The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  The cave floor sloped gradually upward. The breeze freshened and it began to carry faint odors, the brown smell of earth, the green smell of vegetation. These brought me both an easing of tension and a pulse-throb of apprehension. What was waiting for us out there, where a paling of the dark promised the end of this interminable groping?

  There was a rustle of foliage. Almost abruptly, I was in the open.

  I stopped just in time. A foot ahead of me was the sharp edge of a ledge. “Hold it,” I whispered. I don’t quite know why I did whisper. It wasn’t because I was afraid of being overheard. I think it was awe, inspired by a sense of immense height, of isolation under the vast, gold-dusted dome of velvet sky that confronted me.

  A little below my level moving air soughed through a boundless black mass, the swaying roof, it dawned on me, of a forest.

  Helen’s shoulder pressed against mine. I heard George gasp. “Oooh,” Kay breathed. “Ooooh,” and then, “It’s night. Gee, how did it get to be night so fast?”

  So fast was right. It could not be more than an hour, if it was that, since in his sun-flooded kitchen John Barret had said, “It’s only three-thirty. Three-thirty War Time, what’s more, not sun time.”

  No one had answered Kay, but that didn’t bother her. “Look at the stars, Mom,” she prattled on. “They’re so bright and near you can pick them right out of the sky.” Her small hand reached out, as if to pluck one.

  “They’re all wrong,” George was puzzled—something more than puzzled. “I can’t spot a single constellation I know. If I had to navigate by these stars, I’d be lost.”

  “We are lost, George.” Helen clutched Kay to her. “We’re lost in Time and Space.” She buried her face in the little girl’s hair and I saw her shoulders tremble.

  As unbelievable as what she’d said was that Helen Clark should have gone to pieces. I gaped in dismay and George Carson took an involuntary step toward her.

  She straightened up before he could reach her. “Isn’t it thrilling, Kay?” she cried, with just the right note of enthusiasm. “Just think what you can write the next time your English teacher asks for a composition about an interesting true experience!”

  The child looked up. For an instant, from her expression, I was sure she’d not been deceived but abruptly she laughed, exclaimed, “Oh, Mother. You ought to see how funny you look with just the top of your sweater left around your neck.”

  “Goodness!” Helen snatched at the hems of her suit coat, pulled it together over a sheen of silk colorless in the starlight. “Am I glad I felt reckless this morning and put on my best slip.”

  All this eased the tension. At my suggestion we moved back just within the cave. George put Barret down, pillowed the white-maned head on his own rolled-up smoking jacket. Kay broke off the sweater thread, carried it to one side to tie it to a little knob of rock she spied. We found ourselves discussing our next step as matter-of-factly as if we’d missed a train or had run out of gas on the road.

  He wanted us to remain here while he went exploring. I overruled him. “You’ve got to stay here with Helen and Kay. I’m the one to do any poking around that’s necessary.”

  “Nonsense,” he snorted and Helen added her protest. “You can’t either of you accomplish anything in the night. The sensible thing is for us all to stay together till sunrise. Maybe Mr. Barret will wake up before that and then our troubles will all be over.”

  “How is he?” I asked.

  George bent to him. “Pulse seems pretty feeble,” he reported, “But it’s even enough and his breathing is steady. No sign, though, that he’s coming out of it.”

  “Well…”

  “I’m thirsty,” Kay complained. “And I’m getting hungry too.”

  “You’re thirsty and hungry are you?”

  I rumpled her hair. “Okay, grandchild Kay. Let’s you and I run around the corner to the drug store and I’ll buy you a tongue sandwich and a chocolate malted milk. Or do you like vanilla better?”

  She giggled, subsided. “Now, George. Getting back to—”

  “Hush,” Helen interrupted. “Listen!”

  She’d turned to the opening, was staring out, tousled head a little to one side, lips parted. I could make out only the susurrus of the treetops, nothing else. Not even the nocturnal shrill of cicadas or the peep of a bird disturbed in sleep. “I thought I—There! There it is again!”

  “I still don’t hear anything.”

