House of Many Worlds

by Sam Merwin Jr

  "It's like an immense garden party with Japanese lanterns!" exclaimed Elspeth, her fatigue fading as they moved slowly amid bizarre traffic along a broad two-lane avenue. In the parklike center of the road trees tossed up fantastic silhouettes against the looping strings of lights that provided much of the illumination.

  Forty-foot-wide sidewalks flanked it after the fashion of the Champs Elysées in Paris; and great houses, palaces and gardens lay beyond them on either side, many of them brightly lit. Baton Rouge was evidently one of the great cities of the Columbian Republic. Elspeth felt a quick inner response to its drama and beauty.

  "It's mighty well guarded," observed Mack, his eyes taken by the vari-colored uniforms of police and military that flashed brilliantly amid more somber male civilian costume and the gay dresses of strolling women.

  "But it's so gay—so Continental!" Elspeth said.

  "Let's get to the best hotel we can find," replied the practical Mack. "If we can get a room. This town looks full."

  He was right. After three dismal tries they finally obtained lodging at what was evidently the city's supreme hotel, Bienville House. Elspeth felt like a hollow-eyed ruin as she surveyed the splendors of the lobby while Mack signed the register.

  "Tropical lushness," she told herself as she studied the opulent drapes that framed round-arched, two story windows and tried not to notice the magnificent features, figures and grooming of the women who paraded past, most of them on the arms of slim-waisted young officers in vari-colored uniforms or well-fed civilians in evening attire almost as colorful.

  "We are most happy to be able to accommodate you," said the room clerk, a black-browed individual with a charming smile. "It is only by sheerest chance—"

  "That's fine," said Mack curtly. He eyed Elspeth oddly, a bit grimly, as they followed a golden-haired bellboy to an ornate lift. But she failed to register this as an immensely tall gray-haired officer, stunningly handsome in blue, scarlet and gold and literally spangled with gold lace and medals, entered the lift after them. Her fingers tightened on his arm.

  The general or marshal, or whatever he was, was virtually coal black of skin. For once even Mack was startled—perhaps as much by the deference the white liftman and bellboy showed him as by the fact that this man of obviously high rank was a Negro. He smiled at Elspeth, then at Mack, as the lift rose slowly.

  "You must have traveled a long way," he offered in a deep and beautifully soft voice.

  "Oh dear, do we look that terrible!" exclaimed Elspeth. Mack, for once, was too stunned to speak. The ebon general smiled again.

  "If you did, I should scarcely have remarked upon it," he said with a courtesy that warmed the poet. Before she could shovel up a reply the lift stopped and he got out. But at the door he said, "I hope you enjoy your stay with us."

  They got out a floor higher up—the fourth and, as she discovered later, the top story of the hotel. As the bellboy put down their two suitcases to unlock a high white-paneled door, Mack asked, "Who was that—back in the lift?"

  "You don't know Marshal Henry?"

  The boy seemed astonished. "He's here to see President Wilkinson—about this Reed Weston business. He's our Chief of Staff."

  "He's a very charming gentleman," said Elspeth.

  "And a very good tipper," said the boy, opening the door. Elspeth entered first, took in at a glance the high ceiled expanse of the chamber, and crossed its soft carpet to fling open one of three french windows that opened on a wrought-iron balcony. The leaves of a palm tree unfolded before her and beyond and below she could see the flashing loops of the lights along the great avenue.

  "Magic lantern city," she thought, or would "goblin city" be better? She sought to catch some phrase that would convey in cold letters the warmth and magic around them, the softness of the air, the fragrance of its millions of blossoms.

  After a while she turned back to the room, feeling as if she were at least six inches off the floor and floating, floating.

  SHE was jarred back to earth quickly by the sight of Mack—his coat off, his tie pulled loose, his shirt half unbuttoned—stretched out in one of the huge room's several easy chairs. He blew cigarette smoke lazily at the ceiling as she entered.

