VI.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caughtSounds from the noisome hold—Cursing and sighing of souls distraughtAnd cries too sad to be told.Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caughtSounds from the noisome hold—Cursing and sighing of souls distraughtAnd cries too sad to be told.Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caughtSounds from the noisome hold—Cursing and sighing of souls distraughtAnd cries too sad to be told.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caught
Sounds from the noisome hold—
Cursing and sighing of souls distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
Thorn teetered on the dark edge. His footgear made sudden grating noises against it as he fought for balance. He was vaguely conscious of shouts and of a needle of green light swinging down at him.
Unavailingly he wrenched the muscles of his calves, flailed the air with his arms.
Yet as he lurched over, as the edge receded upward—so slowly at first!—he became glad that he had fallen, for the down-chopping green needle made a red-hot splash of the place where he had been standing.
He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of flying togs he was not wearing.
There was time for a futile, spasmodic effort to get clear in his mind how, plunging through the forest, he should find himself on that dark edge.
Indistinct funnel-mouths shot past, so close he almost brushed them. Then he was into something tangly that impeded his fall—slowly at first, then swiftly, as pressures ahead were built up. His motion was sickeningly reversed. He was flung upward and to one side, and came down with a bone-shaking jolt.
He was knee-deep in the stuff that had broken his fall. It made a rustling, faintly skirring noise as he ploughed his way out of it.
He stumbled around what must have been a corner of the dark building from whose roof he had fallen. The shouts from above were shut off.
He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.
He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself—a feeling of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean toughness of muscular fiber—both disturbingly unfamiliar.
He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.
He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging to him. He automatically started to brush it off, and noted that it consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal—identical with the shavings from an old-style, presubtronic hyperlathe. Presumably a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths he had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.
His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and clothing. They seemed strange—the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed, almost clawlike.
Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came memories of the evening's events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.
There was something clenched in his left hand—so tightly that the fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn't have changed. And yet—
His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.
Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into his pocket—a pocket that wasn't quite where it should be and that contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd surging along the blue-litten avenue.
The foreboding became a tightening ball of fear, exploded into realization.
That other Thorn had changed places with him. He was wearing that other Thorn's clothing—drab, servile, workaday. He was inhabiting that other Thorn's body—his own but strangely altered and ill-cared-for, aquiver with unfamiliar tensions and emotions.
He was in the world of his nightmares.
He stood stock-still, staring, the crowd flowing around him, jostling him wearily.
His first reaction, after a giant buffet of amazement and awe that left him intoxicatedly weak, was one of deep-seated moral satisfaction. The balance had at last been righted. Now that other Thorn could enjoy the good fortunes of utopia, while he endured that other Thorn's lot. There was no longer the stifling sense of being dominated by another personality, to whom misfortune and suffering had given the whiphand.
He was filled with an almost demoniac exhilaration—a desire to explore and familiarize himself with this world which he had long studied through the slits of nightmare, to drag from the drifting crowd around him an explanation as to its whys and wherefores.
But that would not be so easy.
An atmosphere of weary secrecy and suspicion pervaded the avenue. The voices of the people who jostled him dropped to mumbles as they went by. Heads were bowed or averted—but eyes glanced sharply.
He let himself move forward with the crowd, meanwhile studying it closely.
The misery and boredom and thwarted yearning for escape bluely shadowed in almost all the faces, was so much like that he remembered from his nightmares that he could easily pretend that he was dreaming—but only pretend.
There was a distorted familiarity about some of the faces that provided undiminishing twinges of horror. Those must be individuals whose duplicates in his own world he vaguely knew, or had glimpsed under different circumstances.
It was as if the people of his own world were engaged in acting out some strange pageant—perhaps a symbolic presentation dedicated to all the drab, monotonous, futile lives swallowed up in the muck of history.
They were dressed, both men and women, in tunic and trousers of some pale color that the blue light made it impossible to determine. There was no individuality—their clothes were all alike, although some seemed more like work clothes, others more like military uniforms.
Some seemed to be keeping watch on the others. These were treated with a mingled deference and hostility—way was made for them, but they were not spoken to. And they were spied on in turn—indeed, Thorn got the impression of an almost intolerably complex web of spying and counterspying.
Even more deference was shown to occasional individuals in dark clothing, but for a time Thorn did not get a close glimpse of any of these.
Everyone seemed on guard, wearily apprehensive.
Everywhere was the suggestion of an elaborate hierarchy of authority.
There was a steady drone of whispered or mumbled conversation.
One thing became fairly certain to Thorn before long. These people were going nowhere. All their uneasy drifting had no purpose except to fill up an empty period between work and sleep—a period in which some unseen, higher authority allowed them freedom, but forbid them from doing anything with it.
