It wasn’t what the experts called a severe quake, but of course that depended upon one’s point of view. People who watched bridges collapse thought it was the worst disaster they had ever been a party to, which was the same sentiment expressed by those whose homes were destroyed. The government people said it wasn’t anything to get alarmed over, that what with the second and third dimensions moving around outside of ours and possibly even through us, we had to anticipate a little ground settling, or something. I knew better and so did Kisko. He might have been deep in psychic trauma but his soul wasn’t so paralyzed it couldn’t respond when a sleeping leviathan stirred.
I had been hoping spring would have a healing effect upon him. It turned out to be one of those long and gorgeous seasons with trees and bushes budding and blooming until the world looked like a garden.
Olger carried out the last bucket of ashes and started cleaning walls while Kisko and I took leisurely walks. I kept waiting for him to wake up and begin living again.
“Worst case of walking withdrawal I’ve ever seen,” said the doctor in town. “Usually when they’re this bad, they just He down and begin dying so earnestly we have to stick them in a life support unit. Of course when they do that these days, they do die since we haven’t the power to run the machines.”
“Tell me something cheerful,” I said.
“He’s in top condition, if you discount the fact that his brain isn’t working right. X-rays show that all his broken bones are healed, except for his right shoulder which will always be a trifle weak. You haven’t told me how he got all those breaks. Did he have a run-in with a com chopper or something?”
“What can be done for him?”
“Nothing. There isn’t anything wrong with him. He has to focus his attention outside his private fog, is all. I’d say the likelihood of that happening within the next fifty years is zero. My advice is for you to take him up to the home on the hill over there and leave him. It isn’t a bad place.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m only being friendly. I don’t know what happened to him. Pain is the most subjective thing in the world, more so than taste or opinion. Some other person might have taken his punishment and walked away from it whole while somebody else would have lost his marbles halfway through the ordeal. The human mind can’t be messed around with. I have a machine in my lab that can knock you off your shelf just by shining a little light in your eyes. Take your daddy to that home on the hill and say good-bye to him.”
It had been a while since I visited D so after returning Kisko to the farm, I went to Waterworld for a good soaking. Floating and drifting in green water helped me to think. There were many things I thought I should do, but it seemed like too much of an effort to even consider them. There was the metal girder that needed investigating, also the net that made prisoners of swimmers, besides which Croff had to be hunted down and questioned. So many situations pending, seemingly innumerable solutions to problems skulking just beyond reach or vision, and what was required was action.
Making myself do it, I left the third dimension and went to the second, popped noisily into what I thought was going to be the engine house in the pit in Gothland. Good fortune remained with me but it wasn’t good enough to spare me a hefty fright or a wild ride.
The engine house had been a temporary thing with the sloks and it had either been converted into a comer station for the pipes or disassembled altogether and replaced with a junction.
I no sooner materialized as a goth than I found myself in the midst of a black maelstrom. I was immediately disoriented because Gothland wasn’t the place for such a thing. Regardless, I was hurled from wall to wall by some kind of thick fluid that gushed from the first pipe into the second so rapidly I had no time to think about getting my footing. That I was in for a hectic ride was obvious so I relaxed as much as possible and let myself go careening down the pipe. Sometimes I was scraped along the ceiling or side but always I was thrust forward by the fluid. It wasn’t water, mud or tar. It tasted like a combination of acid and clay.
An advantage of being a goth was that I could see in and through almost any land of substance. Somewhere ahead of me the environment was bound to alter and, since I couldn’t anticipate whether or not it would be pleasant or even tolerable, it would be better if I got out now.
I had only one chance and took it without hesitating. I didn’t know where the gushing acid was headed, didn’t want to know at that moment, and so when I saw what looked like a yellow light off to my right, I twisted as strongly as I could and dived for it. A second later I pitched onto the top of a high mound of sand on Earth, rolled down the side of it and landed on the rough ground of a quarry.
Irtimediately I regretted having left the bore. Possibly nothing drastic would have happened to me had I remained in it and I also might have discovered what the acid solution was for. Now I couldn’t find my way back into the metal pipe because the ring that had handled my passage had ducked away and was gone by the time I landed at the bottom of the sand pile. I hadn’t seen what color it was.
The next day I made a phone call and placed an ad in the Big City Bugle: CROFF, MEET ME TUESDAY NOON IN PEORIA. After that, each Tuesday I ring-traveled into the cornfield to see if my old hermit acquaintance was there. Usually I lingered for thirty minutes or so and then left.
Having heard there were some ring experts in Boston, I paid a visit to one of their institutions of higher learning and was told in haughty tones by a young secretary that Doctor Ectri didn’t grant many interviews, particularly to juveniles. I thanked him and left in a hurry. It seemed Washington wasn’t the only place Ectri liked.
Brooding in Waterworld one day, wishing I were a singlecelled creature without the brains to worry about more than where my next meal was coming from, swimming and drifting along with currents created by minor maelstroms, I came across a large clump of seaweed serving as a graveyard for the bodies of two women and two men. They were securely bound and probably never would have drifted loose.
