The Lighter Side (12 page)

"An optical illusion," he said doubtfully.

"By no means. It's an Aperture. Now, here's what I want you to do: write a note—I'll dictate—and simply toss it through. That's all. I'll just have to trust to luck that it lands where I want it to." 

"It will land in the local sewage processing plant," Roger protested. "This is the craziest method I ever heard of for delivering mail!"

"Move a little closer to the Aperture; you'll see it's not as simple as it appears at first glance." 

Roger edged closer. The line broadened into a ribbon that gleamed with rainbow colors like a film of oil on water. Closer still, it widened to become a shimmering plane that seemed to extend through the wall to infinity. He stepped back, dizzy.

"It was like looking over the edge of the world," he whispered.

"Close," the voice said. "Now quickly, the note." 

"I'll have to borrow a pencil." Roger stepped back into the lobby, secured the loan of a gnawed stub from a ticket clerk. Back inside, he took out a crumpled envelope and smoothed it.

"Shoot," he said. "Let's get this over with."

"Very well, start off 'Dear S'lunt.' Or no, make that 'Technor Second Level S'lunt.' Or maybe 'Dear Technor' would be better . . . " 

"I don't know how to spell 'Technor,'" Roger said. "And I'm not sure about 'S'lunt.'"

"It doesn't matter. Let's just launch right into the matter: 'My attempt to traverse Axial Channel partially successful. Apparent Museum and associated retrieval system work of advanced race capable of manipulations in at least two superior orders of dimensionality. Recommend effort to dispatch null-engine to terminal coordinates to break temporal statis. Signed, Q'nell, Field Agent.'" 

"What does all that mean?" Roger queried.

"Never mind! Did you get it all down?" 

"I missed the part after 'My attempt.'"

The voice repeated the message. Roger copied it out in block capitals.

"Now pitch it through the Aperture, and you're finished," the voice said.

As Roger made a move to step into the stall, two men burst through the outer door. One was the ticket clerk.

"That's him!" He pointed excitedly at Roger. "I knew as soon as he asked for a pencil and started for the john that he was one of those fellows you're looking for!"

The other man, a slight, gray-haired chap with a look of FBI about him, came toward Roger with a knowing smile.

"Have you been, er, decorating the walls, young fellow?" he inquired.

"You've got it all wrong," Roger protested. "I was just—"

"Don't let him go back in and erase them!" the clerk warned.

"The message!"
the voice hissed urgently.

"Let's just take a look at your work," the gray-haired man said easily, reaching for the door.

"You don't understand!" Roger backed into the stall. "I was just—"

"Grab him!" The clerk caught his sleeve. The other man caught his other sleeve. As they sought to drag him forth, Roger struggled to free himself from their clutches.

"I'm innocent!" he yelled. "This place was already illustrated when I came in!"

"Yes, of course!" the gray-haired man panted. "Don't get the wrong impression, sir! I'm a curator of the graffiti collection at the Museum of Contemporary Folk Expression. We're looking for creative minds to do a hundred-foot mural for our rotunda!"

With a ripping of cloth, Roger tore free, stumbled back—

"Watch out!"
the voice called—too late. Roger saw the shimmering plane flash out on either side, saw it curl in to form a glittering tube about him. For an instant, he teetered there, enclosed in a misty grayness; then, with a sound as of a mighty rushing of waters, he felt himself swirled around and down into depthless emptiness.

He was on a beach. That was the first thought that came into focus as his stunned mind returned to awareness. Brilliant sunshine glared down on yellow sand. He sat up, looked across the shimmer of heat to eroded spires of pink stone looming in the distance. The dance of the air reminded him of something, but thinking made his head hurt. And that in turn reminded him of something else . . . 

Tentatively, Roger Tyson put his hand to his ear, felt the button there.

"Wh—what happened?" he whispered.

There was no answer.

"Voice?" he called. "Agent Q'nell, or whatever your name is?"

Silence.

"Well—at least I'm cured of part of my affliction," Roger told himself. "Now if I can just figure out where I am . . . " Probably, he considered, he had been on a three-weeks' binge, and was now just coming out of the alcoholic fog.

