Microcosmic God (34 page)

“He waited until his successor was thoroughly trained, so that in any eventuality the city would not be left without an antiquarian for more than a very little while, and he studied carefully the records of the city’s customs. These forbade any citizen’s leaving the city, and carefully described the boundaries thereof. They were so very old, however, that they neglected to stipulate the boundaries along the duration dimension, since duration perception was a development of only the past four or five thousand years. As an antiquarian, Hark Vegas was familiar with the technique. He moved himself out along the duration of a metallic fragment and thus disappeared from the city.

“Now this unheard-of happening disturbed the timeless balance of the city, for Hark Vegas was no longer to be found. Within seconds
of his disappearance, news of it had reached the other half of the city, and the group of specialists there.

“The matter involved me immediately for several reasons. In the first place, my field was—damn it, there’s no word for it in your language yet. It’s a mental science and has to do with time perceptions. At any rate, I was the only one whose field enabled him to reason where Hark Vegas had gone. Secondly, Hark Vegas was my contemporary in the other half of the city. We would both be replaced within a week, but during that week there would be one too many in my half of the city, one too few in his—an intolerable, absolutely unprecedented state of affairs. There was only one thing to do, since I was qualified, and that was to find him and bring him back. My leaving would restore the balance; if I were successful in finding him, our return would not disturb it. It was the only thing to do, for the status quo had to be maintained at all costs. I acquired a piece of the metal he had used—an easy thing to do, since everything in the city was catalogued—and came away.”

Face paused to light a cigarette. The man smoked, I noticed, with more sheer enjoyment than anyone I had ever met.

“Well,” said Harry impatiently, “did you find him?”

Face leaned back in a cloud of blue smoke and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “No,” he said, “And I’ll tell you why.

“I ran into a characteristic of dimensions that was so utterly simple that it had all but escaped me. Let me give you an example. How many sides has a cube?”

“Six,” said Harry promptly.

Face nodded. “Exactly. Excluding the duration dimension, the cube is a three-dimensional body and has six sides. There are
two
sides as manifestations of each dimension. I think I overlooked that. You see, there are four dimensions, but eight
—directions!
”

He paused, while the three of us knotted our brows over the conception. “Right and left,” he said. “Up and down. Forward and backward—and ‘beginningwards’ and ‘endwards’—the two directions in the duration dimension!”

Delehanty raised his head slowly. “You mean you—didn’t know which
way
to go?”

“Precisely. I entered the durational field and struck off blindly in the wrong direction! I went as far as I reasoned Hark Vegas had gone, and then stopped to look around. I found myself in such a bewildering, uproarious, chaotic world that I simply hadn’t the mental equipment to cope with it. I had to retreat into a deserted place and develop it. I came into your world—here, about eight years ago. And when I had begun to get the ways of this world, I came out of hiding and began my search. It ended almost as soon as it had begun, for I stopped searching!

“Do you know what happened to me? Do you realize that never before had I seen color, or movement, or argument, or love, hate, noise, confusion, growth, death, laughter? Can you imagine my delighted first glimpses of a street fight, a traffic jam, a factory strike? I should have been horrified, perhaps—but never had I seen such beautiful marvels, such superb and profound and moving happenings. I threw myself into it. I became one of you. I became an accountant, throttling down what powers I alone of all this earth possess, striving for life as a man on an equal footing with the rest of men. You can’t know my joy and my delight! I make a mistake in my entries, and the city—this city, does not care or suffer for it, but brawls on unheeding. My responsibilities are to myself alone, and I defy my cast-steel customs and laugh doing it. I’m living here, you see? Living! Go back? Hah!”

“Colors,” I murmured. “Noise, and happy filth, and sorrows and screams. So they got you—
too!”

Face’s smile grew slowly and then flashed away. He stared at me like some alabaster-faced statue for nearly a full minute, and then the agile tendrils of his mind whipped out and encountered mine. We clutched each other thus, and the aura of our own forces around us struck two men dumb.

“Hark Vegas,” he said woodenly.

I nodded.

He straightened, drew a deep breath, threw back his head and laughed. “This colossal joke,” he said, wiping his eyes, “was thirty-eight thousand years in the making. Pleased to meet you—Jack.”

We left then. Harry and Delehanty can’t remember anything but a poker game.

