“Now you know pot couldn’t do this.”
“After you’ve had hold of it for a while, anything could do everything. I remember that meatloaf you made....”
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Dorothy announced, breaking up the huddle. “We have to find Adolphus as soon as possible, preferably before morning. We’ll break up into separate search parties. The two natives will go with Sylvia, since the fifing might attract him. Back down the twisty road toward camp. The rest of us will have to scatter through the woods. Have you all your silver whistles?”
Each of the circus people-cyclops-centaurs produced a thin silver whistle and brandished it in the air. Sylvia was wearing hers on a fine silver chain around her neck.
“Fine,” Dorothy continued. “If you find Adolphus, or have any trouble, use the whistle.”
A pair of headlights swung silently around the lot, and an electric pulled up to us. Our frightened friends were in it. The man stuck his head out and stared intently at us for a long moment. “I shall write to The Barb about this,” he said in a tight voice.
“Don’t be silly,” the woman said as the car pulled away. “You know you can’t write.”
Giganto went off into the woods, chanting “Haroom, haroom,” under his breath like a rehearsing foghorn. Ronald adjusted his tie, nodded, and trotted away.
“I’d like to thank you for helping us,” Dorothy said. “I’ll see that you both get free passes. Good luck.” She shook hands with each of us. “Watch out for Sylvia, if you would. She’s very bright and capable, but she does tend to be a bit impulsive.”
“I’ll stay close to her,” I assured Dorothy.
“Now, Dorothy, I can take care of myself. It’s Adolphus we should worry about. He’s never been in the wild before.” Sylvia smiled up at me. “But I thank you, good sir, for your assistance.”
“And your friend for his beauteous tootling,” redheaded Dorothy added. “Would you consider a short gig with our circus while we’re here in Nueva España?”
“Gig?” I asked.
“That’s circus for job,” Sylvia told me.
“I know,” I said. “But somehow—”
“Nueva España?” Chester asked.
“Go off, people. We’ll talk later.” Dorothy shooed us down the narrow path leading away from the parking lot.
“Chester,” I said, feeling the gravel crunch under my feet, “how long has this path been here?”
“Why,” he said. Then he stopped. “Wait a second.”
“What is it?” Sylvia asked, turning back to us.
“There’s a stone wall all around the parking lot.”
“No there isn’t,” Sylvia said.
“Right,” I agreed. We plunged into the darkness, following the luminescence of the path. “Sylvia, tell me something about the circus.”
“What sort of something?”
“Where the—acts—are from. Like that.”
“Well...Adolphus is a mute, of course. Rhan Kik’hik Pyrtmyr is from Arcturus.”
“Ran—”
That’s Giganto. That’s his real name. Ronald is from somewhere in the Quagdirian Federation. He’s here writing his thesis on Pre-Human Religion. Something about the emergence of the centaur myth. The circus is just a way of earning money while he’s here; his grant isn’t too liberal.”
“I understand his problem. And the unicorn is a mute. Is that mutant?”
“Do you know of any unicorns that aren’t?”
“The young lady has a point,” Chester said, pausing between versus of “Barkus Is Willing.”
“Time travel?” I again suggested.
“I don’t know. Sylvia, tell me: what year is this?”
“That’s silly,” said Sylvia. “Nineteen thirty-six.”
“I should have guessed,” Chester said, regarding his recorder strangely..
“I think I hear something,” Sylvia said. “Please don’t play for a moment.”
“Parallel I time tracks,” I said. “Each moving at a slightly different speed. I remember a story....”
“Maybe they just number the years differently,” Chester suggested.
“Hush!” Sylvia whispered. “Listen to that. It certainly doesn’t sound like a unicorn.”
It certainly didn’t. A thin, high whistling sound with undertones of bass honk, it seemed to come from all around us.
“Look,” Chester said quietly.
I looked. Up in the air, slightly off to the left, hung a thing. A long, cigar-shaped thing with portholes giving off blue flashes. It was etched in the sky so sharply in red light that it gave the impression of being outlined in neon tubing. It wasn’t moving.
“Look at what?” I asked Chester nonchalantly. “The flying saucer?”
Chester took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “All right,” he agreed. “Look at the flying saucer. Isn’t it wonderful how all you have to do is label something to understand it?”
“What is that thing?” Sylvia asked.
“It’s not one of yours then,” I said, “from the circus or somewhere?”
“It is not,” she assured me. Her eyes were getting wide. I think this was the first time she realized there was something wrong besides a missing Adolphus.
“How far away do you think it is?” I asked Chester.
“That depends,” he said. “How big is it?”
“We could triangulate,” I suggested. “How’s your trig?”
“Just fine,” Anderson snarled. “How’s yours?”
“I just thought....”
“At a time like this, your scientific experiments are out of place. Set up your fun-fair project tomorrow.”
“I think it’s important to know how far away it is,” I informed Chester.
“The only thing that’s important,” Chester told me calmly, “is that it doesn’t get any closer.”
It got closer. Adding a weird meep meep sound to its orchestration, it started blinking an insistent red light at us and growing smoothly larger.
“Is it after us?” I asked.
