Doorways in the Sand Page 15

  As it paused for an instant, perhaps debating the best disposition of the alkaloids my excess nitrogen would provide, the past couple of days flashed before me. No more than that, as I was still fresh on the earlier portions of my life from the last time I had been about to die.

  I don’t know whether it was that certain smile or morbid curiosity that manipulated me next. Doctor Drade had wanted to keep me hospitalized for further observation, despite the prima facie evidence of my healed chest. I disappointed him, however, and checked out around five hours after Nadler and Ragma had departed. Hal picked me up and drove me home.

  Declining an offer to dine with Hal and Mary, I retired early that evening, first calling Ginny, who now seemed anxious to resume life where we had been interrupted at it back in my undergraduate days. We made a date for the following afternoon, and I turned in after a brief constitutional about the neighborhood rooftops.

  Troubled, my sleep? Yes. External security there was, to the extent of a pair of drowsy coplike stakeouts I had spotted from above while taking the air. Inside, though, I shuffled my deck of distresses and dealt myself bad hand after bad hand until I was cleaned out, mercifully, before six bells.

  From then to morning was nine hours long for me and interspersed with short features, none of which I could get a pin through afterward, save for the smile. I awoke knowing what I had to do and immediately set about rationalizing it so that it would not seem like another compulsion. And after a time I decided that perhaps it was not. Really, anyone would be curious about the place where he almost died.

  So I phoned Hal and tried to borrow his car. Mary was using it, though. However, Ralph’s was available and I hiked over and picked it up.

  It was a crisp, clear morning with a hint of balminess to come. Driving seaward, I thought of my new job and of Ginny and of the smile. The job was to outlast the current difficulty, Nadler had assured me, and the more I considered it the more it seemed that it might be worthwhile. If you have to do something, it is fortunate if it can be something interesting, something more than a little enjoyable. All those races out there, somewhere, concerning which we now knew next to nothing—I was going to have an opportunity to mine the unknown, hopefully to fetch forth something of understanding, to consider the exotic, to transform the familiar. I realized, suddenly, that I was excited at the prospect. I wanted to do it. I had no illusions as to why I had been hired, but now that I had my foot between door and jamb I wanted to push by the present obstructions and have a go at the real work. It seemed, just then, that alien anthropology (well, xenology, more correctly, I suppose) was really the sort of thing for which I had been preparing myself all along, in my own eclectic way. I chuckled softly. In addition to being excited, it occurred to me that I might be happy.

  Having grown a bit more used to doing things in reverse, I found that driving a stereoisocar was not all that difficult. I came to a proper halt at every sign, and once I got out into the country there were very few traffic distractions. In fact, the only thing that had given me any trouble at all since the reversal was shaving. My traumatized nervous system had responded to the imaged reversal of a front-back reversal by jittering my hand to a bloody halt and waiting for me to dust off the electric shaver. This done, it was still a peculiar experience, but with the removal of the hazard it repaid me with confidence and a reasonably clean face.

  And as I grinned and grimaced in the glass, I had thought of the only fragment of the night’s dreaming that remained with me. There was this smile. Whose? I did not know. It was just a smile, somewhere a little over the line from the place where things begin to make sense. It remained with me, though, flickering on and off like a fluorescent tube about to call it quits; and as I drove along the route Hal had taken earlier, I tried free-associating my way around it, Doctor Marko not being handy.

  Nothing but the “Mona Lisa” came to pass. It did not feel quite right, in terms of analytic correspondence. Still, it was this famous painting that had gone out in exchange for the Rhennius machine. There could be some subtle connection—at least in my subconscious—or else a red herring born of coincidence and imagination, which sounds more like a caption for a Dali or an Ernst than a Da Vinci.

  I shook my head and watched the morning go by. After a time I came to the side road and took it.

  Leaving the car where we had parked before, I located the path and made my way down to the cottage. I observed it discreetly for a long while, saw no signs of life. Ragma had insisted that I seek to avoid troublesome situations, but this hardly seemed to qualify as one. I approached it from the rear, advancing on the window through which Paul must have entered. Yes. The latch was broken. Peering inside, I saw a small bedroom, quite empty. Circling the building then, I glanced in the other windows, saw that the place was indeed deserted. The fractured front door was nailed shut, so I returned to the rear and entered after the fashion of my former mentor and master rockmaker.

  I made my way through the bedroom and on out the door from which Paul had emerged. In the front room the signs of our struggles were unobliterated. I wondered which of the dried bloodstains might be my own.

  I glanced out the window. The sea was calmer, with more to it than was the case the last time I had passed this way. It lay cleaner scud lines on the beach, where no new doorways gaped that I could see. Turning away from it then, I studied the tackle and netting which had taken Paul so neatly where he stood, upsetting the balance of power and getting me punctured that day.

  Some lines and a section of mesh were still snagged by a nail in one of the rafters, loosely leashing the junk on the floor below. To my right, a series of two-by-fours nailed between wall supports made a track up to that level.

