The World-Thinker and Other Stories Read online

  The faint buzz of the door-bell sounded.

  “You better answer it,” said Trasek. “You’ll save your housekeeper the worst fright of her life.”

  Horzabky motioned with his gun. “Go ahead of me, open the door.”

  As they marched down the hall, the fat woman in the pink robe appeared. “Go back to bed, Martha,” said Horzabky. “I’ll take care of it.” The woman turned, retired.

  The bell rang again. Trasek put his hand on the door. “A warning, Doctor. Be careful with that gun. I don’t mind a bullet or two at me—but if you injure my brother, the relatively easy death I plan for you will be postponed indefinitely.”

  “Open the door!” croaked Horzabky.

  Trasek threw it wide.

  The thing lurched in from the darkness, stood swaying in the hall. Horzabky’s breath came as if someone had kicked him in the belly.

  “That’s a man,” said Trasek. “A man inside out.”

  Horzabky pushed the glasses back up on the ridge of his nose. “Is this—is this one of—”

  Trasek had been brightly watching Horzabky’s gun. “It’s one of your victims, Doctor. You sent him through your No. 4 hole. That’s a plastic coverall he’s wearing to keep the flies off him, or rather, from inside him, because to himself he’s still a normal man, and it’s the universe that’s backwards.”

  “How many more are there like him?” inquired Horzabky, casually.

  “None. Flies got some, sunburn most of the others, and the natives shot a lot full of reed arrows. A government cattle inspector came along and wanted to know what was going on. How he ever recognized—” Trasek nodded toward his brother “—for a man is a mystery. But he took care of him, as well as he was able, and I finally got a letter…”

  Horzabky pursed his small pink mouth. “And what was your plan, relative to him?”

  “You and I are going to help him back through Hole No. 4. That should put him right side out again, in relation to the world.”

  Horzabky smiled thinly. “You’re an amazing fellow. You must know that both you and your brother are threats to the quiet life I plan to live here, that I can’t possibly permit you to leave alive.”

  Trasek sprang forward so fast his figure blurred. Before Horzabky could blink, Trasek seized his wrist, jerked the gun free. He turned his head to his brother.

  “This way, Emmer.” Then to Horzabky: “Back with you, Doctor, back to your art gallery.”

  They returned down the hall to the library. Trasek motioned to picture No. 4. “Remove the glass, if you please.”

  Horzabky complied slowly, and with a surly expression. Trasek leaned slightly through the hole, surveyed the country, pulled back. “If this is how things look to you, Emmer, I fail to understand your continued sanity…Well, here’s the hole. It’s about a six foot drop, but at least you’ll be right side to the world. First you’d better take off that plastic playsuit, or you’ll have it all wound up in your bowels.”

  Trasek unzipped the covering, wadded it up, tossed it through the hole. He dragged a chair close under the hole. Emmer climbed awkwardly up, inserted himself, dropped through.

  Trasek and Horzabky watched him a moment—still inside out, but one with his environment.

  “That’s a bad month out of anyone’s life,” said Trasek. His mouth jerked. “I was forgetting the years he spent as a Kunvasian slave…” A hand was at his pocket; Horzabky seized the gun, stepped away, the weapon leveled.

  “You won’t snatch it this time, my friend.”

  Trasek’s harsh smile came. “No, you’re right there. You may keep the gun.”

  Horzabky stood staring, half-at, half-past Trasek. “You have given me an upsetting evening,” he muttered. “I was sure the entire number had been disposed of.” He glanced down the line of pictures.

  “Now you’re not sure, eh Doctor?” Trasek jeered. “Maybe not all of them died when they passed through…Maybe they’re waiting just out of sight, like rats in a hole—”

  “Impossible.”

  “—maybe you’ve carried them with you everywhere, maybe they steal out during the night to eat and return to hide.”

  “Nonsense,” blurted Horzabky. “I saw them die. In No. 1 they turned stiff and crumbled, vanished off in the murk. In No. 2 they struggled and kicked and finally came all apart and the parts jerked off in all directions. In No. 3 they expanded, exploded. In No. 4—well, as you know. In No. 5 they were picked up and whisked like chaff along the corridors, far down and out of sight. In No. 6—it’s impossible to see into the blur, but any object pushed in and withdrawn is changed in every atom, petrified, every bit made part of the new space. In No. 7, matter just melts.”

