by Fritz Leiber
foodstuffs and their exposure to heat and moisture and other influences. The entertainment and games centers, where swirling gaiety and high-pitched excitement were the rule.
Everywhere happiness—or, rather, creative freedom. A great rich surging world, unaware, save for nightmare glimpses, of the abyss-edge on which it danced.
Maddeningly unaware.
Clawly’s features writhed. Thus, he thought, the Dawn gods must have felt when looking down upon mankind the evening before Ragnarok.
To be able to shake those people out of their complacency, make them aware of danger!
The seer’s words returned to him: “Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it wait supine for the hunter—You must give it a reason … extemporize a danger—Mars.”
Mars! The seer’s disappearance had caused Clawly to miss the idea behind the word, but now, remembering, he grasped it in a flash. A faked Martian invasion. Doctored reports from the First Interplanetary Expedition—mysterious disappearance of spaceships—unknown craft approaching Earth—rumor of a vast fleet—running fights in the stratosphere—
Firemoor of the Extraterrestrial Service was his friend, and believed in his theories. Moreover, Firemoor was daring—even reckless. Many of the young men under him were of similar temperament. The thing could be done!
Abruptly Clawly shook his head, scowled. Any such invasion scare would be a criminal hoax. It was a notion that must have been forced upon him by the darker, more wantonly mischievous side of his nature—or by some lingering hypnotic influence of Oktav.
And yet—
No! He must forget the notion. Find another way.
He slid from the desk, began to pace. Opposition. That was what he needed. Something concrete to fight against. Something, some person, some group, that was opposed to him, that was trying to thwart him at every turn.
He stopped, wondering why he had not thought of it before.
There were two men who were trying to thwart him, who had shrewdly undermined his and Thorn’s theories, two men who had shown an odd personality reversal in the past months, who had impressed him with a fleeting sense of strangeness and alienage.
Two members of the World Executive Committee.
Conjerly and Tempelmar.
Brushing the treetops, swooping through leaf-framed gaps, startling a squirrel that had been dozing on an upper branch, Clawly glided into the open and made a running landing on the olive-floored sun-deck of Conjerly’s home.
It was very quiet. There was only the humming of some bees in the flower garden, up from which sweet, heavy odors drifted sluggishly and curled across the deck. The sun beat down. On all sides without a break, the trees—solid masses of burnished leaves—pressed in.
Clawly crossed quietly to the dilated doorway in the cream-colored wall. He did not remove his flying togs. His visor he had thrown open during flight.
Raising his hand, he twice broke the invisible beam spanning the doorway. A low musical drone sounded, was repeated.
There was no answering sound, no footsteps. Clawly waited.
The general quiet, the feeling of lifelessness, made his abused nerves twitch. Forest homes like this, reached only by flying, were devilishly lonely and isolated.
Then he became aware of another faint, rhythmic sound, which the humming of the bees had masked. It came from inside the house. Throaty breathing. The intervals between breaths seemed abnormally long.
Clawly hesitated. Then he smoothly ducked under the beam.
He walked softly down a dark, cool corridor. The breathing grew steadily louder, though there was no change in its labored, sighing monotony. Opposite the third opened doorway the increase in volume was abrupt.
As his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, he made out a low couch and the figure of a man sprawled on it, on his back, arms dropped to either side, pale blob of bald head thrown limply back. At intervals the vague face quivered with the slow-paced breathing.
Clawly fumbled sideways, switched on a window, went over to the couch.
On the floor, under Conjerly’s hand, was a deflated elastoid bag. Clawly picked it up, sniffed, quickly averted his head from the faintly pungent soporific odor.
He shook the bulky sleeper, less gently after a moment.
It did not interrupt the measured snores.
The first impression of Conjerly’s face was one of utter emptiness, the deep-grooved wrinkles of character and emotion a network of disused roads. But on closer examination, hints of personality became dimly apparent, as if glimpsed at the bottom of a smudgy pool.
The longer Clawly studied them, the surer he became that the suspicions he had clutched at so eagerly in Oktav’s office were groundless. This was the Conjerly he had known. Unimaginative perhaps, stubborn and blunt, a little too inclined to conservatism, a little too fond of curling down those deep furrows at the corners of the mouth—but nothing alien, nothing malign.
The rhythm of the breathing changed. The sleeper stirred. One hand came slowly up, brushed blindly at the chest.
Clawly watched motionlessly. From all sides the heavy summery silence pressed in.
The rhythm of the breathing continued to change. The sleeper tossed. The hand fumbled restlessly at the neck of the loose houserobe.
And something else changed. It seemed to Clawly as if the face of the Conjerly he knew were sinking downward into a narrow bottomless pit, becoming tiny as a cameo, vanishing utterly, leaving only a hollow mask. And then, as if another face were rising to fill the mask—and in this second face, if not malignity, at least grim and unswervingly hostile purpose.
The sleeper mumbled, murmured. Clawly bent low, caught words. Words with a shuddery, unplacable quality of distance to them, as if they came from another cosmos.
“. . . transtime machine … invasion … three days … we … prevent action … until—”
Then, from the silence behind him, a different sound—a faint crunch.
