FIDDLER’S GREEN

By Richard McKenna

 

 

Here is one more of the handful of unpublished stories Richard McKenna left behind when he died in 1964. Like his “The Secret Place in a way, it is about the longing that most of us have felt for Somewhere Else—some other world, better, simpler and more private than this one.

 

Many writers have dealt with the theme since H.G. Wells wrote “The Door in the Wall” before the turn of the century; but rarely has it been developed with such persuasiveness and power as McKenna gives it here.

 

If indeed there is another place beyond this too-solid reality—call it Avalon, Cockaigne, Fiddler’s Green—then eight desperate men, dying of thirst in an open boat, might find a way to enter it: for “God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east”

 

* * * *

 

On the morning of the fifth day Kinross woke knowing that before the sun went down one of them would be eaten. He wondered what it would be like.

 

All yesterday the eight dungaree- and khaki-clad seamen had wrangled about it in thirst-cracked voices. Eight chance-spared survivors adrift without food or water in a disabled launch, riding the Indian Ocean swells to a sea anchor. The S.S. Ixion, 6,000-ton tramp sneaking contraband explosives to the Reds in Sumatra, had blown up and sunk in ten minutes the night of December 23, 1959. Fat John Kruger, the radioman, had not gotten off a distress signal. Four days under the vertical sun of Capricorn, off the steamer lanes and a thousand miles from land, no rain and little hope of any, reason enough and time, for dark thinking.

 

Kinross, lean and wiry in the faded dungarees of an engineer, looked at the others and wondered how it would go. They were in the same general positions as yesterday, still sleeping or pretending to sleep. He looked at the stubbled faces, cracked lips and sunken eyes and he knew how they felt. Skin tight and wooden, tongue stuck to teeth and palate, the dry throat a horror of whistling breath and every cell in the body, clamoring.

 

Thirst was worse than pain, he thought. Weber’s law for pain. Pain increased as the logarithm of what caused it; a man could keep pace. But thirst was exponential. It went up and up and never stopped. Yesterday they had turned the corner and today something had to give.

 

Little Fay, of the rat face and bulging forehead, had begun it yesterday. Human flesh boiled in seawater, he had said, took up most of the salt and left a nourishing broth fresh enough to drink. Kinross remembered that false bit of sea lore being whispered among the apprentices on his first cruise long years ago, but now it was no tidbit for the morbid curiosity of youth. It shouldered into the boat like a ninth passenger sitting between him and all the others.

 

“No leedle sticks, Fay,” the giant Swede Kerbeck had growled. “If we haf to eat somebody we yoost eat you.”

 

Kinross looked at Kerbeck now, sitting just to the left on the stern grating with one huge, bronzed arm draped over the useless tiller. He wore a white singlet and khaki pants and Kinross wondered if he was awake. There was no telling about Kruger just across from him either. The radioman had slept that way, with puffy, hairless hands clasped across the ample stomach under the white sweatshirt, for most of the four days. He had not joined in the restless moving about and talking of the others, stirring only to remoisten the handkerchief he kept on top of his almost hairless head.

 

“You won’t eat me!” Fay had squalled. “Nor draw lots, neither. Let’s have a volunteer, somebody that’s to blame for this fix.”

 

Fay had blamed Kerbeck because the boat was not provisioned. The Swede retorted angrily that he knew it had been so when they had left Mossamedes. Fay blamed Kinross because the launch engine was disabled. Kinross, skin crawling, pointed out mildly enough that the battery had been up and the diesel okay two days before the sinking. Then Fay turned on Kruger for failing to send out a distress signal. Kruger had insisted that the blast had cut him off from the radio shack and that if he had not started at once to swing out the launch possibly none of them would have survived.

 

Kinross looked forward now at Fay sleeping beside the engine. On the opposite side, also asleep, was Bo Bo, the huge Senegalese stoker, clad only in dungaree shorts. It had seemed to Kinross yesterday that Fay had some sort of understanding with the powerful Negro. Bo Bo had rumbled assent to Fay’s accusations and so had the three men in the forward compartment.

 

Kruger, surprisingly, had resolved the threat. Speaking without heat in his high-pitched, penetrating voice, he told them: touch one of us aft here and all three will fight. Kerbeck had nodded and unshipped the heavy brass tiller.

 

While they wavered, Kruger went over to the attack. “Single out only one man, why don’t you, Fay? Who’s had the most life already? Take the oldest.”

 

Silva, the wizened, popeyed Portygee in the bow, creaked an outraged protest. Beside him the thick-set Mexican Garcia laughed harshly.

 

“Okay, then who’s going to die soonest? Take the weakest,” said Kruger. “Take Whelan.”

 

The kid Whelan, also in the bow, found strength to whimper an agonized plea. Kinross, remembering yesterday, looked at the two men sprawled in the bow. He half thought the Mexican was looking back at him. His stocky, dungaree-clad body seemed braced against the pitch of the boat as it rode, the swells, unlike the flaccidity of the old Portygee.

 

It was Garcia who had said finally, “You lose, Fay. You’ll have to take your chance on drawing lots with the rest of us. I’ll line up with Kruger.”

 

The three men aft had voted against drawing lots but agreed to go along with the majority. Then Kruger found fault with every method suggested, pointing out how fraud could enter. The day wore out in wrangling. Kinross thought back to the curiously unstrained, liquid quality of Kruger’s light voice as contrasted with the harsh croaking of the others. He had seemed in better shape than the rest and somehow in control of things.

 

Just before sunset, when they had put it off until next day and while Silva was fingering his rosary and praying for rain, the kid Whelan had seen green fields off to port. He shouted his discovery, flailed his body across the gunwale and sank like a stone.

 

“There you go, Kruger!” Fay had husked bitterly. “Up to now that fat carcass of yours had one chance in eight.” Kinross remembered his own twinge of regret.

 

Kinross felt the rising sun sucking at his dry eyeballs and thirst flamed three-dimensionally through him, consuming sense and reason. He knew that today would be the day and that he wanted it so. He glanced forward again and the Mexican was really looking at him out of red-rimmed eyes.

 

“I know what you’re thinking, Kinross,” he called aft. His voice roused the others. They began sitting up.

 

* * * *

 

Little Fay led off, head bobbing and jerking, red eyes demanding agreement. “Draw lots,” he said. “No more palaver. Right now or none of us will see sunset.”

 

Kruger agreed. He clinked several shillings in his hand and passed them around to be looked at. Only one was a George V. Blindfold Bo Bo, the stupidest one, he proposed, and let him pick coins out of the bailing bucket one by one. Fay would sit back to back with him and as soon as Bo Bo had a coin up, but before anyone had seen it, Fay would call the name of the man who was to get it. Whoever got the beard would be the victim.

 

It was agreed. Silva asked for time to pray and Fay mocked at him. The little man perched on the engine housing, his back against Bo Bo, and looked around calculatingly. Kinross could feel the malice in his glance.

 

“Law of averages,” Kinross was thinking. “In the middle of the series. Number three or four. Nonsense, of course.”

 

Apparently Fay thought so too. When the Negro fumbled up the first coin and asked, “Who get this one?” Fay answered “I’ll take it.” It was a queen, and Kinross hated Fay.

 

The next one Fay awarded to Bo Bo and the giant black was safe. For the next, while Kinross held his breath, Fay named Kerbeck. Also safe. Each time a sigh went through the boat.

 

Then the fourth trial and Fay called out “Kinross.” The engineer blinked his dry eyes and strained to see the coin in the thick black fingers. He knew first from the relief on Silva’s face and then he saw it plainly himself. It was the beard.

 

No one would meet his eyes but Fay and Bo Bo. Kinross hardly knew what he felt. The thought came “an end of torment” and then “I’ll die clean.” But he still dully resented Fay’s nasty air of triumph.

 

Fay opened his clasp knife and slid the bailing bucket next to the engine. “Hold him across the engine housing, Bo Bo,” he ordered. “We can’t afford to lose any of the blood.”

 

“Damn you, Fay, I’m still alive,” Kinross said. His gaunt features worked painfully and his Adam’s apple twitched in a futile attempt at swallowing.

 

“Knock me in the head first, mates,” he pleaded. “You, Kerbeck, use the tiller.”

 

“Yah,” said the Swede, still not returning his glance. “Now yoost you wait a leedle, Fay.”

 

“All of you listen to me,” Kruger said. “I know a way we can get as much fresh water as we can drink, in just a few minutes, and nobody has to die.” His light voice was effortless, liquid, trickling the words into their startled ears.

 

* * * *

 

All hands looked at Kruger, suspicious, half hating him for his cool voice and lack of obvious suffering. Kinross felt a thrill of hope.

 

“I mean it,” Kruger said earnestly. “Cold, fresh water is all around us, waiting for us, if we only knew one little thing that we can’t quite remember. You felt it all day yesterday. You feel it now.”

 

They stared. Fay ran his thumb back and forth along the edge of the clasp knife. Then Garcia said angrily, “You’re nuts, Kruger. Your gyro’s tumbled.”

 

“No, Garcia,” Kruger said, “I was never saner. I knew this all the time, before the ship blew even, but I had to wait for the right moment. Sleep, not talk, not move, nothing to waste body water, so I could talk when the time came. Now it’s here. Now is the time. You feel it, don’t you? Listen to me now.” Kruger’s clear, light voice babbled like water running over stones. He stepped up on the stern grating and looked down at the six men frozen into a tableau around the engine. Kinross noted that his sparse white hair lay smooth and saw a hint of set muscles under the fat face.

 

“I’ll tell you a true story so you can understand easy,” Kruger continued. “Long time ago, long ago, in the Tibesti highlands of Africa, some soldiers were lost and dying of thirst, like us now. They went up a valley, a dry wash with bones on the ground, to two big rocks like pillars side by side. They did something there, and when they went between the two big rocks they were in a different world with green trees and running water. All of them lived and afterward some of them came back.”

 

“I heard that story before, somewhere,” Kinross said.

 

Fay jerked toward him. “A lie, Kinross! You’re welshing! Kruger, it’s a stall!”

 

“I didn’t believe the story,” Kinross said mildly. “I don’t believe it now.”

 

“I do believe it,” Kruger said sharply. “I know it’s true. I’ve been there. I’ve looked into that world. We can do just what those soldiers did.”

 

“Bilge, Kruger!” Garcia growled. “How could there be such a world? How could you get in it?”

 

“I didn’t get in, Garcia. I could see and hear, but when I walked into it everything faded around me.”

 

“Then what good—”

 

“Wait. Let me finish. I lacked something we have here. I was alone, not half dead with thirst, and I couldn’t all the way believe what I saw and heard.”

 

“So what does—”

 

“Wait. Hear me out. Believe me, Garcia, all of you. There are seven of us here and no other humans in a thousand miles. Our need is more than we can stand. We can believe. We must believe or die. Trust me. I know.”

 

The Mexican scratched the black stubble along his heavy jaw. “Kruger, I think you’re crazy as Whelan,” he said slowly.

