Garth watched them come. He took one step backward, then relaxed. He had shot his bolt, and all he could do was to wait. The pudgy one picked him up gingerly, tried to carry him at arm’s length, found he was too heavy, and hurried across the floor with him. She set him down gently on the table. One of the women hurried up with a small edition of the cage. Garth stepped in and a gate was sealed. A tube was fitted to it, and Garth heard air hissing in. He was grateful for the increased pressure, his skin had felt raw and distended for hours.
The pudgy one lifted the small cage bodily and set it on top of the larger glass cell in which Bronze lay. A lever was flipped, and Garth dropped ungracefully into the large one.
His first act was to run to Bronze and feel his pulse. It was weak but steady. Garth unbuckled his helmet and pulled it off, then knelt by Bronze.
“Bronze …”
No answer.
“Bronze!”
No answer.
“Bronzie boy … look at all those women.”
“Gug?” Bronze’s eyes opened and he blinked owlishly.
Garth chuckled. “Bronze, you were after women. Look, man.”
Bronze’s gaze got as far as the glass wall, tested its shaky focus, and then penetrated outward. He sat bolt upright. “For me?”
Then he keeled over in a dead faint.
Garth sat and chafed his wrists, laughing weakly. Then, after a while, he went to sleep.
The pudgy one was relieved after a while. Butch waved away her own relief and stayed, elbows on the table, head low, glaring hatred and fear at the men. There was some sort of distant call. All the other women left. But the big blonde still stayed.
Garth had a dream in which he was chasing a girl in a brown cowl. She ran because she feared him, but he chased her because he knew he could show her there was nothing to fear. As he gained on her, he heard Bronze’s voice.
“Garth.” It was very quiet. Intense, but weak.
Garth sat up abruptly. Something hard and sharp whacked him in the forehead. There was a gout of blood. He fell back, dazed, then opened his eyes. He saw that Butch had maneuvered the point of the scalpel within a few inches of his forehead as he slept. He could see her looking at him, her face twisted in slow-motion convulsions of laughter. The all but inaudible boom of her voice was a tangible thing threatening the glass.
Garth turned to Bronze. He was lying on his back with one of the U-shaped clamps on his throat. It was pressing just tight enough to pin him down, just tight enough to keep his face scarlet. His breath rasped. “Garth,” he whispered.
Garth staggered to his feet. Blood ran into his eyes. There was another deep hoot of laughter from outside. Garth wiped the blood away and staggered toward Bronze. The scalpel whistled down and across his path. He dodged, but lost his footing and fell.
There was a thunderous pounding on the table. Butch was apparently having herself a hell of a time.
Garth looked at the scalpel. It hung limply. He crawled toward Bronze. A tweezer-clamp shot out and caught his ankle. He pulled free of it, leaving four square inches of skin in its serrated jaws. He went on doggedly. He reached Bronze, put a foot on each side of the big man’s neck, got a good grip on the U-clamp and pulled it upward. Bronze rolled free, his great lungs pumping. The flat of the scalpel hit Garth between the shoulder-blades and knocked him sprawling next to Bronze.
“How long have we been here?” asked Bronze painfully.
“Day—day and a half. On Earth, that’s eight, nine months. Wonder what Viki’s doing?”
He looked around, suddenly sat up. Butch was gone.
“Here come the rest of them. We’ll know pretty soon.”
They stood up and watched the slow, distance-eating march of the giants.
“They’re carrying something … Will you look at those faces, Bronze!”
“They look wild.”
“Glory … See her? The tall cool one.”
“I see a tall one,” said Bronze, deadpan.
“She’s putting something on the big table here. Hey, what is that thing?”
“Looks like a tombstone.”
Garth said, “I’ve heard of making the prisoner dig his own grave, but this—”
The stone was put in the small box and aired. Big hands lifted it and set it on their roof.
“Get out from under.”
The stone dropped, teetered. Garth leapt up and steadied it. It settled back on its base.
