by Ted White
My eyes cleared for a moment and I saw the rifleman standing between me and his car. Grunting again, I crashed into him and heard him “whuff!” as I slammed him against the fender. I stepped clumsily back and he slowly toppled over sideways to the ground, holding his stomach and gasping for breath.
Then I felt somebody grab my right arm, and somebody else took hold of my left. My eyes seemed to have gone blind again, but I could tell where the two men were now, since I could feel them. I moved my arms heavily and swung the two men towards each other. They collided, but my arms were too weak now, and I didn’t cause any damage.
Suddenly I found myself on my knees, and it looked as though someone were throwing the sidewalk at me. The rifleman’s stomach was in the way of my head, as he lay on the ground groaning and trying to catch his breath, and I caught him hard, if inadvertently. He uttered a choked sound as things inside my own head seemed to detach themselves, and I felt myself swimming in some huge airless waterless swimming pool. All sounds seemed to vanish away in a strange distant hollow way, and then dimly reappeared.
“Boy!” someone was panting with exertion, “that usually knocks ’em out like a boulder on a gopher, but this guy—how’s Andy? We’re gonna have to tesach this big fella a little lesson one of these days. . . .” The voice faded away into a misty sound and somehow I found myself not hearing, but seeing the words being spoken around me.
Hands gripped me by the arms and legs and began to lift me off of Andy. “Beat that?” I saw flashing in my mind, “Here we come ready to fight the whole damn commie cell and he comes walkin’ into our hands. . . .”
I twisted my shoulders and hips sharply, lashing out with foot and hand blindly. Shouts of astonishment went off behind my eyes, and I fell to the ground again. I tried to pick myself up, but it was like being stoned blind. My body lurched sidewise and came up against the side of the car. For a moment my head cleared and I stood up straight, looking about me. Three large, tough-looking men in black, all wearing swastika armbands and big black metal belt buckles with swastikas in bold relief, stood around me in a wary semicircle.
“C’mon,” I said hoarsely. “Get’m. What y’waitin’ for. . . .”
“Dammit,” the one who had been driving said to the others, “you heard ’em. Let’s go.” They jumped me all at once. I caught the guy in the middle with a left in the stomach hard enough to knock* him across the sidewalk to the side of the building, but the other two had me by the arms and then the drug was taking over again.
This time I was hustled into the car. I was n6 longer interested in fighting. My mind had relaxed; no commands were coming through. I fell back against the cushions of the back seat and saw the sounds of the others getting into the car.
The car picked up speed silently and moved quickly away from the Communist headquarters.
“Hey, Billy,” one said from the front seat. “Beat on him a couple times for Andy here. Hard. Andy’s not in very good shape from the way this bastard handled him. Come on, give him a belt, Billy!”
Billy gave me a belt. He was sitting on my right; all he did was turn slightly in the seat and slap me full across the face with the back of his hand. I felt blood welling slightly in a scratch his ring opened up.
But I felt no anger. I felt nothing except the simple fact of the pain. I found myself half-conscious, able to observe, able to think after a fashion, but totally unable to act on the basis of my thoughts.
“Ahh, hit ’m again, Billy. You give him one, Jim!”
Jim turned to me, cupped my chin gently with his left hand, and slapped me stingingly, back and forth, with his right.
I felt several more cuts open up. My mind observed the phenomenon with interest. Jim and Billy sat back in their seats and the one in front almost seemed to pout with disappointment.
Suddenly he pulled himself up on the front seat, leaned over it towards me, and swung a right hard at my stomach. Even though my mind was unable to brace my stomach muscles for the blow, my body was in good enough shape to take the blow without much injury.
“Ow,” yelled the guy in the front seat. “That fat gut of his is tough—I coulda broke my hand!”
“Maybe he’s wearin’ a iron corset,” Billy snickered.
“Hey, you,” said Jim. “Why’d those Commies have you penned up in there?”