  “I do,” Kay piped. “People singing,” and some shift of the breeze brought it to me too. Faintly. The merest shadow of melody that brushed some vaguely familiar chord.

  A long stride took George to the ledge. The music faded—welled up again. Briefly the words were distinct;

  “…no more, my lady. Oh, weep no more today…”

  and died again beneath the vast, dark rustle of foliage.

  There was no longer anything to dread in the luminous night. Where “My Old Kentucky Home” was being sung under the stars, no matter how strange the stars might be, there could be nothing to fear.

  I started to say something to that effect, was checked by the touch of Helen’s fingers on my sleeve. She motioned to George. Within the cave-mouth’s jagged black frame he was silhouetted, stalwart and unmoving against those alien stars, in the grip of some strong emotion.

  As we watched him, some vagrant trick of the wind once more brought us the singing, this time even more dearly than before, so clearly that we thought it was children’s voices we heard in the rollicking, roguishly gay song to which they’d shifted:

  …think the world is made for fun and frolic,

  And so do I.

  And so do I.

  Some think it well to be all melancholic

  To pine and sigh.

  But I, I spend my time in singing—”

  George groaned. Even in the pallid starlight I could discern the torment in his face. “Pete and I used to—Did you hear that?” he broke off. “Pop! Did you hear—? ‘Some happy song.’” He was visibly trembling. “They did just sang that, didn’t they? I didn’t imagine it? ‘Happy song.’”

  “Why yes,” I replied, wondering. “Seems to me that’s wrong, but—”

  “Of course it’s wrong! It should be joyous, but Pete’s always sung it happy, and—”

  “You think it may be your Peter who taught it that way to the others.” Helen’s hand was on his arm, impulsively. “It must be Peter. Oh, George! He’s down there and since he’s singing he’s well and happy.”

  “Maybe. I hope you’re right, but I don’t dare let myself—I’m climbing down there. Right now!”

  “Can I go with him, mom?” Kay tugged at her mother’s skirt. “Can I?”

  “We’re all going, honey. Come on.”

  “Hey.” George had already started off. “I can’t carry the old man.”

  “Leave him,” he flung over his shoulder.

  “Suppose he wakes up and escapes? We’ll have no way of finding out how to get back to civilization.”

  “What do you think this is? We don’t have to rely on him any longer—Okay. Stay here if you want to.”

  There, was nothing for me to do but follow. The ledge was only about three feet wide, but it was so smooth and sloped downward so gradually that there was no sense of peril.

  Above us rose the escarpment to whose face it clung, topless, vertical rock starkly naked of vegetation and unsubstantial seeming in the stellar glimmer. What was it? The Palisades? That high cliff along the Hudson would be dwarfed into insignificance by this Himalayan height.

  Even in the Himalayas, most gigantic of Earth’s ranges, this precipice would be colossal.

  CHAPTER VIII

  “You’ve’ decided to stop at last, have you? So even the iron man gets tired.”

  George gave no sign he’d heard me. He just stood there, shoulders hunched, blunt jaw out-thrust, peering through the leaf-flecked shadows. I shrugged, leaned my back against a tree trunk, too tired for either resentment or curi
osity.

  Helen must be as weary as I, but she was a woman.

  “What is it, George? What do you see?”

  The slow downward slant of the ledge had taken us some three miles or more from the point below the cave where the singing had seemed to come. We’d had all that distance to retrace, guiding ourselves by occasional glimpses of the towering precipice.

  In contrast with that gigantic height, the trees had appeared tiny, actually the smallest I’d noticed before weariness had caused me to lose interest was six feet through, and they soared breathlessly upward for a hundred feet before their boughs sprang outward to form the shimmering canopy of the woods.

  They grew far apart and the spaces between them were extraordinarily free of brush for so obviously ancient a forest. We’d seemed to plod endlessly through the aisles of some De Quinceyan dream-cathedral, vast and awesome and unreal.

  “I see it, Mumsy. I see what he’s looking at.” Kay pulled her, hand from her mother’s, pointed to where a reddish glow wavered briefly on the bark of some arboreal giant. “It’s a fire. A camp fire, I betcha.”

