The experiments seemed pointless to me though I kept my opinion to myself. My randomly gathering drees couldn’t tell him what he wanted to know since he hadn’t examined them before they changed but he seemed to think he was gaining considerable information from the rabbits, squirrels, skunks, turtles and what not that I brought back. When I kept asking him if they showed any abnormal characteristics he ran me off the premises, banished me to the main building and had Pat and Mike escort me to and from classes. He really was off his shelf.
He relented when I agreed to let him hook me up to his mechanical contraption and monitor my brain waves. The thing reminded me of the execution chairs of olden times, was cold and metallic and smelled of battery acid. Gorwyn frowned and scowled as he performed the necessaries.
“I know exactly what I’m doing, just as I always do,” he said, strapping my arms and legs.
“You’re going to kill me,” I said. “I know you don’t like me.”
“Have you changed your mind? Say so and it’s back to the main building with you.”
“The straps are too tight. What’s that thing?”
“A crown of wires. It won’t hurt.”
“Is all this exactly legal?”
“Not exactly. Want to quit?”
“Yes.”
“Too late.”
There was no use my asking him later what he had learned from the experiment or if he had learned anything at all. I think he lied nearly all the time.
“It was interesting because that’s the second time I’ve used the crown but your brain activity is no different than that of a non-muter. I could have gotten the same results with a regular monitor.”
“It made my head buzz. Things knocked and slid around in there.”
It was about a week later that I took it upon myself to visit a police station in New Mexico. It seemed to be far enough away from my usual stomping grounds so that if I wasn’t graciously received it wouldn’t be easy for them to trace me.
Lieutenant Solvo was bored and sleepy and looked as if he thought I was a crackpot. It was difficult for me to believe that someone as immobile as he could be a crook. He was a burly, gum-chewing Indian with eyes so big and dark they were frightening. They were fathomless, told me nothing about the mind behind them. On second thought I didn’t think Solvo was slow at much of anything.
First he wanted to know my name and address, scowled when I stumbled over both, sat back in his chair and yawned while I told him about oil. Not a shadow flickered in his eyes, not a muscle in his face twitched which assured me I had wasted my time coming here. Either he was corrupt or didn’t believe a word I said.
“I suppose locating you later won’t be a problem,” he said, proceeding to shatter my illusions about anonymity. “Your story tells me you’re a muter, you’re an adolescent so if I need to talk to you I’ll contact Mutat. You’re either a resident there or they’ll have an idea where you can be reached. Have you seen any of this oil coming out of the pipe?”
“Don’t need to. I can add one and one.”
“Those huge structures in the other dimensions must have been seen by many travelers.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I’ve never found any boundaries in D. No matter how big an object you stick into infinity, it’s still a drop in the bucket, right? The few who wander too close in Waterworld are captured in nets and killed. Sloks take care of intruders in Gothland.”
“You know so much for one so young and so small. Maybe you’re thinking to fool an old fool, maybe you’re telling me a bunch of dreams, maybe everything you say is fact. When you placed your head against the pipe in Waterworld, how regular were the pulsations? How many times a minute would you estimate?”
The speed with which he shifted from low to high gear made me blink. “I don’t remember. They were slow. The slower, the more oil, right? And the bigger the earthquakes for the rest of us.
“I’d like the names of all the police officers your friend contacted.”
I gave him two or three names Croff had mentioned, where they worked and whatever else about them I could recall.
No sooner was I out the door of the building than someone silently fell into place behind me. Without missing more than a step or two I turned and retraced my route to Solvo’s office. “That’s all I need,” I said. “A tail. If everything I said to you is true, I can’t afford to attract any more attention than I already have. Those people I told you about are dangerous.”
He waved a hand, smiled a smile. Really, it was nothing. “A thought on my part to see that you returned to your home in safety. But since you object, consider him nonexistent.”
He was, but that was only because somebody else took up the chase which wasn’t a merry one since it took more cunning than I knew I had to lose her. I believed Solvo was trying to tell me something by insisting upon keeping tabs on me but I didn’t know whether to feel reassured about him or doubly worried.
Pat and Mike weren’t half as good as my new tail. I walked into the lobby of a skyscraper, took an el to the twentieth floor and horrified some onlookers by opening a window and diving out. Hopefully, whoever was following me would immediately be dissuaded. Landing in D-a, I loped up a smoking hill and barely tipped its crest as I gained the distinct impression that a goth had left the very same ring behind and was even now imitating my movements.
I didn’t believe it but I flashed on down my hill and crouched behind some rocks. Though I waited with more than normal patience nobody came. No goth broke the horizon, no employee of Solvo’s showed to enlighten me. Thinking she might be hiding, I crawled to the hilltop and looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Now I knew a little bit about what Croff must have felt when he had no one to go to. He had wanted to unload the responsibility of his knowledge and so did I. For all his efforts he was six feet under and I seemed to be following hot in his footsteps. What I had done was probably sic another enemy onto my trail.
I stood on the slope in Gothland and wondered if my eyes had played tricks on me. Had a girl really come after me through the ring and was she skulking in goth form in one of the myriad cracks and crevices below?
