Special Deliverance (22 page)

The weather, which had been fine and sunny during all the time since Lansing had first come into the world, turned cloudy and blustery. A sharp, cruel wind blew out of the northwest and at times there were short sleet squalls, the pellets of ice stinging his face.

As he came down the steep plunge into the bowl where the cube sat, a dull gray under the clouded sky, he saw that the card players were no longer there.

He reached the bottom of the hill and started across the level ground, aiming for the cube, head bent against the wind.

At the sound of a shout, he jerked his head up and there she was, running down the road toward him.

“Mary!” he shouted, breaking into a run.

Then she was in his arms, clinging to him. Tears ran down her cheeks as she lifted her head to take his kiss.

“I found your note,” she said. “I hurried. I was trying to catch up with you.”

“Thank God you’re here,” he said. “Thank God I found you.”

“Did the landlady at the inn give you my note?”

“She said you’d left one, but she lost it. Both of us looked for it. We tore the inn apart; we couldn’t find it.”

“I wrote you I was going to the city and would meet you there. Then I got lost in the badlands. I got off the trail and couldn’t find it again. I wandered for days, not knowing where I was, then all at once I climbed a hill and the city lay below me.”

“I’ve been hunting you ever since I got back to the singing tower. I found Sandra dead and—”

“She was dead before I left. I would have stayed, but the Wailer showed up. He kept edging in on me, closer all the time. I was afraid—Lord, how frightened I was. I headed for the inn. He trailed me all the way. I knew you would come to the inn to find me, but the landlady ordered me out. I had no money and she wouldn’t let me stay, so I wrote the note to you and left. The Wailer didn’t show up and it was all right, then I got lost.”

He kissed her. “It’s all right now,” he said. “We found one another. We are together.”

“Where is Jurgens? Is he with you?”

“He’s lost. He fell into Chaos.”

“Chaos? Edward, what is Chaos?”

“I’ll tell you later. There’ll be lots of time. Jorgenson and Melissa came back from the west, but they didn’t come with me.”

She stepped away from him.

“Edward,” she said.

“Yes, what is it, Mary?”

“I think I know our answer. It’s the cube. It was the cube all the time.”

“The cube?”

“I just thought of it, just awhile ago, walking down the road. Something that we overlooked. Something that we never thought of. It just came to me. I wasn’t even thinking of it, then suddenly I knew it.”

“Knew it? For God’s sake, Mary…”

“Well, I can’t be sure. But I think I’m right. You remember the flat stones that we found, the slabs of stone, the three of them, set into the sand? We had to brush them off to find them. They were covered with sand.”

“Yes, I remember. Yesterday the card players were sitting on one of them.”

“The card players? Why should the card players—”

“Never mind that now. What about the stones?”

“What if there were other stones? Stone forming a walk that led up to the cube? Three walks up to the cube. Put there so that anyone who wanted could walk up to the cube, safe from whatever it is that guards it. But covered by sand so the walks can’t be seen.”

“You mean…”

“Let’s have a look,” she said. “We could cut a tree branch or a bush and use it as a broom.”

“I’ll use it as a broom,” he said. “You stay back, out of the way.”

She said, meekly, “All right. I’ll be right behind you.”

They found a bush and cut it down.

As they approached the circle of sand, she said, “The sign is down. The warning sign, in Russian. You pounded it in again and now it’s down, mostly covered by the sand.”

“There’s someone here,” he said, “who works hard to make it tough on people. Notes are lost, signs are down, walks are covered. Which of the stones should we start with?”

“I don’t think it matters. If one doesn’t work out, we’ll try another.”

“If there are other stones, if there is a walk. What do we do when we get up to the cube?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He walked out on the slab and crouched cautiously at the end of it, reached out with the bush to brush at the sand. Underneath the brushing another slab showed through. He brushed some more.

“You are right,” he said. “There is another stone. Why didn’t we think of this to start with?”

“A mental lapse,” she said. “Brought on by apprehension. Jurgens had been crippled and that business with the Parson and the Brigadier had us scared.”

