The S hadow People

(1969) *

Margaret St, Clair

Contents

Charter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Book information

CHARTER 1

Thoughts draw them. They are sensitive, they pick up something from us, they can track us by our thoughts as dogs can track by scent. Angry or disturbed or painful thoughts attract them most. That is why, in the old stories, somebody who had been “ill-sained” was particularly liable to capture by Otherworld denizens. And yet, for all their sensitivity, there could scarcely exist beings more primitive, rude, nearer to the archaic clay. They are not all alike.

There are three kinds of them, the gray, the black and the green. Green is the worst, but I have seen some wh ite ones, too. I think that was underneath Merced. I wandered for a long time before I came out.

They dwell in a strange world, one of roaring waters, bitter cold, ice-coated rocks and fox fires glowing in the dark. They call our world the Bright World, the Clear World, or Middle-Earth. Their material culture is of the rudest. They have almost no artifacts except the ones they steal from us. Yet their place is home to them: I suppose that is what Kirk meant, in his Secret Commonwealth, when he spoke of th eir “happy polity.” Their atter— corn is their one great luxury — that, and human flesh.

I did not learn all these things at once, of course. They were all things that I learned from personal experience.

I was living on Telegraph Avenue then, in the Shast a Inn, and my girl, Carol, was living in a “basement apartment” a couple of blocks from me. We did not consider ourselves members of the hip community, though I suppose an outsider would have — I worked on the staff of the local hip newspaper and had a lu xuriant moustache, and Carol was ambitious in noncommercial film making. We rarely turned on with anything.

I was somewhat older than she —not enough to be a serious barrier, but enough to give “Come Up the Years,” which had been a popular rock tune when we met, a particular poignancy and point. The basement apartment consisted of a toilet, a shower, and one room, fenced off from the rest of the basement with s heets of Japanese bamboo matting. There was no hot water in the shower, but Carol was a hardy girl; she even washed her long light hair in the shower, using Woolite for soap.

The basement room was warm and dry. Carol slept on the floor, in a double sleep ing bag, with her still camera, an SLR Miranda, near her right hand. The camera was her most valued possession. When I wanted to give her a present, I got her an accessory for it.

The sheets of bamboo matting gave the exiguous room a close, intimate, alm ost luxurious feeling. When I stayed with her, we used, to hear faint chirps and squeakings on the other side of the makeshift partition. The noise never bothered us. We thought it was mice.

The quality of our first eight or ten months together would be hard to convey. It was more than happiness, though we certainly were happy, and more than youth, though we knew we were young. I have said that we did not consider ourselves hippies; and yet the Avenue, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, was our right, our app o inted place. It was ours, as the sea belongs to the dolphin and the air to a bird. It was a place where anything delightful could happen, a place where a Shetland pony could be sheltered in a station wagon, or soap bubbles drift in a glittering shower alon g the street. We felt a passionate loyalty to the Avenue. I expect an Athenian in his city’s great years would have been able to understand.

Eight months, ten months, I’ve forgotten which it was. It must have rained sometimes during those days, but when I think of them, the sun always seems to be shining. Then we had a quarrel.

We had had quarrels before, of course, but never so bitter and destructive as this. The immediate cause was trivial: Carol, who wasn’t old enough herself to vote, objected to the candidate for whom I had cast my ballot in a recent Berkeley city election. But as the argument continued, we found heavier and heavier weapons against each other, until at last things were said by both of us that I do not, even now, particularly enjoy t h inking about.

Neither of us cared enough about who was elected mayor of Berkeley to account for the fury of our quarrel. I suppose the real cause was repressed jealousy on both sides, an aching, desperate jealousy our code forbade us to recognize.

The quarrel ended with my throwing open the door of my room in the Shasta Inn and telling Carol to get out.

“Very well, you –– – – – ” she said. Even her lips were white.

Two days passed. Every time the phone on my desk rang, I hoped it would be Carol. It never was. Finally, about twelve o’clock on the third evening, I got out of bed, put on my clothes, and started to walk over to Carol’s place.

It was a coolish night. The Coffee House was just closing . I passed a man and a girl walking with their arms around each other and the girl’s head on the man’s shoulder. They weren’t anybody I knew.

A light was on in Carol’s room. I knocked. No answer. I tried the door. It was unlocked —a bad habit of Carol’s I was always scolding her about. After hesitating for an instant, I went in.

The little tensor light, standing on the floor beside her sleeping bag, was burning, but she wasn’t in the room.

I looked in the bathroom; she wasn’t there, either. I went back and stood irresolutely beside her sleeping bag.

On impulse, I put my hand between the layers of the sleeping bag. There was still warmth in the bed; Carol had left it not many minutes before.

I was beginning to be alarmed. I looked around, hunting som e clue. The camera was on the floor. Under the right edge of the sleeping bag, close to the lamp, I found one of the filters for her camera. It looked as if it had been stepped on. The yellow glass was cracked.

She might have stepped on it herself. For a moment common sense warred with alarm in my mi n d, and common sense won. Carol had probably decided that she was hungry, and gone out to get something to eat. I hadn’t met her on the street, but she might have decided to take the shortcut through Mrs. And erson’s back yard. The Doggy Diner was open until two.

I’d wait for her. I took off my jacket and shoes, and got into the sleeping bag. The bed was warm, though the pillow felt damp. (Had she been crying? I felt a small pleasure at the thought.) At a ny rate, I was in Carol’s bed again. She ought to be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. I yawned.

The bag was warm and comfortable, and I was tired. I dozed off, still expecting to hear the door open and my girl come in.

I woke a good many hours later. Gray light was coming through the room’s high windows. As soon as I knew where I was, I felt beside me in the bed for Carol. She wasn’t there. She hadn’t come home all night.

I looked at my watch. It was just after six. Carol hadn’t come home all night.

1 went in the bathroom. She wasn’t there, of course. Was it possible that she’d come back, seen me sleeping in her bed, and, still unwilling to end our quarrel, gone away again? For a moment this idea comforted me. Then —the light was better now than it had been the night before — I saw something odd on the floor. I bent and examined it. It was a shiny mark on the concrete, about four inches wide, and it went from the far side of the bed toward the matting, where it stopped.

For some reason the mark, th ough I didn’t know what might have caused it, greatly increased my alarm. My heart was beating hard.

I put on my shoes and jacket, and washed my face in the bathroom. Carol might be annoyed with me, if nothing was the matter and her absence had a normal explanation. But I was too alarmed to wait any longer. I was going to the police.

The officer I spoke to was a pleasant young man about my own age, and he listened to me attentively. “Her bed was warm when you got there,” he said, summing up when I had f inished. “Her door was unlocked, and you found signs of a struggle. That’s what you meant about the broken fitter, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Somebody must have stepped on it.”

“You found signs of a struggle. She never did come back, though you waited for her all night. You’re afraid something may have happened to her.”

“I — -yes.”

“Excuse me, but this is off the record. Did your girl smoke pot or use acid?”

I shook my head. “Not since I’ve known her. We’d both tried pot and liked it. But we hadn’t had any for a long time.”

“I asked because sometimes —with acid, anyhow — people get a little confused. They don’t quite know where they are, wander off, get lost, and so on. That w ould be the simplest explanation, you know.”

“She didn’t like acid. She didn’t like the way it made her feel. Nobody that sounds like her was hurt in an accident last night, or anything of that sort?”

“No. We get reports from the hospitals. Well, I’ll get her description from you, and we’ll let you know if we hear anything.”

He took down what I told him —Carol Jennings, age nineteen, height five feet seven inches, long light hair, brown eyes. “Any scars, marks, physical peculiarities?” he asked, looking up from the paper.

“No. She’s small-boned. Her wrists are unusually thin.”

“Weight?”

“About a hundred and fifteen.”

“Well, that’s about it. We’ll let you know if we hear anything. And be sure to let us know if she pops up safe and sound in a few days.” He smiled, and I realized he wasn’t taking me too seriously.

All the same, I felt better for having enlisted the fuzz on Carol’s behalf. It wasn’t until I was a couple of blocks from the city hall that I realized I hadn’t mentioned the shiny mark on the floor to him.

It was still early. I walked back to the Shasta Inn, bathed, had breakfast at the Coffee House, and got to my desk at the Barb in plenty of time.

Miller, in charge of layout, came by about noon. ”What’s the matter, man?” he asked. “You’ve looked down all week; today you look terrible. Punk trip?”

“It’s Carol,” I answered. “She’s” — I boggled at the word “disappeared” — “gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“That’s just the point. I don’t know.” I told him what had happened the night before, once more omitting the shiny mark on the concrete.

“You think she was kidnappe d, don’t you?” he said when I had finished.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, but you implied it. She’s probably staying with some friend.”

“I called everybody I could think of this morning. They all say they haven’t seen her.”

“U m .” Miller played absent ly with the crux ansata hanging around his neck. “Why don’t you scry to find out where she is? You can scry: I’ve seen you do it. I think you’re a natural sensitive.”

I shrugged. “To me, it’s a form of self-hypnosis. I have no confidence in it.”

“Very probably it is. It’s still a way of finding out what you don’t know consciously. You remember what D. H. Lawrence said about classical augury?”

I’d heard Miller quote Lawrence on the subject of augury several times already. “Yeah, I remember,” I sa id.

“Lawrence said that the augur watched the flight of birds so he could find out what direction the birds in his heart were flying,” Miller said relentlessly. “He meant by that that the practice of divination is designed to bring subconscious knowledge into consciousness. In the subliminal parts of your mind, you know where Carol is.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, I think so. Scrying would tell you what is already in your mind.”

I didn’t say anything. I wished he would go away. Miller stood by my desk a little lo nger. Then he patted me on the shoulder and turned away.

I kept hoping the police would call, but of course they didn’t. By quitting time, I was even more worried about Carol than I had been at six that morning. I still thought scrying was an unlikely wa y to find out what had happened to her.

I walked over to the basement apartment. Everything was exactly as I had left it, including the glittering mark on the concrete. She hadn’t been back.

It was the time of day when she and I used to sit on the terrace of the Coffee House, sipping soft drinks and watching the kaleidoscopic crowd move along the sidewalk. She had been talking —before we had our quarrel-about getting a place where she could co o k for us and even entertain friends. But we had both been sentimentally attached to the room with the walls of bamboo matting.

I stood irresolutely on the corner of Haste and Telegraph. I was much too worried to be hungry, and while everyone I told about Carol’s absence had been sympathetic, they had soon changed the subject. She was all I could think about, though. Finally I decided to go up to my room and have a glass of sherry. It would help to pass some of the long, worried evening that lay in front o f me.

The bottle of Spanish sherry was in my bottom drawer. (Fay, the chambermaid, was a teetotaler.) I half-filled a tumbler with the gold liquid and sat on the edge of the bed drinking it. It tasted good. I was tired and tense, and the sherry felt frie ndly and comforting. I poured more into the glass.

The ring pattern on the bottom of the tumbler looked portentous and significant, seen through the clear liquid. A light show, in my own bedroom. What was it somebody had said about scrying? That the one essential was a “clear depth” into which the scryer could look? The time I had tried it, at a party at which Miller had been present, I had used the regulation crystal ball. But I could think of no real reason that a glass of sherry would not do.

The lig ht, as I remembered, ought to be coming from behind me. I switched on the table lamp and turned my back to it. I looked down into the glass.

The liquid seemed to grow slightly cloudy. I kept on looking. Small darting sparks shot —very pretty — through me cl oudiness. Then a great welling-up, a dark expansion, of the cloudiness.

I knew what that meant. In a minute I was going to see something.

The clouds did not disappear, as they had done during my other scrying. Slowly they transformed themselves, until I saw, instead of billowy storm clouds, a length of angry water. Waves roaring toward a rocky shore? Cross currents in a rock-vexed, foaming river? It could have been either one. There was nothing to give a clue.

I watched with straining eyes until the p icture faded.

Nothing took its place. I was looking down into a glass tumbler half-full of sherry.

I sighed. I finished the sherry. Miller’s theory —that I knew, on an unconscious level, where Carol had gone —didn’t seem to apply to my vision. It might have a symbolic meaning, but I didn’t know what the meaning was. Perhaps it would come to me later.

I reached for the telephone and called a couple of people Carol had been on nodding terms with. They hadn’t s een her and were surprised to learn she was missing.

I drank some more sherry. I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed.

I woke about twelve-thirty. I had a slight headache, but my sleep had done me good: I was sure I knew where Carol was.

The ang ry water I had seen in my scrying had been the representation of an actual scene along the California coast —the rough surf near Big Sur. Carol had friends there, a couple called Clifford and Eadie Wilson. She must be with them. I wondered that I had not t h ought of them before.

The Wilsons had no telephone, and they lived too far from town for a telegram to be delivered to them. A letter would take too long. I’d have to go to Big Sur.

1 found a bus timetable in the upper drawer of the dresser. The earlie st bus down the coast left at eight-thirty A.M ., and got to Monterey about four hours later. From there on, I’d have to hitchhike.

I undressed and got into bed properly. I was feeling —ought to have been feeling — much better, since I had the prospect of f inding my girl soon. There was a good deal of noise in the wall near the head of my bed, and it bothered me. I supposed the room next to mine had finally been rented, and the new tenant appeared to be a noisy one.

My idea about Carol seemed ‘as reasonable next morning as it had during the dark hours. She must be with the Wilsons. I left a note for my boss with the switchboard operator —employment on a hip newspaper has an elastic quality —and caught the Monterey bus in plenty of time. By one in the afternoon I was standing beside the highway, trying to hitch a ride.

Big Sur — actually it is the Big Sur country, since the town of Big Sur hardly exists —is about twenty-five miles from Monterey, with highway number one on one side of it and the Santa Lucia hills on the other. It is beautiful country, wild with rocks and noisy with surf. The highway is a famous scenic drive. I have never much cared for the loca l e, despite its beauty. There is an unwholesome feel to it.

There was very little traffic. The day was cloudy and cool. Two care passed me without stopping. I began to walk along the highway, looking back hopefully now and then.

J had walked for about an hour —nobody stopped for me — when, on the hill side of the road, I saw a man come out from behind a rock and stand looking at me. His head was slightly bent, his hair long and dark, his clothing nondescript.. He was about a hundred feet away from me.

He startled me, w here had he come from? He remained motionless looking at me, his hands clasped behind his buck, until I drew abreast of him. Then he took two steps backward, without turning, and was behind the rock once more.

Fifty feet down the road, I turned and looked back at the rock. I could see behind it now , and there seemed no place from which he could have come or to which he could have gone.

Not long after the encounter with the motionless watcher, I got a lift on a vegetable truck. He took me as far as the country road up which, as I remembered, Cliffo rd and Eadie lived. Their name was on one of the mailboxes at the edge of the highway.

I thanked the vegetable truck man and got out. The road was first uphill, and then level, with a series of impressive views on the coastal side. After I had been walki ng for a while, a deer dashed across the road in front of me and into a thicket of poison oak.

The Wilsons’ house was on the seaward side, sheltered by two magnificent madrones, with a steep, narrow trail leading down to the back door. There was a weather-beaten redwood chaise on a level spot beside the house.

I plunged down the trail, knocked on the front door, and waited. I was already planning what I would say to Carol if she came t o the door. But it would probably be Eadie or Clifford. I hoped they would remember me.

No answer. I knocked again. No answer. The air around the little house seemed frighteningly still.

I peered in the window. There was a chair on either side of the F ranklin stove, and the pillows on the divan opposite the window were fluffed out plumply. I couldn’t see whether there was dust on things or not. I went around to the back and looked in the kitchen window. With the exception of a few plates in the dish dra iner on the sink, the kitchen was in order, with surfaces clear and no foodstuffs in sight. The door was locked.

I was breathing hard. I had been so sure Carol would be here, and —but, of course, they might all three have gone into Monterey for groceries. Monterey was a sizable town. I would have been unlikely to encounter them there.

After some hesitation, I wrote a note and pushed it under the back door. I walked up the trail to the county road and started back toward the highway.

I’d look in Wilsons ‘ mailbox and see if their mail had been picked up recently. And if I met any cars coming along the county road, I’d stop them and ask if they’d seen the Wilsons. The nearest house to the Wilsons’ place had a “For Sale” sign on it. Not much use in asking t here.

I got back to highway number one without meeting anybody. The mailbox —one of those big RFD things — was full of mail, including three copies of The San Francisco Chronicle. The mail evidently hadn’t been picked up for at least thr ee days. But Carol hadn’t been missing for more than thirty-eight or forty hours. If the Wilsons had gone somewhere on a short trip, they must have left at least two days before Carol disappeared.

All this was conjectural. The Wilsons might have been too occupied recently to pick up their mail, and when an unexpected guest arrived, they would have had to go into Monterey for food. (As can be seen, I was reluctant to give up my idea that Carol was at Big Sur.) I’d walk down the highway to the gas pump and the Big Sur Cafe, and see what I could find out.

I got a ride without even lifting my thumb, and in less than ten minutes I was order ing a hamburger and a cup of coffee at the lunch counter. “I have friends here,” I said to the waitress when she brought my order. “Clifford and Eadie Wilson. They don’t seem to be home, though. Do you know where they’ve gone?”

She frowned. “The Wilsons, ” she said. She had a faintly Spanish accent. “Seems to me, Mr. Wilson was in here last week, Friday or so. Yes, I’m pretty sure. He said they was going down to LA for a little while.”

This was very unwelcome news. It had always been unreasonable that Ca rol should depart her bed after mid nig h t for Big Sur, and I had clung to the idea only because the alternatives were both unreasonable and frightening. I was wondering what to do next when the man who had been playing the pinball machine in the corner tur ned and came toward me. The light fell on his face, and I recognized him.

It was Carl Hood, one of the Coffee House regulars. Occasionally he contributed an article to the hip community newspaper. He was older than most of us —about forty, I think — and goo d-looking in a distinguished, thin-featured way, but Carol had never liked him. She had once remarked that, though he often warned people of coming narco busts, the people he warned got busted just the same. He was said to have been a TA in the philosop hy department once. He always wore a green parka, and had a string of uncut turquoise beads around his neck.

“Hello,” he said. “Dick Aldridge himself. What are you doing here? This is not where it’s at.”

“I know,” I said. I hesitated. Carol’s dislike o f him was in my mind. But I was worried, he seemed friendly, I felt I needed advice. I decided to tell him why I was there.

He listened attentively, rubbing his hand across his clean-shaven chin, and now and then lifting his gray eyes to mine. “It’s odd, certainly,” he said when I had finished. “No wonder you’re worried. Have you thought that she might simply have gone across the bay, to the Haight-Ashbury? That’s a likely place for her to have gone.”

“Yes,” I answered. “I called up everybody we know th ere. They all said they hadn’t seen her. But I’m going to go looking for her there when I get back. The thing that bothers me most is that she left her camera. No matter where she went, no matter how uptight she was at me, she wouldn’t leave her camera. I f she forgot it — and she never did forget it — she’d come back for it.”

“Um.” Hood rubbed his chin for a moment longer, his head averted. Then he turned his face to mine and looked directly in my eyes. “Have you considered the possibility,” he said, “that sh e may not be on the skin of the world at all?”

-

CHAPTER 2

I just missed the last northbound bus and had to sit in the waiting room at Monterey all night. I managed to doze a good deal of the time. When I wasn’t nodding, I kept thinking about Carl Hood —wondering what he had meant by his remark, and why, after he h ad made it, he had seemed to regret what he had said, and had refused to explain. He didn’t seem to me the sort of person who would ever let slip more than he had meant to say.

Day came at last. I slept a little more on the bus. When we got to SF, I left the bus and went out to the Haight-Ashbury. I wandered around for a while, went in two or three shops whose wares Carol had admired and asked the clerks about her, and finally had a hamburger and coffee at a place where she and I had eaten once or twice. Nobody had seen her, and it seemed more and more unlikely to me that she would elect to hide from me in the Haight-Ashbury.

She had never liked the locale, even before it got touristy, saying that stoned teenies and warmed-over mantras struck her as a ba d combination. (I suspect she was basically unsympathetic to Eastern mysticism.) That she should come there for solace while she was recovering from a disastrous love affair was hard to accept. But if she wasn’t there, then where —?

Suddenly I was anxious to get back to Berkeley. There might be a message for me, either at the inn or where I worked; the atmosphere of the Haight —withdrawn e x hibitionism, self-encapsulated color —was an acute irritant. As a Bohemia, it had too few bookstores. I wanted to get back to the Avenue.

There was no messages for me at the inn. T showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes. Carol would have been much more likely to leave a message for me at the paper, anyhow. There would surely be a notation on the pad on my desk. Or the PBX girl would have written down a number for me to call. After all, I’d been gone more than thirty-six hours. I’d hurry and get to where I worked.

Nothing. My mouth got dry. I phoned the police, and was told, by the same polite young m an to whom I’d reported Carol’s disappearance, that nothing had been heard of her. He seemed surprised that she hadn’t come back.

It was a long afternoon. I would have liked to talk to Miller, but only saw him once, in rapid transit past my desk, too abs orbed even to nod to me. I got more and more anxious. My fingers began to tremble. By eight o’clock —it was my night to work late —I had trouble hitting the right keys on the typewriter.

I was done about nine. I hadn’t had any dinner and hadn’t wanted any. As I passed the Coffee House, Fay, the chambermaid who did my room at the beat-up Shasta Inn, hailed me.

“Hi, Dick,” she said from her chair on the terrace, “you look terrible. Get yourself something to eat inside, and come and sit down with me.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Get a milkshake, then. You look like you need food.”

After a moment, I obeyed her. Fay was a small, brown-haired girl, about my own age, who was working as a chambermaid part time while she took courses in psychology at the university. She was not a very good chambermaid, but she was perfectly honest. There was a faint softness in her speech that made me think she might have come from the South originally. I did not find her particularly attractive, but I did not find her unattractive, e i ther. She impressed me as being reserved.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked as I was unloading my tray on her table. “That cake looks good. Your bed wasn’t slept in last night.”

“You certainly keep tabs on me,” I answered, a little resentfully. “Do you kn ow when everybody in the inn sleeps out?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Just about. But don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I just thought you were looking bad.”

After all, I wanted to talk. Fay was friendly, and I didn’t know her well enough to make confiding in her embarrassing. Once more I poured out my tale of Carol’s disappearance, including my scrying, the expedition to Big Sur, and my hunt in the Haight-Ashbury. “She’s been gone almost forty-eight hours now,” I finished. “He r bed was still warm on Monday night, you know.”

“You think she’s been kidnapped, don’t you?” Fay said. “Eat your cake. Whatever has happened or hasn’t happened, you’ll need to be fed.”

“Miller said that, too,” I answered, obediently swallowing the las t of the cake. It occurred to me that Fay wasn’t so much reserved as she was bossy. Still, the cake tasted good. “That I thought she’d been kidnapped, I mean. But why should she be kidnapped? There’s been no attempt at a ransom, and if there had, I haven’t any money.

“Carol is young and good-looking, but there are a couple of thousand girls in Berkeley who’re the same. Why should kidnappers pick on her, especially?”

“The other girls weren’t sleeping in basement apartments, and they weren’t emotionally u pset because they’d had a serious quarrel with their boy friends.”

“You mean, her being upset would have made her easier to kidnap? That she wouldn’t resist much if somebody pulled a gun on her and —forced her to go with him?”

Fay ran her hand over her dark hair. “No, that’s not quite what I meant. Listen, were there any other traces of a struggle besides the broken filter?”

“No. Her bed wasn’t mussed up.”

“Nothing else odd at all?” she persisted.

“There was a mark on the floor,” I said, almost un willingly. “A broad mark, shiny and glittering, like dried slime.”

“Oh!”

“You know what made it?” I was excited.

“Maybe.” Fay obviously wasn’t going to say anything more. She folded her arms on her chest and stared past me at the street.

Her curtness exasperated me. “You think Carol was kidnapped,” I said stiffly, “but do you know by whom? Do you know where they would have taken her? If you do, I can’t understand why you don’t tell me. If you’re afraid to tell me, you should go to the police.”

Fay sighed. She looked at me, and then away again. She seemed to be making up her mind whether to confide in me. “I’m not quite sure who has taken her,” she said at last. “There are three kinds of them, the gray —but never mind that. As to where she may have b een taken, I don’t know an easy way of describing it. Let’s just say that —she may no longer be on the skin of the world.”

I felt a strong, unpleasant thrill.

“The skin of the world”—it was the expression Carl Hood had used. “What do you mean by that?” I demanded. “Carol must be somewhere! Or do you mean that she —is under —I mean, she isn’t alive any more?”

“No, I think she’s still alive.”

“Something supernatural, then?”

“Not supernatural, either. Natural enough, but old and fr ightening. Do you love her enough to go after her?”

“Yes. But where do I go?”

“I can show you how to follow. The —people you are hunting leave traces.”

“Fay! What are you hinting at? You seem to know something —what is it? How do you know?”

“At home—” she said, and stopped. “Never mind, it isn’t necessary that you understand. The most important thing is not to eat or drink while you are gone. Remember that.” She leaned across the table toward me, her eyes serious and intent..“You must take food and wate r with you. Don’t be tempted to eat what you find, or what they offer you.”

A girl walked by wearing white Levis, with a black tutu over them. A few yards down the block somebody began whomping on a guitar with electric amplification. A truck parked at t he curb was projecting light patterns on sheets of butcher paper. I don’t know whether, in a more conventional environment than this one, Fay’s remarks would have struck me as fantastic; here they seemed piercingly relevant, like the sound of an alarm cloc k breaking through an overlong dream. I stared at her.

“You’ll need stout shoes,” she went on, “with nonskid soles. You’ll have to do a lot of walking and crawling —clambering, really. I don’t think”—she looked closely at my eyes, rather than into them —”that you’ll need to take any light source with you. It will be rather dark, though, all the same.

“Do you have a knife?”

“A pocket knife, yes,” I replied.

“That may be enough. They dislike steel.”

“But—where am I going? Who is ‘they’? Where do I start?”

“A good place to start would be in the basement of the inn later tonight. I’ll take you down and show you how to go. As to where you’re going —you could call it Otherworld. Or Underearth.”

-

Fay knocked on the door of my room rather less than an hour later. I had changed to old clothes and sturdy shoes, and put chocolate bars and sandwiches in the pockets of my jacket. Water I had in an old canteen. I didn’t know how long I would be gone (gone? gone where?), but the rent on my room was paid till t he end of the month, and I thought that would be enough.

She took me down the service stairs to the inn’s basement. The inn was an old building; the fire department had seen to it that the basement was free of imflammable litter, but all around the edges of the big, shadowy area were glass and metallic remainders —flower pots, glass jars, bags of nails, rusty tools, fragments of a dismantled bicycle. It ought all to have been thrown out long ago.

“Now,” said Fay, pausing beside the furnace boiler, “do yo u feel a draft?”

“Yes, several. This is a drafty place.”

“There is only one we are interested in. Move your head around and see if you feel a —it is really not a draft, I don’t know what to call it —a current of air that is definitely colder than the others. Colder and a little moist. That will be the one.”

I moved my head obediently, half-sniffling. “I feel something, I think. It’s almost a smell.”

“Yes, that’s it. Notice, when you move your head , how it seems to strengthen, and not necessarily in the direction from which the current appears to come.”

“Yes. It gets stronger that way.” I pointed to the wall where an extrusion of a stepladder and a sawhorse stood. “I must say I don’t care for it, as a smell.”

“Of course, you don’t. Try to follow it.”

I went forward, sniffing and moving my head, until I came up against the wall. “It ends here,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t. Go around behind the ladder. Do you see that gap? The gradient would take y ou into that.”

I stood looking at the opening, feeling the chill, disagreeable current come out of it, and hesitating. “Go on,” Fay said after a minute. “You must go into it.”

“Into that? I can’t. It’s too small.”

“No, it is not. You can make it. I’ll show you.”

She got in front of me, raised her arms above her head, and with a couple of boneless wriggles, disappeared into the gap. It was almost like a conjuring trick.

If she could, I supposed I could, too. I wa s taller than she, but she was considerably more billowy. I tried raising my arms, as she had done, but it seemed to add to my difficulties. Finally, I tried pulling in my buttocks sharply, throwing my head back, and forcing the air out of my lungs. This w orked, and I got through the opening handily enough, though I could feel the sandwiches in my pockets grinding against the rough edges of the gap.

I was standing in another space, a confined one from the feel of the air. When I moved my head, I could det ect the cold, unpleasant gradient strengthening away from me. The space was dark, but after a moment I could make out the silhouette of my companion. The walls gave out a very pale light.

“Where are we?” I asked in a low voice. The environment made me fe el that I really ought to whisper.

“In the next cellar,” she answered. “Do you feel the gradient? Remember, it is the direction toward which it strengthens, not the direction from which it appears to be coming, that is important.”

“Yes.”

“Follow it.”

I groped my way toward the farther wall, where, rather low down, there was a not impossibly narrow horizontal opening, as if a couple of courses of brick had been left out.

“You must go on by yourself,” Fay said. “But remember, if you come to a place that seems absolutely impossible, look about for another way. This road is used, and by beings who, however lithe, boneless and pliable themselves, take bulky objects with them. There is always a passable way to Otherworld.

“The way may surface for a whi le. They go over such spots when the nights are darkest. Don’t be alarmed. The way will go down again. Use your steel knife to protect yourself, if they seem threatening. Good-bye. Good luck.”

She touched me on the wrist with one hand. Before I could say anything, she had slithered through the gap on the Shasta Inn side once more, and was gone.

I almost started after her. The enterprise in which I was engaged, now that the persuasiveness of Fay’s presence was removed, seemed abruptly preposterous. A “wa y to Otherworld,” indeed. I was in a cellar adjacent to the basement of the Shasta Inn, that was all, and Fay was an odd girl whose oddity had taken a somewhat unconventional shape. Perhaps she was high on something unusual, an intoxicant that enabled her to construct a grotesque, plausible account of what had happened to Carol four nights before.

But if Carol hadn’t been taken to “Otherworld,” what had become of her? Had she been forced, probably at the point of a gun, into somebody’s car a few minutes before I got to her apartment? It was possible, and yet I didn’t believe it. She would have resisted, screamed, ducked under the kidnapper’s arm, struggled, fought back. She wasn’t, in short, an easy girl to intimidate. Only a kidnapper who could paralyze her will could have abducted her.

I heard a faint scurry and twittering off to my right. The noise decided me. It might be only mice (more likely rats), but it was noteworthy how often I heard such noises around me. I could feel the gradient, the increas ing coldness and disgusting moisture Fay had spoken of, Carol was gone, gone somewhere. I would try to follow. If I was doing a foolish thing, it was still no more foolish than waiting anxiously in Berkeley to hear news of her.

I got down on my knees and rolled and pushed myself through the horizontal opening. It was roomy enough, but the floor on the other side was lower, and I had to grope with my toes for it.

This cellar was much smaller than the other two had been. I wonder ed where I was with relation to the outside world. I moved my head about, but couldn’t pick up the cold draft I had been following. I felt around the circumference of the room —it seemed to be circular —but couldn’t find any opening. It wasn’t until I stood on tiptoe that I felt, brushing moistly against my eyeballs, the “current of air” I was looking for.

This time the opening was high up, and bigger than the other two. I could see it, very faintly, darker against the dark, rough wall, and it seemed to be round. How was I to get up to it?

Fay had stressed that this way to Otherworld was used; I felt around on the wall with my hands until I located two projections, suitably spaced under the hole’s opening. I set my feet on them, and was bumping my head on the rim of the hole in the next moment.

There is no point in describing the next cellar, or the one that came after it, or the one after that. I went on from place to place, sometimes to a deeper chamber, sometimes to shallower, but never, I thought, get ting much farther into the earth, until about four o’clock. Then the gradient led me into the open, through a high cellar window and out into somebody’s untidy, junk-filled backyard.

I stood in the weak moonlight —the moon was low in the sky, and only hal f full —moving my head and snuffling for the cold, outwelling current of disgust I had been following. Whether or not Fay was correct in her ideas about what had happened to Carol, it was certainly remarkable that I had been able to make my way through a c h ain of basements and cellars this far. It seemed to me I had come a good many miles. I wondered where I was.

The cold-odor-moisture gradient was very faint. I thought I had it, moved confidently toward the neighboring backyard, and lost it again. I went back to my point of exit from the cellar, and stood there snuffling. I hoped there were no dogs which would start barking at me.

At last I thought I had found it. It was down low, so that I had to move in a half crouch. I was in this position when, about six inches from my nose, I saw something gleaming among the short weeds and dry grass. It seemed to be a circle of dullish metal. I thought it was probably the key from a beer can, but I picked it up.

As soon as it was in the palm of my hand, I knew wha t it was. I had seen it often enough before, gleaming against Carol’s light hair. It was one of the pair of engraved silver hoop earrings she habitually wore.

I drew a deep breath. The track I was following might or might not be the route to the place Fa y had cryptically called Otherworld. There was still room for doubt. Fay’s strange hints and peculiar allusions were hard to accept. But one thing was certain: this was Carol’s earring. Carol had passed this way.

-

CHAPTER 3

The gradient was strengthening. The coldness and moisture were more noticeable, the repellent quality, almost an odor, was growing nauseating. And mixed with my increasing distaste for it was a new emotion, a disgusted fascination, so that I found myself s niffing for it even while my nose wrinkled with dislike.

After I had picked up Carol’s earring and put it in my pocket, I had found the trail again, in an unpainted, sagging wooden shed across the street. There was a trapdoor in the floor of the shed; wh en I raised it, the cold, moist air welled up, and I saw a flight of steps. I went down them, turned to the left, and came to a low rectangular space filled with what seemed to be old beer cans. Other ambiguous places had followed. Now I was in a cellar, d ark enough, but not too dark for me to see that there was a broad glittering mark on the floor. (The acuity of my vision in these inky places surprised me; the upwelling moisture seemed to have something to do with it.) This cellar was the third or fourt h in the chain since I had opened the trapdoor. I felt that I was getting deeper. There was a lot of faint chirping in the walls.

I decided to eat half of one of my sandwiches. I was hungry, and, while the cellar was damp and unpleasant, the next would probably be worse. Besides, there was a crate of some sort I could sit on. The rest would do me good.

I seated myself on the crate (the cellar was piled with rotting cardboard boxes) and got out my sandwich. It was tuna fish, and the taste mingled oddly with the repellent updraft from the cellar’s far wall. But the food was good, and I followed it with a sip of water from my canteen. I felt I had better be sparing with food and water, since I did not know how long I would have to depend on them.

When I had eaten, I held out my fingers and dusted the crumbs of food from them. There was a twitter, quite close to me, and then a sudden sharp nip on the middle finger of my right hand.

