HALLOCK'S MADNESS

"A most singular case," mumbled Dr. Pertinnet, walking a dignified hop-scotch among the checkered tiles of the sanitarium waiting room. "Can't be unique, of course--nothing's ever unique: must have been someone like Hallock in medical history. Just never recorded."

Ransom Morrow sighed good-naturedly and heaved himself over to the little doctor. He reached down and plucked at a white sleeve.

"Hey, Doc, remember me? I've been recorded. Not in the Psychiatrist's Weekly Monitor, but in your appointment book. Nila said you wanted some help. And now that I managed to get on the subject of Nila, how is she and where is she? My expedition's trotting off to Uganda in a week, and I want to do my Christmas shopping early."

Dr. Pertinnet blinked at him until recognition widened his weak scholarly eyes. "Ransom, my boy! Glad to see you. Miss Budd is taking care of the patient. Hallock--you know, Hallock the explorer. She said you once worshipped him; her idea to call you."

"Hallock? Wells W. Hallock?" Morrow whistled a slow bar of recollection. "The greatest of them all. Before Peary, before Johnson, before Livingston. And for sheer dogged searching, before even old Ponce de Leon. Mom used to tear his books out of my hands; I had to read them at night under a blanket with a flashlight. He got me interested in broken cities and forgotten temples. Why, if it weren't for Hallock--"

He broke off and stared down at the old man. "What's the matter with him? And what can I do?"

"Trauma! Nothing definite, nothing we can name, but it is quite obviously driving him psychotic. And unlike most cases of this sort, he realizes it and wants help desperately. But he seems to feel that our help is worse than nothing at all; he keeps saying that psychiatry will complete the tragedy that curiosity began. He's resisted all our efforts so violently that we've been forced to resort to--well, to the straitjacket."

Ransom Morrow shook his head. Wells W. Hallock in a straitjacket! Huge, fearless Hallock, who had shot his way out of the underground temple in northern India where the original, primitive Thuggee was practiced, who penetrated to the vampire cult of Lengluana and took flashbulb photographs! Hallock, who had laughed at superstition and dream-fancies and roared his way into the inaccessible, twilit corners of the world!

An attendant was handing a white envelope and a sheet of beworded paper to Dr. Pertinnet. "That's the complete report, Doctor," he said. "We checked the original analysis as you requested, but the results were the same. No injurious substances--definitely Phoenix dactylifera, however. And we still haven't found the cat."

"Then find her. Find her!" The attendant backed out in a flurry of sirs and buts. "Valuable experimental animal like that--allowing it to escape and run around as if--"

"You still haven't told me how I can help."

The doctor stuffed the envelope and paper into a pocket of his gown. "Of course. Fact is, I don't know myself. Miss Budd mentioned your name to Hallock, told him it was his influence that started you exploring. Now, he insists on seeing you. Says only you can help him, understand him. Pretty usual fixation under the circumstances, except that he never heard of you before. Miss Budd suggested that we call you in any case. He might make a useful slip, if you can win his confidence. I don't see any harm in it, just so you don't get him overexcited."

They walked down a long, silent, antiseptic corridor. Dr. Pertinnet paused before a smooth door.

"Understand," he placed a friendly hand on Ransom's shoulder, "understand, we can't have any affectionate hijinks between you and Miss Budd in that room. This case is difficult enough, what with Dr. Risbummer--my predecessor in the case--suddenly taking it in his head to disappear without leaving a trace of his notes. And now the cat. We just can't have any more tomfoolery. Straight scientific investigation."

"Gotcha, Doc," the young man grinned. "I'll save my research on Nila for this evening. Meanwhile, lead on. I'm agape and agog but not aglow."

They entered a large, airy room that shrieked of hospital austerity. A screen, a night table, a small chair, and a large bed were its only furniture. Nila Budd, trim, blonde, and hygienically beautiful in her starched white uniform, sat on the chair doling spoonfuls out of a china bowl to a weather-beaten face.

She paused as they came in, and smiled briefly at Ransom. Then she dropped the spoon into the bowl and set it on the table near a tiny chest made of incredibly yellowed ivory. She walked up to them while the man lying on the bed watched her curiously out of great, deep-sunk eyes. He seemed strangely free, as if the buttoned sheets which restrained his immense body were somehow not significant, somehow didn't matter...

"I did as you suggested with the sedative, Doctor," she whispered. "He's been fairly docile all day, no trouble at all. Hello, Ran."

"Hi." He attempted a brief embrace, but she evaded him and walked over to where the doctor stood looking down at Hallock.

"I've brought you an old admirer," the doctor was saying. "This is Ransom Morrow. Your books inspired him to become an explorer. He's leaving for Uganda next week in search of--of--"

"Of a paleolithic Hamitic civilization around Lake Albert," Ransom finished, walking over to the bed. "I'm honored to meet you, sir."

Wells W. Hallock raised his head and stared at the younger man. His hair, cut long and free in the style affected by men of the old West, was no longer the shiny black of a thousand pictures; it was white, thin, and straggled. But his eyes were proud.

