Destiny Times Three
By FRITZ LEIBER, Jr.
Illustrated by Orban
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction March, April 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I.
The ash Yggdrasil great evil suffers,
Far more than men do know;
The hart bites its top, its trunk is rotting,
And Nidhogg gnaws beneath.
In ghostly, shivering streamers of green and blue, like northern
lights, the closing hues of the fourth Hoderson symchromy, called "the
Yggdrasil," shuddered down toward visual silence. Once more the ancient
myth, antedating even the Dawn Civilization, had been told—of the tree
of life with its roots in heaven and hell and the land of the frost
giants, and serpents gnawing at those roots and the gods fighting to
preserve it. Transmuted into significant color by Hoderson's genius,
interpreted by the world's greatest color instrumentalists, the
primeval legend of cosmic dread and rottenness and mystery, of wheels
within cosmic wheels, had once more enthralled its beholders.
In the grip of an unearthly excitement, Thorn crouched forward, one
hand jammed against the grassy earth beyond his outspread cloak. The
lean wrist shook. It burst upon him, as never before, how the Yggdrasil
legend paralleled the hypothesis which Clawly and he were going to
present later this night to the World Executive Committee.
More roots of reality than one, all right, and worse than serpents
gnawing, if that hypothesis were true.
And no gods to oppose them—only two fumbling, overmatched men.
Thorn stole a glance at the audience scattered across the hillside. The
upturned faces of utopia's sane, healthy citizenry seemed bloodless and
cruel and infinitely alien. Like masks. Thorn shuddered.
A dark, stooped figure slipped between him and Clawly. In the last
dying upflare of the symchromy—the last wan lightning stroke as
the storm called life departed from the universe—Thorn made out a
majestic, ancient face shadowed by a black hood. Its age put him in
mind of a fancy he had once heard someone advance, presumably in
jest—that a few men of the Dawn Civilization's twentieth century had
somehow secretly survived into the present. The stranger and Clawly
seemed to be conversing in earnest, low-pitched whispers.
Thorn's inward excitement reached a peak. It was as if his mind had
become a thin, taut membrane, against which, from the farthest reaches
of infinity, beat unknown pulses. He seemed to sense the presence of
stars beyond the stars, time-streams beyond time.
The symchromy closed. There began a long moment of complete blackness.
Then—
Thorn sensed what could only be described as something from a region
beyond the stars beyond the stars, from an existence beyond the
time-streams beyond time. A blind but purposeful fumbling that for a
moment closed on him and made him its agent.
No longer his to control, his hand stole sideways, touched some soft
fabric, brushed along it with infinite delicacy, slipped beneath a
layer of similar fabric, closed lightly on a round, hard, smooth
something about as big as a hen's egg. Then his hand came swiftly back
and thrust the something into his pocket.
Gentle groundlight flooded the hillside, though hardly touching the
black false-sky above. The audience burst into applause. Cloaks
were waved, making the hillside a crazy sea of color. Thorn blinked
stupidly. Like a flimsy but brightly-painted screen switched abruptly
into place, the scene around him cut off his vision of many-layered
infinities. And the groping power that a moment before had commanded
his movements, now vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him
with the realization that he had just committed an utterly unmotivated,
irrational theft.
He looked around. The old man in black was already striding toward the
amphitheater's rim, threading his way between applauding groups. Thorn
half-withdrew from his pocket the object he had stolen. It was about
two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem,
nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all
four.
It would be easy to run after the man, to say, "You dropped this." But
he didn't.
The applause became patchy, erratic, surged up again as members of the
orchestra began to emerge from the pit. There was a lot of confused
activity in that direction. Shouts and laughter.
A familiar sardonic voice remarked, "Quite a gaudy show they put on.
Though perhaps a bit too close for comfort to our business of the
evening."
Thorn became aware that Clawly was studying him speculatively. He
asked, "Who was that you were talking to?"
Clawly hesitated a moment. "A psychologist I consulted some months
back when I had insomnia. You remember."
Thorn nodded vaguely, stood sunk in thought. Clawly prodded him out of
it with, "It's late. There are quite a few arrangements to check, and
we haven't much time."
Together they started up the hillside.
Especially as a pair, they presented a striking appearance—they
were such a study in similarities and contrasts. Certainly they both
seemed spiritually akin to some wilder and more troubled age than
safe, satisfied, wholesome utopia. Clawly was a small man, but dapper
and almost dancingly lithe, with gleamingly alert, subtle features.
He might have been some Borgia or Medici from that dark, glittering,
twisted core of the Dawn Civilization, when by modern standards
mankind was more than half insane. He looked like a small, red-haired,
devil-may-care satan, harnessed for good purposes.
Thorn, on the other hand, seemed like a somewhat disheveled and
reckless saint, lured by evil. His tall, gaunt frame increased the
illusion. He, too, would have fitted into that history-twisted black
dawn, perhaps as a Savonarola or da Vinci.
In that age they might have been the bitterest and most vindictive of
enemies, but it was obvious that in this they were the most unshakably
loyal of friends.
One also sensed that more than friendship linked them. Some secret,
shared purpose that demanded the utmost of their abilities and put
upon their shoulders crushing responsibilities.
They looked tired. Clawly's features were too nervously mobile, Thorn's
eyes too darkly circled, even allowing for the shadows cast by the
groundlight, which waned as the false-sky faded, became ragged, showed
the stars.
They reached the amphitheater's grassy rim, walked along a row of
neatly piled flying togs with distinctive luminescent monograms,
spotted their own. Already members of the audience were launching like
bats into the summary darkness, filling it with the faint gusty hum
of subtronic power, that basic force underlying electric, magnetic,
and gravitational phenomena, that titan, potentially earth-destroying
power, chained for human use.
As he climbed into his flying togs, Thorn kept looking around.
False-sky and groundlight had both dissolved, opening a view to the
far horizon, although a little weather, kept electronically at bay for
the symchromy, was beginning to drift in—thin streamers of cloud. He
felt as never before a poignancy in the beauty of utopia, because he
knew as never before how near it might be to disaster, how closely it
was pressed upon by alien infinities. There was something spectral
about the grandeur of the lonely, softly-glowing skylons, lofty and
distant as mountains, thrusting up from the dark rolling countryside.
Those vertical, one-building cities of his people, focuses of communal
activity, gleaming pegs sparsely studding the whole earth—the Mauve Z
peering over the next hill, seeming to top it but actually miles away;
beyond it the Gray Twins, linked by a fantastically delicate aerial
bridge; off to the left the pearly finger of the Opal Cross; last,
farther left, thirty miles away but jutting boldly above the curve of
the earth, the mountainous Blue Lorraine—all these majestic skylons
seemed to Thorn like the last pinnacles of some fairy city engulfed
by a rising black tide. And the streams of flying men and women, with
their softly winking identification lights, no more than fireflies
doomed to drown.
His fingers adjusted the last fastening of his togs, paused there.
Clawly only said, "Well?" but there was in that one word the sense of a
leave-taking from all this beauty and comfort and safety—an ultimate
embarkation.
They pulled down their visors. From their feelings, it might have been
Mars toward which they launched themselves—a sullen ember halfway up
the sky, even now being tentatively probed by the First Interplanetary
Expedition. But their actual destination was the Opal Cross.
II.
Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public
problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the
small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb
the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters.
Nyarlathotep, H. P. Lovecraft.
Suppressing the fatigue that surged up in him disconcertingly, Clawly
rose to address the World Executive Committee. He found it less easy
to suppress the feeling that had in part caused the surge of fatigue:
the illusion that he was a charlatan seeking to persuade sane men of
the truth of fabricated legends of the supernatural. His smile was
characteristic of him—friendly, but faintly diabolic, mocking himself
as well as others. Then the smile faded.
He summed up, "Well, gentlemen, you've heard the experts. And by now
you've guessed why, with the exception of Thorn, they were asked
to testify separately. Also, for better or worse"—he grimaced
grayly—"you've guessed the astounding nature of the danger which Thorn
and I believe over-hangs the world. You know what we want—the means
for continuing our research on a vastly extended and accelerated scale,
along with a program of confidential detective investigation throughout
the world's citizenry. So nothing remains but to ask your verdict.
There are a few points, however, which perhaps will bear stressing."
There was noncommittal silence in the Sky Room of the Opal Cross. It
was a huge chamber and seemed no less huge because the ceiling was at
present opaque—a great gray span arching from the World Map on the
south wall to the Space Map on the north. Yet the few men gathered in
an uneven horseshoe of armchairs near the center in no way suggested
political leaders seeking a prestige-enhancing background for their
deliberations, but rather a group of ordinary men who for various
practical reasons had chosen to meet in a ballroom. Any other group
than the World Executive Committee might just as well have reserved the
Sky Room. Indeed, others had danced here earlier this night, as was
mutely testified by a scattering of lost gloves, scarves, and slippers,
along with half-emptied glasses and other flotsam of gaiety.
Yet in the faces of the gathered few there was apparent a wisdom and
a penetrating understanding and a leisurely efficiency in action that
it would have been hard to find the equal of, in any similar group
in earlier times. And a good thing, thought Clawly, for what he was
trying to convince them of was something not calculated to appeal to
the intelligence of practical administrators—it was doubtful if any
earlier culture would have granted him and Thorn any hearing at all.
He surveyed the faces unobtrusively, his dark glance flitting like a
shadow, and was relieved to note that only in Conjerly's and perhaps
Tempelmar's was a completely unfavorable reaction apparent. Firemoor,
on the contrary, registered feverish and unquestioning belief, but
that was to be expected in the volatile, easily-swayed chief of the
Extraterrestrial Service—and a man who was Clawly's admiring friend.
Firemoor was alone in this open expression of credulity. Chairman
Shielding, whose opinion mattered most, looked on the whole skeptical
and perhaps a shade disapproving; though that, fortunately, was the
heavy-set man's normal expression.
The rest, reserving judgment, were watchful and attentive. With the
unexpected exception of Thorn, who seemed scarcely to be listening,
lost in some strange fatigued abstraction since he had finished making
his report.
A still-wavering audience, Clawly decided. What he said now, and how he
said it, would count heavily.
He touched a small box. Instantly some tens of thousands of pinpricks
of green light twinkled from the World Map.
He said, "The nightmare-frequency for an average night a hundred years
ago, as extrapolated from random samplings. Each dot—a bad dream. A
dream bad enough to make the dreamer wake in fright."
Again he touched the box. The twinkling pattern changed slightly—there
were different clusterings—but the total number of pinpricks seemed
not to change.
"The same, for fifty years ago," he said. "Next—forty." Again there
was merely a slight alteration in the grouping.
"And now—thirty." This time the total number of pinpricks seemed
slightly to increase.
Clawly paused. He said, "I'd like to remind you, gentlemen, that Thorn
proved conclusively that his method of sampling was not responsible
for any changes in the frequency. He met all the objections you
raised—that his subjects were reporting their dreams more fully,
that he wasn't switching subjects often enough to avoid cultivating a
nightmare-dreaming tendency, and so on."
Once more his hand moved toward the box. "Twenty-five." This time there
was no arguing about the increase.
"Twenty."
"Fifteen."
"Ten."
"Five."
Each time the total greenness jumped, until now it was a general glow
emanating from all the continental areas. Only the seas still showed
widely scattered points, where men dreamed in supra- or sub-surface
craft, and a few heavy clusters, where ocean-based skylons rose through
the waves.
"And now, gentlemen, the present."
The evil radiance swamped the continents, reached out and touched the
faces of the armchair observers.
"There you have it, gentlemen. A restful night in utopia," said Clawly
quietly. The green glow unwholesomely emphasized his tired pallor and
the creases of strain around eyes and mouth. He went on, "Of course
it's obvious that if nightmares are as common as all that, you and
yours can hardly have escaped. Each of you knows the answer to that
question. As for myself—my nightly experiences provide one more small
confirmation of Thorn's report."
He switched off the map. The carefully noncommittal faces turned back
to him.
Clawly noted that the faint, creeping dawn-line on the World Map was
hardly two hours away from the Opal Cross. He said, "I pass over the
corroborating evidence—the slight steady decrease in average sleeping
time, the increase in day sleeping and nocturnal social activity, the
unprecedented growth of art and fiction dealing with supernatural
terror, and so on—in order to emphasize as strongly as possible
Thorn's secondary discovery: the similarity between the nightmare
landscapes of his dreamers. A similarity so astonishing that, to me,
the wonder is that it wasn't noticed sooner, though of course Thorn
wasn't looking for it and he tells me that most of his earlier subjects
were unable, or disinclined, to describe in detail the landscapes
of their nightmares." He looked around. "Frankly, that similarity
is unbelievable. I don't think even Thorn did full justice to it in
the time he had for his report—you'd have to visit his offices,
see his charts and dream-sketches, inspect his monumental tables of
correlation. Think: hundreds of dreamers, to take only Thorn's samples,
thousands of miles apart, and all of them dreaming—not the same
nightmare, which might be explained by assuming telepathy or some
subtle form of mass suggestion—but nightmares with the same landscape,
the same general landscape. As if each dreamer were looking through a
different window at a consistently distorted version of our own world.
A dream world so real that when I recently suggested to Thorn he try to
make a map of it, he did not dismiss my notion as nonsensical."
The absence of a stir among his listeners was more impressive than any
stir could have been. Clawly noted that Conjerly's frown had deepened,
become almost angry. He seemed about to speak, when Tempelmar casually
forestalled him.
"I don't think telepathy can be counted out as an explanation,"
said the tall, long-featured, sleepy-eyed man. "It's still a purely
hypothetic field—we don't know how it would operate. And there may
have been contacts between Thorn's subjects that he didn't know about.
They may have told each other their nightmares and so started a train
of suggestion."
"I don't believe so," said Clawly slowly. "His precautions were
thorough. Moreover, it wouldn't fit with the reluctance of the dreamers
to describe their nightmares."
"Also," Tempelmar continued, "we still aren't a step nearer the
underlying cause of the phenomenon. It might be anything—for instance,
some unpredictable physiological effect of subtronic power, since it
came into use about thirty years ago."
"Precisely," said Clawly. "And so for the present we'll leave it
at that—vastly more frequent nightmares with strangely similar
landscapes, cause unknown—while I"—he again gauged the position of
the dawn-line—"while I hurry on to those matters which I consider the
core of our case: the incidence of cryptic amnesia and delusions of
nonrecognition. The latter first."
Again Conjerly seemed about to interrupt, and again something stopped
him. Clawly got the impression it was a slight deterring movement from
Tempelmar.
He touched the box. Some hundreds of yellow dots appeared on the World
Map, a considerable portion of them in close clusters of two and three.
He said, "This time, remember, we can't go back any fifty years. These
are such recent matters that there wasn't any hint of them even in last
year's Report on the Psychological State of the World. As the experts
agreed, we are dealing with an entirely new kind of mental disturbance.
At least, no cases can be established prior to the last two years,
which is the period covered by this projection."
He looked toward the map. "Each yellow dot is a case of delusions of
nonrecognition. An otherwise normal individual fails to recognize a
family member or friend, maintains in the face of all evidence that
he is an alien and impostor—a frequent accusation, quite baseless,
is that his place has been taken by an unknown identical twin. This
delusion persists, attended by emotional disturbances of such magnitude
that the sufferer seeks the services of a psychiatrist—in those cases
we know about. With the psychiatrist's assistance, one of
two adjustments is achieved: the delusions fade and the avowed alien
is accepted as the true individual, or they persist and there is a
separation—where husband and wife are involved, a divorce. In either
case, the sufferer recovers completely.
"And now—cryptic amnesia. For a reason that will soon become apparent,
I'll first switch off the other projection."
The yellow dots vanished, and in their place glowed a somewhat smaller
number of violet pinpoints. These showed no tendency to form clusters.
"It is called cryptic, I'll remind you, because the victim makes a very
determined and intelligently executed effort to conceal his memory
lapse—frequently shutting himself up for several days on some pretext
and feverishly studying all materials and documents relating to himself
he can lay hands on. Undoubtedly sometimes he succeeds. The cases we
hear about are those in which he makes such major slips—as being
mistaken as to what his business is, who he is married to, who his
friends are, what is going on in the world—that he is forced, against
his will, to go to a psychiatrist. Whereupon, realizing that his
efforts have failed, he generally confesses his amnesia, but is unable
to offer any information as to its cause, or any convincing explanation
of his attempt at concealment. Thereafter, readjustment is rapid."
He looked around. "And now, gentlemen, a matter which the experts
didn't bring out, because I arranged it that way. I have saved it
in order to impress it upon your minds as forcibly as possible—the
correlation between cryptic amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition."
He paused with his hand near the box, aware that there was something
of the conjurer about his movements and trying to minimize it. "I'm
going to switch on both projections at once. Where cases of cryptic
amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition coincide—I mean, where it
is the cryptic amnesiac about whom the other person or persons had
delusions of nonrecognition—the dots will likewise coincide; and
you know what happens when violet and yellow light mix. I'll remind
you that in ordinary cases of amnesia there are no delusions of
nonrecognition—family and friends are aware of the victim's memory
lapse, but they do not mistake him for a stranger."
His hand moved. Except for a sprinkling of yellow, the dots that glowed
on the map were pure white.
"Complementary colors," said Clawly quietly. "The yellow has blanked
out all the violet. In some cases one violet has accounted for a
cluster of yellows—where more than one individual had delusions of
nonrecognition about the same cryptic amnesiac. Except for the surplus
cases of nonrecognition—which almost certainly correspond to cases of
successfully concealed cryptic amnesia—the nonrecognitions and cryptic
amnesias are shown to be dual manifestations of a single underlying
phenomenon."
He paused. The tension in the Sky Room deepened. He leaned forward. "It
is that underlying phenomenon, gentlemen, which I believe constitutes a
threat to the security of the world, and demands the most immediate and
thorough-going investigation. Though staggering, the implications are
obvious."
The tautness continued, but slowly Conjerly got to his feet. His
compact, stubby frame, bald bullet-head, and uncompromisingly impassive
features were in striking contrast with Clawly's mobile, half-haggard,
debonair visage.
Leashed anger deepened Conjerly's voice, enhanced its authority.
"We have come a long way from the Dawn Era, gentlemen. One might
think we would never again have to grapple with civilization's old
enemy superstition. But I am forced to that regretful conclusion when
I hear this gentleman, to whom we have granted the privilege of an
audience, advancing theories of demoniac possession to explain cases
of amnesia and nonrecognition." He looked at Clawly. "Unless I wholly
misunderstood?"
Clawly decisively shook his head. "You didn't. It is my contention—I
might as well put it in plain words—that alien minds are displacing
the minds of our citizens, that they are infiltering Earth, seeking
to gain a foothold here. As to what minds they are, where they come
from—I can't answer that, except to remind you that Thorn's studies
of dream landscapes hint at a world strangely like our own, though
strangely distorted. But the secrecy of the invaders implies that their
purpose is hostile—at best, suspect. And I need not remind you that,
in this age of subtronic power, the presence of even a tiny hostile
group could become a threat to Earth's very existence."
Slowly Conjerly clenched his stub fingers, unclenched them. When he
spoke, it was as if he were reciting a creed.
"Materialism is our bedrock, gentlemen—the firm belief that every
phenomenon must have a real existence and a real cause. It has made
possible science technology, unbiased self-understanding. I am
open-minded. I will go as far as any in granting a hearing to new
theories. But when those theories are a revival of the oldest and most
ignorant superstitions, when this gentleman seeks to frighten us with
nightmares and tales of evil spirits stealing human bodies, when he
asks us on this evidence to institute a gigantic witch-hunt, when he
raises the old bogey of subtronic power breaking loose, when he brings
in a colleague"—he glared at Thorn—"who takes seriously to the idea
of surveying dream worlds with transit and theodolite—then I say,
gentlemen, that if we yield to such suggestions, we might as well throw
materialism overboard and, as for safeguarding the future of mankind,
ask the advice of fortunetellers!"
At the last word Clawly started, recovered himself. He dared not look
around to see if anyone had noticed.
The anger in Conjerly's voice strained at its leash, threatened to
break it.
"I presume, sir, that your confidential investigators will go out with
wolfsbane to test for werewolves, garlic to uncover vampires, and cross
and holy water to exorcise demons!"
"They will go out with nothing but open minds," Clawly answered quietly.
Conjerly breathed deeply, his face reddened slightly, he squared
himself for a fresh and more uncompromising assault. But just at that
moment Tempelmar eased himself out of his chair. As if by accident, his
elbow brushed Conjerly's.
"No need to quarrel," Tempelmar drawled pleasantly, "though our
visitor's suggestions do sound rather peculiar to minds tempered to a
realistic materialism. Nevertheless, it is our duty to safeguard the
world from any real dangers, no matter how improbable or remote. So,
considering the evidence, we must not pass lightly over our visitor's
theory that alien minds are usurping those of Earth—at least not until
there has been an opportunity to advance alternate theories."
"Alternate theories have been advanced, tested, and discarded,"
said Clawly sharply.
"Of course," Tempelmar agreed smilingly. "But in science that's a
process that never quite ends, isn't it?"
He sat down, Conjerly following suit as if drawn. Clawly was irascibly
conscious of having got the worst of the interchange—and the lanky,
sleepy-eyed Tempelmar's quiet skepticism had been more damaging than
Conjerly's blunt opposition, though both had told. He felt, emanating
from the two of them, a weight of personal hostility that bothered and
oppressed him. For a moment they seemed like utter strangers.
