Maker of Universes (2 page)

She had unhumanly large eyes, as big in proportion to her face as those of a cat. Her lips were full and crimson, her skin golden-brown. The thick wavy hair hanging loose along the side of her face was tigerstriped: slightly zigzag bands of black almost touched the ground as she leaned around the tree.

Then the walls became white as the rolled-up eye of a corpse. All was as before except for the pain in his knees and the hardness of the horn lying against his ankle.

He picked it up and turned to look at it in the light from the recreation room. Although stunned, he no longer believed that he was insane. He had seen through into another universe and something from it had been delivered to him — why or how, he did not know.

The horn was a little less than two and a half feet long and weighed less than a quarter of a pound. It was shaped like an African buffalo’s horn except at the mouth, where it flared out broadly. The tip was fitted with a mouthpiece of some soft golden material; the horn itself was of silver or silver-plated metal. There were no valves, but on turning it over he saw seven little buttons in a row. A half-inch inside the mouth was a web of silvery threads. When the horn was held at an angle to the light from the bulbs overhead, the web looked as if it went deep into the horn.

It was then the light also struck the body of the horn so that he saw what he had missed during his first examination: a hieroglyph was lightly inscribed halfway down the length. It looked like nothing he had seen before, and he was an expert on all types of alphabetic writing, ideographs, and pictographs.

“Robert!” his wife said.

“Be right up, dear!” He placed the horn in the right-hand front corner of the closet and closed the door. There was nothing else he could do except to run out of the house with the horn. If he appeared with it, he would be questioned by both his wife and Bresson. Since he had not come into the house with the horn, he could not claim it was his. Bresson would want to take the instrument into his custody, since it would have been discovered on property of his agency.

Wolff was in an agony of uncertainty. How could he get the horn out of the house? What was to prevent Bresson from bringing around other clients, perhaps today, who would see the horn as soon as they opened the closet door? A client might call it to Bresson’s attention.

He walked up the steps and into the large living room. Brenda was still glaring. Bresson, a chubby, spectacled man of about thirty-five, looked uncomfortable, although he was smiling.

“Well, how do you like it?” he asked.

“Great,” Wolff replied. “It reminds me of the type of house we have back home.”

“I like it,” Bresson said. “I’m from the Midwest myself. I can appreciate that you might not want to live in a ranchtype home. Not that I’m knocking them. I live in one myself.”

Wolff walked to the window and looked out. The midafternoon May sun shone brightly from the blue Arizona skies. The lawn was covered with the fresh Bermuda grass, planted three weeks before, new as the houses in this just-built development of Hohokam Homes.

“Almost all the houses are ground level,” Bresson was saying. “Excavating in this hard caliche costs a great deal, but these houses aren’t expensive. Not for what you get.”

Wolff thought.
If the caliche hadn’t been dug away to make room for the recreation room, what would the man on the other side have seen when the opening appeared? Would he have seen only earth and thus been denied the chance to get rid of that horn? Undoubtedly.

“You may have read why we had to delay opening this development,” Bresson said. “While we were digging, we uncovered a former town of the Hohokam.”

“Hohokam?” Mrs. Wolff said. “Who were they?”

“Lots of people who come into Arizona have never heard of them,” Bresson replied. “But you can’t live long in the Phoenix area without running across references to them. They were the Indians who lived a long time ago in the Valley of the Sun; they may have come here at least 1200 years ago. They dug irrigation canals, built towns here, had a swinging civilization. But something happened to them, no one knows what. They just up and disappeared several hundred years ago. Some archeologists claim the Papago and Pima Indians are their descendants.”

Mrs. Wolff sniffed and said, “I’ve seen them. They don’t look like they could build anything except those rundown adobe shacks on the reservation.”

Wolff turned and said, almost savagely, “The modern Maya don’t look as if they could ever have built their temples or invented the concept of zero, either. But they did.”

Brenda gasped. Mr. Bresson smiled even more mechanically. “Anyway, we had to suspend digging until the archeologists were through. Held up operations about three months, but we couldn’t do a thing because the state tied our hands.

