The Dark Design

  Frigate said, “I’ve been with you twenty-six years. Twenty-six! And I’ve never told anybody what your real names were.”

  Farrington sat down in the chair at his desk. Toying with his knife, he said, “That seems against human nature. How could you keep your mouth shut that long? And why?”

  “Especially why?” Rider said. He stood near the door, a hornfish stiletto in his hand.

  “It was evident that you didn’t want it known, for one thing. So, being your friend, I didn’t say anything. Though I will admit I wondered why you were so secretive.”

  Farrington looked at Rider. “What do you think, Tom?”

  Rider shrugged, and said, “We made a mistake. We should have just laughed it off. Admitted who we are and made up some tall tale to account for it.”

  Farrington put the knife down and lit a cigarette.

  “Yeah. That’s hindsight. What’ll we do now?”

  Rider said, “After all this mysterious folderol, Pete must know we got something to hide.”

  “He already said that.”

  Rider sheathed the stiletto and lit a cigarette. Frigate wondered if he should make a break for it now. His chances for success were small. Though both men were smaller, they were very strong and quick. Besides, trying to escape would make him look guilty.

  Guilty of what?

  Tom said, “That’s better. Forget about getting away. Relax.”

  “With you two thinking of murder?”

  Rider laughed and said, “After all these years you ought to know we can’t kill in cold blood. Even a stranger, and we’re sort of fond of you, Pete.”

  “Well, if I were what you think I am, whatever that is, what would you do?”

  “Work up a passion so I wouldn’t have to kill you in cold blood, I reckon.”

  “Why?”

  “If you aren’t really Peter Frigate, then you know.”

  “Who in hell else could I be?”

  There was a long silence. Finally, Farrington ground out his cigarette in an ashtray clamped to the desk.

  “The thing is, Tom,” he said, “he has been with us longer than any of our wives. If he was one of Them, why would he stay around so long? Especially since he claims he recognized us the day he met us.

  “We would have been scooped up that night, if he’s one of Them.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “We don’t know more than one-quarter of what’s going on. One-eightieth, maybe. And what we do know may be a lie. Maybe we’ve been played for suckers.”

  “Them? Scooped up?” Frigate said.

  Martin Farrington looked at Tom, and he said, “What’ll we do now? There isn’t any way of identifying Them. We’re fools, Tom. We should’ve just told him a big lie. Now we got to go all the way.”

  “If he’s one of Them, then he already knows,” Rider said. “So we wouldn’t be telling him much he doesn’t know. Except about the Ethical. And if he is an agent, then he wouldn’t have been put on our trail unless They suspected we’d been contacted by Him.”

  “Yeah, we jumped the gun. And there isn’t any gun in the first place. You know, if Pete’s an agent, why would he have suggested the blimp? Would an agent want us to get to the tower?”

  “That’s right. Unless…”

  “Don’t keep me hanging.”

  “Unless there’s something haywire, and he’s as much in the dark now as we are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen, Tom, lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking when I should’ve been sleeping or screwing. I’ve been thinking that there’s something mysterious going on. I don’t mean what the Ethical told us. I mean this business of there suddenly being no more resurrections.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe stopping them wasn’t the original plan—whatever that is?”

  “You mean, somebody threw a monkey wrench in the machinery? And that blew the fuse and left everybody in the dark?”

  “Yes. And the agents don’t know what’s going on any more than me and you.”

  “Which could mean that Pete here is an agent. He’s just trying to get home.”

  “You mean he might’ve found us but couldn’t do anything about it? So he went along for the ride? And he proposed this blimp idea because it’d help him, not us, get there faster?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So that puts us back where we were. Pete could be one of Them.”

  “If he is, it’s like I said. We won’t be telling him anything he don’t know.”

  “Yeah, but he could tell us plenty. Plenty!”

  “You going to beat it out of him? What if he really is Frigate?”

