There IS always something ghostly and disembodied about swimming at night. Don felt that he and Phyllis were suspended in a gulf in which floated a few remote stars. The water, just at blood heat, seemed scarcely more tangible than the bland air. A little tremor of nervous expectation ran over him.
Phyllis, beside him, was swimming with smooth, slow strokes. When they had gone a considerable distance from the shore, she paused and seemed to orient herself. Then she turned to the right.
"About here," she said finally. She was speaking with her lips close to his ear. "Don't swim any more—it disturbs the water. I have to look."
"What are you looking for?" Don queried in the same cautious tone.
"A ripple. It's very faint. I don't think one could find it even if he knew it was here, unless he'd seen it before."
She began to move back and forth very slowly, pausing often and waiting for the surface of the water to grow quiet.
Don floated and watched her. At last she turned and came back to him.
"Fill your lungs," she said softly. "Follow me." She hesitated. "Don't be startled. The sphere, at the end, was a funny place."
She dived. He followed her arrowy body downward. At the bottom—probably nowhere on Fyon was the depth of water over twenty feet—he saw her very, very faintly in the greenish light as she seemed to stoop and tug at something in the sand.
There was an augmented pressure on his eardrums. She caught his hand as he stood up waveringly beside her, and led him forward. The darkness became pitchy. At the same time he was aware that the pressure in his ears had lifted.
"Don't breathe yet," she said faintly. The sound did not seem to carry well. "This is an in-between place."
They moved forward perhaps five steps in the absolute darkness. Don's lungs were hurting. Phyllis withdrew her hand from his. He thought she fumbled and then pressed a stud—an impression certainly not based on sight, since he could see nothing. She took his hand again, and they walked forward one more step. Despite her warning, he could not repress a start of surprise.
They were standing in a brightly lighted space filled with phantom images of themselves. Don and Phyllis, half a hundred times repeated, bowed, wavered, advanced, retreated, and slid forward again. Three-dimensional, apparently solid, they seemed to be everywhere, even overhead. The edges, the colors of the phantoms were perhaps not so sharp as in life, and each spurious Don or Phyllis was surrounded with a dim prismatic aura that moved as it moved.
Don raised his hand, and all the other Dons imitated him. He turned to real-Phyllis, who was standing quietly beside him. "What is it?" he asked.
Phyllis shrugged. "I don't know," she said. Her voice, though perfectly distinct, seemed now near, now in the distance, and now, unexpectedly, inside his head. "It wasn't like this at first. When we first met here, it was just a space. Then it gradually filled up—got populated, so to speak. Each time we came here, there were a few more figures. It was uncanny. The technicians weren't able to account for it.
"The sphere lets in oxygen, from that dissolved in the water outside, and of course it's made to be absolutely invisible and not let out any light. One of the theories they had about it was that it somehow trapped mental force, the way glass does solar radiation, and transformed it into the images. The technicians thought it might have other properties they weren't aware of when they built it, but they never got to experiment with it, though they wanted to.
"It's an odd place, certainly. We used to notice how hungry we were after we'd been here a few hours. But the technicians swore it was harmless, Don, and I think you'll be safe here for a time. Keep away from the metal bar in the sand that projects the sphere."
She pointed, and Don saw, under the feet of the phantoms, a metal bar, perhaps a meter long, that glowed like liquid, sluggish gold. "Keep away from that," she continued. "I'll come out with food tablets for you tomorrow. I'm sure to hear from the Fish messenger soon. Don't worry. We'll get you out as soon as we can."
She turned. He saw, with a stab of dismay, that she was going. Ignoring the tapestry of meaningless motion around them, he caught her hand. "Phyllis ... you can't run all these risks, Just to save my skin. It isn't fair."
She let him hold her fingers. "It isn't just for you—" she answered slowly—"though I would anyway. It's because the SSP mustn't have the doll. How I wish I knew what they want her for! Don, could I see her before I go?"
He was pleased, almost flattered, and yet he had never wanted anyone else to see his little golden wonder. Always before he had felt an inner reluctance. Carefully he balanced Vulcan's doll on the palm of his hand for her to see.