 

“Whelan wasn’t crazy,” Kruger said. “He was just a kid and couldn’t wait. He saw a green meadow. Believe me now, all of you, if we all had seen that meadow at the same time Whelan saw it we would be walking in it right this minute!”

 

“Yah, like Whelan now is walking,” Kerbeck put in.

 

“We killed Whelan, do you understand? We killed him because we couldn’t believe what he saw and so it wasn’t true.” The light, bubbling voice splashed with vehemence.

 

“I think I get you, Kruger,” Garcia said slowly.

 

“I don’t,” Kinross said, “unless you want us all to die in a mass hallucination.”

 

“I want us to live in a mass hallucination. We can. We must or die. Believe me. I know ‘this.”

 

“Then you mean go out in a happy dream, not knowing when the end comes?”

 

“Damn you, Kinross, you’ve got a little education. That’s why it’s so hard for you to understand. But let me tell you, this world, this Indian Ocean, is a hallucination, too. The whole human race has been a million years building it up, training itself to see and believe, making the world strong enough to stand any kind of shock. It’s like a dream we can’t wake up from. But believe me, Kinross, you can wake up from this nightmare. Trust me. I know the way.”

 

Kinross thought, “I’m a fool to argue. It’s a delay for me, in any case. But maybe . . . maybe . . .” Aloud he said, “What you say. . . Yes, I know the thought . . . but all anyone can do is talk about it. There’s no way to act on it.”

 

“The more word-juggling the less action, that’s why! But we can act, like the soldiers of Tibesti.”

 

“A myth. A romantic legend.”

 

“A true story. I’ve been there, seen, heard. I know. It was long ago, before the Romans, when the web of the world was not so closely woven as now. There were fewer men like you in the world then, Kinross.”

 

“Kruger,” Kerbeck broke in, “I hear that story one time myself. You been sure now, Kruger?”

 

“Yes, sure, sure, sure. Kerbeck, I know this.”

 

“I go along, Kruger,” the big Swede said firmly. Garcia said, “I’m trying, Kruger. Keep talking.”

 

The clear, light voice resumed its liquid cadence. “You, Kinross, you’re the obstacle. You’re the brain, the engineer with a slide rule on the log desk. You’re a symbol and you hold back the rest of us. You’ve got to believe or we’ll cut your throat and try with six men. I mean it, Kinross!”

 

“I want to believe, Kruger. Something in me knows better, but I can feel it slipping. Talk it up. Help me.”

 

“All right. You know all this already. You’re not learning something new but remembering something you were trained to forget. But listen. Reality cracks open sometimes. Indians on vision quest, saints in the Theban desert, martyrs in the flame. Always deprivation, pain long drawn out, like us here, like Whelan yesterday. But always the world heals itself, clanks back together, with the power of the people who will not see, will not believe, because they think they can’t believe. Like you helped to kill Whelan yesterday.

 

“You know something about electricity. Well, it’s like a field, strongest where the most people are. No miracles in cities. People hold the world together. They’re trained from the cradle up to hold it together. Our language is the skeleton of the world. The words we talk with are bricks and mortar to build a prison in which we turn cannibal and die of thirst. Kinross, do you follow me?”

 

“Yes, I follow you, but—”

 

“No buts. Listen. Here we are, 18 south 82 east, seven men in ten million square miles of emptiness. The reality field is weak here. It’s a thin spot in the world, Kinross, don’t you understand? We’re at the limit of endurance. We don’t care if the public world comes apart in a thousand places if only we can break out of it here, save our lives, drink cool, fresh water. . .”

 

Kinross felt a shiver of dread run over him. “Hold on,” he said. “I think I do care about the public world coming apart. . .”

 

“Hah! You begin to believe!” The clear, smooth voice fountained in triumph. “It soaks in, under the words and behind the thinking. It scares you. All right. Believe me now, Kinross. I’ve studied this for half my life. We will not harm the public world when we steal ourselves from it. We will leave a little opening, as in the Tibesti, but who will ever find it?”

 

The old Portygee waved his skinny arms and croaked. Then he found his voice and said, “I know the story of Tibesti, Kruger. My fathers have lived in Mogador for six hundred years. It is a Berber story and it is unholy.”

 

“But true, Silva,” Kruger said softly. “That’s all we care about. We all know it’s true.”

 

“You want a black miracle, Kruger. God will not let you do it. We will lose our souls.”

 

“We will take personal possession of our souls, Silva. That’s what I’ve been telling Kinross. God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east.”

 

“No, no,” the old man wailed. “It is better we pray for a white miracle, a ship, rain to fall. . .”

 

“Whatever lets me live is a white miracle,” Garcia said explosively. “Kruger’s right, Silva. I been sabotaging every prayer you made the last four days just by being here. It’s the only way for us, Silva.”

 

“You hear, Kinross?” Kruger asked. “They believe. They’re ready. They can’t wait on you much longer.”

 

“I believe,” Kinross said, swallowing painfully, “but I have to know how. Okay, black magic, but what words, what thoughts, what acts?”

 

“No words. No thoughts. They are walls to break through. One only act. An unnameable, unthinkable act. I know what bothers you, Kinross. Listen now. I mean group hypnosis, a shared hallucination, something done every day somewhere in the world. But here there is a thin spot. Here there is no mass of people to keep the public world intact. Our hallucination will become the public world to us, with water and fruit and grass. We’ve been feeling it for days, all around us, waiting for us. . .”

 

The men around Kinross murmured and snuffled. An enormous excitement began to stir in him.

 

“I believe, Kruger. I feel it now. But how do you know what kind of world. . . ?”

 

“Damn it, Kinross, it’s not a preexistent world. It’s only there potentially. We’ll make it up as we go along, put in what we want ... a Fiddler’s Green.”

 

“Yah,” said Kerbeck. “Fiddler’s Green. I hear about that too. Hurry up, Kinross.”

 

“I’m ready,” Kinross said. “For sure, I’m ready.”

 

“All right,” Kruger said. “Now we cross over, to our own world and the fresh, cold water. All of you lie down, stretch out best way you can, like you wanted to rest.”

 

Kinross lay flat in the after compartment, beside Kerbeck. Kruger looked down at them with his moon face that now seemed hewn of granite. He swayed against the taffrail to the regular pitch and dip of the boat.

 

“Rest,” he said. “Don’t try, don’t strain, or you’ll miss it. You, Kinross, don’t try to watch yourself. Rest. Don’t think. Let your bellies sag and your fingers come apart. . .

 

“Your bodies are heavy, too heavy for you. You are sinking flat against the soft wood. You are letting go, sagging down. .

 

Kinross felt the languor and the heaviness. Kruger’s voice sounded more distant but still clear, liquid, never-stopping.

 

“. . . resting now. Pain is going. Fear is going . . . further away . . . happy . . . sure of things . . . you believe me because I know . . . you trust me because I know. .

 

Kinross felt a mouth twitch and it was his own. The inert, heavy body was somehow his own also. There was a singsong rise and fall, like the swells, in Kruger’s pattering, babbling voice.

 

“...resting . . . so-o-o relaxed . . . can’t blink your eyes ... try ... no matter how hard you try. .

 

Kinross felt a tingling in the hands and feet of the body that could not blink its eyes. But of course. . .

 

“. . . jaws are stuck ... try hard as you can . . . can’t open . . . hand coming up ... up and up and up . . . as a feather ... up and up . . . try . . . hard as you can . .. Kinross, try to put your hand down!”

 

The hand floated in Kinross’ field of view. It had something to do with him. He willed it to drop but it would not obey. His vision was pulsating to the rhythm of the swells and the fading in and out of Kruger’s voice. First he saw Kruger far off but clear and distinct, like through the wrong way of a telescope, and the voice was clear, burbling, like water falling down rocks. Then the fat man rushed closer and closer, looming larger and larger, becoming more hazy and indistinct as he filled the sky, and the voice faded out. Then the back swing. . .

 

“. . . hands going down . . . relaxed on the soft, restful wood ... all relaxed . . . almost ready now . . . stay relaxed until I give you the signal . . . hear this now: for the signal I will clap my hands twice and say, ‘Act.’ You will know what do and all together you will do it . . . take me with you . . . each one, reach out a hand and take me along . . . blind where you see, deaf where you hear . . . must not fail to take me . . . remember that.

 

“... sea is gone, sky is gone, nothing here but the boat and a gray mist. Kinross, what do you see?”

 

Gray mist swirling, black boat, no color, no detail, a sketch in a dream ... no motion ... no more pulsation of things . . . the endless plash and murmur of the voice, and then another voice, “I see gray mist all around.”

 

“Gray mist all around, and in the mist now one thing. One thing you see. Silva, what do you see?”

 

“A face. I see a face.”

 

“Fay, you see the face. Describe the face.”

 

“A giant’s face. Bigger than the boat. It is worried and stern.”

 

“Kerbeck, you see the face. How is it shaped?”

 

“Round and fat. A leedle fuzz of beard there is.”

 

“Garcia, you see the face. Tell us the colors.”

 

“Eyes blue. Hair almost white. Skin smooth and white. Lips thin and red.”

 

“Kinross, you see the face. Describe it in detail.”

 

“Thin eyebrows, high arched, white against white. Broad forehead. Bulging cheeks. Flat nose, large, flaring nostrils. Wide mouth, thin lips.”

 

“Bo Bo, you see the face. Who is it, Bo Bo? Tell us who it is.”

 

“It is you, Boss Kruger.”

 

“Yes,” said the Face, the great lips moving. “Now you are ready. Now you are close. Remember the signal. You have let go of yourselves by giving me control. Now I will do for you what no man can do for himself: I will set you free. Remember the signal. Remember your orders.

 

“You are thirsty. Thirst claws in your throats, tears at your guts. You have to drink. You don’t care, don’t think. You would drink the blood of your children and of your fathers and not care. Water, cold, wet, splashing water, rivers of water, all around you, waiting for you, green trees and grass and water.

 

“You already know how to get to it. You always knew, from before time you knew, and now you remember and you are ready for the signal. All together and take me with you. You know what to do. Not in words, not in thoughts, not in pictures, deeper, older, far underneath those, you know. Before the word, before the thought, there was the act.”

 

The great mouth gaped on the final word and green light flashed in its inner darkness. The mists swirled closer and Kinross floated there on an intolerable needle point of thirst. Great eyes blue-blazing, with dreadful intensity, the Face spoke again:

 

“in the beginning is the act!”

 

It shouted the last word tremendously. There was a sharp double clap of thunder and green lightnings played in the cavernous mouth which yawned wide on the word until it filled the field of vision. The green lightnings firmed into trees, mossy rocks, a brawling stream . . . Kinross tugged the heavy body after him by one arm, splash, splash, in the cold, clear water.

 

* * * *

 

Kinross drank greedily. The coolness flowed into him and out along his arteries and the fire died. He could see the others kneeling in or beside the clear stream running smoothly over rounded pebbles and white sand. Then a great weariness came over him. He drank again briefly, lay down on the smooth turf beside the stream and slept.

