One and Wonder (35 page)

“Boy!” I said. “Do you tan quickly! Couple of minutes ago, you were as white as the bed sheet.”

The gladiator shaded his eyes from the twin suns. “Is this yet another guise of the magician Garor to drive me insane—an Earthman here, on the Plains of Istak? Or am I already—mad?” His voice was deep, smoothly modulated.

My own was perfectly normal. Indeed, after the initial effort, I felt perfectly normal, except for the heat.

I said: “That's the growing idea where I've just come from—that you're going nuts.”

You know those half-dreams, just on the verge of sleep, in which you can control your own imagery to some extent? That's how I felt. I knew intuitively what Steve was getting at when he said I could play it off the cuff. I looked down. Tweed suit, brogues—naturally. That's what I was wearing when I last looked at myself. I had no reason to think I was wearing—and therefore to be wearing—anything else. But something cooler was indicated in this heat, generated by Marsham Craswell's imagination.

Something like his own gladiator costume, perhaps.

Sandals—fine. There were my feet—in sandals.

Then I laughed. I had nearly fallen into the error of accepting his imagination.

“Do you mind if I switch off one of those suns?” I asked politely. “It's a little hot.”

I gave one of the suns a very dirty look. It disappeared.

The gladiator raised his sword. “You are—Garor!” he cried. “But your witchery shall not avail you against the Sword!”

He rushed forward. The shining blade cleaved the air towards my skull.

I thought very, very fast.

The sword clanged, and streaked off at a sharp tangent from my G.I. brain-pan protector. I'd last worn that homely piece of hardware in the Argonne, and I knew it would stop a mere sword. I took it off.

“Now listen to me, Marsham Craswell,” I said. “My name's Pete Parnell, of the Sunday
Star,
and—”

Craswell looked up from his sword, chest heaving, startled eyes bright as if with recognition. “Wait! I know now who you are—Nelpar Retrep, Man of the Seven Moons, come to fight with me against the Snake and his ungodly disciple, magician and sorceress, Garor. Welcome, my friend!”

He held out a huge bronzed hand. I shook it.

It was obvious that, unable to rationalize—or irrationalize—me, he was writing me into the plot of his dream! Right. It had been amusing so far. I'd string along for a while. My imagination hadn't taken a licking—yet.

Craswell said: “My followers, the great-hearted Dok-men of the Blue Hills, have just been slain in a gory battle. We were about to brave the many perils of the Plains of Istak in our quest for the Diamond—but all this, of course, you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “What now?”

Craswell turned suddenly, pointed. “There,” he muttered. “A sight that strikes terror even into my heart—Garor returns to the battle, at the head of
her dread Legion of Lakros, beasts of the Overwork!, drawn into evil symbiosis with alien intelligences—invulnerable to men, but not to the Sword, or to the mighty weapons of Nelpar of the Seven Moons. We shall fight them alone!”

Racing across the vast plain of green dust towards us was a horde of . . . er . . . creatures. My vocabulary can't cope fully with Craswell's imagination. Gigantic, shimmering things, drooling thick ichor, half-flying, half-lolloping. Enough to say I looked around for a washbasin to spit in. I found one, with soap and towels complete, but I pushed it over, looked at a patch of green dust and thought hard.

The outline of the phone booth wavered a little before I could fix it. I dashed inside, dialed. “Police H.Q.? Riot squad here—and quick!”

I stepped outside the booth. Craswell was whirling the Sword round his head, yelling war cries as he faced the onrushing monsters.

From the other direction came the swelling scream of a police siren. Half a dozen good, solid patrol cars screeched to a dust-spurting stop outside the phone booth. I don't have to think hard to get a New York cop car fixed in my mind. These were just right. And the first man out, running to my side and patting his cap on firmly, was just right, too.

Michael O'Faolin, the biggest, toughest, nicest cop I know.

“Mike,” I said, pointing. “Fix ‘em.”

“Shure, an’ it's an aisy job f'the bhoys I've brought along,” said Mike, hitching his belt.

He deployed his men.

Craswell looked at them fanning out to take the charge, then staggered back towards me, hand over his eyes. “Madness!” he shouted. “What madness is this? What are you doing?”

For a moment, the whole scene wavered. The lone red sun blinked out, the green desert became a murky transparency through which I caught a split-second glimpse of white beds with two figures lying on them. Then Craswell uncovered his eyes.