He was conscious of standing too much alone. In every face he could
suddenly see skepticism. Shielding was the worst—his expression
had become that of a man who suddenly sees through the tricks of a
sleight-of-hand artist masquerading as a true magician. And Thorn, who
should have been mentally at his side, lending him support, was sunk in
some strange reverie.
He realized that even in his own mind there was a growing doubt of the
things he was saying.
Then, utterly unexpectedly, adding immeasurably to his dismay, Thorn
got up, and without even a muttered excuse to the men beside him,
left the room. He moved a little stiffly, like a sleepwalker. Several
glanced after him curiously. Conjerly nodded. Tempelmar smiled.
Clawly noted it. He rallied himself. He said, "Well, gentlemen?"
III.
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.
Like a dreamer who falls head-foremost for giddy miles and then is
wafted to a stop as gently as a leaf, Thorn plunged down the main
vertical levitator of the Opal Cross and swam out of it at ground
level, before its descent into the half mile of basements. At this
hour the great gravity-less tube was relatively empty, except for the
ceaseless silent plunge and ascent of the graduated subtronic currents
and the air they swept along. There were a few other down-and-up
swimmers—distant leaflike swirls of color afloat in the contracting
white perspective of the tube—but, like a dreamer, Thorn did not seem
to take note of them.
Another levitating current carried him along some hundred yards of
mural-faced corridor to one of the pedestrian entrances of the Opal
Cross. A group of revelers stopped their crazy, squealing dance in the
current to watch him. They looked like figures swum out of the potently
realistic murals—but with a more hectic, troubled gaiety on their
faces. There was something about the way he plunged past them unseeing,
his sleepwalker's eyes fixed on something a dozen yards ahead, that
awakened unpleasant personal thoughts and spoiled their feverish
fun-making.
The pedestrian entrance was really a city-limits. Here the one-building
metropolis ended, and there began the horizontal miles of half-wild
countryside, dark as the ancient past, trackless and roadless in the
main, dotted in many areas with small private dwellings, but liberally
brushed with forests.
A pair of lovers on the terrace, pausing for a kiss as they adjusted
their flying togs, broke off to look curiously after Thorn as he
hurried down the ramp and across the close-cropped lawn, following one
of the palely-glowing pathways. The up-slanting pathlight, throwing
into gaunt relief his angular cheek-bones and chin, made him resemble
some ancient pilgrim or crusader in the grip of a religious compulsion.
Then the forest had swallowed him up.
A strange mixture of trance and willfullness, of dream and waking,
of aimless wandering and purposeful tramping, gripped Thorn as he
adventured down that black-fringed ghost-trail. Odd memories of
childhood, of old hopes and desires, of student days with Clawly,
of his work and the bewildering speculations it had led to, drifted
across his mind, poignant but meaningless. Among these, but drained of
significance, like the background of a dream, there was a lingering
picture of the scene he had left behind him in the Sky Room. He was
conscious of somehow having deserted a friend, abandoned a world,
betrayed a great purpose—but it was a blurred consciousness and he had
forgotten what the great purpose was.
Nothing seemed to matter any longer but the impulse pulling him
forward, the sense of an unknown but definite destination.
He had the feeling that if he looked long enough at that receding,
beckoning point a dozen yards ahead, something would grow there.
The forest path was narrow and twisting. Its faint glow silhouetted
weeds and brambles partly over-growing it. His hands pushed aside
encroaching twigs.
He felt something tugging at his mind from ahead, as if there were
other avenues leading to his subconscious than that which went through
his consciousness. As if his subconscious were the core of two or more
minds, of which his was the only one.
Under the influence of that tugging, imagination awoke.
Instantly it began to recreate the world of his nightmares. The
world which had obscurely dominated his life and turned him to
dream-research, where he had found similar nightmares. The world
where danger lay. The blue-litten world in which a mushroom growth of
ugly squat buildings, like the factories and tenements and barracks
of ancient times, blotched the utopian countryside, and along whose
sluice-like avenues great crowds of people ceaselessly drifted, unhappy
but unable to rest—among them that other, dream Thorn, who hated and
envied him, deluged him with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.
For almost as long as he could remember, that dream Thorn had tainted
his life—the specter at his feasts, the suppliant at his gates, the
eternal accuser in the courts of inmost thought—drifting phantom-wise
across his days, rising up starkly real and terrible in his nights.
During the long, busy holiday of youth, when every day had been a
new adventure and every thought a revelation, that dream Thorn had
been painfully discovering the meaning of oppression and fear, had
been security swept away and parents exiled, had attended schools in
which knowledge was forbidden and all a man learned was his place.
When he was discovering happiness and love, that dream Thorn had been
rebelliously grieving for a young wife snatched away from him forever
because of some autocratic government's arbitrary decrees. And while
he was accomplishing his life's work, building new knowledge stone by
stone, that dream Thorn had toiled monotonously at meaningless jobs,
slunk away to brood and plot with others of his kind, been harried by
a fiendishly efficient secret police, become a hater and a killer.
Day by day, month by month, year by year, the dark-stranded dream life
had paralleled his own.
He knew the other Thorn's emotions almost better than his own, but the
actual conditions and specific details of the dream Thorn's life were
blurred and confused in a characteristically dreamlike fashion. It
was as if he were dreaming that other Thorn's dreams—while, by some
devilish exchange, that other Thorn dreamed his dreams and hated him
for his good fortune.
A sense of guilt toward his dream-twin was the dominant fact in Thorn's
inner life.
And now, pushing through the forest, he began to fancy that he could
see something at the receding focus of his vision a dozen yards ahead,
something that kept flickering and fading, so that he could scarcely
be sure that he saw it, and that yet seemed an embodiment of all the
unseen forces dragging him along—a pale, wraithlike face, horribly
like his own.
The sense of a destination grew stronger and more urgent. The mile
wall of the Opal Cross, a pale cataract of stone glimpsed now and then
through overhanging branches, still seemed to rise almost at his heels,
creating the maddening illusion that he was making no progress. The
wraith-face blacked out. He began to run.
Twigs lashed him. A root caught at his foot. He stumbled, checked
himself, and went on more slowly, relieved to find that he could at
least govern the rate of his progress.
The forces tugging at him were both like and infinitely unlike those
which had for a moment controlled his movements at the symchromy.
Whereas those had seemed to have a wholly alien source, these seemed to
have come from a single human mind.
He felt in his pocket for the object he had stolen from Clawly's
mysterious confidant. He could not see much of its color now, but that
made its baffling texture stand out. It seemed to have a little more
inertia than its weight would account for. He was certain he had never
touched anything quite like it before.
He couldn't say where the notion came from, but he suddenly found
himself wondering if the thing could be a single molecule. Fantastic!
And yet, was there anything to absolutely prevent atoms from
assembling, or being assembled, in such a giant structure?
Such a molecule would have more atoms than the universe had suns.
Oversize molecules were the keys of life—the hormones, the activators,
the carriers of heredity. What doors might not a supergiant molecule
unlock?
The merest fancy—yet frightening. He started to throw the thing away,
but instead tucked it back in his pocket.
There was a rush in the leaves. A large cat paused for an instant in
the pathlight to snarl and stare at him. Such cats were common pets,
for centuries bred for intelligence and for centuries tame. Yet now, on
the prowl, it seemed all wild—with an added, evil insight gained from
long association with man.
The path branched. He took a sharp turn, picking his way over bulbous
roots. The pathlight grew dim and diffuse, its substance dissolved and
spread by erosion. At places the vegetation had absorbed some of the
luminescence. Leaves and stems glowed faintly.
But beyond, on either side, the forest was a black, choked infinity.
It had come inscrutably alive.
The sense of a thousand infinities pressing upon him, experienced
briefly at the Yggdrasil, now returned with redoubled force.
The Yggdrasil was true. Reality was not what it seemed on the surface.
It had many roots, some strong and true, some twisted and gnarled,
nourished in many worlds.
He quickened his pace. Again something seemed to be growing at the
focus of his vision—a flitting, pulsating, bluish glow. It was like
the Yggdrasil's Nidhogg motif. Nidhogg, the worm gnawing ceaselessly at
the root of the tree of life that goes down to hell. It droned against
his vision—an unshakable color-tune.
Then, gradually, it became a face. His own face, but seared by
unfamiliar emotions, haggard with unknown miseries, hard, vengeful,
accusing—the face of the dream Thorn, beckoning, commanding, luring
him toward some unknown destination in the maze of unknown, unseen
worlds.
With a sob of courage and fear, he plunged toward it.
He must come to grips with that other Thorn, settle accounts with him,
even the balance of pleasure and pain between them, right the wrong of
their unequal lives. For in some sense he must be that other
Thorn, and that other Thorn must be he. And a man could not be untrue
to himself.
The wraithlike face receded as swiftly as he advanced.
His progress through the forest became a nightmarish running of the
gauntlet, through a double row of giant black trees that slashed him
with their branches.
The face kept always a few yards ahead.
Fear came, but too late—he could not stop.
The dreamy veils that had been drawn across his thoughts and memories
during the first stages of his flight from the Opal Cross, were torn
away. He realized that what was happening to him was the same thing
that had happened to hundreds of other individuals. He realized that an
alien mind was displacing his own, that another invader and potential
cryptic amnesiac was gaining a foothold on Earth.
The thought hit him hard that he was deserting Clawly, leaving the
whole world in the lurch.
But he was only a will-less thing that ran with outclutched hands.
Once he crossed a bare hilltop and for a moment caught a glimpse of the
lonely glowing skylons—the Blue Lorraine, the Gray Twins, the Myrtle
Y—but distant beyond reach, like a farewell.
He was near the end of his strength.
The sense of a destination grew overpoweringly strong.
Now it was something just around the next turn in the path.
He plunged through a giddy stretch of darkness thick as ink—and came
to a desperate halt, digging in his heels, flailing his arms.
From somewhere, perhaps from deep within his own mind, came a faint
echo of mocking laughter.
IV.
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not—
Like a mote in the grip of an intangible whirlwind, Clawly whipped
through the gray dawn on a steady surge of subtronic power toward the
upper levels of the Blue Lorraine. The brighter stars, and Mars, were
winking out. Through the visor of his flying togs the rushing air sent
a chill to which his blood could not quite respond. He should be home,
recuperating from defeat, planning new lines of attack. He should be
letting fatigue poisons drain normally from his plasma, instead of
knocking them out with stimulol. He should be giving his thoughts a
chance to unwind. Or he should have given way to lurking apprehensions
and be making a frantic search for Thorn. But the itch of a larger
worry was upon him, and until he had done a certain thing, he could not
pursue personal interests, or rest.
With Thorn gone, his rebuff in the Sky Room loomed as a black and
paralyzingly insurmountable obstacle that grew momently higher. They
were lucky, he told himself, not to have had their present research
funds curtailed—let alone having them increased, or being given a
large staff of assistants, or being granted access to the closely
guarded files of confidential information on cryptic amnesiacs and
other citizens. Any earlier culture would probably have forbidden their
research entirely, as a menace to the mental stability of the public.
Only an almost fetishlike reverence for individual liberty and the
inviolability of personal pursuits, had saved them.
The Committee's adverse decision had even shaken his own beliefs. He
felt himself a puny little man, beset by uncertainties and doubts,
quite incompetent to protect the world from dangers as shadowy, vast,
and inscrutable as the gloom-drenched woodlands a mile below.
Why the devil had Thorn left the meeting like that, of necessity
creating a bad impression? Surely he couldn't have given way to any
luring hypnotic impulse—he of all men ought to know the danger of
that. Still, there had been that unpleasant suggestion of sleepwalking
in his departure—an impression that Clawly's memory kept magnifying.
And Thorn was a strange fellow. After all these years, Clawly still
found him unpredictable. Thorn had a spiritual recklessness, an urge
to plumb all mental deeps. And God knows there were deeps enough
for plumbing these days, if one were foolish. Clawly felt them in
himself—the faint touch of a darker, less pleasant version of his own
personality, against which he must keep constantly on guard.
If he had let something happen to Thorn—!
A variation in the terrestrial magnetic field, not responded to soon
enough, sent him spinning sideways a dozen yards, forced his attention
back on his trip.
He wondered if he had managed to slip away as unobtrusively as he had
thought. A few of the committee members had wanted to talk. Firemoor,
who had voted against the others and supported Clawly's views rather
too excitedly, had been particularly insistent. But he had managed
to put them off. Still, what if he were followed? Surely Conjerly's
reference to "fortunetellers" had been mere chance, although it had
given him a nasty turn. But if Conjerly and Tempelmar should find out
where he was going now—What a handle that would give them against him!
It would be wiser to drop the whole business, at least for a time.
No use. The vice of the thing—if vice it be—was in his blood. The
Blue Lorraine drew him as a magnet flicks up a grain of iron.
A host of images fought for possession of his tired mind, as he
plunged through thin streamers of paling cloud. Green dots on the World
Map. The greens and blues of the Yggdrasil—and in what nightmare
worlds had Hoderson found his inspiration? The blue-tinted sketches one
of Thorn's dreamers had made of the world of his nightmares. A sallow
image of Thorn's face altered and drawn by pain, such an image as might
float into the mind of one who watches too long by a sickbed. The looks
on the faces of Conjerly and Tempelmar—that fleeting impression of a
hostile strangeness. The hint of a dark alien presence in the depths of
his own mind.
The Blue Lorraine grew gigantic, loomed as a vast, shadow-girt cliff,
its topmost pinnacles white with frost although the night below had
been summery. There were already signs of a new day beginning. Here
and there freighters clung like beetles to the wall, discharging or
receiving cargo through unseen ports. Some distance below a stream of
foodstuffs for the great dining halls, partly packaged, partly not,
was coming in on a subtronic current. Off to one side an attendant
shepherded a small swarm of arriving schoolchildren, although it was
too early yet for the big crowds.
Clawly swooped to a landing stage, hovered for a moment like a bird,
then dropped. In the ante-room he and another early arriver helped each
other remove and check their flying togs.
He was breathing hard, there was a deafness and a ringing in his ears,
he rubbed his chilled fingers. He should not have made such a steep
and swift ascent. It would have been easier to land at a lower stage
and come up by levitator. But this way was more satisfying to his
impatience. And there was less chance of someone following him unseen.
A levitating current wafted him down a quarter mile of mainstem
corridor to the district of the psychologists. From there he walked.
He looked around uneasily. Only now did real doubt hit him. What
if Conjerly were right? What if he were merely dragging up ancient
superstitions, foisting them on a group of overspecialized experts,
Thorn included? What if the world-threat he had tried to sell to
the World Executive Committee were just so much morbid nonsense,
elaborately bastioned by a vast array of misinterpreted evidence? What
if the darker, crueler, deviltry-loving side of his mind were more in
control than he realized? He felt uncomfortably like a charlatan, a
mountebank trying to pipe the whole world down a sinister side street,
a chaos-loving jester seeking to perpetrate a vast and unpleasant hoax.
It was all such a crazy business, with origins far more dubious than he
had dared reveal even to Thorn, from whom he had no other secrets. Best
back down now, at least quit stirring up any more dark currents.
But the other urge was irresistible. There were things he had to know,
no matter the way of knowing.
Stealing himself, he paraphrased Conjerly. "If the evidence seems
to point that way, if the safety of mankind seems to demand it,
then I will throw materialism overboard and ask the advice of
fortunetellers!"
He stopped. A door faced him. Abruptly it was a doorway. He went in,
approached the desk and the motionless, black-robed figure behind it.
As always, there was in Oktav's face that overpowering suggestion of
age—age far greater than could be accounted for by filmy white hair,
sunken cheeks, skin tight-drawn and wrinkle-etched. Unwilled, Clawly's
thoughts turned toward the Dawn Civilization with its knights in armor
and aircraft winged like birds, its whispered tales of elixirs of
eternal life—and toward that oddly long-lived superstition, rumor,
hallucination, that men clad in the antique garments of the Late Middle
Dawn Civilization occasionally appeared on Earth for brief periods at
remote places.
Oktav's garb, at any rate, was just an ordinary houserobe. But in their
wrinkle-meshed orbits, his eyes seemed to burn with the hopes and fears
and sorrows of centuries. They took no note of Clawly as he edged into
a chair.
"I see suspense and controversy," intoned the seer abruptly. "All night
it has surged around you. It regards that matter whereof we spoke at
the Yggdrasil. I see others doubting and you seeking to persuade them.
I see two in particular in grim opposition to you, but I cannot see
their minds or motives. I see you in the end losing your grip, partly
because of a friend's seeming desertion, and going down in defeat."
Of course, thought Clawly, he could learn all this by fairly simple
spying. Still, it impressed him, as it always had since he first
chanced—But was it wholly chance?—to contact Oktav in the guise of an
ordinary psychologist.
Not looking at the seer, with a shyness he showed toward no one else,
Clawly asked, "What about the world's future? Do you see anything more
there?"
There was a faint drumming in the seer's voice. "Only thickening
dreams, more alien spirits stalking the world in human mask, doom
overhanging, great claws readying to pounce—but whence or when I
cannot tell, only that your recent effort to convince others of the
danger has brought the danger closer."
Clawly shivered. Then he sat straighter. He was no longer shy.
Docketing the question about Thorn that was pushing at his lips, he
said, "Look, Oktav, I've got to know more. It's obvious that you're
hiding things from me. If I map the best course I can from the hints
you give me, and then you tell me that it is the wrong course, you
tie my hands. For the good of mankind, you've got to describe the
overhanging danger more definitely."
"And bring down upon us forces that will destroy us both?" The seer's
eyes stabbed at him. "There are worlds within worlds, wheels within
wheels. Already I have told you too much for our safety. Moreover,
there are things I honestly do not know, things hidden even from the
Great Experimenters—and my guesses might be worse than yours."
Taut with a sense of feverish unreality, Clawly's mind wandered.
What was Oktav—what lay behind that ancient mask? Were all faces
only masks? What lay behind Conjerly's and Tempelmar's? Thorn's?
His own? Could your own mind be a mask, too, hiding things from
your own consciousness? What was the world—this brief masquerade
of inexplicable events, flaring up from the future to be instantly
extinguished in the past?
"But then what am I to do, Oktav?" he heard his tired voice ask.
The seer replied, "I have told you before. Prepare your world for any
eventuality. Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it wait supine for the
hunter."
"But how can I, Oktav? My request for a mere program of investigation
was balked. How can I ask the world to arm—for no reason?"
The seer paused. When he finally answered there drummed in his voice,
stronger than ever, the bitter wisdom of centuries.
"Then you must give it a reason. Always governments have provided
appropriate motives for action, when the real motives would be
unpalatable to the many, or beyond their belief. You must extemporize
a danger that fits the trend of their short-range thinking. Now let me
see—Mars—"
There was a slight sound. The seer wheeled around with a serpentine
rapidity, one skinny hand plunged in the breast of his robe. It fumbled
wildly, agitating the black, weightless fabric, then came out empty. A
look of extreme consternation contorted his features.
Clawly's eyes shifted with his to the inner doorway.
The figure stayed there peering at Oktav for only a moment. Then, with
an impatient, peremptory flirt of its head, it turned and moved out of
sight. But it was indelibly etched, down to the very last detail, on
Clawly's panic-shaken vision.
Most immediately frightening was the impression of age—age greater
than Oktav's, although, or perhaps because, the man's physical
appearance was that of thirty-odd, with dark hair, low forehead,
vigorous jaw. But in the eyes, in the general expression—centuries of
knowledge. Yet knowledge without wisdom, or with only a narrow-minded,
puritanic, unsympathetic, overweening simulacrum of wisdom. A
disturbing blend of unconscious ignorance and consciousness of power.
The animal man turned god, without transfiguration.
But the most lingering impression, oddly repellent, was of its
clothing. Crampingly unwieldly upper and nether garments of
tight-woven, compressed, tortured animal-hair, fastened by bits of
bone or horn. The upper garment had an underduplicate of some sort of
bleached vegetable fiber, confined at the throat by two devices—one a
tightly knotted scarf of crudely woven and colored insect spinnings,
the other a high and unyielding white neckband, either of the same
fiber as the shirt, glazed and stiffened, or some primitive plastic.
It gave Clawly an added, anti-climactic start to realize that the
clothing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he had
seen pictured in history albums, would have just this appearance, if
actually prepared according to the ancient processes and worn by a
human being.
Without explanation, Oktav rose and moved toward the inner doorway. His
hand fumbled again in his robe, but it was merely an idle repetition
of the earlier gesture. In the last glimpse he had of his face, Clawly
saw continued consternation, frantic memory-searching, and the frozen
intentness of a competent mind scanning every possible avenue of escape
from a deadly trap.
Oktav went through the doorway.
There was no sound.
Clawly waited.
Time spun on. Clawly shifted his position, caught himself, coughed,
waited, coughed again, got up, moved toward the inner doorway, came
back and sat down.
There was time, too much time. Time to think again and again of that
odd superstition about fleeting appearances of men in Dawn-Civilization
garb. Time to make a thousand nightmarish deductions from the age in
Oktav's, and that other's, eyes.
Finally he got up and walked to the inner doorway.
There was a tiny unfurnished room, without windows or another door, the
typical secondary compartment of offices like this. Its walls were bare
and seamless.
There was no one.
V.
... and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague
blacknesses had told of the presence of consciousness and will.
