Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“We saw you,” said Param.

“Didn’t you hear Umbo say that Param turned them invisible?” said Rigg. “When she’s skipping forward through time, not enough light reflects from her, during any one fraction of a second that she exists in, to allow her to be detected by the human eye.”

“We didn’t have any food or water,” said Umbo, “so we skipped through the days till you got here with provisions. It took about fifteen minutes. At a rough guess.”

“So you’re thirsty?” asked Olivenko.

“A little,” said Param, “but we can wait a while longer.”

Rigg looked across the Wall. More than a mile away, Mother’s and Citizen’s soldiers were still waving their bars of metal around. “So you two aren’t really there right now,” he asked.

“Oh, we are,” said Umbo. “We’re still jumping off the rock. We were about halfway down when I popped us back a couple of weeks. That’ll be day after tomorrow, I think.”

“The day after that,” said Param. “Mother apparently wouldn’t let them give up and go away, and I was about at the limits of slow time, so Umbo saved our lives.”

“As she saved mine by disappearing in the first place,” said Umbo. “And as you saved us both by signaling me to bring you back to the present. That was very generous of you. I hope it wasn’t too terrible, passing through the last part of the Wall without any help at all.”

Olivenko shuddered. “It was the worst thing in the world.”

“You passed through part of the Wall unaided in any way?” asked the expendable.

“The last fifty steps or so,” said Olivenko.

“And then they came back and got me,” said Rigg. “I fell and gave up, and they carried me through.”

“Having passed through the Wall,” the expendable asked Loaf and Olivenko, “you returned into it in order to retrieve this boy?”

Olivenko and Loaf answered simultaneously.

“We’re soldiers,” said Loaf.

“He’s our friend,” said Olivenko.

Then they glanced at each other and said, “What he said.” Then they laughed.

“Then all five of you are very remarkable humans, for you have all done, in your own way, what is not possible to do.”

“So you believe us?” asked Param. She sounded a little incredulous.

“While you spoke,” said the expendable, “I have been in communication with the active expendable in your former wallfold. He assures me that you are all capable of doing what you claim to have done.” The expendable pointed to Param. “You can make microleaps into the future.” To Umbo: “You can do the opposite, speeding up the experience of time so that the surrounding timeflow seems to slow down. And you have also apparently learned how to do a limited version of what he can do.”

The expendable pointed to Rigg. “He is the actual time traveler—all past times are present before him, and he can select the timeframe of any living creature and join him in his own time, returning to the ‘present’ time that he most recently occupied.”

Then, to everyone’s surprise, he pointed at Loaf and Olivenko. “Both of you possess, to varying degrees, a powerful natural resistance to the wallfield. Normal human beings cannot endure it. Their volition disappears within a few seconds, and they go mad and lie down and die. They can walk perhaps a dozen steps, but that is all.”

Olivenko and Loaf looked at each other and at the others. Olivenko said, “What are the odds of the two of us having the same—”

As Loaf said, “It must be a pretty common ability—”

“It is a rare ability, but the active expendable in your former wallfold tells me that your field sensitivity attracts you to those who can manipulate fields—like these three. It is not surprising when people with these abilities find each other. Or so says the active expendable in your former—”

“You mean my father,” said Rigg.

“Yes,” said the expendable. “He confirms that he is the expendable that you called Father.”

“But he died.”

“In wallfolds where the expendables continue to pass for human,” said the expendable, “it is necessary for them to pretend to die from time to time, lest people notice that they do not age.”