The Crack In Space (18 page)

‘I could destroy you,’ the old Sinanthropus said. He no longer seemed much impressed by George Walt’s line of argument. ‘But I am frankly too disappointed to care one way or another. It’s clear to me, and I will soon see that it’s equally clear to my people, that you Homo sapiens are a treacherous lot. Probably best avoided.’ To Jim he said, ‘Is that so?’

‘We’re known for that,’ Jim agreed.

‘And that’s how you triumphed originally over our ancestors on this parallel world?’

‘You’re damn right,’ Jim said. He added, ‘And we’d do it again, given half a chance.’

‘Probably you would not genuinely have delivered that museum of yours to us,’ the Sinanthropus said, ‘the name of which I have already forgotten. Well, no matter. Obviously it’s impossible to do business with you Homo sapiens; you’re adept, polished liars. Nothing we agreed on would remain truly binding in such a milieu. My people lack even a name for such conduct.’

‘No wonder we had so little trouble wiping you out,’ Jim said.

‘In view of your dedication to fraud,’ the Sinanthropus said, ‘I see no real point in my remaining here; the longer I go on, the more immersed I become. Personally, I regret this whole encounter; my people have suffered by it already. God knows what would become of us if we were so naive as to try to continue.’ An unhappy expression on his face, the aged, white-haired Sinanthropus turned his back and walked away from Jim Briskin and George Walt. ‘It would be unnatural for people of our race to seek to participate in an exclusively destructive relationship,’ he said, over his shoulder. And vanished. One moment he stood there, the next he had gone. Even George Walt seemed taken aback; both eyes blinked. The Sinanthropus, by means of his so called magic, had returned to his own world.

‘Smart,’ George Walt said, presently. ‘You handled that extremely well, Briskin. I never saw it coming. One hundred years of work gone down the drain. Give me my arm back and we’ll call it quits; I’m too old to go through this kind of thing any more.’ The head added, ‘You’re probably right. After all, politically speaking, Briskin is a professional; he can run rings around us. What happened here just now demonstrates that.’

‘Honesty generally wins out,’ Jim said.

‘You call that trash you peddled to that half-animal just now—you call that honesty? I never heard such a mass of twisted  . . .’ George Walt broke off, then. ‘Like everybody else. I more or less trusted you, Briskin. It never occurred to me you’d trade on such techniques to win an issue. Your integrity’s just a myth! Probably dreamed up by your campaign manager.’

‘You mean you actually are their Wind God?’

‘Pragmatically speaking, yes. Every one of us, in relation to them, are gods  . . . speaking in terms of the evolutionary hierarchy, anyhow, in the broadest possible sense.’

Jim said, ‘Was it you who enabled them to shoot apart the QB observation satellite?’

Nodding, George Walt said, ‘Yes, it was. By my magic.’

‘What you mean,’ Jim said, ‘is that you ferried a ground-to-air guided missile over to them. Magic, my foot.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘I have to get back down to Earth; I’ve got a major speech to record. You care to accompany me back to my ‘hopper?’

‘I’m busy,’ George Walt said curtly. ‘I have to fit my arm back on. This whole business makes me sick, and not only that, terribly angry; I’m going to initiate beamed broadcasts twenty-four hours a day on all frequencies denouncing you, as soon as I can get the satellite’s transmitter started up again. I look forward to your losing in November, Briskin; that’s the one nice thing I can count on.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Jim said, shrugging. He left the office, made his way to the elevator. Behind him, George Walt brought a tool kit out from their desk and began the task of repairing the damage to the artificial body which Jim Briskin had purposefully accomplished. The expression on George Walt’s face was one of great gloom.

In his entrenched position, along with other company personnel, on the outskirts of the flank of the TD administration building in Washington, D.C., Don Stanley noted all at once, and to his complete surprise, a sudden lull in the fierce racket from the Pekes within.

