by C. L. Moore
“I wish you weren’t,” Bill said uncomfortably. “I don’t like it.”
“All we can do is guess, at this stage. Guess—and wait. We can’t tell without a control, and we haven’t got any control. There’s only Rufus. And—”
“And Rufus is changing,” Bill finished for him. “He’s changing into someone else.”
“Don’t talk like a fool,” Morgan said sharply. “He’s changing into Rufus, that’s all. A Rufus we never knew, but perfectly genuine. My guess is that most of the adjustments took place in adolescence, and he isn’t going back that far. I’m only suggesting that the stories you heard about his young days may have been—well, not entirely true. He’s confused now. We’ll have to wait until the changes stop and his mind clears up to find out what really happened.”
“He’s changing,” Bill said stubbornly, as if he had not been listening. “He’s going back, and we don’t know where it will end.”
“It’s ended already. He’s on his last series of shots now. You haven’t any reason to think he won’t stop at thirty-five, when we wind up the treatments, have you?”
Bill laid down the book and looked at it thoughtfully. “No reason,” he said. “Only—the current’s so strong. Biological time flows so fast when you reach the midpoint. Like the river flowing toward Niagara. I wonder if you can go too far. Maybe there’s a point beyond which you can’t stop. I’m an alarmist, Pete. I have a feeling we’ve saddled a tiger.”
“Now you’re mixing metaphors,” Morgan said dryly.
In June Bill said, “He won’t let me in his room any more.”
Morgan sighed. “What now?”
“The decorators finished two days ago. Dark-purple hangings all around the walls. I’m sure they thought he was a little crazy, but they didn’t argue. Now he’s got an old clock up there he’s been tinkering with, and he found a table somewhere with a chessboard top, and he’s making the strangest calculations on it.”
“What kind of calculations?”
Bill shrugged irritably. “How do I know? I’d thought he was getting better. Those spells of … of false memory haven’t seemed to bother him so much lately. Or if they do, he doesn’t talk about it.”
“When was the last?”
Bill opened his desk drawer and flipped the notebook cover. “Ten days ago he said the view from his windows wasn’t right. Also that his room was ugly and he didn’t know how he’d stood it all these years. It was about then that he began to complain of these pains, too.”
“Oh, the ‘growing pains.’ And they began to localize—when?”
“A week ago.” Bill scowled. “I don’t like ’em. I thought it was gastric—I still think it is. But he shouldn’t be having any trouble at all. He’s perfect, inside and out. Those last X-rays—”
“Taken a week ago,” Morgan reminded him.
“Yes, but—”
“If he keeps having a bellyache after meals, something may have gone wrong only a few days ago. Remember, Rufus is unique.”
“He’s that, all right. Well, I’ll start all over, if I can catch him. He’s getting very skittish these days. I can’t keep up with him any more.”
“Is he out now? I’d like to have a look at his room.”
Bill nodded. “You won’t find out anything. But come on up.”
Purple curtains inside clogged the door for a moment as if the room itself were trying to hold them out. Then the door came open, and a draft from the hall made the four walls billow and shiver with rich, dark-purple folds, as if things had run to hiding everywhere an instant before the two men entered. The only light come in a purple glow through curtains across the windows, until Bill crossed the room and put back the draperies that covered them. Then they could see more clearly the big carved bed, the chest of drawers, the few chairs.
At the bed’s foot stood the chessboard table, chalk marks scrawled across the squares. At the back of the table stood the clock, an old-fashioned mantelpiece ornament that filled the room with a curious sort of hiccupping tick. They listened a moment, then Morgan said, “That’s funny. Wonder if it’s accidental. Do you hear a … a halfbeat between the ticks?” They listened again. Tick-ti-tock went the clock.
“It’s old,” Bill said. “Probably something wrong with it. What I want you to look at is the second hand. See?”
