The Unteleported Man

9

When Rachmael ben Applebaum made out the dim, shadowy shapes of the UN pursuit ships as they ap­proached to escort the Omphalos he knew that, whatever else was a cover, at least this much was true: the UN had traced him, had him and no doubt Dosker as well. So — he clicked on the microwave transmitter and raised, after an interval, the UN pursuit ships' local commanding officer.

"I'll believe you," Rachmael said, "when I hear Al Dosker say it." And when I look him over, he said to himself, for signs of a cephalic 'wash. But — why would they say it if it wasn't true? They had him; he and the Omphalos, detected, were now booty captured by the armed inter-system vessels of the great UN structure that spanned from planet to planet. Why make up a cover when there was no force to influence, no force able to provide any resistance?

God above, he thought. If it's true, then we can rely on Horst Bertold. We let our prejudices blind us... von Einem is German and Horst Bertold is German. But that does not any more prove they are working together, are secret collaborators, than, say, any two Ubangis or any two Jews. Adolf Hitler was not even a German... so our own thinking, he realized, has betrayed us.

But — maybe now we can believe this. We can see. New Whole Germany has produced Dr. Sepp von Einem and Trails of Hoffman Limited... but it may also have produced something else when it created Horst Bertold.

We will see, Rachmael said to himself.

— Will wait until we are in New New York at UN Headquarters; face Horst Bertold and see the evidence of the assertion given by relayed macroradio signal.

The assertion that as of six a.m. New New York time this morning, UN troops had entered all retail outlets of Trails of Hoffman Limited, had seized the Telpor instruments — had, throughout Terra, arbitrarily and without warning of any kind, halted emigration to Whale's Mouth.

Twelve hours later Rachmael was led by a worried, overworked female secretary into the UN Secretary General's office.

"The fanatic," Horst Bertold said, surveying him. "The idealist who sparked the hankering in Matson Glazer-Holliday that caused him to attempt his coup d'etat at Whale's Mouth." He turned to an aide. "Bring in the Telpor Apparat."

Seconds later the familiar bipolar mechanism was noisily carted into the UN leader's office, along with a thoroughly unnerved-looking technician; minus his goggles he looked frightened and — small.

To the Telpor technician, Horst Bertold said, "Does this operate to permit teleportation two ways? Or only one? Zwei oder ein ? Antworte."

"Just outward, Mein Herr Sekretar General," the technician quavered. "As Theorem One demonstrates, the recession of matter toward — "

Horst Bertold said to his aide, "Bring in our 'wash psychiatrists. Have them start with their EEG mach­ines."

At that, the Telpor technician said, in a voice that broke with dismayed intimidation, "Dasz brauchen Sie nicht."

"He's saying," Bertold said to Rachmael, "that he will cooperate; we don't need to employ our psychiatrists with him. So ask him." He jerked his head fiercely toward the cowering THL employee, this man in his white smock who had assisted in the emigration of literally millions of innocent human beings. "Ask him whether the Telpors work both ways."

The technician said, virtually inaudibly, "Beide. Both ways."

"There never was any 'Theorem One,' " Bertold snapped.

"Sie haben Recht," the technician agreed, nodding.

"Bring in Dosker," Bertold said to his overworked female secretary.

When Dosker appeared he said to Rachmael at once, "Freya is still alive over there." He indicated the Telpor instrument. "We've been in contact through this. But — "He hesitated.

Horst Bertold said, "Matson Glazer-Holliday is dead. They murdered him immediately. But nearly half of Lies Incorporated's field personnel remain alive at various installations at Newcolonizedland, and we're beginning to supply them on a strategic basis. With wea­pons of types which they instantly need. And presently we will, at tactical spots, try commando teams; we can do a lot, I think, with our commando teams."

"What can I do?" Rachmael said. He felt over­whelming impotence; it was going on — had been going on — without him. While he journeyed — pointlessly — through 'tween, utterly empty, space.

