"They sure do take their own sweet time," the Negro private complained.
Mansard watched as the second-hand of his wrist watch moved twice around
the dial. The private seated across from him rose to his feet with an
uncanny quietness and walked over to the portal, which here seemed no more
than a hairline-thin circle drawn upon the solid steel. As a preventive
measure against claustrophobia, however, a massive functionless doorhandle
ornamented its surface.
"This son of a bitch ain't working!" the private said. "We're
stuck
in this goddamn tomb!"
"Calm down, Private -- and
sit
down. You heard what they said at the
practice session about touching the walls. Keep your hand away from
that handle."
But the private, thoroughly panicked, had not heard Hansard's words.
"I'm getting
out
of here. I'm not gonna -- "
His hand was only centimeters away from the doorhandle when he saw the
other hand. It was freckled and covered with a nap of red hair. It was
reaching for him through the steel wall.
The private screamed and stumbled backward. Even these clumsy movements
were performed with that same catlike quietness. A second disembodied hand,
differing from the first in that it held a revolver, appeared. Then, bit by
bit, the plane of the door surrendered the entire front of the body so that
it formed a sort of bas-relief. The private continued his muted screaming.
Hansard did not at first recognize the apparition as Worsaw. Perhaps,
after all, it was not Worsaw, for Hansard had seen him only minutes before,
in uniform and clean-shaven -- and this man,
this
Worsaw, was dressed
in walking shorts and a tee-shirt and sported a full red beard.
"Hiya, Meatball," he said (and certainly it was Worsaw's voice that spoke),
addressing the private, who became silent once more. "How'd you like to be
integrated?" A rhetorical question, for without waiting for a reply he shot
the private three times in the, face. The body crumpled backward against --
and partly through -- the wall.
Hansard had heard of no other cases of insanity produced by transmittal,
but then he knew so little about it altogether. Perhaps he was not mad,
but only dreaming. Except that in dreams the dreamers should not be
discountenanced by the bizarreness of the dream-world.
"That takes care of
one
son of a bitch," the spectral Worsaw said.
Before the man's murderous inference could be realized, Hansard acted.
In a single motion he threw himself from the bench, and the attaché case
that he had been holding at Worsaw's gun hand. The gun went off, doing
harm only to the case.
In leaping from the bench, Hansard had landed on the floor of the steel
vault, or, more precisely,
in it
, for his hands had sunk several inches
into the steel, which felt like chilled turpentine against his skin.
This was strange, really very strange. But for the time being Hansard
had accepted the logic of this dream-world and was not to be distracted
from his immediate purpose, which was to disarm Worsaw, by any untimely
sense of wonderment. He sprang up to catch hold of Worsaw's hand,
but found that with the same movement his legs sank knee-deep into the
insubstantial floor.
Hansard's actions would have been fatally slow, except that when the
attaché case had struck Worsaw the latter staggered backward half a
step. Mere inches, but far enough so that his face vanished into the wall
out of which it had materialized. But the gun and the hand that held it
were still within the vault and Hansard, lunging and sinking at once,
caught hold of the former.
He tried to lever the weapon out of Worsaw's hand, but Worsaw held fast
to it. As he struggled, Hansard found himself sinking deeper into the floor,
and the drag of his weight unbalanced Worsaw. Hansard gave a violent twist
to the arm of the falling man. The gun fired.
And Worsaw was dead.
Hansard, waist-deep in chrome-vanadium steel, stared at the bleeding body
before him. He tried not to think, fearing that if he ventured even the
smallest speculation he would hse all capacity for action. It was hard
to maintain even the most provisional faith in the dream-world.
He found that if he moved slowly he was able to raise himself out of the
floor, which then supported the full weight of his body in the customary
manner of steel floors. He picked up the attaché case (even here in the
dream-world, a Priority-A letter commands respect), and sat down carefully
on the bench.
Avoiding the sight of the two corpses, be stared intently at the sign
stencilled on the wall of the vault:
CAMP JACKSON/EARTH
MATTER TRANSMITTER
He counted to ten (no better strategy suggested itself), but the corpses
were still there afterward; and when he poked the toe of his shoe at the
floor, he punctured the steel with his foot. He was stuck in his dream.
