"That"s it!" cried Pillbot hoa.r.s.ely. "You switched the pattern of imitation on It--tricked It into bringing you here. That"s what made it angry--"
"Angry?" Harper almost dropped his pad, clutched at Pillbot as there was a sudden upheaval of the invisible tension-surface on which they stood. A violent shake sprawled them on the "ground" and now Harper saw the torso of Gault, a few feet away, apparently hovering above the surface.
"Yes, angry!" Pillbot was pale. "As long as you merely gave it something to imitate it was pacified. But now it recognizes opposition, an effort to outwit it due to your switching the pattern of imitation. Its condition is dangerous--it"s bound to react violently. We have to get out of here. You must know some way--"
Harper again scribbled some figures on his pad. "As soon as I"ve worked out this formula--"
Pillbot shook him frantically. "Can"t you understand! This Creature is a mental patient of a violent type. We are in a fourth dimensional insane asylum!" Pillbot gazed upward fearfully at a descending ma.s.s. "The pattern of its action fits perfectly," he went on. "Some violent type of insanity, combined with delusions of grandeur. Any slightest opposition will cause a spasm of fury. It recognizes such opposition in the way you tricked it into bringing you here. At first I thought it was a primitive mentality, but now I know it is a highly evolved, but insane creature, thinks it"s Napoleon, wants to conquer the three dimensional plane which its attention has been attracted to in some way--"
Harper looked up in surprise. "Does it know about Napoleon?"
"Of course not, you fool!" screamed Pillbot. "It has the Napoleonic complex, identifies itself with some great conqueror of its own realm. And now it"s on the rampage. We have to get out of here--" He clutched at Harper as another upheaval of the surface threw them down.
Rising, Harper put away his pad. His calculations were complete. He could now show engineers how to build high buildings, taking advantage of s.p.a.ce stress instead of trying to fight the stress.
For the first time, the danger of their position seemed to penetrate to his consciousness. He looked about--and his eyes rested on a strange familiar projection rising from the invisible floor a few feet away. It was the section of his clay statue that had vanished--vanished because its peculiar shape had somehow caused it to be warped into the fourth dimension!
Why hadn"t he been able to move it--Professor Gault moved about freely.
He and Pillbot went over to it, tried to move it. A slight filmy webwork around the projection caught Harper"s eye. Now he knew--the Being had somehow affixed it to the spot as a landmark, so It could locate the laboratory. It must have been this projection that had first attracted the Being"s attention to the three dimensional world, since, ordinarily, It would never have noticed the presence of three dimensional life, any more than humans would notice the presence of two dimensional life if such existed!
Harper looked up at a bleat from Pillbot. Above them was a sudden furious play of lights and shades. Vast ma.s.ses seemed shifting in crazy juxtapositions, now descending rapidly toward them.
"Quick," Harper, now fully aroused, gasped to Pillbot. "Climb down this projection!"
"Climb down it--?"
"Yes, there is a fluid condition of s.p.a.ce where it penetrates between the two planes. By hugging its contours you will emerge into the laboratory--I hope!"
Pillbot glanced overhead nervously, then experimentally slid a font down the projection. The foot vanished. With a cry of relief, Pillbot lowered himself until only head and shoulders were visible. Then that too vanished.
Harper looked up. Some monstrous suggestion of Form was almost upon him. He grasped the projection and just as his head sank out of sight the Form seemed to smash down on him.
Pillbot helped Harper to his feet, from where he had sprawled at the base of the statue, on the laboratory floor.
"Quick," he gasped. "The Creature will be infuriated now, by our escape from Its realm. A maniacal spasm is sure to follow. We must get Gault back in some way, then leave the laboratory."
Even as they dashed over toward the abbreviated form of Gault, the laboratory shook. Invisible strains seemed to be bulging the walls inward.
Harper rushed to the desk upon which still reposed the cutout, the section between neck and waist still arched off the surface. As Harper reached toward the cutout to press it flat, Gault"s eyes widened, his mouth opened in a soundless shout of opposition. Harper hesitated.
"Never mind him," yammered Pillbot. "Press the figure flat!"
Harper pressed it flat.
For an instant the laboratory stopped its ominous vibration. Then the figure of Gault flew through the air, came up against a wall--but it was his complete figure.