The Haunter of the Dark, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
With a sickening ultimate plunge, that seemed to plumb in instants
distances greater than the diameter of the cosmos—a plunge in which
more than flesh and bones were stripped away, transformed—Oktav
followed his summoner into a region of not only visual night.
Here in the Zone, outside the bubble of space-time, on the borders of
eternity, even the atoms were still. Only thought moved—but thought
powered beyond description or belief, thought that could make or mar
universes, thought not unbefitting gods.
Most strange, then, to realize that it was human thought, with all its
homely biases and foibles. Like finding, on another planet in another
universe, a peasant's cottage with smoke wreathing above the thatched
roof and an axe wedged in a half-chopped log.
Mice scurrying at midnight in a vast cathedral—and the faint
suggestion that the cathedral might not be otherwise wholly empty.
Oktav, or that which had been Oktav, oriented itself—himself—making
use of the sole means of perception that functioned in the Zone. It was
most akin to touch, but touch strangely extended and sensitive only to
projected thought or processes akin to thought.
Groping like a man shut in an infinite closet, Oktav felt the eternal
hum of the Probability Engine, the lesser hum of the seven unlocked
talismans. He felt the seven human minds in their stations around the
engine, felt six of them stiffen with cold disapproval as Ters made
report. Then he took his own station, the last and eighth.
Ters concluded.
Prim thought, "We summoned you, Oktav, to hear your explanation of
certain highly questionable activities in which you have recently
indulged—only to learn that you have additionally committed an act
of unprecedented negligence. Never before has a talisman been lost.
And only twice has it been necessary to make an expedition to recover
one—when its possessor met accidental death in a space-time world.
How can you have permitted this to happen, since a talisman gives
infallible warning if it is in any way spatially or temporarily parted
from its owner?"
"I am myself deeply puzzled," Oktav admitted. "Some obscure influence
must have been operative, inhibiting the warning or closing my mind to
it. I did not become aware of the loss until I was summoned. However,
casting my mind back across the last Earth-day's events, I believe I
can now discern the identity of the individual into whose hands it
fell—or who stole it."
"Was the talisman inert at the time?" thought Prim quickly.
"Yes," thought Oktav. "A Key-idea known only to myself would be
necessary to unlock its powers."
"That is one small point in your favor," thought Prim.
"I am gravely at fault," thought Oktav, "but it can easily be mended.
Lend me another talisman and I will return to the world and recover it."
"It will not be permitted," thought Prim. "You have already spent too
much time in the world, Oktav. Although you are the youngest of us,
your body is senile."
Before he could check himself, or at least avoid projection, Oktav
thought, "Yes, and by so doing I have learned much that you, in your
snug retreat, would do well to become aware of."
"The world and its emotions have corrupted you," thought Prim. "And
that brings me to the second and major point of our complaint."
Oktav felt the seven minds converge hostilely upon him. Careful to mask
his ideational processes, Oktav probed the others for possible sympathy
or weakness. Lack of a talisman put him at a great disadvantage. His
hopes fell.
Prim thought, "It has come to our attention that you have been telling
secrets. Moved by some corrupt emotionality, and under the astounding
primitive guise of fortunetelling, you have been disbursing forbidden
knowledge—cloudily perhaps, but none the less unequivocally—to
earthlings of the main-trunk world."
"I do not deny it," thought Oktav, crossing his Rubicon. "The
main-trunk world needs to know more. It has been your spoiled
brat. And as often happens to a spoiled brat, you now push it,
unprepared and unaided, into a dubious future."
Prim's answering thought, amplified by his talisman, thundered in the
measureless dark. "We are the best judges of what is good for
the world. Our minds are dedicated far more selflessly than yours to
the world's welfare, and we have chosen the only sound scientific
method for insuring its continued and ultimate happiness. One of the
unalterable conditions of that method is that no Earthling have the
slightest concrete hint of our activities. Has your mind departed so
far from scientific clarity—influenced perhaps by bodily decay due to
injudicious exposure to space-time—that I must recount to you our
purpose and our rules?"
The darkness pulsed. Oktav projected no answering thought. Prim
continued, thinking in a careful step-by-step way, as if for a child.
"No scientific experiment is possible without controls—set-ups in
which the conditions are unaltered, as a comparison, in order to
gauge the exact effects of the alteration. There is, under natural
conditions, only one world. Hence no experiments can be performed
upon it. One can never test scientifically which form of social
organization, government, and so forth, is best for it. But the
creation of alternate worlds by the Probability Engine changes all
that."
Prim's thought beat at Oktav.
"Can it be that the underlying logic of our procedure has somehow
always escaped you? From our vantage point we observe the world as
it rides into the cone of the future—a cone that always narrows
towards the present, because in the remote future there are many major
possibilities still realizable, in the near future only a relative
few. We note the approach of crucial epochs, when the world must
make some great choice, as between democracy and totalitarianism,
managerialism and servicism, benevolent elitism and enforced equalism
and so on. Then, carefully choosing the right moment and focussing the
Probability Engine chiefly upon the minds of the world's leaders, we
widen the cone of the future. Two or more major possibilities are then
realized instead of just one. Time is bifurcated, or trifurcated. We
have alternate worlds, at first containing many objects and people
in common, but diverging more and more—bifurcating more and more
completely—as the consequences of the alternate decisions make
themselves felt."
"I criticize," thought Oktav, plunging into uncharted waters. "You
are thinking in generalities. You are personifying the world, and
forgetting that major possibilities are merely an accumulation of minor
ones. I do not believe that the distinction between the two major
alternate possibilities in a bifurcation is at all clear-cut."
The idea was too novel to make any immediate impression, except that
Oktav's mind was indeed being hazy and disordered. As if Oktav had not
thought, Prim continued, "For example, we last split the time-stream
thirty Earth-years ago. Discovery of subtronic power had provided the
world with a practically unlimited source of space-time energy. The
benevolent elite governing the world was faced with three clear-cut
alternatives: It could suppress the discovery completely, killing its
inventors. It could keep it a Party secret, make it a Party asset.
It could impart it to the world at large, which would destroy the
authority of the Party and be tantamount to dissolving it, since it
would put into the hands of any person, or at least any small group
of persons, the power to destroy the world. In a natural state, only
one of these possibilities could be realized. Earth would only have
one chance in three of guessing right. As we arranged it, all three
possibilities were realized. A few years' continued observation
sufficed to show us that the third alternative—that of making
subtronic power common property—was the right one. The other two had
already resulted in untold unendurable miseries and horrors."
"Yes, the botched worlds," Oktav interrupted bitterly. "How many of
them have there been, Prim? How many, since the beginning?"
"In creating the best of all possible worlds, we of necessity also
created the worst," Prim replied with a strained patience.
"Yes—worlds of horror that might have never been, had you not insisted
on materializing all the possibilities, good and evil lurking in men's
minds. If you had not interfered, man still might have achieved that
best world—suppressing the evil possibilities."
"Do you suggest that we should leave all to chance?" Prim exploded
angrily. "Become fatalists? We, who are masters of fate?"
"And then," Oktav continued, brushing aside the interruption, "having
created those worst or near-worlds—but still human, living ones, with
happiness as well as horror in them, populated by individuals honestly
striving to make the best of bad guesses—you destroy them."
"Of course!" Prim thought back in righteous indignation. "As soon as we
were sure they were the less desirable alternatives, we put them out
of their misery."
"Yes." Oktav's bitterness was like an acid drench. "Drowning the
unwanted kittens. While you lavish affection on one, putting the rest
in the sack."
"It was the most merciful thing to do," Prim retorted. "There was no
pain—only instantaneous obliteration."
Oktav reacted. All his earlier doubts and flashes of rebellion were
suddenly consolidated into a burning desire to shake the complacency of
the others. He gave his ironic thoughts their head, sent them whipping
through the dark.
"Who are you to tell whether or not there's pain in instantaneous
obliteration? Oh yes, the botched worlds, the controls, the experiments
that failed—they don't matter, let's put them out of their misery,
let's get rid of the evidence of our mistakes, let's obliterate them
because we can't stand their mute accusations. As if the Earthlings
of the botched worlds didn't have as much right to their future, no
matter how sorry and troubled, as the Earthlings of the main trunk.
What crime have they committed save that of guessing wrong, when,
by your admission, all was guess-work? What difference is there
between the main trunk and the lopped branches, except your judgment
that the former seems happier, more successful? Let me tell you
something. You've coddled the main-trunk world for so long, you've
tied your limited human affections to it so tightly, that you've
gotten to believing that it's the only real world, the only world that
counts—that the others are merely ghosts, object lessons, hypothetics.
But in actuality they're just as throbbingly alive, just as deserving
of consideration, just as real."
"They no longer exist," thought Prim crushingly. "It is obvious that
your mind, tainted by Earth-bound emotions, has become hopelessly
disordered. You are pleading the cause of that which no longer is."
"Are you so sure?" Oktav could feel his questioning thought hang in
the dark, like a great black bubble, coercing attention. "What if the
botched worlds still live? What if, in thinking to obliterate them,
you have merely put them beyond the reach of your observation, cut
them loose from the main-trunk time-stream, set them adrift in the
oceans of eternity? I've told you that you ought to visit the world
more often in the flesh. You'd find out that your beloved main-trunkers
are becoming conscious of a shadowy, overhanging danger, that they're
uncovering evidences of an infiltration, a silent and mystery-shrouded
invasion across mental boundaries. Here and there in your main-trunk
world, minds are being displaced by minds from somewhere else. What if
that invasion comes from one of the botched worlds—say from one of the
worlds of the last trifurcation? That split occurred so recently that
the alternate worlds would still contain many duplicate individuals,
and between duplicate individuals there may be subtle bonds that
reach even across the intertime void—on your admission, time-splits
are never at first complete, and there may be unchanging shared
deeps in the subconscious minds of duplicate individuals, opening the
way for forced interchanges of consciousness. What if the botched
worlds have continued to develop in the everlasting dark, outside
the range of your knowledge, spawning who knows what abnormalities
and horrors, like mutant monsters confined in caves? What if, with
a tortured genius resulting from their misery, they've discovered
things about time that even you do not know? What if they're out
there—waiting, watching, devoured by resentment, preparing to leap
upon your pet?"
Oktav paused and probed the darkness. Faint, but unmistakable, came the
pulse of fear. He had shaken their complacency all right—but not to
his advantage.
"You're thinking nonsense," Prim thundered at him coldly, in
thought-tones in which there was no longer any hope of mercy or
reprieve. "It is laughable even to consider that we could be guilty
of such a glaring error as you suggest. We know every crevice of
space-time, every twig and leaflet. We are the masters of the
Probability Engine."
"Are you?" Reckless now of all consequences, Oktav asked the
unprecedented, forbidden, ultimate question. "I know when I was
initiated, and presumably when the rest of you were initiated, it
was always assumed and strongly suggested, though never stated with
absolute definiteness, that Prim, the first of us, a mental mutant and
supergenius of the nineteenth century, invented the Probability Engine.
I, an awestruck neophyte, accepted this attitude. But now I know that
I never really believed it. No human mind could ever have conceived
the Probability Engine. Prim did not invent it. He merely found it,
probably by chancing on a lost talisman. Thereafter some peculiarity of
the Engine permitted him to take it out of reach of its true owners,
hide it from them. Then he took us in with him, one by one, because a
single mind was insufficient to operate the Engine in all its phases
and potentialities. But Prim never invented it. He stole it."
With a sense of exultation, Oktav realized that he had touched their
primal vulnerability—though at the same time insuring his own doom.
He felt the seven resentful, frightened minds converge upon him
suffocatingly. He probed now for one thing only—any relaxing of
watchfulness, any faltering of awareness, on the part of any one of
them. And as he probed, he kept choking out additional insults against
the resistance.
"Is there any one of you, Prim included, who even understands the
Probability Engine, let alone having the capacity to devise it?
"You prate of science, but do you understand even the science of modern
Earthlings? Can any one of you outline to me the theoretic background
of subtronic physics? Even your puppets have outstripped you. You're
atavisms, relics of the Dawn Civilization, mental mummies, apes crept
into a factory at night and monkeying with the machinery.
"You're sorcerer's apprentices—and what will happen when the sorcerer
comes back? What if I should stop this eternal whispering and send a
call winging clear and unhampered through eternity: 'Oh sorcerer, True
Owners, here is your stolen Engine'?"
They pressed on him frantically, frightenedly, as if by sheer mental
weight to prevent any such call being sent. He felt that he would go
down under the pressure, cease to be. But at the same time his probing
uncovered a certain muddiness in Kart's thinking, a certain wandering
due to doubt and fear, and he clutched at it, desperately but subtly.
Prim finished reading sentence. "—and so Ters and Septem will
escort Oktav back to the world, and when he is in the flesh, make
disposition of him." He paused, continued. "Meanwhile, Sikst will make
an expedition to recover the lost talisman, calling for aid if not
immediately successful. At the same time, since the functioning of the
Probability Engine is seriously hampered so long as there is an empty
station, Sekond, Kart and Kant will visit the world in order to select
a suitable successor for Oktav. I will remain here and—"
He was interrupted by a flurry of startled thought from Kart, which
rose swiftly to a peak of dismay.
"My talisman! Oktav has stolen it! He is gone!"
VI.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caught
Sounds from the noisome hold—
Cursing and sighing of souls distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
Thorn teetered on the dark edge. His footgear made sudden grating
noises against it as he fought for balance. He was vaguely conscious of
shouts and of a needle of green light swinging down at him.
Unavailingly he wrenched the muscles of his calves, flailed the air
with his arms.
Yet as he lurched over, as the edge receded upward—so slowly at
first!—he became glad that he had fallen, for the down-chopping green
needle made a red-hot splash of the place where he had been standing.
He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of flying togs he was
not wearing.
There was time for a futile, spasmodic effort to get clear in his mind
how, plunging through the forest, he should find himself on that dark
edge.
Indistinct funnel-mouths shot past, so close he almost brushed them.
Then he was into something tangly that impeded his fall—slowly at
first, then swiftly, as pressures ahead were built up. His motion was
sickeningly reversed. He was flung upward and to one side, and came
down with a bone-shaking jolt.
He was knee-deep in the stuff that had broken his fall. It made a
rustling, faintly skirring noise as he ploughed his way out of it.
He stumbled around what must have been a corner of the dark building
from whose roof he had fallen. The shouts from above were shut off.
He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined
scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.
He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the
twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself—a feeling
of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean
toughness of muscular fiber—both disturbingly unfamiliar.
He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the
top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the
nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue
at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the
avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.
He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging
to him. He automatically started to brush it off, and noted that it
consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal—identical with
the shavings from an old-style, presubtronic hyperlathe. Presumably
a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths he
had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many
hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce
so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to
gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.
His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and
clothing. They seemed strange—the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed,
almost clawlike.
Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came
memories of the evening's events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in
black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.
There was something clenched in his left hand—so tightly that the
fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had
stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he
still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn't have changed.
And yet—
His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.
Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into
his pocket—a pocket that wasn't quite where it should be and that
contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down
the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd
surging along the blue-litten avenue.
The foreboding became a tightening ball of fear, exploded into
realization.
That other Thorn had changed places with him. He was wearing that other
Thorn's clothing—drab, servile, workaday. He was inhabiting that other
Thorn's body—his own but strangely altered and ill-cared-for, aquiver
with unfamiliar tensions and emotions.
He was in the world of his nightmares.
He stood stock-still, staring, the crowd flowing around him, jostling
him wearily.
His first reaction, after a giant buffet of amazement and awe that left
him intoxicatedly weak, was one of deep-seated moral satisfaction. The
balance had at last been righted. Now that other Thorn could enjoy
the good fortunes of utopia, while he endured that other Thorn's lot.
There was no longer the stifling sense of being dominated by another
personality, to whom misfortune and suffering had given the whiphand.
He was filled with an almost demoniac exhilaration—a desire to explore
and familiarize himself with this world which he had long studied
through the slits of nightmare, to drag from the drifting crowd around
him an explanation as to its whys and wherefores.
But that would not be so easy.
An atmosphere of weary secrecy and suspicion pervaded the avenue. The
voices of the people who jostled him dropped to mumbles as they went
by. Heads were bowed or averted—but eyes glanced sharply.
He let himself move forward with the crowd, meanwhile studying it
closely.
The misery and boredom and thwarted yearning for escape bluely shadowed
in almost all the faces, was so much like that he remembered from his
nightmares that he could easily pretend that he was dreaming—but only
pretend.
There was a distorted familiarity about some of the faces that provided
undiminishing twinges of horror. Those must be individuals whose
duplicates in his own world he vaguely knew, or had glimpsed under
different circumstances.
It was as if the people of his own world were engaged in acting out
some strange pageant—perhaps a symbolic presentation dedicated to all
the drab, monotonous, futile lives swallowed up in the muck of history.
They were dressed, both men and women, in tunic and trousers of some
pale color that the blue light made it impossible to determine. There
was no individuality—their clothes were all alike, although some
seemed more like work clothes, others more like military uniforms.
Some seemed to be keeping watch on the others. These were treated with
a mingled deference and hostility—way was made for them, but they
were not spoken to. And they were spied on in turn—indeed, Thorn got
the impression of an almost intolerably complex web of spying and
counterspying.
Even more deference was shown to occasional individuals in dark
clothing, but for a time Thorn did not get a close glimpse of any of
these.
Everyone seemed on guard, wearily apprehensive.
Everywhere was the suggestion of an elaborate hierarchy of authority.
There was a steady drone of whispered or mumbled conversation.
One thing became fairly certain to Thorn before long. These people
were going nowhere. All their uneasy drifting had no purpose except to
fill up an empty period between work and sleep—a period in which some
unseen, higher authority allowed them freedom, but forbid them from
doing anything with it.
As he drifted along Thorn became more a part of the current, took on
its coloring, ceased to arouse special suspicion. He began to overhear
words, phrases, then whole fragments of dialogue. All of these had one
thing in common: some mention of, or allusion to, the activities of a
certain "they." Whatever the subject-matter, this pronoun kept cropping
up. It was given a score of different inflections, none of them free
from haunting anxiety and veiled resentment. There grew in Thorn's
mind the image of an authority that was at once tyrannical, fatherly,
arbitrary, austere, possessed of overpowering prestige, yet so familiar
that it was never referred to in any more definite way.
"They've put our department on a twelve-hour shift."
The speaker was evidently a machinist. Anyway, a few hyperlathe
shavings stuck to his creased garments.
His companion nodded. "I wonder what the new parts that are coming
through are for."
"Something big."
"Must be. I wonder what they're planning."
"Something big."
"I guess so. But I wish we at least knew the name of what we're
building."
No answer, except a tired, mirthless chuckle.
The crowd changed formation. Thorn found himself trailing behind
another group, this time mostly elderly women.
"Our work-group has turned out over seven hundred thousand identical
parts since the speed-up started. I've kept count."
"That won't tell you anything."
"No, but they must be getting ready for something. Look at how
many are being drafted. All the forty-one-year-olds, and the
thirty-seven-year-old women."
"They came through twice tonight, looking for Recalcitrants. They took
Jon."
"Have you had the new kind of inspection? They line you up and ask you
a lot of questions about who you are and what you're doing. Very simple
questions—but if you don't answer them right, they take you away."
"That wouldn't help them catch Recalcitrants. I wonder who they're
trying to catch now."
"Let's go back to the dormitory."
"Not for a while yet."
Another meaningless shift put Thorn next to a group containing a girl.
She said, "I'm going into the army tomorrow."
"Yes."
"I wish there were something different we could do tonight."
"They won't let us do anything." A weak, whining note of rebellion
entered her voice. "They have everything—powers like magic—they can
fly—they live in the clouds, away from this horrible light. Oh, I
wish—"
"Sh! They'll think you're a Recalcitrant. Besides, all this is
temporary—they've told us so. There'll be happiness for everyone, as
soon as the danger is over."
"I know—but why won't they tell us what the danger is?"
"There are military reasons. Sh!"
Someone who smiled maliciously had stolen up behind them, but Thorn
did not learn the sequence to this interlude, if it had one, for yet
another shift carried him to the other side of the avenue and put him
near two individuals, a man and a woman, whose drab clothing was of the
more soldierly cut.
"They say we may be going on maneuvers again next week. They've put a
lot of new recruits in with us. There must be millions of us. I wish I
knew what they were planning to do with us, when there's no enemy."
"Maybe things from another planet—"
"Yes, but that's just a rumor."
"Still, there's talk of marching orders coming any day now—complete
mobilization."
"Yes, but against what?" The woman's voice had a faint overtone of
hysteria. "That's what I keep asking myself at practice whenever I look
through the slit and depress the trigger of the new gun—not knowing
what it is that the gun will shoot or how it really works. I keep
asking myself, over and over, what's going to be out there instead of
the neat little target—what it is I'm going to kill. Until sometimes I
think I'm going crazy. Oh Burk, there's something I've got to tell you,
though I promised not to. I heard it yesterday—I mustn't tell who told
me. It's that there's really a way of escape to that happier world we
all dream of, if only you know how to concentrate your mind—"
"Sh!"
This time it was Thorn's eavesdropping that precipitated the warning.
He managed to listen in on many similar, smaller fragments of talk.
