by neetha Napew
“Wait,” He said, moving past me to the gate where He stopped, examining the lock. He took off His gloves and placed His hands on the padlock. He stared at the thing a moment, as if imprinting the mechanism on His mind. Finally, He grunted and sucked in huge lungfulls of air. While I watched, the tip of His finger elongated, thinned to the thickness of a coathanger wire, and snaked into the keyhole on the face of the lock. A minute or so passed with the wind beating on us like a hundred rubber sledgehammers. Then something clicked. Clicked again, louder. That was the most joyous sound I had ever heard, for I had not been looking forward to the prospect of scrambling over an eight-foot fence in twenty to thirty mile-an-hour winds with a twenty-five pound pack on my back. Perhaps I’m timid and afraid of new adventures, but I preferred walking through to climbing over. He withdrew His hand, reformed His finger into more conventional shape, put on His gloves, and pushed the big gates inward with a dramatic flourish that showed He had seen or read some pretty melodramatic stuff in His free time back at the laboratory.
“Very tricky,” I said, slapping Him on the back. “You should think about going into show business. Get yourself the proper manager and go on the circuit with a magic act.”
We moved inside, closing the gate behind and locking it again. Except for our prints in the newly fallen snow, there was no sign that the night park had been violated, and the continuing storm would cover even those traces in a few minutes. With that flimsy gate between us and the Port, I felt relieved, though I had no reason to. “We’ll follow the road for a while,” I said. “It isn’t likely anyone will be on it at this hour of the morning and in this weather.”
We began walking, goggles over our eyes and face masks pulled down to thwart the biting cold and the tremendous, razor-edged whip’ of the wind. The road had been plowed open after a recent storm, but the new snow was rapidly covering it once more. The snowbanks that had been formed on either side by the plows were layered, so many feet thick for each storm of the season. If this rugged weather continued all winter, the road would be closed before spring with nowhere to shove the succeeding deluges. We had not gone more than half a mile when He pulled off His face mask and said, “Tell me about this place we’re going.”
I reluctantly pulled down my own mask and winced at the stinging air. It dried my lips almost instantly and started cracking them until I could almost feel the skin slowly splitting under hard fingers of air. I shivered, blew out a cloud of steam. In the true Arctic, I am given to believe from various works I have read, the temperatures drop so far below zero that the breath, upon exiting the body, really and truly does freeze—at least the moisture in it does. The lungs, in this infernal cold, are susceptible to freezing from contact with the icy, dry air, and one must breathe shallowly to avoid this fate. Now, as we trudged along this park road, far from the ice plains of the true Arctic, I marveled that there could be any place in the world with temperatures so cold that these would be classified as a warm spell. “Is it so important to know that I have to risk freezing my mouth and picking up a lovely blue haze on my pretty face?”
“I’d just like to know,” He said.
I shrugged. “At the base of the mountain and up to about five thousand feet, they lease cabins to prominent citizens for vacation retreats. Don’t misunderstand me. The World Authority wouldn’t want anyone thinking little things like these are reserved for the elite. That wouldn’t fit the Great Democracy claims. It isn’t exactly exclusively set aside for prominent people, but the prices are so stiff that only prominent people can afford to rent here. Same difference, though the politicians like the fine lines drawn in. Harry Leach—Doctor Harry Leach—the old man who ran City General when I interned there, leases one in the second level. It’s secluded. Nearest other cabin is slightly over a mile away. He keeps it stocked with food and fuel for sudden whimsical weekends.” Whenever a new student nurse happens to catch his eye and he can convince her an old codger like himself would do anything for such a lovely, young piece of candy, I thought. Those were about as whimsical as his weekends got.
“He doesn’t mind our using it?” He asked. I could see that He was consciously slowing His giant stride so that I could keep up and—indeed—so it appeared I was setting the pace. Another indication of His growing fatherly attitude?
“He’ll never have to know,” I said. “In fact, what he doesn’t know will be to his benefit.”
“And they won’t find us?”
“How long do you need?” I asked. “I have some idea how long we’re going to have.”
He grimaced, calculating. His eyes almost shined in the darkness like a cat’s eyes, phosphorescent blue like the edges of lightning bolts caught on the night horizon. Though He had His goggles shoved up, He did not seem to blink those eyes, and they were not watering. He rubbed a hand over His face to wipe the snow off His eyebrows and lashes. “Three days should do it. Things are coming along faster than ever, much faster than I had at first anticipated.”
I had planned, once we seemed free of our tails in San Francisco, to stay at the cabin a few months, knowing Harry rarely came in the wintertime, his carousing saps apparently low until the rebirth of spring. But now that we had been spotted in Cantwell, our time would be severely cut short. Three days would be stretching it some. “Well,” I said, trying to sound as confident as possible under the circumstances, “the first thing they are going to do is check monorail and low-altitude air traffic records to see whether we transferred to some other system and left Cantwell—which is what they will be expecting. We have been running for seven days, skipping from port to port, and there is no reason for them to presume that we have suddenly changed our operating procedure. When they find that we did not leave by other means, they’ll go over the travel records of our taxi and the three decoys I dispatched with every electronic wonder instrument in the Investigation Bureau bag. They won’t find much. We can count on that, at least. They’ll see maybe thirty or forty trip records from those four taxis that departed the Port at the same general time. In minutes, they’ll be down to the four that are important. True, one of those records will show that someone came to the park, but that will be expected to be a tourist’s taxi, or one belonging to someone who rents one of these cabins. Even if it’s narrowed down farther, the taxi will show that it came to the park and then followed a random pattern. That should arouse their suspicions. It will present the possibility that we jumped out of the cab somewhere along that impromptu route. So we should have a day or two days before they start thoroughly investigating the park. They might think to do it earlier, but they’ll put it off until last, because it is such a damnably big job.”
