Daughter by Philip José Farmer

 

DAUGHTER

A Sequel to MOTHER

By PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories Winter 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

 Philip José Farmer @ Amazon

---

CQ! CQ!

This is Mother Hardhead pulsing.

Keep quiet, all you virgins and Mothers, while I communicate. Listen, listen, all you who are hooked into this broadcast. Listen, and I will tell you how I left my Mother, how my two sisters and I grew our shells, how I dealt with the olfway, and why I have become the Mother with the most prestige, the strongest shell, the most powerful broadcaster and beamer, and the pulser of a new language.

First, before I tell my story, I will reveal to all you who do not know it that my father was a mobile.

Yes, do not be nervequivered. That is a so-story. It is not a not-so-story.

Father was a mobile.

---

Mother pulsed, "Get out!"

Then, to show she meant business, she opened her exit-iris.

That sobered us up and made us realize how serious she was. Before, when she snapped open her iris, she did it so we could practise pulsing at the other young crouched in the doorway to their Mother's wombs, or else send a respectful message to the Mothers themselves, or even a quick one to Grandmother, far away on a mountainside. Not that she received, I think, because we young were too weak to transmit that far. Anyway, Grandmother never acknowledged receipt.

At times, when Mother was annoyed because we would all broadcast at once instead of asking her permission to speak one at a time or because we would crawl up the sides of her womb and then drop off the ceiling onto the floor with a thud, she would pulse at us to get out and build our own shells. She meant it, she said.

Then, according to our mood, we would either settle down or else get more boisterous. Mother would reach out with her tentacles and hold us down and spank us. If that did no good, she would threaten us with the olfway. That did the trick. That is until she used him too many times. After a while, we got so we didn't believe there was an olfway. Mother, we thought, was creating a not-so-story. We should have known better, however, for Mother loathed not-so-stories.

Another thing that quivered her nerves was our conversation with Father in Orsemay. Although he had taught her his language, he refused to teach her Orsemay. When he wanted to send messages to us that he knew she wouldn't approve, he would pulse at us in our private language. That was another thing, I think, that finally made Mother so angry she cast us out despite Father's pleadings that we be allowed to remain four more seasons.

You must understand that we virgins had remained in the womb far longer than we should have. The cause for our overstay was Father.

He was the mobile.

Yes, I know what you're going to reply. All fathers, you will repeat, are mobiles.

But he was father. He was the pulsing mobile.

Yes, he could, too. He could pulse with the best of us. Or maybe he himself couldn't. Not directly. We pulse with organs in our body. But Father, if I understand him correctly, used a creature of some kind which was separate from his body. Or maybe it was an organ that wasn't attached to him.

Anyway, he had no internal organs or pulse-stalks growing from him to pulse with. He used this creature, this r-a-d-i-o, as he called it. And it worked just fine.

When he conversed with Mother, he did so in Motherpulse or in his own language, mobile-pulse. With us he used Orsemay. That's like mobile-pulse, only a little different. Mother never did figure out the difference.

When I finish my story, dearie, I'll teach you Orsemay. I've been beamed that you've enough prestige to join our Highest Hill sorority and thus learn our secret communication.

Mother declared Father had two means of pulsing. Besides his radio, which he used to communicate with us, he could pulse in another and totally different manner. He didn't use dotdeet-ditdashes, either. His pulses needed air to carry them, and he sent them with the same organ he ate with. Boils one's stomach to think of it, doesn't it?

Father was caught while passing by my Mother. She didn't know what mating-lust perfume to send downwind towards him so he would be lured within reach of her tentacles. She had never smelled a mobile like him before. But he did have an odor that was similar to that of another kind of mobile, so she wafted that towards him. It seemed to work, because he came close enough for her to seize him with her extra-uterine tentacles and pop him into her shell.

---

Later, after I was born, Father radioed me—in Orsemay, of course, so Mother wouldn't understand—that he had smelled the perfume and that it, among other things, had attracted him. But the odor had been that of a hairy tree-climbing mobile, and he had wondered what such creatures were doing on a bare hill-top. When he learned to converse with Mother, he was surprised that she had identified him with that mobile.

Ah, well, he pulsed, it is not the first time a female has made a monkey of a man.

He also informed me that he had thought Mother was just an enormous boulder on top of the hill. Not until a section of the supposed rock opened out was he aware of anything out of the ordinary or that the boulder was her shell and held her body within. Mother, he radioed, is something like a dinosaur-sized snail, or jellyfish, equipped with organs that generate radar and radio waves and with an egg-shaped chamber big as the living room of a bungalow, a womb in which she bears and raises her young.

I didn't understand more than half of these terms of course. Nor was Father able to explain them satisfactorily.

He did make me promise not to pulse Mother that he had thought she was just a big lump of mineral. Why, I don't know.

Father puzzled Mother. Though he fought her when she dragged him in, he had no claws or teeth sharp enough to tear her conception-spot. Mother tried to provoke him further, but he refused to react. When she realized that he was a pulse-sending mobile, and released him to study him, he wandered around the womb. After a while he caught on to the fact that Mother was beaming from her womb pulse-stalk. He learned how to talk with her by using his detachable organ, which he termed a panrad. Eventually, he taught her his language, mobile-pulse. When Mother learned that and informed other Mothers about that, her prestige became the highest in all the area. No Mother had ever thought of a new language. The idea stunned them.

Father said he was the only communicating mobile on this world. His s-p-a-c-e-s-h-i-p had crashed, and he would now remain forever with Mother.

Father learned the dinnerpulses when Mother summoned her young playing about her womb. He radioed the proper message. Mother's nerves were quivered by the idea that he was semantic, but she opened her stew-iris and let him eat. Then Father held up fruit or other objects and let Mother beam at him with her wombstalk what the proper dotdit-deetdashes were for each. Then he would repeat on his panrad the name of the object to verify it.

Mother's sense of smell helped her, of course. Sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference between an apple and a peach just by pulsing it. Odors aid you.

She caught on fast. Father told her she was very intelligent—for a female. That quivered her nerves. She wouldn't pulse with him for several mealperiods after that.

---

One thing that Mother especially liked about Father was that when conception-time came, she could direct him what to do. She didn't have to depend on luring a non-semantic mobile into her shell with perfumes and then hold it to her conception-spot while it scratched and bit the spot in its efforts to fight its way from the grip of her tentacles. Father had no claws, but he carried a detachable claw. He named it an s-c-a-l-p-e-l.

When I asked him why he had so many detachable organs, he replied that he was a man of parts.

Father was always talking nonsense.

But he had trouble understanding Mother, too.

Her reproductive processes amazed him.

"By G-o-d," he beamed, "who'd believe it? That a healing process in a wound would result in conception? Just the opposite of cancer."

When we were adolescents and about ready to be shoved out of Mother's shell, we received Mother asking Father to mangle her spot again. Father replied no. He wanted to wait another four seasons. He had said farewell to two broods of his young, and he wanted to keep us around longer so he could give us a real education and enjoy us instead of starting to raise another group of virgins.

This refusal quivered Mother's nerves and upset her stew-stomach so that our food was sour for several meals. But she didn't act against him. He gave her too much prestige. All the Mothers were dropping Motherpulse and learning mobile from Mother as fast as she could teach it.

I asked, "What's prestige?"

"When you send, the others have to receive. And they don't dare pulse back until you're through and you give your permission."

"Oh, I'd like prestige!"

Father interrupted, "Little Hardhead, if you want to get ahead, you tune in to me. I'll tell you a few things even your Mother can't. After all, I'm a mobile, and I've been around."

And he would outline what I had to expect once I left him and Mother and how, if I used my brain, I could survive and eventually get more prestige than even Grandmother had.

Why he called me Hardhead, I don't know. I was still a virgin and had not, of course, grown a shell. I was as soft-bodied as any of my sisters. But he told me he was f-o-n-d of me because I was so hard-headed. I accepted the statement without trying to grasp it.

Anyway, we got eight extra seasons in Mother because Father wanted it that way. We might have gotten some more, but when winter came again, Mother insisted Father mangle her spot. He replied he wasn't ready. He was just beginning to get acquainted with his children—he called us Sluggos—and, after we left, he'd have nobody but Mother to talk to until the next brood grew up.

Moreover, she was starting to repeat herself and he didn't think she appreciated him like she should. Her stew was too often soured or else so over-boiled that the meat was shredded into a neargoo.

That was enough for Mother.

"Get out!" she pulsed.

"Fine! And don't think you're throwing me out in the cold, either!" zztd back Father. "Yours is not the only shell in this world."

That made Mother's nerves quiver until her whole body shook. She put up her big outside stalk and beamed her sisters and aunts. The Mother across the valley confessed that, during one of the times Father had basked in the warmth of the s-u-n while lying just outside Mother's opened iris, she had asked him to come live with her.

Mother changed her mind. She realized that, with him gone, her prestige would die and that of the hussy across the valley would grow.

"Seems as if I'm here for the duration," radioed Father.

Then, "Whoever would think your Mother'd be j-e-a-l-o-u-s?"

Life with Father was full of those incomprehensible semantic groups. Too often he would not, or could not, explain.

For a long time Father brooded in one spot. He wouldn't answer us or Mother.

Finally, she became overquivered. We had grown so big and boisterous and sassy that she was one continual shudder. And she must have thought that as long as we were around to communicate with him, she had no chance to get him to rip up her spot.

So, out we went.

Before we passed forever from her shell, she warned, "Beware the olfway."

---

My sisters ignored her, but I was impressed. Father had described the beast and its terrible ways. Indeed, he used to dwell so much on it that we young, and Mother, had dropped the old term for it and used Father's. It began when he reprimanded her for threatening us too often with the beast when we misbehaved.

"Don't 'cry wolf.'"

He then beamed me the story of the origin of that puzzling phrase. He did it in Orsemay, of course, because Mother would lash him with her tentacles if she thought he was pulsing something that was not-so. The very idea of not-so strained her brain until she couldn't think straight.

I wasn't sure myself what not-so was, but I enjoyed his stories. And I, like the other virgins and Mother herself, began terming the killer "the olfway."

Anyway, after I'd beamed, "Good sending, Mother," I felt Father's strange stiff mobile-tentacles around me and something wet and warm falling from him onto me. He pulsed, "Good l-u-c-k, Hardhead. Send me a message via hook-up sometimes. And be sure to remember what I told you about dealing with the olfway."

I pulsed that I would. I left with the most indescribable feeling inside me. It was a nervequivering that was both good and bad, if you can imagine such a thing, dearie.

But I soon forgot it in the adventure of rolling down a hill, climbing slowly up the next one on my single foot, rolling down the other side, and so on. After about ten warm-periods, all my sisters but two had left me. They found hilltops on which to build their shells. But my two faithful sisters had listened to my ideas about how we should not be content with anything less than the highest hilltops.

"Once you've grown a shell, you stay where you are."

So they agreed to follow me.

But I led them a long, long ways, and they would complain that they were tired and sore and getting afraid of running into some meat-eating mobile. They even wanted to move into the empty shells of Mothers who had been eaten by the olfway or died when cancer, instead of young, developed in the conception-spots.

"Come on," I urged. "There's no prestige in moving into empties. Do you want to take bottom place in every community-pulsing just because you're too lazy to build your own covers?"

"But we'll resorb the empties and then grow our own later on."

"Yes? How many Mothers have declared that? And how many have done it? Come on, Sluggos."

We kept getting into higher country. Finally, I scanned the set-up I was searching for. It was a small, flat-topped mountain with many hills around it. I crept up it. When I was on top, I test-beamed. Its summit was higher than any of the eminences for as far as I could reach. And I guessed that when I became adult and had much more power, I would be able to cover a tremendous area. Meanwhile, other virgins would sooner or later be moving in and occupying the lesser hills.

As Father would have expressed it, I was on top of the world.

---

It happened that my little mountain was rich. The search-tendrils I grew and then sunk into the soil found many varieties of minerals. I could build from them a huge shell. The bigger the shell, the larger the Mother. The larger the Mother, the more powerful the pulse.

Moreover, I detected many large flying mobiles. Eagles, Father termed them. They would make good mates. They had sharp beaks and tearing talons.

Below, in a valley, was a stream. I grew a hollow-tendril under the soil and down the mountainside until it entered the water. Then I began pumping it up to fill my stomachs.

The valley soil was good. I did what no other of our kind had ever done, what Father had taught me. My far-groping tendrils picked up seeds dropped by trees or flowers or birds and planted them. I spread an underground net of tendrils around an apple tree. But I didn't plan on passing the tree's fallen fruit from tendril-frond to frond and so on up the slope and into my irises. I had a different destination in mind for them.