That was a stupid question. They had me under wraps because they considered me tfie key to their conquest of my world. I was the difference between going into it blind or .with open eyes.
“I am the key to their conquest of my world,” I told Jim earnestly. “I make the difference between going into it blind or with open eyes.”
“Shee-it!” said Billy. “Get that! The guy’s gone crazy.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” said Jim. “Whaddya mean, ‘your world,’ fella?”
“I come from an alternate probability world,” I said with my mouth. “In my world the Angels never invaded. Otherwise it is nearly identical to this world. The Commies want to move into it, displace their doubles, and take over.”
“Pipe that,” said Jim. “If this guy’s on the level, it’s no wonder he’s so damned important!”
“Awww, come on! Whoever heard of a—what? Alternating world?”
“He can’t be lying. Not with all that juice in him.”
“Yeah? Well, I seem to recall a few other things he couldn’t do.”
“So he’s big, so it takes longer to work on him. This sounds like the real stuff, you know?”
‘Tell us more, big fella.”
And I told them, God help me. I told them one hell of a lot that I never told the Technocrats, the Commies, anyone else in this damned world. I told them freely, easily, like a pleasant afternoon conversation.
In the back of my mind I knew perfectly well what had happened. I’d been very efficiently drugged. And it was forcing me to turn my guts inside out to them.
What really surprised me, though, was their apparent ignorance. They didn’t know my name, and they hadn’t realized my significance in their world when they’d picked me up. They knew nothing of the Technocrats’ matter displacer. Their original aim seemed to have been one of harassing the Commies, throwing sand in the works almost at random, in the hopes of messing their enemies up. “A bunch of Angel-lovin’ Jews,” Billy called them once. Swell fellows I kept running into. By comparison, the Technocrats and little Joey came up smelling like roses.
All this time we’d been travelling crosstown and uptown, keeping as much as possible to the side streets. I could see where my eyes were pointed, but the last time they’d hit me, my stare had been directed to the driver’s neck, which was no great help.
Suddenly I was flying into the front seat.
With a very solid sound like four full cans of garbage dropped from about four flights up, our car smacked full into a stationary yellow car angled across the street. The driver, I was pleased to notice, was impaled on the broken shaft of the steering wheel, while my other friend in the front seat had his head firmly imbedded in the shattered windshield.
“Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” a voice was droning from somewhere behind me. Then I heard the doors of the car open, and the voice stopped.
I was getting tired of this. Like a record played over and over—I seemed to be caught in an endless cycle. It began—or ended, depending on where you came in— with my getting knocked out. Then I would wake up, usually on a sofa. I’d have a few gay, mad, abandoned adventures, and then go through the cycle again.
I felt like maybe it was the cycle of a washing machine. I ached all over.
But there’s only so long you can put off anything. Finally I opened my eyes.
Yep, a couch again.
Straining against my assorted aches and pains, I propped myself up on one elbow, and took a look around.
The room was the lushest I’d been in yet. The lighting was low, and I couldn’t make out details, but from the rich draperies and heavy carpet it figured I wasn’t back with
any of my old friends.
I got myself into a sitting position, and propped my head on my arms. To say that I had a kingsized hangover would be to put it too mildly. I stared * at the carpet, without seeing it, and waited for my head to stop spinning. The design of the carpet didn’t help any. It was one of those modern, free-form designs, with all sorts of different colored threads crawling about among each other. The dominant color was a rich brown, with oranges and greens mixed in. But closing my eyes was worse. Then the whole room would start spinning.
I didn’t hear the door, and at first I didn’t hear the footsteps; it was a soft carpet. But when I looked up again, I wasn’t alone.
“Well,” she said wearily, “what are we going to do with you, now?”
Standing in front of me was a statuesque blonde. She was big; that was the first thing I noticed. She looked to be a good six feet or more tall. And everything about her was in proportion. Put her some distance away, without any handy size referents, and you’d have no idea she was taller than average.
