The Gate of Time Read online

  He pushed on into the woods. His legs and arms were shaking, and something inside him was trembling also. Reaction, he told himself. It was natural, and he would be all right as soon as he got a chance to get hold of himself. Only thing was, he might not get a chance. The Germans or the Rumanians would be sending out search parties now. Probably, the peasants living in the house on the other side of the road had seen them drop, although it was possible that no one had. But if they had watched the big American ship burning and falling, and had seen the two chutists, they might be phoning in now to the nearest garrison or the police post.

  He had been on his hands and knees, covering his chute with dirt in a depression between two huge tree-roots. Abruptly, he straightened up, grunting as if hit in the pit of his stomach. It just occurred to him that he had not seen a single telephone wire during his drop. Nor had he seen any electrical transmission towers or wires. This was strange. The absence of these would not have been peculiar if the plane had gone down out in the sticks. Rumania was not a very well developed country. But the Hiawatha must not have been more that five miles from the refineries in Ploesti when it had encountered the German fighter.

  Moreover, where were the suburbs that had been below him only a minute before he had experienced that twisting feeling? One moment they were there; the next, gone. And there was something peculiar also about the suddenness with which the German had appeared. He could swear that it had dropped out of the sky itself.

  They finished covering up the chutes. Two Hawks stripped off his heavy suit and at once felt cooler. There was a slight breeze, which meant that the wind must have sprung up again outside the woods. O’Brien already had his suit off. He wiped his freckled forehead and said, “It sure is quiet, ain’t it? Hell of a lot quieter than it’s going to be, huh?”

  “You got a gun?” Two Hawks asked.

  O’Brien shook his head and pointed at the .32 automatic in the holster at Two Hawks’ side. “That isn’t much of a gun,” he said. “How many bullets you got?”

  “Five loaded. Twenty more in my pocket,” Two Hawks said. He did not mention the two- barreled derringer in the little holster on the inside of his belt in back nor the switchblade knife in his pocket.

  “Well, it’s better than nothing,” O’Brien said.

  “Not much better.” Two Hawks was silent for a moment, conscious that O’Brien was watching him with expectation. It was evident he was not going to offer any suggestions. That was as it should be, since Two Hawks was the officer. But Two Hawks doubted that O’Brien would have anything helpful to say even if he were asked to do so.

  It struck Two Hawks then that he knew very little about O’Brien except that he was a steady man during a mission, had been born in Dublin, and had emigrated to America when he was eleven years old. Since then, he had lived in Chicago.

  Finally, O’Brien said, “I’m sure glad you’re with me. You’re an Indian and you been raised in the country. I don’t know what the hell to do in all these trees. I’m lost.”

  By then, Two Hawks had the map out of the pocket of his jacket. He did not think it would help O’Brien’s morale to tell him that his officer, the Indian, had been raised in the country and knew the woods there, but he did not know this country or these woods.

  Two Hawks spread the map out and discussed the best routes of escape. After a half hour, during which they took off their jackets and unbuttoned their shirts because of the heat, they had picked several avenues of flight. Whichever one they took, they would travel at night and hole up during the day.

  “Let’s go back to the edge of the woods so we can watch the road,” Two Hawks said. “And the farmhouse. If we’re lucky, we weren’t seen. But if some peasant has told the local constabulary, they’ll be searching these woods for us soon. Maybe we better get out of here. Just in case. In fact, we will if the coast looks clear.”

  They sat behind a thick bush, in the shadows cast by a huge pine, and watched the road and the farmhouse. A half-hour passed while they swatted at mosquitoes and midges, handicapped by having to strike softly so they would not make slapping noises. They saw no human beings. The only sound was that of the wind shushing through the treetops, the distant barking of a dog, and the bellowing of a bull from beyond the farmhouse.

  Two Hawks sat patiently, only moving to speed the circulation in his legs, cramped from sitting still. O’Brien fidgeted, coughed softly, and started to take a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Two Hawks said, “No smoking. Somebody might see the smoke. Or even smell the tobacco.”

  “From this distance?” O’Brien said.

