“The key must be in the Judge’s pocket. Hurry.”
She went with reluctant speed to the prone figure. It lay on its back, the head propped against the wall, the eyes screwed shut in a violent psychic effort to shut out the world. In the left jacket pocket were keys on a ring—and one single. This she took. It worked.
Kay stood blinking at sunlight. “Horty.”
“That’s right.” He came in, touched her arm, grinned. “You shouldn’t write letters. Come on, Bunny.”
Kay said, “They thought I knew where you were.”
“You do.” He turned away from her and studied the supine form of Armand Bluett. “What a sight. Something the matter with his stomach?”
Bunny had arrowed to the bunk, knelt beside it. “Havana… Oh Havana…”
Havana lay stiffly on his back. His eyes were glazed and his lips pouted and dry. Kay said, “Is—is he… I’ve done what I could. He wants something. I’m afraid he—” She went to the bedside.
Horty followed. Havana’s pale chubby lips slowly relaxed, then pursed themselves. A faint sound escaped. Kay said, “I wish I knew what he wants!” Bunny said nothing. She put her hands on the hot cheeks, gently, but as if she would wrest something up out of him by brute force.
Horty frowned. “Maybe I can find out,” he said.
Kay saw his face relax, smoothed over by a deep placidity. He bent close to Havana. The silence was so profound, suddenly, that the carnival noises outside seemed to wash in on them, roaring.
The face Horty turned to Kay a moment later was twisted with grief. “I know what he wants. There may not be time before the Maneater gets here… but—There’s got to be time,” he said decisively. He turned to Kay. “I’ve got to go to the other end of the trailer. If he moves—” indicating the Judge—“hit him with your shoe. Preferably with a foot in it.” He went out, his hand, oddly, on his throat, kneading.
“What’s he going to do?”
Bunny, her eyes fixed on Havana’s comatose face, answered, “I don’t know. Something for Havana. Did you see his face when he went out? I don’t think Havana’s going to—to—”
From the partition came the sound of a guitar, the six open strings brushed lightly. The A was dropped, raised a fraction. The E was flatted a bit. Then a chord…
Somewhere a girl began to sing to the guitar. Stardust. The voice was full and clear, a lyric soprano, pure as a boy’s voice. Perhaps it was a boy’s voice. There was a trace of vibrato at the ends of the phrases. The voice sang to the lyric, just barely trailing the beat, not quite ad lib, not quite stylized, and as free as breathing. The guitar was not played in complicated chords, but mostly in swift and delicate runs in and about the melody.
Havana’s eyes were still open, and still he did not move. But his eyes were wet now, and not glazed, and gradually he smiled. Kay knelt beside Bunny. Perhaps she knelt only to be nearer… Havana whispered, through his smile, “Kiddo.”
When the song was done, his face relaxed. Quite clearly he said “Hey.” There was a world of compliment in the single syllable. After that, and before Horty came back, he died.
Entering, Horty did not even glance at the cot. He seemed to be having trouble with his throat. “Come on,” he said hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
They called Bunny and went to the door. But Bunny stayed by the bunk, her hands on Havana’s cheeks, her soft round face set.
“Bunny, come on. If the Maneater comes back—”
There was a step outside, a thump against the wall of the trailer. Kay wheeled and looked at the suddenly darkened window. Solum’s great sad face filled it. Just then Horty screamed shrilly and dropped writhing to the floor. Kay turned to face the opening door.
“Good of you to wait,” said Pierre Monetre, looking about.
16
ZENA HUDDLED ON THE edge of the lumpy motel bed and whimpered. Horty and Bunny had been gone for nearly two hours; for the past hour, depression had grown over her until it was like bitter incense in the air, like clothes of lead sheeting on her battered limbs. Twice she had leapt up and paced impatiently, but her knee hurt her and drove her back to the bed, to punch the pillow impotently, to lie passive and watch the doubts circling endlessly about her. Should she have told Horty about himself? Should she not have given him more cruelty, more ruthlessness, about more things than revenging himself on Armand Bluett? How deep had her training gone in the malleable entity which was Horty? Could not Monetre, with his fierce, directive power undo her twelve years’ work in an instant? She knew so little; she was, she felt, so small a thing to have undertaken the manufacture of a—a human being.