The monsters began to diminish some twenty yards from the riot squad. By the time they got to the cops, they were man-size, and very amenable to discipline—enforced by raps over their horny noggins with nightsticks. They were bundled into the squad cars, which set off again over the plains.

Michael O'Faolin remained. I said: “Thanks, Mike. I may have a couple of spare tickets for the big fight tomorrow night. See you later.”

“Just what I was wantin’, Pete. ‘Tis me day off. Now, how do I get home?”

I opened the door of the phone booth. “Right inside.” He stepped in. I turned to Craswell.

“Mighty magic, O Nelpar!” he exclaimed. “To creatures of Garor's
mind you opposed creatures of your own!”

He'd woven the whole incident into his plot already.

“We must go forward now, Nelpar of the Seven Moons—forward to the Citadel of the Snake, a thousand lokspans over the burning Plains of Istak.”

“How about the Diamond?”

“The Diamond—?”

Evidently, he'd run so far ahead of himself getting me fixed into the landscape that he'd forgotten all about the Diamond that could kill the Snake. I didn't remind him.

However, a thousand lokspans over the burning plains sounded a little too far for walking, whatever a lokspan might be.

I said: “Why do you make things tough for yourself, Craswell?”

“The name,” he said with tremendous dignity, “is Multan.”

“Multan, Sultan, Shashlik, Dikkidam, Hammaneggs or whatever polysyllabic pooh-bah you wish to call yourself—I still ask, why make things tough for yourself when there's plenty of cabs around? Just whistle.”

I whistled. The Purple Cab swung in, perfect to the last detail, including a hulking-backed, unshaven driver, dead ringer for the impolite gorilla who'd brought me out to Pentagon that evening.

There is nothing on earth quite so unutterably prosaic as a New York Purple Cab with that sort of driver. The sight upset Craswell, and the green plains wavered again while he struggled to fit the cab into his dream.

“What new magic is this! You are indeed mighty, Nelpar!”

He got in. But he was trembling with the effort to maintain the structure of this world into which he had escaped, against my deliberate attempts to bring it crashing round his ears and restore him to colourless—but sane—normality.

At this stage, I felt curiously sorry for him; but I realized that it might only be by permitting him to reach the heights of creative imagery before dousing him with the sponge from the cold bucket that I could jerk his drifting ego back out of dreamland.

It was dangerous thinking. Dangerous—for me.

Craswell’s thousand lokspans appeared to be the equivalent of ten blocks. Or perhaps he wanted to gloss over the mundane near-reality of a cab ride. He pointed forward, past the drivers shoulder: “The Citadel of the Snake!”

To me, it looked remarkably like a wedding cake designed by Dali in red plastic: ten stories high, each storey a platter half a mile thick, each platter diminishing in size and offset to the one beneath so that the edifice spiraled towards the glossy sky.

The cab rolled into its vast shadow, stopped beneath the sheer, blank precipice of the base platter, which might have been two miles in diameter.
Or three. Or four. What's a mile or two among dreamers?

Craswell hopped out quickly. I got out on the driver's side.

The driver said: “Dollar-fifty.”

Square, unshaven jaw, low forehead, dirty-red hair straggling under his cap. I said: “Comes high for a short trip.”

“Lookit the clock,” he growled, squirming his shoulders. “Do I come out and get it?”

I said sweetly: “Go to hell.”

Cab and driver shot downward through the green sand with the speed of an express elevator. The hole closed up. The times I've wanted to do just that—

Craswell was regarding me open-mouthed. I said: “Sorry. Now I'm being escapist, too. Get on with the plot.”

He muttered something I didn't catch, strode across to the red wall in which a crack, meeting place of mighty gates, had appeared, and raised his sword.

“Open, Garor! Your doom is nigh, Multan and Nelpar are here to brave the terrors of this Citadel and free the world from the tyranny of the Snake!” He hammered at the crack with the sword-hilt.

“Not so loud,” I murmured. “You'll wake the neighbours. Why not use the bell-push?” I put my thumb on the button and pressed. The towering gates swung slowly open.

“You. . . you have been here before—”

“Yes—after my last lobster supper.” I bowed. “After you.” I followed him into a great, echoing tunnel with fluorescent walls. The gates closed behind us. He paused and looked at me with an odd gleam in his eyes. A gleam of—sanity. And there was anger in the set of his lips. Anger for me, not Garor or the Snake.

