Stairway to Forever

by Robert Adams

  They camped the night atop the last low hill overlooking the Pony Plain. Fitz had emptied everything from the bike and sidecar except basic tools, some water, his carbine and ammo, knowing he would be at the ship, barring disaster or misfortune, well before the fall of the next night. Then, just as dawn was streaking the eastern sky, there was a bright, rosy flash high in the sky above the distant lines of sand dunes and from that flash fell three red stars.

  Fumbling in his haste, Fitz dug frantically under the greasy tools until he found the canvas case that held the Very pistol. He started to fire, then thought to check the loaded shell. Replacing the green one with a red, he held the projector at a steep angle and fired the signal.

  "Danna, I'm coming!" he breathed.

  The plain seemed normal, with small herds of ponies, a flock of the rat-tailed ostriches and some smaller beasts in evidence. At the spot where he had slain the Teeth and Claws, there were only a few of the bigger bones and part of the skull and a few teeth remaining, all now marked by toothmarks and scouring sand, thoroughly desiccated by sun and wind. Well, it was only fitting that the monster that had fed for so long on the fauna of that plain should finally go to feed said fauna itself; that was simply Nature's way.

  With the knowledge that Danna was waiting for him, the journey across the plain seemed to last forever. Why was she calling him back so soon, he wondered. Had the situation with the I.R.S. and Blutegel improved, was that it? No, more likely, considering the man involved, it had gotten far worse, he thought glumly. If only there was a safe place for Danna to be that was closer to the hills than the ship was.

  "So, what do you want, Fitz, egg in your beer?"

  Right now, he'd take the beer, gallons of it, iced and icy cold. Then the eggs, a gross of them—fried eggs, boiled eggs, poached eggs, coddled eggs, a five-egg omelet with cheese, cheddar cheese, lots of it, and minced onions and green peppers and garlic and shallots. He could almost taste a whole big head of steamed cauliflower with a sauce of Swiss cheese and saffron and pepper. Creamed spinach and rolls. Bread of any kind! Salt sticks, swirl rye, hot buttermilk biscuits melting in butter, with dark honey. Anything but bloody meatl

  Funny, he had always eaten a good quantity of meat, when he could get it or had been able to afford it—steaks, chops, cutlets, roasts, patties, thick stews and ragouts, kebabs—but these past weeks of living on little save meat, with occasionally a few berries or wild greens and the rare fish, had awakened within him a distaste for even the thought of meat or blood. No, his hunger now was for vegetables, grain products, eggs, milk and cheese, spices and herbs. And he meant to have his fill of them, too, even if he had to go back into that other, overcrowded, stinking, paved-over and mostly hostile world to get them.

  "But," he chuckled to himself, "I'd better not let Kassandra know that I'm in the least egg-hungry."

  All journeys must come to an end and, just after midday, Fitz came to the first low dune. Another half hour, and he was wheeling the bike up the gangplanks into the waist of the sometime warship. And Danna was standing on the quarterdeck, above him, wearing only a dark, healthy tan and a metallic something that held her reddish-brown, now-longer hair back upon her neck. She looked far younger than he had recalled her and he knew that he never

  before had seen any woman so beautiful and appealing to him.

  She came down the ladder and walked to where he stood and kissed him, thoroughly, but then she stepped back and said, "Fitz, come into the cabin with me, please. There's something . . . youve got to tell me if I'm going nuts or what/'

  In the cabin, the shutters still were bolted and the gas lanterns still were blazing out their stark white light. The ancient ship's table was laid with a plastic plate, some utensils and a wineglass. Beside the table hung a slender green wine bottle . . . that was what he thought at first glance, at least.

  "I was in here last night, eating some cheese and bread and a glass of wine before I went to bed, Fitz. Then I somehow shoved the bottle too near the edge of that table and, when I moved to turn a page in the brief I was reading, it wobbled off and fell. I thought in the split second that if it broke, I'd have to go back into that other world tomorrow and get more because it was the last bottle here and I didn't want to go, because I'd have to dress and I just wished it would stop falling and not break or spill . . . and it did, Fitz. It . . . it's still there, I laid awake half the night just looking at it. Is it really just sitting there, six or eight inches above the floor, with nothing to support it, like my eyes tell me it is? Please, Fitz, tell me!"