Clawly whirled. Standing in the doorway, filling half its width and all its height, was Tempelmar.
And in Tempelmar’s lean, horselike face the vanishing flicker of a look in which suspicion, alarm, and a more active emotion were blended—a lethal look.
But by the time Clawly was looking straight at him, it had been replaced by an urbane, condescending, eyebrow-raising “Well?”
Again a sound from behind. Turning, backing a little so that he could take in both men at once, Clawly saw that Conjerly was sitting up, rubbing his face. He took away his hands and his small eyes stared at Clawly—blankly at first. Then his expression changed too, became a “Well?”—though more angry, indignant, less urbane. It was an expression that did not belong to the man who had lain there drugged.
The words Clawly had barely caught were still humming in his ears.
Even as he phrased his excuse—“… came to talk with you about the program … heard sounds of distressed breathing … alarmed … walked in …”—even as he considered the possibility of immediate physical attack and the best way to meet it, he came to a decision.
He would see Firemoor.
VIII.
In what a shadow, or deep pit
of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful
mankind live!
The Duchess of Maid, John Webster.
With bent shoulders, sunken head, paralyzed arm still dangling at his side, Thorn crouched uncomfortably in his lightless cell, as if the whole actual weight of the Black Star—up to the cold, cloud-piercing pinnacle where “they” held council—were upon him. His mind was tired to the breaking point, oppressed by the twisted, tyrannous world into which he had blundered, by the aching body not his own, by the brain which refused to think his thoughts in the way he wanted to think them.
And yet, in a sense, the human mind is tireless—an instrument built for weary decades of uninterrupted thinking and dreaming. And so Thorn continued to work on, revolving miseries, regrets, and fears, striving to unlock the stubborn memory
chambers of the unfamiliar brain, turning from that to equally hopeless efforts to make plans. Mostly it struggled nightmarishly with the problem of escape back to his own world, and with the paradoxical riddles which that problem involved. Fie must, Thorn told himself, still be making partial use of his brain back in World I—to give it a name—just as Thorn II—to give him a name—must be making use of these locked memory chambers. All thought had to be based on a physical brain; it couldn’t go on in emptiness. Also, since Universes I and II—to give them names—were independent, self-contained space-time set-ups, they couldn’t have an ordinary spatial relationship—they couldn’t be far from or near to each other. The only linkage between them seemed to be the mental ones between quasiduplicate brains, and such linkages would not involve distance in any common sense of the term. His transition into World II had seemed to take place instantaneously; hence, pragmatically speaking, the two universes could be considered as superimposed on each other. Whether he was in one or the other was just a matter of viewpoint.
So near and yet so far. So diabolically similar to attempts to wake from a nightmare—and the blackness of his cell increased the similarity. All he had to do was summon up enough mental energy, find sufficient impetus, to force a reexchange of viewpoints between himself and Thorn II. And yet as he struggled and strained through seeming eternities in the dark, as he strove to sink, to plunge, down the dark channels of the subconscious and found them closed, as he felt out the iron resistances of that other Thorn, he began to think the effort impossible—even began to wonder if World I were not just the wishful dream of a scarred, hunted, memoryless man in a world where invisible tyrants plotted un-understandable invasions, commanded the building of inexplicable machines, and bent millions to their wholly cryptic will.
At least, whatever the sufficient impetus was, he could not find it.
A vertical slit of light appeared, widened to a square, revealed a long corridor. And in it, flanked by two black-uniformed guards, the other Clawly.
So similar was the dapper figure to the Clawly he knew—rigged out in a strange costume and acting in a play—that it was all he could do not to spring up with a friendly greeting.
And then, to think that this Clawly’s mind was linked to the other’s, that somewhere, just across its subconscious, his friend’s thoughts moved—Dizzying. He stared at the trim, ironic face with a terrible fascination.
Clawly II spoke. “Consider yourself flattered. I’m going to deliver you personally to the Servants of the People. They’ll want to be the ones to decide, in your case, between immediate self-sacrifice, assisted confession, or what not.” He chuckled without personal malice. “The Servants have devised quite amusing euphemisms for Death and Torture, haven’t they? The odd thing is, they seem to take them seriously—the euphemisms, I mean.”
The uniformed guards, in whose stolid faces were written years of unquestioning obedience to incomprehensible orders, did not laugh. If anything, they looked shocked.
Thorn staggered up and stepped slowly forward, feeling that by that action he was accepting a destiny not of his own making but as inescapable as all destinies are, that he was making his entrance, on an unknown stage, into an unknown play. They started down the corridor, the guards bringing up the rear.
“You make rather a poorer assassin than I’d have imagined, if you’ll pardon the criticism,” Clawly II remarked after a moment. “That screaming my name to get me off guard—a very ill-advised dodge. And then dropping your weapon in the streatnbed. No—you can’t exactly call it competent. I’m afraid you didn’t live up to your reputation of being the most dangerous of the Recalcitrants. But then, of course, you were fagged.”
Thorn sensed something more in the remarks than courteous knifetwisting. Undeniably, Clawly II was vaguely aware of something off-key, and was probing for it. Thorn tightened his guard, for he had decided on at least one thing in the dark—that he would not reveal that he was a displaced mind, except to escape some immediate doom. It might be all right if they would consider him insane. But he was reasonably certain they would not.