"Still weeping," Phyllis murmured. She seemed to have forgotten where she was. "Oh, beautiful. One could worship her, except that, somehow, it would be worshiping ourselves."
At last she raised her head from contemplation. "I've got to go," she said vaguely. She looked around her, still abstracted and remote. Her tone grew sharp. "Don! Look at the other Dons! Isn't she real? There's no image. What have you got in your hand?"
He followed her gesture. Dons and Phyllises surrounded them. Each Don held out his hand toward a Phyllis. Each of them balanced on his palm a lens of burning light.
"I don't understand," Phyllis was saying puzzledly. "Isn't she real? What is she made of that the images show her as a burning lens?"
Don was as puzzled as the girl. "She's real, of course," he answered at last. "But perhaps she's only real in the sense that she's energy. Or a focus for it. How can we tell?"
"Yes." She pressed his hand. "I'll be back tomorrow with food, Don. Good night. Good luck."
It was the middle of the afternoon when she came back. One moment Don was lying on the sand while his entourage of phantoms moved dimly about him, bleached to inconsequence by the daylight; the next the sphere was filled with Phyllis' images. He got to his feet.
"Hello," she said nervously. "You must be starving. I'm sorry I couldn't get here before. I've brought food tablets for you." She handed them to him.
"No, I'm not hungry. I think I've been asleep. But I'm glad you've come."
"Aren't there fewer images than there were?" she asked, looking. "Perhaps you've been eating them, and that's why you're not hungry." She gave a trembling laugh.
She was wearing dark blue "petals", very handsome with her dark eyes and skin. Don said, "Has something upset you, dear?"
"Yes—no—I mean—" She did not seem to have noticed the little endearing word. "I'll have to tell you," she said slowly. "The messenger isn't going to come."
"Oh." Don realized how much he had been depending on the chance of escape represented by the messenger. "How can you be sure?"
"I went to the cave today and waited. He didn't show up, but I thought 'tomorrow'. When I got back to my room in the hotel, a parcel had come for me. It was one of those little memorial coffins, you know what I mean. It wasn't from anybody I ever heard of, and then I understood. We'd agreed to use that as a signal for trouble in the Fish. It means the messenger isn't coming. The lining of the coffin was black, and that means bad trouble. Perhaps the messenger is dead."
Don said, "Perhaps later—"
"I don't think so." Phyllis shivered. "So then I remembered, I'd heard of a man once who was supposed to be friendly to the Holy Fish, though he wasn't in it. An important man. I thought he might be able to help us. I tried to contact him.
"I gave the operator his name and his identity number. She was gone a long time. When she came back, she said there was no such person. She said there never had been."
"But—how could that be?"
"I don't know. I heard once that sometimes they 'expunge' people, wipe out everything about them, just as if they had never lived. Maybe that's what happened to him.
"I didn't know what to do. Payne came in the bar at noon for a drink. He said two men had been in the restaurant asking questions about you. He seemed upset. He was afraid you were in trouble. He was sure the men were from the SSP.
> "I didn't have any more Holy Fish contacts. I knew the SSP would find the sphere if once they started hunting you seriously. Don, I hope I did the right thing. As soon as I could get away from the bar, I went to see Kunitz."
Kunitz. So it had come to Kunitz at last, then, in spite of everything. What else could she have done? "What did he say?" Don asked.
"Kunitz? He seemed very—upset. I mean, I felt that I'd brought him more of a problem than just helping you get away. Finally he said you were to wait in the sphere until it was dark, and then swim to that island they call Struve. It's quite a way, but I think you can make it. I think—oh, I hope—Kunitz is reliable." Her eyes were anxious. "He said somebody would be waiting on the island to pick you up."
"And after that?"
"He's getting in touch with a friend who has a space needle. They're going to make connections with the captain of some bigger craft."
There was a silence. "I've helped you finely, haven't I, Don?" she said. She bit her lip ."I made you waste a day, here in the hemisphere, and had to go to Kunitz in the end, when my plans failed. The Holy Fish! A talking shop, an organization with no members. Yes, I've been a lot of help."
