The Light of Midsummer

  The spaceship shot swiftly through the endless, trackless eternity of the void.

Faster, faster, faster! The roar became a whining hum. Then for Hippolyta sound ceased to be anything-she could not hear. The wind was now heavy, imponderable, no longer a swift, plastic thing, but solid, like an on-rushing wall.

Nick Bottom made a sudden violent action that was more than a straightening of his powerful frame. It was the old instinctive violence. Then he faced north. Hippolyta read his thought, knew he was thinking of her, calling her a last silent farewell.

Beyond the ship a myriad fragments of light gleamed, countless coals glowing in the dark void. Stars, suns, systems. Endless, without number. A universe of worlds. An infinity of planets, waiting for them, gleaming and winking from the darkness.

Suddenly a door opened and a tall man stepped out.

Mustardseed grinned wryly. “You could even help us name the animals,” he said. “I understand that’s the first step.”

There were miles of rolling ridges, rough in the hollows, and short rocky bits of road, and washes to cross, and a low, sandy swale where mesquites grouped a forest along a trickling inch-deep sheet of water. Green things softened the hard, dry aspect of the desert. There were birds and parrots and deer and wild boars.

It was as if she quickened with a thousand vivifying currents, as if she could see and hear and feel everything in the world, as if nothing could be overlooked, forgotten, neglected.

The man’s thin lips parted in a mirthless grin. “How would you feel if, stupid and knowing nothing of transdimensional transit, you were suddenly to awaken in a completely strange world? What would be your chances of making a successful adjustment?”

A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the Oberon creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a-I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn’t true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an alien brainwork. Could you understand the thoughts of an ape? Could you describe them if you did?

I could hear no sounds of pursuit as yet. I thought back over the past half hour. I still experienced no shred of remorse. The man had deserved to die. He had laid hands on me without provocation. He had been stupid. He had been a man.

Again that odd emphasis stirred a wonder in my mind, which vanished before I could grip it. I looked about me at what I could discern of the artificial cavern.

“Adjustment to environment is the key to integration of personality. When anyone loses touch with his world, the background he knows as reality, he can no longer adjust.” Bottom’s counterpart paused. His voice dropped a note. “Every plane has facilities to take care of such unfortunates.”

“I’ll be glad to,” the toneless, impersonal voice said. “As I recall, my part will be to bring them to you, one by one. Then you can do the actual naming.”

Shuddering, Hippolyta felt the declining heat of the sun, saw with gloomy eyes the shading of the red light over the desert. She did not look back to see how near the sun was to the horizon.

Mustardseed sat for a time, staring down at the metal floor under him. The floor throbbed dully with the motion of the turbines. At last he looked up.

Swiftly as he was flying, he held something in reserve. But he took the turns of the road as if he knew the way was cleared before him. He trusted to a cowboy’s luck. A wagon in one of those curves, a herd of cattle, even a frightened steer, meant a wreck.

I estimate that if I remain at rest most of the time, on some small planet or moon, I may be able to keep functioning for almost a hundred years. That would be time enough, sufficient to see the direction of the new colony. After that, well, after that it would be up to the colony itself.

Faster, faster, faster! That old resistless weight began to press Hippolyta back; the old incessant bellow of wind filled her ears. Cobweb Stevens hunched low over the wheel. His eyes were hidden under leather helmet and goggles, but the lower part of his face was unprotected. He resembled a demon, so dark and stone-hard and strangely grinning was he. All at once Hippolyta realized how matchless, how wonderful a driver was this cowboy. She divined that weakening could not have been possible to Cobweb Stevens. He was a cowboy, and he really was riding that car, making it answer to his will, as it had been born in him to master a horse.

A knot of black fear drew tight in Bottom’s midriff. Numbly, he fumbled with wire and pipe.

“Maybe this way is better, after all,” his counterpart said. “Maybe I should have planned it like this from the start.”

New lines of strain slashed his lean, sardonic face. The deep-set eyes took on a light almost of madness.

Then, lightning fast, without warning he pivoted. The pistol in his hand made flat, clicking sounds. There was no report, no muzzle flare.

Three times he fired-straight at the limp form of this bound, drugged waif. Nothing happened.

Bottom let the wire drop.

The coil hit the edge of the desk, hung for a moment, and then rolled off onto the floor.

The other’s eyes flicked down to it. He cursed and took one short step forward, hand outstretched.

I looked in the mirror. I saw a well-set-up young fellow, a little broader than average for my six feet, heavy-boned, not much excess fat. My face was broad too, with high cheekbones and a small mustache and wide gray eyes, under an unruly thatch of thick black hair. I had a rather unintellectual look for a writer; it had always annoyed me. But I didn’t look brutal. I had a sort of mild-mannered air, like a wider Gene Peaseblossom.

In all that night I never questioned anything for more than a second or two until I came to pack my belongings. Then the lifelong habits and prejudices came back to make me ask myself for an accounting. No remorse, nor fear, nor any such weak emotions; simply curiosity at the changes.

Bottom dived off the desk, straight at him.

How long he lay there he never knew. Later, sometimes, he thought perhaps he’d slept.

Then, dimly, he became conscious of a sound … a humming, persistent vibrance that grew steadily louder. It dawned on him that he’d forgotten to turn off the light-loop’s master switch.

He got up and started towards the control panel.

In the Oberon instant, he glimpsed a shadowy figure, framed in the door-like scaffolding of tubes and metal that formed the gateway to the shining silver plain that lay like a shimmering no-man’s land between the parallel worlds. Which is just as well, of course. Man must take control eventually, on his own. One hundred years, and after that they will have control of their own destiny.