Her hair was tucked up on top of her head in some sort of elaborate hairdo. Actually, it was conservative, compared with what I’d seen on the streets and in the subway. There were some comblike things mixed in with it, and the effect was to make her look, if anything, taller.
She was surrounded by a distinct halo.
It was a soft fluttering of colors that outlined her body, an aura that was distinctly visible in the soft light of the room. I first glimpsed it as golden, but it wasn’t. It was a rainbow, starting near her body a light green, shading into bright yellow, and then fading off into a darkening orange. But the yellow was* most predominant.
I’d met my first Angel.
She was not unangelic in appearance, either. Her features—totally human, quite feminine—were soft and warm; quietly beautiful. But she looked tired, and her manner was brusque.
I was wasting her time, intruding on her private life, her expression said.
“How about a little hair of the dog?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?” She had no accent that I could place.
“I’ve got a wicked hangover. You know what a hangover is?”
“You needn’t be patronizing,” she said, rather defensively. “Yes, of course I know what a hangover is. In your case it is the result of the drug you were given. You are suffering what I believe are called withdrawal symptoms.”
“In that case I’ll skip the repeat dose,” I said. Involuntarily, I groaned. “You wouldn’t care to tell me what I’m doing here?” I asked hopefully.
“I wish I knew,” she replied. “You’re a problem,'and naturally problems always get wished off on me. I wish you humans—! No . . .” She shook her head, wearily. “Forget it. It’s not your fault.”
The hangover seemed to be wearing off, and I tried standing up. The Angel retreated a few steps. I was taller than her, but not by much. It gave me an oddly satisfied feeling. I’ve been so used, for so long, to being a giant among “normal” people; now I felt as though I was among my own kind. This was what it must feel like to be normal-sized.
“Well,” I said, “just what is it you plan doing with me? Or hadn’t you decided about that either?”
She took another step backwards, nearly bumping into a hanging flowerpot thing. The plant in it looked like no flower I’d ever seen before. It had huge red leaves with yellow spots on them, and out of the yellow spots grew delicate little bluebell-like flowers—but they waved to and fro, as though sniffing the air for some elusive scent. I felt my body’s automatic animal response, my neck tingling as my hair tried to rise, my mouth quirking into a vestige of a threatening snarl. I clamped down on my emotions, and took my eyes off the plant-thing, back to the Angel.
“You’re in my apartment,” she said. “We took you from those Nazi people. They gave you a heavy dose of narcostymine. It immobilizes the conscious centers of the brain, and, in sufficient quantities, causes total unconsciousness. When we found you, you were quite unconscious.”
“They musta given me a second dose when the first didn’t take right away,” I said. “I didn’t even notice.” “You’ve been unconscious for hours,” she went on. “Finally, when it became obvious you would not revive until after working hours, they gave you to me to take care of. It is what you humans call passing the buck.” She gave me a bitter smile.
“So now I’m all yours, huh?” I said sarcastically. “How nice. Your very own human pet.”
“Stop it!” she said with a sudden flash of anger. “You have no right to say that. None at all. You know nothing about us, nothing about me at all.”
“Too true,” I agreed. “Enlighten me, why don’t you?”
The light was too dim. For a moment I was sure she’d blushed.
“I—my name is Shama. I am the junior member of the legation here. This—my apartment, is here above our offices so that I can tend to things, like . . . like, you.” “How old are you?” I asked.
“How old? I—I would be perhaps twenty-five by your reckoning, your growth rates.” She seemed curiously ill at ease, on the defensive.
“What do you people want with me?” I asked, pressing my advantage.
It was the wrong thing to say. I’d gotten her off herself as the subject. She became brusque, businesslike again. I’d reminded her of our true relative status again. “You seem to be the object of a city-wide hunt among all your human extremist groups—the so-called ‘underground,’ ” she said. “Naturally, that interested us.”