 

When he awoke, Garcia was sitting beside him eating bananas and offered him some. Kinross looked around while he was eating. Level ground extended perhaps ten yards on either side of the little stream; then convexly curved banks rose abruptly for a hundred feet. In the diffuse, watery light the land was green with grass and the darker green of trees and bushes. The colors were flat and homogeneous. There were no random irregularities on the land such as gullies or rock outcrops. The trees were blurred masses never quite in direct view. The grass was blurred and vague. It was like the time he had had his eyes dilated for refraction. But he could see Garcia plainly enough.

 

Kinross shook his head and blinked. Garcia chuckled.

 

“Don’t let it bother you,” he said. “Why be curious?”

 

“Can’t help it, I guess,” Kinross replied. Then he spied Kruger’s supine form to his left and said, “Let’s wake Kruger.”

 

“Tried it already,” the Mexican said. “He ain’t dead and he ain’t alive. Go see what you think.”

 

Kinross felt a pang of alarm. Kruger was needed here. He rose, walked over and examined the body. It was warm and pliant but unresponsive. He shook his head again.

 

Curses broke out behind the indefinite shrubbery on the bank across the stream. Fay’s voice. Then the little man came into view beside the huge Negro. They had papayas and guavas.

 

“Kruger still asleep?” Fay asked. “Damn him and his world. Everything I pick in it is full of worm-holes and rotten spots.”

 

“Try some of my bananas here,” Garcia said. Fay ate one and muttered reluctant gratification.

 

“We’ve got to do something about Kruger,” Kinross said. “Let’s have a conference.”

 

“Silva! Kerbeck! Come in!” the Mexican shouted.

 

The two came down the bank. Kerbeck was eating a large turnip with the aid of his belt knife. Silva fingered his rosary.

 

“Kruger’s in a kind of trance, I think,” Kinross said. “We’ll have to build a shelter for him.”

 

“There won’t be any weather here,” Silva said. “No day, no night, no shadows. This place is unholy. It isn’t real.”

 

“Nonsense,” Kinross objected. “It’s real enough.” He kicked at the turf, without leaving any mark on it.

 

“No!” Silva cried. “Nothing’s really here. I can’t get close to a tree trunk. They slide away from me.” Kerbeck and Fay mumbled in agreement.

 

“Let’s catch Silva a tree,” Garcia said with a laugh. “That little one over there. Spread out in a circle around it and keep looking at it so it can’t get away.”

 

Kinross suspected from their expressions that the others shared his own fearful excitement, his sense of the forbidden. All but the mocking Garcia. They surrounded the tree and Kinross could see Kerbeck beyond it well enough, but the smooth, green trunk did seem to slide out of the way of a focused glance.

 

“We got it for you, Silva,” Garcia said. “Go in now. Take hold of it and smell it.”

 

Silva approached the tree gingerly. His wrinkled old face had a wary look and his lips were moving. “You’re not me, tree,” he said softly. “You’ve got to be yourself by yourself. You’re too smooth and too green.”

 

Suddenly the old man embraced the trunk and held his face a foot away, peering intently. His voice rose higher. “Show me spots and cracks and dents and rough places and bumps. . .”

 

Fear thrilled Kinross. He heard a far-off roaring noise and the luminous overcast descended in gray swirls. The light dimmed and the flat greens of the landscape turned grayish.

 

“Silva, stop it!” he shouted.

 

“Knock it off, Silva!” cried the Mexican.

 

“... show me whiskers and spines and wrinkles and lines and pits. . .” Silva’s voice, unheeding, rose higher in pitch.

 

The mists swirled closer. There came a light, slapping, rustling sound. Then a voice spoke, clear and silvery, out of the air above them.

 

“Silva! Stop that, Silva, or I’ll blind you!”

 

“Unholy!” Silva shrieked. “I will look through you!”

 

“Silva! Be blind!” commanded the silvery voice. It seemed almost to sing the words.

 

Silva choked off and stood erect. Then he clapped his hands to his eyes and screamed, “I’m blind. Shipmates, it’s dark! Isn’t it dark? The sun went out. . .”

 

Kinross, trembling, walked over to Silva as the mists dispersed again.

 

“Easy, Silva. You’ll be all right soon,” he comforted the sobbing old man.

 

“That voice,” Garcia said softly. “I know that voice.”

 

“Yes,” said Bo Bo. “It was Boss Kruger.”

 

* * * *

 

Okay, Kinross and Garcia agreed, no looking closely at anything. The awareness of the others seemed already so naturally unfocused that they could hardly understand the meaning of the taboo. Kinross did not try to explain. Fay proposed that he stay to look after Silva and Kruger, provided that the others would bring food, since all that he picked for himself was inedible.

 

“Kinross, let’s go for a walk,” Garcia said. “You haven’t looked around yet.”

 

They walked downstream. “What happened just now?” Garcia asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Kinross said. “It was Kruger’s voice, all right. Maybe we’re really still back in that boat and Kruger is making us dream this.”

 

“If that’s so, I don’t want to come out of it,” the Mexican said feelingly, “but I don’t think so. I’m real, if this world isn’t. When I pinch myself it hurts. My insides work.”

 

“Me too. But I could sure smell saltwater and diesel oil for a few seconds there. Silva almost made us slip back.”

 

“Kruger was right, I guess,” the Mexican said slowly, “but it’s tough on poor old Silva.”

 

They walked on in silence beside the rippling stream. Then Kinross said, “I’ve got a hankering for apples. Wonder if there are any here?”

 

“Sure,” said Garcia, “just over here.” He crossed the stream and pointed out apples on a low-hanging bough. They were large, bright red and without blemish. Kinross ate several with relish before he noticed that they had no seeds and remarked on it to the Mexican,

 

“Watch it,” warned Garcia. “No looking close.”

 

“Well, they taste good,” Kinross said.

 

“I’ll tell you something,” the Mexican said abruptly. “There’s only one tree here. You find it wherever you look for it and it’s always got what you want growing on it. I found that out while you were asleep. I experimented.”

 

Kinross felt the strange dread run over him gently. “That might be dangerous,” he warned.

 

“I didn’t try to make it be two trees,” the Mexican assured him. “Something already told me I shouldn’t look too close.

 

“There’s something else, too,” Garcia said, when Kinross did not answer. “I’ll let you find it out for yourself. Let’s climb this bank and see what’s on top.”

 

“Good idea,” Kinross agreed, leading off.

 

The bank was steeply convex, smooth and regular. Kinross climbed at an angle in order to have a gentler grade and suddenly realized that he was nearly down to the stream again. He swore mildly at his inattention and turned back up the slope, more directly this time. After a few minutes he looked hack to see how far down the stream was and realized with a shock that he was really looking up the bank. He looked in front of him again and the floodplain of the little stream was almost at his feet. He could not remember which way he had been going and panic fingered at him.

 

“Give up,” Garcia said. “Do you feel it now?”

 

“I feel something, but what it is. . .”

 

“Feel lost, maybe?” the Mexican asked.

 

“No, not lost. Camp, or anyway Kruger, is that way.” Kinross pointed upstream.

 

“Sure it isn’t downstream?”

 

“Sure as sure,” Kinross insisted.

 

“Well, go on back and I’ll meet you there,” the Mexican said, starting off downstream. “Look for landmarks on the way,” he called over his shoulder.

 

Kinross didn’t see any landmarks. Nothing stood out in any large, general way. As he approached the group around Kruger’s body he saw Garcia coming along the bank from the opposite direction.

 

“Garcia, does this damn creek run in a circle?” he called in surprise.

 

“No,” said the Mexican. “You feel it now, don’t you? This world is all one place and you can’t cut it any finer. Every time you go up the bank it leads you down to the stream bed. Whichever way you walk along the stream, you come to Kruger.”

 

* * * *

 

Kinross woke up to see Kerbeck splashing water over his head in the stream. Garcia was sleeping nearby and Kinross woke him.

 

“What’ll we eat this morning?” he asked. “Papayas, d’ye think?”

 

“Bacon and eggs,” the Mexican yawned. “Let’s find a bacon and egg tree.”

 

“Don’t joke,” Kinross said. “Kruger won’t like it.”

 

“Oh well, papayas,” Garcia said. He walked down to the stream and splashed water in his face. Then the two men walked up the little valley.

 

“What do you mean, ‘this morning’,” Garcia asked suddenly. “I don’t remember any night.”

 

* * * *

 

The night was pitch black. “Kinross,” Garcia called out of the blackness.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Remember how it got suddenly dark just now?”

 

“Yes, but it was a long while back.”

 

“Bet you won’t remember it in the morning.”

 

“Will there be a morning?” Kinross asked. “I’ve been awake forever.” Sleep was a defense.

 

* * * *

 

“Wake up, Kinross,” Garcia said, shaking him. “It’s a fine morning to gather papayas.”

 

“Is it a morning?” Kinross asked. “I don’t remember any night.”

 

“We gotta talk,” the Mexican grunted. “Unless we want to sing to ourselves like Kerbeck or moan and cry like Silva over there.”

 

“Silva? I thought that was the wind.”

 

“No wind in this world, Kinross.”

 

* * * *

 

Kinross bit into papaya pulp. “How long have we been here, do you think?” he asked Garcia.

 

“It’s been a while.”

 

“I can’t remember any whole day. Silva was blinded. Was that yesterday? Kerbeck stopped talking and started singing. Was that yesterday?”

 

“I don’t know,” the Mexican said. “It seems like everything happened yesterday. My beard grew half an inch yesterday.”

 

Kinross rubbed his own jaw. The brown whiskers were long enough to lie flat and springy.

 

* * * *

 

He was walking alone when a whisper came from just behind his head. “Kinross, this is Kruger. Come and talk to me.”

 

Kinross whirled to face nothing. “Where?” he whispered.

 

“Just start walking,” came the reply, still from behind.

 

Kinross started up the bank. He climbed steadily, remembering vaguely a previous attempt at doing so, and suddenly looked back. The stream was far below, lost under the convex curve of the bank that was really a valley wall. Miles across the valley was the other wall, curving up in countersymmetry to the slope he was climbing. He pressed on, wondering, to come out on a height of land like a continental divide. Smooth, sweeping curves fell off enormously on either hand into hazy obscurity.

 

He walked along it to the right. It had the same terrain of vague grass and indefinite shrubs and trees, flat shades of green with nothing standing out. After a while he saw a gently rounded height rising to his left, but the whisper directed him down a long gentle slope to his right and then up a shorter, steeper slope to a high plain. There was a vast curve to it, almost too great to sense, but the horizon on the left seemed lower than that on the right. He walked on steadily.

 

Kinross seemed tireless to himself. He did not know how long he had been walking. He climbed another abrupt slope and a series of shallow but enormous transverse swales replaced the rounded plain. The land still curved downward to the left. Far ahead was a clear mountain shape.

 

It, too, was green. He started up a concave slope which turned steeply convex so that he seemed to be defying gravity as he climbed it. Then the slope leveled off considerably and he was approaching a wall of dark forest beyond which a reddish-black rock pinnacle soared into the sky.

