Despoina sighed. “We must hope they’re all right. Let’s try to find out where we are.”
We opened the rough wooden door and walked into a short corridor. Here three or four other doors confronted us. A deep humming seemed to come from behind the nearest one.
Despoina threw it open. We saw a large, a very large room—it seemed half the size of a skating rink—that was as full of electrical equipment as a power company sub-station. The air was loud with its noise.
I was about to close the door again, when I saw, at the far end of the big room, a flicker of moving cloth. Somebody was tending the machinery.
“Hi, there!” I yelled. “You down there! Hello!” There was no answer, but I heard, a second later, the noise of hurrying feet and the slamming of a door.
With Despoina at my heels, I ran toward the sound. There was nobody there, and when we opened the door that had just been slammed, we found we were in another corridor, a longer one, with six doors opening out of it. No one was in the corridor.
Despoina and I looked at each other. I selected one of the doors at random and found we were in a perfect maze of partitioned rooms and cubbyholes. There were shelves and storage space everywhere. None of it was occupied.
We made our way back to the corridor. I opened the other doors and found, in turn, that one of them hid a shallow supply closet; one gave on another very long corridor with more doors; one on an elaborate cache of tinned and canned desserts; one opened on a bunk room for four, apparently never occupied; and the last on a tiled shower and lavatory. It seemed hopeless.
“Let’s try to pick him up with the seeing,” Despoina suggested.
We tried, but the attempt was as fruitless as our attempt to contact Ross and Kyra telepathically had been. For some reason which I do not understand even now—I recommend it to the curiosity of future investigators—our distance senses were useless here. (We Wicca do not consider “the seeing” extra-sensory.) All we got was blackness and a touch of vertigo.
We were getting worried. We didn’t know where we were or how to get away from there, and the urgency of our need to get to H was more acute than ever. At last Despoina said, “We ought to set a trap.”
“What could we bait it with?” I asked.
“Well, the person we saw in the room with the machinery obviously isn’t curious. There’s no point to doing something to appeal to his curiosity. But he was working on the machinery. Suppose we disabled one of the generators? Wouldn’t that bring him running to see what was wrong?”
It was a good idea. Inside the generator room, I fixed a length of wire across the opening of the door through which the unknown might be expected to enter. It was meant as a trip-up. Then I took a screwdriver and scraped a handful of good-sized grit from one of the rock walls. I tossed the grit into the armature of the biggest of the generators.
There was a shower of bright sparks. The happy hum of machinery changed to a harsh note of protest. The grinding lasted for only an instant. Then there was a big puff of black smoke. I smelled ozone in the air.
The fluorescent panels in the ceiling had dimmed perceptibly. “That ought to bring him,” I said. “I hope he’s got an auxiliary generator stashed away somewhere.”
We settled ourselves on either side of the door to wait. The cuts on my chest were bleeding a little; I could feel the blood trickling down through the hair.
The semi-twilight was soothing, and I had had a sleepless night. I tried to keep awake, but I think I dozed. I was roused by Despoina taking my hand.
“Listen,” she breathed. “Somebody’s coming.”
There was a noise of flapping footsteps, and an indistinct muttering. The unknown seemed to be talking to himself.
The sounds drew nearer. I waited tensely, my muscles taut. The door opened. There was a heavy thud. The unknown had fallen to the floor.
I pounced on him before he could move. He did not resist me at all. He had fallen on his face, and he lay so quietly that I thought he might be badly hurt. But he was still talking, I didn’t know whether to me or to himself.
“Get up,” I said finally. I helped him to his feet.
My eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light, and I could see him pretty well. He was wearing a purplish dressing gown, with a scarf tucked in at the neck, and he looked like my idea of Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. Both his forehead and his chin receded. He was definitely fat. Dark glasses covered his eyes.
“Why didn’t you stay in the moon room?” he asked petulantly. His voice was faded and high. “You were supposed to stay there. You’re to be transshipped.”
20
During the time we were in contact, he never looked directly at either of us, but always at a point an inch or two above our heads. It made him disconcerting to deal with.
“Transshipped? Where to?” I asked. “To the moon?”
He was silent. Only, seemingly without thinking, he put out a long pale tongue and licked his lower lip and chin.
“We want to get to level H,” I said. I was holding him by the collar of his dressing gown. Without precisely meaning to do it, I gave him a vigorous shake.
He ignored the shake. “To level H!” He laughed. “I can make a better level H than any you’re likely to find.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Didn’t you see my pictures?” He sounded surprised. (It was the only thing he ever did seem surprised at; he took our presence in his territory, and my ruin of the generator, with perfect calm.) “There’s one of them outside the window of the moon room. You must have noticed it. I’ve made dozens of them.”
He fumbled in the pocket of his dressing gown and brought out a tiny model of a service-station gas pump. “This is one I’m working on,” he said, holding it for us to see. “I don’t know yet what to use for the hose, though.”
He put the model back carefully in his pocket. From the other pocket he extracted a flat cooky and began munching on it.