Meanwhile, my sisters had topped two hills much lower than mine. When I found out what they were doing, my nerves quivered. Both had built shells! One was glass; the other, cellulose!

"What do you think you're doing? Aren't you afraid of the olfway?"

"Pulse away, old grouch. Nothing's the matter with us. We're just ready for winter and mating-heat, that's all. We'll be Mothers, then, and you'll still be growing your big old shell. Where'll your prestige be? The others won't even pulse with you 'cause you'll still be a virgin and a half-shelled one at that!"

"Brittlehead! Woodenhead!"

"Yah! Yah! Hardhead!"

They were right—in a way. I was still soft and naked and helpless, an evergrowing mass of quivering flesh, a ready prey to any meat-eating mobile that found me. I was a fool and a gambler. Nevertheless, I took my leisure and sunk my tendrils and located ore and sucked up iron in suspension and built an inner shell larger, I think, than Grandmother's. Then I laid a thick sheath of copper over that, so the iron wouldn't rust. Over that I grew a layer of bone made out of calcium I'd extracted from the rocks thereabouts. Nor did I bother, as my sisters had done, to resorb my virgin's stalk and grow an adult one. That could come later.

Just as fall was going out, I finished my shells. Body-changing and growing began. I ate from my crops, and I had much meat, too, because I'd put up little cellulose latticework shells in the valley and raised many mobiles from the young that my far-groping tendrils had plucked from their nests.

I planned my structure with an end in mind. I grew my stomach much broader and deeper than usual. It was not that I was overly hungry. It was for a purpose, which I shall transmit to you later, dearie.

My stew-stomach was also much closer to the top of my shell than it is in most of us. In fact, I intentionally shifted my brain from the top to one side and raised the stomach in its place. Father had informed me I should take advantage of my ability to partially direct the location of my adult organs. It took me time, but I did it just before winter came.

Cold weather arrived.

And the olfway.

---

He came as he always does, his long nose with its retractible antennae sniffing out the minute encrustations of pure minerals that we virgins leave on our trails. The olfway follows his nose to wherever it will take him. This time it led him to my sister who had built her shell of glass. I had suspected she would be the first to be contacted by an olfway. In fact, that was one of the reasons I had chosen a hill-top further down the line. The olfway always takes the closest shell.

When sister Glasshead detected the terrible mobile, she sent out wild pulse after pulse.

"What will I do? Do? Do?"

"Sit tight, sister, and hope."

Such advice was like feeding on cold stew, but it was the best, and the only, that I could give. I did not remind her that she should have followed my example, built a triple shell, and not been so eager to have a good time by gossiping with others.

The olfway prowled about, tried to dig underneath her base, which was on solid rock, and failed. He did manage to knock off a chunk of glass as a sample. Ordinarily, he would then have swallowed the sample and gone off to pupate. That would have given my sister a season of rest before he returned to attack. In the meanwhile, she might have built another coating of some other material and frustrated the monster for another season.

It just so happened that that particular olfway had, unfortunately for sister, made his last meal on a Mother whose covering had also been of glass. He retained his special organs for dealing with such mixtures of silicates. One of them was a huge and hard ball of some material on the end of his very long tail. Another was an acid for weakening the glass. After he had dripped that over a certain area, he battered her shell with the ball. Not long before the first snowfall he broke through her shield and got to her flesh.

Her wildly alternating beams and broadcasts of panic and terror still bounce around in my nerves when I think of them. Yet, I must admit my reaction was tinged with contempt. I do not think she had even taken the trouble to put boron oxide instead of silicon in her glass. If she had, she might....

What's that? How dare you interrupt?... Oh, very well, I accept your humble apologies. Don't let it happen again, dearie. As for what you wanted to know, I'll describe later the substances that Father termed silicates and boron oxides and such. After my story is done.

To continue, the killer, after finishing Glasshead off, followed his nose along her trail back down the hill to the junction. There he had his choice of my other sister's or of mine. He decided on hers. Again he went through his pattern of trying to dig under her, crawling over her, biting off her pulse-stalks, and then chewing a sample of shell.

Snow fell hard. He crept off, sluggishly scooped a hole, and crawled in for the winter.

Sister Woodenhead grew another stalk. She exulted, "He found my shell too thick! He'll never get me!"

Ah, sister, if only you had received from Father and not spent so much time playing with the other Sluggos. Then you would have remembered what he taught. You would have known that an olfway, like us, is different from most creatures. The majority of beings have functions that depend upon their structures. But the olfway, that nasty creature, has a structure that depends upon his functions.

I did not quiver her nerves by telling her that, now that he had secreted a sample of her cellulose-shell in his body, he was pupating around it. Father had informed me that some arthropods follow a life-stage that goes from egg to larva to pupa to adult. When a caterpillar pupates in its cocoon, for instance, practically its whole body dissolves, its tissues disintegrate. Then something reforms the pulpy whole into a structurally new creature with new functions, the butterfly.

The butterfly, however, never repupates. The olfway does. He parts company with his fellow arthropods in this peculiar ability. Thus, when he tackles a Mother, he chews off a tiny bit of the shell and goes to sleep with it. During a whole season, crouched in his den, he dreams around the sample—or his body does. His tissues melt and then coalesce. Only his nervous system remains intact, thus preserving the memory of his identity and what he has to do when he emerges from his hole.

So it happened. The olfway came out of his hole, nested on top of sister Woodenhead's dome, and inserted a modified ovipositor into the hole left by again biting off her stalk. I could more or less follow his plan of attack, because the winds quite often blew my way, and I could sniff the chemicals he was dripping.

He pulped the cellulose with a solution of something or other, soaked it in some caustic stuff, and then poured on an evil-smelling fluid that boiled and bubbled. After that had ceased its violent action, he washed some more caustic on the enlarging depression and finished by blowing out the viscous solution through a tube. He repeated the process many times.

Though my sister, I suppose, desperately grew more cellulose, she was not fast enough. Relentlessly, the olfway widened the hole. When it was large enough, he slipped inside.

End of sister....

---

The whole affair of the olfway was lengthy. I was busy, and I gained time by something I had made even before I erected my dome. This was the false trail of encrustations that I had laid, one of the very things my sisters had mocked. They did not understand what I was doing when I then back-tracked, a process which took me several days, and concealed with dirt my real track. But if they had lived, they would have comprehended. For the olfway turned off the genuine trail to my summit and followed the false.

Naturally, it led him to the edge of a cliff. Before he could check his swift pace, he fell off.

Somehow, he escaped serious injury and scrambled back up to the spurious path. Reversing, he found and dug up the cover over the actual tracks.

That counterfeit path was a good trick, one my Father taught me. Too bad it hadn't worked, for the monster came straight up the mountain, heading for me, his antennae plowing up the loose dirt and branches which covered my encrustations.

However, I wasn't through. Long before he showed up I had collected a number of large rocks and cemented them into one large boulder. The boulder itself was poised on the edge of the summit. Around its middle I had deposited a ring of iron, grooved to fit a rail of the same mineral. This rail led from the boulder to a point halfway down the slope. Thus, when the mobile had reached that ridge of iron and was following it up the slope, I removed with my tentacles the little rocks that kept the boulder from toppling over the edge of the summit.

---

My weapon rolled down its track with terrific speed. I'm sure it would have crushed the olfway if he had not felt the rail vibrating with his nose. He sprawled aside. The boulder rushed by, just missing him.

Though disappointed, I did get another idea to deal with future olfways. If I deposited two rails halfway down the slope, one on each side of the main line, and sent three boulders down at the same time, the monster could leap aside from the center, either way, and still get it on the nose!

He must have been frightened, for I didn't pip him for five warm-periods after that. Then he came back up the rail, not, as I had expected, up the opposite if much steeper side of the mountain. He was stupid, all right.

I want to pause here and explain that the boulder was my idea, not Father's. Yet I must add that it was Father, not Mother, who started me thinking original thoughts. I know it quivers all your nerves to think that a mere mobile, good for nothing but food and mating, could not only be semantic but could have a higher degree of semanticism.

I don't insist he had a higher quality. I think it was different, and that I got some of that difference from him.

To continue, there was nothing I could do while the olfway prowled about and sampled my shell. Nothing except hope. And hope, as I found out, isn't enough. The mobile bit off a piece of my shell's outer bone covering. I thought he'd be satisfied, and that, when he returned after pupating, he'd find the second sheath of copper. That would delay him until another season. Then he'd find the iron and have to retire again. By then it would be winter, and he'd be forced to hibernate or else he would be so frustrated he'd give up and go searching for easier prey.

 

I didn't know that an olfway never gives up and is very thorough. He spent days digging around my base and uncovered a place where I'd been careless in sheathing. All three elements of the shell could be detected. I knew the weak spot existed, but I hadn't thought he'd go that deep.

---

Away went the killer to pupate. When summer came, he crawled out of his hole. Before attacking me, however, he ate up my crops, upset my cage-shells and devoured the mobiles therein, dug up my tendrils and ate them, and broke off my waterpipe.

But when he picked all the apples off my tree and consumed them, my nerves tingled. The summer before I had transported, via my network of underground tendrils, an amount of a certain poisonous mineral to the tree. In so doing I killed the tendrils that did the work, but I succeeded in feeding to the roots minute amounts of the stuff—selenium, Father termed it, I think. I grew more tendrils and carried more poison to the tree. Eventually, the plant was full of the potion, yet I had fed it so slowly that it had built up a kind of immunity. A kind of, I say, because it was actually a rather sickly tree.

I must admit I got the idea from one of Father's not-so stories, tapped out in Orsemay so Mother wouldn't be vexed. It was about a mobile—a female, Father claimed, though I find the concept of a female mobile too nervequivering to dwell on—a mobile who was put into a long sleep by a poisoned apple.

The olfway seemed not to have heard of the story. All he did was retch. After he had recovered, he crawled up and perched on top of my dome. He broke off my big pulse-stalk and inserted his ovipositor in the hole and began dripping acid.

I was frightened, true, for as you all know, there is nothing more panic-striking than being deprived of pulsing and not knowing at all what is going on in the world outside your shell. But, at the same time, his actions were what I had expected and planned on. So I tried to suppress my nervequiverings. After all, I knew the olfway would work on that spot. It was for that very reason that I had shifted my brain to one side and jacked up my oversize stomach closer to the top of my dome.

My sisters had scoffed because I'd taken so much trouble with my organs. They'd been satisfied with the normal procedure of growing into Mother-size. While I was still waiting for the water pumped up from the stream to fill my sac, my sisters had long before heated theirs and were eating nice warm stew. Meanwhile, I was consuming much fruit and uncooked meat, which sometimes made me sick. However, the rejected stuff was good for the crops, so I didn't altogether suffer a loss.

As you know, once the stomach is full of water and well walled up, our body heat warms the fluid. As there is no leakage of heat except when we iris meat and vegetables in or out, the water comes to the boiling point.

Well, to pulse on with the story, when the mobile had scaled away the bone and copper and iron with his acids and made a hole large enough for his body, he dropped in for dinner.

I suppose he anticipated the usual helpless Mother or virgin, nerves numbed and waiting to be eaten.

If he did, his own nerves must have quivered. There was an iris on the upper part of my stomach, and it had been grown with the dimensions of a certain carnivorous mobile in mind.

But there was a period when I thought I hadn't fashioned the opening large enough. I had him half through, but I couldn't get his hindquarters past the lips. He was wedged in tight and clawing my flesh away in great gobbets. I was in such pain I shook my body back and forth and, I believe, actually rocked my shell on its base. Yet, despite my jerking nerves, I strained and struggled and gulped hard, oh, so hard. And, finally, just when I was on the verge of vomiting him back up the hole through which he had come, which would have been the end of me, I gave a tremendous convulsive gulp and popped him in.

My iris closed. Nor, much as he bit and poured out searing acids, would I open it again. I was determined that I was going to keep this meat in my stew, the biggest piece any Mother had ever had.

Oh, he fought. But not for long. The boiling water pushed into his open mouth and drenched his breathing-sacs. He couldn't take a sample of that hot fluid and then crawl off to pupate around it.

He was through—and he was delicious.

Yes, I know that I am to be congratulated and that this information for dealing with the monster must be broadcast to every one of us everywhere. But don't forget to pulse that a mobile was partly responsible for the victory over our ancient enemy. It may quiver your nerves to admit it, but he was.

