I DROPPED THE GUN AND the bag of ammunition, the colimicon, and ranâwith Sybil right behind me. Bolivar led the way, stumbled to a halt towards the rear of the cave. He looked around, shuffled his feet. “No, more to the left,” he mumbled. “Back, back. Good.”
“Fast!” he shouted, raising his arms. “Take my hands!”
We weren't arguing. He seized our hands and, with a powerful muscular contraction, pulled us tight against his chest. I opened my mouth to speakâ
It was a completely indescribable sensation. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before, had no relation to heat or pain, cold, emotions, electrocution.
Then it ended; bright light flared and there was a thunderous sound.
“Get down!” someone shouted and Bolivar dragged us after him to the floor of the room. Rapid explosions sounded, gunfire. I had a quick glimpse of a man firing a handweapon, clumsily, for when the gun recoiled he dropped it. From his left hand; his right arm was bandaged. He turned then and ran, followed by other running footsteps.
“James!” Bolivar cried out.
“Fine, fine,” a muffled voice answered. He came out from behind the ruins of the burning machine. His face was smeared black and he was brushing glowing embers from his shirt. “Very close. Good thing he wasn't shooting at me. He did a good job on the electronics though.”
“Thanks, boys, for getting us back,” I said, then-coughed raspingly. “My throat hurts like Hell.”
There was a hiss of white fumes and the fires were blotted out by the automatic quenchers. An alarm was ringing in the distance.
“Explain later,” James said. “Let's get out before anyone else shows up.”
I didn't argue. Still numb from the events of the past day. Day? We ran out of the church, it was night, the van was parked at the curb just where we had seen it lastâhow long ago?
“Into the back,” James ordered. He started the engine as the rest of us struggled in through the open rear doors. Barely had time to close them before he kicked in the power. We sprawled and rolled and heard the sound of sirens getting louderâthen dying away as the van broadsided around a corner. He slowed after that, drove at what must have been something like normal speed. Turned a few more times and stopped. James spun his driver's seat around to face us and smiled.
“Drinks, anyone?”
Through the windshield a large rotating sign was visible. RODNEY'S ROBOT DRINKING DEN with CHEAPEST AND MOST ALCOHOLIC DRINKS IN TOWN in smaller lettering below. A robotic face appeared at the window. “Welcome to this drunkards' paradise. Orders, please,” it grated.
“Four large beers,” I told it, then coughed uncontrollably.
“Tell us what happened,” Sybil said when I had gasped into silence.
“Sure,” Bolivar said. “But firstâare you guys all right?” Looking at us intently, relaxing only when we had nodded our heads. “Good, great. You gave us a scare, Dad, when the alarm went off.”
“I didn't think that I had time to actuate it.”
“You didn't. We only knew something was wrong when your heart stopped. We hit hard then.”
“It never stopped!” I said defensively, grabbing at the pulse in my wrist. A nice solid thud-thud.
“That's good to hear. But we didn't know that at the time. We must have broken in just seconds after you went to Hell. Marablis, wearing some kooky outfit, was still working the controls. Bolivar got him with the stunner as he was turning around.”
“I dropped himâbut you were both gone. That explained the stopped heartbeat. You had been moved, transported, sentâto Hell as we found out. James took care of that. Advanced hypnotism, he's very good.”
“Been a bit of a hobby for some years. Marablis was an easy subject. Stress and shock. I eased him under and took control. He told us that he had sent you both to Hell. Bolivar said that he would go after you. I had Marablis work the machine and you know the rest. It was a long five minutes but it worked out fine in the end.”
I should have been immune to surprises by this time. I wasn't. “Five minutes! We were in Hell for hoursâmost of a day at least.”
“Different time scales?” Bolivar said. “And I'll tell you something else just as outré. When I was in Hell I was here at the same time, I mean I could see what Bolivar was seeing, hear him speaking.”
“And vice versaâ”
“Beer,” a tinny voice said and Sybil and I leaped forward.
“Four more,” Bolivar said as we drained our glasses. He handed us the two remaining full ones.
The cold liquid helped. Gasping with pleasure, my brain got back into gear and I remembered something else. “James! The shooting when we arrivedâwhat happened?”
“Just that. As you were coming back through, this guy burst in waving a gun. I dived for cover while he shot up the machinery. Then he and Marablis ran for it.”
“I had a quick look at him,” I said. “It couldn't have been, but ⦔
James nodded solemnly. “I could see him very clearly. It was Professor Slakeyâwith a bandage on the stump of his right wrist.”
“Then who, whoâ?” I said, doing a stunned owl imitation.
“Who was at the controls, you mean? Who sent you to Hell and brought you back? That was also Professor Slakey. Working the controls with his good right hand.”
“I have more news,” I said. “There is a bright-red, long-tailed and behorned Slakey in Hell.”
The silence got longer and longer as we considered the implications, or lack of them, in this information, until Sybil spoke. “James, whistle for the waiter if you please. Order up a bottle of something a bit stronger for the next round.”
Nobody argued with that. Everything had happened so fastâand so incomprehensiblyâthat I had trouble pulling my thoughts together. Then memory struck hard.
“Angelina? Where is she?”
