by C. L. Moore
"Think!" Norman said violently.
"I have to think?"
"No. Wrong, wrong. Think wrong."
"I'm thinking wrong?"
Norman made a gesture of despair and turned away toward his room, carrying the wire turban with him.
Fowler, rubbing his forehead where the wires had pressed, wondered dizzily what had happened. Think wrong. It didn't make sense. He looked at himself in the television screen, which was a mirror when not in use, fingered the red line of the turban's pressure, and murmured, "Thinking, something to do with thinking. What?" Apparently the turban was designed to alter his patterns of thought, to open up some dazzling door through which he could perceive the new causalities that guided Norman's mind.
He thought that in some way it was probably connected with that moment when the helmet had seemed to wrench first his hair and then his skull and then his innermost thoughts in the wrong direction. But he couldn't work it out. He was too tired. All the emotional strain of the past days, the menace still hanging over him, the tremulous excitement of what lay in the immediate future—no, he couldn't be expected to reason things through very clearly just now. It was Norman's job. Norman would have to solve that problem for them both.
Norman did. He came out of his room in a few minutes, carrying the turban, twisted now into a higher, rounder shape, the gem of light glowing bluer than before. He approached Fowler with a firm step.
"You ... thinking wrong," he said with great distinctness. "Too ... too old. Can't change. Think wrong!"
He stared anxiously at Fowler and Fowler stared back, searching the deep-set eyes for some clue to the meaning hidden in the locked chambers of the skull behind them.
"Thinking wrong." Fowler echoed. "Too ... old? I don't understand. Or—do I? You mean my mind isn't flexible enough any more?" He remembered the wrenching moment when every mental process had tried vainly to turn sidewise in his head. "But then it won't work at all!"
"Oh, yes," Norman said confidently.
"But if I'm too old—" It wasn't age, really. Fowler was not old in years. But the grooves of his thinking had worn themselves deep in the past years since Norman came. He had fixed inflexibly in the paths of his own self-indulgence and now his mind could not accept the answer the wire turban offered. "I can't change," he told Norman despairingly. "If I'd only made you do this when you first came, before my mind set in its pattern—"
Norman held out the turban, reversed so that the blue light bathed his face in blinking radiance. "This—will work," he said confidently.
Belated caution made Fowler dodge back a little. "Now wait. I want to know more before we ... how can it work? You can't make me any younger, and I don't want any random tampering with my brain. I—"
Norman was not listening. With a swift, sure gesture he pressed the wired wreath down on Fowler's head.
There was the wrenching of hair and scalp, skull and brain. This first—and then very swiftly the shadows moved upon the floor, the sun gleamed for one moment through the eastern windows and the world darkened outside. The darkness winked and was purple, was dull red, was daylight—
Fowler could not stir. He tried furiously to snatch the turban from his head, but no impulse from his brain made any connection with the motionless limbs. He still stood facing the mirror, the blue light still winked thoughtfully back at him, but everything moved so fast he had no time to comprehend light or dark for what they were, or the blurred motions reflected in the glass, or what was happening to him.
This was yesterday, and the week before, and the year before, but he did not clearly know it. You can't make me any younger. Very dimly he remembered having said that to Norman at some remote interval of time. His thoughts moved sluggishly somewhere at the very core of his brain, whose outer layers were being peeled off one by one, hour by hour, day by day. But Norman could make him younger. Norman was making him younger. Norman was whisking him back and back toward the moment when his brain would regain flexibility enough for the magical turban to open that door to genius.
Those blurs in the mirror were people moving at normal time-speed—himself, Norman, Veronica going forward in time as he slipped backward through it, neither perceiving the other. But twice he saw Norman moving through the room at a speed that matched his own, walking slowly and looking for something. He saw him search behind a chair-cushion and pull out a creased folder, legal size—the folder he had last sent Norman to find, on that day when he vanished from his closed room!
Norman, then, had traveled in time before. Norman's powers must be more far-reaching, more dazzling, than he had ever guessed. As his own powers would be, when his mind cleared again and this blinding flicker stopped.
Night and day went by like the flapping of a black wing. That was the way Wells had put it. That was the way it looked. A hypnotic flapping. It left him dazed and dull—
Norman, holding the folder, lifted his head and for one instant looked Fowler in the face in the glass. Then he turned and went away through time to another meeting in another interval that would lead backward again to this meeting, and on and on around a closing spiral which no mind could fully comprehend. It didn't matter. Only one thing really mattered. Fowler stood there shocked for an instant into almost total wakefulness, staring at his own face in the mirror, remembering Norman's face.
For one timeless moment, while night and day flapped around him, he stood helpless, motionless, staring appalled at his reflection in the gray that was the blending of time—and he knew who Norman was.
Then mercifully the hypnosis took over again and he knew nothing at all.
-
There are centers in the brain never meant for man's use today. Not until the race has evolved the strength to handle them. A man of today might learn the secret that would unlock those centers, and if he were a fool he might even turn the key that would let the door swing open.