Gradually a change came over his mood—a complete change. His curiosity
was not satisfied, but it was quenched. Oh, he had guessed several
things from what he had heard, all right—in particular, that the
"new kind of inspection" was designed to uncover displaced minds like
his own, and that the "way of escape" was the one the other Thorn
had taken—but this knowledge no longer lured him on. The fever of
demoniac excitement had waned as swiftly as drunkenness, and left
as sickening a depression in its wake. Normal human emotions were
re-asserting themselves—a shrinking from the ominous strangeness of
this distorted world, and an aching, unreasoning, mountingly frantic
desire to get back to familiar faces and scenes.
Bitter regret began to torture him for having deserted Clawly and his
home-world because of the pressure of a purely personal moral problem.
No knowing what confusions and dangers the other Thorn might weave for
an unsuspecting Clawly. And upon Clawly alone, now that he was gone,
the safety of the home-world depended. True, if most of the displacing
minds from this world were only those of oppressed individuals seeking
escape, they would constitute no immediate unified danger. But if the
shadowy, autocratic "they" were contemplating an invasion—that would
be a very different matter.
The avenue, now skirting some sort of barren hillside, had become
hateful to him. It was like a treadmill, and the glaring lights
prevented any extended glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He would
probably have left it soon in any case, even without sight of the
jam-up ahead, where some sort of inspection of all walkers seemed to be
going on. As it was, that sight decided him. He edged over to the side,
waited for what he thought was a good opportunity, and ducked through
the hedge.
Some minutes later, panting from concentrated exertion, his clothes
muddied and grass-stained, he came out on the hilltop. The darkness and
the familiar stars were a relief. He looked around.
His first impression was reassuring. For a moment it even roused in
him the hope that, in his scramble up the hillside, the world had come
right again. There, where it should be, was the Opal Cross. There were
the Gray Twins. Concentrating on them, he could ignore the unpleasant
suggestion of darker, squatter buildings bulging like slugs or beetles
from the intervening countryside, could ignore even the meshwork of
blue-litten, crawling avenues.
But the aerial bridge connecting the Twins must be darked out. Still,
in that case the reflected light from the two towers ought to enable
him to catch the outlines of either end of it.
And where was the Blue Lorraine? It didn't seem a hazy enough night to
blot out that vast skylon.
Where, between him and the Twins, was the Mauve Z?
Shakingly he turned around. For a moment again his hope surged up. The
countryside seemed clearer this way, and in the distance the Myrtle Y
and the Gray H were like signposts of home.
But between him and them, rearing up from that very hillside where this
evening he had watched the Yggdrasil, as if built in a night by jinn,
was a great dark skylon, higher than any he had ever seen, higher even
than the Blue Lorraine. It had an ebon shimmer. The main elements of
its structure were five tapering wings radiating at equal intervals
from a central tower. It looked like some symbol of pride and power
conceived in the dreams of primeval kings.
A name came to him. The Black Star.
"Who are you up there? Come down!"
Thorn whirled around. The blue glare from the avenue silhouetted two
men halfway up the hillside. Their heads were craned upward. The
position of their arms suggested that they held weapons of some sort
trained upon him.
He stood stock-still, conscious that the blue glow extended far
enough to make him conspicuous. His senses were suddenly very keen.
The present instant seemed to widen out infinitely, as if he and his
two challengers were frozen men. It burst on him, with a dreadful
certainty, that those men shouting on the roof had been trying to kill
him. Save for the luck of overbalancing, he would this moment be a
mangled cinder. The body he was in was one which other men were trying
to kill.
"Come down at once!"
He threw himself flat. There was no needle of green, but something
hissed faintly through the grass at his heels. He wriggled desperately
for a few feet, then came up in a crouch and ran recklessly down the
hillside away from the avenue.
Luck was with him. He kept footing in his crazy, breathless plunge
through the semidark.
He entered thin forest, had to go more slowly. Leaves and fallen
branches crackled under his feet. Straggly trees half blotted the stars.
All at once he became aware of shouting ahead. He turned, following a
dry gravelly watercourse. But after a while there was shouting in that
direction, too. Then something big swooped into the sky overhead and
hung, and from it exploded blinding light, illumining the forest with a
steady white glare crueler than day's.
He dove to cover in thick underbrush.
For a long time the hunt beat around him, now receding a little, now
coming close. Once footsteps crunched in the gravel a dozen feet away.
The underbrush, shot through with the relentless white glare, seemed
a most inadequate screen. But any attempt to change position would be
very risky.
He hitched himself up a little to peer through the gaps in the leaves,
and found that his right hand was clutching the metal cylinder he had
felt in his pocket earlier. He must have snatched it out at some stage
in his flight—perhaps an automatic response of his alien muscles.
He examined the thing, wondering if it were a weapon. He noted two
controlling levers, but their function was unclear. As a last resort,
he could try pointing the thing and pushing them.
A rustle of leaves snapped his attention to one of the leafy gaps. A
figure had emerged on the opposite bank of the dried watercourse. It
was turned away, but from the first there was something breathlessly
familiar about the self-assured posture, the cock of the close-cropped,
red-haired head.
The theatric glare struck an ebon shimmer from the uniform it was
wearing, and outlined on one shoulder, of a somberer blackness than the
uniform, a black star.
Thorn leaned forward, parting with his hand the brambly wall of his
retreat.
The figure turned and the face became visible.
In a strangled voice—his first words since he had found himself on the
roof-edge—Thorn cried out, "Clawly!" and rushed forward.
For a moment there was no change in Clawly's expression. Then, with
feline agility, he sprang to one side. Thorn stumbled in the pitted
streambed, dropped the metal cylinder. Clawly whipped out something
and pointed it. Thorn started up toward him. Then—there was no sound
save a faint hissing, no sight, but agonizing pain shot through Thorn's
right shoulder.
And stayed. Lesser waves of it rippled through the rest of his body. He
was grotesquely frozen in the act of scrambling upward. It was as if an
invisible red-hot needle in Clawly's hand transfixed his shoulder and
held him helpless.
Staring up in shocked, tortured dismay, the first glimmerings of the
truth came to Thorn.
Clawly—this Clawly—smiled.
VII.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Clawly quit his nervous prowling and perched on Oktav's desk. His
satanic face was set in tight, thwarted lines. Except for his rummaging
everything in the room was just as it had been when he had stolen out
early this morning. The outer door aslit, Oktav's black cloak thrown
over the back of his chair, the door to the empty inner chamber open.
As if the seer had been called away on some brief, minor errand.
Clawly was irked at the impulse which had drawn him back to this place.
True, his rummaging had uncovered some suggestive and disquieting
things—in particular, an assortment of small objects and implements
that seemed to extend back without a break to the Late Middle Dawn
Civilization, including a maddeningly random collection of notes that
began in faded stain on sheets of bleached and compressed vegetable
fiber, shifted to typed characters on similar sheets, kept on through
engraving stylus and plastic film to memoranda ribbon and recording
wire, and finally ended in multilevel writing tape.
But what Clawly wanted was something that would enable him to get a
hook into the problem that hung before him like a vast, slippery,
ungraspable sphere.
He still had, strong as ever, the conviction that this room was the
center of a web, the key to the whole thing—but it was a key he did
not know how to use.
His heels beat a muffled tattoo against the desk as he searched his
mind for possible alternate avenues of attack.
Thorn? That was a whole problem in itself, only a few hours old, but
full of the most nerve-racking possibilities. He took from his pouch
and nervously fingered the fragment of tape with its scrawlingly
recorded message which he had found earlier today on Thorn's desk at
their office—that message which no one had seen Thorn leave.
A matter of the greatest importance has arisen. I must handle it
alone. Will be back in a few days. Cancel or postpone all activities
until my return.
Thorn.
Although the general style of recording was characteristically Thorn's,
it had a subtly different swing to it, an alien undercurrent, as if
some other mind were using Thorn's habitual patterns of muscular
action. And the message itself, which might refer to anything, was
alarmingly suggestive of a cryptic amnesiac's play for time.
On the other hand, it would be just like Thorn to play the lone wolf if
he saw fit.
If he followed his simplest impulses, Clawly would resume the search
for Thorn he had begun on finding the message. But he had already put
that search into the hands of agencies more competent than any single
individual could possibly be. They would find Thorn if anyone could,
and for him to try to help them would merely be a concession to his
anxiety.
His heels beat a sharper tattoo.
The research program? But that was crippled by the Committee's adverse
decision, and by Thorn's absence. He couldn't do much there. Besides
he had the feeling that any research program was becoming too slow and
remote a measure for dealing with the present situation.
The Committee itself? But what single, definite thing could he tell
them that he had not told them last night?
His own mind, then? How about that as an avenue of attack? Stronger
than ever before, the conviction came that there were dark avenues
leading down from his consciousness—one of them to a frighteningly
devilish, chaos-loving version of himself—and that if he concentrated
his mind in a certain peculiar way he might be able to slip down one of
them.
There was a devil-may-care lure to those dark avenues—the promise of
a world better suiting the darker, Dawn phases of his personality.
And, if Thorn had been displaced, that would be the only way of
getting to him.
But that wasn't grappling with the problem. That was letting go,
plunging with indefensible recklessness into the unknown—a crazy last
resort.
To grapple with a problem, you had to have firm footing—and grab.
The tattoo ended with a sudden slam of heels. Was this room getting
on his nerves? This silent room, with its feel of tangible linkages
with future and past, its sense of standing on the edge of a timeless,
unchanging center of things, in which action had no place—sapping his
will power, rendering him incapable of making a decision, now that
there was no longer a seer to interpret for him.
The problem was in one sense so clear-cut. Earth threatened by invasion
from across a new kind of frontier.
But to get a grip on that problem.
He leaned across the desk and flipped the televisor, riffling through
various local scenes in the Blue Lorraine. The Great Rotunda, with its
aerial promenade, where a slow subtronic current carried chatting,
smiling throngs in an upward spiral past displays of arts and wares.
The Floral Rotunda, where pedestrians strolled along gently rolling
paths under arches of exotic greenery. The other formal social centers.
The endless corridors of individual enterprises, where one might come
upon anything from a puppet-carver's to a specialized subtronic lab,
a mood-creator's to a cat-fancier's. The busy schools. The production
areas, where keen-eyed machine tenders governed and artistically varied
the flow of processing. The maintenance and replacement centers. The
vast kitchens, where subtle cooks ruled to a hairbreadth the mixing
of foodstuffs and their exposure to heat and moisture and other
influences. The entertainment and games centers, where swirling gaiety
and high-pitched excitement were the rule.
Everywhere happiness—or, rather, creative freedom. A great rich
surging world, unaware, save for nightmare glimpses, of the abyss-edge
on which it danced.
Maddeningly unaware.
Clawly's features writhed. Thus, he thought, the Dawn gods must have
felt when looking down upon mankind the evening before Ragnarok.
To be able to shake those people out of their complacency, make them
aware of danger!
The seer's words returned to him: "Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it
wait supine for the hunter—You must give it a reason ... extemporize a
danger—Mars."
Mars! The seer's disappearance had caused Clawly to miss the idea
behind the word, but now, remembering, he grasped it in a flash. A
faked Martian invasion. Doctored reports from the First Interplanetary
Expedition—mysterious disappearance of spaceships—unknown craft
approaching Earth—rumor of a vast fleet—running fights in the
stratosphere—
Firemoor of the Extraterrestrial Service was his friend, and believed
in his theories. Moreover, Firemoor was daring—even reckless. Many of
the young men under him were of similar temperament. The thing could be
done!
Abruptly Clawly shook his head, scowled. Any such invasion scare would
be a criminal hoax. It was a notion that must have been forced upon him
by the darker, more wantonly mischievous side of his nature—or by some
lingering hypnotic influence of Oktav.
And yet—
No! He must forget the notion. Find another way.
He slid from the desk, began to pace. Opposition. That was what he
needed. Something concrete to fight against. Something, some person,
some group, that was opposed to him, that was trying to thwart him at
every turn.
He stopped, wondering why he had not thought of it before.
There were two men who were trying to thwart him, who had shrewdly
undermined his and Thorn's theories, two men who had shown an odd
personality reversal in the past months, who had impressed him with a
fleeting sense of strangeness and alienage.
Two members of the World Executive Committee.
Conjerly and Tempelmar.
Brushing the treetops, swooping through leaf-framed gaps, startling a
squirrel that had been dozing on an upper branch, Clawly glided into
the open and made a running landing on the olive-floored sun-deck of
Conjerly's home.
It was very quiet. There was only the humming of some bees in the
flower garden, up from which sweet, heavy odors drifted sluggishly and
curled across the deck. The sun beat down. On all sides without a
break, the trees—solid masses of burnished leaves—pressed in.
Clawly crossed quietly to the dilated doorway in the cream-colored
wall. He did not remove his flying togs. His visor he had thrown open
during flight.
Raising his hand, he twice broke the invisible beam spanning the
doorway. A low musical drone sounded, was repeated.
There was no answering sound, no footsteps. Clawly waited.
The general quiet, the feeling of lifelessness, made his abused nerves
twitch. Forest homes like this, reached only by flying, were devilishly
lonely and isolated.
Then he became aware of another faint, rhythmic sound, which the
humming of the bees had masked. It came from inside the house. Throaty
breathing. The intervals between breaths seemed abnormally long.
Clawly hesitated. Then he smoothly ducked under the beam.
He walked softly down a dark, cool corridor. The breathing grew
steadily louder, though there was no change in its labored, sighing
monotony. Opposite the third opened doorway the increase in volume was
abrupt.
As his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, he made out a low
couch and the figure of a man sprawled on it, on his back, arms dropped
to either side, pale blob of bald head thrown limply back. At intervals
the vague face quivered with the slow-paced breathing.
Clawly fumbled sideways, switched on a window, went over to the couch.
On the floor, under Conjerly's hand, was a deflated elastoid bag.
Clawly picked it up, sniffed, quickly averted his head from the faintly
pungent soporific odor.
He shook the bulky sleeper, less gently after a moment.
It did not interrupt the measured snores.
The first impression of Conjerly's face was one of utter emptiness, the
deep-grooved wrinkles of character and emotion a network of disused
roads. But on closer examination, hints of personality became dimly
apparent, as if glimpsed at the bottom of a smudgy pool.
The longer Clawly studied them, the surer he became that the suspicions
he had clutched at so eagerly in Oktav's office were groundless.
This was the Conjerly he had known. Unimaginative perhaps, stubborn
and blunt, a little too inclined to conservatism, a little too fond
of curling down those deep furrows at the corners of the mouth—but
nothing alien, nothing malign.
The rhythm of the breathing changed. The sleeper stirred. One hand came
slowly up, brushed blindly at the chest.
Clawly watched motionlessly. From all sides the heavy summery silence
pressed in.
The rhythm of the breathing continued to change. The sleeper tossed.
The hand fumbled restlessly at the neck of the loose house robe.
And something else changed. It seemed to Clawly as if the face of the
Conjerly he knew were sinking downward into a narrow bottomless pit,
becoming tiny as a cameo, vanishing utterly, leaving only a hollow
mask. And then, as if another face were rising to fill the mask—and
in this second face, if not malignity, at least grim and unswervingly
hostile purpose.
The sleeper mumbled, murmured. Clawly bent low, caught words. Words
with a shuddery, unplacable quality of distance to them, as if they
came from another cosmos.
"... transtime machine ... invasion ... three days ... we ... prevent
action ... until—"
Then, from the silence behind him, a different sound—a faint crunch.
Clawly whirled. Standing in the doorway, filling half its width and all
its height, was Tempelmar.
And in Tempelmar's lean, horse-like face the vanishing flicker of
a look in which suspicion, alarm, and a more active emotion were
blended—a lethal look.
But by the time Clawly was looking straight at him, it had been
replaced by an urbane, condescending, eyebrow-raising "Well?"
Again a sound from behind. Turning, backing a little so that he could
take in both men at once, Clawly saw that Conjerly was sitting up,
rubbing his face. He took away his hands and his small eyes stared
at Clawly—blankly at first. Then his expression changed too, became
a "Well?"—though more angry, indignant, less urbane. It was an
expression that did not belong to the man who had lain there drugged.
The words Clawly had barely caught were still humming in his ears.
Even as he phrased his excuse—"... came to talk with you about the
program ... heard sounds of distressed breathing ... alarmed ... walked
in ..."—even as he considered the possibility of immediate physical
attack and the best way to meet it, he came to a decision.
He would see Firemoor.
VIII.
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster.
With bent shoulders, sunken head, paralyzed arm still dangling at his
side, Thorn crouched uncomfortably in his lightless cell, as if the
whole actual weight of the Black Star—up to the cold, cloud-piercing
pinnacle where "they" held council—were upon him. His mind was tired
to the breaking point, oppressed by the twisted, tyrannous world into
which he had blundered, by the aching body not his own, by the brain
which refused to think his thoughts in the way he wanted to think them.
And yet, in a sense, the human mind is tireless—an instrument built
for weary decades of uninterrupted thinking and dreaming. And so Thorn
continued to work on, revolving miseries, regrets, and fears, striving
to unlock the stubborn memory chambers of the unfamiliar brain,
turning from that to equally hopeless efforts to make plans. Mostly
it struggled nightmarishly with the problem of escape back to his own
world, and with the paradoxical riddles which that problem involved.
He must, Thorn told himself, still be making partial use of his brain
back in World I—to give it a name—just as Thorn II—to give him a
name—must be making use of these locked memory chambers. All thought
had to be based on a physical brain; it couldn't go on in emptiness.
Also, since Universes I and II—to give them names—were independent,
self-contained space-time set-ups, they couldn't have an ordinary
spatial relationship—they couldn't be far from or near to each other.
The only linkage between them seemed to be the mental ones between
quasi-duplicate brains, and such linkages would not involve distance in
any common sense of the term. His transition into World II had seemed
to take place instantaneously; hence, pragmatically speaking, the two
universes could be considered as super-imposed on each other. Whether
he was in one or the other was just a matter of viewpoint.
So near and yet so far. So diabolically similar to attempts to
wake from a nightmare—and the blackness of his cell increased the
similarity. All he had to do was summon up enough mental energy, find
sufficient impetus, to force a re-exchange of viewpoints between
himself and Thorn II. And yet as he struggled and strained through
seeming eternities in the dark, as he strove to sink, to plunge, down
the dark channels of the subconscious and found them closed, as he felt
out the iron resistances of that other Thorn, he began to think the
effort impossible—even began to wonder if World I were not just the
wishful dream of a scarred, hunted, memoryless man in a world where
invisible tyrants plotted un-understandable invasions, commanded the
building of inexplicable machines, and bent millions to their wholly
cryptic will.
At least, whatever the sufficient impetus was, he could not find it.
A vertical slit of light appeared, widened to a square, revealed a long
corridor. And in it, flanked by two black-uniformed guards, the other
Clawly.
So similar was the dapper figure to the Clawly he knew—rigged out in a
strange costume and acting in a play—that it was all he could do not
to spring up with a friendly greeting.
And then, to think that this Clawly's mind was linked to the other's,
that somewhere, just across its subconscious, his friend's thoughts
moved—Dizzying. He stared at the trim, ironic face with a terrible
fascination.
Clawly II spoke. "Consider yourself flattered. I'm going to deliver you
personally to the Servants of the People. They'll want to be the ones
to decide, in your case, between immediate self-sacrifice, assisted
confession, or what not." He chuckled without personal malice. "The
Servants have devised quite amusing euphemisms for Death and Torture,
haven't they? The odd thing is, they seem to take them seriously—the
euphemisms, I mean."
The uniformed guards, in whose stolid faces were written years of
unquestioning obedience to incomprehensible orders, did not laugh. If
anything, they looked shocked.
Thorn staggered up and stepped slowly forward, feeling that by that
action he was accepting a destiny not of his own making but as
inescapable as all destinies are, that he was making his entrance, on
an unknown stage, into an unknown play. They started down the corridor,
the guards bringing up the rear.
"You make rather a poorer assassin than I'd have imagined, if you'll
pardon the criticism," Clawly II remarked after a moment. "That
screaming my name to get me off guard—a very ill-advised dodge. And
then dropping your weapon in the streambed. No—you can't exactly call
it competent. I'm afraid you didn't live up to your reputation of being
the most dangerous of the Recalcitrants. But then, of course, you were
fagged."
Thorn sensed something more in the remarks than courteous
knife-twisting. Undeniably, Clawly II was vaguely aware of something
off-key, and was probing for it. Thorn tightened his guard, for he had
decided on at least one thing in the dark—that he would not reveal
that he was a displaced mind, except to escape some immediate doom.
It might be all right if they would consider him insane. But he was
reasonably certain they would not.
Clawly II looked up at him curiously. "Rather silent, aren't you?
Last time we met, as I recall, you denounced me—or was it the things
I stood for?—in the most bitter language, though with admirable
restraint. Can it be that you're beginning to reconsider the wisdom of
recalcitrance? Rather late for that, I'm afraid."
He waited a while. Then, "It's you that hates me, you know. I hate
no one." He caught Thorn's involuntary grimace, the twitch of the
shoulder from which hung the paralyzed right arm. "Oh, I sometimes hurt
people, but that's mainly adjustment to circumstances—quite another
thing. My ideal, which I've pretty well achieved, is to become so
perfectly adjusted to circumstances that I float freely on the stream
of life, unannoyed by any tugs of hate, love, fear, caution, guilt,
responsibility, and so forth—all the while enjoying the spectacle and
occasionally poking in a finger."