“Come on,” Chester said. “Let’s not stay here and find out.”
We started running, following the trail. Chester and I ran as fast as we could, which was pretty fast considering our sedentary lives. Sylvia loped along with us with the easy grace of a young gazelle. I decided to tell her to run faster if she could and let us catch up, but I didn’t have enough breath to talk and run at the same time.
The saucer swerved slightly, correcting its aim and settling whether it was after us or not, and I tripped. Flat on my face. The gravel dug into my nose and forehead and something sharp scraped across my leg. My eyes filled with a warm, sticky wetness and I couldn’t see. There was no pain, and my brain seemed curiously clear. Everything was happening in slow motion. I tried to get up, but my leg wouldn’t work and I fell back down. At least, I thought, this will give Chester and Sylvia a better chance to get away. I wondered whether there would someday be a brass marker at the spot where I had fallen.
Two hands tugged at my elbow, a slim arm was slid under my shoulder, and in a second I was on my feet. “Can you walk?” Sylvia inquired anxiously.
“You are the clumsiest person on the whole West Coast,” panted Chester.
It is a curious trait of the human animal that in times of stress, if he doesn’t panic, he tends to become overly polite and verbose. Well, anyway, I do. “If you two would proceed up the trail, I shall endeavor to follow as soon as possible,” said I. “Not that I don’t fully appreciate your stopping for me.”
“Don’t be silly,” Chester said. “Here, wipe the blood off your face.” He handed me a great square of fabric.
“Look!” Sylvia said.
“Wow!” Chester breathed.
“Where?” I asked, trying to clear my eyes. “At what? What’s happening?” As soon as I could see, I looked around. There was nothing in sight but trees. “Where is it?” I yelped, turning quickly through three hundred and sixty degrees. “Wh
at happened to it?”
“It disappeared in sections,” Sylvia said. “I saw it blink out.”
“In sections?”
“Yars,” drawled Chester in the accent he uses to explain anything he doesn’t understand. “In sections, from left to right. As if it were the moon and a cloud passed in front of it.”
“You don’t think that could be it, do you?” I asked, staring apprehensively at the sky. “Or maybe it just turned its running lights out.”
“No,” Chester said “There was something permanent about this. Besides, you can see stars through where it was. It’s gone.”
I brushed myself off. “I wonder what it was.”
“I thought we’d already settled that,” said Chester, smiling tightly at me. “It’s a flying saucer.”
I discovered I could walk, so we continued down the trail.
“I hope it didn’t frighten Adolphus too much,” Sylvia said.
I had the sudden notion that it might be what had happened to Adolphus, but I didn’t say it.
“Are you all right?” Chester asked me. “Do you want to go on, or go back and get medicated?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just a few abrasions. Continue the quest.”
Sylvia took my hand and looked at me solemnly. “I’m glad, Michael the Theodore Bear, that you were not hurt.” Somehow the nickname, which Chester had fastened on me when the world was young, didn’t sound so silly when Sylvia said it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Then, let us find Adolphus.” She sang, “Trala, tralee. Would you tootle a little, Chester?” Sylvia had amazing powers of recuperation. She skipped ahead of us on the path.
“A lot of things seem to be happening all at once,” I told Chester.
“Enemy action,” he replied.
“Huh?”
“That’s what you told me once. An old Army motto you had found when you were doing those war books. ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’ This is the third time.”
“You have a point,” I admitted as we walked down the path together. “I wonder what next?”
B
L
I
P
CHAPTER THREE
That answered my question. Something had happened, although I had no idea what. First of all, there was that blip. It wasn’t exactly a sound, it was more like a feeling —a gut-wrenching, universe-shaking, giant blip of a feeling. Then there were the changes.
It was now daylight; seemingly early morning, just after dawn, but nonetheless daylight. We were still in the middle of a woods, but it was a different woods. It was more ordered: the trees seemed almost laid out in rows. The path was now a narrow brick road. A narrow —as a matter of fact —yellow brick road.
“Michael! Chester! Help!”
We ran ahead. There, sitting on yellow bricks, was Sylvia. She was crying; long, convulsive sobs that racked her thin body and left her shaking. “Help me. Please. It’s awful,” she gasped.
“She’s hysterical,” Chester said helpfully.
“What’s the matter, Sylvia?” I asked, squatting down beside her. Silly question; what wasn’t?
Chester bent over us. “Slap her on the back,” he suggested. “Put your head between your legs,” he told Sylvia.
I ignored him. “You’ll be all right,” I told Sylvia, taking her in my arms and holding her tightly. “Come on, now. What’s the matter?”
Sylvia clutched my arm tightly for a minute and then let go and pushed me away. “Let me lie down for a while, please. That...thing...whatever it was, twisted my insides all up. Didn’t you feel it?”
“We felt it,” I told her, rolling my jacket up and putting it under her head, “but I guess it didn’t bother us that strongly. Not physically.”
“Some people get seasick and some don’t,” Chester added. “It’s like that.”
“It wasn’t this bad the first time,” Sylvia said, looking very pale in the bland, sunless dawn. “I’m cold.”
“The first time?” Chester asked.
