Part 6

Clawly II ignored the second question--and the comment. He swaggered up to the table, planted his hands on it, looked them over, and said, "I laughed to think of how sincerely you will voice your distress when you discover all inhabitants of the other world to be hopeless Recalcitrants--and take appropriate measures. Come, face circumstances. You will be forced to destroy most of the inhabitants of the other world, and you know it."

"We know nothing of the sort," replied the chairman coldly. "Take care that your impudent and foolish opinions do not make us lose confidence in you. In these critical times your shrewdness and ingenuity are valuable to us. You are a useful tool, and only imprudent men destroy a tool because its mannerisms annoy them. But if, in your foolhardy opinionatedness you cease to be useful--that is another matter. As regards the misguided inhabitants of the other world, you very well know that our intentions are the best."

"Of course," agreed Clawly II, smiling broadly, "but just consider what's actually going to happen. In three days the transtime machine will subtronically isolate and annihilate a spatio-temporal patch in this world, setting up stresses which cannot be relieved by any redistribution of material in this world; accordingly the lacuna will find with the corresponding patch from the other world, thereby creating an area common to both worlds. Through this common area your armed forces will pour. They will come as invaders, awakening horror and fear. They will have the element of surprise on their side, but there will inevitably be resistance--organized in desperate haste, but using improvised subtronic weapons. Most important, that resistance will not come, as it would in this world, from a small elite directing an ignorant multitude, but from a people of uniformly high education--a people used to freedom and adverse to submitting to any autocratic government, no matter how well-intentioned. That resistance will not cease until the other world has been destroyed in subtronic battle, or you are forced to destroy it subtronically yourselves and retire through the gap. All that is painfully clear."

"It is nothing of the sort," replied the chairman in measured and dispassionate tones. "Our invasion will be well-nigh bloodless, though we must prepare for all eventualities. At the proper moment Conjerly and Tempelmar will seize control of the so-called World Executive Committee, thereby preventing any organized resistance at the fountainhead. The majority of inhabitants of the other world have no technical knowledge of subtronic power and will therefore constitute no danger. Ultimately they will be grateful to us for insuring the safety of their world and protecting them from their irresponsible leaders. It will only be necessary for us to capture and confine all technicians and scientists having a knowledge of subtronic physics. To do this, we must admittedly be ready to take any and all necessary steps, no matter how unpleasant. For our main purpose, of which we never lose sight, is always to keep the knowledge of subtronic power--which now imperils two worlds--in the possession of a small, responsible, and benevolent elite."

* * * * *

Thorn shivered. The horrible thing was that these Servants actually believed that they were acting for the best, that they had the good of mankind--of two mankinds--at heart.

"Exactly," said Clawly II, continuing to smile. "The only thing you don't see, or pretend not to see, is the inevitable consequences of that main purpose. Even now your secrets are gravely endangered. Mind-exchange is putting more and more Recalcitrants and Escapists into the other world. It is only a matter of time before some of them begin to realize that the inhabitants of that world are their potential allies rather than their foes, and join forces with them. Similarly it is only a matter of time until the mind of a subtronic technician is displaced into this world and contacted by the Recalcitrants here--then you will have to fight subtronic wars in two worlds. Your only chance, as I'm glad you recognize in part, is to strike hard and fast, destroy the other world, along with all the Recalcitrants and Escapists who have entered it, then seek out and eliminate all displaced minds in this world. Your weakness is in not admitting this at the start. Everything would be much easier if you would leave out pseudobenevolent intentions and recognize that you are up against an equation in destruction, which you must solve in the only logical way possible--by a general canceling out."

And he rocked back on his heels a little, again surveying the eleven old faces. It struck Thorn that thus legendary Loki must have mocked the Dawn Gods and flayed their high-sounding pretenses, confident that his cunning and proven usefulness would protect him from their wrath. As for the Servants, their paternalism was unpleasantly apparent in their attitude toward Clawly II. They treated him like a brilliantly mischievous favorite child--always indulged, often threatened, seldom punished.