A long sweep-hand was moving very slowly around the broad face. It did not match the other two. The presumption was that Rugus had found it elsewhere and added it very inefficiently, for as they watched it leaped about three seconds and resumed its slow crawl. A little farther on it leaped again. Then it made almost a complete circuit, and jumped five seconds.
“I hope Rufus isn’t keeping any dates by this thing,” Morgan murmured. “Lucky for him he doesn’t repair clocks for a living. What’s the idea?”
“I wish I knew. I asked, of course, and he said he was just tinkering. It looks like it, too, in a way. But here’s something funny.” Bill stooped and opened the glass. “Look. It’s very small. Here, and over here, see?”
Bending, Morgan made out upon the face of the clock, irregularly spaced between the numerals, a series of very tiny colored markings painted upon the dial. Red and green and brown, tiny and intricate, with curled lines like Persian writing. All around the face they went, varicolored and enigmatic. Morgan pulled his mustache and watched the erratic second-hand twitch around its path. Whenever it jumped it came to rest somewhere upon a twist of colored lines.
“That can’t be accidental,” he said after a moment. “But what’s the idea? What does it record? Did you ask him?”
Bill gave him a long look. “No,” he said finally, “I didn’t.”
Morgan regarded him narrowly. “Why not?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe … maybe I didn’t want to know.” He closed the glass face. “It looks crazy. But when it comes to machinery that measures time—Well, I wonder if Rufus doesn’t know more than we do.” He paused. “You turned his mind loose to explore time,” he said almost accusingly.
Morgan shook his head. “You’re losing your perspective, Bill.”
“Maybe. Well—what do you make of the chessboard?”
They looked at it blankly. Careful scrawls had been traced almost at random within the squares, though it seemed evident that to the mind which directed that scrawling, purpose had been clear.
“He could just be working out some chess problem, couldn’t he?” suggested Morgan.
“I thought of that. I asked him if he’d like to play, and he said he didn’t know how and didn’t want to be bothered. That was when he threw me out. I think it’s got something to do with the clock, myself. You know what I think, Pete? If the clock measures hours, maybe the squares measure days. Like a calendar.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’ve got one idea, though. Suppose during the hypnosis he imagined he did see something that—disturbed him. Say he did see something. Posthypnotic command stopped him from remembering it consciously, but his subconscious is still worried. Couldn’t that emerge into a conscious, purposeless tinkering with things that have to do with time? And if it could, do you think maybe he may suddenly remember, some day, what’s behind it all?”
Morgan faced him squarely across the table and the hiccupping clock.
“Listen, Bill. Listen to me. You’re losing your perspective badly over this. You won’t do Rufus any good if you let yourself get lost in a morass of mysticism.”
Bill said abruptly, “Pete, do you know much about Faust?”
If he had expected a protest, he was surprised. Morgan grimaced, the heavy lines deepening around his mouth.
“Yeah. I looked him up. Interesting.”
“Suppose for a minute that the legend’s got a basis of fact. Suppose that somewhere back three hundred years there really were two men who tried this same experiment and made a record of it in code. Does that give you any ideas?”
Morgan scowled. “Nothing a
pplicable. The legend’s basis is the old medieval idea that knowledge is essentially evil. ‘Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the Tree.’ Faust, like Adam, was tempted and tasted the fruit, and got punished. The moral’s simply that to know too much is to disobey God and nare, and God and nature will exact a penalty.”
“That’s just it. Faust paid with his soul. But the point is that the experiment didn’t run smoothly up to the end, and then suddenly collapse. Mephistopheles didn’t really present a bill and carry off his reward. Their experiment went wrong almost from the start—like ours. Faust was an intelligent man. He wouldn’t have bartered his immortal soul for a short fling on earth. It wouldn’t have been worth while. The whole point was that Faust never took Mephisto seriously until it was too late. He deliberately let Mephistopheles spread out his trumpery pleasures, perfectly sure that they wouldn’t give him enjoyment enough to matter any. And of course if they didn’t the bargain was void. It was when he actually began to enjoy what Mephistopheles had to offer that he lost his soul, not at the end, when the bill was paid.” Bill thumped the chess table emphatically. “Could a code tell you any plainer that the thing got out of hand almost at the beginning?” He looked at Morgan with narrowed eyes. “All we’ve got to do now is find out what the code for ‘soul’ means.”
