To the Vanishing Point

by Alan Dean Foster

  "I cannot swim."

  The motor home did not leak. Not even a little bit. Nor did it show signs of leaking as they plunged deeper and deeper into the resurgent sea. By law they should have come to a halt. At the very least, water should have seeped into the engine compartment and shut them down, or the air they continued to breathe should have made them too buoyant to cling to the increasingly rough seabed. Laws, however, no longer seemed to apply to them, natural ones least of all.

  Mouse continued to give directions and Frank obeyed, too far beyond astonishment to object. He tried to pretend they were out for an afternoon drive on the San Diego Freeway, but it was hard to ignore the fish and other denizens of the deep who swam curiously up to the windshield and windows. Something was keeping the water out, and it wasn’t a pressure differential or airtight seals. It defied reason — which meant that in the context of the past several days it was perfectly logical.

  "Just don’t open any windows." Mouse’s eyes alternated between open and shut. Frank wasn’t inclined to ask why. "We are safe within a fragment of your reality, which you have carried about with you the way a diving spider carries its air supply. Now is the time for you to make use of it."

  "How long will it last?" Alicia asked softly, marveling at the increasingly dark landscape.

  "Long enough."

  "It’d better, little singer." For the first time since they’d made his acquaintance, the big Navajo was showing symptoms of fear.

  They had a hard time driving through the kelp forest that clung to the narrow continental shelf. A pair of mutated things that looked like sharks with hands inspected them closely before swimming away. Frank wondered how their protective bubble of reality would respond to a direct attack. Would any assailants bounce off, or would they be able to penetrate?

  As time passed and the air inside the motor home remained breathable, he found he was able to relax a little. They were so deep now that if their protection did collapse it would all be over in a few seconds. They rolled down an increasingly flat and featureless bottom until he came to a steep drop-off. He wasn’t even surprised to discover that the brakes still functioned.

  "Keep going," Mouse instructed him.

  "What, over that?"

  "It’s the way." Her eyes were only half open, giving her a slightly sinister look.

  Frank turned to his wife. They exchanged one more kiss. No need for words anymore. Not in a here and now that wasn’t.

  He switched from brake to accelerator. As they went over the cliff he instinctively shifted into low. The slope was almost seventy degrees, but they didn’t fall. Somehow he kept control.

  "Reality is sticky stuff," Mouse told him with a sly smile.

  Feeling almost jaunty, he switched on the headlights. The twin beams pierced the blackness for forty feet. Schools of small silvery fish swam into the lights, hung as if paralyzed for an instant before dashing away in fright.

  Their descent seemed to continue forever. When the cliff did terminate, the end was abrupt and unexpected. The ground leveled off. A broad, flat plain stretched endlessly before them. It looked like mud and sand, but the motor home progressed across the uncertain surface without any trouble at all. Except for the small area lit by the headlights, it was pitch-black around them.

  "Wow, did you guys see that?" Wendy was sitting by a big side window, staring out into the darkness.

  "See what, dear?" her mother asked.

  "Something big. It had teeth and fins and it looked like a neon sign!"

  "Didn’t know we were that deep." Frank spoke without turning. "You sure we’re goin' the right way?"

  "We are going the only way," Mouse assured him.

  "Pressure down here must be hundreds of pounds a square inch, or however the hell they measure that stuff."

  Whatever the pressure was, the motor home cruised along unaffected. The roof did not crack, the joints did not groan. It wouldn’t take that long, Frank knew. If their protection went, the motor home and everything within would be flattened like a tin can beneath a tank.

  Other phosphorescent monstrosities gradually became visible. Things with stomachs bigger than their bodies, with heads bigger than their stomachs, all needle-sharp teeth and bright electric eyes. The motor home’s lights froze them briefly before they jerked or darted back into the eternal night that was their home.

  Other creatures, infrequent but active, scuttled out of the motor home’s path, stirring up mud and silt as they fled. Once something like a fifty-foot flounder exploded out of their way, stirring up so much muck they never got a decent look at it.