The nip disconcerted me. I sucked my finger, wondering whether wha t had bitten me had dirty teeth or was carrying any of the more dangerous viruses. It was not a rat, I was sure of that. The cellar was dark, but my eyes had sharpened, and I could have seen anything that would ordinarily have been visible. I am inclined t o think, in view of what I afterward found to be the case, that what had nipped me was some one of the animal hangers-on of the denizens of Otherworld. They have their pets and parasites, as we do, and it is most unlikely they were ever the source of the n oises and twitterings I heard. They are called “the silent people,” not because they cannot talk, but because they are noiseless in their actions and rarely speak.

I got to my feet. The small noises were all around me, and I found it unpleasant. Suddenly I remembered my pocket knife. I got it out, opened it, and stabbed at random into the darkness. The squeaking stopped, though I was sure I hadn’t struck anything.

Fay had said “they” disliked steel. I wished I had brought a bigger knife. I resolved, if the track led into a suitable spot, to see if I could find a bigger piece of steel. An old file, a rusty hacksaw blade —anything of that sort would help. I might reasonably expect to find scrap metal in a cellar junk heap.

I wondered, as I sniffed along t he moist gradient toward the small opening in the wall of the current cellar, why Fay hadn’t led me directly to the shed with the trapdoor in its floor. Since the track surfaced at that point, I could have followed it from there on perfectly well, and I w o uld have saved hours of laborious clambering. It was possible that Fay hadn’t known of any entrance to Otherworld besides the one in the basement of the Shasta Inn (this later turned out to be correct). Or the road down might change from time to time, as a cellar was blocked, filled-in, or otherwise removed from the chain. And finally, there was a certain merit, from the point of view of psychological conditioning, to making a gradual approach to Otherworld.

The level of the next cellar was nearly six fee t below that of the current one; I had to jump for it. It seemed to be a small space, no more than four or five feet across, and I had the nasty feeling that I had jumped into a steep-sided pit. I found the opening, though, and had to jump again.

This new cellar—underground structure —semicave —was bigger, with a sort of trash heap against one wall. I remembered my wish to find a bigger knife than the flimsy pocket affair that was in my hand. The trash heap —it seemed to be composed of rotting layer s of fabric, stained with damp and, paradoxically, bearing the traces of fire —yielded nothing but a nest of sluggish salamanders. But beside the heap, somewhat apart from it on the floor, were several bones with cracked ends. They were beef bones, I think, and it looked as if they had been cracked for the sake of the marrow.

I wondered how they had got there. People don’t usually carry bones into cellars, and if they had been placed there for the convenience of a dog once, it was hard to think anybody wou ld have kept a dog in this dark, wet place. There were no traces of a dog.

While I had been poking through the pile of fabric tatters, the twittering had been going on around me, always concentrated about my right hand. I suppose the wound on my finger, with its smell of blood, attracted them. From time to time I would slash out with my pocket knife, and then the noise would stop for a little while.

I sighed. I wished I could have found something a little more efficient to use against my invisible entou rage. I was turning my head around, trying to pick up the gradient again, when I saw something gleaming dimly against the wall opposite from the trash heap. It was a long streak, rather high up.

On impulse I went toward it. The light was a little worse o n this wall than elsewhere in the cellar, where the bluish phosphorescence characteristic of Otherworld had begun to show. Even standing directly under the streak, I couldn’t be sure what it was.

I reached up toward it. My fingers found a smooth, cold su rface. It was metal, certainly, and —a knife? No. I lifted it down from the two pegs that supported it. It was a sword.

The lightest place in the cellar was the junction of the two walls opposite, where the wan phosphorescence made something of a glow. I took the sword there to look at it.

Even in the poor light I could see that it was a beautiful thing. It was about four feet long, the blade two-edged and gently tapering, with —I thought —some engraving high up on it. The blade was not at all rusted, desp ite the fact that it had certainly been lying against a moisture-oozing wall.

Above the blade there was a knuckle guard some seven inches long and almost two inches wide, made of a pale golden metal. The form of the guard was unusual —two long concave arc s laid back to back, with an orb between their separated ends. The arcs, except for their flatness, were like crescent moons.

Above the knuckle guard there was a hilt, comfortably wide, wrapped with leather strapping for security of grip, and above the h ilt there was a flat boss of the same golden metal, bearing, on both its surfaces, one of the oldest sacred signs, the pentacle.

Finding the sword had an extraordinary effect on me. It seemed not only beautiful, but powerful, and to op pose, with its beneficent strength, the peculiar sordidity of the place where I had found it. (That sordidity —the heap of wet, scorched tatters and the cracked bones on the floor —was a foretaste of the cold disgust of Otherworld. It was with me constantl y from this place on, like a bitter ache in the bones.) And the sword gave a measure of hope to my quest for Carol. Holding it in my right hand, I realized how little confidence I had had in finding her or being able to rescue her. It was still not probabl e I should be able to do these things. But I felt it was possible.

All the same, the sword was going to be an awkward thing to carry. It wasn’t especially sharp, but it was both too sharp and too long for me to stick it through my belt, like a small boy p laying pirate. I needed some sort of sheath or suspension for it.

After some thought, I hunted through the heap of tatters until I found several stout, undamaged pieces. I braided them together into a sort of sling, and hung the sword from my belt with i t.

It was time to leave the cellar. I hunted about for the gradient and found the new opening very low down in one wall. I had to lie down on my belly to get into it.

The air that was coming toward me felt somehow different. When I was through the gap, I saw why. This was no cellar that I stood in, but a large natural cavern. There would be no more cellars. I was on the edge of a new world.

I stood clutching the sword and hesitating. I felt re luctant to go forward. I had the sword to help me, of course. But in this moment it seemed to mislike me, to be not quite happy in my hand.

-

CHAPTER 4

There was a dull roaring somewhere ahead. After a moment, I realized i t was the sound of rushing water. Perhaps I remembered the angry water I had seen in my scrying in the sherry glass; at any rate, the sound acted on me like a sharp push. I found myself walking forward across the floor of the cavern, my hand on the hilt of the sword.

It was difficult to tell how large the cavern was, partly because of the light and partly because it was full of damp, confusing echoes. The floor sloped slightly downward. I seemed to be scuffling through dark gray sand. I was alert for dang er, but nothing —or nobody —came near me. But among the echoes there were sounds that might have been soft footsteps, and I thought I saw glistening marks on the sand.

The noise of the water grew louder. When I finally got up to it, I found it was a stream , not wide but dark and exceedingly turbulent, that flowed straight across the cavern. It came out of the rock and roared into the rock. The sandy banks were only a foot or two high. The stream could not have been flowing in its present channel very long, or it would have worn a deeper bed for itself. There is always a water barrier between our world and Underearth.

I stood looking at the water. It made so much spray I couldn’t see what was on the other side at all, but the gradient —the upwelling of cold —definitely led across it. That meant I would have to cross the stream. It was far too rapid and turbulent for me to be able to swim it, but Fay had said there was always a passable way to Underearth. If beings with bulky loads could cross this stream repe a tedly, there must be some sort of ford.

I stepped over the bank and down into the water. It was bitterly cold, with streaks of peculiar soapy warmth, and oddly dark-colored. Even when it broke into whitish foam, it still kept its dark coloration. I think in a better light it would have looked dull red.

My first step, still close to the bank, had brought the water halfway up my thighs. I couldn’t get in much deeper than that and keep my footing. I bent over, probed in front of me with the sword, and found I couldn’t touch bottom. One step forward, and the inky water would be over my head. But there must be shallow places. I would look for them.

I moved along, probing, until the sword touched bottom only a little deeper than where I stood. I stepped onto the indicated spot and probed again. I found another shallow within arm’s reach, this time only slightly above my knees. It was a real relief to pause there momentarily. My next step forward plunged me in considerably deeper. It was hard to keep on m y feet, the current tore at me so.

Shallow spot followed shallow spot. I was almost across when the sword encountered a seemingly solid place that gave way unexpectedly. The current there was particularly strong, and I was leaning well forward, my weight behind the probing tip of the sword. I overbalanced. The next moment I was struggling in the furious water, borne helplessly toward the rock wall.

I flailed with my hands and tried to swim. I wasn’t afraid —I hadn’t had time to get frightened —but the tho ught of the cruel rocks and the white spray around them was in the back of my mind. I had sense enough not to let loose of the sword.

I rolled over and over, tumbled by the current like a sock in a clothes dryer. Spinning and struggling, I managed to sta b downward with the sword into the stream’s sandy bottom, and deep enough so that the blade resisted the current for a moment. With the sword as a lever, I swung myself forward toward the bank. My feet came down in a spot where the water, though turbulent, was only thigh deep. A moment later I was standing, dripping wet, on the low, sandy bank, safely across the stream.

My first concern was for the sword. I dried it as well as I could on my wet clothing. Then I thought of the sandwiches. They were still s afe in their wax wrappers, and the strap of my canteen hadn’t broken. It was darker on this side. The cavern here was lower-roofed, but seemed much broader. Turn as I might, I could find no trace of the gradient I had followed thus far. I walked slowly al o ng the bank of the stream, hunting for it, twisting and bending, but there was nothing. Here, in Underearth, on the other side of the water barrier, the gradient difference had ceased to exist. Or rather, it had spread out everywhere.

I was standing shiv ering in my soaked clothes, wondering what to do, when a man —an indeterminate figure —-came out of the gloom toward me, his finger on his lips. His face was pale, and whatever the dark garment was he was wearing, it seemed to have holes in it, since I coul d catch glimpses of pale flesh when he moved.

He looked at me with great earnestness, a peculiar staring intensity, his eyebrows arched and his eyes rolling, as if he had something of the greatest significance to impart. I said something —or at least made a noise with my lips —and he rebounded from me like a Ping-Pong ball. He stopped at least twenty-five feet away from me, still with his finger to his lips. I took a step toward him. He made a chewing motion with the lower part of his face, and ran off to t h e left.

Well, I could go forward. I might be able to catch up with the man who had avoided me, or find some other inhabitant of the subterranean world, and try to find out where Carol was. But when I was at about the point at which the staring man had di sappeared, I saw a break in the left wall through which he had probably gone. Should I try to follow him? Had Carol been taken that way? How was I to tell? The opening seemed pitch dark. There were glistening marks on the sand near it; but there were glist ening marks everywhere.

I looked around me uncertainly. Behind me, I saw the tracks I had made up from the water glowing with dim phosphorescence. Finally, I decided to go straight on. The opening in the rock looked too small for Carol, who was of normal size, to have been carried through it. But I was not altogether happy about my choice.

My uncertainty increased when, fifty feet or so farther on, there was another opening in the rock on the left side. It too was small, but not so small that it would have been impossible to drag an unconscious human being through it. I had come no great way from the river, and already I had found two ways Carol might conceiv a bly have been taken! I began to fear that Underearth, lightless and cold, was a sort of labyrinth in which I might wander indefinitely without ever finding my girl. How could I tell the paths her abductors had taken from all the ones that they had not? Bu t Fay would not have sent me in quest of Carol unless she had thought it possible for me to find her. Very well. I would hunt till I found her. I would bring her back to daylight.

I would look in the likely places first. This opening, small, low and jagge d, did not really seem very likely. I would go on until I found a more probable place.

Blended with the confusing echoes and the constant sound of water dripping from the roof, I heard a peculiar flapping noise somewhere ahead. When I got up to the noise , I saw it came from a niche in the rock, where two or three men —it was hard to be sure in the wan light —were doing something to another who lay spread against the sand.

One man had control of each of the victim’s arms, and the third had pulled his tongue from his mouth and was jabbing at it with some instrument. The flapping noise came from the beating of the victim’s heels against the sand as he writhed in pain and trie d to free himself.

All four fled silently when I came abreast of them, the torturers and the tortured. They hardly seemed to look at me, but from later experiences, I think they were running from the sword. Why they were torturing him, whether they had an y reason at all, it is impossible to say. Such scenes are common in Underearth. Torturers and tortured change roles easily.

What impressed me the most about the incident was its noiselessness. Even in his pain the victim had been silent. The four men had fled like figures in a dream. I might have thought I had imagined them, except that they left ridges and dents in the sand.

They had run off to the right, where there seemed to be another of those openings in the rock. But now I was getting to the end o f the cavern. I could see the rock closing down ahead.

The roof had grown lower. In front of me were three large, pitch-black openings, ranged like doorways in the rock. They all had the look of major thoroughfares, with the edges worn smooth either from traffic or the flow of some ancient river; and each of them was wide enough for a girl to have been carried through it. I had to take one of them, or go back to one of the low openings I had previously scorned.

As far as I could see, there was absolutely no reason to prefer one of the three ways to another. On impulse I started down the extreme right-hand one.

It was much darker in this new channel than it had been in the cavern. The walls did not phosphoresce at all. I walked forward in darkness so profound that it seemed to impede the beating of my heart. Would even Otherworld denizens use a highway that was so impenetrably black? It was possible, of course, that it would grow lighter after a while.

I went forward a little farther. I disliked the feel of this channel more and more. Finally, I decided to turn back and try one of the other ways. I didn’t know whether I was being cowardly or wise.

This time I chose the opening on the far left. It was very sli ghtly less dark than the first passage had been, and it seemed wider. I hadn’t gone very far in it when the sword began to vibrate, very pleasantly and melodiously, in my hand.

It was like the purring of some sweet-throated tiger, or the humming of some big happy bee. I found it wonderfully reassuring; it didn’t occur to me, even for a moment, to wonder whether something external had set the sword to vibrating. It was exactly as if it had spoken to me and told me I was taking the right way.

All the same , I decided to try the middle passage as a check. It turned out to be the lightest of the three passages, though that is not to say it was in any respect really light. I walked along it for some fifty feet. The sword was silent. Good, I would take the lef t -hand way.

The sword repeated its humming approval as I entered it.

The way led generally downward. Sometimes there were patches of fox fire on the walls, but often I moved in utter darkness. Sometimes the passage was wide, wide enough for several me n to have walked through it abreast, and then it would narrow to the width of a hall door. There were many alternatives and twists, and the sword guided me surely through them all.

Once, in a particularly dark spot, it began to vibrate warningly in my hand. I tapped the rock in front of me with the blade, and found there was a great hole in the floor, from which came dimly and far below the sound of rushing water. Fortunately, the p a ssage was wide at that place, and there was plenty of room for me to detour around the opening. I wondered whether the heroes of saga, who thought of their swords as living and looked in their blades for counsel before they went to war, had had swords l ike mine.

It was bitterly cold. The sweat of my exertions seemed to freeze on my back. The rock heaps I clambered over were often glazed with ice. I was getting tired, and when I came to a hollow in the floor between two higher points, I decided to try to sl eep or rest. The rock was a little warmer there.

I lay down on my back, with the hilt of the sword in my hand. I thought it was safe enough. I had neither heard nor seen any Underearth people since I entered the passage. But I felt guilty to be resting w hile Carol was still unfound.

The rock was so hard that I did not think I could sleep. I was tireder than I had realized. I was asleep and dreaming almost as soon as I lay down.

I dreamed of daylight, exquisite bright colors, translucent blue-green wav es breaking in creamy froth on a sunny beach. The dream shifted to beds of bright flowers, and then back to the waves crashing on the beach. The roaring of the waves turned to an ominous whir. I was suddenly awake, my eyes open on darkness, clutching the h ilt of the sword, which was vibrating angrily in my hand.

Before I could get to my feet, I felt a stunning blow on the tendons of my shoulder, between my neck and my collar bone. It was my sword arm; for a moment I couldn’t lift the sword at all, and whe n I could, I couldn’t raise it much above the level of my thigh. Still, it was some defense; and I was able to scramble to my feet and look around me before I was struck again, this time a hard slash on the back of my head. Blood began to run down my neck and along my back under my clothes.

I managed to transfer the sword to my left hand. I struck out with it awkwardly, still dizzy from the blow on the back of my head. There seemed to be at least three attackers. One, perhaps a woman, lurked in the backgr ound, her head dimly silhouetted against a patch of fox fire. She seemed to urge the others on with meaning looks and arched, foolish eyebrows. But I could not see well enough to be sure of any of this.

It was plain, at least, that they dreadfully feared the steel of the sword. They winced aside from it as if it were burning hot. I managed to cut one of them badly with the blade. The others ran then, with him stumbling after them.

I didn’t go after them, though I supposed they would be lurking for me in the darkness somewhere ahead. I stood leaning on the sword, panting and weak, while I recovered myself. I wondered how they, who so hated steel, had managed to cut my head with “something that seemed as hard and sharp as a knife. (I later found that they had attacked me with a favorite weapon of theirs, owl talons bound with sinew to the head of a wooden club.) None of the wounds I got in Otherworld, then or later, ever infected, though I was often weak and sick. It seems odd. I suppose the low temperature had something to do with it.

At last, I roused myself to go forward. I thought of eating, but I decided I might need the food more later. I could stand my hunger for a while.

I kept stepping in something sticky. In one of the lighter places in the passage, I saw that the stickiness was blood from the man I had wounded. There was no other sign of the beings that had attacked me as I slept.

I had to keep stopping to rest. By pr eference, I did this in one of the spots where fox fire gave a certain wan light. The constant darkness tended to erode my awareness of myself; to see my hands, even dimly, helped me realize I still had a body. At one of these halts, I saw a saucer of meal resting on a ledge in the rock.

What was it doing here? I picked up the dish and examined it. It was an ordinary saucer, plastic I think, but the meal it held was unusual. It looked like very coarse corn meal, dull brick-red in color, and it had a faint ly phosphorescent glow.

For some reason, it looked awfully good to me. I picked up a handful of the meal, sifted it through my fingers, carried a pinch of it to my lips.

There was a squeaking somewhere near me. Suddenly I remembered Fay’s warning again st eating or drinking while I was in Otherworld. I put the dish down carefully, convinced that I had been about to do something very dangerous. But there had been no sound from the sword.

-

CHAPTER 5

I slept once more before I came on the cavern with the feast. The cavern was quite large; dripping water had made a curtain of stalactites down the middle that partly hid its interior from anybody who stood at the entrance. The lower part of the walls was d i mly and regularly luminous with chunks of fox fire. I suppose the beings who assembled in the cavern tended to bring pieces of fox fire with them when they came.

I didn’t at first realize that there was anybody in the cavern. I was well into it before I saw movement on the rock floor in front of me. They, for their part, were so absorbed in what they were doing that I was almost among them before they noticed me at all. There must have been twenty or thirty of them —a large gathering for the Silent People.

They scattered when they perceived me. They scurried away in all directions, like crabs or rats. I was to observe on other occasions a certain shamefacedness in them when they feasted, as if a remembered human taboo faintly disturbed them at such times. Even if I hadn’t been carrying the sword, they would not have attacked me immediately.

As it was, I was halfway across the cavern before I heard them coming on me from behind. I trusted the sword to protect me, but I didn’t want to fight with so many of them, if it could be avoided. So I went forward at a half-run, stabbing over my shoulder at them with the sword. I wounded one or two of them, I think. But, of course, they made no sound.

The floor was slippery, partly from moisture and partly from the remains of what my attacker had been eating. I had to keep looking down to safeguard my footing. In one of these quick looks I saw the bones of a human forearm. They had been gnawed and picked quite clean.

My assailants fell behind. I reached the cavern exit unharmed and with no followers. The bones couldn’t have been Carol’s; they were too small. But the sight made me realize what the reason probably was for her having been kidnapped, and from then on I sweated with anxiety to find her. From then on, I s topped to rest only when I couldn’t make myself move.

It was during one of these forced and infrequent rests that the exile came up to me. I thought him one of the Otherearth people, at first, and got ready to defend my self. Then I saw that he didn’t wince from the sword. He was bigger than the others, too, and he carried himself differently.

He stopped about ten feet away from me, with his hands clasped together under his chin and his neck stretched out. The light was wretched, as always, but it seemed to me that one of his eyes was gone.

We remained looking at each other for a minute or two, oddly embarrassed about speaking. “Hello,” I said finally.

“Hello,” he answered. His voice was flat and loud, like a deaf pe rson’s. “What year is it?”

I told him. He began to weep silently, tears rolling down his cheek from his good eye. “Twenty years!” he said in his flat voice. He was rocking back and forth in his grief, his hands still clasped under his chin. “I’ve been wa ndering down here in the darkness for twenty years!”

His statement shocked me without exciting my pity. “How did you get here?” I asked after a moment. It was all I could think of to say.

“They brought me. I managed to escape. They’ve never tried very hard to kill me. I suppose I was more fun left alive.—Twenty years!”

“Would you like to go back? Back to the light?”

“Yes.” He had hesitated perceptibly before answering. “People they’ve brought down here, and let live, are just their toys. They do —oh, anything. One of them gouged one of my eyes out once. He wasn’t even angry. He didn’t seem to enjoy doing it. He did it for no reason at all.”

“You couldn’t find your way out, to get back?”

“No.” Once more the hesitation. “They eat human flesh, you know,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s their big luxury. That’s why they kidnap people. But I’ve never tasted it, of course.”

I thought of the gnawed bones I had seen, and my fears about Carol . For a moment, the subject was too painful for me to speak about. Besides, I’d rested long enough.

“Where are you going?” he asked as I started forward.

“I’m looking for a girl. Have you seen her?” I described Carol to him.

“Oh. I think so.”

“Wher e is she?”

“Ahead.” He made a vague outward motion with one hand.

“She’s —still alive?”

“I think so. I mean, I’d have known, if —but she’s in danger. There’re preparations they make before eating. They’ve made those preparations. They could take her at any time.”

My heart gave a painful bound. What he was telling me was, of course, no more than I had already surmised, except for the factor of her immediate danger. But it made me feel worse to hear it stated baldly. I didn’t answer him.

“You think that thing you’re carrying will show you where she is, don’t you?” he said, trotting along beside me.

“Yes.”

“I expect it will. But it may get you there too late.”

“Um.” I quickened my pace.

“I know a shortcut,” he offered. I felt he was p eering at me intently, but it was too dark to be sure. “I’ll show it to you if you’ll promise to take me back to the Bright World after you find your girl.”

“Where is it?”

“Ahead. I’ll show you when we get there. You go down some rocks and under a wate rfall. There’s a hole behind the fall that leads right to where she is.” He cleared his throat.

“It seems funny to be talking so much,” he said. “They almost never talk. They can hear a pin drop, though.”

This remark didn’t seem to need answering. We went forward in silence for perhaps ten minutes. Then he said abruptly, “This is it.”

“The shortcut?”

“Yes. There’s a hole in the floor, do you see? with a rock slide spilling into it. You go down the rocks —they’re more stable than they look —and turn left when you get to the bottom. The waterfall is a little way off.”

I hesitated. I could see the rock slide well enough, and it certainly appeared to lead into a hole. The exile was bending over, pointing. I thought I could hear the rush of water from below.

I got down on my knees and leaned out over the opening. I had no great confidence in my would-be guide, and I wanted to know how far down the bottom was before I trusted myself to the rock slope. My righ t hand was pressed loosely over the blade of the sword.

The bottom seemed to be a good way down. I was still leaning over, my hands as well as my knees on the rock floor, when the blade of the sword vibrated warningly under my palm.

Startled, I looked up quickly. The one-eyed man was about to bring a sizable rock down on my head.

I dodged, and the rock hit my ear a glancing blow. The next minute I was on my feet, the sword in my hand, and its point at the exile’s throat.

“Why did you do that?” I dem anded. I was almost too angry to be able to speak. The blow itself wouldn’t have been very serious, but poised as I was, I would certainly have pitched over the edge of the opening. And the bottom seemed to be at least thirty feet down.

“Don’t hit me! Please don’t hit me!” the exile said, cowering away from me. “I wanted the Glain.”

The answer astonished me. I’d thought he probably wanted to get the sword, or that he might be trying to kill me so he could eat my flesh (I hadn’t wholly a ccepted his profession of innocence on this topic.).

“What’s the Glain?” I asked. “Why would killing me help you get it?”

“I don’t care anything about killing you,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “But if I had your sword, I could try to get the Glain. Even if I failed, the sword would still help me to get more to eat.”

“What’s the Glain?”

He didn’t want to answer. I made a stabbing motion at his throat with the sword, and he said in a rush, “It’s a stone. A talisman. You’re safe if you have it . It can do all sorts of things.”

“Where i s it?”

Again he was reluctant to answer. I suppose he thought I was capable of forgetting all about Carol, and going off in search of something he wanted for himself. “The Gray Dwarf has it,” he said finally. “Or he knows where it is. If I had it, I could be king down here.”

“I thought you wanted to go back to the Bright World.”

“Go back?” He repeated the phrase five or six times in his loud, flat voice, and then began to giggle, while his good eye wept. “Nobody ever goes back.”

“Why not?” I was thinking of Carol.

“Because —if you’d eaten the atter-corn, you’d know.”

“Atter-cor n? Is that the reddish meal they put out in the saucers?”

“Yes. They grow it on sprouted grain. They let us have it.” He lolled his head at me, like a hanged man, and tittered disgustingly.

Suddenly I couldn’t endure him. “Go away,” I said.

“What?”

“Go away. Go back in the rock. I don’t want you near me.”

“Oh, very well!”

He skipped away noiselessly. At a safe distance, he turned and said, “You think you’re so smart, so much bet ter than I am. You’re just the same as I am. Elves and men are just the same!”

It was the first time I had heard the inhabitants of Other-world called “elves.” Other than that, the exile’s taunt made little impression on me.

“You don’t care?” he said, much more nastily. “I know something you will care about, though. Your girl’s already been killed.”

“Killed?”

“Yes. Killed and eaten. Those were her bones you saw the elves in the cavern gnawing on!”

He giggled viciously and bounced into an opening i n the rock before I could start after him.

I didn’t altogether believe him. His malice was patent, and besides, the bones I had seen in the cavern were so small they must have belonged to a child. Carol could be —must be —still alive.

All the same, he ha d dealt me a staggering blow. For a moment I was too dazed and weak to move. The sword trembled in my hand. At last, I roused myself to go on.

-

CHAPTER 6

Not long after my encounter with the exile, I began to have hallucinations. They came on gradually —the result, I suppose, of loss of blood and insufficient food and sleep. They were slow and reasonable at first.

The low passages I moved through appeared to broaden and become more luminous. First corridors, then caves, and at last caverns, bigger and bigger caverns, until I felt they were as vast as continents. Ahead of me there were usually glowing clouds, faintly reddish, as if angry fires a long way off had colored them.

After a while I saw figures silhouetted against the clouds. They were scaled to fit the enormous caverns, with legs as thick as columns, and they had shepherd’s crooks in their hands. I wondered what animals they could be herd ing: in a moment my internal magic lantern provided a glimpse of thick-haired mammoths moving docilely among the giants’ legs.

This illusion, which had been rather dim and dull-colored, gave place to another, more vivid one. It took a little while for th e replacement; the mammoths thinned out and the light brightened. Then I saw rows of slaves with big wooden collars tending beds of red-spurred grain. They moved creakily, dipping from the hip and rising all in one piece, like wall beams.

Behind them the grain effloresced into big, fluffy scarlet clusters. Pollen blew from the clusters. Soon the air was full of reddish haze. I knew I was seeing the origin of the saucers of reddish meal. The tempting saucers of reddish, forbidden meal.

My next hallucinat ion was much more grim. I walked through another cave where the Silent People had been feasting. The floor was littered with partially unfleshed bones. As I advanced, the bones rolled together and joined themselves, and after a moment one of the Undereart h people stood up, grimacing at me with his foolish eyebrows.

He was unstable. When he tried to take a step toward me, his bones fell apart and rolled about on the rock floor again. They went through another period of attempted recombination, making union s and then crumbling, before they stood up once more, this time unmistakably a man. A man? Yes, and I thought I knew him. This raw being, with bones gaping through his destroyed skin —surely he was myself.

This illusion gave me an insight I was to retain. Up until that point, I hadn’t known what I thought the inhabitants of Underearth were —malicious troglodytes, I suppose, with supernatural attributes and abilities. Now, even in my abnormal state of consciousness, I knew what the exile had meant when he h a d said that men and elves were all the same. However much we might have diverged, we had a common origin with them. Their blood was our blood. We came from the same root.

The realization woke a drowsy horror in me. I felt that I ought to feel more, that my sleepy acceptance of a common ancestry ought to be replaced by vivid, anguished abhorrence of the fact. But the complacence persisted, though it became mixed with a certain somnolent guilt.

Not only ought I to have felt more emotion, but it seemed, so mehow, that I was responsible for my ancestry, as if I had chosen to be of that descent. Then even the guilt was eroded away, and the flux of visions continued unimpeded. And yet, all this time, through hallucination, emotion and illusion, I was moving ste adily onward, at as quick a pace as was possible, with the sword held ready in my hand.

My last hallucination was a pretty thing. I saw a great golden torrent, molten living gold, pouring down from a high cliff into a rock basin beneath. Golden drops spl ashed out from the basin, transformed themselves in the air into fluttering little fishes, and lay in heaving pools of gold on the rock floor. The air was full of the flash and rush of gold.

The waterfall pleased me. It seemed to fill the passage from side to side; I would have to go under it in order to go forward at all, and I found the idea agreeable. I stepped forward confidently.

The next instant I was foundering in water up to my waist , drenched, chilled and buffeted in one of the typical icy, roaring Otherworld streams. My hallucination, like one or two earlier, had been secreted around a kernel of the actual; there really was a waterfall, though it was not much like the go lden torrent I had fantasied.

The cold water brought me to my senses. I realized I had been hallucinating for a considerable period. I scrambled out of the basin the fall had dug for itself —it was about eight feet across —and stood on the other side panti ng for breath and shivering.

Once more, my first concern was for the sword. There wasn’t a thread on me that was dry enough to serve as a towel, but I shook the loose moisture from the sword blade and tried to get it a little drier by drawing it between my thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t much use: water ran down the blade from my soaked clothing faster than I could wipe it off. At last, I gave up. I decided I’d better have some food, before I started to have hallucinations again.

I ate as I walked alo ng. The food tasted good, but unfamiliar. The water from the waterfall flowed noisily along the rock floor beside me. After a few hundred yards, it found another gap in the floor and plunged roaring into it, as abruptly as it had appeared from above on th e level where I walked. I hardly noticed its disappearance. I had begun to think about Carol again.

The exile had taunted me with her death. I felt pretty sure he had been lying. But earlier, before his malice had become plain, he had made a much more dis turbing statement: he had said, “Nobody ever goes back.” And when I had pressed him for a reason, he had said, “If you’d eaten the atter-corn, you’d know.” Fay had warned me not to eat or drink what I found in Otherworld. If Carol had eaten, would site —wa n t to go back?

I’d find her, and find out. Fay wouldn’t have sent me on a probably impossible quest. I wouldn’t worry —If Carol —I —The sword thrilled strongly in my hand.

It was neither a warning vibration nor an approving humming, but an announcement, unmistakable in character. I turned back a few steps, as if I had received a verbal admonition. There was an inconspicuous rift in the rock on the left of the passage. I ent e red it. It opened out after a yard or two. And there, chained with wooden chains facing the wall, was Carol. Her captors had put chunks and slabs of fox fire around her. Her silhouette was outlined by them.

She sat flaccid and motionless, as if life had withdrawn from her body and still clung only to a part of her skull. The hopelessness that came from her had a paralyzing quality. I felt that if I looked at her very long, I would lose my own wish to live.

There was a bowl of water and a saucer of the m eal on the floor by her side.

Now that the moment had come, I couldn’t speak. I touched her shoulder; it felt heavy and plastic, like modeling clay. She didn’t move at all. For a moment, I wondered foolishly whether she really was a statue, an image, tha t the inhabitants of Otherworld had made and chained up in this place.

I touched her again. This time she spoke, in a voice without inflection, almost a whisper: “Go away.”

I didn’t know what to do. “Carol —I’m here,” I said finally. I got in front of h er. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to see me. If her body seemed like Plasticine, her eyeballs might have been wood.

Or was she dreaming with her eyes open? Again, I didn’t know what to do. “It’s me, Dick,” I said.

“You can’t be. I dreamed of you over and over, dreamed you’d come for me. Those dreams were so real. And I always woke up to being chained to the rock. Go away. I don’t want to dream about you again. I hate those dreams. It hurts so much to wake up from them. Go away.” Her voice had strengthened a little, and I felt this was a good sign.

“I’m real,” I said. I began to rub my hands over her face, slowly and delicately, trying to rouse her. Her face felt flaccid and unnatural, like her shoulder, and it was icy cold.

She shook her head very slightly. “Not real. How can this be real? How could you have come here? Nobody knew I was taken. Nobody even knows about this place.

“When they brought me here, I thought I’d gone mad. They burst in through the matting in the bas ement. I fought them, my throat was so tight I couldn’t even scream. You can’t have come here.”

“I have come, though,” I said. “Fay helped me on the way. I’m really here. I’ve come to take you back.”

“Back?”

“Yes. Back to the daylight. To Upper Earth .”

Her face contracted under my fingers, as if she were w eeping, but no tears came. “I can’t go back,” she said. There it was, what I had dreaded. “Why not?”

“I ate some of the corn.”

I must have started involuntarily, for she said, with a touch of defensiveness, “I got so cold. I used to cry, and the tears froze on my cheeks. Now I can’t cry. And I never feel cold. The corn made the difference.”

Concerned as I was for her, I yielded to an irresistible curiosity. “What does it taste like?” I asked.

“Bitter. But after a while, it hasn’t any taste at all. It’s like water in my mouth now.

“How long have I been here?”

“I don’t know exactly. About a week, I guess.”

“I thought it had been a long time, six months or a year. They’re going to kill me, Dick. They brought me down here because they want to eat my flesh. This is a jail —where they eat the prisoners.”

“No, they’re not going to kill you,” I said stoutly. “I’m going to take you back to the Bright World.”

“I can’t go.”

“Why not?” I thought of the exile. “Do you like it here?”

“No. No. You can’t imagine how I hate it. But when I ate the corn, I —took this place into myself. Now it’s a part of me. I can’t go back.”

Her hopelessness seemed more psychological than a matter of a physical addiction. At least, that was what I would believe until it proved wrong.

I knelt in front of her, took her manacled hands —they had the same inert, clayey quality as the rest of her body —and put her palms against my face. “I’m Dick Aldridge,” I said. “I used to be your lover. I still love you. I’m really here, no matter how unlikely it seems. And I’m going to take you back with me.” I pressed her hands down hard against my cheeks.

“Your face is warm,” she said, as if surprised. “But how can you take me back? You’d never be able to find your way out of here. And I’m in chains.”