But after that he would do nothing at all of his own volition.
For modern man is still too weak to handle the terrible energy that must pour forth to activate those centers. The grossly overloaded physical and mental connections could hold for only a fraction of a second. Then the energy flooding into the newly unlocked brain-center never meant for use until perhaps a thousand more years have remodeled mankind, would collapse the channels, fuse the connections, make every synapse falter in the moment when the gates of the mind swing wide.
On Fowler's head the turban of wires glowed incandescent and vanished. The thing that had once happened to Norman happened now to him. The dazzling revelation—the draining, the atrophy—
He had recognized Norman's face reflected in the mirror beside his own, both white with exhaustion, both stunned and empty. He knew who Norman was, what motives moved him, what corroding irony had made his punishing of Norman just. But by the time he knew, it was already far too late to alter the future or the past.
-
Time flapped its wings more slowly. That moment of times gone swung round again as the circle came to its close. Memories flickered more and more dimly in Fowler's mind, like day and night, like the vague, shapeless world which was all he could perceive now. He felt cold and weak, strangely, intolerably, inhumanly weak with a weakness of the blood and bone, of the mind and soul. He saw his surroundings dimly, but he saw—other things—with a swimming clarity that had no meaning to him. He saw causes and effects as tangible before him as he had once seen trees and grass. But remote, indifferent, part of another world.
Help was what he needed. There was something he must remember. Something of terrible import. He must find help, to focus his mind upon the things that would work his cure. Cure was possible; he knew it—he knew it. But he needed help.
Somehow there was a door before him. He reached vaguely, moving his hand almost by reflex toward his pocket. But he had no pocket. This was a suit of the new fashion, sleek in fabric, cut without pockets. He would have to knock, to ring. He remembered—
The face he had seen in the
mirror. His own face? But even then it had been changing, as a cloud before the sun drains life and color and soul from a landscape. The expunging amnesia wiped across its mind had had its parallel physically, too; the traumatic shock of moving through time—the dark wing flapping—had sponged the recognizable characteristics from his face, leaving the matrix, the characterless basic. This was not his face. He had no face; he had no memory. He knew only that this familiar door before him was the door to the help he must have to save himself from a circling eternity.
It was almost wholly a reflex gesture that moved his finger toward the doorbell. The last dregs of memory and initiative drained from him with the motion.
Again the chimes played three soft notes. Again the circle closed.
Again the blank man waited for John Fowler to open the door.
The End
BEYOND EARTH'S GATES
(aka The Portal in the Picture)
Startling Stories - September 1949
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Henry Kuttner
Contents
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Epilogue
Prologue
SHE called herself Malesca. Her agent called her the "Loveliest Girl in the World" and I suppose he wasn't far wrong, at that. If I'd known she was playing the Windsor Roof that night I'd have gone somewhere else.
But by the time I was at the table, having a sandwich and a highball, it was too late. The lights dimmed, the spot went on and there stood Malesca, bowing to the storm of applause. I wasn't going to let her spoil my drink. I could always look somewhere else while she was on. I ate white meat of chicken, drank my highball and thought about other things—until the famous velvet voice began to sing.
I listened to her sing. A chair creaked. In the dimness someone sat down beside me. I peered through the gloom, recognizing the man, a top figure in show business.
"Hello, Burton," he said.
"Hello."
"Mind if I join you?"
I waved my hand and he gave his order to the waiter who slid up noiselessly. Malesca was still singing.
The man beside me watched her, as rapt and intent as everybody else in the club except me.
Two encores later, when the lights went up, I realized that he was staring at me curiously. My disinterest in the singer must have been pretty obvious.
"No like?" he asked in a puzzled voice.
Even before Korzybski that particular question would have been meaningless. I couldn't answer him and I knew it. So I didn't bother. I just didn't say anything. I could see Malesca from the corner of my eye, hear the rustle of her stiff skirts as she came through the tables toward me. I sighed.
She was wearing some light flowery scent I knew she hadn't picked out for herself. She put her hand on the table edge and leaned toward me.
"Eddie," she said.
"Well?"
"Eddie, I haven't seen you for ages."
"That's right."
"Listen, why don't you wait around? Take me somewhere after my last show. We could have a drink or something. How about it, Eddie?"
Her voice was pure magic. It had been magic on radio and records and video. It would soon be magic in the movies. I didn't say a word.
"Eddie—please."
I picked up my glass, emptied it, brushed crumbs off my coat, laid the napkin beside the plate.
"Thanks," I said. "Wish I could."
She stared at me, the familiar, searching stare full of incomprehension. I could hear the applause still echoing.
"Eddie—"
"You heard me," I said. "Take a walk. Take an encore. Go on, beat it."
Without a word she turned away and went back to the floor, her skirts frothing and hissing as she squeezed between the tables. The man beside me said: "Eddie, are you crazy?"
"Probably," I said. I wasn't going to explain to him.
