[Are you all right?] Silly [Can you hear me?] Question. Silly question. [Oh, Michael!] Was someone out there? A vortex spread before me, beckoning and drawing me closer. At the bottom lay oblivion and the fall was eternal, and the thought was sweet.
Something stung the arm that was of my body. The vortex receded and I cried.
Something stung my arm, and my body again was me, and it hurt, and I screamed. And I woke.
“Michael, oh dear Michael, oh precious Bear,” the litany went. I opened my eye and then my other eye and tried to focus.
Awareness flooded back to me. The pain receded, blocked off by what I recognized as chemical means. My face felt sticky all over, warm and sticky; but it was being wiped. Being wiped? I made an effort to focus past my nose and saw Sylvia’s face above me, framed in a halo of pink light. “Angel,” I said.
“What? I didn’t understand, love. Say again.”
I made an effort to coordinate. “Angel,” I said. “Framed in a halo of light. But I think I’m alive.”
“Yes. You were going into shock. It’s lucky I’m a trained nurse and had my aidpack with me. Lie still for a minute.”
“I didn’t know you were a nurse. How long was I out? It felt like days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
“I’m a nurse because it’s my second job in the circus. Dorothy was too. You were unconscious for under a minute. I ran back to you the second that machine disappeared. The moving line hasn’t reached us yet. About another,” she squinted at the road, “thirty seconds.” She wiped my eyes and the blood-halo disappeared. “I gave you a strong dead-pain dose so you can walk—I pray. We must move aside in case we go to the same world the Tiger machines did.”
Sylvia planted her feet and pulled at my arm. I tried to gather my legs under me and push up. In a few seconds, I was on my feet and finding out how hard it is to balance when you have no sense of feeling. “Lean on me,” Sylvia said, “we’ll go faster.”
“Don’t be subtle,” I said, swaying. “If I don’t lean on you, we won’t go at all. Did Chester and Dorothy make it?”
Sylvia looked at me for a long moment, considering. “I don’t know the idiom,” she said. “Look.”
I looked. Across the clearing lay two bodies. One was—had been—Chester: clothing shredded, legs mashed and head twisted to an angle that life would not allow. The other body was unrecognizable. “Later,” I said, “I shall be sick. Then I’ll probably spend some time crying. I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything.”
“You’re crying,” Sylvia said gently.
“I guess I am.” I smiled weakly.
Something twisted my inside, whipped me around, and socked me in the solar plexus.
B
L
I
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CHAPTER SEVEN
And, again, we were somewhere else. The first thing I did was to scout the area carefully and confirm my first impression—no tanks. The moving line sent them somewhere and us elsewhere. The second thing I did was collapse.
When I woke up I was between clean sheets over a soft mattress and Sylvia was sleeping in an upholstered chair beside the bed. The bed had posts sticking up from each of the four comers and a canopy overhead. The blue and yellow flowered pattern of the drapes around the bed was echoed by the smaller patterned curtains on the three small windows. The walls were covered with cleanly scrubbed, but slightly peeling and faded print wallpaper. On the wall by the door was a framed photograph of a group of men in knickers standing by a camel, with the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid in the background. After gathering these impressions I lay back to think about them and to enjoy the sensation of breathing.
When I woke up again Sylvia was fussing with a tray. “Welcome back,” she said. “Have some soup.”
“How long,” I asked after taking a sip of tomato soup, which was thoughtfully lukewarm, “have I been away?”
“Overnight,” Sylvia told me, spooning some more soup into my mouth. She anticipated the next questions. “This house is about half a mile down the road from where you swooned. I walked until I reached it and told them you had been in an accident, and they came out to get you. They’ve been very nice, and I now have ridden in a car.”