‘Some darn thing has happened,’ Howard conjectured, also aware of the unexpected silence. ‘We better get set for another rush; they’re probably determined to overwhelm us this time. Before that idiot Schwarz can get army . . .’

‘Wait,’ Stanley said, listening. ‘You know what I think? I think the fliegemer Pekes are gone.’

Puzzled, Howard said, ‘Gone where?’

Rising to his haunches Stanley peered at the administration building, at the shattered windows on the nearest side, and the conviction came to him stronger than ever that the building was now, for some totally obscure and merciful reason, deserted. With caution, aware of the acute risk he was taking, he began to walk slowly step by step toward the front entrance.

‘They’ll pop you out of existence,’ Howard called to him warningly, ‘with those funny little weapons of theirs; better get back down, you half-wit.’ But he, too, stood up. So did a number of armed company police.

Opening the familiar front door of the building, Stanley peeped inside.

He saw no sign of Pekes anywhere. The halls were empty and silent. The invasion by the chinless dawn men from the parallel Earth had ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and somewhat more mysteriously.

Howard, joining him, said, ‘Um, we scared them off.’

‘Scared them off nothing. They changed their collective minds.’ Stanley started in the direction of the elevator leading to the floor one subsurface labs. ‘I have an intuition,’ he said over his shoulder to Howard. ‘And I want to verify it as soon as I can.’

When he and Howard reached the labs, Stanley discovered that he was right  . . . and a good thing, too. The nexus joining the two parallel Earths had vanished.

‘They  . . . closed it down,’ Howard said, wonderingly craning his neck, as if expecting to see it crop up once more in a remote comer.

‘So now,’ Stanley murmured, ‘our problem is to reopen our own earlier nexus. The original one. And make the try to relocate our colonists before the moment in which they’re wiped out.’ The chances of success struck him as being not very good, and yet of course the attempt had to be made.

‘Why do you think they called their invasion off?’ Howard asked.

Stanley gestured emptily. ‘Maybe they didn’t like it here after all.’ Who knew? Certainly he did not. Perhaps they would never know. In any case they had their work cut out for them; several thousand men and women on the other side were wholly dependent on them for their lives. For their safe return to this world. Remembering the human skeletons which had been dredged up from the swamp a hundred years hence. Stanley felt deep forebodings. At best we can only save some of them, he realized. But that’s better than nothing. Even if we save only one life, it’s worth it.

‘How long do you think it’ll take to make contact with our people stranded over there?’ Howard asked him. ‘A day? As long as a week?’

‘Let’s find out,’ Stanley said shortly, and started at once in the direction of the power supply of Dar Pethel’s defective Jiffi-scuttler.

The depressing task of bringing the colonists back from alter-Earth had begun.

FOURTEEN

In November, despite the abusive broadcasts from the Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite, or because of them, Jim Briskin succeeded in nosing out the incumbent Bill Schwarz and thereby won the presidential election.

So now, at long last, Salisbury Heim said to himself, we have a Negro President of the United States. A new epoch in human understanding has arrived.

At least, let’s hope so.

‘What we need,’ Patricia said meditatively, ‘is a party, so we can celebrate.’

‘I’m too tired to celebrate,’ Sal said. It had been a tough haul from the nominating convention to this; he remembered clearly every inch of it. The worst part, it went without saying, had been the collapse of the abortive emigration program announced in Jim’s Chicago speech; why that had not put a permanent end to Jim’s election chances, Sal Heim did not know even at this late date. Perhaps it was because Bill Schwarz had managed to move so adroitly, had embroiled himself—deliberately—in the situation; hence much, if not most, of the ultimate blame had fallen on him, not on Jim.

‘But we deserve to take a little time off to relax,’ Pat pointed out. ‘We’ve been working for months; if we go on this way  . . .’