Thorn winced—Clawly II's remarks were so similar to those which Clawly
I sometimes made when he was in a banteringly bitter mood. Certainly
the man must have some sort of suspicions and be trying to draw him
out—he'd never talk so revealingly otherwise. Beyond that, there was
the suggestion that Clawly II was bothered by certain unaccustomed
feelings of sympathy and was trying to get to the bottom of them.
Perhaps the independence of quasi-duplicate minds wasn't as complete as
it had at first appeared. Perhaps Clawly I's emotions were obscurely
filtering through to Clawly II. It was all very confusing, unnervingly
so, and Thorn was relieved when their entry into a large room postponed
the moment when he would have to decide on a line of answers.
It was an arresting room, chiefly because it was divided into two
areas in which two separate ways of life held sway, as clearly as
if there had been a broad white line extending across the middle,
with the notice, "Thou shalt not pass." On this side was quite a
crowd of people, most of them sitting around on benches, a few in
black uniforms, the rest in servile gray. They were all obviously
waiting—for orders, permissions, judgments, interviews. They
displayed, to an exaggerated degree, that mixture of uneasiness and
boredom characteristic of people who must wait. Four words sprang to
Thorn's mind, summing them up. They did not know.
On the other side were fewer people—a bare half dozen, seated at
various desks. Their superiority was not obviously displayed. Their
clothing was, if anything, drabber and more severe, and the furnishings
they used were in no way luxurious. But something in their manner,
something in the way they glanced speculatively up from their work, put
gulfs between them and those who uneasily waited. This time only two
words were needed. They knew.
Clawly II's arrival seemed to cause an increase in the uneasiness. At
least, Thorn caught several frightened glances, and sensed a general
relaxing of tension when it became obvious that Clawly II's mission
did not concern anyone here. He also noted that the two guards seemed
relieved when Clawly dismissed them.
One other glance he thought he caught was of a perplexingly different
sort. It was directed at him rather than Clawly II. It came from an
elderly, gray-clad man, whose face awoke no sense of recognition
either in this world or his own. It conveyed, if he was not mistaken,
sympathy, anxiety, and—strangest of all—loyalty. Still,
if Thorn II had been some sort of rebel leader, the incident was
understandable. Thorn quailed, wondering if he had put himself into
the position of betraying a worthy movement in this world as well as
his own.
Clawly II seemed to be a person of reputation on the other side of the
room as well, for his clipped, "To the Servants' Hall, with a person
for the Servants," passed them through without a question.
They entered another corridor, and their surroundings began to change
very rapidly. A few paces brought them to a subtronic tube. Thorn was
glad that he was startled into moving jerkily when the upward-surging
current gripped them, for a glance at Clawly II warned him that
it would not be well to show much familiarity with this form of
transportation.
And now, for the first time since his plunge into World II, Thorn's
mind began to work with clarity. It may have been the soothing
familiarity of the current.
Obviously, in World II subtronic power was the closely-guarded
possession of a ruling elite. There had been no evidence at all of
its employment on the other side of the dividing line. Moreover, that
would explain why the workers and soldiers on the other side were
kept ignorant of the true nature and theory of at least some of the
instruments they constructed or used. It would also explain the need
for the vast amount of work—there were two ways of life, based on
entirely different power-systems, to be maintained.
Then as to the relationship between Worlds I and II. For closely
related they must be—it was unthinkable that two eternally independent
universes could have produced two near-identical Opal Crosses, Gray
Twins, Clawlys, Thorn, and an uncounted host of other similars; if one
granted that possibility, one would have to grant anything. No—Worlds
I and II must be the results of a split in the time-stream, however
caused, and a fairly recent split at that, for the two worlds contained
duplicate individuals and it was again unthinkable that, if the split
had occurred as much as a hundred years ago, the same individuals would
have been born in the two worlds—the same gametes, under different
circumstances, still uniting to form the same zygotes.
The split must—of course!—have occurred when the nightmare-increase
began in World I. About thirty years ago.
But—Thorn's credulity almost rebelled—would it have been possible
for two worlds to become so different in a short time? Freedom in
one, tyranny in the other. Decent people in one, emotional monsters
and cringing, embittered underlings in the other. It was horrible to
think that human nature, especially the nature of people you loved and
respected, could be so much the toy of circumstance.
And yet—the modern world was keyed for change. Wars could, had, come
overnight. Sweeping technological changes had been accomplished in
a few months. And granting such an immense initial difference as the
decision to keep subtronic power a government secret in World II, to
make it public property in World I—
Moreover, there was a way of testing. Without pausing to consider,
Thorn said, "Remember when we were children? We used to play together.
Once we swore an oath of undying friendship."
Clawly II twisted toward him in the current, which was now taking them
up past winking corridor entries.
"You are breaking," he remarked in surprise. "I never expected a
play for sympathy. Yes, of course I remember."
"And then about two years later," Thorn plunged on, "when our glider
dropped in the lake and I was knocked out, you towed me ashore."
Clawly II laughed, but the puzzled look around his eyes deepened. "Did
you really believe I saved you? It hardly fits with your behavior
toward me afterwards. No, as I think you know, I swam ashore. That was
the day on which I first realized that I was I, and that everything and
everybody else was circumstances."
Thorn shivered, as much in horror of this changeling beside him as in
satisfaction at having checked the date of the time-split. Then he felt
revulsion rising in him, more from the body he occupied than from his
own thoughts.
"There isn't room in the world for even two people with that
attitude," he heard himself challenge bitterly.
"Yes, but there is room for one," Clawly II replied laughingly. Then he
frowned and continued hesitatingly, as if against his better judgment.
"Look, why don't you try the same thing? Your only chance with the
Servants is to make yourself useful to them. Remember, they too are
just something to be adjusted to."
For a moment it seemed to Thorn as if Clawly I were striving to look
through the eyes of Clawly II. As he tried to gain control of the
baffling jumble of emotions this sensation produced, Clawly II took him
by the arm and steered them into the slower periphery of the current,
then into a dead-current area before the mouth of a short pedestrian
corridor.
"No talk from here on," he warned Thorn. "But remember my advice."
There were calculatingly-eyed guards inside the corridor mouth, but
again a mere "With a person for the Servants" passed them in.
A low, gray door, without numeral or insignia, blocked the end of the
corridor. Some yards short of it was a narrow side-door. Clawly II
touched something and the side-door opened. Thorn followed him through
it. After a few paces down a dim, curving passageway, they came to
a large room, but Clawly II stopped them just short of it. Again he
touched something. A door slid silently out of the wall behind them,
changing the end of the passageway into a dark niche in the room
ahead. Signing to Thorn that they were to wait and watch, Clawly II
leaned back with a slow speculative smile.
IX.
Black Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
John Keats (with an ironic alteration)
It was a notably bare room, smaller and lower-ceilinged than he had
expected. It was furnished with ostentatious simplicity, and nothing
broke the gray monotony of the walls.
Around the longer side of a kidney-shaped table, eleven men sat on
stools. Their gray tunics, though clean, were like those of beggars.
They were all old, some bald, some capped with close-cropped white or
gray. They all sat very erect.
The first thing that struck Thorn—with surprise, he realized—was that
the Servants of the People looked in no way malignant, villainous, or
evil.
But looking at them a second time, Thorn began to wonder if there
was not something worse. A puritanic grimness that knew no humor. A
suffocating consciousness of responsibility, as if all the troubles of
the world rested on their shoulders alone. A paternal aloofness, as if
everyone else were an irresponsible child. A selflessness swollen to
such bounds as to become supreme selfishness. An intolerable sense of
personal importance that their beggarly clothes and surroundings only
emphasized.
But Thorn had barely gleaned this impression, had had no time to
survey the faces in detail, except to note that one of two seemed
vaguely familiar, when his attention became rivetted on the man who was
standing on the other side of the table, the focus of their converging
eyes.
That man was obviously one of them. His manner and general appearance
were the same.
But that man was also Conjerly.
He was speaking. "I must return at once. The soporific I inhaled into
my other body will wear off shortly, and if the other mind becomes
conscious, exchange will be difficult. True, Tempelmar is on guard
there and could administer another dose. But that is dangerous.
Understand, we will attempt no further exchanges unless it becomes
necessary to transmit to you information of vital importance. The
process is too risky. There is always the possibility of the mental
channels being blocked, and one or both of us being marooned here."
"You are wise," observed the midmost of the Servants, apparently their
chairman, a tall thin man with wrinkle-puckered lips. "No further
exchanges should be necessary. I anticipate no emergencies."
"And so I take my leave," Conjerly continued, "assured that the
transtime machine is ready and that the invasion will begin in three
days, at the hour agreed. We will prevent the World Executive Committee
from taking any significant action until then."
Thorn leaned forward, half guessing what was coming. Clawly II's hand
touched his sleeve.
Conjerly bowed his head, stood there rigid. Two black-uniformed guards
appeared and took up positions close to him, one on either side.
For a full half minute nothing happened.
Then a great shiver went through Conjerly. He slumped forward, would
have fallen except for the two guards. He hung in their arms, breathing
heavily.
When he raised his face, Thorn saw that it had a different expression,
was that of a different man. A man who looked dazed and sick.
"Where—? Who?" he mumbled thickly. The guards began to lead him out.
Then his eyes cleared. He seemed to recognize the situation. "Don't
lock me up. Let me explain," he cried out, his voice racked by a
desperate yet hopeless urgency. "My name's Conjerly. I'm a member
of the World Executive Committee." His face, twisted back over his
shoulder, was a white, uncomprehending mask. "Who are you? What do you
want out of me? Why am I drugged? What have you done to my body? What
are you trying to do to my mind? What—"
The guards dragged him out.
The wrinkle-lipped chairman lowered his eyes. "A distressing
occurrence. But, of course, strictly necessary. It is good to think
that, when we have things under control in the other world, no such
confinements and withholdings of permissible information will have to
be practiced—except, of course, in the case of hopeless Recalcitrants."
The others nodded silently. Then Thorn started, for from beside him
came an amused, incredulous snicker—not a polite or pleasant sound,
and certainly unexpected.
All eyes were turned in their direction.
Clawly II strode out leisurely.
"What did your laughter signify?" The chairman asked sharply, without
preliminaries, a look of displeasure settling on his face. "And who
is that you have smuggled into our council, without informing us?
Let me tell you, some day you will go too far in your disregard of
regulations."
Clawly II ignored the second question—and the comment. He swaggered
up to the table, planted his hands on it, looked them over, and said,
"I laughed to think of how sincerely you will voice your distress
when you discover all inhabitants of the other world to be hopeless
Recalcitrants—and take appropriate measures. Come, face circumstances.
You will be forced to destroy most of the inhabitants of the other
world, and you know it."
"We know nothing of the sort," replied the chairman coldly. "Take care
that your impudent and foolish opinions do not make us lose confidence
in you. In these critical times your shrewdness and ingenuity are
valuable to us. You are a useful tool, and only imprudent men destroy
a tool because its mannerisms annoy them. But if, in your foolhardy
opinionatedness you cease to be useful—that is another matter. As
regards the misguided inhabitants of the other world, you very well
know that our intentions are the best."
"Of course," agreed Clawly II, smiling broadly, "but just consider
what's actually going to happen. In three days the transtime machine
will subtronically isolate and annihilate a spatio-temporal patch
in this world, setting up stresses which cannot be relieved by any
redistribution of material in this world; accordingly the lacuna
will find with the corresponding patch from the other world, thereby
creating an area common to both worlds. Through this common area your
armed forces will pour. They will come as invaders, awakening horror
and fear. They will have the element of surprise on their side, but
there will inevitably be resistance—organized in desperate haste, but
using improvised subtronic weapons. Most important, that resistance
will not come, as it would in this world, from a small elite directing
an ignorant multitude, but from a people of uniformly high education—a
people used to freedom and adverse to submitting to any autocratic
government, no matter how well-intentioned. That resistance will not
cease until the other world has been destroyed in subtronic battle,
or you are forced to destroy it subtronically yourselves and retire
through the gap. All that is painfully clear."
"It is nothing of the sort," replied the chairman in measured and
dispassionate tones. "Our invasion will be well-nigh bloodless,
though we must prepare for all eventualities. At the proper moment
Conjerly and Tempelmar will seize control of the so-called World
Executive Committee, thereby preventing any organized resistance at the
fountainhead. The majority of inhabitants of the other world have no
technical knowledge of subtronic power and will therefore constitute no
danger. Ultimately they will be grateful to us for insuring the safety
of their world and protecting them from their irresponsible leaders. It
will only be necessary for us to capture and confine all technicians
and scientists having a knowledge of subtronic physics. To do this, we
must admittedly be ready to take any and all necessary steps, no matter
how unpleasant. For our main purpose, of which we never lose sight, is
always to keep the knowledge of subtronic power—which now imperils
two worlds—in the possession of a small, responsible, and benevolent
elite."
Thorn shivered. The horrible thing was that these Servants actually
believed that they were acting for the best, that they had the good of
mankind—of two mankinds—at heart.
"Exactly," said Clawly II, continuing to smile. "The only thing you
don't see, or pretend not to see, is the inevitable consequences of
that main purpose. Even now your secrets are gravely endangered.
Mind-exchange is putting more and more Recalcitrants and Escapists
into the other world. It is only a matter of time before some of them
begin to realize that the inhabitants of that world are their potential
allies rather than their foes, and join forces with them. Similarly it
is only a matter of time until the mind of a subtronic technician is
displaced into this world and contacted by the Recalcitrants here—then
you will have to fight subtronic wars in two worlds. Your only chance,
as I'm glad you recognize in part, is to strike hard and fast, destroy
the other world, along with all the Recalcitrants and Escapists who
have entered it, then seek out and eliminate all displaced minds in
this world. Your weakness is in not admitting this at the start.
Everything would be much easier if you would leave out pseudobenevolent
intentions and recognize that you are up against an equation in
destruction, which you must solve in the only logical way possible—by
a general canceling out."
And he rocked back on his heels a little, again surveying the eleven
old faces. It struck Thorn that thus legendary Loki must have mocked
the Dawn Gods and flayed their high-sounding pretenses, confident that
his cunning and proven usefulness would protect him from their wrath.
As for the Servants, their paternalism was unpleasantly apparent in
their attitude toward Clawly II. They treated him like a brilliantly
mischievous favorite child—always indulged, often threatened, seldom
punished.
Certainly there was a germ of greatness about this Clawly II. If only
he had Clawly I's sane attitude toward life, so that his critical
thinking would come to something more than mere sardonic jibing!
One thing was certain, Clawly II's claim that he wanted to float on the
stream of life was a gross understatement. What he really wanted was to
dance along a precipice—and this time, apparently, he had taken one
heedless step too many.
For the chairman looked at him and said, "The question arises whether
your insistence on destruction has not assumed the proportions of a
mania. We will at once reconsider your usefulness as a tool."
Clawly II bowed. He said smoothly, "First it would be well to interview
the person I have brought you. You will be pleased when I tell you who
he is." And he motioned to Thorn.
All eyes turned on the niche.
Abruptly, painfully, Thorn woke from his impersonal absorption in the
scene unrolling before him. Again it came to him, like a hammer blow,
that he was not watching from the safety of a spy-hole, but was himself
immediately and fatally involved. Again the urge to escape racked
him—with redoubled force, because of the warning that he must now at
all costs take back to World I. It was such a simple thing. Just a
change of viewpoints. He had seen Conjerly accomplish it. Surely, if he
concentrated his mind in the right way, it would be that other Thorn
who walked forward to face the Servants and the destiny of that other
Thorn's own making, while he sank back. Surely his need to warn a world
would give him sufficient impetus.
But all the time he was walking toward the table. It was his
dragging feet that scuffed the gray flooring, his dry throat
that swallowed, his cold hands that clenched and unclenched. The
eleven old faces wavered, blurred, came clear again, seemed to swell,
grow gray and monstrous, become the merciless masks of judges of some
fabled underworld, where he must answer for another man's crimes.
The table stopped his forward progress. He heard Clawly II say, "I am
afraid that I am still very useful to you. Here is your chief enemy,
brought to book by my efforts alone. He was part of our bag when he
raided the local Recalcitrant headquarters last night. He escaped and
took to the hills, where I personally recaptured him—the Recalcitrant
leader Thorn 37-P-82."
But the Servants' reaction could not have been the one Clawly was
expecting, for the old faces registered anger and alarm. "Irresponsible
child!" the chairman rapped out. "Didn't you hear what Conjerly
reported—that he is certain there has occurred a mind exchange between
the Thorns? This man is not the Recalcitrant, but a displaced mind
come to spy on us. You have provided him with what he wanted—an
opportunity to learn our plans."
Thorn felt their converging hostility—a palpable force. His mind
shrank back from the windows of his eyes, but, chained there, continued
to peer through them.
The chairman's wrinkled hand dropped below the table. He said, "There
is only one course of action." His hand came up, and in it a slim
gleaming cone. "To eliminate the displaced mind before a re-exchange
can be—"
Thorn was dimly conscious of Clawly II leaping forward. He heard him
begin, "No! Wait! Don't you see—"
But although that was all he heard, he knew what Clawly II was going
to say and why he was going to say it. He also knew why Thorn II had
been able to exchange with him when Thorn II thought he was trapped and
facing death on the rooftop. He knew that the chairman's action was
the very thing that would nullify the chairman's purpose. At last he
had found the sufficient impetus—it was staring at him down the slim,
gleaming cone, leering at him even as the chains broke and his mind
dropped back from the windows of his eyes into a black, dimensionless
pit.
The fear of death.
X.
Three roots there are that three ways run
'Neath the ash-tree Yggdrasil;
'Neath the first lives Hel, 'neath the second the frost giants,
'Neath the last are the lands of men.
Thorn did not ask himself why his resting place was dark and stuffy,
rocky and dry, or where the stale, sour smell of woodsmoke came from.
He was content to lie there and let his mind snuggle down into his
body, lull itself with simple sensations, forget the reverberations of
its terrible journey. World II still clung to him sluggishly. But like
a nightmare from which one has wakened, it could be disregarded.
In a moment he would rouse himself and do what must be done. In a
moment, he knew, he would know no peace until the warning had been
given and all essential steps taken, until the invasion had been met
and decisively thrown back. He would be a creature of tension, of
duty, of war.
But for the moment nothing mattered, nothing could break his sense of
peace.
Odd, though, that the heavy woodsmoke did not make him cough, and that
his body was not aching from its cramped position and rocky crouch.
Muffledly, as if its source were underground, came a distant howling,
melancholy and long-drawn-out, ending on a low note of menace.
He started up. His shielding hand encountered a low ceiling of rock,
hurriedly traced it to jagged, sloping walls on either side.
It was he that was underground, not the howling.
What the devil had Thorn II been doing in a cave in World I? Why was
he wearing this odd jumble of heavy clothing, that seemed to include
thick, stiff boots and furs? Where had he gotten the long knife that
was stuck in his belt?
The cramping darkness was suddenly full of threats. In panicky haste he
continued his feeling-out of the walls, found that he was in a small
domed chamber, high enough in the center so that he could almost stand
upright. On three sides the walls extended down to the uneven floor, or
to the mouths of horizontal crevices too narrow to stick more than an
arm in.
On the fourth side was a low opening. By getting down on hands and
knees he could wriggle in.
It led slightly upward. The smell of woodsmoke grew heavier. After
two sharp turns, where jagged edges caught but did not tear his heavy
clothing, he began to see the gray gleam of daylight.
The roof of the passageway grew higher, so that he could almost walk
upright. Then it suddenly opened into a larger chamber, the other end
of which was completely open to a gloomy landscape.
This landscape consisted of a steep hillside of granite boulders and
wind-warped pines, all patched with snow, at a middle distance, as if
across a ravine.
But Thorn did not inspect it closely, for he was looking chiefly at the
fire blocking the mouth of the narrow passageway, sending up smoke that
billowed back from the ceiling, making the day even more gloomy and dim.
It immediately struck him as being a very remarkable fire, though he
couldn't say why. After a while he decided that it was because it had
been very cleverly constructed to burn steadily for a long time, some
of the logs and branches being so placed that they would not fall into
the fire until others had been consumed. Whoever had built that fire
must have painstakingly visualized just how it was going to burn over a
period of several hours.
But why should he waste time admiring a fire? He kicked it aside with
the clumsy boots Thorn II had dug up God knows where, and strode to the
mouth of the cave.
Claws skirred on rock, and he had the impression of a lithe furry
animal whisking off to one side.
The cave opened on a hillside, similar to the one opposite and
slanting down to a twisting, ice-choked stream. Overhead a gray, dreary
sky seemed to be trending toward nightfall. The walls of the ravine
shut off any more distant horizon. It was very cold.
The scene was hauntingly familiar.
Had Thorn II been insane, or gone insane? Why else should he have
hidden himself in a cave in a near-arctic wild-life reserve? For that
certainly seemed to be what he had done, despite the difficulty in
picturing just how he had managed to do it in so short a time.
A fine thing if, after getting back to his rightful world, he should
starve to death in a reserve, or be killed by some of the formidable
animals with which they were stocked.
He must climb the hill behind him. Wherever he was, he'd be able to
sight a beacon or skylon from its top.
It suddenly occurred to him that this ravine was devilishly like one in
the woodland near the symchromy amphitheater, a ravine in which he and
Clawly used to go exploring when they were boys. There was something
unforgettably distinctive about the pattern of the streambed.
But that couldn't be. The weather was all wrong. And that ravine
was much more thickly wooded. Besides, erosion patterns were always
repeating themselves.