  I climbed it and crossed among the rafters, pausing every few paces to strike a light and examine the dustcoated wood. On the opposite side of the disturbed area where the equipment had rested, I came across a trail of small wedge-shaped smudges, leading in from a crossbrace which in turn bore them from the top of the side frame itself. I descended then and searched the rest of the cottage quite thoroughly but came across nothing else that was of any interest. So I went back outside, smoked a cigarette while I thought about it, then headed back for the car.

  Smiles. Ginny had many of them that afternoon, and we spent the rest of the day avoiding troublesome situations. She was more than a little surprised to learn that I had graduated and gotten a job. No matter. The day had fulfilled its promise, was balmy, stayed bright. We ambled about the campus and the town, laughing and touching a lot. Later, we wound up at a chamber-music recital, which for some forgotten reason seemed the perfect thing to do and was. We stopped at a nearby café afterward, then went on up to my place so that I could show her it was only normally disarrayed, among other things. Smiles.

  And the following day was a variation on the same theme. The weather varied also, a bit of rain beginning in the afternoon. But that was all right, too. Made things seem cozier. Nice to be inside. Imagining a roaring fireplace across the room. Stuff like that. She had not noticed that I was reversed, and I made up such a lovely lie for my scar, involving initiation into a secret society within a tribe I had recently fielded, that I almost wished I had written it down. Alack! And more smiles.

  About nine in the evening my phone shattered the idyll. My premonition equipment printed out a warning, but like a Low Flying Aircraft sign failed to suggest anything I could do about it. I roused myself and answered the thing, a sigh followed by a “Yes?”

  “Fred?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Ted Nadler. A problem has come up.”

  “Like what?”

  “Zeemeister and Buckler have escaped.”

  “From where? How?”

  “They had been transferred to a prison hospital later on in the same day they w ere brought in. They just left it a few hours ago, as nearly as we can tell. As to how they went about it, nobody seems to know. They left nine unconscious employees—medical and secur
ity—behind them. The doctors think it was some sort of neurotropic gas that was used—at least, the victims are all responding to atropine. But when the director called me none of them had come out of it sufficiently to be able to say what had occurred.”

  “Too bad. But then, I guess we’ve seen the last of them for a time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did I just say? They are probably on their way out of the country. Kidnapping charges, attempted homicide charges—reasons like that.”

  “We can’t chance it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They just might head your way instead. So you had better send your girlfriend home and pack a suitcase. I will be picking you up in around half an hour.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Sorry, but I can, and that’s an order. Your job now requires that you take a trip. So does your health, for that matter.”

  “All right. Where?”

  “New York,” he said.

  And then click. Thus, the invasion of Eden.

  I returned to Ginny.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “We still have half an hour.”

  Actually, it took him more like an hour to get to my place, which gave me time to make a nasty, coldblooded decision of a sort I had never had to make before and to act on it.

  Merimee answered on the sixth ring and recognized my voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “Listen, do you recall an offer you made the last time that we talked?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’d like to take you up on it,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Two of them. Their names are Zeemeister and Buckler—”

  “Oh, Morty and Jamie! Sure.”

  “You know them?”

  “Yes. Morty used to work for your uncle occasionally. When business was booming and we were swamped with orders, we sometimes had to hire on extra help. He was a fat little kid, eager to learn the trade. I never much liked him myself, but he had enthusiasm and certain aptitudes. After Al fired him, he began operations on his own and built up a fairly decent business. He acquired Jamie a couple years later, to deal with competitors and handle customer complaints. Jamie used to be a light-heavyweight boxer—a pretty good one—and he had lots of military experience. Deserted from three different armies—”

  “Why did Uncle Al fire Zeemeister?”

  “Oh, the man was dishonest. Who wants untrustworthy employees?”

  “True. Well, they’ve come close to killing me twice now, and I have just learned they are loose again.”

  “I take it you do not know their present whereabouts?”

  “That, unfortunately, is the case.”

  “Hmm. It makes things more difficult. Well, let us get at it from the other end. Where are you going to be for the next few days?”

  “I should be heading for New York within the hour.”

  “Excellent! Where will you be staying?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You are welcome to stay here again. In fact, it might facilitate—”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve graduated. Doctorate, in fact. Now I have a job. My boss is taking me to New York tonight. I don’t know where he will be putting me up yet. I’ll try to call you as soon as I get in.”

  “Okay. Congratulations on the job and the degree. When you make up your mind to do something, you really move fast—just like your uncle. I look forward to hearing the whole story soon. In the meantime, I will put out some feelers. Also, I think I can promise you a pleasant surprise before too long.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “Now, it would not be a surprise if I told you, would it, dear boy? Trust me.”

  “Okay, here’s trust,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Till later.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Thus, with premeditation and full intent, et cetera. No apologies. I was tired of being shot, and it is always a shame to waste any sort of gift certificate.

  The hotel, as it turned out, was directly across the street from the same partly fleshed skeleton of a possible office building that I had used to gain access to the roof of the structure diagonally across the street—namely, the hall that housed the Rhennius machine.