  “I wouldn’t, anyway. Not unless I knew the stakes were really high. Oh, hell, not even then.”

  “We could just sail on and leave him behind,” Farrington said.

  Tom smiled crookedly and said, “Yeah? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have to trust your quivering flesh and beating heart to a skyboat.”

  “You’re getting awful close to making me mad, Tom.”

  “Okay, I won’t ever say another word about that subject. Besides, I know you ain’t got a cowardly bone in your body.

  “So, what’ll we do? Remember, if we did sail on, by the time we got to the North Pole—if we ever did—Pete here would have the whole thing solved.”

  “Oh, hell,” Farrington said. “How could he be one of Them? They’re superior to human beings, right? And Pete sure isn’t no superman. No offense, Pete.”

  Tom glanced narrow-eyed at Frigate.

  “He could be pretending to be only human. But I don’t think anybody could put up a front like that for twenty-six years.”

  “Let’s tell him then. What do we have to lose? Besides, I’m tired of keeping a secret for twenty-nine years.”

  “You always did talk too much.”

  “Look who’s talking, Old Chief Run-off-at-the-mouth himself.”

  Farrington lit another cigarette. Rider followed his example, then said, “You want to light up, too, Pete?”

  “You’re trying to kill me with smoke,” Frigate said. He drew a cigar out of his over-the-shoulder bag.

  “I think I need a drink, too.”

  “We all do. Tom, you do the honors. Then we’ll tell all. God, what a relief!”

  ’T was a dark and stormy night,” Tom said. He smiled to acknowledge that he knew he was deliberately imitating the classical opening line of ghost stories.

  “Jack and I…”

  “Keep it Martin, Tom. Remember? Even when in private.”

  “Sure, but you were Jack then. Anyway, I knew the Kid here, but we weren’t good friends yet. Our huts were close together, both of us were sailors on a patrol sloop in the navy of a local warlord.

  “One night, when I was off duty, sleeping in my hut, I suddenly woke up. It wasn’t the thunder and lightning that woke me up, either. It was a tap on my shoulder.

  “At first, I thought it was Howardine, my woman. You remember her, Kid?”

  “She was a beauty,” Martin said to Frigate. “A redheaded Scotchwoman.”

  Frigate stirred, and he said, “I’m anxious to get to the heart of the matter.”

  “Okay, no frills then. It wasn’t her, because she was sound asleep. Then a flash of lightning showed me a dark figure squatting by me. I started to rear up, my hand going under my pillow for my tomahawk. But I couldn’t move.

  “I guess I was drugged or under a spell of some kind. I thought, Oh, oh! This guy has got it in for me, and he’s paralyzed me somehow and now yours truly is going to get it.

  “Of course, I’d wake up someplace else, but I didn’t feel like leaving.

  “Then a couple of flashes showed the outline of the guy in detail. I was startled. Not scared, you realize, just startled. His body was covered in a big black cloak. And the head! There wasn’t any. I mean, it was covered by a big globe, like a fishbowl. It was all black so I couldn’t see his face. But somehow he could see me.
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  “If I couldn’t move, I could talk. I said, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I spoke loud enough to wake Howardine up, but she didn’t stir during the whole parley. I figure she had been drugged, too, but worse than me.

  “The stranger spoke in a deep voice, answering me in English.

  “‘I don’t have much time, so I won’t go into much detail. My name doesn’t matter. In any event, I couldn’t tell you because they might find you and unreel your memory.’

  “I wondered what that meant, unreeling my memory. The whole business was beginning to look bizarre. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I wished I was.

  “‘If they should, they’ll know everything that is said and done here,’ the hombre said. ‘It’s like taking a movie of your mind. They can clip out what they don’t want you to remember, and you won’t. But if they should do that, I’ll talk to you again.’

  “‘Who’s they?’ I said.

  “‘The people who restructured this planet and who resurrected you,’ he said. ‘Now, listen, and don’t talk until I’m finished.’

