Hell's Gate

reached up and groped until he found an indentation deep enough to crook fingers in. Painstakingly, he moved up the wall, for once worrying more about speed than quiet.
        When he hooked his fingers over the flat roof of the two story building, the search party that had been following him was directly below. The vacii stood talking with members of the other search party that had been scouring the connecting alleyway. They whined and wheezed and cackled, finally split up again, each continuing down its own corridor. When Salsbury could no longer hear the slapping of their feet and only an occasional screech of their conversation, he risked kicking up over the rest of the wall and rolling onto the roof.
        He stretched out, catching his breath, and looked at the stars which shown so brightly overhead. After a moment, there was a nagging in his mind that something was terribly wrong. In an instant, he saw what it was.
        There were two moons.
        One of them was the size and color of the moon as he had been used to it, the moon of the Earth he had come from. The second, hanging close to it was about half as large and of a shimmering greenish tint much darker than the regular moon. He watched them for a long time, fascinated. This was, of course, an alternate probability and would have differences-like the two moons. That was a strange and somehow delightful difference. But he wondered what the other deviations would be like. Perhaps, even if he escaped the vacii compound, he would find this Earth uninhabitable, a desert, a no-man's-land. Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed it yet.
        When he grew tired of frightening himself, he went across the roof to the far edge and looked at the top of the next building. It was two stories, but it was four feet away. He tensed, jumped the gap easily, landed on his toes to keep from making excessive noise. The rest of the escape was boring. He moved from roof to roof, almost like an automaton. He could not move in a straight line, for not all the buildings were two stories, and he could not leap to the side of a ten story structure and expect to hold on. At last, he reached the end of the complex. Beyond was the wall of a valley, sloping upward, crowded with the dark, looming shapes of pine trees. It looked much like a virgin forest.
        He dropped off the roof, crouched in the shadows beside the building and looked across the twenty feet of bare earth, checking the forest for signs of vacii sentries. It was difficult to see, much of anything against the monolithic pitch of that intense growth, but when he was relatively confident there were no guards, he moved out, crossed the barren space quickly, and moved into the trees, effectively disappearing from sight had any vacii happened to look his way now.
        The deeper he walked into the wood, the surer he was that the forest was a virgin place, relatively unchanged through several thousands of years, certainly untouched by civilization, even this close the compound. The trees were enormous, towering monsters that blocked the sunlight out during the day so that little or nothing grew beneath them. The floor was unlittered, as perfectly kept as a living room carpet Just a few odds and ends of rock to pick his way around, otherwise easy going.
        The land began to rise as the base of the mountain insinuated itself on the gentle hills he had met at first Trying to keep to places where some of the moonlight managed to filter through the heavy blanket of pine needles overhead, he went upward with the land. Once he fell climbing a short rock face and skinned his shin badly. However, the bleeding ceased within moments, and the pain was gone shortly thereafter.
        When he reached the top of the valley wall, he sat down and stared over the trees into the alien complex. The starship was the center of it, and for the first time, Salsbury had some idea of the true size of that piece of machinery. He estimated it at three-hundred feet in width and fifteen-hundred feet long. The remainder of the complex was made up of connecting, various-sized buildings which stretched from valley wall to valley wall and two-thousand feet from both ends of the starship.
        But being able to look down on it did not make him able to feel superior to it.
        He was still seventy-six probability lines away from his own world… Away from Lynda,
        Lynda. He thought about her, about the smooth warmness of her