Sideslip

by Ted White, Dave van Arnam

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

One minute I was in New York . . . walking down Sixth Avenue, a private eye on a two-bit job . . . Next minute I was in New York . . . a crazy town I almost recognised - but Goebbels was speaking in Union square, Hitler invited me to a cocktail party, and aliens from outer space were running the whole show. Fun City it wasn't . . . Plucked from his own "time", a pawn in a Galactic power play, Ron Archer fights his way through a deadly maze of intrigue and conspiracy to an incredible destiny at the end of the star lanes!

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 184

Sample

IT HAPPENED so smoothly that I never noticed it. The transition was as smooth as a baby’s cheek. I didn’t miss a step.

One moment I was pushing my way through the usual summer throng of Manhattan’s late shoppers—the next I was still in the midst of crowds of people—somewhere else.

My name’s Ronald Archer, and I’m a private detective. After what TV’s done for us, that probably makes me sound like a pretty glamorous kind of guy—the latest Ivy-League fashions, shoulder-holstered .45, and night-clubs every night with a different chick. Well, forget it. For one thing, I’ve never been able to find, or afford, clothes that’d look Ivy League on my six-foot-six, 280-pound body, I have a .38 Police Positive, but it’s gathered dust in my bottom drawer for years, and with my face I’ve never had to fight off the chicks. And because I really do have my own agency, like all the fancy TV types do, and don’t work for Pinkerton or Burns or one of the big agencies, I’ll probably never have the money for good tailoring or the high-priced fillies. A one-man op in New York gets by on the leavings—occasional guard details, divorce work, once in a while stuff subcontracted when the big agencies are shorthanded. I pull through the thin times as a process server.

That’s what I’d been doing: attempting to serve divorce papers on a guy named Guy Mathews, an investment broker in Rockefeller Center. My luck—he’d already left his offices for the day.

I was feeling pretty disgruntled, not really watching where I was going. It’s easy for any seasoned New Yorker; you switch over onto automatic, and make your way through the crowds, navigate your way into the subway, and ride all the way home with a blank stare in front of you, your mind a thousand miles away. With me it’s even easier. Big guys pretty much make their own way. From time to time I try to remember all the advantages of my size and weight, because otherwise I might get depressed.

So anyway, as I said, I wasn’t really paying attention, and the transition could’ve occurred anywhere along the block of Sixth Avenue I was on at the moment. But when I noticed, it hit me hard.

I was still in a big city—big enough to be New York City, but not any New York City I knew. Everything was off-key. The first thing I’d noticed was when I’d glanced up at the Time-Life building. It wasn’t there: in its place was a two-block orange skyscraper swamping not only a good portion of where Rockefeller Plaza should be, but the dingy block south of it too.

Then the subtler things started sinking in. The colors, the scents, the very gestalt-feeling of the city that you have when you’ve lived with a city long enough to be part of it—all were wrong. The sky was a brazen yellow, and the air—cleaner than I’d ever seen it on a hot summer’s day in Manhattan—smelled faintly of ozone, and not at all of exhaust fumes. The sounds: no raucous honking, none of the roar and rumble of cabs and trucks. There were cars and trucks in the streets, sure enough, but they looked different, and they hummed, quietly.

The people didn’t look any different at first, and then they did—glaringly different. The dominant colors were reds: men and women alike wore shades of red. The women wore the brighter colors, some shading into orange. The men’s suits tended towards charcoaled reds; fortunately my wrinkled brown suit was not too out of place among them.

Then I noticed a man standing ahead of me, looking at the headlines displayed on a newsstand. He was wearing a cocked hat, with a feather in it, a coat which looked like red suede leather, which came down to his hips and was drawn in with a two-inch-wide black belt, and dark maroon tights. Only his black shoes looked normal, in a relative sort of way: they were pointy-toed, like the Italian-type favored by the younger set—I’d tried a pair on once, but couldn’t find anything which would accommodate my size eighteen-EEE foot without pinching like hell. Under his arm, this character out of Robin Hood was carrying an attaché case. Nobody was giving him a second glance.

