by Damon Knight
Falk turned in desperation and, as the lizard came up, swung a knotted fist to the point of its snout. He heard its steam-whistle screech, saw it collapse, and then he was diving through the open door ahead.
The door closed gently behind him—a sheet of glassy substance, the same blue as the walls, gliding down to seal the opening.
Falk stared at it. Through its transparency he could see the dark shapes of the lizards crowding around, leaning to pry at the bottom of the door, gesticulating at each other. It was plain, at any rate, that the door was not going to open for them.
Whether it would open for him, when he wanted it to, was another matter.
He looked around him. The building was a single huge room, so long and deep that he could barely see the far walls. Scattered over the floor, patternless, were boxes, or chests, racks, shelves, little ambiguous mounds. Nearly all the objects , Falk could see were fashioned of the same glass-like material.
There was no dust in the room; but now that Falk thought of it, he realised that there had been none in any of the Doorways, either. How that was done he could not conjecture. He moved to the nearest object, a file, or rack formed apparently to take many things of diverse shapes and sizes. It was a quarter empty now, and the remaining contents had a jumbled look.
He picked up an orange glass spindle, full of embedded threads, or flaws that looped in a curious pattern from one end to the other. He put it down, took a hollow sphere of opal. It was made in halves and seemed to be empty, but Falk could find no way to take it apart. He replaced it and took a brown object shaped like a double crescent, with a clear fracture plane running diagonally through it…
Half an hour later he realised that he was not going to find any picture books or engineering manuals or any one thing that would unlock the mystery of the Doorway people for him. If there were any knowledge to be gained here, it would have to come from the building as a whole.
The lizards distracted him. He could see them through the walls of the building, pressing their snouts against the glass, staring with little round eyes, gesturing at him. But he learned things from them.
The group broke up finally, leaving only one to guard the exit; the others dispersed. Falk saw one go into the building directly across the plaza. The door closed behind him. A little later another one approached and pounded on the door; but it did not open until the first lizard came close to it inside. Some automatic mechanism, beyond Falk’s fathoming, evidently responded to the presence or absence of any living thing inside each building. When the last person left, the door stayed open; when another person entered, it shut and would not open for the next unless the first person allowed it.
That added one item to the description of the Doorway people that Falk was building in his mind. They were not property-conscious—not afraid that thieves would enter in their absence, for the doors stood open when they were gone—but they respected each other’s love of privacy.
Falk had previously thought of this building as a vast factory or laboratory or dormitory—a place designed to serve a large number of people, anyhow. Now he revised his opinion. Each building, he thought, was the private domain of one person—or, if they had family groups, only two or three. But how could one person use all this space, all these possessions?
He made the comparison that by now was becoming automatic. He asked himself what a cliff dweller would make of a millionaire’s triplex apartment in New York.
It helped, but not enough. The objects around him were all specialised tools; they would not function for him and so told him nothing about the Doorway builders. There was nothing that he could compare to a bed, to a table, to a shower bath. He could not see the people who had lived here.
With an effort, he forced himself to stop thinking in terms of men. The facts were important, not his prejudices. And then what had been a barrier became a road. There were no beds, tables, showers? Then the Doorway people did not sleep; they did not eat; they did not bathe.
Probably, thought Falk, they did not die.
They were fit to live among the stars…
The riddle of the deserted chamber mocked him. How, having built this city, would they leave it? How would they spread the network of the Doorways across the face of the galaxy, and then leave it unused?
The first question answered itself. Looking at the littered chamber, Falk thought of his comparison of the cliff dweller and the millionaire and humbly acknowledged his presumption. Not a millionaire’s triplex, he told himself… a tent.
Once there had been something of particular interest on this world. No telling what it had been, for that had been some millions of years ago when Mars was a living world. But the Doorway people, a few of them, had come here to observe it. When they were finished, they had gone away, leaving their tents behind, as a man might abandon a crude shelter of sticks and leaves.
And the other things they had left behind them? The cubes, cones, rods, odd shapes, each one beyond price to a man? Empty cans, thought Falk; toothpaste tubes, wrapping paper.