After I finished my bowl of soup, Sylvia took it downstairs and came back with Mrs. Siddens, the woman of the house. A matronly type in her fifties, dressed in calico except for a spotless white apron, she clucked over me and let me know that she’d be “consarned” if “them reckless fools in their motor cars aren’t goin’ to ruin the whole countryside; what with knocken’ down fence posts, runnen’ through barns, speeden’ across the night at up to thirty miles an hour and honken’ their horns at all hours, waken’ a body up. And now they’re goin’ hitten’ into people. They ought to be a law to regulate them machines, that’s what Harry says!” She nodded her head emphatically up and down, while wringing her hands between the folds of her apron, creating a spreading wave of creases.
“You’re a good woman, Mrs. Siddens,” I told her. “And I thank you for what you’ve done for us. Harry, I take it, is your husband?”
“My man,” she agreed. “He went into town this morn. Would have brought back a doctor, but your wife, bein’ a trained nurse and all, said you wouldn’t need one. You just lie there and take it easy; don’t worry about a thing. It’s our bound pleasure to help.” Nodding forcefully several times, she retreated to the door and clumped downstairs.
“Hi, wife,” I said to Sylvia, who had sat demurely through this.
“They assumed it when they picked you up,” she explained. “They seemed to want to assume it, so I agreed.”
“I agree also. Come to bed, wife.”
Sylvia patted my head. “Mayhap sometime when you won’t fall asleep. We’ll see.”
“Thanks,” I said, leaning back weakly on the pillow. She was right: I fell asleep almost immediately.
When I woke up again, I could tell I was better. I felt stronger and I was hungry. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. A second later I was sitting down again. After a few minutes the dizziness had passed, and I was able to stay on my feet. My clothes were nowhere in sight, but a terrycloth robe had been hung behind the door. I put it on, wrapping it one and a half times around me, and belted it. The end dragged on the floor. Its owner, I deduced, was a large man. I giggled, pleased that I could deduce anything. Too much sleep must have made me slightly punch-drunk. Ah, well: the horrors of war. The thought that followed wasn’t funny, and I suppressed it. I made my way gingerly down the stairs, heading toward a room from which I could hear the murmur of voices.
It was the kitchen, and the two girls were showing each other baking secrets and giggling over womanly things. They stopped talking as I walked in, and turned to stare at me. I felt as though I had accidentally penetrated to the ritual room of some mystic lodge and had almost overheard the most guarded arcane secrets.
For the land of Man is the whole of the world
Which is his to fight and tame;
But Woman by the kitchen fire
Guards the eternal flame.
And Man must quest for deeds and best
The dark to renew his youth,
While Woman, softly before the flame
Speaks on the Ancient Truth.
“Michael,” Sylvia exclaimed. “Are you all right? How do you feel? Are you sure you should be out of bed?”
Mrs. Siddens nodded her head. “Just like a man. A full day he lies there, black to the world, weak as a kitten. Then he wakes up and poof, you can’t keep him in bed twenty seconds so’s he might get well on his own without suffrin’ a relapse and haven’ to get the doc in to take care of what nature would’f looked after pretty slick on her own iffn a body would let her.” Having given that speech, she smiled and all the wrinkles in her face fell into place so you could tell immediately how she’d gotten them. “Sit down and let’s get some solid food into you, if you’re bound determined to be out o
f bed.”
I sat down and Sylvia came over and inspected me in her best nursely manner: checking my pulse, feeling my forehead with her lips, tapping and rubbing at me and peering into my left ear earnestly. I was afraid to ask her what she was looking for in my ear. “Will I pass?” I asked when she was through.
“Of the seventeen exercises we give as a test of physical condition, I doubt if you could pass one; but you’ll live.”
“Will I ever be able to play the piano?” I asked, unable to restrain the impulse.
“What’s a piano?” Sylvia inquired.
“We have one in the parlor,” Mrs. Siddens volunteered. “Do you play?”
“Only chopsticks and variations on a theme by chance.”
“I love pianner music,” she informed me, “and oprey and plays and mellerdrammer and the musicals the band puts on every summer on Sheepmeadow and the traveling Shakespeares and all them cultured things. I take Harry to all of ‘em. He likes ‘em too, but he ain’t as enthusiastical as what I am.”