Certainly there was a germ of greatness about this Clawly II. If only he had Clawly I's sane attitude toward life, so that his critical thinking would come to something more than mere sardonic jibing!

One thing was certain, Clawly II's claim that he wanted to float on the stream of life was a gross understatement. What he really wanted was to dance along a precipice--and this time, apparently, he had taken one heedless step too many.

For the chairman looked at him and said, "The question arises whether your insistence on destruction has not assumed the proportions of a mania. We will at once reconsider your usefulness as a tool."

Clawly II bowed. He said smoothly, "First it would be well to interview the person I have brought you. You will be pleased when I tell you who he is." And he motioned to Thorn.

All eyes turned on the niche.

Abruptly, painfully, Thorn woke from his impersonal absorption in the scene unrolling before him. Again it came to him, like a hammer blow, that he was not watching from the safety of a spy-hole, but was himself immediately and fatally involved. Again the urge to escape racked him--with redoubled force, because of the warning that he must now at all costs take back to World I. It was such a simple thing. Just a change of viewpoints. He had seen Conjerly accomplish it. Surely, if he concentrated his mind in the right way, it would be that other Thorn who walked forward to face the Servants and the destiny of that other Thorn's own making, while he sank back. Surely his need to warn a world would give him sufficient impetus.

But all the time he was walking toward the table. It was _his_ dragging feet that scuffed the gray flooring, _his_ dry throat that swallowed, _his_ cold hands that clenched and unclenched. The eleven old faces wavered, blurred, came clear again, seemed to swell, grow gray and monstrous, become the merciless masks of judges of some fabled underworld, where he must answer for another man's crimes.

The table stopped his forward progress. He heard Clawly II say, "I am afraid that I am still very useful to you. Here is your chief enemy, brought to book by my efforts alone. He was part of our bag when he raided the local Recalcitrant headquarters last night. He escaped and took to the hills, where I personally recaptured him--the Recalcitrant leader Thorn 37-P-82."

But the Servants' reaction could not have been the one Clawly was expecting, for the old faces registered anger and alarm. "Irresponsible child!" the chairman rapped out. "Didn't you hear what Conjerly reported--that he is certain there has occurred a mind exchange between the Thorns? This man is not the Recalcitrant, but a displaced mind come to spy on us. You have provided him with what he wanted--an opportunity to learn our plans."

Thorn felt their converging hostility--a palpable force. His mind shrank back from the windows of his eyes, but, chained there, continued to peer through them.

The chairman's wrinkled hand dropped below the table. He said, "There is only one course of action." His hand came up, and in it a slim gleaming cone. "To eliminate the displaced mind before a re-exchange can be--"

Thorn was dimly conscious of Clawly II leaping forward. He heard him begin, "No! Wait! Don't you see--"

But although that was all he heard, he knew what Clawly II was going to say and why he was going to say it. He also knew why Thorn II had been able to exchange with him when Thorn II thought he was trapped and facing death on the rooftop. He knew that the chairman's action was the very thing that would nullify the chairman's purpose. At last he had found the sufficient impetus--it was staring at him down the slim, gleaming cone, leering at him even as the chains broke and his mind dropped back from the windows of his eyes into a black, dimensionless pit.

The fear of death.

X.

Three roots there are that three ways run 'Neath the ash-tree Yggdrasil; 'Neath the first lives Hel, 'neath the second the frost giants, 'Neath the last are the lands of men.

Elder Edda

Thorn did not ask himself why his resting place was dark and stuffy, rocky and dry, or where the stale, sour smell of woodsmoke came from. He was content to lie there and let his mind snuggle down into his body, lull itself with simple sensations, forget the reverberations of its terrible journey. World II still clung to him sluggishly. But like a nightmare from which one has wakened, it could be disregarded.

