World of Tiers 03 - A Private Cosmos

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  At the end wall of the room, he twisted a projection that looked as fixed as the rest of the decorations. He turned the projection to the right 160 degrees, then to the left left 160, and then spun it completely around twice to the right. A section of wall slid back, Kickaha breathed out tension of uncertainty. He had not been sure that he remembered the proper code. The possibility was strong that a wrong manipulation would have resulted in anything from a cloud of poisonous gas or vapor to a beam which would cut him in half.

  He pulled in Do Shuptarp after him. The Teutoniac started to protest. Then he began to scream as both fell down a lightless shaft. Kickaha clapped his hand over Do Shuptarp's mouth and said, "Quiet! We won't be hurt!"

  The wind of their descent snatched his words away. Do Shuptarp continued to struggle, but he subsided when they began to slow down in their fall. Presently, they seemed to be motionless. The walls suddenly lit up, and they could see that they were falling slowly. The shaft a few feet above them and a few feet below them was dark. The light accompanied them as they descended. Then they were at the bottom of the shaft. There was no

  218

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  dust, although the darkness above the silence felt as if the place had not seen a living creature for hundreds of years.

  Angrily, the Teutoniac said, "I may have heart failure yet."

  Kickaha said, "I had to do it that way. If you knew how you were going to fall, you'd never have gone through with it on your own. It would have been too much to ask you."

  "You jumped," Do Shuptarp said.

  "Sure. And I've practiced it a score of times. I didn't have the guts either until I'd seen Wolff— the Lord—do it several times."

  He smiled. "Even so, this time, I wasn't sure that the field was on. The Sellers could have turned it off. Wouldn't that have been a good joke on us?"

  Do Shuptarp did not seem to think it was funny. Kickaha turned from him to the business of getting out of the shaft. This demanded beating a code with his knuckles on the shaft wall. A section slid out, and they entered a whitewalled room about thirty feet square and well illuminated. It was bare except for a dozen crescents set in the stone floor and a dozen hanging on wall-pegs. The crescents were unmarked.

  Kickaha put out a hand to restrain Do Shuptarp. "Not a step more! This room is dangerous unless you go through an undeviating ritual. And I'm not sure I remember it all!"

  The Teutoniac was sweating, although the air was cool and moving slightly. "I was going to ask why we didn't come here in the first place," he said, "instead of walking through the corridors. Now, I see."

  "Let's hope you continue to see," Kickaha said

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  219

  ambiguously. He advanced three steps forward straight from the entrance. Then he walked sideways until he was even with the extreme right-end crescent on the wall. He turned around once and walked to the crescent, his right arm extended stiffly at right angles to the floor. As soon as his fingertips touched the crescent, he said, "Okay, soldier. You can walk about as you please now—I think."

  But he lost his smile as he studied the crescents. He said, "One of these will gate us to inside the armory. But I can't remember which. The second from the right or the third?"

  Do Shuptarp asked what would happen if the wrong crescent were chosen.

  "One of these—I don't know which—would gate us into the control room," he said. "I'd choose that if I had a beamer or if I thought the Bellers hadn't rigged extra-mass-intrusion alarms in the control room. And if I knew which it was.

  "One will gate us right back to the underground prison from which we just came. A third would gate us to the moon. A fifth, to the Atlantean level. I forget exactly what the others will do, except that one would put you into a universe that is, to say the least, undesirable."

  Do Shuptarp shivered and said, "I am a brave man. I've proved that on the battlefield. But I feel like a baby lost in a forest full of wolves."

  Kickaha didn't answer, although he approved of Do Shuptarp's frankness. He could not make up his mind about the second or third crescent. He had to pick one because there was no getting back up the shaft—like so many routes in the palace, it was one-way.

  Finally, he said, "I'm fairly sure it's the third.

  220

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  WolfFs mind favors threes or multiples thereof. But . . ."

  He shrugged and said, "What the hell. We can't stand here forever."