‘One beer at one small bar,’ Sal decided. ‘And then bed. I’ll compromise at that.’ He did not especially enjoy going out in public, these days; inevitably he rubbed up against some individual who had been a part of the colonizing effort on alter-Earth or who, anyhow, had a brother-in-law who had gone trustingly over there. Such encounters had been rather unpleasant; he always found himself trying to answer questions which simply could not be answered. Why’d you get us into that? had been the primary inquiry, asked in a variety of ways, but still always amounting to the same thing. And yet, despite this, they had won.

‘I think we should get together with a few people,’ Pat disagreed. ‘Certainly with Jim; that goes without saying. And then Leon Turpin, if he’ll join us, because after all it was Mr Turpin who got us off the hook by bringing those people back to our world—or anyhow his engineers did. Someone at TD did. It was TD that saved us, Sal; let’s finally face it and give credit where credit is due.’

‘All right,’ Sal said. ‘Just so long as that little Kansas City businessman who showed up with that defective ‘scuttler isn’t along; that’s all I insist on.’ The man on account of whom all the trouble had broken out in the first place. At the moment, Sal could not even recall his name, an obvious Freudian block.

‘The one I blame,’ Pat said, ‘is Lurton Sands.’

‘Then don’t invite him either,’ Sal said. But there was hardly much chance of that; Sands was in prison, right now, for his crime against the sleeping bibs and his ridiculous attempt on Jim’s life. As was Cally Vale for having lasered the ‘scuttler repairman. That whole business had been excessively melancholy, both intrinsically and as a conspicuous harbinger of the difficulties which it had ushered into their collective lives, difficulties which by no means were over.

‘You know,’ Pat said fretfully, ‘there’s one thing that still, right now, I can’t quite get out of my mind. I keep having this sneaking, nervous anxiety that . . ..’ She smiled at him uneasily, her jessamine lips twitching. ‘I hope I don’t pass it on to you, but . . .’

‘But deep down inside,’ Sal finished for her, ‘you’re afraid a few of those Pekes have stayed on this side.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded.

Sal said, ‘I get the same damn intimation, now and then. Late at night, I keep looking out of the comer of my eye, especially on the street when I see someone furtive looking hurrying away around a comer to get out of sight. And the funny thing is that from what Jim tells me, I know he feels exactly the same way. Maybe we all have a residual sense of guilt connected with the Pekes  . . . after all, we did invade their world first. It’s our consciences bothering us.’

Shivering, as she was wearing only a weightless Tafek-web negligee, his wife said, ‘I hope that’s all it is. Because I’d really hate to run into a Peke some dark night; I’d think right away that they’d opened a nexus again into our world at some point and were very carefully, secretly, ferrying a wide stream of their cousins and aunts across.’

As if we’re not desperately overcrowded as it is, Sal thought, without having to cope with that any more.

‘What I can never comprehend,’ he murmured, ‘is why they didn’t accept our liberal offer of the Smithsonian. And for that matter the Library of Congress. Gosh, they pulled out without getting anything.’

‘Pride,’ Pat said.

‘No.’ Sal shook his head.

‘Stupidity, then. Dumb, dawn-man stupidity. There’s no frontal lobe inside that sloping forehead.’

‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘But how can you expect one species to follow the logic of another? They operate at their level ; we operate at ours. And never the twain will meet  . . . I hope.’ Anyhow not in his lifetime, he said to himself. Maybe a later generation will be open-minded enough to accept such things, but not now; not we who inhabit this world at this particular moment.

‘Shall I ask Mr Turpin to come here to our place?’ Pat asked. ‘Are we going to have the party here?’

‘Maybe Turpin won’t want to celebrate Jim’s victory,’ Sal said. ‘He and Schwarz were pretty thick through most of the campaign.’

‘Let me ask you something,’ Pat said suddenly. ‘Do you think George Walt really are a Wind God? After all, they were born with two bodies and four arms and legs, the artificial part wasn’t installed until much later. So originally they were exactly what they pretended to be. Jim didn’t tell that Sinanthropus that.’

‘You’re darn right he didn’t,’ Sal said vigorously. ‘And don’t you rock the boat out of any misplaced ethical motives  . . . you hear?’