“I’m sure,” I told her. “It’s wonderful to find someone who upholds the banner of culture.” I was immediately ashamed of myself for having made fun of her and reassured to find that she hadn’t noticed.
“All the wives around here are upholden’ that there banner,” she explained. “We takes our men to everythin’ cultural what happens.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, staring earnestly into the bowl of oatmeal she had put in front of me and wondering what the long-suffering men felt about all this culture. The oatmeal had large islands of butter distributed throughout a lake of cream that almost overlapped the sides of the bowl. The lake bottom was white with sugar. A bit rich, I thought, for a sick man who doesn’t nohow like oatmeal. Oh, well; mustn’t offend mine hostess, who was certainly going out of her way to be kind and helpful to two strangers. I stirred the mess up until it attained the consistency of thick cement and spooned a gob into my mouth, trying to swallow without tasting it.
After the third gobfull, the taste snuck past my guard and banged into the gustatory reception centers. “Marf gloop!” I said, in some surprise.
“What did you say, husband?” Sylvia asked.
I swallowed. “That’s good,” I repeated. “Tacky, but good.”
“Mind you eat it all before it hardens,” Mrs. Siddens called from across the kitchen at the side table where she was chopping large yellow gourds into small yellow squares. “I got to go tend to my gardenin’ now. You two make yourselves at home. If they’s anythin’ you want, don’t ask.” She gathered her apron about her and stalked out the kitchen door.
“Nice woman,” Sylvia said. “I was helping her before you came down. Prester John, but she can cook.”
(Prester John?) “I’ll bet it’s a whole nice family,” I said, determined to keep spooning the cereal into my mouth as long as I could. Already the mass in the bowl was tugging hard at the spoon each time I tried to lift it. “People don’t grow in a vacuum, they affect each other. How can something this much like quick-setting cement taste so good?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia admitted. “Have you ever tasted quick-setting cement?”
“You have a point.”
“Her husband—her ‘man’—Harry is also a kind and thoughtful soul. He’s very big; that must be his bathrobe you’re wearing. The youngest son is quiet and reserved; very polite. He’s with his father. The eldest is away at school.”
“You’ve learned a lot,” I congratulated her. “Do you have any idea where we are?”
“In a province by name of Nebraska. It might also be of interest to know that the year in this, er, world is 1926 Anno Domini.”
“It would seem that the time rates are different in the various worlds,” I said. “Judging by what I see around me, this could be the 1926 from the history of my world. I wish Chester were here.”
“Now—”
“It’s all right,” I assured her. “Just a random thought. We’ll stick to the main cause, and no crying for the dead until after the battle.”
“Are we in a battle?” Sylvia asked.
“It may not have started yet,” I told her, “but the lines are drawn and the skirmishers are out. That long sleep seems to have given my subconscious a chance to work, and I have a vague notion of what’s happening, although not why or how. But I intend to find out.”
“Tell me,” Sylvia said, perching on the side of the table.
I found that while I had been speaking the spoon had taken root in the oatmeal, sticking straight up; and I couldn’t budge it. I picked up spoon, oatmeal and bowl like a large candy apple and waved it about to punctuate my explanation. “The blips,” I said, “are new and widespread. The last we were in must have been some sort of focus or node, since that mix of people was too varied to have come from the same culture, or cultural mix. My guess is that they are in some way artificial and caused by the people, or things, in the saucers.”
“Why?”
“Because the saucers seem to be around when they happen, and seem very interested in the results. Maybe we’re part of a vast scientific experiment on the part of a people who have learned to manipulate space-time, whatever that is. All I know is, where I come from scientists talk about it as though it exists, and if it exists someone will find a way to use it.”
“We have an apparatus that does something like that,” Sylvia told me.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t understand it at all. Maybe the arithmeticking is beyond all I was taught, but I have been on craft that made use of it.”
“In what way?” I demanded. “Skipping through worlds? Why didn’t you mention it before?”