In a moment he would rouse himself and do what must be done. In a moment, he knew, he would know no peace until the warning had been given and all essential steps taken, until the invasion had been met and decisively thrown back. He would be a creature of tension, of duty, of war.

But for the moment nothing mattered, nothing could break his sense of peace.

Odd, though, that the heavy woodsmoke did not make him cough, and that his body was not aching from its cramped position and rocky crouch.

Muffledly, as if its source were underground, came a distant howling, melancholy and long-drawn-out, ending on a low note of menace.

He started up. His shielding hand encountered a low ceiling of rock, hurriedly traced it to jagged, sloping walls on either side.

It was he that was underground, not the howling.

What the devil had Thorn II been doing in a cave in World I? Why was he wearing this odd jumble of heavy clothing, that seemed to include thick, stiff boots and furs? Where had he gotten the long knife that was stuck in his belt?

The cramping darkness was suddenly full of threats. In panicky haste he continued his feeling-out of the walls, found that he was in a small domed chamber, high enough in the center so that he could almost stand upright. On three sides the walls extended down to the uneven floor, or to the mouths of horizontal crevices too narrow to stick more than an arm in.

On the fourth side was a low opening. By getting down on hands and knees he could wriggle in.

It led slightly upward. The smell of woodsmoke grew heavier. After two sharp turns, where jagged edges caught but did not tear his heavy clothing, he began to see the gray gleam of daylight.

The roof of the passageway grew higher, so that he could almost walk upright. Then it suddenly opened into a larger chamber, the other end of which was completely open to a gloomy landscape.

This landscape consisted of a steep hillside of granite boulders and wind-warped pines, all patched with snow, at a middle distance, as if across a ravine.

But Thorn did not inspect it closely, for he was looking chiefly at the fire blocking the mouth of the narrow passageway, sending up smoke that billowed back from the ceiling, making the day even more gloomy and dim.

It immediately struck him as being a very remarkable fire, though he couldn't say why. After a while he decided that it was because it had been very cleverly constructed to burn steadily for a long time, some of the logs and branches being so placed that they would not fall into the fire until others had been consumed. Whoever had built that fire must have painstakingly visualized just how it was going to burn over a period of several hours.

But why should he waste time admiring a fire? He kicked it aside with the clumsy boots Thorn II had dug up God knows where, and strode to the mouth of the cave.

Claws skirred on rock, and he had the impression of a lithe furry animal whisking off to one side.

The cave opened on a hillside, similar to the one opposite and slanting down to a twisting, ice-choked stream. Overhead a gray, dreary sky seemed to be trending toward nightfall. The walls of the ravine shut off any more distant horizon. It was very cold.

The scene was hauntingly familiar.

Had Thorn II been insane, or gone insane? Why else should he have hidden himself in a cave in a near-arctic wild-life reserve? For that certainly seemed to be what he had done, despite the difficulty in picturing just how he had managed to do it in so short a time.

A fine thing if, after getting back to his rightful world, he should starve to death in a reserve, or be killed by some of the formidable animals with which they were stocked.

He must climb the hill behind him. Wherever he was, he'd be able to sight a beacon or skylon from its top.

It suddenly occurred to him that this ravine was devilishly like one in the woodland near the symchromy amphitheater, a ravine in which he and Clawly used to go exploring when they were boys. There was something unforgettably distinctive about the pattern of the streambed.

But that couldn't be. The weather was all wrong. And that ravine was much more thickly wooded. Besides, erosion patterns were always repeating themselves.

He started to examine the queer, bulky clothing Thorn II had been wearing. In doing so, he got one good look at his hands--and stopped.

He stood for a long moment with his eyes closed. Even when soft paws pattered warily somewhere over his head and a bit of gravel came trickling down, he did not jerk.

