by C. L. Moore
"Everybody keeps pointing guns at my belly," Harding said mildly. "I'll develop a stigmatic target if this goes on. Relax. I could blow up the island too, if I felt like it. This building's the control center for the whole setup, and I know practically every gismo here. Wait a minute, Turner. I want a cigarette." He turned his back to the screen, searching upon the desk top as if for matches. "Mayall, get busy!" he whispered, rolling his eyes sidewise. "What's the delay for? Call your Team!"
"Harding," Turner said from the wall. "Turn around here. I don't trust you. Come out of that door and start walking north. I mean it!" His fat hand quivered on the lever.
"All right," Harding said. "Take it easy. Can't I light a cigarette first?" He cupped a match in his hands, and in their shelter looked anxiously at Mayall. The bearded man had taken his hands off the Round Table plate and was scribbling busily in large letters on a pad.
"No time for the Team," he whispered. "Look—read this." He held it up. Harding blew smoke and scanned the lines of writing. He nodded very slightly, turned to face Turner on the screen.
"Relax," he said. "I'm on my way. Just take it easy—we need each other now. I'll play along with you."
"Have you got any choice?" Turner demanded angrily.
"Maybe not. Any last instructions? Because after I leave this building we can't talk. I'll be beyond reach of any TV screens."
"Get going, that's all. If I don't see you before I count to—"
"Hold on!" Harding said. "I've got some … some stairs to climb before I reach the door. This room is two flights underground. I'll be outside in about twenty seconds. Don't be rash!"
"Twenty seconds, then," Turner said. "I'm starting to count now."
Instantly Harding turned away and stepped toward the inner door, outside the range of the screen.
Mayall moved ahead of him, on tiptoe, every gesture precise and accurate now that he had a definite job to do. But Harding didn't like the suggestion of a satisfied smirk half hidden by his beard.
"Mark time!" Mayall said urgently. "Mark time!
He had swung open a section of the wall, revealing within, between parted chain mail curtains, a little cubicle hung with glittering, swinging mesh from floor to ceiling. A shove sent Harding staggering into the shining tent. The curtains closed behind him. Mayall's whisper sounded disembodied from outside.
"Mark time—but stay in the same place. Like a treadmill." A switch clicked loudly somewhere behind the curtain. "You're on. He can see your image. Start moving, Ed."
Suddenly, without having moved a step, Harding found himself facing the village street. In perfect reflection upon the swinging walls around him he saw dusty roads patterned with sun and shadow, the sheds across the way, the Integration Building looming behind him, its door swinging open. Then the street swung smoothly from right to left before him, lay out straight toward the vanishing point between two distant hills. It was exactly as if he and not the street had turned.
"Mark time, you fool!"
Harding belatedly began to walk, swinging his arms a little, moving his feet, almost taken in by the illusion of what he saw around him. It seemed strange that the breeze which made the leaves move soundlessly did not ripple his own hair.
To all intents and purposes he was actually outdoors, walking at a leisurely pace toward the hills beyond which the spaceship towered. Overhead was the clear sky and the sun. Around him, stereoscopic and in perfect perspective, lay the village. Again the images swung dizzily and he was facing in a new direction as the path turned itself under his feet, sliding backward below him at the rate of a man's normal walk.
"Don't stop for a second," Mayall's voice said from the other side of that unreal curtain which looked like the airy distances between Harding and the hills. "Keep walking, and keep in the path. Your image is being projected outside—like a mirage. Turner's watching you. It's a moving mirage. Your image is being moved forward across the island at a slow rate of speed, but you've got to keep your feet treadmilling or Turner may get suspicious. Can you see your way?"
"Just as if I were outside," Harding said, marking time. "Is it all right to talk?"
"For a few minutes, yes. You're still too far away for him to see your lips move, and I've got the sound cut. I've set the projection for straight on down the road and over the two hills to the relay station. It'll take care of itself now as long as you guide your course so you don't seem to be walking in the air or through the houses."