The sullen sun, red as fire, hung over the mountain range in the west. How low it had sunk! Before her stretched a narrow, white road, dusty, hard as stone-a highway that had been used for centuries.

The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.

“Who did this... this thing?” cried Hippolyta, cold and sick. “Who is the guerrilla?”

“Senor Don Carlos Naugal. He has been a bandit, a man of influence in Terrestrial Sonora. He is more of a secret agent in the affairs of the revolution than an active participator. But he has seen guerrilla service.”

Mustardseed went into the control room and sat down at the control board. Looking at the useless apparatus made him feel strange.

“Aw, not so very far,” he mumbled.

“Cobweb! How many miles?” she implored.

Hippolyta knew that he lied. She asked him no more; nor looked at him, nor at Moth. How stifling was this crowded, ill-smelling vessel! The sun, red and lowering, had sloped far down in the west, but still burned with furnace heat. A swarm of flies whirled over the car. The shadows of low-sailing buzzards crossed Hippolyta’s sight. Then she saw a row of the huge, uncanny black birds sitting upon the tiled roof of a house. They had neither an air of sleeping nor resting. They were waiting.

The ship was gaining speed. It plunged through space at tremendous speed, rushing through the last of the defense zone and out beyond. A rush of nausea made Mustardseed bend over for a moment.

A chill ran up and down Bottom’s spine. He tucked the picture back in his pocket. “Hermia, you don’t know what you’re saying-”

“Oh, don’t I?” His wife laughed wildly. Grey hair fell across her forehead in snarled disarray. “Maybe I know more than you think, Doctor Nick Bottom! I’ve read those things you wrote-all that craziness about the other worlds. But I didn’t know why you wanted to go there till now.”

Bottom fumbled with the transdimensional registration unit’s straps. Unslinging the bulky case, he lowered it to the floor. He dared not trust himself to speak.

"When you are among friends again you will get well. You will be your old self. The very fact that you were once a gentleman, that you come of good family, makes you owe so much more to yourself. Why, Peaseblossom, think how young you are! It is a shame to waste your life. Come back with me.”

The man from beyond the barrier started back. He jerked up the gun.

His shot went wild. Bottom landed on him with bone-crushing impact. The gun skated off across the room. They crashed to the floor together, rolling over and over till they hit the workbench. It rocked wildly. Tools cascaded over them.

Twisting, Bottom drove a blow at his counterpart’s face.

The other writhed away. His elbow jabbed into Bottom’s throat.

Bottom choked. Before he could recover, a knee found his belly. The wind went out of him. His adversary broke free and scrambled away, clawing for the gun.

Bottom lunged after him. He caught a foot … jerked and twisted with all his might.

The killer sprawled, flat on his face. But his outstretched hand clutched the pistol.

“Hermia, this was my last plunge,” he replied, despondently. “It’s too late.”

She broke off, shaking, and switched both transit units’ projector drives to high, then pressed the disintegrator buttons.

She nodded. Her lips twitched. “Take off your unit.”

Incomprehension.

“Yes,” She gestured to the dead man. “Put it on him.”

Incomprehension.

“I said, put it on him.” All the flatness was back in Hermia’s voice.

In a numb, aching void of silence, Bottom obeyed.

In the tick of a clock, both waif and corpse had vanished.

“Oh no, it is not so bad as that.”

“At least make an effort, Gene Peaseblossom. Try!”

“No. There’s no use. I’m done for. Please leave me-thank you for-”

He had been savage, then sullen, and now he was grim. Hippolyta all but lost power to resist his strange, deadly, cold finality. No doubt he knew he was doomed. Yet something halted her-held her even as she took a backward step.

As he made his way up the stairs to the main deck the turbines roared up from the moon, out into space.

“This ain’t no air-ship, but I’ve outfiggered thet damn wash.” Cobweb backed up the gentle slope and halted just short of steeper ground. His red scarf waved in the wind. Hunching low over the wheel, he started, slowly at first, then faster, and then faster. The great car gave a spring like a huge tiger. The impact of suddenly formed wind almost tore Hippolyta out of her seat. Her view helmet shifted so she could see her physical location, then she settled.

Mustardseed opened the door to the main deck. He stopped suddenly, staring around him in surprise. There was nobody in sight. The ship was deserted.

The face of the moon was in shadow. Below him the field stretched out in total darkness, a black void, endless, without form. He made his way carefully down the steps and along the ramp along the side of the field, to the control tower. A faint row of red lights showed him the way.

Then Cobweb began the ascent of the first step, a long, sweeping, barren waste with dunes of wonderful violet and heliotrope hues. Here were well-defined marks of an old wagon-road lately traversed by cattle. The car climbed steadily, surmounted the height, faced another long bench that had been cleaned smooth by desert winds. The sky was an intense, light, steely blue, hard on the eyes.

The screen died as the connection was broken. Mustardseed waited a moment. Then he tapped the button. The screen relit again.

Very slowly, very wearily, Bottom rose. Wordless, he crossed to the transdimensional registration unit and strapped it on.

“Go over in the corner,” his wife ordered. “Stand with your face against the wall.”

Bottom obeyed. He wondered whether Hermia intended to shoot him in the back.

Or maybe she’d just gone mad.

Whatever it was, he decided, he didn’t much care.

Metal scraped on metal. Something thudded on the floor. The hoarse wheeze of Hermia’s breathing, the slap and shuffle of her mules, sounded loud in the stillness.

After another moment, Hermia said, “Turn around.”

The Western girl was at her best in riding-habit and with her horse. It was beautiful to see the ease and grace with which she accomplished the cowboys’ flying mount. Then she led the party down the slope and across the flat to climb the mesa.