She wished, fiercely, that she could burrow her mind into the strange living crystals, as the Maneater tried to do, but completely, so that she could find the rules of the game, the facts about a form of life so alien that logic seemed not to work on it at all. The crystals had a rich vitality; they created, they bred, they felt pain; but to what end did they live? Crush one, and the others seemed not to mind. And why, why did they make these “dream-things” of theirs, laboriously, cell by cell—sometimes to create only a horror, a freak, an unfinished, unfunctional monstrosity, sometimes to copy a natural object so perfectly that there was no real distinction between the copy and its original; and sometimes, as in Horty’s case, to create something new, something that was not a copy of anything but, perhaps, a mean, a living norm on the surface, and a completely fluid, polymorphic being at its core? What was their connection with these creations? How long did a crystal retain control of its product—and how, having built it, could it abruptly leave it to go its own way? And when the rare syzygy occurred by which two crystals made something like Horty—when would they release him to be his own creature… and what would become of him then?
Perhaps the Maneater had been right when he had described the creatures of the crystals as their dreams—solid figments of their alien imaginations, built any way they might occur, patterned on partial suggestions pictured by faulty memories of real objects. She knew—the Maneater had happily demonstrated—that there were thousands, perhaps millions of the crystals on earth, living their strange lives, as oblivious to humanity as humanity was to them, for the life-cycles, the purposes and aims of the two species were completely separate. Yet—how many men walked the earth who were not men at all; how many trees, how many rabbits, flowers, amoebae, sea-worms, redwoods, eels and eagles grew and flowered, swam and hunted and stood among their prototypes with none knowing that they were an alien dream, having, apart from the dream, no history?
“Books,” Zena snorted. The books she had read! She had snatched everything she could get her hands on that would give her the slightest lead on the nature of the dreaming crystals. And for every drop of information she had gained (and passed on to Horty) about physiology, biology, comparative anatomy, philosophy, history, theosophy and psychology, she had taken in a gallon of smug certitude, of bland assumptions that humanity was the peak of creation. The answers… the books had answers for everything. A new variety of manglewort appears, and some learned pundit places his finger alongside his nose and pronounces, “Mutation!” Sometimes, certainly. But—always? What of the hidden crystal-creatare dreaming in a ditch, absently performing, by some strange telekinesis, a miracle of creation?
She loved, she worshipped Charles Fort, who refused to believe that any answer was the only answer.
She looked at her watch yet again, and whimpered. If she only knew; if she could only guide him… if she could get guidance herself, somewhere, somewhere…
The doorknob turned. Zena froze, staring at it. Something heavy pressed against the door. There was no knock. The crack between door and frame, high up, widened. Then the bolt let go, and Solum burst into the room.
His loose-skinned, grey-green face and dangling lower lip seemed to pull more than usual at the small, inflamed eyes. He took a half-step back to swing the door closed behind him, and crossed the room to her, his great arms away from his body as if to chec
k any move she might make.
His presence told her some terrible news. No one knew where she was but Horty and Bunny, who had left her in this tourist cabin before they crossed the highway to the carnival. And when last heard of, Solum had been on the road with the Maneater.
So—the Maneater was back, and he had contacted Bunny or Horty, or both, and, worst of all, he had been able to extract information that neither would give willingly.
She looked up at him out of a tearing flurry of deadening resignation and mounting terror. “Solum—”
His lips moved. His tongue passed over his brilliant pointed teeth. He reached for her, and she shrank back.
And then he dropped to his knees. Moving slowly, he took her tiny foot in one of his hands, bent over it with an air that was, unmistakably, reverence.
He kissed her instep, ever so gently, and he wept. He released her foot and crouched there, immersed in great noiseless shuddering sobs.