  Trasek had been musing. “No. 2 seems disagreeable…No. 4—no, Horzabky, not even for you. I don’t believe in torture, for which you can thank your stars…Well, No. 2, shall we say? Will you climb through by yourself, or shall I help you?”

  Horzabky’s mouth twisted like a mottled rose-bud; his eyes sparked. “You miserable…Insolent…” He spat the words, and they darted through the air like white serpents. He raised his arm; the gun roared—once, twice.

  Trasek, still grinning, went to the wall, took down No. 2, propped it against one of the massive tables. The violent shapes of the world within swam, shifted, outraged the mind.

  Horzabky was whining in a high-pitched tone. He ran a few steps closer to Trasek, pushed the gun almost into his face, fired again—again—again.

  White marks appeared on Trasek’s forehead, cheek. Horzabky floundered back.

  “You can’t kill me,” said Trasek. “Not with matter from this world. I’m one of your alumni, too. You sent me through No. 6; I’m like that stick of wood—impervious!”

  Horzabky leaned against the table, the gun dangling from his hand. “But—but—”

  “The rest of them are dead, Doctor. There is no bottom to this hole; you just fall forever—unless you happen to catch the edge of the opening. I finally climbed back in while you were out gassing the guards. Now, Doctor,” he took a soft step closer to the palsied Horzabky, “No. 2 is waiting for you…”

  The God and the Temple Robber

  In the nip-and-tuck business of keeping himself alive, Briar Kelly had not yet been able to shed his disguise. The adventure had turned out rather more ruggedly than it had started. He had not bargained for so much hell.

  Up to the moment he had entered the queer dark temple at North City, the disguise had served him well. He had been one with the Han; no one had looked at him twice. Once inside the temple he was alone and disguise was unnecessary.

  It was an oddly impressive place. A Gothic web of trusses supported the ceiling; alcoves along the walls were crammed with bric-a-brac. Red and green lamps cast an illumination which was stifled and absorbed by black drapes.

  Walking slowly down the central nave, every nerve tingling, Kelly had approached the tall black mirror at the far end, watching his looming reflection with hypnotic fascination. There were limpid depths beyond, and Kelly would have looked more closely had he not seen the jewel: a ball of cool green fire resting on a black velvet cushion.

  With marvelling fingers Kelly had lifted it, turned it over and over—and then tumult had broken loose. The red and green lights flickered; an alarm horn brayed like a crazy bull. Vengeful priests appeared in the alcoves as if by magic, and the disguise had become a liability. The tubular black cloak constricted his legs as he ran—back along the aisle, down the shabby steps, through the foul back alleys to his air-boat. Now as he crouched low over the controls sweat beaded up under the white grease-paint and his skin itched and crawled.

  Ten feet below, the salt-crusted mud-flats fleeted astern. Dirty yellow rushes whipped the hull. Pressing an elbow to his hip Kelly felt the hard shape of the jewel. The sensation aroused mixed feelings, apprehension predominating. He dropped the boat even closer to the ground. “Five minutes of this, I’ll be out of radar range,” thought Kelly. “Back at Bucktown, I’m just one
among fifty thousand. They can’t very well locate me, unless Herli talks, or Mapes…”

  He hazarded a glance at the rear-vision plate. North City could still be seen, an exaggerated Mont St. Michel jutting up from the dreary salt marsh. Misty exhalations blurred the detail; it faded into the sky, finally dropped below the horizon. Kelly eased up the nose of the boat, rose tangentially from the surface, aiming into Magra Taratempos, the hot white sun.

  The atmosphere thinned, the sky deepened to black, stars came out. There was old Sol, a yellow star hanging between Sadal Suud and Sadal Melik in Aquarius—only thirty light years to home—

  Kelly heard a faint swishing sound. The light changed, shifting white to red. He blinked, looked around in bewilderment.