 

He pushed into the forest, to find it only a half-mile belt of woods which gave way to a desert. This was a dull red, gently rising plain over which were scattered huge reddish boulders many times higher than his head. He picked his way between them over ground which seemed hot and vibrating until he came to the base of the rock pinnacle. As he neared it a pattern of intersecting curves on top indicated that it was cratered.

 

It was a vertical climb, but Kinross made it with the same inexplicable ease as the earlier ones. He descended a little way into the crater and said, “Here I am, Kruger.”

 

Kruger’s natural voice spoke out of the air from a point directly ahead. “Sit down, Kinross. Tell me what you think.”

 

Kinross sat crosslegged on the rough rock surface. “I think you’re running this show, Kruger,” he said. “I think maybe you saved my life. Past that, I don’t know what to think.”

 

“You’re curious about me, aren’t you? Well, so am I. Partly I make up the rules and partly I discover them. This is a very primitive world, Kinross.”

 

“It’s prehuman,” Kinross said. “You took us deep.”

 

“Had to, for people like us.”

 

“You’re just a voice in the air to me,” Kinross said. “How do you experience yourself?”

 

“I have a body, but I suppose it’s a private hallucination. I can’t animate my real body. It must be some result of my not having been in deep trance when we crossed over.”

 

“Is that good or bad, for you?”

 

“Depends. I have unique powers but also special responsibilities. For instance, I am forced to animate this world and my capacity is limited. That’s the reason for the taboo on looking closely or trying to use things.”

 

“Oh. Silva then . . . can you restore his sight?”

 

“Yes, his blindness is purely functional. But I won’t. He’d destroy us all. He’d look and look until our world fell apart. He gave me a bad time, Kinross.”

 

“I was scared too. Tell me, what would have happened if—?”

 

“Back in the boat, perhaps. Or some kind of limbo.”

 

“Is your existence purely mental now, Kruger?” .

 

“No. I told you, I have an hallucinated body which seems perfectly real to me. But it cannot use the substance of this world the way you and the others do. Kinross, I still have the same thirst I had when we came over. It is like—what you remember. I can’t quench it and I can’t endure it. This world is a kind of hell to me...”

 

“Holy Moses, Kruger! That’s too bad. Can we do anything?”

 

“I have one hope. It’s why I brought you here.”

 

“Tell me.”

 

“I want to put you into still deeper hypnosis, deep as man can go. I want to set up such a deep rapport between us that I will share with you the animation of your body and you will share with me the animation of this world. Then I will be able to eat and drink.”

 

“Granting it’s possible, how would that seem to me?”

 

“You mean animating the world? I can’t describe it to you. A joy beyond words.”

 

“No, I mean you in my body. How do you know I won’t have your thirst then? Which of us would be dominant?”

 

“We could quench the thirst, that’s the point. I would grant you dominance in the body and retain my dominance in the world.”

 

Kinross tugged at his shaggy brown hair. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “You scare me, Kruger. Why me?”

 

“Because of your mind, Kinross. You’re an engineer. We must build natural law into this world if I am ever to have rest. I need intimate access to your world-picture so that it can inform this world.”

 

“Why can’t I help you just as I am?”

 

“You can, but not enough. I need to superimpose your world-picture on mine in complete interaction.”

 

Decision welled up in Kinross. “No,” he said. “Take one of the others. Except for Garcia and maybe Silva they hardly seem to know they’re alive, but they eat and drink.”

 

“I’ve taken a large part of them into the world already, and something of you and Garcia too. But I want you intact, as a unity.”

 

“No.”

 

“Think of the power and the joy. It is indescribable, Kinross.”

 

“No.”

 

“Think of what you can lose. I can blind you, paralyze you.”

 

“I’ll grant that. But you won’t. In a way I can’t explain I know you need us, Kruger. You need our eyes and ears and our understanding minds in order to see and appreciate this world of yours. Your sight dimmed when you blinded Silva.”

 

“That isn’t wholly true. I needed you absolutely in order to get across, in order to form this world, but not now.”

 

“I’ll gamble you’re lying, Kruger. You don’t have a large enough population to afford playing tyrant.”

 

“Don’t underestimate me, Kinross. You don’t know me and you never can. I have a fierce will in this matter that must not be denied. From childhood on I have worked toward this culmination with absolute ruthlessness. I deliberately did not send a distress message from the Ixion because I wanted the chance I got. Does that impress you?”

 

“Not in your favor, Kruger. So little Ratface was right. . .”

 

“I don’t want your favor or your pity, Kinross. I want your conviction that you cannot stand out against me. I’ll tell you more. I planted the bomb in the Ixion’s cargo hold. I dumped the food and water out of the launch. I ran down the battery and jammed the fuel pump. I timed the explosion so that you would be just coming off watch. That convinces you. Now you know that you cannot stand out against such a will as mine.”

 

Kinross stood up and squinted his brown eyes into the emptiness before him. “I’m convinced that you made your own world but now you can’t get all the way into it. I’m convinced that you should not. Kruger, to hell with you.”

 

“It is my world and I’ll come all the way into it in spite of you,” Kruger said. “Look at me!” On the command the voice rang out strong and silvery, a great singing.

 

“You’re not there,” Kinross said, standing up.

 

“Yes I am here. Look at me.”

 

The air before Kinross became half visible, a ghostly streaming upward.

 

“Look at me!” the chiming, silvery voice repeated.

 

There came a sound like tearing silk. The hair stood up on Kinross’ neck and a coldness raced over his skin. The streaming air thickened and eddied, became a surface whorled and contoured in a third dimension, became vibrantly alive, became the shape of a great face.

 

“Kinross, look at me!” the Face commanded in a voice like great bells.

 

Kinross took a deep breath. “I learn my lessons well, Kruger,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re not there. I don’t see you.”

 

He walked directly into the Face and through it, feeling an electric thrill in his cringing flesh as he did so. Then he was clambering down the sheer face of the pinnacle.

 

As Kinross crossed the high plain on his way back, rain began to fall from the overcast. Gusts of wind buffeted him. There was no surface runoff of the rain and no clear effect of the wind in the indefinite trees and shrubbery. “Kruger’s learning,” Kinross said to himself. Then darkness came suddenly and he lay down and slept. When he awoke he was back beside the little stream and Garcia told him he had been gone four days.

 

* * * *

 

“Four days?” Kinross asked in surprise. “Doesn’t everything still happen yesterday?”

 

“Not anymore,” the Mexican said. “Where in hell have you been?”

 

“Outside somehow, arguing with Kruger,” Kinross said, looking around. “Damn it, this place feels different. And where’s Kruger’s body and the others?”

 

“It is different,” Garcia said. “I’ll tell you. First, Fay found a cave. . .”

 

The cave was the source of the stream, which now ran out of it, Garcia explained. Fay and Bo Bo had carried Kruger’s body into it and now spent most of their time in there. Fay claimed that Kruger awoke at intervals to eat and drink and that he had made Fay his spokesman. Fay and Bo Bo had piled up a cairn of rocks before the cave mouth and had commanded Kerbeck and Garcia to bring fruit and place it there every morning. Silva now sat beside the cairn, rocking and wailing as before.

 

“I couldn’t make Kerbeck understand,” Garcia added. “He roams the hillsides now like a wild man. So I’ve been supplying them by myself.”

 

“The place is bigger,” Kinross commented. The valley floor extended now for several hundred yards on either side of the little stream and the walls rose hundreds of feet. The oppressive regularity of outline was relieved by a hint of weather sculpturing and meaningful groupings of plant life.

 

“Space is nailed down better too,” Garcia said. “There are all kinds of trees now that stay put and can be looked at.” He slapped at a fly buzzing around his head.

 

“Hello!” Kinross exclaimed. “Insects!”

 

“Yes,” Garcia agreed sourly. “Little animals in the brush, too. Rats and lizards, I think. And I got rained on once. It ain’t all good, Kinross.”

 

“Let’s go see that cave,” Kinross proposed. “I’ll tell you what happened to me on the way.”

 

They walked half a mile upstream. The valley narrowed and its walls became more vertical. A tangled growth of dark timber trees filled it. The diffuse light from the permanently overcast sky scarcely penetrated its gloom. Then they came into a clearing perhaps a hundred yards across and Kinross could see the darkly wooded slopes rising steeply on three sides. Directly ahead was the cave.

 

Two relatively narrow basaltic dikes slanted up the slope for more than a hundred feet, coming together at the top to form an inverted V. The stream ran out of the cavernous darkness at its base, bisected the clearing and lost itself in the dark wood. Near where the stream emerged, Kinross could see the cairn like a low stone platform about ten feet across and he could see and hear Silva, who sat wailing beside it.

 

“I can’t talk to Silva no more than Kerbeck,” Garcia said. “Silva thinks I’m a devil.”

 

They walked across the clearing. The giant Bo Bo came out of the cave to meet them.

 

“You have not brought fruit,” he said, in words that Kinross knew were never his own. “Go away and return with fruit.”

 

“Okay, Kruger,” Kinross said. “That much I’ll do for you.”

 

* * * *

 

Days passed. To Kinross they seemed interminable, yet curiously void of remembered activity. He and Garcia tried marking off time with stones from the creek, but overnight the stones disappeared. So did banana peels and papaya rinds. The land would not hold a mark. The two men wrangled over what had happened in the preceding days and at last Kinross said, “It’s just like before, only now everything happened last week.”

 

“Then my beard grew an inch last week,” said Garcia, stroking its blue-blackness. Kinross’ beard was crinkled and reddish and more than an inch long.

 

“What’s the end of this?” the Mexican asked once. “Do we just go on in this two-mile-across world forever?”

 

“I expect we’ll get old and die,” Kinross said.

 

“I ain’t so sure even of that,” Garcia said. “I feel like I’m getting younger. I want a steak and a bottle of beer and a woman.”

 

“So do I,” Kinross agreed, “but this is still better than the boat.”

 

“Yes,” Garcia said feelingly. “Give Kruger that much, even if he did set the whole thing up.”

 

“I think Kruger is a lot less happy than we are,” Kinross said.

 

“Nobody’s happy but Kerbeck,” Garcia growled.

 

They saw Kerbeck often as they gathered fruit or tramped the confines of the little valley seeking relief of boredom. The giant Swede ranged through the land like an elemental spirit. He wore the remnants of his khaki trousers and singlet and his yellow hair and red beard were long and tangled. He seemed to recognize Garcia and Kinross, but made only humming noises in response to their words.

 

* * * *

 

Kinross often felt that it was the unrelieved blackness of the nights which oppressed him most. He wanted stars and a moon. One night he awoke feeling uneasy and saw a scattering of stars in the sky, strangely constellated. He moved to wake Garcia but sleep overcame him again and he dreamed for the first time he could remember in that world. He was back on the rock pinnacle in the desert talking to Kruger. Kruger was wearing Fay’s body and he was worried.

 

“Something’s happened, Kinross,” he said. “There are stars and I didn’t shape them; I couldn’t. This world has suddenly received a great increase in animation and not all of it is under my control.”

