Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  He climbed up without difficulty. He went to the closed door in the wall and pushed at it uselessly; this one had no latch, but an opening that looked like an odd keyhole. In a small rack beside the door hung ten or twelve oddshaped metal sticks.

  Half-heartedly, Kelsey tried a few more yells and listened to the waiting silence. Well, he could sit around until something happened. Or he could continue to work on the door. He couldn’t think of any other course.

  He took some of the metal sticks from the little rack and studied them. They all looked as if they would fit the door’s keyhole, but no two were shaped exactly alike. He chose one at random, and tried it in the door.

  HIS hand got a nasty, grating shock, unlike electricity, unlike the previous gentle knockout stings. He dropped the key and at the same instant heard water gushing up in the room below. Kelsey slammed the floor hatch down and sat on it. Should he try to stop the flood by putting another key in the door? His hand still tingled; he decided not. Was he being punished in some crazy way for trying to open the door, by someone controlling all this, or was he just caught in a chain of accidents?

  Soon the muffled watersound stopped. Gingerly he eased the hatch open; the bottom face of it turned up dripping wet. The room below was full and brimming over.

  He didn’t like this at all. Could the room he was now in be flooded too? He closed the hatch and saw with horror that a little water came seeping up through it, as if the hatch were made of blotting paper. Yet it looked and felt like hard metal.

  He decided to try the door again, shock or no shock. It was better than just waiting here, to maybe drown if the water rose again.

  He took another key. He decided to peel off his trunks and try using them for insulation when he held the key and tried it in the door . . . but maybe he could do better than that.

  Wasn’t one key enough to open a door? Why have so many in the rack? Starting to think, he really saw another detail for the first time: marked above the door was a small number 7.

  He had noticed it before without thinking about it; you saw numbers all the time, on doors and lots of other places. But maybe a key would be numbered 7.

  There were small numbers engraved on each of the ten keys, but each key bore a number of two or three digits; there was no number 7.

  Kelsey looked more closely at the door. Near the keyhole ran a series of numbers in the same neat engraving borne by the keys: 2 6 14 30. None of the numbers matched a key’s number. Yet he thought there must be some connection. 2 6 14 30 . . . he sat comparing numbers for what seemed about five minutes before something clicked in his memory, taking him back to the intelligence tests he had experienced in high school. A series of numbers . . . complete the logical sequence, the instructions had said. It was one of those things that teachers thought up to make the smart kids feel good, he had told himself at the time, knowing that he himself wasn’t a smart kid. He hadn’t tried very hard at the test, feeling there was no point in it. But when they showed him the results, he hadn’t done badly at all, in fact a little better than average all along the line.

  That had surprised him, because he had never done very well in school. He had never wanted to, because most of the kids he knew sort of sneered at guys who were brains, and the uncle he lived with was always talking down book learning and college guys who thought they knew a lot. His aunt had never said much about it one way or the other.

  The numbers: 2 6 14 30. Complete the logical sequence. Well, it was worth a try. 6 was 3 times 2. 14 was—no.

  Each number was larger than the one before it. Not double; 2 times 2 was 4, you had to add 2 more to get 6. 2 times 6 was 12, you had to add 2 . . .

  “Yeah!” he said aloud. He ran through the whole series in his mind, twice, to be sure. He looked for, and found, a key numbered 62. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. He drew a deep breath and inserted it.

  THE door opened easily; there was no sting, and no sound of water from below. Kelsey let out breath with a relieved whoof.

  The room beyond the door was quite similar to the one in which he stood. As he stepped through he found himself facing another door, this one with a number 6 above it. He was certain before he tried it that it was locked.

  On the wall near door 6, beside a key rack, was a tiny shelf holding a stack of papers. Kelsey riffled through the papers. Pages from some kind of textbook on English. He thought that nothing he found could surprise him any more.