  Frank glanced down at the speedometer. With the accelerator pushed to the floor and no obstacles to slow their progress, they were doing slightly over a hundred miles an hour, right up near the motor home’s limit. He saw no reason for caution. There was nothing down here to run into and in Mouse they had a guide more efficient than any sonar.

  Only once did she direct him to deviate momentarily from their course. As they did so he saw the plutonic glow of subsurface vents off to their left. Five-foot-long worms clustered close around whirling plumes of Earth’s breath. Bacteria clouded the water, feeding on hydrogen sulfides. It was all real, and more alien than anything they’d yet encountered.

  After several days of this Frank found himself wondering if it was Mouse’s intention to circumnavigate the globe underwater. They were making excellent progress and the fuel level fell with inexplicable slowness, but their range was still finite. She assured him repeatedly that they were not driving aimlessly, but toward a definite destination.

  There was no propane to cook with, but the motor home’s microwave worked fine. Assisted by the imaginative Flucca, Alicia managed to conjure up remarkably nutritious meals from their declining food stock. Only Burnfingers was unable to relax and enjoy the impossible ride. Knowing that tons of water pressed tight all around them, held back only by a thin strip of transient reality, he kept to himself and said little.

  "We’re getting close," Mouse finally said one day.

  Frank was doing his stint at the wheel. Now he took a deep breath. He’d begun to despair of ever hearing those words despite her repeated reassurances.

  She was crowding close, her perfume distracting him from his driving. "Turn here. No, more to the right. That’s it."

  He complied, marveling once more at how the motor home responded under what should have been not only impossible but deadly conditions.

  "Now straight."

  A loud bump came from beneath and Frank’s blood went cold for an instant. Then he realized they hadn’t lost their seal of reality. It was only the sound of the front shocks adjusting as they began to ascend. He shifted back into low.

  The grade was as steep as the one they’d descended when leaving Los Angeles but the motor home climbed with all the agility of a four-wheel drive. Several hours passed before Wendy let out a shout.

  "Dad, turn the lights off! It’s getting light outside!"

  Sure enough, the blackness through which they’d traveled for days was giving way to a velvety purple color. Soon brightly hued schools of tropical fish were swimming around them, darting for cover among rocks and coral as the motor home advanced.

  Paradoxically, Frank found he was more nervous now than he’d been at any time since leaving Los Angeles They’d come a long way under unbelievable circumstances. But if anything went wrong now they could drown just as easily twenty feet beneath the surface as two miles down.

  He was worrying needlessly. The motor home continued to ascend into water clear as crystal. Doubly gratifying was the fact that all the fish looked normal. They saw no mutants, no bizarre shapes, no twisted bodies. Only color and form.

  They had to drive for a while before they found a break in the jagged reef. Once beyond the coral wall, the surface hung placidly only a few feet above them. The radio antenna broke through, leaving a small wake behind it as they advanced. Frank found himself driving across a gentle bottom paved with w
hite sand.

  Come on, he found himself urging the motor home. Just a little farther. Another couple hundred yards and we can breathe free again. A little longer and we’ll be there.

  Be where? he asked himself. Be where, beware. He found he could smile, however grim the humor of it, now that the pressure induced by their abyssal excursion was almost gone. What strange territory had they reached after days of hard driving? Would this land prove as blasted and doomed as the Los Angeles they’d fled? Or would it be as peaceful and normal as the coral and fish surrounding them?

  They began to emerge from the sea, waiting tensely as the water fell first below the level of the windshield, then past the hood, and finally to the tires. Frank drove out onto a wide crescent beach. Dry sand slowed the motor home no more than had the abyssal muck. Reality, he’d long since concluded, was a wonderful accessory to have on a long trip.

  There was a gap in the line of palm trees that fringed the beach. He didn’t need Mouse to point the way. The opening revealed a paved highway two lanes wide. A faded, intermittent yellow stripe ran down the middle.

  It was getting hot, but he held off activating the air-conditioning. The gas gauge was hovering perilously near empty.

  Alicia rose abruptly and marched toward the door. "I’m going outside."

