A contented grin spread across Kerwin’s face. “That’s fine. It doesn’t matter what the Sikan do now because I’ve finally gone out of my mind.”
“Then we all have,” Rail told him, “because I see them too.”
The three little men walked over and the one in the middle stuck out his hand. “Allow me to make an introduction of myself. I am Brittle.”
Not knowing what else to do, Kerwin shook the small hand. The grip was firm without being quite normal. As he drew back his palm, a gentle tingling tickled the skin.
“Aren’t they cute?” Miranda commented as Izmir continued to twist and wind around her like a barber pole on vacation.
“Cute, hell,” Seeth sniffed. “Catch those threads. Where’d you get the clown suit, Jack?”
The man in the plaid, whose name was Odenaw, replied, “We wished our appearance to be as harmless and familiar as possible so we would not shock you. You have suffered too many shocks already.”
Kerwin’s gaze narrowed. “How do you know how many shocks we’ve been through?”
“Oh, we’ve been monitoring your situation from the beginning. We’d been hoping things would calm down so we could approach you differently.”
The third little man said nothing. He kept staring at Miranda. No, not at Miranda, Kerwin realized, but at the manner in which Izmir had draped himself around her.
“Everything’s gotten a bit out of hand,” Odenaw concluded.
“You could say that,” Kerwin agreed. “It started with two Oomemians trying to arrest a bowling ball, and now we’ve got two galaxies competing for possession.”
“Oh, there’s more than that involved,” said Brittle. “You’ve no idea how much more.”
“I didn’t think there was anything more.” He could say whatever he wanted to now, Kerwin realized, because he was obviously completely mad. “You know all about the Sikan, right?”
“Oh, we’ve been around,” Odenaw told him. He was tugging on the lapels of his plaid jacket. “It’s no big deal. You’ve seen one galaxy, you’ve seen ‘em all. Massive quasars—now those are worth detouring to visit, but ordinary galaxies are common as hydrogen. Even the food’s pretty much the same.”
“How did you get here? I mean, in here, with us?” Rail demanded. “I have just about decided that you are real and I am not imagining you, though you could be a trick of the Sikan to unnerve us. Mass delusions are not unknown.”
“They’re not us, either,” Brittle assured him. “Your minds appear to be holding quite well, considering what you’ve been through.”
Off to one side, Miranda was conversing with the third little man. “Yes, he’s kind of becoming when he wants to be.”
“As much of him as you can see.” The third little man’s name was Riztivethariamalian, but he responded to Rizz.
“You mean there’s more of him that we can’t see?”
Rizz nodded somberly.
“We’re Halets,” said Brittle. “Like Odenaw says, we know how to get around.”
Kerwin stared at him, looked over at Rail who shook his head. “Never heard of them,” the Prufillian confessed.
“Well, that’s the idea,” said Brittle. “You’re not supposed to hear of us. We’re very big on anonymity.”
“You guys must be pretty big on some other stuff.” Seeth gestured at the invisible walls of their prison. “I mean, you got aboard this ship which has got to be really well screened and defended and nobody’s showed up to check you out.”
“Oh, I don’t think the Sikan know we’re here yet, though eventually their internal sensors are likely to detect our auras no matter how hard we try to damp ourselves.” Brittle looked down at himself. “These aren’t our natural forms, of course. Just something we whipped up so we wouldn’t alarm you.” He glanced at Rail. “No offense, Prufillian.”
“What’s a Halet?” Kerwin asked.
“Us. Me. We.”
“I bet,” said Odenaw suddenly, “you folks would like to leave this place.”
Kerwin gaped at him. “You’re not here. You’re just figments of my imagination. Oomemians, Prufillians, Isotat, Sikan, now you guys—it’s too much. I can’t take anymore. I could handle God showing up, but not Sneezy, Dopey, and Doc.”
“No, no.” Brittle frowned at him. “I am Brittle, that is Odenaw, and the other is—“
“Never mind, forget it, skip it,” Kerwin moaned, sitting down on the deck and holding his head in his hands.
“Oh, I see.” Odenaw grinned. “I have referenced the allusion, and a very amusing one it is, too. But inaccurate. I remind you these are not our normal forms.”
“What are your normal forms?” Kerwin peeked out between his hands.
“I’m afraid we can’t show you that,” said Odenaw solemnly. “You wouldn’t be capable of relating to them anyhow.”
“I don’t know why not. We’ve related to everything else, and some of it’s been pretty wild. About the only thing I can’t relate to is my brother.”
“Same here,” growled Seeth.
“This is different.” Brittle leaned over and said casually to Seeth, “Like your music.”
“Yeah? No bullshit?” He brightened considerably.
“No bullshit. Like I said, we have been observing you for some time hoping events would quiet around you, when in fact quite the opposite seems to have occurred. We could wait until the battle is concluded and simply remove Izmir from the victors.”
“You can do such a thing?” Rail murmured in awe.
“Oh yes, but that would mean waiting on death and destruction, and we don’t like to see anyone perish unnecessarily, not even members of species as insignificant and immature as your own. That’s why we decided to intervene now, before things became worse.”
“There’s worse than this?” Kerwin said.
