Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“Garth Gesell …” she moaned.
She stooped over the hand and only then did she realize that it was thrust through the flame as if through a curtain.
She seized it and pulled. She saw the forearm, the elbow … “Bronze!” she screamed. She set her small bare feet against the lower frame and lifted and pulled.
Garth Gesell’s body slid out. It was flecked with blood. Blood flowed slowly from his nostrils and ears. His lifeless face held just the expression of terror and agony she had seen in her dream. His flesh was mottled and his lips were blue.
She screamed again, a wordless cry of fury at the fates rather than one of fear. She flipped the body over on its face, turned the head to one side, put her fingers in the unresisting mouth and drew the tongue forward. Then she knelt with her left knee between his thighs and began to apply artificial respiration. “Bronze!” She called again and again, with each measured pressure of her sure hands.
Bronze appeared at the door, looking like a war-horse, his nostrils dilated, his muscular chest gleaming with sweat. “What is—what are you doing to him?” He strode forward, his big hand out to pluck her away from Gesell.
She put her head back and said “Stop.” It was said quietly but with such intensity that he halted as if he had run into a wagon-tongue in the dark. Daw came in, rubbing his eyes.
She ignored the men. She lay down on the floor beside Garth and put her face next to his.
“Viki!” said Daw in horror. “Your vows …”
“Shut up,” she hissed, and put her mouth against Garth’s.
Bronze said, “What the hell’s she …”
“Leave her,” said Daw in a new voice.
Bronze’s startled expression matched Daw’s natural one.
Bronze followed his gaze. Exactly in synchronization, Viki’s cheeks and Garth’s expanded and relaxed. In the sudden silence, they could hear the breath whistle in Viki’s arched nostrils.
“Gesell …” whispered Viki hoarsely. She put her mouth against Garth’s again.
Suddenly his head jerked back. Feebly, he coughed.
“She did it,” muttered Bronze. “Viki—you did it.”
Viki rolled like a cat and bounded to her feet. She dipped her hand in a waterbucket and sloshed the freezing mass into the middle of Garth’s back. He gasped, a great gulping inhalation, and began to cough again. “Get alcohol,” said Viki tightly.
They rolled Garth over and Daw lifted his head. They forced a few drops of ethyl alcohol into Garth’s mouth. He shuddered.
“Somebody kissed me,” he said. He lay back, breathing deeply. “The … Gateway … women are dead. It’s no use.”
“What was it?” asked Daw. “Was the air poisonous?”
“No … it was all right—what there was of it. There just wasn’t enough. I don’t know what caused it, but something has used up most of the air in that world. I passed out before I’d gone any real distance. And the women …”
“Didn’t you see any signs of them?”
“Not a thing. The world seemed empty. Parallel X …”
There was a silence. Then Garth asked, “Well—where do we go from here?”
Daw suddenly leaped to his feet. “Gesell!” he cried. “Great Gesell, forgive me!”
Garth looked up at him curiously. “Daw I’ve told you a thousand times not to call me—”
“You!” spat Daw. “You—impostor! You apostate! You’re the devil! You came here in the guise of the great Gesell in order to invade the sanctuary of Gesell’s women. No Gesell would tire, no Gesell would fail. No Gesell would respond to the clutches of a female.”
Bronze was on his feet. “Now, listen, you—”
Daw threw out his skinny arms dramatically. “Go on—kill me; I deserve a hundred deaths for my failure as a Guardian. But I die in defense of Gesell and his works. It’s the least I can do.” He suddenly flew at Bronze. “Kill me now—kill me!”
Bronze put out one mighty arm and caught the front of Daw’s tunic. Daw flailed away helplessly. His arms were far shorter than Bronze’s, and all he could do was to rain blows on the iron biceps and kick feebly at the man’s boots.
“What shall I do?” said the amazed Bronze. “Shall I squash him?”
“Don’t harm him,” said Garth. “But I guess you better put him to sleep.”
Bronze brought his free hand up and over and put a hammerlike blow on the very top of Daw’s head. The little Guardian went limp.
Bronze draped him across the crook of his elbow like a spare blanket.
“What about you?” he said to the girl.
Viki stared up at him out of wide eyes and turned to Garth. “I serve Gesell.”
