All the other eight of us sighed at once. "Next," rapped the captain, and Colonel Martineau followed. The black swallowed him up with no more trace than it had left of Edna Valeska.
I was next in line.
I was standing no more than six feet from the mystery civilian. He gave me a quick look over his shoulder.
And I twigged. Skinny, far more harassed-looking, but the same man. There was no question about it. "Lavrenti!" I exclaimed. "You're Ambassador Lavrenti Djugashvili!"
His guard snapped, "You crazy? Don't bother Dr. Douglas now!"
"Wait a damn minute," protested the civilian. "You! What did you call me?" -'
"Djugashvili," I said. "You're the Ambassador of the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Djugashvili."
He looked at me fretfully for a moment. "My name's not Djugashvili," he said, returning to his board. He juggled dials for a moment, before nodding to the captain to scoot me through the portal. "But my grandfather's was," he called, just as I stepped into the blackness.
When I was a kid I had an active fantasy life, and it concentrated on two subjects. One was space travel. The other was sex. The principal reason I wanted to become a scientist, back as a sophomore at Lane Tech, was so I could visit other worlds. I never lost that fantasy, exactly, it just sort of slowly evaporated away over the years.
The other I never lost at all. I had the best collection of dirty books on the Near North Side. Porno flicks hadn't got out in the open yet, but there were places where you could pay two dollars and get into the back room of a coin-machine arcade or a sleazy bookstore and watch grainy black-and-white films from Tijuana and Havana. (For a long time I wasn't entirely sure that a man could make love to a woman without wearing black calf-length stockings and a mask.) I traded lies with all the other guys in the chess club and on the tennis team, and I put myself to sleep every night in the timehonored adolescent way, with my imagination carefully writing the scenario of the perfect seduction: the gossamer negligee, the chilled wine by the bed, the silken sheets. .
And then came the Fourth of July. Peggy Hofstader.
Her apartment house was near enough the lake to watch the fireworks, and there was nobody on the roof but us, and I'd managed to score two bottles of warm, nasty-tasting beer. And when the fireworks were blattering out their rackety-bang, all-over-the-sky finale, and I felt Peggy's hand reaching toward where no hand but mine had ever gone before, I realized my bluff was called. Fantasy had suddenly become real. All unprepared, I was making my debut, and what did you do with all those arms and legs and parts and places?
It was a good thing for me that Peggy knew my lines better than I did. I needed all the help I could get.
There wasn't anybody to help me now.
In a wholly different way, I was up against the same shuddery, scary, exciting thing. There was another world on the other side of that blackness.
I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. And I walked into it.
What did it feel like?
Mostly it felt like nothing at all. I've been to a couple of science fairs where they had air doors separating the rooms, currents of ascending air mixed with water vapor so it looked as though a cloud were hanging in the doorway; they project pictures or advertising messages on them, and you walk right through them. This felt like even less of a world-crossing transition than that. It was just that at one moment I was in a shooting range in the basement of a building, noisy, filled with people, lit by banks of flickering fluorescent lights .
And then I took a step, and suddenly I was at the bottom of an excavation. I stood on duckboards, in the hottest August sunlight New Mexico can produce. Scaffolding rose around me, supporting curious machines like TV cameras with round wire shields over where their lenses ought to be. A cherry picker stood idle beside one of them, with a man idly looking down at me from the cup. Scoopedout sandy walls surrounded me. A roaring truck motor was breaking my eardrums just a few feet away.
I didn't have time to study the scene. There were two soldiers standing there to grab my arms and pull me forward. "Into the truck," one of them ordered, and turned to get the next prisoner who came stumbling through. I climbed into the truck—unremarkable Army six-by-six with board seats around the sides and a soldier manning a light machine gun, pointed toward us, squatting on the cab. When all nine of us were aboard, the truck motor roared even louder; the vehicle jerked forward, and we climbed up out of the excavation onto a mesa where two Army helicopters stood by, their rotors slowly turning. "Out," ordered the guard, who had followed us into the truck, and one by one we jumped down as the truck roared away. The guard who did the talking, watching us carefully, backed away to exchange a few words with the pilot of one of the helicopters. We all looked at each other.
We were up in bare, sandy hills. I could see the barracky buildings of an actual Army base a mile or so across the mesa—the original Sandia, I supposed. Nearer there was a tractorless OD-painted trailer body, windows showing that it was some kind of an office, on the lip of the excavation. And across the excavation were two or three other trailers, but not offices: they carried generators, thudding away, and the cables went straight down to the machines at the floor of the pit.
I was gasping from the sun in a minute, and so were the rest of us, but we were all too keyed-up to worry about heatstroke. Edna Valeska tugged at my sleeve. "They had to dig to get down to basement level," she said, pointing.
"What?"
"They wanted to come out in the basement of the building," she explained, "and there wasn't any building here. So they had to dig."
"Oh, yeah." It didn't seem important. To tell the truth, I'd had too many things to react to, I didn't know what was important and what was not any more. I could see two more figures appear out of the black rectangle: Nyla-the-Sergeant, and the man who looked like, but said he wasn't, Djugashvili. They exchanged words, and Nyla turned away to get into a jeep. "What about the scaffolding?"
"At a guess," said Dr. Valeska, "that was a matter of positioning too. They wanted to bug us. To look into the laboratories. Some of them were on the top floor."
It sounded rational enough, though I was no longer sure about what constituted rationality, either. One of the juniors put his finger on the central question.
"What do you think they're going to do with us?" he asked, his voice quavering.
Nobody had a good answer for that. Colonel Martineau came closest. "I think that's what we're going to find out from the sergeant," he said, as Nyla Sambok's jeep spun sand from its wheels while she parked it behind us.
She didn't tell us, though—at least not right away. She was called, scowling, over to the colloquy between the guard and the copter pilots. "Colloquy" was too mild a word; it was becoming a straight-out argument, and they weren't keeping their voices down.
We didn't have to wonder long about the subject of the disagreement. It was like that old puzzle of the missionaries and the cannibals crossing a river. Each helicopter could hold five persons besides the pilot. There were nine of us—nine prisoners—and one guard made ten. Two loads. Only neither of the pilots was willing to take a chance with carrying five of us enemy maniac desperadoes without an armed guard.
"Aw, shit," said Sergeant Sambok at last. "Get on with it. You take four, you take four, and I'll keep the odd one here until one of you gets back." And as they grudgingly started loading us into the choppers, she spun and pointed to me. "Leave that one," she said. "I'll hold him for the next trip."
"Sure, Sarge," whined one of the guards, "but the major said—"
"Move it," ordered Nyla. And they did. When the choppers were airborne she turned to look at me analytically. I guess I didn't look like too much of a problem to deal with for a healthy woman with a carbine. She gave a short nod. "No sense frying our brains out here," she said. "Let's get inside the trailer."