T
HE GOVERNOR TOOK
a sight between two leaves of carefully imported mint, lining the green notch up with the corner of the bamboo verandah and the bowed figure of the man on the beach. He was silent so long that his guest became restless, missing the easy drone of the governor’s voice. That was the only thing to do, he thought, watching the old man pressing the cool glass against his cheek, peering through the leaves at the beachcomber; the only thing a man could do in this dreary, brilliant group of little islands—you could only talk. If you didn’t keep a conversation going, you thought of the heat and surf-etched silences, and the weary rattle of palm fronds, and that brought you back to the heat again. God, he thought suddenly, the governor dresses for dinner in this heat, every last damn day.

“Poor crazy devil,” muttered the governor.

His American visitor asked, “Who?”

The governor gestured with his glass toward the sea and the beachcomber, and then sipped.

The American swiveled and stared. The beachcomber stood dejectedly with the surf tumbling about his knees, and the sun was sinking so rapidly that his shadow crept and crawled along the beach like something with a life of its own. A trick of the light seemed to make the man’s flesh transparent for a split second, and it appeared to the American that the man was a broad-shouldered skeleton standing there staring out to sea. A slight shift of shades showed him up again for what he was, the thin husk of a man, sharp-boned, stringy.

The American grunted and turned back toward his host. “What’s the matter with him?”

The governor said, “Him? He just doesn’t give a damn any more. He lost something and he can’t—I can’t let him—get it back.”

“What did he lose?”

The governor regarded him gravely. “You’re a businessman. You deal in dollars and cents and tons—You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and you might not let me finish.”

The American opened his mouth to protest, but the governor held up his hand and said, “Listen to that.”

The beachcomber’s cracked wail drifted out over the cluttered beach and the whispering surf. “Ahniroo!” he cried. “Ahni- Ahniroo!” Then for a long while he was silent, and it grew darker. Just as the sleepy sun pulled the blanket of horizon over its head, they saw the beachcomber’s shoulders slump. He turned and walked up the beach.

The American squinted at him. “I take it he isn’t as crazy as he looks?”

The governor shook his head. “You can put it that way.”

The American settled himself more comfortably. He didn’t care about the ‘comber particularly, or the governor either, for that matter. But he had to stay here another forty-eight hours, and there would be nothing to do until the mail steamer came except to sit and talk with the old boy. The man seemed to have at least one good yarn to tell, which was promising.

“Come on—give,” he grinned. “I’ll take your word for it. Don’t forget, I’m not used to this kind of country, or the funny business that goes on in it. Who is he, anyhow? And why is he calling out over the water? Gives me the creeps. Who’s Ahniroo—or what is it?”

The governor leaned back and looked up at a spider that would probably drop down someone’s collar before the evening was over, and he said nothing for quite a while. Then he began:

Ahniroo was a … a friend of the fellow’s. I doubt that any man has had a friend like that. As far as the man himself is concerned—yes, you may be right. Perhaps he isn’t quite all there. But after what he went through, the surprising thing is that he can talk fairly sensibly. Of course, he’s peculiar there, too—all he’ll talk about is Ahniroo, but he does it quite rationally.

He was a seaman, much like any other seaman. He had relatives ashore and was going to marry one of these years, perhaps; and there was a visit to the place where he was born, some day, when he could
walk into the town with a hundred-dollar bill in every pocket of a new suit. Like other seamen he saved his money and spent it and lost it and had it stolen from him, and like some other seamen he drank.

Being on the beach really started the whole thing for him. A sailor’s unemployment is unlike any other kind, in that it is so little dependent on the man’s whereabouts. A silk mill worker must starve around a silk mill before he can get his job, but a seaman can starve anywhere. If he is a real seaman, he is a painter and a general handyman, a stevedore and roustabout. Chances are that he can drive a truck or play a little music or can turn his hand at any of a thousand semiskilled trades. He may not know where he will eat next, but he can always find a bit of drink to warm him or cool him as the weather dictates. But Barry—our beachcomber over there—didn’t care much for eating, and didn’t do much of it for quite a while, except when it was forced on him. He concentrated on the drinking, and the more he drank the more reasons he found for drinking, until he couldn’t walk or sleep or work or travel or stay still without a little snort or two as a persuader. Not so good. He lost a lot of jobs ashore and afloat. When he had a job he’d guzzle to celebrate, and when he lost one he’d guzzle to console himself. You can imagine what happened.

