“There’s a castle on Ben Lawers,” she answered. “Not a real castle but an alien thing. It’s a sort of trap. We call it the House of Doors. It took us in, absorbed us—don’t ask me how. Since when we’ve been to many different places, all of which were terrible. And finally I’m here.”
“We?” He uncorked his bottle, took a swig.
Watching him drink, Angela couldn’t hide her disgust. Now that they were away from the other Rods—now that there was no “competition” and his fear of the unknown was fading—he was beginning to sound and behave like his old self again. His true self: his swinish, overbearing self. “Me,” she finally answered, “Spencer Gill, a man called Jack Turnbull, an MOD minister called David Anderson—oh, and some others. It’s all very confused and confusing. I might have been here for a couple of days, a week, even a month for all I know.”
He thought about it, nodded. “All of that time,” he said, “with all of those men.” His voice had thickened; she could almost feel his eyes on the loll of her breasts where Gill’s shirt barely covered them, coveting them. He pulled on the bottle again, drinking deep. “Dressed like that, and with all those men …”
The beach had narrowed to a strip of sand fifty feet wide between the sea and the forest. Away out across the ocean a faint silver nimbus was forming on the horizon. Dawn was about to break. Angela brushed dangling ringlets of jet hair out of her eyes. “I must have slept the night right through,” she said. “That’s how badly I needed it.”
“Needed it?” Rod repeated her, chuckling gruffly. “You, badly in need of it? That’ll be the day! Oh, sleep! I see what you mean!” And suddenly his voice was thick with sarcasm.
Finding the firm, ocean-washed sand easier going, Angela walked faster. It had dawned on her that she was stronger than Rod, or at least that she had more stamina. There was that to say for the House of Doors at least: it built up your stamina!
“I suppose you realise,” he said, panting as he hurried to catch up, “that we’re pretty much like Adam and Eve in this fucking place? I mean if we can’t get out of here, if we’re actually stuck here, we—”
She whirled to face him, her deep, dark eyes alive in the first ray of light from the rising sun—but alive with anger, not fear. “I realise a lot of things,” she snapped. “Like what a cheap, shitty, bullying bastard you were! Like just how bad it was with you! And like how it will never be that way again, not on any world! A Garden of Eden? Is that what you were thinking? Well forget it, Rod. I’d have those mindless clones of yours before I’d ever have you again!”
He grabbed her arm, brought her to a halt. His face had twisted into that familiar, ugly, lusting snarl she knew so well of old. “You’re still my wife,” he reminded her, his voice guttural now. “You can’t deny me anything. And especially not here.” He took another long pull at his bottle, which was already three-quarters empty. “God, how I’ve missed pouring myself into you—Angela, sweetheart!”
Something snapped. She drew back her arm, balled her small fist and hit him. But it was more shock and astonishment than pain that felled him. Snarling obscenities, he scrambled upright again. But before he could say or do anything further—
“Angelaaa!” a voice called from the forest. “Where are you, sweetheart? Just think of all the good times when we find you, Angela. Why you’ll be able to have us three at a time! It will be fun while it lasts, anyway. While you last, Angela …”
“They know you!” The real Rod drunkenly blurted his accusation. “They’ve had you-you, can’t deny it. But you’d deny me, wouldn’t you-bitch!” .
Naked figures stepped out of the trees, and others were coming from back along the beach. For a moment Angela was frozen in horror-with the horrific futility of it all—but only for a moment. It still wasn’t her time to give in, not yet by a long shot.
She turned from Rod and ran through the shallow water and softly lapping wavelets. Alarmed by her thudding footsteps, and possibly by the renewed burst of calling from the forest and beach, great strange night-feeding crabs came trundling out of the ocean-fringing palms, tumbling each other in their eagerness to make it back to the safety of the sea. They were timid things, all of a foot long ,but carrying no pincers, and they reared up and cowered back from Angela where she ran and Rod as he pursued her.