  I somehow doubted that this was a matter of pure coincidence. When I commented on it, though, Nadler did not reply. It was after midnight that we were checking in, and I had been with the man continually since he had picked me up.

  Then: “I’m about out of cigarettes,” I said as we approached the desk, first noting, of course, that there was no cigarette machine in sight.

  “Good,” he replied. “Filthy habit.”

  The girl at the desk was more sympathetic, however, and told me where I could find one on the mezzanine. I thanked her, got our room number, told Nadler I would be up in a minute and left him there.

  Naturally, I headed immediately for the nearest phone, got hold of Merimee and told him where I was.

  “Good. Consider it staked out,” he said. “By the way, I believe that the customers are in town. One of my associates thinks she saw them earlier.”

  “That was quick.”

  “Accidental, too. Still . . . Be of good cheer. Sleep well. Adieu.”

  “G’night.”

  I headed for the elevators, caught one to my floor and sought our room. Lacking a key, I knocked.

  There was no response for a time. Then, just as I was about to knock again, Nadler’s voice inquired, “Who is it?”

  “Me. Cassidy,” I said.

  “Come on ahead. It’s unlocked.”

  Trusting, preoccupied and a trifle tired, I turned the knob, pushed and entered. A mistake anyone could have made.

  “Ted! What the hell is—” and by then a vine had snagged me by the leg and another was slipping about my shoulder—“it?” I inquired, going airborne.

  I struggled, of course. Who wouldn’t? But the thing raised me a good five feet into the air, shifting me into a horizontal position directly above its less than attractive self. It then proceeded to turn me upside down, so that my field of vision was dominated by its gray-green bulk, its tub of slime and its octopod members all awrithe. I had a hunch it meant me ill even before its leafy appendages came open like switchblades, showing me their moist, spiny and suspiciously ruddy insides.

  I let out a bleat and tore at the vines. Then something that felt like a red-hot poker occurred behind my eyes and passed from side to side and back within my head. Stark terror poured forth, and I twisted convulsively within the living bonds.

  Then came what seemed a sharp whistling noise, the stabbing sensation was gone from my cranium, the vines slackened, collapsed, and I fell, twisting, to the carpet, narrowly missing the bucket’s rim. A bit of the slime slopped over onto me, and inert tentacles fell like holiday streamers about me. I moaned and reached over to rub my shoulder.

  “He’s hurt!” came a voice that I recognized as Ragma’s.

  I turned my head to receive the sympathy I heard rushing toward me on little furry feet and big shod ones.

  However, Ragma in his dog suit and Nadler and Paul Byler in equally appropriate garb rushed past me, squatted about the tub and began ministering to the militant vegetable. I crawled off into a corner, where I regained my feet if not my composure. Then I began mouthing obscenities, which were ignored. Finally, I shrugged, wiped the slime from my sleeve, found a chair, lit a cigarette and watched the show.

  They raised the limp members and manipulated them, massaged them. Ragma tore off into the next room and returned with what appeared to be an elaborate lamp, which he plugged into an outlet and focussed on the nasty shrub. Producing an atomizer, he sprayed its vicious leaves. He stirred the slime. He dumped some chemicals into it.

  “What could have gone wrong?” Nadler said.

  “I have no idea,”
Ragma replied. “There! I think he is coming around!”

  The tentacles began to twitch, like shocked serpents. Then the leaves opened and closed, slowly. A series of shudders shook the thing. Finally, it reared itself upright once again, extended all its members, let them go slack, extended them again, relaxed again.

  “That’s better,” Ragma said.

  “Anybody care how I’m feeling?” I asked.

  Ragma turned and glared at me.

  “You!” he said. “Just what did you do to poor Doctor M’mrm’mlrr, anyway?”

  “Come again? My hearing seems to have been affected.”

  “What did you do to Doctor M’mrm’mlrr?”

  “Thank you. That is what I thought you said. Damned if I know. Who is Doctor Murmur?”

  “M’mrm’mlrr,” he corrected. “Doctor M’mrm’mlrr is the telepathic analyst I brought to examine you. We made a good connection and got him here ahead of schedule. Then the first thing you do when he tries to examine you is incapacitate him.”

  “That thing,” I inquired, gesturing at the tub and its occupant, “is the telepath?”

  “Not everyone is a member of the animal kingdom, as you define it,” he said. “The doctor is a representative of a totally different line of life development than your own. Anything wrong with that? Are you prejudiced against plants or something?”

  “My prejudice is against being seized, squeezed and waved about in the air.”

  “The doctor practices a technique known as assault therapy.”

  “Then he should make allowance for the occasional patient who is not a pacifist. I don’t know what I did, but I am glad that I did it.”

  Ragma turned away, cocked his head as if studying a gramophone horn, then announced, “He is feeling better. He wishes to meditate for a time. We are to leave the light on. It should not be overlong.”

  The vines stirred, moved to bunch themselves near the special lamp. Doctor M’mrm’mlrr grew still.

  “Why does he want to assault his patients?” I asked. “It seems somewhat counterproductive to the building up of a good practice.”