For the first half hour after starting for Park Headquarters, Diacono made decent time. Not as fast as when he was being chased, but he strode along at a pretty good pace. The first thing he did was to angle shoreward, to get on the firm, windpacked snow along the edge of the old ice. The traction it afforded made walking both easier and faster.
After a few minutes, the wound again seemed to have stopped bleeding, and he could feel the clotting pull on his skin. The pain had slackened.
At one point he saw something lying in the snow not far ahead, and went to it: the bones of a moose, with blood and a few scraps of hide around. There were a lot of wolf tracks, and the tracks of scavengers—ravens and fox. It all seemed several days old; the wolf tracks had ice crystals in them that had frozen out of the air when the arctic cold moved in.
A half mile farther on, he had stumbled—stepped one snowshoe onto the toe of the other—and fallen heavily with the pack on his back, again catching himself reflexively on his mittened hands. This time the stab of pain in his shoulder was so bad that he stayed on his hands and knees for a minute or so before getting up and going on his way again. After that the shoulder bled much worse than before, until the thick woolen inner mitten was sodden with blood that squished when he flexed his hand. He decided that the bullet, probably flattened by hitting a tree, must be lodged in the deltoid, and in the fall had damaged a vein or artery more severely.
For just a moment he considered trying to do something about it, but that was clearly impractical. He'd have to strip to the waist, and to bandage the deltoid effectively would require a body bandage, applied somehow with his left hand. It couldn't even be undertaken with a mitten on, and barehanded, his fingers would be useless within a minute or so. Then he'd still have to put on his undershirt, shirt...
No, he'd just have to tough the wound out like an old grizzly.
Before long he noticed he was leaving a blood trail; the leather outer shell of the mitten was full, and blood was dribbling from it. He pulled it off and dumped it out, then slid his hand back into it, all without stopping his steady stride. The bleeding would stop soon enough, he told himself, or if it didn't, it didn't.
To Miki it seemed he couldn't long continue like that. With a quick mental "I'll be back," she flicked away.
Farley Waner had gone to bed about twelve-thirty, having stayed up to finish a novel he'd been reading. His pilot, Chuck Carnes, had been asleep for almost three hours. In the morning they would begin their aerial survey of the island's moose population.
Both men were asleep when Miki arrived. She spent five minutes trying to waken Waner, sensing that he was sleeping less deeply than the other. Finally he sat up, looked at the clock, muttered something about "crazy dreams," and got out of bed. As he started for the refrigerator, she undertook to put an image of herself in front of him.
He paused, blinked, shook his head. For a moment he'd thought he was looking at a beautiful nude woman, but women were not semitransparent. He walked right through the image, opened the refrigerator door, and took out the bottle of scotch. What the Park Service doesn't know, he thought as he tipped the illicit bottle, won't hurt them. Then he tipped it a couple more times, trying to ignore the thoughts stirring in his mind.
After that he went back to bed.
Miki decided then that she would try to produce poltergeist effects. If she succeeded, that would surely get their attention. But first she would return to Frank, just for half a minute, long enough to tell him she was trying to get help.
With the thought, she left the building. She did not make an instantaneous transfer; if she had, her experience might have confused her even more than it did. Instead she sped from the building, angling toward Saginaw Point and around it, zipping along above the old shelf ice to meet Frank. It took finite time, seconds, and had she looked back before rounding Saginaw Point, from her elevation she might have seen the lights flash on in the cabin, where suddenly Waner was putting away the dishes while Carnes talked of going to bed early.
Her eyes were on the ice ahead, though, watching for Frank. Seconds later she slowed, thinking she should have seen him by then. There was no sign of him. Alarm flashed through her; perhaps he'd passed out from loss of blood.
But she could not even find his tracks! She came to the remains of the moose, the days-old tracks of wolves and the rest, but nowhere, nowhere was there any sign that Frank Diacono had ever been there. It wasn't as if he'd fallen through a hole in the ice, or been attacked and taken away. It was as if he never was!
There was a moment's panic, the panic of a strong and competent person confronted with evidence of her own insanity. She fought it down, and psychically called his name.
