"What we're going to do," I said, "is steal a portal. Then we're going home."
That changed the look on everybody's face. Especially the men. I've noticed about men that while a naked body always interests them, there is something especially exciting about one that's all damp and rosy from the bath; they can't wait to get it sweaty and soiled again. But I took their minds off that pretty fast. Moe nodded, accepting it as a directive. The other Larry looked stunned. And my own Larry snarled, "For God's sake, Nyla, don't you know when you're well off? Stay here! Forget going back!"
I shook my head. "Maybe you can forget it, sweets," I said, "because, to tell the truth, you've got no future back home anyway. But I work for the Bureau, and they expect something from me. I'm going to deliver."
"Aw, hell, Nyla," he grumbled. "Do you want to go back to where you can go to jail for wearing shorts three inches above the knee? This isn't such a bad place! Once they get this war thing straightened out—" Then his mind caught up with his mouth, and the look on his face changed from angry to apprehensive. "What do you mean, no future?"
I said comfortably, "You couldn't figure on protection from me forever, could you? I would say you're just about used up, sweetmeat. . . . Will you hand me those slacks, Bowquist?"
"But Nyla! You and I have something going!"
"Aw, Larry, who are you kidding? You were running your own little rackets, a swindle here, a little larceny there. I don't blame you for figuring out that meeting me was your big break. Screwing an FBI bureau chief was a great way to find out if we were getting close to you. But we were, hon. I just didn't tell you."
"Nyla!" He was beginning to sweat. The other Larry, on the other hand, was beginning to look a little more cheerfuclass="underline" the worse things got for somebody else, the less oppressive his own problems seemed. They were two of a kind—slippery good looks, charm, meanness inside and all.
"No hard feelings," I said, zipping the slacks and admiring myself in the mirror. They weren't as tight as I would have liked them, but then I would be trying to avoid attention, not attract it. I patted his shoulder. "I got what I wanted, too, you know. I would put you definitely in the top ten of all the men I've ever known in the bed department, and besides I knew you'd fink for me. As you did." I took the towel off my head and felt the hair. Still pretty wet. "Bowquist, have you got a hair dryer I can borrow?"
"In the bathroom," she said, getting up to get it, but I stopped her.
"You get it and plug it in for me, Larry," I said, to my own Larry. Resentfully he disappeared and I heard him knocking around in the cabinets. "Now, what we're going to do is make a trade. We've got something they want. They've got something I want."
"What's that, boss?" rumbled Moe, frowning over the difficult concepts.
"What they've got is a portal. What we've got is hostages." I smiled pleasantly at the other Nyla and the other Larry. "Bowquist is the one they'll be most anxious to ransom, I guess," I said, "judging by the way her boyfriend was hugging her. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a portal. Leaves you, Dr. Douglas. I gather they want you a whole lot—"
"Oh, no, "he yelled. "Listen, don't turn me over to them! I've got a better idea."
"I'm listening," I said, still smiling.
"We'll borrow a portal, maybe—I don't know how, but we'll figure something out. We'll go back to your time. I'll teach you how to build them, just the way I did for the others! The way you wanted me to! I'll work myself to death for you, I swear I will!"
I thought it over. "Might be simpler in some ways," I conceded. "Question is, how do we get to a portal?" I turned to Bowquist. "Maybe that's where you come in," I said. "Do you think if we talked real nice to your boyfriend he could get us the use of a portal, just for a little while?"
"I have no idea," she said, very cool, very remote. These sleazy goings-on were not part of her world. I had to admire her. Part of me wished I could be more like her; part of me was bitterly complaining that I could have been, would have been; if things had gone a little differently for me, because after all I was her—"What?"
"I said," she repeated, "that something seems to have happened to your own boyfriend." She was looking at the bathroom door.
It took me a second to understand what she was talking about. Then I realized she was right. The sounds from the bathroom had stopped some time ago, but no Larry came out. I got to the door in nothing flat.
There was nowhere to hide in there, not under the sink, not even in the shower cubicle, with its curtain pulled back just the way I had left it to show no one inside.
He wasn't there. There was absolutely no way he could have got out. But he wasn't there.
For the first time in a very long time, I was really scared. I turned to Moe, over by the window, opening my mouth to tell him to look under the bed or something. Moe's expression was puzzled— Then there was no expression on his face at all. There wasn't even a face to have one on.
Like that.
I was looking at him, and then I was looking through him. He wasn't there any more. I saw the window, and the gun he'd taken away from the soldier he'd killed lying on the sill, but of the man who had stood in front of them there was no sign at all.
I felt suddenly naked as well as scared. I don't mean just skinbare, as when I came out of the shower; I mean helpless and defenseless. I jumped for that gun out of pure reflex.
I never got to it.
The room flicked away. . .
And I was gone too.
They had crossed over the wet green fields of Ireland and were two hundred miles out over the Atlantic before they finished checking the tickets. It wasn't the most fun job in the world. The passengers were itchy and irritable. They knew something was wrong. There had been the unexplained wait before they left the gate at Heathrow, the whispered conferences among the cabin crew, the unusual request for everyone to show tickets again after they were airborne. It had to be done, though. 640 boarding passes had been issued. 640 tickets had been picked up at the gate. Only 639 passengers were on the plane. Somebody, somehow, had entered the mobile gate at one end and never come out at the other. When every seat in both levels and all six compartments had been cross-checked against the printout, including all eighteen lavatories and nine baggage spaces, they still had no answer, but at least they had a name. "Well," said the purser glumly, "at least we know we didn't count wrong. But what do you suppose they're going to tell the family of this Dr. John Gribbin?"
27 August 1983
10:50 P.M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P,
Being a major is not really being a major when you have no troops to command, and they had taken mine away from me. There was fighting going on. At a quarter of eleven every gun we had put through the portals began firing at once. The fighting was bloody. I knew this because I was watching the reentry portal under the bridge, and I could see the casualties coming back. But I wasn't taking any part in it. I was standing around with my thumb in my butt, waiting for someone to tell me where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to do.
The whole operation was beginning to look very bad. Maybe even terminally bad. The new troops going through the portal south of the bridge weren't heads-up, eyes-bright, combat-ready killers. They slouched into the big black square and didn't talk. And the ones coming back— The medics had their hands full with the ones coming back.