The shock threw them off their feet. They weren’t hurled down physically, just reduced to such a state of imbalance that they fell of their own accord. All of their senses clashed with what had happened to them, fought against the unbelievability of it, and lost to its reality. They had moved or had been moved between an “A” and a “B” with neither physical nor mental perception of distance covered or time expended. And human minds aren’t built to take that sort of treatment. The sensation it produced was a sort of drunkenness without the alcoholic confusion. Confusion was there, certainly, but it was that of minds confronted—indeed surrounded—by the Unacceptable.
What Gill had seen as he staggered and collapsed to all fours was this:
Square grey clouds moving with an almost mathematical precision across a domed sky of blue hexagons, like a cross-section through a honeycomb but vast as the vault of heaven itself. In the distance, mountains formed of a myriad pyramidal and similarly upward-pointing and angular geometric shapes stood heaped against a horizon of hexagon-formed sky, whose colour darkened to a pure indigo in which square stars radiated white flashes of light from their corners. And a pale ten-sided moon was hanging over the rim of a flat plain of green graph squares, which marched all the way from the left of Gill’s visual periphery and dwindled away to the horizon of his right.
That was what he had seen. Before that: he remembered that the Castle had rushed down upon him and enclosed him and the others, following which it had apparently moved them somewhere. Somewhere else. Between being engulfed and emerging here, there had been an impression of intense white light—like the flash as a nuclear weapon explodes, which precedes the appearance of the stalk and boiling white mushroom head—and that was all. Gill’s instinct had been to close his eyes and he had done so as he fell to all fours, but not before the weird landscape had impressed itself upon his retinas, remaining there as his senses ceased their spinning. And when he opened his eyes. again, everything was quite different.
The stranger who had been last to climb the steps to the Castle was already on his feet, helping Turnbull up, and the world around seemed more nearly normal—or at least normal by comparison with that first entirely alien landscape of rigidly geometrical designs. But still, Gill saw, totally abnormal by any mundane orientation. It was, quite simply, an alien scene.
Angela saw it where she lay sprawled, gave a small cry, and squeezed her eyes shut, then threw herself in Gill’s direction. He caught her, cradled her in his arms and said: “It’s all right. You’re all right now.” And thought: God, where are we?
“Where are we?” someone whispered, and Gill wondered if perhaps he hadn’t after all uttered the words out loud. But it had been Anderson, pale as a wraith, round-eyed, cringing down into himself where he lay curled on the … grass?
Gill got up, helped Angela to her feet. No sooner up, she flew into his arms again. In other circumstances he would have been pleased—even here her nearness gave him something of pleasure—but he’d sooner be lover than protector. Was that how she saw him, he wondered? A man of strength? He hoped not. Any one of the others could probably do a better job of protecting her than he could.
“Mon Dieu!” Varre lay where he had fallen, pointing. All eyes followed his trembling hand and finger.
Behind them, maybe fifty yards away, stood the Castle. But it was a Castle with a difference. It now had doors. Indeed the great hexagon of its base contained entire rows of doors along all three of its visible walls.
Turnbull said, “Anyone hurt?” He was being practical, but his voice wasn’t as deep as it might be. He stepped between Anderson and the man from SCOPE and helped them to their feet. Varre remained where he was, moaning a little as he hugged the ground, his eyes wide in terror.
Anderson brushed himself down—an entirely involuntary, habitual, and meaningless action, for there was no dust—and again asked, “Where are we?”
Gill had the answer to that one. He could feel it all around him, like a vast invisible factory. He was something bacteriologically small stuck to a continent-sized microchip in the guts of an incredibly complex machine. Almost without thinking, he answered Anderson’s question. “We’re inside the Castle!” he said.
“Jesus, have I gone nuts?” the American with the SCOPE badge whispered. He looked at each of their strange, strained faces in turn, then more fearfully at his alien surroundings. “Is this … it?”
“It what?” Turnbull wanted to know. He was more alert now, in control of himself, as close to normal as could be in the circumstances.
