There had been no sensation at all as Jerry stepped through the flat
sheet of grayness in the doorway; no more physical awareness than
a blind man might feel when passing through the beam of a powerful
light. Perhaps there was a slight sensation of the mere presence of the
energies that kept the opacity in existence--but that sensation, Jerry
knew, was psychological, not actual.
"Although," he realized, as his world became an infinity of opalescent
gray, "in this place, a psychological awareness will be no different
from a genuine physical sensation. Better be careful what I think about
in this psychokinetic fog...."
The thought was barely formulated when the grayness changed. It became
moist against his flesh, and started swirling in tendrils about him.
"Damn it, be _careful_!" he belatedly cautioned his mind. "Now the
stuff _is_ fog!" Ahead of him in the swirling mist a brighter-than-gray
glow led his footsteps forward.
He found himself standing beneath an overhanging marquee. Its black
undersurface was runneled with condensed moisture amid the garish naked
bulbs that haloed the wet cement sidewalk.
A red-coated doorman, resplendent behind rows of bright brassy buttons,
gave him a smile as he pulled open the door that led to the club. Jerry
nodded and went inside.
Thick crimson carpet cushioned his footfalls as he moved cautiously
through an empty lobby, then down a white marble staircase toward the
ballroom. Dimly, he was aware that the band at the far end of the
mammoth room was playing music. What song he didn't know until a chance
chording reminded him of a popular song of the day ... at which point
that suddenly was the tune. The tables ringing the dance floor were
covered with bright linen and shining silver. The tables were empty
of patrons, however, until Jerry casually thought, "I should think
business would be better--"
Suddenly a horde of laughing couples appeared in the chairs, with
hurrying waiters bringing champagne, trays and menus to their guests.
The men wore tuxedos; the women were in evening dress. He looked
suddenly at himself, and saw that his uniform was now the official
dress uniform of the Space Corps. Before he could conquer it, his mind
voiced a quick wish that he shouldn't be dining alone; and then a girl
was rising from her place at a table beside the dance floor, hurrying
to greet him, hands outstretched.
Her fingers were small and strong and warm. She smiled up at him.
"Jerry, darling."
* * * * *
Despite her being only arm's length from him, he could not see her
well at all. His impression was merely one of youth, loveliness and
girl-ness. But then, as he tried to ascertain precisely what she looked
like, hidden corners of his mind began to supply each detail an instant
before his conscious quest for it and Jerry, in a few moments, was
suddenly staggered with delighted shock.
Very few men are privileged to find a girl who lives up to all their
dreams of perfection in a woman.
Hair as soft as cobweb, as fluffy as dancing clouds, as golden as
flowing honey, cascaded down about a slender alabaster throat, and died
in golden ripples on smooth white shoulders. Eyes the rich brown of
raw chocolate gazed serenely at him from under red-gold brows and jet
lashes, their patrician serenity permeated with a touch of twinkling
impishness. Her lips were soft and not unlike berry-stained velvet,
sweet and warm and tempting; her mouth generous and tilted at the
corners into a smile of greeting--obviously the result of her subduing
a frank laugh of joy at seeing him. Geometrically perfect teeth flashed
white as porcelain between her lips. Her gown was a shimmering midnight
blue, highlighted with random sprinkles of brightly coruscating gems.
Even as his lips parted to ask her name, Jerry knew it and spoke it
softly. "Carol."
"Listen," she said softly, tilting her head toward where the band had
begun a new song. Swift, urgent and rapturous, it floated through the
room, surrounded the two of them, took possession of them. Then Carol
was in his arms, and Jerry was dancing out onto the floor with her. The
other couples were a blur of forgotten figures that swayed.
Jerry knew the melody. It was their song, their own private love
song, the one that had been playing on the night when they both knew,
suddenly, that there could be no one else for either of them but the
other....
As they returned to their table, Jerry realized that Carol was now
garbed in a white peasant blouse and bright flowered flaring skirt, and
that her hair was drawn back at the temples to expose her ears, now
adorned with golden hoops. The table was in a lattice-backed booth,
covered with a red-and-white checkered cloth. The inner surface of the
table held salt, pepper, grated cheese and breadsticks, matching cruets
of pale olive oil and dark vinegar. The band was now a five-man gypsy
ensemble.
* * * * *
"Remember the first time we came here, Jerry?" asked Carol, her eyes at
once upon his face and distant, dreamy....
As she smiled, Jerry noticed with dull horror that one of her eyes was
perceptibly lower than the other.
The teeth she flashed his way were mottled with brown stains. She took
hold of his fingers with her own.
"Carol!" he said shakily, staring at the knuckly, red-raw hands that
clutched at his. "What's happening?"
"Happening?" she said, her voice a raucous croak of amusement.
"_Nothing's_ happening! In fact, you're probably one of the dullest
guys I ever got stuck with." She tossed her head petulantly. Coarse,
straw-colored hair flipped away from her thick neck. Her breath was
sour with wine and miasmic with garlic.
"Carol!" he cried.
"Don't whine!" she snapped, viciously. "I hate a guy who whines!" With
that, she shoved out of the booth, and waddled toward the rear of the
coffeehouse, one hand scratching at a bulge of flesh that overhung
the too-tight girdle. Her black leotards were twisted and dull as she
passed the flashing rainbow lights of the brassy jukebox.
Jerry shoved away from the table, overturning his coffee in its cracked
china cup, and he wove his way through the reek and smoke toward the
door through which she'd vanished.
When he got there, the door was a peeling poster on a bare brick wall,
advertising some long-forgotten show. His fingers scrabbled on rough
mortar for a moment. Then he turned and paced back to his cot, where he
flopped on his back in the long shadows of the bars.
"Norcriss!" said the guard, coming into the cell. "This is it!" The
brass uniform buttons flashed brightly.
