Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  The judge’s eyebrows went up, like a buzzard hoisting its wings for the takeoff. “You ken Thane MacSvensson?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Hrrrmph. Well. He’s out of town. But — uh — if that’s so, I’m sure you’re a good burger. I hereby sentence you to ten days in jail, sentence withheld until I can check your mooding, and thereafter on your good acting. You are free.”

  Like a good thane’s thane, Eric Dunedin kept his curiosity to himself. This became a really heroic task when he was sent out to buy a bottle of soluble hair dye, a false mustache, and a pair of phoney spectacles with flat glass panes in them.

  There was no doubt about it; the boss was a changed man since his reappearance. He had raised Dunedin’s salary, and except for occasional outbursts of choler treated him very considerately. The weird accent had largely disappeared; but this hard, inscrutable man wasn’t the bishop Dunedin had known.

  Park presented himself in his disguise to the renting agent at 125 Isleif. He said: “Remember me? I was here this morning asking about a room.” The man said sure he remembered him; he never forgot a face. Park rented a small two-room apartment, calling himself Allister Park. Later in the evening he took some books, a folder of etchings, and a couple of suitcases full of clothes over. When he returned to the bishop’s house he found another car with a couple of large watchful men waiting at the curb. Rather than risk contact with a hostile authority, he went back to his new apartment and read. Around midnight he dropped in at a small hash house for a cup of coffee. In fifteen minutes he was calling the waitress “sweetie-pie.” The etchings worked like a charm.

  Dunedin looked out the window and announced: “Two wains and five knicks, Hallow. The twoth wain drew up just now. The men in it look as if they’d eat their own mothers without salt.”

  Park thought. He had to get out somehow. He had looked into the subject of search warrants, illegal entry, and so forth, as practiced in the Bretwaldate of Vinland, and was reasonably sure the detectives wouldn’t invade his house. The laws of Vinland gave what Park thought was an impractically exaggerated sanctity to a man’s home, but he was glad of that as things were. However, if he stepped out, the pack would be all over him with charges of drunken driving, conspiracy to violate the tobacco tax, and anything else they could think of.

  He telephoned the “knicks’ branch,” or police department, and spoke falsetto: “Are you the knicks? Glory be to Patrick and Bridget! I’m Wife Caroline Chisholm, at 79 Mercia, and we have a crazy man running up and down the halls naked with an ax. Sure he’s killed my poor husband already; spattered his brains all over the hall he did, and I’m locked in my room and looking for him to break in any time.” Park stamped on the floor, and continued: “Eeek! That’s the monster now, trying to break the door down. Oh, hurry, I pray. He’s shouting that he’s going to chop me in little bits and feed me to his cat!.. Yes, 79 Mercia. Eeeee! Save me!”

  He hung up and went back to the window. In five minutes, as he expected, the gongs of the police wains sounded, and three of the vehicles skidded around the corner and stopped in front of No. 79, down the block. Funny hats tumbled out like oranges from a burst paper bag, and raced up the front steps with guns and ropes enough to handle Gargantua. The five who had been watching the house got out of their cars too and ran down the block.

  Allister Park lit his pipe, and strode briskly out the front door, down the street away from the disturbance, and around the corner.

  Park was announced, as Bishop Scoglund, to Dr. Edwy Borup. The head of the Psychophysical Institute was a smallish, bald, snaggle-toothed man, who smiled with an uneasy cordiality.

  Park smiled back. “Wonderful work you’ve been doing, Dr. Borup.” After handing out a few more vague compliments, he got down to business. “I understand that poor Dr. Noggle is now one of your patients?”

  “Umm — uh — yes, Reverend Hallow. He is. Uh — his lusty working seems to have brock on a brainly breakdown.” Park sighed. “The good Lord will see him through, let us hope. I wonder if I could see him? I had some small kenning of him before his trouble. He once told me he’d like my spiritual guidance, when he got around to it.”

  “Well — umm — I’m not sure it would be wise — in his kilter-”

  “Oh, come now, Dr. Borup; surely thocks of hicker things would be good for him…”

  The sharp-nosed, gray-haired man who had been Joseph Noggle sat morosely in his room, hardly bothering to look up when Park entered.