Clawly II looked up at him curiously. “Rather silent, aren’t you? Last time we met, as I recall, you denounced me—or was it the things I stood for?—in the most bitter language, though with admirable restraint. Can it be that you’re beginning to reconsider the wisdom of recalcitrance? Rather late for that, I’m afraid.”
He waited a while. Then, “It’s you that hate me, you know. I hate no one.” He caught Thorn’s involuntary grimace, the twitch of the shoulder from which hung the paralyzed right arm. “Oh, I sometimes hurt people, but that’s mainly adjustment to circumstances—quite another thing. My ideal, which I’ve pretty well achieved, is to become so perfectly adjusted to circumstances that I float freely on the stream of life, unannoyed by any tugs of hate, love, fear, caution, guilt, responsibility, and so forth—all the while enjoying the spectacle and occasionally poking in a finger.”
Thorn winced—Clawly II’s remarks were so similar to those which Clawly I sometimes made when he was in a banteringly bitter mood. Certainly the man must have some sort of suspicions and be trying to draw him out—he’d never talk so revealingly otherwise. Beyond that, there was the suggestion that Clawly II was bothered by certain unaccustomed feelings of sympathy and was trying to get to the bottom of them. Perhaps the independence of quasi-duplicate minds wasn’t as complete as it had at first appeared. Perhaps Clawly I’s emotions were obscurely filtering through to Clawly II. It was all very confusing, unnervingly so, and Thorn was relieved when their entry into a large room postponed the moment when he would have to decide on a line of answers.
It was an arresting room, chiefly because it was divided into two areas in which two separate ways of life held sway, as clearly as if there had been a broad white line extending across the middle, with the notice, “Thou shalt not pass.” On this side was quite a crowd of people, most of them sitting around on benches, a few in black uniforms, the rest in servile gray. They were all obviously waiting—for orders, permissions, judgments, interviews. They displayed, to an exaggerated degree, that mixture of uneasiness and boredom characteristic of people who must wait. Four words sprang to Thorn’s mind, summing them up. They did not know.
On the other side were fewer people—a bare half dozen, seated at various desks. Their superiority was not obviously displayed. Their clothing was, if anything, drabber and more severe, and the furnishings they used were in no way luxurious. But something in their manner, something in the way they glanced speculatively up from their work, put gulfs between them and those who uneasily waited. This time only two words were needed. They knew.
Clawly II’s arrival seemed to cause an increase in the uneasiness. At least, Thorn caught several frightened glances, and sensed a general relaxing of tension when it became obvious that Clawly II’s mission did not concern anyone here. He also noted that the two guards seemed relieved when Clawly dismissed them.
One other glance he thought he caught was of a perplexingly different sort. It was directed at him rather than Clawly II. It came from an elderly, gray-clad man, whose face awoke no sense of recognition either in this world or his own. It conveyed, if he was not mistaken, sympathy, anxiety, and—strangest of all—loyalty. Still, if Thorn II had been some sort of rebel leader, the incident was understandable. Thorn quailed, wondering if he had put himself into the position of betraying a worthy movement in this world as well as his own.
Clawly II seemed to be a person of reputation on the other side of the room as well, for his clipped, “To the Servants’ Hall, with a person for the Servants,” passed them through without a question.
They entered another corridor, and their surroundings began to change very rapidly. A few paces brought them to a subtronic tube. Thorn was glad that he was startled into moving jerkily when the upward-surging current gripped them, for a glance at Clawly II warned him that it would not be well to show much familiarity with this form of transportation.
And now, for the first time since his plunge into World II, Thorn’s mind began to work with clarity. It may have been the soothing familiarity of the current.
Obviously, in World II subtronic power was the closely-guarded possession of a ruling elite. There had been no evidence at all of its employment on the other side of the dividing line. Moreover, that would explain why the workers and soldiers on the other side were kept ignorant of the true nature and theory of at least some of the instruments they constructed or used. It would also explain the need for the vast amount of work—there were two ways of life, based on entirely different power-systems, to be maintained.
Then as to the relationship between Worlds I and II. For closely related they must be—it was unthinkable that two eternally independent universes could have produced two near-identical Opal Crosses, Gray Twins, Clawlys, Thorn, and an uncounted host of other similars; if one granted that possibility, one would have to grant anything. No—Worlds I and II must be the results of a split in the time-stream, however caused, and a fairly recent split at that, for the two worlds contained duplicate individuals and it was again unthinkable that, if the split had occurred as much as a hundred years ago, the same individuals would have been born in the two worlds—the same gametes, under different circumstances, still uniting to form the same zygotes.
The split must—of course!—have occurred when the nightmare-increase began in World I. About thirty years ago.
But—Thorn’s credulity almost rebelled—would it have been possible for two worlds to become so different in a short time? Freedom in one, tyranny in the other. Decent people in one, emotional monsters and cringing, embittered underlings in the other. It was horrible to think that human nature, especially the nature of people you loved and respected, could be so much the toy of circumstance.