I found out why, a minute later. Three men walked by, similarly garbed, accompanied by a fourth in a more normal suit—it was only minus the lapels. Once I’d started looking, within the next thirty seconds I saw dozens of others, some wearing light capes, some with only laced-neck tunics, some with crew-cuts, others with shoulder-length hair, none acting like they’d come off the set of a nearby TV sound-stage, or belonged to the limp-wrist set. And they accounted for a fair percentage of the men on the street.

Standing still like that, the crowd eddying around me, made me aware of something else. Coming up through the soles of my feet was an inaudible, subsonic throb.

Subsonics are funny things. Hit the right note—eight cycles, I think it is—and you can reduce a solid citizen to gibbering fear. So I make no excuses for what I did next. The whole scene had me pretty badly rattled, and when a man rushed out of the orange building up ahead, looked around wildly, and then stared straight at me, I didn’t wait to see what he’d do next. I turned and ran.

I looked back over my shoulder, and saw the man gesturing at me. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear the words. Two men in yellow uniforms had emerged from the same building, and now they were cutting through the crowd after me.

Being big has its advantages and its disadvantages. Nobody gave me much trouble as I ran down the crowded sidewalk. But I stood out head and shoulders over everyone else—the guys behind me weren’t about to lose sight of me.

I had a moment to wonder why I was running in the first place, but my instincts told me this was no place to stop and try to figure it out. Ahead, I saw a subway entrance. I made for it.

Over the entrance was the usual sign, saying “Subway”—but that was the second word on the sign. The first was a meaningless scrawl of nameless symbols.

That, if anything, underscored the obvious: wherever I was, it wasn’t home.

A man once told me I was the pragmatic type, and I actually took the trouble of looking it up. He was right, and I shouldn’t have bothered. All my life I’ve picked up the cards that were dealt me, and done my best to play them. Right at this moment I wasn’t sure whose deck it was, and it was only my perennially suspicious nature that made me suspect all the cards but mine might be wild.

There was something wrong with the subway entrance. At first I thought it was a normal set of steps leading down into the fluorescent-lit depths. Then I thought it was an escalator. The steps seemed blurred, flickering away so fast that my eyes couldn’t focus on them, like the flicker of a fluorescent tube glimpsed from the corner of your eye.

I didn’t know what the hell it was, but people had been going down it, and now I had no choice—I’d pounded right up to it.

—And the next thing I knew I was still running, a little off-stride, in the corridor below. The damn thing had whisked me down its length in just one of those flicks. I looked behind me, slowing to a fast walk. People were nonchalantly appearing at the bottom of the thing in mid-stride, and walking right on as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. And it was—for them. I pushed my mouth shut, and hurried around a bend in the corridor. The men in the yellow uniforms hadn’t been that far behind.

The corridor opened onto a wide concourse which had a naggingly familiar look to it. My end was fenced off from the main body of the concourse, the fence broken in the center by a row of turnstiles. They were exactly the same type in the Rockefeller Plaza–47th Street concourse of the Sixth Avenue IND in my own world.

Before you got to the turnstiles, there was a change booth. It was painted post office blue, like the wooden turnstiles. The floor was tiled with a checkerboard of modern asphalt tile, the surface pocked like a bad case of acne from thousands of secretarial spike heels, each tiny depression a dirty sunken pimple. There was a steady stream of people pushing each way through the turnstiles, a small line before the change booth. I felt in my pocket for a token, feeling helpless.

A small age-worn yellow enamelled metal plate fastened to the change booth dictated: “FARE—FIVE CENTS.” Fastened above it was a shiny polished chrome plate with some more of those strange squiggles.

Five cents? It was worth a chance. I fingered a nearly smooth buffalo head nickel nervously as I approached the turnstile. Nearby a worn man, face only a couple shades lighter than his faded uniform, pushed in a desultory way at his pushbroom. Beyond the turnstile a man in a black uniform trimmed with yellow gauntlets and boots idled, his gaze flicking over me without betraying interest. I put my nickel in the slot and pushed against the turnstile.