  Magra Taratempos had disappeared. Low to the left a giant red sun hulked above the horizon; below, the salt marshes swam in a new claret light.

  In amazement Kelly gazed from red sun to planet, back up across the heavens where Magra Taratempos had hung only a moment before.

  “I’ve gone crazy,” said Kelly. “Unless…”

  Two or three months before, a peculiar rumor had circulated Bucktown. For lack of better entertainment, the sophisticates of the city had made a joke of the story, until it finally grew stale and was no more heard.

  Kelly, who worked as computer switchman at the astrogation station, was well-acquainted with the rumor. It went to the effect that a Han priest, dour and intense under his black cloak, had been tripped into the marsh by a drunken pollen-collector. Like a turtle the priest had shoved his white face out from under the hood of his cloak, and rasped in the pidgin of the planet: “You abuse the priest of Han; you mock us and the name of the Great God. Time is short. The Seventh Year is at hand, and you godless Earth-things will seek to flee, but there will be nowhere for you to go.”

  Such had been the tale. Kelly remembered the pleased excitement which had fluttered from tongue to tongue. He grimaced, examined the sky in new apprehension.

  The facts were before his eyes, undeniable. Magra Taratempos had vanished. In a different quarter of the sky a new sun had appeared.

  Careless of radar tracing, he nosed up and broke entirely clear of the atmosphere. The stellar patterns had changed. Blackness curtained half the sky, with here and there a lone spark of a star or the wisp of a far galaxy. To the other quarter a vast blot of light stretched across the sky, a narrow elongated luminosity with a central swelling, the whole peppered with a million tiny points of light.

  Kelly cut the power from his engine; the air-boat drifted. Unquestionably the luminous blot was a galaxy seen from one of its outer fringes. In ever-growing bewilderment, Kelly looked back at the planet below. To the south he could see the triangular plateau shouldering up from the swamp, and Lake Lenore near Bucktown. Below was the salt marsh, and far to the north, the rugged pile where the Han had their city.

  “Let’s face it,” said Kelly. “Unless I’m out of my mind—and I don’t think I am—the entire planet has been picked up and taken to a new sun…I’ve heard of strange things here and there, but this is it…”

  He felt the weight of the jewel in his pocket, and with it a new thrill of apprehension. To the best of his knowledge the Han priests could not identify him. At Bucktown it had been Herli and Mapes who had urged him into the escapade, but they would hold their tongues. Ostensibly he had flown to his cabin along the lakeshore, and there was no one to know of his comings and goings…He turned the boat down toward Bucktown, and a half hour later landed at his cabin beside Lake Lenore. He had scraped the grease-paint from his face; the cloak he had jettisoned over the swamp; and the jewel still weighed heavy in his pocket.

  The cabin, a low flat-roofed building with aluminum walls and a glass front, appeared strange and unfamiliar in the new light. Kelly walked warily to the door. He looked right and left. No one, nothing was visible. He put his ear to the panel of the door. No sound.

  He slid back the panel, stepped inside, swept the interior with a swift glance. Everything appeared as he had left it.

  He started toward the visiphone, then halted.

  The jewel.

  He took it from his pocket, examined it for the first time. It was a sphere the size of a golf-ball. The center shone with a sharp green fire, decreasing toward the outer surface. He hefted it. It was unnaturally heavy. Strangely fascinating, altogether lovely. Think of it around the neck of Lynette Mason…

  Not now. Kelly wrapped it in paper, tucked it into an empty pint jar. Behind the cabin, an old shag-bark slanted up out of the black humus and overhung the roof like a gray and tattered beach-umbrella. Kelly dug a hole under one of the arched roots, buried the jewel.

  Returning to the cabin, he walked to the visiphone, reached out to call the station. While his hand was yet a foot from the buttons, the buzzer sounded…Kelly drew his hand back.

  Better not to answer.

  The buzzer sounded again—again. Kelly stood holding his breath, looking at the blank face of the screen.

  Silence.

  He washed the last of the grease-paint from his face, changed his clothes, ran outside, jumped into his air-boat and took off for Bucktown.

