He took three rapid steps toward the boulder where the cane leaned, as the acid, choking atmosphere numbed his sense of smell with the assault of its odor and filled his lungs. He reached the cane and seized it even as his eyesight began to sear and blur with tears. Almost, he could hear Blunt chanting, as he had chanted in the vision tank back there underground at Malabar Mine while Paul watched.
"Destruct! The ultimate destruct! The creative destruct that will rescue Man from being saved forever..."
Then Paul felt his knees strike the ground as he fell. And with that his identity quit his body forever and left it there, fallen and dying in the suffocation of the yet-untamed atmosphere of the world which would be called New Earth, with a splintered walking stick clutched in its single fist.
Chapter 20
Full twenty-fathoms times five, thy body lies. Of its bones is ocean debris made....
Thirty miles due west of La Jolla, California, which is a few miles up the coast line from San Diego, on a sandy underwater pleateau six-hundred-odd feet below the surface of the ever-moving blue Pacific, Paul's bodiless identity hovered above a skeleton of a man wrapped and weighted with half-inch chain. This place had not been his original intended destination, but he had detoured here to settle a purely emotional point in his own mind. Now, hovering above the chain-wrapped skeleton, he sensed with relief that the body it once supported had died a natural death. It was not that he doubted that Blunt had been willing to murder to gain the results he wanted. It was just that he wished the ledger sheet on which he and Blunt were totaled up together and against each other to be as clean as possible.
He left the white bones in the peace of their eternal darkness, and went his way.
His way—the way Blunt's cane on New Earth had been designed to send him—led him to an awakening in something like a coffin. He lay, legs together, arms at his sides, on his back, and tightly enclosed in a metal container. His eyes were open but they saw nothing but blackness. His pattern-linked perception, however, recognized that he was in a sort of cold-storage vault—something very like the slide-out six-and-a-half-foot drawers for unclaimed bodies in a public morgue. The body he now inhabited was identical with the one he was used to, except that it had two good arms. However, it seemed completely paralyzed.
It was paralyzed, he recognized with a sudden grim humor, because it was frozen stiff. The container in which he lay was surrounded with refrigerator coils and his body's temperature was a little more than twenty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The body would first have to be thawed before any life could be brought to it.
Paul surveyed the surrounding pattern. It would be surprising if Blunt, who had made so many arrangements where Paul was concerned, had not also made some here. Sure enough, the container lay on tilted tracks and was held inside the freezing unit by the bare hooking of a catch. Paul made the necessary slight alterations in the pattern and the catch failed. He slid out into the light of a brightly illuminated room without windows.
As he emerged into the room, the temperature rose sharply and suddenly from close to freezing to seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. Lying at a tilted angle that put his feet close to the floor below the container and his head several inches higher, Paul saw it was a small room with a single door and no furniture, tiled in white.
The single item of interest in it was a message neatly printed in large letters on the wall opposite Paul. It read:
Paul: As soon as you find yourself able, come and join us in suite 1243, at the Koh-i-Nor.
—Walt Blunt
Paul's container had gone into action on its own now. It was beaming deep, gentle heat into the very center of his frozen bones and tissues. It would take—what? Half an hour, perhaps longer, to bring him up to a living temperature so that his identity could take over command of his new body in the ordinary sense. Of course, almost undoubtedly Blunt had planned that Paul would help and hurry the process along. In any case it was rather fine scheduling, and showed an attitude toward other people and the universe that was far from modest. For the first time—in such small unexpected ways, thought Paul, do past things of minor importance explain themselves— Paul received a sudden extra insight into Jase's repeated accusation of arrogance. Over the years Jase must have become well acquainted with arrogance, in the person of Blunt.
Yes, thought Paul, he would hurry things along. But in a way in which Blunt, with his less complete awareness of the pattern, could not expect. Blunt would not expect that the message on the wall would be a clear warning to Paul that the Chantry Guild had already made its move. Outside this room the world would be trapped in a war— a strange, weird war such as it had never known before. And Blunt, general of the attacking forces, would have tuned the entrance of Paul upon the battlefield for the most effective moment from Blunt's point of view.