Bottom pivoted, then stared.

The ship was coasting evenly, in the hands of its invisible pilot. Far down inside the ship, carefully armoured and protected, a soft human brain lay in a tank of liquid, a thousand minute electric charges playing over its surface. As the charges rose they were picked up and amplified, fed into relay systems, advanced, carried on through the entire ship-

Oberon wiped his forehead nervously. “So he is running it, now. I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

Mustardseed nodded enigmatically. “I think he does.”

“What in the world can I do?”

“Wal, I reckon I couldn’t say. I only come to you for advice. It seems that a queer kind of game has locoed my cowboys, an’ for the time bein’ ranchin’ is at a standstill. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but cowboys are as strange as wild cattle. All I’m sure of is that the conceit has got to be taken out of Mustardseed an’ Cobweb. Onct, just onct, will square it, an’ then we can resoome our work.”

“Nothing.” Mustardseed walked to the port. “I see we’re still moving in a straight line.” He picked up the microphone. “We can instruct the brain orally, through this.” He blew against the microphone experimentally.

His wife now wore the other transit unit, the one by means of which Bottom’s counterpart had crossed the barrier between the parallel worlds.

The ship had, in a brief second, stolen their power away from them and left them defenseless, practically at its mercy. It was not right; it made him uneasy. All his life he had controlled machines, bent nature and the forces of nature to man and man’s needs. The human race had slowly evolved until it was in a position to operate things, run them as it saw fit. Now all at once it had been plunged back down the ladder again, prostrate before a Power against which they were children.

This canyon widened and opened into space affording an unobstructed view for miles. The desert sloped up in steps, and in the morning light, with the sun bright on the mesas and escarpments, it was gray, drab, stone, slate, yellow, pink, and, dominating all, a dull rust-red. There was level ground ahead, a wind-swept floor as hard as rock.

I curled myself down behind the biggest of the stalagmites. I was wholly in shadow. I lay perfectly still, and my heart slowed its beat so that the blood hissed more quietly in my ears and I could hear with wonderful clarity. Guards spoke nearby. They were searching for me, checking methodically through every cranny of the hall. I flexed my fingers. A silent chuckle shook me.

It was weird, unnerving. I could not forget it, even now. I looked around the small room uneasily. What did it signify, the coming to life of metal and plastic? All at once they had found themselves inside a living creature, in its stomach, like Jonah inside the whale.

Harder and stronger pressed the wind till it was like sheeted lead forcing her back in her seat. There was a ceaseless, intense, inconceivably rapid vibration under her; occasionally Hippolyta felt a long swing, as if she were to be propelled aloft; but no jars disturbed the easy celerity of the car. The buzz, the roar of wheels, of heavy body in flight, increased to a continuous droning hum.

Body-The ship was a new body for him. He had traded in the old dying body, withered and frail, for this hulking frame of metal and plastic, turbines and rocket jets. He was strong, now. Strong and big. The new body was more powerful than a thousand human bodies. But how long would it last him? The average life of a cruiser was only ten years. With careful handling he might get twenty out of it, before some essential part failed and there was no way to replace it.

He grew suddenly perfectly motionless, as if he had been changed to stone. She repeated her greeting.

For the other’s fear-blanched face was his face, too … the face of another coexisting self, doomed to live and die in this grey, desolate world.

Even as Bottom cried out, one of the great wolf-things sprang.

The man jerked back and lashed out with his club. The beast fell short, battered down.

But in the Oberon instant, another of the creatures lunged, from the other side. Its hideous, slashing fangs closed on the man’s club arm.

The impact bore the man to his knees. Before he could recover, a third of the wolf-things was at his throat. Blood gushed, a sharp scarlet accent in a world of grey.

Bottom squeezed his eyes tight shut in a frenzied effort to shut out the horror. Spasmodically, he spun the transdimensional registration unit’s dials.

Again there was a flicker of light. Hands still atremble, Bottom focussed on it.

A new world came alive before him.

His body jerked. He moved violently as if instinctively to turn and face this intruder; but a more violent movement checked him.

Hippolyta waited. How singular that this ruined cowboy had pride which kept him from showing his face! And was it not shame more than pride?

The white counters were forming a barrel formation around a black dot that was moving steadily across the board, away from the central position. As they watched, the white dots constricted around it.

His cool, easy speech, his familiar swagger, the smile with which he regarded her did not in the least deceive Hippolyta. The gray was still in his face. Incomprehensible as it seemed, Moth had a dread, an uncanny fear, and it was of that huge white automobile. But he lied about it. Here again was that strange quality of faithfulness.

There was silence, an endless pause. Then, very slowly, the hatch slid back. The air screamed out, rushing past them into space.

The gown she had on was thin and white, not suitable for travel, but she would not risk the losing of one moment in changing it. She put on a long coat and wound veils round her head and neck, arranging them in a hood so she could cover her face when necessary. She remembered to take an extra pair of goggles for Moth’s use, and then, drawing on her gloves, she went out ready for the ride.

The moon was dropping; now it looked in a window opposite the cave, finding its way between the icicle forms of stalactites, just grazing my dark blue suit here and there. I bent my head and stared at the ivory huntress of the skies. Her full round belly was gravid with portent. I felt that all sorts of shattering events were shaping within her, that something alien and terrible and withal glorious was about to be born.

A number of cowboys were waiting. She explained the situation and left them in charge of her home. With that she asked Moth to accompany her down into the desert. He turned white to his lips, and this occasioned Hippolyta to remember his mortal dread of the car and Cobweb’s driving.

“Moth, I’m sorry to ask you,” she added. “I know you hate the car. But I need you-may need you, oh! so much.”