He started to examine the queer, bulky clothing Thorn II had been
wearing. In doing so, he got one good look at his hands—and stopped.
He stood for a long moment with his eyes closed. Even when soft paws
pattered warily somewhere over his head and a bit of gravel came
trickling down, he did not jerk.
Rapidly the determination grew in his mind that he must get to the
hilltop and establish his position before he did anything else, before
he thought anything else, certainly before he examined his hands or
his face more closely. It was more a terror-inspired compulsion than a
determination. He stepped to the rocky lip in front of the cave, and
looked back. Again there was the impression of a gray, furry animal
streaking for cover. Something about the size of a cat. He hurriedly
surveyed the routes leading upward, picked one that seemed to slope
more gradually and avoid the steeper barren stretches, and immediately
started up it at a scrambling trot, his eyes fixed resolutely ahead.
But after he had gone a little way, he saw something that made him stop
and stare despite the compulsion driving him.
On a pine-framed boulder about a dozen yards ahead, to one side of the
route he was taking, three cats sat watching him.
They were cats, all right, house cats, though they seemed to be of a
particularly thick-furred breed.
But one wouldn't normally find house cats on a wild-life reserve. Their
presence argued the nearness of human habitation. Moreover, they
were eying him with a poised intentness that indicated some kind of
familiarity, and did not fit with their earlier racing for cover—if
those had been the same animals.
He called, "Kitty!" His voice cracked a little. "Kitty!"
The sound drifted thinly across the hillside, as if congealed by the
cold.
And then the sound was answered, or rather echoed, by the cat to the
right, a black and gray.
It was not exactly the word "Kitty" that the cat miowed, but it was a
sound so like it, so faithful to his exact intonations, that his flesh
crawled.
"Kii ... eee." Again the eerily mocking, mimicking challenge rang out.
He was afraid.
He started forward again. At the first scrape of his boots on gravel,
the cats vanished.
For some time he made fast, steady progress, although the going was
by no means easy, sometimes leading along the rims of landslides,
sometimes forcing him to fight his way through thick clumps of scrub
trees. The last "Kii ... eee" stuck in his ears, and at times he was
pretty sure he glimpsed furry bodies slipping along to one side,
paralleling his progress. His thoughts went off on unpleasant tacks,
chiefly about the degree to which careful breeding had increased the
intelligence of house cats, the way in which they had always maintained
their aloof and independent life in the midst of man's civilization,
and other less concrete speculations.
Once he heard another sound, a repetition of the melancholy howling
that had first startled him in the cave. It might have been wolves, or
dogs, and seemed to come from somewhere low in the ravine and quite a
distance away.
The sky was growing darker.
The rapid ascent was taking less out of him than he would have
imagined. He was panting, but in a steady, easy way. He felt he could
keep up this pace for a considerable distance.
The pines began to thin on the uphill side. He emerged onto a long,
wide slope that stretched, ever-steepening, boulder-strewn but almost
barren of vegetation, to the ravine's horizon. His easiest way lay
along its base, past tangled underbrush.
A little distance ahead and up the slope, a large chunk of granite
jutted out. On its rim sat three cats, again regarding him. Something
about the way they were turned toward each other, the little movements
they made, suggested that they were holding a conference and that the
topic of the conference was—he.
From behind and below the howling came again. The cats pricked up their
ears. There were more movements, more glances in his direction. Then as
he began jogging along again, one of the cats—the tiger—leaped down
and streaked away past him, downhill. While the black-and-gray and the
black dropped off the granite rim more leisurely and began to trot
along in the direction he was taking, with frequent sidewise glances.
He quickened his pace, grateful for the reserve energy.
The going was good. There were no eroded chutes to be edged around, no
pines to fight.
Once the howling was repeated faintly.
The shadowy bodies of the cats slipped between the boulders, in and
out. Gradually he began to draw ahead of them.
For some reason everything felt very natural, as if he had been created
for this running through the dusk.
He sprinted up the last stretch, came out on top.
For a long time he just looked and turned, and turned and looked.
Everything else—emotions, thought—was subordinated to the act of
seeing.
Up here it was still pretty light. And there were no hills to shut out
the view. It stretched, snow-streaked, lightless, lifeless, achingly
drear, to black horizons in three directions and a distant glittering
ice-wall in the fourth.
The only suggestion of habitation was a thin pencil of smoke rising
some distance across the plateau he faced.
For as long as he could, he pretended not to recognize the ruins
sparsely dotting the landscape—vast mountainous stumps of structures,
buckled and tortured things, blackened and ice-streaked, surrounded by
strange formations of rock that suggested lava ridges, as if the very
ground had melted and churned and boiled when those ruins were made.
A ruined world, from which the last rays of a setting sun, piercing for
a moment the smoky ruins, struck dismal yellow highlights.
But recognition could only be held at bay for a few minutes. His guess
about the ravine had been correct. That snow-shrouded, mile-long mound
ahead of him was the grave of the Opal Cross. That dark monolith far to
the left was the stump of the Gray H. Those two lopped towers, crazily
buckled and leaning toward each other as if for support, were the Gray
Twins. That split and jagged mass the other side of the ravine, black
against the encroaching ice, up-thrust like the hand of a buried man,
was the Rusty T.
It could hardly be World I, no matter after what catastrophe or lapse
of years. For there was no sign, not even a suggestive hump, of the
Blue Lorraine, the Mauve Z, or the Myrtle Y. Nor World II, for the
Black Star's ruins would have bulked monstrously on the immediate left.
He looked at his hands.
They were thickened and calloused, ridged and darkened by scars of
wounds and frostbite, the nails grained and uneven. And yet they were
Thorn's hands.
He lifted them and touched his chapped, scaly face, with its
high-growing, uncombed beard and long hair matted against his neck
under the fur hood.
His clothes were a miscellany of stiff, inexpertly-tanned furs,
portions of a worn and dirty suit of flying togs, and improvised
bits of stuff, such as the hacked-out sections of elastoid flooring
constituting the soles of his boots.
His heavy belt, which was reinforced with reading-tape, supported two
pouches, besides the knife, which seemed to be a crudely-hilted cutter
from a hyperlathe.
One of the pouches contained a sling shot powered by strips of
elastoid, several large pebbles, and three dark, dubious chunks of meat.
In the other were two small containers of nutriment-concentrate with
packaging-insignia of twenty-five years ago, a stimulol cannister
with one pellet left, two bits of sharp metal, a jagged fragment of
flint, three more pieces of elastoid, more reading-tape, a cord made
of sinew, a glastic lens, a wood carver's handsaw, a small, dismantled
heat-projector showing signs of much readaptive tinkering, several
unidentifiable objects, and—the smooth gray sphere he had stolen at
the Yggdrasil.
Even as he was telling himself it could not be the same one, his blunt
fingers were recognizing its unforgettable smoothness, its oblate
form, its queerly exaggerated inertia. His mind was remembering he had
fancied it a single supergiant molecule, a key—if one knew how to use
it—to the doors of unseen worlds.
But there was only time to guess that the thing must be linked to his
mind rather than to any of the bodies his mind had occupied, and to
wonder how it had escaped the thorough search to which he had been
subjected in the Black Star, when his attention was diverted by a faint
eager yapping that burst out suddenly and was as suddenly choked off.
He turned around. Up the boulder-studded slope he had just ascended,
streaming out of the underbrush at its base, came a pack of wolves, or
dogs—at least thirty of them. They took the same sloping course that
he had taken. There was a strange suggestion of discipline about their
silent running. He could not be sure—the light was very bad—but he
fancied he saw smaller furry shapes clinging to the backs of one or two
of them.
He knew now why he had spent time admiring a fire.
But the pack was between him and that fire, so he turned and ran across
the plateau toward where he had glimpsed the rising wisp of smoke.
As he ran he broke out and chewed the lone stimulol pellet, breathing
thanks to that Thorn—he would call him Thorn III—who had hoarded the
pellet for so many years, against some ultimate emergency.
He ran well. His clumsily-booted feet avoided rocks and ruts, hit
firmly on icy patches, with a sureness that made him wonder if they
did not know the route. And when the stimulol hit his blood-stream, he
was able to increase speed slightly. But risking a look back, he saw
the pack pouring up over the crest. A steady baying began, eager and
mournful.
In the growing darkness ahead a low, ruddy, winking light showed. He
studied its slow increase in size, intent on gauging the exact moment
when he would dare to sprint.
The way became rougher. It was a marvel how his feet carried him. The
ruddy light became a patch, illumining a semicircular opening behind
it. The baying drew near. He could hear the scuff of clawed feet. He
started to sprint.
And just in time. There was a great brown hound springing higher than
his shoulder, snapping in at his neck, splashing it with slaver, as he
jumped the fire, turned with his whipped-out knife, and took his stand
beside the gnarled man with the spear, in front of the doorless doorway
of the half-buried room, or large crate, of weathered plastoid.
Then for a moment it was chaotic battle—gaunt-bellied forms rearing
above the flames—red eyes and clashing yellow fangs—spear and cutter
licking out—reek of singed hair—snarls, squeals, grunts, gasps—and,
dominating it all, making it hellish, those three spitting, mewing
cat-faces peering over the shoulders of three dogs that hung in the
rear.
Then, as if at a note of command, the dogs all retreated and it was
suddenly over. Without a word, Thorn and the other man began to repair
and restock with fuel the scattered fire. When it was finished, the
other man asked, "Did they get you anywhere? I may be crazy, but I
think the devils are starting to poison the teeth of some of the
hounds."
Thorn said, "I don't think so," and began to examine his hands and arms.
The other man nodded. "What food you got?" he asked suddenly.
Thorn told him. The other man seemed impressed by the
nutriment-concentrate. He said, "We could hunt together for a while,
I guess. Ought to work out good—having one watching while the other
sleeps." He spoke rapidly, jumbling the words together. His voice
sounded disused. He studied Thorn uneasily.
Thorn studied him. He was smaller and moved with a limp, but beard,
skin, and clothing were like Thorn's. The screwed-up face was not
familiar. The darting, red-rimmed eyes below the jutting brows were
not altogether sane. Thorn's presence seemed to put him on edge, to
shake his emotions to the core. Every time he snapped shut his cracked,
nervous lips, Thorn felt that he dammed up a torrent of babblingly
eager talk.
He asked Thorn, "Where did you come from?"
"A cave in the ravine," Thorn replied, wondering how much to tell.
"What's your story?"
The man looked at him queerly. He trembled. Then the cracked lips
opened.
To Thorn, squatting there behind the crackling fence of flame, staring
out into a night that was black except for the occasional red hint of
eyes, it seemed that what he heard was what he had always known.
"My name was Darkington. I was a geology student. What saved me was
that I was in the mountains when the power broke loose. I guess we
all knew about the power, didn't we? It was in the air. We'd always
known that some day someone would find out what it was behind gravity
and electricity and magnetism"—he stumbled over the long words—"and
the more they tried to hush it up, the surer we were that someone had
found out. I guess they shouldn't have tried to hush it up. I guess
intelligent creatures can't back out of their destiny like that.
"But anyway I was in the mountains when the power broke loose and ate
up all the metal it could reach. Our party was laid up by the fumes,
and two of them died. Afterwards some of us started out to try to
contact other survivors, but the fumes were worse where we went and
some more died and the rest broke up. I got in with a gang that was
trying to make a go of farming just north of the volcano belt, but we
made a lot of mistakes and then came the first of the long winters and
finished off all our plans and made us realize that the weather had all
gone different, what with the exposed raw rock taking all the carbon
dioxide out of the air, and not enough green stuff left to replace
it. After that I drifted around and took up with different scavenging
gangs, but when the cannibalism started and the cats and dogs began to
get really dangerous, I headed north and made it to the glaciers. Since
then I've just hung on, like you see me."
He turned to Thorn. Already his voice was hoarse. Like nervous hunger,
his eagerness to talk had not carried him far.
Thorn shook his head, peering beyond the fire. "There must be a way,"
he said slowly. "Admittedly it would be difficult and we'd risk our
lives, but still there must be a way."
"A way?" the other asked blankly.
"Yes, back to wherever men are beginning to band together and rebuild.
South, I suppose. We might have to hunt for a long time, but we'd find
it."
There was a long silence. A curious look of sympathy came into the
other man's face.
"You've got the dreams," he told Thorn, making his croaking voice
gentle. "I get them myself, so strong that I can make myself believe
for a while that everything's the way it was. But it's just the dreams.
Nobody's banding together. Nobody's going to rebuild civilization,
unless"—his hand indicated something beyond the fire—"unless it's
those devils out there."
XI.
He who lets fortunetellers shape his decisions, follows a chartless
course.
Artemidorus of Cilicia
Alternate waves of guilt and almost unbearable excitement washed Clawly
I as he hurried through the deserted corridors of the Blue Lorraine
toward the office of Oktav. In grimmest seriousness he wondered whether
his own fancied role of mad Pied Piper had not come true, whether
his mind—and those of Firemoor and his other accomplices in the
Martian hoax—were not already more than half usurped by diabolically
mischievous mentalities whose only purpose, or pleasure, was to see a
sane world reduced to chaos.
For the faked threat of a Martian invasion was producing all the
effects he could ever have anticipated, and more, as the scenes he had
just been witnessing proved. They stuck in his mind, those scenes.
The air around the Blue Lorraine aswarm with fliers from bullet-swift
couriers to meddlesome schoolchildren. Streams of machine-units and
various materials and supplies going out on subtronic currents for
distribution to selected points in the surrounding countryside, for it
had early become apparent that the skylons were exceedingly vulnerable
to attack from space—all Earth's eggs in a few thousand baskets.
Engineers busy around the Blue Lorraine's frosty summit, setting up
energy-projectors and other improvised subtronic artillery—for
although the skylons were vulnerable, they were the proud symbols and
beloved homes of civilization and would be defended to the last. All
eyes craned apprehensively upward as a thundering spaceship burst
through the blue sky, then lowered in ruefully humorous relief as
it became obvious that it was, of course, no alien invader, but one
of Earth's own ships headed for the nearby yards to be fitted with
subtronic weapons. All eyes turned momentarily to the west, where
defensive screens were being tried out, to watch a vast iridescent dome
leap momentarily into being and a circle of woodland puff into smoke.
Excited eyes, all of them, as ready to flash with humor as to betray
shock, anxiety, or fear. Eyes that were seven-eighths "There probably
won't be any invasion" and one-eighth "There will be." Eyes that made
Clawly proud of mankind, but that also awakened sickening doubts as to
the wisdom of his trickery.
And to think that this sort of thing was going on all over the world.
The use of subtronic power in transport and fabrication made possible
a swiftness in preparation never before known in Earth's history.
Organization was a weak point, the Earth being geared for the leisurely
existence of peace and individual freedom, but various local agencies
were taking over while the World Executive Committee created the
framework of a centralized military authority. Confusedly perhaps,
and a little bunglingly, but eagerly, wholeheartedly, and above all
swiftly, Earth was arming to meet the threat.
It was all so much bigger than anyone could have anticipated,
Clawly told himself for the hundredth time, unconsciously increasing
his already rapid pace as he neared Oktav's office. He had started it
all, but now it was out of his hands. He could only wait and hope that,
when the real invasion came, across time rather than space, the present
preparations would prove useful to Earth's bewildered defenders. In any
case, a few hours would tell the story, for this was the third day.
But what if the transtime invasion did not come in three days? The hoax
might be uncovered at any moment now—Firemoor was already regretting
the whole business, on the verge of a funk—and during the period of
angry reaction no invasion reports of any sort would be believed. Then
he would be in the position of having cried wolf to the world.
Or what if the transtime invasion did not come at all? All his actions
had been based on such insubstantial evidence—Thorn's dream-studies,
certain suggestive psychological aberrations, the drugged Conjerly's
murmur of "... invasion ... three days...." He was becoming
increasingly convinced that he would soon wake, as if from a nightmare,
and find himself accused as a madman or charlatan.
Certainly his nerves were getting out of hand. He needed Thorn. Never
before had he realized the degree to which he and Thorn were each
other's balance wheel. But Thorn was still missing, and the inquiry
agencies had no progress to report. Despite the larger anxieties in
which his mind was engulfed, Thorn's absence preyed upon it to such a
degree that he had twice fancied he spotted Thorn among the swirling
crowd outside the Blue Lorraine.
But even more than he needed Thorn, he needed Oktav. Now that the
crisis had come, he could see to what an extent the seer's advice
had determined all his actions, from his first serious belief in the
possibility of transtime invasion to his engineering of the Martian
hoax. Call it superstition, ignorant credulity, hypnotism, the fact
remained that he believed in Oktav, was convinced that Oktav had access
to fields of knowledge undreamed of by ordinary men. And now that
Oktav was gone, he felt an increasing helplessness and desperation, so
that he could not resist the impulse driving him back once more to the
cryptically empty office.
As he raised his hand to activate the door, memories came stealing
eerily back—of former sessions in the room beyond, of the last
session, of Oktav's strange summoner clad in the garments of Dawn
Civilization, of the inexplicable disappearance of summoner and
summoned in the exitless inner chamber.
But before his hand could activate the door, it opened.
Clad in his customary black robe, Oktav was sitting at his desk.
As if into a dream within a dream, Clawly entered.
Although the seer had always seemed supernaturally ancient, Clawly's
first impression was that Oktav had vastly aged in the past three days.
Something had happened to drain his small remaining store of life
forces almost to the last drop. The hands were folded white claws. The
face was wrinkle-puckered skin drawn tight over a fragile skull. But
in the sunken, droopingly lidded eyes, knowledge burned more fiercely
than ever. And not knowledge alone, but also something new—a reckless
determination to use that knowledge. It was a look that made Clawly
shiver—and thrill.
All the questions that had pounded at his brain so long, waiting for
this interview, were suddenly mute.
"I have been on a far journey," said the seer. "I have visited many
worlds that were supposed to be dead, and have seen what strange
horrors can result when mere men seek to make wise use of a power
befitting only a god or creatures like gods. I have gone in constant
danger, for there are those against whom I have rebelled and who
therefore seek my life, but I am safe from them for a time. Sit down,
and I will tell you what is in my mind."
Clawly complied. Oktav leaned forward, tapping the desk with one
bone-thin finger.
He continued, "For a long time I have spoken to you in riddles, dealt
with you vaguely, because I was trying to play a double game—impart
essential information to you, and yet not impart it. That time is past.
From now on I speak clearly. In a little while I shall depart on a
desperate venture. If it succeeds, I do not think you will have to fear
the invasion threatening your world. But it may fail, and therefore I
must first put at your disposal all the information I possess, so that
you can judge how best to act in that event."
He looked up quickly. Clawly heard movement in the corridor. But it was
from the inner chamber that the sudden interruption came.
Once again Oktav's summoner stood in the inner doorway. Once again
that young-old, ignorant-wise, animal-god face was turned on Oktav.
The muscles of the clamped jaw stood out like knobs. One arm in its
cylinderlike sleeve of stiff, ancient fabric, was rigidly extended
toward the seer.
But Clawly had only time for the barest glance, and Oktav had even
less—he was just starting to turn and his eyes were only on the verge
of being lighted with a flicker of recognition—when a great tongue of
softly bluish flame licked out from the summoner's hand and, not dying
as flames should, folded around Oktav like a shroud.
Before Clawly's eyes, Oktav's robe burst into flame. His body
shriveled, blackened, contorted in agony, curling like a leaf. Then it
was still.
The soft flame returned to the summoner's hand.
Incapable of motion or connected thought or any feeling but
a sick dismay, Clawly watched. The summoner walked over to
Oktav's desk—clumsily, as if he were not used to dealing with
three-dimensional worlds, but also contemptuously, as if worlds of
three or any other number of dimensions were very trivial affairs to
him. He extracted from the charred remains of Oktav's robe a small gray
sphere, which Clawly now saw was similar to one which the summoner had
been holding in his outstretched hand. Then, with an equal clumsiness
and contempt, with a sweeping glance that saw Clawly and ignored him,
the summoner walked back through the inner doorway.
Clawly's body felt like a sack of water. He could not take his eyes off
the thing behind the desk. It looked more like a burnt mummy than a
burnt man. By some chance the blue flame had spared the high forehead,
giving the face a grotesquely splotched appearance.
The outer door was opened, but Clawly did not turn or otherwise move.
He heard a hissing inhalation—presumably when the newcomer saw the
hideous corpse—but the newcomer had to come round in front before
Clawly saw and recognized—or rather, partly recognized—him. And
even then Clawly felt no reaction of astonishment or relief, or any
reaction he might have expected to feel. The incredible scene he had
just witnessed lingered like an after-image, and other thoughts and
feelings refused to come into focus. The dead body of Oktav dominated
his vision and his mind, as if emanating a palpable aura that blurred
everything else.
The newcomer noted the incompleteness of Clawly's recognition, for he
said, "Yes, I'm Thorn, but, I think you know, not the Thorn who was
your friend, although I am inhabiting his body." To Clawly the words
seemed to come from a great distance; he had to fight an insidious
lethargy to hear them at all. They continued, "That Thorn is taking
my place in the world—and three days ago I rejoiced to think of the
suffering he would undergo there. Fact is, I was your enemy—his and
yours—but now I'm not so sure. I'm even beginning to think we may be
able to help each other a great deal. But I'm responsible for more
lives than just my own, so until I'm sure of you, I daren't take any
chances. That's the reason for this."