Only Paul would come early.
He reached into the pattern and to the invincible knowledge that had become a part of him with his own individual ability. He cut certain lines of causal relationship, and established new ones. The pattern altered, in the immediate identity area of the body. And the body itself floated upright out of its container.
It floated toward the door. The door opened. Skimming just above the steps, it mounted a flight of stairs and passed through a farther door into a small hallway. Beyond, was a third door, a transparent door to the traffic level, on a street Paul recognized as being less than a dozen blocks from the Koh-i-Nor. It was night beyond this last door, and for some reason the Complex without seemed darker than it should be.
Paul's body floated to the last door. It opened and he floated out into the hot July night. The Complex Internal
Weather Control seemed to have failed in its functioning, for the temperature outside here was in the high nineties at the very least and humidity must be close to a hundred per cent. The still air of the Complex seemed to hang heavily in the unusual shadows between structures, and its heat wrapped itself steamily around Paul's icy body.
No vehicles were in motion. And here, at least, the streets seemed deserted. Paul swung about and skimmed off along the concrete walk in the direction which he knew would take him to the Koh-i-Nor.
The streets were as empty as if the people in the Complex had locked and barred their doors against some plague or roaming madness. In the first half block the only sound Paul heard was the insane, insect-like buzzing of a defective street light. He looked up at its pulsating, uncertain glow, and saw at least part of the reason it did not do well. Its pole had become a monstrous cane of red-and-white striped candy.
Paul floated on. At the next corner he passed a closed door. From the crack beneath it, however, a flood of red fluid remarkably like blood in its color and viscosity was flowing. One block farther on, Paul turned down into a new street and saw his first living person of the night
This was a man with his shirt half torn off, who was sitting in a doorway and turning a kitchen knife over and over in his hands. He looked up as Paul came toward him.
"Are you a psychiatrist?" he said. "I need———" His lifted eyes caught sight of Paul's feet and the space between them and the pavement. "Oh," he said. He looked down at his hands and went back to playing with his knife again.
Paul paused. And then he realized that his body could not speak. He went on, and as he did so he reached once more into the pattern. It was possible, as he had suspected Blunt had intended, to hurry things up. Living cells could not be thawed quite as crudely as dead meat, but borrowing heat uniformly from the general surroundings was even more efficient than the deep-heating mechanism of the storage container had been. Slowly, but at the same time much more rapidly than might have been expected, a living warmth came to Paul's body as he proceeded on toward the Koh-i-Nor.
He passed other things of the night which bore little relation to normality. A monument in the center of one street crossing was slowly melting down as he passed, like wax in a warm oven. The stone head of a lion, at the corner of a heavy balcony runnin
g around one large building, dipped its heavy muzzle and roared down at him as he passed below. In the center of one street he passed a circle of blackness—a hole of nothingness that showed, not the level below, but a spatial distortion on which the human eye was not equipped to focus. No cars were running—Complex Transportation must have been as inactive or powerless as Internal Weather—but occasionally Paul saw other people, alone, on foot, and at some distance. None of them stayed to talk when they saw him coming, but hurried off rapidly.
Life was rapidly taking over Paul's body. He had started the heart early. By the time he reached the concourse his temperature was at ninety-six and a fraction of a degree, pulse and respiration almost normal. He could have walked it, but he waited until he actually reached the entrance to the North Tower of the hotel before he put his feet to the ground.
He walked into a dim-lit lobby illuminated only by emergency lighting, and empty of guests. A white face stared at him from well back of the desk counter. It was the clerk with the elegant longhand. Paul paid him no attention, but walked on around the corner to the elevators.
