"The Orban boy," Wayne said. His voice was thick, and it trembled a little, as though he were just about to lose control of it. "He's here. You wrote an article about him, remember? Would you like to meet him?"
Ruth swayed.
Wayne thought perhaps she was going to faint. It was a crazy thing to do, but he leaped toward her without realizing that he was standing a yard from the machine.
As he caught her in his arms, something caught him. It was like a fierce rush of wind. It was cyclonic. It whirled him around and started pulling him backward, straight toward the machine. He held on to the girl without realizing that he was pulling her inexorably in the same direction.
Ruth screamed.
The room seemed to pinwheel. It was much easier for Wayne not to let go of the girl. He did not realize that she was in deadly danger. He thought only of protecting her. There was a howling in the room as light blazed out from the croquet wicket to envelop them.
Far off, as though in an inverted lens, Wayne saw the Orban boy rushing out of the kitchen, his bearded face twitching in terror. Then everything in the room seemed to whip away into emptiness.…
Stability came back in slow stages. Wayne was aware first of warmth in his arms, a cry quavering from human lips. Then of a firm surface taking shape beneath him.
He was sitting on the ground holding Ruth in his arms. She was struggling to free herself, one hand pushing against his chin, her face a blob of whiteness.
He was sitting with his back against a firm stone surface, staring down at her. He could see her face clearly now, distinct and white in a blue glimmering light.
"Ken, where are we?" she choked.
It wasn't an easy question to answer. It was a world of rugged contours. They seemed to be resting on a plain that sloped away into glowing blue mist. There was a curious, dynamic quality about the landscape. Its very emptiness thrust itself on Wayne like chords of music struck wildly on a piano.
Certainly he was resting with his back against a stone wall of some sort rising sheer behind him. When he turned his head, he could see the wall clearly.
With a little groan, Ruth disentangled herself and slipped to the ground at his side, making it easier for him to take note of his surroundings.
There wasn't very much to take note of. Just the wall and the bleak, desolate landscape. A few pebbles were scattered about, and—something small and globular and blubbery that was stirring in a cuplike hollow directly in front of Wayne.
Ruth cried out suddenly and plucked at his sleeve.
"Ken, look! That little egg thing is alive!"
An egg thing! Of course, it did resemble an egg. It was veined and oddly cracked and something wet was spilling out of it. Something projected from it too—the long shaft of an arrow.
Wayne's neck hairs rose. He got up and staggered toward the "egg," and as he did so, the whole surface of the wall swept into view. It bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Great Wall of China reduced to fairy-tale dimensions.
Rugged and battlemented it was, but small—not more than thirty feet in height at the tower sections and much lower in between. It curved in and out over the plain, under a sky of fiery blueness, to lose itself at the horizon's rim with a kind of downsweeping rush that conveyed an illusion of motion.
The egg-shaped object had stopped moving when Wayne dropped to one knee beside it. The arrow had pierced it cruelly, and Wayne could not doubt that it had ceased to feel pain. The little white tadpole arms which sprouted from it were limp now, completely inert in the blue glare. Equally limp was its puckered, little-old-man face, the mouth hanging open, the heavily lidded eyes drained of all expression.
Wayne did not attempt to withdraw the arrow. Obviously the egg thing was dead. He was glad that it could not return his stare. He arose and turned to Ruth.
"It was alive!" he said. "A ghastly little animal with an almost human face, shaped like an egg. I can't believe—"
Twang!
As the arrow sped past Wayne, he leaped back with a startled cry. Something huge and blue had come out from behind a bend in the wall to aim a bow at him. He caught a brief, terrifying glimpse of it as it darted back into shadows.
Wayne turned abruptly and gripped his companion's arm. "We've got to get away from here as quickly as possible," he whispered with hoarse urgency.
"Away?" Ruth stared. "How can we? The machine has disappeared."
"We must get away from this wall. There's something deadly here that shoots to kill!"
"Human beings?"
"Man-shaped beings. Angular, flattish. They don't seem to have any heads."
Ruth swayed toward him. "Are you sure they're shooting at us?"