‘Okay,’ she said, nodding.

Outside on the sidewalk a gang of well-wishers yelled up praise and slogans of congratulations; the racket filtered into the conapt, and Sal went to glance out the living room window.

Some Cols, he saw. And also some Whites. Just what he hoped to see; just what the entire struggle had been about. How long it had been in coming  . . . almost two centuries more than it should have taken. The mind of man was uncommonly stubborn and slow to change. Reformers, including himself, were always prone to forget that. Victory always seemed just around the corner. But generally it was not, after all.

A vote for Jim Briskin, he thought, recalling the clichés and tirades of the campaign, is a vote for humanity itself. Stale now, and always oversimplified, and yet deep underneath substantially true. The slogan had embodied the motor which had driven them on, which had, finally, enabled them to win. And now what? Sal asked himself. The big problems, every one of them, still remained. The bibs, in their all too many warehouses throughout the nation, had become the property of Jim Briskin and the Republican-Liberal Party. As had the desolate, roving packs of unemployed Cols, not to mention the unhappy lower fringes of the white in-group  . . . men such as Mr Hadley, who had been the first White to emigrate, as well as nearly the first to come stumbling back, after the nexus had, mercifully, been reopened.

It’ll be a hard four years for Jim, he realized soberly. He’s inherited a vast, savage burden from Schwarz. If he thinks he’s worn down now, he should see himself next year or the year after that. But I guess that’s what he wants. I hope so, anyhow.

Did we get or learn anything from our unexpected confrontation with the Pekes? he wondered.

It showed us, he decided, that the difference between say myself and the average Negro is so damn slight, by every truly meaningful criterion, that for all intents and purposes it doesn’t exist. When something like that, a contact with a race that’s not Homo sapiens, occurs, at last we can finally see this. And I don’t mean just myself; it was given to me to see this from the start. I mean the ordinary (statistically speaking) fat, mean slob who plops down next to you on a jet-hopper, snatches up a homeopape that someone’s left, reads a headline, and then begins to spout right and left his miserable opinions. So maybe, in the final analysis, this is what won the election for Jim. Could it be? Admittedly, we can never be certain. But we can make an educated guess and say yes, maybe so. Maybe it was.

In that case, the whole wretched fracas was worth while.

‘All the time you’ve been standing there in your dreams of self-glory,’ Pat said archly, ‘I’ve been on the vid getting hold of people for our party. Mr Turpin can’t come or doesn’t care to come, which is more likely, but he’s sending a few of his carefully cultivated big-time employees—an administrative assistant named Donald Stanley, for instance, whom he said we ought to meet. He didn’t say why.’

‘I know why,’ Sal said. ‘Tito Cravelli mentioned him, and anyhow I met him personally on our trip to alter-Earth. Stanley was directly in charge of the defective ‘scuttler and, in a sense, was responsible for getting the entire project going. Yes, Stanley certainly should be part of this get-together. And I hope you called Tito. Our man in the world.’

‘I’ll call him now,’ Pat said, ‘and can you think of anyone else?’

‘The more the better,’ Sal said, beginning finally to get into the spirit of the thing.

Late at night Darius Pethel worked alone in his closed-up store. Something tapped on the window, and he glanced up, startled. There, on the dark sidewalk, stood Stuart Hadley.

Going to the front door, Pethel unlocked it. Opening it he said, ‘I thought you emigrated.’

‘Cut it out. You know we all came back.’ Shoulders hunched, Hadley entered the store. The familiar place where he had worked so long.

‘How was it over there?’

‘Awful.’

‘So I heard,’ Pethel said. ‘I suppose you want your job back. With each and every trimming.’

‘Why not? I’m as good as I ever was.’ Restlessly, Hadley roamed about the marginal shadowy spaces of the store. ‘You’ll be glad to hear I’m back with my wife. Sparky returned to the Golden Door satellite; they’re going to open it again. In spite of Jim Briskin’s election. I guess there’s going to be a showdown fight.’ He added, ‘Frankly I couldn’t care less. I’ve got my own problems. Well? What do you say? Can I come back?’ He tried to make it sound casual.

