by Brian Ball
Would he be able to understand how Spingarn was required to help the Alien, though!
Would any of the others realize just what sort of a pact the Alien had dictated?
It had given Spingarn a task. And it had promised their own release in return.
Spingarn found huge echoes of that insistent booming still ringing around his brain:
“Get me out! I want out! Stop the—the Frames!”
The Alien was screaming with despair that it wanted release from its own version of the Frames of Talisker!
“Spingarn!” shuddered Ethel. “Did you hear it too!”
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “The Alien was here. Here, out of the iron meteorite—it was here, out of the block—it wanted to see Spingarn, that other Spingarn! It wants to stop the Frames of Talisker!”
“Aye,” said Hawk, his broad face pale and sweating, “you’re right, lad, about the nature of the Devil here—that was His Satanic Majesty, all right, or I’m a Dutchman, and I’m no blasted stiff-necked Hollander! Not Hawk of the Pioneers! Why, it roared out of this iron casing like some fiend from the Pit! And did you see its face!”
Spingarn then realized that they would all have seen a different form of the Alien; its vast invisible presence was a thing of mental projection; it gobbled up the internal psychic mechanisms of a human mind and turned them into its own form of mind beamer. What Ethel must have seen—briefly, before she relapsed into the relief of unconsciousness—and what Hawk swore so vehemently he had witnessed, would have borne only a surface relationship to the semantic patterns which had been Spingarn’s interpretation of the Alien’s own psyche. But they all knew what the Alien required. The girl repeated its urgings:
“Spingarn! It wants us to help it! The Alien wants us to help it out of—of the Frames!”
She stopped and the four of them looked at one another in mutual wonder. They had all been through as strange an experience as any mind could conceive; and they had all reached approximately an equal understanding of that experience. Spingarn spoke for them all.
“Yes. The Alien and my early self made the Frames. But always the Alien had its own special purpose. It needed to see a succession of random events so that it could orient itself.”
“You—the Plot Director that you were,” said Ethel, “—you were acting out of impulse. But the Alien needed the Frames of Talisker?”
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “We all saw that.”
“Did we, Captain?”
“You too, Hawk.”
“That I did! The Devil of Devils had to work its way out of a Pit, so it called up this place to exercise in.”
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “That’s as near to it as we can get. The Alien had to have a set of random principles at work around it so that it could picture itself in an equal situation.”
It fell into place quietly.
They listened as Spingarn built up the picture of events that had occurred outside the framework of the Galaxy; events which must have been ancient when the first world of all was shrouded in rain forests and hot mists; events which had taken place, perhaps, in a Universe that bore no relation whatsoever to the time and space quotients they knew.
“The way I see it is this.” The gondola rose, sailed on, over the wide, hot desert, still swaying slightly in a gentle arc; below, the little white blockhouse was a geometric point of reference, a hypnotic center of attention which one or another of the voyagers referred to as the strange story built itself up. “The planet housed the Alien for millions of years. I don’t know where the planet came from, but our records show that it’s extra-Galactic. My guess is that it isn’t a part of Universal matter at all. I believe it was thrust through some hole in the continuums—that it was a sort of burial of the Alien.” Spingarn paused. “Urn burial.”
The sense of circumnavigating a mausoleum overwhelmed him.
It seemed that they sailed, in this stout gondola, with its taut silken balloon, above a graveyard. A planetary graveyard.
“I think the Alien was buried alive in the planet.”
“And thrown out of its own Universe!” whispered Ethel.
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “Disposed of.”
Hawk coughed and grunted. “The Devil not dead? Why, Captain, and you, miss, it was active enough a short while ago! You say the King of Darkness was buried! He’s not the sort you can kill off, His Majesty! He’s more lives than a cat!”
Spingarn went on:
“I don’t think he was buried as dead. I believe he was buried alive. Deliberately.”
“They—” and Ethel paused as the thought of what she meant by that quiet they, “—they threw him out? Undead?”