“Not in Hell,” James said. “That was the first question I asked Marablis when I put him under. He admitted that much under stress. Fought hard not to answer where she was, almost surfaced from the trance. I put him deep under to bring you two back from Hell. When you were back safe I was going to press him really hard for an answer. Butâyou know what happened. Sorry ⦔
“No sorry!” I shouted happily. “Angelina is not deadâbut has been sent somewhere. Maybe Heaven. We'll find out. Meanwhile, you got us back. Sorry is not the word to use. We'll have to try and work out what happened, what all these puzzles and paradoxes mean. But not right now. There are two things that we must urgently do now. We have to get help. And we've been compromised enough. Slakey knew about Sybil and me when he knocked us out. Now he knows the whole family is after him. He might try and fight back so we have to stay away from the hotel room. And we must contact the Special Corps at once.”
“All I need is a phone,” Sybil said. “I have a local contact number that will be spliced through directly to Inskipp.”
“Perfect. We outline what has happened. Tell him to order a tight guard around that church. No one is to go either in or out. Then tell him to get Professor Coypu here soonest. Anyone who can build a working time machine as well as many other scientific miracles certainly ought to be able to figure out just what is going on with these Hell and Heaven machines. We'll stay out of sight until the professor has arrivedâalong with the Space Marines. Never forgetâwe have been to Hell and we came back. We're going to find Angelina and get her back with us the same way.”
Â
I suppose that I should have enjoyed the days of forced relaxation at the Vaska Hulja Holiday Heaven, but I had too much to worry about. Always lurking behind all the pleasures of swimming and sunbathing, drinking and eating, was the knowledge that Angelina was still missing. There was some reassurance in the fact that her kidnappers had admitted that she was alive, though not where she was. Small consolation; she was still gone and that could not be denied. A dark memory that would not go away. I knew that the twins shared these feelings, because behind all the horseplay and vying for Sybil's attention was that same memory. I would catch a bleakness of expression when one of them did not know he was being watched.
Nor was it all fun and games. We went to work. The first thing that we had done after checking into this hotel, with false identities, was to list everything we knew, had seen, had experienced. None of it seemed to make senseâyet we knew that it must. We forwarded all of this material to the Special Corps where, hopefully, wiser heads than ours might make sense of it.
They did. Or it did, a wiser head I mean. Our little trip to Hell seemed to have had a scrambling effect on my brain so at times my thoughts would dribble away. I also kept looking in mirrors to see if I was turning red. After awhile I stopped doing thisâbut I still felt the base of my spine when I was showering
to see if I was growing a tail. Disconcerting. This feckless state of affairs ended next morning when I came down early for breakfast and saw a familiar figure at our table.
“Professor Coypuâat last!” I called out in glad greeting. He smiled briefly with his buckteeth popping out between his lips like yellowed gravestones.
“Ahh, Jim, yes. You're looking fit, skin tanned but not red. Any signs of a tail?”
“Thank you, no, I have been keeping track. And you?”
“Fine, fine. On my way here I examined the remains of the destroyed machines at the church and have analyzed all your notes, examined the clothing you wore in Hell, thank you. It all seems fairly straightforward.”
“Straightforward! I see nothing but confusion and obfuscation where you ⦔
“See the forest as well as the trees. I can inform you in full confidence that inventing the temporal helix for my time machine was much more difficult.” His teeth snapped off a piece of toast and he chewed it with quick rodént-like enthusiasm.
“You wouldn't care to chop some of that metaphorical wood for meâwould you?”
“Yes, of course.” He patted his lips with his napkin, giving his protruding teeth a surreptitious polish at the same time. “As soon as I discovered that Jiving Justin was involved in this matter, the shape of future things to come became clear ⦔
“Jiving Justin?” I burbled with complete lack of comprehension.
“Yes,” he cackled, flashing His teeth at me. “That's what we used to call him at university.”
“Who, who?” I was in owl overdrive again.
“Justin Slakey. He used to play the slide trombone in our little jazz quartet. I must admit to being fairly groovy myself on the banjo as wellâ”
“Professor! The point of it all, pleaseâwould you kindly return to it?”
“Of course. Even when I first met him, Slakey was a genius.
Old beyond his yearsâwhich considering the state of geriartrics might have been far older than he appeared. He took the theory of galactic strings, which as you undoubtedly know has been around as theory for a long time. No one had ever come close to tackling it until Slakey invented the mathematics to prove their existence. Even the theoretical wormtubes between galaxies were clear to him. He published some papers on these, but never put everything together into a coherent whole. At least, until now, I thought he hadn't completed his theory. It is obvious that he has.”
He washed some more nibbled toast down with a quick swig of coffee. I resisted more owl imitations.
“Stop at once!” I suggested. “Start over since I haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about.”
“No reason that you should. The reality of the wormholes between one universe and another can only be described by negative number mathematics. A nonmathematical model would be only a crude approximationâ”
“Then crudely approximate for me.”
He chewed away, forehead furrowed in thought, unconsciously brushing away a strand of lank hair that floated down in front of his eyes. “Crudely put ⦔
“Yes?”
“Very
crudely put, our universe is like a badly cooked fried egg. In a pan of equally badly cooked and stringy eggs.” Breakfast had obviously inspired this imagery; I had eaten the eggs here before. “The frying pan represents space-time. But it must be an invisible frying pan since it has no dimensions and cannot be measured. Are you with me so far?”
“Yoke and all.”
“Good. Entropy will always be the big enemy. Everything is running down, cooling down towards the heat death of the universe. If entropy could be reversed the problem would be easy to solve. But it cannot. Butâ” This was a big
but
since he raised an exclamatory finger and tapped his teeth. “But although entropy cannot be reversed, the rate of entropic decay
can be measured and displayed, only by mathematics of course, and can be proven to proceed at a different rate in different universes. You see the importance of this?”