The World Between and Other Stories Read online

  “Better?”

  “That’s better.”

  “Do you have any troubles?”

  “Goats hurt their feet, stay up in the hills. Crazy people down the valley; they won’t go away.”

  “How do you mean ‘crazy’?”

  The chief was silent. Director Birch said in a whisper to Mary and Raymond, “By analyzing his concept of sanity we get a clue to his own derangement.”

  The chief lay quiet. Director Birch said in his soothing voice, “Suppose you tell us about your own life.”

  The chief spoke readily. “Ah, that’s good. I’m chief. I understand all talks; nobody else knows about things.”

  “A good life, eh?”

  “Sure, everything good.” He spoke on, in disjointed phrases, in words sometimes unintelligible, but the picture of his life came clear. “Everything go easy—no bother, no trouble—everything good. When it rain, fire feels good. When suns shine hot, then wind blow, feels good. Lots of goats, everybody eat.”

  “Don’t you have troubles, worries?”

  “Sure. Crazy people live in valley. They make town: New Town. No good. Straight—straight—straight. No good. Crazy. That’s bad. We get lots of salt, but we leave New Town, run up hill to old place.”

  “You don’t like the people in the valley?”

  “They good people, they all crazy. Big Devil bring them to valley. Big Devil watch all time. Pretty soon all go tick-tick-tick—like Big Devil.”

  Director Birch turned to Raymond and Mary, his face in a puzzled frown. “This isn’t going so good. He’s too assured, too forthright.”

  Raymond said guardedly, “Can you cure him?”

  “Before I can cure a psychosis,” said Director Birch, “I have to locate it. So far I don’t seem to be even warm.”

  “It’s not sane to die off like flies,” whispered Mary. “And that’s what the Flits are doing.”

  The Director returned to the chief. “Why do your people die, Chief? Why do they die in New Town?”

  The chief said in a hoarse voice, “They look down. No pretty scenery. Crazy cut-up. No river. Straight water. It hurts the eyes; we open canal, make good river…Huts all same. Go crazy looking at all same. People go crazy; we kill ’em.”

  Director Birch said, “I think that’s all we’d better do just now till we study the case a little more closely.”

  “Yes,” said Brother Raymond in a troubled voice. “We’ve got to think this over.”

  They left the Rest Home through the main reception hall. The benches bulged with applicants for admission and their relatives, with custodian officers and persons in their care. Outside the sky was wadded with overcast. Sallow light indicated Urban somewhere in the sky. Rain spattered in the dust, big, syrupy drops.

  Brother Raymond and Sister Mary waited for the bus at the curve of the traffic circle.

  “There’s something wrong,” said Brother Raymond in a bleak voice. “Something very very wrong.”

  “And I’m not so sure it isn’t in us.” Sister Mary looked around the landscape, across the young orchards, up Sarah Gulvin Avenue into the center of Glory City.

  “A strange planet is always a battle,” said Brother Raymond. “We’ve got to bear faith, trust in God—and fight!”

  Mary clutched his arm. He turned. “What’s the trouble?”

  “I saw—or thought I saw—someone running through the bushes.”

  Raymond craned his neck. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “I thought it looked like the chief.”

  “Your imagination, dear.”

  They boarded the bus, and presently were secure in their white-walled, flower-gardened home.

  The communicator sounded. It was Director Birch. His voice was troubled. “I don’t want to worry you, but the chief got loose. He’s off the premises—where we don’t know.”

  Mary said under her breath, “I knew, I knew!”

  Raymond said soberly, “You don’t think there’s any danger?”

  “No. His pattern isn’t violent. But I’d lock my door anyway.”

  “Thanks for calling, Director.”

  “Not at all, Brother Raymond.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “What now?” asked Mary.

  “I’ll lock the doors, and then we’ll get a good night’s sleep.”

  Sometime in the night Mary woke up with a start. Brother Raymond rolled over on his side. “What’s the trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. “What time is it?”