At once she was caught up in a vortex, a whirling darkness without snow or stars or any light at all...
And opened her eyes in her bedroom, fully clothed. The clock read six oh-five—early evening. She had just been somewhere. The memory was fading quickly, like a dream, but she clutched one piece of it: She had been with a man called Frank Diacono. And ... he was in trouble ... and the clock should read much later than five minutes after six! She whispered the name aloud to herself and put her attention on the mental image that came to her, of a man pouring blood from his mitten. From that she gradually pulled the rest of it back, including his inexplicable erasure, the evidence of hallucination.
But this still left her in mystery. She did not know of the Games Master's court, or that its final disposition was underway, the source of her bewilderment. She might have poured herself a drink. She might have said "enough of that," and stayed away from out-of-body travel for days or weeks. What she did instead was close her eyes and psychically seek out a vaguely remembered Tory Merlin for advice.
Peter Shark paused in his orderly scanning of the night to look at the distant lights of Thunder Bay, Ontario, some thirty miles north. That wild Canadian shore seemed to him a strange place for a city of a hundred thousand. But minerals and natural harbors were wherever the matrix put them, he reminded himself, and man was hungry for both. The business of minerals was itself a major game for beings to play, with many roles, as well as being a necessary background element for most other games in the Tikh Cheki Matrix.
He didn't remember ever thinking this before.
Shark resumed his scanning then, rotating his viewpoint clockwise away from Thunder Bay, around to the east, the south, the west, with nothing to see in any of those directions except night and nature. No sign of man, no plane, no lights except the silent stars in a sky from which all moisture had been frozen.
Even Peter Shark could appreciate a sky like that, could feel its beauty. He gazed upward for a moment, then continued his scanning of the night around the island, watching and listening intently for the plane that would bring Merlin and his people to their death.
He gazed down briefly at the ridgetop below him, but saw no one, nor any tracks in the snow. The six snowshoers moving through the forest below escaped his vision, for they were skirting around the ridge crest openings, avoiding exposure, keeping carefully to cover.
They entered no opening until the last fifty yards to the gate, a mile west of Shark's position. The last of them carried a small, bushy fir sapling, which he used as best he could to obscure their tracks. Then all six snowshoers got into the elevator. The big man who'd broken trail for them chuckled as they started down.
"This is the damnedest thing I ever heard of," he said quietly, flexing his now-unwounded shoulder. "And here I am living it: the shooting of an altered scene in real life!"
Basically, the Merlin group had been given another chance. Merlin and Jerry had been allowed to rescript the scene, which they did in conference with Frank and Ole, Paul and Carol, under the Games Master's surveillance.
The result wasn't at all what Hollywood would consider a shooting script, or even a master scene script. Or even a treatment. It required only a brief discussion and decision, and nothing was written down. Simply, the Games Master would return them to the time and place at which they'd started up the trail above Chickenbone Lake. From there, all the principals would pick up life again as if the rejected scene had never been lived, would create anew on the stage—ad lib. The surprise generator would still be on line, or be on line again, depending on how you looked at it, complete with accelerator. And again Shark would watch for them, with full intention, and ability, to prevent their success.
This time Frank would follow a covered route. And when they reached the surprise generator—if they reached the surprise generator—they would leave it on line, only removing the accelerator. Alfred and Walter were authorized and instructed to then trash the accelerator.
With the accelerator gone, the output of the surprise generator would return to the preacceleration level: The human race would have another chance in this cycle to make good its potential.
It was far from the first time a scene had been reshot with a revised script, but it was one of the very few times that any of the principals remembered afterward that there had, in fact, been a re-shoot. Shark did not remember, nor did Gracco; to them there was only the revised reality. But those with whom Vic had worked, remembered. Both versions were accessible to them.
When the Merlin party came back out the gate, fifteen minutes after entering, they exposed themselves only briefly again, with Paul once more wielding his crude fir brush to their trail. Then they trekked through the timber, down the slope toward Siskiwit Lake. It took them somewhat longer to reach Lake Superior than it had taken Frank in the original version, because Vic and Ole in particular were worn out.