  He matched the third right-hand crescent with the third from the left on the floor. "I do remember that the loose crescents go with opposing fixed ones," he said. He carefully explained to Do Shuptarp the procedure for using a gate and what they might expect. Then the two stepped into the circle formed by the two crescents. They waited for about three seconds. There was no sensation of movement or flicker of passage before their eyes, but, abruptly, they were in a room about three hundred feet square. Familiar and exotic weapons and armor were in shelves on the walls or in racks and stands on the floor.

  "We made it," Kickaha said. He stepped out of the circle and said, "We'll get some hand-be'amers and power-packs, some rope, and a spy-missile guider and goggles. Oh, yes, some short-range neutron hand-grenades, too."

  He also picked two well-balanced knives for throwing. Do Shuptarp tried out his beamer on a small target at the armory rear. The metal disc, which was six inches thick, melted away within five seconds. Kickaha strapped a metal box to his back in a harness. This contained several spy-missiles, power broadcasting-receiving apparatus for the missiles, and the video-audio goggles.

  Kickaha hoped that the Bellers had not come across these yet. If they had guards who were looking around corners or prowling the corridors with the missiles, it was goodbye.

  The door had been locked by Wolff, and, as nearly as Kickaha could determine, no one had

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  221

  unlocked it. It had many safeguards to prevent access by unauthorized persons from the outside, but there was nothing to prevent a person on the inside from leaving without hindrance. Kickaha was relieved. The Bellers had not been able to penetrate this, which meant they had no spy-missiles. Unless, that is, they had brought some in from the other universes. But since the crafts had used none, he did not think they had any.

  He put on the goggles over his eyes and ears and, holding the control box in his hands, guided a missile out the open doors. The missile was about three inches long and was shaped like a schoolboy's folded-paper airplane. It was transparent, and the tiny colored parts could be seen in a strong light at certain angles. Its nose contained an "eye," through which Kickaha could get a peculiar and limited view and an "ear" through which he could hear noises, muted or amplified as he wished.

  He turned the missile this way and that, saw that no one was in the hall, and shoved the goggles up on top of his head. When he left the armory, he closed the door, knowing that it would automatically lock and arm itself. He used his eyes to guide the missile on the straightaway, and when he wanted to look around corners, he slipped the goggles down.

  Kickaha and Do Shuptarp, with the missile, covered about six miles of horizontal and vertical travel, leaving one wing and crossing another to get to the building containing the control room. The trip took longer than a mere hike because of their caution.

  Once, they passed by a colossal window close to the edge of the monolith on which the palace sat.

  222

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  Do Shuptarp almost fainted when he saw the sun. It was below him. He had to look downward to see it. Seeing the level of Atlantis spread out flatly for a five hundred mile radius, and then a piece of the level below that, and a shard of still a lower one, made him turn white.

  Kickaha pulled him away from the window and tried to explain the tower structure of the planet and the rotation of the tiny sun about it. Since the palace was on top of the highest monolith ofjhe planet, it was actually above the su
n, which was at the level of the middle monolith.

  The Teutoniac said he understood this. But he had never seen the sun except from his native level. And, of course, from the moon. But both times the sun had seemed high.

  "If you think that was a frightening experience," Kickaha said, "you should look over the edge of the world sometime from the bottom level, the Garden level."

  They entered the central massif of the building, which housed the control room. Here they proceeded even more slowly. They walked down a Brobdingnagian hall lined with mirrors which gave, not the outer physical reflection, but the inner physical reflection. Rather, as Kickaha explained, each mirror detected the waves of a different area of the brain and then synthesized these with music and colors and subsonics and gave them back as visual images. Some were hideous and some beautiful and some outrageously obscene and some almost numinousiy threatening.

  "They don't mean anything," Kickaha said, "unless the viewer wants to interpret what they mean to him. They have no objective meaning."