They had abandoned this city and the million things in it because they were of no value.
The sun was redder, nearer the horizon. Falk looked at the chronometer strapped to the wrist of his suit and found to his surprise that it was more than five hours since he had left Wolfert on Mars.
He had not eaten. He took food out of his pack and looked at the labels on the cans. But he was not hungry; he did not even feel tired.
He watched the lizards outside. They were scurrying around in the plaza now, bringing armloads of junk from the building, packing them into big red boxes. As Falk watched, a curious construction floated into view down at the end of the plaza. It was a kind of airboat, an open shell with two lizards riding it, supported by two winglike extensions with streamlined, down-pointing shapes at their ends.
It drifted slowly until it hovered over the pile of boxes the lizards had gathered. Then a hatch opened in its belly, and a hook emerged at the end of three cords. The lizards on the plaza began slinging loops of cord from their boxes to the hook.
Falk watched them idly. The hook began to rise, dragging the boxes after it, and at the last moment one of the lizards tossed another loop over it.
The new box was heavy; the hook stopped when it took up the slack, and the airboat dipped slightly. Then it rose again, and the hook rose too, until the whole load was ten feet off the ground.
Abruptly one of the three cords snapped; Falk saw it whip through the air, saw the load lurch ponderously to one side, and the airboat dip. Simultaneously the pilot sent the boat down to take up the strain on the remaining cords.
The lizards were scattering. The load struck heavily; and a moment later so did the airboat. It bounced, skidded wildly, and came to rest as the pilot shut off the power.
The lizards crowded around again, and the two in the airboat climbed down for an interminable conference. Eventually they got aboard again, and the boat rose a few feet while the lizards beneath disengaged the hook. Then there was another conference. Falk could see that the doors of the boat’s hatch were closed and had a crumpled look. Evidently they were jammed and could not be opened again.
Finally the boat came down once more, and with much argument and gesticulation the boxes were unpacked and some of their contents reloaded into two boxes, these being hoisted with much effort into the airboat’s cockpit. The rest was left strewn around the plaza.
The airboat lifted and went away, and most of the lizards followed it. One straggler came over for a last look at Falk; he peered and gestured through the wall for a while, then gave it up and followed the rest. The plaza was deserted.
Some time passed, and then Falk saw a pillar of white flame that lifted, with a glint of silver at its tip, somewhere beyond the city, and grew until it arched upward to the zenith, dwindled, and vanished.
So they had spaceships, the lizards. They did not dare use the Doorways, either. Not fit, not fit… too much like men.
Falk w
ent out into the plaza and stood, letting the freshening breeze ruffle his hair. The sun was dropping behind the mountains, and the whole sky had turned ruddy, like a great crimson cape streaming out of the west. Falk watched, reluctant to leave, until the colors faded through violet to gray, and the first stars came out.
It was a good world. A man could stay here, probably, and live his life out in comfort and ease. No doubt there were exotic fruits to be had from those trees; certainly there was water; the climate was good; and Falk thought sardonically . that there could be no dangerous wild beasts, or those!twittering tourists would never have come here.
If all a man wanted was a hiding place, there could be no better world than this. For a moment Falk was strongly tempted. He thought of the cold dead world he had seen and wondered if he would ever find a place as fair as this again.
Also, he knew now that if the Doorway builders still lived, they must long ago have drawn in their outposts. Perhaps they lived now on only one planet, out of all the billions. Falk would die before he found it.
He looked at the rubble the lizards had left in the middle of . the plaza. One box was still filled, but burst open; that was the one that had caused all the trouble. Around it was a child’s litter of baubles—pretty glass toys, red, green, blue, yellow, white.
A lizard,abandoned here by his fellows, would no doubt be happy enough in the end.
With a sigh, Falk turned back to the building. The door opened before him, and he collected his belongings, fastened down his helmet, strapped on his knapsack again.
The sky was dark now, and Falk paused to look up at the familiar sweep of the Milky Way. Then he switched on his helmet light and turned toward the waiting Doorway.