It clicked, and I was through. The uniformed man gave me a sharper look as I hurried past him to the stairs that led down to the level below. Behind me I heard a shout, then a clearly enunciated and totally unintelligible command barked over my head.

I vaulted down the stairs, hitting only two, and landing with a jar that traveled all the way up my spine.

There was a train in the station, waiting on the local tracks. The doors were starting to close.

“You! Hey, you—!”

I shoved one shoulder between the closing doors, and with both hands forced them open long enough to jump inside. They snapped shut behind me with a strong thump.

A woman with platinum blonde hair, shoulder-length on one side and close-cropped on the other, gave me a curious look, but more I think for my size than anything else. The train was crowded enough that perhaps a dozen were standing in the car.

Through the window I saw the two yellow-uniformed men hurtle down the steps, Black Uniform right behind them. One of the two raised his hand, an odd and menacing-looking object almost encasing it, a tube projecting from it pointing straight at me. Just then the train started to move, and the other knocked the first’s arm aside, almost savagely.

As my car swept past him, I could see Black Uniform sprinting along the platform. I had a pretty good idea what he was up to, so I started moving towards the front end of my car.

The train was still accelerating when the emergency brakes cut in. The shrill scream of metal on naked metal tore at my ears as momentum threw me into a red-jerkined man with a dyed-blue crew-cut. He muttered several distinct imprecations in good English, as I pulled myself off him, but a good look at me shut him up. I yanked open the door at the front of the car, and stepped onto the narrow platform between cars, letting the door slide shut behind me again.

From what I’d seen of it, the cars on this train weren’t very different from those in what I now was thinking of as my own time. The seating arrangements were a little different, but the cars were as grimy, and the essential mechanical details seemed to be the same. I was gambling they were.

They’d stopped the train, of course. The cop, or whatever he was, had gotten to the control booth at the end of the platform, and had had them throw the track trip that stopped a train dead. Next they’d come looking for me. I still had no idea why, but I had a good idea—especially after seeing one of them point that thing at me—that it wouldn’t be healthy for them to find me. I have a sixth sense about things like that. …

On each side of me, there were chain-linked bars forming fences that guided one into the car ahead. But instead of opening the door to that car, I unhooked the fence on my left from the car ahead, pushed the lightly sprung bumpers apart, and moved to the outer edge of the platforms, now only wide enough to support one foot on each, a gap of almost two feet between them. I carefully hooked the fence back in place, then dropped down to the tracks.

I’d had my choice of this side or the other, and, superficially, the other side seemed more advantageous, since there was a running walkway along that side, at side-door height. But it seemed more than likely that my pursuers would be using that themselves, and I preferred not to run into them.

I was standing between the express and local tracks, unpleasantly aware of the close proximity of my feet to both third rails. Track walkers, workmen, got a lot closer, I told myself. Besides, in the dim light which reached down from the train’s windows, I could see the live rails were shielded with wooden planks over them—just as the ones I’d known had been; that much hadn’t changed, anyway—so I’d be safe at least as long as I didn’t scuff one foot up under a shield. Still the thought of something more than, I presumed, 600 volts right there within kicking distance didn’t make me any too happy.

I didn’t have much time to worry about it, though. Suddenly bright lights were sweeping down the tracks next to me, a whisper grew into a rumbling roar, and an express train was whipping past me. I leaned flat against my own train, and sucked in my stomach. I felt as though if I relaxed for a moment I’d be slammed into mincemeat by the train barrelling past me.

Then, with the after wind of suddenly gritty air in my face, it was gone. I felt the sweat trickling down my back.

Overhead, through an open window, I heard the tinny squawk of the stalled train’s PA speakers. The words were incomprehensible. I couldn’t tell whether they were English or not. But the message was clear. They were looking for me.