She was growing more animated, even though it was in maintaining the hopelessness of her rescue. “Your chains are wood,” I said. “Watch.”

I picked up the sword —I had been kneeling with the f l at of the blade under me, for safety —and cut down against the bight of the chain that held Carol’s wrists together. There was an instant’s resistance, and then the wooden links parted as if they had been butter.

With equal ease I cut the length that held Carol to the rock. The fetters around her wrists and feet gave me a little more trouble —I had to saw at them —but I managed it “You see,” I said. “I cut the chains. You’re free.”

She was rubbing her wrists. After a m oment, she looked at me —really looked at me —and smiled. I suppose it was the first time anyone had ever smiled in Underearth. “Yes, you cut the chains,” she said. “But how can you find our way up? There are passages and passages. And everything is dark.”

“We’ll get back the same way I got down,” I said. “You saw what the sword can do. Come on.”

I tried to put my hands in her armpits and help her to her feet, but she pushed me away. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m dirty. I wish I could have a bath.”

This feminine concern for her person struck me as the most hopeful thing yet. “There’s plenty of water ahead for you to bathe in,” I said, “if you don’t mind its being cold.”

“Is there?” She scrambled to her feet and took a step toward me. “Dick, it —I —I can hardly believe it. It’s a miracle. But I’ll try to go back. Oh, Dick! You came for me. You followed me into this dreadful place.” She was smiling, a tremulous, dazzling smile.

I felt so happy it made me dizzy. I’d have liked to kiss her, but I respec ted her prohibition. “Come on,” I said. I started to walk out of the rift.

She followed me, and then halted. “I’m hungry,” she said, like a child. Before I could stop her, she had picked up the saucer of meal and was lapping up some of the corn between h er lips and her tongue. “Don’t eat that,” I said.

She put it down after a moment. “Why not? I’ve eaten it before.”

She was right, but the incident made me uneasy. Nonetheless, I felt optimistic as I took her hand and led her out into the main passage. We had begun the long way back.

-

CHAPTER 7

I was afraid she would be taken from me again. It seemed unlikely that the beings who had kidnapped Carol would relinquish her to the Bright World without a struggle. So I stood watch over her with the sword when she slept or rested, and stationed myself i n front of her, with the sword over my knees, when I myself had to rest.

Our progress was slow. Carol was weak and lethargic, like somebody convalescing from a bad illness, and she could only move slowly. Also, her vision in the darkness of Underearth wa s astonishingly bad. When she was away from the infrequent patches of fox fire, she was completely blind. It struck me as odd that her vision was so much worse than mine, and I blamed it on the atter-corn she had been eating. But whatever the cause, we ha d to walk hand in hand for safety most of the time, and that slowed us down still more.

Yet we did advance. The attacks I expected were at first nothing but brief skirmishes with an isolated elf or two; when Carol and I reached the cavern of the feast wit hout having been seriously threatened, I felt that a milestone had been reached.

We entered the cavern. The chunks of fox fire were still in place around the walls, and bones —I hoped Carol would not notice them —still littered the floor, but the cav ern seemed otherwise empty. Our assailants were, in fact, lurking in the cover provided by the fringe of stalactite-stalagmite formations.

The sword gave warning an instant before they attacked, but, since they came from two directions at once, the warni ng wasn’t much help. Even without Carol to protect, I should have been in a bad position.

I was holding her by the wrist. I ran for the cavern wall, towing her after me and hoping none of the attackers would make a grab at her. When I reached the wall, I shoved her up against it and stood in front of her, covering her with my body. She knew as well as I did what the situation was, but she hadn’t uttered a sound.

There were about thirty of them, an astonishingly large number for beings as solitary as the Silent People are. They were armed with wooden cudgels and clubs. They obviously feared and loathed the sword —it appeared to affect them very much as a flamethrower would —but I couldn’t engage all of them at once with it. They surrounded me in a semicircl e, and while I was stabbing out at an assailant on one side, another would be launching a cautious blow at me from the opposite rim. I knew that sooner or later one of the blows was going to connect and I would be knocked unconscious. And Carol would be ca ptured again.

We were saved by an unlikely accident. One of the attackers on my right took a swipe at me just as I thrust with the sword at the elf standing next to him. The one I thrust at winced aside from the intolerable metal and jostled the other, s o that the blow meant for me actually landed on the temple of a club bearer several feet away from him.

It was only a glancing blow, but it threw them into momentary confusion. I made successful slashes at two of them, both on exposed parts of their bodi es, and blood began to flow freely. The circle around me wavered, and then broke up entirely.

For an instant, I didn’t understand what was happening. Then I saw that they were attacking each other, by twos and threes, sometimes with clubs and sometimes w ith their bare hands. Their faces were puckered with fury. The sight and smell of their own blood had intoxicated them.

I suppose this propensity to be made furious by one another is the reason that the Silent People are so rarely found in groups of more than three. Apparently their savagery is much increased by their presence in numbers. At the moment, I didn’t speculate about it. I grabbed Carol by the wrist and ran for the exit from the cavern.

They didn’t pay any attention to our going. By now the a ir was heavy with the smell of their blood, heavy and musky, like the smell of certain reptiles. For the first time, I observed that it had a faint blue phosphorescence.

After the episode in the caver n, Carol was constantly anxious. We both knew how close an escape we had had, but that didn’t seem to be what was bothering her. It was a generalized apprehension, as if, in trying to escape, we were doing something so impossible that it was morally wrong.

She was still eating atter-corn —she always seemed to be able to find the dishes of it, despite her blindness —and I thought it might be the cause of her anxiety. But when I got her to try one of my chocolate bars instead, she didn’t seem any less anxious . In the end, I decided what had happened to her before I found her was enough to account for any amount of anxiety.

We didn’t talk much. There was no point in drawing attention to ourselves. But as time passed and we went forward, her hand became more a nd more alive in mine. It was wonderful to feel it change from Plasticine to flesh. However anxious she was, her bodily resilience was returning. Holding her hand, I understood what Browning had meant when he said, “Your hand’s a perfect woman in itself.”

There were other attacks on us, mere skirmishes, nothing half so bad as the one in the cave. I knew we were on the last lap of our journey back to the light. Carol knew it, too, and I felt her growing more instead of less anxious. It made me a little imp atient with her.

We entered the final cavern before the water barrier that separates the Bright World from Underearth, the cavern where I had first seen one of the Underearth folk beckoning to me. It was lighter than I remembered it; I realized how much darkness Carol and I had been struggling through.

We had gone only a few steps when Carl Hood appeared, stepping, apparently, out of the solid rock. He was wearing the green parka he usually wore, with the hood lying back on his shoulders, and he looked perfectly composed. There was a faint smile on his face.

Carol saw him almost as soon as I did. Her fingers jerked in my hand. Well, I knew she was keyed-up. She put her lips to my ear and spoke softly. “Kill him,” she said.

“What?” I was really surpri sed.

“Kill him,” she repeated. “You know how he always brings trouble with him. What’s he doing down here? How did he get here? Kill him, Dick, while you still can.”

“Why should I kill him?” I said. “He tried to put me on your trail. Besides, he’s olde r than I am, and he’s unarmed.”

“How do you know he’s unarmed? I don’t trust him.”

“I know you don’t. But I can’t kill him because you don’t like him. It’s not reason en ough.” Privately, I felt that Carol’s suffering was still affecting her judgment. Hood’s presence here was odd, certainly, but he had given me the first hint of what had become of her.

Carol sighed, a long, shuddering sigh. “Dick, you’re making a great m istake.”

All the time we had been carrying on our whispered conversation, Hood had been walking toward us, at a tranquil, deliberate pace. By now he was so close that I could see the string of turquoises around his neck. Even if I had accepted Carol’s su spicions of him, he looked so normal, so much a part of the Bright World, that I would have discarded them.

“Hello,” he said. “I see you found her and brought her back. It’s quite an achievement. I don’t believe it’s ever been done before. Allow me to co ngratulate you.” He held out his right hand to me.

I took it mechanically. His fingers were cool and faintly gritty, as if with rock dust. “You have a right to be proud of yourself,” he went on. “The new Orpheus! But you must both be hungry. I’ve brought food with me. How about having a picnic meal?”

He produced a large paper bag from one of the parka’s side pockets. “Hamburgers,” Hood said. “And in the other pocket”—he tapped it —“I’ve got three cans of beer.”

Carol shook her head. Partly to him and p artly to me, she said, “Let’s go across the water first. We can eat on the other side.”

“The crossing’s a bit of an ordeal,” Hood answered. “You’d be in better shape for it if you ate first.”

He sat down on the rock and extracted three ham burgers from the bag. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s a long way back up, and there’s no good place for a sit-down meal for hours.”

Carol looked at him appraisingly. At last, she sat down beside him and took one of the hamburgers. I seated myself, too, but wh en I reached out for one of the hamburgers, she pushed my hand away from it. “Don’t you eat anything of his,” she said.

I remembered Fay’s warning. The hamburgers smelled delicious, but I got out my last sandwich, and a cracked and battered candy bar. “O.K.,” I said.

Hood seemed not to notice the little incident. “And the beer,” he said. He got three sealed cans from his pocket. “I hope it won’t be shook-up and warm.”

An unopened can of beer seemed harmless enough, but I rejected it in favor of water from my canteen. While Carol and Hood ate the hamburgers and drank the beer, I munched stale bread and wolfed up the peanuts of my candy bar.

Carol finished eating and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. “Hurry up, Dick,” she said. “It may not be too la te, even now.” She got to her feet and started at a quick pace toward the end of the cavern, turning now and again to look over her shoulder at me.

“All right,” I said. I got up, picked up the sword, and started after her.

“You might as well save yours elf the effort,” Hood said, without moving from where he sat on the rock. “You won’t be able to cross the barrier.”

“What? Why not? What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I said,” Hood ans wered. He upended his can of beer and let the last drops trickle down his throat. “There’s no use in your going to the water barrier with her, Aldridge. You won’t be able to cross.”

He sounded so self-confident that I felt an abrupt stab of fear. “Why wo n’t I be able to?” I demanded. “What’s going to stop me?”

“You’ve tasted atter-corn,” he answered. “You won’t be able to get across now.”

“But—I haven’t tasted it!”

“Hurry up, Dick,” Carol called from the end of the cavern. She had stepped off the bank and was actually standing knee-deep in the water, though it tugged at her. “Hurry up!”

Hood rose to his feet. “Oh, yes, you have tasted the corn. It only takes a litt le, you know. It was on my fingers when I shook hands with you. You contaminated your own food.”

I remembered the grittiness of his fingers. “You’re lying,” I said, combating my growing fear. “The sword would have warned me.”

“The sword is mine,” Hood said. “I hung it on the wall for you to find. Why should it warn you? It remembers its master.”

So the sword—the beautiful, faithful sword —I remembered how, when I first found it, it had seemed to mislike my hand.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“You are beginning to believe me,” Hood answered tranquilly.

“No. She”—I indicated Carol, who, from her cupped hands, was calling something at me —“has already started the crossing. Or do you mean she won’t be able to leave Otherworld, either?” This was w hat I particularly feared.

“Oh, she’d be able to make it all right.”

“Then I don’t understand what you’re driving at. She’s eaten atter-corn constantly.”

“Yes. But it hasn’t affected her as it has you. She is not of elf-stock.”

I stared at him. “Ne ither am I!”

“Oh, are you not?” Hood’s handsome, thin-lipped face crinkled up in a laugh. “Watch.”

He got a penknife from his hip pocket and opened it. I didn’t know what he was going to do. Suddenly he thrust the flat of the blade toward my face.

It was just as if he had thrust white-hot steel toward me. I winced aside involuntarily.

“You see?” Hood said. “There were indications of elf descent in you before you tasted the meal, of course. Your name —‘Aldridge’ was originally ‘eldrich,’ or elfish —and your ability to see in the dark, to mention a couple. But eating the meal has made what was latent manifest.”

“I don’t believe you. I’m human.”

Hood raised his shoulders in a little shrug. “The elf blood in you is a long way back. But it’s there. Go ahead and try to cross the water barrier. You’ll see.”

With as much dignity as I could, I turned from him and started toward Carol. She had stepped out of the water and was standing on the bank waiting for me.

“What were you talking about to him?” sh e asked. “Let’s start across. Hood frightens me.”

“All right.” I took her hand in mine. I was still holding the sword in my other hand, but well away from my body. Its proximity was making me increasingly uncomfortable.

I stepped over the bank into the roaring stream. I don’t know what I had feared might happen —perhaps that the water would feel red-hot, like the knife blade, or that I would be physically unable to enter it. But I got into the brawling water easily enough.

It was when I tried to take the next step forward that the trouble came. I could thrust out with the sword and find a suitable shallow place, but the muscles in my legs were as useless as columns of sand. I couldn’t make a step forward. The water did no t seem particularly cold to me. But its touch had eroded my strength away.

“What’s the matter, Dick?” Carol asked. Her head was tilted questioningly. “Why don’t we go on?”

I felt both foolish and alarmed. Again and again I tried to swing my legs into t he shallow I had found with the sword; they would no more move than if they had been wooden posts that I willed to move. The paralysis was not absolute. I could, I found, move my legs backward easily enough. But I couldn’t go forward at all.

“What’s the matter?” Carol repeated, her voice rising.

It occurred to me that I might be able to make the crossing if I moved up-or downstream a little. “Let’s try farther down,” I said. “The water’s, unh, too rough here.”

“All right.”

We went a few feet downst ream, but the story was still the same. I couldn’t advance an inch to get across.

Carol was staring at me with her lips parted. Before she could say anything, Hood came sauntering up, his hands in his pockets. “I told you you wouldn’t be able to cross the water barrier,” he said to me. “They never can.”

I was too angry and perplexed to reply, but Carol said, “Why can’t he cross? What do you mean by ‘they’?”

“He can’t cross because he’s of elf descent and he’s tasted atter-corn,” Hood said. He explained how he had tricked me, ending, “He’ll have to stay on this side.”

Carol said, in a rather wobbling voice, “Elves do cross the water barrier. They crossed when —they took me, and when they brought me back down wi th them.”

“There are different sorts of elves,” Hood answered. “I myself, for example, am one of the green kind. We are sometimes considered the most dangerous of all, since we can go among men as men.”

There was a silence. I was still holding Carol’s hand. It was trembling.

I got out of the water and helped Carol out. Hood did not move. He stood facing us perfectly at ease, with a faint smile on his lips, a smile that was more insulting than a grin of triumph would have been.

“Give me the sword,” he said after a minute, holding out his hand. “You won’t be able to stand it near you in a little while. It’s steel.”

“Wo. It’s my sword now. I’m its new master. It doesn’t make me too Uncomfortable for me to be able to stand it.” Th is was true; and I felt that if the sword was not perfectly happy in my hand, it yet disliked Hood more than it did me.

“Very well,” he said unemotionally. “I’ll get it back after you’re dead. Don’t try to kill me with it, Aldridge. She”—he indicated Car ol —“will never be able to get across the water barrier unless I show her the way.”

I looked at Carol. She had turned chalk-white. She put out her hand blindly and to uched me on the wrist. “I told you to kill him,” she said in a voice that was almost a groan. “Dick, I’ll stay here with you.”

It was plain the words had cost her a great deal. She knew, almost better than I, what she was condemning herself to.

It was not easy for me, either, to answer, “No. How could you stay here? You belong to the Bright World. What good would your staying with me do?”

“I could comfort you,” she replied, with a curious touch of humility.

“No. How would it comfort me to see you s uffering in this place? I don’t believe I could stand it. If you want to comfort me, Carol, go back to the Bright World. Be happy there.”

“But—happy? Without you? After you saved me?”

“You must try,” I answered. “Go with him.”

“With him? Oh, Dick, yo u should have killed him!”

“I know. But you can’t get past the water barrier without him. After you’re back, you can part company with him. Hood, will you take her back safely?”

He nodded slowly, with more emotion than I had yet seen him s how. “Yes. I swear by the blade of the sword.”

It was an oath I had confidence in. Carol’s hand was still resting on my wrist. I took it and put it in Hood’s hand. “Go with him,” I said.

She pulled loose and stood for a moment free. She put her arms ar ound my neck and kissed me on the lips. “Good-bye, Dick,” she said. Then she turned to follow Hood, who was waiting for her.

“Good-bye, my—my love,” I said. I raised the blade of the sword in salutation.

Under Hood’s guidance, she was already in the wa ter. She turned and waved to me, a last greeting.

Separate eternities lay before us. Though she was already too far away to hear me, I repeated, “Good-bye.”

-

CHAPTER 8

The cavern, now I was alone, was full of echoes. It seemed I coul d hear the echo of my breathing and of the beating of my heart. Hood had spoken of getting the sword back from me after my death; I wondered how long it would take me to die.

In an ordinary environment, this thought would have been morbid. Here, it was o nly realistic. Yet I suppose that nobody, unless he is in acute pain, accepts the idea of his imminent death with much relish. Besides, I grudged Hood the sword. It deserved to have a better master than a green elf. I resolved to survive as long as I coul d , and, if I felt I was on the point of death, to try to put the sword forever beyond Hood’s reach.

All this sounds much more composed than I was. My heart, whose beating I could hear echoed from the cavern walls, was thudding with rage and grief. I was t orn by angry emotions and, above all, regret that I had not obeyed Carol and killed Hood out of hand.

Had he been responsible for her kidnapping? Why had he tricked me into eating the atter-corn? Had it been mere maliciousness, or had he been trying to g et Carol away from me so he could have her for himself? He had never shown an interest in her when we had been in Upper Earth; mere maliciousness was a more probable motive. But I longed to know that Carol would get safely back and be able to rid herself o f him. It was dreadful to think that I would never know what had happened. For me, the water barrier that separates the two worlds was a barrier almost as absolute as death.

What ought my next move to be? The physical means of survival were easy. I co uld drink wherever I found water, and eat whenever I found a saucer of atter-corn. There was no need to abstain from it any longer. The sword, though I had to carry it well away from my body because of the uncomfortable sensation of heat it caused, would p robably still defend me and rout the steel-hating denizens of Underearth as it had before. But what should I do with this ambiguous freedom? I could go anywhere I chose; but it didn’t make the slightest difference where I went.

I was still wondering what to do when the atter-corn intoxication came on.

An atter-corn high consists of a few hours of furious, rushing animal hallucinations, and then settles down to a longer-lasting state of elevated misery. At any rate, that was how it was for me. I suppose someone of pure human stock, or who was all elf, would experience something different.

The animal illusions are exceedingly vivid. While I was a stag that first time, I could smell my own dung and feel the fleas crawling through the close hairs of my hide. I appeared to be walking on my hind legs, carrying the sword in my armpit, and the position rather distressed me. My horns were broad and branched, and felt heavy, though in good balance.

I stopped being a stag, and became a wolf. I had dense gray fur, soft padded paws, and fierce green eyes. Since I trotted on all fours I was carrying the sword in my mouth. I had to be careful not to cut my mouth on the edge.

I’ve forgotten what I became after I stopped being a wolf. There was a flood, a spate, a near torrent, of animal incarnations. I stayed in one shape only a few seconds. I remember being a goat and after that a rat, but the stag and goat were recurrent forms I took.

When I sobered u p and entered on the stage of elevated misery, I found I had gone a considerable distance down the right-hand corridor, the corridor I had rejected as being too dark when I began my Underearth search for Carol. I was still carrying the sword, and its proxi mity made me no more uncomfortable than it had several hours earlier. On this point, at least, Hood was proving to be wrong.

The corridor was very slightly less dark than I remembered it. But I had a reasonable awareness of my bodily location, and for an odd reason: the atter-corn I had eaten, though the amount had been so small, had made my skin secretions slightly phosphorescent. I could see my hands and the tip of my nose as a faint blue glimmer, and the hilt of the sword, where I had touched it, had t he same faint blue sheen.

I was to notice the same thing in the skins of other elves subsequently, though such a phosphorescence had been absent in their earlier attacks on me. I suppose atter-corn makes the vision more sensitive if one is of elf stock.

I kept on moving down the corridor. After a while it was crossed by a broader channel, colder and a little better lighted, and I turned into it. I didn’t care where I went.

By now, the stage of elevated misery was setting in. The misery is at once a hi gh-toned Weltschmerz, juvenile and romantic, and the most sordid and grimy of pains. There is a peculiar squalid, gritty, ugly quality in it. This quality of feeling makes it hard to bear.

I was beginning to grow very tired. My steps came more and more s lowly, until half a minute would elapse without my moving my* feet. This fatigue —more accurately, torpor —increased until I felt I must put myself in a safe place where I could give in to it. Instinct drove me to seek a rift in the rock, some more or less h orizontal fissure I could crawl into while the chilly torpor held on. Elves always hunt for such a place.

I found a good one after a little searching. It was deep, long enough to accommodate me lying at almost full length, and too narrow for any elf to f ollow me in. The worst that could happen to me there would be to share my rock couch with some sluggish newt or eft.

I crawled in. But I was not lying down to slumber, but to a period of chilly inactivity, a wide-eyed torpor in which all the grimy misery, the constant cold ache of Underearth would persist. The atter-corn I had tasted, small though the quantity was, made me understand what Carol had meant when she said that, when she ate the corn, she took “this place” into herself.

I had taken it into myself, it was a foreign body I had ingested. And yet, since it was a part of me now, it was my own and hence, in a way, dear to me. People who have experienced a great deal of physical pain will know what I mean. It is a part of the general psychological acuteness of Homer that he uses the same Greek word to mean both what is dear to one and what is one’s own.

I don’t know how long I lay in the cleft. Atter-corn disturbs the perception of time. Nobody bothered me or even came near me. At last, I roused myself to crawl out. I was feeling hungry. I would hunt for a saucer of atter-corn.

I sniffed. Until that moment it had not occurred to me that the meal would have a smell. Now I was sure of it. I sniffed again. And, after a moment, I found the characteristic smell —metallic, acrid, and yet cereal —coming to my nose. It wasn’t far off.

The smell made my mouth water. The fl ow of saliva was a little painful, but it increased my hunger. When I found the saucer, a hundred feet or so farther on, I was trembling with eagerness.

I thought, of course, that eating the meal would probably give me another high. It didn’t matter, rea lly. The animal hallucinations were a diversion from the bleakness around me, and the subsequent misery seemed a part of the nature of things. I scooped up the reddish powder in big pinches between my fingers and ate it eagerly.

It didn’t taste bitter, t hen or afterwards. (I suppose Carol found it bitter because she was of human stock.) It had no taste at all, or, rather, it tasted exactly like the inside of my mouth. I suppose this incestuous identity was the reason for the appetite it inspired in me. Bu t the eating itself was disappointing. And swallowing the meal was really painful. It seemed to cling to my throat and rasp and smart as it went down.

I put the saucer down finally, satiated if not satisfied. It occurred to me to wonder who filled the sa ucers and where the meal in them came from. And did the elves subsist on the meal primarily, or had they other food? (The answer to this is that the inhabitants of Underearth steal a great deal from our world. Much of the damage we attribute to rats is re a lly their doing. Cereals they particularly like, but they will also take cheese, meat and dried fruits. They never take cans, because the metal distresses them. In the parts of Underearth that are relatively near the surface, there are amphibians and rept i les the elves like to eat. Some of the streams contain blind fish. There is also the human flesh they prize so much. But the staple, the backbone of their diet, is the atter-corn.) After I had eaten, I caught water in my hands from a small, angry stream, and after I had drunk, my next high came on.

There is not much point in describing it. All the highs the corn produces are alike in plan, and all are different in detail. This one put me in surroundings appropriate to the kind of animal I was at the moment, which my earlier high had not. But when th e period of elevated misery set in, it was exactly the same. This part of the experience is almost invariable, even to the quantity of misery.

I found another cleft, crawled into it, and let the cold torpor wash over me. I had incautiously left my arm nea r the opening, and not long before I was ready to emerge I felt a burning pain in the fleshy part of my thumb.

Still somewhat sluggish, I pulled my hand back to safety, blood running from a long open wound. Fortunately, it was in my left hand. After a li ttle while, I roused myself to crawl out of the crevice and confront my attackers. From the noises of sniffling and whining, I judged there was more than one of them.

It was not elves this time, but the elves’ animal parasites, that had gathered around m y rock bed. They were about the size of large cats and, I suspect, originally of the cat kind. If I did not mention them among the elves’ food resources, it is because their flesh is too rank-flavored for even the strong-stomached Silent People to eat.

There were four of them. When they saw me, they began an excited mewling, leaping far off the rock floor to slash with their claws at my face. One of them I cut in the chest, and another I wounded deeply under the foreleg. The other two got through my defe n se to slit my clothing and scratch my hands. They seemed to have no fear of the sword. I suppose they had never seen an elf armed with metal before.

I was afraid of getting one of them spitted on the sword So I used it to slash, keeping the edge in front of my face. After I wounded the third, they all ran away, leaving a lot of their blood on the rock.

My thumb was bleeding freely. Drops splashed down on the rock, on top of the blood the black cat-creatures had left. For some reason, the thought of my b lood mingling with theirs filled me with nausea, and I hastily tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of my shirt to tie up my hand. The bandage was an awkward one, but it did stop the bleeding. If my blood had continued to flow, much would have been chang e d.

I tore another strip to use to clean the sword. Handling the sword, with only cloth between me and the metal, made me thoroughly uncomfortable. But I had a notion that the animals’ blood would corrode the steel.

I was still scouring gingerly at the metal when som e thing made me look up. An elf, perhaps a woman, was standing in front of me.

There were chunks of fox fire in its hair. For the first time, I realized that elves arch their eyebrows because they have to support the weight of an imaginary crown of horns. The being before me mewled and beckoned because it was dancing its way through the mazes of some animal fantasy.

I don’t know what it—she —had in mind. Her intentions seemed to be less violent than those of the Silent People usually are. But when her eyes fell on the sword, now gleaming clean, her mouth opened in a wide, ugly O. She turned and ran incontinently, while the chunks of fox fire tumbled to the rock.

Once more the sword had put an elf to flight. And yet I could handle it. Of elf stock though I was, I could carry its naked steel through the corridors of this Arctic hell. I began to feel a certain perverse pride in myself.

I was getting hungry. Where should I go now? Toward the next saucer of atter-corn, I supposed, and the next period of hallucinated misery. The whole of Underearth lay open before me. I could go wherever my feet would take me. It was for me to choose.

Yes, but since Underearth was everywhere the same, my choices meant nothing. Wherever I went, I would always be in the same place. Underearth might be of enormous extent. But it was always the same place.

There was an exception to this, as I was sh6rtly to find out.

-

CHAPTER 9

I kept on eating atter-corn. There was really nothing else for me to eat, unless I wanted to fight one of the elves for the poor loot he had brought from Upper Earth. The meal is not only a potent hallucinogen, it is also extraordinarily nutritious and sustaining, though its exclusive ingestion gives rise to long-term deficiencies.

I kept on having hallucinations, too. Their range extended somewhat. Sometimes I flew, or s wam, or crawled, as well as trotted or pranced. The new hallucinations had the same extraordinary vividness as the old. It seems that the meal has the power to send consciousness up and down the ladder of evolution at random. I could never find any inner l ogic to my transmigrations. It may be significant that much of the time I seemed to hear the roaring of an angry sea.

The saucers of meal were getting closer together. My hunger could be satisfied immediately; beyond that, the spacing of the saucers meant nothing to me. I had speculated once before on how they were filled. Now, quite by accident, I was to witness it.

I happened to be lying in a cleft with my eyes open, facing outward, in the first stage of torpid misery. I saw a shadow flit by, a distillation of darkness, carrying something in its hand.

I was not yet so torpid but that I could raise my head to watch. The being poured from what it was carrying into a saucer thirty or so feet down the passage from my hard bed. I thought I saw it go on down the passage and halt at another saucer, but I could not be sure.

I put my head down and let misery wash over me. When I came out of the torpor, a good many hours later, I visited the saucers and found them roundly full of the reddish meal. They really had been replenished, then, but by a being so silent and so invisible that I could doubt having seen it. Even its s k in had lacked the faintly phosphorescent gleam of most Underearth denizens. I had, in fact, seen a black elf, intent on its task of atter-corn distribution. There was more significance than I realized in the increasingly close spacing of the saucers of th e corn.

I had been going generally downhill. When I came to a choice of ways, I tended to take the lower one. The sword had been inert in my hand since I had parted from Carol. Now I found a triple branching, where all three ways seemed to descend.

I took the one on the left. After I had gone along it a little while, it began to rise. This by itself would not have made me retrace my steps, but I heard faint noises ahead of me. After I groped my way around a twist in the passage, I saw three or four elve s ahead, armed with clubs and standing across the way.

I could, of course, fight them for passage and probably get through. Get through to what? There seemed to be no point in provoking a conflict, and I turned back, though I wondered a little why they ha d laid such an obvious ambush for me. My high came on about that time, and I had other mental occupations than speculation about the motives of elves. They had seemed to be of the black kind.

More highs, more atter-corn eating, more elevated misery. Othe rworld is a montage of hallucination, violence, and grinding physical wretchedness. I found another parting of the ways, and took, for a whim, the passage that seemed to lead slightly up. Once more, after I had gone along the passage a few hundred feet, I was opposed by an armed band of the Silent People.

I turned back this time, too. But the incident set me to thinking, between bouts of illusion and torpor, and I decided that, if my going upwar d was opposed once more, I would challenge the opposers. It began to look as if my moving in a particular direction were objected to. By whom? And for what reason? That was what I would find out. I wasn’t particularly afraid of the Silent People, even in l arger groups than the two that had opposed me. More than anything else, I disliked the idea of getting their blood on the sword.

More time passed. I may have been moving in a big circle, though I don’t think so. For the third time, I began to walk along an upward-sloping passage; and once more I found, after a certain distance, that a group of elves was opposing me.

I happened to be at a point in my atter-corn cycle where I was having the hallucination of being a wolf. When I saw the black group of elve s ahead of me, carrying clubs and wavering uncertainly against the rock, I decided they were a bunch of Middle European villagers on their way home from church at midnight. I charged them, growling horribly (this in itself must greatly have disconcerted t h em, since the Silent People almost never make a sound in their atter-corn fits), and swinging the sword over my shoulder at them. I think I believed it was some sort of fifth paw.

I leaped among them, yelping, snapping, and swinging the sword. They tried to keep out of the reach of the scalding metal, while striking repeatedly at me with their clubs. The clubs were formidable enough, but I was bouncing about like a rubber ball, and most of the time they missed or hit themselves.

I cut one of them deeply where the neck meets the slope of the shoulder. He gasped, dropped his club, and ran down the passage, bleeding, as I later found, very freely indeed. The other two managed not to be seduced by the smell of his blood; they kept on striking at me, and one of them hit me fairly on the top of the head. I might have dropped the sword, except that at that moment my hallucination changed to being a very large serpent, something on the order of a python, and I clutched the sword avidly in my coils.

I suppose I hissed, but serpents are not much in the way of fighters. Fortunately for me, I became a lion almost immediately. I got one of the attackers in his right wrist; he dropped the club and ran, and the third, after a creditable moment of hesitation, followed h im.

The whole episode illustrated the Silent People’s astonishing lack of enterprise and savvy. If they had stationed a fourth elf behind me, to attack me from the rear, I would have been done for. But I suppose they never thought of it.

For a while, nothing happened. I continued to go forward, wondering, in the gaps between animal hallucinations, why the elves had tried so hard to bar my way. (All my thoughts and perceptions occurred in rifts in the atter-corn intoxication. It was like looking at a la n dscape through flurries of thick-falling snowflakes.) Then a man came staggering out across my path as abruptly as if he had been pushed —as, indeed, I later found he had.

He was human, not an elf. I could tell by his stature, his bearing, his lusterless skin, his lack of fear of the sword. The first thing he said was, “There’s a poison mouse in the wall up ahead.”

“What?”

“A poison mouse. Come on. I’ll show you.” He put his hand on my left wrist and tried to pull me ahead.

I hung back. Neither his mien nor his words inspired confidence. Besides, I was getting to the point in my high where high-falutin’ Wehschmerz and torpor replace the animal illusions. I was beginning to want to find a crack in the rock where I could lie do wn.

“Come on,” he repeated.

“No.”

“You’ve got to! It’s dangerous. When you walk under it, it’ll jump down on you. People —get bit.”

Once more he laid his hand on my wrist. I was too languid to throw it off this time, and I let him lead me on for twe nty or so feet, when he stopped.

“It’s up there,” he said, pointing. “You can see it if you look.”

I craned my neck, but could see nothing except a crevice in the rock overhead. The ceiling was unusually low at this point. “There’s nothing there,” I sa id after a moment.

“Yes, there is! It’s up inside the crack. All you have to do is poke up after it. You can kill it with one good poke.” He made a stabbing gesture with his arm.

I don’t know what made me so docile. Perhaps it was a wish to get rid of him so I could find a place to lie down. At any rate, I thrust the sword deep into the crack as he was motioning me to do.

“There’s nothing there,” I said, still with the sword abov e my head.

“Yes, there is. You just didn’t push hard enough. Go on, try again.”

Once more, I obeyed. This time, as I started to withdraw the sword, still having met nothing, I felt the tip of it lifted and held.

The meaning of the obstructing force c ame to me instantly. My torpor left me. With both hands on the hilt of the sword, I pulled downward for all I was worth. I suppose the elves who, hiding in the ceiling, had been fishing for my blade with rope nooses, hadn’t managed to tighten up on it yet. Or I may have begun to resist sooner than they had thought I would. Anyhow, after a bad minute or two, when it seemed the blade would be jerked out of my hands, I was able to cut downward sharply. The sword came free. There was still a length of rope kno t ted about the blade.

I turned to the exile, who was leaning back against the wall with a vacant expression on his face. “Well?” I demanded. “The rope doesn’t look much like a poison mouse.”

“They made me do it. They wrenched my arms —it always hurts so —and then they pushed me out in the passage in front of you.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Elves?”

“Yes.” He was rubbing his shoulders, as if they were hurting him.

“Why would elves want the sword? They can’t stand being near steel.”

“He didn’t want it to have,” the exile explained. “He just wanted to get it away from you. He’s afraid of it.”

“Who is?”

“The Gray Dwarf.” He sounded surprised. “I hope they don’t get angry at me because they didn’t get the sword.” He sighed and swallo wed apprehensively.

I had heard the Gray Dwarf mentioned before, in connection with something he had or knew the location of. It had been a long time ago, before I had found —and again lost —Carol, before I had had to turn back from the water barrier.

I couldn’t remember what I had been told, and it didn’t seem to matter. I was getting so torpid that it would have been physically impossible for me to question the exile further. I left him leaning back against the rock, rubbing his shoulders, and walked o n very slowly until I found a cleft I could get into. I dropped into torpor as a stone falls into a dark well.

