VII.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;There was the Veil through which I might not see:The Rubaiyat.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;There was the Veil through which I might not see:The Rubaiyat.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;There was the Veil through which I might not see:
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
The Rubaiyat.
The Rubaiyat.
Clawly quit his nervous prowling and perched on Oktav's desk. His satanic face was set in tight, thwarted lines. Except for his rummaging everything in the room was just as it had been when he had stolen out early this morning. The outer door aslit, Oktav's black cloak thrown over the back of his chair, the door to the empty inner chamber open. As if the seer had been called away on some brief, minor errand.
Clawly was irked at the impulse which had drawn him back to this place. True, his rummaging had uncovered some suggestive and disquieting things—in particular, an assortment of small objects and implements that seemed to extend back without a break to the Late Middle Dawn Civilization, including a maddeningly random collection of notes that began in faded stain on sheets of bleached and compressed vegetable fiber, shifted to typed characters on similar sheets, kept on through engraving stylus and plastic film to memoranda ribbon and recording wire, and finally ended in multilevel writing tape.
But what Clawly wanted was something that would enable him to get a hook into the problem that hung before him like a vast, slippery, ungraspable sphere.
He still had, strong as ever, the conviction that this room was the center of a web, the key to the whole thing—but it was a key he did not know how to use.
His heels beat a muffled tattoo against the desk as he searched his mind for possible alternate avenues of attack.
Thorn? That was a whole problem in itself, only a few hours old, but full of the most nerve-racking possibilities. He took from his pouch and nervously fingered the fragment of tape with its scrawlingly recorded message which he had found earlier today on Thorn's desk at their office—that message which no one had seen Thorn leave.
A matter of the greatest importance has arisen. I must handle it alone. Will be back in a few days. Cancel or postpone all activities until my return.Thorn.
A matter of the greatest importance has arisen. I must handle it alone. Will be back in a few days. Cancel or postpone all activities until my return.
Thorn.
Although the general style of recording was characteristically Thorn's, it had a subtly different swing to it, an alien undercurrent, as if some other mind were using Thorn's habitual patterns of muscular action. And the message itself, which might refer to anything, was alarmingly suggestive of a cryptic amnesiac's play for time.
On the other hand, it would be just like Thorn to play the lone wolf if he saw fit.
If he followed his simplest impulses, Clawly would resume the search for Thorn he had begun on finding the message. But he had already put that search into the hands of agencies more competent than any single individual could possibly be. They would find Thorn if anyone could, and for him to try to help them would merely be a concession to his anxiety.
His heels beat a sharper tattoo.
The research program? But that was crippled by the Committee's adverse decision, and by Thorn's absence. He couldn't do much there. Besides he had the feeling that any research program was becoming too slow and remote a measure for dealing with the present situation.
The Committee itself? But what single, definite thing could he tell them that he had not told them last night?
His own mind, then? How about that as an avenue of attack? Stronger than ever before, the conviction came that there were dark avenues leading down from his consciousness—one of them to a frighteningly devilish, chaos-loving version of himself—and that if he concentrated his mind in a certain peculiar way he might be able to slip down one of them.
There was a devil-may-care lure to those dark avenues—the promise of a world better suiting the darker, Dawn phases of his personality. And, if Thornhadbeen displaced, that would be the only way of getting to him.
But that wasn't grappling with the problem. That was letting go, plunging with indefensible recklessness into the unknown—a crazy last resort.
To grapple with a problem, you had to have firm footing—and grab.
The tattoo ended with a sudden slam of heels. Was this room getting on his nerves? This silent room, with its feel of tangible linkages with future and past, its sense of standing on the edge of a timeless, unchanging center of things, in which action had no place—sapping his will power, rendering him incapable of making a decision, now that there was no longer a seer to interpret for him.
The problem was in one sense so clear-cut. Earth threatened by invasion from across a new kind of frontier.
But to get a grip on that problem.
He leaned across the desk and flipped the televisor, riffling through various local scenes in the Blue Lorraine. The Great Rotunda, with its aerial promenade, where a slow subtronic current carried chatting, smiling throngs in an upward spiral past displays of arts and wares. The Floral Rotunda, where pedestrians strolled along gently rolling paths under arches of exotic greenery. The other formal social centers. The endless corridors of individual enterprises, where one might come upon anything from a puppet-carver's to a specialized subtronic lab, a mood-creator's to a cat-fancier's. The busy schools. The production areas, where keen-eyed machine tenders governed and artistically varied the flow of processing. The maintenance and replacement centers. The vast kitchens, where subtle cooks ruled to a hairbreadth the mixing of foodstuffs and their exposure to heat and moisture and other influences. The entertainment and games centers, where swirling gaiety and high-pitched excitement were the rule.
Everywhere happiness—or, rather, creative freedom. A great rich surging world, unaware, save for nightmare glimpses, of the abyss-edge on which it danced.
Maddeningly unaware.
Clawly's features writhed. Thus, he thought, the Dawn gods must have felt when looking down upon mankind the evening before Ragnarok.
To be able to shake those people out of their complacency, make them aware of danger!
The seer's words returned to him: "Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it wait supine for the hunter—You must give it a reason ... extemporize a danger—Mars."