“And left him to be found.”
Horace roused himself from his own electronic nightmare.
“And you found him—that is, you in another persona, sir?”
“I did. Found and awakened him.” Spingarn grinned. “I wonder how I did it!” Then the images came flooding back. “Yes. I think I know.” He wouldn’t burden the others with those sense-blinding scenes. They had been spared the ferocious impact of the Alien, it was clear. All they had discerned, in their state of unconscious awareness, was that the Alien needed them to help it out of its own personal jail. “Leave it,” he told them. “We’ll concentrate on the problems we have.”
“Aye, lad,” agreed Hawk. His bottle-nosed face was healthy again. He had sensed the call to arms in Spingarn’s tones. “What are we to do?”
“Just a minute, Sergeant,” said Ethel. “Tell me, Spingarn, why the Frames of Talisker! Why this crazy series of Frames that change at random! Why a mob of giants—and the ghosts! And the balloons which were supposed to be spaceships! Why the road that leads into the sky! Why all those other wretched tribes you’ve told us about!” She edged away from Spingarn’s tail. “Why that!” She kicked out a fragment of the meteorite. “And this!”
“Oh, madam, surely it’s obvious!”
The robot was about to launch itself into another half-explanation, but Spingarn silenced it with a wave of his hand.
“It’s a reenactment,” he said.
“A reenactment,” said Ethel. “Of what?”
“Of what the Alien feels.”
Something of the Alien’s own struggles with the total disorientation had slipped into the others’ minds. They had shared in the profound and chaotic feeling of loss which it had suffered. Ethel began to understand at last:
“The Alien wakes in a strange Universe.”
“Yes,” Spingarn agreed. “Completely new. Terrifyingly unfamiliar.”
“It meets other minds.”
“Ah, madam,” said Horace, “you have this wonderful ability to follow the Captain’s thoughts—you two have a symbiotic relationship! You should mate! What a product of fission you would produce!”
“Quiet!” growled Hawk. “Aye, Captain, I’m with you! It would be like hearing the Frogs for the first time! All that noise and nothing of it to put your mind to—talking through their noses and whining so it’s not a Christian tongue at all!”
“Worse,” said Spingarn, remembering the agonizing bewilderment of the Time-Out blip. “Complete and utter fragmentation of all it had once known. New stars. Fresh galaxies. Different temporal structures. Gravitational and electromagnetic fields that couldn’t operate in its own Universe. And then creatures—me!—with minds like mad mazes!”
“So when it was released from its coffin,” said Ethel, shuddering, “it knew it had been thrown into a new Universe!”
Spingarn said, “It knew.”
“And you—the man who was you—worked with it!”
“Yes. They built the Frames of Talisker.” Memories evaded Spingarn, but the sum of their imprinted and faded ghosts was a feeling of wild and sardonic amusement. “The Alien wanted a completely random situation built up around the only intelligent life-form it found in our Galaxy. It wanted people and events to move totally at random. It found the one man, of all the billions of peopl
e it might have met, who could construct such a situation.”
Hawk contemplated Spingarn for a moment or two; he sucked on his empty clay pipe and gave his opinion:
“I’d a notion or two about you when we served Queen Anne,” he said. “You had the look of a rogue, Captain. Likable, you might say, but always it seemed you were hanging fire, waiting to explode, lad. So you put this place in motion, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And what now?”
“Shortly, Sergeant,” said Spingarn. “Understand first what the Alien is. What it needs.”
“Go on,” urged Ethel. “It needed to be oriented.”
“That’s it. Oriented. It needed to see how other intelligent beings adapted themselves against a fragmented situation. Then it could begin to decide its own strategies for action. Before it could begin to act, it had to learn its own capabilities.”
“Through assessing ours,” added Ethel. “Yes. It watched the things thrown into the Frames of Talisker so that it could decide how it should act!”
“It asked for Time-Out,” put in Horace, who had shown what was for it a remarkable restraint.
