Then there was the world of cool, flowing lava. I could tell it wasn’t mud just as I knew it wasn’t hot. Now and then a mass of it slid up the bank where I rested, hardened momentarily until more of the stuff washed over it and took it away. Curious, I reached down to touch a small flake that remained, cringed as my hand broke an invisible barrier and entered the atmosphere of the strange molten rock that flowed like a mud slide. A burning sensation made me snatch my hand back and I saw it was a bright red and beginning to blister.
Back through the ring I stumbled, bellowing at the top of my lungs. I continued to be noisy until someone brought a variety of things to pour over my throbbing appendage. For a while it was a hit and miss process until Deron tried vinegar which turned out to be the magical solution that stopped the burning and blistering.
“No more dumb experiments when you’re in there 1” said Erma.
“What land of world has an atmosphere made of lye?” I said. “Who cares?” she roared. “It could have been pure acid or marshmallow.”
“But the whole place was like gray mud slipping and sliding all the time. There wasn’t anything solid anywhere.”
“Did you see any people?”
“No.”
“Then we don’t care what you saw. Shut up and do your job and no more poking your hands into those planets.”
I knew they were concerned about my being injured only because then I wouldn’t be able to continue working for them. “You could get any muter to do what I’m doing,” I said. “Why does it have to be me?”
“Don’t tell me lies,” said Deron. “Nobody I’ve ever heard of can match you in D. We know you mute into a giant goth and a small swimmer, and you can see more rings than anyone. I remember once you told me you could see others besides blue and green and I didn’t believe you. I know better now.”
“But I can’t see double greens. At least not consciously.”
“The rings don’t seem to care, do they? None of us can get through them but you can so you’re the pigeon.”
“How did you know I could do it?”
“I didn’t know it but I was told you might be able to. Waiting around for you to regain your memory is taking too long.”
“Who told you?” I was wasting my breath. He didn’t answer. Once in a while they let me rest and I began to notice a pattern. Every day about two hours before sundown we quit and I was put back in the leg iron. Each morning, an hour or two before noon, we stopped for about thirty minutes. They wouldn’t let me go into D then and they never let me out of their sight. In fact, during that half-hour morning break, Erma or someone else practically sat on me.
“I think you made a mistake,” I said to her one morning during the break. “You assume I can find one particular planet out of a few trillion. What makes you so optimistic? Or should I have said greedy?”
“Quiet.”
I didn’t like talking to her. She belonged in a rubber room, not free and untrammeled to roam the countryside. “Who are the people I’m looking for?” I said.
“Don’t waste your breath trying to pump me. I don’t know who they are and I care less. I just follow orders.”
One day they got into an argument about what the monitors were registering. Deron said the readings meant a green double ring and Erma said they meant blue. Meanwhile I stood by, growing pensive. I thought Erma gave up too easily and of course it was because she didn’t give a hang about me, but they sat me down in the chair and shoved me into what was supposed to have been a green double ring. It wasn’t. It was one of the blue kind.
I had an impression of a cloudy blue color as I went forward into D after which I found myself walking across a sea of glass between panes so clear and unmarred they were almost invisible. I could make out their edges but that was all. Spread out everywhere around me were glittering cubicles with mirrors in them. All rendered reflections but some gave two, some three, some four and some more than that. I noticed that none gave a single reflection and I didn’t know how I knew this without going into each cubicle, but I did.
The thought of not going into one never occurred to me. That was how strong the lure was. I walked into one that showed me a double image of myself. Upon all the mirror shards were two of me. An eerie feeling passed over me and I suddenly felt the necessity of getting out of there, of getting away from all the cubicles and escaping from that world as quickly as I could. How distinctly I recall racing across the sea of glass toward the yellow ring, my breath hot and hard in my throat.
My panic didn’t cease or even lessen as I stepped onto Earth. I knew something was wrong. I felt the same but I was filled with a sense of foreboding. I saw Deron and Erma staring at me and then at something on the ground. Looking down, I saw a naked infant crawling beside me. She had silken yellow hair and big blue eyes. Suddenly she stopped crawling, sat up and began to sob.
She kept crying as I picked her up and went back through the ring. I didn’t know where it was, couldn’t see it, but I guessed it hadn’t moved, and it turned out that I was correct. My actions were purely mechanical and if Td taken the time to think about it I probably wouldn’t have done it that way, to my further regret.
I took the baby and gave it back to the cubicle where it came from. As soon as I stepped between the glittering panes, the child disappeared from my arms and then I again sped across the glassy sea and leaped toward home, this time alone.
“How do I know what happened?” said Deron. “In the first place I’m no muter. In the second place I haven’t a wild imagination. Maybe there’s a bunch of babies in that world and one comes out with every traveler. Anyhow, we know the place is blue and we don’t want anything to do with it Green is our color.”