This, the UN Secretary General seemed to read on his face. "You awakened Matson," he pointed out. "Which caused Matson to attempt his aborted coup. And the relayed message from Freya Holm to Dosker and then to the Omphalos informed us of the reality hidden under Theodoric Ferry's cover; a cover which we carry the moral stigma for accepting all these fifteen years. Everything based on the one fundamental hoax that teleportation could be achieved in only one direc­tion..." He grimaced. "However, Trails of Hoffman Limited made an error as great as their cover when they did not impede your two thousand Lies Incorporated veterans from crossing over." To Dosker he said, "But even so, that would not have been enough. However, with our tactical support — "

"It wasn't enough even at the start," Dosker said, "since they took out Matson right away." Half to him­self, half to Rachmael, he said, "We never had a chance. Probably Matson never knew; he probably didn't even live that long. Anyhow, maybe you can retrieve Freya. Do you want to?"

Instantly Rachmael said, "Yes." To Horst Bertold he said, "Can I get equipment out of you? Defensive screens, if not offensive hardware? And I'll go alone." They would not, in the confusion, notice him, perhaps. Whale's Mouth had become a battlefield, and too many participants were involved; one lone man was a cypher, a mote; he would enter inconspicuously and if he found her at all it would be that way, as an entity too trifling to be considered by the vast warring entities. Within the context of the power struggle which had already trun­cated Lies Incorporated; one contender had been abol­ished at the start, and now only the two monoliths existed in the field to slug it out, THL on one hand, the UN as its wise old antagonist, its roots of victory deep in the last century. The UN, he reflected, had a headstart, that of fifty years.

But Trails of Hoffman Limited had the inventive genius of half-senile but still crafty old Dr. Sepp von Einem. And — the inventor of the Telpor instrument might not have ceased with that construct.

He wondered if Horst Bertold had considered this.

It didn't matter, because if von Einem had produced something else of equal — or of merely significant — value, it would show up now.

In the streets of Newcolonizedland, whatever Dr. Sepp von Einem and THL had over the years developed would be at this moment in full use. Because this was, for all participants, the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath; now they were, like beasts in the field, being tried. And God help, Rachmael thought, the contender who was found wanting. Because out of this only one participant would live; there would be extended to the loser no par­tial, no half, life. Not in this arena.

He himself — he had only one task, as he saw it. That of getting Freya Holm out of Whale's Mouth and back safely to Terra.

The eighteen-year journey, the odyssey aboard the Omphalos, learning Attic Greek so that he could read the Bachae in the original — that childlike fantasy had withered at the press of the iron glove of the reality-situation, the struggle going on — not eighteen years from now — but at this instant, at the Whale's Mouth terminals of six thousand Telpor stations.

" 'Sein Herz voll Hasz geladen,' " Horst Bertold said to Rachmael. "You speak Yiddish? You understand?"

"I speak a little Yiddish," Rachmael said, "but that's German. 'His heart heavy with hate.' What's that from?"

"From the Civil War in Spain," Bertold said. "From a song of the International Brigade. Germans, mostly, who had left the Third Reich to fight in Spain against Franco, in the 1930s. They were, I suppose, Com­munists. But — they were fighting Fascism, and very early; and they were Germans. So they were always 'good' Germans... what that man, Hans Beimler, hated was Nazism and Fascism, in all its stages and states and manifestations." After a pause he said, "We fought the Nazis, too, we 'good' Germans; verges' uns nie." Forget us never, Bertold had said, quietly, calmly. Because we did not merely join the fight late, in the 1950s or '60s, but from the start. The first human beings to fight to the death, to kill and be killed by the Nazis, were —

Germans.

"And Terra," Bertold said to Rachmael, "ought not to forget that. As I hope they will not forget who at this moment is taking out Dr. Sepp von Einem and creatures allied with him. Theodoric Ferry, his boss... who, by the way, is an American." He smiled at Rachmael. "But there are 'good' Americans. Despite the A-bomb dropped on those Japanese women and children and elderly."

Rachmael was silent; he could not answer this.