The light fell across the burst box the lizards had left, and Falk saw a hard edge of something thrusting out. It was not the glassy adamant of the Doorway builders; it looked like stone.
Falk stooped and tore the box aside.
He saw a slab of rock, roughly smoothed to the shape of a wedge. On its upper face, characters were incised. They were in English.
With blood pounding in his ears, Falk knelt by the stone. and read what was written there.
THE DOORWAYS STOP THE AGING PROCESS. I WAS 32 WHEN I LEFT MARS, AM HARDLY OLDER NOW THOUGH I HAVE BEEN TRAVELING FROM STAR TO STAR FOR A TIME I BELIEVE CANNOT BE LESS THAN 20 YEARS. BUT YOU MUST KEEP ON. I STOPPED HERE 2 YRS. FOUND MYSELF AGING—HAVE OBSERVED THAT MILKY WAY LOOKS NEARLY THE SAME FROM ALL PLANETS SO FAR VISITED. THIS CANNOT BE COINCIDENCE. BELIEVE THAT DOORWAY TRAVEL IS RANDOM ONLY WITHIN CONCENTRIC BELTS OF STARS & THAT SOONER OR LATER YOU HIT DOORWAY WHICH GIVES ENTRY TO NEXT INNERMOST BELT. IF I AM RIGHT, FINAL DESTINATION IS CENTER OF GALAXY. I HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE.
JAMES E. TANNER
NATIVE OF EARTH
Falk stood up, blinded by the glory of the vision that grew in his mind. He thought he understood now why the Doorways were not selective and why their makers no longer used them.
Once—a billion years ago, perhaps—they must have been uncontested owners of the galaxy. But many of their worlds were small planets like Mars—too small to keep their atmospheres and their water forever. Millions of years ago, they must have begun to fall back from these. And meanwhile, Falk thought, on the greater worlds just now cooling, the lesser breeds had arisen: the crawling, brawling things. The lizards. The men. Things not worthy of the stars.
But even a man could learn if he lived long enough, journeyed far enough. James Tanner had signed himself not “TERRAN SPACE CORPS” or “U.S.A.” but “NATIVE OF EARTH.”
So the way was made long, and the way was made hard; and the lesser breeds stayed on their planets. But for a man, or a lizard, who would give up all that he called “life” for knowledge, the way was open.
Falk turned off the beam of his lamp and looked up at the diamond mist of the galaxy. Where would he be a thousand years from today? Standing on that mote of light, or that, or that…?
Not dust, at any rate. Not dust, unmourned, unworthy. He would be a voyager with a destination, and perhaps half his journey would be done.
Wolfert would wait in vain for his return, but it would not matter; Wolfert was happy—if you called that happiness. And on Earth, the mountains would rise and fall long after the question of human survival had been forgotten.
Falk, by that time, perhaps, would be home.
BEACHCOMBER
Maxwell and the girl with the astonishing bust had started their weekend on Thursday in Venice. Friday they went to Paris, Saturday to Nice, and on Sunday they were bored. The girl, whose name was Alice, pouted at him across the breakfast table. “Vernon, let’s go someplace else,” she said.
“Sure,” said Maxwell, not too graciously. “Don’t you want your bug eggs?”
“Urgh,” said Alice, pushing them away. “If I ever did, I don’t now. Why do you “have to be so unpleasant in the morning?”
The eggs were insect eggs, all right, but they were on the menu as oeufs Procyon Thibault, and three of the half-inch brown spheres cost about one thousand times their value in calories. Maxwell was well paid as a script writer for the North American Unit Ministry of Information—he bossed a gang of six gagmen on the Cosmic Cocktail show—but he was beginning to hate to think about what these five days were costing him.
Maxwell was a small man, sturdily built and not bad-looking, except that he was a little pop-eyed. When he raised his eyebrows, which he did whenever he spoke, his brown forehead creased into accordionlike wrinkles. Some girls found this attractive; those who didn’t were usually impressed by his hand-finished duroplast tunics and forty-credit cummerbunds. He had an unhappy suspicion that Alice, whose most prominent feature has already been mentioned, was one of the latter group.