And of course there was no great hurry now; they had only to move fast enough to keep from freezing, for this time there was no alarm. Gracco slept. Shark never spotted them, saw no tracks; and the chaos generator never went off-line, so there was not that to shock him. Sleepless and restless as he was, awake only through the frequent ingestion of caffeine tablets and coffee, Shark failed to notice the change in the matrix when the accelerator was removed.
When finally the Merlin team was well out on the new ice, they radioed Lampi, then crawled into their arctic sleeping bags fully clothed, to doze fitfully in the minus-thirty-degree cold. An hour later, they were in the air on their way to Duluth. In the noisy cabin of the De Haviland they again dozed fitfully, except for Diacono, who rode up front with Lampi, keeping him company and telling him as much as he thought the pilot was ready to hear.
Lampi didn't know he had hitchhikers; Lefty and Leo were inconspicuous and weighed nothing at all. But about the time the plane reached the Minnesota shore, below Beaver Bay, the ghosts "disappeared," whether to recycle, or tour, or leave the Tikh Cheki Matrix, they didn't say. The ghost who is free both of compulsions and current purposes is very free indeed, free even of old associations, and has many alternatives available.
Finally, Lampi set his six passengers down on the ice at the edge of Grand Lake. Frank's pickup was waiting for them undisturbed, and surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) it even started.
Back in the warmth and relative quiet of the motel, the victorious team members debriefed one another. They were emotionally high, though their bodies were tired. Jerry told Frank more details of the trial, with occasional input by others. Frank told about his flight through the woods, and the role that Miki Ludi had played; they never learned how the ghosts had harassed his pursuers. Tory, through Vic, told of the assaults on Hardman and Shark by Miki Ludi, the ghosts, the Van Wyks, and herself, along with another whom they had not identified but whom Ole suspected was Madame Tanya.
Miki, who'd arrived with Tory sans body, wasn't ready yet to share her story with these tired but exuberant others. But after Frank was in bed, she told him silently what had happened at Park Headquarters, laughing about it now, and what she had found, or failed to find, when she'd gone back to look for him. That had been right after the transition, when the original scene had just been scrubbed.
Next they made plans, she and Frank. Miki would visit him in Flagstaff, and look into the possibilities of a fitness salon there. If that didn't look good, Frank would send coaching resumes to high schools and colleges in the Los Angeles area. Once established together, they could evolve a new project, whatever that might be.
While Ole was getting ready for bed, Jerry borrowed his car keys and left their room to knock on Carol's door. She was waiting. Together they went to an all-night restaurant and talked over coffee.
It didn't take them long to make their decisions: When they got back to L.A., they'd get married. They would also have Ole train them as operational psychics. He had offered to, had said that with what he, and they, had learned from Vic, it would be easy. They already had come a long way.
Carol and Jerry agreed that they didn't want to be in the psychic business, but psychic abilities would be a boon in whatever they did decide to do.
Tired as they were, when they got back to the motel they started to kiss goodnight at Carol's door, then instead went inside together. Ole could have a room to himself that night.
When Jerry left with the car keys, Ole Sigurdsson didn't go to sleep at once. He lay there with his big hands behind his head, fingers interlocked, gazing at the ceiling. For a while he would work with Vic and Tory on their research, he decided, from L.A. as much as he was able, and in Arizona when necessary. He'd learn from them and help them as much as he could. They had the master key, and the doors were there waiting; with the surprise generator stabilized, it looked as if there'd be time to finish exploring.
There still were nuclear weapons, fanaticism, and all the other threats, but those were only dangers, not certain doom. And now that Merlin's research had enabled them to handle the problem of the accelerating chaos generator, what other effects might they create—especially as the research advanced.
While Frank and Miki conferred, Vic had left his body in bed and relocated himself in the ranch house. Tory's body was asleep, but that was no problem.
"Howdy."
"Well, hello there! I enjoyed the debriefings, and I expect I'll remember them when I wake up. I'm doing better and better on that these days, seems like."
"I'll phone you when I get up," Vic thought to her, "and remind you, just in case. We'll be starting home on toward noon."