“But, Solum—” she said, stupidly. She put out a hand and touched his wet cheek. He pressed it closer. She watched him in utter astonishment. Long ago she used to wonder at what went on in the mind behind this hideous face, a mind locked in a silent, speechless universe, with all the world pouring in through the observant eyes and never an expression, never a conclusion or an emotion coming out.
“What is it, Solum?” she whispered. “Horty—”
He looked up and nodded rapidly. She stared at him. “Solum—can you hear?”
He seemed to hesitate; then he pointed to his ear, and shook his head. Immediately he pointed to his brow, and nodded.
“Oh-h-h…” Zena breathed. For years there had been idle arguments in the carnival as to whether the Alligator-skinned Man was really deaf. There was instance after instance to prove both that he was, and that he was not. The Maneater knew, but had never told her. He was—telepathic! She flushed as she thought of it, the times that carnies, half-kidding, had hurled insults at him; worse, the horrified reactions of the customers.
“But—What’s happened? Have you seen Horty? Bunny?”
His head bobbed twice.
“Where are they? Are they safe?”
He thumbed toward the carnival, and shook his head gravely.
“Th-the Maneater’s got them?”
Yes.
“And the girl?”
Yes.
She hopped off the bed, strode away and back, ignoring the pain. “He sent you here to get me?”
Yes.
“But why don’t you scoop me up and take me back, then?”
No answer. He motioned feebly. She said, “Let’s see. You took the jewels when he asked you to…”
Solum tapped his forehead, spread his hands. Suddenly she understood. “He hypnotized you then.”
Solum shook his head slowly.
She understood that it had been a matter of indifference to him. But this time it was different. Something had happened to change his mind, and drastically.
“Oh, I wish you could talk!”
He made anxious, lateral circular motions with his right hand. “Oh, of course!” she exploded. She limped to the splintery bureau and her purse. She found her pen; she had no paper but her checkbook. “Here, Solum. Hurry. Tell me!”
His huge hands enveloped the pen, completely hid the narrow paper. He wrote rapidly while Zena wrung her hands in impatience. At last he handed it to her. His script was delicate, almost microscopic, and as neat as engraving.
He had written, tersely, “M. hates people. Me too. Not so much. M. wants help, I helped him. M. wanted Horty so he could hurt more people. I didn’t care. Still helped. People never liked me.
“I am human, a little. Horty is not human at all. But when Havana was dying, he wanted Kiddo to sing. Horty read his mind. He knew. There was no time. There was danger. Horty knew. Horty didn’t save himself. He made Kiddo’s voice. He sang for Havana. Too late then. M. came. Caught him. Horty did this so Havana could die happy. It didn’t help Horty. Horty knew; did it anyway. Horty is love. M. is hate. Horty more human than I am. I am ashamed. You made Horty. Now I help you.”
Zena read it, her eyes growing very bright. “Havana’s dead, then.”
Solum made a significant gesture, twisting his head in his hands, pointing to his neck, snapping his fingers loudly. He shook his fist at the carnival.
“Yes. The Maneater killed him…. How did you know about the song?”
Solum tapped his forehead.
“Oh. You got it from Bunny, and the girl Kay; from their minds.”
Zena sat on the bed, pressing her knuckles hard against her cheekbones. Think, think… oh, for guidance; for a word of advice about these alien things! The Maneater, crazed, inhuman; surely a warped crystalline product; there must be some way of stopping him. If only she could contact one of the jewels and ask it what to do… surely it would know. If only she had the “middle-man,” the interpreter, that the Maneater had been seeking all these years…
The middle-man! “I’m blind, I’m stone blind and stupid!” she gasped. All these years her single purpose had been to keep Horty away from the crystals; he must have nothing to do with them, lest the Maneater use him against humanity. But Horty was what he was; he was the very thing the Maneater wanted; he was the one who could contact the crystals. There must be a way in which the crystals could destroy what they created!
But would the crystals tell him of such a thing?
They wouldn’t have to, she decided instantly. All Horty would have to do would be to understand the strange mental mechanism of the crystals, and the method would be clear to him.
