by Brian N Ball
Marvell snorted.
The creature heard and raised its head.
Liz leaped back, teeth chattering, tail waving stiffly. She presented herself to Marvell, who reached out a reassuring digit but still she wailed in fright. The thing frightened her.
It was bigger than it had seemed. It stank abominably. And it was alive and unharmed!
“Marvell!” called Spingarn, recognizing the features of the Plot Director even beneath the overlay of anthropoidal characteristics. “Marvell, it’s me, Spingarn!”
Marvell gibbered back, enraged by fear.
He hated the stinking white ape but it was meat; he feared its roarings, yet they struck some chord of memory: he was appalled by the confusion he felt.
So he struck out at Liz, without meaning to harm her; she screamed in dismay and lobbed a chunk of dirt down at Spingarn with complete accuracy. The mud struck Spingarn in the face as he was about to try to reason with Marvell.
Seeing this discomfiture of the enemy, Marvell’s tone changed to one of triumph. He bellowed loudly, the trees echoing his yells. Liz screamed with enraged delight. She lobbed another clod of mud.
Again Spingarn’s eyes were filled with thick, clinging ooze. He cleared the mess away. It was so ludicrous! Trapped here by a pair of transmogrified Plot personnel!
Marvell leaned down to strike with his stone ax at Spingarn’s head. It was the first incautious move he had made since the abortive venture into the swamplands.
Spingarn saw his opportunity and reached out a brawny arm. Marvell was unbalanced, overconfident, perhaps too impressed by the female’s success in hitting the white ape with the mud missiles. He yelled in fear.
Spingarn pulled, and the hairy bulk of Marvell fell partly on him, partly in the ooze and water. Liz saw her mate disappear. At once she retreated to a tree. Shrieks and yells came from the pit. One identifiable bellow was for assistance.
She advanced, ax held before her in shaking hands.
Spingarn felt fear-driven hands clawing at his face. Yellow teeth tried to fasten on his neck. It was no time to try to appeal to Marvell’s buried human instincts. He struck with great power and accuracy for the nerve-centers.
Marvell screamed with rage and terror, for suddenly both arms were hanging numbly and uselessly, and his belly was full of pain. His teeth worked on the empty air and he tried to lurch forward so that he could bite the vicious white ape’s jugular.
The ape struck again, and Marvell slumped.
“Aggaw!” screamed Liz, looking down.
Spingarn wasted no time. In a lightning movement he located the heavy stone ax, picked it up and threw it at the female’s head. She dodged back, but a glancing blow was enough to render her senseless. The lighter, better made ax she had carried slithered down onto her mate’s belly.
Spingarn breathed heavily and felt a lightening of the spirit. His fearsome range of physical skills had not deserted him. He was Spingarn, the man who had survived in a thousand eerie epochs, Spingarn who surmounted all difficulties!
He addressed himself to the task of cutting footholds and handholds in the side of the pit. Marvell’s unconscious body would be a useful first stepping-stone. The buffoon had his uses, after all.
Horace came to the decision that he should intervene as Hawk lit the fuse. It had been a tricky situation. What Hawk proposed to do was well within the Probability Quotients, but one had to weigh this against the Primitive’s lack of understanding of the consequences of his plan.
After all, Spingarn was inside the Possibility Space, so he could not be aware of what Hawk intended. And Hawk was equally ignorant of Spingarn’s reentry into what he thought to be Satan’s domain.
“Sergeant,” said Horace, “ah, Captain Spingarn is in there.”
Hawk’s timing had been impeccable.
The uncanny gold-shot black space formed in its usual place beside the sergeant’s stone fortifications. Great whorls of power coalesced, and the emptiness that somehow lived flowered into being.
“What?” bellowed Hawk.
“The captain went through Hell Gates early this morning, Sergeant.”
Hawk’s pipe dropped from his mouth.
Sparks flew to the fuse. In a moment, the gray core of the fuse had burst into volatile life, and sparks showered briskly from it.
“Get down!” bawled Hawk. “ ’Ware blast!”
Horace obeyed. Hawk jumped behind a stone wall.
