sign of submission. 'Do honorrr to me.'
I stared at him.
His eyes-cylindrical camera-lens affairs-rotated back and forth. Presently he said, 'You will not do me the honorrr?'
'Yes, I will.' I said.
I approached the alien, knife in hand, looking for an appropriate spot on the shiny chitin of his abdomen. I had no doubt as to his sincerity. Stabbing underhanded; I plunged the blade of the knife into his body and yanked upward. The exoskeleton was tough, but capable of being cut; however, I was in a bad position for leverage.
'Difficult?' the alien asked. 'May I assist?'
I nodded. Twrrrll took the hilt in both hands and jerked the knife upward. The carapace split like thin plastic. He ran the knife up to the middle of the chest, pink froth oozing from the wound.
Suddenly his head exploded in flame. An energy bolt had come from the direction of the door. I looked.
It was John. He got off another shot, this one missing, just as the alien fell. Then he came running over.
'You got him,' he said breathlessly. 'Thank God. And with his own knife, too. Dreadfully sorry, but I looked all over for you. How did you manage to corner him in here?'
I told him of Twrrrll's surrender. He could scarcely believe it.
'Incomprehensible,' he said, gazing at the alien's prostrate form. 'We'll never fathom the alien mind. Never.'
'I'm not so sure it'd be a good idea if we did,' I said.
25
It felt good to be back on the road again.
We'd decided to take our chances at ground level. The spacetime ship was still on the mend, and there was no telling when it would heal itself. (Strange how easy it was to think of the process in these terms). Besides, there was no guarantee that we'd be safe in the ship. There were other reasons. I didn't like being a passenger, being chauffeured about. It made me feel vulnerable; I hate being helpless and not in control. Moreover, as we were now down to two enemies — Moore and his puppet-mistress-I decided that keeping to the ground was a calculated risk we could afford to take. It might even be the best way to go…
… I thought, grinding my teeth.
Of course, we all knew very well that it wasn't over. It was only a matter of time before our enemies would move against us once again.
The train let us off in an unusual region of Microcosmos — unusual in the sense that we'd not seen terrain like this before. It was mostly flat grassland, relieved here and there by sharp low ridges proliferating in networks like wrinkles in a bed sheet. Visibility was unlimited, and the master portal was a vast gray smear on the 'horizon.'
'Well, we'll be able to see 'em coming for kilometers,' Sam said.
'Miles and miles,' I said.
Sam looked at me askance. 'How much time did you say you spent back in 1964?'
'About a month and a half, maybe less.'
'Sure rubbed off. `Miles' indeed.'
This wasn't exactly sparkling conversation, but it filled in the lulls. We were nervous and trying to make the best of it. It is profoundly disquieting to know that somewhere out there is an all-powerful deity who wants to cancel your season ticket. We talked about this. It was a way of relieving the psychological discomfort.
'But if she's that powerful,' Sam argued, 'why can't she just swoop down any time and pound us into hash?'
I said, 'You should have been a theologian. John, this is right up your alley, isn't it?'
John said, 'My suspicion is that Prime is somehow inhibiting the Goddess from making an overt move. I think that's why she finds it necessary to work through human agents.'
'Makes sense,' I said, 'until you try to speculate as to why the Goddess has it in for us in the first place. And what is it she wants to do, exactly? Wipe us out, or just prevent us from going back? Or both?'
'That's a good one,' Sam said. 'You say she originally asked you for the Black Cube?'
'Yeah. But now she has it. Or one of them, anyway.'
'Maybe it was the wrong cube.'
'There's only one cube, Sam. You've got to understand that basic fact.'
'Oh, I understand that basic fact, all right. I just don't want to deal with the sucker.'
I thumbed the intercom switch. 'Arthur, old buddy! How's it going back there?'
'Please, I'm nauseated.'
'Now, just hold on a minute. Tell me how a robot can get motion sickness. You're really not a robot, are you?' I had suspected as much all along.
'Of course I'm a robot. Why can't a robot get motion sickness?'
I grunted out a derisive laugh. 'It just doesn't make sense.' 'Nonsense. I feel pain, discomfort, the whole thing. In a somewhat subdued form, though. Don't ask me to explain.'
'For pity's sake, why? Why would your makers go to the trouble of wiring you with pain circuits?'
'For the same reason you got wired with 'em. Excellent mechanism for automatically protecting the organism. You instinctively avoid pain, ergo anything that would tend to damage you. Quod erat whatever. Wake me when we get there.'
It was Arthur who had insisted on coming along. He maintained that he was responsible for us and wouldn't feel as though his obligation had been properly discharged until he'd seen us safely through the correct portal. Besides, the spacetime ship might come in handy at some point, if and when it cured itself of its ailments.
We were about two hours from the portal. I wasn't rushing, just maintaining a steady speed. There was no use in hurrying. They were out there, and would make an appearance at some point. Count on it. For now, it was simply a matter of watching the road and waiting, keeping one or two extra eyes on the sweep scanners, wondering when some innocuous gray dot swimming in the murky stuff at the extreme range of vision would suddenly turn into something wickedly sharp and welldefined, move in at you and strike. No telling what it would be: an armored car, perhaps, or a shimmering cube or other shape, or maybe something you could barely comprehend, some monstrous mind-denying unreality. It didn't matter. We were dead no matter what. Because I had the feeling that we had long ago scraped bottom, run out of tricks. We had dodged one too many bullets. I was very worried.
Something else was bothering me.
We had already located the portal that led back to T-Maze, and mapped a route to it through the congeries of highways that twined among the forest of towering cylinders. But judging from what Arthur told us and from what we had learned from the map, this portal would not send us back in time. We would not arrive back in T-Maze paradoxically before we left. This was not a 'backtime' route, as Skyway travelers were wont to say.
'The system's just not built that way,' Arthur told us. 'It was designed to eliminate the possibility of a paradox.'
'How was it done?' I asked.
'Dearie me, I couldn't give you specifics, but I do know this. There is a sort of standard, objective time observed along the entire length of the Skyway. It works so that the `present' always moves with the traveler. You'll never get ahead of it or behind it. When you retqrn to the place you left, the stretch of time that has passed there is equal to the time you spent away. Don't ask me how it's done. Actually, if you really want to get technical about it, the time flows aren't exactly equal. There is slippage, for some esoteric reason, but it amounts only to nanoseconds. Due to quantum uncertainties, I think.'
After all this time, after all the legends, the tall tales, the stories told about me, the fact was that the way back still was not clear. When I'd first laid eyes on her, Darla had acted as though we'd met before, a meeting I knew very well never occurred. She'd stuck to that story ever since. I'd come to believe her, and my belief wasn't based entirely on my growing love for her. Other facts, other observations had persuaded me. But now doubt gnawed again.