As he drifted along Thorn became more a part of the current, took on its coloring, ceased to arouse special suspicion. He began to overhear words, phrases, then whole fragments of dialogue. All of these had one thing in common: some mention of, or allusion to, the activities of a certain "they." Whatever the subject-matter, this pronoun kept cropping up. It was given a score of different inflections, none of them free from haunting anxiety and veiled resentment. There grew in Thorn's mind the image of an authority that was at once tyrannical, fatherly, arbitrary, austere, possessed of overpowering prestige, yet so familiar that it was never referred to in any more definite way.
"They've put our department on a twelve-hour shift."
The speaker was evidently a machinist. Anyway, a few hyperlathe shavings stuck to his creased garments.
His companion nodded. "I wonder what the new parts that are coming through are for."
"Something big."
"Must be. I wonder what they're planning."
"Something big."
"I guess so. But I wish we at least knew the name of what we're building."
No answer, except a tired, mirthless chuckle.
The crowd changed formation. Thorn found himself trailing behind another group, this time mostly elderly women.
"Our work-group has turned out over seven hundred thousand identical parts since the speed-up started. I've kept count."
"That won't tell you anything."
"No, but they must be getting ready for something. Look at how many are being drafted. All the forty-one-year-olds, and the thirty-seven-year-old women."
"They came through twice tonight, looking for Recalcitrants. They took Jon."
"Have you had the new kind of inspection? They line you up and ask you a lot of questions about who you are and what you're doing. Very simple questions—but if you don't answer them right, they take you away."
"That wouldn't help them catch Recalcitrants. I wonder who they're trying to catch now."
"Let's go back to the dormitory."
"Not for a while yet."
Another meaningless shift put Thorn next to a group containing a girl.
She said, "I'm going into the army tomorrow."
"Yes."
"I wish there were something different we could do tonight."
"They won't let us do anything." A weak, whining note of rebellion entered her voice. "They have everything—powers like magic—they can fly—they live in the clouds, away from this horrible light. Oh, I wish—"
"Sh!They'll think you're a Recalcitrant. Besides, all this is temporary—they've told us so. There'll be happiness for everyone, as soon as the danger is over."
"I know—but why won't they tell us what the danger is?"
"There are military reasons.Sh!"
Someone who smiled maliciously had stolen up behind them, but Thorn did not learn the sequence to this interlude, if it had one, for yet another shift carried him to the other side of the avenue and put him near two individuals, a man and a woman, whose drab clothing was of the more soldierly cut.
"They say we may be going on maneuvers again next week. They've put a lot of new recruits in with us. There must be millions of us. I wish I knew what they were planning to do with us, when there's no enemy."
"Maybe things from another planet—"
"Yes, but that's just a rumor."
"Still, there's talk of marching orders coming any day now—complete mobilization."
"Yes, but against what?" The woman's voice had a faint overtone of hysteria. "That's what I keep asking myself at practice whenever I look through the slit and depress the trigger of the new gun—not knowing what it is that the gun will shoot or how it really works. I keep asking myself, over and over, what's going to be out there instead of the neat little target—what it is I'm going to kill. Until sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Oh Burk, there's something I've got to tell you, though I promised not to. I heard it yesterday—I mustn't tell who told me. It's that there's really a way of escape to that happier world we all dream of, if only you know how to concentrate your mind—"
"Sh!"
This time it was Thorn's eavesdropping that precipitated the warning.
He managed to listen in on many similar, smaller fragments of talk.
Gradually a change came over his mood—a complete change. His curiosity was not satisfied, but it was quenched. Oh, he had guessed several things from what he had heard, all right—in particular, that the "new kind of inspection" was designed to uncover displaced minds like his own, and that the "way of escape" was the one the other Thorn had taken—but this knowledge no longer lured him on. The fever of demoniac excitement had waned as swiftly as drunkenness, and left as sickening a depression in its wake. Normal human emotions were re-asserting themselves—a shrinking from the ominous strangeness of this distorted world, and an aching, unreasoning, mountingly frantic desire to get back to familiar faces and scenes.
Bitter regret began to torture him for having deserted Clawly and his home-world because of the pressure of a purely personal moral problem. No knowing what confusions and dangers the other Thorn might weave for an unsuspecting Clawly. And upon Clawly alone, now that he was gone, the safety of the home-world depended. True, if most of the displacing minds from this world were only those of oppressed individuals seeking escape, they would constitute no immediate unified danger. But if the shadowy, autocratic "they" were contemplating an invasion—that would be a very different matter.
The avenue, now skirting some sort of barren hillside, had become hateful to him. It was like a treadmill, and the glaring lights prevented any extended glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He would probably have left it soon in any case, even without sight of the jam-up ahead, where some sort of inspection of all walkers seemed to be going on. As it was, that sight decided him. He edged over to the side, waited for what he thought was a good opportunity, and ducked through the hedge.