“Bitch!” he shouted after her. “Cow! It’s the end of you, sweetheart. You’d better believe it—the end!”
She tripped on what looked like a length of slimy rope-which immediately snaked across the wet sand and was sucked down out of sight! It was the siphon of some great clam, which had been sent up like a snorkel to lie on the surface of the quaking sand. Then she saw what was happening: the great crabs, scuttling down to the beach, were triggering the clams. Vast hinged shells were opening, and the crabs were tumbling into their scalloped cups; and when they had their fill, then the shells were grinding shut again. But huge? Why, these things could surely take a man! Some of them must be all of ten or twelve feet across, and the shell of the horny valves was at least eight inches thick! And yet, while there was an obvious danger in it, there was nothing sinister; it was Nature at work and nothing more.
Again Angela stepped on some wriggling, snaking thing, and a shell opened immediately in front of her. Sand and salt water fountained as the huge bivalve yawned like a trapdoor; inside, pink and grey flesh pulsated and a mantle full of black, saucer-sized eyes flopped and writhed. Angela leaped to one side—straight into the arms of Rod! He grabbed her shirt and tore it from her, then threw her down and nailed her writhing body to the sand with his own superior weight.
“You … bastard!” she spat at him, but he caught her breasts in his hands and squeezed.
“Hold it right there, sweetheart,” he said, “and hold it very still. Or I swear I’ll pulp these tits of yours!” He would and she knew it. She did as he demanded—for now—relaxed and lay quite still. He pinned her throat with one hand, tore open his trousers with the other. Nothing happened. Made impotent by the liquor, he was no threat.
But Angela was. She brought up her knee as hard and as fast as she could, ramming it home between his thighs. Screaming like a gelding he flopped to one side and curled up, holding himself. She scrambled to her feet. And through the expanding dawn light she saw them coming. But where Rod was impotent, the pseudo-Rods most certainly were not.
She turned this way and that. They were everywhere. Rod grabbed her ankle, screaming, “She’s here, she’s here! The bitch is here! Come and get your fill!” .
She yanked back her foot, broke free of his grasp, turned to run. But where to? Rod-was up on his knees; he lunged at her and staggered to his feet, then slipped on a writhing siphon that slurped down out of sight into the sand. He grabbed her arm—and a great shell cranked open to one side of them. Rod teetered on the brink of the monster Tridacna; Angela kicked him again in the same place; he fell, gagging, into suffocating slop and constricting muscular tissues. And the upper shell lowered itself and ground shut.
The pseudo-Rods were converging on Angela. She had nowhere left to run. “Fuck you all!” she screamed at them, shaking her balled fists.
Then, close by, another shell opened. But inside it there was only the yawning blackness of a great pit. It was the colour of space out between the farthest stars. But Angela knew that in fact it was a door, a tunnel to another world.
And even as the Rods came leering and loping towards her, she gave a glad, mad cry and toppled herself in … .
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Spencer Gill woke up to a weird dawn on a weird mechanical world which was half the creation of his own mind and half the work of an alien machine called a synthesizer. A machine which could synthesise anything, even space itself. Many of the worlds it made were or had been real worlds: it recreated them not in space as we know it but in the space between the spaces we know. Gill woke up and felt the Thone instrument in his pocket and remembered how to use it, master it, understand it. And that was important, for
it was a step towards the understanding of all such machines.
In the hour or so leading to waking his mind had broken barriers of new knowledge. Lying just under the surface of his conscious machine mentality, subconscious instinct had released a flood of alien ideas: he had been allowed to glimpse new techniques, had felt his abilities enhanced, expanded, had more fully grasped that basic understanding which was the key. But like all things dreamed he knew that such skills would fade without practice, that the ephemeral would pass without reinforcement. Jewel insects turn to dust in a year, but preserved in amber they last out the aeons.
“Amber,” said Gill to Barney, who already understood quite a bit of what his new master still had to learn. “I have to find some amber, Barney—or else my dragonflies might crumble. Last time we were here you wanted to show us something. All right—so show me.”