 

“What can I do about it? Or care?”

 

“You care, all right. We’re in this world together, like in a lifeboat, Kinross. And I’m scared now. There’s an alien presence, perhaps a number of them, seeking our world. They may be hostile.”

 

“I doubt it, if they bring stars,’’ Kinross said. “Where are they?”

 

“I don’t know. Wandering outside of our space here, looking for us, I suppose. I want you and Garcia to go and find them.”

 

“Why can’t you do that?”

 

“Your guess was partly right, Kinross. I have my limits and my need for men like you and Garcia. I’m asking, not commanding. We’re still in the same boat, remember.”

 

“Yes. Okay, I’ll go. But how. . .”

 

“Just start walking. I’ll let you through the re-entry barrier again.”

 

Kinross awoke with a start. The stars were still in the sky and a crescent moon hung above the horizon across the little stream. Garcia snored nearby.

 

“Wake up!” Kinross said, shaking him. The Mexican snorted and sat up.

 

“Madre de Dios!” he gasped. “Stars and a moon! Kinross, are we back. . . ?”

 

“No,” Kinross said. “Let’s go hunting. I’ve just been talking to Kruger.”

 

“Hunting? At night? Hunting what?”

 

“Maybe what made the stars. How do I know? Come on, Garcia, my feet are burning.”

 

Kinross strode off, leaping the creek and heading directly toward the crescent moon. The Mexican stumbled after him muttering in Spanish.

 

* * * *

 

Once more Kinross reached the height of land, and the moon, fuller now, hung above the horizon on the right, in the same direction he had gone before. He walked briskly, the Mexican following in silence. Once Garcia exclaimed and pointed down to the right. Kinross looked and saw the cave mouth far below, the dwarfed clearing and the mighty slope curving convexly up from it to his present level. The moonlight touched the dark treetops with silver.

 

As they walked Kinross told Garcia about his dream. The Mexican did not doubt that it was genuine. Kinross warned him about the peculiar timelessness of experience outside the re-entry barrier. “It’s like everything happened two minutes ago,” he said.

 

“Yes,” said Garcia. “Look at that moon now, three-quarters full. Maybe we’ve been walking for a month.”

 

“Or a minute,” Kinross said.

 

It was not to be the same trip as before. Once on the high, gently curving plain he remembered, he found they were bearing sharply to the right, going up a gentle rise. Then the land pitched the other way and they began crossing shallow ravines with running water in their bottoms. The land grew rougher and the ravines deeper until, crossing one of them, Kinross saw that it bore directly for the moon. He continued down the stream bed in ankle-deep water instead of climbing out.

 

The banks were of wet, dark stone and became steeper and higher as they went. The stream narrowed and became knee-deep and the current tugged fiercely at them, forcing them to cling to the stones to maintain their footing. The sharp V of the ravine ahead almost cradled the full moon and Kinross could hear a distant roar of falling water.

 

“Looks rough up ahead, Garcia,” he called to the Mexican ten feet behind him. “Watch it.”

 

He moved ahead another hundred yards toward the increasing noise and edged around a rock shoulder against which the water swirled angrily. The force of the current quickened suddenly, almost snatching his legs from under him, so that he flattened himself against the rock and called a warning back to Garcia.

 

Over the glassily smooth, veined lip of the waterfall twenty feet in front of him, Kinross looked into a vast pit, steeply conical and many miles across. It was beaded around the rim and threaded down the sides with falling water that whispered enormously across the distance. The full moon riding directly above washed the whole with silver. At the bottom of the pit was another moon which, Kinross thought fleetingly, must be a reflecting pond or lake.

 

Garcia called from behind. “What do you see, Kinross? Why have you stopped?”

 

“I see one more step and death, I think,” Kinross called back. “It’s a waterfall. We’ll have to climb the bank here if we possibly can.”

 

He made no move to return, but stared down into the pit. Abruptly the urge came to him to surrender, to let the water carry him over the brink. It was sudden and overpowering, almost sexual, a savage assault on his spirit. He clung desperately to the rock face and muttered a prayer under his breath, “Mother of God, spare me now.”

 

The compulsion, still powerful, withdrew a little distance. “Garcia,” he called, “start climbing, in the name of God. Keep talking to me.”

 

“There’s a ledge back here, slanting up,” Garcia said from above. “Come back under me and I’ll give you a hand up.”

 

Kinross edged back around the rock shoulder and scrambled up to join Garcia. The Mexican led the way up the narrow ledge.

 

“There’s something up ahead that will take your breath away,” Kinross warned him. “A pit. Wait till you see it. And when you do, hang on to yourself.”

 

Garcia grunted and kept climbing. The ledge petered out and the way became more difficult and dangerous. Then they were standing on a rocky headland falling steeply on three sides into the great pit that was all around them.

 

“Madre de Dios!” breathed Garcia. He repeated it several times, otherwise speechless. Both men stood silently, gazing into the pit. Finally Garcia raised a hand and whispered, “Listen!”

 

Kinross listened. He heard a crackling of brush and a rattling of dislodged pebbles. It came from the left, seemingly not far off.

 

“Something’s coming up out of the pit,” he whispered.

 

“What’s coming? Kinross, we ain’t alone in this world!”

 

“We’ve got to go closer,” Kinross said. “Have to know. Walk easy.”

 

They stalked the sound, retreating from the headland and skirting the edge of the pit. As they neared the source of the noise, the brush became tangled and waist-high and they made noises of their own, unavoidably. Then all was silent and Kinross feared their quarry was alarmed until he heard a snuffling, whimpering noise that set his nerves still more on edge. They crept closer. Then Garcia grasped his arm and pulled him to a crouch.

 

Kinross strained his eyes toward where the Mexican was pointing. Suddenly, taking vague form in the pattern of silvery light and shadow, he saw a human figure not fifty feet away. “We capture him,” he told Garcia in dumb show. The Mexican nodded. Both men rose and rushed headlong.

 

Kinross’ longer legs got him there first. The figure rose and fled a step or two before he brought it down with a flying tackle. A split second later the stocky Mexican added his considerable weight to the tangle of arms and legs and then a despairing, agonized scream arose from the captive. Electric surprise jolted Kinross.

 

“Let go, Garcia,” he commanded. “Get up. It’s a woman!”

 

* * * *

 

She was Mary Chadwick and she had three strong brothers who could clobber any man in Queensland and Kinross and Garcia were beasts and savages and they were to take her home immediately or it would be the worse for them. Then she clung to Kinross and cried hysterically.

 

While Kinross tried awkwardly to comfort her, day came, less abruptly than usual but swiftly enough to remind Kinross how unaccountably time still ran. The light was harsh and bright and he saw the disk of the sun for the first time. The familiar overcast was gone, the sky clear and blue. Sight of the two bearded men did not seem to reassure the woman.

 

She was quite young and dressed for riding, khaki shirt and trousers, with laced boots, outlining a tall and generous figure. Honey-colored hair hung loose to her shoulders. Her eyes, swollen with crying, were an intense blue verging on violet. Her fair skin was tanned to pale gold and a dusting of freckles lay across the bridge of her strong nose.

 

She recovered quickly. “Who are you?” she asked in a clear but low-pitched voice. “What is this place? Nothing like it in the Coast Ranges I ever heard of.”

 

The men introduced themselves. Kinross failed completely to make her understand the nature of the world around them.

 

“Ships? Sailors? What rot!” she exclaimed. “You say you don’t understand it yourselves, so go along with that nonsense. All we need do is walk until we find a track or see smoke or—you know all that.”

 

“Okay, we’re lost then,” Kinross agreed. “We’re somewhere in Australia, I take it?”

 

“Yes, Queensland, and somewhere on the south fork of the Herbert River. I was riding along and I must have fallen asleep . . . where my horse is, I’m sure I have no earthly notion.”

 

Kinross and Garcia exchanged glances. “Excuse me, Mary,” the Mexican said, his black eyes blazing with excitement. “I just have to talk crazy for a minute to my friend here.” Then to Kinross, “How come? According to the soldiers of Tibesti story the gate should be in the Indian Ocean. Has this world got more than one hole in it, you suppose?”

 

“That’s bothering me, too. The way I’ve always understood it, without ever believing any of it, mind you, the two worlds are not superimposed. They just have that one small area in common, the gate. . .”

 

“Well, if it opens on land. . .”

 

“I know what you’re thinking. But we’ve got to give Kerbeck and Silva a chance. Anyway, those two.” Kinross turned to the girl.

 

“Mary,” he asked, “can you remember exactly where in that pit you first found yourself? Did you mark the spot?”

 

“No, why should I have? I’ll not go back down there for all the mad fossickers in the entire North. Take me to your camp or your diggings or whatever. I hope someone there will talk sense to me.”

 

The Mexican laughed suddenly. “I just remembered old Bart Garcia, my first ancestor in Mexico, was a prospector too,” he said. “That was a new world and he had a rough time in it. Lead on, Kinross.”

 

“All roads lead to Kruger,” said Kinross, striding off.

 

“All but one,” Garcia corrected, looking back at the great pit, shadowed now by slanting sunlight.

 

* * * *

 

The way back was rugged at first, then more gentle. Kinross exclaimed in pleased surprise when a bird fluttered through the brush and Garcia said, “So that’s what I been hearing.” Then Kinross heard it too, a multitudinous chirping and twittering all around them. But the birds, like the indefinite trees and shrubs, were always annoyingly peripheral to direct vision. They were wing flashes, darting colors at the edge of sight.

 

“Doesn’t it bother you, not being able to look at them?” he asked the girl.

 

“But I can see them,” she said. “You strange men. . .”

 

Keck-keck-keck-kee-rack! came a noise from the brush and Kinross jumped.

 

“There!” the girl pointed. “It’s a coach whip. Can’t you see him now?”

 

Kinross could not. “There,” she insisted, “hopping about in the wattle. Just look, won’t you!”

 

Garcia saw it first. Finally Kinross believed he saw the small, dark green thrush shape with white throat, long, perky tail and black crest. But he felt uneasily that he was really seeing a verbal description. Keck-keck-keck kee-rack! He jumped again and felt foolish.

 

As they walked, Kinross questioned the girl. She lived on a small cattle station in the mountains south of Cairns with her father and three brothers. She was twenty-four and unmarried, had spent a year at school in Brisbane, didn’t like cities. Her brothers worked part-time in the mines. This would be first-rate country for running stock and she couldn’t imagine how the land survey had missed it.

 

“Look at the sun, Kinross,” Garcia said once. “We’re going west. Feels good to be able to say that.”

 

The sun was low when they reached the height of land above the valley. “Kruger Valley,” Kinross called it, since the girl demanded a name. The stupendous wooded slope rising on three sides from the cave mouth was touched with a glory by the declining sun and her pose of matter-of-fact assurance broke once more.

 

“Nothing like that in the Coast Ranges,” she whispered. “I just know it.”