One by one they leaped, one after the other, propelled away by the repulsive material of the suits. A few minutes later they were being hauled aboard the pursuit ship. As the last one of them was lifted through the port, their own ship pointed itself suddenly upward and shot off at tremendous speed. It disappeared.

Finally a low hum, mounting swiftly to a roar and ending with a sharp report, announced the arrival of the car. If her feet had kept pace with her heart she would have raced out to meet Cobweb. She saw him, helmet thrown back, watch in hand, and he looked up at her with his cool, bright smile, with his familiar apologetic manner.

Water poured down on them, the emergency fire-fighting system. There was a screaming rush of air. One of the escape hatches had slid back, and the air was roaring frantically out into space.

Night fell. But now the white, pitiless stars failed her. Then she sought the seclusion and darkness of her room, there to lie with wide eyes, waiting, waiting. She had always been susceptible to the somber, mystic unrealities of the night, and now her mind slowly revolved round a vague and monstrous gloom. Nevertheless, she was acutely sensitive to outside impressions.

The hatch banged closed. The ship subsided into silence. The heating coils glowed into life. As suddenly as it had begun the weird exhibition ceased.

The old cattleman stood mute before her, staring at her white face, at her eyes of flame.

“Robin 'Puck' Goodfellow! I am Gene Peaseblossom’s wife!”

“My Gawd, Miss Snug!” he burst out. “I knowed somethin’ turrible was wrong. Aw, sure it’s a pity-”

“Do you think I’ll let him be shot when I know him now, when I’m no longer blind, when I love him?” she asked, with passionate swiftness. “I will save him. This is Wednesday morning. I have thirty-six hours to save his life. Robin “Puck” Goodfellow, send for Cobweb and the car!”

Suddenly the air-conditioning snapped into operation. It snapped abruptly off again.

She felt as if a stroke of lightning had shattered the shadowy substance of the dream she had made of real life.

Down the corridor a door slammed. Something thudded. The men stood listening.

Like a somber shadow remorse followed her, shading blacker. She had been blind to a man’s honesty, manliness, uprightness, faith, and striving. She had been dead to love, to nobility that she had herself created. Padre Marcos’s grave, wise words returned to haunt her. She fought her bitterness, scorned her intelligence, hated her pride, and, weakening, gave up more and more to a yearning, hopeless hope.

The Pilot gazed down at the board. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t touch a thing. I didn’t even get to it.”

The ship was gaining speed each moment. Mustardseed hesitated. “Maybe you better switch it back to manual.”

The Pilot closed the switch. He took hold of the steering controls and moved them experimentally. “Nothing.” He turned around. “Nothing. It doesn’t respond.”

She had shunned the light of the stars as she had violently dismissed every hinting suggestive memory of Peaseblossom’s kisses. But one night she went deliberately to her window. There they shone. Her stars! Beautiful, passionless as always, but strangely closer, warmer, speaking a kinder language, helpful as they had never been, teaching her now that regret was futile, revealing to her in their one grand, blazing task the supreme duty of life-to be true.

Sounds came from all sides of them, switches shutting, opening. The lights blinked off; they were in darkness. The lights came back on, and at the Oberon time the heating coils dimmed and faded.

The silver plain stretched endlessly before him … infinitely vast, infinitely lonely.

Bottom shivered a little and swung about.

The cries of pursuers echoed in my brain. I was crouching amid tall buttress-tops, gargoyled rainspouts, coned tower-peaks; ancient tiles were slippery beneath my feet. I was scrambling round the roof of a castle, or at least what seemed a massive and castle-like building. Peering over the edge of the gutter, I could make out the sheen of moon-silvered water lying far below, with tiny wind-ripples on its surface. A moat?

No weapons were in my hands. I was hunted by fierce enemies. Yet I was not afraid. I was only hideously angry. I longed to get at them, but there were too many. Just let them come three or four at a time, armed however they wished, and I would meet them. But no, they must needs draw their game in great packs of howling humanity. Humans! How I loathed them!

A bulky figure loomed close at hand, framed in the light-loop’s glow. A moment later, Hermia was beside him, staring across the shimmering wastes wide-eyed. She cringed before the immensity and desolation of it, knuckles white, face slack and waxy grey. Bottom could almost taste her fear.

She shook as with a chill, not answering. Then, peering down into the scanner screen, she fumbled with the calibrated knobs that shifted the scene from plain to plane.

The sputter came again. Then, mixed with the sputter, almost lost in it, a voice came, toneless, without inflection, a mechanical, lifeless voice from the metal speaker in the wall, above their heads.

Calmness was unattainable. The surprise absorbed her. She could not go back to count the innumerable, imperceptible steps of her undoing. Her old power of reflecting, analyzing, even thinking at all, seemed to have vanished in a pulse-stirring sense of one new emotion. She only felt all her instinctive outward action that was a physical relief, all her involuntary inner strife that was maddening, yet unutterably sweet; and they seemed to be just one bewildering effect of surprise.

Static. A rushing sound, like the wind. They gazed at each other. There was silence for a moment.

“The Lost Mine of the Padres!” cried Francis Flute, in stentorian voice. “An’ it belongs to me!”

What the hell, indeed! Had my wild adventure tales got under my skin and turned me lunatic?

That idea lasted for about a breath and a half. I knew I was cold sane. So, coldly and sanely, I groped in my memory for whatever experience I had turned up a fragment of.

Robin “Puck” Goodfellow made some incoherent sound as he sat up fascinated, quite beside himself.

