"Break a leg, sir," said Sergeant Sambok, grinning at me through her camouflage makeup, and I was on.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the microphone, "this is Dominic DeSota. Urgent circumstances have led to the necessity for a precautionary action at Sandia Base and nearby. There is nothing for you to fear. In one hour we will make a television broadcast through the local stations. All networks are urged to carry it live, and at that time the necessity for this action will be made clear."
I looked at the lieutenant, who drew his finger across his throat. The corporal with the backpack moved a switch, and I was off the air.
"See you later, Major," the lieutenant said, and followed his crew out of the room.
I leaned back, testing the leather chair. These people did themselves well; there were paintings on the wall and carpeting on the floor. "How'd it go, Nyla?" I asked.
She grinned. "Really well, Major. If you ever get out of soldiering, you ought to get into radio."
"I'm too big to fit into those little-bitty sets," I told her. "Have you notified Tac-Five this building is secure?"
"Yes, sir. Tac-Five says, 'Well done, Major DeSota.' The follow-on echelons have taken the next six buildings too. The whole area is secure."
"The prisoners?"
"We set up a stockade in the parking lot. Corporal Harris and three men are guarding them."
"Fine, fine," I said, pulling at the locked drawers again. I'd taken over the chief scientist's office, but unfortunately the chief scientist had been off the base at the moment. He had taken his keys with him. An annoyance, not a problem. "Open this up for me, Sergeant," I said, and Sergeant Sambok studied the locks for a moment, gauged the angle of possible ricochets, then placed the muzzle of her carbine a few inches from the lock. As she shot it out, .25 caliber bullets whined across the office.
The drawers opened with no further trouble. Inside was the usual mess of disorderly stuff you find in a neat man's desk, but among the mess were a couple of notebooks and a whole drawer of files. Of course, we'd watched these people pretty closely for months before we opened the portal, but Dr. Douglas would want to look the papers over. "Orderly," I said. Sergeant Sambok nodded, and a private popped in from the hallway. "Take this stuff back to the sally port," I ordered, juggling a slim, expensive-looking gold cigarette lighter engraved Harrah's Club, Lake Tahoe. It would have made a fine souvenir, but I put it back and slammed the drawer shut.
After all, we weren't thieves.
Sergeant Sambok was standing by the door, and something about the look on her face made me ask, "What else, Sergeant?"
"Private Dormeyer is AWOL," she said.
"Shit." Her look expressed concurrence with my opinion. "There's no AWOL under combat conditions. If the MP's get him, they'll call it desertion." More concurrence. "Damn it, Sergeant, somebody's got to know where he's gone! Find him. I want to keep this in the company."
"Yes, sir. I'll take care of it myself."
"Yes, you will," I told her. "Take ten minutes to find out where he is. Then meet me at the sally point."
My assault party was the first one through, but we'd attained our objectives. There were three hundred more troops on the base now—ours, I mean, not counting the ones we were taking prisoner—and I had nothing to do any more until it was time for the television broadcast. That wouldn't happen until the TV station in Albuquerque was secure, so that we could get it on the network. I headed down for the sally point in the basement of the building. Once it had been a pistol range, but when our peepers found it, it wasn't used for much of anything.
That made it perfect for us. We got our whole party across before anyone knew we were there.
Sandia was an old military base, in our time as well as theirs.
The difference was that in our time it had stayed small. In theirs it had grown immense. There were square miles of desert and hill inside its barbed-wire boundaries.
There were not, however, very many of their troops actually deployed anywhere on the base. The perimeter was guarded more by electrons than by men, with a post only every quarter mile or so along the fence. Of course, that must have seemed like plenty of protection to the base commandant. Outside of a paratroop drop, which would have given plenty of radar warning, there was no way any sizable number of enemies could get up to the wire without being detected in plenty of time to summon reinforcements unless, like us, they came from inside. When I got to the sally port there was already a map of the base tacked up on the wall, with the secured points in red crayon. The key parts had been the Cathouse and its immediate neighbors, the MP barracks, the headquarters, the signals exchange, and the radio station. We now owned them all. The few troops who had thought they were guarding them now realized how badly they had failed, in our stockade.
Troops were still coming in. They weren't needed, but it did no harm to have them—what if the previous occupants, against all logic, decided to fight? Bright floodlights racked along the wall showed the column of twos emerging from nothingness. They broke step, marched to a wall, fell out, were assembled again by their officers and noncoms, and marched off to reinforce the troops already in place.
It was a weird sight. If you positioned yourself right next to the sally portal, in the same plane as the plane of the portal itself, it was even weirder. Toes, feet, legs, fists, bellies, heads appeared in that order. If you got behind the portal plane, you could see-what would you guess? Raw meat and guts? The insides of those transported soldiers? Nothing of the kind. You couldn't see anything at all. Because from behind, the whole rectangle of the sally portal was featureless, lightless, unrelieved black. From in front there was nothing much, either. Just the troops emerging from the portal, and behind them the dusty walls of the old pistol range.
"Major?" It was Sergeant Sambok again. She looked around and lowered her voice to say, "I think I know where Dormeyer went."
"Good work, Sergeant," I said.
She shook her head. "He's off the base. He sneaked out somehow. He's gone into Albuquerque. The thing is, he lived—he lives here. In Albuquerque, I mean."
Not so good. But it wasn't her fault. "You did right," I said, and indeed she had. For a reservist, Nyla Sambok was a first-rate soldier. The funny thing was that she'd been a music teacher in civilian life, married to a harpsichord player. They'd both got their scholarships by joining the Reserve and they'd both been activated in the call-up; a lot of reservists were bitter, but Sambok was good enough and soldier enough that I'd requested her to come down with me from Chicago to take over this detachment. The fact that she was a great-looking woman didn't hurt any, either. But I've never messed around with the enlisted personnel. Only thought of it, now and then.
"Tac-Five will be on the horn for you in about two minutes," she went on. "I got the word as I was coming in."
"Fine," I said, "but I've got an idea. Go down to the stockade and bring back Senator DeSota's clothes for me."
Even Sergeant Sambok could look surprised. "His clothes?"
"What I said, Sergeant. You can leave him his underwear, but I want all the rest. Even the socks."
A quick flash of comprehension crossed her face. "Right, Major," she said, grinning, and was gone, leaving me to wait for TacFive's call.
Two-way communication across the skin that separates parallel times is harder than one. They had to shut down the portal and collapse the field to get the energy, but when the portal officer nodded I picked up the phone and General Magruder didn't keep me waiting. "Well done, Major," he barked. "The President says the same. He's been following this very closely, of course."
"Thank you, sir."