Eventually I grew angry. I tried to be subtle about it, carefully concealed myself before calling a green ring to me, went through in a hurry and grabbed the nearest cluster of weeds as a shield before whirling to watch the entrance into the dimension. I wasn’t certain but there seemed to be a slight blurring of color after which there came an impression of movement close to me and then some seven meters away a swimmer materialized.
She was about a meter and three-quarters long, fifty kilos in weight, tan of skin, black of hair with fine features and eyes like Solvo’s. When she didn’t find what she was looking for she stopped short and floated while I and the clump of seaweed drifted unnoticed past her. She swam some twenty meters in all four directions before coming back to her original position, all the while seeking, searching, looking for an adversary who had apparently disappeared. There was something about her stance and the way she peered through the water that made me think she was not only puzzled but excited and pleased as well. She was good at muting and maybe she didn’t often meet someone she couldn’t catch.
It didn’t take her long to show me just how good she was. After prowling around and not finding me, she called a blue ring to her that had been meandering just off to her left, and not only was I amazed to see someone besides myself have command over dimensional doorways but there was also the fact that she did it so rapidly. I had never made it a practice to send rings zooming through space but this spawn of Solvo bossed them as if they were made of smoke. She flitted out of Waterworld faster than I could blink, left me hanging onto the seaweed and wondering if perhaps now wasn’t the best time to make my getaway.
I hesitated just long enough for her to play out her waiting game. She popped back into the water close enough to my hiding place to make me flinch. I and the seaweed drifted with more enthusiasm, but she
must have thought her sudden appearance accounted for the movement so she didn’t investigate.
Spying a familiar blue ring, I called it to me, swam through into Gothland, leaped up an escarpment that was low enough for me but too high for a normal sized animal and crouched down with about a split second to spare. The Indian came through the misty doorway like a wraith, landed like an oiled spring and stopped dead still. I was confident she hadn’t actually seen me leave Waterworld but had probably only noticed the slight warping of the area as I traveled. Anyhow, she was a speedy demon and like no other muter I had ever met. She was also short of temper, paced the hot ground below, glared first in one direction and then another, growled low in her throat and generally made like someone who didn’t appreciate what was happening.
She was too sharp to fool around with and I had other business to attend to so I raced along the mountain ridge until I found a yellow ring that took me to Mutat.
Someone had blitzed my room, spattered ink on the walls, threw mud on my clothes, filled the tub and dumped in my shoes and books, put bugs in my bed, etcetera. Not wasting a moment’s time, I stomped down the hall and kicked in Tedwar’s door, found him in the bathroom and hauled him out into the living room where I proceeded to lack him around.
He got away from me and ran behind the couch. “You make me sick!” he screamed. His red hair was askew, his eyes were wild. While he yelled he grabbed up books from a shelf behind him and threw them at me. “You stinking hog! You have to have everything, don’t you?”
Like a rabbit I leaped up over the couch and clamped my legs around his neck. We both fell to the floor with him on the bottom and he hit his head hard. He began to sob but I didn’t pause, punched him, gouged him, elbowed him, kneed his ribs.
“I don’t care what you do!” he shrieked. “Stay away from himl He isn’t yours, he’s mine!”
What he said was a little bit interesting so I stopped pounding him, intending to continue with added zest in a second or two, right after I found out why he was so bilious.
He was far gone by then. His face purple and his eyes bulging, he drooled and cried his heart out and after a while I discovered why he hated me and had given my room the business.
“You ruined it!” he said, glaring up at me as if I had horns. “We were beginning to get along! You’re a filthy slob! I’ll kill you if you don’t stay away from him. He doesn’t need you for his experiments and you have no right! I can do them as good as you! He isn’t your father, he’s mine!”
I had a headache all the rest of the day. One thing I couldn’t stand was someone else’s emotional traumas. It was enough just handling my own. A couple of nurses had showed up and carried Tedwar, kicking and shouting, to the infirmary and I went to pack my gear. I was stunned over the whole thing. I’d had no idea he was Gorwyn’s son.
That evening I tossed my suitcase out a window and then muted down onto the campus. Pat and Mike were behind me but I didn’t care. When the time came to lose them I would do it. There was a note on Tedwar’s bureau telling him how sorry I was and that I hadn’t tried to steal his father’s affections.
I was almost at the end of the drive when I heard a scream and looked over toward the ring channel where something unusual was happening to one of the circles. Too far away to tell what it was, I walked closer and then dropped my suitcase and stared in horror. A large brown ring had left the channel and was dancing across the grass. Tedwar was inside it, helplessly tumbling within some kind of vortex.
Close enough to grasp him, I reached out to do so when the ring darted away. I called to it and was surprised when it kept on going. Tedwar’s screams grew shrill. I don’t think he saw or heard me or was aware of anything but the horror enveloping him. The ring was drawing him in and though he couldn’t see it he was going even deeper. In another moment he would be all the way into the brown dimension.