The barrel was engulfed by the fantastic, blazing radiance of the entrance to the Alien’s Possibility Space just as it exploded.
A huge rush of hot wind passed over Hawk.
Worse followed.
Molten sand spumed into the air. A shower of crazily spinning fragments of pure incandescence leaped upward, black-gold globules of uncanny radiance that swamped the sunlight and turned the sky purple-black.
Writhing chunks of matter were hurled high up, and Hawk could see the chains of things that might be animals whirled high above him. Linked things danced in a frenzied, interwoven pattern of evolution. To Hawk’s incredulous gaze, it was as if the boggarts were gradually becoming transmuted into more familiar beasts as they progressed. For a moment, even Hawk’s ossified and Primitive mind could grasp the Alien’s massive design.
He could glimpse into its grandiose scheme and see how the basic chromosomes of the human body had been built into strange fabrics; how varying shapes could be built into the cunning harmonies of the new gene-patterns.
“Bowels of God!” Hawk exclaimed. “Hawk’s verily hoist with his own petard! Me poor Captain Devil Spingarn, where are ye now?”
Spingarn felt the surge of violence as the Alien reacted to the explosion. Great waves of appalling violence beat around him and the two apes.
The pit vanished, and so did all sense of belonging to a fixed order of space and time. A terrible radiance invested the space he had possessed.
Spingarn knew what had happened.
Once before he had been in this non-place, outside the familiar dimensions, away from all that was comprehensible.
Spingarn felt even thought sliding away.
Molecules and eerie submolecular structures danced zanily into his eyes and out through the back of his head. For a moment, he thought he heard the female ape saying, “You must be Spingarn!” and then the zooming undulations of the Alien’s restructuring of space and time brought an end to all senses.
* * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Spingarn knew the terror to come.
Three blobs of quintessential blackness engulfed all thought and sight and sound in a raging hollow space. Spingarn was aware of the wide-eyed, shocked gibbering face of Marvell-ape, and the astonished orange-flecked eyes of a human female who was forming before him, shedding fur and tail and round comical ears: the ape and the woman reflected his own awareness of the horror of otherness, the huge and sweeping presence of something so alien and gigantically powerful that they felt a worm of pure terror biting into their souls.
Marvell-ape squealed, all animal, but with a human incredulity behind the large, rolling, red-rimmed eyes. The young woman put her hands to her head in a child’s gesture of tormented fear.
He read her expression.
It was worse than the awful blow to the psyche that came with cell-fusion, for the alien force burned with a furious impatience in every corner of the body and brain in a single clamoring, raging instant. And it was the woman’s first time.
What Marvell-ape suffered could only be guessed.
At least, for Spingarn, there was a contact. The piece of himself that met the furious torrent of energy had encountered the Alien before. And, now that the thing had emerged from its eerie, enigmatic retreat behind the black-gold corridors, he knew how to communicate with it.
“Spingarn!” he tried to yell, but it was a soundless call, simply a huge projection of what he thought himself to be. “Me!”
It knew him. Of course it knew him!
Hadn’t he fou
nd it? Hadn’t he rescued it from its macabre, hundred million-year entombment in the deep fault below Talisker’s crust? A fault so old that vast layers of strata had sealed it from the gaze of the humans who had come centuries before Spingarn’s time to build the first of the Frames and insert into the rocks below the surface the vast dimensional engines that controlled the barriers!
And hadn’t he formed a strange alliance with the Alien? That early, arrogant Spingarn, the man who had reactivated the Frames of Talisker had indeed formed a most unholy alliance with the all-powerful, blind giant roused from its antique burial! It had been a terrible combination of intellects, two beings from different Universes, both shrewd, cunning, dominant, malicious and wildly irresponsible. Together, they had planned the mad Frames of Talisker.
Vile and terrible results had come from that union of intellects! And he, Spingarn the Probability Man, had been ordered to right the wrongs he had done to so many of the weirdly transformed Time-outers of Talisker!
There was a reckoning to come!
The woman urged words, ideas forward.