Where did I get the idea of putting my stew-sac just below the hole the olfway always makes in the top of our shells? Well, it was like so many I had. It came from one of Father's not-so stories, told in Orsemay. I'll pulse it sometime when I'm not so busy. After you, dearie, have learned our secret language.

I'll start your lessons now. First....

What's that? You're quivering with curiosity? Oh, very well, I'll give you some idea of the not-so story, then I'll continue my lessons with this neophyte.

It's about eethay olfway and eethay eethray ittlelay igspay.

Philip José Farmer @ Amazon

The Land Where Time Stood Still by Arthur Leo Zagat

 

Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1936

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The Land Where Time Stood Still

by

Arthur Leo Zagat

 First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug 1936

---

• Chapter I. Into Nothingness
• Chapter II. Trapped by Flame
• Chapter III. Lair of the Future-men
• Chapter IV. The Siege of the Primitives
• Chapter V. The Primitives Take the Crater
• Chapter VI. Through the Eddy

---

 

---

I. — INTO NOTHINGNESS

IT was, perhaps, the almost unbelievable antiquity of Silbury Hill that oppressed Ronald Stratton with a queasy premonition of disaster. He thought again of the old legend: that anyone entering the stone rings on top of Silbury Hill between dusk and dawn vanished, leaving no trace. The thought lingered.

The twilight silence, the low-lying layer of ground mist veiling his footing, the chill of evening damp striking into his very bones, combined to trouble the young American with sinister unreality. Something of that feeling had been with him all during the journey through England's South Country; had troubled him as he stood on Salisbury Plain where, twenty years before, had drilled the father he had never known, proud in the uniform of his ancestral land.

Tall and clean-limbed and lithe the American volunteer must have been then, bronze-skinned and frank-eyed as his son now was who retraced in a nostalgic memorial tour the route of his hero father's last voyage. Silbury was part of that sentimental pilgrimage—

Ron Stratton suddenly stumbled, sprawling into a grass-hidden ditch. He rolled, caught at whipping tendrils of a bush, pulled himself to his feet. He took a step forward—into the wrenching, frantic instant of sheer nothingness!

It was as if he had walked over the brink of a sheer precipice, save that, though a bottomless abyss yawned fearfully beneath him, he oddly knew no sensation of falling. The world, the universe had simply vanished from beneath him.

His foot came down on solid ground. Stratton pulled in a gasping, choked breath between his teeth. He'd never before experienced anything like that moment of terrific giddiness, of deathlike vertigo. Queer. The light seemed to have grown stronger. It filtered through the trees with a reddish grow somehow eerie?

The trees! How had he come into this forest? There hadn't been any trees at all, a moment ago! Was he dreaming?

Something scampered through the brush behind Stratton, and he whirled to the sound. A brown beastlet popped into sight between two rugged boles, a perfectly formed horse not knee-high to the man. Great, limpid eyes were startled in the miniature head—and then the creature had spun around and vanished.

RONALD STRATTON stared at the spot where it had been. He managed to get himself moving, managed to get to where he could look down upon the hoof-prints. The tracks were unmistakable. Three-toed, those were the traces of an Eohippus, of that forgotten ancestor of the horse extinct before man's first anthropoid progenitor learned to swing along arboreal highways by four clutching paws and a prehensile tail.

Stratton's scalp made a tight cap for his skull. His hands were out in a peculiar, thrusting gesture, as though he were trying to push away some dreadful thing that was closing in upon, him. What had happened to him? Where was he?

A scream sliced the forest stillness, a woman's scream, high and shrill and compact with terror. Stratton's head jerked up to it, to the swift threshing of someone running through the thicket. Something white flicked among the trees, took shape in the form of a running girl. Long blond braids streamed behind her, and her face was as white as the white robe fluttering about her slim form. Her fear-dilated eyes saw him as she went past. "Help me, I prithee," she screamed; and her archaic appeal was blotted out by a horrid, bestial roar blasting from leaf-veiled aisles whence she came, by the thunder of a far heavier body pursuing her.

The underbrush tossed in the grip of a whirling tornado, parted to the plunge of a huge, hairy creature who ran half-crouched and bellowing.

The American leaped for the monster, flailed frantic fists at a brutal, leathery visage. His blows pounded against rock-hard bone, pitifully ineffectual. Something struck him, catapulted him backward. For the first time he saw clearly the thing he had attacked, and amazement seared through him.

It—it wasn't a gorilla, despite the stiff black hair covering its big-thewed haunches, despite its chinless, flat-nosed, beetling-browed countenance. A ragged pelt was slung about its waist. It clutched a wooden-handled, flint-headed axe in one spatulate-fingered hand; and in its lurid, beady eyes there was a groping, grotesque sort of intelligence not quite bestial. It was a man, a man from out the dawn of time. A Neanderthal man, whose like had vanished from the earth countless eons ago.

The ape-man's black, thick lips snarled back from yellow fangs. His neckless throat pulsated, vented a nerve-shattering, insensate roar. Threat was fierce in that horrid ululation, but underlying the menace a singular note of inquiry seemed to signal a bewilderment in the creature's small brain as great as Stratton's own. That was what had checked its charge, what held it now, momentarily hesitant.

In that instant of reprieve Stratton heard the bush rustle behind him, felt a twitch at his right hand. His fingers closed on something hard that fitted into his palm.

"Mayhap this dagger will aid thee against the ogre," a whisper came to him. "This blade, and my prayers."

THE aborigine's bellow blasted again. He sprang, catapulted down upon Stratton, his flint axe arcing before him.

The youth's frantic side-spring saved his skull, but the Stone Age weapon hit his left shoulder, numbing it. Stratton struck out blindly with the dagger, felt its point strike flesh and sink sickeningly into it. Then the hairy body of his antagonist bore him down. He thudded appallingly to the ground.

Harsh hands clamped his throat, cut off breath. His lungs labored, tortured by lack of air. Blood roared in his ears, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

And suddenly air pulled in between Stratton's teeth as the strangling hold on his throat relaxed. The insupportable mass crushing him was abruptly flaccid, lifeless. Fiery stabs cut Stratton's chest as he gasped in saving breaths. Instinctively he heaved off from himself the anthropoid's limp mass.

"Marry! Thou hast slain him with a single thrust of the poniard!" The girl's voice was thrilled, applauding. "See how his black blood doth flow!"

His vision cleared. The girl stood above him, briar-tears gashing her robe to reveal tantalizing glimpses of lissome curves. Her blue eyes danced with excitement in a face small-featured, red-lipped, somehow pagan in the upthrust of high cheekbones, in the blunt modeling of its tiny chin. Even in that moment Stratton's heart skipped a beat at the elfin beauty of that countenance.

"I wouldn't have had it to thrust if it wasn't for you," he grunted, struggling erect. "You've got a lot of sand, young lady."

She looked puzzled. "Sand? Prithee, what meanest thou?"

"That's American slang for courage." Why was she talking in that confoundedly queer lingo? Even if she was dressed up for a masquerade, what had happened here should have shaken her out of it.

The girl shrugged. "Nay, but thy speech groweth ever more strange. And thy garb, too, is passing queer." She gazed about her, her pupils widened with sudden fright. "What—what land is this, what forest?" she cried out.

His own bemusement swept back on Stratton. "I—I don't know," he faltered. "I was hoping you'd tell me that."

She stepped backward in awe. "By the Holy Rood, 'tis an enchantment some sorcerer hath cast upon us! Look you. But a moment hence I hurried with milady's message to her lover that Sir Aglavaine hath returned betimes from Arthur's court. Seeking to hasten back so that I might bend knee at vesper orisons, I dared cross the ancient mound that riseth betwixt the castle and Avebury Town. As I attained its crest some strange malaise o'ercame me; and then, and then—"

"Yes," Ron Stratton prompted. "What happened?"

"And then there were these trees about me and the fearsome face of yon ogre peered at me from among them. I fled. He pursued. I came upon thee and—and the rest thou knowest."

Stratton shook his head violently, as though to jar his brain into functioning. "Wait a minute. What's all this you're saying about Sir Aglavaine, Arthur's court, a castle? Are you kidding me?"

She looked at him dumbly, as though she did not understand. "Kidding?"

"All right. Skip it. I'm having trouble understanding you, too. What year do you think this is?"

"What year?" She backed farther, warily, as though she were about to dash away. "Forsooth, hath bemusement clouded thy accompt of time? 'Tis five hundred and a score years since Our Lord was born in Bethlehem."

LITTLE chill prickles scampered along Stratton's spine. She believed it! She believed that she was telling the truth. But—

His eyes slitted as his gaze left her, to shift from the corpse of the Neanderthal man to the tracks of the Eohippus, and back to this girl, who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Malory's Mort d'Arthur, if his memory of paleontology did not fail him, at least a million years ranged between the tiny horse and himself. It was possible that the animal and the beast-man were survivals, by some inconceivable quirk of fate, from the misty ages in which they belonged. They couldn't tell him. But she could. She had. She told him that the present was to her A. D. 520. To him it was 1936. That meant—What did it mean?

"Everything's mixed up here," he groaned. "Time's all mixed up. It's as if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling through Time. As if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel's axis where all the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that doesn't move at all through Time, because it is the center. Where there is no Time. Where the past and the present and the future are all one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands still."

---

II. — TRAPPED BY FLAME

THE girl's lambent eyes flicked about, returned to him, "Marry," she sighed. "An' it doth appear to have been of no avail."

Ronald Stratton started. "What was of no avail?"

"The spell thou hast essayed. See, the woods still cluster around us, and Silbury Hill hath not reappeared."

In spite of his perturbation the youth grinned. "I don't blame you for thinking it some incantation. It sounds pretty goofy to me. Looks like we're going to be together for quite a while, so maybe we'd better get acquainted. What's your name?"

"I am called Elaise." She dipped in a graceful curtsey. "Tirewoman I am to Milady Melisante, spouse to Sir Aglavaine of Silbury Keep."

"I'm Ronald Stratton—Ronny to my friends."

"Ronny. It falleth trippingly from the tongue. Ronny."

"Sounds swell when you say it. Strikes me we'd better try to find some way out of here. I'm not hankering to spend the night in these woods. Might be damned unhealthy, judging from what we've seen here already."

"Whither thou goest I follow, Squire Ronny." She said it demurely, but he could have sworn there was a glint of amusement in the blue eyes over which her luxuriant lashes drooped. "Having saved my life from the ogre it is forfeit to thee. All I have and am is thine to command."

"The hell you say!" Stratton muttered. "Come on then." Was the minx laughing at him?

"Perchance thou mayst have need of this, Ronny," he heard her say behind him. He threw a glance backward over his shoulder, saw her tugging the dagger from the ape-man's breast, She got it out, started after him, wiping the blood from its blade with a handful of leaves. He shuddered at her callousness. Then he recalled the brawling, ribald, tempestuous age from which she came. Handling a gory dagger then was no more than cleaning a muddy tennis ball to the girl of now?

Then—Now. Those terms no longer had any meaning. The concepts of a dead past, a living present, a future yet unborn—all were false, utterly false. All Time exists simultaneously, in the same manner that all space exists simultaneously. Minutes, hours, years, centuries are merely measurements of location in terms of time; just as yards, miles, light-years are measurements of location in terms of space.

Space-time, time-space—the terms of the mathematical physicists, their theories that had seemed to Ronny Stratton's realistic mind so much fairy-tale nonsense, had suddenly become breathing truths. If he had only paid more attention to them, tried to understand them! Didn't Einstein talk about ether-warps, about eddies in the flux of space and time? Was there such an eddy on Silbury Hill, through which he had slipped into some alien dimension? Did the ancient Druids know it; was that why they had selected the spot for their savage rituals? Had they erected those monstrous circles to warn their charges from the very fate that had overtaken Elaise and himself?

"RONNY! Ronny!" The girl's cry recalled Stratton to awareness of his surroundings. "What enchanted domain is this?"

They were at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the plateau it covered. Ten feet from where they stood, the terrain dropped away in a precipitous, headlong descent.

Sheer down for a thousand feet the high cliff fell, and far below a great plain spread mile after mile to a vague and murky horizon, a limitless expanse of tumbled, grotesque rock. Queerly angular, strangely distorted, the tortured stone soared in needle-like spires toward the lurid sky, or lay strewn in the fractured fragments of some gigantic cataclysm; piled here in gigantic mounds, there flattened to jagged fields.

Nowhere in that far-flung tumulus was there any sign of verdure, nowhere the glint of water; the hint of human habitation. But it was not alone the infinite desolation of that vast vista that gave it the eerie, ominous cast of a nightmare landscape. Color ran riot there. Violent greens warred with oranges virulent as the venom of the cobra. Fiery scarlet streamed shrieking between the yellow of a finch's breast and blue cold as Polar ice.