"Of course, I've never been a drinker," he reminded himself. "But that's probably why it hit me so hard."

He came shakily to his feet, looking around at the vast expanse of sand. It was not a beach, he saw. Merely a boulder-dotted desert, stretching on and endlessly on. "Probably Arizona," he thought. "Maybe the road is just out of sight; but in what direction?"

A massive water-carved rock squatted fifty feet away. Roger went to it, climbed its side. Standing atop it ten feet above the level, he could see for miles across the flat expanse. Far away to the east, a line of pale cliffs edged the world. To the north there was only a vacant horizon. The west was the same. But to the south a ravine cut across the flat ground—and a ravine suggested the action of water.

"A drink," Roger said. "That's what I need." He scrambled down, started across toward the dark line of the cut.

For the first ten minutes he walked steadily forward, skirting the frequent large stones, keeping the sun on his left. Encountering rougher ground, he slowed, picking his route with care.

Mounting a low ridge, he shaded his eyes, scanning the route ahead. The ravine, which should have been very close now, was not to be seen. But . . . Roger closed his eyes, resting them, looked again. What he saw was unmistakable. The boulder that he had climbed, from which he had sighted the ravine, lay a hundred yards ahead, squarely in his path.

Four times Roger Tyson had oriented himself with his back to the rock and walked directly away from it—twice to the south, once each to the north and east. Each time, within fifteen minutes, he had returned to the landmark. There had been no careless changes of direction, he was sure of that. Walking east, he had faced directly into the sun's glare—and after a quarter of an hour had again encountered the ubiquitous boulder.

Now he sat in the shade of the massive rock, his eyes closed, feeling the heat that beat down from above, reflected from below, radiated from the stone at his back. Already he felt weak and listless from dehydration. At this rate, he wouldn't last until sundown—the only relief he could hope for. Not that that would change anything. He would still be lost here in this landscape of illusions . . . 

That was it! The place didn't really exist; it was nothing but a creation of his fever-racked mind. With this conclusion came a sense that now that he had penetrated the mirage, it should be possible to ignore it. Roger concentrated on the mundane reality of the normal world: singing commercials, tourist attractions, Rotarians, chrome-plated bumpers, artificial eyelashes . . . 

He opened his eyes. The lifeless desert still stretched about him. Illusion or otherwise, he was stuck with it.

But damn it, it was impossible! A surge of healthy anger drove him to his feet. There had to be a key to it—some imperfection that could be detected by acute observation. He would pick a starting point and, step by step, analyze what the situation was that he faced! This time, sighting on a distant landmark—a spire of stone at least ten miles away—Roger walked slowly, pausing frequently to study the ground around him. He wasn't sure precisely what he was looking for, but it was clear that the trap in which he was caught—he thought of it in those terms now—bore some resemblance to a goldfish bowl, in which the puzzled fish swam endlessly, bumping his nose against an invisible barrier which relentlessly led him back again to his starting point. The barrier here was an intangible one, a three-dimensional wall; but like the glass of the bowl, it should be possible to confront it directly, rather than sliding along beside it, like a guppy swimming parallel to the wall of his prison.

Something in the landscape ahead caught Roger's attention, some deviation from the usual aspect of the physical world. It took him minutes of close observation to pinpoint it: objects in the distance before him appeared to slide away to the left and right as he advanced. The apparent movement in itself was a normal perspective effect; it was the rate of movement that was wrong. The array of boulders stretching out before him seemed to part too swiftly—and at the exact center point of his view, there seemed to be an almost invisible vertical line of turbulence, a line that disappeared as he halted, resumed again as he went forward, always at the precise point toward which he moved. It wasn't a tangible thing, he saw; merely a plane along which the expansion of the scene took place. As he watched, a tiny object came into existence there, grew with each step until the familiar boulder lay there in his path, a hundred yards ahead. He looked back. The rock was no longer visible; the distant line of cliffs glowed orange in the late sunlight.

"All right," he said aloud, his voice a lonely sound in the silent immensity around him. "It's some kind of lens effect. A four-dimensional lens, maybe. Putting a name to it doesn't help much, but at least I've pinned down one aspect of it." He scratched a mark on the ground, then walked on to the stone, counting his paces. Three hundred and twenty-one. He returned to the mark, continued along that route until the boulder reappeared ahead; then he went on, counting his steps. Four hundred and four paces in this direction.