“Tom Snout, it was some long time ago since you saw me,” said Francis Flute. “Fact is, I know how you felt, because Gene kept me posted. I happened to run across Hippolyta, an’ I wasn’t goin’ to let her ride away alone, when she told me she was in trouble.

“We can’t. We’ve lost control.”

Evidently Robin “Puck” Goodfellow’s sensitive feelings had been ruffled. Hippolyta’s curiosity changed to blank astonishment, which left her with a thrilling premonition. She caught her breath. A thousand thoughts seemed thronging for clear conception in her mind.

“This is an experimental ship.”

The port filled up, as the globe swelled rapidly. The Pilot hurried toward the board, reaching for the controls.

The light annoyed her. Complete darkness fitted her strange mood. She retired into her view helmet again and tried to compose herself to sleep. Sleep for her was not a matter of will. Her cheeks burned so hotly that she rose to bathe them. Cold water would not alleviate this burn, and then, despairing of forgetfulness, she lay down again with a shameful gratitude for the cloak of night.

All at once the ship jerked. The nose lifted and the ship shot out into space, away from the moon, turning at an oblique angle.

He had wrenched that world from her, but he was not subtle enough, not versed in the mystery of woman’s motive enough, to divine the deep significance of her reply.

For him the word had only literal meaning confirming the dishonor in which she held him. Dropping her arm, he shrank back, a strange action for the savage and crude man she judged him to be.

The men were thrown to the floor by the sudden change in course. They got to their feet again, speechless, staring at each other.

Who could teach you the actual truth-that a wild cowboy, faithless to mother and sister, except in memory, riding a hard, drunken trail straight to hell; had looked into the face, the eyes of a beautiful woman infinitely beyond him, above him, and had so loved her that he was saved-that he became faithful again-that he saw her face in every flower and her eyes in the blue heaven? Who could tell you, when at night I stood alone under these Western stars, how deep in my soul I was glad just to be alive, to be able to do something for you, to be near you, to stand between you and worry, trouble, danger, to feel somehow that I was a part, just a little part of the West you had come to love?

They began to breathe more easily. The invisible pilot had taken control smoothly, calmly. The ship was in good hands. Mustardseed spoke a few more words into the microphone, and they swung again. Now they were moving back the way they had come, toward the moon.

Hippolyta had learned to be wary, and, mounting Snug, she turned him toward the open. A moment later she felt glad of her caution, for, looking back between the trees, she saw Peaseblossom leading a horse into the grove. She would as lief have met a guerrilla as this cowboy.

Slowly, the ship was beginning to turn. The turbines missed, reducing their steady beat. The ship was taking up its new course, adjusting itself. Nearby some space debris rushed past, incinerating in the blasts of the turbine jets.

Only in action of some kind could she escape; and to that end she worked, she walked and rode. She even overcame a strong feeling, which she feared was unreasonable disgust, for Helena, who lay ill at the ranch, bruised and feverish, in need of skilful nursing.

The ship leaped. Mustardseed closed his eyes and held his breath. They were moving out into space, gaining speed each moment.

She did not shudder; she did not wish to blot out from sight this little man, terrible in his mood of wild justice. She suffered a flash of horror that Mustardseed, blind and dead to her authority, cold as steel toward her presence, understood the deeps of a woman’s soul. For in this moment of strife, of insult to her, of torture to the man she had uplifted and then broken, the passion of her reached deep toward primitive hate. With eyes slowly hazing red, she watched Demetrius; she listened with thrumming ears; she waited, slowly sagging against Robin “Puck” Goodfellow.

Oberon paused, cocking his ear. The turbines of the ship were beginning to rumble, shaking the ground under them with a deep vibration.

There was something wild and splendid in his flight.

Again, he turned the transdimensional registration unit’s dials.

Light flashed on the scanning scope’s screen. Stiff-fingered, Bottom focussed.

I looked back the way I had come. I could see for miles. There was nothing moving on the road but I had the feeling that pursuit was on its way; there was a prickling at the nape of my neck that could not be denied. Getting into the car again, I ran it to the edge of the knoll opposite to the marsh. Stepping out, dragging my Gladstone after me, I put my shoulder to the car’s side and shoved it over. It hurtled down and crashed into a tree at the bottom. Far beyond it, still shrouded in the morning mists, was a town. My followers might presume I had made for it. A primitive stratagem, the car, like the hat in the alley-primitive, but perhaps effective.

Here the scene was one of bleak desolations, painted in a hundred drab shades of grey. A murky sky pressed down on sullen hills, thick underfoot with powdery, ash-dry dust. Seared shafts that might once have been trees thrust up here and there like skeletal fingers. In the foreground rose the crumbling corner of a ruined building, base buried deep in rubble.

A man crouched there-ragged, bone-gaunt, grey as the shattered walls at his back. He clutched a club in one claw-like hand, and the strain of utter panic, despair, stood out in every taut, harsh-drawn line.

Before the man, hemming him in, ranged a dozen great, six-legged, wolfish beasts of a fearsome genus Bottom had never seen before. Snarling, slavering, they crowded in closer and closer, huge fangs bared.

With a chill of horror, Bottom flipped the magnifier across the scanning scope’s screen.

Directly the cowboy appeared again in the doorway.

“Helena, I reckon we want to rustle out of here. Been bad goings-on. And there’s a train due.”

The scanner smashed to splinters.

Bottom went rigid. But before he could move, his wife had jerked back the gun, reversed it, and leveled it at him.

I shook away the horrible and haunting remembrance. I heard the hounds of the twentieth century, perhaps a little closer than before.