  George stirred, said, low-toned. “You people wait here while I look that over.”

  “Be careful, Geo—” He strode away, leaving Helen in mid-sentence, looking after him with an odd, almost tender expression on her face. After a minute she turned to me. “He loves his son very much, doesn’t he?” The huskiness in her voice was more noticeable than I’d ever heard it except when once or twice she’d talked to me of her dreams for Kay. “Too much to have room for any—anything else in his mind.”

  “Any one else,” I suggested, dryly, “Is what you meant to say. It seems so. Well,” I yawned, “I’m going to try and get some rest. I’d advise you and Kay to do the same.” I let myself awkwardly down to the ground, stretched out, “What time is it, anyway?”

  She held her wrist-watch up, turned her hand to catch one of the pallid beams filtering through the whispering foliage overhead. “It’s—Oh, dear! It’s stopped. I’m sure I wound—” She shook the watch, put it to her ear, looked at it again. Her breath caught. “Kay. I wish you would lie down, sweetheart.” Her voice was strangely flat. “See that pile of dried leaves over there. It looks so comfy and soft. Go lie down there.”

  “You come with me.”

  “I shall in a little while. I just want to talk to grandpa Harry about something. Go on now.”

  The little girl obeyed, though with evident reluctance. Helen settled down beside me.

  “You have a watch,” she murmured, “Even if you are too tired to get it out. Please look at it.”

  “What—? Oh, all right.” I dug out my Waltham from the fob pocket my paunch made too tight for comfort.

  “What do you know about that? It’s stopped too.”

  “What time does it say it is?”

  “A quarter to four.”

  “Mine says thirteen of. It hasn’t stopped. Neither has yours.”

  I shoved up to a sitting posture.

  “That’s impossible! It was three-thirty when—Hell!” I burst into a laugh. “You had me dizzy for a second.—It’s a quarter-to-four in the morning, of course.”

  “You know better than that.” The moon must have risen because in the flecks of light dancing across the pale oval of her face I could clearly see how drawn it was. “You know as well as I do twelve hours haven’t passed since we were in the Barrett’s kitchen.”

  “Oh, now—”

  “It was twilight when Kay first found herself in that cave, when we arrived there not more than ten minutes later it was full night. The sun doesn’t set in April till well after seven.” The delicate wings of her nose quivered. “We might as well face it. We’re living at a different rate of time than our watches are adjusted to measure.”

  I stared blankly. “A different rate of time—Sorry, Helen. I was never good at puzzles. Just what do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure myself.” She spread her hands. “All I know is we’ve done things that should have taken us three hours or more while our watches were marking off only about fifteen minutes, and that sounds like something I once read in a book by a man named Dunn. An Experiment with Time it was called. I didn’t understand it very well, but I do remember that he showed how time must run differently in different regions of Space.”

  “Poppycock,” I snorted. “Balderdash.”

  “I thought it was too, till I talked about it with Wes—with a young man I know who teaches graduate courses in Science, at N.Y.U. He told me that while Dunn’s book is popularized, it’s basically sound. Wes tried to explain to me how according to the latest theories Time and Space are all mixed up—‘interrelated functions of one another’ is the phrase he used. ’Unless modern mathematical physics is all wrong,’ he told me, ‘if you were suddenly to be translated to some other part of Space, your watch would keep on measuring time as it is here but you would be living at an entirely different rate.’

  “I must have looked awfully dumb, because he quit, told me not to worry my head about it, it was just something mathematicians liked to play around with and had no practical application. I—”

  “Hold it, Helen!” My skin was prickling. “Let me think.” I was back in the living room of that charming small house in Westchester County. I was looking at a book I’d picked at random from a shelf and an old man’s gentle murmur was in my ears. “All I’ve done is to find a practical application of his discovery of the essential identity of Space and Time…”

  “No, damn it,” I said aloud. “I don’t believe it,” and abruptly chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just thought of the old story, Helen, about the hillbilly making his first visit to the Zoo. You must have heard it a thousand times. How, he stood in front of the giraffes cage and drawled, ‘Shucks. I don’t believe it. That ain’t no sich animule.’ Maybe I’m like that hillbilly, but—”

  I didn’t finish. George Carson was coming into sight, past a gigantic bole. He was grinning from ear to ear and beside him trotted a sturdy little boy in shorts and sneakers.