And he indicated the small tubular object in his hand, which seemed
to be the dismantled main propulsion unit of a suit of flying togs—a
crude but effective short-range blaster.
Clawly began to take him in, though it was still hard for him to see
anything but the thing behind the desk. Yes, it was Thorn's face, all
right, but with a very uncharacteristic expression of stubborn and
practical determination.
The newcomer continued, "I've been following you because Thorn's
memoranda tapes showed that you and he were working together in
what seemed to be an effort to warn this world of its danger. But
lately things have been happening that make me doubt that—things
I want explained. What's this Martian invasion? Is it real? Or an
attempt to rouse your world into a state of preparedness? Or a piece
of misdirection designed to confuse the issue and make the Servant's
invasion easier? Then, why did you come here, and who is this creature,
and how did he die?" With a gesture of repugnance, he indicated the
body of Oktav. "What I overheard reawakened my old suspicion that
there's somebody behind this business of duplicate worlds, somebody
who's making a profit from it, somebody—"
His voice went dead. In an instant, all the frowning concentration
blanked out of his face. Very slowly, like a man who suddenly becomes
aware that there is a monster behind him, he began to turn around.
At the same time, Clawly felt himself begin to shake—and for the same
reason.
It was a very small and ordinary thing—just a small cough, a dry
clearing of the throat. But it came from behind the desk.
The shriveled, scorched body was swaying a little; the charred hands
were pushing across the desk, leaving black smears; a tremor was
apparent in the blackened jaw.
For a moment they only watched in horror. Then, drawn by the same
irresistible impulse, they slowly approached the desk.
The blind, ghastly movements continued. Then the burnt lips parted, and
they heard the whisper—a whisper that was in every syllable a hard-won
victory over seared tissues.
"I should be dead, but strange vitalities linger in him who has
possessed a talisman. My eyes are embers, but I can dimly see you. Come
closer, that I may say what must be said. I have a testament to make,
and little time in which to make it, and no choice as to whom it is
made. Draw nearer, that I may tell you what must be done for the sake
of all worlds."
They obeyed, sweat starting from their foreheads in awe of the
inhumanly sustained vitality that permitted this charred mummy to speak.
"Purely by chance, a man of the Dawn Civilization discovered a
talisman—a small nonmechanical engine controlled by thought—giving
him the power of traveling in time, and across time, and into the
regions beyond time. There it led him to seven other talismans, and
to a similar but larger engine of even greater power, which he named
the Probability Engine. He took in with him seven accomplices, I being
one, and together we used the Probability Engine to split time and make
actual all possible worlds, preserving only the best of them, and—so
we thought—destroying the rest."
The whisper slowly began to diminish in strength. Clawly and the other
leaned in closer to the black, white-foreheaded face.
"But I discovered that those destroyed worlds still exist, and I know
too well what mad tinkering the others will be prompted to, when they
make the same discovery. You must prevent them, as I intended to. In
particular, you must find the Probability Engine and summon its true
owners, whatever creatures they may be, who built it and who lost the
first talisman. They're the only ones fitted to deal with the tangle
of problems we have created. But to find the Probability Engine, you
must have a talisman. Ters, who destroyed me, took mine, but that was
one which I had stolen. My own original talisman is in the possession
of Thorn, the Thorn of this world, who stole it from me, I now believe,
because of some unconscious prompting from the True Owners, groping
through many-layered reality in an effort to find their lost engine.
That Thorn is worlds away from here, more worlds than you suspect. But
you"—his fingers fumbled sideways, touching those of the other Thorn,
who did not withdraw his hand—"can get into touch ... with him ...
through your linked ... subconscious minds." The whisper was barely
audible. It was obvious that even the talisman-vitalized strength was
drawing to an end. "That talisman ... which he has ... is inert. It
takes a key-thought ... to unlock its powers. You must transmit ... the
key-thought ... to him. The key-thought ... is ... 'Three botched ...
worlds—'"
The whisper trailed off into a dry rattle, then silence. The jaw
fell open. The head slumped forward. Clawly caught it, palm to white
forehead, and let it gently down on to the desk, where the groping
fingers had traced a black, crisscross pattern.
Over it, Clawly's eyes, and those of the other Thorn, met.
XII.
The coup d'etat may appear in a thousand different guises. The
prudent ruler suspects even his own shadow.
de Etienne
The Sky Room of the Opal Cross was so altered it was hard to believe
it had been a festivities center only three days ago. The World Map
and Space Map still held their dominating positions, but the one was
dotted with colored pictorial symbols indicating the location of
spaceports and space-yards, defense installations, armament fabrication
and conversion centers, regular and emergency power stations, field
headquarters, and like military information, while the Space Map, in
which a system of perspective realistically conveyed three-dimensional
depth, was similarly dotted in the Marsward sector to indicate the real
or hypothetic location of spacecraft. This latter map emphasized with
chilling clarity the fact that Earth had nothing at all in the way of
an interplanetary battle fleet, only a scattering of unarmed or lightly
armed exploratory craft that now, by stretching a point, could be
counted as scouts. While fanning out from Mars in a great hemisphere,
hypothetic but none the less impressive, loomed a vast armada.
The rest of the Sky Room was filled with terraced banks of televisor
panels, transmission boards, plotting tables, and various calculating
machines, all visible from the central control table around which they
crowded. One whole sector was devoted to other military installations
and specialized headquarters in the Opal Cross. Other sectors linked
the control table with field headquarters, observation centers,
spacecraft, and so on.
But now all the boards and tables, save the central one, were
unoccupied. The calculating machines were untended and inoperative. And
the massed rows of televisor panels were all blank gray—as pointless
as a museum with empty cases.
A similar effect of bewildered deflation was apparent in most of the
faces of the World Executive Committee around the control table. The
exceptions included Chairman Shielding, who looked very angry, though
it was a grave anger and well under control; Conjerly and Tempelmar,
completely and utterly impassive; Clawly, also impassive, but with the
suggestion that it would only take a hairtrigger touch to release swift
speech or action; and Firemoor, who, sitting beside Clawly, was plainly
ill at ease—pale, nervous, and sweating.
Shielding, on his feet, was explaining why the Sky Room had been
cleared of its myriad operators and clerks. His voice was as cuttingly
realistic as a spray of ice water.
"... and then," he continued, "when astronomic photographs
incontrovertibly proved that there were no alien craft of any sort
near Mars—certainly none of the size reported and nothing remotely
resembling a fleet, not even any faintly suspicious asteroids or
cometary bodies—I hesitated no longer. On my own responsibility I sent
out orders countermanding any and all defense preparations. That was
half an hour ago."
One of the gray panels high in the Opal Cross sector came to life. As
if through a window, a young man with a square face and crisply cropped
blond hair peered out. The emptiness of the Sky Room seemed to startle
him. He looked around for a moment, then switched to high amplification
and called down to Shielding,
"Physical Research Headquarters reporting. A slight variation in
spatio-temporal constants has been noted in this immediate locality.
The variation is of a highly technical nature, but the influence of
unknown spy-beams or range-finding emanations is a possible, though
unlikely, explanation."
Shielding called sharply, "Didn't you receive the order countermanding
all activities?"
"Yes, but I thought—"
"Sorry," called Shielding, "but the order applies to Research
Headquarters as much as any others."
"I see," said the young man and, with a vague nod, blanked out.
There was no particular reaction to this dialogue, except that the
studied composure of Conjerly and Tempelmar became, if anything, more
marked—almost complacent.
Shielding turned back. "We now come to the question of who engineered
this criminally irresponsible hoax, which," he added somberly, "has
already cost the lives of more than a hundred individuals, victims
of defense-preparation accidents." Firemoor winced and went a shade
paler. "Unquestionably a number of persons must have been in on it,
mainly members of the Extraterrestrial Service. It couldn't have been
done otherwise. But we are more interested in the identity of the main
instigators. I am sorry to say that there can be no question as to
the identity of at least two of these. The confession of three of the
accomplices make it—"
"Co-ordination Center 3 reporting." Another of the Opal Cross panels
had flashed on and its perplexed occupant, like the other, was using
high amplification to call his message down to Shielding. "Local Power
Station 4 has just cut me off, in the midst of a message describing
an inexplicable drain on their power supply. Also, the presence of an
unknown vehicle has been reported from the main rotunda."
"We are not receiving reports," Shielding shouted back. "Please consult
your immediate superior for instructions."
"Right," the other replied sharply, immediately switching off.
"There you see, gentlemen," Shielding commented bitterly, "just how
difficult it is to halt a hoax of this sort. In spite of all our
efforts, there undoubtedly will be more tragic accidents before minds
get back to normal." He paused, turned. "Clawly and Firemoor, what
do you have to say for yourselves in justification of your actions,
beyond a confession of wanton mischievousness, or—I must mention this
possibility too—an attempt to create confusion for the furtherance
of some treasonable plot? Remember it is not a matter of accomplices'
confessions alone, who might conceivably perpetrate a hoax and then
attempt to shift the blame onto blindly gullible and negligent
superiors. There is also the testimony of two members of our own
committee, who can for the moment remain anonymous—"
"I see no reason for that," drawled Tempelmar.
"Thank you." Shielding nodded to him. "Very well, then. The testimony
of Conjerly and Tempelmar." And he turned again toward the accused.
Firemoor looked down at the table and twisted miserably. Clawly
returned Shielding's gaze squarely. But before either of them could
reply—
"Co-ordination Center 4! Reporting the presence of a group of armed
individuals in black garments of an unfamiliar pattern proceeding—"
"Please do not bother us!" Shielding shouted irritably. "Consult your
superior! Tell him to refer all communications to Co-ordination Center
1!"
This time the offending panel blanked out without reply.
Shielding turned to a master control board behind him and rapidly
flipped off all the beams, insuring against future interruption.
Clawly stood up. His face had the frozenness of pent tension, an
odd mixture of grim seriousness and mocking exasperation at men's
blindness, suggestive of a gargoyle.
"It was a hoax," he said coolly, "and I alone planned it. But it was
a hoax that was absolutely necessary to prepare the world for that
other invasion, against which I tried to warn you three days ago. The
invasion whose vanguard is already in our midst. Of course Conjerly and
Tempelmar testified against me—for they are part of the vanguard!"
"You're psychotic," said Shielding flatly, lowering his head a
little, like a bull. "Paranoid. The only wonder is how it escaped the
psychiatrists. Watch him, some of you"—he indicated those nearest
Clawly—"while I call the attendants."
"Stay where you are, all of you! And you, Shielding, don't flip that
beam!" Clawly had danced back a step, and a metal tube gleamed in his
hand. "Since you believe I planned the Martian hoax—and I did—perhaps
you'll believe that I won't stop at a few more deaths, not accidental
this time, in order to make you see the truth. Idiots! Can't you see
what's happening under your very noses? Don't you see what those
reports may have meant? Call Co-ordination Center 1, Shielding. Go on,
I mean it, call them!"
But at that instant Firemoor spun round in his chair and dove at
Clawly, pinioning his arms, hurling them both down, wrenching the metal
tube from his hand, sending it spinning to one side. A moment later he
had dragged Clawly to his feet, still holding him pinioned.
"I'm sorry," he gasped miserably. "But I had to do it for your own
sake. We were wrong—wrong to the point of being crazy. And now we've
got to admit it. Looking back, I can't see how I ever—"
But Clawly did not even look at him. He stared grimly at Shielding.
"Thank you, Firemoor," said Shielding, a certain relief apparent in
his voice. "You still have a great deal to answer for. That can't be
minimized—but this last action of yours will certainly count in your
favor."
This information did not seem to make Firemoor particularly happy. The
pinioned Clawly continued to ignore him and to stare at Shielding.
"Call Communications Center 1," he said, deliberately.
Shielding dismissed the interruption with a glance. He sat down.
"The attendants will remove him shortly. Well, gentlemen," he said,
"it's time we considered how best to repair the general dislocations
caused by this panic. Also there's the matter of our position with
regard to the trial of the accomplices." There was a general pulling-in
of chairs.
"Call Communications Center 1," Clawly repeated.
Shielding did not even look up.
But someone else said, "Yes. I think now you'd better call them."
Shielding had started automatically to comply, before he realized just
who it was that was speaking—and the particular tone that was being
used.
It was Conjerly and the tone was one of command.
Conjerly and Tempelmar had risen, and were standing there as solidly as
two obelisks—and indeed there was something unpleasantly monumental
in their intensified, self-satisfied composure. Before anyone realized
it, the center of attention of the meeting had shifted from Clawly and
Firemoor to these new figures—or rather to these old and familiar
figures suddenly seen in a new and formidable guise.
Shielding blinked at them a moment, as if he didn't know who they were.
Then, with a haste that was almost that of fear, he swung around and
flipped a beam on the board behind him.
Halfway up the terraced banks of gray squares, a panel came to life.
A man in black uniform looked down from it.
"Communications Center 1 seized for the Servants," he announced crisply
in a queerly accented though perfectly intelligible voice.
Shielding stood stock-still for a moment, then flipped another beam.
"The soldiers of the Servants are in control at this point," said the
second black-uniformed individual, speaking with equal crispness.
With a stifled, incredulous gasp, Shielding ran his hand down the
board, flipping on all the panels in the Opal Cross sector.
Most of them showed black-uniformed figures. Of the remainder, the
majority were empty.
And then it became apparent that not all the black-uniformed figures
were merely televised images. Some of them were standing between the
panels, in the Sky Room itself, holding weapons trained.
By a psychological illusion, the figures of Conjerly and Tempelmar
seemed to grow taller.
"Yes," Conjerly said, soberly, almost kindly, "your government—or,
rather, that absence of all sane control which you call a
government—is now in the capable hands of the Servants of the People.
Clawly's assertions were all quite correct, though fortunately we were
able to keep you from believing them—a necessary deception. There is
an invasion going on—an invasion that is in the best interests of all
worlds, and one from which yours will benefit greatly. It is being
made across time, through a region that has become common to both our
worlds. That region is our transtime bridgehead. And, as is plain to
see, our bridgehead coincides with your headquarters."
Clawly was not listening. He was watching a figure that was striding
down the paneled terraces, its smilingly curious eyes fixed upon him.
And as he watched, Firemoor and Shielding and some others began to
watch too, slack-faced, dully amazed at this secondary impossibility.
The approaching figure was clad in black military flying togs whose
sleek cut and suavely gleaming texture marked them as those of an
individual of rank. But so far as physique and appearance were
concerned, down to the last detail of facial structure, including even
a similarity of expression—a certain latent sardonic mockery—he was
Clawly's duplicate.
There was something very distinctive about the way the two eyed each
other. No one could have said just when it started, but by the time
they were facing each other across the control table, it was very
plain; the look of two men come to fight a duel.
Clawly's face hardened. His gaze seemed to concentrate. His duplicate
started, as if at a slight unexpected blow. For an instant he grinned
unpleasantly, then his face grew likewise grim.
Neither moved. There was only that intense staring, accompanied by a
silent straining of muscles and a breathing that grew heavy. But none
of those who watched doubted but that an intangible duel was being
fought.
Conjerly, frowning, stepped forward. But just then there grew a look of
sudden desperate terror in the contorted face of Clawly's black-clad
duplicate. He staggered back a step, as if to avoid falling into a pit.
An unintelligible cry was wrenched out of him, and he snatched at his
holster.
But even as he raised the weapon, there flashed across the first
Clawly's features a triumphant, oddly departing smile.
XIII.
Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high
The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose;
In the black, cramping tunnel Thorn could only swing his knife in a
narrow arc, and the snarl of the attacking dog was concentrated into a
grating roar that hurt his eardrums. Nevertheless, knife took effect
before fangs, and with an angry whimper the dog backed away—there was
no room to turn.
From the receding scuffle of its claws Thorn could tell that it had
retreated almost to the beginning of the tunnel. He relaxed from the
crouch that had put his back against the rocky roof, sprawled in a
position calculated to rest elbows and knees, and considered his
situation.
Of course, as he could see now, it had been an inexcusable blunder to
enter the tunnel without first building a fire to insure his being
able to get back to a place from which he could use his slingshot.
But coming down the ravine he hadn't seen a sign of the devils, and
there was no denying it had been necessary to revisit the cave to see
if Thorn III had any extra food, weapons, or clothing stored there.
The need for food was imperative, and yesterday he and Darkington had
completely failed in their hunting.
He wondered if Darkington would attempt a rescue. Hardly, since it
would be late afternoon before the gnarled little man returned from
his own hunting circuit. With night coming on, it was unlikely that
he would risk his life venturing down into the ravine for the sake of
a man whom he believed to be half-crazy. For Thorn had tried to tell
him altogether too much about alternate worlds in which Civilization
had not perished. Darkington had dismissed all this as "the dreams,"
and Thorn had shut up, but not until he realized he was forfeiting
all Darkington's confidence in him as a hard-bitten and realistic
neo-savage.
Besides, Darkington was a little crazy himself. Long years of solitary
living had developed fixed habit patterns. His hunger for comradeship
had become largely a subjective fantasy, and the unexpected appearance
of an actual comrade seemed to make him uncomfortable and uneasy rather
than anything else, since it demanded readaptation. A man marooned in
a wilderness and trying to get back to civilization is one thing. But
a man who knows that civilization is dead and that before him stretch
only dark savage eons in which other creatures will have the center of
the stage, is quite a different animal.
Something was digging into Thorn's side. Twisting his left hand back at
an uncomfortable angle—his right still held the knife or cutter—he
worked the pouch from under him and took out the offending article.
It was the puzzling sphere that had stayed with him during all his
passages between the worlds. Irritably he tossed it away. He had wasted
enough time trying to figure out the significance or purpose of the
thing. It was as useless as ... as that graveyard of skylons up there.
He heard it bound up the tunnel, roll back a way, come to rest.
Evidently his captors heard it too, for there came a sharp mewing and
growling, which did not break off sharply, but sank into a confused
palaver of similar sounds, strongly suggestive of some kind of speech.
Once or twice he thought he recognized human words, oddly telescoped
and slurred to fit feline and canine palates. It was not pleasant to
be cramped up in a tunnel and wondering what cats and dogs were saying
about you in a half-borrowed, quasi-intelligent jargon.
And then, very softly, Thorn thought he heard someone calling his name.
His almost immediate reaction was a sardonic grimace at the vast number
of unlikely sounds a miserable man will twist into a resemblance of his
name. But gradually the fancied sound began to exert a subtle pull on
his thoughts, dragging them away toward speculations which his present
predicament did not justify.
But who is to say what thoughts a trapped and doomed man shall think?
As Thorn told himself with some calmness, this was probably his last
stretch of reflective thinking. Of course, when death came sufficiently
close, the fear of it might enable him to escape into another body. But
that was by no means certain or even probable. He reflected that every
exchange he had made had been into a worse world. And now, presumably,
he was at the bottom, and like energy that has reached the nadir of its
cycle of degradation, unable to rise except with outside help.
Besides, he did not like the idea of dooming any other Thorn to this
predicament, although he was afraid he would do it if given the chance.
Again he dreamily fancied he heard his name called.
He wondered what was happening to those other Thorns, in their
hodgepodged destinies. Thorn III in World II—had he died in
the instant of his arrival there, or had the Servants noted the
personality-change in time and perhaps spared him? Thorn II in World I.
Thorn I in World III. It was like some crazy game—some game devised by
a mad, cruel god.
And yet what was the whole universe, so far as it had been revealed to
him, but a mad, cruel pageantry? The Dawn myth was right—there were
serpents gnawing at every root of the cosmic ash Yggdrasil. In three
days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World III,
wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand.
World II, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and
boredom. World I, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or
inward worth, not better than the others—only luckier.
Three botched worlds.
He started. It was as if, with that last thought, something altogether
outside his mind had attached itself to his mind in the most intimate
way imaginable. He had the queerest feeling that his thoughts had
gained power, that they were no longer locked-in and helpless
except for their ability to control a puny lever-assembly of bones
and contractile tissue, that they could reach out of his mind like
tentacles and move things, that they had direct control of a vastly
more competent engine.
A faint sound up the tunnel recalled his altered mind to his present
predicament. It might have been a tiny scrape of claws on rock. It
was not repeated. He gripped his knife. Perhaps one of the beasts was
attempting a surprise attack. If only there were some light—
A yellowish flame, the color of the woodfire he had been visualizing,
flared up without warning a few feet ahead, casting shafts of ruddy
glare and shadow along the irregular tunnel. It lit up the muzzles
of a gaunt gray dog and a scarred black cat that had been creeping
toward him, side by side. For an instant surprise froze them. Then
the dog backed off frantically, with a yelp of panic. The cat snarled
menacingly and stared wildly at the flame, as if desperately trying to
figure out its modus operandi.
But, with Thorn's thought, the flame advanced and the cat gave ground
before it. At first it only backed, continuing to snarl and stare. Then
it turned tail, and answering in a great screech the questioning mews
and growls that had been coming down the tunnel, fled as if from death.
The flame continued to advance, changing color when Thorn thought of
daylight. And as Thorn edged and squirmed along, it seemed to him that
somehow his way was made easier.
The tunnel heightened, widened. He emerged in the outer chamber in time
to hear a receding rattle of gravel.
The flame, white now, had come to rest in the middle of the rocky
floor. Even as he stooped, it rose to meet him, winking out—and there
rested lightly on his palm the gray sphere, cool and unsmirched, that
he had tossed away a few minutes before.