"And it's an honor to meet you, Mr. Morrow," he said at last, in a voice so hoarse that Ransom had to bend over the bed to catch the carefully shaped syllables. "I've heard of your work in North Africa and Ethiopia. But Dr. Pertinnet is very wrong when he says my books made you an explorer. It was curiosity that did it--divine, satanic curiosity--like the curiosity which brought me to this. Your curiosity, Mr. Morrow--it can save me, do you hear, it can save me! Only we must have weapons--an elephant rifle, machine guns, machetes, hand grenades--"

"Hallock!" The psychiatrist cut in on the sharply rising voice. "If you go on this way, I'll have to ask Mr. Morrow to leave. Now lie back and relax. That's right, rela-a-ax."

The explorer dropped his head to the pillow. "You had the Fruit analyzed, didn't you?" he asked suddenly.

Dr. Pertinnet was flustered. "Y-yes. We did. Surprisingly enough, it contains nothing that might be termed a drug." He set the envelope down on the ivory chest and unfolded the sheet of paper given him by the orderly. "Of course, it's difficult to be certain in its present dried condition, but it appears to be nothing more than a variety of Phoenix dactylifera. In other words, a date. Common, ordinary fruit of the date palm."

"Common, ordinary--"

The man on the bed tilted his chin at the ceiling and laughed soundlessly. "You call the Fruit a common, ordinary date! What would you call the Gates of Hell, Doctor--doors or railings? Would you look at them and say, 'Why, here's a fence that needs whitewashing?'" He coughed for a moment and continued his feverish whispering. "And what happened when you gave a bit to the cat? Have you found the cat yet?"

"Why, no. How did you know we gave a piece to a cat?" the doctor asked him suddenly. "Has she been in here? We've searched the hospital--Nurse, have you seen the cat?"

"No, Doctor," Hallock broke in before Nila could answer, "the nurse hasn't seen the cat. But I have. She's a badly frightened little pussy by now--if she isn't dead. You gave her a pretty large piece, you know. She won't be able to get back. And she hasn't seen any of the larger things yet, just the two-headed snake and the portions of the giant centipede and--"

The doctor leaned over and gripped the explorer's shoulder through the thick sheets. "Where is the cat, Hallock?" he asked in a soothing voice. "Where did you see her last?"

"Here," the man on the bed whispered. "Here. In my head. In my horrible brain. Where I go when you make me fall asleep. Where I meet Dr. Risbummer, cowering and gibbering to himself. Only he isn't Dr. Risbummer any more, but a poor, mad, crippled thing who clings to me for protection, who begs me not to have nightmares because he's tired of running, because he's afraid he'll fall and get caught sometime."

"Hopeless!" Dr. Pertinnet straightened. "Most unfortunate about Dr. Risbummer's disappearance. Not only don't we have his diagnosis available, but the whole affair has strengthened Hallock's hallucinations. Given them substance, as it were." He moved toward the door. "If we could only find Risbummer!"

"You can, damn it, you can!" Hallock strained against the sheets. "Give him a chance. Just don't stick any more of those needles into me, don't put me to sleep any more."

"I told you there would be no further hypodermics, unless you made them necessary. The sedative for tonight has already been administered; Miss Budd mixed it with the broth she fed you."

Ransom, licking his dry lips, decided he would never forget the look of furious horror that distended Hallock's eyes.

"You fool! You crazy, crazy, crazy fools!" He writhed on the solid bed as if he wanted to dissolve through it. "I begged--"

"Now, then, Mr. Hallock," Nila told him, "you do need sleep."

"Sleep!" The massive head dropped back to the pillow. "Oh, go away. Go away."

"Miss Budd," the doctor called as he pushed the door open. "I'd like to see you for a moment."

"Right with you, Doctor." She touched Morrow's arm before slipping after him. "I go off duty in an hour, Ran; hang around and say nice stuff to my patient."

Hallock watched the nurse leave. "Like her a lot?" he whispered.

"Yeah."

"She's a nice girl. And a good nurse. But she doesn't take to the idea of your wandering off to Uganda and similar points unknown?"

"That's right, sir. Calls it adolescence in longer pants." Morrow dropped to the chair. He was still finding difficulty in associating this heroic wreck with the Wells W. Hallock he had read about--crisp, cynical, fearless...

"She may be wrong. And she may be right. There are those among us who walk wide arcs around horror, who obey the simpler, more important precepts of their religion. And then, Morrow, there are the whistling fools who rush in where even fallen angels fear to tread. People like you and people like me, may the gentle God have mercy on us."

His voice was so hoarse that hardly one recognizable sound broke the rhythmic, rustling sentences. Ransom found himself leaning close to the tough, wrinkled face framed on three sides by long white hair.

"I'm sorry," the old explorer chuckled somewhere in his throat. "My voice is hard to hear. You see, I--well, I scream too much."

There was a brief silence while he breathed heavily and fidgeted his head about on the pillow. Down the hall, a clock ticked in regular hammer-strokes.

"You're an explorer because you have a curiosity that eats at your insides night and day. But how much curiosity do you really have, Ransom Morrow? Enough to wander willingly through a land that has never been mapped, through a land never meant to be mapped? A land filled with creatures that are unfortunately not inconceivable, whose greatest horror is that they have been conceived and exist in the mind of an imaginative, foolhardy idiot! Have you the curiosity to do that and come to the rescue of a pitiful hulk whom only you can save before the ministrations of kindly doctors and sympathetic nurses send him stumbling forever into the abyss of the unutterable?" He paused, coughed soundlessly, smiled. "I'm sorry. To leave out the drama, have you the curiosity to eat a slightly mildewed dried date?"

"From there?" Morrow jerked his fascinated eyes to where the white envelope reposed on the ivory chest.

