Doorways in the Sand (6 page)

Moaning. Shadows, a lesser black. Flash. Flashes. A light through parted lashes, dim. The ground below, passing. The moaning, mine.

"Do you hear me, Fred?"

"Yes," I said, "yes . . ."

The movement ceased. I overheard an exchange in a language I did not recognize. Then the ground rose. I was deposited upon it.

"Are you awake? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, yes. I already said 'yes.' How many times-"

"Yes, he appears to be awake"-this superfluous comment in a voice I recognized as that of my friend the wombat.

There bad been more than one voice, but I could not see the speakers because of the angle at which I lay. And it was too much trouble to turn my head. I opened my eyes fully, though, and saw that the terrain was flat and pinked, though not tenderized, by the first low flames of morning.

All of the previous day's happenings slowly emerged from that place where memories stay when you are not using them. These, along with the moral I had drawn from them, were as responsible as muscle tone for my unwillingness to turn and regard my companions. And it wasn't bad just lying there. If I waited long enough, I might go away again and come back someplace else.

"I say," came a strange voice, "would you care for a peanut-butter sandwich?"

Pieces of broken reverie fell all about me. Gagging, I gained a new perspective on the ground and the long shadows that lay across it.

Because of the peculiar outline I had regarded, I was not completely surprised when I raised my head and saw a six-foot-plus kangaroo standing beside the wombat. It considered me through a pair of dark glasses as it removed a sandwich bag from its pouch.

"Peanut butter is rich in protein," it said.

Hanging there, some twenty or thirty thousand miles above it, I was in a perfect position to enjoy the event if California were to break loose, slip away and vanish beneath the Pacific. Unfortunately, this did not occur. Instead, the whole world slipped away as the vessel continued its orbiting and the argument proceeded behind my back.

However, at the rate things were going it seemed possible that the San Andreas fault would have several more opportunities to present me with the desired spectacle while providing some Donnelly of the distant future with material for a book on the peculiarities of that antediluvian world and its masterfully scripted passage. When one has nothing better to do one can always hope.

As, through that port beside which I reclined, presumably resting, only half listening to the heated sounds exchanged between Charv and Ragma, I regarded the Earth and then the star-dotted field beyond it, immense in the distance of distances, I was taken by a glorious sensation doubtless compiled of recovery from my earlier discomforts, a near-metaphysical satisfaction of my acrophiliac tendencies and a general overlay of fatigue that spread slowly, lightly across me, like a delicious fall of big-flaked snow. I had never been at this altitude before, witnessing the distances, struggling to gain perspective, overwhelmed by the consideration of space, space and more space. The beauty of basic things, things as they are and things as they might be, reached out to me then, and I recalled some lines I had scribbled long ago, on regretfully giving up my math major rather than take a degree in it:

Lobachevsky alone has looked on Beauty bare.

She curves in here, she curves in here. She curves out there.

Her parallel clefts come together to tease

In un-callipygianous-wise;

With fewer than one hundred eighty degrees

Her glorious triangle lies.

Her double-trumpet symmetry Riemann did not court-

His tastes to simpler-curvedness, the buxom Teuton sort!

An ellipse is fine for as far as it goes,

But modesty, away!

If I'm going to see Beauty without her clothes

Give me hyperbolas any old day.

The world is curves, I've heard it said,

And straightway in it nothing lies.

This then my wish, before I'm dead:

To look through Lobachevsky's eyes.

I felt very drowsy. I had been into and out of consciousness periodically and had no idea as to how much time had elapsed. My watch, of course, was of no assistance. I resisted going away again, however, both to prolong the aesthetic seizure and to keep abreast of developmenta about me.

I was uncertain as to whether my rescuers were aware of my wakefulness, in that I was facing away from them, reclined and loosely restrained in a hammocklike affair of soft webbing. And even if they were aware, the fact that they were conversing in a non-terrestrial language doubtless provided them with a feeling of insulation. At some earlier time I had slowly realized that the thing that would most have surprised them probably surprised me even more. This was the discovery that, when I gave it a piece of my divided attention, I could understand what they were saying.

