“All ready,” he said after a moment.”
“Then throw the switch.”
With his hand upon it Dantan hesitated for one last instant of wariness. He was stepping into unknown territory now, and to him the unknown meant the perilous. His mind went back briefly to the Redhelms scouring the canyons above for him. He quieted his uneasy mind with the thought that there might be some weapon in the world of the voice which he could turn against them later. Certainly, without a weapon, he had little to lose. But he knew that weapon or no weapon, danger or not, he must see the face behind that sweet, familiar, imperious voice.
He pressed the lever forward. It hesitated, the weight of milleniums behind its inertia. Then, groaning a little in its socket, it moved.
Across the screen above it a blaze of color raged like a sudden shining deluge. Blinded by the glare, Dajatan leaped back and swung an arm across his eyes.
When he looked again the colors had cleared. Blinking, he stared—and forgot to look away. For the screen was a window now, with the world of Zha behind it… And in the center of that window—a girl. He looked once at her, and then closed his eyes. He had felt his heart move, and a nerve jumped in his lean cheek.
He whispered a name.
Impassively the girl looked down at him from the screen. There was no change, no light of recognition upon that familiar, beloved face. The face of the girl who had died at the Redhelm hands, long ago, in the fortress of Klanvahr… For her sake he had hunted the Redhelms all these dangerous years. For her sake he had taken to the spaceways and the outlaw life. In a way, for her sake the Redhelms hunted him now through the canyons overhead. But here in the screen, she did not know him.
He knew that this was not possible. Some outrageous trick of vision made the face and the slender body of a woman from another universe seem the counterpart of that remembered woman. But he knew it must be an illusion, for in a world as different as Zha surely there could be no human creatures at all, certainly no human who wore the same face as the girl he remembered.
Aside from the girl herself, there was nothing to see. The screen was blank, except for vague shapes—outlines—The helmet, he thought, filtered out more than light. He sensed, somehow, that beyond her stretched the world of Zha, but he could see nothing except the shifting, ever-changing colors of the background.
She looked down at him without expression. Obviously the sight of him had wakened in her no such deep-reaching echoes of emotion as her face woke in him. She said, her voice almost unbearably familiar; a voice sounding from the silence of death over many chilly years,
“Dantan. Samuel Dantan. Earthly language is as harsh as the Klanvahr I learned from Sanfel. Yet my name may seem strange to you. I am Quiana.”
He said hoarsely, “What do you want? What did you want with Sanfel?”
“Help,” Quiana said. “A weapon. Sanfel had promised me a weapon. He was working very hard to make one, risking much…and now time has eaten him up—that strange, capricious time that varies so much between your world and mine. To me it was only yesterday—and I still need the weapon.”
Dantan’s laugh was harsh with jealousy of that unknown and long-dead Martian.
“Then I’m the wrong man,” he said roughly. “I’ve no weapon. I’ve men tracking me down to kill me, now.”
She leaned forward a little, gesturing. “Can you escape? You are hidden here, you know.”
“They’ll find the same way I found, up above.”
“The laboratory door can be locked, at the top of the shaft.”
“I know. I locked it. But there’s no food or water here… No, if I had any weapons I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Would you not?” she asked in a curious voice. “In old Klanvahr, Sanfel once told me, they had a saying that none could hide from his destiny.”
Dantan gave her a keen, inquiring look. Did she mean—herself? That same face and voice and body, so cruelly come back from death to waken the old grief anew? Or did she know whose likeness she wore—or could it be only his imagination, after all? For if Sanfel had known her too, and if Sanfel had died as long ago as he must have died, then this same lovely image had lived centuries and milleniums before the girl at Klanvahr Fortress…
“I remember,” said Dantan briefly.
“My world,” she went on, oblivious to the turmoil in his mind, “my world is too different to offer you any shelter, though I suppose you could enter it for a little while, in that protective armor that Sanfel made. But not to stay. We spring from soil too alien to one another’s worlds… Even this communication is not easy. And there is no safety here in Zha either, now. Now that Sanfel has failed me.”
“I—I’d help you if I could.” He said it with difficulty, trying to force the remembrance upon himself that this was a stranger… “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She shrugged with a poignantly familiar motion.
“I have an Enemy. One of a lower race. And he—it—there is no word!—has cut me off from my people here in a part of Zha that is—well, dangerous—I can’t describe to you the conditions here. We have no common terms to use in speaking of them. But there is great danger, and the Enemy is coming closer—and I am alone. If there were another of my people here to divide the peril I think I could destroy him. He has a weapon of his own, and it is stronger than my power, though not stronger than the power two of my race together can wield. It—it pulls. It destroys, in a way I can find no word to say. I had hoped from Sanfel something to divert him until he could be killed. I told him how to forge such a weapon, but—time would not let him do it. The teeth of time ground him into dust, as my Enemy’s weapon will grind me soon.”
She shrugged again.
“If I could get you a gun,” Dantan said. “A force-ray—”
“What are they?”
He described the weapons of his day. But Quiana’s smile was a little scornful when he finished.
“We of Zha have passed beyond the use of missile weapons—even such missiles as bullets or rays. Nor could they touch my Enemy. No, we can destroy in ways that require no—no beams or explosives. No, Dantan, you speak in terms of your own universe. We have no common ground. It is a pity that time eddied between Sanfel and me, but eddy it did, and I am helpless now. And the Enemy will be upon me soon. Very soon.”
She let her shoulders sag and resignation dimmed the remembered vividness of her face. Dantan looked up at her grimly, muscles riding his set jaw. It was almost intolerable, this facing her again in need, and again helpless, and himself without power to aid. It had been bad enough that first time, to learn long afterward that she had died at enemy hands while he was too far away to protect her. But to see it all take place again before his very eyes!
“There must be a way,” he said, and his hand gripped the lever marked “door” in the ancient tongue.
“Wait!” Quiana’s voice was urgent.
“What would happen?”
“The door would open. I could enter your world, and you mine.”
“Why can’t you leave, then, and wait until it’s safe to go back?”
“I have tried that,” Quiana said. “It will never be safe. The Enemy waited too. No, it must come, in the end, to a battle—and I shall not win that fight. I shall not see my own people or my own land again, and I suppose I must face that knowledge. But I did hope, when I heard Sanfel’s signal sound again…” She smiled a little. “I know you would help me if you could, Dantan. But there is nothing to be done now.”
“I’ll come in,” he said doggedly. “Maybe there’s something I could do.”
“You could not touch him. Even now there’s danger. He was very close when I heard that signal. This is his territory. When I heard the bell and thought Sanfel had returned with a weapon for me, I dared greatly in coming here.” Her voice died away; a withdrawn look veiled her eyes from him.