The worker came out; a thin-faced little man with a bobcut hairdo. “I got the signal on the clear-out sequence. I knew you wanted someone to wait behind and keep watch. I had this on him all the time.” He held up an ancient projectile weapon. “Could’a plugged him any time. But I figured you knew I was watching.”
“No, I didn’t know you were watching.”
“Jeez, I could’a swore you knew I was watching.”
The Professor looked at him. He said, softly, “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, I guess you didn’t. You sure looked scared as hell, Perfesser. You was really sweatin’. But, see, I thought you must of known I was watching. That’s why I din’t punch him all that time.”
“Clever of you.”
“But, Jeez, if you din’t know, then, Jeez, you could of been really tore up by them piranhas, huh?”
“Yes. I could, huh.”
“You want I should get the cops on him, Perfesser?”
The Professor’s voice was low and nasty. “No, I don’t want you to do anything. Just go home. And forget what happened tonight if you want to keep your shift-card.”
The thin-faced little man hobbled his head anxiously. “Yessir, Perfesser, yessir indeed. Whatever you say.”
He walked away quickly, and as the drapes parted to swallow him, the fat man heard him say, “But, Jeez, you sure was sweatin’.”
The Professor went back into the office and passed his fingertips over a section of wall. His prints were instantly recognized, and a section slid up, revealing a private vid. He studded out a number, left the vision off, and said succinctly:
“It will have to be tonight. Three a.m. Have Dirt get to them. At her place, in thirty minutes.”
A short sharp word acknowledged the message.
“Thirty years and more, and almost done,” the Professor said to no one at all, clicking off the vid. The wall slid back down, and he fell into his seat. It rocked beneath him, and held him as he sat in misery and loneliness. His fat a bulwark against the chill that crept in softly.
In an age where wealth and opulence were commonplaces, the people had maintained the Slum for kicks. It was fake and japery from one end to the other. It made people feel good to think there were still areas of mystery and intrigue, places where people poorer than themselves lived. The governmental system that always kept the Slum fully inhabited was too involved for any one man to understand, but Rondell knew one family out of every four got the “call” to go to the Slum for a one year term on a demographic rotational basis. Heavy casino losers also were domiciled in the Slum. Phony dives and trumped-up excitement.
Rondell stalked through this sideshow Slum.
He found 6627A Broad Street without difficulty. It was a walk-up next to a place laughingly called The Hang-Dog House. He went up quickly, having found the name he sought on a plate downstairs. The door to the apartment was no trouble … an old-style slide-bolt he cut with the vibroblade.
Moonlight streamed down through a high window, and he could see the squalor typical of these artificial dumps. In the bed, a woman with dark-black-almost-blue-black hair slept, lying on her arm.
He crept toward the bed and hardly realized for a moment after the needle-nose was aimed at his head, that the disruptor was in her hand.
“Who are you?” she said softly. “Who sent you? What are you doing here?”
Her face was half-shadowed by the moonlight’s angle, but even in the partial light he could see she was hard-featured. Not particularly good-looking at all…in fact rather eagle-nosed and high-browed, but her naked body gleamed in the dusk of the flat She had deep lines in her face, much like his own; and he could see a familiar narrowing of her eyes.
He told her quickly who he was, and from where he had come, and for how long he had been running. He told her because he was so tired of running and he wanted only answers himself, even as she wanted answers. He hid nothing; and as he talked quietly, the disruptor lowered.
Then she spoke to him. Her name was Elenessa, and she, too, had been running for a long, long time. As long as he. And her circumstances had been the same. The constant harrying by the society, on all sides. And a man named Zalenkoz, who was comparable in background to the Professor.
They sat and talked, and in a while, they knew each other. Better than a thousand years together, they knew what was under the skin and in the head of each. Because they had gone the same distance separately. So they were mated in mind when the rat-faced man knocked at the door.