 

When they started down the slope west of the forested area, Kinross was impressed too. Trees stood out in clear view, unique, individual. The coarse grass was plain to see, as well as clumps of flowers in bright colors. Small, brightly varicolored birds flitted ahead of them and Kinross knew that he was really seeing them. The flat sameness of color and the smooth regularity of form were gone from the land. Kinross with rising excitement pointed out to Garcia rock outcrops, gullies and patches of erosion-bared earth.

 

“Something’s happened, Garcia,” he said. “Here, inside the re-entry barrier, the land sticks backward into time now.”

 

“Looks sure enough real,” the Mexican agreed. “Wonder if we could light a fire tonight?”

 

“Yes, and chop trees,” Kinross almost shouted. “Mary will need a shelter.”

 

“Of course a fire,” the woman said. “We shall want to roast things, I suppose.”

 

“Maybe knock down some birds,” Garcia said. “I’m hungry for meat.”

 

“No!” the girl cried in outrage. “You wouldn’t dare!”

 

“Not these pretty little ones,” Garcia hastily assured her. “What do you call them, anyway?”

 

“They’re pittas,” she said. “Noisy little paint pots, aren’t they? They say ‘walk-to-WORK, walk-to-WORK.’“

 

“That’s what we’re doing, I guess,” Garcia chuckled.

 

They picked their way down the fairly steep hillside, Kinross preparing the girl for what she would find down by the stream, when she interrupted him.

 

“Who are they?” she asked, pointing to the left.

 

Kinross and Garcia could see nothing. “What is it you see?” Kinross asked.

 

“A whole band of blacks, myalls,” she whispered, obviously disturbed. “On their knees, in the bush.”

 

“Now I partly see them,” the Mexican said. “It’s worse than the birds were this morning.”

 

“I can’t see a thing,” Kinross complained. “Only trees and shrubs.”

 

“Look slantwise,” Garcia urged. “Let your eyes go slack. Every kid knows how to do that.”

 

Kinross tried to unfocus his gaze and suddenly he saw them, dozens of them. Dwarfs, black with red eyes. Naked and grotesquely formed, huge hands and feet, knobbed joints, slubber lips, limbs knotted with muscles. They were looking back at him, but without apparent interest. Alarm bit into him.

 

“My God!” he breathed.

 

“They’re a pack of devils,” Garcia muttered. “Kinross, what in hell are they?”

 

“They’re blacks,” the girl said. ‘‘Back in the earlies they used to spear white men sometimes in the Coast Ranges, but they’re tame enough now. We must just walk by and pretend not to see them. They’re supposed to be in the spirit world.”

 

“They’re dwarfs, pygmies,” Kinross objected. “Do you have pygmies in Queensland?”

 

“They’re on their knees,” she answered sharply, “hiding from us in one of their spirit places. Come along! Walk by and pretend not to see them.”

 

“Let’s try,” Kinross assented.

 

They walked on without incident until they reached the valley floor. As they walked along the level Garcia began looking sharply to left and right.

 

“Kinross, something’s dogging us, slipping through the brush after us on both sides,” he said.

 

“Those black things?” Kinross asked, stomach muscles knotting.

 

“No, can’t see well, but they’re taller and graylike.”

 

“I can see them,” the girl said. “They’re gins, Binghi women of that mob we passed. They look like ghosts when they smear themselves with wood ashes.”

 

“What are they after?” Kinross asked, half seeing the elusive shapes in the corner of his eye.

 

“They want to trail us to our camp so they can steal and beg,” the girl said. “Mind you send them away straight off when they come in.”

 

Garcia said, “They got nice shapes, now that I know they’re women. Kinross, can you see them yet?”

 

“Just partly,” Kinross said.

 

The flitting shapes left them before they reached the stream. As they stood doubtfully on the bank, distant shouting came from the hillside they had just descended. Kinross saw Kerbeck charging through the scrub, black motes scattering before him.

 

“God!” he gasped. “Kerbeck’s fighting the black things!”

 

“Winning, too,” Garcia commented, less perturbed than Kinross. “Look at ‘em run.”

 

“He shouldn’t,” the girl said. “They’ll creep back and spear him tonight. All of us, perhaps.” She shuddered.

 

Kerbeck came plunging down the hill in great leaps. He crossed the quarter mile of valley floor, in and out of sight, looming up bronzed and gigantic. His floating hair and beard were an aureole in the light of the westering sun. He shouldered Kinross aside and grasped the girl by her upper arms, staring fixedly into her eyes. He was humming and buzzing frantically.

 

Kinross pulled vainly at one of the great arms, protesting. Then the Swede quieted, releasing the girl, smiling and humming placidly.

 

“It’s all right,” the girl said. “He wanted to be sure that my eyes had pupils.”

 

Kinross looked blankly from her blue-violet eyes to the flat blue eyes of the huge Norseman.

 

“He’s been chasing the devil-devils,” she explained. “He thought I might be one. Their eyes don’t have pupils, just black smudges on white eyeballs.” Kerbeck hummed happily. Kinross shook his head.

 

“She’s right, Kinross,” Garcia said. “I got part of it. It’s another one of them things, you got to listen sideways-like.”

 

“They turn into trees and rocks when he catches them,” the girl added. “He’s been up a gum tree for days about them and he’s glad you two are back.”

 

“Oh lord!” Kinross groaned. “I feel like a damned infant. So you do agree they’re devils now?”

 

“No more!” she said sharply. “They’re abos on a spirit-land walkabout. The whole push of you are mad as snakes.”

 

“Let’s make a fire,” Kinross said, turning away.

 

There was plenty of dried grass and fallen branches, unlike before. Garcia had matches, soon had a fire. Kinross borrowed Kerbeck’s belt knife to trim poles from the branches the giant Swede obligingly pulled off the trees, and work on a small hut went forward rapidly. Garcia cut fronds from a palmettolike tree to weave between the upright poles, and the girl gathered brownish wool from the top of it to make herself a bed. “Burrawang,” she called it. She pronounced the finished effort a passable “humpy.”

 

Under the darkness they roasted nubbly breadfruit in the coals and peeled bananas. Kerbeck melted into the night. All ate in silence. Finally the girl said, “Where are we? Fair truth, now. Where are we?”

 

“Like I told you this morning—” Kinross began, but she stopped him.

 

“I know. I believe it has to seem that way to you. But do you know where I am?”

 

Both men murmured their question.

 

“In Alcheringa,” she said. “In the Binghi spirit land. I fell into it somehow, riding through one of the old sacred places. There are picture writings all along the South Herbert. Today, when I saw the abos, I knew. . .”

 

“Mary, they were dwarfs,” Kinross said. “They were not human.”

 

“When the abos go back to the spirit land they are not human either,” she said. “And at the same time something more than human. I’ve heard mobs of talk about it. But those gins—they shouldn’t be here. Nor I. It’s frightful bad luck for a woman to enter the spirit land. When I was a little girl I used to think it blanky unfair. . .”

 

“How do the natives get in and out of. . . Alcheringa?” Kinross asked with quickened interest.

 

“They dance and sing their way, paint themselves, use churingas—oh, all sorts of rites,” she said. “No one must be about, especially no women.”

 

From the darkness overhead a weird, whistling wail floated down. Both men jumped to their feet.

 

“Sit down,” the girl bade them. “At home, on Chadwick Station, I would call that the cry of a stone curlew. They fly about and call in the darkness. The blacks call them the souls of children trying to break out of the spirit world in order to be born. What are they here, I wonder?”

 

She looked upward. Kinross and Garcia sat down again. Then a slender bird with thin legs and long, curving beak dropped into the firelight to perch on her shoulder.

 

“Poor little night baby,” the girl addressed it, “you’ll watch over me, won’t you?”

 

She rose abruptly, said good night and went into the hut. Kinross looked at Garcia.

 

“We’re responsible for her being here,” he said. “We’ve got to get her back to her people.”

 

“Kruger’s responsible,” Garcia said.

 

“Us too. If Kruger doesn’t come talk to me tonight I’m going in the cave in the morning. Will you come along?”

 

“Sure,” said the Mexican, yawning. “Pleasant dreams.”

 

* * * *

 

Red dawn above the great slope up-valley woke Kinross from a dreamless sleep. He blew an ember into flame and built up the fire. Charred breadfruit rinds littered the ground and he reflected wryly that this world no longer policed itself. He put the rinds into the fire.

 

Somewhere on the hillside across the stream, Kerbeck shouted and brush crackled. Garcia got up and the woman peeped out of her hut as Kinross stood irresolute. Then Kerbeck came in view. He carried a stalk of yellow bananas over his left shoulder and with his right hand clutched a small man by the neck. He half pushed, half kicked the little man down the slope.

 

The huge Norseman hummed excitedly as he approached across the level. Suddenly Kinross, still half asleep, heard words in the humming, as he had sometimes heard wind-voices in the singing of telegraph wires when he was a boy on the high plains of Nebraska.

 

“I catch me a devil,” Kerbeck was saying.

 

The devil was a swarthy, broad-faced little man dressed in baggy gray woolen garments. His eyes were closed, his face screwed up in fear, and he was gabbling under his breath. Garcia listened, suddenly alert, and then spoke sharply to the man in Spanish. He got a torrent of words in reply.

 

“He’s a Peruvian,” Garcia interpreted. “He comes from the mountains above Tacna. He’s been wandering lost for days. He thinks he’s dead and that Kerbeck is the boss devil.”

 

“Seems to be mutual,” Kinross said. “Tell him he’ll be all right now. I wonder how many more. . .”

 

Kerbeck went away, humming and buzzing. The little Peruvian, still badly frightened, crouched beyond the fire and ate bananas with them. Then Kinross, explaining his purpose to the woman, proposed to Garcia that they visit the cave.

 

“Not empty-handed,” the Mexican reminded him. “Remember, we got a duty.”

 

Along the way they gathered guavas and papayas into Kinross’ shirt, pushed through the grove and laid the fruits on the stone platform. Silva sat beside it, rocking and wailing almost inaudibly. Kinross patted his shoulder.

 

“Cheer up, Silva, old man,” he said. “We’re going in to see Kruger now. May have some good news for you.”

 

“Unholy,” the old man moaned. “Full of devils. You’re a devil.”

 

The two men walked to the cave mouth and stopped. They looked at each other.

 

“What are we waiting for?” Garcia asked.

 

“I don’t know. I expected Fay or Bo Bo to be on guard, I guess,” Kinross said. “Hell with it. In we go.”

 

The cave pinched sharply in to become a nearly round tunnel about fifteen feet high. The stream splashed along the bottom, forcing them to wade. The water shone with a soft light and moisture oozing through cracks in the black rock made luminous patches here and there on the walls. The rock had the blocky, amorphous look of basalt. The air was cool and utterly still except for the murmur of the stream.

 

The two men waded in silence for a good way before they heard a clear noise of turbulent water somewhere ahead. Then they came into an indefinitely large chamber with the luminous water cascading broadly down its back wall from a blackness above. Fay and Bo Bo were asleep on rough terraces beside the stream.