* * * * *

Rapidly the determination grew in his mind that he must get to the hilltop and establish his position before he did anything else, before he thought anything else, certainly before he examined his hands or his face more closely. It was more a terror-inspired compulsion than a determination. He stepped to the rocky lip in front of the cave, and looked back. Again there was the impression of a gray, furry animal streaking for cover. Something about the size of a cat. He hurriedly surveyed the routes leading upward, picked one that seemed to slope more gradually and avoid the steeper barren stretches, and immediately started up it at a scrambling trot, his eyes fixed resolutely ahead.

But after he had gone a little way, he saw something that made him stop and stare despite the compulsion driving him.

On a pine-framed boulder about a dozen yards ahead, to one side of the route he was taking, three cats sat watching him.

They were cats, all right, house cats, though they seemed to be of a particularly thick-furred breed.

But one wouldn't normally find house cats on a wild-life reserve. Their presence argued the nearness of human habitation. Moreover, they were eying him with a poised intentness that indicated some kind of familiarity, and did not fit with their earlier racing for cover--if those had been the same animals.

He called, "Kitty!" His voice cracked a little. "Kitty!"

The sound drifted thinly across the hillside, as if congealed by the cold.

And then the sound was answered, or rather echoed, by the cat to the right, a black and gray.

It was not exactly the word "Kitty" that the cat miowed, but it was a sound so like it, so faithful to his exact intonations, that his flesh crawled.

"Kii ... eee." Again the eerily mocking, mimicking challenge rang out.

He was afraid.

He started forward again. At the first scrape of his boots on gravel, the cats vanished.

For some time he made fast, steady progress, although the going was by no means easy, sometimes leading along the rims of landslides, sometimes forcing him to fight his way through thick clumps of scrub trees. The last "Kii ... eee" stuck in his ears, and at times he was pretty sure he glimpsed furry bodies slipping along to one side, paralleling his progress. His thoughts went off on unpleasant tacks, chiefly about the degree to which careful breeding had increased the intelligence of house cats, the way in which they had always maintained their aloof and independent life in the midst of man's civilization, and other less concrete speculations.

Once he heard another sound, a repetition of the melancholy howling that had first startled him in the cave. It might have been wolves, or dogs, and seemed to come from somewhere low in the ravine and quite a distance away.

The sky was growing darker.

The rapid ascent was taking less out of him than he would have imagined. He was panting, but in a steady, easy way. He felt he could keep up this pace for a considerable distance.

The pines began to thin on the uphill side. He emerged onto a long, wide slope that stretched, ever-steepening, boulder-strewn but almost barren of vegetation, to the ravine's horizon. His easiest way lay along its base, past tangled underbrush.

A little distance ahead and up the slope, a large chunk of granite jutted out. On its rim sat three cats, again regarding him. Something about the way they were turned toward each other, the little movements they made, suggested that they were holding a conference and that the topic of the conference was--he.

From behind and below the howling came again. The cats pricked up their ears. There were more movements, more glances in his direction. Then as he began jogging along again, one of the cats--the tiger--leaped down and streaked away past him, downhill. While the black-and-gray and the black dropped off the granite rim more leisurely and began to trot along in the direction he was taking, with frequent sidewise glances.

He quickened his pace, grateful for the reserve energy.

The going was good. There were no eroded chutes to be edged around, no pines to fight.

Once the howling was repeated faintly.

The shadowy bodies of the cats slipped between the boulders, in and out. Gradually he began to draw ahead of them.

* * * * *

For some reason everything felt very natural, as if he had been created for this running through the dusk.

He sprinted up the last stretch, came out on top.

For a long time he just looked and turned, and turned and looked. Everything else--emotions, thought--was subordinated to the act of seeing.

Up here it was still pretty light. And there were no hills to shut out the view. It stretched, snow-streaked, lightless, lifeless, achingly drear, to black horizons in three directions and a distant glittering ice-wall in the fourth.

The only suggestion of habitation was a thin pencil of smoke rising some distance across the plateau he faced.