Elenessa had thrown a wrap around herself. She sat on the edge of the bed, and when the knock came, she started violently. “Cops,” she whispered. Rondell shrugged and pulled his disruptor. He motioned for her to open the door and slipped silently behind the frame. She walked Lightly, on the balls of her feet; as he walked.
When she threw open the door the rat-faced man standing there was caught unaware; he didn’t have time to conceal the fact that he had been picking his nose.
A simple-minded grin flickered across his face, and his nose twitched like a gopher’s. “Dirt’s the name,” he said. “I was sent by-“
Rondell was around the door, and the disruptor was leveled at the ridiculous little Slum dweller. “Get in here! And I’ll see if it’s worthwhile letting you live.”
The rat-faced little man thrust his hands into the air and his eyes grew large. “Hey, lissen, don’t get cute wit’ that t’ing. I’m onny doin’ what I was paid ta do. A big fat guy and a guy with real black hair an’ a beard paid me—”
Elenessa broke in. “That sounds like your Professor … and Zalenkoz.”
Rondell motioned with the disruptor for Dirt to finish what he had been saying. “They paid me to come and fetch ya. That’s all. Honest.”
“What do you mean, ‘Fetch us?’”
The little man spread his hands, and then started to reach into a side pocket. “Hold it!”
“Just a piece of paper, chief, that’s all,” Dirt said.
“Just the same, hold it.” Rondell went to him, felt in the man’s pocket, and came up with a slip of paper. “This it?” The little man nodded.
Rondell unfolded it, and across the top was printed: FROM THE DESK OF THE PROFESSOR CASINO ROW.
The paper had an address written on it. An address far uptown in the palatial Salazzo Plaza area. “This was where you were supposed to lead us?”
“That’s right, chief. I got two extra hours added on my card for the job, so ya better lemme take ya, or I’ll lose that time at the tables.”
“Sure,” Rondell answered, understandingly.
Then they trussed Dirt up, and prepared to find the tower in Salazzo Plaza.
The tower was alabaster; rising out of the night like an ivory fang, deadly and smooth. High up, ringing its top, a gigantic wheel of jewels sparkled against the night skyline of white and black and gold.
Rondell had no trouble with the portal. The vibroblade slid across the maglock and the entrance irised. It was dark inside. Darker than the night. Rondell undipped a torch from his pouch-fold, and held it up, casting its sharp, thin light around. The place was empty. In the center of the room stood a suction tube, disappearing into the ceiling.
Rondell led the way, with Elenessa directly behind him, her step assured, the disruptor ready. They came into the center of the empty vestibules, stopped, looked around. It was silence on silence.
Then they started toward the droptube …
They could not move …
Lights went on. Suddenly, glaringly, alarmingly, lights flooded everything, and they were standing in the middle of a tensor-field. Beneath their feet an impregnated grid showed up through the total-conductivity floor. From the ceiling, vaulted high and gold above them, the nozzles of tensor machines protruded, and from their snouts came the faint, high buzz of the directional ion-beams.
A speaker concealed somewhere in the walls whiffed, as though someone were blowing into it, to make sure it was on. Then a voice came through.
r /> “Sorry to have to trick you, but we were quite certain you wouldn’t come of your own volition. Not after the way we’ve treated you.”
“Zalenkoz!” Elenessa screamed, straining motionlessly at the invisible bonds holding her.
“Yes, my child,” he replied through the speaker, “the one man you despise.”
“Let me free! I’ll kill you!” But there was no release and she subsided into a vicious silence.
“So goodbye,” Zalenkoz said.
A plate slid back in the ceiling, and a complex machine rolled down on tracks. It was aimed directly at them. They heard a switch being knifed down, through the speaker, and knew that wherever he was in the tower, Zalenkoz had turned on the weird machine.
A blue ray shot from the mouth of the machine bathing them in radiation.
Rondell caught a glimpse of Elenessa from the corner of his eyes. She was fading.
“Stop!” he screamed. “Stop! We deserve to know! Why are you killing us? I was told the answer was here! We deserve to know!”