These, being a balanced system running on stored power, had been unaffected by the obvious curtailment of services otherwise. Silently, gently, efficiently, as if the human race were already dead and only a mechani-cal duty remained, the disks floated one after another in regular, spaced intervals, up and down the transparent tubes of their shafts. Paul stepped onto a disk ascending the up shaft.
He slid smoothly up, past a succession of empty hallways, barely lighted by the red emergency light above the door to the stairs on each level. Only once did he see someone. That was in passing the ninth level. It was a woman—a young woman, almost a girl. At the sight of him passing up the elevator tube, she turned hastily and ducked into a doorway.
He went on up.
The twelfth level of the hotel, in contrast to the rest of the world Paul had seen that night, was fully lighted. Its illumination seemed almost garish in contrast to the surrounding dark. But no one stirred about its corridor, either. More than this, Paul received from the closed doors he passed an impression of darkness and emptiness beyond, as if suite 1243 toward which he walked was the only space with life within it on this bright level.
When he turned a last corner of the corridor and approached 1243, he saw its door was ajar. It stood three-quarters of the way rolled back into its wall socket, and the sound of a voice came audibly through the opening.
The voice was that of Kirk Tyne.
". . . your blind spot," he was saying. "That's what I can't understand, Walt. A man of your intelligence who thinks the present can be changed in the present, without going back and altering the predisposing factors of the past. And so you let loose this madness on the world."
Paul stopped just short of the entrance. He had heard this argument from Tyne before, at the tune when Tyne had taken him onto the World Engineer's personal staff. Now it struck Paul as interesting to know what Blunt's answer to it would be.
"You've sold your birthright for a mess of circuits," answered Blunt's voice. "You don't think, Kirk. You parrot what the Supe tells you. If the past can't be changed, the present must. For the future's sake."
"Will you use a little logic?" asked Tyne. "I tell you the present cannot be changed without changing the past. Even the Supe, with all its stored knowledge, wouldn't be able to calculate the ultimate possibilities of a single insect's life pattern being altered in the past. And that's the easier way. What you're trying here, now, tonight, is the harder."
"Kirk," said Blunt's voice. "You're a fool. The predisposing factors leading up to this hour have been laid and set up for centuries now. All that's necessary for us is to recognize them and use them."
"I tell you that's not true!"
"Because your Supe . . ." Blunt was beginning, with hard irony forming a cutting edge to his resonant voice, when Paul stirred himself again. He stepped forward, entered the doorway, and walked into the main lounge of what was probably one of the best suites the Koh-i-Nor had to offer its guests.
Around this large room seven people stood in tableau. Close and on Paul's left was Kantele. Just beyond her, half turned away from the entrance, was Blunt, an odd tall hat on his head and a heavy black cape with purple facings rippling down from his wide shoulders. Beyond Blunt stood Burton McLeod, who of all seven showed the least concern, and Jase, also in cape and hat. His back to the blue curtains closed across the wide, far window wall of the room opposite the door, stood Eaton White, like a small, colorless silhouette. To White's left, on the opposite side of the room, stood the Koh-i-Nor Hotel's security agent, James Butler. But the bizarre touch was upon him, too. He wore the all-black jumper and slacks of one of the better-known marching societies, an outfit that left only face and hands whitely exposed; and in one of those white hands, he held a slim, lethal police handgun which had had its front sight removed. In place of the sight gleamed a small, blue metal cross.
He and McLeod stood across from each other with perhaps a dozen feet of carpet between them. The police handgun casually covered the chest of McLeod, and both men stood untensely, but as if aware of no others in the room besides themselves.
Closest of all, on Paul's right, stood Tyne. He faced the half-turned-away Blunt, and so was, like the colorless and motionless Eaton White, the first to see Paul as he entered. The sudden widening of his eyes made Blunt check his speech. The rest all turned, even Butler and McLeod. And Kantele gasped. They, all except Blunt, stood like people who witness a basic violation of the natural laws by which they have lived all their lives.