  Raymond consulted the wall clock. “Five minutes to one.”

  Sister Mary lay still.

  “Did you hear something?” Raymond asked.

  “No. I just had a—twinge. Something’s wrong, Raymond!”

  He pulled her close, cradled her fair head in the hollow of his neck. “All we can do is our best, dear, and pray that it’s God’s will.”

  They fell into a fitful doze, tossing and turning. Raymond got up to go to the bathroom. Outside was night—a dark sky except for a rosy glow at the north horizon. Red Robundus wandered somewhere below.

  Raymond shuffled sleepily back to bed.

  “What’s the time, dear?” came Mary’s voice.

  Raymond peered at the clock. “Five minutes to one.”

  He got into bed. Mary’s body was rigid. “Did you say—five minutes to one?”

  “Why yes,” said Raymond. A few seconds later he climbed out of bed, went into the kitchen. “It says five minutes to one in here, too. I’ll call the Clock and have them send out a pulse.”

  He went to the communicator, pressed buttons. No response.

  “They don’t answer.”

  Mary was at his elbow. “Try again.”

  Raymond pressed out the number. “That’s strange.”

  “Call Information,” said Mary.

  Raymond pressed for Information. Before he could frame a question, a crisp voice said, “The Great Clock is momentarily out of order. Please have patience. The Great Clock is out of order.”

  Raymond thought he recognized the voice. He punched the visual button. The voice said, “God keep you, Brother Raymond.”

  “God keep you, Brother Ramsdell…What in the world has gone wrong?”

  “It’s one of your protégés, Raymond. One of the Flits—raving mad. He rolled boulders down on the Clock.”

  “Did he—did he—”

  “He started a landslide. We don’t have any more Clock.”

  Inspector Coble found no one to meet him at the Glory City space-port. He peered up and down the tarmac; he was alone. A scrap of paper blew across the far end of the field; nothing else moved.

  Odd, thought Inspector Coble. A committee had always been on hand to welcome him, with a program that was flattering but rather wearing. First to the Arch-Deacon’s bungalow for a banquet, cheerful speeches and progress reports, then services in the central chapel, and finally a punctilious escort to the foot of the Grand Montagne.

  Excellent people, by Inspector Coble’s lights, but too painfully honest and fanatical to be interesting.

  He left instructions with the two men who crewed the official ship, and set off on foot toward Glory City. Red Robundus was high, but sinking toward the east; he looked toward Salvation Bluff to check local time. A clump of smoky lace-veils blocked his view.

  Inspector Coble, striding briskly along the road, suddenly jerked to a halt. He raised his head as if testing the air, looked about him in a complete circle. He frowned, moved slowly on.

  The colonists had been making changes, he thought. Exactly what and how, he could not instantly determine: the fence there—a section had been torn out. Weeds were prospering in the ditch beside the road. Examining the ditch, he sensed movement in the harp-grass behind, the sound of young voices. Curiosity aroused, Coble jumped the ditch, parted the harp-grass.

  A boy and girl of sixteen or so were wading in a shallow pond; the girl held three limp water-flowers, the boy was kissing her. They turned up start
led faces; Inspector Coble withdrew.

  Back on the road he looked up and down. Where in thunder was everybody? The fields—empty. Nobody working. Inspector Coble shrugged, continued.

  He passed the Rest Home, and looked at it curiously. It seemed considerably larger than he remembered it: a pair of wings, some temporary barracks had been added. He noticed that the gravel of the driveway was hardly as neat as it might be. The ambulance drawn up to the side was dusty. The place looked vaguely run down. The inspector for the second time stopped dead in his tracks. Music? From the Rest Home?

  He turned down the driveway, approached. The music grew louder. Inspector Coble slowly pushed through the front door. In the reception hall were eight or ten people—they wore bizarre costumes: feathers, fronds of dyed grass, fantastic necklaces of glass and metal. The music sounded loud from the auditorium, a kind of wild jig.

  “Inspector!” cried a pretty woman with fair hair. “Inspector Coble! You’ve arrived!”

