There was one little fellow who sat apart from all the others. He held something in his lap and was turning it around, admiring it, happy in the possession of a wondrous toy.
Suddenly he tossed it in the air and caught it and the sun flashed on its many colors. Vickers, seeing what it was, skipped a breath or two.
It was the missing top!
He left the sidewalk and sauntered across the lot.
The playing boys did not notice him or, rather, they ignored him, after the manner of the playing youngster for whom the adult does not exist, or is no more than a shadowy personage out of some unreal and unsatisfactory world.
Vickers stood above the boy who held the top.
“Hello, son.”
“Hello yourself.”
“What you got?”
“I found it,” said the boy. “It’s a pretty thing,” said Vickers. “I’d like to buy it from you.”
“It ain’t for sale.”
“I’d pay quite a bit,” said Vickers, feeling desperate.
The boy looked up with interest.
“Enough for a new bicycle?”
Vickers dug into his pocket and pulled out folded bills.
“Gosh, mister . . .”
Out of the corner of his eye, Vickers saw the policeman standing on the sidewalk, watching him. The policeman took a step, started across the lot.
“Here,” said Vickers.
He grabbed the top and tossed the folded bills into the boy’s lap. He straightened and ran, heading for the alley.
“Hey, you!” the policeman shouted.
Vickers kept on running.
A gun exploded and Vickers heard the thin, high whine of a bullet going high over his head.
REACHING the first of the buildings in the alley, Vickers ducked around it, into a passageway between two buildings and realized that he’d turned in the wrong direction. The passageway would lead him back to the street on which lay the wrecked and battered car.
He saw an open basement window, gauged his distance and threw himself feet first through the window. The sill caught him in the back and he felt the fire of pain run along his body. Then his head smacked into something and the basement was a place of darkness filled with a million stars. He came down sprawling and the wind was knocked out of him and the top, flying from his hand, bounced along the floor.
He clawed himself to his hands and knees and grabbed the top. He found a water pipe, grasped it and pulled himself erect. There was a raw place on his back that burned and his head buzzed with the violence of the blow. But he was safe, at least for a little while.
He found stairs and climbed them and saw that he was in the back room of a hardware store. The place was filled with haphazardly piled rolls of chicken wire, rolls of roofing paper, cardboard cartons, bales of binder twine, lengths of stove pipe, crated stoves, coils of manila rope.
He could hear people moving around up in front, but there was no one in sight. He ducked behind a crated stove and from the window above his head, a splash of sun came down, so that he crouched in a pool of light.
Outside, in the alleyway, he heard running feet go past and from far away he heard men shouting. He hunched down, pressing his body against the rough board crating of the stove and tried to control his labored breathing, afraid that anyone coming into the room might hear his rasping breath.
He’d have to figure out some way to get away. If he stayed where he was, they finally would find him. They would start combing the area, police and citizen alike. And, by that time, they would know who it was they hunted. The boy would tell them he found the top lying near the car and someone then might remember seeing him park the car and the waitress in the restaurant might tell them how he stayed while the others raced outside. From many little bits of information, they would know their fugitive was the man whose Forever car they’d smashed.
He wondered what would happen to him when they found him, but he knew well enough, remembering the bulletin from St. Malo, about the man hanging from the lamp post with a placard on his chest.
But there was no way to escape. He couldn’t sneak out into the alley, for they’d be watching for him. He could go back into the basement, but that wasn’t any better than where he was. He could saunter into the store and act like a customer, finally walk out to the street, doing his best to look like an ordinary citizen who had dropped into the place to look at some gun or tool. But he doubted that he could carry it off.
So the illogic hadn’t paid off, after all. Logic and reason were still the winners. There was no escape from this sunlit refuge behind the crated stove.
There was no escape, unless—He had found the top again. He had it there with him.
There was no escape—unless the top should work.
HE put the top’s point on the floor and slowly pumped the handle. It picked up speed. He let go and it spun, whistling. He knelt in front of it and watched the colored stripes. He saw them come into being and he followed them into infinity and he wondered where they went. He forced his attention on the top, narrowing it down until the top was all he saw.
It didn’t work. The top wobbled and he put out a hand and stopped it.
He tried again.
He had to be an eight-year-old. He must clear away his mind, sweep out all adult thoughts, all adult worry, all sophistication. He must become a child.