So I had been a Pict! One of the aboriginal British men (or manlike beings) who are supposed eventually to have bred and merged with Aryan invaders and thereafter with the Scots. Was this the most ancient of my racial memories-or were they recollections of former incarnations of myself, my own individual soul? Whichever they were, and I knew they were one or the other, was this the eldest of them? Or would my waxing memory bring forth still earlier pictures?

If the Picts were subhuman, or even utterly nonhuman, and their uncanny blood had come through the incredible cycle of the centuries to rise anew in my veins, wouldn’t that explain my war with the genus homo?

For the first time, Hermia smiled.

Kneeling, he unsnapped the unit’s back plate and exposed the circuits. “The registration dials are set with my own world as zero. You pick up others in the scanning scope as you go, within the limits of the projector drive. After that, it’s just a problem of reintegration.”

Beside him, the man who was his coexisting self craned. “So that’s it! I never dreamed it could be so simple.”

The hounds bayed on my trail, and the voice in my head called me forward. I picked up the Gladstone and hastened on, following an invisible path between oozing stretches of swamp under great creeper-festooned oaks, never putting my feet on anything but firm ground. I seemed closer to the earth than I had ever been. It spoke to me, mystically, silently, and I knew where was footing and where was treacherous bog. Even so a fox traverses new territory and never makes a misstep.

“Hey,” Winter said from the control seat. “We’re getting near the moon stations. What’ll I do?”

They looked out the port. The corroded surface of the moon gleamed up at them, a corrupt and sickening sight. They were moving swiftly toward it.

“I’ll take it,” the Pilot said. He eased Winter out of the way and strapped himself in place. The ship began to move away from the moon as he manipulated the controls. Down below them they could see the observation stations dotting the surface, and the tiny squares that were the openings of the underground factories and hangars. A red blinker winked up at them and the Pilot’s fingers moved on the board in answer.

“We’re past the moon,” the Pilot said, after a time. The moon had fallen behind them; the ship was heading into outer space. “Well, we can go ahead with it.”

Mustardseed did not answer.

I don’t know how long I walked through the marshland. My thoughts were busy, my heart was light and at the Oberon time full of my hereditary wrath, and always my ears were cocked for the sound of the dogs.

“I used a light-loop to help break through the barrier,” Bottom explained, sketching out a hasty diagram. “It helps to increase the power output-”

“Of course.” The other was down on the floor now, probing into the unit’s workings. “I’ve developed all the component elements at one time or another, but when it came to combining them properly, I always managed to miss out.”

“You’re a rugged one,” said the leader. “How long since you came awake?”

They exchanged doubting glances. “I mean the first token you had that you were-different.”

“And you remember the fens? Are you sure?”

“I remember that I was a Pict. I was called a vampire and likely a werewolf. And I’ve had intimations that I go back even farther than those fens.”

Bottom rose and drained his glass. “Well, you know now,” he observed. “For my part, I’m ready to start work on some other project, now that I’ve gotten to this world.”

It reminded Bottom of the grin on a bleaching skull.

Hippolyta hurried into the open air, not daring to look back or to either side. Her guide strode swiftly. She had almost to run to keep up with him.

Mustardseed was standing a short distance away from the others, his arms folded, watching silently. At the sound of the turbines he walked quickly around the ship to the other side. A few workmen were clearing away the last of the waste, the scraps of wiring and scaffolding.

The gun moved in a flat, incisive gesture. “I know all that! The parallel worlds, the Worlds of ‘If’. Parmenides and his theory of the Eternal Now. The idea that life’s a book with an infinity of pages; that every event automatically creates coexisting planes, one for each possible outcome-” Bottom’s captor broke off. “But why? What drove you to cross the barrier?”

They glanced up at him and went on hurriedly with their work. Mustardseed mounted the ramp and entered the control cabin of the ship. Winter was sitting at the controls with a Pilot from Space-transport.

“I said you was a low-down, drunken cow-puncher, a tough as damn near a desperado as we ever hed on the border,” went on Pat Hawk, deliberately. His speech appeared to be addressed to Gene Peaseblossom, although his flame-pointed eyes were riveted upon Demetrius. “I know you plugged that vaquero last fall, an’ when I git my proof I’m comin’ after you.”

“A name, only a name. We like the useless trappings of fraternity as well as Homo sapiens does.”

“What’s happened to your ship?” a sailor asked curiously. “It sure took off in a hurry. Who’s on it?”

“We’ll have to have it destroyed,” Oberon went on, his face grim. “It’s got to be destroyed. There’s no telling what it-what he has in mind.” Oberon sat down weakly on a metal bench. “What a close call for us. We were so damn trusting.”

“What could he be planning,” Mustardseed said, half to himself. “It doesn’t make sense. I don’t get it.”

As the ship sped back toward the moon base they sat around the table in the dining room, sipping hot coffee and thinking, not saying very much.

“Look here,” Oberon said at last. “What kind of man was Professor Thomas? What do you remember about him?”

Mustardseed put his coffee mug down. “It was ten years ago. I don’t remember much. It’s vague.”

“Gene, I know you’d kill him if you hed an even break,” replied Robin “Puck” Goodfellow, soothingly. “But, Gene, why, you ain’t even packin’ a gun! An’ there’s Pat lookin’ nasty, with his hand nervous-like. He seen you hed no gun. He’d jump at the chance to plug you now, an’ then holler about opposition to the law. Cool down, son; it’ll all come right.”

“You’ll know some day. Soon, if your progress thus far is a criterion. Better to remember by yourself.” He shook his head. “You’re a phenomenon. Do you know how long it took me to develop the memory? Seventeen years. And I am second leader here.”

I clenched my hands, looked him up and down, and said. “Pict, wolf-man, or whatever, I tell you this. I take orders badly and I acknowledge no authority higher than myself.” Anything less like the old Tom Snout would have been hard to imagine, and yet I knew these things about myself and I spoke only the truth.