  "Don't detonate," he told her. "It's the only decent room in the city. I had to tell them we were—er—together to get it. Apparently the marriage rules are a bit lax in this world. That clerk downstairs told me it didn't matter before I could lie about us and say we were."

  Her eyes ranged quickly to his suitcase, already open on a stand beside hers near the door, to the luxurious bathroom half exposed to her right, to the immense platform bed whose four posts rose with slim dignity, pointing toward the ornate plaster pattern of the ceiling above them. He followed her gaze.

  "Cherubs," he said, looking up at them. "Cute—what?"

  "Mack Fraser," she began, "if you think for a moment that I'm going to go to—"

  "Relax, my iron virgin," he told her blandly. "You can sleep on the couch if you spurn my company. Perhaps, if you snore, it might be better that way."

  "Oooh!" said Elspeth, unable to find verbal expression for once in her life. Mack just lay back in the chair and grinned at her evilly, enjoying her discomfiture.

  Suddenly, overcome with fatigue, with the emotional and nervous strains of the past few days, Elspeth collapsed on the floor and burst into tears. She was dimly conscious of Mack, swearing but concerned, rising quickly and coming over to her. Crying released the tension and made her feel better inside, but her head felt stuffy and she knew her nose was red.

  "Very well," he said gruffly, bending to get his hands beneath her shoulders and pull her to her feet. He held her to him briefly and gave her back an awkward pat as she laid her head against his shoulder. "I was only fooling—except about the fact that this is the only room in the city."

  "But what are we going to do?" she sniffed, wishing for the moment that she were dead. Now Mack would really have something on her. He stood away from her, thrust a handkerchief under her nose.

  "Blow," he told her. Then, when she had complied, "It's not that bad. Grab a robe and take a bath and you'll feel better. I'll go downstairs and see if I can't find some books that will give us some information on this world we're in. When you get through bathing, I'll take one. Then let's do some boning. And don't worry—I'll sleep on the couch. I planned to anyway."

  "You're so kind and I'm so simply stinking," she heard herself say unexpectedly. She stifled another burst of sobs, managed a teary smile. "All right, Mack," she said meekly.

  "That's better," he told her, releasing her and moving toward the door. "You won't be stinking after you bathe."

  "You star-faced mole!" she snapped at him. He was laughing softly as he closed the door behind him.

  After thinking things over briefly, Elspeth took his advice. The warm water of the immense sunken tub washed away her travel dirt and most of her tension and left only a comfortable glow. When she emerged, Mack was already back. He waved toward a portable table adorned with bottles, ice and glasses.

  "Help yourself," he told her. "It's my turn. And you might glance these over while I'm in the tub. We've got to do a lot of boning up in a hurry." He nodded toward the half dozen books and periodicals which lay piled on a straight chair near the door.

  By the time Mack rejoined her, looking unexpectedly scrubbed and little-boyish, Elspeth, the barely-sipped drink in front of her forgotten, was already deep in concentration upon a brief popular history of Columbia, which he had found downstairs. He had to give her a shake before she became aware of him.

  "Hey!" he said. "What have you found out?"

  "Oh!" She looked at him blankly, returned to herself. "We have a terrible lot to learn," she said. She motioned vaguely at the other reading material he had brought to the room. "Better see what you can get out of those. I'll give you a precis of this. It's the same world as ours up to about 1814."

  "Then old Horelle wasn't kidding," said Mack, picking up
the other books and magazines and settling in a chair. He seemed, she thought, to have become at least temporarily adjusted to their transfer of worlds. It had taken concrete evidence of sorts. Mack was no one to let a mere idea convince him.

  She delved back into the book. The differences in the past—and therefore in the present—were fascinating. It all hinged on the Burr-Wilkinson conspiracy, which had been renewed with belated success. In return for pulling the fledgling United States out of the war with England, the conspirators, abetted by Spaniards and Louisianians and New Englanders, had overthrown the Madison regime following Cockburn's burning of Washington, made peace with England and founded the Columbian Republic.

