Special Deliverance (17 page)

T
HEY REACHED THE SINGING tower on the fourth day after they left the inn.

The tower was not a tower; it was a needle. Standing on top a high hill, it jabbed a finger heavenward. At the base it measured a good six feet across, tapering to a sharp point a hundred feet or more above the ground. It was of a rather nasty pinkish color and was made of a substance that appeared similar to the substance of which the cube had been constructed. Plastic, Lansing told himself, although he was fairly sure that it was not plastic. When he laid his hand flat against its surface, he could feel a slight vibration, as if the wind out of the west, playing upon it, was causing it to vibrate along its entire length as a freestanding, tapering, most unlikely violin string would vibrate to the bow.

With the exception of Sandra, all of them were disappointed with the music it made. Jorgenson said, in fact, that it wasn’t music—that is was simply noise. It was not generally loud, although at tunes it did become a little louder. It sounded, Lansing thought, somewhat like chamber music, although his exposure to chamber music had been slight. Long ago, he recalled, Alice on a Sunday afternoon had enticed him to a chamber music concert and he had suffered, silently but acutely, through two solid hours of it. Yet, despite the fact that more often than not it was a soft music, it had fantastic carrying power. They had heard the first wind-blown snatches of it on the afternoon of the third day out.

Sandra had been instantly entranced; even hearing only snatches of it, she had been captivated. She had balked at stopping to camp that night.

“Can’t we press on?” she’d asked. “Perhaps we can reach the tower before the night is done. None of us is really all that toed and it will be cool walking in the night.”

Lansing had ruled out, rather brusquely, any thought of traveling by night.

Sandra had not argued. She had not helped fix supper, as had been her habit, but had walked out on a small knoll above the camping place and had stood there, a small, slender, wind-blown figure, tensed with listening. She had refused to eat, she did not sleep; she had stood upon the knoll all night.

Now that they had climbed the high hill to its top, where stood the so-called tower, she still was in her trance. She stood to one side, head thrown back, staring upward at the tower, listening with every fiber of her being.

“It stirs me not at all,” said Jorgenson. “What does she find in it?”

“It stirs you not at all,” Melissa said, “because you have no soul. No matter what you may say, it still is music, although a strange music at the best. I like music you can dance to. I used to dance a lot. This is not music one can dance to.”

“I’m worried about Sandra,” Mary said to Lansing. “She hasn’t eaten since we heard the first notes of the music and she hasn’t slept. What shall we do about it?”

Lansing shook his head. “Leave her alone for a while. She may snap out of it.”

When the evening meal was cooked, Melissa took a plate of food to Sandra and coaxed her into eating, although she did not eat a great deal and spoke scarcely at all.

Sitting by the fire and watching the woman, outlined against the sunset color of the west, Lansing recalled how anxiously she had looked forward to the singing tower. On that first night out from the inn, she had said, “It could be beautiful. How I hope it is! There is so little that is beautiful in this world. A world deprived of beauty.”

“You live for beauty,” he had said.

“Oh, indeed I do. All this afternoon I have tried to make a poem. There is something here from which a poem might be made—a thing of beauty in itself springing from a place that is most unbeautiful. But I cannot get it started. I know what I want to say, but the thought and word will not come together.”

And now, sitting by the fire and watching her, so bewitched by music that bewitched no one else, he wondered if she had made any progress with her poem.

Jorgenson was saying to Jurgens, “Back at the inn you said we should travel north. We had been warned against the north. You said you were suspicious whenever you were warned, that if one were told not to go somewhere, one must always go. There are always attempts, you said, to mislead one in his quests.”

“That’s quite right,” said Jurgens. “I think my reasoning is sound.”

“But we went west, not north.”

“We traveled toward the known; now we’ll travel to the unknown. Now, having reached the tower, we’ll swing north and have a look at Chaos.”

Jorgenson looked questioningly at Lansing and Lansing nodded at him. “That’s what I had in mind as well. Do you have comment?”

Jorgenson shook his head, embarrassed.

“I wonder,” said Melissa, “what Chaos possibly could be.”

“It could be almost anything,” said Lansing.

“I don’t like the sound of it.”

“You mean you are afraid of it?”

“Yes, that’s it. I’m afraid of it.”

“People put different names to the selfsame thing,” said Mary. “Chaos might mean one thing to us and a totally different thing to someone else. Different cultural backgrounds make for varying perceptions.”

“We are grasping at straws,” said Jorgenson. “Desperately, unthinkingly grasping. We first grasped at the cube, then at the city. Now it’s the singing tower and Chaos.”