  He rose and caught her before she was halfway to the exit. "No way. We don’t know what’s out there."

  "It should be safe enough." Both of them turned to Mouse. Her eyes were open wide now, lavender beacons. "We’re free of the water and back on the right reality line. Your own — or one barely distinguishable from it."

  "Barely?" Frank clung to his doubts. "That’s what you said about the one we just fled."

  Flucca was standing by the door. "I’ll go first, if you like."

  "Not a chance, Small Chef." Burnfingers brushed him aside. Frank was startled to see that the big man was hyperventilating. Apparently he’d stood the confinement as long as he was able.

  Before anyone could stop him, which would likely have been an impossible task in any event, he pushed the door open and jumped out. Air rushed through, sweeping aside the staleness of the previous days. It was rich with the aroma of saltwater, green growing things, and comforting warmth. It drew them to the doorway.

  Burnfingers was doing a dance ten yards distant, hooting gleefully and kicking up sand. "It is all right, it is good!" Ignoring their stares, he knelt to grab a handful of sand and rub it over his face. Then he toppled slowly onto his back, arms spread wide, eyes regarding the clouds.

  "Is he dead?" Alicia wondered fearfully.

  "Naw." Frank used the handgrip to ease himself out, thrilled to be standing on solid ground once more. "He’s just enjoying the sunshine."

  Wendy followed her father. Alicia exited next, inhaling the fresh air. Frank watched her breasts rise and fall, marveling at the thoughts that can occur to a man even in times of serious crisis. Mouse was standing alongside his wife, and his subsequent thoughts embarrassed him deeply.

  Burnfingers hadn’t budged. While the others joined him in relaxing for the first time in days, Frank spent the time giving the motor home a thorough examination.

  There was ample proof that their deep-sea drive had been anything but a dream. Rank saltwater was still dripping from the roof. Bottom-dwelling fish and crustaceans unlucky enough to have been caught in the axles and bumpers were starting to decay in the sun. Some had exploded messily under the pressure change. Flucca wandered over to help him with the cleanup.

  "Look at this one." The little man held up a three-foot-long fish with minuscule fins. The body was barely an inch in diameter. Two feelers as long as the body itself protruded from the skull. It twitched once in Flucca’s grasp.

  "We’ve been through a lot of madness, but this last has to be the ultimate. We all oughta be as dead as that eel thing. And this," Frank said as he tapped the metal side of the motor home, "should be scrap."

  "Some things they still build well," was all Flucca could think of to say.

  After circling the vehicle one last time to convince himself it was still intact, Frank and Flucca rejoined the others.

  "Isn’t this a beautiful spot?" Alicia was surveying the little bay where they’d emerged from the sea, shading her gaze from a tropical sun. "Maybe when this is all over we can come back here."

  "If it’s on our reality line, yeah." There was a harshness to his tone he hadn’t intended. He turned to Mouse. "You said we were real close. You’ve been spouting that line ever since we picked you up."

  "Distance is a relative matter, Frank Sonderberg. North we must go a little ways farther yet."

  "What happens when we get there?" Wendy asked her. "To this Vanishing Point, I mean."

  "When we get there? When we get there, child, why then you will hear me sing."

  "But we’ve already heard you sing."

  Mouse shook her head slowly. "No. You haven’t heard me sing. Really sing. Not yet." She continued to stare northward. "But I think there is yet time for that. Yet time."

  "Then let’s get moving." Frank turned toward the motor home.

  "I know we have to find Steven," Alicia said to him, "but don’t you think you should rest a little?"

  "We’ll rest when this is done. In our own reality, which we’re not sure this is yet." He trudged through the sand toward the only reality he’d known for days. Reluctantly, his family followed.

  "Not home." Burnfingers Begay brushed sand from his pants and sleeves. "Hot enough, but the palm trees do not belong. Arizona has plenty of beach. Just no ocean."

  Wendy laughed and Alicia smiled, but not Frank. His sense of humor was stuck on another reality line. He wouldn’t laugh again until his family was back together and Burnfingers Begay and Mouse and Niccolo Flucca and the Anarchis and Chaos had all been jammed back into the unimportant corner of his mind where they belonged.