  “Not likely, but we don’t want to take any chances,” Two Hawks replied. For another half-hour, he continued to watch. O’Brien groaned softly, whistled between his teeth, shifted back and forth, then began to rock on the base of his spine. “You’d make a hell of a poor hunter,” Two Hawks said.

  “I ain’t an Indian,” O’Brien said. “I’m just a city boy.”

  “We’re not in the city. So try practising some patience.”

  He sat for fifteen minutes more, then said, “Let’s get over to the house. Looks deserted. Maybe we could get some food and be on our way into the woods on the other side of the house.”

  “Whose getting ants in their pants now?” O’Brien said.

  Two Hawks did not reply. He rose and took the switchblade from his pocket and stuck it between the front of his belt and his belly. He walked on ahead of O’Brien, who seemed reluctant to leave the imagined safety of the woods. Before Two Hawks had gone ten yards, O’Brien had run up to him.

  “Take it easy,” Two Hawks said. “Act as if you had every right to be here. Anybody seeing us from a long ways off might not think anything about it if we’re casual.”

  There was a ditch between the edge of the field and the road. They leaped across the little stream in its bottom and walked across the dirt road. The ground was wet but not muddy, as rf it had rained a few days ago. There were deep ruts, however, that looked like wagon tracks. And there were tracks of cattle and piles of excrement.

  “No horses,” Two Hawks said to himself. O’Brien said, “What?” But Two Hawks had opened the wooden gate and was ahead of him. He noticed that the hinges were also of wood, secured to the gate by wooden pins. The grass in the yard was short, kept so by several sheep with very fat tails. These raised their heads and then shied away but uttered no baas. Two Hawks wondered if they had vocal cords; it seemed unlikely that normal sheep would have been silent during the long time he had listened in the woods.

  Now he could hear the clucking of hens from behind the house and the snort of some large animals in the barn. The house itself was built in the shape of an L with the long part of the leader facing the road. There was no porch. Big thick logs, the interstices between them chinked up by a whitish substance, formed the structure of the house. The roof was thatched.

  On the smooth wood of the door was painted a crude representation of an eagle. Above it was painted a large open blue eye over which was a black X.

  Two Hawks raised the wooden latch that locked the door and pushed in. He had no chance to follow his plan to walk boldly in. At that moment, a woman walked around the corner of the house. She gasped and stood still, staring at them with large brown eyes. Her brown skin turned pale.

  Two Hawks smiled at her and greeted her in what he hoped was passable Rumanian. He had tried to gain some fluency in the language from a fellow officer of Rumanian descent while stationed in Tobruk, but he had not had time to master more than a few stock phrases and the names of some common items.

  The woman looked puzzled, said something in an unfamiliar tongue, and then walked towards them. She had a rather pretty face, although her shape was a little too squat and her legs too thick for Two Hawks’ taste. Her hair was blue-black, parted in the middle and plastered down with some sort of oil. Two braided pigtails hung down her back. She wore a necklace of red and tightly coiled seashells, an open-necked blouse of blue cotton, a
wide belt of leather with a copper clasp, and a skirt of bright red cotton. It reached to her ankles. Her feet were bare and smeared with dirt, mud, and what looked like chicken excrement. A real peasant, thought Two Hawks. But if she’s friendly, that’s all that counts.

  He tried some more Rumanian, got nowhere, and switched to German. She replied in the same guttural language she had used before. Although it did not sound Slavic to him, he spoke in Bulgarian. His knowledge of this was even more limited than his Rumanian. She evidently did not understand this either. However, she spoke the third time in a different speech than her first. This resembled Slavic; he tried again with Bulgarian, then with Russian, and Hungarian. She only shrugged and repeated the phrase. After hearing several more repetitions, Two Hawks understood that she was doing as he was, that is, trying out a foreign language of which she knew very little.

  But when she saw that Two Hawks did not understand a word of it, she seemed to be relieved. She even smiled at him and then fell back into the first tongue she had used.

  Two Hawks frowned. There was something familiar about it. Almost, he could catch a word here and there. Almost, but not quite.

