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O Ye of Little Faith
Niven felt for the rock wall behind him. His fingertips grazed the crumbling rocks. The wall curved.
He prayed that it curved. It had to curve, to go around the bowl in which he was trapped, or he was
dead. That simply: he was dead. The minotaur advanced another few feet, pawing the red-dust earth
with hooves of gold now dulled by a faint dusty crimson patina. The minotaur advanced another few
feet, raking at the red-dust earth with his trident, sending a thin, stinging spray into Niven’s face.
Niven blinked back tears from the dirt.
The creature’s gimlet eyes were as red as the ground it stomped. Head of a bull, gigantic
body of an Atlas, something out of a child’s fable, it stepped carefully toward him, prodding the air
with the blood-encrusted trident.
The minotaur bellowed, a sound of rage almost human but ending as a beast’s groan. The
eyes. The malevolent little red eyes. Red and vengeful; not merely with volcanic hatred, but with
something else...something incredibly ancient, primeval, a rage born of loss and frustration from a
time before men had walked the Earth. A time when the minotaurs and their fellow-myths had ruled
the world. A world where they no longer belonged, a world that did not believe they had ever
existed.
And now, somehow, in some inexplicable fashion, Niven--a man with no particular talents--
had been thrown crosswise and slantwise through universes into a place, a time, a continuum (an
Earth?) where the minotaur still roamed. Where the minotaur could at last have his full revenge on
the creatures that had replaced him. It was the day of reckoning for Homo sapiens.
Niven backed around the bowl, feeling the dirt of the wall crumbling in his fingers as he felt
behind him; in his other hand he brandished the rough-wood club he had found underfoot as he ran
from the beast. He let it droop in his hand a moment, the weight of it difficult to keep at the ready
for very long. The minotaur’s face of frenzy glowed with heat. It leaped. Niven swung the club with
a bunching of muscles that sent him whirling half-around. The minotaur dug the trident deep in the
dirt and ground to a snorting halt, two feet in front of the flat arc swing of the club. Niven spun
around completely, and the club struck the wall and shattered to splinters.
The minotaur’s half-growl, half-snort bore traces of triumphant amusement as it exploded
behind the dark-haired man, and Niven felt sweat come to his back. The impact of the blow against
the wall had sent a tremor through his entire body; his left arm was quite numb. Yet it had saved
him. There was an opening in the wall, an opening in the rock-wall of the deep valley bowl, an
opening he would not have seen backing around the wall. Now there was a scant hope of staying
alive.
As the minotaur gathered itself for a leap that would send its gigantic body plunging into
Niven, the man slipped sidewise, and was inside the mountain.
He turned then, and ran. Behind him the light from that weird place--vaguely blue and light--
mote laden--faded and was abruptly lost as he caromed around a sharp turn in the passage. It was
dark now, pitch absolute dark, and all Niven could see was the scintillance of tiny sparks behind his
eyes. Suddenly he found himself longing to see even that light behind him, that snippet of blue and
cadaverous gray in a sky that had never been roof of any world he had known.
And then he was falling....
Suddenly, and without any sense of having moved, between one step and the next, he
plunged over a lip of stone, and was falling. Down and down, tumbling over and over, and the walls
of moist slippery stone reeled around him, unseen but cold, as he tried to grab some small hold.
His fingertips skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating...for a long
moment...but was lost in the next instant as a gasp that became a shriek was torn from him. He