  “Well, my friend,” said Park, “what have they been doing to you?”

  “Nothing,” said the man. His voice had a nervous edge. “That’s the trouble. Every day I’m a different man in a different sanitarium. Each day they tell me that two days previously I got violent and tried to poke somebody in the nose. I haven’t poked nobody in the nose. Why in God’s name don’t they do something? Sure, I know I’m crazy. I’ll cooperate, if they’ll do something.”

  “There, there,” said Park. “The good Lord watches over all of us. By the way, what were you before your trouble started?”

  “I taught singing.”

  Park thought several “frickful aiths.” If a singing teacher, or somebody equally incompetent for his kind of work, were in his body now…

  He lit a pipe and talked soothingly and inconsequentially to the man, who though not in a pleasant mood, was too grateful for a bit of company to discourage him. Finally he got what he was waiting for. A husky male nurse came in to take the patient’s temperature and tell Park that his time was up.

  Park hung around, on one excuse or another, until the nurse had finished. Then he followed the nurse out and grasped his arm.

  “What is it, Hallow?” asked the nurse.

  “Are you poor Noggle’s regular attendant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got any kinfolk, or people you like specially, in the priesthood?”

  “Yes, there’s my Aunt Thyra. She’s a nun at the New Lindisfarne Abbey.”

  “Like to see her advanced?”

  “Why — I guess so; yes. She’s always been pretty good to me.”

  “All right. Here’s what you do. Can you get out, or send somebody out, to telephone Noggle’s condition to me every morning before noon?”

  The nurse guessed he could. “All right,” snapped Park. “And it won’t do anybody any good if anybody knows you’re doing it, understand?” He realized that his public-prosecutor manner was creeping back on him. He smiled benignly. “The Lord will bless you, my son.”

  Park telephoned Dunedin; asked him to learn the name of somebody who dwelt on the top floor of the apartment house next door, and to collect one ladder, thirty feet of rope, and one brick. He made him call back the name of the top-floor tenant. “But Hallow, what in the name of Patrick do you want a brick for…”

  Park, chuckling, told him he’d learn. When he got off the folkwain at Mercia Street, he didn’t walk boldly up to his own house. He entered the apartment house next door and said he was calling on Mrs. Figgis, his clericals constituting adequate credentials. When the elevator-man let him out on the top floor, he simply climbed to the roof and whistled for Monkey-face. He directed Dunedin in the tieing of the end of the rope to the brick, the heaving thereof to the roof of the apartment house, and the planting of the ladder to bridge the ten-foot gap. After that it was a simple matter for Park to lower himself to his own roof, without being intercepted by the watchdogs in front of his house.

  As soon as he got in, the phone rang. A sweetness-and-light voice at the other end said: “This is Cooley, Hallow. Every time I’ve called your man has said you were out or else that you couldn’t be bothered!”

  “That’s right,” said Park. “I was.”

  “Yes? Anyway, we’re all giving praises to the Lord that you were spared.”

  “That’s fine,” said Park.

  “It surely is a wonderful case of how His love watches over us-”

  “What’s on your mind, Cooley?” said Park, sternly
repressing a snarl of impatience.

  “Oh — uh — what I meant was, will you give your usual sermon next Sunday?”

  Park thought quickly. If he could give a sermon and get away with it, it ought to discourage the people who were trying to prove the bishop loony. “Sure I will. Where are you calling from?”

  “Why — uh — the vestry.” Some damned assistant, thought Park. “But, Hallow, won’t you come up tonight? I’m getting some of the parishioners together in the chapel for a homish thanksgiving stint — with hymns of-”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Park. “Give ’em my love anyway. There goes my doorbell. Bye.” He marched into the library, muttering. Dunedin asked: “What is it, Hallow?”

  “Gotta prepare a goddam sermon,” said Park, taking some small pleasure at his thane’s thane’s expression of horror.