“I still am scared,” he said.

He cleaned the near end of the second slab, stepped out on it and swept the sand off the rest of it. Leaning out, he brushed at the sand in line with the second slab. Another slab appeared.

“Steppingstones,” said Mary. “Right up to the cube.”

“Once we get there, what happens?”

“We’ll find out then,” she said.

“What if nothing happens?”

“Look,” she said, “at least we will have tried.”

“I suppose there’s that,” he said.

“One more slab,” he said, wondering if there would be another slab. It would be just like the jokers who ran this business to lay out a path and leave it one stone short.

He leaned out and brushed, and there was another slab.

Mary moved up beside him and they stood together, facing the deep-blue wall of the cube. Lansing put out a hand and ran his palm flat across the wall.

“There is nothing,” he said. “I’ve been thinking all this time there might be a door. But there isn’t. If there were, you’d see at least a hairline crack. Just a wall, that’s all.”

“Push on it,” said Mary.

He pushed on it and there was a door. Quickly they stepped through it and the door hissed shut behind them.

T
HEY STOOD IN AN enormous room filled with blue light. Tapestries hung about the walls, and between the tapestries were windows—those portions of the walls not masked by the tapestries. Scattered all about the room were groupings of furniture. In an upholstered basket close to the door a curled-up creature slept. It resembled a cat, but was not a cat.

“Edward,” said Mary, breathlessly, “those windows look out on the world we left. There could have been people in here watching us both now and the other time that we were here.”

“One-way glass,” said Lansing. “A visitor can’t see in, but can be seen from inside the room.”

“It isn’t glass,” she said.

“Well, of course it’s not, but the principle’s the same.”

“They were sitting here,” said Mary, “laughing at us while we were trying to get in.”

The room, in all its emptiness, seemed to be unoccupied. Then Lansing saw them. Sitting in a row on a large couch at the far end of the room were the four card players, sitting there and waiting, their dead-white, skull-like faces staring fixedly at them.

Lansing nudged Mary and gestured at the players. When she saw them, she shrank back against him.

“They’re horrible,” she said. “Will we never get away from them?”

“They have a way of turning up,” he said.

The tapestries, he saw, were not normal tapestries. They moved—or, rather, the scenes that were depicted on them moved. A brook sparkled in the sun and the little waves and eddies brought about as the water gurgled down a rocky incline were actual, moving waves and eddies, not cleverly painted waves and eddies. The branches of the trees that grew along the brook moved in the wind and birds flew about among them. A rabbit crouched, nibbling in a patch of clover, then hopped to another place and resumed its nibbling.

On another of the tapestries young maidens, clothed in gauzelike veils, danced blithely in a forest glade to the piping of a faun who, in his playing, danced more energetically, although less gracefully, than the maidens, his cloven hoofs thumping on the sod. The trees that sur rounded the glade, great misshapen, not quite ordinary, trees, were swaying to the music, also dancing to the pipe.

“We might as well,” said Mary, “go across the room and see what it is they want of us.”

“If they’ll talk to us,” said Lansing. “They may just sit and look at us.”

They started walking down the room. It was a long, awkward length of space to cover with the card players watching, without a muscle moving in their faces. These could be the kind of men, if they were men, who might find it impossible to move their lips to smile, impossible to laugh, impossible to be human.

They sat, unmoving, in a row upon the couch, their hands placed firmly on their knees, with never a flicker of expression to indicate they saw anything at all.

They were so alike, so like four peas in a pod, that Lansing could not think of them as four, but only as a single entity, as if the four were one. He did not know their names. He had never heard their names. He wondered if they might, in fact, have no names. To distinguish one from the other, he assigned them identities, mentally tying tags upon them. Starting from the left, he would think of them as A, B, C and D.

Resolutely, he and Mary marched down the length of room. They came to a halt some six feet from where the players sat. They came to a halt and waited. So far as the card players were concerned, it seemed, they were not even there.

I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to speak, Lansing told himself. I’ll stand here till they speak. I’ll make them speak.