"Yes. From there. It's the Fruit, Morrow, the Fruit of the Tree. Only you must be careful--you mustn't, like Risbummer--a little--a taste--" His eyes closed as his voice trailed away. Suddenly they opened again, and he whispered rapidly, as if each word were measured in years of life. "Must help me, Morrow--knives--guns. Gets worse each time. Fools gave--me sedative. Can't fight--tied down--but dangerously close--dangerous--must get help--some way--some--way--" This time his lids slid shut, and his breathing slowed to a sleeping regularity.

Ransom watched the determined muscles of his face relax and grow gentle. Then he rose and tiptoed to the small table.

The chest was well known to any reader of Hallock's books. Given to him by a Buddhist lama for services rendered and friendship tendered, the hard yellow box had once contained the crowning, though fragmentary, jewels of every expedition. It had once held that bit of stone from Java--the earliest artifact definitely known to have been made by human hands; the tiny, primitive steam engine assembled by the priests of ancient Egypt had once rattled against its hard corners. Now?

Morrow picked up the envelope and flipped back the cover of the chest.

A handful of dry, olive-shaped objects lay on the creamy surface of the bottom. Dr. Pertinnet's dates! Ransom smiled. Outside the room, the little doctor's voice was detailing dreary instructions to Nila's occasional bubble of assent.

Slowly he reached for the envelope, pried it open with thumb and forefinger, and peered inside.

More dates. No, only one this time. Rather, what was left of the one used in the analysis.

A black powder residue of the brittle fruit streaked the lower edge of the envelope. Ransom dug his finger into it idly. Some powder wedged into the nail. He brought his hand up and sniffed the stuff.

Strange! He felt--dizzy. What a--a warm odor!

He steadied himself against the table and reached for a pinch of the powder. He brought it near his nostrils. He paused for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and inhaled deeply.

The lights went out and the floor dissolved.

He was falling, falling through endless space and eternal twilight. Fear swathed itself about him like an oversized blanket. He beat his arms frantically against the dark as he somersaulted slowly.

--|--

Round and round he went; round and round and down. Always down into the hungry gloom. He was startled to find that he was screaming; he closed his mouth with difficulty.

There he was sitting on the bottom. Bottom of what? And when had he hit? There hadn't even been a thud; at the rate he was falling--what was it: thirty-two feet per second?--he should have broken at least every other bone. He felt his body carefully; nary a bone.

But when had he hit?

He rose on the hard, gray surface and stared into the shifting darkness. Something--something was moving.

A camel with a long, scaly tail that ended in a human head broke from the shadows and raced past him. Ransom whirled in time to see it disappear into the dark again, the smiling head bumping evenly against its shanks.

"Sqgg," breathed Ransom Morrow.

As if in answer, he heard a musical whine on his right. He turned. A cat! Nothing else? No saber-teeth, no pink worms instead of hair? Nope, just an every-blessed-day ordinary cat! A snow-white cat with the tiniest black saddle.

It lay on its belly, all four feet braced, regarding him intently. "Miauu?" it questioned.

Ransom knelt and snapped his fingers at it. "Here, puss," he called. "Here, puss, puss, puss."

Red gums rolled back to display a lion's maw in miniature. It lunged forward and snapped. Ransom jerked his hand away and leaped to his feet. "You are certainly one suspicious feline," he said, examining his fingers ruefully. "Not that I blame you--here!"

He jumped as two sets of voices--one human--began screaming.

The camel had wandered into what appeared at first to be a bramble patch. Only, as Ransom squinted ahead desperately, he saw it wasn't brambles that curled round it with hairy strength and dragged it to a many-eyed darker blot of head in the center. It was a huge spider--or a collection of fantastically large spiders with only one head but with the slavering evil and obscene legs of them all.

Long neck distended, the camel was bellowing its terror deafeningly, while, at the other end, the human head screamed almost recognizable words as it bit and tore at the extremities of the incredible arthropod.

Ransom backed away slowly, his hands slipping the leather belt off his waist. Not much of a weapon in this place, but he had to have something in his hands!

As the great dripping mouth in the center took its first bite of the camel, a bluish light began to break. Ransom looked around for the cat.

It was rubbing against the scrawny legs of an old man dressed in the flapping rags of a once-white laboratory smock.

The old man placed a hand foolishly against the side of his face. "Y-you aren't Hallock," he mumbled.

"No," Ransom told him. "But I'm not one of the citizens of this place, either." He stepped toward him.

With a look of complete fear, the old man moved back a few steps. Then he turned and ran. The cat loped after him easily, its smooth stride contrasting with his determined staggering.

Ransom cursed and began to follow. The old man and the cat grew fainter, though the light was much stronger now. After a moment, they had disappeared. The multilegged spider had also vanished. He was alone in a well lit emptiness.

"Now what?" he asked himself.

"Now what what?" Nila's voice questioned. He spun around. She was bending over Hallock's sleeping head on the hospital pillow. The severe room was back, white and reassuringly normal. Down the corridor, the noisy clock still ticked.

"Where have you been? You know my patients can't be left alone. We just stepped outside the door for a moment, and you took it into your head to go sightseeing. Can't you forget that explorer's itch long enough to do an old man a simple human kindness? And while I'm on the subject, how did you get out of here? The doctor and I were standing right against the door all the time."