  The motor home balked when he started the engine. It jerked forward, hesitated, balked again. The exhaust pipe spat water and dead fish all over the pristine beach. Gritting his teeth, Frank kept trying it until the engine cleared. By the time they pulled into the northbound lane of the narrow road, it was running smoothly again.

  The terrain was a patchwork: emerald outcrops of dense vegetation consisting of palms, ferns, and brilliant flowers alternating with barren fields of rough dark lava. As the road crossed a narrow spit that extended out into the ocean, they came into view of a towering active volcano. It reminded Frank too much of the first stop on their odyssey through alternate realities.

  Mouse’s reaction was very different. "The place!" she declared excitedly. "The marker. The smoking harbinger. Very soon now, very soon." She was standing between his seat and Alicia’s, staring intently forward.

  Soon they were driving along a thin strip of road with ocean on one side and sheer cliffs on the other. Rocks lying in the road kept Frank glancing nervously at the plant-choked wall of stone on their left. The road had been sliced from the sheer rock at great expense, yet no one seemed to use it. Since leaving the beach they hadn’t seen another vehicle, another sign of life.

  "Wherever we’re going we’d better get there soon," he muttered. "I don’t know how it’s lasted this long, but we’ve about run out." He indicated the fuel gauge. The digital readout rested on empty. "We’re down to emergency gas, if there is any. Must be, because we’re still goin'."

  "There! Turn there!"

  It threw Frank for a moment because it was so rare that Mouse shouted. He hit the brakes harder than was necessary, then crept forward until they reached the turnoff she’d indicated.

  The steep, narrow dirt track occupied a cleft in the rocks. Concealed as it was by thick ferns and other growths, it was all but invisible from the main road. He would have driven past it a hundred times without suspecting its presence. Reluctantly, he turned into the opening. It was barely wide enough to admit the motor home. Occasionally the metal sides scraped rock.

  Tropical flora closed in
around them. It was as if they were traveling down a long, green tunnel. At times the ferns packing the open space in search of scarce sunlight were so thick they completely blocked the windshield. Frank had to drive slowly and by feel, praying there were no sharp dips or unexpected bends or drop-offs ahead. Soon the road itself disappeared. They continued to advance up the streambed, which had cut the canyon. A trickle of water ran down the center, disappearing between their wheels and reemerging in their wake.

  After half an hour of driving across terrain that the motor home had never been designed to handle, the tunnel opened onto a much wider but equally steep-sided canyon.

  Walls of volcanic rock towered hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. In places they were nearly vertical. Everywhere was dense vegetation. It looked like films Frank had seen of New Guinea or the South Pacific, though there was no reason to believe they were anywhere in either vicinity, or even on the same reality line where such familiar places existed.

  Mouse stood close by, nodding and murmuring incomprehensibly to herself. In the absence of further instruction he kept going.

  The streambed filled up and became more like a road again, silt muting the bumps and bounces. The squeaking, complaining suspension gave every indication of failing utterly at any moment.

  They topped a small rise in the middle of the canyon valley. Ahead, the by now awesome walls enclosing them on all sides came together. Almost. Where they nearly met, a thin sliver of sky showed clearly. Everything ended at that place. Or extended from it, Frank thought. The canyon, the vegetation, the little stream, even the sky and sunlight all angled toward that narrow passage.

  Mouse sighed heavily. "There it is."

  "There what is?" he asked tiredly.

  Her smile was wider than ever. "The Vanishing Point."

  18

  Having come so far the hard way, they all sat and stared for a long time. Even the motor home seemed to idle easier.

  "What happens when we get there?" Wendy finally asked, breaking the silence. "Do we vanish, too?"

  Mouse brought herself back from some faraway place to smile at Wendy. "No. It is the insubstantials that disappear at that place. Space, time, reality: that’s what a vanishing point is all about. It’s where everything goes when it’s not here, a place all its own, at once a part of yet outside the real cosmos. It’s the focus of real and of time."