As usual, I was hungry when my lethargy withdrew. I would smell atter-corn somewhere near; when I put my head out of the crevice, I found a sauc er of it on the floor almost under my nose.

I didn’t think the meal had been there when I had crawled into my retreat. That made me wary and, though I wanted more, I scooped up only a few fingersful of the meal before I stopped eating. I felt that danger lay ahead, and I didn’t want to be any higher than necessary when I encountered it.

The passage ascended slowly. It was lighter, too. Chunks and slabs of fox fire had been laid against the walls. And as I went ahead warily, sword ready in my hand, I bec ame aware of a new thing: the stink of rotting flesh was heavy on the air.

For all its squalid misery, Underearth is a place of few smells. This is partly because the temperature is so low, and partly because any shreds or gobbets of flesh are immediatel y gobbled up by the elves’ parasitical animals. Clean-picked bones have little smell.

The stink of flesh was mingled with the smell of atter-corn. There must be an abundance of both, for the smell to come to me so strongly. Plenty of meat, and plenty of the intoxicant meal —to elf eyes, the place to which the upward-sloping passage led must seem a sort of land of Cockaigne.

Somebody was coming toward me, somebody extraordinarily tall.

The figure drew closer. I saw it was not one creature, but two —a black-clad elf, thicker-set than is usual for its lithe, boneless tribe, and a gray, squat being mounted on the elf’s shoulders, Old-Man-of-the-Sea style.

I held the sword warily, ready for what might come. The elf’s head was bowed, but the face of his rider was aglitter with phosphorescent sweat. He seemed to be smiling, and when he got close enough to me to be heard readily, he spoke.

“Hello,” he said. He had a high, rather squeaky voice. “I thought I’d come out to meet you. Welcome to my humble abo de!”

“You’re the Gray Dwarf?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. Keep that thing away from rrie, can’t you? I mean that sword. I don’t know how you can stand to carry it.”

“Sorry,” I said, but I didn’t lower the sword. The Dwarf’s hand was resting unostentati ously on a kind of holster on his right hip. It was made of what looked like fur, and it had curved edges. I thought that what it held must have a lunate shape.

“May I offer you a little refreshment?” the Dwarf said.

“Refreshment?” I echoed. My halluci nations were beginning, but I resisted them.

“Yes. Corn, or perhaps a nice steak?” He leered at me ingratiatingly. I didn’t realize it, but he was counting on my having developed the protein hunger which a prolonged diet of atter-corn usually brings. It is one of the excuses for the cannibalism of Otherworld. “No, thank you. I’m not hungry.”

“Oh. Well, come and take a look around, anyhow, why don’t you?” He kicked his bearer twice in the chest. Never, then or later, did I hear him address a word to one of his shadowy servitors. He used blows or finger signs.

The elf turned obediently and started back in the direction from which it had come. The Dwarf grinned cordially over his shoulder at me and beckoned. I followe d, and we entered the cavern almost side by side.

I looked about me curiously. It was a largish place, very well lighted, by Underearth standards, by all the pieces of glowing wood placed around the walls. Two or three carcasses, partly dismembered, lay on the floor at my left. From their smallness, I judged them to be elf, not human. There was an enormous heap of atter-corn to the right. And in the middle of the rear wall, directly opposite me, was the Dwarf’s nest.

It was made of mineral concretions, stony icicles, intricately laced together so that they formed a large pod, a sort of bristly egg. There was a hole about two feet above the floor that I supposed the Dwarf used for entering and leaving; through it I could see that the floor of the pod was lined with varicolored patches of fur, mainly black. In a world whose softest bed was rock glazed with ice, the nest looked remarkably soft and attractive —until, that is, I reflected that the patchwork of fur must be the scalps of dead elves. The air stan k with the smell of dead flesh.

The Dwarf hopped down off his bearer’s back. He was squat and short-legged, with a powerful frame, especially in the arms and chest. He looked like a gray elf who had been compressed horizontally.

“Sure you won’t have som ething to eat?” he asked, cocking his head up at me.

“No.”

“Sit down and rest a while, then.” He snapped his fingers, and an elf in the background went to the nest and came back with a small particolored fur rug. The Dwarf squatted down on it and motio ned me to sit down by his side. I remembered the probable source of the fur and declined.

“Sit opposite me, then,” he said. He giggled politely. “Tell me, what brings you here?”

It was an incredible conversation. I w as getting more and more hallucinated, though I was resisting it as much as I could; I decided I might as well tell the truth. “I came because you didn’t want me to,” I said.

“Oh.”

I looked around. There were a lot of elves around the walls of the cave rn, more than I had noticed at first. I began to wonder if I had put my head in a trap. Elves are so incapable of concerted action that I dismissed the idea.

“What are they doing with the atter-corn?” I asked.

He pursed up his lips. “Putting it in sack s , so they can distribute it.”

“Why do they bother to distribute it?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “It’s automatic,” he said.

This was no answer, but I was at the moment changing from an anaconda to a badger and couldn’t object to it. (Later, when I mulled over the question, I decided that this automatism might be a relic of earlier elf habits, a kind of communal sharing that had managed to survive from a time when the inhabitants of Underearth were more social than they are now. Or it might b e that the Dwarf began the distribution to assure himself of a steady supply of elf meat; the saucers are thicker near his lair, and this certainly acts as an attraction. At any rate, as far as my observation is valid, the distribution goes on all through Underearth, and that is a very large stretch.) The Dwarf moved a little restlessly on the fur rug. His right hand still rested on the holster that might hold a weapon. “Like a little water?” he asked.

He seemed determined that I take something. I nodded, feeling my antlers too heavy to nod very hard. There was a feathery fungus —puffball, really —growing up through the pine needles on the forest floor. I looked at it thoughtfully with my agate eyes. Agate. Green stone.

One of the elves brought wate r. My hallucinations had stopped for a moment, but the words “green stone” stayed in my mind. I picked up the cup (plastic —they must have stolen it from the Bright World), and put it down again. Abruptly I said, “I was told you have a talisman. It’s calle d the Glainstone.”

“You were told wrong. Don’t you like your drink?”

“I’m not thirsty. Do you know where the Glainstone is?”

“No, I—watch out!”

His gesture of warning was not very well done, but involuntarily I looked in the direction he was pointin g. Deftly the Dwarf unhooked his weapon from its holster and tossed it overhand at me.

It was a stone axe, thrown with force. But the sword, only partly by my volition, had gone up to parry the axe even as the Dwarf launched it at me. Stone struck on met al, and the metal won. The axe fell back heavily. The edge grazed the Dwarf’s knee.

It was the tiniest of scratches. But he began to scream and buck about on his fur rug, hissing like a snake. “I knew it! I knew it! Oh, it hurts! Oooh, ooooh! It hurts me so!”

I could hardly believe that such a minute wound could cause so much pain. “What’s the matter?” I said.

“Poison,” he replied bitterly. “On the edge of the axe. I knew the sword would cause trouble for me. Oooh, oooh.”

I refrained from pointing out that the sword wouldn’t have bothered him if he hadn’t tried to kill me with a poisoned weapon, but I was getting angry. He bumped around on the rug for a moment longer, and then turned abruptly and writhed across the floor like a worm to his nest He pulled himself up to the opening with his strong arms, balanced a moment, and fell onto the fur with a plop.

“I may die,” he said from within the nest in a biting voice. “At the very least, I’ll be sick for a long time. It’s your fault.”

The sword seemed to thrill in my hand. Well, I was angry myself. I’d spared Hood, over Carol’s warning. I wasn’t going to let this poisonous cannibal survive.

I ran to the nest and struck through the opening at him. But he had curled himself against the cushioned sides; the sword was too short to reach him, though an angry humming was running along its blade. And, though I hunted for a chink in the bristling, stony pod, I couldn’t find any. He seemed to be safe.

He was laughing, between spasms of hissing and pain. “Yah! You failed! For all your wonderful sword, you failed! Yah, Yah!” He puckered up his face and spat at me.

He was an elf; I might not be able to kill him, but he would still dislike proximity to the sword. I held it as close to him as I could get and said, “Do you know where the Glainstone is?”

“I know where it’s said to be,” he answered, grinding his teeth.

“Where?”

“Do you think I’d tell you?” He laughed nastily. “You can’t get in after me with that thing, and I hurt so much already I don’t mind having it near me. You’ve no way of making me tell.” He shut his lips with an air of gratified malice, though he opened th e m occasionally to scream and hiss with pain.

It was a stalemate. I couldn’t get through to kill him, but he was wounded and probably would be harmless for a long time. Finally, I turned to leave the cavern, looking around warily for a possible attack by the elves. They had seemed to ignore the whole episode, and kept on stolidly at their work around the heap of meal.

I passed between the decaying carcasses and the meal heap. There was no attempt to stop me. The Dwarfs final words were, “Don’t be so plea sed with yourself! I’ll find an answer to Merlin’s sword!”

-

CHAPTER 10

After my encounter with the Gray Dwarf, I began to descend once more. Faced by bis malice, I had had something like purpose and motive; now they were gone, and all I had left was the drive to keep on going down.

Why did I keep moving? All places were alike: I might as well stay near one saucer, drink from one torrent, be torpid in one cleft. But Otherworld is a restless place. Its inhabitants are always in agitated motion. There may be a periodicity to this. Kirk, who wrote about it, says that there is and affirms that the elves are most restless at the time of the Bright World cross-quarter days. I had no means of measuring time and, in any case, was too absorbed i n my ambulant misery to care.

I was coming to have hallucinations of size as well as of animal identity. If I met an elf —I believe I met some white elves about this time —he might be the size of an ant or tower above me like a tree. Also, the whole cycle seemed to have speeded up, so that the interval from atter-corn high to high was much shorter than it had been.

I rarely thought of Carol or anything else. The drive to descend had taken over my mental horizon. There was no goal, only a drive. Down, down , and down.

There may have been incidents to color this long descent. If there were, I no longer remember them. Things blur.

I still retained some feeling for the sword, my one link with the Bright World. The Dwarf had called it “Merlin’s sword.” I did n’t speculate about what he had meant by this. But I was still resolved that Hood —whoever he might be —should never have the sword. And that resolve may have been one of the components of my drive to descend. Hood would never be able to follow me so far an d so deep.

The fox fires were fewer. I moved in absolute blackness much of the time, not caring what chasm might wait for my next step, if only it were deep enough that Hood could not regain the sword. I think that once or twice the blade did warn me back from an abyss. It is probable.

The saucers of meal were farther and farther apart. Sometimes I felt I had come to the last one, but there was always a saucer beyond. But the meal in them grew increasingly stale, crusted as if it had not been disturbed f or a long time. Perhaps the elves’ rounds rarely brought them this far, perhaps this part of the distribution of the meal had been discontinued for years.

And still I went down.

I came at last to the end of everything. I had gone so deep that there was an uncomfortable pressure in my ears. No passages led on down from this place. The skull-shaped hill, glazed as smooth as a bald man’s head by its coat of ice, was Otherworld’s end. Nothing lay beyond it. This was it.

The skull rested on its chin, with tufts of blackish moss growing in the eyeholes. The cranium was faintly luminous, glowing like thin, yellowish bone. The hill was so lofty that I had to tip my head far back to see its crest. And yet, by the confusion of siz e I had experienced for several weeks in my hallucinations, it was simultaneously a rather undersized human skull lying at my feet.

I contemplated it indifferently. Was the moss in the eyeholes really moss, or was it a bristle of dark forest trees? The ai r was thick and stale, and I found I was panting for breath. It didn’t matter. In a little while I would sit down on the rock floor and begin my waiting. I didn’t have to go any farther. Hood would never find me here.

An ice-louse crawled out of the mout h of the skull. It was flat and gray, shaped like a pear and segmented like a hand grenade. In a sudden surge of revulsion —the last emotion I might have been expected to feel —I swung Merlin’s sword at it.

My foot slipped as I struck, and I overbalanced. I put out my hand to break my fall. Somehow —the sword seemed to jump forward —somehow I cut myself deeply on the left wrist.

I scrambled to my feet. The cut didn’t hurt, though it was bleeding freely. I stuck the sword in the holster I had made for it so many weeks before, and gripped my wrist with the other hand to try to stop the blood.

The gash kept on bleeding. Blood began to trickle down between my fingers and drip on the floor. It grew to a rivulet, a little stream that ran along the ground and lap ped at the edges of the ice-rimmed skull.

There was a low hissing sound, and then a whitish smoke. The light from the cranium waned. Something strange was happening. My blood was melting the ice on the skull.

I felt lightheaded and giddy, not so much because I was losing blood as because something heavy was being sloughed off. After a moment, I realized what it was. The atter-corn intoxication in me was ebbing away. Otherworld had been in me, a cold and heavy part of me..Now I was bleeding it out.

I looked around me like a man wakening from a dream. I stood in a real place, bitter cold, with an ice-glazed hill in fronNof me. Otherworld was still there, as detestable, as wretched as ever. But its coldness and misery had become external. However much they might still press on me, it was from the outside.

My wrist was still bleeding. Absently I tore another strip from my shirt and tightened it hard around the cut. A dazzling knowledge had come to me: I could go back to the Bright World. The water barrier would no longer repel me. I could cross it and go back to daylight, to the blessed light of the sun.

I drew a deep breath. I think I was smiling. The mound before me was a hillock, not a skull. I turned from i t, holding the sword once more, to grope my way upward. I felt that Merlin’s blade, for the first time since I had found it, was entirely happy in my hand.

-

It was a long way up. I had resolved to eat no more of the corn, for fear of being trapped again i n the bitter cycle of hallucination, exalted misery, and torpid repose. But the weeks of physical hardships —sunlessness, cold, poisonous food —had worn me. And if I did not eat the reddish meal, what was I to eat?

The elves seemed to avoid me. If I had fo und one carrying food spoils from the Bright World, I would certainly have fought him for them. Perhaps the elves read my thoughts and, knowing I was armed with the -sword, wisely avoided me.

I kept going for a long time. I forded streams, dodged waterfa lls, trudged the endless corridors of Otherworld. My shoes fell off my feet, which rather surprised me. I didn’t think I’d done enough walking to wear them out. But perhaps they hadn’t been particularly good shoes.

Water was always available, and I drank freely. But I knew I was moving more and more slowly. I had stomach cramps and fits of retching. Even the sword was getting too heavy for me.

I had to stop to rest every few feet. I was sitting under a patch of fox fire, resting, when I realized I was going to have trouble getting up again. I was, in fact, confronted by a bitter choice: I could find a saucer of atter-corn, eat from it, and run t he risk of a new addiction. Or I could stay where I was, fasting and getting weaker and weaker. Eventually I would keel over or an elf would kill me. I’d never be able to get back aboveground. And Hood, of course, would get the sword.

Put that way, there was no real choice. I levered myself up leaning on the sword and wobbled along the passage to the next saucer of meal. I scooped it up in big pinches. It tasted bitter, bitter as gall, and it rasped my throat like fire as it went down.

I waited. I retch ed a little, but not enough to bring up the meal I had eaten. Finally, it became plain I wasn’t going to have any more hallucinations. I could eat atter-corn.

I flexed my arms experimentally. Yes, I was feeling stronger. I left the saucer and began to go upward again. My legs felt light and nimble. I’d had the green light. I could get back to Middle Earth.

All the same, I still had a problem. The corn nourished me, but I began to be vexed by a gnawing protein hunger. When I rested, I was haunted by visi ons of slabs of beef, puffy omelets, grilled salmon, chicken liver, even lowly lentil soup. After one of these barren orgies, the corn in the saucers tasted bitterer than ever. I found I was gnawing the insides of my lips and swallowing the snippets of fl e sh with avidity. It was time to do something. I was getting into the more frequented parts of Underearth. I decided to try to rob an elf of what protein he might have brought back from our world.

I found what seemed a good place to hide, behind a rock at a place where there was a choice of passengers. My stomach was rumbling: I hoped my potential quarry wouldn’t be able to hear it. The exile I had encountered so many weeks before had said elves could hear a pin drop.

I kept sniffing. Atter-corn —was that what the characteristic smell of Underearth was, the gradient I had followed to get here?—came to my nose in bursts of acridity. An elf or two went past the rock where I crouched. And then, from upward, I smelled something good. Protein. Real food.

I peered out very cautiously. It seemed to be a gray elf, with a gunny sack slung over his shoulder. He was looking about him alertly, as if he expected attack. From time to time he would reach around and put a hand in his bag —elves are as boneless as eels —an d draw out something he popped into his mouth. Then he munched.

When he was quite close, I stepped out in front of him, pointing the sword at his throat. He jumped back, showing the automatic aversion for steel these beings have. I grabbed the sack from h im and fumbled in it, my eyes fixed on him. His lips puffed out, and he blubbered noiselessly.

I found what seemed to be an opened package of hot dogs. I took it out and gave the sack back to the elf. The transaction made me ashamed, and I didn’t want an ything except the hot dogs.

Losing the packages must have been a real tragedy in his eyes. He found his tongue abruptly and said, in a rusty, booming voice, “If I had —Glain, you couldn’t.” It was the only time I ever heard any of the Silent People speak.

“The Glain?” I asked. “Do you know where it is?”

He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together. He might have meant that he didn’t know, or that he knew and wouldn’t tell .

I was in no mood for interrogating elves just then. I lowered the swor d, and he bounded on past me, ricocheting from wall to wall. I suppose he thought I might change my mind and take the whole sack.

The hot dogs, though they were a little the worse for wear from having been carried so far in a gunny sack, woke a diapason of flavors in my mouth. I thought I could taste sunlight in them, blue skies, green grass —all the sweetness and savor of Earth. I munched all six of them as I trudged along: never did tournedos with Bearnaise sauce taste more delicious to a gourmet than th ose clammy cylinders of protein tasted to me. My stomach, alienated by so much bitterness, sent up waves of gratitude. I felt extraordinarily restored. It seemed to me I could leap over an Alp. I made really good progress from then on.

No elves came near me. My last contact with the Silent People occurred almost within earshot of the water barrier, when I came on two of them copulating dog style. It was. the only time I ever saw elves engaged in sexual activity. They seemed to me younger than the general run of elves, and I got the strong impression —though I couldn’t have said from what —that they were both having hallucinations of being of the lion sort.

As I got abreast of them, the male left the female. Almost before she could straighten herself, he gr abbed for her throat. She twisted away from him and ran, in the typical bouncing fashion, with him furiously after her. Neither of them made a sound, and their expressions, both during the copulation and after it, were sullen and morose.

I was too concer ned with crossing the water barrier to speculate about the demographic patterns of the inhabitants of Otherworld. Despite my confidence that I’d be able to cross, I couldn’t help feeling anxious. I stepped into the roaring water —much colder than I remembe r ed it from last time —and probed ahead of me with the sword.

There was no trouble. I moved from shallow spot to shallow spot, with the full cooperation of my legs and no more than the normal resistance of angry water tugging at me. But when I got to the o ther side, I had to sit down on the rock for a while to rest. Relief had made me weak.

I was up again in an instant. The Bright World lay before me. I could rest later, when I’d got back.

I began to retrace my downward pat h in reverse order. Since I was barefooted now, there were often strange textures under my feet. The first in the series of cellars was the place where I had found Merlin’s sword. I went through it quickly, but I did notic e there was no sign a sword had ever hung against its walls.

Cellars, basements, and cellars. I followed the gradient against its grain. Once the way upward surfaced, at the spot where I had found Carol’s earring before, and I stood for the first time in weeks under the open sky. It was a very dark night, but how good —how inexpressibly good! —it was to breathe free air again!

I thought of staying aboveground and getting back to Berkeley by bus. But I didn’t know what time it was —buses stop running dur ing the small hours —and I was barefoot and carrying a naked sword. In the end, I reluctantly decided to go below once more. As I picked my way across the junk-filled backyard toward the cellar window, I heard a faint popping in the distance, like firecrac kers.

I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was absorbed in planning what I’d do when I got back to the Shasta Inn. My things should still be in my room, since the rent was paid to the end of the month. I’d have a quick hot bath, change my clothes, put on some shoes, and go looking for Carol. She was very unlikely to be in the basement apartment. It would have too many painful associations for her. But she might have left word with the landlady as to where she had gone. I didn’t think I’d have much troubl e finding her.

I came to a cellar I didn’t recognize. Well, I might have forgotten what any particular cellar or basement was like. But after that there was a newish cellar, completely unlike anything in my mind. And the gradient stopped here. This was th e end of the line. I groped about for a door, found it, went up some stairs. I was out in the street.

The street? Yes, but where was I? Berkeley, probably, but in a part of Berkeley that I didn’t recognize, though the terrain was vaguely familiar. The st reet lights seemed dazzlingly brilliant and hurt my eyes.

I was standing on the edge of a huge parking lot or, at any rate, of a large paved area. No cars were parked in it. There was a service station across the street, but it wasn’t lit up. The buildin g from which I had come was unlighted, too; it seemed to be a sort of shopping arcade, but the shops were empty and the windows had no glass. Across the street there was a partly constructed apartment house. It looked as if work on it had been stopped sev e ral months ago.

Down the street, about a block and a half away, there was a big, square, somber building, very brightly lighted, with odd-looking humps at intervals around the roof. It was hard to be sure what the humps were; the lights made my eyes blur , and I saw colored halos around them. But I thought the humps looked like gun emplacements. Except for myself, there was nobody at all on the street.

Gun emplacements? I’d look for a street sign and find out where I was.

The sign on the lamp post said “Telegraph.” And the sign at right angles to it read “Haste.”

Telegraph and Haste? Impossible! Where was the Shasta Inn, the Coffee House, the big bookstore, the shops, the crowd? Some sort of clearance project might have b een undertaken during my absence, but the big building down Telegraph would have taken months to build. How long had I been gone?

I was still standing under the street light, blinking and wondering what to do, when I heard footsteps coming from the direc tion of the campus. A woman was walking toward me.

She was a small woman, peculiarly dressed. There was a helmet with a plastic visor-bubble on her head, and a secret-agent type trench coat was belted tightly around her slender waist. Her legs were sheat hed in high, soft leather boots, and there was a carbine slung ove r her right shoulder. The whole effect was of military chic, like a female Maquis in a World War II movie. She turned her head alertly from side to side as she walked.

I suppose I was in the shadow of the street light. At any rate, she didn’t see me until she was almost up with me. She gave a nervous jump. “Don’t come near me,” she said in a high, alarmed voice. “I’ve got a permit. I warn you, I’m armed.” She was leveling the carbine at m e.

As soon as she spoke, I recognized her voice. “Fay! For God’s sake,” I said.

She peered at me uncertainly. “Dick! Dick Aldridge! Where’ve you been? I thought you were dead! Where did you get Merlin’s sword?”

“I found it on a wall,” I answered absen tly. “Why should you think I was dead? I don’t understand what’s been happening.”

“I thought you were dead because you were gone so long,” she replied. “What else could I think? You weren’t with your girl when she came back.”

“How long have I been gone?” I asked. “Carol’s O.K.?”

“I suppose she is. I haven’t seen her for months.”

“Listen, how long have I been gone?” I was getting scared.

“Almost three years.”

“No! It’s impossible.” I thought of my bare feet and the rate at w hich my shoes had worn out. It was to fight a growing conviction in myself that I said, “I ‘ve only been gone a few weeks.”

“No, it’s almost three years.” She fumbled in the musette bag that hung from her belt and produced a newspaper. It was small and th in, about the size of a high-school weekly. “Look at the date,” she said.

I looked. Unless Fay had had a newspaper printed especially to deceive me, there was no doubt that very nearly three years had elapsed since I had gone in search of my missing girl.

My jaw must have dropped. Fay said. “Did you eat atter-corn?”

“Yes. There was nothing else to eat.”

“That accounts for it. It disturbs the perception of time.”

I made an effort to get a grip on my wits. “You say you’ve seen Carol?”

“Your girl? Yes, several times. She was always with Hood.”

“How did she look? I don’t understand why she was with Hood.”

Fay shrugged. “She looked sad, I thought. I tried to speak to her several times. I wanted to find out what had happened to you. Hoo d always had her get up and leave when he saw me coming. He obviously didn’t want me to talk to her.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Two or three months ago. Listen, Dick, I can’t stand here talking to you. I ‘m on my way to work. The patrol will be arou nd any minute. We’ll both be picked up.”

“But—where shall I go?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded irritated and unfriendly. “That’s your problem, I guess.”

I looked at her in sil ence. I felt dazed. Carol with Hood, the Avenue so changed as to be unrecognizable, three years gone out of my life —it was hard to accept. Even Fay had withdrawn her rather bossy sympathy.

I looked down at the blade of the sword. It had been faithful to me through all perils, and guided me back to the Bright World at last. I had escaped from Underearth physically. But at this moment, standing under the street light with Fay eying me impatiently, I felt that I had brought some of its coldness and detestab i lity back with me.

-

CHAPTER 11

I dreamed of the Gray Dwarf a good deal at this time. I suppose it was because the world I had come back to resembled Otherworld in its unmotivated violence. The buzzing of mosquitoes would waken me several times during the night; I would rouse a little, look at the sword gleaming on the wall where I had hung it, and roll over on the couch and go back to sleep. Once I remember hearing the little monster tell me that there were two kinds of A stilbe —Astilbe givrigum and Astilbe gatherum. “Astilbe givri gum’s arsenic,” he told me in the dream. “It makes people turn black and die. Gatherum’s different. Gatherum we use to envenom a ring.”

I was staying with Fay. She had relented at the last mo ment and given me directions for getting to her apartment. I had taken a zigzag course through the night, hiding in shadows, listening for the patrol, and trying to avoid the sensors of the robfuzz.

The machine caught up with me on Durant. In quite a ple asant mechanical voice, it told me to halt. Then it sprayed me with a paralyzing nerve gas and felt around my neck with its prostheses for the Id disk that ought to have been hanging there.

For some reason, perhaps that I had eaten so much atter-corn, th e paralysant had no effect on me. I shoved Merlin’s sword through the grid that covered the thing’s viewer and shorted it out in a shower of sparks. I got quite an electric jolt, but the sword hilt was some protection. Except for a tiny eroded spot on the blade, the sword did not suffer. By the time the human fuzz could come to the rescue of their mechanical colleague, I was safe in Fay’s apartment.

The incident made me realize that an Id disk was a desirable thing to have, and when Fay came back from wor k —she was working at the computer center, from three to eight —I asked her about it.

“Yes, you’ll have to have an identity disk,” she said, unsmiling. She sipped her coffee slowly. “Nobody’s allowed on the street without one. It’s a part of the safe-stree ts campaign.”

“How do I go about getting one?”

She chewed her lip. “It’s not going to be easy. You see, the first thing the examiner will want to know is where you spent the last three years.”

“I could say I’ve been in a federal prison.”

This flippancy annoyed Fay. “No, you couldn’t,” she answered. “They check up on statements. I suppose the only thing for me to do is to try to forge a record for you. Then I can apply for the disk.”

“Wouldn’t that be a lot of work?”

“Not really. Computers are the biggest fools! People flummox them all the time. Anybody who works with them can think of a dozen ways to foul them up. They’re high-toned, technical, and stupid. But it will take me a while, I expect about a week.”

“This is awfully good of you, Fay .”

“Not good at all,” she snapped. She seemed to be in a contrary mood. “It’s the only way I can get you out of my hair. I’m not heartless enough to turn you over to the fuzz, and I can’t have any social life as long as you’re here. Stay away from the wi ndows, Dick, and don’t make any noise. There are heavy penalties for harboring a diskless man.”

I would have liked to thank her again, but I didn’t want to get snapped at. “What will you do?” I asked. “What’s the technique of forging a record for someone ?”

“Well, you’ve probably got a card in the center already —credit ratings were used as the base for the system when it was first set up. But it would be so hard for me to get hold of your card that I think it would be simpler for us to start out with a whole new one. It takes a court order to pull a card, but it’s no great trick to add one to the master file.

“What kind of a record would you like?”

“You mean I can select any past I like?”

“Just about. Of course, it shouldn’t be somethin g so odd that they’ll check up on it. An ordinary sort of record is best. Remember, your future will depend on the past you select.”

I reflected. It was a unique opportunity, but I felt a certain lack of imagination when it came to taking advantage of it . Finally, it was decided that I should be Richard Eldridge, B.A. from the university in Poly Sci-(actually, I had been in the English department), who had migrated to Washington when the first of the big hippie crackdowns came. I had been drifting around in the Pacific Northwest for the last three years, working at almost anything that didn’t require a union card. My credit rating was fair —C minus —and Fay planned to include several anonymous complaints against me “because you always get stuff like that.”

After several tries, she got a passable Polaroid picture of me. “I’ll get Gerda to encode it,” she said, “and put the info on your card. I’ve done enough favors for her that she won’t mind. And you’ve got to have a coded picture that looks somewhat like you.”

“I really do appreciate your doing —”

“You can show your appreciation by washing the breakfast dishes,” she interrupted rudely. “I’m going out to get some groceries, and buy you some clothes and a pair of shoes. Nobody goes barefoot now.”

“For Christsake, if I’m not welcome —”

“Oh, shut up and do the dishes! I’ll be back in about an hour.”

The situation between me and Fay at this time was a curious one. She seemed to resent my presence; I certainly resented my dependency on her. We were alwa ys snapping at each other. Yet once she said that she was glad to have a man staying with her, she felt so much safer, and she shopped carefully and thoughtfully for my clothing. There was an odd, half-antagonistic attraction, almost an affection, between us.

My confinement in her apartment was not so irksome as it might have been, partly because I was exhausted physically and welcomed the opportunity to rest, and partly because I was getting caught up on all that had happened while I had been wandering t hrough Underearth. I read old magazines, watched TV with the sound turned low, and tanned myself discreetly with Fay’s sunlamp. Even so, Fay was always surprising me with references to things that, as far as I was concerned, hadn’t happened yet. I had tim e -traveled three years into the future. On the whole, I didn’t care for it.

The safe-streets bit was a good example. The Id disk system had been begun under the prodding of a newly elected president, and people had been inclined to accept it, despite the warnings of civil-libertarians, because they wanted an end to violence. Yet the streets were not safe; Fay, when she went to work, equipped herself with a small arsenal, and she had had to take a course in judo before she could even apply for a permit to b e out during the curfewed hours.

The paradoxes of American life had augmented. Berkeley —“civil, dog-barking Berkeley”—had been occupied twice by the National Guard, and legislators generally, caught in a cross-fire of violence, had been able to contrive no better answer to it than to appropriate more money for computers and arms for the police. Yet this country, torn by inner strife, with a wrecked educational system and a blackout of Constitutional guarantees, had been able to land six men on the moon an d bring back five of them in safety. It was an achievement, but of what kind?

I thought about Carol a good deal. Presumably, she was with Hood voluntarily, but there was no way of being certain until I asked her about it myself. Neither her name nor Hood ‘s was in the phone directory. I resolved to go looking for her as soon as I could legally be on the streets.

The great day came. Fay hung the identity disk ceremoniously around my neck. “It was a lot more trouble to get than I had thought it would be,” she said, “but all’s well that ends well. You’re a free man, Dick. What are you going to do first?”

“Empty the garbage,” I said. I’d washed the dishes and done some cooking during Fay’s absences, but the garbage had had to wait to be emptied until she ca me back. She had been afraid that somebody might see me outside, even at night.

I went out on the back steps. The air felt wonderful. I looked toward the bay, but we were, I supposed, too low for me to see the water. I turned toward the hills.—What? Coul d it —?

The Berkeley hills were gone.

Gone. I wasn’t imagining it. From where I was standing, I ought to have been able to see the big C on the hills behind the campus, the university’s constructions on the hills, and especially the thousands of houses on the Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito hills. They were all gone. The hills were gone. There were no more hills to be seen than if I had been standing on the back steps of an apartment in Santa Ana. Only far to the righ t , in Oakland, did the natural terrain seem to have been spared.

I was still goggling when Fay came out after me, a coffee cup in her hand. “What’s the trouble, Dick? You look upset.”

“The hills!” I made a sweeping gesture. “What’s happened to the hills ?”

“Oh. I forgot to tell you. It was a computer foul-up.”

“Computers did that?”

“Un-hunh. There was a city-owned fleet of bulldozers that was sent out to do a small leveling job for a park. They were supposed to be programmed for that, anyhow. Somebody coded the card wrong, or maybe the coding machine went wrong by itself. Anyhow, the ‘dozers started taking down the hills.”

“But—wasn’t there any human being in charge of them?”

“There was a foreman, but he left after he saw them nicely started on the leveling job for the park. It was Friday afternoon, you see, and he wanted to get started on his weekend.”

“Didn’t anybody try to stop the bulldozers?”

“Of course. But the foreman couldn’t be located, the computer center was closed, and the mayor was out of town. There was no way of stopping the ‘dozers except by dynamiting them, which was what they finally did.”

I must have blinked. “It wasn’t the only time the computers have caused a big me ss,” Fay said. “Two or three blocks in the Telly area were razed and paved before plans for a mall were approved. But the mistakes often seem to be to somebody’s advantage. That’s what people say, anyhow.”

“Did leveling the Berkeley hills benefit anybody ?”

“In a way. A fleet of automated dump trucks removed the earth the ‘dozers tore loose. Guess where they dumped it.”

“I give up,” I said grimly.

“In San Francisco Bay.”

“You mean—they used it to fill in the bay?”

“That’s right. Now there are eight or ten high-rise apartment buildings going up on the fill.”

“Yes, but—what happened to the people whose homes were razed? Didn’t they sue the city?”

“Of course they did. Millions and millions of dollars’ worth of dama ge suits. The city had to get loans from Washington to pay the judgments against it. But the hills are gone. And the bay is partly filled in.”

There was a silence. I said, “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

“O.K.” As I started down the steps, I thought I heard her say, “You didn’t empty the garbage,” but I couldn’t be sure.

It was a beautiful day. Glum as I was feeling, my spirits rose slightly when I got out into the sunshine. It was good to stretch my legs . I decided to walk over to the computer center and see if they would tell me where Miss Carol Jennings was to be found. The stories Fay had been telling me about the failings of computers were probably exaggerated. Even if they weren’t, asking at the com p uter center about Carol was the easiest way of beginning the search for her.

There were few people on the streets. The women’s dresses were dowdily long, in dull colors, but the men’s clothing had changed little from how I remembered it. There were lots of black leather jackets. When I met somebody on the sidewalk, he or she would wince away from me, as if he wanted a safe distance between us. Even at the bus stops, people stayed apart from each other.