  Peter. Peter Carson.

  CHAPTER IX

  He was a small-sized replica of George, the same chunky build, the same smiling gray eyes. Those eyes adored his father as by the unsteady illumination of the campfire and two flickering candles he and a curly-haired small girl he’d introduced as Margy brought to the rough wooden table the food for which we’d discovered a ravenous appetite.

  Queer food for me to be enjoying. I like onions and French fries with my steaks, the rest of your vegetables are spinach as far as I’m concerned. This stuff, however, tasted blamed good, even cold. Some sort of cooked grain in a bowl, a slab of something more solid that I could not identify, some peculiarly shaped fruit. “Now if I only had some coffee to wash all this down,” I remarked. “I’d feel like Lucullus.”

  “Try this, sir.”

  Peter put in front of me a mug rather skillfully carved out of wood. I sniffed the limpid liquid it contained, sipped. It had a tangy, pleasant taste, altogether new to me.

  “What is this?”

  “Panjusade, we call it. It comes from a tree out there.”

  The lad gestured vaguely across the clearing.

  It was an open space about two acres in extent, near one end of which the bark-covered stakes that formed the long table’s legs had been driven into the ground. Along the side of the field to my right a narrow brook purled and beside this two large, rectangular tents cast black shadows in the moonlight. A baseball diamond was marked out on the grassy expanse we faced and beyond this I could just make out the uprights of a basketball standard.

  Beside me, on the end of the backless bench where we sat in a row, sprawled a limp-limbed and much mauled doll.

  “I hope you have some milk for Kay, Peter,” Helen was asking anxiously.

  He looked troubled.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clark, I—We—That is—”

  “Oh, it really doesn’t matter i
f she misses it for once. She can make up for it in the morning.”

  “There won’t be any in the morning either,” the boy said. “We don’t have any cows. Aunt Mary wanted to bring some but Uncle John said no. He thinks that’s one of the good things about Tranquillia, that there are no animals here.”

  “No animals at all?”

  “Nor birds either,” he nodded as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “There’s just the trees and plants in the valley where the woods end and—and that’s all.”

  “The plants and the trees give us all our food,” Margy put in. She was a tiny tyke, snip-nosed, most apparently full of life and the devil but she’d waited on us with the grave courtesy of an adult. “And we’re finding out how to make clothes out of them, and everything else we need.”

  “I see.” I knew by Helen’s expression that she did not see at all, asked the question that was troubling her—and me. “What did this Uncle John of yours mean when he said it’s a good thing there are no animals here?”

  Peter hesitated an instant before answering. “He explained if there were animals we’d start killing them for food and maybe to protect ourselves from wild ones, and that would kind of teach us killing living things is sometimes all right, and after a while someone would get the idea, maybe, that it’s sometimes right to kill people too, like in wars and such.”

  George grunted. He stared at his son, his expression at once startled, puzzled and speculative. “This ‘Uncle John’ is John Barret, Pete?”

  “Of course. He and Aunt Mary are the only grownups ever came here till you did.”

  “And Tranquillia, as you call this place, is a children’s camp?”

  The lad shifted from foot to foot, looked uncomfortable. “I guess you might say it is, Lieutenant Carson,” Margy answered for him. “There’s only us kids live here.”

  “I’m asking Pete.” George kept his level, almost stern gaze on the boy. “All right, son. You’ve stalled long enough. We’re fed and rested, now I want the whole story.”

  A muscle knotted in Peter’s freckled cheek. His mouth opened, closed again.

  His eyes were unhappy. “Excuse me,” Margy came to his rescue. “Kay looks awful tired. Maybe you’d like me to take her in the girls’ tent, Mrs. Clark, and show her where she’s to sleep.”