“Got any ideas?” Morgan inquired sardonically. “I’m worried more about you, Bill, than I am about Rufus. I’m beginning to wonder if we haven’t made a mistake in our subject. You’re too close to Rufus.”
He was surprised at the look that came over Bill’s face. He watched him frown a little, thump the table again, and then walk to the window and back without saying anything. Morgan waited. Presently:
“I’m not, really,” Bill said. “Father and I never were very close emotionally. He wasn’t the type. Rufus, I think, could be. Rufus has all the warmth that Father lacked. I like him. But it’s more than that, Pete. There’s something in the relationship between us that affects me as Rufus is affected. It’s a physical thing. Rufus is my closest living relative, though he’s a stranger now even in appearance. Half my chromosomes are his. If I hated him, I’d still be linked to him by that much heritage. Things are happening to him now that never happened to a human being before, so far as we know. It’s as if, when you pull him out of the straight course of human behavior, you pull me too. I can’t look at the thing abstractly any more.” He laughed almost apologetically. “I keep dreaming about rivers. Deep, swift waters running faster and faster, with the abyss just ahead and no way on earth to escape it.”
“Dream-symbolism—” began Morgan.
“Oh, I know, of course. But the river itself is a symbol. Sometimes it’s Rufus on the raft, sometimes it’s me. But the riptide has always caught us. We’ve gone too far to turn back. I wonder if—”
“Stop wondering. You’ve worked too hard. What you need is a rest from Rufus and everything connected with him. After you get those X-rays and figure out what’s wrong with him, suppose you get away for awhile. When you come back Rufus will be thirty-five going-on-forty again and you can forget about the river and start dreaming about snakes or teeth or something like that. O.K.?”
Bill nodded doubtfully. “O.K. I’ll try.”
Three days later, in the Westerfield stydy, Morgan held an X-ray plate against the light and squinted at the shadowy maze of outlines. He looked a long time, and his hand was shaking when he laid the plate down carefully, scowling at Bill under brows so heavy they almost hid the expression of his eyes. It was an expression of bewilderment that verged on fear.
“You faked these!”
Bill made a futile gesture. “I wish I had.”
Morgan gave him another piercing glance and turned back to the light for a second look. His hand was still shaking. He steadied it with the other and stared. Then he took up another plate and looked at that.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “It never happened. It couldn’t.”
“The … the simplification—” began Bill in an uncertain voice.
“The wonder is he can digest anything, with this setup. Not that I believe it for a minute, of course.”
“Everything’s simplifying,” Bill went on, as if he had not heard. “Even his bones. Even his ribs. They give like a child’s ribs, half cartilage. I got to thinking, you know, after I saw that. I gave him a basal, just on a hunch, and he’s plus forty. His thyroid is burning him up. But Pete, it doesn’t seem to hurt him! No loss of weight, no increased appetite, sleeps like a baby—why, my nerves are twice as jumpy as his.”
“But—that’s impossible.”
“I know.”
Silence. Then, “Anything else wrong?”
Bill shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I was afraid to run any more tests on him after that. It’s the truth, Pete—I was afraid to.”
Morgan put the last plate down very gently, and turned his back on the table. For the first time there was uncertainty in his motions. He was no longer a man supremely sure of himself. He said, in an indecisive voice, “Yeah. Well, we’ll start tomorrow and give him a thorough going over. I … I think maybe we can find what’s—”
“It’s no use, Pete. You see that. We’ve started something we can’t stop. He’s gone too far along the river, and the current’s got him. All the basic life processes that move so fast in youth are moving in him now faster than we can move. God knows where he’s going—not back along any path a man ever heard of before—but he’s into the current and we can’t do a thing about it.”
