Complete Stories (31 page)

Well all right, I’d asked for it. Typical event on a long two-man probe. But then, all at once, it got a lot worse. A glob of my blood drifted into our toilet-vent, a louvered oval in the center of the dash. The vent channeled right to the superslime, our food, our air, our good buddy, a DNA-doctored mutant tissue with no FDA approval. My blood went in the vent, the superslime tasted of it, found it good, and wanted more, more, MORE.

There we were in the front seat of our Ford station wagon, me behind the wheel, and Harry bent over my slashed wrist, an instant poised just right there, and then a thick gout, a thick nasty gout of hungry super- slime reared out of the toilet-vent all reach and menace. The slime’s distributive, ambiguous, non-FDA brain had realized a basic truth: People Are Food.

More and more of the thick, mucus-like slime came oozing out of the vent. A pseudopod, the size of a man’s arm, waved about, feeling for flesh. Harry shrank away from it, trying to scoot back over the seat. But a lax tentacle stretched out to block his escape-route. The stuff was stalking him—I guess he smelled stronger than I.

Quickly I tied Harry’s handkerchief around my wrist, making a sort of tourniquet, and then I slipped over the seat and into the station wagon’s rear. If I could just get to the laser in time! We hadn’t planned to use it till later, and it was packed in under a lot of other …

“Help me, Fletcher! For the love of God, help me!”

For some twisted reason I found Harry’s cries amusing.

“
That’s twice
,” I called, in a voice shaking with laughter. “That’s twice, Harry. And you didn’t say please.”

“Please help me! It’s all over my leg and it’s oozing some kind of acid on me. Oh God it burns, Fletcher, it’s
digesting
me!”

There was the laser. I snatched it up and leaned into the front seat. The slime had woven a sort of wet cage all around Harry, a cage of thick green ropes dripping hydrochloric acid. Harry had his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around his head. A piece of slime was plastered against his left leg. Faint wisps of smoke drifted up from this spot as the acid ate away at Harry’s baggy pants.

Moving quickly, I lasered through the slime-rope that fed out of the toilet-vent, and then I snapped the vent’s louvers shut. Cut off from the main body-mass, the slime tendrils around Harry lost their purposefulness and simply flopped down over him. The acid-secretions stopped as well, and we were able to scrape the stuff off without too much pain. Harry was unharmed, except for an ugly red burn on his thigh. My wounded wrist began to throb as the adrenaline faded.

“Here,” said Harry, fumbling open the glove-compartment. “Here’s the first-aid kit. Let me bandage your wrist for you.”

“Oh no, Harry. Let me fix your burn first.”

We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Suddenly I felt better than I’d felt all month.

“I’ll turn the drive back on.”

“Good. Open it up all the way and we’ll catch that sucker by next week.” Harry’s voice was a little muffled. He was chewing a mouthful of the slime.

Our last week of pursuit went by pretty quickly. Harry amused himself by putting together a little Zeeman catastrophe-machine out of rubber-bands and paper-clips. The effect was that if you moved one of the paper-clips around in the contraption, it felt like there was a complexly folded set of forces acting on the clip. At one spot, in particular, the clip would always give a sudden jerk. That was supposed to be a “catastrophe,” in the sense of “abrupt and unpredictable change.” Harry claimed that if you called one direction “fear” and the other direction “rage,” then that little twitch of the paper-clip symbolized what he’d been feeling when he pulled the knife on me. I let him talk, and spent most of my time programming some video-games onto our computer.

As we approached the runaway inertia-winder’s black sphere, we turned off our drive more and more often to check our progress. It was important to line ourselves up so we’d be heading right towards the center. Once we were inside, our drive wouldn’t be nearly so powerful.

Day by day the sphere grew, blotting out the distant stars. Soon we could see nothing else. We blasted the rockets for twelve more hours, cut power, and coasted towards the interface. We wanted to be able to get a fix on the other rocket as soon as we entered its sphere of influence.

“How will we know when we’re inside?” I asked Harry.

“You’ll feel your inertia go away again. And our radar’ll pick up the other rocket. And maybe …”

Just then I felt a little twitch, a space-ripple running the length of our ship. A strange twinkling filled the space ahead of us.

Before I could say anything, the speaker on our radio crackled into life. “Greetings, masslings. Hail the dearth!” The voice was high and staticky, almost a random whistle. “Hail the dearth!” chimed in more of the little voices. “And sideways fro!”