“Maybe it was an hallucination,” said Erma. “I don’t see how that could have been a real kid. I mean, where’d it go?”
I told her and she sneered.
Bass was the only one who would actually carry on a conversation with me, which was unfortunate in a way since she had to be the most ignorant person in the camp. “I couldn’t stay away from alcohol,” she said to me as she recounted a little of her personal history. “I’d break out of the detox clinic, find a bar and go on a toot. My parents would send private hounds to sniff me out and back I’d land in the clinic only to wait for the best time to bust out. Then they both died and there was nobody to pick me up from the gutter, so that’s where I stayed for too many years. If you want to know anything about dreg towns, just ask me.”
She wasn’t interested in muting or discussing babies that popped from nowhere. “Half the time I think it’s all a joke and there aren’t really rings all over the place,” she said. “What good do they do me if I can’t see them? Anyhow, I finally broke myself of the bottle and now Tm an upstanding citizen making her change by stealing from the tax collectors. Every time a barrel goes onto a boxcar it’s a percentage taken from them since the stuff goes to companies through the back door. I like the work.
Keeps me from getting bored. The name of this state? Why, it’s Pennsylvania. Don’t you even know where you are?”
“Do you know if there are any other camps like this one?” I said.
“Oh, I doubt that. You know, the pipe is propped through a pair of those stinking rings, or at least that’s what they tell me, and they don’t want to do it again or maybe they don’t know how. And you ask a lot of questions.”
“Why are you so free about answering them?”
“Most likely they’ll kill you when they’re done with you, no matter what they promise to the contrary so what’s the difference if I tell you stuff?”
“Will that bother you? Their killing me, I mean.”
“Like water off a duck’s back. This whole world is a slaughterhouse and everybody has to go sometime.”
“I’d like to know why I’m here.”
“You can blame that on Erma. She sniffed out the hiding place of a guy in Vermont named Trundle who had all the answers, only instead of bringing him in for que
stioning she broke his neck. She said it was an accident but I know different. She’s an animal. So they went on the hunt for another solution to their problem, and you were it”
“How can I be it when I don’t know anything?”
“They tell me you’re better than nothing. Now shut up and quit bending my ear.”
21
I really tried to see the double rings they kept shoving me through. I squinted, crossed my eyes, blinked fast, gaped, tried peeking from angles but it did no good and I saw nothing. How a part of my brain could perceive something without my knowledge was a mystery that bewildered and agitated me.
“Don’t think about it,” said Deron. “What do you care whether you can see them or not?”
“You’ll learn nothing from me. Suppose I find those people? I won’t volunteer the information and you can’t get it from me with drugs.”
He took hold of my ear and made a good try at twisting it off. “Who says you won’t volunteer anything and everything you know?”
“Maybe I found them already.”
“You’d be surprised at some of the machinery we have. You’re set up on a diagram like the blueprints of a building. You might call it an emotion reader.”
“What am I supposed to register when I find the hidden people?”
“Something different. Erma will recognize it.” He twisted my other ear. “How’s that horse I loved so much? I figure one day I’ll pleasure myself by putting a bullet in one of his big, brown eyes.”
“He’s gone,” I said. “Took off into D after a female with wings. I expect he’s raising a family and won’t ever come back.” It was a chill, smoggy morning when Bass took charge of me during the thirty-minute break.
“Why do we knock off every day at this time?” I said. I had asked the same question more than once to the others but had received no answer.
“You’re always asking me things, aren’t you?” she said. “It has to do with solar cells on one of the machines. The energy runs out and this is the time we replenish it.”
“Is it the machine that monitors rings or is it the one that regulates the transparent shield?”
“In fact I think it’s the one that hauls you all over the place between D. You know, when you think you’re coming out one place and you come here instead. What kind of feeling is that?”
“Like when you dive into a pool you think is full of water and suddenly you realize there’s nothing in it.”
“You’re a funny kid. Sometimes you talk like you’re older than me and then other times you sound about fifteen. Hey, what’s the matter? What’d I say?”
“I’m scared,” I said and started to sniffle. “You people all hate me. How much do you think I can take?”
“That isn’t anything to do with me. I got no feelings one way or the other. Come on, close your trap. I hate blubbering. It never did me any good when I was hurting and I can tell you it won’t do you any, either.”
“Look how miserable I am,” I said, spitting out the tears leaking into my mouth. “I don’t get fed properly, every day my life is threatened, I have no mother or father. I might as well be a slave hauling blocks to build pyramids.”
Eyeing me with an unrelenting expression, she said, “Let me give you a piece of advice. Nobody here cares whether you live or die or whether you got up on the right or left side of the bed. Do you get the picture? Quit whining and just squat in that chair for twenty minutes more and then you get to go into D.”