He put his arm around Mary’s shoulder and held her close against him, the two of them standing side by side, facing the silent players.

Finally A spoke to them, the thin slash of mouth moving just a little, as if it were an effort to force out the words.

“So,” he said, “you have solved the problem.”

“You take us by surprise,” said Mary. “We are not aware a problem has been solved.”

“We might have solved it sooner,” Lansing said, “if we had known what the problem was. Or even that there was a problem. Now, since you say we’ve solved it, what happens? Do we get to go back home?”

“No one ever solves it the first time round,” said B. “They always must come back.”

“You’ve not answered my question,” said Lansing. “What happens now? Do we go back home?”

“Oh, my, no,” said D. “No, you don’t go home. We could not let you go.”

“You must realize,” said C, “that we get so few of you. Out of a few of the groups we may get one, almost never two, as is the case with you. Out of the most of them, we get none at all.”

“They go fumbling off in all directions,” said A. “They go bolting off, seeking sanctuary in the apple-blossom world or they become entranced with the translators or they—”

“By translators,” Mary said, “you mean the machines in the city that keep crooning to themselves?”

“That is our name for them,” said B. “Perhaps you can think of a better name.”

“I wouldn’t even try,” said Mary.

“There’s Chaos,” Lansing said. “That must gobble up a lot of them. Yet you threw me a rope at Chaos.”

“We threw you the rope,” said A, “because you tried to save the robot. At the risk of your own life, never hesitating, you tried to save the robot.”

“I thought he was worth saving. He was a friend of mine.”

“He well might have been worth saving,” said A, “but he used poor judgment. Here we have no place for those who have poor judgment.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at,” said Lansing, angrily. “I don’t like the way you sit in judgment. I don’t like anything about the four of you and I never have.”

“As we go,” said D, “we are getting nowhere. I grant you the privilege of the animosity that you bear us. But we cannot allow petty bickering to sway us from the need to talk with one another.”

“Another thing,” said Lansing. “If the talk promises to be of any length, we do not propose to stand here before you like supplicants before a throne. You at least might have the decency to provide us a place to sit.”

“By all means, sit,” said A. “Drag over a couple of chairs and be comfortable.”

Lansing walked to one side of the room and came back with chairs. The two of them sat down.

The creature that had been sleeping in the basket came strolling across the floor, sniffling as it came. It rubbed affectionately against Mary’s legs and lay down on her feet. It gazed up at her with eyes of liquid friendliness.

“Can this be the Sniffler?” she asked. “It prowled about our campfires, but we never caught a glimpse of it.”

“This is your sniffler,” said C. “There are a number of snifflers; this one was assigned to you.”

“The sniffler watched us?”

“Yes, it watched you.”

“And reported back?”

“Naturally,” said C.

“You watched us every minute,” Lansing said. “You never missed a lick. You knew everything we did. You read us like a book. Would you mind telling me what is going on?”

“Willingly,” said A. “You’ve earned the right to know. By coming here, you have earned the right to know.”

“If you’ll only listen,” said B, “we shall attempt to tell you.”

“We’re listening,” said Mary.

“You know, of course,” said A, “about the multiplicity of worlds, worlds splitting off at crisis points to form still other worlds. And I take it you are acquainted with the evolutionary process.”

“We know of evolution,” Mary said. “A system of sorting out to make possible the selection of the fittest.”

“Exactly. If you think about it, you will see that the splitting off of alternate worlds is an evolutionary process.”

“You mean for the selection of better worlds? Don’t you have some trouble with the definition of a better world?”

“Yes, of course we do. That’s the reason you are here. That’s the reason we have brought many others here. Evolution, as such, does not work. It operates on the basis of the development of dominant life forms. In many cases the survival factors that make for dominance in themselves are faulty. All of them have flaws; many of them carry the seeds of their own destruction.”

“That is true,” said Lansing. “On my own world we have developed a mechanism which enables us, if we wish or blunder into it, to commit racial suicide.”