“Yes,” she said, sitting up with my help so I could put the jacket around her instead of under her. “The first time was when the train arrived. That’s when Adolphus ran away. We thought it was one of the famous Nueva España earthquakes, but it wasn’t. I got sick then too; but at least the time and place stayed the same.” She thought about that for a second. “Or they seemed to, they seemed to. Tell me, didn’t you know about unicorns?”
“Yes,” I told her. “But to us the unicorn is a mythical beast.”
“And it isn’t nineteen thirty-six,” Chester added moodily. “That was about fifty years ago.”
“I’m in the future?” Sylvia asked.
“I thought of that,” I told her.
“Then we’d have unicorns,” Chester explained, describing a unicorn with his hands. “And, from what you told us, interstellar travel.”
“You don’t travel to far planets?”
“We barely travel to near planets.”
“Then...what is happening?”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it all out,” I said reassuringly. “Chester’s very good at figuring things out. He has an oracle.”
P h e e—e e—e e p !
“What was that?” I asked, standing up.
“It was a pheep,” Chester informed me.
“Dorothy!” Sylvia exclaimed. “That’s her signal.” She tugged out her silver whistle and gave a long triple blast on it.
P h e e—e e—e e e p P e e e p—e e e p !
“She’s coming,” Sylvia said. “I wonder why none of the others answered.”
“They might not have gone blip,” Chester said. “They may be still wandering around in the dark looking for a unicorn. There’s something to be said for that.”
“Sylvia!” Dorothy called, breaking noisily through the underbrush. “Here you are. Where is everyone else?”
“Well,” I said, “we’re here.”
“You pheeped?” Chester asked. Once he gets hold of a spelling, he seldom lets go of it.
“Pheeped?”
“Whistled,” I explained.
“Oh. Phee—ee—eep!?”
“That’s it,” Chester agreed. “Pheep.”
“I’m afraid we’re pretty much the ‘everybody else’,” I said.
“What happened, was it an earthquake?” Dorothy asked, looking around for signs of damage.
“It seems to have been more of a time quake,” Chester said, and proceeded to explain what we thought we knew about what we assumed had happened.
I sat down next to Sylvia. “How are you feeling now?”
“Much better, thank you. The effects pass quickly. I’m not so cold anymore.”
“That’s good.”
“Do you want your jacket back?”
“No, no. Keep it as long as you need it; I’m fine.” People, especially girls, always assume a selfish motive if there’s one available to be assumed. That’s rule number five.
Dorothy pheeped a few more times, but got no answers. She put the whistle away. “I guess you’re right. The silver whistle becomes merely a symbol, blown in an empty wood where none can hear.”
“We’re here,” I reminded her.
“Left alone in a quadrilateral wood to whistle for my no-dimensional friends!” she declaimed dramatically.
“If you want to be left alone,” I hinted.
“Leave her alone,” Chester ordered. “She’s merely being poetic. You, as a matter of fact (and a mind of fiction), should listen.”
I spent the next few moments working that one through, putting in the necessary punctuation and sorting it out. By the time I had it, the conversation had passed me by.
“I think so, positively,” Dorothy was saying.
“All right, it’s settled. Let’s go.” Chester finished stripping the twigs and leaves off a walking stick he was manufacturing and whipped it through the air. “Onward!”
“Where
are you leading us?” I demanded.
“Listen, troop, yours is not to reason why....”
“How come every time you decide to lead you start calling me ‘troop’?” I demanded. “Have you thought of what that makes the girls?”
Chester chalked the end of his walking stick and took a couple of shots on an imaginary pool table. “Never mind making the girls. Right now we go onward—out of the woods.”
“Why don’t we go back to the Trembling Womb?”
“Because the TW probably isn’t there anymore; and that flying cigar might be.”
“Onward,” I agreed.
We followed the yellow brick road as it twisted through the orderly rows of trees, through hill and dale and over stream. The road went over water like a brick snake: no supports, just a single thickness of bricks humping across the stream. It managed to look like a part of nature and not an intrusion. But in this wood, nature itself was awfully ordered, with the trees planted in rows and the flowers growing in clumps and arranged with an eye to color.
“I think we’re in somebody’s private forest,” I announced, noticing a neat line of elm running through the oak and spruce.
“More like a garden,” Chester commented.
“Why garden?”
“Take a look at that patch of dahlia over there. Those reddish-purple flowers in the square plot.”
“I like dahlia.” Sylvia said. “They float.”
The flowers filled a square about six by six feet. In front of the patch was a sign:
DAHLIA
MULTIFLORA DAHL
23: 91;616
Rhumpartet Alternate
“So that’s how you knew they were dahlia. I agree, it’s a garden.”
“Onward!”
* * * *
“Ohhh....”
“Chester! Michael! Come look at this,” yelled one of the girls, from around the next bend in the road.
We ran.
“What?” I demanded, looking around.
“That!” Sylvia pointed up.
I looked up. And up. We had entered a grove of sempervirens. Redwoods. The trees that aren’t grown up until a thousand years and at last five hundred feet have passed under them.
“Look at them!” Sylvia breathed. “Now I know what an oak looks like to an ant.”
The Unicorn Girl Page 3