“My behind has callouses from sitting here!” I yelled. “I don’t want to go into D! I don’t want to live!” Suddenly I shrieked and kept on shrieking. “Kill me now!” I shouted. “I’m not doing anything more for you or anybody!”
Bass took a few steps away from me and glanced toward the barracks. “Cut that out,” she growled. “You’ll make me look bad with Erma. She’s liable to sack me.”
“Kill me!” I howled. “Go ahead! Who cares!” Even as I bellowed and carried on I didn’t think it would work. She had soused for so long her brain was damaged but she was a hound dog when it came to following simple orders, and her simple order for the day was not to let me get out of the chair. I bawled and screeched but all she did was chide me and watch the barracks to see if anyone was coming out to investigate the racket I made.
That an earthquake hit then was fortunate for me and not so unexpected or coincidental as the huge pipe protruding through the blue ring on the hill above camp caused almost constant tremors. Only once or twice, though, had the shaking been severe enough to knock things down. For instance, a tree had once crashed onto a generator and put it out of action for a full day and, only a few days before, the ground split under one of the troughs leading from the oil tub. But such damage was rare because the worst of the underground shocks created by the blue ring being held unnaturally stationary were released miles away.
Anyway, this particular shock was a strong one and seemed to cause the ground around my chair to tilt. Seldom one to entertain indecision, I was on my feet in a moment and taking advantage of the fact that Bass had lost a bit of her balance and was leaning away from me. I was wearing heavy boots and I gave her a kick in the belly that toppled her over backward.
She was slick as grease, agile as a rubber band, mad as a wolverine. One instant she was laid out awkward and sputtering, and in the next she completely changed her position and took a tight grip on my ankle.
Cringing as I did it, I kicked her hard on the jaw. Her head jerked back, her eyes slammed shut and just for a second she was out cold. Then she was wide awake, looking at me with murderous rage and grabbing at me. Workers poured out of the barracks led by Erma who never stopped howling as she raced across the treacherous ground like a winged leviathan. Her red skirt was held high so it wouldn’t impede her progress, and it didn’t, but that made no difference since I was in the act of doing what I sometimes did best—ring jumping. The circle was little and blue and I loved it as I went through it.
“Fancy meeting you here?” said Gorwyn.
In astonishment I looked around and realized the world had indeed gone mad if coincidences could happen this often for I sat smack in the middle of Gorwyn’s front walk with a rope about my neck.
“What a relief!” I said and stood up and tried to hug him. “They’re trying to kill me! How did you pull me here?” I followed him as he made little hops and skips to avoid my hands. He didn’t move very far away and he didn’t let go of the rope attached to my neck. “Oh, all right!” I said, giving up trying to climb into his arms. “At least I’m away from them. You don’t know how grateful I am to be here.”
“No more than I am to have you. Come along.” He tugged on the rope and I felt pressure.
“Do I have to wear this collar?” I asked.
“Naturally. You don’t think I want you to escape, do you?”
“Okay, I’ll come peacefully. Where to?”
“How about Hades? Or how about my lab? Or the dungeon in the lower level of my house?”
“Any place but where I’ve just been.”
The thing was, he wasn’t kidding. After we went down a long, damp, winding, dark stairway made of stone and he locked me in a black cell, I still couldn’t believe it. My hands on the bars, I tried to reason with him.
“I know you like me to do experiments with you, though I can’t figure out why, and I’m willing to help you all I can. I feel as if I owe you plenty of favors. Why do you lock me up like a prisoner?”
“You’re an idiot,” he said, attaching some kind of flashlight to the wall outside my cell. In the eerie light he looked like a hollow-cheeked cadaver.
“Since when is that a crime?”
“Hardly ever, except in your case. You really should know better.”
The sound of his voice must have traveled down a narrow corridor to my right and alerted someone in that vicinity. They began yelling and banging on the wall.
“Somebody’s there!” I said.
“Yes, I have two other h
ouse guests.”
“Who?”
“Your girl friend and Tedwar ”
“Lamana?” I said, knowing how stupidly bewildered I sounded. “Tedwar? Why?”
“As long as you’re all behind bars you can’t get in my hair. The three of you are exasperating pests. Unfortunately for me, only one of you is of any use to me.”
“Me?”
“True.”
Gorwyn r “What?”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’ve been called so once or twice.”
Even as I asked I didn’t consider that it might be true. Not at all did I consider it. “Did you ever know a man named CrofiF?” He finished with the light and turned. Now his face was in darkness and all I had to read him by was his mild voice. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, he came to Mutat to see you. Instead, he saw me. Better yet, I saw him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe he decided who you reminded him of. Or maybe he remembered something else. He only got a glimpse of me at the school and I really wanted to believe he hadn’t recognized me, but then he left so quickly. What else could I do? Acting upon assumptions is the reason I got ahead in the world. I simply sent some people to stop my old colleague from opening the can of worms before I wanted it opened.”
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