“After I get the service station done, I’ll make another supermarket,” he said around the crumbs.
“Do you like desserts?” Despoina asked him. She had put a cajoling note in her voice.
“Yes. Don’t you?” He finished the cooky and began on another one.
“You’ve got to help us get down to level H,” I told him as sternly as I could. Actually, I felt foolish saying anything at all to him; it was like talking to a cream puff.
He shook his head. “Impossible,” he said, addressing the air above me. “That’s not what my instructions say.”
“Where are you supposed to send us?” I asked.
“Harris wanted to go to the moon. That’s why he put up that montage. But he wound up as a technician on level F.”
“How long ago was this?” I asked, still trying to get at something definite.
“I don’t know. A week or two. No, it might be years. I’ve made a lot of models since then.”
Despoina said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to help us to level H than to transship us?”
“I guess so. But my instructions don’t say that.”
“We like desserts too,” I said, trying to be severe. “We love them. If you don’t help us down to H, we’ll eat them all up.”
“All up?” He sounded doubtful.
“All of them. You know there aren’t any too many left.”
“Oh!” He got another cooky from his pocket and popped it, whole, into his mouth. “All right. If there’s trouble, I’ll say it was your fault. But that man”—he meant me—“will have to install the auxiliary generator.” His words were muffled, but audible enough.
This seemed reasonable. Under his direction, I lugged over a smallish generator from a closet in the next corridor and installed it. He kept a jealous eye on my movements and on Despoina. I could see he feared for the safety of his cache of desserts.
When the generator was installed, he said, “I haven’t done this for a long time. I’d better try sending something to H before I send you.”
The light had got back to normal since the power output was restored. I tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at me. Still, there didn’t seem any especial reason why he should be lying. I said, “What are you going to send?”
“Those planks that came before you did.” His head was tilted far back, and his eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Following his gaze, I saw that a viewing plate was set overhead, where the floor and sides of the moon room were visible.
Ratty opened the front of a console and began twiddling with dials. “You two go move the planks so their long axis is parallel with the door, with a margin of about two feet around them,” he told us. “Then come back here.”
We obeyed. I think we were both nervous, for it was certainly possible that he would take advantage of our being in the moon room to send us anywhere at all to get rid of us. But nothing happened, and we got back to the generators all right.
Old Fat Rat had pulled a piece of peg board forward, and was laying out a design on its surface with metal clips. The design closely resembled the one Despoina had constructed with the fish at the poolside. Then he put wires in the clips and strung the wires back in the same design.
“What a lot of trouble this is,” he said; “almost as much trouble as sending you to…” His high voice died away, and he got another cooky, a filled one this time, out of his pocket. He munched on it with his eyes half closed. Then, licking his lips, he pressed a switch.
Despoina and I were both looking at the viewing plate. A pattern of moving squares had become dimly visible on the floor where the planks did not cover it. The squares pursued each other monotonously for at least four or five minutes, without anything more happening. I yawned involuntarily as I watched them.
Suddenly the plate grew dark. Then it seemed to explode into a billow of light brown.
What had happened? The billow of light brown stayed on the viewing plate. It didn’t resemble anything I was familiar with. “Let’s go see what it is,” I suggested at last
The three of us, old Fat Rat flapping along in his bedroom slippers, went out into the corridor. I opened the door of the moon room, and what was inside came puffing out.
We had jumped back, but it was quite harmless. It was a mass of fluffy wood shavings, a little coarser than the stuff the British used to call woodwool, and the Americans, unaccountably, excelsior. I looked inside the moon room, and saw that it was filled, filled to the ceiling, with the shavings. This, then, was what had become of the planks Ratty had attempted to transmit.
“I must have done something wrong,” he said unnecessarily, looking over our heads. He popped a candy—peppermint, from the smell of it—into his mouth. “If you’ll clear that woody stuff out of the way, I’ll transmit you to H.”
There was no need for Despoina and me to exchange glances. Entrusting ourselves to Ratty’s ministrations was obvious madness. He might have been a good mechanic once, but time and loneliness had long ago eroded his competence.
“Isn’t there any other way to get to H besides the transmitter?” I demanded.
He closed his eyes and sucked voluptuously on his peppermint.
I was wondering whether I should hit him, threaten to destroy his cache of desserts, or try flattery, when Despoina said in my ear, “Grab him from behind, Sam, and hold his head so he has to look at me.”
Fat Rat was standing with his back half turned to me. I threw one arm around his body, pinning his hands to his sides, and with my other hand pressed down on the top of his head. He was puffy to the touch, like a marshmallow, and he smelled stale.
Despoina stepped in front of him, fumbling at the neck of her dress. She brought out something dangling at the end of a fine gold chain. It was her ring, the ring I had gone into the depths once before to take to her.
She unfastened the chin and began to swing the ring back and forth in an arc before Ratty’s eyes. I could feel his head moving a very little from side to side as he followed the motion of the ring.