"Nice work," Harding said admiringly. "I've seen something like this done before, but only under restricted lab conditions. How do you do it?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Mayall said mockingly. "This whole island is a lab. Or a theater. All I need is a specially sensitized frequency beam reflected down from the ionized island roof, to serve as light-sensitive cells. I've got projecting devices, carrier and receiver, two sets of them, one for you here inside and one for the outdoor illusions. Two-way visual projection, plus a mobile unit, chiefly a series of relay zoom lenses. But the details are my business, naturally. All you need to know is that you'll keep marking time with your feet for about ten minutes before your projected image comes within clear sight of Turner, and he comes in sight of you—exactly as if you really were walking through the village. Only, this way I can keep my eye on you."
"Get busy, then," Harding urged the blue hills before him. "Make it fast. Turner will use that hot sonic once he finds out he's being tricked."
"I'm calling the Team now—"
Harding turned sharply toward the sound of the voice. His steps on the sliding road faltered. He glanced back at the curtains through which he had entered, meditating possible action.
"Don't you do it!" Mayall's sharp voice snapped, as if the hills had spoken. "I'm watching you. You can't do a thing but stay put and keep walking. If you step out of line, we both die. Remember, my life depends on you!" He laughed. "The Team's coming in now. Don't strain your ears. You won't hear a thing. I've got that sound cut."
"You may not need the Team," Harding said, trudging in one spot doggedly. "Why not order the spaceship to take off? Then Turner can't—"
"On no. That's my insurance. Without it, I'm immobilized. Besides, it wouldn't work—you see why, don't you?"
Harding nodded. Of course he saw. The usual slow-starting take-off would give Turner time to keep his beam focused on the fuel tanks while he exploded them, and a top-speed take-off, never used on Earth, would blast the entire village. Space flight, to be safe, was a job for boosters initially, and that inevitable, fatal slowness was the final wall of the trap in which Turner had caught them. But—
"Phase?" Harding suggested.
"That's the only out," Mayall said flatly.
-
"It'll take a good Team."
"I've got one."
Harding was silent, turning over possibilities in his mind, marking time briskly as the dusty way glided under his feet. Tension was tightening in him. He wanted to start running. But he was trapped in a squirrel-cage helplessness that kept him immobilized while Mayall hatched schemes with his mysterious Team in Round Table session. Who could guess what murky plans moved in that strange, unstable mind?
The visual mirage around Harding was perfect. So perfect the impulse to test the nearest tree with a questing finger was almost irresistible. Was he really indoors? Halfway he disbelieved it. Only the ghostly silence of the world he walked through attested to its unreality.
The fringes of the village slipped away behind him. Now he was climbing the first hill, remembering to bend forward a little as the ground seemed to rise steeply before him. The domed relay station where Turner waited dropped below the hilltop and vanished for a moment. Until he reached the rise of ground ahead, he would be hidden from Turner. But that did no good. If he didn't reappear on schedule at the hilltop, Turner would certainly suspect a trick. And if he did suspect, he was very likely to act. A man with a bullet through his wrist is apt to be impulsive.
The spaceship w
ould blow, and the island with it. Or at least, a good part of the surface of the island, along with whatever life forms happened to be there at the time.
Phase. Phase was the answer. Harding kept walking automatically across the grassy rise, tilting his body forward to compensate for the slant. No, he needn't bother yet with that. Turner couldn't see him. He stopped walking. There was no need. Eerily, the landscape still moved backward around him at a walking pace. Once, a little while ago, he had crossed this island's hills and talked to its trees, hearing the leaves reply in Mayall's bitter voice. Now he glided in utter silence where sight was the least reliable of the senses.
He looked ahead, deep into the illusion, estimating the distance to the rise. The landscape flowed by around him. Tentatively he reached for the curtains upon which all this unreality unrolled itself. His hand touched woven metal, invisible in midair. He waited, listening. No sound came from May all. If he were really able to see into the cubicle, he was not looking now. He sat at his Round Table, facing the Composite Image of his Team.