  Fortunately the bishop was an orderly man. There were manuscripts of all his sermons for the past five years, and phonograph records (in the form of magnetized wire) of several. There was also plenty of information about the order of procedure in a Celtic Christian service. Park set about concocting a sermon out of fragments and paragraphs of those the bishop had delivered during the past year, playing the spools of wire over and over to learn the bishop’s inflections. He wished he had some way of getting the bishop’s gestures, too.

  He was still at it next day when he dimly heard his doorbell. He thought nothing of it, trusting to Dunedin to turn the visitor away, until Monkey-face came in and announced that a pair of knicks awaited without.

  Park jumped up. “Did you let ’em in?”

  “No, Hallow, I thought-”

  “Good boy! I’ll take care of ’em.”

  * * *

  The larger of the two cops smiled disarmingly. “Can we come in, Hallow, to use your wiretalker?”

  “Nope,” said Park. “Sorry.”

  The knick frowned. “In that case we gotta come in anyway. Mistrust of unlawful owning of pipe.” He put his foot in the door crack.

  A pipe, Park knew, was a gun. He turned and stamped on the toe of the shoe, hard; then slammed the door shut as the foot was jerked back. There were some seconds of “frickful aiths” wafting through the door, then the pounding of a fist against it.

  “Get a warrant!” Park yelled through the door. The noise subsided. Park called Dunedin and told him to lock the other entrances. Presently the knicks departed. Park’s inference, based upon what he had been able to learn of Vinland law, that they would not force an entrance without a warrant, had proved correct. However, they would be back, and there is nothing especially difficult about “finding” an illegal weapon in a man’s house, whether he had one before or not.

  So Park packed a suitcase, climbed to the roof of the adjoining apartment, and went down the elevator. The elevator man looked at him in a marked manner. Once in the street, he made sure nobody was looking, and slapped on his mustache and glasses. He pulled his bonnet well down to hide his undyed hair, and walked over to Allister Park’s place. There he telephoned Dunedin, and directed him to call the city editors of all the pro-bishop newspapers and tip them off that an attempt to frame the bishop impended. He told Dunedin to let the reporters in when they came; the more the better. Preferably there should be at least one in every room. Now, he thought, let those flatfeet try to sneak a gun into one of my bureau drawers so they can “find” it and raise a stink.

  He spent the night at the apartment, and the next day, having gotten his sermon in shape, he paid a visit to his church. He found a functionary of some sort in an office, and told him that he, Allister Park, was considering getting married in St. Columbanus’, and would the functionary (a Th. Morgan) please show him around? Th. Morgan was pleased to; Dr. Cooley usually did that job, but he was out this afternoon. Park looked sharply through his phoney spectacles, memorizing the geography of the place. He wished now he’d passed up the sermon for one more week, and had instead attended next Sunday’s service as Allister Park, so that he could see how the thing was done. But it was too late now. Morgan broke in on his thoughts: “There’s Dr. Cooley now, Thane Park; wouldn’t you like to meet him?”

  “Ulp,” said Park. “Sorry; got to see a man. Thanks a lot.” Before the startled cleric could protest, Park was making for the door as fast as he could go without breaking into a run. The plump, rosy young man in pincenez, whom Park saw out of the corner of his eye, must be Cooley. Park had no intention of submitting his rather thin disguise to his assistant’s inspection.

  He telephoned the bishop’s home. The other people in the lunchroom were startled by the roar of laughter that came through the glass of his telephone booth as Dunedin described the two unhappy cops trying to plant a gun in his house under the noses of a dozen hostile wise-cracking reporters. Monkey-face added: “I–I took the freedom, your hallowship, of finding out that two of the newsers live right near here. If the knicks try that again, and these newsers are at home, we could wirecall them over.”

  “You’re learning fast, old boy,” said Park. “Guess I can come home now.”

  It was Saturday when Dunedin answered a call from the Psychophysical Institute. He cocked an eye upward, whence came a series of irregular whams as if trunks were being tossed downstairs. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get him.” As he wheezed upstairs, the whams gave way to a quick, muffled drumming. If anything were needed to convince him that something drastic had happened to his master’s mind, the installation and regular use of a horizontal bar and a punching bag in a disused room was it.