If only she could tell him! Horty learned quickly, thought slowly; for eidetic memory is the enemy of methodical thought. Ultimately he would think of this himself—but by then he might be the Maneater’s crippled slave. What could she do? Write him a note? He might not even be conscious to read it! If only she were a telepath… Telepath!
“Solum,” she said urgently, “Can you—speak, up here” (she touched her forehead) as well as hear?”
He shook his head. But at the same time he picked up the check on which he had written and pointed to a word.
“Horty. You can speak to Horty?”
He shook his head, and then made outgoing motions from his brow. “Oh,” she said. “You can’t project it, but he can read it if he tries.” He nodded eagerly.
“Good!” she said. She drew a deep breath; she knew, at last, exactly what she must do. But the cost… it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.
“Take me back there, Solum. You’ve caught me. I’m frightened, I’m angry. Get to Horty. You can think of a way. Get to him and think hard. Think: Ask the crystals how to kill one of their dream-things. Find out from the crystals. Got that, Solum?”
The wall had gone up years ago, when Horty came to the very simple conclusions that the peremptory summonses which awakened him at night in his bunk were for Zena, and not for him. Cogito, ergo sum; the wall, once erected, stood untended for years, until Zena suggested that he try reaching into the hypnotized Bunny’s mind. The wall had come down for that; it was still down when he used his new sense to locate the trailer in which Kay was a prisoner, and when he sought the nature of Havana’s dying wish. His sensitive mind was therefore open and unguarded when the Maneater arrived and hurled at him his schooled and vicious lance of hatred. Horty went down in flames of agony.
In ordinary terms, he was completely unconscious. He did not see Solum catch the fainting Kay Hallowell and tuck her under his long arm while his other hand darted out to snatch up soft-faced, tenderhearted Bunny, who fought and spit as she dangled there. He had no memory of being carried to Monetre’s big trailer, of the tottering advent, a few minutes later, of a shaken and murderous Armand Bluett. He was not aware of Monetre’s quick hypnotic control of hysterical Bunny, nor of her calm flat voice revealing Zena’s whereabouts, nor of Monetre’s crackling command to Solum to go to the motor court and bring Zena back. He did not hear Monetre’s blunt o
rder to Armand Bluett: “I don’t think I need you and the girl for anything any more. Stand back there out of the way.” He did not see Kay’s sudden dash for the door, nor the cruel blow of Armand Bluett’s fist which sent her sliding back into the corner as he snarled, “I need you for something, sweetheart, and you’re not getting out of my sight again.”
But the blacking out of the ordinary world revealed another. It was not strange; it had coexisted with the other. Horty saw it now only because the other was taken away.
There was nothing about it to relieve the utter lightlessness of oblivion. In it, Horty was immune to astonishment and quite without curiosity. It was a place of flickering impressions and sensations; of pleasure in an integration of abstract thought, of excitement at the approach of one complexity to another, of engrossing concentration in distant and exoteric constructions. He felt the presence of individuals, very strongly indeed; the liaison between them was non-existent, except for the rare approach of one to another and, somewhere far off, a fused pair which he knew were exceptional. But for these, it was a world of self-developing entities, each evolving richly according to its taste. There was a sense of permanence, of life so long that death was not a factor, save as an aesthetic termination. Here there was no hunger, no hunting, no co-operation, and no fear; these things had nothing to do with the bases of a life like this. Basically trained to accept and to believe in that which surrounded him, Horty delved not at all, made no comparisons, and was neither intrigued nor puzzled.
Presently he sensed the tentative approach of the force which had blasted him, used now as a goad rather than as a spear. He rebuffed it easily, but moved to regain consciousness so that he might deal with the annoyance.
He opened his eyes and found them caught and held by those of Pierre Monetre, who sat at his desk facing him. Horty was sprawled back in an easy-chair, his head propped in the angle of the back and a small rounded wing. The Maneater was radiating nothing. He simply watched, and waited.
Horty closed his eyes, sighed, moved his jaws as a man does on awakening.
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