“Where do you want to go?” asked Maxwell. Their coffee came out of the conveyor, steaming and fragrant, and he sipped his moodily. “Want to run over to Algiers? Or up to Stockholm?”
“No,” said Alice. She leaned forward across the table, and put up one long white hand to keep her honey-colored hair out of her eyes. “You don’t know what I mean. I mean, let’s go to some other planet.”
Maxwell choked slightly and spilled coffee on the table top. “Europe is all right,” Alice was saying with disdain, “but it’s all getting to be just like Chicago. Let’s go some place different for once.”
“And be back by tomorrow noon?” Maxwell demanded. “It’s ten hours even to Proxima; we’d have just time to turn around and get back on the liner.”
Alice dropped her long lashes, contriving to look inviting and sullen at the same time. Not bad at that, Maxwell thought, for ten o’clock in the morning. “You couldn’t get Monday off, I suppose,” she said.
Maxwell’s crew worked two weeks ahead, anyhow; it would only mean digging in harder when he got back. What the hell, why not play sick until Tuesday or Wednesday?
Alice’s lashes rose again, slowly enough for one swift, sure look at Maxwell’s face. Then her eye corners crinkled, and she gave him her A-Number-One smile. “That’s why I love you so, Vernie,” she said with satisfaction.
They took the liner to Gamma Tauri IV, the clearing point for the system, then transferred to the interplanet shuttle for Three. Three was an almost undeveloped planet; there were perhaps a hundred cities near the equator, and some mines and plantations in the temperate zones—the rest was nothing but scenery. Maxwell had heard about it from people at the Ministry; he’d been warned to go within a year or so if he went at all—after that it would be as full of tourists as Proxima II.
The scenery was worth the trip. Sitting comfortably on their rented airscooters, stripped to shorts and shirts, with the polarised sunscreens moderating the blazing heat of Gamma Tauri, Maxwell and the girl could look in any horizontal direction and see a thousand square miles of exuberant blue-green foliage.
Two hundred feet below, the tops of gigantic tree ferns waved spasmodically in the breeze. They were following a chain of low mountains that bisected this
continent; the treetops sloped away abruptly on either side, showing an occasional glimpse of reddish-brown undergrowth, and merged into a sea of blue-green that became bluer and mistier toward the horizon. A flying thing moved lazily across the clear, cumulus-dotted sky, perhaps half a mile away. Maxwell trained his binoculars on it: it was an absurd lozenge with six pairs of wings—an insect, perhaps; he couldn’t tell. He heard a raucous cry down below, not far away, and glanced down hoping to see one of the carnivores; but the rippling sea of foliage was unbroken.
He watched Alice breathing deeply. Maxwell grinned. Her face was shiny with perspiration and pleasure. “Where to now?” he asked.
The girl peered to the right, where a glint of silver shone at the horizon. “Is that the sea over there?” she asked. “If it is, let’s go look for a nice beach and have our lunch.”
There were no nice beaches; they were all covered with inch-thick pebbles instead of sand; but Alice kept wanting to try the next place. After each abortive approach, they went up to two thousand feet to survey the shore line. Alice pointed and said, “There’s a nice-looking one. Oh! There’s somebody on it.”
Maxwell looked, and saw a tiny figure moving along the shore. “Might be somebody I know,” he said, and focused his binoculars. He saw a broad, naked back, dark against the silvery sea. The man was stooping, looking at something on the beach.
The figure straightened, and Maxwell saw a blazing crest of blond hair, then the strongly modeled nose and chin, as the man turned. “Oh-oh,” he said, lowering the binoculars.
Alice was staring intently through her binoculars. “Isn’t he handsome,” she breathed. “Do you know him?”
“Yes,” said Maxwell. “That’s the Beachcomber. I interviewed him a couple of times. We’d better leave him be.”
Alice kept staring. “Honestly,” she said. “I never saw such a—Look, Vernie, he’s waving at us.”
Maxwell looked again. The Beachcomber’s face was turned up directly toward them. As Maxwell watched, the man’s lips moved unmistakably in the syllables of his name.