"All right," Bertold said, then. "We will put you together with a wep-x, a weapon expert. To see what gear you should have. And then good luck. I hope you bring back Miss Holm." He smiled — fleetingly. And turned at once to other matters.

A minor UN official plucked at Rachmael's sleeve. "I'm to take charge of your problem," he explained. "I will be handling it from now on. Tell me, Mr. ben Applebaum; precisely what contemporary — and I do not mean last month's or last year's — weapons of war you are accustomed to operating, if any? And how recently you have been exposed to the neurological and bacterial — "

"I've had absolutely no military training," Rachmael said. "Or antineuro or -bac modulation."

"We can still assist you," the minor UN official said. "There is certain equipment requiring no prior ex­perience. However — " He made a mark on the sheet at­tached to his clipboard. "This does make a difference; eighty percent of the hardware available would be useless to you." He smiled encouragingly. "We must not let it get us down, Mr. ben Applebaum."

"I won't," Rachmael said grimly. "So I'll be teleported to Whale's Mouth after all."

"Yes, within a matter of an hour."

"The unteleported man," Rachmael murmured. "Will be teleported." Instead of enduring the eighteen years aboard the Omphalos. Ironic.

"Are you capable morally," the UN official inquired, "of employing a nerve gas, or would you prefer to — "

"Anything," Rachmael said, "that'll bring back Freya. Anything except the phosphorus weapons, the jellied petroleum products; I won't use any of those, and also the bone-marrow destroyers — leave those out. But lead slugs, the old-fashioned muzzle-expelled shells; I'll accept them, as well as the laser-beam artifacts." He wondered what variety of weapon had gotten Matson Glazer-Holliday, the most professional of men in this area.

"We have something new," the UN official said, con­sulting his clipboard, "and according to the Defense Department people very promising. It's a time-warping construct that sets up a field which coagulates the — "

"Just equip me," Rachmael said. "And get me over there. To her."

"Right away," the UN official promised, and led him rapidly down a side hall to a hi-speed descent ramp. To the UN Advance-weapons Archives.

At the retail outlet of Trails of Hoffman Limited, Jack and Ruth McElhatten and their two children emerged from a flapple taxi; a robot-like organism carted their luggage, all seven overstuffed seedy — borrowed for the most part — suitcases, as they entered the modern, small building which for them was to be the last stopping-point on Terra.

Going up to the counter, Jack McElhatten searched about for a clerk to wait on them. Jeez, he thought; just when you decide to make the Big Move they decide to step out for a coffee break.

A smartly uniformed armed UN soldier, with an arm­band identifying him as a member of the crack UAR division, approached him. "What did you wish?"

Jack McElhatten said, "Hell, we came here to emi­grate. I've got the poscreds." He reached for his wallet. "Where are the forms to fill out, and then I know we got to take shots and — "

The UN soldier politely said, "Sir, have you watched your info media during the last forty-eight hours?"

"We've been packing." Ruth McElhatten spoke up. "Why, what is it? Has something happened?"

And then, through an open rear door, Jack McElhat­ten saw it. The Telpor. And his heart bent with mingled dread and anticipation. What an admirably large move this was, this true migration; seeing the twin wall-like polar surfaces of the Telpor was to see — the frontier it­self. In his mind he recalled the years of TV scenes of grasslands, of miles of green, lush —

"Sir," the UN soldier said, "read this notice." He pointed to a square white with words so dark, so un-glamorous, that Jack McElhatten, even without reading them, felt the glow, the wonder of what for him was a long-held inner vision, depart.

"Oh good lord," Ruth said, from beside him as she read the notice. "The UN — it's closed down all the Telpor agencies. Emigration has been suspended." She glanced in dismay at her husband. "Jack, it's now illegal for us to emigrate, it says."

The UN soldier said, "Later on, madam. Emigration will resume. When the situation is resolved." He turned away, then, to halt a second couple, who, with four children, had entered the Trails of Hoffman office.