  ELBA and Waterloo had come and gone while the conspirators—called Founding Fathers in the book—organized their new nation along the hierarchal lines of the ancient Venetian Republic—with the franchise limited to the few, slavery permitted and public office unofficially but actually a matter of inheritance and appointment rather than election. Wilkinsons, Alstons and the like were repeated in prominent posts generation by generation.

  New Orleans was made the capital, for the new republic's attention was focused very much to the south rather than toward Europe. One of the conditions under which England had permitted its founding was that it use every influence to break up the Spanish grip on Latin America. Apparently, however, the British had not planned to have this accomplished as it had been.

  In 1820, Mexico and South America had been ripe for revolt—largely incited by Columbian money and arms. Swift frigates of the Columbian Navy, under the command of Commodore Stephen Decatur, and flying the rebel Mexican flag, had raided St. Helena, had successfully brought off Napoleon and sailed with him to New Orleans.

  By the time the British Government was aware of what had happened Napoleon was safely ensconced on a throne in the viceroy's palace in Mexico City and all Latin and South America were up in arms. With Austrian and Russian aid in Europe the more or less United Americas had been able to beat off the combined British and Spanish efforts to regain the lost territory.

  The British had captured Boston and the Columbians had taken both Montreal and Quebec—cities which were returned when at last peace came in 1826. The Mexican Empire was firmly established as far south as the Panama Isthmus. South America itself was divided into one kingdom, Brazil, and the republics of Venezuela, Peru and Patagonia. These divisions still remained.

  Columbia and Mexico, then under the rule of the former Duke of Reichstadt, had fought a brief war in 1841 over the disputed territory of Texas, with the Columbians winning handily, thanks largely to the genius of Generals Pillow and Quitman.

  In 1850 the Russians, discovering gold close to their California settlement, had attempted to enlarge their holdings by conquest. Mexico and Columbia, along with the British in Canada, had quickly united to drive the minions of the czar from the Western Hemisphere and had divided up the territory among themselves.

  Then had come peace until 1869, when the northeastern states, resentful of their waning role in the republic, attempted to secede. The contest had lasted six years and had all but finished Columbia. But the South, the Midwest —tied to the South by the Mississippi waterway and the greatness of New Orleans—and the Far West, had ultimately been able to prevail against the ten rebellious states—New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio—following the decisive battle of Elmira.

  Thoroughly whipped, the Northeast still played a secondary role in the nation, was famed for its summer resorts and its down-at-heel lost-causism rather than for its heavy industry. Columbia and Mexico had sent a combined expeditionary force to Europe to abet the French in the first war of the West against the union of Turko-Austro-Prussian forces which threatened to overrun the continent. With the help of Russia they had finally been victorious in 1906.

  The second World War had been against Russia, whose czar had sought to destroy the Ottoman Empire and gain a Mediterranean Sea outlet. But the others had turned on him and driven his Russian forces back. Since then the world had been living in uneasy peace.

  Internal troubles in Columbia were serious, Elspeth discovered, despite the legitimist tone of the book she was reading. The slavery problem had settled itself. Compelled by world opinion to enforce humanistic legislation on slave owners, the Columbian Republic had discovered them to be economically impossible. More and more slaves were freed as their support grew more expensive than paying wages to unindentured workers until, when at last slavery was abolished in 1901, passage of the bill had been a mere formality.

  There was virtually no color line, save among the few oligarchial families that actually held the reins of power. Freed slaves for more than a century had been winning high places in government and society, had proved to be invaluable citizens, today held many key positions in business, the government and the professions.

  BUT Columbia, thanks to its history and governmental setup, was too limited a republic to endure without trouble. And trouble it now had in the form of Reed Weston, a highly successful industrial inventor who had turned on the hand that fed him.

  Frowning as she sought to read between the lines, Elspeth detected a profit motive in the revolt. Evidently invention and scientific progress—at least as far as their practical applications went—were strictly limited by the oligarchy.