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  223

  Do Shuptarp was glad to get on. Then Kickaha took a staircase broad enough for ten platoons of soldiers almost to march up. This wound up and up and seemed never to end, as if it were the staircase to Heaven itself.

  XX

  FINALLY, the Teutoniac begged for a rest; Kickaha consented. He sent the spy-missile up for another look. There were no Bellers on the floor below that on which the control room was. There were the burned and melted bodies often taloses, all on the first six steps of the staircase. Apparently, they had been marching up to attack the Bellers in the control room, and they had been beamed down. The device which may have done this was crouching at the top of the stairs. It was a small black box on wheels with a long thin neck of gray metal. At its end was a tiny bulb. This bulb could detect and beam a moving mass at a maximum distance of forty feet.

  It moved the long neck back and forth to sweep the staircase. It did not notice the missile as it sped overhead, which meant that the snake-neck, as Kickaha termed it, was set to detect only larger masses. Kickaha turned the missile and sent it down the hall toward the double doors of the control room. These were closed. He did see, through the missile's "eye," that there were many small discs stuck on the walls all along the corridor— mass-detectors. Their fields were limited, however. A narrow aisle would be left down the center

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  225

  of the corridor so that the warned might walk in it without setting off alarms. And there must be visual devices of some sort out here, too, since the~ Bellers would not neglect these. He moved the missile very slowly along the ceiling because he did not want it seen. And then he spotted devices. They were hidden in the hollowed-out heads of two busts on tops of pedestals. The hollowing-out had been done by the Bellers.

  Kickaha brought the missile back carefully and took off the goggles, then led Do Shuptarp up the staircase. They had not gone far before they smelled the burned protoplasm and plastic. When they were on the floor with the carnage, Kickaha stopped the Teutoniac.

  "As near as I can figure out," he said, "they're all holed up now in the control room. It's up to us to smoke them out or rush them before they get us. I want you to watch our rear at all times. Keep looking! There are many gates in the control room which transmit you to other places in the palace. If the Bellers have figured them out, they'll be using them. So watch it!"

  He was just out of range of the vision and beam-er of the snake-neck at the top of the steps. He sat down and frayed out the fibers at one end of his thinnest rope and tied these around the missile. Then he put the goggles back on and directed the missile up the steps. It moved slowly because of the weight of the rope. The snake-neck continued to sweep the field before it, but did not send a beam at the missile or rope. Though this meant that it was set to react to greater masses, it did not mean that it wasn't transmitting a picture to the Bellers in the control room. If they saw the missile and the

  226

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  rope, they might come charging out and shoot down over the railing. Kickaha told Do Shuptarp to watch above, too, and shoot if anything moved.

  The missile slid by the snake-neck and then around it, drawing the rope with it. It then came back down the steps. Kickaha removed the goggles, untied the rope, seized the ends of the rope, pulled to make sure he had a snug fit, and yanked. The snake-neck came forward and tumbled halfway down the steps. It lay on its side, its neck-and-eye moving back and forth but turned away from the right side of the staircase. Kickaha approached it from the back and turned it off by twisting a dial at its rear.

  He carried the machine back up under one arm while he held a beamer ready in his right hand. Near the top, he got down against the steps and slid the machine onto the floor. Here he turned it'so it faced the bust at the end of the hall past the control room doors. He set the dials and then watched it roll out of sight. Presently, there was a loud crash. He dropped the goggles down and sent the missile to take a look. As he had hoped, the snake-neck had gone down the hall until the mass of the pedestal and its bust had set it off. Its beamer had burned through the hollow stone pedestal until it fell over. The bust was lying on its side with the transmitter camera looking at the wall. The snake-neck had turned its beam on the fallen bust.

  He went back down the staircase and down the hall until he was out of sight of anyone who might come to the top of the steps or look down the side of the well. He replaced the goggles and took the missile to a position above the double doors. The missile, flat against the wall, was standing on its

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  227

  nose and looking straight down.