 

“What have you come to tell me, Kinross?” Kruger’s voice asked out of the dimness. It seemed to shape the noise of the cascading water into its words.

 

* * * *

 

“We found a woman,” Kinross said.

 

“I know. There are many others, both men and women, still making their way here. I have been greatly strengthened. Have you noticed how the world has firmed up and become extended in time?”

 

“Yes. But how do these people get here? Is there more than one gate?”

 

“No. It must have shifted.”

 

“To where, then? One is from Australia, one from Peru.”

 

“So?” Surprise rang in the silvery, liquid voice. “Perhaps it moves then.”

 

“But Tibesti—”

 

“They didn’t know a rotating earth. The sun of Tibesti goes around a stationary earth. But when we—I— set up a succession of days here I must have put a spin into this world. Perhaps it is slightly out of phase with our old world. The gate would wander . . .”

 

“You sound pleased,” Kinross said.

 

“I am. It takes many people to hold a world in place, Kinross. In a few centuries there may be enough here so that I can really rest. They will breed of course, and they will be long-lived here.”

 

“How big do you think the gate is?”

 

“About the size of the boat, I expect. Perhaps an ellipse thirty feet on the major axis.”

 

“How do people come through, not knowing—?”

 

“Several ways are possible. Perhaps it sweeps over them at a moment of intense world-loathing, those moments a man can’t support beyond a second or two. It snatches them up. Or perhaps daydreamers, with their sense of reality unfocused and their mooring lines to their real world slacked or cast loose. They want only to drift a little way out, but the gate comes by and snatches them. I don’t really know, Kinross. Maybe this world is going to be populated by poets and self-haters.”

 

“But the gate? Can we get through it the other way?”

 

“Yes. Some of the soldiers of Tibesti came back—or fled back or were driven back—the old tales are conflicting. But anyone passing back through this gate would risk dropping into an ocean. I suspect the gate sweeps the eighteenth parallel, or near it.”

 

“Kruger, the woman wants to go back. We have to find a way.”

 

“No. No one may go back. Especially not women.”

 

“Kruger, we have no right—”

 

“We do have right and beyond that a duty. She would not be here if she had not voluntarily, at least for a moment, relinquished or rejected her own world. She belongs to us now, and we need her.”

 

“Kruger, I may not obey that. I—”

 

“You must obey. You cannot pass the reentry barrier without my aid.”

 

“Let it go, then, for now,” Kinross conceded. “I have other questions. What are the black dwarfs and pearly-gray women?”

 

“Nature spirits, I suppose you could call them. I stripped them from Fay and Bo Bo, husked them off by the millions until only a bare core of nothingness was left. What those two are now I couldn’t describe to you. But the world is partially self-operating and my load is eased.”

 

Garcia spoke for the first time. “Tough on Fay, for all I hated the little rat.”

 

“Was that what you wanted to do with me?” Kinross asked, shuddering.

 

“No,” the clear, liquid voice said solemnly, “you are a different kind of man, Kinross. You could have helped me to bear the load, and perhaps together we could have endured it until the help came that is coming now. Do not wash your hands of Fay and Bo Bo, Kinross.”

 

“Kruger,” Garcia said hesitantly, “do you mean that all those devils are really Fay and Bo Bo?”

 

“Most of them are,” the silvery voice confirmed, “but many of them are Kerbeck. He is disintegrating without my interference. And some are you, too, Garcia; some are Kinross, the woman, all of you. You are built into this world more than you know.”

 

“I don’t like it,” Garcia said. “Kruger, I won’t give up my devils.”

 

“You can’t help it, Garcia. But you have millions to spare, and besides you don’t really lose them, you know. You just spread yourself through the world, in a way. Every time you put a compulsion on this world by expecting something, it costs you a devil or two. Do you understand?”

 

“No!” the Mexican growled.

 

“I think you do. If you don’t, talk to Kinross later. But it’s not so bad, Garcia. When you become a loose cloud of devils, instead of a shiny black stone, you will be a poet or a sylvan god.”

 

“Kruger,” Kinross broke in, “do you hold it against me, that I denied you my help that time?”

 

“Do you hold it against me that I initiated all this by blowing up the Ixion?”

 

“I don’t know ... I just don’t know. . .”

 

“Nor do I know, Kinross. Perhaps we’re even. And I still have need of you.”

 

“Where is your body, Kruger? Can you animate it yet?”

 

“It is above the waterfall. I can see dimly now how I will animate it in the distant future and come into this world in a kind of glory. But not yet, not yet. . .”

 

“Your thirst, Kruger. Are you still thirsty?”

 

“Yes, Kinross. It still tears at me. I don’t know how much longer I will have to endure it.”

 

“Doesn’t rapport with Fay—?”

 

“No one but you, Kinross. And now not even you. You disobeyed me once.”

 

“Kruger, I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be. May we go now?”

 

“Yes. Go and serve our world. Try to be content.”

 

“Let’s go, Garcia,” Kinross said, turning. The Mexican set off briskly, leading Kinross. When they were passing through the dark grove Kinross halted.

 

“Let’s sit here and talk about devils for a while, Garcia,” he proposed. “I’m not ready to face Mary Chadwick just yet.”

 

* * * *

 

When the two men returned to the fire, more than a dozen people were standing around it. Several were women. A tall, slender man wearing a leather jacket and gray trousers tucked into heavy boots came out of the group to meet them. He had reddish-blond hair.

 

“Mr. Kinross?” he asked. “Allow me to introduce myself and to apologize for making free of your fire. My name is Friedrich von Lankenau.”

 

They shook hands. The newcomer had a sinewy grip in his long fingers. His face was gaunt and bony, frozen, with thin lips and a high, narrow beak of a nose. Kinross stared at him quizzically and deep-set gray eyes looked back at him steadily from under shaggy brows. The thin lips smiled slightly.

 

“Miss Chadwick tells me that you are Mr. Kruger’s lieutenant, so to speak,” the man said. “We are a group gathered together in chance meetings along the way here. We are anxious to learn a rational, physical explanation of what we are experiencing.”

 

A babble of voices broke from the group. “Silence!” snapped the tall man. “If Mr. Kinross will explain, you may all listen, you who know English. I will then to the others explain.” The babble stilled.

 

Kinross told the story of the soldiers of Tibesti and of the sailors of the Ixion. He watched Lankenau closely as he spoke. The man never lost the rigid composure of his features, but his eyes blazed and he continually nodded his comprehension. When he finished Kinross checked the renewed babble by setting Garcia to telling the story in Spanish. Then he drew Lankenau to one side.

 

“Mind telling me where you were when you came through?” he asked.

 

“I was nearly to the top of Sajama in Bolivia, climbing alone.”

 

“How about the others?”

 

“From all over. Brazil, the New Hebrides, Mozambique, Australia, Rhodesia. . .”

 

“I guess Kruger’s right and the gate does sweep the eighteenth parallel,” Kinross mused.

 

“We can establish it quite exactly with a little questioning, I have no doubt,” Lankenau said confidently. “But sooner or later, Mr. Kinross, I would like to talk directly to the Herr Kruger if it can be arranged. I am much intrigued—”

 

“You just go see him, Mr. Lankenau. I’m not his secretary. But I can tell you now, he will permit no one to return to the old world.”

 

“I would not for anything return to the old world!” Lankenau spoke with feeling that broke through his composure.

 

“From boyhood I knew the story of the soldiers of Tibesti,” he continued. “As a very young man I sought the gate through all of the Tibesti, and perhaps found the spot, but it did not reveal itself to me as it did for the Herr Kruger. So I sought a gate of my own, on mountain-tops in winter, such peaks as Sajama. I am not at all sure that I came through your gate, Mr. Kinross, but I am sure that I came to stay.”

 

“Mary—Miss Chadwick—has somewhat the same notion,” Kinross said. “I never knew so many people—” His voice trailed off.

 

“Forgive my outburst,” Lankenau said, composure regained. “For me this is a lost hope suddenly realized, and I am a bit overcome. If you will excuse me, I will visit the Herr Kruger now.”

 

He bowed and strode away springily. Kinross became aware of the Australian woman at his elbow.

 

“Mary,” he said, “did you hear him? But let me tell you, we can get back to your world, although it will be dangerous. I’ll work on it and let you know.”

 

She seemed hardly to listen, staring after the retreating figure. “Bonzer!” she said. “There walks a man.”

 

* * * *

 

Kinross walked away, slightly irritated. Garcia was talking to a group of Latins including the three women. Kinross sought out the Rhodesian, a stocky, florid man wearing plaid shorts. His name was Peter White.

 

“What do you think of all this?” he asked.

 

“You have quite a good thing here,” the man replied. “Like being a child again, isn’t it rather?”

 

Kinross grunted and asked him what he thought of Lankenau. White said he admired von Lankenau, that he had felt rather forlorn and drifting until he had joined von Lankenau’s group. Kinross fidgeted over commonplaces for a few minutes and finally said, “You know, White, we can go back through that gate if we work it right.”

 

“I wouldn’t want to, just yet,” White said soberly. “This is rather a lark.”

 

“But in time—when you get tired—”

 

“Tired? That’s as may be. You know, Kinross, the last I remember of the old world was being almost dead of fever in the low veldt. Dreams . . . visions . . . I’m not ready to wake back. . .”

 

“Then you think this is a dream?”

 

“Yes. A different and a better one.”

 

Kinross excused himself and walked away shaking his head. Garcia was still yapping in Spanish. He walked aimlessly for a while, then lay under a breadfruit tree near the fire and tried to sleep. He felt bored and angry. He saw two newcomers, both women, come down the hillside and left it to Garcia to welcome them.

 

* * * *

 

Hours later von Lankenau strode back from the grove with an exalted look on his lean face. He called his group together and instructed them in their several languages as to their duties. Each must gather a token handful of fruit or berries every morning and place it on the cairn before the cave entrance. Then he spoke of huts and sanitary arrangements. White had a belt axe. One of the Mozambique Negroes had a bush knife and the other a grubbing hoe. When the work was going forward to his satisfaction he joined Kinross under the breadfruit tree. Garcia came with him.

 

“I talked to the Herr Kruger a long time,” von Lankenau said, sitting down and clasping his long arms around his knees. “He told me much, and much of it about you, Mr. Kinross.”

 

“What about me?” Kinross asked, narrowing his eyes.

 

“The special relation between you. Something about the reciprocal way you and he came into this world. He does not understand it himself. But he knows that you should be his lieutenant among the people.”

 

Kinross said nothing. Von Lankenau regarded him gravely for a moment and continued, “I will cheerfully defer to your authority, Mr. Kinross, and help in any way I can.”

 

“I don’t want authority or responsibility,” Kinross said. “You go right on taking charge of things, Mr. Lankenau, only leave me out of it.”

 

“If I must, by your default, then I will. But I hope that I can consult with you.”

 

“Oh, by all means,” Kinross said. “I’m good at talking.”

 

“Let us talk then. Do you know, Mr. Kinross, this situation is absolutely fascinating. Cannot you feel it set fire to your thoughts?”