For a moment it was like being under fire again, back in my tank, in the rutted, blasted fields of France. The German Stukas diving with their banshee screams, the bombs going off all around me, and me feeling like I had all the protection of a sturdy cottage-cheese box. I was in a totally alien world—God only knew how or where—and I was up against the whole system. I had all the chances of a roach on the dance floor of a discotheque. Who dealt this mess?

I had one chance: get with the crowds, be as inconspicuous as I could, blend into anonymity. Get out of there, and lose myself. I started back towards the tail end of the train.

I had just gotten back to the last car when I heard boots on the catwalk. I ducked low, and peered around the end of the train.

There was a detail of the black uniformed types, led by my two in yellow. They were fast becoming my oldest friends in this place.

I stayed crouched down by the truck-assembly, the heat from the just-braked wheels radiating against my face, one of my feet hesitatingly resting on a third rail shield, while one of the men did something to the doors at the end on the other side of the car, and then the ten climbed aboard, and I could hear more orders, this time in English.

“We’re sorry, but a dangerous enemy of the State is on board this train. We must ask everyone to pass between us and return to the station you just left. We regret your inconvenience.” His tone of voice left little doubt that he regretted their inconvenience.

I could hear the people moving around inside the car, a confused muttering and mumbling carrying less a note of protest than grumbling. I leaned one hand against the body of the car, and then looked at my palm. Even in the dim light it was black.

Then the first of the passengers were emerging from the car, walking back along the catwalk towards the brighter lights of the station where the catwalk joined the platform. I watched, and waited.

Finally, after around fifty people had trooped single file down the catwalk, there was a break. They’d finished with the passengers of the last car.

It would take a few moments for the passengers from the next car to walk the gantlet of the black uniforms. Reaching up for the bumper on the end of the car for a handhold, I threw a leg up onto the catwalk and boosted myself up. I hurried a little to catch up with the last man in line, dusting my hands on my handkerchief, and brushing myself off. The man ahead of me, I saw as we approached the brighter lights, had a blue crew-cut.

I’d made it; other passengers were filling the gap behind me, anxiously hurrying to get back to the station and another train. I’d mixed myself in with them and slipped my pursuers’ hands. Sure I had—I was as safe as a blind man in the middle of 42nd Street. They’d be through the train soon, and realize I’d escaped—and then the chase would be on again. I couldn’t just keep moving around in the subways forever. The crowds would thin in another couple of hours anyway. If I stayed on the move much longer than that I wouldn’t last much longer than if I just gave myself up.

The only alternative was to go to earth, somewhere. That shouldn’t be impossible to manage, even here. This was a big city, and it would have its places. They all did. And it wouldn’t be the first time I’d knocked around in such places. It wouldn’t be all that much different, even in the future. …

I stopped dead in my tracks. Suddenly I knew where I was, I’d been working all around the idea, sizing it up like a dog a strange hydrant, sniffing it over to see if it was what it smelled like. The future. I was in “the future”—my future, anyway. This wasn’t just a city that looked a lot like New York City—it was New York City, but a changed city, where new buildings had gone up, a new kind of escalator was in common use, and they’d replaced the air-polluting gasoline-powered buggies with electricity. And somewhere along the line the State had grabbed a little more control. My authoritative yellow-uniformed pursuers proved that. Well, I hadn’t been one of them, but some people had seen it coming.

A sudden pain struck me from behind in the kidneys. I started to swing around, a snarl on my lips. A small old lady was standing behind me, glaring. In her hand was an umbrella, still aimed at me. Light from the dim bulb over our heads glinted off white hair tinted green. “You get along there, mister!” she said, in a voice about as sweet as vinegar. “Whaddya think you are, huh? Causing decent folks more trouble!” A man behind her was staring indignantly at me over her shoulder. I smiled sheepishly, apologized for getting in the way of her umbrella, and turned back toward the station. The people hadn’t changed much, anyway.

My mind kept right on churning. The future … I couldn’t have been thrown too far into it. The subway cars looked about like those introduced in the 1950’s and 60’s, the language hadn’t changed at all. Except for . . .