The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Tracing this course on a flat surface would give a curve but on the spherical surface of the earth, the course was straight. That is, by following a geodesic, and so apparently going out of his way, the navigator in fact bore directly toward his destination.

  This was the principle which Corbin intended to apply to the fourth-dimensional continuum. He would pilot a geodesic which, seemingly wide of the mark in terms of perceptible space, would take him the way he should go.

  Lani did prove helpful in looting the files of other departments. This surreptitious information gave him data on previous translations into hyper-space. Asbal never looked beyond the surface of Corbin’s daily routine. And, to keep Lani in good humor, he devoted evenings to selecting furnishings for the villa.

  Meanwhile, Corbin was not distinguishing himself in his pretense of attempting to improve the method of offsetting space shifts caused by Gale’s installation. Asbal said, “I hear you’re buying a house. Well, you can commute to the volcanoes. And if you can devise a precision-built gas mask, you’ll enjoy your work a great deal more.”

  Corbin’s computing room window looked out over the city. He could see the tiled roof of the villa, and the entrance used by those coming to town from the countryside in which he had made his first appearance. Sometimes, the red tiles, twinkling against a background of foliage, tempted him. His glance strayed often. He was wondering whether Lani really wanted to go with him, or whether she intended to upset his plans in such a way that he could not leave, and yet would evade destructive penalties. Uncertainty warped his calculations.

  So, it was anything but coincidental that, happening to look out, he saw two farmers escorting a red-haired woman who wore slacks and a jacket. The woman was Marcia, newly translated into hyper-space!

  How, and why she had crossed the border had to be answered at once. The replies she made to the bureaucrats before whom she would be taken for a quizzing would upset all his plans. Whatever he did, he had to do in a hurry.

  She would undoubtedly speak of the installation, just as he himself had. This would make Imbro suspect that there was a plan to invade hyper-space. And that would doom Corbin to the volcanoes, with Asbal redoubling his efforts to strengthen the spatial barrier.

  Corbin sent a clerk to take a message to Lani: “Tell her I’m working on calculations that have to be finished tonight. I’ll be working late.”

  * * * *

  Anxiously, he looked out at the flight port. Imbro’s disc was no longer there. None of the personal discs still parked had the insignium of a vice-bureaucrat. That gave him his chance. He left his desk and made for the ground floor laboratories, and thence to the museum. He paused for another look at the Ford convertible.

  “Came in on a geodesic. Ought to go out on one,” he thought.

  Leaving the museum, he presently came to a side entrance of the administration building. There, in an anteroom, he sat down to gossip with messengers. They questioned him pointedly about earth women and their ways. It was pretty much the sort of quizzing encountered by a soldier or sailor returning from duty in the Far East. With a chuckle, Corbin assured them that a woman was pretty much a woman, regardless of what part of space she hailed from. Even in such trivia as complexion, there wasn’t enough difference to count.

  “Well, take it or leave it,” he concluded, and got up. “If you don’t believe me, try asking her. I’ve got to see a man about a volcano.”

  “You try asking her,” his audience challenged. “She can’t talk.”

  “Them she’s not an earth-woman. Probably a robot.”

  That Marcia would not talk encouraged him enormously. Her very arrival had erased red-roofed villas from his mind.

  Once he learned that Marcia was in government quarters, he restrained his impatience, and waited until the curious visitors had convinced themselves that the red-headed foreigner actually would not or could not talk. She was not under guard. After all, there was no place for her to go.

  He spent his time keeping out of sight, except for a few minutes of shopping. He bought a tunic, and a headgear somewhat like a turban. Since veils were not unknown, he got one. Once he had the bundle wrapped up in a long cape he waited until it was late enough for there to be little chance of encounters with fellow employees.

  At last he stalked down the dimly lighted hall and tapped at Marcia’s door. She did not answer. He stepped in. Beckoning for silence, he caught her in his arms and whispered, “Someone may be listening. Put these things on. I’ll be asking you questions. Do not say anything.”