“However, this may be a lucky thing for you. If we hadn’t been held up, these homes might all be sold now. So everything turns out for the best, eh?”

He smiled brightly and looked from one to the other.

Wolff paused, took a deep breath, knowing what was coming from Brenda, and said, “We’ll take it. We’ll sign the papers right now.”

“Robert!” Mrs. Wolff shrilled. “You didn’t even ask me!”

“I’m sorry, my dear, but I’ve made up my mind.”

“Well, I haven’t!”

“Now, now, folks, no need to rush things,” Bresson said. His smile was desperate. “Take your time, talk it over. Even if somebody should come along and buy this particular house—and it might happen before the day’s over; they’re selling like hotcakes, well, there’s plenty more just like this.”

“I want
this
house.”

“Robert, are you out of your mind?” Brenda wailed. “I’ve never seen you act like this before.”

“I’ve given in to you on almost everything,” he said. “I wanted you to be happy. So, now, give in to me on this. It’s not much to ask. Besides, you said this morning that you wanted this type of house, and Hohokam Homes are the only ones like this that we can afford.

“Let’s sign the preliminary papers now. I can make out a check as an earnest.”

“I won’t sign, Robert.”

“Why don’t you two go home and discuss this?” Bresson said. “I’ll be available when you’ve reached a decision.”

“Isn’t my signature good enough?” Wolff replied.

Still holding his strained smile, Bresson said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wolff will have to sign, too.”

Brenda smiled triumphantly.

“Promise me you won’t show it to anybody else,” Wolff said. “Not until tomorrow, anyway. If you’re afraid of losing a sale, I’ll make out an earnest.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary.” Bresson started toward the door with a haste that betrayed his wish to get out of an embarrassing situation. “I won’t show it to anyone until I hear from you in the morning.”

On the way back to their rooms in the Sands Motel in Tempe, neither spoke. Brenda sat rigidly and stared straight ahead through the windshield. Wolff glanced over at her now and then, noting that her nose seemed to be getting sharper and her lips thinner; if she continued, she would look exactly like a fat parrot.

And when she finally did burst loose, talking, she would sound like a fat parrot. The same old tired yet energetic torrent of reproaches and threats would issue. She would upbraid him because of his neglect of her all these years, remind him for the latest in God-knew-how-many-times that he kept his nose buried in his books or else was practicing archery or fencing, or climbing mountains, sports she could not share with him because of her arthritis. She would unreel the years of unhappiness, or claimed unhappiness, and end by weeping violently and bitterly.

Why had he stuck with her? He did not know except that he had loved her very much when they were young and also because her accusations were not entirely untrue. Moreover, he found the thought of separation painful, even more painful than the thought of staying with her.

Yet he was entitled to reap the harvests of his labors as a professor of English and classical languages. Now that he had enough money and leisure time, he could pursue studies that his duties had denied him. With this Arizona home as a base, he could even travel. Or could he? Brenda would not refuse to go with him—in fact, she would insist on accompanying him. But she would be so bored that his own life would be miserable. He could not blame her for that, for she did not have the same interests as he. But should he give up the things that made life rich for him just to make her happy? Especially since she was not going to be happy anyway?

As he expected, her tongue became quite active after supper. He listened, tried to remonstrate quietly with her and point out her lack of logic and the injustice and baselessness of her recriminations. It was no use. She ended as always, weeping and threatening to leave him or to kill herself.

This time, he did not give in.

“I want that house, and I want to enjoy life as I’ve planned to,” he said firmly. “That’s that.”

He put on his coat and strode to the door. “I’ll be back later. Maybe.”

She screamed and threw an ashtray at him. He ducked; the tray bounced off the door, gouging out a piece of the wood. Fortunately, she did not follow him and make a scene outside, as she had on previous occasions.

