In the end they all gave up and let me go, showed me the door once more and offered me their best wishes.
Disgruntled and feeling out of sorts, I went to the rest home to see Tedwar. For a while he talked just fine, told me a little bit about his schedule and what he was doing by way of therapy. Then the old black mood hit him and his spirits fell into the gutter.
“Gorwyn doesn’t care about me,” he said. “He told me so.
Every time I told him I loved him he laughed. He has no feelings for anyone.”
“You’re upsetting yourself,” I said. “Try and calm down. You’ll make more sense if you take your time.”
“How can I be calm? Don’t you understand that I’m being ripped apart by the agony of my existence? Help me. I don’t know what you can do, but help me.”
Later the muscular orderly tried to reassure me. “How can we help him when we don’t know which part of his babble to take seriously? He grows more unreasonable every day. Take my advice and stay away from him. He doesn’t like you anyway. You get his hackles up faster than anybody I know.”
Thoughtfully I walked away…. Tedwar, unfortunately, was nuts and he was likely to stay that way. Like old Bud Jupiter. Which reminded me, what kind of name was that for a grown man?
I’d been meaning to check it out and it was too bad I had put it off so long. Or maybe it was just as well since what I found out made no sense. At the library I consulted a familiar volume, skimmed the bio alongside Bud’s photograph, and then there it was hitting me between the eyes. Naturally Bud was a nickname. Jupiter’s real name was Apton. Once upon a time he had been a big name in rings, had traveled the lecture route, had bought homes in Japan, Egypt and Alaska and had gone completely haywire at age fifty-two. Now I knew that Croff had been wrong about at least one thing. Practically everyone I knew was somehow involved in my troubles.
The knowledge hit me in the wrong manner, weighed too heavily on my soul, rocked me so that I grew even more confused. And dumb. I muted to Gothland in order to relax in a safe place but then didn’t check to make certain it was safe. I didn’t pay attention to where I landed, fooled around and was careless, failed to look to my health and well being, strayed too close to forbidden territory until I inadvertently happened upon the enemy.
The slok was big and swift and I realized I would have to work at it to get away from him but initially I wasn’t worried because somewhere I had gotten the idea that I was the smartest thing in all the worlds.
It was dumb of me to play with him and in the end I bitterly regretted having done so but that didn’t help me as I raced down stone corridors in fear for my life. I knew he had seen me but it never occurred to me that he was waiting for me or anybody to come through those high arches. Anyway, I skidded through and out of the cave and then played games popping in and out of crevices and around or up over stalactites until I finally realized the slok hadn’t gone on about other business but, in fact, had made me his business.
He wasn’t giving up but remained as tenacious as lint, clung to my trail while I made genuine efforts toward losing him. Staying ahead of him was possible only as long as I had wide open labyrinths, but I lost ground when twists and turns became prevalent. He was better than I on short hops, more agile in skinning around corners, better even at low jumping so that it wasn’t long before I could hear the chattering sounds of his teeth as he grew confident of catching me.
By the time it finally dawned on me that I might possibly fail to outrun him, I already felt the strain of the chase. I assumed the slok was also tiring but he didn’t sound like it as he talked to himself about how much fun it was going to be to inflict damage upon my body. From the beginning I made mistakes. Instead of heading for large, familiar labyrinths I took those that merely seemed promising only to have them turn out to be too narrow or winding. Quick entrances into corridors and fast exits from them seemed to be the thing to do as my pursuer was forced to take time to decide which way I had gone.
The next labyrinth I chose grew more narrow instead of widening and I guessed it didn’t empty into an amphitheater but came to a dead end somewhere ahead. Actually it opened into a crevice jam-packed with the bodies of two goths whose look-alike features immediately attracted my attention. Both approximately fifty kilos in weight, they had the same head and body features, paws shaped the same, both tails curled at the tip, and the wounds in their throats were exactly alike. What I had here was a set of twins who had been made to bleed to death.