It was a rough monolith, about three feet tall, cut from soft, snow-white limestone. In it was a chamber with a glass door.
“Will you ever look at that,” breathed Bronze.
Garth stared.
Cut into the stone were the words,
THE GATEWAY
OF
GESELL
“I don’t get it,” said Garth.
Bronze said, “Look in the thing. The little door.”
Garth peered, and saw a plastic scroll. He opened the door, took out the scroll and unrolled it. In exquisitely neat script it read:
This is your Gateway to all that is human;
to all that sweats, and cries, and tries;
to all hungers, to all puzzlement;
to mistakes compounded,
to mysteries cleared,
to growth, to strength, to complication,
to ultimate simplicity.
Friends, be welcome,
others be warned.
Gesell is your gate
As he was mine.
A closed gate should never be guarded.
My gate it open, I guard it well.
Gesell knows I love him.
Please tell him I know it too.
Viki (Escaped)
There was a long quiet.
“Escaped,” said Garth. “Escaped.”
There was a thump over their heads. The airlock box had been placed there. There was a speaker baffle into it. It dropped. Bronze caught it, handed it to Garth.
Garth looked out through the wall and saw Glory, her calm face suffused, her eyes misty.
“Garth Gesell, you’ve read the scroll. I brought it because I didn’t want you to wait; I didn’t want you to just hear about it. She fixed your Gateway, Garth, and shoved the stone through so we’d find it. Then, when we were whooping and bawling properly, she let us find her.
“We couldn’t have trusted any calculations, any statements. But we examined her and she’s Escaped—oh, beyond question. That we could trust. For the one thing the Ffanx would never spend, not even to bait a trap for the biggest game, was a single drop of extradiol, which she carries unmolested. Viki’s given us back a world, Garth, just by loving you …
“Are you ready to start on the calculations?”
Garth leaned against the wall near the speaker. Standing upright seemed to make his heart labor. “Not until I’ve seen Viki,” he said.
There was a pause. Then Glory’s voice again, “Bronze. Put on that helmet.”
Unquestioningly, Bronze did. The airlock box thumped above them. Garth sat down and leaned against the wall. His heart would not be quiet.
Bronze was suddenly beside him, helmeted. He clasped Garth’s shoulder so hard it hurt, and as suddenly was gone. There was a slight scuffling sound. Garth turned. Bronze, in the lock, was lowering someone into the cage. Then the upper box was taken away.
She stood and looked at him gravely, unafraid. But this time there was a world of difference.
He put out his arms. He, or she, moved. Perhaps both. He pressed her cheek against his, and when he took it away, both were wet. So one of them wept.
Perhaps both.
With her mathematical staff, Glory said, “He was quite right about the shift, you see. He and Viki and Bronze can go back through their own Gateway. But we’ll have to open another. We go to a world where we will be only three times the size of the natives. There we build still another Gateway. And that will be Earth, and we’ll be home.”
“If it’s as easy as that,” asked the
pudgy one, “Why did we have to be so cautious? Why didn’t we go straight to that intermediate world and wait there?”
“Because,” said Glory Gehman, “the intermediate world is the Ffanx planet. Do you see?”
Earth keeps a solemn festival at the meadows of Hack and Sack, through whose blue arch came first death, and then life.
Never Underestimate
“SHE WAS BRAZEN, of course,” said Lucinda, passing the marmalade, “but the brass was beautifully polished. The whole thing made me quite angry, though at the same time I was delighted.”
Meticulously Dr. Lefferts closed the newly-arrived Journal of the Microbiological Institute, placed it on the copy of Strength of Materials in Various Radioisotopic Alloys which lay beside his plate, and carefully removed his pince-nez. “You begin in mid-sequence,” he said, picking up a butter knife. “Your thought is a predicate without a stated subject. Finally, your description of your reactions contains parts which appear mutually exclusive.” He attacked the marmalade. “Will you elucidate?”
Lucinda laughed good-naturedly. “Of course, darling. Where would you like me to begin?”