"We can't wait to find out. We've got to run for it."
"Where do you think we are?" Ruth breathed in sick horror. "Another dimension?"
Before Wayne could reply, another arrow sped past them with a vibrant twang.
They broke into a run, keeping close to the wall, their shadows preceding them in the blue glimmering. Panting, terrified, they came to a brief halt beneath a darkly looming tower that seemed to bulge out over the plain.
At right angles to the wall, a hundred feet from where they were standing, a vast circular mound bisected the plain, its edges misty in the strange light.
"Come on!" Wayne urged. "That mound may be hollow. We've got to chance it."
They were in motion again, racing toward the mound, when they heard a fluttering sound. It seemed to beat out from the mound in tangible waves, like the stirring of migratory birds gathering in great numbers in a tree and shaking the air with their flutterings.
Then up from the mound twenty or thirty winged black shapes soared, spiraling up into the sky in a wild, soaring ecstasy of flight. Almost instantly the arrows started flying.
One by one the birds dropped like dead sticks to the ground amidst a flurry of deadly arrows. With hoarse cawings they dropped, their feathers flying, their long, lizardlike bodies pierced by the cruel shafts.
Back into the mound they dropped, straight down with their flutterings stilled.
For a moment there was complete stillness on the plain, unearthly, terrifying.
Then Wayne said in a choked voice: "Does all this remind you of something? In a vague, distorted, nightmarish way, I mean? Does it?"
Ruth stared across the plain before replying. It seemed to her that she saw shadows, angular, menacing, moving in the distance, on the rim of her vision. It seemed to her that she saw the shadows of bows, blue on the plain. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!" she said. "Six and twenty blackbirds—baked into a pie!"
"You thought of that too, did you?" Wayne's lips were white. "We didn't see Humpty Dumpty fall, but it was a great fall he had. It smashed him, and not all the King's horses and all the King's men—"
"Stop it!" Ruth's voice was almost a scream. "There are no horses, no King's men here. That egg was a hideous little animal with the face of an ape. And blackbirds don't have lizardlike bodies."
A procession came around the mouth with a far-off beating of tiny drums. It could not be said that they were King's horses or King's men. They were something not quite rational.
It was a winding procession of egg-things, tottering on little stumpy legs, and prancing green shapes that bore a startling resemblance to walking-stick insects. The eggs were linked together by dangling wisps of filmy stuff. When they came closer, the filmy stuff resolved itself into a net, glimmering, metallic.
They're going to catch Humpty Dumpty when he falls, Wayne thought wildly.
Suddenly the long wall stirred with activity. A dozen little egg-shapes were running along it, dodging and weaving, their tadpole forelimbs quivering.
A shadow, dark, ominous, moved on the plain.
Twang!
The running eggs splintered as they fell. A wailing went up from the advancing procession, long-drawn, shrill. The "King's horses" swerved in closer to the wall, the net floating free.
Too late! The ground was
littered with writhing and dying egg-shapes, shattered, spilling their yolks. One was not writhing. It was completely bashed in, a flattish horror swimming in its yolk.
Suddenly Ruth screamed, "Look over there! It's one of those angular, headless things. It's aiming at us!"
The blue bowman had stepped out from the shadow of the wall and was sharply limned in the downslanting radiance. His arms and legs were metallic zigzags, his body an angular shaft. He was slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, a Zeus lightning bolt aping the human form, a cut-out shape like a figure on a lampshade, standing poised and vibrant as he raised his bow.
Wayne swung about, took hold of Ruth, and dragged her to the ground. The arrow twanged horribly as it left the bow. They could feel death brushing them as the ghastly, headless figure sprang back into shadows.
Then they were in motion again. They headed straight for the mound, past the procession of toddling ovoids and prancing walking sticks, their faces livid with terror. Another arrow sped past them, raising a flurry of dust as it thudded into the base of the mound.
Then they were climbing up over a tumbled rampart of thrown-up earth and down into a hollow rimmed with blue shadows that seemed to leap toward them out of the gloom.
"That took courage," a quiet voice said.