Something slapped into our windshield then, something green-yellow-white and glowing, something like a living flame.

“Oh my,” said Harry.

The light-glob on our windshield twisted and flickered, forming itself into the shape of a wiry little man. His face was sharp and pointed, with a mischievous slash-mouth and great, staring eyes. A goblin.

“I’ve seen it before,” I stuttered. “I’ve seen that thing before.”

Spots of light flickered everywhere, as far ahead of us as I could see. It was like we’d flown into a swarm of varicolored fireflies.

“It’s all full of aliens,” Harry gasped. “The inertia-winder’s sphere of influence is full of aliens. Maybe we should leave, Fletcher. Maybe we should turn around before they get us. Hurry up and turn the ship around!”

I hesitated, lost in thought. That goblin looked just like the creature I’d seen in Snerman’s office. And …

“Oh masslings, flee not so soon,” said the speaker. The little green goblin bowed and capered, mouthing the words. Bits of flame scattered off his fingertips.

Another glob of light flopped into our windshield. It was mostly red and brown. As before, the flickering damped down, and the thing took humanoid shape.

“That’s a gnome,” said Harry, his voice cracking a little. “A little gnome just like the statue that Mother had in our backyard. These aren’t aliens, Fletcher, these are …”

“How do you do, and how do you do, and how do you do again,” boomed a voice as the red-jacketed little gnome bowed in turn to Harry, the goblin and me. He had muddy boots and a dense white beard. A pleasant-looking fellow.

Another shape landed, and another. A slender pink sprite with gauzy gold wings, and a blobby mermaid. They all looked…familiar, like things seen or dreamed once before.

“Come out, come out, come out and play,” sang their voices, and the eldritch creatures pressed up against our windshield. The gnome produced a sturdy silver hammer from inside his coat and began tapping at our titaniplast, as if looking for the right place. The mermaid drooled, the goblin snickered, and the little sprite made limbering-up gestures with her magic wand.

“Look out!” screamed Harry. “They’re going to break our windshield!”

“Let’s get out of here,” I cried, reaching for the gearshift. “I’m going to cut the drive back …”

But just then the windshield shattered. The gaping hole with its shards of plastic was like a horrible insatiable mouth. The air screamed out past us, while loose cargo flew this way and that. I struggled to hang onto the steering wheel, but the wind was too strong. I let it take me then; I let myself flutter out like a dead leaf. No use fighting it; we were dead for sure.

The cold nothingness of space burned into my nose and lungs, like Alpine air at first, coming on and on, infinitely empty, utterly pure. Something grabbed me by the leg, something hot—the goblin.

That should have been it…but it wasn’t. The sprite ran her wand all over me, coating me with an even, golden glow. Suddenly the frost on my tongue melted and I could breathe. No, that’s not quite right. It wasn’t that I could breathe, it was that I no longer
needed
to breathe. The aching nausea of suffocation went away as soon as the wand touched my lips. Somehow the sprite had wrapped me in an energy barrier and had put my viscera in stasis.

I could move around as easily as ever. The first thing I did was look to see what had happened to Harry. He was still in his seat, his legs grimly wedged against the dash. His eyes had a glazed, staring quality…frozen solid? The sprite went in after him.

It occurred to me that I was hearing voices, an impossibility in empty space. Could it be telepathy? Maybe it had been telepathy all along…I didn’t recall ever having turned the radio
on
, come to think of it.

“Greet thee meet in ever neverplace,” said the goblin, still clutching my leg in his hot, flickering hand. “Seekers be ye free to slide?”

“He can’t understand that,” said the gnome, tugging at his beard. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about, Fire. I wonder what his name is?” The sturdy little man floated in front of me, waiting for me to introduce myself.

I went ahead and pretended I could talk, letting the words form in my mind. “I’m Joe Fletcher. My partner’s name is Harry Gerber. We built the machine that’s at the center of this sphere. We want to turn it off. But who are you?”

“I’m called Earth,” said the gnome. “But really I’m everywhere. The goblin is Fire, and the ladies are Air and Water. We’re elementals.”

“Wawa,” said the soggy mermaid called Water. “Wa glub.”

“Silly Water,” sang the sprite. She’d finished coating Harry with pixie-dust. “You’re all right now, Harry Gerber.”