“I’m interested in the food,” He said.
“What do you mean?”
“I hope there’ll be a lot of it. I’m going to need it to get energy for the changes I’m making in myself.”
“Big changes?” I asked.
He grinned again. ,”Just wait, Jacob. Just wait.”
I pulled my mask back up and worked my jaw to unstiffen it. He did not bother to replace His mask. The cold no longer bothered Him. He had adapted to it . . .
III
We left the road when I judged we were nearing the fork that would reveal to us the first ranger station and tourist information bureau. Getting over the plowed snowbanks at the edge of the road proved even more difficult than it looked, and it looked quite difficult indeed. Somehow, we clambered through, damp and disheveled when we came out into the snowy, but more or less open fields,
I had only been in the park three times before, all three back when I had been an intern and Harry had given me the keys and wished me luck with whatever nurse had recently fallen for my limited charms and unlimited line. Admittedly, an unusual act of friendship for a hospital staff director to show to a lowly intern, but then Harry was the one who had gotten me interested in medicine back when I was still toddling around in wet pants (he had given me a doctor play kit), the one who took c
are of me after my mother and father were killed in one of the early intercontinental rocket flights, the one who had seen that I prepared for and was accepted by the best medical school in the country. Our relationship at City General, then, was bound to be somewhat unorthodox. Harry never made my internship easy, understand. It was only socially that he treated me kindly; in the hospital I was as gruffly handled as the rest, perhaps even more so. I wondered what Harry thought of me now. Then the brush grew denser, the snow deeper and more heavily drifted, and there was not time for thinking about anything but breaking through into open country.
He moved ahead now, breaking a path with His larger bulk, kicking the drifts apart and forging on like a flesh tank or a large, thick-skinned jungle animal that has never met the immovable object. Thorn vines snagged our suits and held us up, but I was confident we could make the cabin by morning. It was only a matter of keeping a steady pace, even a somewhat cautious one hampered by drifts and thorns. In time, we came out into fields and stopped for a breather, though He would not have required one. I checked the compass, which had a luminous face, and looked at the softly glowing map I had brought out of my wallet. The background of the map was a gently shimmering green, the various lines and grids either crimson or orange or white. At arms length, it somewhat resembled an old-fashioned psychedelic light show. “Straight across that field,” I said. “And we had better break out the snowshoes.”
Halfway across the open land on our way toward the next clump of pines that stood like skinny sentinels in the darkness, black patches against the snowy hills, we found that the snowshoes had not been instruments of over-caution. The field dropped ten feet within three yards, forming a breaking point for drift winds, and the rest of the broad flatlands, clear to the woods, was buried in a good six feet of snow. We treaded carefully despite the fact that the crust seemed everywhere thick enough to support us. We stayed ten feet apart to distribute our weight and help prevent too great a strain on the crisp outer layer of the drift. I felt like a stunt man trying to prove he could walk on softboiled eggs without disaster. A hundred yards from the trees, I felt the crust cracking under me, slowly but relentlessly. Then I heard it: painful whining and a low, dull moan.
I panicked, was about to run to avoid disaster, and remembered that would not help the situation at all. No running. Walk as if you were that damn fool stunt-man on the softboiled eggs. But by the time I remembered, I had convulsively leaped a single step to escape the weak area, smashed through the crust with all the force of my 160 pounds, and fell through snow over my head.
When I was a kid, the other kids used to call me Bucket Feet Kennelmen.
Now I knew why.
I flailed, trying to beat away the endless slide of white powder that covered my face, creeping coldly up my nostrils, came close to suffocating, and broke through so that I was looking up the hole I had made at the dense night clouds and the ever-faster fall of snow. I stood very still, afraid to move lest the loose snow beneath the crust and on all sides of the shaft come down on top of me, making my position that much more impossible. It seemed like slightly over six months, but it was no more than a minute or two before His face appeared and He came to the rim of the broken crust, cautious not to get too close, but leaning out towards me.
“Don’t you fall in too,” I warned. “Any ideas on getting me out of here?”
“I’ll dig a sloping path into you and pack the snow as I come,” He said. “It’s the only way. I can’t pull you out. That would break the crust here and bring me down with you.”
“What are you going to dig with?” I asked. “We haven’t any shovels or tools.”
“Wait,” He said.
The wind howled above. A gust of it blew a film of snow over my face.
