"Where is my woman?" I said peremptorily.
"On your departure, she expressed a desire to inquire further into the
health of her sibling," said the Martian. "She is even now with him and
his companions."
"In that cage?" I cried angrily.
"I assure you she is--"
"Kindly forego the lecture on metabolic stasis and raise the damned
thing, will you?" I interrupted.
The Martian warped and sparkled in a dizzying movement that I could
only interpret as a shrug, and then the huge parabolite cage came
rising up from that not-quite-there flooring.
"Jery!"
"Snow, baby!"
We clung to each other awkwardly, and our lips met between the columnar
bars. I pulled back and called, "Can't you open this thing up, now?"
"Your mission is not quite accomplished, Jery Delvin," said the
Martian. "The man Philip Baxter is within our realm, but as yet
undestroyed."
"You mean I've still got to--"
"As told you repeatedly: Physical contact between our races is
impossible, Jery Delvin."
"Hey, what about that?" I said. "After I left here, I got to wondering
how, if what you just said is true, you people were able to manipulate
the Brain to select me."
"The Brain of which you speak works on a principle of force-fields,
generated by induction coils. We simply placed the right counterforces
in the right places. No actual contact was necessary."
"Well, damn it," I said, after a glance back at Baxter and Clatclit,
who were staring bewilderedly toward the source of the voice, "can't
you just keep him here? He's bound to perish from lack of food, or
water, or--"
"Jery Delvin, the metabolic stasis which I have already mentioned
to you is not something we used specially for these boys. It is a
necessary contingent of our world. Where there is absolute Location,
there is absolutely no change of the sort you mentioned."
I gave up. "All right, all right. I won't argue the point. If you could
get at him, I guess you would. Not a chance of dropping him down a
hole, or something, though?"
"By the very nature of our world, hazardous localizing is an
impossibility. Our universe possesses a self-regulatory locale-control
that obviates the contingency of perilous placement of an individual."
"Their universe has what?" Snow asked me, her blue-violet eyes wide.
"A built-in safety feature," I muttered. "It figures, now that I think
of it. If Location is absolute, it is One. That means that it's either
all-safe, or all-dangerous. It can't have a bit of one thing and a bit
another. Which means that I'm still carrying the ball."
"Correction," said Baxter, behind me, "you have fumbled."
I looked back at him. He had the collapser in his hand yet, despite our
space-warping materialization in the cavern. And the muzzle was pointed
right at Snow's breast, at the Amnesty.
"Jery!" she cried, hanging onto my arm.
"Baxter!" I yelled, stepping in front of her and flattening myself
against the bars. "Give us a chance! If that damned thing triggers the
parabolite, you'll go with us!"
"How little you know, Delvin," Baxter smiled. "There are any number of
features of this other dimension which even your fantastic intellect
has not guessed. Did it never occur to you to wonder just where I'd
learned the construction of a teleportation machine?"
"I--I'd assumed you learned it somehow from the Ancients," I said.
"Before they realized you intended their destruction."
"I take my hat off to you," said Baxter, with a slight nod of grudging
admiration. "I didn't realize you'd thought things out quite that far."
"Hell, it was the only way you could have learned," I said. "But what's
it got to do with--"
"With the fission-bomb?" Baxter said, smiling. "Why, only everything.
You see, Delvin, teleported matter, in order to bypass distance, must
travel in the place where there is no distance: the fourth dimension.
And so, the brunt of the blast will be absorbed by the Ancients, not by
me."
I heard the Martian gasp. Apparently, they weren't aware of this fact.
It was more than just displacement they faced, it was death.
"Your agents," I temporized, "they'd then be using a system that
transported them via radioactive chaos!"
Baxter shook his head. "Since the transfer is an instantaneous one, I
rather doubt that they'd absorb any roentgens to speak of."
That seemed to be that. He was set to fire, and I was all out of
arguments. And my stance between Snow and that ray-pistol was only a
fleeting protection. She'd go about one second after I did.
Then, behind me in the cage, I heard a movement, and Snow gave a little
cry. I jerked my head about.
Ted, with more sense than his sister, had simply taken the Amnesty from
about her throat and flung it away. All of us followed its flight with
dazzled eyes.
Baxter swung up the barrel of the collapser and fired. And in the
same instant, the spinning disc halted, and then dodged out of the
trajectory of the bolt.
The Martian was protecting himself in the only way he could: Changing
the parabolite-bomb's location.
I crouched involuntarily, clutching Snow's hand through the bars,
as the life-and-death contest went on. The tiny disc of destruction
flitted here, there and everywhere, in a dizzying erratic course, while
Baxter kept the trigger of the collapser depressed tightly, and slashed
wildly in the eye-dazzling light of that place with the pulsing beam.
I wasn't in favor of the Ancients, exactly, but I was bound and
determined to halt Baxter's reckless blasting with that gun, one flick
of whose ray would disintegrate me, Snow or Clatclit, not to mention
the frightened huddle of small boys in that cage. And there was one way
to halt him.
"At him!" I cried to the Martian. "He won't fire if it's anywhere near
himself!"
He must have heard me. The disc skidded to a wobbly halt, and then it
dove like an eagle toward Baxter in a swift, graceful line. A straight
line.