Mars! The seer's disappearance had caused Clawly to miss the idea behind the word, but now, remembering, he grasped it in a flash. A faked Martian invasion. Doctored reports from the First Interplanetary Expedition—mysterious disappearance of spaceships—unknown craft approaching Earth—rumor of a vast fleet—running fights in the stratosphere—
Firemoor of the Extraterrestrial Service was his friend, and believed in his theories. Moreover, Firemoor was daring—even reckless. Many of the young men under him were of similar temperament. The thing could be done!
Abruptly Clawly shook his head, scowled. Any such invasion scare would be a criminal hoax. It was a notion that must have been forced upon him by the darker, more wantonly mischievous side of his nature—or by some lingering hypnotic influence of Oktav.
And yet—
No! He must forget the notion. Find another way.
He slid from the desk, began to pace. Opposition. That was what he needed. Something concrete to fight against. Something, some person, some group, that was opposed to him, that was trying to thwart him at every turn.
He stopped, wondering why he had not thought of it before.
There were two men who were trying to thwart him, who had shrewdly undermined his and Thorn's theories, two men who had shown an odd personality reversal in the past months, who had impressed him with a fleeting sense of strangeness and alienage.
Two members of the World Executive Committee.
Conjerly and Tempelmar.
Brushing the treetops, swooping through leaf-framed gaps, startling a squirrel that had been dozing on an upper branch, Clawly glided into the open and made a running landing on the olive-floored sun-deck of Conjerly's home.
It was very quiet. There was only the humming of some bees in the flower garden, up from which sweet, heavy odors drifted sluggishly and curled across the deck. The sun beat down. On all sides without a break, the trees—solid masses of burnished leaves—pressed in.
Clawly crossed quietly to the dilated doorway in the cream-colored wall. He did not remove his flying togs. His visor he had thrown open during flight.
Raising his hand, he twice broke the invisible beam spanning the doorway. A low musical drone sounded, was repeated.
There was no answering sound, no footsteps. Clawly waited.
The general quiet, the feeling of lifelessness, made his abused nerves twitch. Forest homes like this, reached only by flying, were devilishly lonely and isolated.
Then he became aware of another faint, rhythmic sound, which the humming of the bees had masked. It came from inside the house. Throaty breathing. The intervals between breaths seemed abnormally long.
Clawly hesitated. Then he smoothly ducked under the beam.
He walked softly down a dark, cool corridor. The breathing grew steadily louder, though there was no change in its labored, sighing monotony. Opposite the third opened doorway the increase in volume was abrupt.
As his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, he made out a low couch and the figure of a man sprawled on it, on his back, arms dropped to either side, pale blob of bald head thrown limply back. At intervals the vague face quivered with the slow-paced breathing.
Clawly fumbled sideways, switched on a window, went over to the couch.
On the floor, under Conjerly's hand, was a deflated elastoid bag. Clawly picked it up, sniffed, quickly averted his head from the faintly pungent soporific odor.
He shook the bulky sleeper, less gently after a moment.
It did not interrupt the measured snores.
The first impression of Conjerly's face was one of utter emptiness, the deep-grooved wrinkles of character and emotion a network of disused roads. But on closer examination, hints of personality became dimly apparent, as if glimpsed at the bottom of a smudgy pool.
The longer Clawly studied them, the surer he became that the suspicions he had clutched at so eagerly in Oktav's office were groundless. This was the Conjerly he had known. Unimaginative perhaps, stubborn and blunt, a little too inclined to conservatism, a little too fond of curling down those deep furrows at the corners of the mouth—but nothing alien, nothing malign.
The rhythm of the breathing changed. The sleeper stirred. One hand came slowly up, brushed blindly at the chest.
Clawly watched motionlessly. From all sides the heavy summery silence pressed in.
The rhythm of the breathing continued to change. The sleeper tossed. The hand fumbled restlessly at the neck of the loose house robe.
And something else changed. It seemed to Clawly as if the face of the Conjerly he knew were sinking downward into a narrow bottomless pit, becoming tiny as a cameo, vanishing utterly, leaving only a hollow mask. And then, as if another face were rising to fill the mask—and in this second face, if not malignity, at least grim and unswervingly hostile purpose.
The sleeper mumbled, murmured. Clawly bent low, caught words. Words with a shuddery, unplacable quality of distance to them, as if they came from another cosmos.
"... transtime machine ... invasion ... three days ... we ... prevent action ... until—"
Then, from the silence behind him, a different sound—a faint crunch.
Clawly whirled. Standing in the doorway, filling half its width and all its height, was Tempelmar.
And in Tempelmar's lean, horse-like face the vanishing flicker of a look in which suspicion, alarm, and a more active emotion were blended—a lethal look.
But by the time Clawly was looking straight at him, it had been replaced by an urbane, condescending, eyebrow-raising "Well?"
Again a sound from behind. Turning, backing a little so that he could take in both men at once, Clawly saw that Conjerly was sitting up, rubbing his face. He took away his hands and his small eyes stared at Clawly—blankly at first. Then his expression changed too, became a "Well?"—though more angry, indignant, less urbane. It was an expression that did not belong to the man who had lain there drugged.
The words Clawly had barely caught were still humming in his ears.
Even as he phrased his excuse—"... came to talk with you about the program ... heard sounds of distressed breathing ... alarmed ... walked in ..."—even as he considered the possibility of immediate physical attack and the best way to meet it, he came to a decision.
He would see Firemoor.