“The human race, with its intelligence,” said B, “is a life form too finely tuned to be allowed to waste itself—to commit, as you say, racial suicide. It is true, of course, that when, and if, the race dwindles to extinction, a successor will arise, some other life form with a survival factor greater than intelligence. What that factor might be, we cannot imagine. It would not necessarily be superior to intelligence. The trouble with the human race is that it has never given the intelligence it possesses the opportunity to develop to its full potential.”

“You think you have a way to develop that full potential?” Mary asked.

“We hope we have,” said D.

“You have seen this world you now are on,” said A. “You have had the opportunity to guess at some of its accomplishments, at the direction in which its technology was trending.”

“Yes, we have,” said Lansing. “The doors that open on other worlds. A better concept than world-seekers in my world have come up with. Back home we dream of starships. Only dream of them, for they may not be possible. Although, come to think of it, on Jurgens’s world Earth was empty because its people had gone out to the stars.”

“Do you know,” asked C, “if they ever got there?”

“I assume they did,” said Lansing. “But no, I don’t know they did.”

“And there are what you call the translators,” said Mary. “Another way to travel—to travel and to learn. I suppose you could utilize the method to study the entire universe, bring back ideas and concepts the human race might never have dreamed of on its own. Edward and I were only caught on the edges of it. The Brigadier rushed in and was lost. Could you tell us where he went?”

“That we cannot do,” said A. “Used improperly, the method can be dangerous.”

“Yet you leave it open,” Lansing said. “Callously, you leave it open, a trap for unwary visitors.”

“There,” said D, “you have hit exactly on the point. The unwary are eliminated from consideration. In our plan we have no use for those who act as fools.”

“The way you eliminated Sandra at the singing tower and Jurgens on the slopes of Chaos.”

“I sense hostility,” said D.

“You’re damned right you sense hostility. I am hostile. You eliminated four of us.”

“You were lucky,” A told him. “More often than not an entire band is eliminated. But not by anything we do. They are eliminated by the faults within themselves.”

“And the people at the camp? The refugee camp near the singing tower?”

“They are the failures. They gave up. Gave up and ‘hunkered down.’ You two did not give up. That’s why you are here.”

“We’re here,” said Lansing, “because Mary always believed the answer lay within this cube.”

“And by the force of her belief, you solved the riddle of the cube,” said A.

“That’s true,” said Lansing. “Being true, then why am I here? Because I tagged along with Mary?”

“You’re here because, along the way, you made the right decisions.”

“At Chaos I made a wrong decision.”

“We don’t think you did,” said C. “A matter of survival, while important, is not always a correct decision. There are decisions that can ignore survival.”

Sniffler, resting on Mary’s feet, had gone fast asleep.

“You make moral decisions,” said Lansing, angrily. “You’re great decision makers. And with such certainty. Tell me, just who the hell are you? The last survivors of the humans who lived upon this world?”

“No, we’re not,” said A. “We can’t even claim that we are human. Our home is on a planet on the far side of the galaxy.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I don’t know if we can tell you so you’ll understand. There’s no word in your language that adequately expresses what we are. For the want of a better term, you might think of us as social workers.”

“Social workers!” said Lansing. “For the love of Christ! It has come to this. The human race has need of social workers. We’ve sunk so low in the galactic ghetto that we need social workers!”

“I told you,” said A, “that the term was not precise. But consider this: Within the galaxy there are few intelligences that have the potential promise of you humans. Yet, unless something can be done about it, you are headed for extinction—all of you. Even so great a civilization as once existed on this alternate world went down to nothing. Folly brought it down—economic folly, political folly. You, Lansing, must know that if someone presses a button, your world is gone as well. You, Miss Owen, lived on a world that is heading for a great disaster. Someday soon the empires will fall and from the wreckage it will take thousands of years for a new civilization to arise, if it ever does. Even if it does, it may be a worse civilization than the one you know. On all the alternate worlds, disasters loom in one guise or another. The human race got off to a bad start and has not improved. It was doomed from the first beginning. The solution, as we see it, is to recruit a cadre of selected humans from all the many worlds, using them to give the race a new beginning and a second chance.”