  Engraved beside the new door’s keyhole was the word: ADVERB. Kelsey suspected there would not be a key marked ADVERB, and he was right. But each key did have a word on it.

  Was some crazy schoolteacher running this place? He pictured some old maid, driven batty by years in a classroom, inheriting a fortune and—nuts.

  But memories of school returned once more, informing him that an adverb was one of those things called the parts of speech. He supposed that various teachers had tortured him with the parts of speech at least a hundred times during his twelve years of schooling. How could he ever need to know what an adverb was? Well, he did now.

  Kelsey reached for the pages of English textbook and searched through them carefully until he found a list of words exemplifying the category ADVERB. None of the words on the keys were in the list. He would have to think about the category ADVERB and decide which key-word fitted it.

  He did.

  Again the door opened easily for his chosen key. He was not surprised at the sight of another similar room, and the number 5 above another door. Almost jauntily he walked directly across the new room to study door 5 for a small engraved symbol.

  He found the letter H, which might stand for a lot of things.

  This time the shelf beside the door was large, holding books, wires, and glass in various shapes that reminded him of what he had seen in his occasional glimpses from the hallway of the high school chemistry lab. A small metal tub held a clear odorless liquid that might be water, from the lack of smell. Careful, now, he warned himself. But he didn’t feel thirsty yet.

  There was no keyhole in door 5. A simple latch was sealed under a casing of some clear substance that resisted Kelsey’s pushing fingers like iron.

  He sighed. He would have to play it by the book, and the books on the shelf were thick and formidable-looking volumes. A glance showed him they were physics and chemistry texts. He groaned.

  From somewhere in the rooms behind him came a watery gurgle.

  WELL, there was no use just sitting here, and nothing else to do but keep trying to figure a way out. This chemistry business here looked far too hard for him to solve, but it would at least give him something to do.

  First, the symbol on the door. A book told him that H represented the element hydrogen. He discovered that it was possible to produce hydrogen from water, given electricity and suitable apparatus. These were provided, the electricity from an ordinarylooking wall outlet. On the shelf was a glass tube of peculiar shape that seemed designed to convey the newly released hydrogen to the seal holding the latch. The little tub was marked ILO, which he learned meant water.

  He went to work with containers and wires and electrodes, following a procedure roughly outlined in the books. After several mistakes and one mild electric shock he had the apparatus working. The seal over the latch melted away like ice in July sunshine. Kelsey wondered idly what the seal was made from; but he didn’t much care, as long as he got rid of it.

  He had been briefly worried by the realization that the other gas produced, called oxygen, was escaping into the air of the room. He thought the name was familiar, but he wasn’t sure until a book assured him he had been breathing the stuff all his life.

  Stepping into the next room, and facing door number 4, Kelsey felt almost at home. Before he could do anything else a great sleepiness rose up in him and overcame him. He stretched out on the floor, worried drowsily for a moment about the chance of another flood as he slept, and sank into oblivion.

  If he dreamed, he did not remember it when he awoke.<
br />
  HE sat up alertly, feeling good, remembering instantly all that had happened.

  There was another shelf in this room, it was as big as the last, and he supposed the books and odd-looking junk on it would enable him to open Door 4. But he paused after getting to his feet and stretching, to consider first another puzzle.

  He felt refreshed and alert, as if he had just slept eight hours. He had spent an undeterminable time getting through the other rooms, and lying unconscious in them.

  However long he had been in this place, he had had nothing to eat or drink since arriving. He didn’t want anything now. And another thing; there had been nothing like plumbing in any of the rooms, unless you counted the flooding pipe in the first. It seemed that he didn’t need any plumbing.

  He felt physically fine in every way. He didn’t even want a cigarette.

  He had shaved in the morning (this morning? yesterday?) before going to work. He rubbed his face; it was still smooth.

  His comfort was eerie, evoking forgotten ghost stories about people who had died without knowing it. Had he really drowned while swimming in the lake?