  She lost little time getting shed of her slacks and replacing them with a tunic. Corbin kept the few moments animated by a volley of questions of the sort he had heard his predecessors ask.

  Once she was dressed, he whispered, “Meet me at the foot of the stairs.” And then, with a final futile question, he exclaimed as in disgust at a creature who could not understand a single one of three of four languages. He stamped out into the hall.

  He doubted that any listeners had been posted. Any such precision of procedure would have been unnatural.

  After endlessly dragging minutes, Marcia was at his side. Avoiding the main entrance, they stepped to a dark alley which skirted the commissary. Emerging from its gloom, they made a circuit which brought them finally into the dim glow of vapor bulbs. The few pedestrians abroad paid them no heed.

  Presently they were in the central park of the city. It had all the shadows which could be desired. Corbin picked the deepest of these, and drew Marcia well out of sight.

  “I saw you,” he began, “as you came in.”

  “I couldn’t count on anything that lucky,” she answered. “I couldn’t count on anything at all. That’s why I wouldn’t talk. So they’d send for you, if you were here. Because you knew the latest earth customs and speech. What I mean, is, I didn’t want them to think I’d come to find you, even if I’d been sure they’d’ve been obliging enough to try.”

  “You came to find me? How’d you manage?”

  Breathlessly, eagerly, incoherently, each crowded into the other’s speech, now that the impact of the encounter had worn off. “I suspected Les of having played some sort of trick. I accused him.”

  “Bluffed him?”

  “Bluffed. Oh, desperately. He got frightened. So I made him break the barrier. To let me across.”

  “Oh, good Lord!” Corbin exclaimed in dismay. “Now he’ll make sure of himself by seeing that neither of us will ever get back.”

  “No, he won’t! I took care of that. The old, old trick. Writings that will accuse him if I don’t come back. If ever a man was in a jitter, it was Lester Gale.”

  “Sweet, whatever possessed you to risk it?”

  “From what we saw, that night, for a split second,” she answered, “we both knew you had been translated. That you’d not been ionized or annihilated. It was all my fault, so I had to risk coming to help you.”

  “Your fault?”

  “Of course it was. I’d played up to Les, simply to prod you away from your security worship. I didn’t realize he took it so seriously that he’d dispose of you. Les will be keeping the power on, not at peak, but nearly so. Enough for us to pick the spot where the barrier can be crossed. Enough for him to see us so he can turn on full power, the top load, the peak that the installation couldn’t stand for more than a few seconds. And so we’ll go back.”

  He told her of the geodesics he had been calculating.

  “But now you don’t need anything of the sort,” she countered. “Let’s start, right away. Can you fly a disc?”

  “The noise of take-off would be a dead giveaway at night. We’d have a patrol after us. They’re against the return of anyone. You were smarter than you realized. If you’d talked, we’d be in a nasty fix. Know the way to where you broke through?”

  She described the area, the black cliff, and the earth crac
ks.

  “Right where I crossed.”

  “It’s a long walk.”

  “There’s a Ford in the museum. If the patrols were alerted, it would be hard for them to follow it at night. They don’t have radar.”

  * * * *

  By such light as a crescent moon offered, Corbin and Marcia pushed the convertible from the museum’s ground floor, and into the shadows of the street. “Wait in that corner,” he said, “while I go to my plotting room to get charts and the gear, I fixed for escape.”

  “You won’t need them,” she protested. “Les—”

  “I’m taking no chances. You’ve got only a slim hold on him.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  They followed darkened corridors and stairways. Minutes later, they returned. With Marcia steering, Corbin shoved the car for nearly a block, and into the sled-yard of a produce warehouse. The yard was near the city gateway. Its high walls would muffle sound. He primed the carburetor. He jacked up the rear end. With the gears meshed, he gave the wheel a few turns before Marcia twisted the ignition key.

  There would be no grinding of the starter to put anyone on the alert. The next twist of the wheel made the engine fire. Marcia throttled down after the first brief moment of muffler rumble.