But Blunt leaned upon the straight silver knob of a new walking stick and smiled. As perhaps the Athenian pole-march Callimachus smiled on that day in late September, twenty-five hundred and forty years previous, on seeing in the cool bright sunlight between clouds, the dust of his reinforced Greek wings close in on the Persian horde on the plain of Marathon.
"You're a little early, not too much," he said, looking at Paul. "Kirk here hasn't quite been softened up enough yet. But come on in—myself."
And Paul, walking into the suite, seeing Blunt full and clearly face on for the first time, saw indeed—himself.
Chapter 21
Paul strode into the suite. The eyes of all of them were fixed on him, but none showed more shattering from the blow than the blue eyes of Kantele. For, of course, she alone of them all had felt it from the beginning, even though she would not admit it to herself. It was the reason she had been so drawn to Paul, and bad denied being drawn so fiercely. Paul had not blamed her then; and understanding as he did now, he blamed her less. Even for him, as he stopped, facing Blunt from the distance of a few feet, the experience had its unnatural elements.
To those standing watching, he knew, it must be worse. For it was not a physical resemblance that he shared with Walter Blunt. They were both tall, wide-shouldered, long-boned, with strong facial features. But there the similarity of the flesh ceased. Their common identity was all the more jolting to the emotions because it was a matter of nonphysical duplications. They should not have looked alike. But they did.
It was weirdly as if the same man wore two different costumes and disguises. The surface appearances were totally different, but identically the same way of standing, the same balance of movement, the same mannerisms and attitudes, glowed through the outer shells like the same candle-flame through two differently ornamented lanterns.
"You understand," said Blunt conversationally to Paul, "why I've dodged you all this time?"
"Of course," said Paul.
At that, Kirk Tyne finally found his voice again. And a note that rang clearly in it witnessed to the fact that for the first time the World Engineer was seriously shaken in his convictions.
"What kind of unnatural devil-thing is this, Walt?" he burst out.
"It's a long story," said Blunt. He still leaned on his cane, examining Paul almost the way a connoisseur might examine a particularly valued work of art "But that's what
I brought you here to hear, Kirk."
Kirk glanced from Paul to Blunt and back, as if magnetically attracted against his will.
"I don't believe it," he said.
"Neither the world nor I," answered Blunt, without shifting his gaze off Paul, "will care what you think after tonight, Kirk."
"Satan!" said a voice. Those in the room, including Paul and Blunt, all looked. It was James Butler, the hotel agent, and he was lifting the gun in his hand. The blue cross on the end of its barrel centered on Paul, wavered, and swung over to point at Blunt "Denier of God."
Something black flickered through the air of the room. There was the sound of a soft impact, and Butler staggered and dropped the gun from his suddenly limp grasp. The polished haft of a leaf-shaped, hiltless knife stood out from the muscles of the agent's shoulder. McLeod came walking calmly across the room. He bent to scoop up the gun and tucked it into his waistband, and then taking hold of Butler's shoulder with his left hand, he pulled out the knife with his right. He pulled a self-adjusting pressure bandage from his pocket, put it around Butler's shoulder to cover the wound, and lifted the crippled arm across Butler's chest into the grasp of Butler's other arm.
"Hold that," he said. Butler looked at him. The agent had not made a sound. McLeod went back to his position beyond Blunt.
"Now," asked Kirk, out of a white face, "you sick your hoods on me, and decent people?"
"You call that fanatic decent?" asked Blunt, nodding at the blackclad Butler. "How decent would he have been if he'd shot me, or Paul? As he would have, if Burt hadn't stopped him."
"It makes no difference," said Kirk. Before their eyes, with a remarkable effort of will, they saw the man pull himself together. He repeated himself more calmly. "It makes no difference. None of this makes any difference. There are still only sixty thousand of you. That's not enough to wreck the world."
"Kirk," said Blunt, "you know I enjoy arguing with you. You make such a fine straight man."