LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER THREE

      That answered my question. Something had happened, although I had no idea what. First of all, there was that blip. It wasn’t exactly a sound, it was more like a feeling —a gut-wrenching, universe-shaking, giant blip of a feeling. Then there were the changes.

      It was now daylight; seemingly early morning, just after dawn, but nonetheless daylight. We were still in the middle of a woods, but it was a different woods. It was more ordered: the trees seemed almost laid out in rows. The path was now a narrow brick road. A narrow —as a matter of fact —yellow brick road.

      “Michael! Chester! Help!”

      We ran ahead. There, sitting on yellow bricks, was Sylvia. She was crying; long, convulsive sobs that racked her thin body and left her shaking. “Help me. Please. It’s awful,” she gasped.

      “She’s hysterical,” Chester said helpfully.

      “What’s the matter, Sylvia?” I asked, squatting down beside her. Silly question; what wasn’t?

      Chester bent over us. “Slap her on the back,” he suggested. “Put your head between your legs,” he told Sylvia.

      I ignored him. “You’ll be all right,” I told Sylvia, taking her in my arms and holding her tightly. “Come on, now. What’s the matter?”

      Sylvia clutched my arm tightly for a minute and then let go and pushed me away. “Let me lie down for a while, please. That...thing...whatever it was, twisted my insides all up. Didn’t you feel it?”

      “We felt it,” I told her, rolling my jacket up and putting it under her head, “but I guess it didn’t bother us that strongly. Not physically.”

      “Some people get seasick and some don’t,” Chester added. “It’s like that.”

      “It wasn’t this bad the first time,” Sylvia said, looking very pale in the bland, sunless dawn. “I’m cold.”

      “The first time?” Chester asked.

      “Yes,” she said, sitting up with my help so I could put the jacket around her instead of under her. “The first time was when the train arrived. That’s when Adolphus ran away. We thought it was one of the famous Nueva España earthquakes, but it wasn’t. I got sick then too; but at least the time and place stayed the same.” She thought about that for a second. “Or they seemed to, they seemed to. Tell me, didn’t you know about unicorns?”

      “Yes,” I told her. “But to us the unicorn is a mythical beast.”

      “And it isn’t nineteen thirty-six,” Chester added moodily. “That was about fifty years ago.”

      “I’m in the future?” Sylvia asked.

      “I thought of that,” I told her.

      “Then we’d have unicorns,” Chester explained, describing a unicorn with his hands. “And, from what you told us, interstellar travel.”

      “You don’t travel to far planets?”

      “We barely travel to near planets.”

      “Then...what is happening?”

      “I’m sure we’ll figure it all out,” I said reassuringly. “Chester’s very good at figuring things out. He has an oracle.”

      P h e e—e e—e e p !

      “What was that?” I asked, standing up.

      “It was a pheep,” Chester informed me.

      “Dorothy!” Sylvia exclaimed. “That’s her signal.” She tugged out her silver whistle and gave a long triple blast on it.

      P h e e—e e—e e e p P e e e p—e e e p !

      “She’s coming,” Sylvia said. “I wonder why none of the others answered.”

      “They might not have gone blip,” Chester said. “They may be still wandering around in the dark looking for a unicorn. There’s something to be said for that.”

      “Sylvia!” Dorothy called, breaking noisily through the underbrush. “Here you are. Where is everyone else?”

      “Well,” I said, “we’re here.”

      “You pheeped?” Chester asked. Once he gets hold of a spelling, he seldom lets go of it.

      “Pheeped?”

      “Whistled,” I explained.

      “Oh. Phee—ee—eep!?”

      “That’s it,” Chester agreed. “Pheep.”

      “I’m afraid we’re pretty much the ‘everybody else’,” I said.

      “What happened, was it an earthquake?” Dorothy asked, looking around for signs of damage.

      “It seems to have been more of a time quake,” Chester said, and proceeded to explain what we thought we knew about what we assumed had happened.

      I sat down next to Sylvia. “How are you feeling now?”

      “Much better, thank you. The effects pass quickly. I’m not so cold anymore.”

      “That’s good.”

      “Do you want your jacket back?”

      “No, no. Keep it as long as you need it; I’m fine.” People, especially girls, always assume a selfish motive if there’s one available to be assumed. That’s rule number five.

      Dorothy pheeped a few more times, but got no answers. She put the whistle away. “I guess you’re right. The silver whistle becomes merely a symbol, blown in an empty wood where none can hear.”

      “We’re here,” I reminded her.

      “Left alone in a quadrilateral wood to whistle for my no-dimensional friends!” she declaimed dramatically.

      “If you want to be left alone,” I hinted.

      “Leave her alone,” Chester ordered. “She’s merely being poetic. You, as a matter of fact (and a mind of fiction), should listen.”

      I spent the next few moments working that one through, putting in the necessary punctuation and sorting it out. By the time I had it, the conversation had passed me by.

      “I think so, positively,” Dorothy was saying.

      “All right, it’s settled. Let’s go.” Chester finished stripping the twigs and leaves off a walking stick he was manufacturing and whipped it through the air. “Onward!”

      “Where are you leading us?” I demanded.

      “Listen, troop, yours is not to reason why....”

      “How come every time you decide to lead you start calling me ‘troop’?” I demanded. “Have you thought of what that makes the girls?”

      Chester chalked the end of his walking stick and took a couple of shots on an imaginary pool table. “Never mind making the girls. Right now we go onward—out of the woods.”

      “Why don’t we go back to the Trembling Womb?”

      “Because the TW probably isn’t there anymore; and that flying cigar might be.”

      “Onward,” I agreed.

      We followed the yellow brick road as it twisted through the orderly rows of trees, through hill and dale and over stream. The road went over water like a brick snake: no supports, just a single thickness of bricks humping across the stream. It managed to look like a part of nature and not an intrusion. But in this wood, nature itself was awfully ordered, with the trees planted in rows and the flowers growing in clumps and arranged with an eye to color.

      “I think we’re in somebody’s private forest,” I announced,

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