Which was only a polite way of saying, he realized, that he was mad.
But damn it, he didn't
feel
mad.
There was no time for finer flights of epistemology, for at that moment
another man entered through the wall of the vault. It was Worsaw. He was
barechested and wearing skivvies, and Hansard was glad to see that his
hands were empty. The living Worsaw looked at the dead Worsaw on the
floor and swore.
Now Hansard did panic, though in his panic he did a wiser thing than
he could have conceived soberly. He ran away. He turned around on the
bench where he had been sitting and ran away through the steel wall.
Coming out of the wall, he fell four feet and sank up to the middle of his
calves in the concrete floor. Directly in front of him, not two feet away,
was one of the M.P.'s that guarded the manmitter.
"Guard!" he shouted. "Guard, there's someone -- " His voice died in his
throat as the hand that he had placed upon the guard's shoulder sank
through his flesh as through a light mist of sea spray. The guard gave
no sign that he had felt Hansard's hand or heard his voice.
But others did -- and now Hansard became aware that the hall was filled
with unauthorized personnel. Some of them Hansard recognized as men from
his own company, though like the two Worsaws, they were all bearded and
dressed as though they were on furlough in Hawaii; others were complete
strangers. They moved about the hall freely, unchallenged by the guards
to whom they seemed to be invisible.
Worsaw stepped out of the steel wall behind Hansard. He was holding the gun
that had belonged to his dead double. "All right, Captain, the fun's done.
Now, let's see what you got in that briefcase."
Hansard broke into a sprint, but two of Worsaw's confederates blocked
his path in the direction he had taken.
"Don't waste bullets, Snooky," one of these men shouted -- a scrawny,
towheaded man that Hansard recognized as Corporal Lesh. "We'll get him."
Hansard veered to the right, rounding the corner of the manmitter.
There, in a heap before the door of the Steel Womb, were half the men of
"A" Company -- all eight of the Negroes and five whites -- in their uniforms
and either dead or dying. Nearby was another, more orderly pile of bodies;
here the remaining men of the company were bound hand and foot. A second
Lesh and a man unknown to Hansard stood guard over them with rifles.
Worsaw -- the same Worsaw that Hansard had seen enter the manmitter with
the last squad that morning -- struggled to his feet and shouted, "Don't
kill that bastard -- you hear me? Don't touch him. I want him for myself!"
Lesh, who had been raising his rifle to take aim at Hansard, seemed
uncertain whether to heed his prisoner's request or kick him back into
the heap. His doubt was resolved by the other Worsaw -- the Worsaw with
the revolver -- who commanded Lesh to do as his double (or would it be
triple in this case?) had ordered. "If the fourteen of us can't take
care of a goddamn fairy officer, then he deserves to get away."
Hansard was encircled, and each moment the circle narrowed. He stood with
his back to the wall of the transmitter (upon which the Christmas-tree
lights were festively a-burble once more), and considered whether to make
a dash to the right or to the left -- then realized that his encirclement
was only apparent, that there was a clear path to the rear.
He turned and leaped once more through the steel wall of the vault.
Forgetting that the floor of the inner chamber was raised two feet
above the floor level of the hall, he found himself standing knee-deep
in steel again.
Like a wading pool, he thought, and the thought saved his life.
For, if he could wade in it, should he not be equally able to swim in it?
Filling his lungs, he bent double and plunged his whole body into the
yielding floor. With his eyes closed and the handle of the attaché case
clenched between his teeth (Priority-A was, after all, the ultimate
security rating), he went through the motions of swimming underwater.
His limbs moved through the metamorphosed steel more easily than through
water, but he had no way of knowing if these motions were propelling
him forward.
There was no sensation, as there would be for a swimmer, of water flowing
over his skin; only a feeling through his entire body, internally as well
as externally, of tingling -- as though he had been dipped into a mild
solution of pure electricity, if such a thing could be.
He "swam" until he was sure that, if his swimming was having any effect
at all, he was out of the hall. Then he changed direction, angling to
the right. At last, starved for oxygen, he had to "surface." He came up
inside a broom closet. It was as good a place as any to catch his breath
and gather his wits.