But it was no longer a detached, external object. It was part of
him, responsive to his every mood and thought, linked to his mind by
tracts that were invisible but as real as the nerves connecting mind
with muscle and sense organ. It was not a machine, telepathically
controlled. It was a second body.
Relief, stark wonder, and exulting awareness of power made him weak.
For a moment everything swam and darkened, but only for a moment—he
seemed to suck limitless vitality from the thing.
He felt a surge of creativeness, so intense as to be painful, like a
flame in the brain. He could do anything he wanted to, go anywhere he
wanted to, make anything he wanted to, create life, change the world,
destroy it if he so willed—
And then—fear. Fear that, since the thing obeyed his thoughts, it
would also obey his foolish, ignorant, or destructive ones. People
can't control their thoughts for very long. Even sane individuals
often think of murder, of catastrophes, of suicide—
Suddenly the sphere had become a gray globe of menace.
And then—after all, he couldn't do anything. Besides any
other limitations the thing might have, it was certainly limited by
his thoughts. It couldn't do things he didn't really understand—like
building a subtronic engine—
Or—
For the first time since he had emerged from the tunnel, he tried to
think collectedly, with more than the surface of his mind.
He found that the depths of his mind were strangely altered. His
subconscious was no longer an opaque and impenetrable screen. He could
see through it, as through a shadowy corridor, sink into it, hear the
thoughts on the other side, the thoughts of the other Thorns.
One of them, he realized, was instructing him, laying a duty upon him.
The message dealt with such matters as to make the imagination shiver.
It seemed to engulf his personality, his consciousness.
His last glimpse of World III was a gray one of dark, snow-streaked
pines wavering in a rocky frame. Then that had clouded over, vanished,
and he was in a limitless blackness where none of the senses worked and
where only thought—itself become a sense—had power.
It was an utterly alien darkness without real up or down, or this way
or that, or any normal spatial properties. It seemed that every point
was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere,
and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or
differentiate. And the darkness was not that of lightlessness, but of
thought itself—fluttering with ghostly visions, aflash with insight.
And then, without surprise or any consciousness of alteration, he
realized that he was no longer one Thorn, but three. A Thorn who had
lived three lives—and whether memory pictured them as having been
lived simultaneously or in sequence seemed to matter not at all. A
Thorn who had learned patience and endurance and self-sufficiency from
harsh World III, who had had ground into the bedrock of his mind the
knowledge that man is an animal in competition with other animals, that
all human aspirations are but small and vaunting and doomed things—but
not necessarily worthless therefore—in a blind and unfeeling cosmos,
and that even death and the extinguishing of all racial hopes are ills
that can be smiled at while you struggle against them. A Thorn who had
seen and experienced in World II the worst of man's cruelty to man,
who had gained a terrible familiarity with human nature's weaknesses,
its cowardly submissiveness to social pressure, its capacity for
self-delusion, its selfishness, its horrible adaptability, who had
plumbed to their seething, poisoning depths the emotions of hate and
resentment and envy and fear, but who in part had risen superior to all
this and learned humility, and sympathy, and sacrifice, and devotion to
a cause. A Thorn who, in too-easy World I, had learned how to use the
dangerous gift of freedom, how to fight human nature's tendency to go
evil and foul itself when it is not being disciplined by hardship and
adversity, how to endure happiness and success without souring, how to
create goals and purposes in an environment that does not supply them
ready-made.
All these experiences were now those of one mind. They did not
contradict or clash with each other. Between them there was no friction
or envy or guilt. Each contributed a fund of understanding, carrying
equal weight in the making of future decisions. And yet there was no
sense of three minds bargaining together or talking together or even
thinking together. There was only one Thorn, who, except for that
period of childhood before the split took place, had lived three lives.
This composite Thorn, sustained by the talisman, poised in the
dimensionless dark beyond space and time, felt that his personality had
suddenly been immeasurably enriched and deepened, that heretofore he
had been going around two-thirds blind and only now begun to appreciate
the many-sidedness of life and the real significance of all that he had
experienced.
And without hesitation or inward argument, without any sense of
responding to the urgings of Thorn II, since there was no longer a
separate Thorn II, he remembered what the death-resisting Oktav had
whispered to him in the Blue Lorraine, syllable by agonized syllable,
and he recalled the duty laid upon him by the seer.
He thought of the first step—the finding of the Probability
Engine—and felt the answering surge of the talisman, and submitted to
its guidance.
There was a dizzying sense of almost instantaneous passage over an
infinite distance—and also a sense that there had been no movement at
all, but only a becoming aware of something right at hand. And then—
The darkness pulsed and throbbed with power, a power that it seemed
must rack to pieces many-branched time and shake down the worlds like
rotten fruit. The thought-choked void quivered with a terrifying
creativity, as if this were the growing-point of all reality.
Thorn became aware of seven minds crowded around the source of the
pulsations and throbbing and quivering. Homely human minds like his
own, but lacking even his own mind's tripled insight, narrower and more
paternalistic than even the minds of World II's Servants of the People.
Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions
of godhead. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their
ignorance—which their power protected.
Then he became aware of vast pictures flaring up in the void in swift
succession—visions shared by the seven minds and absorbing them to
such a degree that they were unconscious of his presence.
Like river-borne wreckage after an eon-long jam has broken, the torrent
of visions flowed past.
World II loomed up. First the drab Servants Hall, where eleven old men
nodded in dour satisfaction as they assured themselves, by report and
transtime televisor, that the invasion was proceeding on schedule.
Then the picture broadened, to show great streams of subtronically
mechanized soldiers and weapons moving in toward the transtime
bridgehead of the Opal Cross. Individual faces flashed by—wry-lipped,
uninterested, obedient, afraid.
For a moment World I was glimpsed—the interior of the Opal Cross shown
in section like an ant-hill, aswarm with black uniforms. Quickly, as
if the seven masters hated to look at their pet world so misused, this
gave way to a panoramic vision of World III, in which hundreds of miles
were swept over without showing anything but fallen or fire-tortured
skylons, seared and scrub-grown wasteland, and—cheek by jowl—glacier
walls and smoke-belching volcanoes.
But that was only the beginning. Fruits of earlier time-splits were
shown. There was a world in which telepathic mutants fought with
jealous nontelepaths, who had found a way of screening their thoughts.
There was a world in which a scarlet-robed hierarchy administered a
science-powered religion that held millions in Dawn Age servitude.
A world in which a tiny clique of hypnotic telepaths broadcast
thoughts which all men believed in and lived by, doubtfully, as if in
a half-dream. A world where civilization, still atomic-powered, was
split into tiny feudalistic domains, forever at war, and the memory
of law and brotherhood and research kept alive only in a few poor
and unarmored monasteries. A world similarly powered and even more
divided, in which each family or friends-group was an economically
self-sustaining microcosm, and civilization consisted only of the
social intercourse and knowledge-exchange of these microcosms. A world
where men lived in idle parasitism on the labor of submen they had
artificially created—and another world in which the relationship was
reversed and the submen lived on men.
A world where two great nations, absorbing all the rest, carried on an
endless bitter war, unable to defeat or be defeated, forever spurred
to new efforts by the fear that past sacrifices might have been in
vain. A world that was absorbed in the conquest of space, and where
the discontented turned their eyes upward toward the new frontier. A
world in which a great new religion gripped men's thoughts, and strange
ceremonies were performed on hilltops and in spacecraft and converts
laughed at hate and misery and fear, and unbelievers wonderingly shook
their heads. A world in which there were no cities and little obvious
machinery, and simply clad men led unostentatious lives. A sparsely
populated world of small cities, whose inhabitants had the grave
smiling look of those who make a new start. A world that was only a
second asteroid belt—a scattering of exploded rocky fragments ringing
the sun.
"We've seen enough!"
Thorn sensed the trapped horror and the torturing sense of unadmitted
guilt in Prim's thought.
The visions flickered out, giving way to the blackness of unactualized
thought. On this blackness Prim's next thought showed fiercely,
grimly, monstrously. It was obvious that the interval had restored his
power-bolstered egotism.
"Our mistake is evident but capable of correction. Our thoughts—or
the thoughts of some of us—did not make it sufficiently clear
to the Probability Engine that absolute destruction rather than a mere
veiling or blacking out, was intended, with regard to the botched
worlds. There is no question as to our next step. Sekond?"
"Destroy! All of them, except the main trunk," instantly pulsed the
answering thought.
"Ters?"
"Destroy!"
"Kart?"
"The invading world first. But all the others too. Swiftly!"
"Kant?"
"It might be well first to.... No! Destroy!"
With a fresh surge of horror and revulsion, Thorn realized that these
minds were absolutely incapable of the slightest approach to unbiased
reasoning. They were so fanatically convinced of the correctness of all
their past decisions as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds,
that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some
of those worlds—or to the fact that the destruction of a lifeless
asteroid belt was a meaningless gesture. They could only see the other
worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk. Their
reactions were as unweighed and hysterical as those of a murderer, who
taking a last look around after an hour spent in obliterating possible
clues, sees his victim feebly stir.
Thorn gathered his will power for what he knew he must do.
"Sikst?"
"Yes, destroy!"
"Septem?"
"Destroy!"
"Okt—"
But even as Prim remembered that there no longer was an Oktav and
joined with the others in thinking destruction, even as the darkness
began to rack and heave with a new violence, Thorn sent out the call.
"Whoever you may be, wherever you may be, Oh you who created it, here
is the Divider of Time, here is the Probability Engine!"
His thought deafened him, like a great shout. He had not realized the
degree to which the others had been thinking in the equivalent of muted
whispers.
Instantly Prim and the rest were around him, choking his thoughts,
strangling his mind, thinking his destruction along with that of the
worlds.
The throbbing of the darkness became that of a great storm, in which
even the Probability Engine seemed on the verge of breaking from
its moorings. Like a many-branched lightning-flash, came a vision
of time-streams lashed and shaken—Worlds I and II torn apart—the
invasion bridge snapped—
But through it Thorn kept sending the call. And he seemed to feel the
eight talismans and the central engine take it up and echo it.
His mind began to suffocate. His consciousness to darken.
All reality seemed to tremble on the edge between being and not-being.
Then without warning, the storm was over and there was only a great
quiet and a great silence present, that might have come from the end
of eternity and might have been here always.
Awe froze their thoughts. They were like boys scuffling in a cathedral
who look up and see the priest.
What they faced gave no sign of its identity. But they knew.
Then it began to think. Great broad thoughts of which they could only
comprehend an edge or corner. But what they did comprehend was simple
and clear.
XIV.
And many a Knot unraveled by the Road
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
Our quest for our Probability Engine and its talismans has occupied
many major units even of our own time. We have prosecuted it with
diligence, because we were aware of the dangers that might arise if
the engine were misused. We built several similar engines to aid us
in the search, but it turned out that the catastrophe in our cosmos
which swept away the engine and cast one of the talismans up on your
time-stream and planet, was of an unknown sort, making the route of the
talisman an untraceably random one. We would have attempted a canvass
of reality, except that a canvass of an infinitude of infinitudes is
impossible. Now our quest is at an end.
I will not attempt to picture ourselves to you, except to state that
we are one of the dominant mentalities in a civilized cosmos of a
different curvature and energy-content than your own.
Regarding the Probability Engine—it was never intended to be used
in the way in which you have used it. It is in essence a calculating
machine, designed to forecast the results of any given act, weighing
all factors. It is set outside space-time, in order that it may
consider all the factors in space-time without itself becoming one
of them. When we are faced with a multiple-choice problem, we feed
each choice into the engine successively, note the results, and act
accordingly. We use it to save mental labor on simple decision-making
routines, and also for the most profound purposes, such as the
determination of possible ultimate fates of our cosmos.
All this, understand, only involves forecasting—never the
actualization of those forecasts.
But no machine is foolproof. Just because the Probability Engine
was not made to create, does not mean that it cannot create, given
sufficient mental tinkering. How shall I make it clear to you? I see
from your minds that most of you are familiar with a type of wheeled
vehicle, propelled by the internal combustion of gases, similar
to vehicles used by some of the lower orders in our own cosmos.
You would see in it only a means of transportation. But suppose
one of your savages—someone possessing less knowledge than even
yourselves—should come upon it. He might see it as a weapon—a
ram, a source of lethal fumes, or an explosive mine. No safety devices
you might install could ever absolutely prevent it from being used in
that fashion.
You, discovering the Probability Engine, were in the same position as
that hypothetical savage. Unfortunately, the engine was swept away from
our cosmos with all its controls open—ready for tinkering. You poked
and pried, used it, as I can see, in many ways, some close to the true
one, some outlandishly improbable. Finally you worked off the guards
that inhibit the engine's inherent creativity. You began to actualize
alternate worlds.
In doing this, you completely reversed the function of the Probability
Engine. We built it in order to avoid making unfavorable decisions.
You used it to insure that unfavorable decisions would be made. You
actualized worlds which for the most part would never have had a remote
chance of existing, if you had left the decision up to the people
inhabiting your world. Normally, even individuals of your caliber
will show considerable shrewdness in weighing the consequences of
their actions and in avoiding any choice that seems apt to result in
unpleasant consequences. You, however, forced the unwise choices to be
made as well as the wise ones—and you continued to do this after your
own race had acquired more real wisdom than you yourselves possessed.
For the Probability Engine in no way increased your mental stature.
Indeed, it had just the opposite effect, for it gave you powers which
enabled you to escape the consequences of your bad judgments—and it
truckled to your delusions by only showing you what you wanted to see.
Understand, it is just a machine. A perfect servant—not an educator.
And perfect servants are the worst educators. True, you could have used
it to educate yourselves. But you preferred to play at being gods,
under the guise of performing scientific experiments on a world that
you didn't faintly understand. God-like, you presumed to judge and
bless and damn. Finally, in trying to make good on your damnations,
you came perilously close to destroying much more than you intended
to—there might even have been unpleasant repercussions in our own
cosmos.
And now, small things, what shall we do with you and your worlds?
Obviously we cannot permit you to retain the Probability Engine or any
of the powers that go with it or the talismans. Also, we cannot for a
moment consider destroying any of the alternate worlds, with a view
to simplification. That which has been given life must be allowed to
use life, and that which has been faced with problems must be given an
opportunity of solving them. If the time-splits were of more recent
origin, we might consider healing them; but deviation has proceeded so
far that that is out of the question.
We might stay here and supervise your worlds, delivering judgments,
preventing destructive conflicts, and gradually lifting you to a higher
mental and spiritual level. But we do not relish playing god. All our
experiences in that direction have been unpleasant, making us conclude
that, just as with an individual, no species can achieve a full and
satisfactory maturity except by its own efforts.
Again, we might remain here and perform various experiments, using the
set-ups which you have created. But that would be abhorrent.
So, small things, there being no better alternative, we will take
away our engine, leaving the situation you have created to develop as
it will—with transtime invasions and interworld wars no longer an
immediate prospect, though looming as a strong future possibility. With
such sufferings and miseries and misunderstandings as exist, but with
the future wide open and no unnatural constraints put on individuals
sufficiently clear-headed and strong-willed to seek to avoid unpleasant
consequences. And with the promise of rich and unusual developments
lying ahead, since, so far as we know, your many-branched time-stream
is unique among the cosmoses. We will watch your future with interest,
hoping some day to welcome you into the commonwealth of mature beings.
You may say that we are at fault for allowing the Probability Engine
to fall into your hands—and indeed, we shall make even stronger
efforts to safeguard it from accident or tinkering in the future. But
remember this. Young and primitive as you are, you are not children,
but responsible and awakened beings, holding in your hands the key
to your future, and with only yourselves to blame if you wantonly go
astray.
As for you individuals who are responsible for all this botchwork,
I sympathize with your ignorance and am willing to admit that your
intentions were in part good. But you chose to play at being gods, and
even ignorant and well-intentioned gods must suffer the consequences of
their creations. And that shall be your fate.
With regard to you, Thorn, your case is of course very different. You
responded to our blindly broadcast influencings, stole a talisman, and
finally summoned us in time to prevent catastrophe. We are grateful.
But there is no reward we can give you. To remove you from your
environment to ours would be a meaningless gesture, and one which you
would regret in the end. We cannot permit you to retain any talismanic
powers, for in the long run you would be no better able to use them
wisely than these others. We would like to continue your satisfying
state of triplicated personality—it presents many interesting
features—but even that may not be, since you have three destinies
to fulfill in three worlds. However, a certain compromise solution,
retaining some of the best features of the triplication, is possible.
And so, small things, we leave you.
From hastily chosen places of concealment and half-scooped fox-holes
around the Opal Cross, a little improvised army stood up. A few
scattered fliers swooped down and silently joined them. The only
uniforms were those of a few members of the Extraterrestrial Service.
Among the civilians were perhaps a score of Recalcitrant Infiltrants
from World II, won over to last-minute co-operation by Thorn II.
The air still reeked acridly. White smoke and fumes came from a dozen
areas where earth and vegetation had been blasted by subtronic weapons.
And there were those who did not stand up, whose bodies lay charred or
had vanished in disintegration.
The ground between them and the Opal Cross was still freshly scored by
the tracks of great vehicles. There were still wide swathes of crushed
vegetation. At one point a group of low buildings had been mashed flat.
And it seemed that the air above still shook with the aftermath of the
passage of mighty warcraft.
But of the great mechanized army that had been fanning out toward and
above them, not one black-uniformed soldier remained.
They continued to stare.
In the Sky Room of the Opal Cross, the members of the World Executive
Committee looked around at a similar emptiness. Only the tatters of
Clawly's body remained as concrete evidence of what had happened. It
was blown almost in two, but the face was untouched. This no longer
showed the triumphant smile which had been apparent a moment before
death. Instead, there was a look of horrified surprise.
Clawly's duplicate had vanished with the other black-uniformed figures.
The first to recover a little from the frozenness of shock was
Shielding. He turned toward Conjerly and Tempelmar.
But the expression on the faces of those two was no longer that of
conquerors, even thwarted and trapped conquerors. Instead there was
a dawning, dazed amazement, and a long-missed familiarity that told
Shielding that the masquerading minds were gone and the old Conjerly
and Tempelmar returned.
Firemoor began to laugh hysterically.
Shielding sat down.
At the World II end of the broken transtime bridgehead, where moments
before the Opal Cross had risen, now yawned a vast smoking pit,
half-filled with an indescribable wreckage of war machines and men,
into which others were still falling from the vanished skylon—like
some vision of Hell. To one side, huge even in comparison with that
pit, loomed the fantastically twisted metal of the transtime machine.
Ear-splitting sounds still echoed. Hurricane gusts still blew.
Above it all, like an escaping black hawk above an erupting volcano,
Clawly flew. Not even the titanic confusion around him, nor the shock
of the time-streams' split, nor his horror at his own predicament,
could restrain his ironic mirth at the thought of how that other
Clawly, in trying to kill him, had insured the change of minds and his
own death.
Now he was forever marooned on World II, in Clawly II's body. But the
memory chambers of Clawly II's brain were open to him, since Clawly
II's mind no longer existed to keep them closed, and so at one bound he
had become a half-inhabitant of World II. He knew where he stood. He
knew what he must do. He had no time for regrets.
A few minutes' flying brought him to the Opal Cross and it was not
long before he was admitted to the Servants Hall. There eleven shaken
old men looked up vengefully at him from reports of disaster. Their
chairman's puckered lips writhed as he accused: "Clawly, I have warned
you before that your lack of care and caution would be your finish. We
hold you to a considerable degree responsible for this calamity. It
is possible that your inexcusably lax handling of the prisoner Thorn
was what permitted word of our invasion to slip through to the enemy.
We have decided to eliminate you." He paused, then added, a little
haltingly, "Before sentence is carried out, however, do you have
anything to say in extenuation of your actions?"
Clawly almost laughed. He knew this scene—from myth. The Dawn Gods
blaming Loki for their failures, trying to frighten him—in hopes that
he would think up a way to get them out of their predicament. The
Servants were bluffing. They weren't even looking for a scapegoat. They
were looking for help.
This was his world, he realized. The dangerous, treacherous
world of which he had always dreamed. The world for which his character
had been shaped. The world in which he could play the traitor's role as
secret ally of the Recalcitrants in the Servants' camp, and prevent or
wreck future invasions of World I. The world in which his fingers could
twitch the cords of destiny.
Confidently, a gargoyle's smile upon his lips, he stepped forward to
answer the Servants.
Briefly Thorn lingered in the extra-cosmic dark, before his tripled
personality and consciousness should again be split. He knew that the
True Owners of the Probability Engine had granted him this respite
in order that he would be able to hit upon the best solution of his
problem. And he had found that solution.
Henceforward, the three Thorns would exchange bodies at intervals, thus
distributing the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives. It was the
strangest of existences to look forward to—for each, a week of the
freedoms and pleasures of World I, a week of the tyrannies and hates of
World II, a week of the hardships and dangers of World III.
Difficulties might arise. Now, being one, the Thorns agreed. Separate,
they might rebel and try to hog good fortune. But each of them would
have the memory of this moment and its pledge.
The strangest of existences, he thought again, hazily, as he felt his
mind beginning to dissolve, felt a three-way tug. But was it really
stranger than any life? One week in heaven—one week in hell—one week
in a frosty ghost-world—
And in seven different worlds of shockingly different cultures, seven
men clad in the awkward and antique garments of the Late Middle Dawn
Civilization, began to look around, in horror and dismay, at the
consequences of their creations.
THE END.
.jpg "Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton")
.jpg "Edith Wharton")
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