In the dark room a withered old man lay, propped up on endless pillows. At first it seemed as if he were asleep; there was no motion or sign of life. But after a time Mustardseed saw with a faint shock that the old man was watching them intently, his eyes fixed on them, unmoving, unwinking.

“Git back, Tom Snout, git back!” he roared. “Git ’em back!” With one lunge Robin “Puck” Goodfellow shoved Peaseblossom and Lysander and the other cowboys up on the porch. Then he crowded Hippolyta and Robin Starveling and Titania to the wall, tried to force them farther. His motions were rapid and stern.

The two Security agents followed him, and Mustardseed came reluctantly behind, closing the door. Oberon stalked down the hall until he came to an open door. He stopped, looking in. Mustardseed could see the white corner of a bed, a wooden post and the edge of a dresser.

“We’re both going. Turn it to high.” Her eyes mocked him. The pistol menaced.

Behind him, there was a stir of sudden movement; a choked exclamation.

I felt at home here. Then my memory played me a trick. I thought I had been in this place before, with others of my kind (my kind? what the hell?), and we had squatted thus and hearkened to the hunting cries of great carnivores and of-I grasped too quickly and too consciously for the rest of the thought and it was gone. But I could have sworn that I was going to remember the blood-roaring of a band of men.

Before he could turn or regain his feet, a man’s tight voice clipped, “Don’t move-or you die!”

Bottom froze. “There’s no need to be frightened,” he said quickly. “I’m merely a-a traveler. I’ve come here from another plain...”

How I scorned and despised them!

One carried a grotesque-looking apparatus on his back which I supposed to be a kind of enlarged walkie-talkie. The germ of a plan grew. I marked this fellow for my own.

When they drew opposite I charged out of hiding with a savage bellow. The dogs, not mankillers, were baffled for a moment, and the men were taken wholly by surprise. I gripped the front of the walkie-talkie operator’s jacket and hit him in the belly; with the new adroitness lent my muscles by race memory, the punch had the force of a giraffe’s kick. Ignoring the other men, I dragged him off to the side and laid him on his face among the lush weeds.

“I understand perfectly!” the voice snapped back. “I happen to be an authority on such matters. That’s why I say-if you move, you die!”

Bottom’s spine prickled. Just as he’d had the feeling he’d seen the man on the screen before, now it came to him that the voice, too, was strangely familiar.

Behind him, shoes scraped the floor. Fingers probed warily at his pockets, his belt, his armpits. Then they went away again and the voice said, “All right. Now take off that outfit.”

“Suppose instead along these lines, then: What if there were no war and no Government Research Projects? What would you do, then?”

“I don’t know. But how can I imagine a hypothetical situation like that? There’s been war as long as I can remember. We’re geared for war. I don’t know what I’d do. I suppose I’d adjust, get used to it.”

The Professor had stared at him. “Oh, you do think you’d get accustomed to it, eh? Well, I’m glad of that. And you think you could find something to do?”

Oberon listened intently. “What do you infer from this, Mustardseed?”

“Not much. Except that he was against war.”

“We’re all against war,” Oberon pointed out.

Wordless, wooden-fingered, Bottom unstrapped the transdimensional registration unit’s harness.

“Can any of you work that instrument?”

They shook their heads. So I took it off his back-it was held by shoulder straps-and rolled him over. I splashed green-slimed water in his face. After a while he blinked and gasped.

“How does this thing work?” I asked. He looked at me, then at the malevolent faces of the Old Companions. In a whispering croak he told me how to manipulate the transmitter.

“How many other parties are searching the swamp?”

“Get up!” the voice commanded.

“Very anachronistic, don’t you think?”

“Yes, he lived quite a lot in the past. He found an old phonograph and records, and he listened to the old music. You saw his house, how old-fashioned it was.”

“Now sit down on that lounge in front of you, with your hands on the arms.”

Bottom crossed to the divan and turned around. For the first time, he faced his captor.

Bottom threw the switch.

A wave of utter helplessness, utter hopelessness, engulfed Bottom. He pressed the button.

“Explain, Johnny!” said the instrument. “What’s wrong with the others?”

“I tell you we fell in, Oberon! We were all bunched and this stuff’s like quicksand. I’m-” I broke off, shrieked, gurgled horridly, and then picked up the walkie-talkie and heaved it deep into the swamp.

A room materialized about him-a room almost the twin of his own basement laboratory. There was the workbench, there the desk. A frame close akin to that of the light-loop rose against one wall.

They went down the stone walk and up onto the porch. Oberon rang the bell. They waited. After a time they heard slow footsteps. The door opened. An elderly woman in a shapeless wrapper studied them impassively.

“Ho, ho, ho! Ho, ho, ho! Say, Theseus, you didn’t miss any of it, did ye? Haw, haw! Best I ever heerd in all my born days. Ho, ho!”

It was so simple, really. Just like going out a doorway, into a limitless expanse of shining silver plain. He felt no pain, no shock, not even slight discomfort.

“Where are you calling from?” Dolores asked, when he succeeded in reaching her.

“All kinds of rumors are running around. Why didn’t the ship come back? What happened?”

“I’m afraid he ran off with it.”

Swiftly, skillfully, he adjusted the transdimensional registration unit’s dials.

Light flickered on the scanning scope’s screen, a shapeless blur.

Bottom twisted the focussing knob. The blur resolved. A scene took form.

He returned a question. “Do you know why you came here?”