The American shook his head, shrugged hopelessly, said, “What I’ve been looking for—no, avoiding—all of my life. Well, it seems that I’ve finally found it. Or it has found me!”
“You’re talking nonsense,” said Turnbull. He turned from him and almost dragged Varre to his feet. “As for you,” he growled, “well, you’d better face it, Varre. We’re in trouble—but we’re all in the same boat.”
“But I … I’m claustrophobic!”
Turnbull gave a harsh laugh. “You’re what? Look, this may not be exactly what we’re used to, but we’re certainly not closed in!”
“Leave him alone,” said Gill. “He’s right, we are closed in. His phobia is doing a good job for him.”
“Closed in?” Anderson clutched Gill’s arm. “Spencer, what do you mean? You said we were inside the Castle—but isn’t that the Castle over there?” He inclined his head towards the enigmatic structure.
Gill said, “It is and it isn’t. Let’s say it’s part of it.”
Anderson stared hard at him for a second, then scowled. “Damn you!” he suddenly snapped, jerking his hand away from Gill’s arm. His face had turned an angry red. “All along you’ve known more about this than you were saying,” he accused.
Gill was taken aback. “Don’t be a fool, Minister,” he said, his own voice tight. “Wherever we are—whatever has happened to us—do you think if I’d known about it I’d be here voluntarily?”
“But just look at this place!” Angela’s words left her in a gasp where she clung to Gill’s arm. So far they’d all avoided really looking, but now they did. It was a world, certainly, but it wasn’t their world.
Far away, the mountains had lost a little of their angularity. There were rounded foothills, hazy with distance, beyond which the peaks themselves were quite majestic, whitecapped above and pale purple at their bases. But still there was that about them which suggested that they’d been painted on some fantastic backdrop. The stars above the mountains were no longer square, but in the deepening twilight they glittered more brightly than Earth’s stars—almost like the stars in a Disney cartoon. As for the great flat plain: its “grass” was underfoot, a carpet of evenly cropped green stretching away as far as the eye could see, presumably to the very mountains. That left only the moon, which was a perfect disc now, yellow as Earth’s moon but entirely featureless.
“The sky was honeycombed,” said Angela. “I … I thought it was, anyway.”
“Me, too,” said Turnbull. “I got one good look at the place before it knocked me down. My eyes must have been shaken all to hell or something. Christ, it looked like computer graphics!”
He’s got it in one, Gill knew it at once. They’d arrived here while the place was still in the process of filling itself in, before it had built a compatible picture. Now they were seeing what it (it what, the Castle?) wanted them to see, something which was bearable by their standards, which had been prepared for them. But did that mean it wasn’t real? Not necessarily. Is a picture on a screen any less real because it’s a picture? And surely it’s more real if you’re actually in the picture!
That thought conjured another, and Gill was suddenly awed. This was one hell of a big screen!
“Spencer, is something wrong?” That was Turnbull, too.
“Something wrong?” Gill looked at him, glanced all about, and snorted. “Are you kidding?”
“Your face had a weird look.”
“You should see y
our own!” But Gill had decided to say nothing that might add to the confusion or aggravate the group’s worries. There’d be time later to think it all through. Maybe …
“Introductions,” said Anderson, very nearly in control of himself again. But his face twitched a little as he awkwardly held out his hand to the American. “David Anderson, from the MOD—er, Ministry of Defence, to you. I shall probably take charge here. Someone will have to, certainly, and I believe I’m best qualified.”
“Miles Clayborne,” said the other. “President of SCOPE. Er, that’s—”
“The Society for the Correlation of Paranormal Experiences,” said Turnbull.
“Ah, you’ve heard of us!”
Gill said, “Is that what you meant? About something you’d been looking for or avoiding all your life? This place, the ultimate paranormal experierice? If so, forget it. We’re having a close encounter, Miles, but with nothing supernatural.”
“But—”
Turnbull cut in. “I’m Jack Turnbull, and this is Spencer Gill. He’s kind of bright. I’ve been sort of looking after him—but not very well, it seems. The young lady is—”
“Angela Denholm.” She spoke for herself. “I’m, well, nothing special.”