"Ronny!" Elaise had shrunk against him. Stratton was abruptly conscious of the quivering warmth of her body against his, of the fragrance of her hair in his nostrils. "See there. What manner of beings are those that dwell in this outland of hell?" His arm went around her, drawing her closer still, but his gaze followed the gesture of her shaking hand. There was movement, just below. He saw them?

Apparently they had come out of some cavern in the face of the very cliff on whose brink he stood, and they were half walking, half crawling, as though seeking to take advantage of every bit of shelter the broken ground offered. Dwarfed though they were by the great height, Stratton could yet sense in their poses an odd combination of fear and aggressiveness. They were both hunter and hunted. They were stalking some as yet unseen enemy, dreading him and yet determined to attack him.

The American was by this time beyond astonishment, yet a chill prickle crawled his spine as he gazed down on the curious file. Their leader was a Roman centurion, the short skirt of his peplum swishing against swart thighs, breast and back protected by burnished armor, small round shield on one arm, stubby sword in the other.

He was followed by a squat, half-naked individual whose long blond hair and yellow, walrus mustachios set him off as one of the Britons whom Caesar's legions conquered. Behind came a gigantic, steel-capped Viking with strung draw-bow, then a hairy aborigine... Had the eddy on Silbury Hill plucked from out of the dead years, one of each race of England's long history to make up that small company? Jute, Pict, Saxon, they were all there, bound together with their common trait of cruel savagery!

THE shadow of a cloud drifted across the great plain. The Roman saw it, crouched suddenly low behind an emerald rock. The others dropped prone. Stratton was aware of a whirring sound. A flash of light darted across the field of his vision. The Briton—vanished!

Where he had lain was a small pit in the rock, its edges glowing red-hot!

The faint sound of a barked order came up to Stratton. The men he watched sprang up, dashed helter-skelter for the shelter of the cliff whence they came. Before they passed from sight two others had whiffed into nothingness with the appalling spontaneity of the first. The whirring was louder, seemed to beat all about the watchers on the cliff with some indescribable threat. Something was in the air, level with Stratton, an egg-shaped metallic object suspended there without visible support. It flashed on him that this was the source of the spark that he had seen smash three humans into nothingness. Elaise whimpered, watching the wingless flyer hover and then it was darting straight toward them!

Terror fanged the youth. His muscles exploded to throw him backward into the obscurity of the forest, carrying Elaise with him. His heel caught on a gnarled root and he sprawled, the girl on top of him. The whirring filled the forest with its menace. Stratton scrambled to his feet, jerked the girl erect. Side by side the two ran through the thicket, blindly, fear lending them wings, the fear of a terrible unknown from which they must escape. They plunged into a clearing.

A tree flared into flame, ahead of them. "This way," Stratton grunted, twisting to the right. Another forest giant was a column of fire, barring their passage. Behind, a third flamed.

"Oh-h-h," Elaise gasped. "The fiend ringeth us around with the flame of his breath. We are doomed."

They were surrounded by a roaring, torrid blaze. Heat beat in upon them, unendurable heat of an oven. Tongues of flame lapped toward them through the brush. They could not escape.

Stratton clutched the girl to him. "We're licked," he murmured. "We're licked, honey, before we start."

Her heart beat against his chest, her arms were around his neck. "We die, my Ronny," she cried. "But we die together."

"Together." What was there in the blue eyes looking up into his that quenched the despair surging in his blood, that sent a thrill of ecstasy through him? What did these red and luscious lips demand? "Together!" Stratton's own lips found her avid mouth, clung. It was almost pleasant—to—die—like this.

"Curious," a dry, shrill voice squeaked. "Curious indeed."

CHARRED, leafless trunks surrounded them, but the fire was gone. The ovoid flying-machine rested in the clearing, and a man stood before a black opening in its sleek side. "I must note the reaction," he continued, "really, I must note it at once." This must be a native, Stratton thought. Surely there was never anyone on earth like him. His bulbous head, with fish-belly-white scalp utterly hairless, accounted for a full half of his height. The rest—his shrunken body, clothed in some tight, iridescent fabric of spun metal; his spidery legs—seemed too fragile to support that great mass. Eyes large as small saucers stared unblinkingly out from under a bulging, immense forehead. His nostrils were gaping tunnels, his ears huge, flapping appendages, but his mouth was a tiny, toothless orifice. He was like some surrealist's caricature, like the spawn of some evil dream...

"No," the monstrosity squealed. "You are wrong. I am Flaton, an Earthman like yourself. Some forty centuries of evolution make the differences between us."

What the hell! The fellow had answered him. But he hadn't spoken! Stratton was sure he hadn't spoken!

"You need not have," the response came. "I know what you are thinking as well as you do yourself. Nor am I talking to you, in your sense of the word. What you think you hear is the projection of my thoughts into your brain. Evidently in your period, telepathy had not yet replaced oral communication.—What was that period?"

"Nineteen thirty—" Stratton started to say. He did not need to finish.

"The twentieth century, in your reckoning!" The American felt a reaction of pleased triumph from his interrogator! "What luck! Wait till Gershon sees you. The fool insists the Fifth Glacier was down as far as the Fiftieth parallel, and life there extinct, by the beginning of the eighteenth. When I produce you he will have to admit that I was right in setting the beginning of the last Ice Age much later... And this other is a female." His unfathomable gaze shifted to Elaise, and he fell silent. No! Evidently his eerie method of communication was focused by the direction in which he looked, for the girl was curtseying. "Five hundred and a score years since Our Lord's birth, master," she quavered. "An it please thee."

Another moment of silence, then she was speaking again. "I am hight Elaise, and this squire Ronny." It was like listening in on one side of a telephone conversation. She could not, of course, understand that she was not really hearing Flaton's questions. Stratton himself could not actually comprehend how it was accomplished, though, child of the Radio Age as he was, there was no magic in it for him. Were his thoughts exposed to the man of the future, he wondered, while the fellow's eyes were not on him? It might be important to know?

Looking carefully at the odd craft that had brought Flaton here, he thought: "Maybe he's more developed than I, but he's weaker. Physical development has been sacrificed to mental. I can break him in half with my fist. I'm going to try it. Now!"

Nothing happened. In the youth's wrists a pulse throbbed. There was limit, then, to Flaton's powers.

Elaise screamed. "No," she shrilled. "No! Thou canst not do that to me! The Virgin Mary forfend—"

STRATTON whirled to her. She was rigid, statuesque with terror. Her dilated eyes were fastened on Flaton's imperturbable countenance, but the fellow hadn't touched her, hadn't approached her.

"What is it, Elaise? What's scared you?"

She was shuddering within the protecting circle of his arms. "Didst not hear? Art thou once more bewitched?"

A cold chuckle within Stratton's skull was the echo of Flaton's cynical amusement. "Mankind no longer is divided into male and female, so I informed her that we should have to dissect her to confirm our records. Her reaction is curious?"

"You devil!" Stratton shouted, and leaped for him. Started to leap, abruptly he was without power to move, as his every nerve, his every cell, was shredded by unutterable anguish. Through a dancing haze of pain he saw a small, black cylinder in one of Flaton's tentacular hands, saw a peculiar green nimbus haloing the end that was pointed at him.

"Fool," the future-man's thought battered at his understanding. "If you were not the sole specimen of your era we have found here I should have disintegrated you before you could pass over a tenth of the space between us. You saw what happened to those on the plains below who were stalking one of our geological parties. A slightly increased pressure of my thumb and every molecule of your frame would he blasted into its component atoms."

Agony twisted through Stratton, knotting his muscles, wrenching at his sinews.

"Stop it!" he moaned. "Stop it! I can't stand it!"

The green nimbus flicked out. The excruciating torture relaxed, though his sinews still quivered with remembrance. "All this is a waste of time," Flaton said. "Come, both of you. Get aboard my stratocar. Quick, now."

Resistance was useless. Stratton turned his back to Flaton,

"We'll have to do what be says, Elaise. We can't fight him." He was between the girl and their captor, shielding her from that omniscient gaze of his. "Not now, anyway; but don't give up hope. I'll find a way out. Don't think about that when he's watching you. Don't think about anything except how helpless we are. We'll fool him yet."

---

III. — LAIR OF THE FUTURE-MEN

ELAISE was like a small, frightened kitten huddling in Ronny Stratton's arms on the strange curved floor of Flaton's curious conveyance. That floor was of no metal Stratton had ever seen. Darting with tremendous speed through the air it had been silvery, but now he could see that it shimmered with ever-changing striations embracing the whole spectrum in their deep, variegated colors.

It was blood-warm to touch, too, and almost it seemed alive, vital with some force yet undreamed of in the twentieth century. Had the people of the future solved the obscure identity of energy with matter just dawning on the scientists of his present? Was this fabric fashioned of some element man and not God had created?

Flaton sprawled at ease in the bow of the sky-craft, his grotesque frame cushioned on a billowing, smoky sub-stance, cloudlike in appearance. Although no machinery was anywhere visible, his pencil-like fingers played along a serrated bank of tiny levers; and in a screen, placed just where he could watch it with a minimum of effort, the weird landscape of this weird space was blurred by projectile-like flight. He was taking them to others like himself. Was their advent here also accidental, or—

"No. We are an expedition sent to examine the specimens trapped here." Stratton was once more startled by the pat answer to his thought. "We are checking the fossil records of the rocks the Great Glacier left behind." Flaton's back was toward him. But a mirror to his right, the American saw now, brought to him a reflection of the prisoners. "History will be an exact science when we return."

"When we return!" Return was possible, then! The thought sank deep into Stratton's consciousness. If they could escape—Good Lord! He had forgotten! He fought frantically to make his mind a blank, to bar from it even the flicker of a plan that Flaton, with his uncanny powers, might read and forestall.

"I'm a damn fool to think escape is possible," he forced to the surface of his brain. "I'm as much in his power as the Neanderthal Man would be in mine if I had him handcuffed and chained, with a machine-gun trained on him. After all, Science must be served. Why should I object even to death if it will advance the knowledge of his wonderful civilization?"

Had he struck the right chord? A wordless communication from Flaton seemed to tell him so, although the future-man's gargoylesque visage betrayed not the slightest expression. It was sexless, soulless—neither cruel nor evil, but more sinister than both in its utter lack of emotion. There was no pity in the man, no mercy.

"I, am afraid," Elaise whimpered. "Oh, Ronny, I am dreadfully afraid. Whither doth he take us?"

"Hush, honey," Stratton whispered, pressing her quivering body to him. "There isn't any use in being afraid. We've got to take what comes, and take it smilingly. We can't do anything to avoid it."

IN the television screen the rushing terrain below was slowing, was becoming more distinct. Evidently they were reaching their destination end the landing was absorbing all of the future-man's attention. The varicolored rocks were taking on definite form. The stratocar was hovering over a circular pit in the plain which held a building of some sort.

They dipped lower still. Stratton could make out another grotesque creature like Flaton, staring up at them. Then they were within the rock-walled crater. It was that, he saw, rather than a pit.

So smoothly had the landing been accomplished it was not until Flaton rose that Stratton realized the stratocar was no longer moving. A wave of the future-man's tentacular arm and a hatchway opened in the vessel's side, apparently of its own motion.

"Get out," the voiceless command came. "We have arrived."

The surface upon which they stepped out was level and glass-smooth, as though the rock had been melted and poured into the cup of its stony walls? Ronald Stratton brought his eyes back to Flaton in time to catch his thought, addressed to the man who had awaited him.

"Wait till Gershon sees this one, Talus. A man from the twentieth century. How he will howl to discover his chronology errs by at least two hundred years."

"I am troubled," Talus replied. "Gershon and Frotal have sent no messages for three quarter-hours. Have you seen anything of them?"

Flaton was undisturbed. "They were being hunted by some barbarians near the cliff they went to explore. I turned those back with a few blasts of the disintegrator ray. Our colleagues are probably making discoveries so interesting that they forgot your request for periodic signals."

"They should not. I don't understand?"

"Naturally. Being merely a representative of the World League's Administration, you could not expect to understand how we scientists react to the acquisition of new knowledge."

Stratton sensed discord here, a schism between the practical men of the Earth of the future and the students. Forty thousand years, he mused, had not served to reconcile that ancient conflict.

"By the same token I am anxious to begin the examination of my own finds. Beside the twentieth century individual I have a female. Just think of that!"

