Maker of Universes (11 page)

“But how did you come into this?” Wolff said.

“I? My name on Earth was Paul Janus Finnegan. My middle name was my mother’s family name. As you know, it also happens to be that of the Latin god of gates and of the old and new year, the god with two faces, one looking ahead and one looking behind.”

Kickaha grinned and said, “Janus is very appropriate, don’t you think? I am a man of two worlds, and I came through the gate between. Not that I have ever returned to Earth or want to. I’ve had adventures and I’ve gained a stature here I never could have had on that grimy old globe. Kickaha isn’t my only name, and I’m a chief on this tier and a big shot of sorts on other tiers. As you will find out.”

Wolff was beginning to wonder about him. He had been so evasive that Wolff suspected Kickaha had another identity about which he did not intend to talk.

“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t you believe it,” Kickaha said. “I’m a trickster, but I’m leveling with you. By the way, did you know how I came by my name among the Bear People? In their language, a
kickaha
is a mythological character, a semidivine trickster. Something like the Old Man Coyote of the Plains of Nanabozho of the Ojibway or Wakdjunkaga of the Winnebago. Some day I’ll tell you how I earned that name and how I became a councilor of the Hrowakas. But I’ve more important things to tell you now.”

VII

I
N 1941, AT THE AGE OF
twenty-three Paul Finnegan had volunteered for the U.S. Cavalry because he loved horses. A short time later, he found himself driving a tank. He was with the Eighth Army and so eventually crossed the Rhine. One day, after having helped take a small town, he discovered an extraordinary object in the ruins of the local museum. It was a crescent of silvery metal, so hard that hammer blows did not dent it nor an acetylene torch melt it.

“I asked some of the citizens about it. All they knew was that it had been in the museum a long time. A professor of chemistry, after making some tests on it, had tried to interest the University of Munich in it but had failed.

“I took it home with me after the war, along with other souvenirs. Then I went back to the University of Indiana. My father had left me enough money to see me through for a few years, so I had a nice little apartment, a sports car, and so on.

“A friend of mine was a newspaper reporter. I told him about the crescent and its peculiar properties and unknown composition. He wrote a story about it which was printed in Bloomington, and the story was picked up by a syndicate. It didn’t create much interest among scientists—in fact, they wanted nothing to do with it.

“Three days later, a man calling himself Mr. Vannax appeared at my apartment. I thought he was Dutch because of his name and his foreign accent. He wanted to see the crescent. I obliged. He got very excited, although he tried to to appear calm. He said he’d like to buy it from me. I asked how much he’d pay, and he said he’d give ten thousand dollars, but no more.

“ ‘Sure you can go higher,’ I said,” Kickaha continued. “ ‘Because if you don’t, you’ll get nowhere.’

“ ‘Twenty thousand?’ Vannax said.

“ ‘Let’s pump it up a bit,’ I said.

“ ‘Thirty thousand?’ “

Finnegan decided to plunge. He asked Vannax if he would pay $100,000. Vannax became even redder in the face and swelled up “like a hoppy toad,” as Finnegan-Kickaha said. But he replied that he would have the sum in twenty-four hours.

“Then I knew I really had something,” Kickaha said to Wolff. “The question was, what? Also, why did this Vannax character so desperately want it? And what kind of a nut was he? No one with good sense, no normal human being, would rise so fast to the bait. He’d be cagier.”

“What did Vannax look like?” Wolff asked.

“Oh, he was a big guy, a well-preserved sixty-five. He had an eagle beak and eagle eyes. He was dressed in expensive conservative clothes. He had a powerful personality, but he was trying to restrain it, to be real nice. And having a hell of a time doing it. He seemed to be a man who wasn’t used to being balked in any thing.”

“ ‘Make it $300,000, and it’s yours’ I said. I never dreamed he’d say yes. I thought he’d get mad and take off. Because I wasn’t going to sell the crescent, not if he offered me a million.”

Vannax, although furious, said that he would pay $300,000 but Finnegan would have to give him an additional twenty-four hours.

“ ‘You have to tell me why you want the crescent and what good it is first,’ I said.