  Park, in a pair of sweat-soaked shorts, turned his pale eyes. Good old Monkey-face. Park, who treated subordinates with great consideration, never told Dunedin what he thought he looked like.

  “It’s the man at the Psychophysical Institute,” announced Dunedin.

  The male nurse announced that, for a change, Joseph Noggle was claiming to be Joseph Noggle.

  Park grabbed his bonnet and drove the steamer over. Borup asked: “But, my dear, dear Hallow, why must you — uh — see this one patient? There are plenty mair who could use your ghostly guidance.”

  Fool amateur, thought Park. If he doesn’t want me to know why he wants to keep Noggle locked up, why doesn’t he say he’s violent or something? This way he’s giving away his whole game. But aloud he gave a few smooth, pious excuses, and got in to see his man.

  The original, authentic Noggle had a quick, nervous manner. It didn’t take him more than a minute to catch on to who Park-Scoglund was.

  “Look here,” he said. “Look here. I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to get at my books and onmarkings. If I don’t get out now, while I’m in my own body, I shan’t be able to stop this damned merry-go-round for another six days!”

  “You mean, my son, that you occupy your own body every six days? What happens the rest of the time?”

  “The rest of the time I’m going around the wheel, indwelling ane after another of the bodies of the other men on my wheel. And the minds of these other men are following me around likewise. So every ane of the six bodies has each of our six minds in it in turn every six days.”

  “I see.” Park smiled benignly. “And what’s this wheel you talk about?”

  “I call it my wheel of if. Each of the other five men on it are the men I should most likely have been if certain things had been otherwise. For instance, the man in whose body my mind dwelt yesterday was the man I should most likely have been if King Egbert had fallen off his horse in 1781.”

  Park didn’t stop to inquire about King Egbert or the sad results of his poor equestrianism. He asked softly: “How did your wheel get started in the first place?”

  “It was when I tried to stop yours! Law of keeping of psychic momentum, you know. I got careless, and the momentum of your wheel was overchanged to mine. So I’ve been going around ever since. Now look here, whatever your name is, I’ve got to get out of here, or I’ll never get stopped. I ordered them to let me out this morning, but all they’d say was that they’d see about it t
omorrow. Tomorrow my body’ll be occupied by some other wheel-mate, and they’ll say I’m crazy again. Borup won’t let me go anyway if he can help it; he likes my job. But you’ve got to use your inflowing as bishop-”

  “Oh,” said Park silkily, “I’ve got to use my influence, eh? Just one more question. Are we all on wheels? And how many of these possible worlds are there?”

  “Yes, we’re all on wheels. The usual number of rooms on a wheel is fourteen — that’s the number on yours — though it sometimes varies. The number of worlds is infinite, or almost, so that the chances that anybody on my wheel would be living in the same world as anybody on yours is pretty small. But that’s not weightful. The weightful thing is to get me out so-”

  “Ah yes, that’s the weightful thing, isn’t it? But suppose you tell me why you started my wheel in the first place?”

  “It was just a forseeking in the mental control of wheels.”

  “You’re lying,” said Park softly.

  “Oh, I’m lying, am I? Well then, reckon out your own reason.”

  “I’m sorry that you take this attitude, my son. How can I help you if you won’t put your trust in me and in God?”

  “Oh, come on, don’t play-act. You’re not the bishop, and you know it.”

  “Ah, but I was a churchman in my former being.” Park fairly oozed holiness. “That’s not odd, is it? Since I was the man the bishop would most likely have been if King Oswiu had chosen for the Romans, and the Arabs had lost the battle of Tours.”

  “You’d hold yourself bound by professional confidence?” Park looked shocked. “What a thock! Of course I would.”

  “All right. I’m something of a sportsman, you know. About a month ago I got badly pinched by the ponies, and I — ah — borrowed a little heading on my pay from the Institute’s funds. Of course I’d have paid it back; it was really quite an honest deed. But I had to make a few little — ah — rightings in the books, because otherwise one who didn’t understand the conditions might have drawn the wrong thocks from them.