“Not world skipping in this sense, but the other. When the Arcturians discovered us they invited us to join the Federated Cloud and gave us the knowledge to build the mechanism that made star travel possible. It does something that I don’t understand to the space-time rate of change around the stellar craft while they travel. But it just feels like a slight bump, nothing at all like that horrible wrench that does these things.”
I said, “They might be related. Say, you mean you’ve been to different planets? You’ve traveled on these interstellar, er, craft?”
“Yes, since I was a small girl. The Great World Circus and Barnum Show goes on tour for four to six months every year or so. That is, we spend a year here and then four to six months traveling. I’ve been on tour four, no five, times. I’ve seen many different worlds and slept under many different suns. That’s a circus joke, because we usually sleep during the day.”
“Do you know that my ambition has always been to make it to the Moon or Mars before I die? And you’ve traveled to many different....”
“The Moon is dead, just a transfer point. I was there twice. Good hotels. I’ve never been to Mars, but I understand it’s quite beautiful in season.”
“Shut,” I declared passionately, “up!”
“Why, Michael, what’s the matter?”
“Never mind. I’m sorry. You wouldn’t understand.” I sighed. “Never been in a car, but she’s been between the stars.”
“The trains take us anywhere we want on Earth. They’re very fast and dependable. If I remember from history we tried personal mechanical vehicles for a short time, but gave them up as a bad idea. They smell up the road, take up too much room, caused many accidents and just proved a general nuisance. They were outlawed forty or fifty years ago. I’ve seen them in museums, but they didn’t look anything like the ones on your world. More like the ones here.”
“I agree,” I told her. “They’re dirty, smelly, dangerous and all that. Maybe we should have had the benign influence of Arcturians on our world.”
“Oh, we gave them up before we were broached.”
“What are the cars like here?”
“Oh, you’ll see when Mrs. Siddens’ man Harry comes back. What are we going to do now?”
“I guess I didn’t make that clear,” I said. “We’re goin
g to go on and search for the source of these happenings. It’s liable to be dangerous, but staying here might be just as dangerous, so we fight. Wait a minute, maybe I shouldn’t have said ‘we’ so quickly. It is going to be dangerous if I manage to get close to the heart of this mess, so it might be better if you wait here or let me settle you some place safe until this is over.”
“Michael!”
“I’ll come back for you, you know that.”
“That isn’t nearly the point. First of all, if you go blip and I don’t, you may not be able to come back. Second of all, what makes you think I’d let you go alone? You’ll need me. And I need you, even if I have to walk through the Valley of Dread to be at your side. Third of all, I have to find Adolphus, and you swore to help me. I will grant that the new quest must be striven first, but after, we have a unicorn to find.”
“A curious mixture, you,” I said, pulling her firmly toward me over the bowl of cement and commencing a lengthy kiss of agreement, exploration, adoration and lust.
“Ahum, hem, hem,” coughed the doorway, and we unwillingly separated and looked up. Mrs. Siddens stood there, turnips in hand, flanked by the tallest, widest, most genial looking giant I’ve ever seen in human form.
The giant gave a happy roar. “Must be feelin’ a mite better,” he declared. “Sure looks better than when we carted him in here.”
“My man Harry,” Mrs. Siddens introduced. She reached behind him and pulled a smaller version into view. “This here’s my youngest, Tanner.”
I stood up and extended my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet both of you. I have a lot to thank you for.”
Harry waved his gigantic mitt. “Nothin’,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “We do what we can for each other and try to live by His words, and I guess that’s what makes us human.”
“I think, maybe, you’ve got a point there,” I agreed. “We thank you anyway.”
“Yes,” Sylvia added. “We do so thank you for your kindness. We were fortunate indeed to have come upon our trouble so close to one who practices his belief, good sir.”
“Shucks,” Harry boomed. “Say, if you don’t mind my askin’, where do you haul from?” He immediately managed to look sorry he’d asked such a personal question.
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