One by one I untied them and shoved them through a yellow ring onto a street in Nebraska where they were resurrected whole, horrified and full of bad memories.
My advice to them was to go home and forget what had happened. It seemed they had been swimming and minding their own business when a net came up from nowhere, grabbed them and carried them to a platform on a metal girder where an extremely large female water breather shot them with a spear gun.
One of the women borrowed bus fare from me and took off for distant parts while the others headed toward a police station down the block. As for myself, I made like the woman and traveled a distance.
“The trouble with you is that you aren’t happy as an orphan,” said Gorwyn. “Subconsciously you’re searching for a family.”
It was several days later and I was smelling the faint musty odor coming from the school’s headmaster. I was here because I had gone into a department store to buy some candy and an eager truant officer had put the tag on me. It was either Mutat or the police so I gave him the school’s address.
“Which I haven’t the faintest hope of finding here,” I said to Gorwyn. “How are the third-floor bouncers these days? Still beating up on the inhabitants?”
“As if they ever did.”
“You could do a lot better around here without me.”
“No doubt, but there’s such a thing as law and it protects creatures such as yourself. Welcome back.”
“I don’t see Pat and Mike around.”
“They seem to have flown the coop, probably to a higher paying job. I regret their absence since they’re fairly good runners ”
“As long as I’m back, I guess I’ll take some courses in rings.” Though I kept a close watch on the newspapers, I found nothing regarding the woman and two men who had gone to report their kidnaping and murder to the police.
A week went by and I was walking through the pasture at the farm with Kisko, both my hands tightly clasped on one of his so he wouldn
’t run away. He was always calmer when someone took the time to touch him and talk to him.
“It’s time for the big experiment,” I said. I stood in front of him while he sat on a tree stump and stared at the sky. Once in a while he blinked. “You can’t go on like this,” I said. “The doctor tells me it isn’t good for your brain.”
Rings drifted through the air and I called a bright blue one to me. Its corona reminded me of a marble, dark and solid in some places and striated in others. “You know what peripheral vision is,” I said to the man seated in front of me. He didn’t know much of anything those days but I talked to him because I was nervous. There was a possibility that he would be dead in a few minutes.
“Sometimes we see a lot of things that are beyond our direct line of sight, such as from the sides of our eyes,” I said. “Like shadows, they don’t always appear to be substantial, but if they’re there, they’re real and if we see even a little piece of them then they mean something to us.”
The wind stirred our hair, chilled me through, made me worry about his catching cold. Would he be better off dead than as he was? “The only reason we’re out here is because you blink so much,” I said. He was looking at the sky as if it was something he had never seen before. “It’s no disgrace on your part to have been beaten up and tortured by a maniac,” I said. “She’ll get her reward, don’t worry. Just because she showed you what hell looks like is no reason for you to curl up and resign from the human race. Anyway, you keep blinking, and for a long time I’ve noticed you only do it when there’s a ring close by. Like right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The doctor said he had to get outside himself. I couldn’t think of a more positive way for me to try and make that happen. My idea was to have him stand directly in front of me, his back to me, with my arms tight around his waist.
The ring grounded ahead of us and then moved slowly to our left where Kisko could get his best glimpse of it, if indeed he could see it at all. If he didn’t see any part of it, I’d step into Gothland alone as soon as I took a step to the left. What would happen to him or both of us if he saw only a part of the ring as we went through was a mystery. I didn’t want to worry about it. Whatever, in my opinion he wouldn’t want to or couldn’t resist its lure.
He tried to break away from me, refused to step to the left. I forced the ring to stay parallel with us as he dragged me along.
Gripping him tighter, I yelled at him to stand still while I made the ring swoop at us. He cried out and started to stampede just as the inner blue donut enveloped us.
Of course he had always been able to see at least a shadow of the rings; of course he didn’t know how to say no and of course he was transmutated into a goth, just as I was. The difference between him and other people was that he had a brain or a mind that could be called unique. When he landed in D-2 he wasn’t an ordinary goth. What he was I didn’t find out that day. All I heard was a shriek of terror and then somewhere ahead of me a huge dark shadow disappeared around a hill of rocks.
8
“It’s all economic and always has been,” said Croff. He glanced uneasily over his shoulder at the cornfield, at the sky, back at me, continually on his toes and ready to bolt. “The only reason I responded to your ad was because I owe you something, but I can’t help you track down your friend. I don’t know that much about the mutating process. The rings themselves were my specialty and I can tell you I wasn’t overly knowledgeable.”
“Tell me about that receiver we took out of you.”
“We were all on the staff at Burgoyne. There was Trundle, myself, Appy, Orfia and the others. Something was placed in our drinks at a faculty party on campus one night and we woke up in a hotel suite with those mechanical devices in our arms. There was a crew of musclemen who brainwashed us with drugs and tape recordings of gibberish. We weren’t supposed to do ring research anymore. They suggested that we change our field of work and concentrate on something else. They wanted us out of the way but they didn’t kill us because each of us had attracted considerable attention with our work. It took me six months to decide to go to the police. The same for the others. We were picked up again and given shock treatments and some more hard conditioning. They removed our complaints from the police files so there was no evidence that we had ever told anyone what happened. I don’t know what became of the others. I only realized what was expected of me. Every time I came back from D that gang picked me up. I simply decided not to come back anymore.”