  He said to O’Brien, “We’ll have to try sign language. I...”

  He stopped; obviously alarmed, she was pointing past him. He turned just in time to catch the flash of sun from the metal of a vehicle through the trees. The forest was thin by the road, and he could see across another field, perhaps three hundred yards long, to a row of trees at right angles to him. This must line the road, which either turned there or was crossed by another road.

  “Somebody coming in a car,” he said. “We’d better take off. We’ll have to trust this girl or else take her with us. And if we do that, we may have to kill her. In which case, we might as well do it now.”

  “No!” O’Brien said. “What the hell...!”

  “Don’t worry,” Two Hawks said. “If we’re captured, we might just end up in a prison camp. But if we kill the girl, we might get executed as common criminals.”

  The woman placed a hand on his wrist and pulled him towards the corner of the house while she gestured with the other hand and talked swiftly. It was evident that she wanted to take them away from the approaching vehicle or perhaps hide them.

  Two Hawks shrugged and decided that there was little else to do. If they took to the woods, they would soon be captured. There just was not enough forest in which to hide.

  They followed the woman around the corner and to the back of the house. She led them inside, to the kitchen. There was a huge stone fireplace with a log fire and a large iron pot on a tripod above the fire. A savory odor rose from the simmering contents. Two Hawks had little time to examine the kitchen; the woman lifted a trapdoor from the middle of the bare wooden floor and gestured to them to go on down. Two Hawks did not like the idea of placing himself and O’Brien in a position from which he could not escape. But he either could do that or take to the woods, and he had already rejected that if something else was offered. He went down a flight of ten steps with the Irishman close behind him. The trapdoor was shut, and they were in complete darkness.

  3

  Above them came the sound of something scraping across the floor. The woman was hiding the trapdoor with furniture. Two Hawks took out his flashlight and examined the room. His nose had already told him that there were strips of garlic and sausage and other food hanging from the roughly hewn beams above. There was a door close by; he pushed this open and then turned off the light. Enough light came through several chinks in the log wall of the house above for him to see. The large chamber was lined with shelves on which sat dust-covered glass jars. These contained preserved fruits, vegetables, and jellies. On the floor beneath the shelves were piles of junk; stuff the owner had not been able to throw away or else considered worth repairing some day. One item that particularly caught his attention was a large wooden mask, broken off at one corner. To examine it closer, he turned on his flashlight. It portrayed the face of a demon or a monster, painted in garish scarlet, purple, and a dead-white.

  “I don’t like being down here, Lieutenant,” O’Brien said. He came close to Two Hawks as if he found comfort in the proximity. Although it was cool in the dark cellar, the Irishman was sweating. He stank of fear.

  Then he said, “There’s something funny as hell about all this. I meant to ask you, but I thought maybe you’d think I’d cracked. Did you feel as if you were being, well, sort of twisted. I got a sickish feeling, just before that German showed up. I thought I’d been hit at first. Then things got too exciting to think about it. But when we was back in the woods, sitting there, I got the same feeling. Only not so strong. Just feeling that there was something a lot more wrong than being shot down and hiding away from the krauts.”

  “Yeah, I had the same feeling, too,” Two Hawks said. “But I can’t explain it.”

  “I felt like, well, like Old Mother Earth herself had disappeared for a minute,” O’Brien said. “How about that, huh?”

  Two Hawks did not answer. He heard the vehicle approaching down the road, then stop in front of the house. The motor sounded like an old Model T. He directed the sergeant to help him pile junk beneath one of the chinks and then stood up on the unstable platform. The hole was only a little larger than his eye, but it permitted him to see the car and the soldiers getting out of it. It was a peculiar looking vehicle, perhaps not so much peculiar as old-fashioned. He remembered O’Brien’s comment when they had first landed about the cars at the head of the ox-drawn wagon train.