  He waited. Minutes went by. He wanted to take the goggles off so he could make sure that Do Shuptarp was watching everywhere. He restrained the impulse—he had to be ready if the doors opened.

  Presently, they did open. A periscopic tube was stuck out and turned in both directions. Then it withdrew and a blond head slowly emerged. The body followed it soon. The Beller ran over to the snake-head and turned it off. Kickaha was disappointed because he had hoped the machine would beam the Beller. However, it scanned and reacted only to objects in front of it.

  The bust was completely melted. The Beller looked at it for a while, then picked up the snake-neck and took it into the control room. Kickaha sent the missile in through the upper part of the doorway and up into the high parts of the room, which was large enough to contain an aircraft carrier of 1945 vintage. He shot the missile across the ceiling and down the opposite wall and low to the floor to a place behind a control console. The vision and audio became fuzzy and limited then, which made him think that the doors had been shut. Although the missile could transmit through material objects within a limited range, it lost much of its effectiveness.

  Zymathol was telling Arswurd of the strange behavior of the snake-neck. He had replaced it with another, which he hoped would not also malfunction. He had not replaced the camera. The other at the opposite end of the hall could do what was needed. Zymathol regretted that they had been so busy trying to get laser-beam or radio

  228

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  contact with von Throat on the moon. Otherwise, they might have been watching the monitor screens and seen what had happened. ~

  Kickaha wanted to continue listening, but he had to keep his campaign going. He switched off the missile in the control room and tied the end of the rope to another missile. This he sent up and around the new snake-neck and pulled it down. It tumbled much farther, bringing up short against the pile of talos bodies at the staircase foot. It was pointed up in the air. Kickaha crawled up to it, reached over the bodies, and turned it off. He took it back up the steps and sent it against the pedestal and bust at the other end of the hall. He was down the steps and had his goggles on and another missile on its way before the crash sounded. The crash came to his ears via the missile.

  Its eye
showed him that the same thing had happened. He turned it to watch the door, but nothing happened for a long time. Finally, he switched to the missile in the control room. Zymathol was arguing that the malfunctioning of the second machine was too coincidental. There was something suspicious happening, something therefore dangerous. He did not want to go outside again to investigate.

  Arswurd said that, like it or not, they couldn't stay here and let an invader prowl around. He had to be killed—and the invader was probably Kickaha. Who else could have gotten inside the palace when all the defenses were set up to make it impregnable?

  Zymathol said that it couldn't be Kickaha. Would von TUrbat and von Swindebarn be up on the moon looking for him if he weren't there?

  This puzzled Kickaha. What was von Turbat

  A PRIVATE COSMOS

  229

  doing there when he must know that his enemy had escaped via the gate in the cave-chamber? Or was von Turbat so suspicious of his archenemy's wiliness that he thought Kickaha might have gated something through to make it look as if he were no longer on the moon? If so, what could make him think that there was anything on the moon to keep Kickaha there?

  He became upset and a trifle frightened then. Could Anana have gated up there after him? Was she being chased by the Bellers? It was a possibility, and it made him anxious.

  Zymathol said that only Kickaha could have turned the taloses against them. Arswurd replied that that was all the more reason for getting rid of such a danger. Zymathol asked how.

  "Not by cowering in here," Arswurd said.

  "Then you go look for him," Zymathol said.

  "I will," Arswurd answered.

  Kickaha found it interesting that the conversation was so human. The Bellers might be born of metal complexes, but they were not like machines off an assembly line. They had all the differences of personality of humans.

  Arswurd started to go to the door, but Zymathol called him back. Zymathol said that their duty demanded they not take unnecessary chances. There were so few of them now that the death of even one greatly lessened their hope of conquest. In fact, instead of aiming for conquest now, they were fighting for survival. Who would have thought that a mere leblabbiy could have killed them so ingeniously and relentlessly? Why, Kickaha was not even a Lord—he was only a human being.