He braced himself against her words. The ivory chest still sat heavily on the small night table; the envelope hung precariously over one edge, a tiny trace of powder oozing out of it. Ransom adjusted the envelope and noticed that his belt was in his hands.

Slowly he threaded it back around his waist. "You say I wasn't in the room when you got back?" he asked at last. "Then where was I?"

"That's the point; the door's the only exit, the windows are all barred, and I looked under the bed and behind the screen. Where did you go?"

He smiled bleakly. "Oh, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon. Pretty goshawful place. Has the doctor left?"

"Yes. He looked in to make certain that Hallock was asleep, couldn't find you, and toddled off to his lab. Ran," she moved close to him, "you look upset. I've never seen such strain on your face. Maybe you better wait for me downstairs."

"Check." He stopped at the door. His right hand was scratched. "That cat," he asked, "the one Pertinnet fed some of Hallock's fruit. The one that disappeared. Was it mostly white with a tiny black saddle near the tail?"

"Yes." He was upset at the sudden whiteness of her face. "Did you see it?"

"Um-m-m. Sorta. Kinda." He went downstairs.

When she joined him a half-hour later, trim in her blue nurse's coat, he had transferred the bulk of a pack of cigarettes from his pocket case to several ashtrays, charring them only slightly in transit. She glanced deductively at his face, then linked her warm arm to his. "Come on, Ran. Let's get out of this place. I want to play."

So they played. At a good restaurant, in the balcony of the best musical comedy of the season, around the dance floor of a dimly lit night club. "Some playing," she commented while a white-coated band stuttered suave music. "When we came in, I almost told the head waiter, 'Pardon my corpse.'"

"I'm sorry. Just not up to snuff tonight, Nila. Would you like to go home?"

She turned to him at the door of her apartment hotel. "All right, Ran, so you saw the cat. Did you see Risbummer, too?"

He spread his feet apart and took a deep breath. "What--what did Risbummer look like?"

"About the same size and weight as Dr. Pertinnet. Old, a little helpless, as if he had reached enough of a second childhood to need a mother again. He had a small acid burn on the tip of his nose."

Ransom blinked his eyes and tried to remember. Did the old man have a small burn on his nose? Maybe. Maybe not.

"I don't know; I really couldn't say. Look here, you and the doctor, you really believe Hallock's story! You don't think he's insane!"

Nila looked down at her shoes, considered. "This is top-secret, Ran; but I'll tell you. We have to believe Hallock to a certain extent. His mind is definitely affected--that we know--but how much is traumatic, induced by his strange experiences, and how much is the strange experience itself...? Dr. Pertinnet has his scientific reputation to consider: he can't go off quarter-cocked until he is absolutely certain of his facts. Meanwhile, we've been treating Hallock as a regular patient and keeping our suspicions from everybody, even you. We feel there may be some other explanation for Hallock vanishing so frequently--"

"Vanishing? You mean he disappears from the bed?"

She nodded. "And reappears on it again ten or fifteen minutes later, right inside his straitjacket. The first time it happened, Jenny, the night nurse, threw a fit up and down the corridor. Dr. Pertinnet smoothed her down and told me to take over till morning. It happened twice while I was on duty. We've managed to keep it quiet; Jenny takes it in her stride now. You see, Hallock only disappears when he's had a sedative. At all other times, he lies fairly still and chatters about his dates."

"I know," Ransom brooded. "They aren't. Dates, I mean. I tasted a bit of one, or rather, I smelled at it. That's what sent me to--wherever I went."

"You didn't! Why, Ran, that's crazy; it's dangerous! We don't know exactly--but Dr. Risbummer is supposed to have eaten one, and he--we only wanted you to get some information from Hallock, to--"

"Sort of a scientific stool pigeon," he snarled. "That gallant old codger is battling something infernally alien and ugly with every ounce of his used-up strength, and all you can do is shoot sedatives in him so he'll perform some more intriguing tricks. No. From here on out, I play Hallock's ball. If he wants guns and knives, he gets 'em; though I can't quite see--"

"But, Ran! You'll ruin everything. At first, we thought the Fruit had something--but since Dr. Pertinnet had it analyzed, we've been forced to drop that line. But if you show Hallock you believe him, we'll never find out what causes his disappearances, what brought on his neurosis. Don't you see what I mean?"

"No, I don't. First, you can get negative analyses a hundred times from Sunday, but it still is the Fruit which somehow activates the whole situation. If either you or Dr. Pertinnet had submitted it to the most elementary analysis of all, you'd have found it to be so, if only you'd have done what Risbummer did--tasted it! Now--well, now you've called me in, and I'm going to do my gosh-damned best to help the old guy. I don't know how exactly, not yet, but I'm going to hit it realistically, honestly."

She laughed at him. "Realistically! The greatest romantic of them all talking about realism! Ransom Morrow, who goes trotting off into the African equivalent of a haunted house because the ordinary, adult world doesn't give him enough thrills. Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but you--you make them up!"

"Now, look, Nila. There's no call--"

"Yes, there is," she told him fiercely. "You insist on slandering the only realism I'll accept, the realism of science, which must be skeptical if it's to be of any use. Perhaps you've discovered something of value by your reckless experiment; perhaps we've overlooked an important item in limiting ourselves to a chemical investigation of the Fruit. Perhaps, I say. But you are still a layman, whom we called in as a layman, and not as a research director. You're worse than the average at that because of your tendency to fly off the handle. In the future, you'll be barred from the hospital--and from Hallock. I'll convey your experiences to the doctor and let him make what he can of them." She paused with her hand on the door. "And perhaps I'll see what I can make of them."