Now I knew what had become of Padarenka and Mikala, but the knowledge didn’t help my situation. Backing from the crevice in a hurry, I snaked through a skinny opening through which the slok came much faster, and I legged it as rapidly as I could toward a generous looking archway.
On the other side was an escarpment too high and sheer to be climbed while to the left and right were solid walls of rock. Incredibly, I had boxed myself in. Not only that, the area wasn’t spacious enough to allow me to maneuver freely which gave all the advantage to the slok who came clicking and clacking toward me like a maniacal caterpillar.
Strange, but I had a series of disorienting sensations or little shocks as the enemy emerged from the tunnel and made ready to attack. He traveled headfirst with his long body coiling and uncoiling behind him like a motorized spring, his teeth working, his dark hide glistening in the red light. Veering to the right as he spied me backed against the escarpment, he scooted up the wall with the obvious intent of getting above me and dropping down on me. At least that’s what he seemed to have in mind until he too began being affected by the disorienting process that had me squatting on my haunches with my own jaws clicking. This mad creature who screamed and sped back and forth across the wall above me like a fly was familiar to me. I knew him. On the other hand, I didn’t know him.
I had forgotten all about flight and fear but simply squatted and watched the thing move from side to side over my head until at last he gave a final screech and dropped onto the ground in front of me. For the first time in my life I saw a quiet, living slok. This giant perched on his bottom tip like a ballet dancer and weaved back and forth while his dark eyes regarded me with plain curiosity.
“Groppo?” I managed to croak. “Is that you, Groppo?”
He knew me as well as I knew him. There was no mistaking the aura surrounding him, not the aura of ape but one that conveyed his spirit to me. He might just as well have been standing before me in simian form.
He chattered unhappily for a moment and then before I could move he whipped about, fleetly sped down the tunnel and disappeared.
Trembling, exhausted, I staggered down the tunnel and headed toward the crevice where Pat and Mike lay dead, went around a corner and was brought up short. The area crawled with sloks. Quietly I backed into an empty corridor, sneaked topside and hunted for a ring that would take me to Solvo.
What happened in the next few seconds might have been even more frightening if I hadn’t been so tired.
I no sooner walked through a yellow ring that should have put me on the sidewalk outside the clinic than I again felt a sensation of being leisurely pulled apart, and in the next moment I stepped onto a dirty patch of ground close to a cluster of noisy machines. There was black smoke everywhere and the strong stench of oil permeated the sky.
Somebody yelled, “Grab her!” but I was already flying down the hill, not that it did any good since the woman in the red dress was capable of doing some flying of her own. As big as she was, she moved like Mercury and caught up with me in a matter of seconds and grasped me by the neck, none too gently.
20
They had built the barracks too hastily so that the corrugated steel walls didn’t meet evenly at the corners. The windows were lopsided, pulling the thin, pliable screens awry. The living quarters consisted of cubicles spacious enough for one occupant, a toilet and a rock-hard bunk. I wore a leg iron that chafed as I moved. It wasn’t long before the flesh around my ankle was raw. My chain permitted me to move from the
bunk to the toilet but not through the doorway.
The smell of oil saturated the air, thick and heavy, menacing somehow. The stuff clung to the walls like adhesive, formed a slick coating on the floor, even made my bunk sticky and unfit. There were the sounds of machinery clanking and shrieking, the more muted tones of men and women cursing and grunting, and through it all could be heard the ponderous splashing of oil as it fell from a pipe into a tub.
Through the doorway of my cubicle I watched Erma. Her red dress was grimy with black smudges. She slouched on a stool, overwhelming it like a hen on a diminutive nest as she swilled soda and stared at the floor. I had learned right away that she wasn’t wasting her time watching me. There were a dozen others to do that. Her duties included nothing so common. She ran the whole outfit.
Somewhere in the distance I heard the squeal of trains laboring up the mountain to loading platforms where workers made ready to transfer filled drums into boxcars.
From where I stood in my cubicle I could see another woman almost as big as Erma, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt. She lay prone on a table and breathed heavily. Her name was Bass. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m beat.”
“Shut up,” said Erma.
“Why don’t you do a little work out there and see how you feel?”
