The Winds of Limbo

CHAPTER TEN

HELEN was getting understandably restless. Five hours had passed and the Fireclown still stood in the position he had taken up against the bulkhead.

Corso and Cornelia Fisher had talked sporadically with Alan, but Helen had refused to join in. Alan felt for her. She had placed all her hopes on gaining information from the Fireclown and, he guessed, she had desperately wanted him to disprove the allegations now being made against him on Earth. But, frustratingly, they were no nearer to getting an explanation; were worse confused, if anything.

If he had been studying any other individual, Alan would have suspected the Fireclown of sleeping with his eyes open. But there was no suggestion of slumber about the Clown's attitude. He was, it seemed, meditating on some problem that concerned him. Possibly the nature of the problem was such that an ordinary man would see no logic or point in solving it.

The Fireclown seemed to exist in his own time-sphere, and his mind was unfathomable.

At last the grotesque giant moved.

"Now," he rumbled, "the Pi-meson will be ready. We have been lucky to find shelter with the monks, for they are probably the only men who can come close to understanding the nature of the ship, and doubtless they will have done their work by now. Come." He moved towards the door.

Alan glanced at Helen and then at the other two. Corso and Cornelia Fisher remained where they were. Helen got up slowly. The Fireclown was already thumping up the corridor before they reached the door.

"I hope you know what you're doing," she whispered. "I'm afraid, Alan. What if his plan is to kill us?"

"Maybe it is." He tried to sound self-possessed. "But he could do that just as easily here as in deep space, couldn't he?"

"There are several ways of dying." She held his hand and he noticed she was shivering. He had never realized before that anyone could be so afraid of death.

Momentarily he felt a sympathy with her fears.

They followed the gaudy figure of the Fireclown until they reached the bay section.

Auditor Kurt was there.

"They have just finished," he told the Fireclown, spinning the wheel of the manually operated airlock. "Your equations were perfectly correct-it was we who were at fault. The field is functioning with one hundred per cent accuracy. Five of us were completely exhausted feeding it. Bias being able to supply those parts was a great stroke of luck."

The Fireclown nodded his thanks and all three stepped through the short tunnel of the airlocks and entered a surprisingly large landing deck. Alan, who had seen the Pi-meson from space, wondered how it could be so big, for a considerable portion of spaceships was taken up with engines and fuel.

Touching a stud, the Fireclown closed the ship's lock. A section of the interior wall slid upwards, revealing a short flight of steps. They climbed the steps and were on a big control deck. The covered ports were extremely large, comprising more than half the area of the walls. Controls varied-some familiar, some not.

And there were many scarcely functional features-rich, red plush couches and chairs, fittings of gold or brass, heavy velvet curtains of yellow and dark blue hung against the ports. It all looked bizarre and faintly archaic, reminding Alan, in a way, of his grandfather's study.

"I shall darken the room," the Fireclown announced. "I can operate the ship better that way. Sit where you will."

The Fireclown did not sit down as Alan and Helen sat together on one of the comfortable couches. He stood at the controls, his huge bulk blotting out half the instruments from Alan's sight. He stretched a hand towards a switch and flicked it up. The lights dimmed slowly and then they were in cold blackness.

Helen gripped Alan's arm and he patted her knee, his mind on other things as a low whining arose from the floor.

Alan sensed tension in the Fireclown's movements heard from the darkness. He tried to analyze them but failed. He saw a screen suddenly light with bright whiteness, color flashed and swirled and they saw a vision of space.

But against the darkness of the cosmos, the spheres which rolled on the screen, flashing by like shoals of multi-colored billiard balls, were unrecognizable as any heavenly bodies Alan had ever seen. Not asteroids by any means, not planets-they were too solid in color and general appearance; they shone, but not with the glitter of reflected sunlight. And they passed swiftly by in hordes.

Moved by the beauty, astonished by the unexpected sight, Alan couldn't voice the questions which flooded into his mind.

In the faint light from the screen the Fireclown's silhouette could be seen in constant motion. The whining had ceased. The spheres on the screen began to jump and progress more slowly. The picture jerked and one sphere, smoky blue in colour, began to grow until the whole screen itself glowed blue. Then it seemed to burst and they flashed towards the fragments, then through them, and saw-a star.

"Sol," commented the Fireclown.

They were getting closer and closer to the sun.

"We'll burn up!" Alan cried fearfully.

"No-the Pi-meson is a special ship. I've avoided any chance of us burning.

See-the flames!"

The flames… Alan thought that the word scarcely described the curling, writhing wonder of those shooting sheets of fire. The control deck was not noticeably warmer, yet Alan felt hot just looking.

The Fireclown was roaring his enigmatic laughter, his arm pointing at the screen.

"There," he shouted, his voice too loud in the confines of the cabin. "There, get used to that for a moment. Look!"

They could not help but look. Both were fascinated, held by the sight. And yet Alan felt his eyes ache and was certain he would be blinded by the brightness.

The Fireclown strode to another panel and turned a knob.

The port coverings began to rise slowly and light flowed in a searing stream into the cabin, brightening everything to an extraordinary degree.

When the ports were fully open Alan shouted his wonder. It seemed they were in the very heart of the sun. Why weren't they made sightless by the glare? Why didn't they burn?

"This is impossible!" Alan whispered. "We should have been destroyed in a second. What is this-an illusion of some sort? Have you hypno-?"

"Be quiet," said the Fireclown, his shape a blob of blackness in the incredible light. "I’ll explain later-if it is possible to make you understand."

Hushed, they let themselves be drawn out into the dancing glare.