By the time I got to the computer center, I was fee ling more depressed than when I had left the apartment. Berkeley seemed a city in the grip of fear. Fear was like a stink in the streets, and I understood why, when Fay got home from work, the first thing she did was to spray the apartment with perfume. I passed two cops with dogs, and one of the robfuzz units, in the course of the rather short walk to the computer center. And yet, short though the distance was, it was long enough for me to see a man attack another with a knife, and hear a woman, apparentl y several blocks away, screaming for help. Her cries stopped abruptly; I hoped one of the policemen had gone to her aid.

There were guards outside the computer-center doors. I walked between them, feeling intimidated and resentful. I found the information counter. There was a steel mesh curtain between the clerks there and the outside world.

“Td like to locate a Miss Carol Jennings,” I said through the curtain.

“Are you from a law-enforcement agency, sir?”

“No.”

“Do you have a court order to see the file you mention?”

“No.”

“Then I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot give you the information you ask for.” She turned away, smiling politely, and after a moment I turned away, too.

In a phone book I found the name of a detective agency. I had no money for telephoning or bus fares, but the agency was within walking distance. I walked.

The tatty blonde in the ankle-length green dress handed me a card to fill out. I put as much information about Carol as I could remember on the card, and gav e it back to the blonde.

“There’s a fifty-dollar deposit, nonrefundable, before we undertake an investigation,” she said, holding out her hand, “with a minimum charge of fifty dollars more when we come up with the data you want. We take credit cards.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing. “I’ll be back later.”

“O.K.” She tossed the card I had filled out into the wastebasket.

When I went back to the apartment, about noon, I told Fay I had a job.

“What doing?” she asked, looking up from the lettuce she w as washing.

“Crating books in the UC library. Listen, Fay, as soon as I get my first pay check, I’ll pay back what you spent on me. And I’ll start looking for a pad for myself today.”

“Urn.” She cleared her throat. “Do you have to move out, Dick? You’v e got used to my hours”—Fay went to bed about six-thirty and got up a little after two —“and we don’t get in each other’s way. I feel a lot safer having you around.”

I remembered the woman I had heard screaming that morning. “Well —” I answered.

“This isn’t a sexual bid,” she continued. She pushed her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “We’d still have separate beds, and so on. Actuall y we wouldn’t see much of eac h o ther, since we’d be working different shifts.

“But we’d both save money, and you’d have a nicer place to live than you’d be able to get on your own. The housing situation is terrible now.”

It sounded reasonable. Besides I really rather liked Fay, and she’d done a lot for me. “O.K., I’ll be glad to stay on here,” I s aid. “We can work out the financial arrangements after I get my first check.”

“Fine. And now, please take the garbage out. You didn’t do it this morning.”

“You saved it for me?” I asked, obeying.

“I saved it for you.”

My job at the University of Ca lifornia library was a melancholy one. I must have crated thousands and thousands of books in the two weeks I worked there. They were being boxed for storage in Richmond, where the university had an enormous warehouse full of crated books.

All but two floors of the library were being closed off. Enrollment at Cal had dropped from about 27,000 to slightly under 5,000, mainly students in Physical Education and Criminology. The campus had been denuded of trees —this was true of Berkeley generally —to remove p l aces where potential assailants could lurk. Some of the old beauty was left, but I constantly missed the hills behind the campus. The once-green lawns were patchy and unkempt.

Yet some of the esteem in which the university h ad once been held still lingered, despite the hatchet job done on the institution by a hostile governor. It displayed itself in an unexpected way.

One morning on my way to work I saw two men struggling on the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, where the m ain entrance to the university had been. One had a knife, and the other, a length of tire chain.

Tire chain, who was bigger and stronger, seemed to be winning. The man with the knife broke away and ran, pursued, to Sather Gate, where he took hold of one of the balustrades. The stronger looked at him for a moment and then turned away, disgusted, without making any further attack on him.

The incident puzzled me, and I asked Red, one of the men with whom I worked, about it.

“Yeah, they don’t chase one another much beyond Sather Gate. Of course, nobody can stay there all night. But it’s a sort of rule that you’re safe if you get to the gate.”

“Why do they stop at that point?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did the custom get started , then?” I asked.

“I don’t know that, either,” he answered with a grin. He was the sort of man who ought to have chewed tobacco.

Most of my first week’s check went to settling accounts with Fay. I promised myself that I would devote the next check to s tarting the hunt for Carol, but at the end of the week the job came to an end. After a brief spell of unemployment, Fay got me on at the computer center, working the same hours as hers.

We were seeing a lot more of each other. I kept put ting off calling on the detective agency; I wanted to have plenty of money before putting the agency on her trail. It was reasonable, in a way. But nearly a month had passed since Fay had hung the Id disk around my neck.

Fay and I walked to work together and came back at the same time. Our being together more resulted in a resumption of our snapping at each other. I seemed to get on her nerves acutely, and she, on mine. I thought of looking for other housing, but Fay appeared to value the protection I ga v e her. She had, after all, been very kind to me. I stayed on.

Our mutual irritability came to a climax one warm September morning. Neither of us had had much sleep the night before; the mosquitoes had been unusually active, and there had been several noi sy fights in the street. Fay began to scold me because, in my trip to the market, I had forgotten the butter.

“You’re always forgetting things,” she said crossly. “Yesterday it was the eggs, and the day before that it was the cream. When I give you a sho pping list, you lose the list.”

“For God’s sake, Fay, stop scolding me! I’ll go back after the butter.”

“You went back the other days, too. I don’t see why you can’t get what we need on the first trip.”

“You shut up!”

“I won’t shut up! I don’t have to shut up! You ungrateful, stupid, bumbling son of a bitch!”

“Son of a bitch, am I?” I said. I was getting really sore.

“Yes! You’re nothing but a lout! Do you have any idea how much trouble I went to to get that damned stupid id entity disk for you? And now you can’t even remember the butter! You’re a big, dumb slob!”

I didn’t see why I should take any more insults. I put my hand over her mouth to try to stop her. Her mouth felt warm and moist and alive against the palm of my ha nd. An instant later I was kissing her.

We wound up in bed—where, I suppose, we had been headed all along. We had to be careful the first time, since Fay wasn’t on the pill. She got a prescription the next day. The scolding stopped. We were happy enoug h. Fay was a good sexual partner, with a pretty, girlish figure and attractive sexual ways. Her breasts were normally full, but with tiny, almost nonexistent nipples. If this seems an oddly cold-blooded observation for a lover to make, the answer is that w e were never really lovers, though we were certainly in a sexual relationship. And yet there was indubitably affection between us, too.

I thought of Carol rarely. When I did, it was with a sense of guilt. I hadn’t precisely abandoned the idea of looking for her, but the search had been indefinitely postponed.

Since Fay and I had begun to share the same bed, there had been a good deal of gnawing and scratching in the walls at night. I thought it was probably mice or, more disturbingly, rats. Berkeley was troubled with small rodents almost as much as it was with mosquitoes. The mosquitoes bred in the brackish pools of the bay fill.

One night in early October, there was so much noise in the wall that it roused me from a fitful sleep. Fay rolled over and s ighed, and I thought she was awake, too.

“Sounds like they’re having a convention,” I said, softly enough that, if she were asleep, I shouldn’t waken her.

“Ettins and orc s,” she answered drowsily.

“What?”

“Ett—oh, excuse me, Dick, I was talking in my sleep. Let’s go back to sleep.” She yawned and turned away from me.

I wasn’t altogether satisfied with her explanation. It seemed to me I’d been on the edge of an important discovery. But she probably had been talking in her sleep, just as she said. Finally, I drifted off myself, despite the noise in the walls.

The days were shortening. As the nights grew longer, the disturbances in the streets increased. Fay and I had little social life because of our odd working hours. Her friends ac cepted my presence in the apartment with calmness, despite the governmental campaign against “immorality,” I suppose because they felt she was safer living with a man. She and I used to watch TV a good deal, and sometimes we played two-handed games of card s. The quality of TV, both picture and content, had worsened during my stay in Underearth. I felt that the culture in which I was living was spinning more and m ore wildly, like a washer with an unbalanced load.

We were eating supper about five o’clock one evening in November when I heard a crackling, grinding noise in the hall. It was followed by a mechanized voice saying, “Riot control. Come out quietly, or you will be gassed. Come out quietly, or you will be gassed. You have been warned.”

I hesitated. Fay grabbed me by the hand and pulled me behind an armchair (we were eating in the living room). There was a fracturing noise i n the hall, followed by a peculiar smell.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Probably a misprogrammed ropig.” By her use of the word, instead of the more polite “robfuzz,” I knew how annoyed she was. “There’s no use in going out in the hall,” she went on. “There’s no reason for the thing to be here, and if we go out, it will only increase the foul-up. I think it’s using a nauseant on u s . We’re lucky it’s not tear gas.”

“But—what will it do if we don’t go out?”

“Probably nothing except throw more gas cans at our door. I’ll call the center and speak to my supervisor.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to call the police?”

“It would take forever to get any action. Open the window, will you, Dick? It’s getting a bit heavy in here.”

I obeyed. The smell was really strong now, but I wasn’t nauseated. Neither was Fay. She got her supervisor on the line, explained the situation, and was switched by the supervisor to the manager of the police computer center in the basement of the big building.

Once more Fay explained herself. I waited. I heard a good deal of movement in the apartment next door, followed by repeated toilet flush ing. I still wasn’t sick. The smell of gas in the living room began to thin out. Finally there was a grinding noise as the robfuzz unit rolled away. It had been recalled.

Neither of us was sick, as I said, but we were both getting high. Fay began to gigg le. Her eyes were glassy bright, and her jaw hung slack. She drifted about the room, giggling and rearranging objects on the coffee table and talking so fast and so shrilly that I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

I felt no inclination to talk, myse lf, but the things around me seemed exquisitely comic; when Fay absently switched the TV on, I almost split a gut laughing at the feathers in the peacock’s tail. After that I got a little nauseated, enough to retch once or twice. I never was sick enough t o vomit, and the nausea soon died down, leaving me hungry.

Fay seemed to be” hungry, too. We went back to the dining table and finished our interrupted meal, giggling a lot. Fay seemed to be particularly affected by the slices of to mato in the salad; she kept poking at them with her fork and laughing, for almost ten minutes.

Finally, about nine o’clock, we began to come down. “We’d better go to bed right away,” Fay said. “We’re not going to get very much sleep.”

“All right.” I yawned and stretched. “I wonder why the gas didn’t make us sick,” I said. “Wasn’t it really a nauseant?”

“Oh, yes. I expect that people of elf des —” She stopped, looking annoyed rather than regretful or dismayed. “So that’s it,” I said after a little pause . “Yes.”

“What are ettins and or c s?”

“Elves’ animals.”

“Listen, Fay, how far back do your elf connections go?”

“Ever since I was a little girl,” she answered slowly.

‘There was one of the entrances to Underearth in the hill near our house. Dad knew, of course. He used to whip me for playing with them.”

“Where was that?”

“In South Carolina. Underearth is a big place.”

“How could you play with them?” I asked after a mom ent. I was remembering the foolish arched eyebrows, the wildness, the violence of the elves I had seen.

“I did, though. There were several little games we used to play —‘Bibble-Babble’ and ‘Dance on Eggs’ I remember particularly.”

“Did they talk to you?”

“Not very often. But I could see into their minds. Oh, and there was ‘Come To Me.’ That was a nice game.”

“Did you ever eat the atter-corn?”

“Once or twice. Some of the animal transformations were fun. And I liked the bright colors. But when I got ol der, I tried to forget all about it. Underearth’s not —anything one’s glad to remember. I couldn’t forget it completely, though. That was why I wasn’t glad to see you when you came back, Dick. You smelled of Otherworld.”

I looked at her. “I suppose that was why we attracted each other,” I said.

“Yes. It was our common elf heritage.”

There was a silence. I thought of asking her whether she had ever crossed the water barrier, and decided against it. It didn’t matter particularly. “Listen,” I told her, “I’m going to go hunting Carol. I’m still in love with her.”

To another woman, in different circumstances, this might have been a brutal thing to say. Fay did not look up from the patterns she was drawing on the tablecloth with her forefinger. “O.K.,” she replied unemotionally.

-

CHAPTER 12

I was stopped ne ar Chowchilla by a roadblock. Two polite highway patrolmen gave me, my car, and my bag a quick but thorough search, and compared my ID disk with several replicas. I was glad, not for the first time, that Fay had taken pains to provide me with a leakproof i dentity.

“What were you searching me for?” I asked one of the patrolmen as he opened the gate in the roadblock to let me through.

“Drugs,” he answered glumly, and waved me on.

My spirits rose slightly as the rented car began to pick up speed. Hood’s “secretary” might or might not be Carol; I found it hard to understand why she, who had always disliked him, should be traveling around with him. But Hood would probably know where she was to be found. Finding him was the first step toward finding her.

I had no real plan for dealing with Hood. I had thought of taking Merlin’s sword, and decided against it —the sword hadn’t helped me when I had confronted him in Underearth before, and a three-and-a-half-foot length of steel can be an awful embarrassment. I had left it hanging on the wall of Fay’s living room.

Fay had watched silently while I packed my bag. When I had started toward the hall door, she had said quickly, “Be careful, Dick. Hood is dangerous.”

“I know,” I said.

And yet, despite her warning and my own knowledge of Hood’s capabilities, I felt that I would be able to handle him. Perhaps this was because I had managed to survive the cold perils of Otherworld and win my way back to the light; the experience had lef t me with a basic confidence that Hood, armed or unarmed, was nothing more than a green elf. Of his malice and dangerousness I had already had bitter proof. But I considered him, in the end, a less formidable antagonist than the Gray Dwarf.

I got to Fres no in the late afternoon. The manager of the motel in El Cerrito, which was the latest address the detective agency had been able to give me for Carol Jennings, had said that “Mr. Hood and his secretary” were going to Fresno. She had added that they must b e going to stay in a hotel, since Mr. Hood had complained that motels were too close to the ground. Hood did not appear to have made a favorable impression on her.

I started with middle-bracket hotels. My great worry was that Hood would be staying in a h otel with closed-circuit TV between the lobby and the guests’ room. I didn’t think I’d be able to bluff my way past a TV camera.

I was lucky. The desk clerk in the fourth hotel I tried, a quiet older building with no TV, said, “Yes, I’ll ring his room,” when I asked to speak to Mr. Carl Hood.

The room telephone appeared to ring for a long time. I waited, feeling the sweat trickling down my back and preparing the story I was going to tell Hood. The lobby smelled dusty and overheated. Finally, the clerk s aid, “His secretary says he’s not in just now. Would you like to speak to her?”

I hesitated. If the secretary wasn’t Carol, I didn’t want to give her my real name, and if it was Carol, I foresaw an interval of painful, disbelieved explanation over the te lephone. Finally, I said, “Tell her Robert Elkins would like to come up. I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Hood’s.”

“Yes, it’s O.K.,” the clerk reported after a moment “They’re in room 419.”

Up in the elevator, dustsmelling, and along the dustsmelling cor ridor. I rapped. After a minute, a voice —Carol’s?—said, “Come in.” I opened the door.

The woman who turned to meet me was wearing dark glasses. Was it Carol? This girl was much thinner than I remembered Carol being, and her face had the slight, generali zed puffiness I had noticed in the faces of the human exiles in Otherworld. Her hair, darker than the old Carol’s, was cut in a “chula crop,” a style that left her ears and thin neck exposed.

“Mr. Hood will be back in a few minutes,” she said in a flat, low voice. “Won’t you sit down?”

Was it Carol? I was still unsure. She was wearing blue, a color Carol had never liked. Then she smiled at me, a hesitant, doubtful, rather mechanical smile, and I was abruptly convinced.

“Carol!” I said.

She turned wh ite, so white I was afraid she was going to faint. She pushed the glasses up on her forehead and peered blindly at me. I saw that the pupils of her brown eyes were so dilated that her eyes looked black, and the whites were suffused with blood.

She groped with her hands before her face, as if she were pushing cobwebs away. “It isn’t —it isn’t really Dick, is it?” she asked. “You said Elkins, over the phone.”

“Yes, it’s Dick. I’ve come back.”

She gave a tiny, doubtful whimper. It cut me to the heart. The next moment I was holding her in my arms.

She was thin to touch, even thinner than she looked, and her mouth, when I kissed her, was thin too. She didn’t respond to my kiss, and her eyes, so dilated and discolored, bothered me.

“I can hardly see you,” she said in her flat voice, as if she picked up my thoughts. “He anoints my eyes. He wants me to be able to see elves.”

“Hood?”

“Yes. How can it be really Dick? This is even harder to belie ve than when you came for me in the darkness, when they were going to eat me. I can’t really be sure.” She touched my face timidly with her fingers. “Anyhow, it isn’t Hood.”

“What are you doing with him?” I asked. “Are you really his secretary?”

“I guess so. I mean, I type letters for him sometimes.”

“But—do you like him?” It stuck in my craw that Carol was apparently staying willingly with the man who had betrayed me to live and die in Underearth.

“Of course not,” she answered with more animation t han she had yet shown. She was no longer quite so death white. “I hate him. Oh, he hasn’t been too unkind to me, actually. He always makes me eat enough, and once, when I had an infected finger, he took me to a doctor. But I hate him so! I hate him from t h e bottom of my heart.”

“But you stay with him.”

“Yes.” She sat down on the bed. “After —I left you down there, I never thought I’d see him again. I’d been gone longer than I thought, about four months. My landlady had put my things in storage.

“I got a job as a part-time, typist. I tried to forget you, though I dreamed about you a lot. But I wasn’t feeling well. I had cramps in my legs a lot, and night after night I’d wake up soaking wet with sweat.

“I went to see a doctor. He told me I must h ave been taking some drug. He didn’t believe me when I told him no.

“He gave me some sleeping tablets. He told me I’d have to get over the addiction by myself. When I took the tablets, I’d try all night long to wake up. And I had cramps all over my body then.

“I didn’t know what to do. The people I used to know couldn’t help me; the big drug crackdowns had begun. Then Hood came. He’d brought a bottle of that meal, the bitter red stuff; with him.

“When I saw it, I knew it was what I wanted. He told me I could have it, have all the atter-corn I wanted, if I’d stay with him.

“I felt so bad, Dick. I hated him, but staying with him really didn’t seem to matter. I never thought I’d see you again. So I took the corn.”

“You’ve been with him ever since?” I asked. I had sat down beside her on the bed, with my arm around her waist. There was an angry ache in my chest.

“Yes. We’ve been so many places —England, Iceland, Baja California, Kansas —I don’t remember half of them. We move about constantly. We go in a hurry, without any warning, and we leave in a hurry, too. We left Helsinki half an hour after we got there.

“Hood has strange visitors. He talks to people in dark alleys, and men knock o n the door in the middle of the night. One of his callers was a sort of Negro, but I never saw a Negro so black. I don’t think he was a Negro. He seemed to be made out of the color black. He and Hood didn’t say anything to each other at all. They only look ed at each other. Then the black man went away. He frightened me.

“Ordinary people call, too, the kind of people whose faces one can’t remember. Sometimes they give Hood money, and sometimes he has money for them. He has plenty of money, though he never seems to work at anything.”

“What do you think he’s trying to do?” I asked. I had been dimly aware of Hood before as the shadowy, malign cause of much that had happened to Carol and me; now I began to wonder whether he might not be the hidden machinator of much more.

Carol pleated her lower lip thoughtfully. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “Once I asked him why we moved around so much, and he hit me and told me to shut up. But I’ve wondered whether he might not be a federal narcotics agent. That would account for his having money without working for it.”

“Is he pushing drugs, do you think?”

“No-o-o, but he seems to have free access to drugs. I think he might be trying to use his contacts with —that place” (she meant Underearth) “for purposes of his own.

He might be trying to shape the beings that live there into something solid, something he would control. Hood wants power. I haven’t lived with him for three years without learning that.”

When she mentioned the years she had spent with Hood, my fi sts clenched involuntarily. I said, “Do you think he’s succeeding in getting it?”

She yawned. “Excuse me. I’m not sure. He’s changed a lot lately. Ever since our second trip to Iceland, he’s been frightened. He seems to think somebody is going to attack him. That’s why he anointed my eyes —so I could see attackers before he could.”

“Can you see more than you used to?” I asked.

She sighed. “I’m not sure. Sometimes things seem to get between me and the light.

“It isn’t only real attack, one from the outside, that he’s frightened of. He talks to himself sometimes, you know, and says that he’s carrying death around within himself. He twists around and claws at his back, over and over, as if something had been planted there.”

I couldn’t make much sense of this. Carol yawned again. “But he’s afraid his Otherworld visitors will attack him?” I asked.

“Yes. Otherworld is big, Dick, bigger than any of us on the surface realize, and it has many entrances. It runs in a belt around a nd under our world. I’ve never really got away from it.”

Once more she yawned. “I’m sleepy,” she said in apology. “I sleep most of the time. I was asleep when you called up from the lobby. I try not to sleep so much, but I can’t help it. It gives me a co ld feeling to be always asleep. But I don’t have dreams, anyhow. I don’t think I could stand it if I had dreams.”

“Are you sleepy because of the atter-corn, or is Hood giving you other drugs?”

“I don’t know. He —I —I don’t know what goes on a lot of the time. I think he has intercourse with me sometimes, but I’m not sure.”

The anger in my chest had changed to a steady heat. I said abruptly, “Leave him.”

“Leave —?” she answered vaguely.

“Yes, of course. You said you hated him. Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you. Leave Hood, and come with me.”

She twisted her fingers together nervously. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“How would I get the atter-corn?”

I was still looking at her, my jaw dro pped, when the door was thrown open and Hood burst in.

He had aged, but I knew him instantly. I sprang to my feet, expecting trouble, but he paid absolutely no attention to me. I might have been invisible.

“So, you little bitch,” he said furiously to Carol, “You set them on my trail, did you? On corners and in alleys, behind walls and fences, wherever I go, and you put them there! Damn you, you pretty, sly little bitch!” His voice was high and quivering.

Carol made no reply to this tirade. She sat qui etly on the bed, her hands in her lap and her head drooping. She was plainly used to tongue lashings of this sort.

I didn’t feel as calm about it as she did. I was standing on Hood’s left, and when he began to mouth more insults, I hit him as hard as I c ould on the side of his chin.

His head snapped back. He must have had a glass jaw, for he went over sideways and hit the floor with a considerable thud.

I ran to the bathroom, and came back with two hand towel s. I tied Hood’s hands together behind his back, and tied his feet together, too. Then I caught him under the arms and pulled and tugged him into an armchair.

His eyelids began to flutter. I slapped him lightly on the cheeks.

“Oh,” he said, opening his eyes, “Aldridge. Back from Underearth so soon?”

“Never mind that,” I said. “I want you to tell me how Carol can be cured of needing atter-corn.”

“Hah?” he said vacantly.

I slapped him harder. “You heard what I said. I want to get Carol —Carol there, the girl you call a ‘bitch’—over needing to eat the corn. How can it be done?” I was perfectly ready to torture him to find out.

“You know how to cure her right now,” he answered readily.

“No, I don’t. How can it be done?”

“How did you get free of needing it yourself?” he answered.

I thought of the way my intoxication had waned at the skull-shaped hill. “I cut my wrist,” I said.

“That’s it. Her blood must be shed. But it’s dangerous, very dangerous, because the elves —”

He paused. His eyes opened so wide I saw the whites all round. He began to writhe in the armchair, straining and tugging to get his hands free.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Elf-shot!” he panted. “Elf-shot!” He whimpered and groaned for a moment, obvi ously in much pain. Then his body jerked forward violently, exactly as if he had been stabbed in the back.

I felt over his back. The cloth of his green sport jacket was intact. I didn’t understand what had happened to him.

“Kill him,” Carol said in a c alm voice. She had risen from the bed. “You know how to help me now. There’s no point in letting him live. He’s always meant trouble for us.”

“I think he’s dead already.”

“He may only have fainted. It’s wiser to make sure.”

I thought it was excellent advice. I had no trouble in feeling ready to kill him. What Carol had suffered from him burned in my mind, and I had good reason to feel murderous toward him on my own account. I got my pocketknife out and opened it. It was not a very big knife, but I kn e w it could kill him if I kept trying. I longed for his blood.

There was a rap at the door. A voice said, “Room service. I’ve brought up Mr. Hood’s ginger ale.”

Carol and I exchanged glances. She swallowed. Then she said, “Mr. Hood doesn’t want it now. He’ll call room service for it later.”

“O.K.,” said the voice.

My mood of violence had ebbed. I closed the knife and put it back in my pocket. “Aren’t you going to kill him?” Carol asked.

I shook my head. “It’s too dangerous. The hot el knows your name and Id disk number. If I kill Hood, there’ll be a big mess. We may both have to face a murder charge. Besides, I think he’s already dead.”

“Make sure,” Carol said earnestly. “Hood is full of tricks.”

I untied his hands and feet and l aid him back in the chair in a natural-looking position. I put my ear to his chest; I couldn’t hear any heartbeat, but then, I wasn’t a doctor.

Carol was hovering over us uneasily. “Try with a mirror,” she suggested.

I got Carol’s looking glass from th e dresser and held it to Hood’s lips. I held it there for three or four minutes, but not the faintest mist appeared on it.

“We’ll leave him in the chair,” I said finally. “It may look as if he’s had a heart attack. Maybe that’s what he did have, actually .”

“Maybe,” Carol agreed unemotionally.

“Get your things packed, kid, and we’ll go.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to take anything with me he gave me. If I could, I’d leave this room naked. I’ll go with you. But I don’t want anything from him.”

It was a point of view I respected. After a little dis cussion, we went down in the elevator and walked through the lobby at an ordinary, unhurried pace.

I helped Carol into the rented car. As I turned the ignition key, I wondered whether I had made a mistake. Perhaps I ought to have held a pillow over Hood’s face for a while, to make sure. But I was certain his heart had ceased to beat.

-

CHAPTER 13

I wanted to avoid the roadblock at Chowchilla. Carol was already beginning to show withdrawal symptom s, and I knew any peace officer would take her into custody as soon as he looked at her. So I drove directly east, by minor roads, until we reached 101 and headed north.

We stopped at a little town, I think Paicines, for gas. The station was one of those one-pump deals in front of a general store. Carol was talking to herself, a muttering monotone whose burden was flight and pursuit. The attendant must have heard her; his eyes widened a little. But he filled the gas tank without comment.

He began to wip e the windshield. I thought I recognized him. I said, “Say, are you Bill Hayes? Used to be with The Initial Chancre?”

“Yeah. I played washboard. I’m trying to live it down, though. I’m studying the piano and playing Czerny etudes.”

“That’s too bad,” I answered. “You were great on the washboard. I was a great admirer of yours.”

Carol was fumbling with the catch of the car door. “Restroom,” she said.

“Around in back, ma’am, to the right,” Bill Hayes said. “I’ll turn the light on for you.” He went to a switch.

Carol stumbled off in the direction he indicated. Hayes finished cleaning the windshield, and opened up the hood to check the water and oil. I paid for the gas. Carol didn’t come back. I felt a growing uneasiness.

As last I went around to the right to look for her. It was quite dark now, but a light on the rear wall of the store lit up a romantically cluttered back yard. Wooden crates, paper cartons, a red shed with a sagging door, and signs reading “Ladies” and “Ge nts” fixed to opposite sides of the building, were merely conventional, but the willow tree, enormously green and bosky, was not, and neither was the pond under it, filmed with algae even more intensely, poisonously green than the leaves of the willow. I c ould see quite clearly, because of the hard light.

Carol was standing beside the pond under the willow, stooping over and scooping up scum from the surface of the pond in her two hands. She raised it to her mouth and began to lap at it.

“Don’t do that!” I said sharply.

She raised her head and looked at me. Her lips and chin were green with scum. “Why not?” she said. “Why not? It tastes like the corn. It could taste like the corn.” She giggled stupidly.

“Come on, get back in the car.” I tried to take her arm.

She pulled away from me. “No. No nonononono. Oh, I do feel so bad. I feel so bad.”

Our voices must have been loud. Bill Hayes came around the side of the store. “The man’s here,” he said in a quick whisper. “If he sees her like that, he’ll ha ng a bust on her. He’ll be around to go to the john as soon as he gets his Coke from the machine. We’d better hide her in the shed.”

Together we pushed and jockeyed Carol into the outbuilding. When the deputy, Coke bottle in hand, came around to the ba ck, Hayes was asking me about the condition of the men’s restroom, and I was replying that yes, it had been fine and sanitary.

“Did you check the oil in my car?” I asked as the deputy went into the head, still holding his Coke bottle.

“Yes, sir. You’re down a quart,” Hayes answered. He was plainly a man who was quick to dig.

“You might as well fill it up.”

“O.K. We only have Western oil, though.”

We went around to the gas pump. Hayes fidgeted with my car; I hoped desperately that Carol would be quiet.

The deputy came out from in back, paid for his gas, and drove off. It was plain he wasn’t suspicious, or he would have hung around waiting for me t o go.

When I went back to the shed, Carol was sitting on the floor, her head drooping. “I think they know,” she said.

“Who knows what?” I asked. I set her on her feet, and steered her around to the car. Hayes helped me put her in.

“The—elves,” Carol answered. “They know they know they know. They know.” She gave a dreary giggle.

“What’s she been on?” our friend asked as I started the car.

“Nothing you’d know about,” I answered. “Thanks a lot for helping us.”

“That’s O.K. I don’t mee t many people who remember my washboard days.”

We got to Berkeley about eleven. Carol was in a bad way, her leg muscles knotted in cramps and her body streaming sweat. She talked constantly of Otherworld pursuit; I didn’t see how they could possibly have followed us from Fresno, but I found her talk unnerving. For all my sojourn under the skin of the world, I knew its denizens had capabilities I was ignorant of.

I stopped the car near a lighted phone booth and looked in the directory for Dr. Fred Gruenwald. He had been the hip community’s favorite physician. I hoped to get something from him that would keep Carol going until I could get her to a motel and try the bleeding operation on her.

Gruenwald’s name wasn’t in the directory, and when I aske d information about him, she said no such phone was listed.

I went back to the car. Now that it was too late, I realized that I should have stopped at a motel with Carol as soon as we left Fresno, perhaps at Rolinda or Kerman. Her symptoms had been sligh t then, and it was improbable the Otherearth pursuers would have tracked her to a chance-chosen motel. I might have been able to release her from her addiction. But I didn’t dare take her to a motel now; she was obviously in the throes of withdrawal from s ome drug, and the penalties for harboring drug users were severe. A motel proprietor would call the fuzz as soon as he looked at her.

I thought of taking her to a non-hip physician; again, I didn’t dare risk it. What a heavy liability my poor girl was! The curfew would come into effect in about half an hour. I’d have to get her in some safe place by then.

I drove around for a while. Carol’s constant moaning got on my nerves. We’d had extraordinary luck in avoiding the flics, but it couldn’t keep up fore ver. What was I to do?

My aimless cruising —was it so aimless?—finally took me past the building that held Fay’s apartment. But, of course, I couldn’t ask Fay for help. I drove around the block twice more. On the third pass, I slipped the car into a parki ng place. There were only a few minutes left.

I rang Fay’s bell. After a good deal of ringing, she came to the door. The door was on a chain that wouldn’t let it open more than an inch and a half, and Fay had a kitchen knife in her hand.

When she saw w ho it was, her expression changed from nervous to wrathful. “Dick! For God’s sake! What are you doing here?”

“I’ve brought Carol.”

“So what?” (All this interchange was carried on in whis pers, for fear of alerting the neighbors.) “It’s not my responsibility.” She started to close the door.

I put the toe of my shoe in the opening. “Fay, wait. It’s not Carol’s fault, or mine, that we have to ask you to take us in.”

“What’s the matter wit h her? Why does she have to be taken in?”

“She’s having withdrawal symptoms.”

“From what?”

“Atter-corn.”

“Atter-corn! And you bring her to me!” Fay’s eyes were indignant. “You’ve got more nerve than anybody I ever knew in my life. Get going! Get yo ur stinking big foot out of my door before I scrunch it!” She began to push on the door.

“But, Fay, we’re not to blame. Hood’s behind all this. He may even have arranged for Carol to be kidnapped in the first place. It’s Hood.”

At the mention of Hood’s name, a peculiar expression passed over Fay’s face. It was a ripple, a quiver, like the wind blowing over the surface of water. After a moment, she silently unchained the door.

“Bring her in,” she said in a resigned whisper. “Don ‘t make any noise.”

I hurried to the car. Carol was only semiconscious, her body knotted in one big cramp. I got her into a modified fireman’s lift, with a good deal of effort, and carried her into the apartment. I put her down on the sofa. From the corn er of my eye I saw Merlin’s sword quietly gleaming on the wall, and it made me feel a little better. I had been gone from the apartment less than three days, but I felt that an enormous length of time had elapsed.

Fay had closed the door and locked it. “My, she is bad,” she said, looking down at Carol. “What’s that on her face?”

“Scum from a pond. She was eating it.”

“It’s so hard just to get by these days. And then you saddle me with a thing like this.”

“I’m sorry.”

Fay’s shoulders moved in a little shrug. “Let’s try putting her in a warm bath. It might help those cramps.”

She moved off to the bathroom, the silk of her dressing gown rustling softly. In a moment, I heard the water running.

I got out my handkerchief and wiped Carol’s face carefully. Then I raised the upper part of her body from the sofa and began undressing her. Her clothing was soaked with sweat, and she was even thinner than I had thought her. Thin and ill, she was still beautiful; she was like th e waning moon that, worn and eroded, yet dominates the sky.

Fay shut off the water. I carried Carol into the bathroom and laid her gently in the tub. Fay tested the temperature of the water with her wrist. “It could be a little bit hotter,” she said. “Rub her arms, Dick, and see if you can loosen up those cramps.”

I obeyed. Fay turned the hot water on in a thin stream. She knelt and began to help with the massage. Except for the small noise from the water tap, the room was quiet. Then we heard a burst of scurrying and scratching that seemed to come from the floor.

Fay and I exchanged glances. “So they’re after her,” she said. “What happened with Hood?”

I filled her in on the occurrences in Fresno while we both continued to massage Carol’s shoulders and arms. “He said freeing her of her addiction could be done, you see,” I finished, “but that it would be very dangerous, because of the elves.”

“Yes, it would be. Was he dead?”

“Hood? I’m positive.”

“Urn. I don’t suppose anybody’s going to regret him.” Fay transferred her massage to Carol’s thighs, which were cramping severely. “Her symptoms came on promptly, didn’t they? Awfully promptly, really. I wonder if he was giving her something besides the a t ter-corn. Barbiturates, or something like that.”