“Time-Out?” asked Ethel.
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “Haven’t you understood yet?”
Ethel was coming to an understanding of the whole strange chain of cosmic events which had led to their adventures on the planet; Spingarn watched as her keen, subtle mind analyzed the elements. The sudden bursting through of the Alien into the Universe they knew; its slow life through the millennia; the planet, swimming gradually into the orbit of the Galaxy; and then life in the Galaxy slowly reaching out, star system by star system until the lonely planet was charted and used. And then the experimental Frames, built on the planet in secret, so that there should be no sudden, overwhelming demand for them on the part of a bored and sensation-deadened population. All of this, and then Ethel’s glint of acknowledgment. But it was Hawk who spoke first:
“Your Alien, Captain. I know what he wants! He wants to get back to the Pit he sprang from!”
Horace sighed in admiration.
“Sergeant, how right! How incisive is the military mind, sir,” it added to Spingarn. “To estimate with such facility the high Probability Quotient in the events—to show such awareness of the pattern in the stream of events! He is correct, isn’t he sir?”
“Oh yes,” said Spingarn. “That’s what it wants. But how do we tell it that it’s about a hundred million years too late?”
24
There was little time to answer Spingarn’s unanswerable question, for Horace was humming with electronic anxiety; the red-furred robot’s antennae were twitching and its sensitive scanners were alert to the eerie pressure changes that heralded another alteration in the Frames of Talisker.
“There’s a new cycle of events impending, sir,” it reported. “The barriers are alive with power! Anything could happen, sir! It’s chaotic down there!”
The extraordinary thing was that the level desert was unchanged. Still the only feature in an otherwise empty, yellow landscape was the squat shape of what looked like a blockhouse. The litter of fallen balloons and struggling giants was far in the distance, and, except for that lonely white shape, the planet contained no evidence of occupation, whether human or Alien. Spingarn knew otherwise.
“This was one of the Alien’s conditions,” he told the others. “I’ll tell it quickly.”
They accepted the incredible logic of the tale almost calmly; after the horrors of the night before, and then the emptiness of the Alien’s own locally created universe, what Spingarn told them was only a simple extension of their adventures.
“The Genekey is our way out,” said Spingarn. “It’s the way we return to an appearance of humanity. It’s what the giants were trying to get hold of—and what a score of poor transmogrified tribes are trying to reach.” He was trying to hold back his own incredulous wonder at the strangeness of his story and the desperate conclusion he had reached. “The Disaster Control agent learned about it, god alone knows how. The giants were given an implanted consciousness of its existence—and I’d guess that all the occupants of these mad Frames were given the same racial memory.”
“We have to find it?” said Ethel.
“Yes,” said Spingarn.
“The Frames are dissolving,” announced Horace. “The barriers are being stripped away! There’s to be a total random situation—every one of the Frames will interact with every other!”
“That’s another of the Alien’s conditions,” agreed Spingarn. “Total, blind chance.”
“Why!” exclaimed Ethel.
“The Genekey,” said Spingarn. “It’s the prize.”
“This—Genekey,” said Sergeant Hawk. “It’s prize of war? If we find it, do we keep it?”
“No,” said Spingarn. “We destroy it.”
“What!!!”
Even Horace joined in the chorus of amazement and sheer anger. Ethel knew what the Genekey meant: return to the normalcy of twenty-ninth century life. It meant that she would lose the radiant beauty of her new form, and the flowing translucent grace of her wings. But it meant freedom too from the deadly presence of the Alien, from the constant threat of an insane series of events; and, more important, a chance to be a woman again. She yelled her anger at Spingarn.
“The Genekey is the chromosome transformer, isn’t it? Didn’t the Alien construct it to turn us back to human beings again, instead of something from nightmares! Once we find it, don’t we leave this place and the Alien?”
“Any moment now,” announced Horace, his thin voice tinged with awe. “All the Frames thrown together—all the peoples in it too! It’s Gotterdammerung, Spingarn! It’s the end of the Frames of Talisker!”