Flaton flung around to Stratton and Elaise. "To the laboratory," he repeated the thought, making of it a command. "At once!"

His leveled ray-gun drove them before him, across the frozen lava of the stockade's floor, in through a high portal in the shimmering metal side of the structure at its center.

A pale blue luminance lit the interior, and the space seemed filled with a pounding, mechanical throbbing. Some sort of machine bulked before Stratton. No part of the complicated device moved, yet somehow it seemed instinct with the same sort of life as had animated the fabric of the stratocar.

THE door of the laboratory was narrow. Stratton went through first. In a larger chamber he glimpsed curious racks on which gleaming instruments were ominously ranged, high panels studded by glowing lights, a maze of tangled cables.

There was something terrifying about all this, some aura of the same dispassionate cruelty he had felt, once, in the experiment room of a naturalist friend whose skinned frogs and guinea-pigs had twitched to the galvanic false-face of searching electrodes'. They had been bundles of gory flesh, like the scarlet horror on a table near a second door in the farther wall. But that was—that had been a man!

"No," Elaise groaned, behind him. "No. I will not—" Her voice choked off.

Stratton whirled, The girl was writhing in the grip of Flaton's macaber weapon, her dear face twisted out of all semblance to humanity by the torture Stratton himself had found unendurable.

The cylinder's green nimbus blinked out and he caught Flaton's grim order. "Disrobe, or you shall feel the agony again. Strip off your garb, female."

Flaton's great eyes flicked to Stratton, and the youth read his appalling intention. Wrath lightninged through him, obliterating fear. He leapt to his feet in a long low dive, his arms flailing ahead of him in a desperate stab at the future-mans spindly legs.

Because instinct, and not thought, inspired that mad attack, Flaton was not warned of it in time to bring his weapon to bear on the berserk youth. Stratton's shoulder crashed against the fellow's frail limbs. They snapped at the impact, and Flaton went down under the mad charge. Paper-thin bones crunched under his blow. Abruptly he realized he was pummeling a squashed thing that did not move, a thing out of which all life had expired.

"Ronny," Elaise was crying. "Here, Ronny. His wand of magic!"

Stratton pushed himself erect, shuddering now with revulsion from the touch of that which had been the fruit of all mankind's long travail, shaking still with the fury that had fired him to his unexpected triumph. Elaise was thrusting at him the black cylinder of the disintegrator ray. He snatched it from her, found the thumb-button that would release its fearful energy.

Somewhere outside someone called: "Flaton! Come quickly. I need your help. The barbarians attack us!"

---

IV. — THE SIEGE OF THE PRIMITIVES

"WHAT now?" Stratton groaned, twisting to the door. The portal, sliding open, revealed Talus, waving filamentary arms in a paroxysm of apprehension.

"Hold it," the American said grimly. "As you are! If you move, I'll ray you!"

"Flaton—dead—incredible! He has the ray-gun!" Talus' thoughts were a jumble of astonishment at the pulped remnant of his companion, of terror of the weapon Stratton held. "He will disintegrate me before I can draw my own. Defeated—from within and without. I should not have come—"

"Damn right you shouldn't," Stratton interjected. This telepathy business had its points, he thought. He knew he was master of the situation now. "What's going on out there?"

"Our screen scans the plain for a half-mile around. I have seen them approaching—the barbarians. They are converging on all sides. They will destroy us."

"That's lovely! How about our getting away in the stratocar?"

"I do not know how to navigate it."

"That means we've got to fight them off. Can we?"

"One man on each side of the wall, with our weapons we should have been impregnable. But you have killed Flaton—"

"Never mind that. I'll make a dicker with you. You take one side, I'll take the other. You ought to be smart enough to see that we've got to play fair with each other or we both lose out. How about it?"

"Done!"

Stratton couldn't distinguish any reservation in the man's mind. Not just now. Afterwards he might change. "Are there any more of these ray-guns around?"

"Another in the cabinet to the left. That one—"

"Elaise," Stratton threw over his shoulder. "There's a magic wand, as you call it, in that closet on this side of me. Get it. You work it by pushing that little thing on its side. You come out with us, stay in the center of the blockade and don't take your eyes off this beauty. If you hear him think anything even a little bit hostile to me or you, let him have it. All the way down!" Then, to Talus, "You get that, don't you?"

"I understand." He was thoroughly cowed. "I shall give her no cause to disintegrate me. But we must hurry, or they will be over the wall.

"Let's go!"

THERE were steps in the sides of the stockade wall. Atop it was a runway protected by a rampart. If there were only four of the future-men, Stratton thought, they must have been here a long time to have built this fortress. Then he saw that it was of the same glass-like consistency as the floor within. He tested the ray on it.

Its button pushed halfway down, the green halo formed around its end, but there was no visible effect on the fused rock. A little further. The green deepened to a brilliant dazzle that extended in a tight beam to the spot at which he aimed. The stone glowed red, then white. It melted, ran in little streamlets down the slick sides of the little wall. That was what they had done! They had melted the solid stone to make their lair.

"Gosh!" Stratton exclaimed, "just think what full power would do to a man!" Then he recalled that he had seen just that? But he was forgetting what he was here for.

He could just see over the rampart. The piebald space outside was vacant. As far as his vision reached, nothing moved. Had Talus tricked him? A swift glance over his shoulder showed him the future-man across the small space, peering intently over the barricade on his side. Elaise was tense beside the stratocar, her gaze un-waveringly on their strange ally, the ray-gun clutched in her small hand and focused on him. Admiration surged up in Stratton. She might be untaught, superstitious, but there was nothing lacking in her courage!

A tiny clink of metal against stone spun Stratton around. Had something dodged behind that boulder, out there?

Twanng! A harp-note sounded somewhere. Something zipped through the air, thudded against the rock wall below him. Again—twanng!—zzzip—thud! This time it struck sparks from the rampart-top a foot to Stratton's left, fell over onto the foot-way. It was an arrow, flint-tipped. The American ducked below the shielding stone, looked from the dart to the cylinder he held. Ages between these two weapons—but that arrow also could kill, and without a target his ray was useless.

His careless exposure of himself had given some marksman his range. Stratton ran, crouching low, along the wall. Popped up for another look. A shambling Dawn-man, pelt-girdled, dodged out from behind a rock, his ferocious countenance more bestial than human. The fellow poised a flint-tipped javelin for the throw. Stratton took snap aim, thumbed his ray-gun's trigger. The dart-hurler whiffed into nothingness.

Revulsion twisted at the pit of the American's stomach, horror at the thing he had done. This death he dealt was worse than death itself. The most savage of warriors buried their dead and their enemy's dead, but he was leaving nothing to bury.

A wail rose into the dimness, hollow and somehow eerie with its keening of the dreadfully dead. A flaxen-haired youth, in leather jerkin and forest-green breeches, was suddenly visible. His longbow was stretched to the tip-point of a feathered arrow and his keen, eager eyes scanned the wall for a mark. Stratton's arm jerked up—but he could not bring himself to press the lethal button.

"Wait," he yelled. "Wait!" There was in him some inchoate realization that the bowman was far nearer kin to him than the callous man of the future, that they two should be fighting shoulder to shoulder in a common cause. "Wait! I—"

The twang of the loosed bowstring cut him short. His ray caught the arrow in midair, sparked it into non-existence. The beam melted a lurid, angry pit just in front of the archer, and the yellow-headed Saxon sprang back to safe concealment.

IF he could only get them to listen, Ronald Stratton thought desperately; if he could only get them to understand that he was not of the people who had come there to capture them and torture them.

Metal clanged, out there, and abruptly another figure was striding through the fantastic landscape of the Timeless Zone. A mailed knight, helmeted and visored, he came on jauntily, secure in the gleaming armor he could not deem other than invulnerable. His great, two-handed sword flashed bloodily in the fading light.

"Hey, you," Stratton called. "Hold up. Listen a minute. I don't want to kill you. Listen to me!"

The knight did not pause as he bellowed, "Ho, caitiff! Though thou art craven, Sir Sanguinor yields thee no quarter. Defend thyself!"

"You damn fool!" Stratton snarled, exasperatedly. "I want to—" The dazzle of Talus's weapon hissed past him. Out there, where the knight had been, a pockmark in the plain glowed redly, a molten pockmark where a gallant man-at-arms was dispersed into myriad scattered atoms.

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "Ronny."

Stratton twisted to her. An ape-visaged aborigine, gigantic, was bringing down a great, stone-headed mace to demolish the shrieking girl. Stratton's flashing beam caught him, blasted him into extinction. The American left the rampart in a great leap, thudded down beside the cringing girl. A chorused jabbering of rage pulled his gaze to the farther wall. Forms were surging over it—ravening, beast-like forms.

The American knew now that the die was cast. No chance for a truce now, for talk. The future-man's ray swept clear the crowded wall. Swept it clear of swarthy, runted Picts; of long-haired, long-bearded dwarfs of the ancient moors; of all the surging, fierce apparitions of a dreamlike past. But others, and still others, took their place: Roman legionnaires, shaggy-bearded Druids, archers who might have fought with Henry of Navarre at Poictiers, a longbowman in the forest green of Robin Hood's gay band. Indomitably they came on and the silent death of Talus's fearful beam scythed them into oblivion.

A hurled spear ripped Stratton's thigh, sent agony searing through him. An arrow sliced his scalp. Talus gave vent to a high, piercing scream. A swift glance showed that his left arm was carried away. Grotesque, incredible in the gathering darkness, he carried on.

"Nerve!" the American exclaimed. "By jingo, he's got nerve!" A thrill ran through him, a tingling thrill of pride in the Race. All of these weirdly assorted participants in the uncanny, nightmare struggle staged in the dying luminance of an outer world were somehow ennobled by that high quality of courage. Ape-man from the fens of the immemorial past, Jute and Druid and knight, Roman and hook-nosed Norman seaman, girl of the sixth century, man of the twentieth, man of the four hundredth—not one of them craven. Above them all fluttered the pennant of bravery that in all the ages must distinguish man from beast.

SUDDENLY the battle was over. Suddenly there were no longer any more attackers for the fearful ray to smite with its green oblivion. Ron Stratton slumped wearily, exhausted, feeling the agony of his wounds.

"They're licked, Elaise," he gasped. "They're licked." Not the least uncanny feature of the uncanny fight was that, now that it was ended, so little remained to show that there had been a fight. "All gone," Stratton groaned. "All—"

"You're wrong," Talus's message squealed in his brain. "There are still others of them out there. I can sense their presence, though they are too far off for me to make out their thoughts." The fellow swore softly.

"The devil!" Stratton pulled himself to the rampart again, peered out once more into the tumulus whence the savage raid had come. Silence brooded, gravelike, among the fantastic rocks. It was a dead world he looked at, shrouded in a mournful dusk. A dead, unpeopled world. "I don't see anyone."

"They are there, nevertheless," he heard. "Hidden to plot a new attack—" That thought broke off; another, took its place. "At last! Gershon and Frotal—"

The thought blanked out, Talus had coiled it, but a whirring sound, faint, out of the almost lightless sky, came to Stratton.

The two missing future-men were coming back.

---

V. — THE PRIMITIVES TAKE THE CRATER

STRATTON saw suddenly a tremendous reaching beam arc against the vault of the maroon-shaded sky; saw a rock flick from its end to hurtle and crash devastatingly against the stockade's facade.

This was a catapult, he realized, a Roman catapult, heavy artillery of Caesar's legions. Some military genius was directing the siege. But the future-man was equal to the new threat. The catapult's huge throwing beam flared suddenly into flame as the disintegrator ray struck it.

Above that pillar of fire, high above and miles distant, a glowing speck showed against the deep maroon of the sky. The same electric shimmer flowed in the skin of Flaton's stratocar. If only Stratton knew how to fly that—

What good, while Frotal and Gershon were aloft to ride him down? Better death at the hands of the barbarians than what they would do to Elaise and himself. Stratton's arm jerked up, brought to bear pointblank on Talus's spidery form. He pressed the button halfway.

The future-man was rigid, quivering in the clutch of that dreadful force.

"Take his wand, Elaise," Stratton yelled. "Quick."

No words sounded in his brain, telepathed from the future-man, but pain and terror impacted there in a chaos of transferred anguish. The girl sprang unhesitantly up the steps to the runway. Stratton flicked off his beam for the instant she needed to snatch away Talus's ray-gun, flicked it on again as Elaise turned questioningly toward him.

"Get into the thing in which we came here," was his next order, "and watch the hole in the wall. If anyone starts to come through, ray him down."