In the confined and yet endless space that the Alien had created for the meeting, the courageous companion of Marvell-ape had recovered from the mind-gouging shock of the terrible presence.
Spingarn felt a glow of pride in this display of human tenacity. He heard, perhaps imagined, the words she spoke.
“Alien?”
Whirlpools of fantastic streamers of light and power writhed into the space. A semantic nightmare began. The woman screamed and screamed again at the unutterable strangeness of what the Alien was projecting as she asked it to identify itself. The pit of blackness was invested with fire and furious whirlpools of doubt, pride, fear, shocking bewilderment and, always, that cloud of otherness that was the hallmark of Talisker’s eerie inhabitant.
“Gawd!” whispered Spingarn, and immediately the Alien fastened on this new idea and sprang ten thousand images of all Spingarn knew as associations with the Deity into the black-gold straining emptiness. Vast globules of holiness solemnly dissolved into one another as weird and forgotten memories of gods strode through the Alien’s projected space. Gods bellowed, bowed, grinned, blessed, cursed, blasted the ghosts of their followers and chewed on their souls. Spingarn tried to divert the Alien’s attention from his inadvertent exclamation.
“I am the Probability Man!”
The Alien allowed the racing clouds of deities to writhe away and the pit of emptiness was full of a vast unseen but vivid acknowledgment of his presence.
Marvell-ape was somewhere within the raging blackness too, a long-armed rolling-eyed Marvell that was totally lost in the pit. And the woman. She was there. Spingarn saw that some incredible chance of chromosome-structuring had brought her back into the human epoch, shuddering back down the chain of evolutionary history. Marvell was still stranded, but she had returned to human form!
And she was alive with questions!
Her mind almost completely disoriented, there was still the vital human force of desire for knowledge within the space she occupied!
She asked his questions for him.
“Spingarn, what is it doing?”
Confusion!
Again, blistering, chaotic arenas of semantic nightmares, as the Alien strove to reach to the two human minds.
Spingarn saw every moment of his doings on Talisker as the Alien dissected everything that had happened to him over the past few years. He saw himself aglow with pride as the first batch of Time-outers encountered the unholy device built as a Clockwork Zodiac. He watched arrogant, selfish Spingarns feeding data into the cell-fusion machines so that the terrible gene-mutations would take place. He saw himself the subject of one of those mutations, a figure horned and with a wickedly barbed tail that lashed at the thyroid giants as they reached for him with huge, bloodstained hands!
Spingarn formed the question once more.
“Why the Possibility Space? Why the evolutionary experiments?”
Pride!
The Alien was very conscious of its achievement.
Contempt.
Spingarn knew that it had survived the entire history of life on Terra. It was older than the oldest of Terrestrial life forms. The Alien was grotesquely amused at the thought of the evolution of his race.
“You needed me!” Spingarn bawled, unafraid. “You needed me! I rescued you when you were buried—you and I needed one another!”
Confusion again.
The otherness in the space boiled around Spingarn, and again he felt the fiery touch of the Alien’s power. It bit into his brain like a serpent. The female screamed.
“Why?” yelled Spingarn, writhing.
There, was a pause, and the thing’s shocked refusal to answer gave Spingarn and Liz Hassell a moment to look at one another. Liz put a hand to Marvell-ape’s shoulder; it accepted the comforting touch. Spingarn saw recognition in the ape’s eyes. It knew the dangers.
“It’s frightened!” said Liz. “Spingarn—I know it’s frightened!”
“Of course it’s frightened!” snarled Spingarn. “It doesn’t know about us or itself or Talisker or any part of the Galaxy—it doesn’t have anything in the Universe to relate to but its crazy experiments here!”
Marvell-ape gibbered softly, eyes wide and brown.
Liz pointed at Marvell.
“He’s supposed to know how to help it!”
All speech stopped as the Alien returned.