"More signs of violence," cried Pillbot. "But that action won"t appease It--we must get out of here--"
Even as he spoke there was a thunderous crackling and roaring. Harper felt himself flying about, and for an instant of awful vertigo he did not know up from down. Forces seemed to be tearing at him. He felt as though he were a piece of iron being attracted simultaneously in several directions by powerful electro magnets.
There was a flare of colored lights, a deafening detonation--and he felt himself knocked breathless against a wall.
He picked himself up, looked around.
On one side of him was the familiar south wall of the laboratory. To the north, east and west was--open air. He was standing on a section of laboratory flooring that jutted out over empty s.p.a.ce from the wall. His desk was a few feet away, right at the edge of the jutting floor. Gault and Pillbot were picking themselves up to one side of the desk.
The pair looked over the edge of the floor, then recoiled, frenziedly hugging the flooring under them.
Harper crawled over, looked over the edge, quickly backed away. Several hundred feet below, the traffic of the city roared!
Gault went over to the door in the one wall, opened it, then stepped back quickly, his face pale.
"The laboratory has been turned inside out!" he shouted. "We are on the outside!"
"We must get away from here," squalled Pillbot. "Another spasm of the creature will precipitate us into the street!"
Gault forgot his apprehensions long enough to freeze Harper with a glance. "This is all your doing," he bawled. "You with your absurd doodling, which attracted the attention of some Being of the fourth dimension!" In his anger, he overlooked the fact that he was contradicting his formerly held opinion.
"The laboratory wrecked," he continued, "and that isn"t all!" He stalked up to the cringing Harper, thrust his face toward him.
"Do you know," he yelled, "why I didn"t want to be returned hastily--why I didn"t want you to bring me back by flattening out the paper cutout? You dolt, did you ever try to get a crease out of a piece of paper?"
"I--I don"t understand," murmured Harper.
"That paper doll was creased, wasn"t it?" shouted Gault.
"Once a piece of paper is creased," he resumed heatedly, "it can"t be perfectly flattened out again. At the crease a thin cross-section continues to bulge--into the third dimension in the case of that paper cutout. Into the fourth dimension in my case! I"m creased too, at the line where I was bent into the fourth dimension! Surely you aren"t blind?"
Harper staggered back as he saw it--a thin, horizontal line of light shining through Gault"s body--across his waistline, through clothes and all.
"I shall have to go through life this way," Gault snarled, "due to your imbecilic "doodling", your meddling with what you don"t understand. Go about constantly with a slit of daylight showing through me. You"re fired!"
"Gentlemen," cried Pillbot. "The ent.i.ty--we must get away. Another spasm will surely follow--"
Harper didn"t think so. A few feet away he had noticed something--his statue lying on its side. It was all there, including the portion that had been in the fourth dimension. The Ent.i.ty"s "landmark" was gone. Harper didn"t believe It would locate this particular area of the third dimension again.
The scream of a fire siren rose up to them. As a ladder sc.r.a.ped over the projecting floor, Harper fondly felt the pad in his pocket with the formula on it. He wasn"t worried now about having been fired. He was seeing visions of a small cottage with Judith....
Of course, he would have to be careful in the future with his "doodling"! He could not again risk attracting the attention of some four dimensional Being--not with Judith to think about!
A MATTER OF PROPORTION.
BY ANNE WALKER.
In order to make a man stop, you must convince him that it"s impossible to go on. Some people, though, just can"t be convinced.
In the dark, our glider chutes zeroed neatly on target--only Art Benjamin missed the edge of the gorge. When we were sure Invader hadn"t heard the crashing of bushes, I climbed down after him. The climb, and what I found, left me shaken. A Special Corps squad leader is not expendable--by order. Clyde Esterbrook, my second and ICEG mate, would have to mine the viaduct while my nerve and glycogen stabilized.
We timed the patrols. Clyde said, "Have to wait till a train"s coming. No time otherwise." Well, it was his show. When the next pair of burly-coated men came over at a trot, he breathed, "Now!" and ghosted out almost before they were clear.
I switched on the ICEG--inter-cortical encephalograph--planted in my temporal bone. My own senses could hear young Ferd breathing, feel and smell the mat of pine needles under me. Through Clyde"s, I could hear the blind whuffle of wind in the girders, feel the crude wood of ties and the iron-cold molding of rails in the star-dark. I could feel, too, an odd, lilting elation in his mind, as if this savage universe were a good thing to take on--spray guns, cold, and all.
