It was a spectacular miniature of central London: Paddington, St. Marylebone, Kensington, Westminster, Fulham, Chelsea; streets, roads, alleys, mews, buildings—I recognized Peter Jones and the Cadogan Hotel—cars, buses, trams, trains, people on the streets, in the parks, even some poking their heads out windows. And—alas for my vision—all still, motionless, and dusty. Not even a mouse track.
Glory gave me a comforting squeeze and took over. “It’s magnificent theater, Madame. May we ask who your set designer was?”
“My son, Kelly. Kelly Towser. He designed and built everything.”
“I thought the name was Toussaint.”
“Can you see a Towser up in lights on a West End theater? I changed it, professionally.”
“Of course. We do the same in the States. Would it be possible for us to interview your son?”
“Why?” Very sharp.
“If we bring you over as a team we must know how your Kelly would feel about that. Will he cooperate?”
“Well…”
“And anyway we’ll need ten more of these.” Nan held up the minibottle. “Gifts to potential backers to show what they’re investing in.”
That did it. “Come.” Madame switched off the lights, locked up, and led us out of the station. “He’s in Pullet Mews. You’ll find him rather difficult.”
“Oh? How? Why?”
“He’s chronically shy.”
“That’s not unusual for artists.”
“His reason is.”
“And what’s that?”
“He’s a Tom Thumb.”
“A dwarf? Not really!”
“Here we are.” Madame opened the door of a small mews cottage, led us up to the top floor, and gave some sort of code rap on the door.
After a moment a little voice inside called, “Mama?”
“Yes, Kelly, and I’ve brought some nice show people from the States who want to meet you.”
“No! No!”
“They want to hire us, Kelly, and take us overseas to build another Lilliput show.”
“No, Mama, no!”
“Now, Kelly, this is your mother asking you. Will her son stand in the way of her success in the American theater?”
At last the door was opened, revealing a charming studio. It was a loft without windows, only a skylight overhead. Under the skylight was a cluttered drafting/work table with a high stool. The walls were shelved with a dazzling display of vivid dolls, puppets, cars, trains, houses, furniture, castles, coins, all in miniature.
It was the first startling surprise. The second came when we stepped into the studio and the door was closed, revealing Kelly Towser. He may have been a Tom Thumb in the eyes of his six-foot, two-hundred-pound mother, but he was no dwarf. About four-ten, wearing a cotton workshirt and corduroy slacks. Cropped hair. I couldn’t see his face because it was masked by the surgeon’s speculum he was wearing for his work.
I offered a hand. “Thank you so much for allowing us to visit, Kelly. My name’s Noyer.”
He didn’t shake. Chronically shy. Instead he clasped his hands behind his back, and that blew it. His pulling back his arms had pushed out his chest, revealing two unmistakable small bumps thrusting against his shirt.
“Holy Saints!” I exclaimed. “Kelly’s a girl!”
“Kelly is my son,” Lady Macbeth shouted. “He is a boy of the male persuasion and will always be one.”
We paid no attention. Glory went to the frightened girl, making soft, soothing sounds. Very gently, she tilted up the speculum to reveal the face. Kelly had the features of a girl in her late twenties, possibly attractive but now distorted by confusion and fear.
The mother went on ranting. “And Kelly will succeed in the male-dominated theater where no woman can. He will design and star in his new productions: Puck in the Dream, Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim, Thomas Sawyer. His name will be up in lights. KELLY TOUSSAINT! And my name will be immortal!”
We ignored her; she was just background noise. Glory displayed the tiny champagne bottle. “Kelly, dear, did you make this beautiful souvenir?”
A nod.
“And did you leave it on our doorstep?”
A nod.
“With a wonderful make-believe story inside, asking for help?”
Kelly almost brightened. “Y-you liked it?”
“Loved it, but why?”
“To get attention.”
I broke in quietly. “There speaks a pro. I know. First you grab ‘em, no matter how, and Kelly certainly grabbed us. My compliments.
“Thank you.” She was close to a smile. “It was fun making it up.”
“But if you want help why didn’t you come in and ask for it?” Glory said.
“I was afraid. It was all so strange and different.”
“Will you tell us what help you need?”
The last surprise. Kelly took fire. “I want to be big,” she erupted, pointing to her mother. “Bigger than Mama so I can get her off my back for all time.”
“No,” Adam said. “You don’t want to be bigger physically, my dear Kelly. It won’t solve your problem, and anyway I can’t give you that. You must be content to remain a petite fille of adorableness, and there are many who would gladly change places with you.”
Hoo-boy! The leopard charm!
“What I can give you,” Macavity went on, “is the power to think big, much bigger than your mother, who has, Alf and Nan report, the typical bird brain of the dumb actress. You’ll be able to out-think, out-guess, and out-whelm the Madame.” That doubtful glance again. “Out-whelm, Alf?”
“Over.”
“Thank you. Now my charge, Kelly dear …”
She was seated on a couch, too shy to meet his eye, but she took a breath and, “Wh-what?”
“A service.”
“Y-you mean maybe m-make you some models?”