Through the still-open rear door, McElhatten saw, to his dumb disbelief, four work-garbed laborers; they were busily, sweatily, efficiently torch-cutting into sec­tions the Telpor equipment.

He then forced himself to read the notice.

After he had read it the UN soldier tapped him — not unkindly — on the shoulder, pointed out a nearby TV set, which, turned on, was being watched by the second couple and their four children. "These are Newcolon­izedland," the UN soldier said. "You see?" His English was not too good, but he was attempting to explain; he wanted the McElhattens to understand why.

Approaching the TV set, Jack McElhatten saw gray, barracks-like structures with tiny, slotted windows like raptor eyes. And — high fences. He stared, uncompre­hendingly... and yet, underneath, comprehending completely; he did not even have to listen to the aud track, to the UN announcer.

Ruth whispered, "My god. It's a — concentration camp."

A puff of smoke and the top floors of the gray cement building disappeared; dwarfed dark shapes scampered, and rapid-fire weapons clattered in the background of the announcer's British-type voice; the calm, reasonable commentary explained what did not need to be ex­plained.

At least not after this sight.

"Is that," Ruth said to her husband, "how we would have lived over there?"

Presently he said, to her and their two children, "Come on. Let's go home." He signaled the robot-organism to pick their luggage up once more.

"But," Ruth protested, "couldn't the UN have helped us? They have all those welfare agencies — "

Jack McElhatten said, "The UN is protecting us now. And not with welfare agencies." He indicated the work-garbed laborers busy dismantling the Telpor unit. "But so late — "

"Not," he said, "too late." He signaled the robot-thing to carry their seven bulging suitcases back outside onto the sidewalk; avoiding the many passing people, the dense, always dense, sidewalk traffic, he searched for a flapple taxi to take himself and his family home again to their miserably cramped, hated conapt.

A man, distributing leaflets, approached him, held out a broadsheet; McElhatten reflexively accepted it. The Friends of a United People outfit, he saw. Glaring banner:

UN VERIFIES COLONY TYRANNY

He said, aloud, "They were right. The cranks. The lunatics, like that guy who wanted to make the eighteen-year trip by interstellar ship." He carefully folded the broadsheet, put it into his pocket to read later; right now he felt too numbed. "I hope," he said aloud, "that my boss will take me back."

"They're fighting,"Ruth said. "You could see on the TV screen; they showed UN soldiers and then others in funny uniforms I never saw before in all my — "

"You think," Jack McElhatten asked his wife, "you could sit in the taxi with the kids while I find a bar and get one good stiff drink?"

She said, "Yes. I could." Now a flapple taxi was swooping down, attracted; it headed for the curb, and the four of them and their mound of fat luggage en­ticing its tropism.

"Because," Jack McElhatten said, "I can use for in­stance a bourbon and water. A double." And then, he said to himself, I'm heading for UN recruiting head­quarters and volunteer.

He did not know for what — not yet. But they would tell him.

His help was needed; he felt it in his blood. A war had to be won, and then, years from now but not eighteen as it had been for that nut written up in the 'papes, they could do it, could emigrate. But before that — the fighting. The winning of Whale's Mouth all over again. Actually, for the first time.

But even before that: the two drinks.

Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nos­trils; he halted, bent in a reflexive half-crouch. Then, here now on the far side, on the ninth planet of Fomal­haut, Rachmael ben Applebaum fingered relentlessly the meager flat tin, the container in his trousers pocket: this the wep-x at the Advance-weapons Archives had at last provided him — radically disguised as well as radi­cally beyond anything in the standard arsenals of the UN. The camouflage of the hyper-miniaturized time-warping construct had seemed to him, when he first viewed it, the sine qua non of misleading packages: the weapon appeared to be bootlegged tin of prophoz from Yucatán, fully automated, helium-battery powered, guaranteed for five-year operation and gynetropic.