It hit him in a small town on the Florida coast. He had just been fired from a little four-thousand ton freighter that ran coastwise and found that stopping in such half-forgotten whistle stops paid expenses. It was on the North American continent, but aside from that it hardly differed from these islands. It was hot and humid and a long, long way from anywhere else.

And Barry found himself sitting on the edge of a wooden sidewalk with his feet and his soul in the gutter, with no money and no job and no food in his stomach. He felt pretty good, being just halfway between a binge and a hangover. He stared for twenty minutes at a painted stone in the dusty road, just because his eyes happened to be directed that way. And before long a scorpion crept out from behind the stone and stood looking at him.

It was like no other scorpion he had ever seen. It was no larger than any other, and the same dark color, but instead of the formidable
pincers, it had
arms
. They were tiny and perfect and pink and soft, and had delicate hands and little diamond specks of fingernails. And—oh, yes, no joints, apparently. They were as sinuous as an elephant’s trunk. It was such an unheard-of thing to see that Barry stared at it for a long moment before he let himself believe what he had seen. Then he shook himself, shrugged drunkenly, and said: “I’ll be damned!” And then, addressing the strange scorpion, “Hi!”

The scorpion waved one of its perfect, impossible arms, and said, “You will be!” and then, “Hi yourself.”

Barry started so violently that he came to his feet. The liquor he had been sopping seemed to have collected in his knees; at any rate, those members were quite liquid and buckled under him, so that he fell on his face. He remembered the scorpion scuttling away, and then his forehead struck the painted stone and the lights went out for him.

Barry had been a strong man, but after two years of nursing from flat bottles, you wouldn’t have known it. He was no beauty. He had a long leather face and purple nose. His eyes were nearly as red as their lids, and his broad shoulders were built of toothpicks and parchment. Skin that had been taut with the solid muscle under it was now loose and dry, and fitted him as badly as the clothes he wore. He was a big fellow—six foot three at least, and he weighed all of a hundred and twenty-seven pounds.

The scorpion was the start of it, and the crack on the skull brought it on full strength. That’s right—the horrors. The good old creeping, crawling horrors. When he came to and hauled his ragged body back up to the sidewalk, he found himself in a new world, horribly peopled by things he couldn’t understand. There were soft white wriggling things—a carpet of them under his feet. Standing at bay in the doorway of a general store down the street was a gryphon, complete with flaming breath, horns and tail, frighteningly real, lifted bodily from an old book that had frightened him when he was a child. He heard a monstrous rustle over his head, and there was a real life prototype of Alice-in-Wonderland’s buck-toothed Jabberwock,
and it was out to get him. He shrieked and tried to run, and fell choking and splattering into the Slough of Despond from “Pilgrim’s Progress.” There was someone else in there with him—a scantily clad girl on skis from the front cover of a Paris magazine. She laughed and turned into a six-legged winged snake which bit at him viciously and vanished. He scrambled to his feet and plunged sobbing down the dusty road, and people on the sidewalks turned and stared and said, “Crazy with th’ heat,” and went on about their business, for heat madness was common among beached sailors in that country in August.

Barry staggered on out of town, which wasn’t very far, and out among the sand dunes and scrub and saw grass. He began to see things that he could not describe, devils and huge spiders and insects. In the angry blaze of the sun he slumped to his knees, sobbing, and then something clicked in his mind and he collapsed from sheer psychic exhaustion.

It was night, and very cool, when he woke again. There was half a moon and a billion stars, and the desertlike dunes were all black velvet and silver. The black and the gleam were crowded with strange life, but it was worse now than it had been in the daytime, because now he could feel what he couldn’t see. He
knew
that twenty feet away from him stood a great foul buzzard that stared steadily at him, and yet he could not see it. It was more than a fearsome sensation that the thing was there; he could feel each feather, every wrinkle of the crested, wattled neck, each calloused serration on its dry yellow legs. As he stared tremblingly into the mounding distances, he felt the grate of a bison’s hoof as it eyed him redly, ready to charge. The sound of a wolf’s teeth impacted on his skin rather than his eardrums, and he felt its rough tongue on its black lips. He screamed and ran toward the town, guided by his omnipresent seaman’s instinct, dodging and zigzagging among the silver dunes. Oh yes—he had ’em. He had the horrors really thoroughly.