"Don't talk like that," he said urgently. "I got to be with you longer, to hear about your sister. I was glad you told me about her. And the time in the sphere hasn't been wasted. I've learned something here."
"How? What?" She tried to smile.
"How? I think it's true that the sphere accumulates mental force. There's a matrix here—a pool—it's hard for me to express. It's something that has accumulated from a lot of minds. There are things in it they didn't, as separate individuals, know. And being in the sphere, I've been in that pool.
"I'm sure of this, Phyllis, anyhow. Something enormous is on the verge of happening. People everywhere—mankind, humanity, if you like the big words—are on the edge of a great change. The SSP doesn't want that change to occur."
Her eyes widened and grew dark. Slowly she nodded. "Oh. Yes. So that's it. You're right. And the doll—?"
"I don't know." Neither of them spoke. The phantom Dons and Phyllises continued to wheel, turn, retreat, advance.
At last she sighed deeply. "I've got to be getting back to the bar, Don. Good luck. I'll show you how to work the exit from the sphere before I go."
"Don't go," he pleaded, unaware that he was signing a certain kind of warrant with the words. "Stay here with me until it's time. Don't go."
"Kunitz said he wanted to speak to me ... but it doesn't matter, Yes, Don, all right. I'll stay."
He took her in his arms. She received him sweetly. No one was watching to see how all the other Dons and Phyllises embraced.
As the light in the water outside faded, the bar in the sand shone with a brighter gold. Don's head was in Phyllis' lap, and she was laughing. They would be starting soon; the man who was to help Don would be waiting on Struve. Things were going to be all right. They must. Don felt an extraordinary, quiet happiness. Suddenly Phyllis screamed.
His heart pounding horribly, Don started to his feet. The metallic bar in the sand flared up in intense yellowness. The posturing phantoms wheeled slowly and then abruptly vanished, like a flame blown out. For a second Don saw the sphere in its original unpopulated emptiness. Then it broke with a long shaking flash of light, and water and the dark-shirted men of the SSP poured in.
Had he always foreknown this moment? The inrush of darkened water, hopelessness, and the armed, anonymous men? He thrust Phyllis behind him; they had stun guns and sliver guns and blasters. He could kill one of them, he thought, if he could get close enough. He had no weapons, nothing. Then a great surge of water caught his love and whirled her away from him.
He swam after her wildly. One of the SSP men was already taking aim at her with a blaster. The noise of the bolt was a staccato thunder over the water, as if a great mouth were saying quickly and heavily, "Death death death."
Phyllis' body seemed to halt and buckle in the middle. For a moment she floated. Then the water around her grew opaque with blood.
Don remembered little after that. He was wild with pain and despair and hate. He must have attacked the man with the blaster; he had a sharply etched picture of Phyllis' murderer sagging back in the water between his hands. He hoped he had killed him, but he never found out for sure. Then somebody shot Don from behind with a stun gun turned to low power and paralyzed him. That was the end of that.
They put a harnesslike arrangement of straps on him and towed him efficiently through the water to their craft. Don was paralyzed, but he was not unconscious. He could still see and hear. One of the guards said, "Where are we taking this fellow?" and another answered, "You ought to know. To Phlegethon."
Chapter Twelve — All the Way Up
At first it was not so bad on the ship. Don, as the paralysis from the stun gun bolt wore off, was in considerable physical distress. Bad as the pain was, he welcomed it, for it was a refuge from thinking about Phyllis—from his grief for her, his sense of failure, and the corroding knowledge that he was guilty of her death. Then, as the pain began to ebb away, treacherously deserting him, his mind tried to save itself in an intense, compulsive, hyperesthetic attentiveness. His perceptions grew abnormally acute. Everything around him was perceived in minute detail, in a focus so sharp that it was etched.
They had been chained side by side to stanchions in a hold in the ship, twenty or thirty—twenty-seven, Don found, counting automatically in the darkness—prisoners, all bound for Phlegethon. Two of them were women, but they were not treated any differently from the rest.