Some minutes later, panting from concentrated exertion, his clothes muddied and grass-stained, he came out on the hilltop. The darkness and the familiar stars were a relief. He looked around.
His first impression was reassuring. For a moment it even roused in him the hope that, in his scramble up the hillside, the world had come right again. There, where it should be, was the Opal Cross. There were the Gray Twins. Concentrating on them, he could ignore the unpleasant suggestion of darker, squatter buildings bulging like slugs or beetles from the intervening countryside, could ignore even the meshwork of blue-litten, crawling avenues.
But the aerial bridge connecting the Twins must be darked out. Still, in that case the reflected light from the two towers ought to enable him to catch the outlines of either end of it.
And where was the Blue Lorraine? It didn't seem a hazy enough night to blot out that vast skylon.
Where, between him and the Twins, was the Mauve Z?
Shakingly he turned around. For a moment again his hope surged up. The countryside seemed clearer this way, and in the distance the Myrtle Y and the Gray H were like signposts of home.
But between him and them, rearing up from that very hillside where this evening he had watched the Yggdrasil, as if built in a night by jinn, was a great dark skylon, higher than any he had ever seen, higher even than the Blue Lorraine. It had an ebon shimmer. The main elements of its structure were five tapering wings radiating at equal intervals from a central tower. It looked like some symbol of pride and power conceived in the dreams of primeval kings.
A name came to him. The Black Star.
"Who are you up there? Come down!"
Thorn whirled around. The blue glare from the avenue silhouetted two men halfway up the hillside. Their heads were craned upward. The position of their arms suggested that they held weapons of some sort trained upon him.
He stood stock-still, conscious that the blue glow extended far enough to make him conspicuous. His senses were suddenly very keen. The present instant seemed to widen out infinitely, as if he and his two challengers were frozen men. It burst on him, with a dreadful certainty, that those men shouting on the roof had been trying to kill him. Save for the luck of overbalancing, he would this moment be a mangled cinder. The body he was in was one which other men were trying to kill.
"Come down at once!"
He threw himself flat. There was no needle of green, but something hissed faintly through the grass at his heels. He wriggled desperately for a few feet, then came up in a crouch and ran recklessly down the hillside away from the avenue.
Luck was with him. He kept footing in his crazy, breathless plunge through the semidark.
He entered thin forest, had to go more slowly. Leaves and fallen branches crackled under his feet. Straggly trees half blotted the stars.
All at once he became aware of shouting ahead. He turned, following a dry gravelly watercourse. But after a while there was shouting in that direction, too. Then something big swooped into the sky overhead and hung, and from it exploded blinding light, illumining the forest with a steady white glare crueler than day's.
He dove to cover in thick underbrush.
For a long time the hunt beat around him, now receding a little, now coming close. Once footsteps crunched in the gravel a dozen feet away.
The underbrush, shot through with the relentless white glare, seemed a most inadequate screen. But any attempt to change position would be very risky.
He hitched himself up a little to peer through the gaps in the leaves, and found that his right hand was clutching the metal cylinder he had felt in his pocket earlier. He must have snatched it out at some stage in his flight—perhaps an automatic response of his alien muscles.
He examined the thing, wondering if it were a weapon. He noted two controlling levers, but their function was unclear. As a last resort, he could try pointing the thing and pushing them.
A rustle of leaves snapped his attention to one of the leafy gaps. A figure had emerged on the opposite bank of the dried watercourse. It was turned away, but from the first there was something breathlessly familiar about the self-assured posture, the cock of the close-cropped, red-haired head.
The theatric glare struck an ebon shimmer from the uniform it was wearing, and outlined on one shoulder, of a somberer blackness than the uniform, a black star.
Thorn leaned forward, parting with his hand the brambly wall of his retreat.
The figure turned and the face became visible.
In a strangled voice—his first words since he had found himself on the roof-edge—Thorn cried out, "Clawly!" and rushed forward.
For a moment there was no change in Clawly's expression. Then, with feline agility, he sprang to one side. Thorn stumbled in the pitted streambed, dropped the metal cylinder. Clawly whipped out something and pointed it. Thorn started up toward him. Then—there was no sound save a faint hissing, no sight, but agonizing pain shot through Thorn's right shoulder.
And stayed. Lesser waves of it rippled through the rest of his body. He was grotesquely frozen in the act of scrambling upward. It was as if an invisible red-hot needle in Clawly's hand transfixed his shoulder and held him helpless.
Staring up in shocked, tortured dismay, the first glimmerings of the truth came to Thorn.
Clawly—thisClawly—smiled.