"Folk who watched us, unseen," Gwen answered. "What thou dost hear came through a device they had, should they need to speak to those within this chamber. They sleep now, of course."
"Of course," Chornoi repeated, numbed.
"I would nurse thee a week, an I could," Gwen said gently, "yet I cannot, and thou must needs arise and aid me."
"Oh, no—Ow!—problem. No, now, I can stand." Rod removed her hand gently as he hefted himself up onto his feet, aching in every joint—but functional. He kept hold of her hand, though.
Gwen gazed at Chornoi's wrists, and her manacles exploded. She stared, then rubbed her joints to make sure they were untouched by all that force. As she did, two more explosions burst the cuffs at her ankles.
"Watch out for shrapnel," Yorick said softly.
"I did." Gwen looked up at him. "None struck thee, did it?"
"Not a bit," Yorick assured her.
Gwen nodded and glared at his handcuffs. They burst, then his ankle-cuffs, too.
He stood up, flexing his fists. "Shall we go?"
Gwen nodded and turned toward the chamber door. "What bearing, husband?"
Rod frowned, gazing off into space as he opened his mind to the myriad of thoughts that spun and twisted through the great complex around them. Down—it would be down low, for protection… There! He caught the thoughts of someone thinking about sending something ahead. He focused on the thoughts… yes, "ahead" meant "future"— 3511, after Rod's own lifetime. He nodded, satisfied, and reached out to touch and meld with Gwen's mind, leading, showing her.
She nodded. "Aye, I see. Then let us go, husband."
The door blew out and away from them, its hinges and bolts shredded like raveled rope. Yorick and Chornoi stared, appalled.
"She's angry," Rod explained. "Catch up, folks."
They leaped to keep up with Gwen, and the familiar moire sprang up around them. Just in time—four guards stationed outside looked up in alarm, then yelled as they leaped back, whipping out their blasters.
The blasters burst into flames in their hands.
They howled, throwing the torches from them, nursing their burns. Gwen ignored them and moved on. The other three had to hurry to keep up.
Chornoi was still staring back at the guards, then turned her head around to look up at Rod. "But she's the gentlest soul I've ever met!"
"I told you," Rod said impatiently, "she's angry."
An iron grille blocked their path. Gwen glared at it, and it burst into smithereens. She marched through the steel rain of its pieces, into an intersection. Blaster fire erupted from both sides. The bubble around them glowed briefly before the blasters exploded in the armsmen's hands. They screamed and whirled away. Gwen marched on.
"Uh, I hate to be indelicate," Yorick said, "but…"
"Because she loves me," Rod answered. "Besides, I've got some power myself, you know. I could survive long enough to get out of range."
They turned into a stairway. As they came out at the bottom, they saw a dozen men blocking their path with iron nets. Gwen narrowed her eyes, and the strands glowed white-hot. Flames licked out along them, and the guardsmen dropped them, cursing. Gwen surged forward, and the force field crashed into the dozen, bulldozing them out of the way. Some of them screamed as it squashed them against the wall, but Gwen paid no heed.
They turned a corner into a wide hallway. Twenty men were drawn up in front of a high double door in two ranks, one kneeling, one standing, all with blasters ready.
The blasters melted in their hands.
They threw them away with yowls of agony, just before the door behind them exploded into iron filings. The guards leaped aside, staring in terror. The iron filings filtered softly to the floor.
Gwen stepped through the door.
A lone technician stood by a wall full of keys, pressure-pads, and sliders, with an open-faced cubicle six feet wide set into it. At the sight of them, his mouth stretched in a grimace of horror, but he whirled and started slapping at keys and pads.
Gwen glared.
An invisible hand yanked the man off his feet, three feet into the air. Suddenly he slumped, unconscious, and the unseen hand dropped him in an untidy bundle.
"He sleeps," Gwen explained. The moire around them disappeared.
Yorick leaped for the wall and started turning and punching.
Rod stood slack-limbed in reaction. Only once before had he ever seen Gwen in a real towering rage, and there hadn't been anywhere nearly as much power arrayed against her.
"Dost'a truly know how this device doth function?" Gwen demanded.
"No fear," Yorick snapped. "I know the standard settings by heart."
"But this isn't your brand," Rod protested.
"No," Yorick agreed, "it's a copy. Who do you think invented the damn thing, anyway?" He twisted a final key. "There! That's date!" He pushed a slider. "That's location!" He punched a sequence on a keypad. "That's the security code! And the instruction to forget!" He punched at a pressure-pad. "And that's the time-delay control! Everybody inside! It'll start up in one minute!"
A huge, hulking shape filled the shattered doorway.
"Laser cannon!" Chornoi yelped.
"Inside, quick!" Rod all but threw her into the six-foot cubicle. Yorick leaped in after her, and Gwen stepped up. Rod was right behind her. He turned just as the cannon rotated, its huge maw facing them. Rod stared into doom.
Doom was suddenly warped and twisted and shot through with the color-swirl of the moire. Gwen clasped his hand with both of hers. "Tis as thick a field as I can manage. Now, husband, lend me of thy strength!"
It took a moment. There had been so much power flying around loose during that march from the torture chamber— and she'd been learning so horribly much about electronics! But after that moment, Rod managed to remember the girl in the haystack, the mother with the baby in her arms, the gentle partner, and his thoughts flowed and melded with hers.
"Thirty seconds," Yorick groaned.
A stream of ruby light lit the force field.
The whole doorway filled with a sheet of flame. It raged and twisted in convolutions—not in a single blast, but in an endless roiling rage.
Sweat sprang out on Gwen's brow. Her hold tightened on Rod's hand.
Rod gave her all the energy he had, all there was of him.
She paled, trembling.
Concern flooded him, and washed into her—concern, tenderness, love.
Heat seared him, a Sahara noon, an oven, a flaming furnace. Chornoi gasped, and Yorick groaned, "Ten seconds."
It was ten seconds of eternity, ten seconds of agony, ten seconds of the sickening realization that, this time, they just might not make it, as the flames baked and raged—but it was ten seconds that were just long enough for their minds to meld completely, and for Rod to realize, in the midst of Hellfire, that she was still the same, loving partner, and that she was still his self-interest, as the flame wrapped them up…
The floor lurched, slamming them against each other, and air flooded in, blessedly cool. Dazed, Rod straightened, clinging to Gwen, gradually becoming aware that the flame was gone, that he was staring into a vast chamber filled with bench after bench full of electronic equipment, huge wardrobes, tall cabinets…
And, right in front of them, a short, spare man in a white lab coat, with a mane of white hair and an eagle's face, on a head that was too large. He glared up at them with a gaze that was so piercing Rod almost shuddered, even though he had borne that stare before.
But he pulled himself together, squared his shoulders and took a deep breath, then stepped down out of the time machine carefully and said, "Dr. McAran, I presume."
They were sitting around a circular table, drinking restoratives (hundred proof). Around them, other tables filled the large room, with a variety of people clustered in discussion groups. Egyptian scribes rubbed elbows with ninth-century paladins; Sumerian peasants chatted with Ming Dynasty bureaucrats. The whole room was a glorious melange of periods and styles, a meeting place of the centuries in a riot of colors, with a nonstop buzz of conversation in a pidgin English that Rod could just barely recognize as the ancestor of his own century's Anglic.