"Sounds good to me. How'd that Shark dude come out that we jumped all over? Nobody said, and I never thought to ask."
"That's right! And you never peeked in on the trial; or anyway, I never noticed you there."
"Couldn't break in there nohow; I knew there was something going on, but it was strictly no trespassing."
"Well, the only reason Shark and Gracco are still around was to do the reshoot tonight. They had to rescript for fatal accidents tomorrow, although in this universe they don't remember doing it. The Dallas house is going to burn to the ground, and there's going to be a bad helicopter wreck on Lake Superior. And they won't get to recycle back in until each one prepares a script with an amends project in it, and gets it approved."
"Huh! Then The Four are down to zero! That ought to help." Tory paused thoughtfully. "You know, we got kind of spoiled lately, what witj Ole and the Van Wyks showing up and bringing all that excitement with them. We're going to have to mock up something new to keep life interesting."
"I was looking at that, flying back to Duluth," Vic replied. "It seems like we've got a possible new shortcut in science. We could research physics and the other basic material fields like that by examining the programs in the reality generator. We'd look at the program instead of the output."
"I don't get it."
"Well, the reality generator is the computer for the video game of life, right? And the usual approach of science is to research the output of that computer—the Tikh Cheki Matrix, the physical world, the setting for games. Scientists don't let themselves know that's what they're doing, but it is. But with the progress we've made on being able to look at the other side of reality, it seems like we could work out a way to examine the programs for it directly. That ought to be a lot quicker, and we'd make a lot fewer mistakes."
Tory looked at the idea. "We'll have to talk about that," she said. "Maybe we ought to hold it down to a major new breakthrough or two. Otherwise, we might spoil a lot of other people's games. All those physicists and mathematicians and such like want to have fun, too."
She paused. "Might be we could try mapping out what lies behind the arcade universe. Leif Haller's peeks into that always looked pretty interesting to me." She changed the subject. "When do you-all expect to get home?"
"We'll sleep late this morning and then head west through North Dakota and Montana, and south through Utah. There could still be hostiles watching for us on the route we came up on, so we might as well play it safe. We'll be home about Thursday."
He paused, pointedly. "There's someone I'd like to bring home with me to stay four or five weeks—the Indian, Paul, that we picked up over east of Tucson. He was with us through the whole thing. I gave him a few sessions along the road, and he's pretty powerful. He wants more, and wants me to train him so he can go back to Oklahoma and pass it on among his folks there."
Tory didn't hesitate. "It's all right with me, for a few weeks. If he's as strong as he looks, maybe I can get him to build me that concrete cistern I've been after ever since last winter, in exchange for the training."
Mentally Vic grinned at her. "I'm going to be glad to see you. My feet have gotten awful cold, sleeping alone."
"Mine, too. Well have to have us a big old foot-warming when you get here. I'll have the boys bring home a jug of peach brandy. It's good for things like warming feet."
When everyone had gone to sleep, the group and a number of past and present associates had a party in the Maxfield Parrish universe. Theirs wasn't the only celebration there, of course, because the whole population had a strong interest in the Tikh Cheki Matrix. But theirs was the most special.
And the most confidential; they all agreed that would be best. Basically, theirs was a planning party: they made a broad-brush integrative script, and created some personal, highly varied outline scripts to start on it with. None of them hazarded a guess as to how long it would take to carry out—how many lifetimes—but now it seemed feasible, and given their recent success, they were rather optimistic about it.
"Word" got "around" the non-material non-universe very quickly: Not only had The Seven Lords of Chaos been extradited from the Tikh Cheki Matrix, but now the generator had been debugged—renovated without a shutdown. Thus in the Maxfield Parrish universe—a "waiting room" as well as the "mezzanine" or "arcade" for the Tikh Cheki Matrix—there were a lot of new applicants. McBee was one.
So the players in the Tikh Cheki Matrix were quickly under pressure to provide more bodies for interested candidates, and a baby boom could be expected that would give sociologists grist for a thousand erroneous papers. The human race would just have to come up with a faster-than-light drive again to handle the population stress.