“Why don’t I pound on you a little and see how you feel?”
“Nuts to you.” Bass turned, lay on her side. “You’re in a good mood. Did Appy holler at you? Is he upset because it’s taking him so long to become the richest man in the world?”
“He’s crazy,” said Erma.
“What’s the kid for?”
“I never asked him.”
“What do you think?” said Bass.
“She knows where somebody is hiding. He wants them. That’s all I know. Who cares?”
Nobody paid any attention to me, not even at mealtime though I detected the odor of food cooking over open fires or on grills. They had toast, meat and a variety of other items the smell of which blended to make an interesting atmosphere. It almost cancelled out the stench of oil. After grieving over my empty stomach for a while I lay down on the dirty bunk and fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night I was awakened by someone gripping my chin and shining a light in my face.
“It’s a good thing you don’t make many mistakes these days,” said a man’s voice.
“How could she get away?” said Erma.
“Tell me about the island.”
“That was a fluke. I still don’t see how she managed. But the grabbing machines are working perfectly now.”
“This is important.”
Erma snorted. “Yeah, I know. She’s wearing a leg iron that stays on until I get orders to take it off.”
They went away and left me in darkness and I lay thinking about the man’s voice. It brought back memories of a ranch house, a scholar who couldn’t ride a spirited horse and a body that had looked broken and dead.
At breakfast Erma brought me a chunk of hard bread and a bottle of soda. “Dumb knot,” she said. “Why don’t you tell them what they want to know and get it over with? Save yourself a lot of sorrow. You can order your amnesia to go away and it will.”
“Just like that?”
She stepped on my foot. I was sitting on the edge of the bunk chewing the bread and wondering how I’d get the lid off the soda bottle when she eased forward and did it. It reminded me of the time Bandit accidentally got my toes under one hoof except that then I was standing in soft sand. Now my foot felt as if it were flattening out on the concrete floor.
“I get the idea you can’t help sounding wise,” said Erma. “It’s your natural state. You were bom wise. In my opinion you should cultivate a gentler and more lady-like manner.”
“I’ll make the attempt,” I said, almost gasping with relief as she moved off my foot. “I didn’t know you were Deron’s pal.”
She paused, grinning. “You remember when I gave him a licking in that cellar? He almost quit because he was so insulted when he heard that was part of the deal. Then after I knocked the stuff out of him he wanted to quit for more urgent reasons. Like bent bones. But he’s a hog for money.”
I couldn’t say anything, merely gave her a sick look.
“That dreg who helped you and your nutty friend get away?” she said. “I pinched him in a couple of sensitive places and gave him a case of eighty proof. For that he made you believe Deron was dead and then he took you and the sap to town. I can’t understand how that fellow lived. I worked him over good.”
“So it was Deron who betrayed us?”
“Betrayed? What an old-fashioned way of putting it.”
I saw him the next day. He was so much the same that I almost expected him to reach for a saddle and mount up. Perhaps he was a little thinner but that was all. His almond-shaped brown eyes went a little round when he saw me looking at him. It wasn’t an act of surprise but more one of mockery.
“I forced Wheaty into D because I thought he did what you did,” I said.
Deron looked interested. “Is that where he is? I’ve been hunting him and Kisko for quite a while. I thought you hid them away somewhere.” He interrupted me when I started to speak. “Don’t ask me how I could do what I’m doing or anything else foolish like it. Try to view the situation from a realistic perspective. This isn’t something your fertile imagination can get you out of. It is, in plain fact, business and you know how people are where that’s concerned. You’re here because there’s something you’re going to do for us. If you don’t we’ll kill you.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Hunt through double green rings until you find some people who don’t want to be found. That’s all.”
“Who are they?”
“Some valuable acquaintances, let’s say.”
“Do you know Appy Jupiter?”
He didn’t answer. He went away looking puzzled.
The next day I went to work. There was no getting free, even when they sent me into D because the alien dimensions couldn’t sustain me and I couldn’t seem to exit anywhere but back at the oil depot. I tried but it did no good. As soon as I exited D I experienced the familiar sensation of being caught in a maelstrom after which I always landed back beside the ring channel and whoever was conducting the experiment that day. Usually it was Deron.
