by Gahan Wilson
‘Have you exited it as yet?’
‘Not so far,’ said the Professor, ‘though I have used it, as you have seen, to project my carbonizing ray with great effect.’
He paused and took hold of his lapels with a gesture he’d probably developed years ago when he stood before his students.
‘So far, Mr Bone, I have traveled only as an observer, but, oh, the things I’ve seen!’
He paused, looked up, and rubbed his hands.
‘The Himalayas, for instance, the very tops of ’em. And I’ve seen the bottom of Mindanao Deep, as this window takes enormous inward pressure. And outward pressure, too, for—oh, Bone, you’ll envy me this!—I have seen Mars! He pointed triumphantly at his face and croaked it out, loud as he could: ‘With these eyes, I have seen Mars!’
He paced a step back and forth to calm himself, and then went on.
‘But I’ve surpassed even those experiences. I’ve achieved the illuminations which mystics have striven for in vain throughout the centuries! I have cleft the rock and observed that which has heretofore burned unseen!’
He glared wildly at us in a half squat with his fists in the air like an excited old gray monkey about to start hopping around in its cage at the zoo; then, maybe because it had dawned on him that he was tiptoeing on the edge of a fit, he lowered his hands carefully, blinked, pursed his lips and moved his face around until it got back something of its professorial calm.
‘A technical point you will find interesting, Mr Bone,’ he said. ‘While transiting hyperspace I have found it is just as many theorists proclaimed it would be: One finds oneself to be entirely reversed, both left to right and inside out. It is a thoroughly remarkable and disturbing sensation, but flesh and blood is not at all the same on the other side of our three-dimensional Möbius strip as it is on this, so that while total reversal is undeniably quite awful when first experienced, one finds one grows accustomed to it and shortly one learns to function in that bizarre and surreal condition. Happily my final calculations have conclusively assured me that the reversal will occur again, returning me to this, my normal condition, when I reenter three-dimensional space at some other point.’
‘Let us sincerely hope for your sake that is what does occur, Professor,’ said Bone, with an ominous edge to his voice, ‘as I imagine being inside out would put even a person as resourceful as yourself in a thoroughly awkward position.’
The Professor stared at one for a moment, then gave him a really dangerous frown, and nodded coldly.
‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘Well, in a moment of inspiration, I imagine I can make some adjustments which might produce exactly that effect on certain passengers. Yourself for instance. Perhaps, when we have finished with our present business I might find the time to carry out just such an amusing little experiment, now that you’ve suggested it.’
‘It iss zo nice to zee old friends make the jokes mitt one another,’ burbled a voice from one side, and we turned to see Dr Schauer glide into the room, pushing before him a rolling gurney with a sheeted body strapped to its top, just like Frankenstein, with Waldo cowering along behind him as the mad assistant in order to complete the picture.
The body on the gurney was doing a pretty good job of writhing in spite of all the straps, and when it finally managed to heave its head clear enough of the sheet to rear it up on its neck and look around at the room, there was the face of President Parker, all right, but from the way its eyes were bulging and from the look of terror it was wearing, I was pretty sure it had to be Parker himself, since nobody would ever have programmed an expression like that into a Waldobot because it would have frightened the kiddies.
His head jarred to a stop when it pointed toward us and he cried out: ‘Mr Bone, these people are crazy! These people are out of their minds! You’ve got to do something about them at once!’
‘I shall do what I can, Mr President,’ said Bone, calmly.
Dr Schauer patted Parker gently on the shoulder, then smiled up with a lot of yellowed teeth showing.
‘I am pleased you have managed to be present at our little moment of triumph, Mr Bone,’ he said in a harsh, hissing voice that made the small hairs on my neck quiver.
Bone looked him up and down.
‘I’m so glad you’ve dropped the accent,’ said Bone. ‘I found it to be one of your most tiresome.’
Schauer said nothing in reply to that, only reached up and took hold of the back of his head with both hands in order to slowly and carefully peel off his hair and face.
