by Fritz Leiber
He looked ahead, and there were two more doors, each with a glowing button and a short word he couldn’t make out.
With a feeling of “This is too much,” he sprawled full length on the floor, as if to sleep. One of his feet touched the transparent wall, while the elbow of the arm pillowing his head touched the wall opposite. He closed his eyes.
It was only then he realized that the sound in his ears wasn’t the roaring and ringing in his head dying away, but the wail of the oncoming wall.
Such was his weariness and sudden fatalistic disinterest that he didn’t tense, let alone jump up. He didn’t even open his eyes.
Cool metal struck him along leg and side, gently but inflexibly. He let the wall roll him over twice before he resignedly scrambled to his feet. There was no sign in the advancing wall of the doorway by which he had entered. Stepping backward evenly, he swept a fingernail across the wall without hearing or feeling the faintest tick. Then he turned and trotted on to the next two doors.
They were marked FIRE and EARTH, and he punched the button of the second almost without physical hesitation, though there was the flash of a wondering whether EARTH might not be the name of a star or moon.
The main course of his nearly instantaneous reasoning had been: Fire will kill me—and don’t give me any tricky plays on meaning that there is a slow “fire” in my flesh and in all life. While earth—hell, even if it packed the next corridor to the top, I could scramble my way in to it before the wall caught up.
Tucked into that flash of reasoning there had even been the crafty though qualified deduction: If this door opens inward like the first, there’s bound to be some space behind it. Though who says doors have to obey rules? This one might slide sideways.
The door did open inward, and he trotted through almost without a break in his step, and it slammed shut behind him.
For a moment he thought he had been cruelly tricked. The whole corridor ahead glared with an irregularly pulsing red like a forest fire.
Then he realized he couldn’t smell a speck of burning or feel any radiant heat. All the flaring red was coming through the transparent wall on the FIRE-door side. There, great flames writhed crowdedly from ceiling to floor. Here, it was cool, while the floor had changed from slightly gritty metal to even cooler packed earth, the dry and faintly sour smell of which now came to him. He reached out and gingerly brushed the transparent wall. It was barely warm, but he supposed it could be double, with insulating vacuum between. Why radiant heat didn’t still come through, he didn’t know.
It did not surprise him to discover that his corridor was as broad as ever and ended in two more labeled doors. Without hesitation he trotted toward them. This time he read the labels by the red glare of the flames. They were DEMONS and TIGERS.
At each word he felt a different quiver of fear. Easy enough to laugh at the concept of demons when in the midst of a wise and scientifically sophisticated civilization. Or to smile warily at tigers, for that matter, when cradling in your arms some potent energy weapon. But alone down here in this labyrinth, naked and unarmed, it was another matter.
Also the change in pace of the choice he had to make rattled him. This one had almost a fairy-tale quality. But there had been nothing of light fantasy, so far, in his experiences down here. Everything had been implacably real, especially the wall. Even demons would be real down here, probably. It occurred to him, too, that he had been lucky until now and had survived by playing hunches. The AIR door could have plunged him into emptiness. EARTH might have smothered or instantly blocked him, while he seemed to recall creatures who could walk through fire, at least for ten yards. This time he must really analyze.
But how? His mind felt useless. He even thought of digging a hole for himself in the dirt, so the wall would pass over him. But the earth was hard as adobe.
A mounting hungry snarl made him glance hurriedly back. The wall was coming on at a speed greater than that to which he had provoked it by his all-out attempt to hold it back, and it was barely five yards away, the same distance as when he had made his split-second EARTH-choice in the last section of the corridor. It had more than canceled the time-advantage that quick decision had gained him; it had given him no credit for it at all. The wall wasn’t fair!
The thoughts started as he whirled around. Demons don’t exist, are superstitious. Everywhere? Outside this red-lit tightening tomb is a universe incomprehensively vast. Somewhere there may be demons, and the mere word symbolizes a power greater than that of creatures.
Tigers are real. But I remember someone killing a tiger barehanded. A leopard, anyhow. But tigers, plural?
The wall struck him. With the thought that demons may exist and be able to kill me, but only an idiot takes on tigers, plural, where there’s an alternative, he jabbed the DEMONS button and was through that door and in turn locked in by it before he could think again.
Again he believed he’d been cruelly tricked. Facing him a few yards away in the glimmering black corridor were two huge felines with silky black fur and green eyes glinting with evil intelligence. They lashed their great tails. They writhed their powerful shoulders. Their claws scraped the gritty metal floor like chalk rasping on slate. They carried their white-fanged heads low, their green eyes glaring up at him. While from their throats issued snarls louder and more menacing than that of the wall.
But at that moment the wall once more struck him. Almost before he knew it, he was running toward the magnified black panthers, his eyes squinted, his shoulders hunched.
They reared up, unsheathing their scimitar claws, fully baring their fangs, and screaming like black trumpets in a satanic symphony. To keep himself from stopping he had to remind himself: They’re not black panthers bigger than tigers, they’re only demons.
As he ran between them, he felt their hot breaths, their bristly fur, but nothing more. Through eyes squinting sideways toward the TIGERS-door wall, he glimpsed glassed-in moonlit jungle and gliding through it, palely and darkly striped, flat-sided felines a little smaller than his demons.
Then he was facing doors glow-labeled REAL and UNREAL, while the wall, not demons, snared at his heels.