“Don’t fight it,” he said. ‘It’s like struggling against an ocean undercurrent. You’ll only wear yourself out.”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you even if I do find something on one of those crazy worlds?”
“Not something. People. At least three. I figure you’ll give everything away sooner or later when you start remembering.”
“What specifically am I supposed to remember?”
“You’ll know that when it happens.”
I wondered if anybody wondered where I was or even cared. Was Solvo hunting for me? Was Lamana the least bit curious as to my whereabouts? Where was Orfia?
The way they propelled me into rings I couldn’t see was only slightly interesting. They had a stack of monitors to tell them what kind of rings passed by and my chair was directly beside a large channel so that at any given time we were surrounded by circles of every shape, size and shade. They had a curved piece of transparent material set up in front of my chair that covered me and prevented me from entering dimensions they weren’t interested in. Somewhere on the property they must have had a ton of machinery that manipulated me like a paper girl who flapped into D at a moment’s notice. Only in the exiting did I have any say but not in my final destination which was, of course, back to Deron.
It finally dawned on me, when the days passed and Solvo didn’t come for me, that one of the machines was either garbling or blanking out the signal emitted from my built-in radio. I couldn’t be rescued if no one knew where I was.
Double green rings led to worlds that weren’t ready for occupancy. Since the transmutation process prepared a traveler for survival on a planet and sinc
e none of the double greens could support life, muting to them could be hazardous. The key to safety lay in entering cautiously and pausing immediately. On the other side of rings were narrow kinds of way stations, brief areas of asylum, spots of territory where a muter could stand, sit or even lie down and enjoy the atmospheric and ground conditions of their homeworld. It seemed that the dimensional doorways were in a more complete state of existence than the worlds themselves, which made sense in a weird kind of way.
I stepped through a double green, for instance, and then shrank back as a huge ball of boiling, sputtering matter shot past me and hurtled through a blood-red sky. It was a world on fire, perhaps newly detached from a sun, rocketing through space in a frenzied attempt to cool and condense. Made of heat, speed and chaos, it would remain so for eons, a bubble in the ocean of reality, unfit for human habitation or any other kind, and so I clung to my small oasis and stared about while at the same time I felt behind me for the slight coolness that would tell me the ring was still there.
Feeling like Noah, I once stood on a shard of safety as a world of water floated by and sprayed me with its wild wetness. It was dark green, almost black, and I saw large chunks of sod churning in it. The horizon was ominous with the threat of rain while the air gathered close and tried to smother me. As I stood beside the ring and looked out at that ugly world, I wondered if I might not have discovered another doorway into Waterworld. Was it possible that my beautiful hideaway of peace and tranquillity lay in those savage depths? I wouldn’t find out. Not equipped with gills and other water breathing apparatus, I couldn’t last five minutes in the dark water.
On another day I stepped through a green double ring and came upon a place that might have belonged at the core of creation. There was a swirling cone moving in the void and beckoning to me to enter it to my destruction, but I held fast to the oasis and merely looked the thing over. Its whirling motion seemed to suck in matter from beyond its narrowest point which was farthest from me. I could see how that portion kept growing darker and thicker, and yet the rotation of the entire cone was such that it obviously drew or pulled on the space nearest to me. A vortex or maw of gas and dust blew around the inner wall of the cone at such tremendous speed that it created a purple glow. Whatever exited from the far end of the cone was so consumed and tenuous that I had to squint to see it. There in the sky, so close I felt I could stretch out and touch it, was the suggestion of a fragile world, a planet of unearthly matter exuded by the vortex, growing from a tiny ball into something that expanded hourly. What kind of planet it would eventually become I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps one day nearly weightless creatures like the fliers and the sphex would wing their way through that purple atmosphere. Perhaps nothing would ever five on it because each morning the horizon would catch fire from the infernal furnace roiling within its conical sun and bum whatever tried to form during the night.
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