"Aye, Ronny, my love," she answered him. "I haste to do thy will."

"Now, you," Stratton addressed Talus, aloud.

"Which way shall I move my thumb, up or down? Will you do just as I say, or do I blot you out?"

There was acquiescence in the message that came to him, cringing, tortured appeal. Stratton relaxed. "Come down and turn off the machine in there that holds up the stratocar."

"But you'll kill them," the agonized protest reached him. "They will fall."

"That's just what I've got in mind. Going to do what I say, or do I start with you?"

Talus's actions replied for him. He was scrambling down the wall. Stratton leaped down, kept right behind him. The future-man shambled into the powerhouse. The American threw a quick glance up into the sky. That ominous flier was nearer, much nearer. Shadowy forms were moving out there on the plain. All the sinister forces of this sinister land were closing in.

"Watch it, Elaise," he called and followed Talus into the building. "Hurry up," he flung at the cowed creature. "Turn it off."

The whir of the approaching flier came to him, high and angry now, like the irate whir of a worker bee whose hive is being attacked. Talus did something—and the whir was gone.

Stratton faced about. Through the open door he could see the sky. A star fell, leaving a long wake of electric flame behind it. The plain spurted a fountain of sparks, green and red and golden. Then there was only darkness out there?

ONLY darkness and the long darting flares from Elaise's ray-guns as she fought off the oncoming hordes. Killing, killing. God, how weary he was of killing! Those poor fellows didn't know what it was all about. They knew only that strange creatures had come here to capture and torture and slay—and that they must fight to save themselves. Stratton jerked around.

"Turn on the power again."

Talus obeyed, thinking, "It won't do any good. The scientists are gone. No one, now, is left who knows how to fly the stratocar. The charges of the ray-guns will soon be exhausted and then—the end."

"Oh, yeah?" Stratton gritted. "I've got an idea. Come on, let's get into the flier and try it out."

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "The Wands hath lost their magic, We are lost."

"Coming, honey. Coming." He grabbed Talus by his one remaining arm, fairly hauled him to the flying machine, threw him into it, leaped in after him. He remembered the motions of Flaton's arms that had closed and opened the hatchway. Clumsily he imitated them. Elation leaped up in him as the hatch cover slid closed.

He twisted. Talus lay almost unconscious on the floor. Elaise stood above the future-man, staring fearfully at the view-screen above the control levers. Mirrored in it was the breached wall of the stockade; through, the gap, Stratton could see the dusk-shrouded figures crawling in, always in. Till the last man was gone they would persist in their attack, not intelligent enough to realize how hopeless it was.

"Talus," Stratton shouted. "You think you don't know how this thing works, but you must have been in them often. You must have watched the pilots manipulate them, and what you saw is deep down in your subconscious. Don't think. Don't try to remember. Just try to picture Flaton, for instance, at some moment he was taking off."

"I cannot," the fellow's despairing whimper came to him. "I cannot remember."

"You've got to, man! Try. Try hard!"

Silence fell in the round-walled cubicle, a thick silence that seemed to quiver with tension. Stratton stared at the future-man, concentrating on his thoughts, on that storehouse of forgotten but never eradicated brain-impressions the psychologists call subconscious memory.

No words came to him, but pictures seemed to form on his retina, pictures like the hazy visions of a dream. They grew more definite in outline. He saw Flaton resting on his grey cloud cushion. He saw the view-screen in front of him. It was a porthole looking out on a platform thronged with hundreds of creatures in the nightmarish shapes of the world of the future. Silhouetted against a blue sky were towering pinnacles of gleaming crystal, fairylike highways leaping from facade to facade in a gossamer arabesque, clouds of ovoid stratocars?

The view-screen drifted upward and he saw the lever-banks. Thin, boneless fingers reached out, pushed one down in its short slot. In the view-screen the crowded platform shot down.

"I have it!" Stratton shouted, and leaped to the bow of the stratocar. He glimpsed the real view-screen, glimpsed a steel-capped Viking rushing in through it, a crowd of others behind him. His shaking hand found a lever, pushed it down.

The uprush of the stratocar flung him down on Talus, crushing the future-man as Stratton had crushed Flaton in his irate onslaught. But the flier was rising. The crater was dwindling in the television screen, was once more a pit in the plain's boundaryless surface.

Ronald Stratton struggled back to the control levers. "I've got to stop this or we'll keep on going up forever." Talus was dead, could not help him any longer. He pushed the tiny handle back into the central point of its slot. The precipitate rise stopped; the stratocar hovered, motionless in the air.

Stratton stared at the control board. He saw now that the switch lifting the stratocar was the topmost of a vertical row of three, that to left and right of the central lever there were two more.

"It looks simple enough," he muttered, "now that I've got a starting point. Top—up. Bottom—down. Middle—forward. Left—left. Right—right. Let's try it. I'll push down the middle one. Here goes!"

THE craft leaped forward. The problem was solved! He could fly the stratocar. But where? Where in this terrible place was safety for him? For Elaise?

"Look, Ronny!" the girl exclaimed. "It waxeth light again. The night here is indeed very short."

The strange red glow that passed here for day was growing in the screen. "It's just some kind of fluctuation of the light, sweetheart," Stratton thought aloud. "You see, there could not really be any day or night here because there isn't any Time."

Below, the eerily colored plain was visible once more, stretching undisturbed to a featureless horizon. No. There, straight ahead, something bulked against the lurid sky, a familiar, grateful green margining its upper edge.

"How would you like to come home with me, Elaise?" Stratton whispered. "Home to England?"

"Ronny!" She was wordless, but her arms around his neck, her kiss on his cheek, was enough.

"All right," he said. "Here goes."

The stratocar came down in the clearing, where Flaton had captured them. Stratton stepped out of it, helped Elaise to descend. They turned shuddering away from the gruesome remnants of the last of the future-men.

"We came from that direction," Stratton Said. "Maybe if we go back there we'll find the eddy once again."

"Whither thou goest I will go," Elaine murmured. "I am thine, my knight, soul and body?"

"Not more than I'm yours, honey. Remember that when we get back to 1936. Come on."

The underbrush rustled against their knees, the trees whispered overhead. They passed the still body of the Neanderthal Man. Then—a wall confronted them, a wall of hazy, swirling nothingness.

"Here goes! Together does it, Elaise, One—two—three!" His arm around her warm waist, Ronald Stratton stepped into the haze.

---

VI. — THROUGH THE EDDY

IT was as if he had walked over the brink of an abyss, save that he did not fall. He was standing on the gentle slope of Silbury Hill. A great monolith loomed above him, black and gaunt against a dusk sky grey and haunting with the death of day. Not a minute, not a second had elapsed since he had taken the fateful step in the other direction.

"Look, Elaine." Ronald Stratton said. "Look down there. See the spire of Avebury Church? We can find a minister there, to wed us." She didn't answer.

"Elaise!" he said sharply, turning to her. She wasn't there beside him. She wasn't anywhere?

"Elaise!"

But she had walked into the eddy, close against him. She must have walked into it. What had happened? Where was she, the girl he had found in the Timeless Zone, who had fought so bravely by his side? The girl he had learned to love, the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from the days of King Arthur?

From the days? Abruptly he understood. He remembered his first explanation of their strange adventure. "We've shot along the year-spokes of that great wheel, each from our own time, and met here at the center?" The reverse, too, was true. Returning, they had each gone back along his own year-spoke, he to 1936, she to A. D. 520. Some vibration of their cosmos, some esoteric, unknown quality, had provided for that. They were fourteen centuries apart.

Ronald Stratton started slowly down the hill, descending toward the valley whose moor was already dark with the gloom of night. Little stars sprinkled it, lights in the homes of people like himself. Of people of the twentieth century. Above them, the red and green winglights of an airplane drifted across the dusk.

"I don't care how advanced your era is; if you haven't got love, I pity you." He had said that to Flaton. "It's the greatest thing in life."

Stratton halted, turned back to the monumental double-ring the Druids had built to warn their people of the terrible thing that lay within. Abruptly he was running back to the high stone that marked the boundary of the eddy. He stopped on its very edge.

"Elaise!" he cried into that dread maelstrom of haze. "Elaise!"

Mad! He would be mad to plunge back into it. She wouldn't be there, in the forest. She was hastening down Silbury Hill, fourteen hundred years ago so as not to be late for evening prayers. She—

"Ronny!"

Her voice came out of the mists. He hadn't heard it, couldn't have heard it, across fourteen centuries. He was mad!

"Ronny!"

"I'm coming, Elaise. Wait for me! I'm coming!"

* * * * *

ABOVE a forest of tall and ancient oaks a lurid sky bent its eerie dome. A tiny horse, three-toed and knee-high to a full-grown man, peered through the underbrush at the couple walking, hand in hand, into the lowering, threatening future of the Land Where Time Stood Still. Hand in hand, heart to heart, the man of the twentieth century and the maid of the sixth went, together, into the Unknown.

---

THE END

The Shape of Things by Ray Bradbury

 

The Shape of Things

By RAY BRADBURY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories February 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid. Peter Horn hadn't planned it that way at all. Neither he nor his wife imagined that such a thing could happen to them. They had talked quietly for days about the birth of their coming child, they had eaten normal foods, slept a great deal, taken in a few shows, and, when it was time for her to fly in the helicopter to the hospital, her husband, Peter Horn, laughed and kissed her.

"Honey, you'll be home in six hours," he said. "These new birth-mechanisms do everything but father the child for you."

She remembered an old-time song. "No, no, they can't take that away from me!" and sang it, and they laughed as the helicopter lifted them over the green way from country to city.

The doctor, a quiet gentleman named Wolcott, was very confident. Polly Ann, the wife, was made ready for the task ahead and the father was put, as usual, out in the waiting room where he could suck on cigarettes or take highballs from a convenient mixer. He was feeling pretty good. This was the first baby, but there was not a thing to worry about. Polly Ann was in good hands.

Dr. Wolcott came into the waiting room an hour later. He looked like a man who has seen death. Peter Horn, on his third highball, did not move. His hand tightened on the glass and he whispered:

"She's dead."

"No," said Wolcott, quietly. "No, no, she's fine. It's the baby."

"The baby's dead, then."

"The baby's alive, too, but—drink the rest of that drink and come along after me. Something's happened."

Yes, indeed, something had happened. The "something" that had happened had brought the entire hospital out into the corridors. People were going and coming from one room to another. As Peter Horn was led through a hallway where attendants in white uniforms were standing around peering into each other's faces and whispering, he became quite sick. The entire thing had the air of a carnival, as if at any moment someone might step up upon a platform and cry:

"Hey, looky looky! The child of Peter Horn! Incredible!"

They entered a small clean room. There was a crowd in the room, looking down at a low table. There was something on the table.

A small blue pyramid.

"Why've you brought me here?" said Horn, turning to the doctor.

The small blue pyramid moved. It began to cry.

---

Peter Horn pushed forward and looked down wildly. He was very white and he was breathing rapidly. "You don't mean that's it?"

The doctor named Wolcott nodded.

The blue pyramid had six blue snake-like appendages, and three eyes that blinked from the tips of projecting structures.

Horn didn't move.

"It weighs seven pounds, eight ounces," someone said.

Horn thought to himself, they're kidding me. This is some joke. Charlie Ruscoll is behind all this. He'll pop in a door any moment and cry "April Fool!" and everybody'll laugh. That's not my child. Oh, horrible! They're kidding me.

Horn stood there, and the sweat rolled down his face.

Dr. Wolcott said, quietly. "We didn't dare show your wife. The shock. She mustn't be told about it—now."

"Get me away from here." Horn turned and his hands were opening and closing without purpose, his eyes were flickering.

Wolcott held his elbow, talking calmly. "This is your child. Understand that, Mr. Horn."

"No. No, it's not." His mind wouldn't touch the thing. "It's a nightmare. Destroy the thing!"

"You can't kill a human being."

"Human?" Horn blinked tears. "That's not human! That's a crime against God!"

The doctor went on, quickly. "We've examined this—child—and we've decided that it is not a mutant, a result of gene destruction or rearrangement. It's not a freak. Nor is it sick, Please listen to everything I say to you."

Horn stared at the wall, his eyes wide and sick. He swayed. The doctor talked distantly, with assurance.

"The child was somehow affected by the birth pressure. There was a dimensional distructure caused by the simultaneous short-circuitings and malfunctionings of the new birth-mechs and the hypnosis machines. Well, anyway," the doctor ended lamely, "your baby was born into—another dimension."

Horn did not even nod. He stood there, waiting.