He thought of playing in the sand, of napping under trees, of the feel of soft grass beneath bare feet. He closed his eyes and concentrated and caught the vision and the color and the smell of it. He opened his eyes and watched the stripes and filled his mind with wonder, with the question of their being and where they went when they disappeared.
It didn’t work.
The top wobbled and he stopped it.
A frantic thought wedged its way into his consciousness. He didn’t have much time. He had to hurry.
He pushed the thought away.
A child had no conception of time. He was a little boy and he had all the time there was and he owned a brand-new top.
He spun it again.
He knew the comfort of a home and loved parents and the playthings scattered on the floor and the story books that Grandma would read to him when she came visiting again. And he watched the top with a simple, childish wonder—watching the stripes come up and disappear, come up and disappear, come up and disappear—
HE fell a foot or so and thumped upon the ground and he was sitting atop a hill. The land stretched out before him for miles and miles and miles, an empty land of waving grass and groves of trees and far-off, winding water.
He looked down at his feet and the top was there, slowly spinning to a wobbling halt.
XXIX
NEW and empty of any mark of Man, the land was raw of earth and sky. Even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed.
From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo. Even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud, a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky.
The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo.
He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation—no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up to the sky.
He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was mid-morning. But if he was wrong, it was afternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night.
He had meant to go into fairyland. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that i
t would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty world, lonely and perhaps dangerous, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death.
He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with some bills in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a ring with the keys to the house and another to his desk and a couple of other keys he couldn’t identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting—and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and paper money less useful than the blank paper and worthless bits of metal.
If this world was empty, he must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself.
He lit a cigarette and tried to think, but all he could think about was that he must go easy on the cigarettes, for the half pack was all he had and when those were gone, there would no more.
An alien land—but not entirely alien, for it was Earth again, the old familiar Earth unscarred by the tools of Man. It had the air of Earth and the grass and sky of Earth, and even the wolves and buffalo were the same as old Earth had borne. Perhaps it was Earth. It looked for all the world as the primal Earth might have looked before Man had stripped and gutted it and torn all its treasures from it.
IT was no alien land—no alien dimension into which the top had flung him, although, of course, the top hadn’t had anything to do with it. It was simply something on which one focused one’s attention, a hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job which it must do. The top had helped him come into this land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this strange, primal world.
There was something he had heard or read.
He went searching for it, digging back into his brain with frantic mental fingers.
A news story? Something he had heard? Or something he had seen on television?
It came to him finally—the article about the man in Boston—a Dr. Aldridge, he seemed to remember who had said that there might be more worlds than one, that there might be an Earth a second ahead of ours and one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other, like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot into the other’s track and the one behind him putting his foot in the same track and so on down the line.
A ring around the Sun.
He hadn’t finished reading the story, he recalled, for something had distracted him and he’d laid the paper aside. He wished he hadn’t. For Aldridge might have been right.
This might be the next world after the old, familiar Earth.
He tried to puzzle out the logic of why there should be a ring of worlds around the Sun, but he gave it up, for he had no idea.
Say, then, that this was Earth No. 2, the next earth behind the original Earth which he had left behind. Say that in topographical features the earths would resemble one another, not exactly like one another, perhaps, but very close in their topography, with little differences here and there, each magnified in turn until probably a matter of ten earths back, the change would become noticeable. But this was only the second earth and its features might be but little changed and on old Earth he had been somewhere in Illinois and this was the kind of land that ancient Illinois would have been.
He had gone into fairyland and there had been a garden and a house in a grove of trees and maybe this was the very earth he had visited when he was a boy of eight. And in later years he had walked an enchanted valley and it, too, might have been this earth, and if that was true, then there was a Preston house exactly like the one which stood so proudly in the Earth of his childhood.
He knew there was little reason to believe there’d be a Preston house, little reason to think anything other than that he was trapped in an empty, lonely world. But he shut his mind to reason, for the hope that there was a Preston house was the only hope there was.
He checked the Sun and saw that it had climbed higher in the sky, and that meant that it was morning and not afternoon, and by that he knew which way was west.
He set off, striding down the hill, heading toward the one hope he had in all this strange new world.
XXX
WELL before dark, he picked a camping site, a grove through which ran a stream.
