Nothing happened as I arrived. I stood up. I could go no higher. I looked at the sky, I looked back down. I waved at the blazing rocket exhaust.
I extruded the pole and attached the flag.
I planted it, there where no breezes would ever stir it. I cut in my communicator, said, “I’m here.” No other words.
It was time to go back down and give Henry his chance, but I looked down the western slope before I turned to go.
The lady was winking again. Perhaps eight hundred feet below, the red light shone. Could that have been what I had seen from the town during the storm, on that night, so long ago?
I didn’t know and I had to.
I spoke into the communicator.
“How’s Mallardi doing?”
“I just stood up,” he answered. “Give me another half hour, and I’m coming up myself.”
“Henry,” I said. “Should he?”
“Gotta take his word how he feels,” said Lanning.
“Well,” I said, “then take it easy. I’ll be gone when you get here. I’m going a little way down the western side. Something I want to see.”
“What?”
“I dunno. That’s why I want to see.”
“Take care.”
“Check.”
The western slope was an easy descent. As I went down it, I realized that the light was coming from an opening in the side of the mountain.
Half an hour later, I stood before it.
I stepped within and was dazzled.
I walked toward it and stopped. It pulsed and quivered and sang.
A vibrating wall of flame leapt from the floor of the cave, towered to the roof of the cave.
It blocked my way, when I wanted to go beyond it.
She was there, and I wanted to reach her.
I took a step forward, so that I was only inches away from it. My communicator was full of static and my arms of cold needles.
It did not bend toward me, as to attack. It cast no heat.
I stared through the veil of fires to where she reclined, her eyes closed, her breast unmoving.
I stared at the bank of machinery beside the far wall. “I’m here,” I said, and I raised my pick.
When its point touched the wall of flame someone took the lid off hell, and I staggered back, blinded. When my vision cleared, the angel stood before me.
“You may not pass here,” he said.
“She is the reason you want me to go back?” I asked. “Yes. Go back.”
“Has she no say in the matter?”
“She sleeps. Go back.”
“So I notice. Why?”
“She must. Go back.”
“Why did she herself appear to me and lead me strangely?”
“I used up the fear-forms I knew. They did not work. I led you strangely because her sleeping mind touches upon my workings. It did so especially when I borrowed her form, so that it interfered with the directive. Go back.”
“What is the directive?”
“She is to be guarded against all things coming up the mountain. Go back.”
“Why? Why is she guarded?”
“She sleeps. Go back.”
The conversation having become somewhat circular at that point, I reached into my pack and drew out the projector. I swung it forward and the angel melted. The flames bent away from my outstretched hand. I sought to open a doorway in the circle of fire. It worked, sort of.
I pushed the projector forward, and the flames bent and bent and bent and finally broke. When they broke, I leaped forward. I made it through, but my protective suit was as scorched as Mallardi’s. I moved to the coffinlike locker within which she slept. I rested my hands on its edge and looked down. She was as fragile as ice. In fact, she was ice…
The machine came alive with lights then, and I felt her somber bedstead vibrate. Then I saw the man.
He was half sprawled across a metal chair beside the machine. He, too, was ice. Only his features were gray, were twisted. He wore black and he was dead and a statue, while she was sleeping and a statue.
She wore blue, and white…
There was an empty casket in the far corner…
But something was happening around me. There came a brightening of the air. Yes, it was air. It hissed upward from frosty jets in the floor, formed into great clouds. Then a feeling of heat occurred and the clouds began to fade and the brightening continued.
I returned to the casket and studied her features.
I wondered what her voice would sound like when/if she spoke. I wondered what lay within her mind. I wondered how her thinking worked, and what she liked and didn’t like. I wondered what her eyes had looked upon, and when.
I wondered all these things, because I could see that whatever forces I had set into operation when I entered the circle of fire were causing her, slowly, to cease being a statue.
She was being awakened.
I waited. Over an hour went by, and still I waited, watching her. She began to breathe. Her eyes opened at last, and for a long time she did not see.
Then her bluefire fell upon me.
“Whitey,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Where am I…?”
“In the damnedest place I could possibly have found anyone.”
She frowned. “I remember,” she said and tried to sit up.
It didn’t work. She fell back.
“What is your name?”
“Linda,” she said. Then, “I dreamed of you, Whitey. Strange dreams… How could that be?”
“It’s tricky,” I said.
“I knew you were coming,” she said. “I saw you fighting monsters on a mountain as high as the sky.”
“Yes, we’re there now.”
“H-have you the cure?”
“Cure? What cure?”
“Dawson’s Plague,” she said.
I felt sick. I felt sick because I realized that she did not sleep as a prisoner, but to postpone her death. She was sick.
“Did you come to live on this world in a ship that moved faster than light?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It took centuries to get here. We slept the cold sleep during the journey. This is one of the bunkers.” She gestured toward the casket with her eyes. I noticed her cheeks had become bright red.
“They all began dying—of the plague,” she said. “There was no cure. My husband—Carl—is a doctor. When he saw that I had it, he said he would keep me in extreme hypothermia until a cure was found. Otherwise, you only live for two days, you know.”
Then she stared up at me, and I realized that her last two words had been a question.