Briefly, he huddled in the safe shadow of a wall, the weapon out, now, visible in the palm of his hand; even the gaily painted halfwitted slogan of the Central American factory had been duplicated, and, at a time like this, on a stranger-planet in another system, he read the quixotic words familiar to him since adolescence:

MORE FUN

AFTER DONE!

And with this, he thought, I'm going to get Freya back. In its witless, gaily colored way the camouflage-package of the weapon seemed more of an insult, a quasi-obscene commentary on the situation confronting him. However, he returned it to his pocket; sliding up­ward to an erect position he once again viewed the nebu­lous rolls of particles in suspension, the cloud masses derived from the molecularization of the nearby build­ings. He saw, too, dim human shapes that sped at ludicrously accelerated speed, each in its own direction, as if some central control usually in operation had, at this dangerous time, where so much was at stake, clicked off, leaving each of the sprinting figures on its own.

And yet they all seemed to understand what they were doing; their activities were not undirected, not random. To his right a cluster had gathered to assemble a com­plex weapon; with industrious, ant-busy fingers they snapped one component after another into position in expert progression: they knew their business, and he wondered — he could not, in the erratic light, make out their uniforms — which faction they represented. Prob­ably, he decided, better to conclude they belonged to THL; safer, he realized. And he would have to assume this, until otherwise proved, about each and every per­son whom he encountered here on this side, this New­colonizedland which was no —

Directly before him a soldier appeared whose eyes glowed huge and unwinking, owl eyes which fixed on him and would never, now that they had perceived him, again look away.

Diving to the ground, Rachmael fumbled numbly for the prophoz tin; it had happened too soon, too un­expectedly — he was not ready and the weapon which he had brought here to use for Freya was not even posi­tioned to protect him, let alone her. His hand touched it, buried deep within his pocket... and at that moment a muffled pop burst near his face as, above him, the THL soldier twisted to re-aim and fire once more.

A high-velocity dart waggled its directing fins as it spun at him. It was, he realized as he watched it descend toward him, a LSD-tipped dart; the hallucinogenic ergotic alkaloid derivative constituted — had constituted ever since its introduction into the field of weapons of war — a unique instrument for reducing the enemy to a condition in which he was absolutely neutralized: in­stead of destroying him, the LSD, injected intraven­ously by the dart, destroyed his world.

Sharp, quick pain snuffed at his arm; the dart had plunged into him, had embedded itself successfully.

The LSD had entered his circulatory system. He had, now, only a few minutes ahead; that realization alone generally took the target out: to know, under conditions such as these, that very shortly the entire self-system, the structure of world-character which had developed stage by stage over the years from birth on —

His thoughts ceased. The LSD had reached the cor­tical tissue of his frontal lobe and all abstract menta­tional processes had instantly shut down. He still saw the world, saw the THL soldier leisurely reloading the dart-releasing gun, the rolling clouds of A-warhead-contaminated ash, the half-ruined buildings, the ant-like scampering figures here and there. He could recognize them and understand what each was. But beyond that — nothing.

Color, Rachmael thought as he saw the transforma­tion in the THL soldier's face; the color-transforma­tion — it had already set in. Swiftly, the drug moved him to ruin; in his bloodstream it rushed him toward the end of his existence in the shared world. For me, he knew, this — but he could not even think it, carry out the steps of a logical thought. Awareness was there, knowledge of what was happening. He watched the lips of the THL soldier become bright, phosphorescent, shiny-pink pure luminosity; the lips, forming a perfect bow, then floated off, detached themselves from the soldier's face, leaving behind the ordinary colorless lips: one hemisphere of Rachmael's brain had received the LSD and succumbed, undoubtedly the right, he being righthanded, the hemis­phere on that side therefore being the undifferentiated of the two. The left still held out, still saw the mundane world; even now, deprived of abstract reasoning, no longer capable of adult cerebral processes, the higher centers of the left hemisphere of his brain fought to stabilize the picture of the world as it knew it, fought knowing that within seconds, now, that picture would give way, would collapse and let in, like some endless flood, the entirety of raw percept-data, uncontrolled, unstructured, without meaning or order, each datum unrelated to the others: the portion of his brain which imposed the framework of space and time onto incom­ing data would not be able to carry out its task. And, with the ringing in of that instant, he would plunge back decades. Back to the initial interval after birth — entry into a world utterly unfamiliar, utterly incompre­hensible.