  Fitz squatted and ran his flattened hand around all sides of the bottle, beneath it and over it. Taking it by the neck, he lifted it easily, sniffed at the opening, then put it to his lips, threw back his head and drained the last few ounces of tepid Moselle down his dry throat.

  Standing up, he held the empty bottle at waist height and let it go. It fell and clunked upon the

  boards. He picked it up and tried once again, and the same result occurred.

  Intent on the experiment, he absent-mindedly meshed his mind with hers and thought to her, "Danna, when I next drop this bottle, try to remember just what you did or thought last night and stop it from hitting the deck. Okay?"

  But she had paled under her tan, her green eyes were wide and she was backing the length of the cabin, both her hands held before her, as if to ward him off.

  "My God, Fitz, what. . . you were talking to me— weren't you? Weren't you?—-but your lips didn't move once. And . . . and still I heard ... no, I didn't hear you, either! But I . . . understood you."

  "It's called telepathy, I believe, Danna. That's how I've been communicating these last weeks, over there in those hills. I guess I just forgot and did it to you. But look, it's simple, love, I can show you how to do it, too. See?" He "showed" her.

  An hour or so of experiments demonstrated that, not only could Danna stop the bottle in midair, but she could also move it vertically or horizontally in empty air, in any direction and for the length, width and height of the cabin, at least. But she could not seem, for some reason, to show him how to arrange his mind and his thoughts to emulate her feats. They tried her out on other larger, heavier items and found that size or weight made no difference, she could move them around and about at will.

  After a long, refreshing swim in the cool sea, Fitz came back to the ship and ate such canned vegetables as remained in the larder and water—foul, chemical-flavored water from the other world. Then and there, he made a note to resupply the ship with

  bottled spring water rather than the jugs of chemical soup from the tap.

  Sitting at the table with pencil and pad, making up a list of the things he needed from the other world, still nude from his swim, he dropped the pencil and it rolled off the table. With a muttered curse, he started to bend to retrieve it, then stopped himself and gave the mental method one more try. It worked this time. The yellow pencil rose, jerkily at first, then more smoothly, up and up and up.

  "Danna! Look."

  Forgetting the list for the nonce, Fitz and Danna played with the pencil and scores of other objects around and about the cabin like a pair of children with a new toy—he would raise something, she would then move that same object laterally or lower it and vice versa, or one of them would raise an object and then cause it to dodge others sent whizzing at it by the other one. After a while, they took their esoteric game outside, onto the beach, and soon had the air about them cluttered with colorful seashells, bits of driftwood and some empty plastic water jugs, as well as the original green wine bottle. They continued to play until the setting sun told them that it was near-ing the time that they should leave for the other world.

  Back in the cabin, Fitz rapidly completed the list, then hurriedly dressed. They had strung the water jugs together, intending to tow them, like so many balloons, across the beach and into the crypt, then up the stairs and across the backyard. Fitz had already raised the small fleet of jugs off the floor, but when he placed about his
neck the stainless steel chain that held the back door key, all of the jugs tumbled back onto the floor, and when he tried to

  raise them once more, he found that he had not the power to do so.

  Wonderingly, he lifted off the chain and dropped it and the brass key upon the table, then he tried again to raise the jugs. He overdid it and the jugs, all of them, zoomed up to ceiling height. He deliberately picked up the chain, and the string of jugs plopped back down onto the floor.

  Calling Danna in from where she was waiting in the waist of the ship, he first showed her, then had her try to raise the jugs, with and then without the steel chain. It was the same for her as for him, with the steel chain in contact with any portion of their bodies, they were devoid of the power to move objects with their minds.

  "Fitz, what in the world . . .?"

  He shrugged, "Don't ask me, Danna. I'll tell you, let's see whether it's the steel or the brass, first, huh?"