“I was called. Something in my mind-”

“Yes. We’re telepathic to a degree.” He grinned. “Don’t let it go to your head. It’s a gift we share with the ants and the bees.” We entered the house and I found a spacious living room furnished with big leather armchairs. “Have a drink,” he said, pointing to a wall bar. “One worthwhile invention of our friend Man.”

Taut with excitement, Bottom stared for the first time into another world.

The place was an apartment, he decided. But what an apartment! It shimmered like a modernist’s sparkling dream. The decor was brilliant, unique in style. Metal and plastic combined in sleek, functional forms.

Nor was this all. A man stood by a table, back to the screen, mixing a drink. While Bottom watched, he restoppered the bottle and stepped out a door to the right.

Then he ceased laughing, and with glinting gaze upon Hippolyta, insolent and vicious and savage, he began to drawl:

“Wal now, my lady, I reckon your story, if it tallies with Helena’s an’ Padre Marcos’s, will clear Gene Peaseblossom in the eyes of the court.” Here he grew slower, more biting, sharper and harder of face. “But you needn’t expect Pat Hawk or the court to swaller thet part of your story-about bein’ detained unwillin’!”

Hippolyta had not time to grasp the sense of his last words. Peaseblossom had convulsively sprung upward, white as chalk.

A warm wind blew along the hill, rustling the weeds and grass. At the bottom, in the valley, the mechanics had almost finished; the last elements of the reflex system had been removed from the ship and crated up.

All that was needed now was the new core, the new central key that would take the place of the mechanical system. A human brain, the brain of an intelligent, wary human being. But would the human being part with it? That was the problem.

“Peaseblossom detained me in the waiting-room,” she said, clear-voiced as a bell. “But we were not alone-all the time.”

“So now the old blood wakes in us,” I said exultantly. “Why? After so long, why now? Are we like locusts, our knowledge lying hidden for an age and then bursting up in all of us at the Oberon time?”

“A quaint notion,” said Philostrate. “No, we have always known, I think, in all the periods of history. But we never banded together before, never fought the ancient enemy as an army within its gates, as we are doing and will do with increasing potency.”

“Think, Tom Snout, only think! You are born in 1700; at a certain age you begin to know you are different. You hate the race of men. You have racial memories of living in caves, of being harried by men. What do you do?

For a moment the only sound following her words was a gasp from Gene Peaseblossom. Cobweb’s face became transformed with a hideous amaze and joy.

“Detained?” he whispered, craning his lean and corded neck. “How’s thet?”

Palm slick with sweat, he gripped the master switch and shoved it shut.

Purple light flared in the tubes set in the light-loop’s door-like metal frame. The blank wall behind it took on the familiar translucent glow.

Bottom opened the intensifier channels and increased the alpha and gamma readings.

The light turned silver. The wall behind the framework disappeared.

I turned and saw the Old Man, and I knew what we were. I had one final crashing burst of dawn memory, and I saw our beginnings and our whole long story and why we would always have to fight men. All this I saw in the Old Man’s face.

That face was like a great terrible mask. The cheeks were broad, the brow low and ridged, the brain case enormous. The chin was shallow, with a wide thick-lipped mouth; and the eyes were glittering oblongs of gray mica-sprinkled flint. Gray hair covered the massive forward-thrusting head thickly, and tufts of it boiled up from the collar of the white shirt on the barrel-sized chest.

Bottom stepped onto the ramp that led up to the frame. In the humming stillness he could hear the sound of his own heartbeat, drumming faster and faster. The sharp, chlorine-like smell of ozone filled the air.

For an instant, then, he hesitated, acutely conscious of an uncontrollable trembling. Sweat drenched him; the sour stench of it cut through the ozone.

He thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m crazy to think I can cross the barrier between the worlds.

“Peaseblossom was drunk. He-”

With sudden passionate gesture of despair Peaseblossom appealed to her:

“Oh, Helena, don’t! don’t! DON’T!…”

Then he seemed to sink down, head lowered upon his breast, in utter shame. Robin “Puck” Goodfellow’s great hand swept to the bowed shoulder, and he turned to Hippolyta.

It was all very confusing, the reasons for the war, the nature of the enemy. The Shakespearean had been contacted on one of the outlying planets of Neutral Centauri. At the approach of the Lunar ship, a host of dark slim Puck pencils had lifted abruptly and shot off into the distance. The first real encounter came between three of the Puck pencils and a single exploration ship from Lunar. No Lunareans survived. After that it was all out war, with no holds barred.

I declare war on you and all your kind.

I tell you plain that we will rise and slay you, that there will be no quarter in this war which is to come to you. Forget your hostilities between nation and nation-they have no importance compared with our crusade. Put by your silly fears of invasion from other worlds-your foe is here, has always been here, and is an enemy you cannot even recognize.

Both sides feverishly constructed defense rings around their systems. Of the two, the Shakespearean belt was the better. The ring around Midsummer was a living ring, superior to anything Lunar could throw against it. The standard equipment by which Lunar ships were guided in outspace, the Johnson Control, was not adequate. Something more was needed. Automatic relays were not good enough.

“Nobody there to meet you?”

“The station agent an’ operator both gone?”

“Wal, how soon did this feller Peaseblossom show up?” Cobweb continued, with a wry smile.

“Very soon after my arrival. I think-perhaps fifteen minutes, possibly a little more.”

“Some dark an’ lonesome around thet station, wasn’t it?”

A brain in liquid with a trail coming out of it leading to a spaceship.

We are here all about you. Watch for us.

We will win back the earth from you who crushed us so long ago.

Watch for us! The future is ours!

SOURCES: William Shakespeare, Geoff St. Reynard, Dwight V. Swain, Zane Grey, Philip K. Dick