He rested there, only his head projecting out of the floor (his body,
cradled in its substance, showed no tendencies either to rise or sink),
fearful that his labored breathing might betray his presence to the . . .
What
were
they -- mutineers? Phantoms?
Or phantasms, the product of his own paranoia?
But he knew perfectly well that he was not mad, and if he were ever to
become mad he would not have inclined in the direction of paranoia.
He had taken an MMPL only last December, and Pittmann had shown him the
results. It was scarcely possible to be more sane than Nathan Hansard.
In the dim light that filtered into the closet through the crack under
the door Hansard could see motes of dust riding in the air. He blew at
them, but his breath did not affect their demure Brownian movement. Yet
he could feel the movement of that same air against his fingertip.
Conclusion? That he, and the crew that had come baying after his blood,
were of another substance than the physical world they moved in. That
he was, in short, a spirit. A ghost.
Was he, then, dead? No -- for death, he had long ago decided, was mere
insentience. Or, if he had died inside the transmitter and this
were
some sort of afterlife, the system of Dante's Inferno was evidently not
going to be of any use as a guide.
Whatever had happened, happened during the time Hansard was in the
transmitter. Instead of going to Mars at the moment of the jump there had
been a malfunction, and his new immaterial condition (for it was simpler
to assume that it was he who had changed and not the world about him)
was its result.
And all the other wraiths -- the three separate Worsaws, the two Leshes,
the pile of corpses -- were
all
of them the result of similar malfunctions?
The bearded Worsaw, he who had first stepped into the vault and would now
step out of it no more, was probably, by this theory, the product of some
earlier transmission breakdown. But what then of the two
other
Worsaws?
Where had they come from? From subsequent breakdowns, presumably.
But this would mean that the original Worsaw who had gone through the
machine, the
real
Worsaw, had continued the course of his own life in
the real world, served his term of duty on Mars and returned to earth --
and made the Mars jump again. Twice again, counting today's jump. And
this
real
Worsaw went on with his life in complete ignorance of the
existence of the Doppelgangers splitting off from him. And if all this
were true . . .
Then there would also be another Nathan Hansard on the Mars Command Post,
of whom he -- the Nathan Hansard resting in the concrete floor of the
broom closet -- was a mere carbon copy resulting from the imperfect
operating of the transmitter.
Though for all he knew, this was its normal function.
In support of his theory, Hansard recollected that there had been a moment
within the transmitter when he had thought he'd seen the word EARTH
flicker to MARS. Had he made the jump to Mars and then bounced back like
a rubber ball in that briefest of moments when the operating switch was
flicked on?
Like a rubber ball, or like . . . an echo . . .
But this was not the time or the place to elaborate ingenious theories.
Worsaw and his confederates were undoubtedly searching the building and
the grounds for him at this moment. He ducked back beneath the floor
and "swam" on through the foundations, surfacing only for air or to get
his bearings; now bobbing up into an office full of silent, industrious
clerks (for there were no noises in this dream-world except the sound of
his own breathing), then into an empty corridor or an unfurnished room
(with which the building seemed to abound, like some gigantic coral
reef). It was several minutes before he was outside the labyrinth of the
security complex and in the sunlight of the April noonday where he saw,
but was not seen by, two of Worsaw's bearded friends.
It would not do to remain in Camp Jackson. He had lost the cap of his uniform
in the transmitter, or in his flight from the hall, so that he would
be conspicuously out of uniform here. Among the throngs of the city,
however, he would be as good as invisible, because if he refrained
from walking through walls there would be no visual evidence of his
dematerialized state.
He considered how he could travel the ten miles to downtown D.C. most
quickly.
Not
by swimming. Ordinarily he would have taken the bus. . . .
It felt strange to pass out the gate of Camp Jackson without showing a
pass or I-D. The city-bound bus was waiting at the curb. Mansard got on,
careful to walk lightly so that his feet would not pass through the floor,
and took an empty seat by a window. A moment later a private sat down
in the same seat -- and in Hansard. Mansard, much shaken, moved to the
seat across the aisle.