“Not quite. We have some microdata which we can’t dissect to eliminate certain items. With your experience and genius for working in miniature, perhaps you can do it for us. You see the chip has been damaged and before we can access the information, we need you to repair it.”
“You couldn’t, not even with Shrdlu?” I asked.
“No. He was hopeless. He’s the one who damaged the disk.”
“Where is he now?”
“Departed for the Library of Congress, spouting Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Swinburne, T. S. Eliot, all the great literary critics. He’ll be the most boring Ph.D. in the history of belles lettres.” To Kelly, “Will you try to help us get the data, my dear? It won’t be easy, and you may not succeed, but no matter. Win or lose, you’ve paid the price, and that will be the last of your miniature hangup. I’ll replace it with the big.”
“I’ll try, Mr. Maser.” We could barely hear her.
“It’ll be rather strange to you, Kelly,” he said, gallantly helping her to her feet. “What we need you to look at has not yet been invented in your time. They’re megabyte chips with memory cells. You’ll go through them, fixing the damaged parts. This way.” As he led her toward the Hellhole he called, “You may have done it again, Alf, but keep your fingers crossed.”
“Who cares? I’m a match for any monster Cagliostro can brew.”
“Ah-ha! Oh-ho! So you two made the connection,” and the paneled door closed.
“Did you You-Hiff him, Glory?” I asked.
“‘You-Hiff’?”
“UHF.”
“No.” She laughed. “He saw the change in you and guessed.”
“I’m changed?”
“Wonderfully! Tremendously!”
“And you?”
“Wonderfully! Tremendously!”
“Yes. I feel like I’ve discovered the source of the Nile.”
“And I feel like the Nile.”
We sat down. Nan straddling my lap and placing my arms around her waist to draw us close, face to face.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” I murmured. “You’re my first and only true love.”<
br />
“And you’re my first, my very first.”
“Don’t tease.”
“But you were.”
“Are you talking virgin?”
“Yes.”
“But I thought—”
She shut me up with her lips and darting tongue and we were still flagrante when Adam and Kelly at last came out of the Hellhole. We didn’t bother to move until Kelly said in a crisp voice, “All right, cut. It’s a take. Print it.” Then we broke and stared.
She was still wearing shirt and slacks but what was now inside made me fear for her mother and the rest of the world.
“Many thanks, Maser,” she said, and we certainly could hear her. “I was a damned fool wasting my time on miniatures and that cockamamie Lilliput show. Here’s World War Two waiting for a giant documentary by Towser Films. I’ll do it in three segments—air, sea, and land. An hour each. The only problem is front money, but I’ll talk the BBC into that for a credit and a cut. ‘The Years That Wiped the World’ with a cast of thousands. Ciao, you all,” and she was gone.
“Jeez, you all.” What else could I say?
“Quite a change.” Adam grinned. “Makes me proud to be a hockshop uncle.”
“Did she fix the chips?”
“Yep. Our brain basements are now safe.”
“What biggie did you replace her mini with, Cecil B. DeMille?”
“P. T. Barnum.”
“Like wow. There’s bound to be a cast of a thousand elephants.”
“All named Jumbo.”
“One thing I can’t understand. She never has any trouble wishing home, but why’d it take her forty years to get
here?”
“Fright, Alf. Fear of the unknown. That often slows them down. Home is familiar so they go like a shot.”
FOUR · SEVEN WELL-HUNG GENTLEMEN
Later, after Adam had departed to scuff around the Olduvai Gorge of a million-plus years ago in search of I the origins of the human collective unconscious, I asked Glory where the Switch was. I knew there had to be one somewhere about or even the Mystery Cat might go mad at the pace. We knaves must sometimes rest.
She removed an exquisite pale blue Ming vase from a niche, exposing a simple switch on the wall behind. I reached in and threw it. Nothing changed, but everything changed. A field flux of the singularity executed a deft Dedekind Cut between a pair of seconds whose interval we traversed, transporting us to a timeless space where we dawdled, showered, ate, drank, diddled, and did it again while no customers were kept waiting or could be as we did it in her room atop the iron stair, skins of her former selves proudly displayed upon the wall.
“A gallery of Glorys,” I remarked, stroking the nearest.
“Perpetually reflowering forth,” said she, “for delight of man and beast. Come bed with me and love my be, Alf of the thousand stars. Have I not waited down the nows?”
“Indeed,” said I, kissing her now, and kissing her now again.
Many a time I rose to the occasion, but finally fell as a dead man falls, into her arms or her eyes, where a soft susurration like ancient waves welcomed me down and down.
… I remembered the iron stair beneath my bare feet, dim, distant, and faint. Then I was through the half-lit room and the big door, drowsing down dark ways where images of sex and violence seemed to scroll at either hand. Following the claw marks then, back between the taking-away and the addingto places …
.. . coming to the place where the seven hung, turning in the breeze—though, in truth, this seemed my first splinter of awareness, the other few but impressions of passage which had been restored to me in that instant. Something about that field … I didn’t know how it worked. Better not to enter there.
I reached forward. I leaned. There was a chill… .