He had lived through that once. Each human, at the moment of birth, had. But now. Now he possessed memory, retention of the disappearing usual world. That and language; that and realization of what ordi­nary and expected experience would presently become.

And how long, subjectively, it would last. How long it would be before he regained — if he did regain — his customary world once more.

The THL soldier, his weapon reloaded, started away, already searching for the next target; he did not bother to notice Rachmael, now. He, too, knew what lay ahead. Rachmael could be forgotten; even now he no longer lived in the shared world, no longer existed.

Without thought, prompted by a brain-area silent but still functioning, Rachmael raced after the THL soldier; with no lapse of time, without sense of having crossed intervening space, he clutched the soldier, dragged him aside and took possession of the long-bladed throwing knife holstered at the man's waist. Choking him with his left arm Rachmael yanked the blade backward in an arc that reversed itself: the blade returned, and the THL soldier followed its reverse trajectory as it approached his stomach. He struggled; in Rachmael's grip he strained, and his eyes dulled as if baked, dried out, with­out fluid and old, mummified by a thousand years. And, in Rachmael's hand, the knife became something he did not know.

The thing which he held ceased its horizontal motion. It moved, but in another direction which was neither up nor forward; he had never seen this direction and its weirdness appalled him, because the thing in his hand moved without moving: it progressed and yet stayed where it was, so that he did not have to change the direc­tion of his eye focus. His gaze fixed, he watched the shining, brittle, transparent thing elaborate itself, pro­duce from its central column slender branches like glass stalagmites; in a series of lurches, of jumps forward into the non-spacial dimension of altered movement, the tree-thing developed until its complexity terrified him. It was all over the world, now; from his hand it had jerked out into stage after stage so that, he knew, it was every­where, and nothing else had room to exist: the tree-thing had taken up all space and crowded reality-as-it-usually-was out.

And still it grew.

He decided, then, to look away from it. In his mind he recalled in distinctness, with labored, painstaking concentration, the THL soldier; he noted the direction, in relation to the enormous, world-filling tree-thing, along which the soldier could be found. He made his head turn, his eyes focus that way.

A small circle, like some far end of a declining tube, opened up and unveiled for him a minute portion of reality-as-it-usually-was. Within that circle he made out the face of the THL soldier, unchanged; it stabilized in normal luminosity and shape. And, meanwhile, throughout the endless area which was not the distant circle of world, a multitude of noiseless, sparklike con­figurations flicked on and achieved form with such magnitude of brightness that even without focussing on them he experienced pain; they appalled the optic por­tion of his percept-system, and yet did not halt the transfer of their impressions: despite the unendurable brilliance the configurations continued to flow into him, and he knew that they had come to stay. Never, he knew. They would never leave.

For an almost unmeasurable fraction of an instant he ventured to look directly at one unusually compelling light-configuration; its furious activity attracted his gaze.

Below it, the circle which contained unaltered reality changed. At once he forced his attention back. Too late?

The THL soldier's face. Swollen eyes. Pale. The man returned Rachmael's gaze; their eyes met and each per­ceived the other, and then the physiognomic properties of the reality-landscape swiftly underwent a crumbling new alteration; the eyes became rocks that immediately were engulfed by a freezing wind which obliterated them with dense snow. The jaw, the cheeks and mouth and chin, even the nose disappeared as they became lesser mountains of barren, uninhabited rock that also suc­cumbed to the snow. Only the tip of the nose projected, a peak presiding alone above a ten-thousand-mile waste that supported no life nor anything that moved. Rach­mael watched, and years lapsed by, recorded by the in­ternal clock of his perceiving mind; he knew the dura­tion and knew the meaning of the landscape's perpetual refusal to live: he knew where he was and he recognized this which he saw. It was beyond his ability not to recognize it.