Moving swiftly, Harding stepped backward on the gliding path and slipped out between the curtains of sunny air. The shadowy control room lurched violently underfoot as the slanting hillside seemed to give place to level floor. On the wall, visible at an angle, the TV screen from which Turner had spoken still showed a foreshortened and flattened relay chamber, and Turner's broad back leaning toward the window that opened in its far wall.
Turner's hand was on the lever. He was stretching to watch the village, the path along which Harding's illusion moved leisurely. His intentness as he stared at the hilltop was so compelling that Harding himself could not be sure his own image would not in the next moment come strolling into view.
Soundlessly, hugging the wall to stay outside the TV screen's range in case Turner should glance back, he slid toward the door of the Round Table room. It was closed. Quietly he laid his hand flat on the lock plate. The vibrations rippled softly under his palm, but he did not manipulate the code of the lock. He put his ear to the panels instead, listening. He could hear only an inarticulate murmuring from inside.
He dared not interrupt.
Absolute concentration would be necessary to work out the phase method that could counter Turner's threat. Phase. He had used it himself, getting through the barriers around the island. But this was a more precarious matter—the sending out of a frequency from another relay station that could cancel Turner's was easy enough, but timing was another matter. When the UHF started slipping down the spectrum, the other would have to slip down too, at exactly the same pace, so that the phase cancellation would operate while Turner's beam passed through the dangerous hot band which would explode the ship's fuel unless the controller beam nullified it.
Only an Integration Team was capable of the enormous concentration that could ensure perfect coordination with Turner. It called for faster than instant perception and reactivity. And Harding thought it extremely doubtful whether many Integrator Teams could manage it. Only the best, the ones who had worked together for years, developed a Composite Image that was an absolute projection and synthesis—and what was Mayall's Team like?
Turner in the TV screen shifted his feet noisily on the floor, exhaled an impatient breath. Harding glanced up, alarmed. Clearly it was time for his projected image to come over the top of the hill. Past time, perhaps. Turner's hand was quivering on the lever already.
Harding flattened himself to the wall once more and slid back rapidly toward his cubicle. Just before he ducked inside he measured the distance between the probable inner wall of the Round Table room and the room where the metal curtains hung. They were side by side, sharing a single wall. Bullets would pierce that wall.
There was no time to waste now. Harding slipped between mesh hangings that swayed like the curtains of reality, blue sky and green grass shivering, warping space, settling again into the illusion of a solid world. The ground glided past fluidly under him. Bending forward as if against a steep slope, Harding began to mark time again as the top of the hill slid level with his feet.
He began to descend the hill. Now he could see the domed building again, and the lake below. He thought of Turner, a white shape dimly visible at a window under the dome, letting out a loud wheeze of relief as his image came into view. The disorienting sense of doubled projections everywhere made Harding's head swim when he tried to think.
"Harding?" The blue lake seemed to speak in Mayall's voice as Harding's path carried him smoothly down toward the shore. "Everything all right?"
"So far," Harding said, moving his feet dutifully as the path skirted the water's edge. "How are you doing?"
"I think we're getting it," Mayall said, apparently out of the rushes around which soundless water lapped.
"You'd better," Harding said, thinking grimly that if they didn't, this ghost of himself might go on gliding for years to come over the desolate island, always supposing the projective equipment survived, by some miracle. Or no—no, the man himself had to stand here before the ghost could walk.
"Harding," the rushes said, half hesitantly, "we've got a few minutes. I want to talk to you. Suppose we succeed. I've got a paralysis beam set upon Turner now. The moment we cancel his hot sonic, the paralysis goes on. Turner's a dead man already, as far as his chances go. But afterward … Ed, what about this Ganymede deal? Have you got proof?"
Harding chuckled.
"Do you take me for a fool? Once Turner dies, do you think I don't know the next question you'll put to your Team? 'How can I force myself to kill Harding?' Maybe it's set up already, just waiting until they're free. They'll give you an answer, too—if we survive. If they're good enough to cancel Turner's beam, they'll be good enough to tell you how to get rid of me. If I die, George, you'll never know the truth about Ganymede."