“I don’t know. She complained of being sleepy most of the time. But I think the main trouble is that she’s hooked on the meal. If she could get over needing that, she’d be O.K.

“Fay, you said you used to play with elves —”

“Yes. I’m not particularly proud of it, but —” Her voice trailed off. I could smell the rose perfume of the bathsoap in the holder beside the tub.

I said, “Do you know how to control the elves?”

“Nobody controls elves,” she replied promptly. “Did you spend three years wandering in Underearth and not learn that?” She grinned at me.

“I’m not so sure,” I answered. “I think you know things about them that I don’t.”

“Maybe.” Her voice was noncommittal.

“Couldn’t what you know be used to keep them off while I shed her blood?”

There was a silence. “Maybe it could,” she said at last. “But why should I put myself out any more for you?”

I tried to think of a reason. “Well,” I said finally, “you’re a kindh earted girl.”

“You mean I’m a chump. But I’m not going to be a chump any longer.

“I’m always helping you, Dick, and always getting the short end of the stick. I refuse to knock myself out this time to help an ex-lover and his current sweetheart.

“I took you in for tonight. But that’s it. That’s all. Tomorrow you get out.”

“Fay!”

“Or I’ll call the pigs,” she finished triumphantly.

-

CHAPTER 14

I kept on arguing. I don’t know why, really, Fay was so stubborn. She didn’t appear to be jealous, and it was certainly to her advantage to restore Carol to normal and get rid of us. Perhaps she did simply feel that she was always acting as a patsy for me and resented it. Or it may have been that she disliked and feared the prospect of having her Otherworld inclinations strengthened. She snapped at me when I tried to find out what her reason was.

Carol she seemed to regard as a victim and was gentle toward. She dosed her gingerly with quarter-tablets of meprobamate and managed to get a few spoonfuls of warm soup down her throat. She helped me lift Carol in and out of the bath, dry her and rub her. It was during one of the rubbing intervals, when Carol, still damp from the bath, was lying on Fay’s bed and we were both massaging her legs, that I said, “Hood would have wanted it to turn out like this.”

“Turn out like what?” Fay snapped. She pushed a strand of her brown hair out of her eyes. “Remind me to call my supervisor and tell her I don’t feel well enough to come to work today.”

“All right. I mean, he’d have liked his death to be the beginning of hell for Carol. He was a sadistic man.”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“But if you were to help us, it would be a postmortem defeat for him. And indirectly, for the whole of Otherworld.”

Fay shot me a suspicious glance. “Otherworld is too fragmented for anybody to speak of it as being a whole,” she obs erved. All the same, I felt she was weakening.

“It’s ironic he should be causing more trouble for her now he’s dead than he did when he was alive,” I continued.

“Um. Shut up, Dick. It’s not my responsibility.”

“O.K. But he got away with everything, d idn’t he? Kidnapping her, abusing her, getting her hooked on drugs —the whole bit. He tried to kill me, and he did succeed in making me lose three years out of my life. Hood got away with everything.”

“I expect he got away with other things, too,” she said absently. She fingered her lips for a moment. I went on rubbing Carol’s legs, almost holding my breath as I waited for her next Words.

“All right,” she said at last, “I’ll help you. But this is the last time, Dick. If I see you drowning in a pool of burning sulfur, you can just drown.”

“I won’t ask you for help again,” I said. I meant it. I was afraid to let her see how much her promise of assistance had relieved me, for fear she mig ht change her mind. “What’s the procedure? What do we do?”

“The first thing to do is to move the furniture back in the living room so I can lay out a circle about ten feet in diameter. It’s going to be a close squeeze.”

She led the way to the living ro om. Now that she had decided to help, she was energetic and active. Under her direction, I began to move pieces of furniture back against the wall. “Don’t make any noise,” she cautioned me. “Mrs. Schumucker, the building manager, is a night prowler and an old snoop. She’s been hanging around for the last two days, trying to find out what happened to ‘my young man.’ She has ears like a cat.”

Fay was right, it was going to be a tight squeeze. I carried the TV, the armchair and the floor lamp into the kitche n. I pushed the dining table —Fay’s living room doubled as a dining room —against the wall. I carried the straight chairs into the bedroom. There were some scurry ings and noises while I was doing it.

I started to push the sofa back and found it had to be lifted. I got one end up and slid my back under it. I was carrying the whole thing, insecurely balanced, toward the side wall when there came a long, moaning scream from Carol, in the bedroom.

The noise startled me so that I dropped the sofa with a crash . It was a loud noise for any time and particularly for two-thirty in the morning. Fay and I looked at each other.

“The old hag will be around within five minutes,” she said. “She never goes to bed before three o’clock. Go into the bedroom, Dick.”

I obeyed. Carol was twisting uneasily on the bed, her eyes glazed and wild. I closed the door, sat down beside her, and began rubbing her body. I was ready to put my hand over her mouth if she should cry out again, but she grew quieter.

The ring at the door came punctually. The dialogue between Mrs. Schumucker and Fay went something like this: -

MRS. SCHUMUCKER: Are you all right, Miss Reece? I heard a cry and a terrible thump in this apartment. It sounded like a body falling. I thought I ‘d ask you before I called the police.

FAY: Yes, Mrs. Schumucker, I’m all right. My friend and I were only moving some furniture.

MRS. SCHUMUCKER: Moving furniture? At this hour? It’s nearly three o’clock, Miss Reece.

FAY: Oh, is it that late? I hadn ‘t realized. He just got back from Stockton.

MRS. SCHUMUCKER: I’m sure I heard a shriek —fay: Oh, that. [Rubbing ankle realistically.] I tripped over the coffee table. It hurt. I couldn’t help yelling. And then he dropped the sofa. He said I startled h im.

MRS. SCHUMUCKER [craning neck inquisitively]: I don’t see him in the apartment.

FAY: NO, he’s in the bathroom. He always shuts the door.

MRS. SCHUMUCKER [retreating modestly]: Oh. Well, if I think there’s any trouble, I’ll call the police. I’m never afraid to call the police, you know.

FAY [beginning to close the door]: Good night, Mrs. Schumucker.

MRS. SCHUMUCKER: Hunh? Oh, good night.

-

Fay came back in the bedroom. “The o ld bag!” she said in a furious whisper. “The funky old bag! ‘Never afraid to call the police,’ indeed! Last year, when my apartment was robbed, she stood by with her door ajar and watched while the thieves carried out my TV! When I asked her why she hadn’t called the police, she said she thought the thieves were TV repairmen. And when I asked her what TV repairmen would be doing calling for a set at three o’clock in the morning, she said, ‘Well, you keep such irregular hours!’ “

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Wait until she goes to bed, I guess. Then we’ll go down to the basement. I ought to have thought of it before. The living room is really too small, anyhow.”

“But if she heard us down there, we’d be sunk,” I said. “We couldn’t make any excuses about moving furniture.”

“She won’t hear us. Once the old devil goes to sleep, nothing wakes her. Besides, she’d be afraid to come down if she did hear us. The stairs are too steep. She’d be afraid she’d break her god-damned neck.”

Fay called her supervisor and made her excuses. Then we turned all the lights in the apartment off, except for a shaded light in the bedroom, and settled ourselves for a lengthy vigil. We didn’t dare to put Carol back in the bath for fear of alerting Mrs. Sch u mucker.

It was a tedious wait. There was a good deal of scurry ing in the darkness, so much that Fay finally got the sword from the living-room wall and laid it across the bed. Carol was doing a lot of twisting and writhing about, but as Fay said, Mrs. Schumucker would undoubtedly expect to hear the bed springs squea k ing.

Carol seemed worse. Fay tried to give her a little more soup, but she wouldn’t take it, and her muscle cramps were getting more severe. I think that both Fay and I were haunted by a fear that Carol might die before we could try to free her from her addiction. It was a possibility, not a probability. We had plenty of time to think about it, though.

About four-thirty, Fay thought we might risk the descent to the basement. We began to gather up the things we would need: the sword, of course, and a len gth of heavy cord to mark out the circumference of the circle, candles from the dining table, whiskey to sterilize the knife I had in my pocket, and material for bandaging Carol’s wrist after I had cut it. These supplies seemed reasonable enough, and so did the saucer Fay got, in which to catch Carol’s blood. But I was surprised when she added a loaf of bread and a container of salt.

I wrapped Carol in the comforter from Fay’s bed. There was no point in trying to dress her. It was only a short distance , and Fay had said that we must all three be naked. “They don’t like nudity,” she whispered when I asked her why. “It’s too much like the light.”

Carol wasn’t heavy, as I’ve said, but she was so much in motion it was difficult to get a firm grip on her. All the same, I had the impression that, beyond her haze of suffering, she was trying her best to cooperate. I clutched her as tightly as I could and followed Fay down the back Stairs.

The door to the basement was unlocked. Fay turned the knob, softly, a nd we went in.

The basement was a big room. It had served as a laundry at one time; there was a row of stationary tubs along one wall, and dusty clotheslines still dangled overhead. Fay indicated a spot in the center of the space, and I set Carol down in it. A faint glow came from the burners of the gas furnace.

Fay began to lay out the cord she had brought, making a big circle with the three of us within it. When she had the cord arranged to her satisfaction, she took her clothes off and motioned to me to do the same.

“Where shall I put them?” I asked, holding pants in my hand.

“In the middle of the circle, with my clothes,” she answered a li ttle absently. “They’ll be out of the way there. Take off your shoes, too.” I had the impression that she was withdrawing from her surroundings, trying to put herself into a frame of mind at once alert and remote.

Carol, lying on the comforter, was twist ing uneasily. I thought I heard a burst of twittering from behind the furnace. Fay stood for a moment with her head bent. Then she picked up the sword in both hands, knelt, and began to move about the circle of cord with it.

Holding the sword at either e nd, she pressed it flat against the cord, in a series of short, straight lines, so that she was outlining the circle by superimposing on it a polygon of a great number of sides. As she worked, she recited, in a loud, singsong voice, the following words: -

“Merlin’s bigghes have mickle might, Power to daunt, and power to dight, Bold to bless, and bold to ban, Power to hold as naught else can.

By the power of Merlin’s sword, Elfins-daunting Merlin’s word, Be the circle duly cast,

Triple-formed, not to be passed, None may cross the sun-strong line, None may dare the salt-blessed cord.”

-

When she had finished her circumambulation, she got to her feet and put the sword down with its point to the east.

Next she picked up the loaf of bread. She pulled its soft i nterior out little by little, crumbled it up, and cast the crumbs in a broad band on top of the circle of cord. There was only just bread enough for her purpose; she had to finish her circle with some of the crust from the loaf’s exterior.

The circle had now been doubly formed. Fay formed it for the third time by laying a thick train of salt on top of the band of crumbs.

I wondered about the efficacy of bread and salt against elves, since they include both items in their diet, but I did not mention my d oubts to Fay. Carol was becoming really agitated, and I hardly noticed what Fay did next. I believe she lit the candles and stuck them upright in their own drippings at appropriate points around the circle. At any rate, one or more of the candles had been lit when Carol rolled over into a four-footed stance and began to crawl rapidly toward the basement door.

I dived for her. I caught her around the waist, and we struggled silently and desperately for a few seconds. Her body was slippery with sweat. At la st I forced her back and made her lie down again on the quilt. There was “something unspeakably odious in the use of force against this naked, frightened, helpless girl. Our common nudity made my actions into a parody of love. It roused a dreadful civil w a r in my heart.

Fay had been watching. When she saw Carol on the quilt once more, she knelt beside her and touched the hilt of the sword to her lips. Carol had made no noise since we entered the basement; at the touch of the s word, her lips opened as if she were about to scream, and I had to put my hand over her mouth. She shook her head wildly from side to side, trying to rid herself of the gag. Once more we were intertwined in a struggle that nauseated me.

All the same, the touch of the sword seemed to have done her good. She was relatively quiet as Fay got the knife from my pocket and sterilized its blade in the whiskey. “Help her up, Dick,” Fay whispered. “Can you hold her up with one hand and cut her wrist with the other ? I’ll try to keep her from crying out.”

I nodded. I felt sick. I knew that what we were doing was for Carol’s good and had to be done. But how I loathed it! Love and violence met in uneasy combination in me. That the violence had to be invoked to rescue my love made it no easier.

I set Carol on her feet. I wanted to say something that would pierce through her fog of suffering and comfort and soothe her. No words came to my lips. My mind was too occupied with wondering how I could hold her upright and si multaneously keep her arm steady enough to mak e an accurate cut. I needed an extra arm.

The twittering and scurrying had been growing louder.

I had hardly noticed them. Now they stopped abruptly. In the sudden silence, I could feel the circle grow ring ed with unseen, voracious eyes.

I couldn’t delay much longer. Fay, seeing my dilemma, took Carol’s hand in hers and held it out to me, palm upward. She passed me the knife.

Carol didn’t resist. I looked at her blue-veined, defenseless wrist hesitantly. After an instant, Fay indicated the spot where I was to cut —a good idea, since my concern for Carol was clouding my judgment. Not the least of my fears was that Carol would wince badly when she felt the touch of the knife, and I would cut wrongly or too d eep.

“Do it,” Fay breathed. “The longer you wait, the harder it will be to do.” Almost blindly I drew the knife across the spot she had picked.

Carol’s body heaved. She did not cry out. Blood followed the line of the knife. Fay stooped for the saucer a nd held it under her wrist. Blood began to run into the little dish.

Was there a bluish glow from the blood? If there was, it lasted only an instant. The blood dripped; and Carol, who had been sagging heavily against my arm, straight ened. She was standing on her own feet.

Fay was watching her closely. When she judged the cut had bled enough, she clapped a gauze pad over it. She held the pad in place with strips of adhesive. As she put the last strip on, Carol said, in quite a normal voice, “Where am I? What’s been happening?”

Fay drew a deep breath. “It worked,” she said.

“What worked?” Carol asked.

“Sssh!” I warned her. “Not so loud.”

“Why did you cut my wrist?” she asked, but in an obedient whisper. “Dick —it is Dick, isn’t it?—I remember something about a hotel room —Hood —and then it’s all black. But I think there was a lot of suffering.”

I explained. Carol listened, pressing her fingertips lightly against the gauze pad. “I remember a little now,” she said. “And I’m over it ! The addiction, I mean.” She smiled, an extraordinary, luminous smile.

“Yes,” said Fay. She was leaning on Merlin’s sword. “You’ll never crave atter-corn again.”

“I can hardly believe it,” I put in. I was shaky with nervous reaction. “And yet, from my own experience, I knew it would work.”

We were still congratulating each other, and I was on the point of asking whether it was safe to leave the circle yet, when I he ard a light cough behind me. I turned, thinking it must be Mrs. Schumucker and wondering what we were going to say to her that would excuse our nudity convincingly. But it was Hood.

-

CHAPTER 15

It was certainly Hood. He was wearing the same green jacket he had been wearing when I had left him for dead in Fresno and, though his shoulders were sagging and the muscles of his face were lax, it was unquestionably he. And yet, there was a difference i n him, something subtle and pervasive; he seemed a little blurred, like an image seen through badly focused binoculars. I stared at him, puzzled. He was holding a little drum in his right hand, a thing about the size of a honeydew melon. The skin of the dr u mhead was black.

Carol had turned death-white. I was afraid she might faint. I put out my hand to steady her. She gave me an odd look and pulled away from me, I suppose she was remembering that it was because of my failure to make sure of Hood’s death in Fresno that he was standing here in Berkeley now.

“This isn’t Hood,” she said after a second. There was a hint of relief in her unsteady voice.

“Isn’t it?” I asked stupidly.

“No. This is somebody from Underearth. I don’t know who it is. But it isn’t Hood. Hood’s been pushed out”

The person in Hood’s body had been listening to us, rubbing his forefinger back and forth over the skin of the drum so it gave out a low buzzing noise. “Who are you?” I asked.

He rubbed the drum a little harder, and the b uzzing turned into a growling roar. “You know who I am,” he said. “We’ve met before this.”

His voice had a fruity, mushy quality, as if a plum pudding were talking. It was not at all like Hood’s usual calm, clipped manner of speech. It sounded like —but h is voice had been high, and squeaky —but —“You’re the Gray Dwarf,” I said.

He gave me a faint smile. The drum made a complaining noise. “How did you get here?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“I got here in a rented car,” he said in his fruity voice. “It was a long drive. This body’s not much good, actually. Hood was a sloppy liver, always gulping down some drug. He was going downhill even before we planted our little secret in the small of hi s back. He didn’t take good care of himself.”

I was beginning to be really alarmed. Hood, as an un-killable opponent, had been a little dim; he was half-mad when I had encountered him in Fresno, and I felt I could probably have worsted him. But the Dwarf, who was riding in Hood’s body as he had once ridden on the back of an elf, was an unknown quantity. He might well have added to his arsenal of menace since I had met him before. I wasn’t sure what the limits of his power were.

I glanced toward Fay. She was leaning on Merlin’s sword, a faint frown between her brows, but she looked calm enough. The sight reassured me. “What do you want?” I asked.

“Oh.” He rubbed the heel of his hand over the drum. “That girl”—he tipped his head toward Carol to indicate h er —“belongs to us. She’s thin, of course. But we never let anything we took for food get back to the light. She must go below and wait for the feast.”

“Wo,” I said. Sweat was running down my naked back. “I didn’t save her twice to let you have her. She s han’t go.”

He raised his shoulders in a little shrug. “We’ll get her all the same. And then, I’d like your body. You’re in better shape than Hood was. And you’re of elf stock. You should be rather easy to evict.”

Somehow, this threat did not much worry me. The Dwarf might have been able to take over the dead or dying Hood, but I didn’t see how it could happen to me. It was more in curiosity than in fear that I asked, “What do you want my body for? You have a body of your own.”

“True, true,” he said in his mushy, mouthy voice. He moved the drum so it was resting in the crook of his left arm. “But it’s a less attractive body than yours is, and daylight bothers its eyes.

“I don’t intend to stay in Underearth always. Hood tried to use us. He failed. But we learned a lot from him. We”—he coughed daintily —“we have plans.”

Had Hood really found out how to hold Underearth, so shifting and restless, together for a purpose? It had seemed to me as uncohering as a rope of sand. But if that had been Hood’s aim, it explained a good deal.

Once more I looked at Fay. She was frowning harder, but she still didn’t seem especially alarmed.

“Have all the plans you want,” I told the Dwarf. “There may be others with you; I have the impression that there are. But you can’t get over the threefold barrier Fay made. And we have Merlin’s sword to protect us. It defeated you before. It will be dayli g ht in a little while.”

He didn’t bother answering. He moved the drum a little higher on his body, so that it was resting against his chest, and began to tap on it with the fingers of the arm that was supporting it, the fingers of his left hand. It was th e first time he had really played the drum.

It was a dry, high pattering, a rhythm that a metrician would have called a series of anapests and resolved an apests. At the same time, he beckoned imperiously to Carol with his free right hand.

She was very pale. Her eyes were opened wide, so that I saw the whites all around. But she moved forward jerkily, out of the protection of the barrier Fay had made, as if the pattering of the drum were something she could not possibly disobey.

I reached out to stop her. I still wasn’t greatly alarmed; I knew I was strong enough to hold her back. But as I touched her, the Dwarf, without missing a beat, began to drum another, different rhythm against the skin of the drumhead, using his right hand. It was stronger and d eeper-toned than the first drumming, and it cut into it without disturbing it. The two patterns intermeshed.

The drumbeats paralyzed my hand. I couldn’t close my fingers around Carol’s arm, I couldn’t hold her back. Ashen and terrified, she moved over th e protective line of the circle, and I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t move at all. The pad on her wrist was stained red with blood.

Of all the miseries Underearth b rought me, this was the worst: to have to look on helplessly while Carol was compelled back into the power of her enemies. Had I saved her twice for this, that she should be reclaimed by them in the end? It would have been kinder to let them kill her in t h e first place; and I wished that, at least, I had not taken her withdrawal symptoms away from her. It would have been better for her to have her consciousness clouded by physical suffering than to go down to her death fully awake and aware.

Bitterness fi lled me. Even now I have nightmares about that helpless, paralyzed submission to the sound of the Dwarf’s dru mming, and I wake up from them dizzy and sick.

I could move my eyeballs a little. I rolled my eyes toward Fay. She was standing a little hunche d over, the muscles of her upper arms and legs standing out like drawings in an anatomy book. Her face glistened with sweat. She couldn’t move any more than I could. The Dwarf’s drum had paralyzed her, too.

I suppose that I had still unconsciously hoped she’d be able to help us —she, or the sword. Now I realized that the drum was what the Dwarf had promised to find when I had parted from him in Underearth: the answer to Merlin’s sword.

Carol got to where they were waiting for her. Some shapes —the light w as poor, and it was hard to make out whether they were black or white elves —took her by the shoulders. The drumming went on.

The sound not only paralyzed, it stung and bit It seemed to have an abrasive quality, to burn my skin. A hot wind blew through my permeable flesh and dried up the marrow within my bones. It had the curious quality of making me feel like an imitation of myself.

I don’t mean a mere detachment or a depersonalization. I mean that the Richard Aldridge, who stood paralyzed in a basement in Berkeley, sweating helplessly while his girl was led away and the Dwarf played hatefully on a little drum —that Richard Aldridge was only one of a hundred, a thousand possible Richard Aldridges, all equally insubstantial and all equally false. We were a ll bad imitations of an imperfect original.

The tempo of the drumming increased. If the Dwarf had wished, he could have sent Fay and me capering around within the circle like figures pulled by a string, or made us bow backward until our spines cracked. He preferred to keep us paralyzed.

I not only imitated myself, I didn’t know who Richard Aldridge was. I felt deflected, drawn aside from myself. Ego —even a speaking acquaintance with that man Aldridge —was a goal the drum taps deflected me from. The noise fettered my thoughts.

Faster and faster. The Dwarf was smiling a little. And now I had a purely physical sensation. My chest was contracting. My breathing grew more and more shallow. It was like the peine forte et dure of medieval criminology, where the accused panted under an ever-increasing weight of stone piled on his chest.

I knew what it meant. The Dwarf had said he wanted my body. He had said that, since I was of elf stock, I should be rather easy to evict. The compression of my chest meant that the eviction had begun.

-

CHAPTER 16

There was a patch of paint, green, like the scum on a pond, on the wall of the basement toward which Carol was be ing led away. I stared at it blindly, while the muscles of my chest contracted and the air in my lungs rushed out. My chest hurt like the devil, not only because my lungs were being sharply compressed, but also because my chest muscles were locked in an a c ute tonic spasm, like the muscle contractions of tetanus. Sweat was pouring down my face and running off my body, and I couldn’t even writhe or cry out.

The tempo of the drumming changed slightly, and I managed to draw a little air.into my lugs. I suppos e the Dwarf didn’t want to do too much damage to my body before he evicted me. His general plan seemed to be to render me partly unconscious from asphyxiation, and then possess himself of my only weakly tenanted body. But I didn’t know just what form the e viction would take.

Abruptly I was a rabbit —a large, healthy buck rabbit, with white and brindle fur, a wiggly nose, and a chin that itched and itched. The illusion was extraordinarily vivid, like those I had had in Otherworld; when I reverted to my huma n identity a moment later, I realized that giving me the illusion of an animal body lay at the heart of the Dwarf’s plan for dispossessing me. He was going to turn me into an animal, evict me into an animal’s body, and that the body was illusory made no d i fference. I would be much easier to evict from my human tenement if I thought I were an animal.

The drumbeat had gone back to its earlier cadence, and the compression of my chest began again. There was a reddish mist before my eyes. I wondered, between noiseless shrieks of anguish, whether I would live on as a sort of ghost in my own body after the Dwarf had dispossessed me, sometimes almost rising to the dignity of an independent nod of the head or a movement of the hand. Or would I be ousted once and for all, dead while my body yet breathed and moved? Would fragments of my personality survive after the odious little Dwarf had taken over my body?

Something was trying to communicate with me.

Somebody or something. It was in the background of my mind, like a name of which one says, “It’s on the tip of my tongue.” It was persistent; it wanted to attr act my attention. I couldn’t focus on it or understand what it wanted to tell me; I was in too much pain. When my next period of being a rabbit came, I slid into it with relief. My chest hurt much less when I was a rabbit, and I didn’t have to try to disc o ver what the unknown communicator wanted to say.

I didn’t stay a rabbit very long this time, and when I went back to being poor old short-winded Dick with the aching chest, the communicator was waiting for me. It was, it gave me to understand, opposed to the Dwarf. It wanted my help.

Help from me? Ridiculous. I was too weak, too small, too short of breath to be able to help anybody. My chin itched too much. I didn’t want to help. I felt resentful. It was asking more of me than ought to be asked. I wante d to be allowed to be a rabbit in peace.

The communicator persisted. I might say, “Go away,” over and over in my head —it kept on trying to attract my attention, like a man swinging a signal light in front of a washed-out bridge. Help. Help. The darkness swallowed the flashes. There was always another flash. What did the communicator want? How could / help?

The drum kept on pattering, a light, intricate, changing rhythm , during all this. I suppose the time was not nearly so long as I thought; certainly Carol had only moved a few steps toward her fate. But now I “heard” the communicator, newly strong, telling me imperatively, “Become what you are!”

It was a cryptic utte rance, especially as I was at the moment in process of becoming a rabbit. The communicator must mean that I should try, at all costs, to hang on to my human identity. If I could stay human, no matter how much it hurt, the Dwarf would have to revise his pl a ns. And that might give whatever the force was that opposed him a chance for success.

All right. I’d try. Though I was already half-covered with brindle fur, I groped desperately after an awareness of my human self, trying to become conscious of Dick Ald ridge, naked and immobilized in a basement in Berkeley, and of his naked, suffering, human body. For a moment, I had it. Then it hurt too much, and I fell back, glad to be a rabbit again. If the communicator made any attempts after that to attract my atten tion, I didn’t notice them.

Carol was led away into the dark. I was slipping back and forth limply between being a buck rabbit and a two -thirds suffocated man when I heard a sudden high noise, not very loud.

The noise itself didn’t seem to be important, but it was followed by a rush and flurry of movement in the room. For a moment, the light, rhythmic patter of the drum taps stopped.

The walls of the room seemed to shake like a curtain made of painted cloth. Reality —the reality of our world —was being twitched aside. In that moment I felt —I knew —that everything in our universe-galaxies, viruses, time, matter, energy, space, everything —was nothing but a flimsy cover for the horrors and splendors of a vaster cosmos than ours. And these horrors and splend ors were funneling down indescribably on the spot in which I stood.

What had happened was that Carol, being led away into the darkness forever, had made a sudden screaming break from her captors. The sight of the patch of green paint, with its reminiscen ce of the scum-coated pond at the service station in Paicines, may have triggered her rebellion. Or there might have been other causes. However that may be, her outburst had startled the Dwarf. The steady, hateful patter of the drum taps had been interrup t ed. And what was opposed to the Dwarf had a chance to assert itself.

There came a great gust of wind. Three of the four candles Fay had set around the circumference of the circle were blown out. The basement seemed to be filling with an element denser th an air, more rarefied than water. Staggering, buffeted by the backlash of incomprehensible energies, I found myself in command of my body again, able to move.

Much good it did me. I was so weak and spent that I could only gasp for air, my head almost bet ween my knees, while I tried not to fall forward on the floor. I felt like a broken jumping jack. The shock of the moment when the hyperworld had impinged on our world had been particularly severe for me, since I had been partially out of my body when it h appened. Occultists will know what I mean.

I was still panting and trying to straighten up when I heard two light taps from the drum. The merest fraction of a second later “Become what you are” rang once more in my brain.

Become—? What was I? A lost man, losing, a loser, sure to lose in this final struggle with Otherworld. For the drum taps, ragged and uncertain at first, were strengthening as the Dwarf regained control of himself. But once again there came the inner voice: “Becom e —what you are.”

I was—I was —my identity went a long way back. I had thousands of years to draw from, tens upon thousands of years. Men dance on deathless feet. But more than anything else, I was —I felt like a dull pupil finally getting the point of a di fficult lesson —I was the man who had carried a naked blade through Hell.

I straightened. My body felt limber and alert Fay was already holding out Merlin’s sword to me, her face furious with urgency. It seemed to leap into my hand.

The drumming stopped . The Dwarf’s mouth came open. Before he could turn to run, I had lunged forward across the barrier of the circle and buried the sword in his chest.

I lunged? No, it hardly seemed to me that I had struck the blow. My arm had only carried out the desires of a mightier hand.

Even in the dim light I could see that the Dwarf looked thoroughly surprised. “Merlin —Merlin can’t have won,” he said in a weak, painful whisper. He tried ineffectively to pull the sword out of his chest.

For a moment, the blade sti rred back and forth, moved by the beating of his heart. He moaned, not very loud. Then he fell backward, kicking. The drum was smashed under him.

The drum, the symbol and source of his power, would beat no more. I pulled the sword out of his body, scarce ly noticing the gush of blood that followed it, and ran toward Carol. Her captors must have fled when they saw that their chief was killed; she was alone, leaning against the wall with the green paint stain, looking very white.

I half-carried her back to stand inside the protection of the circle. I could hardly realize what had happened. It was beginning to be day. The basement floor was wet with blood. I wondered what we should do with the embarrassment of Hood’s body. He had obviously died a violent de a th, he had been a government employee, and we had no plausible account to give of how he had met his end.

Fay seemed to share my concern, for she was looking at the body and frowning. We were all exhausted, and to try to think what to do with a cumbersom e corpse seemed too much of an effort for us to make.

I had my arm around Carol, supporting her, though I felt I could do with some supporting myself. “Look,” she whispered after a moment, bending forward and pointing. “Something is happening to Hood.”

Fay was watching the body, too. The three of us exchanged glances. Hood’s body, no longer tenanted by the Dwarf, was shriveling and shrinking under our eyes. It was an extraordinary process, like seeing an orange suc ked by an invisible man. “The elves are draining him,” Carol said in a low voice.

The face grew more and more wrinkled. The supporting tissues seemed to melt away, leaving a dry, brown mummified husk. I caught a glimpse of bare bones and sinews, lying lo ose in Hood’s clothing. Then even the bones were gone, tugged away into the corner by unseen feeders. Hood’s body had ceased to be a problem to us.

Fay picked up Hood’s clothing. “We can put them in the garbage,” she said. “There’s almost no blood on the m now. The elves lapped up most of it, and from the floor, too. But there’s blood on the sword. Give it to me, Dick. I’ll clean it off.”

I handed her the sword. She hunted through Hood’s clothing until she found a Kleenex. She wiped the sword carefully o n it. But when she handed the blade back to me, there was a shadow on her face. And when I touched the sword myself, I knew why.

I drew a deep breath. The Dwarf had been defeated. Carol was, at least, free of any immediate threat. But the sword —the beaut iful, faithful sword that had been my companion in so many perils —the sword had lost virtue.

It was still a handsome thing, a fine blade with an interesting boss and hilt. But I felt a poignant sense of personal loss. The soul of the sword was gone. It w as only a piece of metal now.

-

CHAPTER 17

Carol kept seeing elves. They may really have been there; Hood h ad anointed her eyes so she would be able to see what was ordinarily invisible. But at the time, I doubted it. I felt that Underearth had been finally defeated when the Dwarf’s drum had been smashed under him.

Carol, though free of her atter-corn addicti on, remained exceedingly high-strung, anxious, and tense. I don’t think this came from any inherent weakness of hers. She was actually a brave and resilient girl who had been through what would have swamped a weaker personality. Also, the world around us w as worsening steadily as sides were chosen up and moderation became a suspect thing. No wonder she slept badly, stayed up half the night, and couldn’t eat!

Like Carol, I was troubled by my past experiences. The moment when I had seen our whole sensible u niverse tremble before a vaster cosmos stayed with me. It was an ultimate glory, an ultimate horror, an ultimate mean inglessness. I didn’t know how to master it. And I badly missed the sword.

We had left it hanging on the wall of Fay’s living room, a de ad piece of metal. But without it, without the sword as it used to be, would I be able to fend for Carol in the troubled days I foresaw ahead? I thought she was capable of making a good recovery eventually. But would she get the chance?

As I have said, I thought Carol’s anxiety about elves was unjustified. But one evening I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, preparatory to going to bed, when I saw something odd on the floor. I bent over, puzzled. After a moment, I identified it: it w a s a bone, long, slender and curving, probably a human rib. There were a lot of dents on it, as if it had been gnawed by small, sharp teeth.

I leaned back against the wash basin, feeling a little sick. Elves again? Surely not When the drum was broken, the y —But how else could the bone have got where it was? We had no pets, and neither did the neighbors. A rat? The bone was too big for a rat to have brought.

I didn’t want to alarm Carol, who was already in bed. (Carol and I were living together and sharin g the same bed. But we weren’t, in the old-fashioned phrase, sleeping together. The one time I had tried sex with her since the Dw arf’s defeat had been so frustrating that I had resolved to let things coast and hope for better times. We had a king-sized b ed, which made it easier.) I tried to think what Fay, my authority on elf matters, would do if she found a human bone in the bathroom. Finally, I went to the kitchen and got a carton of salt.

There was only a dim light in the bedroom. Carol was lying on her back, her arm over her eyes. I began to crawl around on the floor, laying a broad trail of salt clear around the bed. “What are you doing?” Carol asked after a moment.

“I’m looking for my cough drops. They fell off the nightstand.”

“Oh. Good night, Dick.”

“Good night, honey.” I turned off the light. I lay awake for a while, but everything in the apartment was quiet. All the same, I called Fay the next day, tried to get her to have lunch with me, found she was already engaged, and settled on dinner chez nous for that same night.

Fay arrived a little before seven, out of breath and a little irritable. “Some neighborhood you live in,” she observed. “I was stopped by three pigs in one block, one black and two white. Since I got transferred to day shi ft, I’d forgotten what the streets are like at night. Well. How’ve you people been?”

“O.K.,” I replied evasively. I didn’t want to mention the bone while Carol was in the room. “Carol’s been trying to get a job, but the personnel people don’t like her.”

“One woman asked me if I was hooked on anything,” Carol said. She tried to laugh. “I’ll go get us a drink.”

While she was in the kitchen, I leaned toward Fay and said softly, “I found a bone, a human bone in the bathroom last night.”

Fay’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, my,” she said.

“Does it mean the elves are trying to take her back?”

“They might be. They do dislike giving up prey. But it’s more likely to be some of their animals.”

“What shall I do?”

“You might try ringing the bed with salt —”

“I’ve a lready done that.”

“And sleeping with a knife under your pillow. They hate metal that comes to a point.”

“How about the sword?”

“It would be O.K., but it’s rather unwieldy. A knife would be just as good.”