Ransom grabbed her shoulders. "What do you mean? What will you do?"

She shook his arm away. "I don't know yet. But as a nurse, it's my case. I'll do as I think best for the patient."

Then she stepped resolutely away from him and into the lobby. He watched her cross into an elevator and move to the rear without once looking back at him.

--|--

White glare from the street light made him conspicuous and awkward. He walked for half a block talking to himself, and finally called a cab.

This was the nastiest quarrel he'd had with Nila. Of course, it hadn't been the one incident; it was the whole pattern of his coming jaunt to Uganda and her unquenchable opposition.

But Hallock! Poor, poor Hallock. Trapped by a misstep in the suddenly-become-reality of his own nightmares and held there by a series of stumbling, peering psychiatrists. And what nightmares! None of the humdrum kind that brought you awake in a fog of fear and the desperate desire to flick on the light switch, but nightmares filled with incredibly nasty monstrosities whose abilities to inflict injury and even death were disturbingly possible.

And Risbummer? And the cat? What invitation had they answered to find themselves in this world of half-tone horror? And the others--all the others there must have been who nibbled at the Fruit...

Dawn chilled outside his bedroom window before Ransom Morrow finally, reluctantly fell asleep. He had no dreams, but he slept late. He would have slept later, had not the telephone awakened him.

"Morrow? This is Dr. Pertinnet. I'm at the hospital. Uh--did Miss Budd discuss our patient with you last night? Did she mention any specific plans relative to him?"

"Discuss patient?" Ransom yawned a thick gob of sleep out of his mouth. "What you talking about?"

"She can't be found anywhere. First time it's happened. She's a very conscientious nurse. The night nurse said she took over in the morning, while Hallock was still sleeping off his sedative. I came in an hour ago and found Hallock awake, Miss Budd gone. There's no sign of her at all, just a half-eaten date on the floor which Hallock says--"

It was as if there was a definite click in the back of his brain. His mind churned away the clouds, tore into full wakefulness. "Hallock! Does he say she's eaten the Fruit?"

"Ye-e-es." The doctor's voice had uncertain edges. "He says she was curious about it when he woke this morning, and he persuaded her to eat a date. He claims she's eaten so much that she's now a permanent part of his nightmares, and only you can get her out. Of course, it's all preposterous, but since I can't find her anywhere, and since you and she--"

"Yeah! Well, hold on to your stethoscope: I'll be right over!" He slammed down the phone and dressed with flying fingers.

All the tightly packed equipment for his expedition into the African wilderness was in the next room. Ransom thanked a dozen minor deities that he was the youngest member of the group and as such was burdened with most of the armament, which covered every imaginable emergency. He telephoned for a taxi, selected three awkwardly shaped, oilskin-wrapped bundles, and staggered downstairs with them.

The cabbie helped him tug them into the car. His eyes grew round when he felt the muzzle of a submachine gun and the pointed ends of cartridges through one set of wrappings. They grew rounder when Ransom slammed the door and yelled out the hospital address. "First time," he muttered as he settled behind the wheel, "first time I ever seen an accident go to the right place to happen."

Dr. Pertinnet met him in the corridor as he dragged the heavy bundles behind him. "Why, wh-what's that?"

"Pills and poultices," Ransom told him. "Tincture of nitroglycerine. Nice strong medicine that's good for what ails Hallock. I think it may cure him. Here, Doc, take this one. It's bulky and keeps getting in my way."

He pushed into the old explorer's room with the doctor laboring and protesting behind him. A plump nurse blocked his way to the bed.

"Shoo, girl. Go away. Scat. This is man's work. Take yourself a toddle." He pushed past her determined opposition. At a signal from the doctor, she left the room, her nose high and her shoulders shrugging.

Ransom knelt and began to tear the wrappings off the weapons. He stared up at Hallock, smiling from the bed. "I'm ready. Map it out."

"Good," came the whispered reply. "I'm sorry I had to talk Miss Budd into danger, my boy, but I'm getting desperate. I spend more and more time in my dreams now, with greater risk of never returning. I counted on you to act immediately so that the nurse wouldn't spend too much time alone, but I swear I never intended for her to eat that much of the Fruit. I swear I intended for her to come back."

"It's done now. Doctor, give him a sedative. Don't look at me like that--give him a sedative!"

As the doctor unfastened the blanket and swabbed Hallock's arm, Morrow asked, "What do I have to do to get Nila back? And Dr. Risbummer?"

"I'll tell you; I'll be with you... there. We must kill the mother--the Brood Mother of Fancies and Horrors. You have the weapons?"

"Everything short of a portable hydrogen bomb. Rifle--high-powered Winchester--Tommy gun, two machetes, and a batch of hand grenades. Manage?"

The old explorer lay back and stared at the ceiling. "Wonderful! If only I'd had the sense years ago, myself... None of this would have happened. I'd never have reached this helpless, horror-ridden state." His whispers became almost inaudible as his mind wandered under the influence of the sedative.

"In Mesopotamia, far south of Dinra, where the desert turns to broken rock that looks like rubble left over from the making of the world... None of the native guides will go there, although there is a legend that the Garden of Eden and that treasure unheard of... Treasure! There is nothing but the tree--you pick through the sharpest rocks... and there is the tree--"

"The tree?" It was the doctor, breaking his staring silence.

