Destiny Times Three

by Fritz Leiber

  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 out clutched 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 overpowering!y 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

  and which will not—

  Macbeth

  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 or assistants, on 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, bad 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 bad 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 as 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 anteroom 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, cruder, 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 mil 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 narrowminded, 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 unweildly 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 Hunter 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.”