Harry stared at me, his fishlike mouth agape.

“It’s okay,” I said—or thought—to him. “I mean it’s sort of okay. Talk to me subvocally. I’ll be able to hear.”

“We’re both dead and it’s sort of okay?”

“I don’t think we’re dead, Harry.”

“Dearth not dead,” interjected the goblin.

“Wa glubby glub,” said Water.

“We like your machine,” said the gnome. “It’s nice in here, in this big black sphere. Usually we can’t stop moving.”

“This is Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,” I told Harry. “They’re elemental spirits. Gnome, sprite, goblin, mermaid.”

“What about all the others?” asked Harry, sticking his head out through our broken windshield. There were zillions of other bright beings, darting and dancing as far as the eye could see.

“Those are all us, too,” said Earth, the gnome. “There’s only one of me, but I weave back and forth through all of space and time.”

“Me first,” corrected the goblin. “Only me in the wee, wee start.”

“I come before the start,” said Air melodiously. “I am the framework.”

“Wa glub,” said Water, waving a slack hand at the other three and then at herself. “Gaga me.”

“She means that she is logically prior to all of us,” said the sprite. “In the sense that form and becoming are more basic than substance and being.”

“Wawa glubglub,” agreed the mermaid. Her color fluctuated from blue to grey. Her lower half was the traditional fishtail, and her upper half was like a nude woman’s. But she was lumpy, by no means the sexy doll that the word “mermaid” conjures up. Great humps and bulges rippled her flesh like waves on a wind-whipped sea. Now and then a glob of her body would pinch off and drift away into space.

Nor was the sprite sexy in any ordinary sense. Her slender bubblegum-pink body was so attenuated as to be insectlike. With her buzzing gold wings, she was more like a dragonfly than a person. Yet there was something sweet about her small face, something sweet and deeply intelligent.

The goblin’s sharp face also seemed to hold some great wisdom, but a wisdom too arcane for me ever to grasp. Of all the elementals, he seemed the most familiar to me. I’d seen him, or a copy of him, in D.C. the day we launched the winder. And I’d seen him before that: in my dreams, out of the corner of my eye in cities, or on lonely walks in the woods, and most of all, of course, in fires. Have you ever stared too long at a log fire, stared so long that the darting little flames became speedy men peeping out of the wood’s cracks? Speedy men, each a goblin, each a loop of Fire’s tangled lifeline.

The gnome was the most human of the elementals. He looked just right, with dirty brown boots and pants, and with a red jacket and cap. The cap was pointed and fell over to one side.

“I don’t believe this,” said Harry, struggling with our spaceship. “This is so unscientific it makes me sick. I’d almost rather die than be saved by pixie-dust. Why don’t you…elementals tell me you’re from Betelgeuse or Proxima Centauri. It’d made me feel a whole lot better.”

“We’re not from anywhere in particular,” said the sprite, taking Harry’s arm to keep him from drifting off. “We’re abstract concepts personified. Like the electron. The
electron
is in each piece of matter right? Or space.
Space
is everywhere.”

“Not right now it isn’t,” said the gnome, with a nervous glance over his shoulder. “It hasn’t been around recently. I think that’s because there’s no inertia in here.”

“Space as squid is lurking ere wot ye …” began the goblin, but Harry interrupted.

“Well,
we
aren’t from everywhere. We’re from the planet Earth. And you’ve ruined our ship. How are we going to get home?”

“Can’t you fix that windshield?” I asked the gnome. “We just want to turn off the runaway inertia-winder and go back to our people.”

“Cancel dearth?” cried the goblin. “Ah, but merry it is this way, ‘tis the finest fairy-ring that ever was.”

“Prehistoric Stonehenge isn’t so bad,” put in the sprite. “We’re having a good time there, too.”

“And the time when the Sun goes nova and black hole,” added the gnome. “I’m having fun
there
.”

“Wait,” protested Harry. “If you’re really spread out all over space and time, then you must sometimes meet your past selves, right?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Wilst probe the savor?” asked the goblin. A twisting glob of flame, green-yellow-white, smacked into my leg. Too hot. I danced aside and the glob jelled into a copy of the goblin, a past and future self.

“What about time-paradoxes?” asked Harry. “What if your past self does something that it didn’t do?”