  Inspector Coble peered into her face. She wore a kind of patchwork jacket sewn with small iron bells. “It’s—it’s Sister Mary Dunton, isn’t it?”

  “Of course! You’ve arrived at a wonderful time! We’re having a carnival ball—costumes and everything!”

  Brother Raymond clapped the inspector heartily on the back. “Glad to see you, old man! Have some cider—it’s the early press.”

  Inspector Coble backed away. “No, no thanks.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be off on my rounds…and perhaps drop in on you later.”

  Inspector Coble proceeded to the Grand Montagne. He noted that a number of the bungalows had been painted bright shades of green, blue, yellow; that fences in many cases had been pulled down, that gardens looked rather rank and wild.

  He climbed the road to Old Fleetville, where he interviewed the chief. The Flits apparently were not being exploited, suborned, cheated, sickened, enslaved, forcibly proselyted or systematically irritated. The chief seemed in a good humor.

  “I kill the Big Devil,” he told Inspector Coble. “Things go better now.”

  Inspector Coble planned to slip quietly to the space-port and depart, but Brother Raymond Dunton hailed him as he passed their bungalow.

  “Had your breakfast, Inspector?”

  “Dinner, darling!” came Sister Mary’s voice from within. “Urban just went down.”

  “But Maude just came up.”

  “Bacon and eggs anyway, Inspector!”

  The inspector was tired; he smelled hot coffee. “Thanks,” he said, “don’t mind if I do.”

  After the bacon and eggs, over the second cup of coffee, the inspector said cautiously, “You’re looking well, you two.”

  Sister Mary looked especially pretty with her fair hair loose.

  “Never felt better,” said Brother Raymond. “It’s a matter of rhythm, Inspector.”

  The inspector blinked. “Rhythm, eh?”

  “More precisely,” said Sister Mary, “a lack of rhythm.”

  “It all started,” said Brother Raymond, “when we lost our Clock.”

  Inspector Coble gradually pieced out the story. Three weeks later, back at Surge City he put it in his own words to Inspector Keefer.

  “They’d been wasting half their energies holding onto—well, call it a false reality. They were all afraid of the new planet. They pretended it was Earth—tried to whip it, beat it, and just plain hypnotize it into being Earth. Naturally they were licked before they started. Glory is about as completely random a world as you could find. The poor devils were trying to impose Earth rhythm and Earth routine upon this magnificent disorder; this monumental chaos!”

  “No wonder they all went nuts.”

  Inspector Coble nodded. “At first, after the Clock went out, they thought they were goners. Committed their souls to God and just about gave up. A couple of days passed, I guess—and to their surprise they found they were still alive. In fact, even enjoying life. Sleeping when it got dark, working when the sun shone.”

  “Sounds like a good place to retire,” said Inspector Keefer. “How’s the fishing out there on Glory?”

  “Not so good. But the goat-herding is great!”

  The Men Return

  The Relict came furtively down the crag, a shambling gaunt creature with tortured eyes. He moved in a series of quick dashes using panels of dark air for concealment, running behind each passing shadow, at times crawling on all fours, head low to the ground. Arriving at the final low outcrop of rock, he halted and peered across the plain.

  Far away rose low hills, blurring into the sky, which was mottled and sallow like poor milk-glass. The intervening plain spread like rotten velvet, black-green and wrinkled, streaked with ocher and rust. A fountain of liquid rock jetted high in the air, branched out into black coral. In the middle distance a family of gray objects evolved with a sense of purposeful destiny: spheres melted into pyramids, became domes, tufts of white spires, sky-piercing poles; then, as a final tour de force, tesseracts.

  The Relict cared nothing for this; he needed food and out on the plain were plants. They would suffice in lieu of anything better. They grew in the ground, or sometimes on a floating lump of water, or surrounding a core of hard black gas. There were dank black flaps of leaf, clumps of haggard thorn, pale green bulbs, stalks with leaves and contorted flowers. There were no recognizable species, and the Relict had no means of knowing if the leaves and tendrils he had eaten yesterday would poison him today.