And after a moment Morgan nodded. “You were right,” he said. “You’ve been right all along, and I’ve been wrong. Now what?”
Bill made a gesture of futility. “I can’t tell you. This is still your party, Pete. I’m just along for the ride. I saw the dangers first because … well, maybe because Rufus is my own kin and the pull was … tangible … between us. When he went off the beam I could feel it psychically. Could that explain anything?”
Morgan sat down with sudden limpness, like a man whose muscles have abruptly gone weak. But his voice, after a moment’s bewilderment, began to grow firm again.
“It’s up to us to find out. Let’s see.” He shut his eyes and rubbed the closed lids with unsteady fingers. There was another silence. Presently he looked up again and said, “He’s been changing from the very first. I suppose I’ve been assuming that something in our treatment had shuffled his chromosomes and genes around into a new pattern of heredity, and he was beginning to throwback to some ancestor we never knew about. But now I wonder if—” He paused, and a startled look crossed his face. He stared at Bill with eyes that widened enormously. “Now I wonder—” he echoed tonelessly, as if his lips repeated something meaningless, while his mind raced ahead too fast for utterance.
After that he got up with a sudden, abrupt motion and began to pace the floor, his steps rapid. “No,” he murmured, “that’s crazy. But—”
Bill watched him for a moment or two longer. Then he said in a quiet voice, “I had the same idea quite awhile ago. I was afraid to say anything, though.”
Morgan’s head jerked up and he stared. Their eyes held in a long look, awe in Morgan’s. “That they were shuffled—too much? The chromosomes could have fallen into a pattern—too different?”
“You saw the X-rays,” Bill said gently.
“Let’s have a drink,” was all Morgan answered to that.
• • •
When they were settled again, and there was something very soothing and matter-of-fact about the tinkle of ice in their glasses, Morgan began in a voice that strained a little for the prosaic.
“There may be a race that looks like Rufus. Or there may once have been. No use jumping at the impossible before we exhaust normal possibilities. I’ve been trying to think of any race at all with just this facial characteristics, and there isn’t one on earth today, but that’s not saying there never has been. No race sprang full-blown into the world, you know. You and I must have had remote ancestors who li
ved on Atlantis, or were contemporaries of the Atlanteans anyhow. And who knows what they looked like?”
“You keep forgetting,” Bill reminded him, still gently. “The X-rays. And this may be only the beginning. He’ll move faster and faster Physiological time is fast—terribly fast—as it nears the source. Do you think there was ever a race like Rufus—inside?”
Morgan looked at him over the glass rim. He caught his breath to say something forcefully, then let it out in a sigh. “No. I don’t think there ever was. Not here.”
“All right,” Bill said. “You take it from there.”
“How can I?”
“Try. I’m afraid to. My ideas are too … too credulous. I’m curious to see if your mind follows the same track. Go on—take over.”
“He’s a … a changeling,” Morgan began, groping. “There’ve been stories about changelings for a long time. Older than the Faustus legend. I wonder, was Faust a changeling too? Did he have the same potential trace of heredity that a time-reversal could make dominant? Changeling … fairy’s child … fairies? Fragile people, invisible at will, built to another scale than ours—another dimension? Other dimensions, Bill?”
Bill shrugged. “He can’t eat what we eat. If these changes go on, there won’t be a food on earth he can digest. Maybe, somewhere, there is.”
Morgan said abruptly, “Maybe the changes won’t go on, either. We don’t know they will. Are we making fools of ourselves, groping around in fairy stories for an answer we may not need?”
“I think we’ll need it, Pete. Anyhow, let’s go on and see what we get. Another dimension, you were saying.”
“O.K., suppose there were changelings,” Morgan said violently. “Suppose there are goblins and things that go bump in the night—”
“ ‘Good Lord, deliver us,’ ” Bill finished the quotation with a grin. “Use a little logic, Pete. I don’t expect you to believe the pumpkin turned into a coach. But if we apply the alchemist’s formula to the changeling idea, or the Faust legend, do we get anything at all?”