The Alien’s potent and chaotic presence filled the space again, and speech was impossible. It showed them how the ghastly experiment had been conducted, a weird seminar on cell-fusion and psyche recycling that stretched through three hundred million years of life. Spingarn and Liz watched in dazzled amazement as men and women reeled away, changing their physical characteristics in some subtle way that reflected their own basic psyches. Small, quiet women became vast sinuous reptiles living like cows at the bottom of swamps. Angry and sullen men strode down the evolutionary ladder to end as glittering armored insects, while large and quietly-vicious men became primordial carnivores. Spingarn and Liz looked to one another for reassurance, while Marvell-ape hid its eyes.
The Alien waited for a reaction.
“Why?” gasped Spingarn.
Pride again. It was a considerable achievement. An exercise of powers. The Alien had built something. It radiated a feeling of success.
It waited once more.
Spingarn was helpless. There was nothing he could do or say to the Alien. His simple plan had been to show the Alien how a small fragment of order might be made in the chaotic Frames of Talisker: it had responded by showing that it understood the complete and total sphere of Terrestrial activity.
“Marvell!” Spingarn heard Liz call. “Marvell, you know something!”
“Aggaw!” groaned Marvell.
The Alien indicated its mounting impatience. A hint of its vast bewilderment was enough to drive all thought of rebellion and helplessness from Spingarn’s mind.
“Marvell knows!” he yelled to the Alien.
Marvell?
Spingarn saw a fantastic projection of Marvell, whole glittering sequences of Marvells winding around the uncanny emptiness the three ill-assorted creatures inhabited. Marvell, bald, top hat pushed back, bawling uncouth comments to his assistants: Marvell in the green-gold robes of a Mithraic priest: Marvell swanning through an asteroid belt with the graceful wings of the Solar Cultists on his shoulders. Arrogant, conceited, dominant, frequently a failure. Loud, violent, lecherous.
“Yes!” Liz Hassell’s voice rang back.
How?
It was interested. It had reached the two human minds, and accepted that they promised help.
“He’s a bloody ape!” snarled Spingarn, exasperated suddenly. “How can a silly ape like Marvell do anything?”
Marvell-ape nodded wisely. It covered its eyes and whimpered afresh.
“Yes!” Liz yelled. “He can! He can talk—we had speech! It wasn’t much, but we could
talk to one another— we had a language! I can translate still—it’s still here!”
The Alien waited. Spingarn could feel its slow surge of impatience. It matched what he had once felt. There was a recognizable anxiety in its confusion.
“Try,” he told Liz.
Liz Hassell was herself almost tongue-tied. Here, in this impossible hole in the fabric of space and time, she was about to try to translate the ideas of a twenty-ninth century Marvell for a being that had lain deep below Talisker’s haunted Frames! And the language she would use was that of an anthropoidal ape!
Trained as she was in linguistics, it was not an easy task. The words she and Marvell had used during the days of blood, mating (she remembered the mating with a shock of shame), and running from other animals still clung to her memory. The trouble was that there were so few words! A total lexicon of twenty-three words, some of them admittedly usable in combination with others, but none of them relating to advanced abstract ideas. So few words to ask how Marvell-ape could begin to orientate the bizarre Alien!
She held Marvell’s hand and looked into his wide brown eyes. Spingarn watched. The pulsing sense of otherness invested the tiny enclosed pit of emptiness.
“Aggaw-aff?” she said.
Marvell-ape heard the words of the white ape and the sounds of his mate. Liz offered him a finger. Marvell hesitated. Liz thought he might bite it off.
She hid her disgust as he nipped her gently.
She was his mate, but she stank. She had voiced the sound of conciliation.
“Aff,” he said. His male pride began to return. So far, since the world had vanished, he had shown only surrender signs. Now, he stood.
“Uff ?” the stinking mate asked.
“Agg-agg-agg!” Marvell-ape said scornfully.
“Well?” demanded Spingarn.
Liz gestured impatiently, Marvell-ape watching with care. He did not like the abominable white male ape, but it frightened him. It could wound with its hands. He would kill it, given a chance.
“Wait!” Liz said. “I’m just getting him in the right associative field. I’m starting with his notions of the good life—I’ll get him on to food-gathering and—and other things. There’s a couple of word-sounds that mean things like soon and time-past. I’ll lead in to those later.”