"The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil," Hallock said softly, without lowering his gaze. "Not the way it is in the Bible... although some ancestor of man must have eaten of its fruit... it grows in a deep, rocky cleft where the sun cannot reach it and where no water flows... and yet it thrives... the summit is a magnificent crown of large feather-shaped leaves--purple, red and gold--and the Fruit... dozens of species of fruit, over a half of them unrecognizable, all on the same tree... not of this earth, that tree--yet who knows what creatures have eaten of it in the past, and what the Fruit eaten by a hairy Adam and his Eve. I could not know, God help me.

His voice stopped. Dr. Pertinnet tiptoed over to see if he was asleep. Suddenly, the whispers began again. The old explorer's eyes bulged, and he licked his dry lips.

"I could not know... and I didn't care... I picked the dates from the top because I recognized them, and I thought I would be safe... I thought I would be safe!... How was I to know which fruit had already been eaten by man... and then it began!... I lived in my own dreams, the dreams of my past... but only for a moment... it was pleasant... then... but when I gave some to the camel driver, and he disappeared into the dream... then when I saw the Brood Mother and what she sent forth in my mind... I could not know which fruit was already eaten by man... I could not know... what kind of men we would be... what kind if a different fruit had been eaten then... if the one I picked had been eaten... a race living in its dreams... strange powers... what some races have eaten... a dinosaur nibbling at the top... monstrosities of all geologic time eating of it... how was I to know which... which fruit..."

He was asleep.

Morrow said "Whew!" He glanced at the doctor, who was licking his lips and staring at the man on the bed.

"Coming with me?"

The doctor was startled. "Where? How?"

"Into Hallock's madness, or his mind. Comes to the same thing. Want to come along? I need a gun bearer."

"Now look here, Morrow! I've stood around and let this foolishness go on--"

"It's not foolishness," Morrow interrupted. "You should know that by now. You can't find Nila, and I can. You can't give an adequate reason for Hallock's disappearances, and I can. You don't dare taste any of that fruit which your lab says is chemically pure, while I--"

"Oh, all right. All right. I'll admit this situation has its unusual side..."

"The understatement of the millennium. Now wrap this grenade belt around your waist and pick up those cartridge boxes. See if you can slip a machete under your right arm--tha-a-at's right. I'll carry the guns and the other machete." Morrow pulled two dates out of the ivory chest on the night table.

He grinned at the doctor, who was bent almost double under the weight of the armament. "How do you know," the old man grumbled, "that, assuming we go anywhere, we will arrive with this--this confounded arsenal?"

"Don't know. I just assume it from Hallock's instructions and the fact that I carried all my clothes with me on my last visit. Here, have a date. Go on, take it!"

The psychiatrist took the fruit, turned it around doubtfully, and finally, following Ransom Morrow's example, popped it in his mouth.

"Mmmm, good," he said. "Tastes just like--"

--|--

They were falling. Down and down, around and around. All about them, the curiously shifting darkness. Morrow felt the pressing fear, the screaming desire to run away and panic.

"--just like a fruitcake the hospital dietician makes when she's in a good mood," the doctor was saying. His voice was quite calm, with the slightest edge of wonder to it. "Interesting that this should begin by a falling sensation. I think that the most reasonable explanation may be--"

They had landed. Again there was no memory of the actual moment of contact. The doctor rose and brushed nonexistent dust from his white hospital gown. He looked around nearsightedly and continued.

"The most reasonable explanation may be found in Freud. Not the Freud of declining mental powers, but the earlier, more acute scientist."

Ransom Morrow shook his head and began to divest the doctor of his weapons. "Doc," he said, "you are one nerveless wonder."

"Eh? Quite. Now on the subject of a falling sensation, Freud would have it that--Risbummer!"

He had turned and noticed the old man in tattered gown, who stood watching him fearfully. "Risbummer! So this is where you've been keeping yourself! Where are your notes, man?"

"My--notes?"

"Yes, your notes on the Hallock case. Come, come, we need them badly. Inexcusable to go away without leaving your notes available to the staff. I've been through the hospital files three times and your office twice. Where did you put them?"

The other passed his hand through his sparse hair. "My notes. Did--did you look in my cigar box? I seem somehow--I--I think I left them in the cigar box. I'm--I'm sorry for the trouble you've had."

"That's quite all right," Pertinnet told him magnanimously. "Just so we get them into the files eventually." The two men moved off to one side, conversing in low tones, for all the world like two physicians at a sickbed. Risbummer did have a nose-burn.

"Old home week in Hallock's subconscious," Ransom said to himself. He finished loading the rifle and stood up. "Nila," he called. "Hey, Nila!"

He was surprised at the speed with which his call was answered. A hysterical figure in white dashed out of the darkness and flung herself against his chest. He held her, soothed her, kissed her. "You aren't hurt?" he asked anxiously.

"No, I'm not hurt. But this place--this awful, awful place!" She stopped sobbing and straightened her hair. "I must look--oh! As bad as Risbummer. He ran away when he first saw me, but the cat was friendly and after a while so was he. He was in a broken state when I arrived: it's wonderful what a little human conversation will do."

"Well, you aren't merely human," Morrow assured her. He glanced over her head and stiffened. That pith helmet, those tropical shorts, that flowing black hair--it was Wells W. Hallock, but the Hallock of fifteen, of twenty years ago. The cat rubbed affectionately against his khaki wool socks.