“The sword hasn’t come back, has it?” I asked.

She knew what I meant. “No, it’s still dead. It always will be, I think.”

Carol came back with wine and glasses on a tray. “You’re too thin, kiddo,” Fay observed benevolently as Carol handed her a glass.

“So Dick tells me. Dick, your pouch-meals are in the water, but I don’t know how long they ought to boil.”

“I’ll take care of them,” I said. I went out to the kitchen, collected silverware, and set the table. (I had found it unwise to have Carol in the kitchen much, since she burned things and cut herself.) Then I dumped the pouch-meals, two each, on plates and said, “Dinner is served.”

It wasn’t much of a meal, but there was plenty of wine. When we had done eating, I washed the dishes and made coffee. I turned the lights down. Fay and I sat on the sofa, and Carol, in the shadow, in a big chair.

It was the moment I had been waiting for. I wanted to find out more —a lot more —about Underearth and its denizens from Fay, but I didn’t want to alarm Carol in doing it.

Fay came to my aid. “This time of year’s depressing,” she said. “Even the elves feel it, I think. Or, at least, Kirk says they do.”

“Kirk?” Carol asked.

“In his Secret Commonwealth” Fay answered. “Does it bother you to talk about elves, Carol?”

“No-o-o-o. I mean, as long as it’s just talking. I thought I saw one several times, but Dick says it’s just my fancy.” She leaned back in the chair with her hands over her eyes. The movement threw her breasts into relief, and I realized again what a beautiful girl she was. Her blonde hair, getting longer now, was loose around her shoulders, and the dé colletage of her white dress was cut almost to her waist.

“It probably was just your fancy,” Fay agreed, with a sidelong glance at me. “Did you know that, if an elf bothers you, it can sometimes be constrained by an exchange of gifts?”

“No, I didn’t,” Carol replied. “An exchange? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, it doesn’t always work. But i f you say to an elf, ‘As I to thee, thou to me,’ and the elf blinks, then, if you hand it something, a pebble or something, the elf must obey your next command. It’s a sort of geas, as they say in Irish fairy tales.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this when I w ent below to find Carol?” I asked, feeling aggrieved.

“I learned about it afterward. But that’s why I was so calm in the circle when Hood was threatening you. I thought I could constrain him in that way, when the chips were down. Only he had that damn dr um.”

There was a pause. I took the coffee cups away and brought glasses of sherry. “What was the sword?” I asked.

“A focus for magical power,” Fay answered promptly.

“But—what’s magical power?”

“Crystalized will.”

“Whose will?”

“Merlin’s, in the first place. Afterward, the sword tended to carry out the will of whoever owned it.”

“Who was Merlin, though? You surely don’t mean the enchanter in the Arthurian romance?”

“No-o-o.” Fay seemed to arrange her thoughts. “I think Merlin was a great —magician —who visited our Earth between two and three thousand years ago. I suppose the character of the Arthurian Merlin was ultimately derived from him.”

“You said ‘visited our earth.’ Where did the Merlin of the sword come from? Outer spac e?”

Fay wrinkled up her nose. “No, upper space. Do you remember how, in the basement, it seemed that a greater world than ours was impinging on us? I think that greater world is what Merlin came from. The Macrocosmos.”

“The sword isn’t a focus for magical power any longer.”

“No. Its soul has gone back to where it originated, to the greater world.”

Carol moved uneasily in her chair. I felt that the turn of the discussion was distressing her, though I didn’t know why. But she said nothing, and af ter a moment, I asked Fay, “Why did Merlin visit our Earth?”

“How should I know? Perhaps he was an exile. He may have had reasons we can’t even guess at. But I think a Merlin, a great ‘magician,’ really did visit our Earth two or three thousand years ago .”

“But Fay, even three thousand years ago is well within historic times. I mean, magic just isn’t appropriate to a world that was taming horses, building ships, and learning metallurgy. Hammurabi was making laws in Babylon a thousand years before that.”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘magic,’ ” Fay answered mildly. “A visitor from the Macrocosmos might seem a culture hero or a god to the people he visited. But I’m not going to insist on the historical existence of ‘Merlin.’ You’ve felt the sword’s pow ers. What else can one call them except ‘magical’?”

There was no denying this. I said, “Assuming a Merlin really existed, and was the first owner of the sword, was he also the source of the Glain?”

“I don’t know. He may have been. I’ve never seen the Glain.”

“What is it? Does it really exist?”

“Oh, yes. It certainly exists. From the descriptions I’ve heard of it, it projects a protective field of some sort.”

“I thought it was a talisman.”

“A protective talisman, yes. Do you know the myth of the external soul? The Glain may have been where Merlin, marooned on our uncertain Earth, hid his soul —his life.”

I didn’t make much sense out of this. Carol was fidgeting uneasily in her chair, twist ing her hands together, it was with one eye on her that I asked, “What is Underearth really like?”

“You ought to know what it’s like,” Fay retorted blandly. “You spent three years there.”

“Yes, but I was taking a drug all the time. I have a feeling tha t a lot was going on that I missed. What’s it really like?”

Fay considered, chewing her underlip. “It’s a little more magical than you thought,” she conceded at last. “But it’s basically a cold, dreadful, sordid place. The inhabitants like it, of course. It’s home to them. And people from the Bright World can be corrupted into liking it.”

I didn’t know how to phrase my next question tactfully. Finally, I simply said, “How do crosses between elves and human beings come about?”

“They don’t happen very o ften nowadays,” Fay said. “The main source of such crosses was the human women who were kidnapped to suckle elf children. After the woman had spent two or three years in Otherworld, she might not want to go back to the light. And, in time, she might bear a child that was half elf.”

I thought of Fay’s breasts, with their tiny nipples, and wondered whether difficulties in lactation were common with elves. I didn’t like to ask her. At last, I said, “I never saw a young elf,” tentatively.

“No. They’re uncommon.”

“Are they dying out?”

“No, I don’t think so. Both the birthrate and the death rate are low. They war on each other incessantly, but they rarely kill. They have long lives. The low temperature slows down their metabolism.”

“Why did they kidnap me?” Carol asked abruptly. She leaned forward out of the shadow so that the light glinted on her hair. “Oh, I know they —like human flesh. But why did they select me? It doesn’t happen very often, does it?”

“No, not very often. They took you partly b ecause you were disturbed and upset; unhappy thoughts draw them. And partly it was because you were in an accessible location. But it’s also possible —”

“What’s possible? Go on,” I said.

“It’s also possible that they kidnapped Carol because Hood wanted her. He may have planned for things to happen as they did. It’s the kind of cold-blooded scheme a green elf who wanted a woman would think up.”

Carol gave a deep sigh and leaned back in her chair. I heard a dog —probably one of the cross-bred elkhounds th e police were currently using —barking somewhere outside. I asked, “Did you ever visit Underearth, Fay?”

“Why do you ask?” she replied evasively.

“Because you seem to know so much about it.”

She laughed, but didn’t answer. After a moment, she held her wine glass out to me. “Could I have a little more sherry, Dick? And then I must be thinking about going home. It’s been a pleasant evening. I’ve enjoyed myself.”

She had avoided my question. Still, I was almost s ure what the answer would be. “I’ll walk you home,” I told her.

“No, don’t bother.” She finished her drink and stood up. “I still have my arsenal, and lots and lots of permits. I’ll give you a ring when I get home safe. But I don’t like your leaving Caro l alone.”

It sounded O.K. We went with her to the door. “You know, Carol needs more diversion,” Fay said, her hand on the knob. “She’s alone all day.”

“Do you get bored, honey?” I asked.

“I watch TV,” Carol answered.

“You see? She needs diversion,” Fay said. She sounded like a mother-in-law. “Take her dancing some night.”

“The streets aren’t safe,” I replied doubtfully.

“Oh, for cat’s sake!” Fay said impatiently. “Don’t argue so much. There must be several places near here where you could go. And get her a camera. Good night, Dick. Good night, Carol.”

“Good night.”

“Would you like a camera, kid?” I asked when Fay had gone.

“Oh, yes. Yes, a camera would be awfully nice.”

“What kind of a camera? The kind you used to have?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I hadn’t thought about it.” She began collecting the wine glasses. “The kind of camera Ansel Adams uses, I guess,” she said , pausing on the threshold of the kitchen. “I don’t remember what it is. But with a Polaroid back.”

That she had forgotten the details about Adams’ camera, details she would once have had at the tip of her tongue, since she greatly admired his work, made me realize how changed she was. “I’ll look for one for you tomorrow,” I promised.

“That would be wonderful.” She began running water in the sink. “And if I see an elf”—she tried to laugh —“while you’re gone, I’ll put a geas on it.”

“That’s right.”

-

I lost no time in putting Fay’s suggestions into effect. I shopped for the camera during my lunch hour next day, and phoned the Cardboard Coffin, which was only a block and a half from where Carol and I were living, for a table for two that night. The Cof f in was said to have nice music and an atmosphere that, even now, managed to be a little hip. I didn’t think we could get into much trouble in a walk of a block and a half.

Carol was delighted with the camera, and pleased, at least, by the prospect of goi ng out. She dressed carefully, asking my opinion often; and before we left, she hid her new camera in the laundry basket, for fear the apartment should be looted while we were away.

The Coffin turned out to be squarer than I had thought. We ordered beer and sandwiches, and chewed and sipped while we listened to music that seemed to go back to the 1930s.

“Is that a waltz?” Carol asked after a moment.

“I don’t know. I guess it could be,” I answered. I was feeling glum because my evening out wasn’t worki ng better. The dancers, decorously locked in each other’s arms, were doing steps that my mother would have recognized. “I don’t know why people say this place is hip.”

“I think it’s because there’s a light show,” Carol answered. “They mention a light sho w in their ads.”

The light show started about ten minutes later. There was a screen, a little larger than the ones used for home movies, and red and green lights swirled on it, with an occasional burst of what looked like the pattern on the bottom of a p ressed-glass fruit bowl. Sometimes the fruit-bowl pattern would rotate.

It was a poor show, but we watched it hopefully, while the orchestra —trio —played tunes that had come from big musical comedies. Once we tried to dance, but stopped in the middle of a number when people kept bumping into us. We took up too much room for the Cardboard Coffin’s clientele.

We went back to our table. I ordered more beer. Then the trio started a familiar-sounding tune.

Carol recognized it before I did. “Why, it’s that Beatles thing,” she said, ” ‘The Fool on the Hill.’ They’ve got the timing all wrong, though.”

“Yeah. Look at the lights! The music must be inspiring him. This is really good.”

Great dark spirals, like tornadoes, were swooping around on the screen, seeming to burrow into it and then open out subterraneously. Perhaps the man at the lights was remembering the Beatles’ line, “and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round,” and giving an interpretat i on of it. The stuff was really good, far better than what had gone before, but it was somehow disquieting.

Carol reached for her handbag. “Let’s go, Dick,” she said. “I —I’d rather leave, if you don’t mind.” She looked at me appealingly and got to her fee t.

“O.K.,” I answered. I had already paid for what we had consumed. I reached in my pocket for money for the tip and stood up, too.

Suddenly something seemed to fall into the middle of the dance floor. (Actually, I suppose it had been lobbed in from th e door.) An instant later the whole place shook, shook like a flag snapping in a brisk breeze. It was a homemade bomb.

People began to scream. The music stopped. Neither Carol nor I had been hurt; we were some distance from the floor. I pulled her by t he arm toward the emergency exit. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, “before the pigs come. There’s no use in being in a mess.”

She was trembling, but she obeyed. We made our way through an alley and out into the night street. “What was it?” Carol asked as we hurried toward home.

“I expect somebody disapproved of the Coffin’s rock.”

“Rock? That?” She was scornful.

“Well, of their light show. Or perhaps it was a business rival. People throw bombs easy these days.”

We were nearly home. I heard a siren in the direction from which we had come. “I wish I could find some of the people I used to know,” Carol said inconsequentially. “I’ve looked in the phone book and asked the operator, but nobody’s here any more.”

“Are you lonesome, kid?”

“Not exactly. Alone.” She seemed about to say more, but checked herself.

“Well, I ‘m here,” I said, always the faithful boy friend. “I know.” She squeezed my arm.

-

At breakfast next morning she was much more cheerful. There was a hectic quality to her laughter and smiles, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I went to work with her waving good-bye at me from the door, all very devoted and dome stic. “Have fun with the camera,” I told her in the hall.

“Oh, I will.” She smiled and shut the door.

I got home a little early. I expected to find Carol in the living room, flipping restlessly from channel to channel on the TV, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the bedroom or the kitchen.

I was getting apprehensive. When I opened the bathroom door, I saw that the blind had been drawn and the room was quite dark. Carol —it must be she —was lying in the bathtub.

I don’t know what I thought. As I hurried toward the tub, I tripped over something, and there was a sudden brilliant flash.

Hurriedly I ran up the window blind. Carol was lying in the tub with her eyes shut, her head drooping to one side, and the water lapping at her nose.

I pulled the plug and the water, cool to the touch, began to run out. Carol didn’t stir. I spread a bathtowel on the floor , lifted her out of the tub, and laid her on it. She seemed to be unconscious. I hadn’t really faced the possibility that she might be dead.

I tried mouth-to-mouth breathing. After only a few exhalations into her mouth, her eyes opened. “Oh, dear,” she s aid dolefully. “What ceiling is that?”

“It’s the bathroom ceiling,” I told her. Now that I knew she wasn’t drowned, I was getting angry with her. “What was the big idea? What were you doing in the dark in the water? What were you trying to do?”

“I was trying to get a photograph of my soul.” She sneezed.

“A photograph—?”

“Yes. You see,, ever since we were in the basement, I’ve been afraid my —my soul would get lost. You remember how everything seemed to open up?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been afraid. That other world —what Fay called Macrocosmos —is such a big place. My soul could just get lost in it. Like a marble rolling into a crack.”

I couldn’t call her fear absurd; I remembered too clearly the moment when the impossible gl ories of that Overworld had come tunneling down onto the spot where I stood. I was silent.

“You understand,” Carol went on, “it isn’t dying I’m afraid of. It’s having my soul get lost. Last night, when we saw the light show and then there was the explosi on, I was afraid for a minute that Macrocosmos was opening up again. When I realized it was only a bomb, I felt a little better. But I wanted to put my soul in some safe place. I knew that if I could do that, I’d be all right.”

“The explosion itself didn ‘t bother you? I mean, the fact that somebody was trying to kill the Cardboard Coffin’s customers?”

“Of course, it bothered me. Violence makes our world look thin, more like a curtain, and Macrocosmos seem closer. That’s one of the reasons I have trouble forgetting what happened in the basement —as you said, people throw bombs so easy these days.

“Could I have a towel, Dick? I’m awfully wet.”

I handed her a towel from the rack and she began to dry herself and wring the ends of her long hair out into th e towel. “I thought if I could get my soul on film I’d be safer. I knew it wasn’t a very good idea, but I tried to believe it would work because I couldn’t think of anything better. It was the only idea I had.”

“But what were you doing in the bathtub? What did that have to do with it?”

“I thought that if I tried scrying while I was in the water it might make me feel a little detached from myself, enough to be able to get a picture of my soul. I had the camera s et up and a cord fixed so I could pull the shutter release when I felt the right moment had come. Only I fainted before I had any occasion to pull the cord.” Still sitting on the floor, she reached for the roll of toilet paper, pulled some off, and blew h e r nose into it. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you, Dick?”

“No.” This was true; I felt that Carol had been trying to cope with an extraordinary experience by the only means she had available, which were ordinary ones. “What were you scrying in?” I asked.

“A drinking glass. I must have dropped it in the water when I fainted.”

“Did you see anything in the glass that frightened you?”

“I don’t think so. It was the hot water and sitting still while I scried. There was a kind of pressure around my heart, and then things got black.”

She must have been in the bath a long time for the water to get as cold as it was when I pulled her out. I thought of the bone I had found on the bathroom floor. “Don’t do it again,” I said finally.

“Oh, I won’t.” She starte d to get up, rather shakily, and I helped her to her feet.

“But you’re still worried about your soul getting lost?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look at me as she said it. I put my arm around her in a way that was meant to be comforting.

“I feel better now that I’ve told you about it, really I do,” she said, and with that I had to be content. I hoped it was true.

-

CHAPTER 18

It rained a lot that year. Besides the increasing civil dis order, I remember chiefly the short, dark days and the constant rain. Christmas came; Carol and I gave each other presents, but skipped the tree. We were seeing a good deal of Fay. She called up often and made dates with us.

Fay had acquired a boy friend , a dark, heavy-set man named Howard something. He talked so much about the coming revolution and the use of dynamite that I suspected him of being a police spy. Neither Carol nor I liked him, and we tried to get out of invitations he was included in. We b oth thought he was unworthy of Fay.

One rainy evening early in January, I called a taxi —the safest means of transportation —to take us to Fay’s for dinner. We knew that Howard was going to be there, but we didn’t want to make our dislike of him too obvio us. He greeted us with his usual numbing handshake and then went out in the kitchen to get drinks, leaving me and Fay alone in the living room. Carol was taking off her coat in the bedroom.

“What a night,” I said, for want of something better to say. “It wasn’t much colder and gloomier down below than it is in the Bright World tonight.”

Fay gave me an odd look. I felt that I had said something exceedingly tactless, though I couldn’t think where the tactlessness lay. After all, she was not exactly a virg in where knowledge of Underearth was concerned.

Before she could make any answer, Howard —he preferred to be called “Howie”—came back with the drinks. He had brought bourbon for himself and sherry for the rest of us. “Here’s to anarchy,” he said morosely, raising his glass, and we all drank.

The meal was terrible. Fay was ordinarily a good cook, but that night she seemed to be laboring under a tension that made her scorch the frozen peas, undercook the fish, and serve the salad with tap water clinging to the lettuce leaves. She kept holding her wine glass out to Howie to be refilled. By the time we had got through with the entree, she was definitely tanked.

She started to take our plates out to the kitchen. Suddenly she put her hand to her lips. “Excuse me,” she said faintly, and made a dash for the bathroom.

When she came back, she was pale, but she seemed to feel better. Dessert brought no incidents. Over the coffee, Howard —Howie —discussed various homemade explosives, and then, with no transition at all, got on the topic of tarot cards.

“I’ve always been interested in the occult,” he informed us gloomily. Howie’s gloom was almost as striking as his fondness for dynamite. “Tarot packs are scarce items these days. When I saw these in the Thrift Shop, I snapped them up.”

He got the big cards —the de Laurence deck —and the book that accompanies them from the pocket of his safari jacket.

“You put them out in the form of a cross,” he ex plained, “and then you look up what the cards mean in the book. It’s simple. I’ll show you how it works. I’ll do a reading for her.” He indicated Fay.

The tarot had been an in thing long before I had gone below in search of Carol. That Howie should suppose it would be new to us now, three and a half years later, was a part of his general air of being behind the times. Still, it was better than having to play poker with him or watch him attempt to do card tricks.

Fay seemed to feel the same way, for she said, “All right, Howie,” and cleared the coffee table so he could lay out the cards.

Howie’s reading was as low-quality as the meal Fay had given us. He fumbled cards, kept repeating himself, and had to look up everything in the book three times over. As a tarot reader, Howie was strictly a textbook engineer.

I don’t remember much about the details of the reading except for two cards. Howie turned up the Knight of Wands, upright, for card number seven, which is the card t hat shows the Significator’s position or attitude in the circumstances.

“That means departure, flight, change of circumstances,” he told us, keeping his finger on the place in the book. “It can also mean —unh —alienation.”

“Well, I was thinking of lookin g for another apartment,” Fay said, laughing. Despite her laughter, I felt she was a little disturbed. “But since the rent’s paid ahead, I don’t think even Mrs. Schumucker could call it flight.”

Howie turned up two more nondescript cards. Then he came to card ten, the last of the reading, the card that would show the final result, the culmination, “what will come.” It was the Ace of Wands, reversed.

“Hm m,” said Howie. “That means fall, decadence, ruin, perdition. Also, a certain clouded joy. But it’s n ot a good card.

“I’m sorry, Fay. I wouldn’t have wanted to read for you if I hadn’t thought it would come out better.” He gathered up the cards and put them back in their box. His dark, heavy face sagged with contrition. He looked like a bloodhound in a fit of remorse.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Fay said . She drew a long breath. ” ‘A certain clouded joy’—why, what’s wrong with that? That’s about all one can expect in this life —or in any life.”

She shivered. “I’m going to turn up the heat,” she said. “It’s cold in here.”

We talked for a while longer. Howie kept saying how sorry he was he’d turned up a bad card for Fay. Finally, she said, “Shut up, Howie,” in a flat, imperative voice, and he obeyed, though with the expression of somebody who has swallowed something he didn’t intend to. Then it was time f or us to be going home.

During our good-byes, Howard stood with his arm around Fay’s waist. I don’t think she liked the caress very much; she started to push the ruffled cuffs of her sleeves away from her wrists in a gesture of nervous rejection, and the n stopped herself.

The cab driver wanted to see our Id discs before he would accept us as fares.

Carol was silent in the cab, but when we got home, she said, “Dick, I think Howie is beating her.”

“What?” I was really surprised. “Howie’s beating Fay?”

“Yes, I think so. Did you notice the bruises on her wrists when she came back from vomiting? Big black spots on both wrists, as if he’d grabbed her and thrown her around.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Fay’s not that kind of a person. There’s no reason why she’d put up with it.”

Carol shrugged. She took off her dress —we were in the bedroom —and hung it neatly on a hanger. “How else would she get bruises like that? And she didn’t want us to see them. That’s why she wore that lon g-sleeved dress. But being sick upset her so she forgot to keep the cuffs pulled down.”

“There must be some other explanation,” I said feebly. (There was, and we were soon to learn its nature.) “Do you think he’s making out with her?”

“I suppose so.” Carol sat down at the dressing table and began to brush her hair. “But I don’t understand why he doesn’t move in with her. It’s so much safer, living with a man.”

“I don’t think she likes him very well,” I said in a burst of insight. “If they’re lovers, t here’s some nonsexual reason for it.”

Carol put the brush down. She looked so pretty that I couldn’t resist giving her a kiss. Her mouth was perfectly passive under mine; if I tried to have sex with her, it would be exactly the same way. I wished she’d h urry up and improve.

“I’m sorry, Dick,” she said after a moment.

“Oh, that’s O.K.,” I answered. “You won’t always be like this.”

“No. I won’t.”

-

When I got home next night, Carol was on the tele phone. “All right,” she was saying, “we’ll be over. About seven. Fine.” She hung up.

“It was Fay,” she told me, turning from the telephone. “She wants us to have dinner with her again tonight. Howard has to work late, and she’s lonesome. She’s upset. I t old her we would.”

“Oh, Christ. O.K., Fay’s done a lot for us. I’m glad to go. But I wish it weren’t raining again tonight.”

-

When we got out of the cab, we saw that the windows of Fay’s apartment were dark. We exchanged glances. Carol hurried up the steps and began ringing the doorbell. There was no answer. She tried the door. It was unlocked.

Before we could decide what to do, Mrs. Schumucker appeared. She was wearing a blue-checked apron, and her thin bluish hair was rolled up on pi nk rollers.

“She was called out of town,” she said, coughing and wiping her eyes. “Unexpectedly. Anyhow, that’s what she told me. She said she left you a note, but she forgot to tell me where she put it. Do you want me to come in and help you look for it ?”

“No, thank you,” Carol answered. She opened the door and turned on the light. I followed her. Mrs. Schumucker was left in the hall.

The note was easy enough to find. It was propped up against the clock on top of the bookcase. “Carol and Dick,” the e nvelope was addressed. The flap was stuck down firmly all around. Fay knew Mrs. Schumucker’s tendencies.

“Open it,” Carol said.

I did so and held the note so we could both read it. This is what we read: -

Dear Carol and Dick:

I’m sorry to stand you up like this. I suppose I ought to have called you, but the matter wasn’t one I wanted to discuss over the phone. What has happened is that my longing for Otherworld has grown too strong to resist. Blood will tell. Otherworld is in my blood. I have gone below.

This isn’t a sudden decision. For several months now I have been fighting my own feelings. I started up with Howard not so much because I like him —I find him just passable —as because I thought a love affair in the Bright Worl d might help to distract me. But a longing for Otherworld isn’t dealt with so easily.

It’s been really acute all this week. I saw you looking at the bruises on my wrists, Carol. They came from my tying my wrists and my ankles together with clothesline to keep myself from starting on the descent to Otherworld. I found that if I pulled the cord tight enough to hurt, the pain would take my mind off Underearth for a while.

I called you tonight because I knew that if I spent an evening alone I wouldn’t be ab le to resist my wishes any more. But after I called you, I began to think, Why not? Why shouldn’t I go?

So I am going, and I think Otherworld will be quieter because I am there. I’ve been there before, you know. I know from former experience that the inh abitants will accept me as a sort of queen.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. Howard’s reading last night hit the nail on the head. This may be ruin, perdition, a fall. But there is also in it ‘a certain clouded joy.’

Good-bye, my dears. As far as I have any influence —and I think I will have a good deal of influence —your elf troubles are over.

Sincerely and affectionately yours, Fay.

-

We looked at each other. “She can’t be serious,” Carol said, and then took the note from my hand. “She’s written ‘Over’ at the bottom of the page.”

She turned the sheet of notepaper over. At the top of the sheet we read: “P.S. I was married once to Hood.”

Married to Hood —that explained a good deal. I put my arm around Carol, who was on the edge of tears. “Poor Fay,” she said, “poor Fay, down in that dreadful place.”

“She said we weren’t to feel sorry for her,” I answered. “And I think Underearth is something we won’t need to fear any more.”

Carol said nothing. She folded the note up carefully and put it in her handbag. Two or three blocks away I heard a burst of gunfire, followed by the scream of a police siren. I thought, Our Otherworld problems may be over, but we still have to deal with those of the Bright World.

-

CHAPTER 19

It kept on raining. The days were getting a little longer, but they were just as dismal as earlier. Carol got a job doing part-time typing, and I quit my job at the computer center and got one with the Berkeley public-health department. It didn’t pa y quite as well as what I had been doing with computers —I was running routine laboratory analyses —and the hours were longer. But I felt it was more worthwhile.

We missed Fay. We talked about her a good deal. We couldn’t decide whether what had happened t o her was a tragedy or a sort of happy ending. Was she only the latest of Otherworld’s many victims, or was she an august figure like Persephone, ruling tranquilly in the kingdom of Dis? It depended on the point of view.

I suppose her disappearance would have passed unnoticed, except for Howard. The times were troubled, and Mrs. Schumucker, after waiting until Fay’s rent was up, confiscated her household goods and offered her apartment for rent. But Howie, having learned from Mrs. Schumucker that Fay had left a note for us when she was called out of town, came around to see us.

“There’s something very peculiar about this,” he said, glaring at Carol morosely. “People don’t just disappear.”

“In these days they do,” I said. I didn’t expect any real troubl e with Howie —there had been no suspicious circumstances connected with Fay’s leaving —but I wished he’d go away.

“I don’t believe it. The whole Id disc system is designed to prevent people dropping out of sight.”

I shrugged. “Well, she’s gone, syst em or no system.”

“Mrs. Schumucker says she left you a note. I’d like to see that note.”

“I’m sorry. We threw it away.” This wasn’t true. Carol had the note stashed away in a drawer, as a souvenir of our friend.

“Um.” He clasped his hands behind his back and looked from me to Carpi suspiciously. There were little beads of sweat on his forehead, though the room was cool.

There was a short silence. “I could make trouble for you about this,” he said slowly, “but I won’t, if —”

“If what?”

“If you’ll pu t me in touch with the people who’ve helped her go where she is.”

I couldn’t make much sense out of this. “We don’t know anybody,” I said. “As for making trouble for us, go ahead and try. We haven’t done anything.”

Howie’s air of gloomy unease deepened . “I don’t know why you’re stalling so about this,” he said. “Fay told me once she had contacts with the underground.”

I couldn’t repress a slight start. “You see?” Howie said triumphantly. “You do know something.

“Now, look. I want to get out of here.” For a moment, his eyes were wild, and I saw that he was badly frightened. “If you’ll put me in touch with the underground —the people who’ve helped Fay out of the country —I’ll make it well worth your while. Well worth your while.”

Carol frowned. She was sitting on the arm of one of the chairs, sipping a glass of California chianti. “But, Howie, we don’t know anybody like that. We just don’t. We’re not the kind of people who know people.”

“You’ll have a hard time convincing me of that,” he said with a certain spiteful brightness.

“It’s true, though,” Carol answered. “If we knew anybody like that, why would we stay here? Times are getting worse and worse, and. we haven’t any special commitments to any faction. If we could get o ver the border into B.C., we certainly would. Dick and I have talked about it a lot. But we haven’t money enough to be able to post the bond for returning to the States, and we couldn’t possibly qualify for exit permits.”

“I don’t think that’s much of an argument,” Howie said ungraciously. “You probably don’t have money enough to pay what the underground would want, either. Things like that are expensive. But you might know somebody in the underground, all the same.”

“Then how could Fay have afforded th e underground’s services?” Carol asked. “She wasn’t any richer than we are.

“You’ll just have to believe us, Howie. We don’t know anybody in any underground movement. That’s the way it is.”

For a moment, Howard remained staring at us. Then he grabbed h is hat —he hadn’t taken off his raincoat during the interview, but had been quietly dripping on the carpet —and headed for the door. “G’night,” he said morosely, and went out .

-

He was back next evening at about the same time. “I knew you could help me,” he s aid as soon as we had let him in.

I was getting sore. I didn’t like Howard anyhow, and our evening meal, because of the growing food shortage, had consisted of a bar of milk chocolate and half a package of English muffins. It was enough to make anybody i rritable. I said, “We told you last night we don’t know anybody in any underground movement.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I don’t mean that. I’m working on another angle now. There’s something else you know that could help me, help me quite a lot.”

“What?” I asked, with genuine curiosity.

He didn’t reply immediately. He clasped his hands together behind his back and teetered back and forth on his heels a couple of times. Then he said, “Let’s put it this way. I’ve made a bad blunder, a real boo-boo, in conn ection with the people I work for.”

“Who’s that?” Carol asked. Tonight she was drinking tea, the chianti being on the verge of running out and no more in sight. “I don’t think I was ever told where you work.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Howard answered. “I wo rk for several people, actually. But”—he swallowed and licked his lips —“I’ve made a bad mistake for one of them. They’re people who get uptight when somebody makes a mistake.”

It sounded to me as if Howard were a secret agent who had given incorrect inf ormation to his employers. Or perhaps he’d been taking money from several employers at the same time. Actually, Howie in the role of secret agent was hard to credit. He was too sedentary.

“Never mind who I work for,” he went on. “The point is that I’ve m ade a bad mistake. I’d like to try to compensate for it somehow. This is where you come in.”

“How?” I asked.

He looked up at the ceiling gloomily. “Two or three months ago,” he said, “an interesting sample came into my hands. It was an ounce or so of some reddish cereal, coarsely ground, and it had a bitter taste. It was said to be a powerful intoxicant. I turned it over to our —to some chemists I know —and they were interested.”

I felt a thrill of alarm. “You say ‘a sample came into my hands,’” I said, enunciating carefully. “Who gave it to you? What was the source?”

“Oh, a man who worked for one of my employers. His name was Hood. I don’t know where he got it originally. Anyhow, the che mists got working on it. They were interested, very interested. They ran a lot of tests on it.”

Sweat was running down my back. That Howie had narcotics-bureau connections was news, and bad news.

For if Carol’s association with Hood were suspected, she ‘d be in for some unpleasant questioning, at least. So would I. When Hood had actually died could be considered a moot question. But she and I had been with him both times.

“What’s this got to do with us?” Carol asked. I doubt Howard noticed the tremor i n her voice.

“I want more of that meal,” he said. “An ounce doesn’t go very far when there are a lot of tests to run on it. Also, I want information on the conditions under which the meal was produced. The chemists say the reddish color probably comes fr om some fungus growing on the grain. What were the conditions under which it grew? You see what I mean.”

“I suppose so,” I answered. “But what makes you think we can help you with this? You must know we’r e not working for any of the people you are. How did you happen to select us as sources of information?”

He gave me a long, almost scornful look. “I saw it in that tarot,” he said.

I was opening my mouth to tell him what I tho ught of his reasoning when Carol kicked me sharply on the ankle. A little of the tea in her cup slopped into the saucer. She said, “Howie, we don’t admit knowing anything about any meal. But if we could give you the information you want —it’s impossible to get a sample of the meal, perfectly impossible —if we could get you the information, what would there be in it for us?”

“Exit permits,” he answered promptly.

“Exit permits? For how far?”

“Clear on up to Vancouver.”

“Do you expect us to believe this?” Carol said. “Last night you were begging us to put you in contact with some part of the underground so you could get out of the country. If you can’t get out yourself, how could you possibly get exit permits for us?”

“I can, though. It’s different. The y’re watching me, and the minute I make a move to leave, the cords will tighten. But I could get you out. You’d just be friends of mine. You’re not under suspicion.”

“What do your employers want to do with the meal?” I asked. “I don’t suppose it’s disint erested scientific curiosity.”

“No. Well, they thought if the chemists could isolate the active principle in the meal, it would be handy in riot control.”

My face must have shown what I thought of this, for Howie added quickly, “They think it might also be useful for dealing with nausea caused by prolonged weightlessness during interplanetary flight. That’s a worthwhile idea, Aldridge.”

“Um.” Carol and I l ooked at each other. I said, “We’d like to discuss your proposition before we give you an answer.”

“All right.” Howie picked up his hat. “But don’t discuss it too long. Tell you what, Aldridge. I’ll meet you at the telephone booth on the corner of Shattu ck and Milvia tomorrow night about five. I’ll have the exit permits in my pocket, and I’ll give them to you in return for information about the conditions favorable for the fungus growth.

“And don’t try any funny business. I mean, don’t think you can get the permits away from me by force. It wouldn’t do you any good. They’ll call me at each of the checkpoints for verbal confirmation.”

“How do we know you’ll give it?” I asked.

“Why wouldn’t I? I don’t have anything against you two, and I’d rather be ho nest if I can.”

He walked toward the door. “Don’t worry about what use they may make of the fungus,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “The world’s already in such a mess that a little more won’t make any difference. Good night.”

“Good night.”

As soon as he had gone, the discussion started. Carol, though she had led Howie on at first, maintained that we really didn’t have any information about the fungus to give him.

“Yes, we do,” I said. “What?” she demanded.

“That it’s grown in absolute da rkness, except for patches of phosphorescence, at temperatures near zero on heaps of sprouted grain.”

“What kind of grain?” she challenged.