Dr. Wolcott made it emphatic. "Your child is alive, well, and happy. It is lying there, on the table. But because it was born into another dimension it has a shape alien to us. Our eyes, adjusted to a three dimensional concept, cannot recognize it as a baby. But it is. Underneath that camouflage, the strange pyramidal shape and appendages, it is your child."

Horn closed his mouth and shut his eyes and wanted to think. "Can I have a drink?" he asked.

"Certainly," said Wolcott. "Here." A drink was thrust into Horn's hands.

"Now, let me just sit down, sit down somewhere a moment." Horn sank wearily into a chair. It was coming clear. Everything shifted slowly into place. It was his child, no matter what. He shuddered. No matter how horrible it looked, it was his first child.

At last he looked up and tried to see the doctor. "What'll we tell Polly?" His voice was hardly a whisper. It was tired.

"We'll work that out this morning, as soon as you feel up to it."

"What happens after that? Is there any way to—change it back?"

"We'll try. That is, if you give us permission to try. After all, it's your child. You can do anything with him you want to do."

"Him?" Horn laughed ironically, shutting his eyes. "How do you know it's a him?" He sank down into darkness. His ears roared.

Wolcott was visibly upset. "Why, we—that is—well, we don't know, for sure."

Horn drank more of his drink. "What if you can't change him back?"

"I realize what a shock it is to you, Mr. Horn. If you can't bear to look upon the child, we'll be glad to raise him here, at the Institute, for you."

Horn thought it over. "Thanks. But he's still my kid. He still belongs to me and Polly. I'll raise him. I'll give him a home. Raise him like I'd raise any kid. Give him a normal home life. Try to learn to love him. Treat him right." His lips were numb, he couldn't think.

"You realize what a job you're taking on, Mr. Horn? This child can't be allowed to have normal playmates, why, they'd pester it to death in no time. You know how children are. If you decide to raise the child at home, his life will be strictly regimented, he must never be seen by anyone. Is that clear?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it's clear, Doc. Doc, is he okay mentally?"

"Yes. We've tested his reactions. He's a fine healthy child as far as nervous response and such things go."

"I just wanted to be sure. Now, the only problem is Polly."

---

Wolcott frowned. "I confess that one has me stumped. You know it is pretty hard on a woman to hear that her child has been born dead. But this, telling a woman she's given birth to something not recognizable as human. It's not as clean as death. There's too much chance for shock. And yet I must tell her the truth. A doctor gets nowhere by lying to his patient."

Horn put his glass down. "I don't want to lose Polly, too. I'd be prepared now, if you destroyed the child, to take it. But I don't want Polly killed by the shock of this whole thing."

"I think we may be able to change the child back. That's the point which makes me hesitate. If I thought the case was hopeless I'd make out a certificate of euthanasia immediately. But it's at least worth a chance."

Horn was very tired. He was shivering quietly, deeply. "All right, doctor. It needs food, milk and love until you can fix it up. It's had a raw deal so far, no reason for it to go on getting a raw deal. When will we tell Polly?"

"Tomorrow afternoon, when she wakes up."

Horn got up and walked to the table which was warmed by a soft illumination from overhead. The blue pyramid sat upon the table as Horn held out his hand.

"Hello, baby," said Horn.

The blue pyramid looked up at Horn with three bright blue eyes. It shifted a tiny blue tendril, touching Horn's fingers with it.

Horn shivered.

"Hello, baby."

The doctor produced a special feeding bottle.

"This is woman's milk. Here, baby."

---

Baby looked upward through clearing mists. Baby saw the shapes moving over him and knew them to be friendly. Baby was new-born, but already alert, strangely alert. Baby was aware.

There were moving objects above and around Baby. Six cubes of a gray-white color, bending down. Six cubes with hexagonal appendages and three eyes to each cube. Then there were two other cubes coming from a distance over a crystalline plateau. One of the cubes was white. It had three eyes, too. There was something about this White Cube that Baby liked. There was an attraction. Some relation. There was an odor to the White Cube that reminded Baby of itself.

Shrill sounds came from the six bending down gray-white cubes. Sounds of curiosity and wonder. It was like a kind of piccolo music, all playing at once.

Now the two newly arrived cubes, the White Cube, and the Gray Cube, were whistling. After awhile the White Cube extended one of its hexagonal appendages to touch Baby. Baby responded by putting out one of its tendrils from its pyramidal body. Baby liked the White Cube. Baby liked. Baby was hungry. Baby liked. Maybe the White Cube would give it food....

The Gray Cube produced a pink globe for Baby. Baby was now to be fed. Good. Good. Baby accepted food eagerly.

Food was good. All the gray-white cubes drifted away, leaving only the nice White Cube standing over Baby looking down and whistling over and over. Over and over.

---

They told Polly the next day. Not everything. Just enough. Just a hint. They told her the baby was not well, in a certain way. They talked slowly, and in ever tightening circles, in upon Polly. Then Dr. Wolcott gave a long lecture on the birth-mechanisms, how they helped a woman in her labor, and how the birth-mechs were put together, and how, this time, they short-circuited. There was another man of scientific means present and he gave her a dry little talk on dimensions, holding up his fingers, so! one two three and four. Still another man talked of energy and matter. Another spoke of underprivileged children.

Polly finally sat up in bed and said, "What's all the talk for? What's wrong with my baby that you should all be talking so long?"

Wolcott told her.

"Of course, you can wait a week and see it," he said. "Or you can sign over guardianship of the child to the Institute."

"There's only one thing I want to know," said Polly.

---

Dr. Wolcott raised his brows.

"Did I make the child that way?" asked Polly.

"You most certainly did not!"

"The child isn't a monster, genetically?" asked Polly.

"The child was thrust into another continuum. Otherwise, it is perfectly normal."

Polly's tight, lined mouth relaxed. She said, simply, "Then, bring me my baby. I want to see him. Please. Now."

They brought the "child."

The Horns left the hospital the next day. Polly walked out on her own two good legs, with Peter Horn following her, looking at her in quiet amaze.

They did not have the baby with them. That would come later. Horn helped his wife into their helicopter and sat beside her. He lifted the ship, whirring, into the warm air.

"You're a wonder," he said.

"Am I?" she said, lighting a cigarette.

"You are. You didn't cry. You didn't do anything."

"He's not so bad, you know," she said. "Once you get to know him. I can even—hold him in my arms. He's warm and he cries and he even needs his triangular diapers." Here she laughed. He noticed a nervous tremor in the laugh, however. "No, I didn't cry, Pete, because that's my baby. Or he will be. He isn't dead, I thank God for that. He's—I don't know how to explain—still unborn. I like to think he hasn't been born yet. We're waiting for him to show up. I have confidence in Dr. Wolcott. Haven't you?"

"You're right. You're right." He reached over and held her hand. "You know something? You're a peach."

"I can hold on," she said, sitting there looking ahead as the green country swung under them. "I can wait. As long as I know something good will happen. I won't let it hurt or shock me. The mind is a great thing. If it has some hope, then it's cushioned all around. I'll wait six months," she said. And she looked over the edge of the helicopter. "And then maybe I'll kill myself."

"Polly!"

She looked at him as if he'd just come in. "Pete, I'm sorry. But this sort of thing doesn't happen. Once it's over and the baby is finally 'born' I'll forget it so quick it'll never have occurred. But if the doctor can't help us, then a mind can't take it, a mind can only tell the body to climb out on a roof and jump."

"Things'll be all right," he said, holding to the guide-wheel. "They have to be."

She said nothing, but let the cigarette smoke blow out of her mouth in the pounding concussion of the helicopter fan.

Three weeks passed. Every day they flew in to the Institute to visit "Py." For that was the quiet calm name that Polly Horn gave to the blue pyramid that lay on the warm sleeping-table and blinked up at them. Dr. Wolcott was careful to point out that the habits of the "child" were as normal as any others; so many hours sleep, so many awake, so much attentiveness, so much boredom, so much food, so much elimination. Polly Horn listened, and her face softened and her eyes warmed.

At the end of the third week, Dr. Wolcott said, "Feel up to taking him home now? You live in the country, don't you? All right, you have an enclosed patio, he can be out there in the sunlight, on occasion. He needs a mother's love. That's trite, but nevertheless true. He should be suckled. We have an arrangement where he's been fed by the new feed-mech; cooing voice, warmth, hands, and all." Dr. Wolcott's voice was dry, "But still I feel you are familiar enough with him now to know he's a pretty healthy child. Are you game, Mrs. Horn?"

"Yes, I'm game."

"Good. Bring him in every third day for a check up. Here's his formula. We're working on several ideas now, Mrs. Horn. We should have some results for you by the end of the year. I don't want to say anything definite, but I have reason to believe we'll pull that boy right out of the fourth dimension, like a rabbit out of a hat."

The doctor was mildly surprised and pleased when Polly Horn kissed him, then and there.

---

Pete Horn took the 'copter home over the smooth rolling greens of Griffith. From time to time he looked at the pyramid lying in Polly's arms. She was making cooing noises at it, it was replying in approximately the same way.

---

 

Peter took the 'copter home, from time to time looking down at the pyramid in Polly's arms.

---

"I wonder," said Polly.

"What?"

"How do we look to it?" asked his wife.

"I asked Wolcott about that. He said we probably look funny to him, also. He's in one dimension we're in another."

"You mean we don't look like men and women to him?"

"If we could see ourselves, no. But, remember, the baby knows nothing of men or women. To the baby whatever shape we're in, we are natural. It's accustomed to seeing us shaped like cubes or squares or pyramids, as it sees us from its separate dimension. The baby's had no other experience, no other norm with which to compare what it sees. We are its norm. On the other hand, the baby seems weird to us because we compare it to our accustomed shapes and sizes."

"Yes, I see. I see."

Baby was conscious of movement. One White Cube held him in warm appendages. Another White Cube sat further over, within an oblong of purple. The oblong moved in the air over a vast bright plain of pyramids, hexagons, oblongs, pillars, bubbles and multi-colored cubes.

One White Cube made a whistling noise. The other White Cube replied with a whistling. The White Cube that held him shifted about. Baby watched the two White Cubes, and watched the fleeing world outside the traveling bubble.

Baby felt—sleepy. Baby closed his eyes, settled his pyramidal youngness upon the lap of the White Cube, and made faint little noises....

"He's asleep," said Polly Horn.

---

Summer came. Peter Horn himself was busy with his export, import business. But he made certain he was home every night. Polly was all right during the day, but, at night, when she had to be alone with the child, she got to smoking too much, and one night he found her passed out on the davenport, an empty sherry bottle on the table beside her. From then on, he took care of the child himself, nights. When it cried it made a weird whistling noise, like some jungle animal lost and wailing. It wasn't the sound of a baby.

Peter Horn had the nursery sound-proofed.

"So your wife won't hear your baby crying?" asked the workman.

"Yeah," said Pete Horn. "So she won't hear."

They had few visitors. They were afraid that by some accident or other someone might stumble on Py, dear sweet pyramidal little Py.

"What's that noise?" asked a visitor one evening, over his cocktail. "Sounds like some sort of bird. You didn't tell me you had an aviary, Peter?"

"Oh, yes," said Horn, going and closing the nursery door. "Have another drink. Let's get drunk, everybody."

It was like having a dog or a cat in the house. At least that's how Polly looked upon it. Pete Horn watched her and observed exactly how she talked and petted the small Py. It was Py this and Py that, but somehow with some reserve, and sometimes she would look around the room and touch herself, and her hands would clench, and she would look lost and afraid, as if she were waiting for someone to arrive.

In September, Polly reported to Pete: "He can say Daddy. Yes he can. Come on, Py. Say, Daddy!"

---

She held the blue warm pyramid up. "Wheelly," whistled the little warm blue pyramid.

"Daddy," repeated Polly.

"Wheelly!" whistled the pyramid.

"For heaven's sake, cut it out!" shouted Pete Horn. He took the child from her and put it in the nursery where it whistled over and over that name, that name, that name. Whistled, whistled. Horn came out and got himself a stiff drink. Polly was laughing quietly, bitterly.

"Isn't that terrific?" she said. "Even his voice is in the fourth dimension. I teach him to say Daddy and it comes out Wheelly! He says Daddy, but it sounds like Wheelly to us!" She looked at her husband. "Won't it be nice when he learns to talk later? We'll give him Hamlet's soliloquy to memorize and he'll say it but it'll come out, Wheelly-roth urll whee whistle wheet!" She mashed out her cigarette. "The offspring of James Joyce! Aren't we lucky?" She got up. "Give me a drink."

"You've had enough," he said.