"Some tableau!" Hallock said in the booming voice of youth. "Pertinnet and Risbummer are holding a consultation; Budd and Morrow are holding each other. All the stuff come through?" He walked forward briskly.

While the two doctors came up to watch, he selected a machete and loaded the submachine gun; he hung two grenades from his belt.

"Don't mind if I take the Tommy?" he asked. "I know the vulnerable spots better than you. Let the docs carry the ammo."

He moved off into the lifting gloom, and Morrow hurried up beside him. "Where are we going? I don't want to take Nila where there's any danger."

"Well, the location keeps changing, but we'll get there soon. And don't worry about Nila: she's safest with you. You two, along with Pertinnet and Risbummer, are stuck here, by the way: you've all eaten too much of the Fruit. Your only hope is to wipe out the Brood Mother. From what I've seen, all this stuff will dissolve with her. I don't know whether we have enough equipment to sock it to her, but if we haven't--" He shrugged.

Nila walked directly behind them, looking about fearfully at the uglinesses slipping by in the darkness. The doctors brought up the rear, struggling under the heavy boxes of ammunition. The cat roamed on the outskirts of their little group, never moving off too far.

"How is it that you keep your youth?" Morrow asked.

"I don't know. It's one of the things I don't understand about this whole affair: I'm always as young as when I first tasted the Fruit. But that's just one puzzler. Another is why everyone who eats the Fruit winds up in my dream rather than in their own. Possibly because I was the first to eat it, and when it was fresh from the plucking at that. It's convenient to stay young, though, and I've often thought that if it weren't for these horrors barging about--Hello!"

A tiny, red head supported on a flexible stalk of a neck waved down out of the gray shadow. There were three eyes in the head and a kind of sucking proboscis for a mouth. The other end of the stalk protruded from a bulging red mass some ten yards away.

As the head descended lazily, Ransom pumped a shot into the center eye. He heard Hallock let go with a burst from the machine gun, and the head, severed from the neck, fell and dissolved into red liquid as it fell. Almost immediately, a new head began to take form on the thin, twisting neck.

"Get the body--there!" Hallock was yelling.

Ransom pulled a grenade from his belt, ripped the pin out with his teeth, and lobbed it at the main body of the creature. Then--"Drop!" he yelled.

They all fell flat as the terrific concussion sent bits of steel and red, writhing flesh over their heads. When they rose, the monstrosity was gone.

"You fool!" Hallock was raging. "You wild-eyed, trigger-happy fool! Wasting good grenades on a creature like that when we could have finished it with cartridges. We'll need all of our grenades for the Brood Mother." He took stock morosely. "Only five left. They'll have to do."

"Wasn't that the Brood Mother?" Morrow asked. He was still unsteady, but he put a reassuring arm around Nila.

"That? The Brood Mother? Why, that was just one of her minor offspring--part of a nightmare I had ten years ago in Tunis. When you see the Brood Mother--you'll recognize her!"

"How?"

"She just couldn't be anything else! Let's go."

Nila walked up and slipped her arm on Ransom's shoulder. "If we meet one of mama's bigger boys, I want to be as close to you as I can get, Ran," she whispered.

"Steady," Ransom warned. "I'm about ready to go off the deep end myself. But we've got to hold steady." He followed Hallock.

Behind him, he heard the doctors wheezing under the weight of the cartridges. "Did you notice the peculiar manifestation of the color red in that monster, Risbummer?" Dr. Pertinnet was saying. "Remember what Piscoodberry says about the occurrence of red in dreams of the mentally unstable?"

"Do you mean Piscoodberry On Simulated Hypnotism or the Piscoodberry monograph on The Primary Colors and the Subconscious?"

"The monograph, of course! Where are your thoughts, Risbummer? What else could I mean but the monograph? Now, according to Piscoodberry..."

Their voices became low and professionally confidential. Ransom and Nila grinned at each other. They felt better as they moved along behind Hallock.

The number of distorted creatures around them seemed to increase, but nothing moved out to disturb them. They were watched by hundreds of crazy eyes in all kinds of fantastic faces.

An odor, perceptible for the last few minutes, became suddenly stronger. It was something which could only be described as a stink. "Although," said Ransom, "it smells like the great grand-daddy of all stinks. Like everything filthy and foul concentrated in one place." The light had grown until there was almost perfect visibility.

The cat had been moving stiffly in front of their group. It stopped, stared ahead, and began to hump its back. A violent, hating hiss shot from its teeth. Then it slowly retreated until it backed into Hallock's legs. It crawled behind him.

Hallock stopped and peered ahead. "This is it," he said in a low, frightened voice. "The Brood Mother. Load up and get ready."

--|--

The two men saw to their weapons, made certain their grenades were easily detachable and would not catch on any part of their clothing. They stuck the machetes through their belts. Nila helped with the clips of cartridges.

"You stay here," Ransom whispered. He turned to the doctors, who were standing near him in wistful helplessness. He gave Pertinnet one of his grenades. "Take care of her." Then as Hallock squared his shoulders and sighed, he moved up beside him.

"Gotterdammerung," Hallock said. "The last big battle."

They walked forward gingerly, in step, a foot moving slowly ahead after the other one had found firm purchase. The cat padded at their side, its belly hugging the ground.

The stench tore at their nostrils. Solid waves of odor came at them in stronger and stronger layers. Ransom scratched at the stock of his Winchester, trying desperately to see what lay ahead.