“Now,” she said after a while, “what do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you see?”
“A man,” he answered reluctantly.
“What else?”
“Big animals with horns.”
“And the man?”
“He’s running away from them. They’re getting nearer. Oh, the poor man!”
She swung the ring some more. “Who is the man?” she asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper.
“I don’t know”—this with a sort of desperate firmness.
“You know. Who is the man?”
His whole body shuddered. “It’s me! It’s me! Help, help!”
She stopped the motion of the ring with one finger. “What is the other way to H?” she asked.
“… I don’t know.”
Once more the ring began to swing. “What is happening to the man?” she asked in a slow voice.
“Stop the swinging! I’ll tell you anything you want! Help, help!” His sides heaved.
She stopped the ring again. “What is the way to H?”
“Fifth door to your right in the long corridor,” he said. His voice was weak.
I let him go, and he sagged back against the wall. He looked as if he were going to have some sort of fit.
Despoina and I watched him for a moment. After a while he drew a deep sigh and wiped his face with the sleeve of his dressing gown. “I want some dessert,” he said in a feeble voice.
I put my hand under his arm and steered him through the generator room and out into the other corridor. Here he tottered over to the cupboard that held his dessert cache.
He got out a big round tin of English biscuits. His hands were trembling. “Are you all right?” I asked him but he didn’t seem to hear.
Obviously nothing more was to be hoped or expected from him. There were a lot of questions left unanswered—for instance, why he’d preferred trying to send us to H by matter transmitter to telling us about the door—but I didn’t think we’d ever find out the answers to them.
Despoina and I opened the door that led to the long corridor. I looked back toward Ratty. He was leaning up against the wall, his eyes mildly glazed, opening the tin of English biscuits. As I watched, his long tongue came out and licked at the crumbs on his chin.
21
“What was that?” I asked as we walked down the corridor.
“The business with the ring? Dwym-dight—soul paining. Our law forbids it except in the gravest emergencies. Even then, the elders in council should meet and approve. I’m not above the law.”
I thought she might have said more, but by then we had reached the fifth door. I opened it, and we both walked inside.
We were in a largish room, with a good dozen of Ratty’s panoramas installed in niches around the walls. There was a view of a walled medieval city, probably Carcassonne, a splendid lunar landscape with the earth rising on the right, and a very sandy desert, harboring two camels and a palm tree. The other panoramas were more conventional. All were beautifully done, and I found time to wonder fleetingly what Ratty had been in surface life, before he took up tending matter transmitters.
The center of the room held something quite different—a square stone coping, about two feet high and level on top, enclosing a space some five feet on a side. It looked like the coping around an old-fashioned well. A slight wind seemed to be blowing from the sides of the room toward it.
I approached the coping and looked over. I have only a fair head for heights; I was queasy instantly. I was looking down into a bottomless pit.
“Bottomless,” of course, is not strictly accurate. All I mean is that I could see no bottom. The sides drew together with distance and became indistinct. They were pale blue at the top; I could not see their color further down. It was like looking from the top of the Empire State Building down a narrow shaft.
I held out my arm over the opening. Instantly, my hand and forearm jerked up—not because anything had pulled on them,
but for the same reason that someone, lifting an unexpectedly light object, jerks it up in the air. My muscles were braced to withstand the ordinary pull of gravity on my arm, and that pull had abruptly diminished to about a tenth of itself.
Despoina had been watching. Now she went to one of Ratty’s panoramas and came back with her hands full of miniature buildings and pieces of scenery. She dropped them into the shaft.
They fell slowly. We followed them with our eyes as long as we could see them, and still they seemed to be only drifting down.
I swallowed. I didn’t like this at all. But there seemed to be no help for it. “I think it’s an anti-grav,” I said to Despoina. “I’m going to let myself down.”
I sat on the edge of the coping for a minute, getting up my nerve. Then I turned around slowly, letting my body down into the shaft, while I still held onto the coping with my hands.
I felt a fantastic lightness. The air seemed to buoy me up like water; it was no effort at all to sustain my body in the shaft. Indeed, I felt that I could float upward if I wanted to.
“I think it’s all right,” I told Despoina. “I weigh a tenth of what I usually do, but my body offers just as much resistance to the air as usual. It’s like being a ball of crumpled-up newspaper.”
She nodded and unhesitatingly let herself down over the curb beside me. We hung for a moment. “Now!” I said, and we both let go.
I felt an instant of acute fear. But we were drifting down in the gentlest of katabases, the pale blue light around us, in almost pneumatic bliss, and we didn’t accelerate. It was a very superior anti-grav.
I caught her hand and held it. The pale light was steady, and I could see her clearly. Her white dress and her red hair floated around her lightly, buoyed up by the air. I didn’t know what we were falling toward, but I felt remarkably close to her. I would have been willing to go on falling like this for a long time.
“Despoina,” I said, “what did you mean when you said, ‘I’m not above the law’?”
“That there have been… witches who thought they were.”
Sign of the Labrys Page 14