Through the higher levels of the rusting, rotting machine city or factory they made their way under a rising nuclear sun to a place Barney knew of old. The dog led the way, and even if Gill hadn’t followed him, he would have gone on his own. He had to, because unlike Gill he needed to eat. He was here in error, and Sith of the Thone had not caused him to be processed, altered. In short, he was all dog, a real dog, and dogs get hungry. And in some of the synthesizer’s reconstructed worlds at least, there were good things to eat.
A mile from the rusty iron cave Barney reached his objective and stood before it, yipping and wagging his stump of a tail. Gill came after, crawling through a tangle of twisted girders and rust-scabbed, buckled steel plates, and finally stood up before one of the giant TV screens. It seemed no different to all the others Gill had seen: housed in a dull, grey metal frame, it was as big as a large cinema screen and showed alien “static” in the form of colours all muddied together in a vast whirl, like the strange galaxy of some surrealist painter. Protecting the screen was a rusty iron grid formed of bars two inches thick. The squares of the grid were maybe two feet across, so that Gill guessed he could angle himself through if he wanted to. But first he had to be sure that he wanted to.
He wondered if the grid was live and tossed a length of frayed copper cable at it to find out. It was: the piece of cable was hurled sputtering aloft, spraying molten golden droplets everywhere. Barney yelped and cowered back; Gill, too, asking, “So what’s this, Barney? Are you showing me a quick way to end it all if I get desperate? Maybe we’re here to admire the pretty pictures, or something?” .
Or something, obviously. Barney approached the grid, stepped nervously through a square, padded closer to the screen. Then, only a foot or so away from the flat picture, he paused and stood frozen, as if fascinated by the slow, monotonous distortion of colours in meaningless motion. Gill watched, wondered, and thought: Maybe it isn’t meaningless after all.
Finally there came one of those infrequent flashes of white light—at which Barney leaped straight forward, directly into the screen! In a moment he’d disappeared, and the screen’s colours continued their tortured, muddy swirling. It was as if Barney had never been there.
Gill waited for some minutes but the dog didn’t return. Was he dead or what? A dog, committing suicide? Or had he simply known the exact moment to make his move? Gill got down on all fours and, with the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck, crept through one of the squares at the bottom of the grid. There were inches to spare but he didn’t draw breath until he was through. And as he stood up on the other side—
—Barney came back! He stepped out of the screen like coming through a waterfall, except he wasn’t wet. A door? Gill wondered. Is this a door like all the others in the House o Doors—or is it unlike all the others? Obviously it goes somewhere, for Barney went there. But this door seems to be part of a two-way system. And Barney has a return ticket!
Indeed, Barney had more than that. He had a rabbit, too—or something suspiciously like one, despite an extra pair of legs—freshly dead and dangling from his clenched jaws! Wagging his rear end, the dog came and laid his offering at Gill’s feet. The rabbit-thing gave a final twitch and lay still.
Gill shook his head, partly to refuse the gift and partly out of bewilderment. Mostly the latter. How come the dog had figured out things which still mystified him? Was Barney just a dog or maybe … something else? Part of the game? Gill looked at the animal through narrowed eyes; he called him, checked his name tag, automatically fondled his ears. And then he sighed. No, the dog was just a dog—with fleas. And he was hungry.
“You go ahead.” Gill gave him back his offering. “Thanks but I’m not hungry. Not for food, anyway.” But he was very hungry for knowledge.
He looked at the screen and thought about it. He thought about the machinery which governed it, tried to get his mind inside the thing. Nothing. On their way here, Gill had let the jungle of stupid mechanisms and pointless machine parts—the futile, purposeless robots of his nightmares—eradicate the last spark of his instinctive inspiration. He had dreamed that he had all of the answers, but now it seemed they’d slipped away. Like a man who dreams he can fly, and knows how to do it even after he wakes up, only to find as he stumbles from his bed that gravity has robbed him of his talent. The mundane world gets in the way, and this immun-dane world had got in the way of Gill’s expanding machine consciousness, robbing him of dormant, as-yet-unidentified skills.
