So did Barnaby. “How long was I asleep?”
“I dunno. I was asleep myself. Look.”
A pall of gray smoke drifted above the trees, and the smell of burning wood came out of the forest on a hot, acrid wind.
“Forest fire!” Barnaby gasped. He turned and searched for the aperture. To his dismay, he found that it had risen to about ten feet. “Oh, no. My God, what’ll we do?”
“We either get up to that window or run.”
“I’ll never make it, Deena.”
“Neither will I. It’s too high to jump up.”
“Climb up on my shoulders.”
“Okay, say I make it. What then?”
“Look for something up there. A rope, whatever you can find. We’ll never outrun that fire. Come on. Alley- oop, and all that.”
After some initial tries, Deena managed to climb and perch on Barnaby’s shoulders. Shakily she tried to rise to a stand, but couldn’t get purchase on Barnaby’s sloping shoulders. He helped as best he could, letting her use his hands as supports. She tried again, slid off, and went tumbling in the grass.
All the animals had left the clearing except Jane and Buster, who stood looking on curiously, occasionally glancing back toward the rapidly approaching fire front. Streamers of thick black smoke now trailed through the clearing.
“That fire is racing a mile a minute,” Barnaby said worriedly as the roar and crackle of flames came to his ears.
Deena mounted again, circus style, stepping up on Barnaby’s angled thigh and leaping to a stand in one clean motion — but she lost her balance and fell again. It was the right approach, however, and they tried again. This time it worked, and Deena managed to balance herself precariously on Barnaby’s shoulders.
“I got it!” she yelled as she hooked her fingers over the lower rim of the portal. “Push me up!”
“I … I can’t —” Barnaby felt her weight come off his shoulders. He jammed the heel of his hand under her right shoe and lifted, then did the same with the left. He looked up and was struck by what would have been, to someone just arriving on the scene, the bewildering sight of a young black woman hanging on to a hole in the middle of the air. Grunting and puffing, Barnaby boosted her up as far as he could. Deena tried chinning herself, but her strength was not up to it. Her legs flailed out uselessly, with nothing to push against but air.
“I can’t do it!” she cried.
“Yes, you can!” Barnaby glanced toward the source of the eye-searing smoke that now began to engulf the clearing. He could see flames quite clearly now as they licked at the underbrush and raved in the treetops. He looked up at Deena again. “Swing your leg up!”
Deena swung from side to side to get momentum, then kicked out with her right leg. The heel of her shoe caught the outside lip of the aperture, but slipped off, and she very nearly lost her tenuous finger-grip. She tried again with the left, to no avail. Then she got an idea and began to swing back and forth through the plane of the window, as if on a parallel bar. She increased the arc of her swing, then tucked her legs in and let the sudden increase in angular momentum boost her to chinning level. Her right leg shot up over the windowsill.
“You got it!” Barnaby shouted. “Get your arm over!”
Deena got more leg inside the window until she hung almost upside down. Using her legs more than her arms, she pulled herself up to where she could hook her right arm over the sill.
Barnaby watched her disappear inside the portal. Then Deena showed her head.
“I made it!” she cried. “Now what?”
“Is there anything up there we could use?”
“There ain’t nothin’! No rope, no nothin’. Not even any furniture. Oh, Barnaby, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Barnaby said, turning to watch tongues of flame ignite the dry grass at the edge of the clearing.
“I’m gonna go get help,” Deena yelled. “Maybe I can find a rope.”
“Forget it!” Barnaby told her. “There isn’t time. I gotta make a run for it. I —”
He looked down. Jane was nuzzling the backs of his knees. Buster had something clenched between his teeth. It was one chewed end of a very long and very thick vine.
“Thank you,” Barnaby said in astonishment. He took the vine. It seemed long enough and strong enough. But now the problem was one of Deena’s ability to haul him up. He didn’t see how she could do it.
“Throw it up!” Deena yelled.
Barnaby took the vine in both hands and tested its strength. It had a tough, spiral structure that made it almost as strong as top-grade hemp. Barnaby coiled the vine — there was about twenty feet of it — and tossed it up through the aperture. Soon one end came trailing down.
“Tie it good!” she called.
“You’ll never be able to lift me!”
“I got help!”
Barnaby looped the vine around his middle and tied what he hoped was a nonslip knot. “Ready!” he shouted.
Slowly he rose. When he was high enough, he readied up and threw both arms over the sill and pulled with all his might. Two sets of arms grabbed him and hauled him up and through the portal. He tumbled to the floor and lay still, gasping and wheezing.
Having caught his breath, he sat up. Deena and a stranger were smiling at him. The man was dark-haired and bearded, wearing a green doublet and jerkin, green hose, and thigh-high boots of soft buff leather. A saber in a gilded scabbard hung at his side.
“Thank you,” Barnaby said to the man.
“’Twas nothing.” The man peered out the portal, through which smoke drifted.
Barnaby got up and looked out. Buster and Jane had reached the far end of the clearing. They stopped and took one last look back at the portal.
Barnaby heard them as if they had shouted it. He waved, watching the two beautiful animals disappear into the brush.
A moment later, the clearing went up in an incandescent flash and they had to step back from the window.
“I owe you my life,” Barnaby said. “My name’s Barnaby Walsh.”
The man took his hand.
“Kwip’s the name,” the green-clad, dark-bearded stranger said.
Nineteen
Elsewhen
The ruins looked Mayan only because of the jungle setting, but the architecture was just as strange, the carved glyphs just as enigmatic, the hidden crypts as dark and foreboding. Froglike inhuman faces stared out in bas-relief from the walls of buildings whose functions were difficult to guess. They could have been temples, or just as easily dormitories or warehouses. Inside, bare rooms were laid out in bewildering mazes. In one of the larger buildings there was a spacious, rotundalike chamber which did evoke a religious atmosphere, and it was there that the foursome stopped to rest after touring the ruins. The heat was awful, the jungle air a sodden, mist-hung pall that shrouded everything, stifling and oppressing.
The interior walls of the “temple” were profusely decorated in enigmatic frescolike paintings.
“Real interesting,” Gene remarked sarcastically, dabbing at his forehead with his undertunic, which he had doffed, along with his cuirass, in the heat.
“I think so,” Linda said, examining a curious mural which depicted strange bipedal beings doing even stranger things. She couldn’t quite make sense of it.
“Well, I wanted civilization,” Gene said, stalking around the huge polygonal room. “I didn’t count on a dead