This was the hellscape.

No, he thought. It has to stop. Because now he saw tiny distant figures sprouting everywhere to populate the hellscape, and as they formed they continued the dancing, frenzied activities familiar to them — and fa­miliar to him, as if he were back once more and again witnessing this, and knowing with certitude what he would, within the next thousand years, be forced to scrutinize.

His fear, concentrated and directed in this one field, superimposed like a dissolving beam over the hellscape, rolled back the snow, made its thousand-year-old depth fade into thinness; the rocks once more appeared and then retreated backward into time to resume their func­tion as features of a face. The hellscape reverted with awful obedience to what it had been, as if almost no force were needed to push it out of existence, away from the stronghold of reality in which it had a moment before entrenched itself. And this appalled him the most of all: this told him dreadful news. The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known. And this meant that not long ago, when the hellscape first formed, he had been without any life, any at all. Not an enormous force from outside breaking in — that was not what confronted him. There was no adversary. These, the terrible transmutations of world in every direction, had spontaneously entered as his own life had dwindled, faded, and at last — for a moment, anyhow — entirely shut down.

He had died.

But he was now again alive.

Where, then? Not where he had lived before.

The THL soldier's face, customary and natural, hung within the diminished, constricted aperture through which reality showed, a face relieved of the intrusion of hell-attributes. As long, Rachmael realized, as I keep that face in front of me, I'm okay. And if he talks. That would do it; that would get me through.

But he won't, he realized. He tried to kill me; he wants me dead. He did kill me. This man — this sole link with outside — is my murderer.

He stared at the face; in return, the eyes glared un­winkingly back, the owl eyes of cruelty that loathed him and wanted him dead, wanted him to suffer. And the THL soldier said nothing; Rachmael waited and heard no sound, even after years — a decade passed and another began and still no word was spoken. Or if it was he failed to hear it.

"Goddam you," Rachmael said. His own voice did not reach him; he felt his throat tremble with the sound, but his ears detected no change, nothing. "Do some­thing," Rachmael said. "Please."

The soldier smiled.

"Then you can hear me," Rachmael said. "Even af­ter this long." It was amazing that this man still lived, after so many centuries. But he did not bother to reflect on that; all that mattered was the uninterrupted realness of the face before him. "Say something," Rachmael said, "or I'll break you." His words weren't right, he realized. Meaningful, familiar, but somehow not cor­rect; he was bewildered. "Like a rod of iron," he said. "I will dash you in pieces. Like a potter's vessel. For I am like a refiner's fire." Horrified, he tried to compre­hend the warpage of his language; where had the con­ventional, everyday —

Within him all his language disappeared; all words were gone. Some scanning agency of his brain, some organic searching device, swept out mile after mile of emptiness, finding no stored words, nothing to draw on: he felt it sweeping wider and wider, extending its oscilla­tions into every dark reach, overlooking nothing; it wanted, would accept, anything, now; it was desperate. And still, year after year, the empty bins where words, many of them, had once been but were not now.

He said, then, "Tremens factus sum ego et timeo." Because out of the periphery of his vision he had ob­tained a clear glimpse of the progress of the brilliant light-based drama unfolding silently. "Libere me," he said, and repeated it, once, twice, then on and on, without cease. "Libere me Domini," he said, and for a hundred years he listened, watched the events projected soundlessly before him, witnessed forever.

"Let go of me, you bastard," the THL soldier said. His hands grasped Rachmael's neck and the pain was vast beyond compare; Rachmael let go and the face mocked him in leering hate. "And enjoy your expanded consciousness," the soldier said with malice so over­whelming that Rachmael felt throughout him unen­durable somatic torment which came and then stayed.

"Mors scribitum," Rachmael said, appealing to the THL soldier. He repeated it, but there was no response. "Misere me," he said, then; he had nothing else available, nothing more to draw on. "Dies Irae," he said, trying to explain what was happening inside him. "Dies Illa." He waited hopefully; he waited years, but no help, no sound, came. I won't make it, he realized then. Time has stopped. There is no answer.