Gill wouldn’t have agreed with that.
Varre introduced himself, too, and then it was the turn of the other stranger. They all looked at him. “My name is Bannerman,” he told them, shaking hands all round. Rituals, thought Gill, at a time like this! “Jon Bannerman.” Angela thought he had unusually warm hands.
“And what is it you do, Mr. Bannerman?” Anderson enquired, politely.
Bannerman shrugged. “Nothing very much. Right now I’m a tourist … .”
CHAPTER TEN
Gill and Turnbull might have studied Bannerman more closely; for without at present knowing it, they felt a mutual interest in him. A not necessarily flattering interest. But this was neither the time nor the place and each member of the kidnapped (extracted? Abstracted, Gill thought) group had now recovered somewhat from the initial buffeting and was eager to voice his or her opinion. They had all started to babble at once: excited, shrill, mainly incoherent mouthings. Each with the exception of Varre, who now commenced to run, or stumble, in the direction of the second Castle.
“It’s … a house!” he was gibbering. “A House of Doors. It took us in, and now we’ve to find our own way out!”
“Stop him!” Gill yelled, feeling an electric fear tightening his skin. “That thing’s active!” He knew it with an instinct that wouldn’t be denied.
Turnbull raced after the Frenchman. “Why stop him?” he called back. Before Gill could answer he’d caught up, brought the little man down in a rugby tackle within a few paces of the looming walls.
Gill and the others came after. Breathlessly Gill said, “If there’s a way in—or out—he may have triggered it.”
“A way out?” Anderson looked at him. “A way back … home, do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean yet,” said Gill. “Look, the original Castle shut us off from our world. If Varre had gone through one of these doors, maybe he’d have been shut off from us.”
“His lookout, surely?” said Turnbull, holding the struggling, panting Frenchman.
“And maybe ours, too,” Gill answered. “What if he found his way home—on his own—and we were left here?”
“We’d follow him,” said the American, Clayborne, shrugging.
“If we were able to,” said Gill. “If the door he used could be used more than once.”
“But of course it could!” Anderson was angry again, afraid and angry.
“We don’t know that.” Gill rounded on him. “We don’t know anything! Not about this place or this … Castle. No, this House of Doors. I like Varre’s term better. And just suppose he used a door and we all pile in after him. Who says we’d be going home? Why not somewhere … else?”
“But why not home?” said Turnbull, his voice cracking like a whip. And Gill knew how tight the big man was.
“Maybe home,” he told him. “Just maybe, Jack. But if that’s all this was about—a simple return ticket—then why does this damned thing need so many doors?”
Varre had been listening to Gill’s reasoning. Now he stopped struggling in Turnbull’s arms and said, “You people don’t understand. Sacre bleu! you don’t understand!”
“What don’t we understand, Mr. Varre?” Angela spoke gently, reasonably to him.
“We’re inside the Castle—the first one,” he answered, seeming equally reasonable. “All of this”—he waved his arms about, indicating the darkening sky, distant mountains, vast green plains, and enigmatic Castle—“is inside the first one. Don’t ask me how, but it is. I can feel it weighing on me, crushing me”—his voice speeded up—“and I have to get out!” And in another moment he was fighting again, struggling to be free of Turnbull’s overpowering, imprisoning arms.
“You heard what I said,” Gill told him. “One of these doors may, just may, take us home again. And maybe not. But there are an awful lot of them. Suppose one of them is the right one, how do we discover which one? Do we guess? What if we guess wrong? Where do all the wrong doors lead to?”
“Anywhere would have to better than this,” Varre gasped, still struggling.
“Would it?” Gill growled. He’d lost patience with the little Frenchman. Beside which, there was always the chance he was right. Gill nodded at Turnbull, a tight, curt nod. “Okay, Jack—turn him loose.”
“Wait!” Anderson snapped. “Before any one of us does anything rash, can’t we at least rationalize? What are we, rats in a trap?”
Gill thought: The “are we mice or men” bit! He knew the truth of it was that they were all scared stiff. But after all, Anderson was—or had been—a leader of men. And any form of leadership had to be better than none. Didn’t it?