“Besides,” Odenaw put in, “avoiding Sikan fields is kind of fun, in a primitive, simple sort of way.”
Rizz returned to whisper to his companions. Eventually the conference broke up and they turned to face the prisoners.
“We’re ready now,” Brittle informed them. “You aren’t dressed for where we’re going, but then neither are we.” He laughed at some private amusement.
“Won’t the Sikan resist?” Kerwin asked him. “I mean, you can’t just...”
His voice trailed away. “...Move us like—that.”
The Sikan warship was gone. So was their invisible prison. They were standing on a firm, solid surface and a rather warm one at that. Sand shifted beneath his feet. Sandstone monoliths rose into a clear blue sky to north and east, holding back an ocean of dunes. The sand underfoot was white as sugar. A stab of homesickness ran through him. It was just like White Sands National Monument, not far south of Albuquerque. The double star hovering overhead belied that possibility.
Still wearing Izmir, Miranda flung out her arms and turned a small circle. “Imagine! And me without any suntan lotion.”
Seeth was already starting to sweat. He began unzipping his leather jacket. “Yeah, imagine. Inside an hour you’d probably have had alien gumbo picking at your guts. I wouldn’t worry about sunburn, sweetskin.”
“Oh, I have to. I mean, being, like, so fair-skinned and all. I can’t even go down to Galveston for the day without some kind of protection.” She looked over at Brittle. “You guys wouldn’t happen to have any lotion with you, would you?”
“I am sorry,” Brittle told her. “We aren’t prepared to cope with every little discomfort.”
“We’re all here,” Rail observed in amazement. “Even Izmir. You moved him too.”
“It wasn’t easy, Quite a strain, in fact. I’d hate to think what might have happened had he been more resistant, but he appears to have taken quite a liking to your single female. That in itself is most interesting. We hadn’t thought him capable of that kind of radiation on an emotional plane. But there is so much energy involved here that all things may be possible. Emotion is a form of radiatio
n, of energy. When superstrings begin to twist, who knows what the perceivable results may be?”
“There, you see?” Miranda said. “I told you so. If he has all these, like, fields rotating around him, why not emotional ones as well? Just because you can’t detect feelings doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
“Where are we?” Kerwin was breathing rapidly. The air was thinner than they were used to, but other than having to breathe fast and being a little warm, he felt pretty good.
“Not far from the scene of conflict, actually.” Brittle looked skyward without shielding his eyes. “By now the Sikan will note that you are missing, not because of your absence but because of Izmir’s. They’ll be going frantic trying to relocate him.” He chuckled. “They’re going to be very confused if they do manage to find him again. That’s not impossible. For a primitive lot, the Sikan are quite resourceful and even we cannot completely shield Izmir’s erratic pulses from outside detection.”
“I’m not sure I like this.” Seeth was looking sharply from one little man to the other. “I mean, you guys show up looking like refugees from the circus and just like that,” he snapped two fingers, “you move us out of an energy cage and off an alien ship down here to a place that looks almost like back home. No magic words, no buttons, not even a long-distance phone call. How’d you do that?”
“Well,” said Brittle softly, “it’s not difficult if you know what you’re doing. On your world you have developed an artform called origami. It involves folding pieces of paper into interesting shapes. We Halet practice a kind of origami, only we use the fabric of space instead of paper. We just sort of folded things until the point where you were coincided with the point where we wanted to be, and here we are.”
“No kidding? Far out.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Kerwin chose his words carefully. “You called the Sikan primitive.” He luxuriated in the feel of a real breeze as it caressed his face. “Do you have a ship like that around here?”
“We don’t bother with awkward mechanical constructions,” Odenaw informed him. “We gave up on such devices eons ago. They’re messy and you’re always tripping over stuff. More trouble than they’re worth.”
“Actually, for a bunch of runts I think you’ve done okay. I guess I ought to thank you for sneaking us away from those Sikan instead of being so suspicious. I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”
“If you are so all-powerful,” said Rail, “why haven’t you been noticed before?”
“Think on your own store of knowledge,” Brittle advised him. “Until recently, none of you had seen an Isotat. Of the Sikan you knew nothing at all. But the Halet have been around for quite a while. It’s just that there aren’t many of us and we assume different forms and cover a lot of territory.” He smiled at Kerwin.
“By the way, the universe is finite. It’s just awful damn big.”
“You mean, you travel like Izmir?” Miranda asked him.
“Not quite like Izmir. Similar in a different fashion. We like to observe, keep an eye on things sort of the way the Isotat keep an eye on this galaxy and its inhabitants. So we figure it’s kind of up to us to keep an eye on races like the Isotat and the Sikan to make sure they don’t get too big for their hypothetical britches.”
“Like God?” Kerwin managed to choke out.
“No, no!” Brittle frowned. “We’re just folks, just like you. We’ve just been to school a little longer, that’s all.”
“When you’ve been around as long as we have, there’s only one thing left to fight against.” Odenaw looked up at Kerwin. “That’s boredom. But once in a while, say, every five or ten million years, something happens that’s of genuine interest. It draws us.”
“Like Izmir?”