Garth said tiredly. “There seem to be three Gesells around here. My Dad, who’s dead. Me. And some sort of King Arthur-type myth. Which one are you serving?”
“Only you,” she breathed. She rose gracefully, cast a look of utmost scorn at the feebly twitching Daw, excused herself and left the room.
“Let her go,” said Garth to Bronze.
“She’s liable to blow up the joint,” protested Bronze.
“I think not.”
“You can be wrong, Garth Gesell.”
Garth grinned wryly. “You know that, and still you stick around. I wish these dedicated charmers felt the same way. I just can’t live up to what they want me to be.”
“Maybe you can’t,” growled Bronze. “But you should. I told you and told you you should.” He hefted Daw. “What’ll we do with this?”
“Try to talk some sense into him.”
“Let me twist his head off first. Then you can put the sense in with a trowel.”
Garth chuckled. “That won’t be necessary. I know what’s wrong with him. Bronze, many people who take readily to dedicated service do it only because it’s a substitute for ordinary living, which they don’t want to face. That isn’t by any means true of all of ’em, but it is of our boy here. Life these days isn’t easy, I don’t have to tell you that. As a Guardian, Daw had an even, dependable existence where he knew what he had to do and knew exactly how to do it. He saw no reason why that should ever change. And then I came along and reduced him to the level of a guy who is changing his environment a lot now so that it can be changed still more later, and he didn’t like it.”
“That sounds good. Now can you pound that all into his head with one wallop? Or shall I stand guard over him for a year or so
while you lead him by the hand out of a swamp he made himself to wallow in?”
“Easy, easy,” said Garth ruefully.
“Dammit, you need it,” growled Bronze. “Something’s wrong with the Gateway world. Something was wrong with your idea of walking into Gesell Hall that day I met you, but that didn’t stop you.” Bronze wet his lips. “I guess I’m a little bit like that Daw, after all. You got to be what I think you should be before I’ll play along with you.”
They found Viki in the laboratory, staring at the Gateway, which flamed and flickered coldly in its frames. Garth and Bronze ranged up beside her.
“If we could only move around in there,” said Garth. “If we could only know what happened to the air-pressure.”
“The Ffanx did it,” said Viki.
“Let him do the thinking, sister,” said Bronze with the odd combination of bluntness and courtesy he affected with her.
“There are no more Ffanx, Viki,” said Garth. “If I’m sure of anything, I am sure of that.”
“I know that,” said Viki. “I mean that the Ffanx moved from dense air into rarefied air—you said so.”
Garth struck himself a resounding wallop on the forehead. “Bronze,” he said in an awed tone of voice, “she has the brains.”
“Huh?”
“Air helmets! Here I was so defeated that I couldn’t see the one thing that was staring me in the face. Come on. The machine shop!”
The helmets they turned out in the next few days were makeshift but serviceable. Using the domed tops of aluminum pressure tanks and a series of welded bands, and a tightly-gasketed piece of plexiglass, they had the basic design. Soft, thick edging of foam rubber sealed the shoulder, chest and back. The air supply was liquid air passed through a tiny but highly efficient chemical heater. “We want no oxygen drunks on this trip,” Garth explained.
They locked Daw up in the north storeroom. Garth tried to talk to him but found him completely intractable. He was like a man in
a trance. He would speak only to the original Gesell, using his name to call down maledictions on the heads of the impostors.
“What shall we take with us?”
They stood before the Gateway—Bronze impatient and excited, Garth thoughtful, Viki her reserved, willing self. Green floodlights and a smoke generator had been strategically placed on the defense line in the canyon, keyed to the detectors so that any intruder would be badly frightened if he came onto the Court. It was defense enough for the short time they planned to be away.
“My spears,” said Bronze.
“No,” Garth said. “Take this instead.” He tossed over his old blaster. “It’s more compact. I mean no insult to that throwing arm of yours, little man, but the blaster has a little more range.”
“Thanks.” Bronze turned it over admiringly. “Did I ever tell you that if you hadn’t been carrying this when I first met you I’d have knocked you off? I never met a man with one before.”
Garth laughed. “I hadn’t had charges for it for more than four years. It was good protective coloration. But there are plenty of charges now. Viki—”
“I have my dagger. And an extra air tank.”
“Good. I’ll take two extra tanks. That ought to hold us.