It's not nice to have someone trampling all over your ego. Pride is a tiger—even in dreams. The subconscious, as Steve had explained to me, is a function or state of the brain, not a small part of it. In thwarting Craswell, I was disparaging not merely his dream, but his very brain, sneering at his intellectual integrity, at his abilities as an imaginative writer. In a brief moment of rationality, I believe he was strangely aware of this.

He said quietly: “You have limitations, Nelpar. Your outward-turning eyes are blind to the pain of creation; to you the crystal stars are spangles on the dress of a scarlet woman, and you mock the God-blessed unreason that would make life more than the crawling of an animal from womb to grave. In tearing the veil from mystery, you destroy not mystery—for there are many mysteries, a million veils, world within and beyond worlds—but beauty. And in destroying beauty, you destroy your soul.”

These last words, quiet as they sounded, were caught up by the curving
walls of the huge tunnel, amplified then diminished in pulsing repetition, loud then soft, a surging hypnotic echo: “Destroy your SOUL, DESTROY your soul. SOUL—”

Craswell pointed with his sword. His voice was exultant. “There is a veil, Nelpar—and you must tear it lest it become your shroud! The Mist—the Sentient Mist of the Citadel!”

I'll admit that, for a few seconds, he'd had me a little groggy. I felt—subdued. And I understood for the first time his power as a word-spinner.

I knew that it was vital for me to reassert myself.

A thick, grey mist was rolling, wreathing slowly towards us, filling the tunnel to roof-height, puffing out thick, groping tentacles.

“It lives on Life itself,” Craswell shouted. “It feeds, not on flesh, but on the vital principle that animates all flesh. I am safe, Nelpar, for I have the Sword. Can your magic save you?”

“Magic!” I said. “There's no gas invented yet that'll get through a Mark 8 mask.”

Gas-drill—face-piece first, straps behind the ears. No, I hadn't forgotten the old routine.

I adjusted the mask comfortably. “And if it's not gas,” I added, “this will fix it.” I felt over my shoulder, unclipped a nozzle, brought it round into the “ready” position.

I had only used a one-man flame-thrower once—in training—but the experience was etched on my memory.

This was a deluxe model. At the first thirty-foot oily, searing blast, the Mist curled in on itself and rolled back the way it had come. Only quicker.

I shucked off the trappings. “You were in the Army for a while, Craswell. Remember?”

The shining translucency of the walls dimmed suddenly, and beyond them I glimpsed, as in a movie close-up through an unfocused projector, the square, intense face of Steve Blakiston.

Then the walls re-formed, and Craswell, still the bronzed, naked-limbed giant of his imagination, was looking at me again, frowning, worried. “Your words are strange, O Nelpar. It seems you are master of mysteries beyond even my knowing.”

I put on the sort of face I use when the sports editor queries my expenses, aggrieved, pleading. “Your trouble, Craswell, is that you don't want to know. You just won't remember. That's why you're here. But life isn't bad if you oil it a little. Why not snap out of this and come with me for a drink?”

“I do not understand,” he muttered. “But we have a mission to perform. Follow.” And he strode off.

Mention of drink reminded me. There was nothing wrong with my memory. And that tunnel was as hot as the green desert. I remembered a
very small pub just off the street-car depot end of Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland. A ginger-whiskered ancient, an exile from the Highlands, who’d listened to me enthusing over a certain brand of Scotch. “If ye think that's guid, mon, ye'll no’ tasted the brew from ma own private deestillery. Smack yer lips ower this, laddie—” And he'd produced an antique silver flask and poured a generous measure of golden whisky into my glass. I had never tasted such mellow nectar before or since. Until I was walking down the tunnel behind Craswell.

I nearly envisaged the glass, but changed my mind in time to make it the antique flask. I raised it to my lips. Imagination's a wonderful thing.

Craswell was talking. I'd nearly forgotten him.

“. . . near the Hall of Madness, where strange music assaults the brain, weird harmonies that enchant, then kill, rupturing the very cells by a mixture of subsonic and supersonic frequencies. Listen!”

We had reached the end of the tunnel and stood at the top of a slope which, broadening, ran gently downward, veiled by a blue haze, like the smoke from fifty million cigarettes, filling a vast circular hall. The haze eddied, moved by vagrant, sluggish currents of air, and revealed on the farther side, dwarfed by distance but obviously enormous, a complex structure of pipes and consoles.