“What do you suggest?” Bannerman wanted to know. The unaccustomed sound of his voice caused all of them to look at him. He spoke quietly, without their general panic. Indeed, so far he’d been the quietest of them all; perhaps the entire episode had simply stunned him, and being a stranger to everyone present, he’d felt even more out of things. “I mean,” he continued, “what is there to rationalize? Is any of this rational?”
Overhead, more stars were coming out; the moon was brighter now, and the angular mountains darker on night’s horizon; the House of Doors was throwing a soft velvet shadow over the group.
“Something of it might be,” said Miles Clayborne, shivering as he felt the gloom imperceptibly deepening. “I mean, I’m all for getting out of here, but I’d sure as hell like to know where to!”
“I agree,” said Angela Denholm, in the smallest voice of all. “We should try to make sense of everything we’ve experienced and everything we see here, before trying to move on somewhere else.”
Varre had stopped struggling. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he hung almost limp in Turnbull’s arms. “Very well,” he said, “let it be your way. I … I panicked. But believe me, you don’t know what it’s like. I feel … buried alive!”
Turnbull relaxed a little, let the Frenchman go. But he opened his coat and showed him his gun. “Varre,” he said, “I’d like to think we were all going to make it back home. But Gill says if you go for broke you could spoil everyone’s chances. So don’t, or I just might spoil yours.”
“You … threaten me!” Varre gasped, astonished.
“Damned right I do!” Turnbull was vehement. “You’re only one man, and you’re outvoted.” And the thought occurred to him: Come to think of it, this gun of mine carries the biggest vote of all.
“Jean-Pierre,” said Anderson gravely, “Gill and Turnbull are absolutely correct. And to be coldly clinical about it—as Gill would seem to be”—he glanced at Gill thoughtfully for a moment—“might be a very sensible solution. If your phobia is going to prove troublesome, become a danger to us all, then perhaps you should go on alone.”
Gill no
dded. “That way when you put a foot wrong, we’ll just very carefully step round whatever’s left of you,” he said.
Angela at once let go of his arm and stepped away from him. It was the first time she’d parted company with him since they’d arrived here. “Are you really that cold-blooded?” Her eyes held disappointment.
He looked away, said nothing. He wasn’t cold-blooded and meant the Frenchman no harm, but Varre must be made to see sense.
“We’re agreed upon a rationalistic approach, then,” said Anderson. “Very well, so where do we begin?”
Clayborne said, “Bannerman asked if any of this is rational. If it’s paranormal—that is to say supernatural—then none of it is rational. My society has explored dozens of cases, and there’s never been anything remotely—”
“Sorry,” Gill cut him off, “but you’re wasting time. Believe in ghosts all you want, er, Miles?—and who’s to say you’re not right to?—but this isn’t that sort of thing. The Castle grabbed us up and brought us here. Or rather, it enveloped us. Varre is right to believe he’s inside it. We all are—lost in the guts of a machine. So let’s have no more about ghosts, right?”
Clayborne’s jaw jutted a little. “And what the hell are you? Some sort of expert?”
“Yes, he is,” said Turnbull. And to Gill: “Okay, so we’re inside a vast machine. The Castle has snatched us into itself. But why? How? To what end?”
“I only wish I knew,” said Gill, shaking his head. “But I don’t. The whys and wherefores will have to wait. We are here.”
“Inside a machine …” Anderson shook his head, suddenly snorted his derision. “Somehow I don’t think I can buy it.”
“That’s a fair comment,” said Bannerman. “What? A machine that’s bigger on the inside than the outside?”
“It might only seem to be.” Gill was cautious. “Alien technology. And as you’ve all seen for yourselves, it’s far and away superior to ours.”
Turnbull stopped and plucked a blade of grass. He sniffed at it, chewed on the tip, spat it out. “Grass.” He shrugged. “I think. It tastes and feels like it. But flat as a billiard table? Now, if this is an alien world, why grass? Why a moon, stars, mountains?”