The man was sitting on a boulder with a Seral hand blaster cradled in his arms. He was a big man, with massive shoulders and a gaunt-featured face. He had torn off his shirt and made a bandage of it. He sat blinking against the light, his right arm wrapped in the bandage, his eyes deep pools of torment. Empty cartridges lay scattered about his feet.
He smiled wryly and started to rise, then thought better of it.
"I'm James Bryce!" he said. "How did you get here?"
He gestured toward another boulder as he spoke. "Sit down, man. You're safe for the moment. I've been holding them off with carefully timed blasts."
Wayne helped Ruth to the boulder and stood for an instant with his back to Bryce, breathing heavily as he stared across the plain. Then he swung about. Words poured from him, a torrent of words.
When he had finished, Bryce nodded grimly. "I see! Pretty gruesome from start to finish. We're trapped in a world we never dreamed existed, and—we've the Orban boy to thank for it!"
Ruth spoke then. "Mother Goose," she whispered. "The Old English Nursery Rhymes. A world that exists only in the Orban boy's mind. Somehow he's made it real, three-dimensional."
Bryce smiled oddly. "You've been thinking that? It's not true, but it does you credit. It means you have at least a toe-hold on reality. You know that reality can't be reshaped to any kind of preconceived mental pattern."
Bryce forced a crooked smile. "What would another dimension be like, logically? Peopled with men and women like ourselves? A mathematician's pipe dream?
"Rubbish, don't you think? Why should intelligence in another world function on a plane that's comprehensible to us? Take the dreams that have found their way into the literature of childhood. What is the literature of childhood? Isn't it, in its purest essence, a world of nightmare fantasy and diffuse cruelty, without rhyme or reason?"
He looked up quickly. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. What made him fall? Poor old Humpty Dumpty! Weep for him—rush to the wall and watch the poor, pitiful attempts that will be made to put him together again.
"Nothing cruel about poor old Humpty Dumpty. He'd tear your heart out. A lovely, goofy old egg. Where's the cruelty then? I'll tell you. The picture that devilish fantasy conjures up is the essence of cruelty. A smashed, quivering, alive egg, in torment, scattered, spilling its yolk."
"But—"
Bryce waved a muscular hand. "The world of a child's reading is like a pack of tarot cards. You know the old stories of children bewitched and tormented by cruel goblins. There's a grotesquerie in it like nothing on earth.
"A child's mind is wide open to it—receptive. A child really sees into that world, in its dreams. Do you know why? That world really exists—as a sober scientific reality. When we grow up, we forget to remember."
Bryce's lips tightened. "A child's mental receptivity isn't blunted by the world around it. It grows up in two worlds at once, until it adjusts to our reality. But the author of the Mother Goose rhymes remembered his dreams of childhood more vividly than most men."
Bryce made a deprecatory gesture. "The real Humpty Dumpties are quite a bit different. Living ovoids who are always the victims of a cruel sport, destined to be shot down, and rescued too late by their little stricken fellows.
"There's a doom on all of them. What a weird, wild, shooting-gallery world this is! Sport, archery. The headless archers. They're cocks of the walk here, I think, swaggering, slim-waisted bullies. But there's something automatic about them. I don't think they're prime movers."
"I'm glad to know that," Wayne grunted grimly.
"The prime movers who created this world may be a kind of puppet master without visible substance. What impressed me from the instant I arrived here was the automatic, clockwork aspect of everything. It's intangible, hard to pin down. But a sensitive man can hardly fail to be aware of it."
"I know what you mean," Ruth whispered.
"Everything's cyclic. Those blackbirds ascend like clay pigeons released in swarms at intervals, and when the eggs fall, others take their places on the wall. We haven't penetrated very deeply into this world. Old Mother Hubbard may be here too, with a ravenous dog that isn't a dog, really.
"It may be a dog that keeps going to an empty hole in a cliff wall. He rushes in, barking furiously, and comes out without a bone. The cupboard is bare. Then an arrow pierces him, and he's a dead dog for a while. Jack and Jill go up a hill, a target for the headless archers.