“ ‘Nothing doing!’ he shouted. It is enough for you to rob me, you pig of a merchant, you, you earth... worm!’

“ ‘Get out before I throw you out. Or before I call the police,’ I said.”

Vannax began shouting in a foreign tongue. Finnegan went into his bedroom and came out with a .45 automatic. Vannax did not know it was not loaded. He left, although he was cursing and talking to himself all the way to his 1940 Rolls-Royce.

That night Finnegan had trouble getting to sleep. It was after 2:00 A.M. before he succeeded, and even then he kept waking up. During one of his rousings he heard a noise in the front room. Quietly, he rolled out of bed and took the .45, now loaded, from under his pillow. On the way to the bedroom door he picked up his flashlight from the bureau.

Its beam caught Vannax stooping over in the middle of the living room. The silvery crescent was in his hand.

“Then I saw the second crescent on the floor. Vannax had brought another with him. I’d caught him in the act of placing the two together to form a complete circle. I didn’t know why he was doing it, but I found out a moment later.

“I told him to put his hands up. He did so, but he lifted his foot to step into the circle. I told him not to move even a trifle, or I’d shoot. He put one foot inside the circle, anyway. So I fired. I shot over his head, and the slug went into a corner of the room. I just wanted to scare him, figuring if he got shaken up enough he might start talking. He was scared all right; he jumped back.

“I walked across the room while he backed up toward the door. He was babbling like a maniac, threatening me in one breath and offering me half a million in the next. I thought I’d back him up against the door and jam the .45 in his belly. He’d really talk then, spill his guts out about the crescent.

“But as I followed him across the room I stepped into the circle formed by the two crescents. He saw what I was doing and screamed at me not to. Too late then. He and the apartment disappeared, and I found myself still in the circle—only it wasn’t quite the same—and in this world. In the palace of the Lord, on top of the world.”

Kickaha said he might have gone into shock then. But he had avidly read fantasy and science-fiction since the fourth grade of grammar school. The idea of parallel universes and devices for transition between them was familiar. He had been conditioned to accept such concepts. In fact, he half-believed in them. Thus he was flexible-minded enough to bend without breaking and then bounce back. Although frightened, he was at the same time excited and curious.

“I figured out why Vannax hadn’t followed me through the gate. The two crescents, placed together, formed a ‘circuit’. But they weren’t activated until a living being stepped within whatever sort of ‘field’ they radiated. Then one semicircle remained behind on Earth while the other was gated through to this universe, where it latched onto a semicircle waiting for it. In other words, it takes three crescents to make a circuit. One in the world to which you’re going, and two in the one you’re leaving. You step in; one crescent transfers over to the single one in the next universe, leaving only one crescent in the world you just left.

“Vannax must have come to Earth by means of these crescents. And he would not, could not, do so unless there had been a crescent already on Earth. Somehow, maybe we’ll never know, he lost one of them on Earth. Maybe it was stolen by someone who didn’t know its true value. Anyway, he must’ve been searching for it, and when that news story went out about the one I had found in Germany, he knew what it was. After talking to me, he concluded I might not sell it. So he got into my apartment with the crescent he did have. He was just about to complete the circle and pass on over when I stopped him.

“He must be stranded on Earth and unable to get here unless he finds another crescent. For all I know, there may be others on Earth. The one I got in Germany might not even be the one he lost.”

Finnegan wandered about the “palace” for a long while. It was immense, staggeringly beautiful and exotic and filled with treasure, jewels and artifacts. There were also laboratories, or perhaps bioprocess chambers was a better title. In these, Finnegan saw strange creatures slowly forming within huge transparent cylinders. There were many consoles with many operating devices, but he had no idea what they did. The symbols beneath the buttons and levers were unfamiliar.

“I was lucky. The palace is filled with traps to snare or kill the uninvited. But they were not set— why, I don’t know, any more than I knew then why the place was untenanted. But it was a break for me.”

Finnegan left the palace for awhile to go through the exquisite garden that surrounded it. He came to the edge of the monolith on which the palace and garden were.