“Well, well,” said Hawk, rubbing his hands and taking his familiar knapsack from his back. “Something to be blown up, eh, Captain? We’ll be needing the last of my grenades! If there’s to be some little engagement, don’t leave Sergeant Hawk out of it!”
“But why, Spingarn!” yelled Ethel. “Why destroy the Genekey?” She was hurling curses at the Alien and Spingarn impartially. “Why, when all I want out of life is to get out of this place and be with you!”
Spingarn responded to the despairing cry. He took her diaphanous shape and held it for a moment. Then he told her why they had to destroy the only means of escape from the day of judgment on the Frames of Talisker.
“We have to reach the Genekey first. And we have to destroy it! We have to sacrifice our own chances of return and those of every last poor bastard whom I’ve ever sent to this planet, Ethel! If we don’t reach the Genekey first, then the ghosts get it!”
“Boggarts?” said Hawk, beginning to understand. “The ghosts what chased us onto the moving highway?”
“I was right,” said Horace proudly. “After all, I was right! There was such a high Probability Quotient that they weren’t human! They had to be——”
“What?” said Ethel quietly. “What are they?”
“An experiment of the Alien’s,” said Spingarn. “Not mine. The Alien’s alone.”
The blockhouse began to expand, like some desert plant that had suddenly tapped an underground source of water. It stretched thin fingers of stone into the yellow sand.
“It’s begun,” said Horace.
“Tell me,” said Ethel. “What are the ghosts?”
Spingarn held on to the sudden glimpse of frightfulness that he had seen when the Alien had made its conditions for cooperating with him. There had been an uncanny sense of evil about the formless creatures: a mindless wish to harm.
“The Alien found a piece of waste material trapped in its urn. Inside its grave. A chunk of tissue. Alive. Not sentient. But alive. So it grafted what it found onto a human cortex. The ghosts aren’t dead, Ethel. They’re alive. They want to get out of their Frame. They want other human brains! They want to feed on human brains!” The horror of the things overwhelmed them all, Spingarn included. Horace trembled, his antennae shaki
ng like so much grass in the wind. Hawk’s pipe cracked as his stained teeth gritted together. Ethel shrank into Spingarn’s arms.
“If they reach the Genekey,” he said, “they can give themselves human shape. Human intellect. Human abilities. And what will happen to the Galaxy when they get loose?”
Ethel struggled to accept what she had already understood.
“So the Alien wants us to stop them?”
“Yes,” said Spingarn, answering the unasked question that Hawk and Horace too were ready with. “It wouldn’t know how to cope with the physical tasks of destruction,” he told them. “All it can do is create.” It seemed inconsequential, for the Frame below them was heaving like some imprisoned monster struggling to escape, but he added: “It’s not in the nature of the Alien to destroy. I suppose it must come from an artistic Universe.”
“I suggest we descend,” said Horace. “The physical nature of the terrain—” He needed to say no more, for a violent wind tore the gondola almost free from its supporting balloon, hurling the voyagers about like so many leaves.
Spingarn roared, above the noise:
“Get us down, Horace! Are you permitted to act?”
“Yes,” Horace answered primly. “All my resources are entirely at your disposal now, sir.”
Spingarn laughed aloud, the wind whipping aside his shirt and revealing his wide bare chest. He held Ethel with one hand as the robot maneuvered the unsteady craft from one column of air to another.
“Bombs fused!” Hawk reported.
“Good for you, Sergeant,” said Spingarn. “You’ll have more than black powder to play with!”
A hole appeared in the floor of the gondola. Hawk looked down to see a winged creature advancing with a small arbalest in its arms. The quarrel which had made the hole appeared to have done no damage, but Hawk roared his anger.
“Fusils!” he bawled.
He took a weapon and threatened the flying creature with it, causing it to bank and wheel away into the oncoming storm.
“How’s that, Captain?” he yelled. “No bombs?”