"They're Jack and Jill in the nursery rhymes. Here they may be angular, metallic figures, but horribly vulnerable. The pail of water is shattered, spills, and runs like quicksilver into the ground. Jack and Jill pick themselves up, pluck out the arrows, and go staggering back up the hill to get some more water, their faces writhing in agony. Or maybe there are Jack-and-Jill replacements and the first pair die!"
Bryce's gaunt face was deadly pale now in the chill blue light. "It's a hellish clock set in motion and staying in motion," he added.
"The Orban boy knew what this world was like," Wayne said slowly. "He called the archers blue bowmen. How does he fit into it?"
"Remember his strange destiny!" Bryce answered. "That's the crux of it, man! He—"
Bryce stiffened in sudden wariness, tightening his grip on the blaster. "Here they come," he warned. "Keep your shoulders down. They converge, shooting with ugly deliberation. But blasting scatters them."
As he spoke, three blue archers came into view between the wall and the mound. They emerged from shadows to stand motionless for an instant on the plain.
Sweat ran cold on Wayne's back. The upraised bows were trained on the mound, taut and glittering arcs of metal bisected by gleaming arrowheads. The shanks of the arrows were drawn back by hands like mailed fists, the bowstrings beaded with light.
The archers released their bows simultaneously. There was a single sound, like the crack of a whiplash in utter stillness.
It was followed by a dull roar. Smoke swirled from the mound as Bryce blasted, blotting the archers from view. When it cleared, two of the original archers were lying prostrate, but their numbers had been augmented fivefold.
Bryce was cursing softly and holding on to his bandaged arm. "Caught an arrow when I came through," he muttered. "That concussion opened up the wound. Why did it have to be my right arm?"
"Here, let me take that!" Wayne said, wrenching at the blaster.
"I can handle it!" Bryce grunted in angry protest. But Wayne had the blaster now and was aiming it at the headless figures, his lips a bowstring line.
Twang!
One arrow, for an instant that seemed a lifetime, cleaving the air. Then came a dozen arrows, a hundred, in a swirl of brightness above Ruth's terror-wrenched
face.
Wayne blasted not once, but four times in hot anger, his throat a throbbing ache. The energy flare blotted out the plain. A blinding pulsebeat seemed to throb in the heart of the blast amidst an expanding whiteness.
When the smoke thinned out, the plain was littered with recumbent archers. A few were shattered. It was incredibly nerve-torturing to watch metallic zigzags twitch and pick themselves up and whip away into shadows like seared leaves.
"That was reckless!" Bryce grunted. "A single blast would have stopped them just as effectively. They can't stand the shattering repercussions!"
Wayne sucked in his breath. For an instant he remained in a crouching attitude, his eyes bright with horror. Then he stood up. "I asked you how the Orban boy fitted into this," he said grimly. "Let's have the rest of it."
Bryce shrugged. "Consider, man. For generations kids have been brought up on a diet of fantasy and reality. One offsets the other. Children don't know how real the fantasy world is, and the reality around them quickly blots out Humpty Dumpty."
"Well?"
"The Orban boy knew how to read, and the fantasy world took on an unnatural brilliance for him. It became his own intimate, private world. He had just the stars of space to look at, and that inward vision. Don't you see? He had to get to it. He had to break through the dimensional barrier. It became an obsession with him."
"But how?"
"There were technical, scientific books on that ship. The Orban boy knew how to read, and he wasn't an animal. He was whiplash smart. Even at eight, he had a working grasp of applied physics. He'd talked a lot with his father, knew how to tinker."
Bryce kicked at a loose stone with his toe. "Perfectly normal boys of eight have had I.Q.'s of one-fifty. Mozart was an accomplished musician at six—a great one at nine. Boy chess wizards crop up in every generation, and chess is a three-way game. You've got to peg your naked intelligence into a background of semantics and applied psychology. But some kids get monumental backgrounds just by keeping their eyes and ears open.
"What do we know about human intelligence anyway? Illiterate rustics have mastered atomic theory using hit-and-miss techniques. The Orban boy was precocious, granted. But we know even less about precocity than we do about adult intelligence."
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 2 Page 58