Alan's soul seemed full for the first time, it even seemed natural that he should be here. He felt affinity with the flames. He began to identify with them, until he was them.

Time stopped.

Thought stopped.

Life alone remained.

Then blackness swam back. From far away he observed that his rigid body was being shaken, that a voice was bellowing in his ear.

"… you have seen! You have seen! Now you know. Now you know! Come back-there is more to see!"

Shocked, it seemed, back into his body, he opened his eyes. He could see nothing still, but felt the grip on his shoulders and knew that the Fireclown, his voice excited- perhaps insane-was shouting from in front of his face. "That is why I call myself the Fireclown. I am full of the joy of the flames of life!"

"How…?' The word stumbled hoarsely from his lips.

But the Fireclown's hands left his shoulders and he heard the man screaming at Helen, shaking her also.

There could be no fear now, Alan decided. Though, earlier, he might have been perturbed by the Fireclown's ravings, he now half ignored them, aware that there was no need to listen.

What he demanded now was an explanation.

"How could we have seen that and lived?" he shouted roughly, groping out to seize the Fireclown's tattered clothing and tug at it. "How?"

He heard Helen mumble. Satisfied, the Fireclown moved away from her, jerking himself free from Alan's grip.

He got up and followed the Fireclown through the blackness, touched his body again, sensing the tremendous strength in the man.

The Fireclown shook with humor again.

"Give me a moment," he laughed. "I have to feed the ship further directions."

Alan heard him reach the control panel, heard him make adjustments to studs and levers, heard the now familiar whine. He groped his way back to Helen. She put her arms round him. She was crying.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Really-nothing. It's just the-the emotion, I suppose."

The lights came on.

Arms akimbo, the Fireclown stood grinning down at them.

"I see you are somewhat stunned. I had hoped to turn you mad-but you are obviously too entrenched in your own narrow 'sanity" to be helped. That grieves me."

"You promised me you would explain," Alan reminded him shakily.

"If you could understand, I said, if you remember. I’ll explain a little. I am not yet ready to tell you my full reason for bringing you with me. Now, see..

." He turned and depressed a stud and a section of one port slid up to reveal normal space, with the sun flaring-still near, but not so near as to be dangerous. "We have returned to our ordinary state for a while. Now you see the sun as any traveler would see it from this region of space. What do you think of it?"

"Think of it? I don't understand you."

"Good."

"What are you getting at?"

"How important do the conflicts now taking place on Earth seem to you now?"

"I haven't…" He couldn't find the words. They were important, still. Did the Fireclown think that this experience, transcendental as it might have been, could alter his view of Earth's peril?

Impatiently, the Fireclown turned to Helen.

"Is your ambition to become president of Earth still as strong as it was, Miss Curtis?" ^ She nodded. "This-vision or whatever it was-has no bearing on what are, as far as you're concerned, mundane problems relating to our society. I still want to do my best in politics. It has changed nothing. I have probably benefited from the experience. If that* s the case, I shall be better equipped to deal with Earth affairs."

The Fireclown snorted, but Alan felt Helen had never sounded so self-confident as she did now.

"I still want to know how you achieved the effect," Alan insisted.

"Very well. Put simply, we shunted part of ourselves and part of the ship out of normal time and hovered, as it were, on its edges, unaffected by many of its rules."

"But that's impossible. Scientists have never…"

"If it was impossible, Alan Powys, it couldn't have happened and you couldn't have experienced it. As for your scientists, they have never bothered to enquire. I discovered the means of doing this after an experience which almost killed me and certainly affected my thought-process.

"The sun almost killed me, realize that. But I bear it no malice. You and I and the ship existed in a kind of time freeze. The ship's computer has a 'mind' constructed according to my own definitions-they are meaningless to the rigidly thinking scientists of Earth but they work for me because I am the Fireclown!

"I am unique, for I survived death by fire. And fire gave my brain life-brought alive inspiration, knowledge!" He pointed back at the sun, now dwindling behind them.

"There is the fire that gave birth to Earth and fed its denizens with vitality.

Worship it-worship it in gratitude, for without it you would not and could not exist. There is truth-perhaps the sum of truth. It flames, living, and is; self-sufficient, careless of why, for why is a question that need not-cannot-be answered. We are fools to ask it."

"Would you, then, deny Man his intellect?" Alan asked firmly. "For that is what your logic suggests. Should we have stayed in the caves, not using the brains which"-he shrugged-"the sun, if you like, gave us? Not using an entire part of ourselves-the part which set us over the animals, which enabled us to live as weaklings in a world of the strong and the savage, to speculate, to build and to plan? You say we should be content merely to exist-I say we should think. And if our existence is meaningless then our thoughts might, in time, give it meaning."

The Fireclown shook his painted head.

"I knew you would not understand," he said sadly.

"There is no communication between us," Alan said. "I am sane, you are mad."

The Fireclown, for the first time, seemed hurt by Alan's pronouncement. Quietly, without his usual zest, he said: "I know the truth. I know it."

"Men down the ages have known a truth such as the one you know. You are not unique. Fireclown. Not in history."

"I am unique, Alan Powys, for one reason if none other. I have seen the truth for myself. And you shall see it, perhaps. Did you not become absorbed into the fire of the sun? Did you not lose all niggling need for meaning therein?"

"Yes. The forces are overwhelming, I admit. But they are not everything."

The Fireclown opened his mouth and once more bellowed with laughter. "Then you shall see more."

He closed the port and the room darkened.

"Where are we going?" Helen demanded grimly, antagonistically.

But the Fireclown only laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until the strange spheres began to roll across the screen again. Then he was silent.