The Corridors of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

perfect.
    Lockridge didn’t notice. There was too much else.
    The sun had still been well above the horizon when they entered the tunnel, and they couldn’t have been inside more than half
     an hour. But here was night, with a nearly full moon high in the sky. By that wan radiance he saw how the mound-side now covered
     the dolmen, up to the capstone, with a rude wooden door beneath. Around him, grasses nodded in a chill, moist breeze. No farmlands
     lay below; the knoll was surrounded by brush and young trees, a second-growth wilderness. To the south a ridge lifted that
     looked eerily familiar, but it was covered with forest. Old, those trees, incredibly, impossibly old, he had only seen oaks
     so big in the last untouched parts of America. Their tops were hoar in the moonlight, and shadows solid beneath.
    An owl hooted. A wolf howled.
    He raised his eyes again and saw this was not September. That sky belonged to the end of May.

CHAPTER FOUR
    ‘Yes, of course I lied to you,’ Storm said.
    The campfire guttered high, sparks showed, light danced dull on smoke and picked her strong-boned features out of darkness
     in Rembrandt hints. Beyond and around, the night crawled close. Lockridge shivered and held his hands toward the coalbed.
    ‘You would not have believed the truth before you saw,’ Storm went on. ‘Would you? At the very least, time would have been
     lost in explanation, and I had already been much too long in the twentieth century. Each hour multiplied my danger. If Brann
     had thought to guard that Danish gate — He must believe I was killed. There were several other women inmy party, and some were mutilated beyond recognition in the fight with him. Nevertheless, he could have gotten wind of me.’
    Exhausted by reaction, Lockridge said merely. ‘You are from the future, then?’
    She smiled. ‘So are you, now.’
    ‘My future, I mean. When?’
    ‘About two thousand years after your era.’ Her humor faded, she sighed and looked into the gloom that lay back of him. ‘Though
     I have been in so many ages, I am woven into so much history, I sometimes wonder if any of my spirit remains in the year I
     was born.’
    ‘And – we’re still in the same place as we entered the corridor, aren’t we? But in the past. How far?’
    ‘By your reckoning, the late spring of 1827 B.C. I checked the exact date on a calendar clock in the foreroom. Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite
     width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through – so we would not be separated by
     weeks.’ Briskly: ‘If such should ever happen, go back into the corridor and wait. Duration occurs there, too, but on a different
     plane, so that we can rendezvous.’
    Nearly four thousand years, Lockridge thought. On this day Pharaoh sat the throne of Egypt, the sea king of Crete planned
     trade with Babylon. Mohenjodaro stood proud in the Indus valley, the General Grant Tree was a seedling. Bronze was known to
     the Mediterranean world but northern Europe was neolithic, and the dolmen of the knoll had been raised only a few generations
     ago by folk whose slash-and-burn agriculture exhausted the soil and forced them to move elsewhere. Eighteen hundred years
     before Christ, centuries before even Abraham, he sat camped in a Denmark which those people who called themselves Danes had
     yet to enter. The strangeness seeped through him like a physical cold. He fought back the sense and asked :
    ‘What is that corridor, anyway? How does it work?’
    ‘The physics would have no meaning to you,’ Storm said.‘Think of it as a tube of force, whose length has been rotated onto the time axis. Entropy still increases inside; there is
     temporal flow. But from the viewpoint of one within, cosmic time – outside time – is frozen. By choosing the appropriate gate,
     one can step out into any corresponding era. The conversion factor’ – she frowned in concentration – ‘in your