"Thanks, I'll help myself," she said, and did.

October, and then November. Py was learning to talk now. He whistled and squealed and made a bell-like tone when he was hungry. Dr. Wolcott visited. "When his color is a constant bright blue," said the doctor, "that means he's healthy. When the color fades, dull—the child is feeling poorly. Remember that."

"Oh, yes, I will, I will," said Polly. "Robin's egg blue for health. Dull cobalt for illness."

"Young lady," said Wolcott, "You'd better take a couple of these pills and come see me tomorrow for a little chat. I don't like the way you're talking. Stick out your tongue. Ah-hmm. Give me your wrist. Pulse bad. Your eyes, now. Have you been drinking? Look at the stains on your fingers. Cut the cigarettes in half. I'll see you tomorrow."

"You don't give me much to go on," said Polly. "It's been almost a year now."

"My dear Mrs. Horn, I don't want to excite you continually. When we have our mechs ready we'll let you know. We're working every day. There'll be an experiment soon. Take those pills now and shut that nice mouth." He chucked Py under the "chin." "Good healthy baby, by gravy! Twenty pounds if he's an ounce!"

Baby was conscious of the goings and comings of the Two White Cubes. The two nice White Cubes who were with him during all of his waking hours. There was another Cube, a Gray One, who visited on certain days. But mostly it was the Two White Cubes who cared for and loved him. He looked up at the one warm, rounder, softer White Cube and made the low warmbling soft sound of contentment. The White Cube fed him. He was content. He grew. All was familiar and good.

The New Year, the year 1969, arrived.

Rocket ships flashed on the sky, and helicopters whirred and flourished the warm California winds.

Peter Horn carted home large plates of specially poured blue and gray polarized glass, secretly. Through these, he peered at his "child." Nothing doing. The pyramid remained a pyramid, no matter if he viewed it through X-ray or yellow cellophane. The barrier was unbreakable. Horn returned quietly to his drinking.

The big thing happened early in February. Horn, arriving home in his helicopter, was appalled to see a crowd of neighbors gathered on the lawn of his home. Some of them were sitting, others were standing, still others were moving away, with frightened expressions on their faces.

Polly was walking the "child" in the yard.

Polly was quite drunk. She held the small blue pyramid by the hand and walked him up and down. She did not see the helicopter land, nor did she pay much attention as Horn came running up.

One of the neighbors turned. "Oh, Mr. Horn, it's the cutest thing. Where'd you find it?"

One of the others cried, "Hey, you're quite the traveler, Horn. Pick it up in South America?"

---

Polly held the pyramid up. "Say Daddy!" she cried, trying to focus on her husband.

"Wheelly!" cried the pyramid.

"Polly!" shouted Peter Horn, and strode forward.

"He's friendly as a dog or a cat," said Polly staggering along, taking the child with her. She laughed at the neighbors. "Oh, no, he's not dangerous. He looks dangerous, yes, but he's not. He's friendly as a baby. My husband brought him from Afghanistan the other day. Has anybody got a drink?"

The neighbors began to move off when Peter Horn glared at them.

"Come back!" Polly waved at them. "Come back! Don't you want to see my baby? Don't you? Yes, he's my child, my very own! Isn't he simply beautiful!"

He slapped her face.

"My baby," she said, brokenly.

He slapped her again and again until she quit saying it and collapsed. He picked her up and took her into the house. Then he came out and took Py in and then he sat down and phoned the Institute.

"Dr. Wolcott. This is Horn. You'd better get your stuff ready for the experiment. It's tonight or not at all."

There was a hesitation. Finally, Wolcott sighed. "All right. Bring your wife and the child. We'll try to have things in shape."

They hung up.

Horn sat there studying the pyramid.

"The neighbors thought he was the cutest pet," said his wife, lying on the couch, her eyes shut, her lips trembling....

The Institute hall smelled clean, neat, sterile. Dr. Wolcott walked along it, followed by Peter Horn and his wife Polly, who was holding Py in her arms. They turned in at a doorway and stood in a large room. In the center of the room were two tables with large black hoods suspended over them. Behind the tables were a number of machines with dials and levers on them. There was the faintest perceptible hum in the room. Pete Horn looked at Polly for a moment.

Wolcott gave her a glass of liquid. "Drink this." She drank it. "Now. Sit down." They both sat. The doctor put his hands together and looked at them for a moment.

"I want to tell you what I've been doing in the last few months," he said. "I've tried to bring the baby out of the dimension, fourth, fifth, or sixth, that it is in. I haven't said much to you about it, but every time you left the baby for a checkup we worked on the problem. Now, do not get excited, but, I think we have found a way out of our problem."

Polly looked up quickly, her eyes lighting. "What!"

"Now, now, wait a moment," Wolcott cautioned her. "I have a solution, but it has nothing to do with bringing the baby out of the dimension in which it exists."

Polly sank back. Horn simply watched the doctor carefully for anything he might say. Wolcott leaned forward.

"I can't bring Py out, but I can put you people in. That's it." He spread his hands.

Horn looked at the machine in the corner. "You mean you can send us into Py's dimension?"

"If you want to go badly enough."

"I don't know," said Horn. "There'll have to be more explained. We'll have to know what we're getting into."

Polly said nothing. She held Py quietly and looked at him.

Dr. Wolcott explained. "We know what series of accidents, mechanical and electrical, forced Py into his present state. We can reproduce those accidents and stresses. But bringing him back is something else. It might take a million trials and failures before we got the combination. The combination that jammed him into another space was an accident, but luckily we saw, observed and recorded it. There are no records for bringing one back. We have to work in the dark. Therefore, it will be easier to put you in the fourth dimension than to bring Py into ours."

---

Polly asked, simply and earnestly, "Will I see my baby as he really is, if I go into his dimension?"

Wolcott nodded.

Polly said, "Then, I want to go." She was smiling weakly.

"Hold on," said Peter Horn. "We've only been in this office five minutes and already you're promising away the rest of your life."

"I'll be with my real baby, I won't care."

"Dr. Wolcott, what will it be like, in that dimension on the other side?"

"There will be no change that you will notice. You will both seem the same size and shape to one another. The pyramid will become a baby, however. You will have added an extra sense, you will be able to interpret what you see differently."

"But won't we turn into oblongs or pyramids ourselves? And won't you, doctor, look like some geometrical form instead of a human?"

"Does a blind man who sees for the first time give up his ability to hear or taste?" asked the doctor.

"No."

"All right, then. Stop thinking in terms of subtraction. Think in terms of addition. You're gaining something. You lose nothing. You know what a human looks like, which is an advantage Py doesn't have, looking out from his dimension. When you arrive 'over there' you can see Dr. Wolcott as both things, a geometrical abstract or a human, as you choose. It will probably make quite a philosopher out of you. There's one other thing, however."

"And that?"

"To everyone else in the world you, your wife and the child will look like abstract forms. The baby a triangle. Your wife an oblong perhaps. Yourself a hexagonal solid. The world will be shocked, not you."

"We'll be freaks."

"You'll be freaks," said Wolcott. "But you won't know it. You'll have to lead a secluded life."

"Until you find a way to bring all three of us out together."

"That's right. Until then. It may be ten years, twenty. I won't recommend it to you, you may both develop psychoses as a result of feeling apart, different. If there's anything paranoid in you, it'll come out. It's up to you, naturally."

Peter Horn looked at his wife, she looked back gravely.

"We'll go," said Peter Horn.

"Into Py's dimension?" said Wolcott.

"Into Py's dimension," said Peter Horn, quietly.

They stood up from their chairs. "We'll lose no other sense, you're certain, doctor? Hearing or talking. Will you be able to understand us when we talk to you? Py's talk is incomprehensible, just whistles."

"Py talks that way because that's what he thinks we sound like when our talk comes through the dimensions to him. He imitates the sound. When you are over there and talk to me, you'll be talking perfect English, because you know how. Dimensions have to do with senses and time and knowledge. Don't worry about that."

"And what about Py? When we come into his strata of existence. Will he see us as humans, immediately, and won't that be a shock to him? Won't it be dangerous."

"He's awfully young. Things haven't got too set for him. There'll be a slight shock, but your odors will be the same, and your voices will have the same timber and pitch and you'll be just as warm and loving, which is most important of all. You'll get on with him well."

Horn scratched his head slowly. "This seems such a long way around to where we want to go." He sighed. "I wish we could have another kid and forget all about this one."

"This baby is the one that counts. I dare say Polly here wouldn't want any other, would you, Polly? Besides, she can't have another. I didn't say anything before, but her first was her last. It's either this baby or none at all."

"This baby, this baby," said Polly.

---

Wolcott gave Peter Horn a meaningful look. Horn interpreted it correctly. This baby or no more Polly ever again. This baby or Polly would be in a quiet room somewhere staring into space for the rest of her life, quite insane. Polly took this whole thing as a personal failure of her own. Somehow she supposed she herself had forced the child into an alien dimension. She lived only to make right that wrong, to lose the sense of failure, fear and guilt. It had to be Py. It just simply had to be Py. You couldn't reason Polly out of it. There was the evidence, the pyramid, to prove her guilt. It had to be Py.

They walked toward the machine together. "I guess I can take it, if she can," said Horn, taking her hand. "I've worked hard for a good many years now, it might be fun retiring and being an abstract for a change."

"I envy you the journey, to be honest with you," said Wolcott, making adjustments on the large dark machine. "I don't mind telling you that as a result of your being 'over there' you may very well write a volume of philosophy that will set Dewey, Bergson, Hegel or any of the others on their ears. I might 'come over' to visit you one day."

"You'll be welcome. What do we need for the trip?"

"Nothing. Just lie on these tables and be still."

A humming filled the room. A sound of power and energy and warmth.

They lay on the tables, holding hands, Polly and Peter Horn. A double black hood came down over them. They were both in darkness. From somewhere far off in the hospital, a voice-clock sang, "Tick tock, seven o'clock. Tick tock, seven o'clock ..." fading away in a little soft gong.

The low humming grew louder. The machine glittered with hidden, shifting, compressed power.

"Will we be killed, is there any chance of that?" cried Peter Horn.

"No, none!"

The power screamed! The very atoms of the room divided against each other, into alien and enemy camps. The two sides fought for supremacy. Horn opened his mouth to shout as he felt his insides becoming pyramidal, oblong with the terrific electrical wrestlings in the air. He felt a pulling, sucking, demanding power clawing at his body. Wolcott was on the right track, by heavens! The power yearned and nuzzled and pressed through the room. The dimensions of the black hood over his body were stretched, pulled into wild planes of incomprehension. Sweat, pouring down Horn's face, seemed more than sweat, it seemed a dimensional essence!

He felt his body webbed into a dimensional vortex, wrenched, flung, jabbed, suddenly caught and heated so it seemed to melt like running wax.

A clicking sliding noise.

Horn thought swiftly, but calmly. How will it be in the future with Polly and I and Py at home and people coming over for a cocktail party? How will it be?

Suddenly he knew how it would be and the thought of it filled him with a great awe and a sense of credulous faith and time. They would live in the same white house on the same quiet green hill, with a high fence around it to keep out the merely curious. And Dr. Wolcott would come to visit, park his beetle in the yard below, come up the steps and at the door would be a tall slim White Rectangle to meet him with a dry martini in its snake-like hand.

And in an easy chair across the room would sit a Salt White Oblong seated with a copy of Nietzsche open, reading, smoking a pipe. And on the floor would be Py, running about. And there would be talk and more friends would come in and the White Oblong and the White Rectangle would laugh and joke and offer little finger sandwiches and more drinks and it would be a good evening of talk and laughter.

That's how it would be.

Click.

The humming noise stopped.

The hood lifted from Horn.

It was all over.

They were in another dimension.

He heard Polly cry out. There was much light. Then he slipped from the table, stood blinking. Polly was running. She stooped and picked up something from the floor.

It was Peter Horn's son. A living, pink-faced, blue-eyed boy, lying in her arms, gasping and blinking and crying.

The pyramidal shape was gone. Polly was crying with happiness.

Peter Horn walked across the room, trembling, trying to smile himself, to hold on to Polly and the boy baby, both at the same time, and cry with them.

"Well!" said Wolcott, standing back. He did not move for a long while. He only watched the White Oblong and the White slim Rectangle holding the Blue Pyramid on the opposite side of the room. An assistant came in the door.

"Shh," said Wolcott, hand to his lips. "They'll want to be alone awhile. Come along." He took the assistant by the arm and tiptoed across the room. The White Rectangle and the White Oblong didn't even look up when the door closed.