  “You know me, Kid. I don’t take crap off nobody. But this guy spoke as if the whole world was a ranch he owned and I was just one of the hands. Anyway, what could I do?

  “‘They,’ he said, ‘live in the tower set in the middle of the north polar sea. You may have heard rumors about this. Some men actually did get through the mountains that surround the sea.’

  “Right there I would have asked him if he was the one who left that long rope so they could get up the cliff and bored that tunnel for them. But I didn’t know about that story then.

  “He continued, ‘But they did not get into the tower. One of their party, however, died when he fell off a mountain into the sea. He was allowed to be translated back into the Valley.’”

  Tom paused. “He must have had some way of knowing this.

  “The stranger continued, ‘But the others were not. They… never mind.’

  “So,” Tom said, grinning, “he did not know everything about the Egyptians. What he didn’t know was that one of them escaped. Or, if he did, he wasn’t telling me, for some reason. I don’t think, however, he found out about it. Otherwise, he’d have never let him get away. Still… maybe he did.

  “Anyway, the stranger said, ‘The swiftness of verbal communication in the Valley is amazing. I believe you call it the grapevine. The man who fell off the mountain told his story after he was translated, and it has spread throughout the Valley. You may speak. Have you heard the story?’

  “‘Not until now,’ I said.

  “‘Well, you will doubtless hear it in the future. You’ll be going upRiver and will surely encounter it in one distorted form or another. Its essence is true.

  “‘Doubtless, you have wondered why you were raised from the dead and placed here?’

  “I nodded, and he said, ‘My people, the Ethicals, have done this purely as a scientific experiment. They have put all of you here, mixed the races and nations from different times, solely to study your reactions. To record them and to classify them.

  “‘Then!’—and here his voice rose to a pitch of great indignation—‘after they have subjected you to this experiment, after they have filled you with hope for an eternal life, they will close the project! You will die, forever! There will be no more resurrections for you! You will go down into dust, be dust forever!’

  “‘That seems almighty cruel,’ I said, forgetting he’d not given me permission to speak.

  “‘It is inhumanly cruel,’ he said. ‘They have the power to give you life everlasting! At least, it would last as long as your sun lasted. Longer even, since you could always be transported to another planet with a living sun.

  “‘But no! They won’t do that! They say that you do not deserve immortality!’

  “‘That’s downright unethical,’ I said. ‘In which case, how come they call themselves the Ethicals?’

  “That seemed to stop him for a moment. Then he said, ‘Because they think it would be unethical to permit such a miserable, undeserving species to live forever.’

  “‘They sure don’t have a good opinion of us,’ I said.

  “‘I don’t either,” the stranger said. ‘But good or bad opinions of humanity, based on en masse consideration, have nothing to do with the ethical aspects.’

  “‘How can you love someone you despise?’ I said.

  “‘It isn’t easy,’ he said. ‘But nothing truly ethical is easy to do. However, this is wasting my time.’

  “A bluish light glowed, and by its light I could see that he had taken his right hand out from under his cloak. Around its wrist was a device larger than a man’s pocket watch, and it was emitting the bluish light. I couldn’t see what was on its face, but it was also talking, softly, like a radio turned way down.

  “I couldn’t hear the words, but it all sounded to me like some foreign language I never heard before. And the blue light showed me the globe, which was black and looked glassy. His hand was a big one, broad, but with long, slim fingers.

  “‘My time is up,’ he said, and he put his hand under the cloak, and the hut was dark again, except for a lightning bolt now and then.

  “‘I can’t tell you now why I chose you,’ he said, ‘except to say that your aura shows you’re a likely candidate for the job.’

  “What’s an aura? I thought. I knew what it meant according to the dictionary, but I had the feeling he meant something else. And what job? I thought.