  He breathed. His pulse beat. He kicked a toe rather incautiously against a wall and was painfully convinced of solidity. Were his bodily needs being taken care of while he slept? That was hard to believe; he thought any explanation for all this would be hard to believe. Yet one must be true.

  Kelsey walked back through the rooms he had already traversed. Water now filled the second room to the lower edge of the open hatch in the wall. He would have to wade and dive if he wanted another look at the first room, but he saw no point in doing so. On impulse he scooped up water in his hand. It tasted all right.

  But he wasn’t thirsty.

  Whoever was behind this, for whatever unimaginable purpose, seemed to be urging him forward with the threat of flood. There was no way out back here. Whether there would be any way out for him ahead—he told himself there must be.

  Kelsey faced the locked door numbered 4. It had a keyhole, and engraved beside it was the word: ETRUSCAN.

  Kelsey looked at the now familiar rack of keys, and again felt the impulse to try one at random, to rush through doors—he didn’t doubt there would be more of them—as quickly as possible, to get to the bottom of the whole situation. But at door 7, a random try had given unpleasant results. He would keep on solving problems as long as he could, and then guess the rest if he had to.

  Now let’s see about ETRUSCAN, he thought, whatever it means. Each key was numbered to correspond to one of the bits of junk on this room’s shelf. The bits of junk were pottery, clay or stone, painted or carved in decoration, some whole, some only broken pieces.

  There were what looked like textbooks on the shelf again, with covers and a lot of pages missing, as before. This time there were also thick notebooks. Kelsey picked up one of these and found it crammed with neat notes and drawings that were plain enough in detail—but what was it all about?

  Grimly, he began to study the mass of archeological field notes, determined to find out which one of the bits of junk was an ETRUSCAN. He read for what seemed a long time, standing there. He did not grow tired of standing, didn’t even lean on the shelf. He noticed this but put it out of his mind.

  It took a long time. But when the sleepiness came again, and he lay down on the floor, it was in front of a door numbered 3.

  HE put aside speculation about how much time was passing, or what it was all about. “All right, I’ll play your crazy game,” he muttered aloud. He would just accept the absence of any physical need as a blessing, and keep working his way through doors.

  He solved a problem in positional astronomy, learning to use mathematics that he had never dreamed existed. Following an instruction book quite unlike any he had ever seen, he programmed a computer that he only vaguely understood, and did not need to understand. The read-out was a tiny orrery, including a ship that Kelsey had to navigate from planet to planet. Not, to be sure, with the complication of changing mass-ratios.

  The solar system represented in the model had only six planets, none of them with a sizable moon, which facts suggested nothing to Kelsey. He was satisfied when the scheduled journey was complete, and door 3 clicked open for him.

  The test required to open door 2 first appeared somewhat easier. The first half of a musical composition was played repeatedly to Kelsey, through some invisible speaker. Pressing one of a series of numbered buttons brought him the sound of one of four last-halfs, all quite similar. There were books on musical theory, and printed copies of each ending. He listened and studied until he felt sick of all music. Finally he made a choice.

  He was mistaken.

  The door refused the key. No shock bit at his hand, no sound of rushing water came from the rooms behind him. All was quiet, the eternal quiet of this place that might be expected to get on a guv’s nerves, but so far hadn’t bothered him.

  Evidently his mistake was not to be punished. Kelsey was suddenly angry. That someone could push him around like this, use him for a . . . a . . . . guinea pig. The term floated into his mind; he wondered what it was, exactly, that scientists really did with guinea pigs. When he got out of here he would look it up.

  If he got out of here.

  When! Now to get this damned door open. The temptation to choose one of the three remaining keys at random was strong; but no, he would try what he honestly thought to be the second most likely piece of music.

  This time the key worked. Kelsey stepped through and waited for the sleepiness to come.