"Lots of luck," the face said, then. And began to recede, to move away. The soldier was leaving.

Rachmael hit him. Crushed the mouth. Teeth flew; bits of broken white escaped and vanished, and blood that shone with dazzling flame, like a flow of new, clear fire, exposed itself and filled his vision; the power of illumination emanating from the blood overwhelmed everything, and he saw only that — its intensity stifled everything else and for the first time since the dart had approached him he felt wonder, not fear; this was good.

This captivated and pleased him, and he contemplated it with joy.

In five centuries the blood by degrees faded. The flame lessened. Once more, drifting dimly behind the breathing color, the lusterless face of the THL soldier could be made out, uninteresting and unimportant, of no value because it had no light. It was a dreary and tiresome specter, long known, infinitely boring; he ex­perienced excruciating disappointment to see the fire decrease and the THL soldier's features re-gather. How long, he asked himself, do I have to keep seeing this same unlit scene?

The face, however, was not the same. He had broken it. Split it open with his fist. Opened it up, let out the precious, blinding blood; the face, a ruined husk, gaped disrobed of its shell: he saw, not the mere outside, but into its genuine works.

Another face, concealed before, wriggled and squeezed out, as if wishing to escape. As if, Rachmael thought, it knows I can see it, and it can't stand that. That's the one thing it can't endure.

The inner face, emerging from the cracked-open gray-chitin mask, now tried to fold up within itself, at­tempted vigorously to wrap itself in its own semi-fluid tissue. A wet, limp face, made of the sea, dripping, and at the same time stinking; he smelled its salty, acrid scent and felt sick.

The oceanic face possessed a single multi-lensed eye. Beneath the beak. And when it opened its toothless mouth the wideness of the cavity divided the face en­tirely; the mouth separated the face into two un­connected equal parts.

"Esse homo bonus est," Rachmael said, and won­dered numbly why such a simple statement as To be a man is good sounded so peculiar to his ears. "Non homo," he said, then, to the squashed, divided sea-face, "video. Atque malus et timeo; libere me Domini." What he saw before him was not a man, not a man's face, and it was bad and it frightened him. And he could do nothing about it; he could not stop seeing it, he could not leave, and it did not go away, it would never go because there was no time at work, no possibility of change; what confronted him would peer at him forever, and his knowledge of it would dwell inside him for an equal duration, passed on by him to no one because there was no one. "Exe," he said, helplessly; he spoke pointlessly, knowing it would do no good to tell the creature to go away, since there was no way by which it could; it was as trapped as he, and probably just as terrified. "Amicus sum," he said to it, and won­dered if it understood him. "Sumus amici," he said, then, even though he knew it was not so; he and the thing of water were not friends, did not even know what the other consisted of or where it had come from, and he himself, in the dull, sinking dark red expiration of decaying time, time at its wasted and entropic final phase, would stay grafted in this spot confronted by this unfamiliar thing for a million years ticked away by the ponderous moribund clock within him. And never in all that great interval would he obtain any news as to what this ugly deformed creature signified.

It means something, he realized. This thing's ocean-face; its presence at the far end of the tube, at the outer opening where I'm not, that isn't a hallucinated event inside me — it's here for a reason; it drips and wads itself into glued-together folds and stares without winking at me and wants to keep me dead, keep me from ever get­ting back. Not my friend, he thought. Or rather knew. It was not an idea; it was a concrete piece of observed reality outside: when he looked at the thing he saw this fact as part of it: the non-friend attribute came along in­separably. The thing oozed; it oozed and hated to­gether. Hated him, and with absolute contempt; in its oversplattering liquid eye he perceived its derision: not only did it not like him, it did not respect him. He wondered why.

My god, he realized. It must know something about me. Probably it has seen me before, even though I haven't seen it. He knew, then, what this meant.

It had been here all this time.