The ray was cut off—and Elenessa slowly came back to solidarity. She was terribly frightened. “You—you were getting dim; you were disappearing,” she said to Rondell.
He nodded. Through the speaker, with someone’s hand imperfectly over the mike, they could hear Zalenkoz speaking to someone else. Then sounds of agreement, and Rondell heard a familiar voice.
“Rondell-“
“You!” the thief screamed, straining futilely at nothing.
“Rondell, let me speak.” The Professor’s voice overrode the thief’s screams. “We have only a matter of three—what is it, Zalenkoz, four minutes and a few seconds … thanks—four minutes. You have to go through now, or the juncture points won’t merge for another two years.
“And frankly, in your present state of mind, I’m afraid we couldn’t satisfactorily hold either of you for that long.”
Rondell tried to understand. It was hard getting past the hate.
“Over thirty years ago Zalenkoz and I found the key. The temporal-shift Not time, precisely, but something more involved. Something like worlds within worlds, though not quite that, either. Picture the Earth and make it two dimensional, like a paper cutout. Then behind it, like two leaves of a book, another Earth. And another behind that. On and on and on, endlessly, an uncountable number of Earths—in fact, an uncountable number of universes-one after another, each slightly different, each waiting to be discovered.
“So we worked, and we found a way to slip a person through. But what good did it do us? No one would go. Here is a world choking with overpopulation and corruption, laziness and dead souls; and everyone so decadent and smug they would never risk their lives to try a new frontier. Why do you think the space colonies are dying out?
“So we thought of kidnapping them and sending them through. We tried it twice … and neither time did they live out a day. These aren’t easy worlds, some of them. They are Earth … but a different Earth.
“We had to build our own pioneers. We had to create the right kind of person to live in a rugged new environment. So we used you, both of you, and separately went about ruining you for this culture. It was cruel, and it was unrewarding, and don’t think we didn’t suffer as much as you—but in a different way. Now you’re ready. The harrying has turned out some fine stock. If you succeed, there will be others, and there may still be some hope for this rotting planet. You will have escaped your destiny!
“Do you understand?”
They understood, and their hatred was even greater.
Then the machine went on again, and they started to fade under the blue ray. Rondell felt himself slipping in an invisible pool of oil. He could see Ms right shoulder fading, and he screamed again, in terror.
He had to know one thing … he yelled once more, just before dematerializing, “Who am I? Where did I come from?”
And the Professor answered, “I—can’t—tell—you.”
Then they were gone.
The room was silent, and the blue ray vanished.
Then, through the speaker, hardly realizing it was still on, came the sound of crying. Then the voice of Zalenkoz, soothing the other, and Zalenkoz saying, “What is it they say? I think it was Shakespeare. ‘It is a wise father that knows his own child.’ What do you think, Professor … does the reverse apply?”
The fat man did not answer.
After a while the crying stopped.
SomeEarth, somewhere, somewhen, a man named Rondell and a woman named Elenessa found themselves in a primordial jungle. As they stood watching themselves solidify, a saber-toothed beast, vaguely like a cougar, dropped from one of the trees. In a moment, it had cornered them. Rondell and the woman backed up, and watched the beast come closer.
Then it leaped.
Twin disruptors came out, but would not punch. The beast sprang past and knocked the man to the ground. Elenessa had her vibroblade drawn and was on the beast’s back in a moment.
Soon, there was quiet, and blood, and they were alone again.
Alone, the man and woman who had run for a long, long time. Alone, with worlds to conquer.
And they would not bother with anything as ridiculous as calling themselves Adam and Eve.
THE HOUR THAT STRETCHES
The red light flashed ON THE AIR; hincty synthesizer music composed for the tone-deaf began going out at 90.7 megahertz; Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, made a circle with thumb and forefinger; and for the five hundred and forty-first time in the eleven years it had been on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Hour 25 was on the wing. The clock in the booth said 10:02 PM.