“I still think the cube was significant,” Mary said. “I still have the feeling—I can’t get rid of it—that we messed up with the cube. The Brigadier thought it would be the city, but the city was too pat, too patently misleading. It would be a natural reaction for anyone to expect the answers from the city.” She said to Jorgenson, “You found no answers there?”

“Just empty rooms and dust over everything. The four who were lost may have found an answer; that may have been the reason they didn’t return. You found more than we did—the doors and the installation. Still, they told you nothing; they were valueless.”

“Not entirely without value,” said Mary. “They told us much about the inhabitants of the city. A sharply scientific people, technologically inclined, very sophisticated. And what we found pointed the way that they had gone—into other worlds.”

“As we have gone into another world?”

“Precisely,” said Jurgens. “With one exception—they went on their own.”

“And now are snatching us.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” said Lansing. “Someone, some agency, as you say, snatched us, but we can’t be sure who it might have been.”

“This experience,” Mary said to Jorgenson, “can’t be entirely foreign to you. You have been such a traveler. You voluntarily went to other worlds, traveling in time.”

“But no longer,” said Jorgenson. “I have lost my ability. In this place my procedures do not work.”

“Perhaps if you concentrated on how you did it, the mechanism that you used. What you said or did, your state of mind.”

Jorgenson cried at her, “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I tried back there in the city.”

“Yes, he did,” Melissa said. “I have watched him try.”

“If I could have,” said Jorgenson, “if I only could have, it would have been possible to go back in time to that period before the city was deserted, while the people still were there, engaged in whatever work they may have been attempting.”

“That would have been neat,” Melissa said. “Don’t you see how neat it would have been.”

“Yes, we see how neat,” said Lansing.

“You don’t believe in my time traveling,” Jorgenson challenged him.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t. You haven’t. Not in so many words.”

“Look here,” said Lansing, “don’t try to start a hassle. We have all the trouble that we need. We can get along without personality clashes. You say you travel in time and I don’t contradict you. Shall we leave it at that?”

“Fair enough,” said Jorgenson, “if you keep your mouth shut.”

With some effort, Lansing did not answer.

“We’ve struck out,” said Mary, “on most of what we’ve found. I had held a hope the tower might give us a clue.”

“It has given us nothing,” said Jorgenson. “It is like all the other stuff.”

“Sandra may come up with something,” Jurgens said. “She is letting the music soak into her. After a while—”

“It’s nothing but tinkly, seesawing sound,” said Jorgenson. “I can’t see what she could find in it.”

“Sandra comes from an artistic world,” Mary told him. “She is attuned to aesthetic qualities that in other worlds are only marginally developed. The music—”

“If it is music.”

“The music may mean something to her,” Mary said, unperturbed by his interruption. “After a while, she may get around to telling us.”

S
he did not get around to telling them. She ate only a little. She did not refuse to talk, but her talk was short and noncommittal. For the first two days, for almost forty-eight hours, she stood upright, tense with listening, paying no attention to her companions of the trail or, indeed, even to herself.

“We’re wasting time,” Jorgenson complained. “We should be moving north. Chaos, if we find Chaos there, whatever it may be, may tell us something. We can’t be stuck here forever.”

“I won’t go north,” shrilled Melissa. “I’m afraid of Chaos.”

“You’re a flighty bitch,” said Jorgenson. “Not even knowing what it is, you are scared of it.”

“This kind of talk,” said Lansing, “is getting us nowhere. Bickering doesn’t help. We should talk, most certainly, but we should not be yelling at one another.”

“We can’t just march off and leave Sandra,” Mary told them. “She was with us from the start. I will not desert her.”

“North is not the only way to go,” said Jurgens. “We have been told we’ll find a condition there called Chaos, but if we continued, we might find something farther west. At the first inn we heard of the cube and city, but nothing else. At the second inn it was the tower and Chaos. The innkeepers are not too generous with their information. We have a map, but it is worthless. It points the way from the city into the badlands, but nothing more. It does not show the second inn or the tower.”

“Perhaps,” said Lansing, “they tell us all they know.”

“That may be right,” Jurgens agreed, “but we can’t rely on them.”

“The point’s well made,” said Jorgenson. “We should go both west and north.”

“I won’t leave Sandra,” Mary said.

“Maybe if we talked with her,” suggested Jorgenson.

“I’ve tried,” said Mary. “I’ve told her we can’t stay here. I’ve told her we can come back again and then she can listen to the tower. I doubt she even hears me.”

“You could stay with her,” said Jorgenson. “The rest of us split up. Two go west, two go north, see what we can find. Agree all of us will be back in four or five days.”