“Now here’s the plan. We have no radio. I was able to weld in some thin plates to my helmet—I should be able to hear in there. I don’t think you two will be able to unless you touch helmets. I won’t be able to hear you but I can hear outside sounds. So once we get in there, we’re pretty much on our own. All I can say is—keep together and don’t go too far. Mind you, this is just a preliminary recon patrol. Later we can go back in with more and better equipment. Ready?”
Bronze raised a thumb and forefinger in the ancient sign.
“Right!” Viki nodded tensely.
Garth wheeled, settled his helmet down on its shoulderpieces. The others followed suit.
Then Garth plunged through the Gateway.
The three huddled together as they emerged from the Gateway.
They found themselves on a stony plain that stretched out and
away as far as the eye could reach. There were the looming shadows of distant, tremendous mountains. The rocks were soft and coarse, and of the same orange-to-gold shading that characterized the Gateway.
Garth glanced around at the Gateway, and understood how in his previous visit he had missed it. It flickered and flamed as dimly as a candle in the sunlight. He touched his two companions and pointed back at it. They nodded, and he knew they understood the need for caution. In that wilderness of boulders, it would be easy to lose it completely.
He recalled the first Gateway, his father’s, which had debouched on a flat plain, smaller than this. There had been rocks here and there, but nothing like the monstrous, crumbling boulders which surrounded them now. He wondered, as he had many times in the past few days, if the elder Gesell’s specifications had been wrong in some subtle way, and if this was, as Bronze had suggested, a different dimensional world from that to which the women had been sent. In the maze of advanced mathematics involved in the construction of a Gateway, any small slip might have far-reaching results.
His thought broke off sharply. Through the two thin discs welded into the sides of his helmet he could hear a high-pitched, shattering roar. He looked up—
It was a helicopter—but such a machine as a mad aeronautical engineer might dream of in a nightmare!
It was huge and it was slow. It was altogether too slow. Its great blades had a radius of nearly two hundred feet. It settled downward much faster than it seemed to, for its size was so deceptive; the vanes rotated no faster than the wings of an ancient Dutch windmill.
It came to rest a hundred yards away. Its size was incredible. As it rested on the ground, the roof of the fuselage was all of eighty feet from the ground. The door opened.
Garth swept the helmets of the other two against his with one motion. They contacted with a deafening clang.
“Hide!” he barked. “In the rocks … get out of sight!”
He turned and dove for shelter. Just to his right a huge flat rock, which had apparently once stood on edge, leaned over at about eighty
degrees. Under it was just enough space for him to slide into with his helmet protruding.
He looked first for his companions. Bronze was huddled behind a round boulder. Viki was running back toward the Gateway, zigzagging in a panic-struck search for adequate shelter. He saw her trip and fall, and an airtank went bounding away from her shoulder. She rose groggily to her feet and tried to run again.
Garth looked back toward the helicopter. What he saw confirmed the surge of fear he had experienced as its door had opened.
Four women approached with great leaping strides. They were dressed in odds and ends—a ragged halter, a smooth tunic, a slashed skirt. Each was dressed differently and casually. One carried a monstrous knobbed club. All were belted and had long daggers. Around the neck of the leader was a black chain from which swung a mighty jewel, which glowed and sparkled in the universally orange-gold light. The jewel was brilliantly, shockingly green—the characteristic glittering green of neo-tourmaline. But Garth had never seen a crystal of that size. It was gem-cut, and must have been all of forty inches from crown to apex. And the woman carried it comfortably at the end of its ten-foot stick-like mounting, on its chain with links the size of anchor-cable, because she herself was seventy-five feet tall.
Garth was conscious of a pounding in his ears. At first he thought it was the earth-shaking tread of the four giantesses—for the other three were almost as tall as the first. Then he realized that the pounding was caused by the simple fact that in his shock he had forgotten to breathe.
He turned and looked for his companions. Bronze was slack and awed, gaping skyward at the leader’s tremendous head. Viki was nowhere to be seen—
And neither was the Gateway. It was gone.
The leader stopped not twenty yards away, and bent, scanning the ground, fingering her jeweled pendant. Her face was distant, composed and cool. She was very beautiful, with long-lashed eyes and high-arched brows and a complexion like unveined marble.