Nine by Laumer

by Keith Laumer

  “That place looks lived-in,” said Brett, indicating an open apartment window with a curtain billowing above a potted geranium. ‘Til take a look.”

  He came back shaking his head. “They were all in the TV room. They looked so natural at first; I mean, they didn’t look up or anything when I walked in. I turned the set off. The electricity is still working anyway. Wonder how long it will last?” They turned down a residential street. Underfoot the pavement trembled at a distant blast. They skirted a crack, kept going. Occasional golems stood in awkward poses or lay across sidewalks. One, clad in black, tilted awkwardly in a Gothic entry of fretted stone work. “I guess there won’t be any church this Sunday,” said Brett.

  He halted before a brown brick apartment house. An untended hose welled on a patch of sickly lawn. Brett went to the door, stood listening, then went in. Across the room the still figure of a woman sat in a rocker. A curl stirred on her smooth forehead. A flicker of expression seemed to cross the lined face. Brett started forward. “Don’t be afraid. You can come with us—”

  He stopped. A flapping window-shade cast restless shadows on the still golem features on which dust was already settling. Brett turned away, shaking his head.

  “All of them,” he said. “It’s as though they were snipped out of paper. When the Gels died their dummies died with them.” “Why?” said Dhuva. “What does it all mean?”

  “Mean?” said Brett. He shook his head, started off again along the street. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the way things

  Brett sat in a deserted Cadillac, tuning the radio.

  . . anybody hear me?” said a plaintive voice from the speaker. “This is Ab Gullorian, at the Twin Spires. Looks like I’m the only one left alive. Can anybody hear me?”

  Brett tuned… been asking the wrong questions … looking for the Final Fact. Now these are strange matters, brothers. But if a flower blooms, what man shall ask why? What lore do we seek in a symphony … ?”

  He twisted the knob again. “… Kansas City. Not more than half a dozen of us. And the dead! Piled all over the place. But it’s a funny thing: Doc Potter started to do an autopsy—”

  Brett turned the knob… CQ, CQ, CQ. This is Hollip Quate, calling CQ, CQ. There’s been a disaster here at Port Wanderlust. We need—”

  “Take Jesus into your hearts,” another station urged.

  “… to base,” the radio said faintly, with much crackling. “Lunar Observatory to base. Come in, Lunar Control. This is Commander McVee of the Lunar Detachment, sole survivor—” “… hello, Hollip Quate? Hollip Quate? This is Kansas City calling. Say, where did you say you were calling from … ?” “It looks as though both of us had a lot of mistaken ideas about the world outside,” said Brett. “Most of these stations sound as though they might as well be coming from Mars.”

  “I don’t understand where the voices come from,” Dhuva said. “But all the places they name are strange to me … except the Twin Spires.”

  “I’ve heard of Kansas City,” Brett said, “but none of the other ones.”

  The ground trembled. A low rumble rolled. “Another one,” Brett said. He switched off the radio, tried the starter. It groaned, turned over. The engine caught, sputtered, then ran smoothly.

  “Get in, Dhuva. We might as well ride. Which way do we go to get out of this place?”

  “The wall lies in that direction,” said Dhuva. “But I don’t know about a gate.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” said Brett. “This whole place is going to collapse before long. We really started something. I suppose other underground storage tanks caught— and gas lines, too.”

  A building ahead cracked, fell in a heap of pulverized plaster. The car bucked as a blast sent a ripple down the street. A manhole cover popped up, clattered a few feet, dropped from sight. Brett swerved, gunned the car. It leaped over rubble, roared along the littered pavement. Brett looked in the rearview mirror. A block behind them the street ended. Smoke and dust rose from the immense pit.

  “We just missed it that time!” he called. “How far to the wall?”

  “Not far! Turn here …”

  Brett rounded the corner with a shrieking of tires. Ahead the grey wall rose up, blank, featureless.

  “This is a dead end!” Brett shouted.

  “We’d better get out and run for it—”

  “No time! I’m going to ram the wall! Maybe I can knock a hole in it.”

  Dhuva crouched; teeth gritted, Brett held the accelerator to the floor, roared straight toward the wall. The heavy car shot across the last few yards, struck—

  And burst through a curtain of canvas into a field of dry stalks.

  Brett steered the car in a wide curve to halt and look back. A blackened panama hat floated down, settled among the stalks. Smoke poured up in a dense cloud from behind the canvas wall. A fetid stench pervaded the air.

  “That finishes that, I guess,” Brett said.

  “I don’t know. Look there.”

  Brett turned. Far across the dry field columns of smoke rose from the ground.

  “The whole thing’s undermined,” Brett said. “How far does it go?”

  “No telling. But we’d better be off. Perhaps we can get beyond the edge of it. Not that it matters. We’re all that’s left …”

  “You sound like the fat man,” Brett said. “But why should we be so surprised to find out the truth? After all, we never saw it before. All we knew—or thought we knew—was what they told us. The moon, the other side of the world, a distant city … or even the next town. How do we really know what’s there … unless we go and see for ourselves? Does a goldfish in his bowl know what the ocean is like?”

  “Where did they come from, those Gels? How much of the world have they undermined? What about Wavly? Is it a golem country too? The Duke … and all the people I knew?”

  “I don’t know, Dhuva. I’ve been wondering about the people in Casperton. Like Doc Welch. I used to see him in the street with his little black bag. I always thought it was full of pills and scalpels; but maybe it really had zebra’s tails and toad’s eyes in it. Maybe he’s really a magician on his way to cast spells against demons. Maybe the people I used to see hurrying to catch the bus every morning weren’t really going to the office. Maybe they go down into caves and chip away at the foundations of things. Maybe they go up on rooftops and put on rainbow-colored robes and fly away. I used to pass by a bank in Casperton: a big grey stone building with little curtains over the bottom half of the windows. I never go in there. I don’t have anything to do in a bank. I’ve always thought it was full of bankers, banking … Now I don’t know. It could be anything . .

  “That’s why I’m afraid,” Dhuva said. “It could be anything.” “Things aren’t really any different than they were,” said Brett, “… except that now we know.” He turned the big car out across the field toward Casperton.

  “I don’t know what we’ll find when we get back. Aunt Haicey, Pretty-Lee … But there’s only one way to find out.”

  The moon rose as the car bumped westward, raising a trail of dust against the luminous sky of evening.