“Barley, I think. But I believe the fungus would grow on just about anything.”

“Oh, Dick! Did you actually see any of this? Are you really sure of it?”

I reflected. “I think I saw it. I hallucinated a lot of the time. But I am sure that’s the way it’s grown. Why? Aren’t you sure, too?”

She looked away from me. “I guess so.” Her face lit up briefly. “Wait, thou gh. How do the elves turn the sprouted grain into meal?”

“They grind it in stone mills,” I answered promptly. “What the Indians call metates. And befo re you object that I never saw them doing this, I’ll say that it’s the only thing they could do. Perhaps the grinding has something to do with the meal’s development of intoxicating properties.”

“Perhaps it does,” she agreed. She sighed.

“Why are you s o opposed to giving Howie the information?” I asked.

“I don’t like the use the chemists he works for are going to make of it,” she answered, looking down and pleating a fold of her skirt.

“That’s not our fault. You heard what Howie said when he was lea ving. I think he’s right.”

The discussion passed into an argument, with my asking Carol if she was so high-minded she didn’t want to get out of this mess and into B.C., and her answering yes, of course, she wanted to get out, but —Finally, she said, “I always felt like a coward because I didn’t join the vigil at Port Chicago to stop the trucks passing in and out with napalm.”

“That was years ago. That war is over. Besides, you were just a kid. Nobody could have expected you to join the vigilers,” I an swered.

“Kids no older than I was were in the vigil. They put their bodies on the line to try to stop that war. And now you want me to help Howard’s chemists develop a new chemical for riot control! It’s too much. I can’t.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said. “And, anyhow, the chemical in atter-corn may not be any worse than the stuff they’re curren tl y using to control mobs. Dusting for example. It might even be gentler.”

Carol got up and walked over to the window. There wasn’t anything t o be seen from the window except more rain. With her back toward me, she said, “Yes, it might be gentler. But it brings us just one step closer to the naked force of a police state.”

“Then let’s get out of here!” I said sharply. I was getting exasperated . “The police state is coming, no matter what you and I do. .

“Do you always have to be so hard to save, Carol? It seems to me I’m always trying to get you out of bad situations, and having you fight me off. Do you always have to be a sinking ship firing on the rescuers?”

She turned her head toward me for a moment, and then turned back to rest her forehead against the glass of the window. “Are you sorry you brought me back from Underearth?” she said.

“No, of course not! But I wish you didn’t resist me so.”

“I get so stinking sick of having to be taken care of!” she-said with sudden passion. “Always having to be rescued, always having to be saved! Let’s go to bed, Dick. We can’t persuade each other, and I’m tired. Do wha? you want to about cooperatin g with Howie. You will, anyhow.”

I went up to her and tried to kiss her. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for you,” I said.

“Oh, yes. I’m sure you are.

“Can you remember to get some rat poison tomorrow, Dick? I saw a rat in the kitchen tonight.”

“All right.” Once more I tried to kiss her. She didn’t try to pull away, but she certainly didn’t connect with the kiss.

We went to bed. We lay beside each other in silence. Once she said, “Don’t be cross at me, Dick,” and I pretended to be asleep.

Just before I really did go to sleep, I realized that I was irritated toward Carol most of the time then. It was partly the result of a long period of sexual abstinence; but the irritation was also caused by a well-justified feeling of helplessness where taki ng care of my girl was concerned. If we had to stay in Berkeley, I might not be able to fend for her.

The issue between us was still unresolved next morning when I went to work. Over the coffee and English muffins at breakfast, Carol had said, “Of course , I want to get out of the States. The air is so heavy here. But I think one can pay too high a price for anything.” Her eyes looked hollow, as if she hadn’t slept very much.

“For anything?” I had said, getting into my slicker. “Can one pay too high a pr ice for freedom?”

“One can pay too high a price for selfish escape.”

I felt enormously irritated toward her, but her reluctance had affected me all the same. When I went to keep the appointment with Howie at five, I was still not quite positive what an swer I would make to him.

It was raining. I got under the shelter of a roof over hang, and looked up and down the street for him. He wasn’t to be seen, and, though I waited until a little after six, he never did show up. I walked home slowly in the rain, feeling both annoyed and relieved.

“What did you tell him?” Carol asked as soon as I got inside the apartment door.

“Nothing. He didn’t come.”

“Oh.” She looked glad and then disappointed. “I expect he’ll be over later tonight.”

“Probably. He may not have been able to keep our date.”

We had supper —potatoes, lettuce, and a slimy -textured, repellent fish —and settled to wait for Howard. At ten-thirty he still hadn’t come, and we went to bed.

He didn’t come the next night, either. About seven I noticed an extensive reddish glare in the night sky in the direction of Oakland. I turn ed on the TV and was rewarded by a picture tube full of arson and rioting. Oakland was on fire and would have been burning considerably more briskly than it was, except that everything was soaked with rain.

Carol watched for a little while, and then went out in the kitchen to wash the dishes (she was doing more of the housework now). I remembered her distaste for violence, and the explanation she had given for it: violence made our world look thin, like a curtain, and Macrocosmos seem closer.

I went out into the kitchen and found her weeping quie tl y into the dishwater. “You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you, honey?” I asked anxiously.

“Foolish?” she echoed.

“Like trying to get a photograph of your soul.”

“Oh!” She gave a little laugh. “No, of course not. It’s only that I get so sick of seeing buildings set on fire and people hit over the head. It does make things seem thin.”

I very nobly refrained from mentioning British Columbia.

The next day was Frid ay. I bought a copy of the Berkeley Weekly Gazette on my way home from work. The front page was full of small, local, unimportant, cop-upholding news, but the inside pages were occupied with photos and stories about the Oakland riot.

I looked at the pict ures with scanty interest. One riot is pretty much like another, and I had learned over the lab radio at noon that the Oakland “disturbance” had been contained and was almost over. Then a name in one of the accompanying stories caught my eye.

I read that Howard Abaccia, thirty-four, of Hiawath a Terrace, Oakland, had been badly burned by a Molotov cocktail during the rioting. His injuries, third-and fourth-degree burns, had been so extensive that he had died shortly after arrival at the hospital.

I raised my eyebrows a little. Howie was certainly dead; I trusted the newspaper account that far. But Molotov cocktails, at least unsophisticated ones, don’t usually cause such extensive burns on people. And where had Howard been between the time of his b roken date with me and the time of his death? It seemed to me that the shadowy power with which Howard had been involved —Mafia, CIA, internal-security agency —had acted to eliminate him.

I hoped Carol wouldn’t se e the newspaper item. This was reasonable. Usually she barely glanced at such news. But Howard’s name must have caught her eye very much as it had mine. She said, “That’s our Howie, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“So they got him. I mean, it can’t have bee n an accident. Poor Howard, always so gloomy and morose. He certainly had something to be morose about.”

“He did,” I agreed.

“I hope he didn’t have our exit permits on him.”

“It probably wouldn’t make any difference if he did,” I said. “He wouldn’t h ave spilled what he was working on to his employers. He wanted it to be a surprise. If our names were on the permits, they’d think we were just people Howard was doing a favor for.”

“I hope you’re right.” She folded the paper carefully and laid it on the coffee table. “You know, Dick, I was really expecting you’d tell him what we knew about the corn. And —I was glad about it. It wouldn’t have been my fault, and we’d have been able to get out of here. But there’s no chance of it now.”

I nodded. She was ce rtainly right. That gate —if it had ever been open —was closed.

-

CHAPTER 20

The observation platform at Point Reyes Light Station is located above the light; we could see the light itself far below us, clinging desperately to the rock. And below the light, more than six hundred feet down, was the sea.

Wind whistled in our ears. There are always great gusts of wind at Point Reyes, and often choking fog as well. But we had had good luck with the weather. The day was radiantly, preternaturally clear.

North of us we could see the long, straight white line of Point Reyes beach, begi nning to be edged with rose-purple rock cress and sand daisies. And ahead, due west, lay the broad Pacific, noblest of oceans, stretching unfettered clear to Asia. It was an incredible view.

Carol had been leaning out over the railing, looking westward, while her long hair, despite the scarf in which she had t i ed it, whipped in the wind. Now she turned to face me. “Isn’t this,” she said, and paused to bite her lip, “isn’t this the beauty of the world? Light, air, sea, space! The beauty of the world!”

How long was it since I had seen her so happy? Years and years, before we had had our quarrel, before she had been taken away from me. But that day she was radiant. I felt she was bathing in light and space.

“Can’t we stay here, Dick?” she said coaxingly. I thought she was more than half-serious. “I can’t bear to go back to Berkeley after this.”

“The light station is closed to visitors at four,” I said, feeling objectionably square.

She laughed, said something that I didn’t catch, because of the wind, and went back to looking at the view. She was wearing an outfit of the style that was currently fashionable —billowy Oriental-style trousers gathered in at the ankles, and a tight-fittin g little jacket, both bright turquoise. She looked extremely pretty in it, because of her long legs and slender waist, but I preferred her in dresses. Pants on a woman are the next thing to a girdle of chastity.

The wind was rising. I thought she must be getting chilled, but she didn’t seem to notice that she was shivering. We stayed on the platform until an attendant told us it was closing time, and then she left reluctantly. It made me realize how confined and pressed-in she had felt. “Oh, I hate to go b ack!” she said on the way to the car.

We drove back down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, gently downhill, through fields brilliant with the flowers of California spring. They were set so solid with blossoms we could hardly see the green of grass and leaves. ” ‘The winter is over and done, the flowers appear in the fields,’” Carol quoted. “Dick, could you stop the car? I’d like to get out and walk in them.”

I pulled over to the side and stopped. We both got out. “I know the names of some of them,” Carol sai d. “Blue-eyed grass, and brodiaeas and California poppies, of course.- But what are those blue pealike flowers, and those, and those, and those?” She pointed.

“Lupines,” I said, “and larkspur and Franciscan wallflowers. Those are sun cups, those are sea pinks, and that little plant is owl’s clover. And all that yellow is gold fields.”

“How do you know the names of so many?” she asked.

“From high-school botany. We had a teacher who used to bring us here on field trips.”

“Bless her,” Carol said. “I’d like to lie down and roll in them. I’m going to pick a few.”

I opened my mouth to tell her picking wild flowers was illegal, and then shut it again. I didn’t want to dull the happiness on her face, and the flowers would stay f resh long enough to brighten our apartment in Berkeley for several days.

A ‘copter from the sheriff’s office flew over while she was picking her bouquet, but it didn’t come down or bullhorn at us to stop. It was the third ‘copter we had seen flying above the boulevard; it seemed to me the police state had already arrived when an unimportant byway in Marin County was so thoroughly patrolled. I suppose they thought somebody might be trying to escape from California in a rowboat.

“California poppies are th e loveliest of all,” Carol said as she got back in the car with her little bunch of flowers. “People speak of royal blue, and royal gold, but they’re royal orange.” She touched the silky, glowing petals delicately. “But are they really of the poppy family ? They don’t look much like them.”

“They’re not true poppies —Papaver —but they are members of the poppy family,” I told her, pleased to be informative. “They even have some of the narcotic and analgesic properties of poppies generally. The California Indi ans used them to relieve pain.”

She was thoughtful. “That’s interesting. Where would the 1 opiate in them be? I mean, in what part of the plant?”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s not the sort of thing they tell you in high-school botany. But I imagine the s ap exuding from the seed capsules would have narcotic qualities. It’s that way with poppies generally. The gum that’s collected from the wounded seed pods of the opium poppy is the source of opium.”

She didn’t say much on the drive back. The sun was sink ing, and the beautiful day was growing cold. But she arranged her illegal wildflowers carefully in a vase and put it on our dining table. I was glad I hadn’t warned her against picking them.

We had a good supper; we had found a market in Inverness where we had been able to buy eggs, tomatoes, cheese, canned goods, and even a gallon of wine. We had the Berkeley food shortages licked temporarily, and it made us both feel good.

She washed the supper dishes, and I wiped. She looked so pretty when she was ha nging up her apron that I couldn’t help kissing her. To my surprise, she kissed me back —a real kiss, with her mouth open and her eyes half-closed.

I wasn’t too surprised to be able to act. I put my arm around her —she was smiling —and led her into the bed room. She got out of her harem pants under her own power. She always used to be a fine, responsive girl.

That night she outdid herself. She was ardent, inventive, exciting, funny, and sweet. No wonder she had been quoting Canticles in the flower fields a t Point Reyes! We went to sleep in each other’s arms and woke up in more embraces. Indubitably, the winter was over and it was spring.

“What helped you so much, sweetheart?” I asked in one of our waking intervals. “Getting away from Berkeley for a while?”

“It was mainly that,” she said sleepily. “The whole day was lovely.” She seemed about to say more, but checked herself. I thought of her pensiveness when I had told her about the narcotic properties of California poppies. Well, we’d cross that bridge w hen we got to it.

“We’ll go back soon,” I promised.

“I’d like that.”

We didn’t get back to Point Reyes, but Carol didn’t backslide. She was plainly much better (for that matter, I was feeling much better myself). I did notice that there were scratche s on the sides of the long, pointed California poppy pods, and that she kept the pods in the vase even after all the petals had fallen. Whether she was making any use of the sap from the pods I didn’t know. I didn’t think it mattered much if she was. The a mount of opiate she would be able to extract from a handful of Eschscholt zia californica pods would be about like the amount in half a codeine tablet. The pods were more of a psychological crutch than anything else.

-

One evening about the middle of April we came home to find that our apartment had been robbed. Carol’s camera, since she had had the forethought to hide it under the bed, was safe. But the TV—a new wafer-thin hologramatic model —was gone, and most of our clothing, and the electric appliances i n the kitchen. Worst of all, the five big volumes of Sierra Club photographs had been taken from the bookcase. Carol had been particularly fond of them.

“I knew something like this would happen,” Carol said. “We’ve been so happy, and there haven’t been any disturbances in the streets. It was too good to last. But I don’t see why they had to take my books.” There was an odd look m her eyes.

“I may be able to buy some of the things back,” I told her. “Thieves have been offering what they stole for ransom to their victims lately. Don’t cry, sweetheart. I may be able to get your books back.”

“I’m not crying,” she said. This was true, but her self-control bo thered me a little. It seemed unnatural.

Next day came a phone call from the thieves. After some haggling, I got four of the Sierra Club books back, as well as a favorite costume of Carol’s and the electric toaster. The other things I had to let go unran somed, to the annoyance of my caller.

The incident didn’t drive Carol back into sexual disinclination, as I had been afraid it might. But she took to sleepwalking, and several times I found her in the living room, crawling about on her hands and knees, w ith all the lights on. When I asked her, newly awakened, what she had been trying to do, she told me that she had been dreaming that her soul had become a marble and was rolling along the floor. She had been trying to retrieve it before it got lost under t he furniture.

I arranged a couple of excursions in the country —one to Mt. Diablo and one to Mill Valley —and she seemed better. Then the health department moved me from my laboratory job to the rat detail.

The rat detail went around Berkeley trapping an d bagging rats, which were then taken back to the laboratory and examined for signs of plague or plague-infected fleas. I met with some hostility in my tours of duty, but most people were cooperative and glad to see me. I was wearing a health-department u n iform, which may have helped. I didn’t feel particularly dignified catching rats, but I didn’t really mind it. And the job carried a small wage increase. I liked that.

One morning I woke with a splitting headache and sharp pains in my back and limbs. My eyes felt sore and inflamed; the light coming in the bedroom hurt them.

I staggered into the bathroom and vomited. Carol, who was getting breakfast, heard me and came running in. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.

“Sick,” I croaked, and lurched back to bed.

Carol knew there was no chance of getting a physician to make a house call. She could have phoned for an ambulance and had me taken to the hospital, but she didn’t know what would happen to me after I got there : they were all understaffed and underbedded. She tried to get a nurse to come to see me, and was told she’d have to wait at least a couple of days. Meantime, I lay on the bed and groaned. Finally, she called the health department and asked for my boss.

When he heard what my symptoms were, he came over right away. He felt in my armpits and groin and discovered the typical lumps.

“What is it?” Carol asked, who was watching him anxiously.

“Plague,” Dr. Myers answered. “Actually, the causative organism i sn’t old-fashioned Bacillus pestis. It’s one of those nasty bacillus-virus amalgams, with the virus component being furnished by the virus the selenauts brought back.

“I’ll give him an injection of penicillin. Let’s hope it will split the bacillus off fr om the amalgam, and leave us only the virus to deal with. As for you, young lady, you’d better have an immunizing shot. We only got the serum in this morning. The military had priority on it.”

Dr. Myers rolled me over in the bed and gave me an injection in the buttock. “Stay on your belly for a while,” he said. “It makes quite a lump.”

“How did he get plague?” I heard Carol ask.

“Oh, from a plague-infected rat. We couldn’t immunize our people because, as I told you, we only got the serum in this morning.

“Well. Your shot ought to keep you from getting it from him, though it may make you feel a little woozy for a while. As soon a s I get back to the office, I’ll send out a general rat alert, for the whole east bay. We don’t want a pandemic. Hayward is said to have had excellent results in trapping with chemical sex lures.

“I’ll be back this evening to give him another shot. Try t o make him comfortable.”

-

I was sick for a long time. Myers came in twice a day to give me injections of penicillin. Part of the time I was delirious, in the “busy” style oC delirium tremens. Carol nursed me devotedly. I remember wondering several times how long I had been sick; I knew that in plague the chances of survival are good if the victim can get through to the twelfth day.

It wasn’t until late July that I was able t o be up and around again. My clothes were too large for me, and my joints felt weak. The first time I left the apartment, to go-shopping for groceries with Carol, was a great event.

I pushed the cart for her. We stopped at the refrigerator counter, in fr ont of the eggs and cheese. “I’m so glad you’re well,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Dick, you don’t know how glad.”

There was nobody near us. I asked, “Were you afraid I’d die?”

“Oh, I knew you wouldn’t die,” she answered serenely.

“You’d saved me twice before, when I had given up all hope. I knew you wouldn’t leave me this time, even though you were so sick. I asked Dr. Myers once, and he said you’d probably get well. But there was the time a burglar tried to break into the apartme n t, and the time there was a big fire quite near —you were delirious then —and the time —well, I’m so glad you’re well again.”

She looked tired and worn but, as she said, extraordinarily glad. I kissed her quickly. “Things will be better from now on, sweethe art,” I said.

There wasn’t much to buy in the market except eggs, cheese, and that imported Mexican vegetable, jicama. As we were checking out, I noticed that the clerk was giving me odd looks, but I decided it must be because my BDPH uniform was so loos e on me.

We started home. I was carrying the groceries. We had got to the corner of Dana when I noticed that several men were eying me hostilely. One of them, a little, dry, wrinkle-foreheaded man, like a monkey, was particularly provocative. He spat in front of my feet, and then laughed.

I may have jostled him; if I did, it was lightly. But he planted himself squarely in front of Carol and me, with his hands on his hips.

“Look at the rat catcher!” he said in a buzzing, falsetto voice. “Cute little ra t catcher, hogging all the serum for himself and the dirty chick he. works. In his cute little green uniform, stiff with rat blood! Let’s”—he turned and grinned at the men around him —“let’s have a party with him!”

For an instant I didn’t realize he was t alking to me; I even turned my head to see whom he could be addressing. Then I realized it must be myself.

Angry people were standing around Carol and me in a circle. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t fight successfully with eight or ten men, even if I hadn’t been weak from illness and had Carol to take care of. And I was unstrung with surprise: I couldn’t see why my uniform should make me so unpopular. (I didn’t know it at the time, but Myers’ rat alert had started a lot of wild rumors. There had really been a minor epidemic of plague, and though only one person, an elderly woman, had died, the popular belief was that the public-health people were responsible for hundreds of deaths. We we re accused of keeping plague serum —which was certainly in short supply —for ourselves.) My tormentor was bawling more loudly. He grabbed me by the sleeve. I tore loose, and he followed us, yelling.

There weren’t many people behind us, though they were b eginning to close in. I thought we could get through. The small man launched a wild haymaker at my chin, which I managed to dodge. But the next minute somebody else hit me, quite hard, in front of the ear.

I was stunned, but I knew if I fell I’d be badly trampled. I stayed on my feet, and before more blows could come at me, I swung the bag of groceries in an arc in front of me, at the level of my chest.

The bag burst. Eggs, cheese and vegetables shot out. In the ensuing instant of confusion, Carol and I got through the people behind us. The man with the wrinkled forehead was after us the next second, and others followed him, like the tail on a kite.

I don’t know what would hav e happened next if downtown Berkeley hadn’t been under surveillance from th e air. As it was, a police ‘copter flew over with a deafening roar, and ah amplified voice began to roll out, saying, “Disperse. You are declared in a state of insurrection and are subject to military law. You are ordered to disperse. Disperse. Disperse. Or we will dust.”

There was a long “aaah” of rage from the crowd, but it began to scatter. An instant later there came the spiteful rattle of bullets from an upper window. Somebody had made private preparations for a riot earlier.

The small man who had triggered the disturbance (or had I triggered it, by merely being there in my health-department uniform?) screamed. A red blotch appeared on his upper arm. “I’m shot! I’m shot!” he yelled. “Kill the pigs!”

How he thought this could be done wasn’t clear. The ‘copter rose a few feet, and the voice from it grew louder. I don’t suppose any of the shots from the window had connected with it. The small man had obviously been hit by a ricochet. The next moment we were treated to a new weapon of the insurgents, s oon to be used by all sides: the superstrobe.

A dazzlingly bright, dazingly bright light seemed to explode in midair, just a few feet from the cab of the ‘copter. My eyes began to water violently; it was worse than tear gas, and the men in the ‘copter mu st have been blinded and thoroughly confused.

The aircraft rose sharply and then began to settle. It looked as if it were going to come straight down on the mob, and people, their eyes streaming, began to run.

I grabbed Carol by the arm. “Run!” I yelled. “Run for the campus! We’ll be safe there!”

She didn’t move for an instant, I suppose because she was even more affected by the superstrobe than I was. I heard a soft “whoosh” from the police craft. I knew what it meant: they were beginning to dust, and in a minute the air would be full of fine, soft, black powdery dust as the tank under the ‘copter opened like a geaster discharging its spores.

I didn’t stay to see what happened next. I think the sniper in the window lobbed a firebomb at the police from a mortar. I pulled Carol with all my strength in what I hoped was the right direction. The air was already dim with the dust, but the wind was blowing away from us, and not enough was landing on our skins for t h e mycelium to bother us seriously.

We ran. “Really—be —safe?” Carol asked pantingly after we had gone about a block.

“Sure,” I answered. “Campus —refuge.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add “for a while.”

-

CHAPTER 21

“How did the riot get started?” Carol asked suddenly. We were sitting on the ground on the U.C. campus near the main library. We had run and run, past boarded-up store windows on Telly, over the cracked paving of Sproul Plaza, through Sather Gate, and com e to rest, breathless and exhausted, almost in the center of the now-shrunken campus. There, where the beautiful bronze head of Athena still looked down over the worn steps, it had seemed we would be safest, in the very shadow of the goddess.

I didn’t und erstand Carol’s Question at once. “Eh? Well, I suppose I started it,” I answered. “Or rather, the sight of my uniform did.”

“Did it? You know, Dick, I have the impression that the little man with the wrinkled forehead was waiting for you —that he’d have a ttacked you no matter how you’d been dressed.”

“What do you mean? There’s no reason why he should have had it in for me. I don’t think I ever saw him before.”

“No. Oh, I didn’t mean it was personal. But he might have been working for one of the people Howie was working for. They might have been trying to get rid of us.”

“Of us? Why, Carol? If one of Howie’s employers —I suppose you mean internal security or espionage —”

“Yes. Probably the CIA.”

“If one of Howie’s employers had our names, they’d be trying to get information from us, not eliminate us. What good would we be to them dead?”

“I don’t know. Howie was killed in a riot.”

“It’s awfully unreasonable,” I said. “If they wanted to get rid of us, all they’d have to do would be to stage a street attack. Why start a riot to eliminate two people? And at that, it didn’t work. We got away.”

She shrugged. “The CIA is famous for usin g elaborate means to reach simple ends. And we may not keep on getting away.”

I couldn’t really tell her she was being ridiculous. That the CIA would have started a riot to get rid of two unimportant people wasn’t reasonable. But there remained the possi bility —the disconcerting possibility —that that was what had happened. I glanced at Carol. Her head was lowered and her gaze was turned away from me.

Abruptly I realized that her composure was purely superficial. “Are you frightened?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied tonelessly.

“Of Howie’s employers?”

“A little. More than a little, really. But also, the world seems so dreadfully thin. Do you suppose they’ve washed the coating off the people the ‘copter dusted?”

“I hope so. I mean, probably. There’s no reason why the authorities should let people twitch and jerk and suffer when the antidote to dust is easy to apply.”

“They say the dust puffs up like a crust from the moisture in the skin. Let’s not talk about it, Dick. I’m sorry I mentioned it”

“O.K.”

The noise off-campus was increasing. There was more and more gunfire, amplified voices, dogs barking, sirens screaming. The basic note in the noise, the deep, angry roar of a mob, intensified. If the CIA had really started a riot to get rid of Carol and me, they were getting more than they had bargained for. Most city-dwellers, at that time, were full of fear, frustration, and rage. The riot was tapping that reservoir of negative emotion. And a lot of Berkeley would burn that night.

I looked up at the head of Athena. How many years was it since Carol and I had gone in and out of the library, books in our arms, while the Goddess of Wisdom looked down on us benevolently? A world of turmoil lay between.

I put my arm around Carol. She was perfectly pliant , but I felt that any position I put her in she would conform to, like a jointed doll. There was something unnatural about it, like a dead body that the by-products of decay have rendered inordinately flexible.

I took my arm away. After a moment, I got t o my feet and looked in the direction of Telegraph. It was beginning to get dark, and the smokey, reddish glare in the lower sky stood out like the glow of a volcano at night.

“What is it?” Carol asked. She had risen, too, and was standing beside me.

“The computer center, I think. Apparently the rioters have fired it, though I don’t see how they managed it. There were those guns on the roof.”

“A lot of people hated the co m puter center,” Carol said. “When people feel like that about something, it’s bound to go.”

We looked at the fire a little longer. Nobody could regret the computer center. It was a piece of arson of which I rather approved.

We watched the glow spread and increase. After a while, we sat down again. There was nothi ng much else we could do.

I began to wonder whether, if Carol were right about the origin of the riot, there was anything we could do to defend ourselves against further attention from the CIA. Flight would be the only real answer, but I knew we couldn’t get out of the U.S. Anything else?

How would it be if I approached them directly and offered what information I had in an attempt to buy immunity? Would it get us off the hook? Probably not —in an organization as highly compartmented as the CIA, what I told to A would never get through to D. And D, of course, would be the man in charge of getting rid of us. Also, if the CIA hadn’t triggered the riot to try to eliminate us, approaching them wit h an offer of information would be like approaching a potential blackmailer with money in one’s hand.

I picked up a pine cone from the ground and began to crumble it idly. It looked solid, but it broke easily under the pressure of my thumb. It must have been lying on the ground for at least a year.

The ease with which it broke depressed me. I felt there was an uncomfortable resemblance between me and the pine cone. We were brittle and unsubstantial both.

There was a rustling in the bushes at the right.

It is an indication of how completely I was concentrating on the problem of the CIA that my first thought was that the noise must indicate one of their cloak-and-dagger men lurking in the shrubbery.

Carol was wiser. She listened for a moment, her fac e grave and attentive, and then said, “It’s an elf.”

“An elf?” I was really surprised. If Carol was right, it would be the first sign of elf activity since Fay had joined her people below.

The rustling continued. “Are you sure it’s not a rat?” I asked, but Carol shook her head vigorously.

I got out my pocket knife, opened it, and stabbed out forcefully with it. There was a great thrashing in the leaves, as if a family of ferrets were chasi ng some large animal. Rather gingerly, I reached into what seemed to be the center of the disturbance and groped.

After a moment, I brought out one of the Silent People, as Carol had foreseen. It was small and boneless, as they always are, and it winced uncomfortably from the dim light. But it made no attempt to attack me or to escape. I held it at arm’s length, mewling and grimacing and arching its eyebrows foolishly.

“What’s it doing here?” I asked as I tried to control its wriggles.

“Fay sent it, I suppose,” Carol replied. “Why?”

“I don’t know. But I think it has something for you. Make the elf give it to you.”

It sounded like a good idea. I gave the squirming creature a vigorous shake, and said, “I want what you brought. Come on out with it.”

The elf didn’t answer, but a malicious grin writhed across it’s face.

“It’ll take more than that,” Carol said. “Try twisting its arm.”

Once more, I thought it was a good idea. Rather gin gerly, I bent the elf’s boneless arm behind its back and began applying pressure on it.

The elf panted, but made no other sound. I was beginning to sweat. Torturing Fay’s messenger —if that was what the elf was —didn’t appeal to me, and besides, the tortur e process was harder on me than it was on it. They are used to physical violence.

I twisted a little more and then gave up. “It doesn’t work,” I said. “I suppose I could threaten it with metal, but —there must be a better way of (doing this.”

Carol said, “Didn’t Fay say something once about a way of compelling elves to an exchange of gifts?”

“I think so,” I said. “It was when she was having dinner with us once, and she said —u m h —yes, I remember.”

I took an even firmer grip on the elf and bent down so my face was only a few inches from its own. “As I to thee, thou to me,” I said as impressively as I could.

The elf blinked three or four times and then looked away from me. But it had blinked; I found the pine cone I had been chipping at, and held it ou t to the creature. Reluctantly and slowly, it took the cone and stowed it away somewhere in its clothing.

“Give me what you brought,” I told it.

The elf didn’t move. Well, I hadn’t thought this was going to be so easy as Fay had made it sound. “Give me what Fay sent us,” I said. And, when it still didn’t show any sign of obeying, I added, “I command you by the hilt and the power of Merlin’s sword.”

That did it. Slowly the elf reached inside th e fabric that covered its chest and came out with its hand closed. Even more slowly, every line of its body expressing reluctance, it held its hand out to me. I extended my own hand, and it dropped something small in it.

I let the elf go. For a moment, i t glared at me furiously, jaws grinding, head flopping, its whole body churning with rage. Then it fled into the shrubbery and was gone.

“What did it give-you?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know. It’s too dark to be able to see. I’ll strike a match.”

I did so, and we both bent over what I was holding in my other hand.

It was a dull, translucent pebble, like unpolished moonstone, about an inch and three-quarters in length. One side was perfectly plain, the other bore a series of three concentric bosses. The re was no other marking. The pebble had an air of great antiquity, of something that had been formed when tools were few and rude.

“You think Fay sent it?” I asked.

“I’m sure of it,” Carol replied.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She took the pebble from me. “I have a hunch about it, but I might be wrong.”

The match had burned down to my fingers. I dropped it on the ground. Except for the glow in the sky, we were in complete darkness again. I though t Carol was rolling the pebble around in the palm of her hand, but it was too dark for me to be sure.

“If the inner boss is Underearth,” she said, “then I suppose the middle one is the Bright World, and the outside one is Macrocosmos, Upperworld.”

“What of it?” I asked, mystified.

“Oh, nothing, except that —no, that doesn’t work, either. But suppose I rub them sunwise, and in sequence? Stand close to me, Dick.”

I did as she asked. She was still doing something to the pebble in her hand. Suddenly —she said later that she had been rubbing and pressing the bosses in sequence, always coming back to Middle Earth —there sprang up a great soft light around us.

There was no sense of limit or confinement in it; we stood within a deliciously glowing sphere, radiant as moonlight. It was no color, all colors, the moon melted up and diffused into a glorious rainbow of lunar colors. They are different from the colors of the sun.

Carol let out her breath in a tremulous sigh. “How lovely,” she said, “what a lovely place.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A protection, I think.” She was obviously absorbed in pleasure, outside of herself, as she had been that day at Point Reyes. The great soft l ight was something she was bathing in.

“Is it penetrable from outside?”

She looked at me, smiling. “Try it, Dick, and find out.”

Rather hesitantly I stepped toward what I perceived as the edge of the radiance. I went through easily, there was no feel ing of crossing anything. But the light had died entirely away.

Carol didn’t seem to be standing within anything. There was no light around her, nothing. She was just standing quietly in the thickening darkness. But when I put out my hand toward her, I f ailed to touch her. My hand didn’t connect with her. It was like an error of refraction. She wasn’t at the spot where she seemed to be.

I groped after her. She didn’t move. But no matter where I tried to find her, she wasn’t there. My hand al ways seemed to pass her by.

At last, I said, “Can you put the protection down so I can touch you?”

She nodded yes and did something or other to the pebble. An instant afterward, I laid my hand unerringly on her wrist.

She laughed. “It was so strange to see you reaching for me time after time,” she said, “and always missing me. I was perfectly safe all the time, you know, within the light. I don’t see how Fay could bear to part with it.”

“Could bear to part with what?” I asked.

“With this.” She indicated the pebble. “Don’t you know what it is?”

And, of course, I did know. I’d known all the time. I felt a burst of intoxicating happiness. Now I was sure of being able to take care of my girl no matter what might happen. For Fay —does this mean that kindness can be found anywhere, even in Hell?—Fay had sent us Merlin’s other artifact. She had sent us the talisman of talismans, an impenetrable fortress, a place of security and delight. Fay had sent us the Glain.

The End

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Scanned by Hiroller

PRISONERS OF

THE OTHERWORLD

They called it Underearth. It was a kind of Hell in reverse —a world of cold, darkness and dread existing unsuspected beneath Earth’s surface, people by weird half-human creatures who had once been men a nd women.

Aldridge found the fantastic entrance to it in his desperate search for Carol, the beautiful mysterious girl he loved. All he kn ew was that she had vanished into the Otherworld and that he had to find her.

He did find her —but she was strangely changed into an almost mindless automaton. Then he learned one more thing; either he or she could escape to the normal world they had known, but n ot both. And only he could make the choice …

THE

SHADOW PEOPLE

- - -

MARGARET ST, CLAIR

A DELL BOOK

Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

750 Third Avenue New York, New York 10017

Copyright © 1969 by Margaret St. Clair All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspa per.

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

Manufactured in The United States of America First printing —August 1969

Back cover

THE INVASION

OF THE

HALLUCINOGENIC

PEOPLE FROM

UNDEREARTH!

They had existed from time immemorial, hid den in a space warp far beneath th e surface of the earth. Until now, their only form of nourishment had been a strange hallucino genic grain. Now, they hungered for human flesh. The earth was to be their stockyards and mankind their meat …

COVER: JONES PRINTED IN USA

Table of Contents

The Shadow People

CHARTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

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