He took off his shirt and tied it to a stick to form a crude seine, then went down to a small pool in the creek and after some experimenting found how to use the seine to the best advantage. At the end of an hour, he had five good-sized fish.
He cleaned the fish with his pocket knife and lit the fire with a single match and congratulated himself upon his woodsmanship.
He cooked one of the fish and ate it. It was not an easy thing to eat, for he had no salt and the cooking was very far from expert—part of the fish was charred by flame and the rest was raw. But he was ravenous and it didn’t taste too bad until the edge was off his hunger. After that it was a hard job choking down the rest, but he forced himself to do it, for he knew that he faced hard days ahead and to get through them he must keep his belly filled.
By this time, darkness had fallen and he huddled beside the fire. He tried to think, but he was too tired for thinking. He caught himself dozing as he sat.
He slept, awoke to find the fire almost out and the night still black, built up the fire while cold sweat broke out on him. The fire was for protection as well as warmth and cooking and on the day’s march he had seen not only wolves, but bear as well, and once a large tawny shape moving too fast for him to make out what it was, except that it looked fiercely feline.
He woke again and dawn was in the sky! He built up the fire and cooked the rest of the fish, ate one and part of another, tucked the others, messy as they were, into his pocket. He would need food throughout the day, and he did not want to waste the time or matches to make a fire.
He hunted around the grove and found a stout, straight stick. It would serve him for a walking staff and might be of some use as a club if he were called upon to defend himself. He checked his pockets to see that he was leaving nothing behind. He had his pocket knife and the matches and they were the important things. He wrapped the matches carefully in his handkerchief, then put them in his undershirt. He needed those matches, for he doubted very seriously that he could make fire with flint or sticks.
He was off before the Sun was up, slogging northwestward, but going more slowly than the day before, for now he realized that it was not speed but stamina that counted. To wear himself out in these first few days of hiking would be suicidal.
HE lost some time making a wide detour in the afternoon around a fair-sized herd of buffalo. He camped that night in another grove, having stopped an hour or so earlier beside a stream to catch another supply of fish with his shirt-and-staff seine. In the grove he found a few bushes of dewberries, with some fruit still on them, so he had dessert as well as fish.
The Sun came up and he moved on again.
And another day came up and he went on. And another and another.
He caught fish. He picked berries. He found a deer that had been freshly killed, no doubt by some animal that his appearance had scared off. Hacking away with his pocket knife, he cut as many ragged hunks of venison as he could carry. Even without salt, the meat was a welcome change from fish. He even learned to eat a little of it raw, hacking off a mouthful and chewing it methodically as he walked along. He had to discard the last of the meat when it got so high that he couldn’t live with it.
He lost track of time. He had no idea of how many miles he had covered, nor how far he might be fro
m the place where he was heading, nor even if he could find it at all.
His shoes broke open and he stuffed them with dried grass and bound them together with strips cut off his trouser legs.
One day he knelt to drink at a pool and in the glass-clear water saw a strange face staring back, at him. With a shock he realized that it was his own face, that of a bearded man, ragged and dirty and with the lines of fatigue upon him.
The days came and went. He moved ahead, northwestward. He kept putting first one foot out and then the other. The Sun burned him at first and the burn turned to a tan. He crossed a wide, deep river on a log. It took a long time to get across and once the log almost spun and spilled him, but he made it.
He walked through an empty land, with no sign of habitation, although it was a land that was well suited for human occupation. The soil was rich and the grass grew tall and thick, and the trees, which sprang skyward from groves along the watercourses, were straight and towered high into the sky.
Then one day, just before sunset, he topped a rise and saw the land sweeping downward toward the distant ribbon of a river that he thought he recognized.
It was not the river which held his attention, but the flash of setting Sun on a large area of metal far away.
He put up his hand and shielded his eyes against the sunlight and tried to make out what it was, but it was too remote and it shone too brightly.
Climbing down the slope, not knowing whether to be glad or frightened, Vickers kept a close watch on the gleam of far-off metal. At times he lost sight of it when he dipped into the swales, but it was always there when he topped the rise again, so he knew that it was real.
Finally he was able to make out metallic buildings glinting in the Sun, and now he saw that strange shapes came and went in the air above them and that there was a stir of life around them.
But it was not a city or a town. For one thing, it was too metallic. And for another, there were no roads leading into it.
The Complete Serials Page 48