“Oh.…” Dr. Lefferts made a vague gesture. “Practically anywhere. Anywhere at all. Simply supply more relative data in order that I may extrapolate the entire episode and thereby dispose of it. Otherwise I shall certainly keep returning to it all day long. Lucinda, why do you continually do this to me?”
“Do what, dear?”
“Present me with colorful trivialities in just such amounts as will make me demand to hear you out. I have a trained mind, Lucinda; a fine-honed, logical mind. It must think things through. You know that. Why do you continually do this to me?”
“Because,” said Lucinda placidly, “if I started at the beginning and went right through to the end, you wouldn’t listen.”
“I most certainly … eh. Perhaps you’re right.” He laid marmalade onto an English muffin in three parallel bands, and began smoothing them together at right angles to their original lay. “You are right, my dear. That must be rather difficult for you from time to time … yes?”
“No indeed,” said Lucinda, and smiled. “Not as long as I can get your full attention when I want it. And I can.”
Dr. Lefferts chewed her statement with his muffin. At last he said, “I admit that in your inimitable—uh—I think one calls it female way, you can. At least in regard to small issues. Now do me the kindness to explain to me what stimuli could cause you to”—his voice supplied the punctuation—“feel ‘quite angry’ and ‘delighted’ simultaneously.”
Lucinda leaned forward to pour fresh coffee into his cooling cup. She was an ample woman, with an almost tailored combination of svelteness and relaxation. Her voice was like sofa-pillows and her eyes like blued steel. “It was on the Boulevard,” she said. “I was waiting to cross when this girl drove through a red light under the nose of a policeman. It was like watching a magazine illustration come to life—the bright yellow convertible and the blazing blonde in the bright yellow dress … darling, I do think you should call this year’s bra manufacturers for consultation in your Anti-Gravity Research division. They achieve the most baffling effects … anyway, there she was and there by the car was the traffic cop, as red-faced and Hibernian a piece of typecasting as you could wish. He came blustering over to her demanding to know begorry—I think he actually did say begorry—was she color-blind now, or did she perhaps not give a care this marnin’?”
“In albinos,” said Dr. Lefferts, “color perception is—”
Lucinda raised her smooth voice just sufficiently to override him without a break in continuity. “Now, here was an errant violation of the law, flagrantly committed under the eyes of an enforcement officer. I don’t have to tell you what should have happened. What did happen was that the girl kept her head turned away from him until his hands were on the car door. In the sun that hair of hers was positively dazzling. When he was close enough—within range, that is—she tossed her hair back and was face to face with him. You could see that great lump of bog-peat turn to putty. And she said to him (and if I’d had a musical notebook with me I could have jotted down her voice in sharps and flats)—she said, ‘Why, officer, I did it on purpose just so I could see you up close.’ ”
Dr. Lefferts made a slight, disgusted sound. “He arrested her.”
“He did not,” said Lucinda. “He shook a big thick finger at her as if she were a naughty but beloved child, and the push-button blarney that oozed out of him was as easy to see as the wink he gave her. That’s what made me mad.”
“And well it should.” He folded his napkin. “Violations of the law should be immediately pun—”
“The law had little to do with it,” Lucinda said warmly. “I was angry because I know what would have happened to you or to me in that same situation. We’re just not equipped.”
“I begin to see.” He put his pince-nez back on and peered at her. “And what was it that delighted you?”
She stretched easily and half-closed her eyes. “The—what you have called the femaleness of it. It’s good to be a woman, darling, and to watch another woman be female skillfully.”
“I quarrel with your use of the term ‘skillfully,’ ” he said, folding his napkin. “Her ‘skill’ is analogous to an odor of musk or other such exudation in the lower animals.”
“It is not,” she said flatly. “With the lower animals, bait of that kind means one thing and one thing only, complete and final. With a woman, it means nothing of the kind. Never mind what it might mean; consider what it does mean. Do you think for a moment that the blonde in the convertible was making herself available to the policeman?”