For as long as he could, he pretended not to recognize the ruins sparsely dotting the landscape--vast mountainous stumps of structures, buckled and tortured things, blackened and ice-streaked, surrounded by strange formations of rock that suggested lava ridges, as if the very ground had melted and churned and boiled when those ruins were made.

A ruined world, from which the last rays of a setting sun, piercing for a moment the smoky ruins, struck dismal yellow highlights.

But recognition could only be held at bay for a few minutes. His guess about the ravine had been correct. That snow-shrouded, mile-long mound ahead of him was the grave of the Opal Cross. That dark monolith far to the left was the stump of the Gray H. Those two lopped towers, crazily buckled and leaning toward each other as if for support, were the Gray Twins. That split and jagged mass the other side of the ravine, black against the encroaching ice, up-thrust like the hand of a buried man, was the Rusty T.

It could hardly be World I, no matter after what catastrophe or lapse of years. For there was no sign, not even a suggestive hump, of the Blue Lorraine, the Mauve Z, or the Myrtle Y. Nor World II, for the Black Star's ruins would have bulked monstrously on the immediate left.

He looked at his hands.

They were thickened and calloused, ridged and darkened by scars of wounds and frostbite, the nails grained and uneven. And yet they were Thorn's hands.

He lifted them and touched his chapped, scaly face, with its high-growing, uncombed beard and long hair matted against his neck under the fur hood.

His clothes were a miscellany of stiff, inexpertly-tanned furs, portions of a worn and dirty suit of flying togs, and improvised bits of stuff, such as the hacked-out sections of elastoid flooring constituting the soles of his boots.

His heavy belt, which was reinforced with reading-tape, supported two pouches, besides the knife, which seemed to be a crudely-hilted cutter from a hyperlathe.

One of the pouches contained a sling shot powered by strips of elastoid, several large pebbles, and three dark, dubious chunks of meat.

In the other were two small containers of nutriment-concentrate with packaging-insignia of twenty-five years ago, a stimulol cannister with one pellet left, two bits of sharp metal, a jagged fragment of flint, three more pieces of elastoid, more reading-tape, a cord made of sinew, a glastic lens, a wood carver's handsaw, a small, dismantled heat-projector showing signs of much readaptive tinkering, several unidentifiable objects, and--the smooth gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil.

Even as he was telling himself it could not be the same one, his blunt fingers were recognizing its unforgettable smoothness, its oblate form, its queerly exaggerated inertia. His mind was remembering he had fancied it a single supergiant molecule, a key--if one knew how to use it--to the doors of unseen worlds.

But there was only time to guess that the thing must be linked to his mind rather than to any of the bodies his mind had occupied, and to wonder how it had escaped the thorough search to which he had been subjected in the Black Star, when his attention was diverted by a faint eager yapping that burst out suddenly and was as suddenly choked off.

He turned around. Up the boulder-studded slope he had just ascended, streaming out of the underbrush at its base, came a pack of wolves, or dogs--at least thirty of them. They took the same sloping course that he had taken. There was a strange suggestion of discipline about their silent running. He could not be sure--the light was very bad--but he fancied he saw smaller furry shapes clinging to the backs of one or two of them.

He knew now why he had spent time admiring a fire.

But the pack was between him and that fire, so he turned and ran across the plateau toward where he had glimpsed the rising wisp of smoke.

As he ran he broke out and chewed the lone stimulol pellet, breathing thanks to that Thorn--he would call him Thorn III--who had hoarded the pellet for so many years, against some ultimate emergency.

He ran well. His clumsily-booted feet avoided rocks and ruts, hit firmly on icy patches, with a sureness that made him wonder if they did not know the route. And when the stimulol hit his blood-stream, he was able to increase speed slightly. But risking a look back, he saw the pack pouring up over the crest. A steady baying began, eager and mournful.

In the growing darkness ahead a low, ruddy, winking light showed. He studied its slow increase in size, intent on gauging the exact moment when he would dare to sprint.