“I don’t think that’s wise,” protested Lansing. “I am against leaving Mary here alone. Even if I were not, I’m inclined to think we should not split up.”

“So far, there’s been no danger. No real threat of physical danger,” said Jorgenson. “It would be safe. Leave Mary here, the rest of us take a quick run out. I can’t bring myself to hold much hope, but there’s always a chance we will turn up something.”

“Maybe we could carry Sandra,” Jurgens suggested. “If we get her away from the music, she might be all right.”

“I suppose we could,” said Lansing, “but the chances are she’d fight us. She’s not in her right mind. Even if she didn’t fight us, if all we had to do was haul her along, she would slow us up. This is bad country. There are long stretches between water. We have water here, but between here and the last water was two days.”

“Before we left we’d fill the canteens,” said Jorgenson. “We’d drink sparingly. We’d be all right. Farther on the water situation may improve.”

“It seems to me that Jorgenson may be right,” said Mary. “We can’t leave Sandra. I’ll stay with her. There seems to be no danger. The land is empty of any kind of life—only the Sniffler, and he is one of us.”

“I will not leave you here alone,” said Lansing.

“We could leave Jurgens,” suggested Jorgenson.

“No,” Mary told him. “Sandra knows me best. I’m the one she always turned to.” She said to Lansing, “All of us can’t stay here. We are wasting time. We must know what is north and west. If there is nothing there, then we’ll know and can make other plans.”

“I won’t go north,” Melissa said. “I simply will not go.”

“Then you and I’ll go west,” said Jorgenson. “Lansing and Jurgens north. We’ll travel light and fast. A few days only and then we’ll be back. By that time Sandra may be herself again.”

“I still have hopes,” said Mary, “that she is learning something, hearing something to which the rest of us are deaf. The answer, or part of the answer, may be here and she the only one to find it.”

“We stay together,” Lansing insisted. “We are not breaking up.”

“You’re being obstinate,” said Jorgenson.

“So I’m being obstinate,” said Lansing.

Before the end of the day, Sandra had abandoned her standing position and fallen to her knees. Every now and then she crawled, hitching herself closer to the singing tower.

“I’m worried about her,” Lansing told Mary.

“So am I,” said Mary, “but she seems to be all right. She talks a little, not much. She says that she must stay. The others of us should go on, she says, but she can’t leave. Leave her some food and water, she told me, and she’ll be all right. She did eat something this evening and drank some water.”

“Does she tell you what is happening?”

“No, she’s not told me that. I asked her and she either wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me. Couldn’t, I would guess. She may not as yet know herself what’s happening.”

“You’re convinced there is a happening, that it’s not just sheer fascination with the music?”

“I can’t be certain, but I think there is a happening.”

“It’s strange,” he said, “that we can gather no significant information from the tower. There’s nothing here, absolutely nothing to put a handle on. Like the cube. The two of them. Nothing from either one of them. Both of them are constructions. Someone built them for a purpose.”

“Jorgenson was talking about that, too. He thinks they are false clues. Constructions to confuse us.”

“The maze syndrome. Running in a maze. A test to sort us out.”

“He doesn’t say so, but that is what he means.”

They were sitting apart from the others, a short distance from the fire. Jurgens stood to one side, doing nothing, simply standing there. The other two were beside the fire, talking to one another occasionally, but mostly sitting silent.

Mary took Lansing by the hand. “We have to make some move,” she told him. “We can’t just sit here, waiting for Sandra. The man back at the first inn talked about winter coming. He said he closed up for the winter. Winter could be dreadful here. Our time may be short. This is already autumn. Maybe deep into autumn.”

He put an arm around her, drew her close. She rested her head on his shoulder.

“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “Not alone. It would tear me up inside to leave you here alone.”

“You have to,” she said.

“I could go north alone. Leave Jurgens here with you.”

“No, I want Jurgens with you. It’s safe here; there may be danger in the north. Don’t you see? It must be done.”

“Yes, I know. It makes sense. But I simply cannot leave you.”

“Edward, you must. We have to know. What we are looking for may be in the north.”

“Or in the west.”

“Yes, that’s true. It may even be here, but we can’t be certain. Sandra is a poor reed to lean upon. There is a chance she’ll come up with something, but only a chance. Nothing to wait around for.”

“You’ll be careful? You’ll stay right here? You’ll take no chances?”

“I promise you,” she said.

In the morning she kissed him good-bye and said to Jurgens, “You take care of him. I’m counting on you to take care of him.”

Jurgens told her, proudly, “We’ll take care of one another.”