There was nothing I could do. Pat and Mike ran with me, oblivious of what was going on and probably thinking I was playing a strange trick. They couldn’t see brown rings. This one wouldn’t do as I commanded but left the ground to soar high in the sky, hovered directly above me just long enough for me to see it when Tedwar was suddenly sucked all the way in. At a sedate pace it left the area.
Gorwyn reportedly was so upset by the occurrence that he locked himself in his upper story apartment and refused to see anyone. Police swarmed over the grounds looking for clues. Suicide was illegal and they were after information to dispel the rumor that Tedwar had been trying to do away with himself when he fiddled with the equipment in his father’s lab.
They didn’t understand that equipment, neither did anyone and Gorwyn wasn’t about to come out of seclusion for more than a cursory interview, so they snooped and speculated and gave their private version to the press. The boy was playing a prank, had manipulated some highly sophisticated machinery that hadn’t a thing to do with his disappearance. There were searchers in both Gothland and Waterworld but of course they were in the fringe areas near entrances to the campus. They didn’t expect to find Tedwar. Like other runaways, he would come home when he was ready.
I heard his screams again when I went into the brown dimension. Getting there wasn’t easy and I didn’t love the idea, but no one else was doing anything. Tedwar hadn’t come home and who would go and bring him back? They said muters traveled at their own risk. How true and how helpful to Tedwar.
I couldn’t get Gorwyn to come out of his rooms, he wouldn’t talk on the phone, nobody seemed willing to pursue the matter and after the weekend had passed I finally accepted the inevitable and went to do what I could.
My good eye functioned as keenly as ever so that as I stood beside the ring channel on campus and hunted for the right color I saw one almost immediately, a madcap kind of sphere that behaved crazily. It was a muddy brown shade, two meters in diameter with a skinny corona and a core as black as the pit. There wasn’t a thing about it that looked good. It didn’t flow evenly like the other rings but bumped and dragged along, gave feeble little lurches, swerved or sometimes sagged and lost its roundness. It occurred to me that the dimension might be closing up shop and going out of business, shutting down, turning in on itself and automatically rejecting all travelers. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Supposing I mutated into a fat organism while the dimension turned out to be a pair of walls closing together? Supposing?
My entrance wasn’t a matter of simply barging on through, for the ring skipped away from me like a shadow, turned its opening in another direction, was obviously telling me to trek anywhere but into its bosom. Since I couldn’t see off-colors straight on anyhow, it was all right with me when the thing showed me the side of its rim. Behind me, Pat and Mike called in tones growing puzzled and anxious.
“What do you think you’re doing, brat?”
“She’s off her shelf. Always has been. Hey, you, quit moving around like you’re on eggs. What’s the matter with you?”
I turned my back to the brown rim, reached behind me, touched it, felt an awesome coldness. Possibly I was about to become a penguin. “You guys are okay but you’re blind,” I said. “Don’t you see this ring? It’s exactly like the one Tedwar took a ride in.”
“Come away from the channel,” said Pat. “Your brains are baked. Believe me, no matter which ring you take we’ll be on your tail. You can’t get away from us when we’re this close.”
Feeling, touching, investigating, I moved closer to the throbbing rim which was relatively placid now, scarcely bobbing, and the thought came to me that it wasn’t worried because it believed I had gone away. Never before had I ascribed any intelligence or awareness to rings but I gave the idea serious consideration as I prepared to slip around the side. Always from the comer of my eye I kept a bit of it in sight. It grew colder and I grinned more widely at the twins.
“Now you see me, now you—” I said and traveled quickly, not to shock them with my sudden disappearance but to penetrate the ring’s interior before it could skip out on me.
In I went with a gasp followed by a groan because though the world around me changed a great deal I remained the same thin skinned human who liked warm weather.
The planet was dying. It had been around for a long time and its substance had decayed. Its shape changed, its mass shrank in some places while bloating in others, it lost command over itself so that it bulged out of position in space. Eventually the more solid parts began to collapse so that over the eons it became two jutting escarpments approximately three hundred meters apart. In between was simply and utterly nothing. The dimension had split and would soon go hurtling into vacuum.
The last faint glow of heat or energy was too deep inside the separated escarpments to keep the air warm and the loss of power might also account for the fact that I didn’t mutate into another life form. The world was too old and worn out to do its job. In a flash I appeared on top of an endless finger of brittle rock with brown air all around me and a cold breeze whipping through my hair. Sinking to my knees, I hugged my chest and stared around. All about me was sadness. I could feel it everywhere like a heavy hand. The ring hadn’t wanted me, couldn’t fully accommodate me but here I was and my coming had almost drained whatever energy was being generated in its heart.
I thought all those things as I knelt on what little there was left of the planet. Its reserves were so dangerously low that it might not be able to sustain both me and the boy caught between the escarpments. While I had sneaked in just far enough to land on one of the two rocks, Tedwar had been caught in the vortex and must have hurtled through so that his momentum carried him into the empty space between. Now another force had him in its grasp and wouldn’t let go of him until the world was totally without power.
The planet used its flagging strength to hold him in place and prevent his falling away. There he was, suspended, while beneath him and all around him spun a dark maelstrom that might have been the very soul of the dimension. He screamed and kept on screaming because he knew who and where he was.
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