“Get back!” Giyani gripped his sidearm and began to draw it clear of the holster.
McErlain’s rifle clicked faintly. “Take your hand away from the pistol,” he said quietly.
Giyani froze. “Don’t be a fool, sergeant. Don’t you see what he’s doing?”
“Just don’t try to pull that pistol.”
“Who do you think you are?” Giyani’s face darkened with barely suppressed fury. “This isn’t the…’
“Go on,” McErlain prompted with spurious pleasantness. “Tell me I’m not with the Georgetown any more. Let’s have a few more genocide jokes—you like those, Major.”
“I wasn’t…’
“You were! That’s all I’ve had from you for the last year, Major.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be—it was all true, you see.” McErlain’s gaze travelled slowly from Giyani to the enigmatic figure of the Saladinian, and back again. “I was one of the trigger men in that party. We didn’t know anything about the way-out reproductive set-up the natives had. We didn’t know that the handful of males had to preserve their honour and the honour of their race by making a ritual attack. All we saw was a bunch of shaggy centaurs coming at us with spears. So we burned ’em down.”
Surgenor shifted his weight in preparation for a dash up the single tree trunk which was the spine of the ramp.
“They kept coming at us,” McErlain continued, his eyes dull with pain. “So we kept on burning ’em down—and that’s all there was to it. We didn’t find out till afterwards that we had wiped out all the functional males, or that they wouldn’t have done us any harm anyway.”
Giyani spread out his hands. “I’m sorry, McErlain. I didn’t know how it was, but we’ve got to talk about the situation right here, right now.”
But that’s what I am talking about, Major. Didn’t you know?” McErlain looked puzzled. “I thought you’d have known that.”
Giyani took a deep breath, walked towards the sergeant and when he spoke his voice was unwavering. “You’re a thirty-year old man, McErlain. You and I know what that means to you. Now, listen to me carefully—I am ordering you to hand me that rifle.”
“You’re ordering me?”
“I’m ordering you, sergeant.”
“By what authority?”
“You already know that, sergeant. I’m an officer in the armed forces of the planet you and I were born on.”
“An officer!” McErlain’s expression of bafflement grew more pronounced. “But you don’t understand. Not anything…When did you become an officer in the armed forces of the planet you and I were born on?”
Giyani sighed, but decided to humour the sergeant. “On the tenth of June, 2276.”
“And because you’re an officer you’re entitled to give me orders?”
“You’re a thirty-year man, McErlain.”
“Tell me this…sir. Would you have been entitled to give me orders on the ninth of June, 2276?”
“Of course not,” Giyani said soothingly. He extended his hand and grasped the muzzle of the rifle.
McErlain did not relax his grip. “What date is it now?”
“How can we tell?”
“Let me put it another way—is this later than the tenth of June, 2276? Or earlier?”
Giyani showed the first signs of strain. “Don’t be ridiculous, sergeant. In a situation like this, subjective time is what counts.”
“That’s a new one on me,” McErlain commented. “Is it part of Regulations, or did you get it from the book which is going to be written by our friend over there who thinks I can’t see him edging on to the ramp?”
Surgenor took his foot off the silvery trunk and waited, with a growing conviction that an inexplicable and dangerous new element had been added to the situation. The Saladinian had drawn the hood back over her head, but her eyes seemed to be fixed on McErlain. Surgenor could almost believe that she understood what the sergeant was saying.
“It’s like that is it?” Giyani shrugged, walked away from McErlain and leaned against the base of a large yellow-leaved tree. He turned his attention to Surgenor. “Is it just my imagination, David, or is that circle still shrinking a little?”
Surgenor inspected the black disc with its incongruous sprinkling of stars, and his sense of urgency was intensified. The circle did appear to be fractionally smaller.
“It might be due to the air blowing through there,” he said. “Humid air has a lot of mass…’
He stopped speaking as Giyani quickly moved behind the tree against which he had been leaning. From Surgenor’s vantage point he was able to see the major clawing out his sidearm. He threw himself into the lee of the ramp for protection, knowing in his heart that it was totally inadequate, and in the same instant McErlain’s rifle emitted a blaze of man-made lightning. The rifle must have been set at maximum power, because the ultralaser ray sliced explosively clear through the thickness of the tree trunk—and then through Giyani’s chest. He went down in a welter of blood and fire. The tree rocked for a few seconds, grinding the ashes in the blackened cross-section, and tilted away to sprawl noisily downwards through other trees.
Belatedly acknowledging that the ramp offered him no shelter, Surgenor got to his feet and faced McErlain. “My turn now?”
The sergeant nodded.
“You’d better dive through that hole before it disappears,” he said.
“But…’ Surgenor stared at the ill-matched couple—Sergeant McErlain and the small grey figure of the Saladinian woman—and his mind began to teem with conjecture. “Aren’t you going?” he said, scarcely aware of the inanity.
“I have things to do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do me a favour,” McErlain said. “Tell them I put my record straight. I helped kill a planet once—now I’m helping to bring another one to life.”
“I still don’t understand.”
McErlain glanced at the nameless alien woman. “She’s going to have a child soon, perhaps more than one. They’d never survive without my help. Food can’t be all that plentiful.”
Surgenor walked up the ramp and stood beside the black circle. “Suppose there isn’t any food? How do you know any of you will survive?”
“We must,” McErlain said simply. “Where do you think the people of this planet came from?”
“They could have come from anywhere. The chances that the Saladinian race originated here, at this point, are so small that…Surgenor broke off, guiltily, as he saw the desperate need in McErlain’s eyes.
He took one final look at the sergeant and his enigmatic companion, then dived cleanly through the black circle. There was a moment of fear as he fell into the darkness, then he rolled over on cold sand and sat up, shivering. The familiar stars of the Saladinian night sky shone overhead, but his attention was taken up by the circle from which he had emerged.
In this age it was a disc of greeenish light—looking from night into day—hovering above the desert floor. He watched as it shrank unsteadily to the size of a sun-blazing golden plate, to an eye-searing diamond. Air whistled through the aperture with a plaintively ascending note as it dwindled to a star and finally vanished.
When his eyes readjusted to the darkness he picked out the shape of Lieutenant Kelvin lying on the sand a short distance away. The blob of spray-on tissue-weld at his ankle was visible as a whitish blur.
“Do you need any help?” Surgenor asked.
“I’ve already put in a call,” Kelvin said faintly, without moving. “They should be here soon. Where are the others?”
“Back there.” One part of his mind told Surgenor that McErlain and the Saladinian woman had been dead for millions of years, but another now understood they were still alive, because the past and the present and the future are as one. “They can’t make it.”