Or then again, maybe not …
Between the energised grid and the enigmatic screen, Gill and the dog shared the weirdness of the moment. Barney who knew (knew something, at least) and Gill who wanted to know. Barney who had managed to stay alive here, even now gnawing on his rabbit, and Gill who knew he might very well die here. But maybe not.
With fingers that trembled he took out the silver cylinder from his pocket. If only he could revitalise his dream, bring back the knowledge he’d so clearly understood there. He let go of conscious effort and rolled the Thone instrument in his hands, and felt it not only with his fingers but with his mind. The tool came apart in his hands as easily as a fountain pen; he had opened it like opening the back of a watch—no, easier than that. And once again he understood it. And he remembered his dream.
He had been afraid that he’d dream of Angela in her own world of nightmares—a world of black rape and red death—but that had not been the case. Instead his subconscious mind had gone back to wrestling with its basic obsession, his most immediate and burning problem. It may be selfish of him, but he’d dreamed only of alien science and alien mechanics.
There had been no buttons to press in that dream, no switches, no plugs or sockets, nuts or bolts. Fluid mechanics was all that there had been. Nothing solid, for solidity requires effort, and maximum efficiency should be effortless. The dream had simply reinforced his earlier findings, when he’d opened the silver cylinder to examine it for the first time. Except on that occasion he’d actually been trying too hard. But now he had the answer again, the key which was right here, waiting to be turned in its mental lock. And indeed that was the key: do nothing physically, do it mentally!
He looked at the two halves of alien metal in his hands—just looked at them—and they flowed together, fused, became whole. And as he put the cylinder back in his pocket, he looked at the screen again. Except that now he believed it had lost something of its mystery. And he believed he knew why.
A wheel is a wheel. Whether it draws water from a prehistoric well or balances an expensive modern watch, it still performs only one function: to turn. And the alien machines were like that; they might be simple or sophisticated in their own terms, but one principle governed all of them. And it was the same principle for the instrument in Gill’s pocket as for this screen, this portal between alien spheres of existence.
Forcing the Heath-Robinson smog from his mind, Gill gingerly reached out his hands towards the screen. He closed his eyes and felt the nearness of the thing—its alien energy—tingling on his sweating palms. It was a door, yes, but it was a window, too, on all manner of stored, recorded worlds. More, it was an ind
ex, a catalog of contents, a quick search-and-scan tool. A locator.
But how do I make it work? How did Barney make it work?
Answer: he didn’t. It was already working. The dog had simply smelled a world he knew, a friendly one, and jumped into it before it could go away. And suddenly Gill knew that even in a House of Doors, this most certainly was not just any old door.
There are many kinds of doors. One will take you from one room to another. But pass through a door onto a train and your exit point is limited only by the number of stations along the line. The white flashes were stations, switchover points between worlds. And the swirling colours were the sum total of those worlds before fine-tuning and visual definition.
All. right, thought Gill, superimposing his will on the transdimensional multinode which was the screen, now let’s see what I can locate here. It was like using a telephone: all he had to do was dial a number—but with his mind. Any number would do for starters. He gave a mental shrug, and dialed—
And at once the colours on the screen separated and a picture, a real picture, firmed into being. Gaping, Gill took two full paces to the rear before remembering the energised grid. At fhe same time, unnerved by the “memory” he’d activated, he released his mental grip on the locator. The muddy colours- flooded back, but not before he’d got his fill. of what the screen had shown him.
A tossing, throbbing, tropical jungle planet, where green and purple and poisonous yellow flora writhed and fought in hybrid horror, and mighty medusae drifted on mud oceans, and the atmosphere was thick with the spores and pollens of plants in their teeming millions. It had been like a vast, semisentient swamp, or a mad, mutated greenhouse.