  Well, Rumania was supposed to be a very backward country, even if it had the largest and most modern oil refineries in Europe. And the soldiers certainly were not members of the Wehrmacht. On the other hand, their uniforms did not resemble anything in the illustrations he had seen during his briefing in Tobruk. The officer wore a shiny steel helmet shaped to look like a wolf’s head. There were even two steel ears. His knee-length jacket was a green-gray, but the collar had a strip of grayish animal fur sewed to it. There was an enormous gold-braided epaulette on each shoulder and a triple row of large shiny yellow buttons down the front of his jacket. His trousers were skintight, crimson, and had the head of a black bull on each leg just above the knees. He wore a broad leather belt with a holster. A strange-looking pistol was in his hand; he gestured with it while giving orders to his men in a Slavic-sounding speech. He turned and revealed that he was also wearing a sword in a scabbard on his left side. Shiny black calf-length boots completed his uniform.

  Several of the soldiers were within Two Hawks’ range of vision. They wore helmets that had a neck-protecting nape, but the shape above the head was cylindrical, like a steel plug hat. Their black coats came to the waist in front, then curved to make a split-tail in back that fell just below the back of the knees. They had baggy orange trousers and jackboots. There were swords in the scabbards hanging from broad belts and rifles in their hands. The rifles had revolving chambers for the cartridges, like some of the old Western rifles.

  All had full beards and long hair except for the officer. He was a clean-shaven youth, blond and pale, certainly not a dark Rumanian type.

  The men scattered. There were shouts from above, the tread of boots on the floors, and smashing sounds. The officer walked out of sight, but Two Hawks could hear him talking slowly, as if in a language he had been taught in school. The woman answered in the same speech, which had to be her native tongue. Two Hawks found himself straining to catch its meaning, almost but not quite succeeding. Ten minutes passed. The soldiers reassembled. Frightened squawks announced the “expropriation” of hens. A certain amount of stealing was to be expected, Two Hawks thought, but by the woman’s own people? No, the soldiers could not be of the same nationality as she, otherwise there would be no language difficulty. Perhaps the woman belonged to one of the minorities of Rumania. It seemed logical, but he did not believe it.

  Two Hawks waited. He could hear the soldiers laughing and talking loudly to each other. The woman
was silent. About twenty minutes later, the officer apparently made up his mind that his men had had enough fun. He strode out of sight, and his voice came loudly to Two Hawks. Within a minute, the soldiers were lined up before him while he gave them a short but sharp lecture. Then they got into the car and drove off down the road.

  “I don’t think they were looking for us,” Two Hawks said. “They must know that the house has a cellar. But if not us, what were they looking for?”

  He wanted to go out immediately, but he decided that the soldiers could be coming back up the road soon or another group could pass by. Better for the woman to tell them when it was safe. The day passed slowly. There was no sound from outside for a long while except for the clucking hens and mooing cows.

  It was not until dusk that they heard furniture moving above the trapdoor. The door creaked open, and light from a lamp streamed through the oblong.

  Two Hawks took the automatic from O’Brien and went up first, determined to shoot anybody waiting for them. Despite all the evidences of her trustworthiness, he still was not sure that she had not changed her mind and summoned the troops. It did not seem very likely since the soldiers would not have bothered waiting around until dusk. But you never knew, and it was better to take no chances.

  There was a man standing in one corner of the kitchen and munching on a piece of dried meat. Two Hawks, seeing he was unarmed except for a big knife in a scabbard sheath, put his automatic in his belt. The man looked at them stone-facedly. He was as dark as the woman and had an eagle- like nose and high cheekbones. His straight black hair was cut in the shape of a helmet—a German helmet. His black shirt and dirty brown pants looked as if they were made of some coarse and tough cotton. His boots were dirty. He stank as if he had been sweating out in the fields all day. He looked old enough to be the woman’s father and probably was.

  The woman offered the two bowls of stew from the kettle still simmering in the fireplace. Neither was hungry, since they had been sampling the contents of the cellar. But Two Hawks thought it would be politic to accept. It was possible these people might believe that it was a gesture of hospitality and trust to offer a stranger food. They might believe that a man who ate under their roof was automatically sacrosanct. And the reverse could be true also. A stranger who accepted their bread would not break a tabu by harming them.