  Corbin set the jack on the floorboards, keeping the handle on the seat. He had a pair of the irons within reach, just in case he had to take care of a city watchman.

  Taking the wheel, Corbin nosed into the street. Near the city exit, he got out for a look. All was clear; but he was sweat-drenched and trembling before he put the walls behind them. Without headlights, he advanced at a crawl, picking his way along the rutted road.

  “Suppose we don’t make it?” Marcia whispered, tensely.

  “Ease up, honey. Nobody heard us take off.”

  “But something might slip.”

  “Join the outlaw, packs, then…or try to. That’s why I brought the equations and the chart board.”

  After moments of silence, she said, “The road seems to be weaving.”

  “That’s from the power we’re applying. Quantum phenomenon. Lord, Lord, will I be glad to be back where is a reasonable fraction!”

  “If I weren’t so ready to crawl out of my skin, I’d scream with glee, darling.”

  He told her of his bout with the leopard, and his experience with the power projector guns and the whipping post.

  He added to these first observations all the things he had subsequently noted and he concluded, “The smart ones, the scientists, run things. The dumb ones do the work. Those too dumb or too crooked to work, they become bureaucrats. Would you believe it, they don’t use carbon paper in their offices, and when I explained how simple it is to make the stuff, I was nearly lynched.”

  “But why?”

  “Because they make about forty copies of every paper, and think of how many clerks would be put out of work by such a gimmick! And the more employees a bureaucrat has working for him, the more prestige he has. Maybe I’ve had a glimpse of the future we’re facing, in our own space-time, but cockeyed as things are there, it’s still a lot better than that madhouse I fell into!

  “So help me, the minute we cross the barrier, I’m telling Gale where he can shove that job. You and I are starting out, and to hell with security. There isn’t any such thing, and I was a chump for wishing there were. Hyper-space cured me!”

  “We’ll have fun now, Bill. And it won’t be you that’ll be paid off. It’ll be Les, and I can hardly wait.”

  And then he heard it—the far-off roar and hiss of cruising discs. The light of their jets soon became bright enough to reflect from the windshield. Corbin pulled to a halt under a tree: “Half a dozen of them,” he muttered. “Fanning out. What the devil set them on the prowl?”

  Though he did not expect an answer to that question, particularly since he was convinced that Lani’s suspicions had been aroused, Marcia did have a thought: “Maybe they missed me, and began looking for you.”

  CHAPTER VI

  All the discs passed on. “Too high for observation, and not using searchlights,” Corbin remarked, as he nosed out from cover.

  There were blasts and downward reaching spurts of flame. From the ground came eruptions of blue-white sparks. By the intermittent flicker, Corbin could distinguish the outline of a familiar ridge, low and dark. Marcia exclaimed, “That’s it, right ahead. I didn’t black out, the way you did.”

  “They’re hovering over it now. Blasting it with energy slugs.”

  “More coming up behind us.”

  Corbin cursed bitterly. “And flying lower.”

  “They’ll spot us sure, here in the open. Bill, where’ll we go?”

  For answer, Corbin stepped on the gas.

  The discs roared over, blasting the road and the brush on either side. The gunners were apparently not trying to pick a target. They were firing at random, as the city police had. Corbin snapped on the headlights. When Marcia protested, he said, “They’re peppering the whole landscape, till they’ve poured out enough energy to nail us by chance. We’ve got to risk lights and move as fast as we can.”

  The road was now weaving and twisting. Outlines of trees and rocks became hazy. Objects seemed to blend into each other, then separate, only to merge with others. The dark ridge, now highlighted by the incessant discharge of power tubes, seemed to waver, though the vehicle was jouncing and sliding, skidding and yawning in a way to make observation almost impossible. Corbin raised the map board he had clipped to the steering column. On it was the geodesic he had to follow.

  “Can you see if Gale’s got the power on?” he demanded. “How far can you see through?”