"So far, so good," Roger said, walking toward the boulder. "The phenomenon has a fixed center. The fishbowl may be a complete sphere, but it has a definite boundary." He paused as a concept formed in his mind: three-dimensional reality, gathered up at the corners, pulled up to form a closed space, as a washwoman folds up the edges of a sheet to form a bag . . . 

"And all I've got to do," he concluded, "is find the knot!" As this thought completed itself, he noticed a tiny movement ahead. Instantly, he dropped flat behind a convenient rock. Beside the boulder where he had awakened, something glittered in mid-air. Half a dozen metallically jointed members appeared, followed a moment later by a squat, dusky-red body, headless, single-eyed, alien.

"The rutabaga!" Roger choked. "It's still alive—and after me!"

Roger lay flat as the monstrous form emerged fully from the empty air, like an actor sliding from behind an invisible flat. It poised for a moment on its clustered supporting members, identical with an upper ring of armlike appendages; then it moved away from the rock, studying the ground ahead.

"It's following my trail!" Roger gulped. "And in five minutes, it will be sneaking up behind me!" He rose to all fours, scuttled forward a few yards, watching the alien creature move rapidly away on flickering tentacles. Darting from cover to cover, he followed it—his only chance, he knew, to stay ahead of it. Approaching the boulder, he saw a tiny glint of light from a vertical line, like a luminous spider's web, extending from the ground upward.

"It's the Aperture!" he gulped in relief. "I hate to reopen the conversation with the art fancier, but it's better than trying to explain to that vegetable how I happened to steal his bike."

Cautiously, Roger edged closer to the luminous filament, saw it widen, close around him as swiftly as a bursting soap bubble, then as swiftly open out again and vanish behind him.

He was standing in darkness, under a sky criss-crossed by glowing arcs, like a Fourth of July display. The air was filled with thunder, punctuated by pops, bangs, and stuttering detonations.

"It's a celebration," Roger guessed, noting that he was standing ankle deep in cold water. "I wonder what the occasion is?" He groped about him, discovered that he was in a muddy, steep-sided ditch higher than his head. A faint glimmer of light reflected from the damp wall of the cut a few feet ahead. He sloshed to it, turned a right-angle corner, and was facing a sand-bagged, timber-braced doorway. Inside, three men sat at a table made of stacked boxes, holding cards. The light came from a candle stuck to a board.

"Hey! You better get inside, buddy!" one of the men called. He was a sallow, thin-faced youth in a mustard-colored jacket, open at the neck. "Big Otto's due to hit any second now!"

"Blimey, mate," a second man, wearing suspenders over wool underwear, said, slapping a card down on the table. "Don't yer know the ruddy schedule?"

The third man, a stout fellow in a gray-green uniform jacket, placed a card on the table and puffed smoke from an enormous pipe.

"Ach, a new
gesicht!"
he exclaimed heartily.
"Bist du vieleicht ein
poker player?"

"Ah—not just now," Roger responded, entering the murky chamber hesitantly. "Say, I wonder if you fellows can tell me where I am? My, uh, car broke down, you see, while I was on my way to apply for a new job . . . "

Hearty laughter interrupted Roger's explanation.

"New job," the man with the suspenders echoed. "That's a'ot one, chum!"

"Good to meet a guy with a sense o' humor," the man in mustard agreed. "What's your outfit, pal?"

"You are a funny man," the stout player stated solemnly. "You would abbreciate a yoke.
Warum
does
ein Huhn
cross the
strasse?"
 

"Outfit?" Roger queried. "I'm afraid I don't have one."

"Wiped out, huh? Too bad. Well, you can doss down here . . . " His voice was drowned by an ear-splitting shriek followed instantly by an explosion that rocked the underground room. The joke-teller reached to flick a smoking fragment of shell casing from the table.

"To come on s' ozzer
seite!"
he said triumphantly. "Also, vun man says to s' ozzer man, 'Who
vass dass
lady I zaw you viss last
nicht?"