‘No reason why not,’ Pethel said.

‘Thanks.’ Hadley looked relieved. Very much so.

‘Some of you fellas got killed, I read. Nasty.’

‘That’s right, Dar; you’ve got it. They attacked us and the U.S. military unit accompanying us fought them off bangupwise until the entrance, or maybe I should say exit, was reopened. I’d rather not talk about it, to tell you the truth. So many verflugender hopes went down the drainpipe when that failed, mine and a lot of other people’s. Now it’s all up to the new president; we’ll wait, bide our time, see what he can dream up, I guess. That’s about all we can do, whether we like it or not.’

‘You can write letters to homeopapes.’

Hadley glared at him in mute outrage. ‘Some joke. You’re personally okay, Dar; you’re all set. But what about the rest of us? Briskin better come up with something, or it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.’

‘How do you like knowing you’re going to have a col for president?’

‘I voted for him, along with the others.’ Hadley wandered back to the locked front door of the store. ‘Can I start tomorrow?’

‘Sure. Come in at nine.’

‘You think life is worth living, Dar?’ Hadley demanded suddenly.

‘Who knows. And if you have to ask, there’s something wrong with you. What’s the matter, are you sick or something ? I’m not hiring anybody who’s a nut or mentally flammy; you better get straightened out before you show up here tomorrow morning.’

‘The compassionate employers.’ Hadley shook his head. ‘Sorry I asked. I should have known better.’

‘That emigration stunt with that this-olt girl didn’t apparently teach you anything; you’re as fouled up as ever. What’s the matter, can’t you accept life as it is? You’ve always got to pine after what isn’t? A hell of a lot of men would envy you your job; you’re incredibly darn lucky to get it back.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then why don’t you calm down? What’s the matter?’

‘When you had hopes once,’ Hadley explained after a pause, ‘it’s always hard to go on after you give them up. It’s not so hard to give them up; that part is easy. After all, you’ve got to, sometimes. But afterward  . . .’ He gestured, grunting, ‘  . . . What takes their place? Nothing. And the emptiness is frightening. It’s so big. It sort of absorbs everything else; sometimes it’s bigger than the whole world. It grows. It becomes bottomless. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘No,’ Pethel said. Nor did he particularly care.

‘You’re lucky. Maybe it’ll never hit you, or anyhow not until old age, until you’re a hundred and fifty or so.’ Hadley gazed at him. ‘I envy you.’

‘Take a pill,’ Pethel said.

‘I’d be glad to take a pill, if I knew of one. I don’t think they’d help, though. I feel like taking a long walk: maybe I’ll walk all night. You give a darn? Do you want to come along? Hell no, you don’t. I can see that.’

Pethel said, ‘I’ve got work to do; I don’t have time to stroll around taking in the sights. I tell you what, Hadley. When you come back to work tomorrow—listen to this—I’ll give you a raise. Does that cheer you up?’ He peered at him, trying to see.

‘Yes,’ Hadley said, but without conviction.

‘I thought it would.’

‘Maybe Briskin will go back to advocating planet-wetting.’

‘Would that interest you? That tired old nothing program?’

Opening the door, Hadley moved back outside into the dark sidewalk. ‘Anything would interest me. To be honest. I’d buy anything, right now.’

Gloomily, knowing that he had failed somewhere in this interchange with Hadley, Darius Pethel said, ‘Some employee you’re going to make.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Hadley pointed out. ‘Maybe I’ll change, though, in time; maybe something’ll come along. God, I’m still hoping!’ He seemed amazed, even a little disgusted with himself.

‘You know what you could try for a change?’ Pethel said. ‘Showing up a little early, a few minutes before nine. It might alter your life. Even more than that moronic attempt to escape by sneaking off with that girl to that weird world where those semi-apes live. Try it. See if I’m not right.’