Read Online Time Was by Steve Perry - Free Book Online

the enormous clanks and knocks his toy boats could make as they bumped against the porcelain. It made his boats real. Now Janus heard sounds that seemed like footsteps: far away, yet all around him, the water carrying vibrations too long for air to carry. As he approached his entrance, they did not seem to grow louder from there—the water unlocalized sounds—rather, they grew louder from everywhere.
    Janus stopped and stood still. Tried to listen. The sound was too confused.
    Then, since he stood inverted, Janus looked “down,” as it seemed, and saw very clearly, in front of him, the footprint of a man on the ice.
    One black, ripple-sole footprint. In front of him.
    Another joined it—perhaps the man had raised a knee to fix a boot.
    Two black bootprints. Guard’s boots.
    A guard from the compound was standing on the opposite side of the ice from him: right side up on the other side of the ice on which Janus stood upside down, like figures on a playing card.
    Janus tried to figure out how the guard had gotten here so quickly—probably used a hover-car—then decided it didn’t matter.
    The guy was here now, and that didn’t figure into Janus’s scenario.
    The ice was translucent, not transparent: Only the black boot soles pressing flat against the ice could be seen. Janus’s silver air bubbles began to congeal on the ice’s surface, and he stiffened, then decided they were too light for the guard to see. Janus’s boots, suspended from the ice by crampon spikes, should be similarly invisible.
    The man’s shadow fell across the ice.
    Janus flinched and looked around, then he realized he cast no shadow in his otherworld.
    The black soles turned, and Janus saw the unmistakable outline of a gun fall across the ice.
    It looked thin—but that could be a trick of the light; thin and long like a rifle, not a gun you’d use to hunt anything out on this ice. In winter there were only ducks and geese out on the marsh. Any hunter worth the price of his ammo would use a shotgun to hunt.
    The outline turned again: Janus saw, unmistakably, the shadow of a protrusion above the barrel, thicker than the barrel, that began above the pistol grip and ran no more than a quarter of the barrel’s length, where it flared out in a bell. A scope.
    Only rifles had scopes. Shotguns didn’t even have ordinary sights.
    The bootprints started walking in front of him. Janus followed them, walking upside down beneath the man, a pace behind him.
    From the way the bootprints stopped, made half-turns to each side, and from the way the shadow of the rifle swept in an arc along Janus’s glowing ice, back and forth, Janus knew for certain this was a guard.
    The bootprints kept on—Janus stalking the stalker. He found them moving in a curve toward some point. Every five steps the prints would stop, the long compound shadow of the rifle and scope would sweep along the ice like a shadow searchlight across a glowing sky, then the bootprints would continue. Janus gradually became sure.
    His mouth twisted.
    Hunting me.
    Janus followed the bootprints in their curve, certain they were heading for his second exit hole. They were waiting for him to come up.
    Good God! And I think of myself as an intelligent person. He’d cut the hole in his idiosyncratic way. He had his own ways by now.
    He had cut his exit hole near the ice divers’ drying shed a quarter-mile away. He hoped they hadn’t found the shed, but they’d guess it wouldn’t be far from the hole. They’d know he would freeze into a statue unless he could get inside shelter quickly once he came up. The water was never colder than twenty-eight degrees, but the wind above on the lake gave a chill factor of sixty below zero on this ice. That was the rate at which he would turn into an ice statue unless he dried off within a very few minutes of surfacing. How in God’s name could he get out of this? He had only