A difficult phenomenon to describe better, but I'll try: If I listened intently to their words, they swam away from me, as elusive as individual fish in a school of thousands. If I simply regarded the waters, however, I could follow the changing outline, the drift, pick out the splashes and sparklings. Similarly, I could tell what they were saying. Why this should be I had no idea.

And I had ceased to care after a time, for their dialogue was quite repetitious. It was considerably more rewarding to consider the curtate cycloid described by Mount Chimborazo if one were positioned somewhere above the South Pole, to see this portion of the surface as moving backward with respect to the orbital progression of the body.

My thoughts suddenly troubled me. Where had that last one really come from? It felt beautiful, but was it mine? Had some valve given way in my unconscious, releasing a river of libido that cut big chunks of miscellanea from the banks it rushed between, to deposit them in shiny layers of silt up front here where I normally take my ease? Or could it be a telepathic phenomenon-me in a psychically defenseless position, two aliens the only other minds for thousands and thousands of miles about? Was one of them a logophile?

But it did not seem that way. I was certain that my apprehension of the language, for example, was not a telepathic thing. Their speech kept coming into better and better focus-individual words and phrases now, not just abstractions of their sense. I knew that language somehow, the sounds' meanings. I was not simply reading their minds.

What then?

Feeling more than a little sacrilegious, I forced the sense of peace and pleasure transcendent out to arms' length, then shoved as hard as I could. Think, damn it! I ordered my cortex. You are on overtime. Double time for holidays of the spirit. Move!

Turning and returning, back to the thirst, the chill, the aches, the morning . . . Yes. Australia. There I was . . .

The wombat had convinced the kangaroo, whose name I later learned was Charv, that water would benefit me more at that moment than a peanut-butter sandwich. Charv acknowledged the wombat's superior wisdom in matters of human physiology and located a flask in his pouch. The wombat, whose name I then learned to be Ragma, yanked off his paws-or, rather, pawlike mittens-displaying tiny, six-digited hands, thumb opposing, and he administered the liquid in slow doses. While this was being done, I gathered that they were alien plainclothesmen passing as local fauna. The reason was not clear.

"You are very fortunate-" Ragma told me.

After I finished choking, "I begin to appreciate the term 'alien viewpoint,'" I said, "I take it you are a member of a race of masochists."

"Some beings thank another who saves their life," he replied. "And I was about to complete the statement, 'You are very fortunate that we happened along this way.'"

"I'll give you the first," I said. "Thanks. But coincidence is like a rubber band. Stretch it too far and it snaps. Forgive me if I suspect some design in our meeting as we did."

"I am distressed that you focus suspicions upon us," he said, "when all that we have done is render assistance. Your cynicism index may be even higher than was indicated."

"Indicated by whom?" I asked.

"I am not permitted to say," he replied.

He cut short a snappy rejoinder by pouring more water down my throat. Choking and considering, I modified it to "This is ridiculous!"

"I agree," he said. "But now that we are here, everything should soon be in order."

I rose, stretched hard, pulled some of the kinks out of my muscles, seated myself on a nearby rock to defeat a small dizziness.

"All right," I said, reaching for a cigarette and finding all of them crushed. "How about your considering whatever you are permitted to say and then saying it?"

Charv withdrew a package of cigarettes-my brand-from his pouch and passed it to me.

"If you must," he said.

I nodded, opened it, lit one.

"Thank you," I said, returning them.

"Keep the pack," he said. "I am a pipe smoker of sorts. You, by the way, are more in need of rest and nourishment than nicotine. I am monitoring your heartbeat, blood pressure and basal metabolism rate on a small device I have with me-"

"Don't let it worry you, though," said Ragma, helping himself to a cigarette and producing a light from somewhere. "Charv is a hypochondriac. But I do think we ought to get back to our vessel before we talk. You are still not out of danger."

"Vessel? What sort? Where is it?"