  DOOR 1. He had anticipated it, in the back of his mind, for what now seemed many days. Would there be a final answer behind it? Or a door numbered O? Or a trick? He had thought perhaps door 1 would be the most difficult of all to open. He went to work as soon as he woke up.

  Kelsey built a cathedral. At least the structure somewhat resembled a Gothic church when he was through with it. He built it about three feet high, from blocks about a cubic inch in volume, that clung together like mortared masonry when he fitted one to another. He built it using tiny waldo arms, which were another concept utterly new to him. They worked into a glasslike enclosure that prevented him from reaching directly the simple latch of door 1. In this room the latch was not on the door but on the wall a few feet away. A block in the mechanism kept him from quite reaching the latch directly with the arms.

  He had a helper, for the first time. When he pressed a button, a small machine ran from one corner of the enclosure as if anxious to assist him, climbed upon the blocks until it reached the highest point of whatever pile or structure they formed, and reached a tiny arm as far as it could toward the latch.

  Kelsey had to build something with the blocks for the robot to climb on, so it could reach the latch. He soon learned that it could not climb a tall narrow spire of blocks; he didn’t have enough material to build a massive ramp or stairway. Besides the blocks, he had beams to work with, sticks of varied sizes and shapes, up to a few inches long. Each beam had the word TEMPORARY lettered on it. Kelsey soon found what TEMPORARY meant in this case; if the little robot attempted to climb the structure while any of the beams were in place, the blocks immediately lost their cohesiveness and his whole work collapsed.

  A good many of his efforts collapsed from one cause or another, usually while the robot was climbing. The little machine hit the floor hard, but always bounced up and returned to its corner, like an undaunted boxer ready for the next round. Kelsey chuckled at the robot, tried to think of a name for it, and vowed he would have no less patience.

  He built and rebuilt, without tiring. There were books on engineering, architecture, and construction; he studied them between attempts. What he needed was a tall structure, with a fairly large top for the robot to stand on while it reached for the latch. Since the amount of blocks was limited, the structure would have to be hollow inside. He used his little beams for temporary support, and discovered the beauty of the arch, and the use of the flying buttress to keep arch-supporti
ng walls from collapsing outward.

  There came a time when the robot climbed successfully and stretched itself upward, until the tip of one small metal arm reached the latch, curved over, and pulled precisely . . .

  Click!

  He had done it. Seven doors.

  KELSEY felt excitement such that his hands should have trembled with it, but they remained steady and obedient as machines.

  Door 1 swung ajar for him now. He felt an impulse to take the robot with him, but it was still out of his reach behind the glass. And it now hung inanimate from the latch it had opened. It was only a machine.

  Almost without pause Kelsey pushed open door 1 and stepped through. An unumbered door faced him from the familiar place in the opposite wall, but something else grabbed his attention immediately—a ladder rose through a hole in the glowing ceiling, and down through the hole came a greenish wavery light that might be a watermottled reflection of the sun.

  Kelsey climbed quickly. Above the room the ladder curved off to become a sort of stairway, inside a tube big enough to hold a crawling man. Climbing around a sharp bend in the tube, Kelsey felt an odd sensation, as if he had been turned upside down for a moment, lost his balance and his visual perspective. The feeling passed in an instant; he climbed on, into brighter light.

  Some force held clear water up like a lid inside the upper end of the tube; it looked as if the upper end was just under the normal surface of a body of water, with bright light above, as if from a clear sunny sky.

  Kelsey was quite practical about wonders by now. He poked a finger into the waterlid above his head, and withdrew it wet but undamaged. He crawled up through the water, and stopped with head and shoulders in the open air and sun, his weight still supported by the tube.

  He had emerged into the familiarity of the Chicago shoreline, to very nearly the exact spot where he had felt the grasp and sting at his ankle, a few yards offshore from the rocks. The sun was nearly overhead on a bright warm day. Piled as he had left it he saw his clothing. Above the gentle lapping of wave against rock he heard his transistor portable blaring something with a beat.