I touched his arm, gripped it. Was it Pietro the painter or was it the Crusader? I could not be certain. It was necessary, though, that I turn him, so that the faint forward light—
“Ssss! Alf! What are you doing?” I felt her hand upon my shoulder. “You walk in your sleep. Come away!”
She tugged at me, as I was tugging at my hung companion. Our joint effort had him turning proper in a moment… .
I released his arm.
“What dream is this?” I asked as the light came upon his face.
It was my face that I beheld, turning in the pale illumination.
“Why’s the Pussycat got my double hanging in the meat locker, Glory?”
“The story he told you was true. This one just happens to look like you.”
I strode forward, knowing now that I could take more of that chill. I seized the next one by the legs and twisted sharply. He came around, and my own face looked down at me again. I moved to the next, turned him. Again, it was me. And the next, and the next… Again, again. I dropped to my knees.
I felt her hands upon my shoulders.
“All of them! What is this, Glory? Does he collect guys who look like me? Am I going to be Number Eight? Should I start running? How can I, from a guy who can follow me anywhere? What does he want? Why are they here?”
“We must get you out of the field now.” She caught hold of me under my armpits and drew me to my feet. “Come away.”
“Tell me!”
“I will, if you’ll come along with me now.”
“I’m sorry, Alf, that you had to find out for yourself. He was going to tell you, after he got to know you better.”
“So you discussed my case?”
“Yess.”
“In UHF, while I was standing there, I suppose?”
“Yesss.”
“So what was it that I found out for myself? I still don’t know.”
“That you are a part of something, perhaps dangerous, that affects him and this place. He wanted to cultivate you, observe you, to see whether you might give some indication of what your plans are for us, before he risked talking with you about it.”
“‘Risked’? You act as if he’s afraid of me.”
“He is.”
“Let me point out that he’s smarter, stronger, older, wiser—all that cloned quadratic crap—and probably has a lot more sheer animal cunning than me. Maybe he’s even crazier.”
“He has no simple way of knowing what goes on inside you. You might even be his equal and be keeping it well-hidden. You may be a special observer, studying his growth and development—or something much darker. That is why he brought you into his affairs as he never has another—to watch you for some clue as to what your agenda might be.”
“And you are helping him?”
“Of course.”
“Learn anything you’d care to share?”
“No. You baffle me completely. You seem to be just what you held yourself out to be—a journalist with expensive tastes who gets himself assignments to match, a man with a strong curiosity, easy-going, well-educated, and with a grotesque sense of humor. Only we know there has to be more to it than that, if for no other reason than that there are eight of you.”
“This place attracts weirdness, Glory. Maybe I’m part of some harmless synchronicity that reverberates down the years. It provides a fatal attraction for curious guys who look like me— Hey, you weren’t in love with any of them, were you?”
She laughed.
“Many skins ago, who can say?”
“Lots of virginities back, eh? I find the thought of being the recurrent satisfier of your emotional needs rather distasteful. Smacks too much of the assembly line. Says too much about both of us.”
“Ssss. It’s very romantic. Eternal return stuff.”
“—And the other guys didn’t learn any better concerning the Hellhole either. Says a lot about my supposed superior intelligence.”
“Says nothing. We don’t know.”
“Just call me Alf the Eighth.”
Again that sibilant laughter. Her hand continued to knead my right shoulder.
“Only one Alf.”
“Oh?”
“You are all the sam
e person.”
“I don’t understand.”
“After several visitors were swinging in the Hellhole it occurred to Adam to compare tissue samples.”
“And?”
“They are all genetically identical. Clones, Alf.”
“And me?”
“We were able to type you, too. It is the same.”
“You mean I’m a clone?”
“Ssss. I do not know. You may be the original and the rest your reconnaissance team. Perhaps they each learned enough from each occasion and you were somehow monitoring it all. Now, finally, you may be ready to move in person.”
“That’s preposterous! Move? In what fashion? Against what? For what?”
“How am I to know? There are so many possibilities. This place is unique. It represents power, knowledge, wish fulfillment. There is no way to tell what you might be after.”
I shook my head.
“Ridiculous!”
She moved nearer, slithered against me.
“Then let it stay a mystery,” she said, twining about me in an interesting fashion. “Perhaps a ninth one will show up one day and explain everything. In the meantime, let us consider the ways of the flesh.” I felt her tongue upon my cheek and its argument was persuasive. Soon we were twined together in a love-knot I knew I could never undo unassisted, which of course was half the fun.
It was only later, near sleep, that I realized they had kept my thinking and feeling equipment under full siege the entire time I had been with them. I let my thoughts begin to flow, but the tides of fatigue were stronger…
When I woke later I was alone.
I made my way down the stairs and passed to the front of the foyer. The Switch in the niche was still thrown, but I moved to the door, wondering the while. If opening it were absolutely hazardous to the health under null-time conditions, I presumed that throwing the Switch would have locked the door.
So I opened the door.
Beyond the recessed area of the entranceway hung a dense, white fog. I stepped outside, staring. Was it real fog or was it a thing the mind did when confronted with some fundamental physical paradox?
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