  He landed on the roof of the station, noting that Herli’s car was parked in its wonted slot. Suddenly he felt less puzzled and forlorn. The station with its machinery and solid Earth-style regulations projected reassurance, a sense of normality. Somehow the ingenuity and aggressive attack which had taken men to the stars would solve the present enigma.

  Or would it? Ingenuity could take men through space, but ingenuity would find itself strained locating a speck of a planet a hundred thousand light-years in an unknown direction. And Kelly still had his own problem: the jewel. Into his mind’s-eye came a picture: the cabin by the lake, the dilapidated gray parasol of the shag-bark, and glowing under the root, the green eye of the sacred jewel. In the vision he saw the black-robed figure of a Han priest moving across the open space before the cabin, and he saw the flash of the dough-white face…

  Kelly turned a troubled glance up at the big red sun, entered the station.

  The administration section was vacant; Kelly climbed the stair to the operations department.

  He stopped in the doorway, surveyed the room. It covered the entire square of the upper floor. Work-benches made a circuit of the room, with windows above. A polished cylinder, the cosmoscope, came down through the ceiling, and below was the screen to catch the projection.

  Four men stood by the star-index, running a tape. Herli glanced up briefly, turned back to the clicking mechanism.

  Strange. Herli should have been interested, should at least have said hello.

  Kelly self-consciously crossed the room. He cleared his throat. “Well—I made it. I’m back.”

  “So I see,” said Herli.

  Kelly fell silent. He glanced up through the window at the red sun. “What do you make of it?”

  “Not the least idea. We’re running the star-tapes on the off chance it’s been registered—a last-gasp kind of hope.”

  There was more silence. They had been talking before he had entered the room; Kelly sensed this from their posture.

  At last Mapes said with a forced casualness, “Seen the news?”

  “No,” said Kelly. “No, I haven’t.” There was more in Mapes’ voice, something more personal than the shift of the planet. After a moment’s hesitation he went to the visiphone, pushed the code for news.

  The screen lit, showed a view of the swamp. Kelly leaned forward. Buried up to their necks were a dozen boys and girls from the Bucktown High-school. Crawling eagerly over them were the small three-legged salt-crabs; others popped up out of the slime, or tunnelled under toward the squirming bodies.

  Kelly could not stand the screams. He reached forward—

  Herli said sharply, “Leave it on!”—harder than Kelly had ever heard him speak. “The announcement is due pretty soon.”

  The announcement came, in the rasping toneless pidgin of the Han
priests.

  “Among the outsiders is a wicked thief. He has despoiled us of the Seven-year Eye. Let him come forward for his due. Until the thief has brought the Seven-year Eye in his own hand to the sacred temple of Han, every hour one of the outsiders will be buried in the crab-warren. If the thief hangs back, all will be so dealt with, and there will be an end to the Earth-things.”

  Mapes said in a tight voice, “Did you take their Seven-year Eye?”

  Kelly nodded numbly. “Yes.”

  Herli made a sharp sound in his throat, turned away.

  Kelly said miserably, “I don’t know what came over me. There it was—glowing like a little green moon…I took it.”

  Herli said gutturally, “Don’t just stand there.”

  Kelly reached out to the visiphone, pushed buttons. The screen changed, a Han priest stared forth into Kelly’s face.

  Kelly said, “I stole your jewel…Don’t kill any more people. I’ll bring it back to you.”

  The priest said, “Every hour until you arrive one of the Earth-things dies a wicked death.”

  Kelly leaned forward, slammed off the screen with a sudden furious sweep of his hand. He turned in anger.

  “Don’t stand there glaring at me! You, Herli, you told me I wouldn’t even make it into the temple! And if any of you guys had been where I was and saw that jewel like I saw it, you’d have taken it too.”

  Mapes growled under his breath. Herli’s shoulders seemed to sag; he looked away. “Maybe you’re right, Briar.”

  Kelly said, “Are we helpless? Why didn’t we fight when they took those twelve kids? There’s maybe a million Han, but there’s fifty thousand of us—and they have no weapons that I know of.”

  “They’ve seized the power station,” said Herli. “Without power we can’t distill water, we can’t radiate our hydroponics. We’re in a cleft stick.”