"About a quarter of a mile from here," Charv offered, "and Ragma is correct. It will be safer if we depart this place immediately."

"I'll have to take your word for it," I said. "But you were looking for me-me specifically-weren't you? You knew my name. You seem to know something about me..."

"Then you have answered your own question," Ragma replied. "We had reason to believe you were in danger and we were correct."

"How? How did you know?"

They glanced at each other.

"Sorry," Ragma said. "That's another."

"Another what?"

"Thing we are not permitted to say."

"Who does your permitting and forbidding?"

"That's another."

I sighed. "Okay. I guess I'm up to walking that far. If I'm not, you'll know in a hurry."

"Very good," said Charv as I got to my feet.

I felt steadier this time up, and it must have been apparent. He nodded, turned and began moving away with a very unkangaroolike gait. I followed, and Ragma remained at my side. He maintained a bipedal posture this time.

The terrain was fairly level, so the going was not too bad. After a couple of minutes' movement, I was even able to work up some enthusiasm at the thought of the peanut-butter sandwich. Before I could comment on my improved condition, however, Ragma shouted something in Alienese.

Charv responded and took off at an accelerated pace, almost tripping over the lower extremities of his disguise.

Ragma turned to me. "He is going ahead to warm things up," he said, "for a quick liftoff. If you are capable of moving faster, please do so."

I complied as best I could, and "Why the rush?" I inquired.

"My hearing is quite sensitive," he said, "and I have just detected the fact that Zeemeister and Buckler are now airborne. This would seem to indicate that they are either looking for you or departing. It is always best to plan for the worst."

"I take it that they are my uninvited guests and that their names are something you are permitted to say. What do they represent?"

"They are doodlehums."

"Doodlehums?"

"Antisocial individuals, intentional circumventors of statutes."

"Oh, hoodlums. Yes, I guessed that much on my own. What can you tell me about them?"

"Morton Zeemeister," he said, "indulges in many such activities. He is the heavy one with the pale fur. Normally, he remains away from the scene of his hoodling, employing agents to execute it for him. The other, Jamie Buckler, is one such. He has hoodled well for Zeemeister over the years and was recently promoted by him to guard his body."

My own body was protesting the increased pace at that point, so I was not immediately certain whether the humming in my ears-was the product of a tidal bore in my river of red stuff or the sound of the sinister bird. Ragma removed all doubt.

"They are coming this way," he said, "quite rapidly. Are you able to run?"

"I'll try," I said, forcing myself.

The ground dipped, rose again. Ahead, then, I was able to make out what I took to be their vessel: a squashed bell of dull metal, duller squares that might be ports spotted irregularly about its perimeter, an opened hatch. . . My lungs were working like a concertina at a Polish wedding and I felt the first spray of the tide of darkness within my head. I was going to go under again, I knew.

Then came that familiar flicker, as of having taken a step back from reality. I knew that my blood was pooling in my guts, leaving me high and dry, and I resented my subservience to the hydraulics involved. I heard gunshots above the growing roar, as on the soundtrack for a distant show, and even this was not sufficient to draw me back. When your own adrenalin lets you down, who is there left to trust?

I wanted very badly to make it to that hatch and through it. It was not all that distant. I knew now that I would not. An absurd way to die. This near, and not understanding anything. . .

"I'm going!" I shouted toward the bounding form at my side, not knowing whether the words really came out that way.

The sounds of gunfire continued, tiny as elfin popcorn. Fewer than forty feet remained, I was certain, as I judge local distances in terms of horseshoe-court lengths. Raising my arms to shield my face, I fell, not knowing whether I had been hit, scarcely able to care, forward, into a smooth blank that canceled the ground, the sound, the trouble, my flight.

Thus, thus, so and thus: awakening as a thing of textures and shadings: advancing and retreating along a scale of soft/dark, smooth/shadow, slick/bright: all else displaced and translated to this: the colors, sounds and balances a function of these two.

Advance to hard and very bright. Fall back to soft and black...