He removed His gloves and stripped off the insulated jacket and undershirt beneath. His chest and shoulders and arms bulged and rippled with fantastic muscle development. These were muscles the size of those you can get lifting weights every day until you drop, but they were not blocky like weight-lifting muscles; they were leaner, giving hint to a usefulness that a muscle-bound exerciser can never know. The cold should have had Him huddled and trembling, but He didn’t even seem to notice it. He was the supreme study in detachment, in nonchalance. The snow fluttered down and struck His bare shoulders and chest, melted and ran off Him in cold streams of glistening water.
He held His hands out before Him as if doing a stretching exercise, held His fingers close together, closed His eyes and stood solid as a great pine, unmoved even when the wind suddenly picked up and began howling again. I could see very little in the dim light, but I could make out that some transformation was taking place in His hands. When He finally opened His eyes and set to work making a sloping path into me, I saw that the transformation was startling. The fingers had fused together so that the hands were flat scoops. The palms had broadened and lengthened until they were as large as the blade of a spade. He turned and walked out of sight to begin work. Working quickly, He removed the crust from the snow twenty-five feet away and began angling toward me, packing the snow in steps. Two hours later, after a second minor cave-in that required Him to reclear an area of His path, we were both on top of the drift, suited again, and headed toward the woods at the end of the field.
When we reached the trees, I stopped and looked at His hands but could find no trace of the previous transformation. His fingers were back in place, five to a hand, all perfectly formed. “How much of your body can you—change when you want to?” I asked. I had been afraid, back there when I had fallen through the crust, that He would just leave me there. What did He need me for, after all? It seemed that, already, He was going to be too much for World Authority to handle, even with their superior fire power and all their cunning little think tank men. There did not appear to be any need for me, even though He assured me there was.
Of course, that was not His way, abandoning someone to die.
“I can change most of it,” He said matter-of-factly.
“Your face?”
“I’m working on that.”
“And how far have you progressed?”
“I need to be able to exert more delicate control on the bone tissue. It, too, must be changed along with the facial features of the flesh.”
“When you control that, we can stop running,” I said. “You can change your face and go unrecognized.” Indeed, He could assume a different face every few weeks, every week if necessary, and be always a few steps ahead of the authorities with no fear of their ever catching Him.
“Someone would recognize me sooner or later, Jacob. It isn’t just my face. It’s everything about me that singles me out, makes people suspicious of me. I’m— well—different.” He grinned that damned infectious, winning grin of His and spread His hands in a show of helplessness. All for my benefit. He was about as helpless as a full-grown bull elephant.
But what He said had some truth to it. He would always be an outcast. There was an indefinable, unscientific aura about Him that gave Him an indisputably alien air. I knew what it was. He was alien, in that He was a superman, a supergenius too, who could no more pass for a man than a man could pass for a monkey in some jungle ape society. “But a change of face could gain you time to complete your evolution,” I said.
“Get me to the cabin,” He said, gripping my shoulder in His mammoth hand, “and I will only need the three days you promised. Then face-changing won’t be necessary.”
I put on my goggles and mask, for my face was already prickled with numbness that felt like a huge injection of novocaine had been rammed into both my cheeks. I fumbled the compass out and read it, pointed straight ahead. He took the lead, breaking a trail, spraying the snow to both sides, tramping it down, charging through it at a brisk pace. As we walked, I noticed something new about Him. His hand, when He had gripped my shoulder, had been enormous, not just large. Now I saw that He was enormous in every respect. An insulated suit, meant to be bulky, was str
ained to bursting with His giant body. His head seemed higher, larger, with a much greater expanse of forehead. His footprints were half again as large as mine. He lumbered through the dark woods like a fairy-tale giant, crushing or thrusting aside all that got in His way, silent, somewhat mysterious. Again, I was conscious of that part of His personality that always remained shrouded, the eerie side of Him that I had never been able to understand.
It was not exactly the result of the wind or the cold, but I shivered.
Half an hour later, He stopped and squatted in a small clearing, wiping snowflakes from His face and looking about as if He were searching for something He had left behind on a previous trip through these same parts, though He could never have been here before. His head tilted, swayed from side to side like a pendulum through molasses, His lips compressed and bloodless.
“What is it?” I asked, coming up behind Him. “I’m not tired yet, if that’s what you’re troubled about.”
“How far to the cabin, Jacob?” He asked anxiously, His voice closer to a show of emotion than it usually got. It was the first time I had seen anxiety in Him; He was usually the pinnacle of patience, easygoing and willing to wait for all things.
“Well—“ I took the map out of my coat pocket, unfolded it, and squinted to see in the gloom. After a moment, the glowing characters were clear and easy to read. “We’re right about here somewhere,” I said, pointing to a shaded forest area. “Halfway through this section of the forest. Then we have to cover this series of foothills, not rugged but quite steep in some places. Skirt this final copse, and we’re there. Maybe two and a half hours yet.”
“That’s much too long.”
“It’s the shortest way. I checked it several times in San Francisco when we ate dinner, remember? And again in the movie theater when that damned show became intolerable. This always measured the shortest and easiest route. Less hills than if we moved east to take advantage of that temporary ravine, less forests than if we went west along the ridge here.” I pointed to the corresponding portions of the map.