  This, she thought, would account for the poor roads, the few cars, the lack of planes, the amazing weapons of the military they had seen. The rulers of Columbia were not permitting the enrichment of their masses through large-scale cheap production if such a thing were possible. But they were seeing to it that their defenders got the best in weapons and equipment.

  Apparently this had been too much for Reed Weston to endure. He had attempted to push through legislation that would widen the scope of unlimited private enterprise. He had acquired a considerable following, not only in the still underdeveloped Northeast but in the heart of the republic itself.

  When irrevocable presidential veto finally blocked his efforts he had basely resisted arrest and had fled, first to the Black Hills of South Dakota, then to Missouri, where his supporters had been slowly, secretly gathering around him.

  His forces enlarged, he had moved into the Ozarks, thus becoming an open threat to the capital at New Orleans, and insisted that President Wilkinson either withdraw his veto or resign and permit the unthinkable—an election open to every man in Columbia, whether he owned property or not. It was, the book said, anarchy.

  There was no talk of the impending trouble with Mexico but Mack, in his reading, had stumbled across some of that. After listening to Elspeth's summary, he told her about it.

  "It's a grab like Texas," he said. "Southern California this time. A lot of Amer-Columbians have settled there and now Wilkinson and his gang are claiming they aren't getting fair treatment. It's my hunch Wilkinson and this black marshal of his are planning to kill two birds with one stone. They'll heat up the country for a war with Mexico, arm well and move in. Then, if this Weston doesn't join up, they'll be able to pin a traitor tag on him and make it stick. Frankly I wouldn't like to be in his shoes."

  "That's our job, isn't it?" queried Elspeth. "To get him a new pair of shoes, I mean?"

  "Yeah," said Mack, stretching and yawning. "I don't see why we have to go all the way down to New Orleans. It seems to me we ought to be able to contact him a lot more quickly from here."

  "This is the play-city for Wilkinson and his friends," Elspeth told him. "I'll lay odds it's too tightly guarded and screened. It certainly is beautiful."

  "Yeah," said Mack, yawning again, "Let's turn in."

  Although it was late when they got to sleep, Elspeth was awakened early the following morning. Beneath her window the stillness was broken by men's shouts and the sounds of running feet.

  She got up and went out on the balcony and looked down, tying the belt on her robe as she did so, pushing the hair back out of her eyes. Below, through the dark green palm fronds, she saw a pair of
soldiers in lavender uniforms chasing a civilian, who was running desperately along the broad sidewalk.

  "Stop, you scum!" shouted one of the soldiers, raising an oddly designed weapon to his shoulder. When the man, failed to halt, the soldier pressed something. There was a backflash over his shoulder behind him, a flicker of intense heat in front of the flaring muzzle.

  Where the running man had been there was nothing—nothing but, for a wavering instant, an impression of still-running disembodied shoes. Then they, too, were gone.

  The other soldier, apparently a non-commissioned officer of some kind, looked angrily at his mate, then examined the place on the pavement where the running man had been and scuffed at a faint brown stain.

  "What's the idea of burning him here?" he demanded, his voice crackling mad. "You know how the lieutenant is about these sidewalks. He'll have us—what is it?"

  He looked around, following the other soldier's pointing finger, which was aimed directly at Elspeth on the balcony.

  V

  INVOLUNTARILY Elspeth drew back. But there was no doubt about the purpose of the soldiers beneath. Horrified she sought to peer down at them from behind the shelter of palm fronds, saw one of them raising his dreadful weapon toward the balcony.

  At that moment an officer appeared and struck down the disintegrator—if that was what it was—before it could be fired again. He cursed the soldier in low but violent tones. The man saluted, again pointed up at the balcony.

  "I'm sorry, sir," he said, "but she saw—"

  "You muddle-headed idiot!" said the officer. "This is going to raise all kinds of a stink. I gave you men strict orders not to use your—"

  She lost the rest of it but, without understanding why, got a definite impression that she had witnessed something unpardonable and that steps were going to be taken. Terrified, she ducked back inside the big room. Mack was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.