"ZIG-ZAG, YOU IMBECILE!" I yelled, an instant too late.
Even the poorest shot can track an object moving toward or away from
him. Baxter's collapser caught the descending disc a good twenty yards
before it got to him.
My eyes clamped shut against the monstrous blaze of heat and light.
Then, Snow's hand tightly gripped in mine, I was enveloped in inky
blackness, with nothing but empty air beneath the soles of my boots.
And falling.
20
"Snow! Darling, are you all right?" I asked, getting groggily to my
feet and pressing her hand between both of mine. The fall hadn't been
as bad as the one I'd taken earlier through that hole in the floor, but
it was enough to shake me up.
"Y-Yes, I think so, Jery," she said, pressing one slim hand to her
forehead, then brushing a wisp of hair back out of her eyes. I took her
tightly in my arms and held her.
Only then did I suddenly realize where we were.
The light came from the trylon tip of Clatclit's tail. It reflected
in a red glow from the cavern floor, but vanished over our heads into
an impenetrable darkness. Beyond Snow, I saw the Space Scouts getting
to their feet. The kids were in much better shape than I was. With
consistent bad luck, I'd taken the fall on my injured left arm, and now
it was throbbing like crazy. Ted came rushing over to us.
Then I remembered Baxter and looked swiftly about. He was nowhere to be
seen. "Clatclit!" I shouted.
My crystalline buddy came hurrying over to me, his little taillight
bobbing as he ran. His glittering eyes looked a question at me.
"What happened to Baxter?" I said.
Clatclit pointed off into the darkness, and made that serpentine
movement with his hand.
"Into the labyrinth?" I exclaimed. "But why?"
Clatclit pointed toward the floor. I followed his gesture with my eyes,
and saw on the rocky ground the reason. The collapser lay there, its
firing chamber cracked in half. It was useless as a coercion any more,
unless Baxter had a good throwing arm.
"But why didn't you follow him?" I asked.
Disgusted stare. Clatclit pointed to me, Snow, and then the boys, and
followed with an attention-getting tremor of his tail.
"Oh, yeah. We would have trouble getting out of here unguided, at
that!" I said sheepishly. When Snow was around, I couldn't even see the
obvious.
"Any chance Baxter can find his way out of here alone?" I said. "If he
gets to the spaceport before we do, he may get back to Earth and get an
army back here after us."
Clatclit thought it over. Then he placed an arm across my shoulders,
and an arm across Snow's, and looked hopeful.
"Damn," I said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, "it's mighty nice
of you to offer, but we can't spend the rest of our lives down here
with you, Clatclit!" I shook my head. "We've got to get out of here
and get the word to the World Congress before Baxter sews the Earth up
tight."
"Say," Ted's small voice interrupted, "what happened to the bars and
stuff, hey?"
I blinked, startled, and looked about us. Then, on an impulse, I
dropped to my knees and felt the ground. It was plain old lava. I
rocked back on my heels, bewildered, and then I understood, and started
laughing.
"Jery, what is it?"
"Snow, baby, it's the laugh of the century, that's all. Unstable
is hardly the word for the Ancients' universe! Not only did they
dislocate, but they took their contact-material with them! MY guess is
that right now there is no longer a splinter of parabolite in the solar
system."
"But why is that funny?" she asked, as I got to my feet again.
"Because, honey, it means that all Baxter's deep, dire and devious
schemes have come to naught, and by his own hand, at that! He'll never
build his teleportation machine, now!"
"His what?" she said.
"You see, baby, he--Oh, hell, it's a long story. I'll tell you when we
have more time. Right now, we have to head Baxter off, or things won't
be very funny at all."
Following Clatclit's light, Snow, the boys and I moved swiftly across
the floor of that vast cavern, emptied of its space-stressed metal
lining and occupants after heaven knows how many eons of existence
there. The only hitch we encountered in our upward race was that
spray-happy torrent which Clatclit couldn't cross without dribbling
to death. However, a Space Scout is true, brave, and loyal, and he
always carries a rubber poncho inside his travel-kit. It took three of
them to swaddle our guide, but, with the assistance of two of the more
sure-footed Scouts, I was able to tote him bodily across that perilous
bridge, with nothing showing of him but his taillight, and that high in
the air, away from most of the eroding spray. Once unwrapped, he took
the lead again, tail high. Then, Snow's hand tightly in mine, we all
took off like cross-country racers up those winding tunnels of Mars.
We emerged on the hillside overlooking the airstrip, from one of
those "Forbidden to Enter" cave mouths, in the bright glow of the
sand-converter, towering at the far end of the field. Despite political
intrigue, insurrection, and the disappearance of the entire Martian
race from the solar system, it stood there on its girder legs,
monotonously separating the molecules of ferrous oxide into molten iron
and atmosphere.
"Things seem to be quiet at the terminal building," I observed, looking
across the field. "I wonder who won the battle?"
"What battle?" said Snow.
"Boy, honey," I kissed her lightly on the forehead, "you are going to
take years to bring up to date."
To forestall any more questions, I turned and started off across the
landing field, with my alien-plus-female-plus-adolescent group tagging
cautiously after me. I was just busy wishing I still had my collapser,
when, from a cavemouth to our right, a pallid glow appeared, and then a
figure darted out onto the strip, in the glow of the terminal lights.