  They discovered, quickly enough, that brass, bronze, copper, silver, gold, aluminum, nickel or tin, none of them affected their performance, but anything iron or steel, if in contact with their skins, made their power to mentally lift and move objects completely disappear.

  "Well," remarked Fitz, when they were done testing, "now, at least, we know why I couldn't do it when I first arrived, anyway. I was heavy with steel— revolver, knives, steel fittings on my belt, the steel frames of my sunglasses, and so on. And that's so much for my thoughts of raising the loaded bike with me on it over rough ground; I could probably still raise it and move it, but I'd most likely have to get off to do so.

  "Okay, you have no iron or steel on now, so you lead the ducklings and I'll tow the heavy, clumsy

  stuff after you've raised it. I've got a brass chain in my house, as I recall, I'll replace this steel one with it as soon as we get there. Why does Pedro want to see me so bad, anyhow, Danna?"

  "He didn't tell me that, Fitz," she replied, as she raised the jugs again and took their tow string in her hand, "he just said to get you back as soon as possible and gave me a wordless telephone code to tell him when you were back. You see, we're pretty certain that the phone in your house is bugged."

  "Herr Blutegel?" he asked, grimly.

  "Who else," she answered. "And Fitz, that title may be hitting a bit closer to the mark than anyone knows yet."

  While Fitz towed the bigger bundles inside the house, Danna first lowered the jugs, then, grinning mischievously, tied the end of the string to the rail of the steps and raised the plastic jugs high up to almost the limit of the string's length before she, too, went inside.

  Unbeknownst to her and despite the early hour—it was just about dawn here, in this other world—she and Fitz, too, had been seen by malicious eyes, and the moment she had closed the door behind her, Calvin Mathews picked up the plastic bucket of strawberries he had been picking in the garden of Fitz's next-door neighbors and set out for home at a rapid clip.

  Inside, with the blinds tightly drawn and all the drapes closed, Danna used the telephone while Fitz used the shower. He had just come out of the bathroom when the telephone rang. Danna picked it up and switched on the speaker, that he might hear, too.

  A cheery voice said, "Good morning to you. This is Chuck Taylor, here at the WTRI Studios. Your

  telephone number was chosen by our blindfolded guest, here on the WTRI AM Show, and if you can answer our question of the day, you'll be the lucky winner of FOUR . . . HUNDRED . . . DOLLARS. Now, what is a teledu and where does it live?"

  "I'm sure I don't know," said Danna, sounding tired and disgusted, "and don't call back, this is an unlisted number, you turkey!'' Then she hung up and looked at Fitz, smiling. "Pedro got the message and he'll be here at four o'clock."

  Standing nude and damp in the doorway, he grinned. "Do you want to eat or drink . . . first?"

  Still smiling, she kicked off her shoes, stripped off her shirt, then stood up and unbuttoned her shorts, letting them drop to the floor. "Fitz, dearest, I am not a nymphomaniac, but you have, after all, been gone wherever for fifty-one days and ..."

  "The hell I was," yelped Fitz. "No more than fourteen or fifteen days, at the most."

  Around noon, over their brunch, he told her of the Norman knight, Sir Gautier de Montjoie, and of Cool Blue, the baby-blue (most of the time), telepathic lion. He told her of Puss, the leopard-sized, grey feline that also was telepathic and sometimes appeared to him as his long-dead grey housecat, Tom. He told her of the Teeth and Legs—the fearsome beast of which Puss had warned him and which he had had to kill out on the Pony Plain. He told her of the man, the Norman sergeant he had also had to kill. He told her highlights of his trek through the hills and vales and valleys beyond the Pony Plain, and he told her what little he knew of this entity he was supposed to be seeking, this Dagda.

  "Fitz, weren't you ever told any of the old Irish fairy tales as you were growing up? Didn't you at least read some of them? The Dagda was supposed to

  be the King of the Fairies, of the Little People, the Ones Who Were Here Before, who called themselves the Tuatha De Danann. Do you suppose . . . authorities say that all of the old myths have at the least a tiny grain of fact at their root . . . could this strange dimension you and I have somehow managed to penetrate actually be what the myths referred to as 'Fairyland? All these strange things ..."