‘My God, what’s he doing?’ cried Parker, pulling away from the sight of Schauer’s horribly collapsing features as far as his straps would let him. ‘My God, he’s a Chinese gentleman!’
— 18 —
‘MY ROBE,’ hissed the Mandarin, spreading his arms, and a stone-colored guard gently slipped a blood-red sleeve over the long, curving nails of each extended claw. ‘My cap,’ he breathed, and carefully, held reverently with both slate-gray hands, a black cap with a bright ball of coral fixed to its top was settled on his high, bulging skull.
He sighed, comfortable to be himself again, and shook his bony body gently into place. Then he let his green cat’s-eyes travel over each of us in turn.
‘I see there is no need for introductions,’ he said, ‘since we have already met. Mr Enoch Bone and myself, in particular, have met.’
‘As you say,’ said Bone. ‘In particular.’
‘How many times has one of us been absolutely sure he had at last destroyed the other, Mr Bone?’ asked the Mandarin. ‘How many times has one of us seemed to see the other’s body burned or crushed or torn beyond repair? How many times have I raged to learn you’ve once again survived?’
‘Far too often, I am sure, my dear Mandarin,’ said Bone. ‘It has definitely been a frustrating business for us both. Perhaps, this time, we can finally settle things between us. As an example that such relationships can be effectively terminated, permit me to inform you that Spectrobert is dead. “Really and truly,” as Mr Weston put it.’
The Mandarin’s eyes widened, then he clenched his fists in front of him and bared his teeth in what seemed to start out as a snarl, but developed into a spreading grin.
‘Excellent!’ he barked.
‘I was afraid you’d be pleased,’ said Bone.
‘Do be disappointed, Mr Bone: You are indeed a bearer of good tidings!’ hissed the Mandarin. ‘That childish, operatic creature killed all my men but these three with his statue gas. Did he die in pain? Did he suffer?’
‘Mr Weston has the details,’ said Bone, but when the Mandarin turned his glittering green eyes in my direction I had to shake my head and smile in sympathy.
‘He died peacefully,’ I said, ‘with his daughter by his side. Making plans to destroy New York City.’
‘It’s true,’ said Athenee. ‘He was imagining the aluminum eagles on the top of the Chrysler Building melting down its sides.’
‘You too,’ said the Mandarin, meaningfully, after a pause. ‘Both of you. I remember you, Miss Athenee, as a very rude little girl. You teased my marmoset, do you remember? I have not forgotten!’
He finished that last off with a kind of bark, then dismissed us by turning to a gray guard by his side and waving a talon at the president.
‘Unstrap this public fool,’ he said, then turned to Waldo. ‘You free his legs. The two of you, get him to his feet.’
Waldo hurried to the foot of the gurney to obey, but when he’d unbuckled the band running over the presidential ankles he stopped and stared up at the Mandarin with a worried frown.
‘Didn’t you hear what they were talking about,’ he asked, ‘as we came in?’
‘Of course I did,’ said the Mandarin.
‘Well, then,’ said Waldo, ‘aren’t you afraid we’ll all be killed? They were talking about that machine! How it might turn us inside out!’
Bone tsked, which is something he only does when he wants to annoy, and the Mandarin knew it.
‘
Dear me,’ said Bone, indicating the Professor’s machine with a sidewards wave, ‘you don’t mean to tell me there is actually some plan afoot to travel in that thing untested?’
The Mandarin looked at Bone scornfully.
‘You disappoint me, Bone,’ he said, then plucked Waldo forward by his sleeve. ‘This one is a bottomless pit of fear and trembling; there is no end to his pathetic trepidations. But such cowardly talk from you is quite unexpected.’
‘Before we get to all that,’ said Bone, ‘I should like to ask you something out of simple curiosity: How did you manage to make that man your creature? Particularly, how did you involve him in a plot against the leader of his country, since, in reading numerous puerile articles on Mr Waldo in preparation for my visit to his ghastly fairground, everything I’ve come across indicates he is an eminently patriotic fellow and devoted to President Parker in particular. I would have thought a traitorous act of this nature would have been, for him, almost psychologically impossible.’
