOC was getting warmer, too warm, uncomfortably hot on his arm. The pain of it grew sharp, piercing enough to make him gasp, although by now he shouldn’t be feeling any physical sensations.
He should be through by now. But instead of clearing, the misty grayness around him grew suddenly black, as though he’d been dropped down a hole. He had the dizzying, terrifying sensation of falling.
This had never happened before. For an instant he panicked, then he clung desperately to his training and tried to project his mind back to the laboratory. With fear curling around the edges of his thoughts, warping his ability to control himself, he envisioned the lab with its whiteness, its rows of terminals, the hush of the air, the men and women going about their jobs, faces.
He was still falling. The pain in his arm had spread to his chest. He felt as though he were being halved by a saw, slicing its way in steady strokes through the center of him. He wanted to scream, and couldn’t.
What was happening? Why couldn’t he go back?
No hearing, no sight, no feeling of anything solid around him. Complete sensory shut down. He shuddered, feeling the panic blank him again.
He sought to rebuild the lab in his mind, but he was too scared. It wasn’t working. All those drills, all that training to equip him to deal with any difficulty in traveling… nothing worked.
In desperation, he focused on an image of Tchielskov’s face, making it real to him, pretending he could hear the old man’s patient voice talking him through this, talking him back.
What was this? wondered Noel frantically. Time loop? Vortex? Aberration? Anomaly? This close to the portal, it should have registered on the monitors. Hadn’t Bruthe been paying attention? Was it sabotage?
The pain intensified, and there was only the inside of his own skull to scream in. He stopped falling and felt himself jolted, then bumped through a series of ripples like being caught in the wake of a ferry upon Lake Michigan.
He heard a voice. Hope swelled through him. He called out, certain now that he was being pulled back. The voice echoed to him, not heard exactly, but somehow sensed within his mind. He could not understand its words. Everything was gibberish, like listening to a recording played backward. He shouted in response, but it gibbered on for a while, then stopped.
The silence was even worse.
He felt as though he were spinning, end over end, eddying down, looping nowhere, like a child’s kite falling when the string is severed.
How long? he wondered.
Infinity perhaps, whispered a corner of his mind.
This then was death. And there was no end to it, no place of beginning, no point of reference. This was to be nothing, yet aware.
This was hell.
And damnation.
He had never believed in such things before. Now, sobbing in his own fear and the agony that ripped him into pieces, he was forced to believe. He had never considered death beyond a casual ending, preferably in action, hopefully quick. How little he had known, or even guessed.
He would be the first traveler to die in the time streams. They would give him a memorial service. They might even close the Institute for a day, although he doubted it. Trojan would grieve for him, if Trojan himself was not dead too. The project would probably be closed.
Bring me back! he shouted with all his might, straining until he felt something nearly snap within him.
There came a jolt, hard and tangible, as though he had struck something. Energy waved through him, scraping his nerve endings. He felt a rush of wind, and then he heard a churning babble of noise, a din that grew into a crescendo of mindless, deafening, horrible cacophony. Grayness spread before him in an arc, changing to a rainbow of colors too vivid to bear. They seared into him with their brightness. If he had eyes, he tried to shut them, but it did not keep away the colors that branded themselves upon his brain. Images hurled themselves at him, shapes without meaning, alien, confusing.
He heard a crack of sound as though the universe itself had broken apart. It spread out into deafening, numbing thunder that crashed and grumbled forever, echoing in upon itself before finally fading away.
Noel hit the ground with a thump. He had no warning-no return of vision, no smells, no sense at all that he was back in corporeal existence-until he landed. It knocked the breath from him, and at first he could but lie there limp and dazed, unable to comprehend his surroundings.
Lightning ripped the sky overhead, and with a start he came fully conscious, finding himself in the darkness of night with a rainstorm lashing about him, wind howling in his ears, thunder crashing overhead, lightning flashes