  “There’s so much glare—”

  The car went into a spin as though on ice. It came up broadside against a tree, and with the rear axle housing snagged on an outcropping rock. Marcia was pitched out into the weeds. Two women bounced up into sight. For a moment Corbin wondered whether he had encountered a new quantum phenomenon.

  Then he saw that Marcia had neither been duplicated, nor halved… The extra woman was Lani. “You said you’d take me with you,” she told him, “and I’m going.”

  Marcia blinked and swallowed. “You couldn’t’ve had much time for geodesics! I might’ve known you’d do jail right for yourself!”

  “Quit griping and take the wheel. I’m jacking up the hind end. You—” he caught Lani by the arm. “Grab some rocks and brush.”

  Busy moments followed, but Lani found time to say, in gasps, “When she wouldn’t talk, they looked for you, then looked for me. So I knew wherever you were—what you worked with—it wasn’t—”

  “Give ’er the gun!” Corbin yelled, and to Lani, “Shove, and save your breath.”

  “Don’t blame me. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  The rumble of the engine cut off his retort. The car lurched out of the ditch.

  When Corbin resumed the wheel, Marcia cried, “Get back on the road. It leads—”

  “Nothing leads anywhere,” he broke in, and barged across country, in second, weaving in and out among boulders, and dodging clumps of brush too thick to be ridden down.

  The discs were settling slowly as they always did when about to land. They were in crescent formation. The wings of the arc were closing, as if to complete an encirclement when they grounded. The dark ridge loomed up. It cut off the glow of the discs that were just ahead. They had sunk beneath its rim. The distant volcano flared up with a red so deep that it was distinguishable only when mirrored from the ridge.

  “We can’t get away, not even afoot,” Marcia said, despairingly. “Not now. They’re getting out. We can’t join the outlaw packs.”

  Crewmen were silhouetted against the metallic gray of grounded discs. The glare of skycraft almost at landing level picked out others. Some had projectors to scatter power charges.
Remembering the blast that had been sprayed at a whole crowd, to pick only him and lay him out, Corbin resolved not to halt. There were flashes, but no sensation.

  The firing stopped. Those closing in on both sides were now in danger of blasting each other if they shot at their target. They had their lurching, lumbering quarry pocketed.

  Corbin booted the throttle. The black ridge loomed up. Marcia screamed and made a dive for the cowling. Lani caught him by the shoulders and cried, “Stop, you’ll kill us! Give up, we’ll have a chance. Stop—”

  Her frantic grip and her weight made him swerve. There was a grinding skid. A tire let go. Corbin tramped the pedal to the floorboard. He was back on his mark. The headlights picked it out. Ridge or no ridge, he was staying on his geodesic.

  The patrol, having taken their quarry for granted, suddenly broke into a run. They fired as they ran, for now they could level off at the car without peppering each other. Twinkling eruptions flickered from the cliff. It, as well as the vehicle, was their target. And then so many things happened simultaneously that Corbin could no longer keep his perceptions separated. They blended into confusion.

  There was a wild scream from the back seat, a split second before the expected headlong impact. The vehicle slewed like a racer broadsiding into a curve. It dumped Corbin, though without pinning him down. For an instant, he was tangled up with Marcia, a jack handle, a tire iron, and a chart board.

  There was no crumpling of fenders as the car rolled over. It merged with the seemingly solid face of the cliff. Corbin felt as though he had plunged into a porous jelly. He could not tell whether he was penetrating the rock, or whether it was infiltrating into his substance. Crewmen crowded into the same space. They seemed to be coming at him head on, from beneath, and from above. There was neither up, nor down, nor sidewise.

  Corbin plied the jack handle till something twisted it from his grip. He snatched a power gun. Time was as warped as dimension. Bluish light permeated the substance of the cliff. Gale was there. The bulk of the resonator loomed up. Its poles gleamed. Copper bus bars made ruddy splashes. The rest of the resonator room was visible, but with a distorted perspective, as though it reached into infinity.