  He tested the surface of the plain with his foot. The glassy surface (though it likewise seemed a construction of red and gray-green pyramids) accepted his weight, then suddenly sucked at his leg. In a frenzy he tore himself free, jumped back, squatted on the temporarily solid rock.

  Hunger rasped at his stomach. He must eat. He contemplated the plain. Not too far away a pair of Organisms played—sliding, diving, dancing, striking flamboyant poses. Should they approach he would try to kill one of them. They resembled men, and so should make a good meal.

  He waited. A long time? A short time? It might have been either; duration had neither quantitative nor qualitative reality. The sun had vanished, and there was no standard cycle or recurrence. ‘Time’ was a word blank of meaning.

  Matters had not always been so. The Relict retained a few tattered recollections of the old days, before system and logic had been rendered obsolete. Man had dominated Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause.

  Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.

  He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.

  Then came the terrible hour when Earth swam into a pocket of non-causality, and all the ordered tensions of cause–effect dissolved. The special tool was useless; it had no purchase on reality. From the two billions of men, only a few survived—the mad. They were now the Organisms, lords of the era, their discords so exactly equivalent to the vagaries of the land as to constitute a peculiar wild wisdom. Or perhaps the disorganized matter of the world, loose from the old organization, was peculiarly sensitive to psycho-kinesis.

  A handful of others, the Relicts, managed to exist, but only through a delicate set of circumstances. They were the ones most strongly charged with the old causal dynamic. It persisted sufficiently to control the metabolism of their bodies, but could extend no further. They were fast dying out, for sanity provided no leverage against the environment. Sometimes their own minds sputtered and jangled, and they would go raving and leaping out across the plain.

  The Organisms observed with neither surprise nor curiosity; how could surprise exist? The mad Relict might pause by an Organism, and try to duplicate the creature’s existence. The Organism ate a mouthful of plant; so d
id the Relict. The Organism rubbed his feet with crushed water; so did the Relict. Presently the Relict would die of poison or rent bowels or skin lesions, while the Organism relaxed in the dank black grass. Or the Organism might seek to eat the Relict; and the Relict would run off in terror, unable to abide any part of the world—running, bounding, breasting the thick air; eyes wide, mouth open, calling and gasping until finally he foundered in a pool of black iron or blundered into a vacuum pocket, to bat around like a fly in a bottle.

  The Relicts now numbered very few. Finn, he who crouched on the rock overlooking the plain, lived with four others. Two of these were old men and soon would die. Finn likewise would die unless he found food.

  Out on the plain one of the Organisms, Alpha, sat down, caught a handful of air, a globe of blue liquid, a rock, kneaded them together, pulled the mixture like taffy, gave it a great heave. It uncoiled from his hand like rope. The Relict crouched low. No telling what deviltry would occur to the creature. He and all the rest of them—unpredictable! The Relict valued their flesh as food; but the Organisms would eat him if opportunity offered. In the competition he was at a great disadvantage. Their random acts baffled him. If, seeking to escape, he ran, the worst terror would begin. The direction he set his face was seldom the direction the varying frictions of the ground let him move. But the Organisms were as random and uncommitted as the environment, and the double set of disorders sometimes compounded, sometimes canceled each other. In the latter case the Organism might catch him…It was inexplicable. But then, what was not? The word ‘explanation’ had no meaning.

  They were moving toward him; had they seen him? He flattened himself against the sullen yellow rock.

  The two Organisms paused not far away. He could hear their sounds, and crouched, sick from conflicting pangs of hunger and fear.

  Alpha sank to his knees, lay flat on his back, arms and legs flung out at random, addressing the sky in a series of musical cries, sibilants, guttural groans. It was a personal language he had only now improvised, but Beta understood him well.

  “A vision,” cried Alpha. “I see past the sky. I see knots, spinning circles. They tighten into hard points; they will never come undone.”