Though it was dark in the hold—except when a guard, coming in twice a day to feed them, admitted light—it was never quiet. One prisoner sang constantly, in an unvaried monotone, two or three had hour-long fits of talking, others would be taken with spasms of high-pitched, spitting blasphemy or hysterical giggling. For all that, most of them were quiet, sunk in apathy or hopelessness. They slept standing, sagging against their fetters. After he had been in the darkness for an hour or so, Haig thought he could distinguish the beating of each individual heart.
The times when the guard opened the hold to feed the prisoners were times of great mental activity for Haig. He had to use the few moments of light to gather enough sense impressions, particularly visual ones, to last him through the next period of darkness. But this compulsive, passionate, spongelike absorptiveness was not without its dangers. Once Don saw his own chained arms outstretched to take the bowl of mucilaginous porridge the guard was holding out to him, and the sight filled him with a terrible confused rage. How could his body, how dared it, go on existing while Phyllis was dead. Yet his heart beat automatically, his breathing had its usual rhythm, he ate the food the guard brought, and relieved himself. Even the lambda-shaped birthmark on the inside of his elbow was unchanged.
It was after the guard had fed them for the fourth time that somebody shouted from the darkness behind him, "Haig! Is that you up front? Haig!"
Don felt gratitude. He had begun, in the darkness, to count the seconds mentally and add them up into minutes, and the minutes into hours. Sometimes he would lose count, and began to sweat with anxiety. This—anything—was better than that. He shouted, "Yes." He wanted to turn around to face the direction of the voice, but he was chained by a ring around his neck to the stanchion. He called, "Who are you?"
"Henry. From the bar in Baade."
Don's mouth came open in deliberate and exaggerated surprise. He wanted to be surprised; being surprised was a distraction from his thoughts. He shouted, "Why? What are you doing here?"
Just then the woman who laughed began to giggle.
The noise grew more and more loud. Other prisoners began to join in, singing, shouting, shaking chains, gabbling prayers. All Don heard of Henry's answer was the words, "... so it's your fault."
"How?"
The bedlam abated a little. The woman who had laughed was sobbing. Henry called, loud and bitter, "Because you found the doll. How w
as I to know it was that important? I reported it as soon as the tourist with the miragems came back in the bar and told us. It's unfair. How was I to know my eye-beam wasn't focused right?"
Henry, then, had been the local spy and agent for the SSP. An inefficient agent, one who, in punishment for inefficiency, had been picked up and was now on his way to Phlegethon.
Henry began to curse Haig. In a loud, unvarying voice he told all the things he would like to do to Haig himself, all the things he hoped would happen to him on Phlegethon. There was a pause. Then, in a slightly different voice, Henry said, "Have you still got the doll?"
Don could see no reason for not answering. "Yes."
"You won't have her long," Henry shouted spitefully. He laughed. After that he said no more to Haig.
But his words had wakened a great longing in Don. He wanted to see the doll, his doll. She was still in his pocket. He wanted to see her weep.
He couldn't weep for Phyllis himself. Too much had happened, and she had meant too much to him, for such an easy release. But if he could see the doll weeping, see the little tears flowing down the cheeks of his golden wonder, it would be as if Phyllis were being wept for. He would feel that someone, somewhere, knew about the light, bright life and its arbitrary ending, and was sorry. Marking the sparrow's fall? It was foolish. But—yes.
He strained against his chains and tried to reach his pocket. It was impossible. He had been chained with his hands high in front of him, with just enough slack that he could reach his mouth to feed himself. Vulcan's doll was as much out of his reach as if she had been left behind on Fyon. But now that he was thinking of the doll again, he could feel her, faintly warm, in his pocket. There was a remote comfort in it.
The guard came into the stinking hold eight times with food before the ship began to decelerate. The deceleration was hard on the prisoners, who had no protection against it except that offered by their chains. By the time the ship finally landed on Phlegethon, they were all sick and besmeared with their own filth.
The hold was opened wide. One by one the prisoners were unchained, passed through a great jet of water, and led up into the light. At the top of the ramp a guard with a stun gun checked off names against an invoice in his hand.
Agent of the Unknown Page 8