“Good evening, this is your host for Hour 25, Mike Hodel, and my guest tonight is Harlan Ellison. For those of you who have read Mr. Ellison’s forty books, very close to almost one thousand short stories, articles, television columns, essays or commentaries; or who’ve seen his teleplays on commercial television … he needs no introduction. For those of you to whom Harlan’s name isn’t a household word …”
Ellison cut in. “Have yourselves put under house arrest for terminal illiteracy.”
Hodel grinned. “That, listeners, was the voice of Harlan Ellison. And I know he’ll kill me for saying this, because he doesn’t like people to know his many kindnesses, but Harlan came down at the last minute, to an urgent phone call about twenty minutes before we were scheduled to go on the air, filling in for our previously scheduled guest, Dr. Jerry Pournelle—”
Ellison cut in again. “Who is off in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba, helping to train marauders for the violent overthrow of Fidel Castro, or backpacking, or some dumb thing like that.”
“No, come on now,” Hodel said, stifling a smile, “that’s not true and you know it.”
“Of course I know it. That doesn’t mean I won’t malign the man, even if he is my friend. In fact, I’ll malign him because he’s my friend. I mean, anybody who’d call Ellison a friend is obviously a thoroughly corrupt, degenerate sod.”
“Dr. Pournelle, folks, is actually in Pasadena, speaking at the LungFishCon, at the Pasadena-Hilton. At probably this very moment he’s on a panel with Barry Longyear, John Norman, Norman Spinrad and Joanna Russ …”
Ellison cut in again. “The topic of which is ‘Labia and Broadsword Imagery in Contemporary Sci-Fi.’”
In the control booth, Burt Handelsman, crack engineer, fell apart with laughter, snorting Coca-Cola from his nose all over the console,
“And the convention,” Hodel went on doggedly, “is the reason the station is absolutely dead tonight. Even my eminent co-host, Mel Gilden-“
Ellison: “Star of the eminent sci-fi film Mel Needs Women.”
“—Mel Gilden is down there tonight acting as Emcee. So Fm here in solitary congress with our guest and our crack engineer, Burt Handelsman.”
“So what’re we gonna do on this silly show?” Ellison said.
“Well, we can talk about what’s happened to your script for Asimov’s I, Robot.”
“Please.
Spare me. My life is miserable enough as it is.”
“Well, we can always open up the phone lines and take calls from the Group Mind of our faithful listeners,”
“Please,” Ellison said, “do I really have to deal with people who read science fiction? I saw a rerun of Tod Browning’s Freaks last Wednesday and that’s about all the sf fans I can handle for one week.”
“Ignore him, Group Mind. He’s actually a sweet, gentle, loving man who adores his readers.”
“All three of them; especially the one with the goiter.”
“Okay. The phone numbers are 985-KPFK or toll-free from Orange County it’s 985-5735. If you’re outside the 213 area don’t call collect, we frown on moochers and Pacifica has no money.”
Ellison suddenly clapped his hands. “Hey, I’ve got a nifty idea.”
“But is it a peachy idea?”
“It is nifty, peachy, swell and even keen.
“If I had a dime for every clown who has ever come up to me at a cocktail party or a convention or at an autograph session and said, ‘Boy, have I got an idea for a story for you,’ I’d have just a lotta dimes. So why don’t we invite your loyal cadre of freakos, devos and pervos to call in and offer ideas for stories that I will then attempt to whip into utter greatness?”
Hodel’s eyes sparkled. “How about that, Group Mind? A first, right here on Hour 25. Harlan Ellison will collaborate with you on an original idea. All of you who’ve been nurturing the secret belief that you can write, here’s your chance to see what kind of an inventive mind you’ve got.”
“And of course,” Ellison said, “if I sell the stories, IH acknowledge the contribution of the caller.”
“What about the money from the sale?” Hodel asked.
“What about it?” Ellison responded.
“Will you share it?”
“I’m willing to attempt a crazy stunt,” Ellison said. “That doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” He thought a moment. “My philosophy is the same as Robin Hood’s: steal from everybody and keep it all myself.”