We wanted to set the mine so the wreckage would clobber a trail below, one like they"d built in Burma and j.a.pan, where you wouldn"t think a monkey could go; but it probably carried more supplies than the viaduct itself. So Clyde made adjustments precisely, just as we"d figured it with the model back at base. It was a tricky, slow job in the bitter dark.
I began to figure: If he armed it for this train, and ran, she"d go off while we were on location and we"d be drenched in searchlights and spray guns. Already, through his fingers, I felt the hum in the rails that every tank-town-reared kid knows. I turned up my ICEG. "All right, Clyde, get back. Arm it when she"s gone past, for the next one."
I felt him grin, felt his lips form words: "I"ll do better than that, Willie. Look, Daddy-o, no hands!" He slid over the edge and rested elbows and ribs on the raw tie ends.
We"re all acrobats in the Corps. But I didn"t like this act one little bit. Even if he could hang by his hands, the heavy train would jolt him off. But I swallowed my thoughts.
He groped with his foot, contacted a sloping beam, and brought his other foot in. I felt a dull, sc.r.a.ping slither under his moccasin soles. "Frost," he thought calmly, rubbed a clear patch with the edge of his foot, put his weight on it, and transferred his hands to the beam with a twist we hadn"t learned in Corps school. My heart did a double-take; one slip and he"d be off into the gorge, and the frost stung, melting under his bare fingers. He lay in the trough of the ma.s.sive H-beam, slid down about twenty feet to where it made an angle with an upright, and wedged himself there. It took all of twenty seconds, really. But I let out a breath as if I"d been holding it for minutes.
As he settled, searchlights began skimming the bridge. If he"d been running, he"d have been shot to a sieve. As it was, they"d never see him in the mingled glare and black.
His heart hadn"t even speeded up beyond what was required by exertion. The train roared around a shoulder and onto the viaduct, shaking it like an angry hand. But as the boxcars thunder-clattered above his head, he was peering into the gulf at a string of feeble lights threading the bottom. "There"s the flywalk, Willie. They know their stuff. But we"ll get it." Then, as the caboose careened over and the searchlights cut off, "Well, that gives us ten minutes before the patrol comes back."
He levered onto his side, a joint at a time, and began to climb the beam. Never again for me, even by proxy! You just couldn"t climb that thing nohow! The slope was too steep. The beam was too ma.s.sive to shinny, yet too narrow to lie inside and elbow up. The metal was too smooth, and sc.u.mmed with frost. His fingers were beginning to numb. And--he was climbing!
In each fin of the beam, every foot or so, was a round hole. He"d get one finger into a hole and pull, inching his body against the beam. He timed himself to some striding music I didn"t know, not fast but no waste motion, even the pauses rhythmic.
I tell you. I was sweating under my leathers. Maybe I should have switched the ICEG off, for my own sake if not to avoid distracting Clyde. But I was hypnotized, climbing.
In the old days, when you were risking your neck, you were supposed to think great solemn thoughts. Recently, you"re supposed to think about something silly like a singing commercial. Clyde"s mind was neither posturing in front of his mental mirror nor running in some feverish little circle. He faced terror as big as the darkness from gorge bottom to stars, and he was just simply as big as it was--sheer life exulting in defying the dark, the frost and wind and the zombie grip of Invader. I envied him.
Then his rhythm checked. Five feet from the top, he reached confidently for a finger hole ... No hole.
He had already reached as high as he could without shifting his purchase and risking a skid--and even his wrestler"s muscles wouldn"t make the climb again. My stomach quaked: Never see sunlight in the trees any more, just cling till dawn picked you out like a crow"s nest in a dead tree; or drop ...
Not Clyde. His flame of life crouched in anger. Not only the malice of nature and the rage of enemies, but human shiftlessness against him too? Good! He"d take it on.
Shoulder, thigh, knee, foot sc.r.a.ped off frost. He jammed his jaw against the wet iron. His right hand never let go, but it crawled up the fin of the strut like a blind animal, while the load on his points of purchase mounted--watchmaker co-ordination where you"d normally think in boilermaker terms. The flame sank to a spark as he focused, but it never blinked out. This was not the antic.i.p.ated, warded danger, but the trick punch from nowhere. This was It. A sneak squall buffeted him. I cursed thinly. But he sensed an extra purchase from its pressure, and reached the last four inches with a swift glide. The next hole was there.