“Who are they?”
“That’s just it. I haven’t the faintest idea. No hullabaloo was raised because I quit my job and kicked over the traces. Now the whole thing has been forgotten. Nobody cares. I know I’m still not free. There’s a guard stationed outside my home in Atlanta and one outside my office at Burgoyne. I can’t go back to anything or anyone.”
“What do you plan to do with the rest of your life besides look over your shoulder?”
“Be smug and critical if you like. I’ve developed a thick skin. I figure I might as well be a dreg or a hermit if I’m not permitted to do the work for which I was trained.”
“Get the law to help you.”
After looking around again to make sure we were still safe and unobserved, he said, “I did that exactly twelve times. The gang must have some kind of computer tie-in with everything because each time I went to the police I was picked up, taken somewhere and either beaten or forced to listen to their stupid tapes, or both.”
I hid in a culvert after we parted, watched while Croff disappeared among the com stalks, followed him to a ring channel half a mile across dry pastures. Trailing him from there to his shabby dwelling place in Queens was easy.
Back at Mutat I sat in a thirtieth floor lounge and gazed out the window. It was a gray day that matched the shade of my spirit. Somewhere in D a mad goth roamed and prowled and I was responsible for his being there. Or at least I assumed he was a goth. As if that weren’t a serious enough problem to occupy my mind, there was also something wrong with the world. During the past five days there had been at least four earthquakes somewhere, no minor tremors but disturbances severe enough to destroy property and lives.
Rings were like the plates that made up the upper crust of Earth’s surface. Just as the latter floated and created a viable layer upon which living things grew and moved, so the rings drifted and formed the perimeters or surfaces of other dimensions or worlds.
Gorwyn told me that. He helped me to see the rings, seemingly bobbing haphazardly through air and ground, as organized and orderly crusts of Dimensions One, Two and Three. They needn’t spin or float in an observable orbit to maintain a dimension’s outer substance, though they might have been moving in such a manner for all anyone could tell. No one really knew the shape of any dimension, not even that of D-i. For instance, Earth seemed reasonably round but instruments measured and accounted for only certain types of matter and were incapable of tracing the drift of substance moving toward or through rings. In order to do that, special instruments would have to be devised that penetrated Two or Three and then came back through yellow rings because those rings were the corona or perimeter of One. More and more, fact seemed to depend upon perspective.
So much for the outsides of the colored donuts, what about their cores? According to Gorwyn, the rings were adaptors, no more and no less. A living organism or a substance stepped from an environment into plastic surgery or a dressing room, was made over or made up so that he, she or it could exist or function in the next environment. The phenomenon wasn’t something that had simply begun without precedent one day. As a matter of fact, nobody really altered or influenced the universe. One only discovered it.
Gorwyn’s laboratory held a fascination for me, more particularly the animals in their cages. “Never just shove something into a ring,” he said to me one day. “It’s liable to back out and eat your head off.”
“You mean it might get mad at you?” I said.
“Not precisely. Rin
g travel sometimes opens doors in the mind that might better have remained closed. I once had a guinea pig that came back from D-2 as wild and ferocious as a wolf.”
“Did you go in and out with it?”
“Now you’re asking if I can travel through rings. You already know the answer. I can’t see them, therefore I can’t penetrate them. No, I devised a type of leash that stayed on it after it went into D and all I had to do was apply pressure to retrieve it. The thing was so hostile I got rid of it, gave it to a former colleague who was interested in that phase of the business.”
“About the mind—” I began.
“You needn’t ask because I don’t know that much about it. The mechanical monitors tell me exactly where the rings are so I can work with animals that see them, but you can appreciate my limitations. What I’ve learned has taken me a long time. As for your question, some people take tranquilly to the rings while others fall completely off their shelves, have drastic changes in personality, develop all sorts of manias or neuroses, etcetera. Usually those last types go into D once or twice and then spend the rest of their lives in therapy.”
“Suppose there was a crazy person who went in and got lost?” Gorwyn shrugged. “Sheer speculation even discussing such a thing. It would depend upon how crazy he was, the amount of brain stimulation at the time of entry, his body metabolism, adrenalin level, but mostly it would depend upon what he was thinking and who he believed he was when he went in. Why? Do you know someone who’s wandering about lost in D?”
“I was just wondering.”
“I see. Watch out for the monkeys, please. If you play with the hasp on the cage door you might loosen it and then they’ll get out.”
After dinner that evening I sat in my favorite lounge and thought about Kisko and Erma. For some reason the two seemed to go together in my mind those days. Why hadn’t she made a more concerted effort to kill me? In my mind’s eye I saw myself once again chained in the dank cellar, sick and shivering while I imagined how she was killing Kisko and Deron. Wheaty hadn’t believed there was an accomplice with me in D who did all the dirty work while I took the credit and the pay envelopes. He didn’t know exactly how I operated but never in our acquaintance had there ever been a mention of a secret associate of mine.
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