Last time I picked the unreal and won, he thought. Maybe I should again. But demons are only a tiny sub-branch of the small branch of the unreal labeled “supernatural beings.” In the realm of the unreal is also insanity, psychosis, the innumerable delusions of locked-up minds completely out of touch with reality and lacking even internal organization, a sea of locked-in microcosms adrift and lost, never to know each other, even the nearest. While the realm of the real holds a hell of a lot besides tigers.
He was pressing the REAL button as the wall slammed him. Then he was through the REAL door and this time running fast as he could down the black corridor toward the next pair. He kept his eyes averted from the UNREAL side of the corridor, for through its transparency he glimpsed a psychedelic churning of colors and forms, constantly patterning and unpatterning, which he sensed might derange any mind behind eyes which stared very long.
The next two doors were labeled INSTANT PAINLESS DEATH and TORTURE.
Now they’ve quit playing around with me, he thought. They’re slamming it at me, but good. Something’s reached down deep, deep inside me and brought up the slimiest black noggin of them all.
Let’s see, they say even torture comes to an end. Yes, in death. Why not pick painless death to start with? Makes sense. But back there I picked the real. Torture is a part of the real. While death is unreality squared, cubed and to the nth power. With torture, there’s a chance of survival, with death no chance at all. Tautology.
As the wall came screaming up behind him and he pushed the TORTURE button, he thought, Well, at least I’m not strapped down yet, and to stop that I’ll fight as hard as I pushed against the wall.
He was in another section of corridor, all glimmering black this time, no transparent wall, and coming toward him was an anthropoid being or machine, the shape and size of a gorilla, except
it had no head. It kept swinging apart its long arms and then bringing them together, as if to embrace someone tightly, while its stubby legs planted and replanted themselves firmly.
It was made of metal and covered with sharp spikes that were stubby except for five long, curving talons ending each arm. An iron maiden turned inside out.
Choosing a moment when its arms were swinging apart, he punched it with all his might high in the center of its chest.
It slowly toppled over backwards, landed with a sharp crash, and lay there on its back with its stubby legs planting and replanting themselves in air and its long arms swinging apart and closing together, clashing the floor of the corridor each time they were parted widest.
The screaming wall struck him from behind. Choosing the next time the metal arms swung inward, he darted past the thing and sprinted to the next pair of doors, noting there was more lettering below one button than he’d ever seen before.
That door was labeled PERPETUAL SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN HAPPY COMFORT. The other said only DEATH OR LIFE.
He thought, Last time I opted against death. Shouldn’t I do so again?
Behind him, a scraping and clashing mixed with the scream of the wall. Of course, it was the wall pushing the spiked automaton before it.
He thought, solitary confinement in happy comfort. That sounds like being drunk forever, without hangovers. All alone with an infinity of glorious, glowing thoughts and unending wonderful dreams.
But all alone.
An even chance at life is better than that. Any chance of life is better than that.
With the screaming and scraping and clashing just behind him, he frantically jabbed the DEATH OR LIFE button and plunged out into a wide, long patio roofed by a fabric through which violet light filtered onto a smoothly tiled floor, and he stood there gasping and shaking. Behind a table nearby, a woman in the professional whites of a nurse was working quietly at some charts. When his breathing had evened out, she looked up at him and, lifting a gray looseleaf folder, said, “Hello. Here are your name and personal history, to read when you wish.” After a faintly smiling pause she added, “Do you have any immediate questions?”
After a while he said, frowning, “I think I get it about the last four pairs of buttons. But about the first two, would I have died if I’d picked water or fire?”
She replied, “I am not at liberty to answer that. There are many branchings in the corridors.”
He still frowned as he moved slowly toward the table.
“Is something else bothering you?” she asked.
He nodded somewhat surlily and said, “When I punched the Torture button, I didn’t really get any. There was only that witless robot.”
“You are difficult to please,” she replied. “Wasn’t it torture enough, what happened to your hand?”
He lifted it, still balled in a fist, and studied the eight circular wounds, from which blood slowly dripped, and felt the dull pain. Then he reached for the gray folder in her hand, noting that her other was a gleaming metal prosthetic with eight slim many-jointed fingers like a spider’s legs.
As he touched the folder he felt a surge of frantic curiosity and started to flip it open but caught himself and instead, carrying it half rolled, began to walk slowly down the patio, then more rapidly as he neared the balustrade of gray metal marking its end.
Resting his hands on the warm smooth rail, he looked out at the prospect dropping gently away.
In a pale yellow sky, a violet sun was sinking behind rounded hills ten miles away. Its purpling beams shone on a valley half filled with cultivated reddish fields and scarlet trees and half with evenly ranked transparent tubes, through which rushed fluids shading from pink to crimson of some sort of algae farming. Midway to the hills, beside a meandering river, was a town with irregularly spaced round pastel roofs, mostly low. Here and there he made out the figures of two-legged beasts and six-legged ones, the latter carrying their foremost limbs high, like centaurs. From somewhere came a faint piping and a fainter, complexly rhythmic drumming. It looked like a good planet.
After a while he could learn its name and all about it, just as after a while he could learn from the folder, reassuringly bulked between his fingers, his own name and what he’d feared and flinched away from into the black inner corridor which had become the black therapeutic corridor from which he’d now emerged. And after a while he could go back to the nurse and have her fix his hand, the dull pain of which was oddly reassuring.
For the moment it was enough to know he was alive and a man.
—FRITZ LEIBER