I moved into a position to block her view of the dead man, who I feared must be her Carl. I tried to follow her husband’s thinking. He’d had to hurry, as he was obviously further along than she had been. He knew the colony would be wiped out. He must have loved her and been awfully clever, both—awfully resourceful. Mostly, though, he must have loved her. Knowing that the colony would die, he knew it would be centuries before another ship arrived. He had nothing that could power a cold bunker for that long. But up here, on the top of this mountain, almost as cold as outer space itself, power wouldn’t be necessary. Somehow, he had got Linda and the stuff up here. His machine cast a force field around the cave. Working in heat and atmosphere, he had sent her deep into the cold sleep and then prepared his own bunker. When he dropped the wall of forces, no power would be necessary to guarantee the long, icy wait. They could sleep for centuries within the bosom of the Gray Sister, protected by a colony of defense-computer. This last had apparently been programmed quickly, for he was dying. He saw that it was too late to join her. He hurried to set the thing for basic defense, killed the force field, and then went his way into that Dark and Secret Place. Thus it hurled its birds and its angels and its snakes, it raised its walls of fire against me. He died, and it guarded her in her near-death—against everything, including those who would help. My coming to the mountain had activat
ed it. My passing of the defenses had caused her to be summoned back to life.
“Go back!” I heard the machine say through its projected angel, for Henry had entered the cave.
“My God!” I heard him say. “Who’s that?”
“Get Doc!” I said. “Hurry! I’ll explain later. It’s a matter of life! Climb back to where your communicator will work, and tell him it’s Dawson’s Plague—a bad local bug! Hurry!”
“I’m on my way,” he said and was.
“There is a doctor?” she asked.
“Yes. Only about two hours away. Don’t worry… I still don’t see how anyone could have gotten you up here to the top of this mountain, let alone a load of machines.”
“We’re on the big mountain—the forty-miler?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get up?” she asked.
“I climbed it.”
“You really climbed Purgatorio? On the outside?”
“Purgatorio? That’s what you call it? Yes, I climbed it, that way.”
“We didn’t think it could be done.”
“How else might one arrive at its top?”
“It’s hollow inside,” she said. “There are great caves and massive passages. It’s easy to fly up the inside in a pressurized jet car. In fact, it was an amusement ride. Two and a half dollars per person. An hour and a half each way. A dollar to rent a pressurized suit and take an hour’s walk around the top. Nice way to spend an afternoon. Beautiful view…?” She gasped deeply.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said. “Have you any water?”
“Yes,” I said, and I gave her all I had.
As she sipped it, I prayed that Doc had the necessary serum or else would be able to send her back to ice and sleep until it could be gotten. I prayed that he would make good time, for two hours seemed long when measured against her thirst and the red of her flesh.
“My fever is coming again,” she said. “Talk to me, Whitey, please… Tell me things. Keep me with you till he comes. I don’t want my mind to turn back upon what has happened… “
“What would you like me to tell you about, Linda?”
“Tell me why you did it. Tell me what it was like, to climb a mountain like this one. Why?”
I turned my mind back upon what had happened.
“There is a certain madness involved,” I said, “a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have. Each mountain is a deity, you know. Each is an immortal power. If you make sacrifices upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace and for a time you will share this power. Perhaps that is why they call me…
For a time her hand rested in mine. I hoped that through it whatever power I might contain would hold all of her with me for as long as ever.
“I remember the first time that I saw Purgatory, Linda,” I told her. “I looked at it and I was sick. I wondered, where did it lead…
(Stars.
Oh let there be.
This once to end with.
Please.)
“Stars?”
THIS MOMENT OF THE STORM
Back on earth, my old philosophy prof—possibly because he’d misplaced his lecture notes—came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied then, that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked: “What is a man?”
He had known exactly what he was doing. He’d had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).
One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological classification.
The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:
“Is that all?”
And there was his hour and a half.
I learned that Man is the Reasoning Animal, Man is the One Who Laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watch himself doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate—which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder whatever became of Paul?) Anyhow, to most of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but—” or just plain “crap!” I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan…
I’d said, “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”
Stop and think about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting, too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name. Delightful place too, for quite awhile…
It was there that I saw Man’s definitions, one by one, wiped from off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.
… My radio had been playing more static than usual. That’s all. For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.
My hundred-thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western store-fronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint—each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red—to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.
Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday is turquoise, and sunset is emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and seamist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred-thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.
It’s funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women: You say, “She’s a good old tub,” or, “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of femininity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or, conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that little Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary engine in an inland transport-vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons, and seas. Cities, though, are different. Generally, they’re neuter. Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she”. Usually, cities are just “it”.
Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually, this is in the case of small cities near to the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps this is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages which prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.
Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was—a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is Woman. The oldtime Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. I
felt it when I first saw Beta Station—Betty—and the second time I saw her, also.
I am her Hell Cop.
… When six or seven of my hundred-thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel uneasy.
I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girlvoice told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal-vision.
Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged sky-toads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.
I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the airport, the spacer pads, and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport-Vehicle garages, crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving tread-trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple A-frame affairs, were chisel blade, spike-tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod, and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred-thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.
The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.
My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.
I knew then that we were in for something.
I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee,
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth Page 17