  “Suddenly, as if he’d been reading my thought, his hand came out from under the cloak again. The bluish light was bright, very bright, so bright I could hardly see him. But I could see both his hands now, and they lifted the globe off. I thought I’d be able to see at least the outlines of his head, maybe something of his features if I squinted hard enough. But all I could see was the big globe above his head. Not the glass globe, because he held that to one side. The thing above his head was whirling, shot with many colors, and was so bright I could see only that. It put out feelers from time to time, feelers that shot out and then shrank back into the whirling thing.

  “I don’t mind admitting that I was scared then. Well, not really so much scared as awed. It was like seeing an angel face to face, and there’s no shame in being afraid of an angel.”

  “Lucifer was an angel,” Frigate said.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve read the Bible. Shakespeare, too. Maybe I didn’t get through grammar school, but I’m self-educated.”

  “I wasn’t intimating that you were ignorant,” Frigate said.

  Martin snorted, and he said, “You two don’t really believe in angels, do you?”

  “Not me,” Tom said. “But he sure seemed like one. Anyway, I don’t think that aura is ordinarily visible. I think he showed me it by means of that thing he wore on his wrist. It suddenly disappeared, and the bluish glow died immediately. Too soon for me to see his face. Another lightning flash silhouetted him then, and I saw he’d put the glass globe back over his head.

  “Now I knew what he meant by an aura. I figured from what he said that I had one, too. And it was invisible.”

  “Next you’ll be claiming to be an angel,” Martin said.

  “‘You can, you must, be of help to me,’ the stranger said. ‘I want you to start upRiver, toward the tower. But first, you must tell this Jack London what has happened here tonight. And you must convince him that you are telling the truth. And get him to accompany you.

  “‘But under no circumstances are you to tell anyone else that I have talked to you. No one. We Ethicals are few and seldom venture from the tower. But my enemies have agents among you. Not many, compared to you. But they are disguised as resurrectees, and they will be looking for me.

  “‘Someday, they may even suspect that I have recruited help from you Riverdwellers. So they will be trying to find you. If they do, they will take you to the tower, unroll your memories, read them, and excise the parts relevant to me. And return you to the Valley.

  “‘Lon
don has a tiger-aura, too. So you must convince him to go with you. Tell him that I will see both of you again, and then he will believe. And you two will learn more of what this is all about.’

  “He rose, and he said, ‘Until then.’

  “I watched him as another flash of lightning outlined his dark figure, the cloak, and the globe. I was wondering if I was crazy. I tried to get up but couldn’t. After about half an hour, the paralysis wore off, and I went outside. The storm was over then, the clouds were starting to break up. But I couldn’t see any sign of him.”

  Martin took up the story. Tom had come to him the next evening and made him promise to keep silent about what he was going to tell him. Martin did not know whether or not to believe him. What convinced him that he was not lying was that there was no reason for Tom to make up such a fantastic tale.

  The incident had happened, but was it a hoax by some unknown party?

  Tom thought about that and then wondered if perhaps London himself was the stranger, playing a joke on him. They soon realized that neither they nor anybody else they knew could have had the glass globe or the instrument he’d used. And how could anybody fake that blazing aura?

  The Frisco Kid was getting itchy, anyway. He liked the idea of building a sailboat and going on. Whatever the story was, true or not, it gave him an incentive, a meaning to life. Tom felt the same way. The Tower became for them a sort of Holy Grail.

  “I felt kind of lousy leaving Howardine without a word. The Kid wasn’t getting along too well with his woman, a tall plain jane with a chip on her shoulder—I don’t know what he ever saw in her—so he had no regrets about leaving.

  “We scooted on upRiver for a couple of hundred stones, and then we started to build our schooner. Nur came along and helped us build it. He’s the only original member of the crew still with us.”

  Tom, holding his finger to his lips, walked softly to the door. His ear against it, he listened for a moment. Then he yanked it open.

  The little Moor, Nur el-Musafir, was standing by the door.

  Nur did not seem startled or afraid. He said, in English, “May I come in?”