The rushes were silent. The whole ghostly world was silent, for the distance of a dozen paces. Harding trudged on around the edge of the phantom lake under a phantom of sunlit sky. At the top of the next rise stood the phantom of a domed building where a phantom Turner waited to recognize a phantom.
"Ed, tell me the truth," a phantom of Mayall's voice said out of air. "Are you from the Ganymedans?"
"Why not ask your Team?" Harding mocked him. "Maybe I was lying. Maybe I'm just a washed-out Team member trying to muscle in on your racket."
"Or maybe you weren't washed-out," Mayall said. "Maybe the Team sent you to stop me, because they couldn't stop me any other way."
"That would be a joke, wouldn't it?" Harding said, chuckling. "Building up Integrators and Teams to such a pitch of complexity they cancel each other, and we have to go right back to the old prehistoric days of man against man, unarmed—without even weapons against each other, George! Because we can't hurt each other with any weapons. Yes, that would be very funny—if it were true."
"Is it true?"
"Ask your Team," Harding said again cheerfully. "There's another possibility you may not have thought about. What if Venus sent me, George?"
"Venus?" Mayall echoed in a startled voice.
"They might have. They may have been waiting and watching for just such a man as me, George. They snapped you up when you were bounced off the Team. O.K. Maybe they snapped me up, too. I've never said I wasn't approached, have I?"
"But why?" Mayall's voice was bewildered.
"Lots of reasons. Maybe they were curious to know if you'd sell them out when a better offer came along." Harding chuckled again. "Well, they'd know the answer to that, wouldn't they, once I got in touch with my backers again?"
"You won't leave this island," Mayall said grimly. "Ever."
"One of us won't. That's sure. But maybe you'll be the boy who stays. Do you really wonder why Venus might want you kicked off this Team too, George? Maybe for the same reason Twelve-Wye-Lambda had to. What disqualified you for one Team might disqualify you for another. Might? It would!"
"There's no reason—" Mayall sounded a little choked.
"There's eve
ry reason. Why is it Venus hasn't made any offensive moves against Earth for … how long has it been now? … six months? Eight? All Venus does is counter Earth's aggressions—successfully, but defensively. Only defensively. Things are settling down to a status quo—another Hundred Years' War. I wonder why?"
"Why?" Mayall asked harshly.
"Because the top brass always hates for a war to end. And you're top brass as long as Venus depends on your Integrator. Why, you've put up such defenses yourself nobody could get in to stop you, until I came along. Maybe for a long time now your backers have wanted to change things on Akassi. But how could they? They've set up a Frankenstein's monster.
"Did you pick out an incompetent Team on purpose, George? One you could boss around the way you bossed Twelve-Wye-Lambda until I came along? Or have you got 'em drugged or hypnotized? It looks like a draw between Earth and Venus, infinitely prolonged, because Earth's too vitiated to expand and reconquer, and Venus just isn't asking any questions.
"That's what wins any fight, George—asking questions. That's what progress and growth is. Not answering questions so much as asking 'em. And it's the one thing a thinking-machine can't do."
"I suppose you know all the answers, Ed," Mayall said coldly. "I suppose—"
"Nobody knows all the answers. Nobody can. The only way a machine could know them all would be to draw a circle and destroy everything outside it, everything it couldn't handle. And that's what you're doing, George. You're not using your Team or your Integrator or yourself. The one thing nobody wants is status quo right now. Only a machine's at optimum at status quo—and you're a status quo man from away back, George. It's why they threw you off our Team. It's why Venus might have sent me to Akassi."
The landscape unrolled silently when Harding's voice ceased. Mayall said nothing. The lake wheeled away behind and the pathway, straightening itself ahead, swung the whole island around with it until the domed station where Turner sat waiting lay directly before Harding, at the top of the nearing hill.