The Corridors of Time Read Online Free Page A

That seemed to include not asking silly questions.
     He got out and opened the trunk. Storm unlocked a suitcase of her own. ‘I assume you have full camp gear in those packsacks,’
     she said. He nodded. ‘Take yours, then. I will carry my own. Load both guns.’
    Lockridge obeyed with a sharp, not unpleasant prickling in his skin. When the frame was on him, the Webley holstered at his
     side and the Mauser in his hand, he turned about and saw Storm closing her suitcase again. She had donned a sort of cartridge
     belt like none he had ever seen before, a thing of darkly shimmering flexible metal whose pouches appeared to seal themselves
     shut. Hanging on the right, as if by magnetism, was a slim, intricate-barreled thing. Lockridge did a double take. ‘Hey, what
     kind of pistol is that?’
    ‘No matter.’ She hefted the disc of colors. ‘Expect odder sights than this. Lock the car and let us be gone.’
    They entered the plantation and began walking back, parallel to the road, hidden from it by the ordered ranks of pines. Afternoon
     light slanted through a sweet pungency and cast sunspeckles on the ground, which was soft with needles underfoot. ‘I get you,’
     Lockridge said. ‘We don’t want the car to draw attention to where we’re headed, if somebody happens by.’
    ‘Silence,’ Storm ordered.
    A mile or so beyond, she led the way to the road and across. There a harvested grain field lay yellow and stubbly, lifting
     toward a ridge that cut off view of any farmhouse. In the middle stood a hillock topped by a dolmen. Storm slipped agilely
     through the wire fence before Lockridge could help and broke into a trot. Though her pack was not much lighter than his, she
     was still breathing easily when they reached the knoll, and he was a little winded.
    She stopped and opened her belt. A tube came out, vaguelyresembling a large flashlight with a faceted lens. She took her bearings from the sun and started around the hillock. It was
     overgrown with grass and brambles; a marker showed that this relic was protected by the government. Feeling naked under the
     wide empty sky, his pulse thuttering, Lockridge looked at the dolmen as if for some assurance of eternity. Gray and lichen-spotted,
     the upright stones brooded beneath their heavy roof as they had done since a vanished people raised them to be a tomb for
     their dead. But the chamber within, he recalled, had once been buried under heaped earth, of which only this mound was left….
    Storm halted. ‘Yes, here.’ She began to climb the slope.
    ‘Huh? Wait,’ Lockridge protested. ‘We’ve come three quarters around. Why didn’t you go in the other direction?’
    For the first time, he saw confusion on her face. ‘I go widdershins.’ She uttered a hard laugh. ‘Habit. Now, stand back.’
    They were halfway up when she stopped. ‘This place was excavated in 1927,’ she said. ‘Only the dolmen was cleared, and there
     is no further reason for the scientists to come. So we can use it for a gate.’ She did something to a set of controls on the
     tube. ‘We have a rather special way of concealing entrances,’ she warned. ‘Do not be too astonished.’
    A dull light glowed from the lens. The tube hummed and quivered in her grip. A shiver went through the brambles, though there
     was no wind. Abruptly a circle of earth lifted.
    Lifted – straight into the air – ten feet in diameter, twenty feet thick, a plug of turf and soil hung unsupported before
     Lockridge’s eyes. He sprang aside with a yell.
    ‘Quiet!’ Storm rapped. ‘Get inside. Quick!’
    Numbly, he advanced to the hole in the mound. A ramp led down out of sight. He swallowed. The fact that she watched him was
     what mostly drove him ahead. He went into the hill. She followed. Turning, she adjusted the tube in her hand. The cylinder
     of earth sank back. He heard a sigh of compression as it fitted itself into place with machined snugness. Simultaneously,
     a light came on – from no