  She sat up straight in her chair, shook her tousled head and frowned. "Oh, listen to me carry on. A respectable, respected, fifty-five-year-old attorney, and I sound like a fugitive from the funny farm. There are no such things as fairies, so there was never any such place as fairyland, they were all just tales concocted for children."

  He shook his head slowly. "Danna, I know just what is going through your mind right now, because I felt that way at the start of all this myself. But Danna, I had to come to grips with the fact that these things are all real, they exist in reality—a strange world beyond a stone wall under my backyard, a casket of immensely valuable gold coins on board a wrecked, medieval ship on a beach where thirty-foot crocodiles come to nest, ostriches with long tails and fur, flying lizards and gliding rabbits, a leopard-sized reincarnation of my dead cat and a baby-blue lion that used to be a black musician in this other world eighteen years ago, a party of thousand-year-old Norman Crusaders who still think they're somewhere in Syria on their way to Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

  "Face facts, like I had to do, Danna—it's all real, it's there, it exists. It's as real as this."

  He laid down his knife and Danna felt herself rising up out of her chair, floating on empty air, some foot above the seat. Stunned by the singular

  experience, she said nothing for a moment, but Fitz did.

  "Well, I'll be damned! I did it! I did it! Now, let's just see what else I can do."

  As slowly as she, he too arose until they were again facing on the same level. He reached out, took her hand, then proceeded down the hall, towing her behind him, into the bedroom, where he gently lowered both of their bodies into their accustomed place on the rumpled, well-used bed. There, he floated his alarm clock over to him and set it for three-thirty, then floated it back to its place on the nightstand.

  "Danna," he said, smiling, "not only is it all real, just think of the immense possibilities of this sort of a shared talent on lovemaking. Hmmm?"

  Pedro Goldfarb arrived closer to four-thirty, muttering darkly about afternoon traffic and the patent stupidity of county road-planning commissions. Once seated in the parlor, he got immediately down to business.

  "Fitz, there's little time to waste. Despite our cloak-and-dagger machinations, it's entirely possible that Blutegel et alii already know you're back out here. Despite the fact the he's in trouble with his service, the nitwits are letting him stay on to earn out his pension, so he still has a degree of power and he seems to have taken on the cases of you and Gus Tolliver as a very personal crusade; possibly, he means it to be his swan song.

  "It's thanks to Gus, really, that you two are so dee
ply in the soup. The inheritance thing, I might've been able to clear up fairly easily and inexpensively for you, but Gus has a hatred of the I.R. S. that borders on the paranoid, I feel. He had to do the very things I advised him not to do. That he did it

  with his money was bad enough, but he did it with healthy chunks of yours, too.

  "Fitz, the tax laws of the United States are incredibly complicated and even the collectors of them— the honest, candid ones—will tell you that they are not in any manner or means fair to the average taxpayer. But Fitz, the way to thread your way through this dangerous maze is to hire a good firm of C.P.A.s and/or a reputable tax attorney, not to do what Gus has been doing for the both of you—smuggling currency out of the country.

  "Now level with me, Fitz, you don't yet know just how much could be riding on truth at this point. Did you sign any papers Gus may have presented you? Some of them may have been documents written in Spanish or Portuguese."

  "No, Pedro, not that I recall," said Fitz. "I have at least one copy of every business-related thing that I signed, they're all in my files, and you now have my files. Why not ask Gus?"

  Pedro leaned back in his chair. "Gus Tolliver and his wife are no longer in the United States, Fitz. The last call I had from him was from Rio de Janeiro, but he indicated at that time his intentions of leaving Brazil. Just where he is now, I couldn't guess.

  "He said, as did you, that you had signed nothing involved in this sticky business. The good news of that is that, if we can prove it, you may be off at least one prong of Blutegel's hook. But, of course, the bad news is that you may well have lost the bulk of your profits from sales of your gold coins. I don't know, I always had the gut-feeling that Gus Tolliver was a completely honest, aboveboard man . . . but I've been wrong before, like any other human being." He smiled fleetingly and barked a short laugh, for no reason that Fitz could understand . . . not then.