“The yellowjackets,” I said, and then at the look on her face, “your cops—they seemed pretty anxious to get their hands on me back when things were all starting. That was before I’d become the local football.”
She sighed. “All right,” she said. “Just where are you from?”
“You don’t seem all that eager to find out.”
She gave me a sharp look. “As you have discovered, there are drugs which are capable of prying from you all we might want to know. I am in no mood for interrogating you now.”
I shook my head. “This whole bit seems pretty fishy to me. What the hell do you have me here for? Why not park me in the local jail?”
“For the time being, you are quite as safe here.” “Yeah? What’s to stop me from knocking you down and moving right on out of here?”
She smiled. “Try it.”
“Huh?”
“Try it. Go on—knock me down.”
“Well, I, uhh . . .”
“You can’t hurt me. Try.”
Feeling foolish, I raised my arm to give her a halfhearted blow. I swung, and—
It felt like I’d plunged my fist into an instant deep freeze. I shook my arm, and rubbed my hand. The circulation began coming back to it gradually.
The halo—the aura—it was some kind of protective field around her. She was as safe as Fort Knox.
“Well,” I said sheepishly, “so much for that bright idea.”
“You could not escape, anyway,” she said, and motioned me to follow her over to the draped windows.
She pulled a cord, and the drapes moved back along the wall.
We were facing a pair of full, picture windows, meeting in the corner at right angles. And what pictures they held—on the left, lower Manhattan. From what I could see, I judged that I was in the orange monstrosity that, a few thousand of my footsteps ago, had been the Time-Life Building.
The other picture window had an imposing metropolitan scene visible from it, too.
Only not of New York City.
At first I thought it was some kind of floor-to-ceiling TV picture, presumably transmitted from the Angels’ home planet. In Manhattan it was sundown; the other city was in late afternoon or early morning.
Vast towers dwarfed the Empire State Building visible in the New York window. In the golden twilight, a myriad of vessels in many sizes and of totally alien design flitted through the vast mountain range of huge buildings. An infinite variety of colors jewelled the fliers and the
buildings. The Angels had introduced this patterning of rich colors on Earth, and here it was almost grotesque to attempt to blend together such impossible hues. But ... on that “elsewhere” planet, in that endless city, something made it all come out right, and the incredible rainbow of color swept in front of my eyes in a unified blaze of beauty that was dazzling.
And then for a moment I was almost terrified. I had noticed that Manhattan was a quieter city in this world, when I first stepped into it; behind plate glass, it was even more quiet. But I could hear sounds from the other “window” . . . and for the first time I consciously realized that both windows gave a fully three-dimensional view. . . .
From the alien window came strange random whistles and shrieks of sound, muted through the glass, strange hums and glitterings of sounds dashing through the air, incomprehensible noises so varied it was almost like jnusic. And in its rich discordancy, it seemed to fit the magnificence of the city whose brilliant yellow sun was low on a horizon hidden by such countless huge buildings.
For a moment I was sure that if I chose, I could jump through the window, and end up—dead, to be sure— in the alien city that was so alive and so vivid before my eyes.’
“Truly it is a beautiful sight, Shalianna the Glorious,” came the Angel’s soft, fragrant voice behind me.
“Yes ...” I breathed.
In that moment, the Angels became real to me—this world became real to me.
Up to then, it had been a series of neatly administered shocks, each picking up when the last had worn thin.
First, I’m in a different place. The future? No, a different now, Then I start encountering the crazy people who inhabit this now, and each of them in his own way manages to add a bit to my growing pile of shocks.
But throughout it all, I must have been clinging to a few doubts about the whole thing—call it my last shreds of sanity.
Okay, I met an “Angel.” Swell; she’s just a big girl with a force-field or something wrapped around her. It’s still like on TV, right? These are still cute little science-fiction gimmicks. I might be on a Hollywood set, and about to wake up—if I get knocked out often enough.