"All right, Eddie. You know the answers, I suppose. But something must be wrong. The most beautiful woman in the world throwing herself at your feet—and you won't even look at her. That just isn't sensible."
"I'm not a very sensible guy," I told him. It was a lie, of course. I'm the most sensible guy in the world—in any world.
"Don't give me clichés," he said. "That's no answer."
"Clichés!" I said and choked in my glass. "Okay, okay, never mind. Nothing wrong with clichés, you know. They're just truths that happen so often they're trite. It doesn't make them any less true, does it?" I looked at Malesca squaring off at the mike, getting ready to sing again.
"I knew a man once who tried to discredit clichés," I went on thoughtfully, knowing I was probably saying too much. "He failed. He had quite a time, that guy."
"What happened?"
"Oh, he found a fabulous land and rescued a beautiful goddess and overthrew a wicked high priest and—forget it. Maybe it was a book I read."
"What fabulous land was that?" my friend inquired idly.
"Malesco."
He lifted an eyebrow at me and glanced across the room at the Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
"Malesco? Where's that?"
"Right behind you," I said.
Then I picked up my fresh highball and buried my nose in it. I had nothing more to say—to him. But a chord in the music just then woke a thin shivering wire of sound at the back of my brain, and for an instant the barrier between this world and the worlds outside was as thin as air.
Malesco, I thought. I shut my eyes and tried to make the domes and towers of that rose-red city take shape in the darkness while the chord still sounded in my ears. But I couldn't do it. Malesco had gone back into the fable again and the gates were shut forever.
And yet, when I think about it now even the sense of wonder and disbelief is suspended and I have no feeling at all that it was in some dream I walked those streets. They were real. I've got the most convincing kind of proof that they were real.
It all happened quite a while ago ...
-
Chapter I
REMEMBER the story of the blind men and the elephant? Not one of them ever found out it was an elephant. That's the way it was with me. A new world was opening right in front of me and I put it down to eyestrain.
I sat there in my apartment with a bottle and watched the air flicker.
I told myself to get up and switch off the lights because Lorna had got in the habit of dropping by if I didn't show up at the ginmill where she worked, and I didn't want to talk to her. Lorna Maxwell was a leech. She had attached herself to me with all the simple relentlessness of her one-track mind and short of killing her I knew no way to pry her loose.
It all seemed so easy to Lorna. Here I was, rising young actor Eddie Burton with a record of three straight Broadway hits and a good part in something new that all the critics liked. Fine.
Here she was, that third-rate young ginmill singer Lorna Maxwell with no record at all that she admitted to. Don't ask me how we met or how she got her hooks into me. I'm a born easy mark. Children, animals and people like Lorna can spot people like me a mile away.
She'd got it into her addled little head somehow that all I had to do was say the word and she'd be right up there beside me, a success, the darling of the columnists. Only selfishness kept me from saying the magic word to somebody in authority and turning her into Cinderella. Arguments wouldn't move her. It seemed simpler to turn off the lights when I was at home alone and not answer the door.
The air flickered again. I squinted and shook my head. This was getting
a little alarming. It couldn't be the Scotch. It never happened outside the apartment. It never happened unless I was looking at that particular wall.
There was a Rousseau picture on it, Sleeping Gypsy, something Uncle Jim had left me along with the apartment. I made a great effort to focus on the blue-green sky, the lion's blowing mane, the striped robe of the black man on the sand.
But all I got was a blur. And then I knew I must be drunk because a sound seemed to go with the blur, a roaring that might have been the lion except that the lion had entirely vanished and I seemed to be seeing a dome of shining rosy-red light that moved like water.
I squeezed my eyes shut. This was crazy.
Uncle Jim had left me the apartment in his will. It was one of those deals where you pay a fabulous sum down and a high rental for life and call the apartment yours. I wouldn't have got into it myself, but Uncle Jim did and it was nice to have a place the landlord couldn't throw me out of when somebody offered him a higher bribe.
This is probably the place for a word about Uncle Jim Burton. He was a Character. He had red hair, freckles and a way of losing himself in foreign parts for months at a stretch. Sometimes for years.
He used to visit us between trips when I was a kid, and of all the people I knew in those days he was my favorite because he took me in on a secret.
It started out as bedtime stories. All about a marvelous land called Malesco that followed the pattern for all marvelous lands. There was a beautiful princess and a wicked high priest and a dashing young hero whose adventures kept me awake for all of fifteen minutes sometimes after the lights were put out.
Those were the pre-Superman days, so I didn't picture myself soaring through Malesco in a red union suit. But sometimes I wore a lion skin like Tarzan and sometimes the harness of an intrepid Martian warrior who looked like John Carter.
I even learned to speak Malescan. Uncle Jim made it up, of course. He had a restless mind, and he was recovering from some sort of illness during those months he stayed with us when the Malesco stories began. He made up a vocabulary of the language. We worked out a sort of primer together and jabbered away to each other in Malescan with a good deal of fluency before the episode came to an end and he went away again.