“She was hypothesizing a situation in which—”
“She was hypothesizing nothing of the kind. She was blatantly and brazenly getting out of paying a traffic fine, and that was absolutely all. And you can carry it one step further; do you think that for one split second the policeman actually believed that she was inviting him? Of course he didn’t! And yet that situation is one that has obtained through the ages. Women have always been able to get what they wanted from men by pretending to promise a thing which they know men want but will not or cannot take. Mind you, I’m not talking about situations where this yielding is the main issue. I’m talking about the infinitely greater number of occasions where yielding has nothing to do with it. Like weaseling out of traffic tickets.”
“Or skillfully gaining your husband’s reluctant attention over the breakfast table.”
Her sudden laughter was like a shower of sparks. “You’d better get down to the Institute,” she said. “You’ll be late.”
He arose, picked up his book and pamphlet, and walked slowly to the door. Lucinda came with him, hooking her arm through his. Suddenly he stopped, and without looking at her, asked quietly, “That policeman was a manipulated, undignified fool, wasn’t he?”
“Of course he was, darling, and it made a man of him.”
He nodded as if accepting a statistic, and, kissing her, walked out of the house.
Darling, she thought, dear sweet chrome-plated, fine-drawn, high-polished blueprint … I think I’ve found where you keep your vanity. She watched him walk with his even, efficient, unhurried stride to the gate. There he paused and looked back.
“This has been going on too long,” he called. “I shall alter it.”
Lucinda stopped smiling.
“May I come in?”
“Jenny, of course.” Lucinda went to the kitchen door and unhooked it. “Come in, come in. My, you’re prettier than ever this morning.”
“I brought you violets,” said Jenny breathlessly. “Just scads of ’em in the woods behind my place. You took your red curtains down. Is that a new apron? My! You had Canadian bacon for breakfast.”
She darted in past Lucinda, a small, wiry, vibrant girl with sunlit hair and moonlight eyes. “Can I help with the dishes?”
“Thank you, you doll.” Lucinda took down a shallow glass b
owl for the violets.
Jenny busily ran hot water into the sink. “I couldn’t help seeing,” she said. “Your big picture window.… Lucinda, you never leave the breakfast dishes. I keep telling Bob, someday I’ll have the routines you have, everything always so neat, never running out of anything, never in a hurry, never surprised … anyway, all the way over I could see you just sitting by the table there, and the dishes not done and all … is everything all right? I mean, don’t tell me if I shouldn’t ask, but I couldn’t help.…” Her voice trailed off into an ardent and respectful mumble.
“You’re such a sweetheart,” Lucinda said mistily. She came over to the sink carrying clean dishtowels and stood holding them, staring out past Jenny’s head to the level lawns of the village. “Actually, I did have something on my mind … something.…”
She related the whole conversation over breakfast that morning, from her abrupt and partial mentioning of the anecdote about the blonde and the policeman, to her husband’s extraordinary and unequivocal statement about women’s power over men: This has been going on too long. I shall alter it.
“Is that all?” Jenny asked when she had finished.
“Mm. It’s all that was said.”
“Oh, I don’t think you should worry about that.” She crinkled up her eyes, and Lucinda understood that she was putting herself and her young husband in the place of Lucinda and Dr. Lefferts, and trying to empathize a solution. “I think you might have hurt his feelings a little, maybe,” Jenny said at length. “I mean, you admitted that you handled him in much the same way as that blonde handled the policeman, and then you said the policeman was a fool.”
Lucinda smiled. “Very shrewd. And what’s your guess about that parting shot?”
Jenny turned to face her. “You’re not teasing me, asking my opinion, Lucinda? I never thought I’d see the day! Not you—you’re so wise!”
Lucinda patted her shoulder. “The older I get, the more I feel that among women there is a lowest common denominator of wisdom, and that the chief difference between them is a random scattering of blind spots. No, honey, I’m not teasing you. You may be able to see just where I can’t. Now tell me: what do you think he meant by that?”
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