“You’ve seen enough to imagine how I felt when I looked over the edge. The monolith must be at least thirty thousand feet high. Below it is the tier that the Lord named Atlantis. I don’t know whether the Earth myth of Atlantis was founded on this Atlantis or whether the Lord got the name from the myth.

“Below Atlantis is the tier called Dracheland. Then, Amerindia. One sweep of my eye took it in, just as you can see one side of the Earth from a rocket. No details, of course, just big clouds, large lakes, seas, and outlines of continents. And a good part of each successively lower tier was obscured by the one just above it.

“But I could make out the Tower of Babylon structure of this world, even though I didn’t, at that time, understand what I was seeing. It was just too unexpected and alien for me to apprehend any sort of
gestalt
. It didn’t mean anything.”

Finnegan could, however, understand that he was in a desperate situation. He had no means of leaving the top of this world except by trying to return to Earth through the crescents. Unlike the sides of the other monoliths, the face of this one was smooth as a bearing ball. Nor was he going to use the crescents again, not with Vannax undoubtedly waiting for him.

Although he was in no danger of starving—there was food and water enough to last for years—he could not and did not want to stay there. He dreaded the return of the owner, for he might have a very nasty temper. There were some things in the palace which made Kickaha feel uneasy.

“But the gworl came,” Kickaha said. “I suppose—I know—they came from another universe through a gate similar to that which had opened the way for me. At the time, I had no way of knowing how or why they were in the palace. But I was glad I’d gotten there first. If I’d fallen into their hands... ! Later, I figured out they were agents for another Lord. He’s sent them to steal the horn. Now, I’d seen the horn during my wandering about the palace, and had even blown it. But I didn’t know how to press the combinations of buttons on it to make it work. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know its real purpose.

“The gworl came into the palace. A hundred or so of them. Fortunately, I saw them first. Right away, they let their lust for murder get them into trouble. They tried to kill some of the Eyes of the Lord, the eagle-sized ravens in the garden. These hadn’t bothered me, perhaps because they thought I was a guest or didn’t look dangerous.

“The gworl tried to slit a raven’s throat, and the ravens attacked them. The gworl retreated into the palace, where the big birds followed them. There were blood and feathers and pieces of bumpy hairy hide and a few corpses of both sides all over that end of the palace. During the battle, I noticed a gworl coming out of a room with the horn. He went through the corridors as if looking for something.”

Finnegan followed the gworl into another room, about the size of two dirigible hangars. This held a swimming pool and a number of interesting but enigmatic devices. On a marble pedestal was a large golden model of the planet. On each of its levels were several jewels. As Finnegan was to discover, the diamonds, rubies, and sapphires were arranged to form symbols. These indicated various points of resonance.

“Points of resonance?”

“Yes. The symbols were coded mnemonics of the combination of notes required to open gates at certain places. Some gates open to other universes, but others are simply gates between the tiers on this world. These enabled the Lord to travel instantaneously from one level to the next. Associated with the symbols were tiny models of outstanding characteristics of the resonant points on the various tiers.”

The gworl with the horn must have been told by the Lord how to read the symbols. Apparently, he was testing for the Lord to make sure he had the correct horn. He blew seven notes toward the pool, and the waters parted to reveal a piece of dry land with scarlet trees around it and a green sky beyond.

“It was the conceit of the original Lord to enter into the Atlantean tier through the pool itself. I didn’t know at that time where the gate led to. But I saw my only chance to escape from the trap of the palace, and I took it. Coming up from behind the gworl, I snatched the horn from his hand and pushed him sideways into the pool—not into the gate, but into the water.

“You never heard such squawks and screams and such thrashings around. All the fear they don’t have for other things is packed into a dread of water. This gworl went down, came up sputtering and yelling, and then managed to grab hold of the side of the gate. A gate has definite edges, you know, tangible if changing.

“I heard roars and shouts behind me. A dozen gworl with big and bloody knives were entering the room. I dived into the hole, which had started shrinking. It was so small I scraped the skin off my knees going through. But I got through, and the hole closed. It took off both the arms of the gworl who was trying to get out of the water and follow me. I had the horn in my hand, and I was out of their reach for the time being.”