He waited five heartbeats, and pulled. He began at the muscular disadvantage of aligned joints. He had to make it the first time; if you can"t do it with a dollar, you won"t do it with the change. But as elbow and shoulder bent, the flame soared again: Score one more for life!
A minute later, he hooked his arm over the b.u.t.t of a tie, his chin, his other arm, and hung a moment. He didn"t throw a knee up, just rolled and lay between the rails. Even as he relaxed, he glanced at his watch: three minutes to spare. Leisurely, he armed the mine and jogged back to me and Ferd.
As I broke ICEG contact, his flame had sunk to an ember glow of antic.i.p.ation.
We had almost reached the cave p.r.i.c.ked on our map, when we heard the slam of the mine, wee and far-off. We were lying doggo looking out at the snow peaks incandescent in dawn when the first Invader patrols trailed by below. Our equipment was a miracle of hot food and basic medication. Not pastimes, though; and by the second day of hiding, I was thinking too much. There was Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread of black mustache and incongruous hazel eyes, my friend and ICEG mate--what made him tick? Where did he get his delight in the bright eyes of danger? How did he gear his daredevil valor, not to the icy iron and obligatory killing, but to the big music and stars over the gorge? But in the Corps, we don"t ask questions and, above all, never eavesdrop on ICEG.
Young Ferd wasn"t so inhibited. Benjamin"s death had shaken him--losing your ICEG mate is like losing an eye. He began fly-fishing Clyde: How had Clyde figured that stunt, in the dark, with the few minutes he"d had?
"There"s always a way, Ferd, if you"re fighting for what you really want."
"Well, I want to throw out Invader, all right, but--"
"That"s the start, of course, but beyond that--" He changed the subject: perhaps only I knew of his dream about a stronghold for rebels far in these mountains. He smiled. "I guess you get used to calculated risks. Except for imagination, you"re as safe walking a ledge twenty stories up, as down on the sidewalk."
"Not if you trip."
"That"s the calculated risk. If you climb, you get used to it."
"Well, how did you get used to it? Were you a mountaineer or an acrobat?"
"In a way, both." Clyde smiled again, a trifle bitterly and switched the topic. "Anyway, I"ve been in action for the duration except some time in hospital."
Ferd was onto that b.o.n.e.r like an infielder. To get into SC you have to be not only championship fit, but have no history of injury that could crop up to haywire you in a pinch. So, "Hospital? You sure don"t show it now."
Clyde was certainly below par. To cover his slip he backed into a bigger, if less obvious, one. "Oh, I was in that Operation Armada at Golden Gate. Had to be patched up."
He must have figured, Ferd had been a kid then, and I hadn"t been too old. Odds were, we"d recall the episode, and no more. Unfortunately, I"d been a ham operator and I"d been in the corps that beamed those fireships onto the Invader supply fleet in the dense fog. The whole episode was burned into my brain. It had been kamikaze stuff, though there"d been a theoretical chance of the thirty men escaping, to justify sending them out. Actually, one escape boat did get back with three men.
I"d learned about those men, out of morbid, conscience-scalded curiosity. Their leader was Edwin Scott, a medical student. At the very start he"d been shot through the lower spine. So, his companions put him in the escape boat while they clinched their prey. But as the escape boat sheered off, the blast of enemy fire killed three and disabled two.
Scott must have been some boy. He"d already doctored himself with hemostatics and local anaesthetics but, from the hips down, he was dead as salt pork, and his visceral reflexes must have been reacting like a worm cut with a hoe. Yet somehow, he doctored the two others and got that boat home.
The other two had died, but Scott lived as sole survivor of Operation Armada. And he hadn"t been a big, bronze, Latin-Indian with incongruous hazel eyes, but a snub-nosed redhead. And he"d been wheel-chaired for life. They"d patched him up, decorated him, sent him to a base hospital in Wisconsin where he could live in whatever comfort was available. So, he dropped out of sight. And now, this!
Clyde was lying, of course. He"d picked the episode at random. Except that so much else about him didn"t square. Including his name compared to his physique, now I thought about it.
I tabled it during our odyssey home. But during post-mission leave, it kept bothering me. I checked, and came up with what I"d already known: Scott had been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But about Scott, I got a runaround. He"d apparently vanished. Oh, they"d check for me, but that could take years. Which didn"t lull my curiosity any. Into Clyde"s past I was sworn not to pry.
We were training for our next a.s.signment, when word came through of the surrender at Kelowna. It was a flare of sunlight through a black sky. The end was suddenly close.