It was night now, the moon was not yet up, and the only lights came from the windows of the motel, the lamps along the streets, and numerous headlights of the cars along Apache Boulevard. He drove his car out onto the boulevard and went east, then turned south. Within a few minutes he was on the road to the Hohokam Homes. The thought of what he meant to do made his heart beat fast and turned his skin cold. This was the first time in his life that he had seriously considered committing a criminal act.

The Hohokam Homes were ablaze with lights and noisy with music over a PA system and the voices of children playing out in the street while their parents looked at the houses.

He drove on, went through Mesa, turned around and came back through Tempe and down Van Buren and into the heart of Phoenix. He cut north, then east, until he was in the town of Scottsdale. Here he stopped off for an hour and a half at a small tavern. After the luxury of four shots of
Vat 69
, he quit. He wanted no more—rather, feared to take more, because he did not care to be fuddled when he began his project.

When he returned to Hohokam Homes, the lights were out and silence had returned to the desert. He parked his car behind the house in which he had been that afternoon. With his gloved right fist, he smashed the window which gave him access to the recreation room.

By the time he was within the room, he was panting and his heart beat as if he had run several blocks. Though frightened, he had to smile at himself. A man who lived much in his imagination, he had often conceived of himself as a burglar—not the ordinary kind, of course, but a Raffles. Now he knew that his respect for law was too much for him ever to become a great criminal or even a minor one. His conscience was hurting him because of this small act, one that he had thought he was fully justified in carrying out. Moreover, the idea of being caught almost made him give up the horn. After living a quiet, decent and respectable life, he would be ruined if he were to be detected. Was it worth it?

He decided it was. Should he retreat now, he would wonder the rest of his life what he had missed. The greatest of all adventures waited for him, one such as no other man had experienced. If he became a coward now, he might as well shoot himself, for he would not be able to endure the loss of the horn or the self-recriminations for his lack of courage.

It was so dark in the recreation room that he had to feel his way to the closet with his fingertips. Locating the sliding doors, he moved the left-hand one, which he had pushed aside that afternoon. He nudged it slowly to avoid noise, and he stopped to listen for sounds outside the house.

Once the door was fully opened, he retreated a few steps. He placed the mouthpiece of the horn to his lips and blew softly. The blast that issued from it startled him so much that he dropped it. Groping, he finally located it in the corner of the room.

The second time, he blew hard. There was another loud note, no louder than the first. Some device in the horn, perhaps the silvery web inside its mouth, regulated the decible level. For several minutes he stood poised with the horn raised and almost to his mouth. He was trying to reconstruct in his mind the exact sequence of the seven notes he had heard. Obviously the seven little buttons on the underside determined the various harmonics. But he could not find out which was which without experimenting and drawing attention.

He shrugged and murmured, “What the hell.”

Again he blew, but now he pressed the buttons, operating the one closest to him first. Seven loud notes soared forth. Their values were as he remembered them but not in the sequence he recalled.

As the final blast died out, a shout came from a distance. Wolff almost panicked. He swore, lifted the horn back to his lips, and pressed the buttons in an order which he hoped would reproduce the open sesame, the musical key, to the other world.

At the same time, a flashlight beam played across the broken window of the room, then passed by. Wolff blew again. The light returned to the window. More shouts arose. Desperate, Wolff tried different combinations of buttons. The third attempt seemed to be the duplicate of that which the youth on top of the toadstool-shaped boulder had produced.

The flashlight was thrust through the broken window. A deep voice growled, “Come on out, you in there! Come out, or I’ll start shooting!”

Simultaneously, a greenish light appeared on the wall, broke through, and melted a hole. Moonlight shone through. The trees and the boulder were visible only as silhouettes against a green-silver radiating from a great globe of which the rim alone was visible.

He did not delay. He might have hesitated if he had been unnoticed, but now he knew he had to run. The other world offered uncertainty and danger, but this one had a definite, inescapable ignominy and shame. Even as the watchman repeated his demands, Wolff left him and his world behind. He had to stoop and to step high to get through the shrinking hole. When he had turned around on the other side to get a final glimpse, he saw through an opening no larger than a ship’s porthole. In a few seconds, it was gone.