‘You have described the precise reason why I used him as my tool,’ said the Mandarin, pulling the cringing Waldo even closer to him. ‘I knew the president would never believe this miserable entity could plot against him, that he would therefore walk trustingly into any trap involving him. And it worked, Bone. All your many warnings were quite useless, were they not?’
‘This man had gone blind,’ continued the Mandarin, speaking softly, almost gently, and, putting one claw on the top of Waldo’s head, he began kneading it with his nails like a cat kneads a pillow. ‘He kept it from the public because his advisors had told him it would bother the children. But he could not see his Waldo World, he could not draw his duck.’
Suddenly, with two swift moves, he plucked off Waldo’s glasses and pinned his arms to his sides.
‘Look, and see the gift that only I could have given him,’ the Mandarin cried with a triumphant squawk, pushing Waldo forward, turning him this way and that to compensate as he writhed and twisted, trying unsuccessfully to hide his face from us.
‘That is very sad,’ said Athenee.
At first glance it looked as if some lunatic had stitched the frame and lens of a goggle into each one of Waldo’s eye sockets, and done it crudely to boot, since the skin that was sewn to the tiny holes bored into the frames’ edges seemed to be bunched and stretched more than was necessary, but as the Mandarin mercilessly shoved Waldo’s head closer to us, I saw the steel irises roll, I saw the glass pupils dilate and contract. From the way they pinched the red, swollen flesh as they moved, it was obvious they caused him pain, but the things were working eyes.
‘You see the horror in their faces?’ the Mandarin cackled, bending his head down, hissing into Waldo’s ear. ‘You see how disgusted they are at the sight of you?’
‘Hardly at him, Mandarin,’ sneered Bone, ‘rather at the one who has done this thing to him. My congratulations; it is quite an accomplishment. No one but you could have produced such a sublime medical achievement and then degraded it so completely.’
‘But wait,’ the Mandarin snarled at us, ‘you have not seen it all!’ and I was surprised to realize that in spite of all the years I’d dealt with the crazy bastard, I’d never understood how mad he really was.
‘You have them in your pockets.’ He turned, his tall body arching over Waldo’s, and shouted at him like an angry father. ‘I know you always have them. Give them to me!’
Then Waldo tried even harder to break away, but the Mandarin did something particularly vicious which made him howl in agony and scrabble out two round, white things from some hidden place in his coat.
‘Look at them,’ the Mandarin hissed, holding them out in front of us, rolling them around in his palm so we could see the blueness of the irises. ‘Precisely like his original flesh. See how they even quiver? I was going to fit them into his skull when we had finished, I was going to render him that supreme kindness, but no more!’
He spread his fingers, turned his hand until the eyes rolled off and dropped to the floor, bouncing just a little, and he was actually beginning to lift his foot when Bone roared at him like an old lion.
‘Pull yourself together, sir!’ he thundered. ‘If you want me to have any respect for you at all, you’ll leave off this ghastly play. That poor wretch has done his best to do your devil’s work. You have the president because of him. Return him those baubles. And try to do it with some dignity!’
The Mandarin, his leg still raised as in a T’ai Chi posture, studied Bone carefully for a moment, then let his foot gracefully return to the floor, beside, not on, the eyes, as Waldo fell to his knees and gathered them up.
‘They are not baubles,’ the Mandarin said calmly, ‘they are miracles.’
‘As you will,’ said Bone.
‘This has been a ridiculous demonstration,’ said the Professor. ‘Thoroughly ridiculous.’
I wasn’t taught in his kind of school, but I bet headmasters there stand the way he was when they’re thinking of how they’d really like to cane some student.
‘Ah,’ said Bone, ‘we had forgotten your faulty machine.’
‘I have told you that my calculations leave no doubt as to the safety of an exit at some other point,’ the Professor said, with his chin up and trembling like an angry turkey’s.
‘Are you seriously proposing that the lives of your associates,’ said Bone, ‘not to mention this extremely valuable hostage, be risked in a completely untested device? By the way, Mandarin, what exactly do you intend doing with the president?’