Then they saw it.

An immense carpet of living flesh, cradled in its own slime, lay before them. Miles long--and miles wide. A great expanse of flat, undulating tissue, green and yellow and sickly orange. Every now and then, some monstrosity would float up to the side of the organic carpet and move away from it. It was breeding before their unbelieving eyes.

Back and forth it soughed in the thick goo, and the odor arising from it was indescribable. And then, Ransom saw it was not entirely flat: at regular intervals, there were gaping mouths set flush with the surface, opening and closing spasmodically.

Hallock rushed forward, and Ransom, licking lips that tasted like dehydrated cardboard, moved with him. He knew they should go slowly, stalk it and not fire until they knew just where to strike. But he was hypnotized by the horror of the thing, by Hallock, and he ran at it like a madman.

Hallock stopped at the edge of the slime and tore the grenades off his belt. He pulled the pins and threw them in long looping arcs far into the monster. There were explosions and bits of awful flesh splattered about them.

Then Hallock was on his knees, screaming curses and laughter and spraying bullets into the expanse of living matter.

There was an answering scream from ten thousand throats. A vast ripple ran across the blanket of flesh, from mouth to mouth. Then--the far side lifted. Higher and higher--the monster was rearing from the slime!

Ransom got off a grenade as he saw it come up. One mouth winked out into a dripping hole. Then he was beside Hallock, firing into it as it rose.

Those mouths--they weren't only mouths, they were part of individual faces with discernible eyes and noses--they were gaping red mouths and horrible faces, but they reminded Ransom of something he couldn't quite remember.

"Get that center bulge," Hallock was gasping. "Looks like a vital spot!"

Ransom squeezed off a shot right into the palpitating scarlet blob at the exact middle of the creature. It ricocheted! Armor!

He pulled the pin out of his last grenade. Slime dripped down on them. He threw the grenade. It exploded far above the red spot.

They cursed in unison and began to stumble backward, firing as they went. The monster undulated forward, the gaping mouths at the top swinging down closer.

Ransom remembered the grenade he had given Pertinnet. He turned and ran back to where he had left Nila and the two doctors. He dropped his Winchester as he ran, not bothering to retrieve it.

Nila stared over his head at the awful thing coming down and forward. "Ran, oh, Ran," she moaned.

Pertinnet was examining the grenade, turning it over and over in his hands. "Strange device," he observed. "No discernible trigger mechanism. Simplicity should be one of the chief factors--"

Ransom plucked the grenade from his hands and whirled. Hallock was firing straight up now, burst after burst of bullets that had as little effect as wads of paper. He ran out of ammunition or the gun jammed, and he dropped it. He swept the machete from his belt.

"Back, Hallock," Ransom called. "Get back!" The older explorer didn't seem to hear him, but moved ankle-deep into the slime.

Ransom pulled the pin, took dead aim at the red spot and threw. The entire red bulge seemed to open outward as the grenade hit it. The monster screamed again, a perfect chord of screams. It folded back, and in upon itself.

As it rolled back, Hallock stepped onto the surface, swinging his machete like a lunatic. He sliced great hunks out of it before the edge behind him curled inward, carrying him with it--shrieking in horrible pain--wrapped in huge agonizing mouths.

The world cracked. Millions of unmatched cymbals clashed against each other in a discordant rattle of sound. Great splinters of grayness came smashing down all around them.

Ransom grabbed at Nila as he felt himself fall. They turned and twisted down through a dissolving murk. On both sides, he could see fragments of bloated green bodies floating off into spiralling vapor, red and violet areas writhing off into nothingness. Pertinnet and Risbummer, also clutching each other, were floating down slowly some distance away.

Nila huddled her warm and frightened body closer to his. "Those faces," she whimpered. "Those faces! Do you know whose they were? Hallock! Awful! How unbelievably awful!"

They were Hallock, Ransom remembered now. Ten thousand infernally grotesque caricatures--all the faces of the Brood Mother--were Wells W. Hallock's own face. And in that last moment, as he stepped into the creature, Hallock must have known it!

They came to rest in the midst of dazzling whiteness. They shut their eyes against the glare, opened them cautiously again. The glare subsided. Objects appeared indistinctly, became clearer, resolved into the sharp outlines of reality.

Then--no more obscene shapings, no more distorted vision. They were back in the hospital room, all of them, Ransom and Nila still shuddering with excitement. Dr. Pertinnet was unbuttoning the restraining blanket. He placed it carefully around the gory, broken mess on the bed.

"I--I'll get some sedatives for all of us," he said at last. Risbummer followed him through the door.

"Dr. Pertinnet and his sedatives!" Nila cried hysterically.

Ransom crossed to the table and lifted the small ivory chest. "This may not be in the best interests of scientific investigation, Nila, but I think we should destroy what's left of this stuff."

She grabbed the chest from him. "We certainly should," she agreed. "I'll dump it into the hospital incinerator. I'm through with dates for the rest of my life. But--of course--I'll settle for rice."

"A deal." He grinned at her. "If anyone should ask, a character by the name of Ransom Morrow has now had enough adventure to last clear through his grandchildren!"

She walked unsteadily through the door. A moment later Ransom heard the incinerator door open. He lit a cigarette and smiled at the cat. It was lucky not to have a human memory.

Then he stopped smiling. Because the cat had something round and black in its teeth. And it wasn't a mouse.