Brittle nodded, turned contemplative. “We travel incognito. Even visited your Earth once. I spent some time as a tree. Very admirable lifeform. You have plenty of time to sit around and think. If I had to be organic, I think I’d like to be a tree.”
“It was Izmir who brought us here,” Odenaw went on.
“Just as he attracted the attention of the Prufillians and the Oomemians and all the others. He drew us to him because he was Not Boring.”
“I’m still not following all this. Are you guys trying to say that you’re millions of years old?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Brittle.
“Funny, you don’t look a day over two mil,” quipped Seeth.
Brittle smiled again. “That’s what makes you humans stand out among all the other primitive organic races in this bit of space.”
“I thought it was our constant combativeness,” said Kerwin.
“Oh no, that’s not all that uncommon, unfortunately. But you are different. You have the ability to face possible extinction without sacrificing your firm grasp of the absurd. In this one small but important area you have actually vaulted ahead of technologically more advanced peoples like the Oomemians. You have instinctively stumbled upon what might be called the Great Cosmic Silliness, which is the first step on the path to Universal Truth. If you can hang around for a million years or so without snuffing yourselves out of existence, you might really amount to something.”
He looked past Kerwin and his voice grew somber. “As for poor, confused Izmir, we’ve been trying to track him down for, oh, three million or so of your years, give or take a few hundred thousand. He’s been very elusive.”
Kerwin turned to watch the Izmir-dress flow around Miranda’s supple form. “You’re telling me that Izmir’s more than three million years old too?”
“Oh, a great deal more,” said Odenaw enthusiastically. “A great deal more than any of us. He goes back to the Beginnings, but not in this form. There’s been a lot of recent development, alteration, changes in field strength and posture. If he wasn’t what he is now, he wouldn’t be recognizable as such.”
“Listen, couldn’t you just take us home? I’d like a Coke and a hamburger and I want to find out if I can still make up the exam I missed. I want all of this to disappear. I want all of you to disappear.” Kerwin shut his eyes tight. “I’m going to count to ten and you’ll all be gone. One, two, three. ...”
When he reached ten, he opened his eyes slowly. The sun was still hot, the air still thin. Odenaw and Brittle were regarding him with interest.
“You see,” said Brittle, “a real grasp of the Cosmic Silliness.”
“No question of it,” said Odenaw. “Real potential.”
“He ain’t cosmic, but he’s been silly since he was ten,” added Seeth.
“Get hold of yourself,” Brittle advised the older brother. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve coped this long, you can cope a while longer. Shortly we hope to resolve all that’s taken place to everyone’s satisfaction.” He looked sharply skyward. Kerwin did likewise, but there was nothing to be seen. Not so much as a cloud. Then the Halet looked back at him.
“Wouldn’t you like to know what Izmir really is?”
“No, I wouldn’t.” Kerwin hesitated. “You mean, you know? You really know?”
“Really and truly.”
“It took a while to figure it out,” said Odenaw. “There wasn’t much to go on, even though inference has been an exact science among the Halet for quite a while. That’s one of the things that made Izmir so interesting. Interesting enough to bring three of us out to study him. Three is the maximum number of Halet who can be in one place on a solid surface, you see. Otherwise we tend to upset orbital equilibria.”
Brittle was staring at the single blue eye peeping out from among the swirls that now enclosed Miranda in a radiant, rotating gown.
“Izmir is the physical manifestation, the only concrete example, of something your own scientists are just beginning to contemplate. You are familiar with the universal theory of matter?”
“I was just reading about it last week,” said Seeth. “Wasn’t that in Rolling Stone, the one with Dylan on the cover?”
&nb
sp; “What kind of matter are we talking about?” Kerwin inquired hesitantly.
“The missing kind.”
“Oh, you mean the thirty or forty percent that can’t be accounted for by current measurements?” Brittle smiled at him.
“What’s he talking about?” Seeth wanted to know.
“If you add up all the stars and planets and interstellar hydrogen and everything else estimatable, the universe is still missing thirty to forty percent of the matter that all the accepted theories say ought to be hanging around.”
“Very good.” Odenaw sounded approving. “Your percentages are a bit high, but that’s because your people do not yet possess instruments of sufficient sensitivity to detect much of what remains. Actually, only about twelve percent is missing. We’ve pretty well accounted for all the rest.” He looked again at Izmir. Kerwin turned to look with him.
“You saying that somehow Izmir is the key to all the missing matter in the universe?”
“No, not the key, in the sense you use it,” Brittle told him. “We know where the missing twelve percent is now.”
“That’s right,” said Rizz, who’d spent most of his time just staring at Miranda and her unique if temporary outer garment. Twelve percent. Izmir.
“He’s it.”
13
Kerwin considered this bit of news very, very carefully. When he did reply, it was with great caution. “I’ve accepted a lot in the last few days. Prufillians and Oomemians, the Isotat and the Sikan, hundreds of other sentient races, a galaxywide civilization, intergalactic travel and maybe even you, Halet, despite your clothes.
“Now, I agree Izmir’s weird and can do a lot of amazing things, but to say that he’s twelve percent of all the matter in the universe is asking too much. I couldn’t buy that even if I was insane.”