Strong hands were lifting him from the cot, dragging him down a long
corridor toward a steel door. As they got there, the door opened wide,
and Jerry saw the gaping maw of hungry steel gears, while behind him a
man's voice droned prayers.
Then, before the guard could shove Jerry forward into that waiting
mechanical mouth, Jerry noticed the odd shimmer of grayness that lay
between himself and the waiting teeth, and he remembered that he was in
a world of illusion.
At precisely that moment he knew beyond a doubt that those waiting
jaws were illusion in form only. An atomic duplicator does not have to
chew its intake. It merely dissolves the atomic bonds with the rays
that flash between its power plates on either side of the disruption
platform. The waiting mouth and teeth were mere symbols in Jerry's mind
of what was about to occur.
They were unreal--but they could be fatal.
* * * * *
He shut his eyes, shoved backward with his feet, and thought of Carol
as he'd first glimpsed her.
When he opened his eyes once more, she was standing before him in her
ballroom gown again, and the band was just beginning to play their
song once more.
"Jerry," she said, taking his arm. "Dance with me."
"No. We're in danger here. Come on, I'll get your coat. We've got to go
away quickly."
A spark of alarm showed briefly in her eyes. Then she nodded wordlessly
and hurried up the marble staircase with him to the lobby. Jerry got
her coat from the check-room--a marvelous silvery fur that covered
her from neck to waist--and then they were heading out into the fog
together.
"Good evening to you, sir," said the doorman, eyes and buttons bright.
Jerry grunted and led Carol off down the street into the fog.
"Where are we going?" she asked, breathlessly trying to keep pace.
"Away, I hope," he said. Even their movement from the ballroom could
be sheer illusion. Jerry tried moving from the club entrance in the
exact reverse of the motion in which he'd first approached it, trying
to achieve the real doorway that led from the experimental room into
the antiseptic hospital corridor where Burgess waited. But the fog
continued to be fog. It would not take on the form of that intangible
gray shimmering that guarded the entrance to Anthony Mawson's
megalomaniac universe.
"If I could only see where--" he began.
Then every tendril of fog was gone.
Before him lay the cold blackness of outer space, pinpointed with
hard, unwinking stars. Jerry recoiled from the viewplate, shaken, and
turned around to see Carol. Her eyes were wide and startled as she
glanced about at the metal confines of the control cabin. Jerry had
just time enough to think how incongruous she looked in her fur jacket
and long blueblack gown ... and then she was clothed in the neat gray
uniform of the WASP, trim short-sleeved shirt and sharply creased
shorts.
"Jerry," said Carol. She slipped her arm through his, staring at the
infinite stars in the viewplate. "What are we running from?"
He tried to think, but could not remember. "There's--some danger behind
us. We have to get away from it, Carol. It means complete destruction
if we're caught."
Carol stared helplessly at the stars in the viewplate. "But where are
we running to?"
* * * * *
Jerry shook his head. "Impossible to tell. Not without the help of a
good astrogator. Out in space, stars shift and magnitudes change. I'm
not even qualified to guess--"
"Sire," said the astrogator, handing a clipboard to Jerry, "we can
reach any of these seven stars in a few hours. Just tell me where you'd
prefer to go."
Jerry turned to the man, resplendent in his neat Space Corps uniform,
jacket bright with brass buttons. When he tried to focus upon the man's
features he could detect nothing.
"We'd better choose the quickest trip," Jerry said, after a moment's
indecision. "No telling how much fuel we have left."
The astrogator nodded. "I'm afraid that's out of my department, all
right, sir. But if _you'd_ care to check the tanks?" Without waiting
for a reply, the man turned and began to pick his way carefully toward
the rear of the spaceship, stepping from girder to girder. The floor,
Jerry noticed idly as he followed, was exposed to open space between
the curving ribs of steel that formed the framework of the ship.
"Careful, now," he said, helping Carol along from one to the other.
"That's vacuum out there. We don't want to fall through."
Ahead of Jerry, the implacable man with the brass buttons was nearly to
the steel door masking the blast chamber where the components of fuel
were mingled and ignited. Jerry, giddly aware of every hazardous step
over the squares of star-speckled blackness, kept one hand on Carol's
arm, the other on her chessboard.
"Don't spill any of the men!" she cautioned, as the diminutive plastic
figures danced and rattled on the board. "I don't intend to search the
whole cosmos for a pawn."
"Here you go, sir," said the politely insistent astrogator, opening the
steel door. Before Jerry yawned an oval of intense white flame, the
radiating heat crisping against his skin and hair.
"The fission rate," Jerry mumbled, consulting his wristwatch. "I've got
to time it, or I won't be able to calculate the amount of fuel still in
the bulkheads."
"Count it by steps, sir," suggested the astrogator.
"One," said Jerry, stepping out toward that blinding coruscation of
heat. "Two," he said, feeling carefully for the next girder.
Then the toe of his boot slipped from the metal, and he realized,
with a horrible lancing of adrenalin through his abdomen, that he was
falling out the opening between the girders. The only salvation would
be a shove with his still-braced rear foot, but that would carry him
directly into the inferno of burning fuel. An eternity of falling
through icy vacuum against an instant of intolerable searing pain....
"The fire--" gasped Jerry, toppling in inexorable slow motion toward
starry darkness, a cloud of twirling chess pieces orbiting about his
head. "I've got to make it into the fire...."
He tensed the muscles of the laggard leg for the spring that would
carry him to destruction, and then he saw that the chess pieces were
shimmering gray, and the oval frame of the doorway to the flaming fuel
was shimmering gray, and even what had seemed hot white burning was
cold gray waiting mist, and with a yell of remembrance, Jerry clamped
shut his eyes and let himself plunge downward into nothingness....