‘We shall hold him hostage, as you say,’ said the Mandarin. ‘For a fortune. The crime will have the shock of innovation, and the Americans will pay dearly for him. Then we shall return him, but he will be altered.’
He turned to the president, now standing beside him with a gray guard holding his arm, and tapped him on the top of his head. ‘Here, just under his pompadour. I will, of course, see to it that the scar is undetectable. He will be totally receptive, thenceforth, to all suggestions from myself.’
He paused, stood back, and stroked his cheek thoughtfully with one long talon, examining the machine.
‘I dislike admitting it, but Bone’s point is well taken, Professor,’ he said. ‘If you are mistaken not only will my plan be compromised, the world could lose me before I have fulfilled my historical mission and that would be an intolerable tragedy. The device must be tested.’
‘This shows a most offensive lack of faith in my abilities,’ said the Professor, drawing himself up and bringing his swaying head to a rock-solid stop.
‘Merely prudence,’ said the Mandarin, making a tiny little bow.
He walked to a console near the machine, flipped a few stitches, and a huge gray area glimmered on the far wall.
‘Observe a television camera mounted on the ceiling of the Professor’s machine, directed to look through the porthole.’ He pointed to the glimmering. ‘On that screen is what it sees. In this fashion we have journeyed indirectly on previous excursions with our learned friend, observing by proxy the wonders he has seen. We placed another camera to show us the craft’s interior, but the images it sent from hyperspace were totally chaotic, so we abandoned it. I think that last item is a particularly clear indication there may be some risk in exiting from the machine at another destination.’
‘I have proven the total lack of danger scientifically. There is no disputing my figures,’ the Professor said, snapping it out. ‘You have my word on it.’
‘Pshaw,’ snorted Bone, turning to the Mandarin. ‘You know the man’s a megalomaniac, unable to tolerate contradiction. Assurances from such a person are useless.’
The Mandarin’s green eyes shone and dimmed.
‘We must see a test,’ he said, with a tone of total finality.
The Professor shrugged because he saw it was hopeless. As he walked to his machine, I felt a nudge from Bone’s elbow, and started watching him out of the corner of my eye.
Bone had his hands clasped in front of him in ord
er to pretend he wasn’t doing anything with them, but, making tiny moves, he tapped himself with his forefinger then wiggled it at the guard on his right, and when that produced a look of understanding in my eyes, he transferred the point to me then wiggled in the direction of the guard on my left. After that he raised and lowered his eyebrows and I did the same back to him and we both turned to watch the Professor’s demonstration.
It looked even fancier turned on, with something like two hundred dials and oscillators all lit up and pretty, and the round port in its center had started to throb and glow in a shade of violet I’d come to know well. The glimmering screen on the wall brightened and pretty soon it was giving us a repeat image of that part of the laboratory we could see for ourselves in front of the machine, so the tv monitor was working fine.
‘It is functioning properly, of course,’ said the Professor, then he turned in his chair and looked back at us, framed in the violet disk of the porthole which was now shining steadily and brightly, his fringe of hair glowing like a halo.
‘I won’t forget this, Bone,’ said the Professor. ‘Mark that.’
Then he turned back to his controls, pulled down a lever at either side, and he and his machine both were gone.
‘Observe the television image,’ said the Mandarin, indicating the screen with one robed arm. ‘The angles are difficult to follow, are they not? The shapes are difficult to read. One’s eye cannot trace the outline of any image without experiencing sudden, inexplicable reversals. There is a definite sensation of nausea. You are seeing hyperspace from the port of the Professor’s machine.
‘Marvelous,’ said Bone. ‘Magnificent. The man’s a genius, no doubt of it. What a pity!’
The Mandarin shot him a green glance.
‘Because he did not choose your righteous path, Mr Bone?’ he sneered, his teeth glistening in the bright, violet light from the screen.
Bone looked at him and may have been about to reply, but then the tv screen seemed to go black and it was a moment before we realized our eyes were only adjusting to a night scene: a stretch of empty road edged with boulders with rugged mountains beyond them, and a flat, moonlit sea for a background.