 

“I know what you mean, I suppose. We’re tampering with some of the ultimate mysteries. I won’t deny I haven’t thought about them in my time and read strange books, too. But now I wonder. . .”

 

“No moral qualms now, please, Mr. Kinross. You will only torment yourself uselessly like that unfortunate Portuguese. We have a world to build and it need not be a copy of the old one. We may be able to simplify the chemistry, systematize the mineralogy . . . does not the thought intrigue you, Mr. Kinross?”

 

“Huh! You can’t beat the energy laws, Mr. Lankenau. The more people come in, the more closely they will apply. Kruger told me that himself, and I can see them taking hold already.”

 

“The Herr Kruger has never worshipped the Second Law. Otherwise none of us would be here. And most of the people who come in will not remain persons, you know.”

 

Von Lankenau turned a doubtful look on Garcia and continued, “That is another fascinating thing, to watch the personality elements filter back into external nature until the boundary between subject and object is almost lost. Think of what a power of mass suggestibility we will dispose of then! The very trees and rocks will be amenable to suggestion, each with its indwelling fragment of the human spirit! Oh, Kinross . . . your Second Law . . . your dry, word-smothered world . . . this will be a world of magic for long ages before it becomes a world of science.”

 

Kinross frowned. “What right have we to disintegrate personalities in that way? Or to let it happen? Fay and Bo Bo—”

 

“Those two are special cases, sacrificed to an emergency that will not occur again. As for the others, we will devise a set of ritual life patterns that will stabilize them at some lower limit. That is what I and the Herr Kruger talked longest about.”

 

“Let me jump into this,” Garcia growled. “Do you birds think that’s going to happen to me? Suppose I won’t come apart for you, what then?”

 

“You may not be able to help it, Mr. Garcia. And perhaps you will be much happier when you do . . . come apart.”

 

“You sound like Kruger. Kinross, what does he mean?”

 

“He means the emptiness of this world pulls you apart, like it or not. Like when you put a lump of salt in a cup of fresh water, it will dissolve a little at a time.”

 

“Emptiness? Not in the old world?”

 

“Only rarely, in places like the Antarctic, on a life raft at sea, empty places.”

 

“I see. Like in most places the old world is already so salty it can’t take more?”

 

“That’s the idea. The lumps of salt gain instead of losing.”

 

“Hmmm. Like we talked this morning. We used to push our devils off on each other.”

 

“Devils. That is the Herr Kruger’s analogy,” von Lankenau interrupted.

 

“Funny how I know just what he meant by it, without being able to say it any different,” Garcia said.

 

“You have to lose a few devils before you know,” Kinross told him.

 

“Well, I’ve lost some, okay. But I’m still Joe Garcia and my insides work.”

 

“Name magic is one of the oldest and most powerful means of binding one’s devils into a unity, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau assured him. “We will stabilize the villagers well above the name level, I hope.”

 

“Why do you and Kinross just take it for granted that you’re not in line for this . . . this devil losing?”

 

“We are. We lose devils cheerfully, but it is a selective losing. I, and I suspect Mr. Kinross also, we hold ourselves together under a higher magic.”

 

“It’s like this, Garcia,” Kinross said, “you can either just plain be all your devils, or you can be yourself and carry a spare load of devils around with you.”

 

“Devils, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau said gravely, “are bits of experience, large or small, gay or mournful.”

 

“The lived experiences, good or bad, we bind in to ourselves,” Kinross said. “The unlived experiences, the regrets, the might-have-beens, the just-escaped things, we carry around on our backs. But we know it.”

 

“We’re really explaining to each other, aren’t we, Mr. Kinross?” said von Lankenau. “We lose the devils which ride us and we keep the ones which power us. The villagers must lose both kinds indiscriminately.”

 

“I’m still with you,” Garcia said. “Keep talking.”

 

“To draw on your earlier analogy, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau said, “might I say that devils exert an osmotic pressure? It is strongly outward on mountaintops and in such places I have shrugged off a thousand devils. But in Berlin or Paris . . . back they came in tens of thousands.”

 

“That I savvy,” Garcia said. “It’s the difference between being on a long cruise and coming ashore for a month. I get a burn on me to ship out.”

 

“I think you’re okay, Garcia,” Kinross said. “If you weren’t, you would’ve already drifted off like Kerbeck.”

 

“Is not Kerbeck magnificent?” von Lankenau asked. “The end product of devil dispersion, an elemental force, with powers we hardly dare guess at. The Bo Bo thing, too, black and savage. Mr. Kinross, we pay a price for mind. But we must not let it happen to our villagers.”

 

“No, I guess not,” Kinross agreed. “You spoke of rituals. . .”

 

“Yes, a pattern of group rituals to take them through their days and nights, perhaps later through seasons. We will keep them in a mass, maintain a local concentration of devils by mutual reenforcement or successive recapture ... I don’t know quite how to phrase it.”

 

“I see. The thought disturbs me, Mr. Lankenau.”

 

“It need not. I find it exhilarating. I hope that you and Mr. Garcia will help.” Von Lankenau stood up and looked toward the hut-building activity.

 

“We’ll think about it,” Kinross said, getting up himself.

 

“I’ll do what I can,” the Mexican said. Lankenau excused himself and went over to the villagers.

 

“Kinross, something tells me you’re still packing a devil as big as the Queen Mary, for all of your brains,” Garcia said.

 

* * * *

 

Krugertown, as they called it, was built in a day. Mary had a large hut of wattle and daub, near the stone-banked communal fire and a little apart from the village cluster, which lay nearer to the dark grove and the cave entrance. Kinross and Garcia built themselves a similar shelter a short way downstream from the fire. Von Lankenau lived in the village. Every morning Kinross and Garcia took a few bananas or a breadfruit to the cairn. Afterward Garcia often helped von Lankenau with the villagers, but Kinross walked apart with mixed feelings. He climbed about the hillsides, heedless of the growing number of black things and gray women that lurked there. Sometimes he saw Kerbeck, endlessly pursuing the dwarfs and the smoke women, and tried to talk to him. He tried to tell Kerbeck what Kruger had done to him in taking away his humanity. The impassive Swede buzzed and hummed and Kinross did not know how much he understood.

 

Mary walked apart too, always in a flutter of birds. He saw dainty green and blue sun birds, green and white pittas, green and bronze drongos and the demure white nutmeg pigeons she loved most of all. When they met he tried to talk to her and found her aloof and remote.

 

“This world is harmful to you, Mary,” he urged one day. “It disintegrates you, makes you lose part of yourself. Don’t you want to go back to Queensland while you still can? Before it’s too late?”

 

“I send out my birds and I call them back,” she replied. “No harm here.”

 

“That’s no answer, Mary,” he protested. He looked at her untroubled face with the red lips and the smooth brow and laid his arm across her shoulders. She slipped away from him.

 

“Mary, I’m going to take you back to Queensland,” Kinross said sharply. “It’s my duty to you.”

 

She hummed like Kerbeck and moved away. Kinross looked after her morosely. Shortly after, he saw her high on the hillside talking to Kerbeck. . . Or humming with him.

 

* * * *

 

New arrivals came in almost daily, by ones and twos, and melted at once into the village pattern. One day Kinross asked von Lankenau how long he thought it would go on.

 

“The rate is dropping off,” von Lankenau said. “I expect it will decrease asymptotically and never quite stop. But the gate apparently sweeps a quite narrow path and has already caught up most of the susceptibles. And it may be that, as this world fills, its power of attraction lessens also.”

 

“When will it be full?”

 

“Never, I hope. We want thousands, a large gene pool, a larger world. I estimate our surface is only about five miles in diameter now, Mr. Kinross.”

 

“Can’t Kruger make it larger if he likes?”

 

“Only at the expense of internal definition. He is striking a workable balance. But it is boundless by re-entry, and is not that a most fascinating experience, Mr. Kinross?”

 

“I found it disturbing and then frustrating,” Kinross said.

 

“Ah! The limits, of course. But with more people we can extend our surface to more comfortable limits. In the end, I suppose, we shall make it spherical and remove the re-entry barrier to a higher dimension. But I shall be just a bit sorry when we do. Do you take my feeling, Mr. Kinross?”

 

“Just who are ‘we’?” Kinross asked with a sudden edge in his voice. “You and Kruger?”

 

“Oh no. All of us. The culture, the Herr Kruger . . . you will have a part.”

 

“You are kind, Mr. Lankenau.”

 

The tall man looked at him sharply. “Mr. Kinross,” he said solemnly, “any time that you wish to, you may take your rightful position in this world. I urge you to do so. I command by your default, and you know that very well.”

 

“I’ll have no part of it,” Kinross said. “Damn Kruger and his world, snatching up a young woman like Mary Chadwick...”

 

“The Herr Kruger loves you,’ Mr. Kinross. You and Mr. Garcia are his sensorium, due to the peculiar circumstances of your coming here. He can be aware of his world only indifferently through the rest of us and through the Kabeiroi on the hillside.”

 

“Well, I don’t love the Herr Kruger. I hope he’s still mad with thirst.”

 

Von Lankenau raised a cautionary hand. “He does still suffer from thirst,” he said in a low voice, “but your words are unworthy of you, Mr. Kinross. Hate me, if you must, but not the Herr Kruger.”

 

“Why in hell do you have to shave every day?” Kinross asked angrily as he turned away.

 

He looked back from a distance and tugged at his beard. Mary Chadwick was talking to von Lankenau, standing close, looking up at him. Kinross reflected with a twinge that she had never looked up at him in that way. Then he remembered that she was as tall as himself and could not. He walked away swallowing a curse.

 

* * * *

 

That night in their hut Kinross suggested to Garcia that next day they try to break the reentry barrier. The Mexican declined, saying that he and von Lankenau were working out a path-marking ritual with the villagers.

 

“Well, I will,” Kinross said. “I’ll go up there and walk right through it by not believing it’s there, just like I should have done in the boat.”

 

“Yes, and got your throat cut,” Garcia said. “But it’s there, all right. You’ll find out.”

 

Kinross found out. He fought the barrier all day, knowing its impossibility, striving to locate the exact point of reversal in order to step boldly across it. He came near doing so. Again and again, with the tiny instant of vertigo almost upon him, he saw the leering Kabeiroi drift by him and birds fly over, but each time he was turned back, suddenly half a mile down the hill and headed the wrong way. He came home in the evening disgruntled and exhausted.

 

“Lankenau called it a world of magic,” he reflected. “Well, magic, then. Birds fly through the barrier. I’m doing this for Mary. If she would only help me—”

 

He decided to try again during the next thunderstorm, when he hoped Kruger would be too busy with his storm devils to guard the barrier. One morning several days later the sky darkened and the queer light lay along the ground and he knew a storm was making. The black things from the hillside invaded the valley in gusts of damp wind, sidling and eddying through the shrubbery just out of eye reach. Poised on rocks, treetops and all pointed things, the gray women strained upward in a tension of half-visible air. With the first drops of rain Kinross set off up the hillside.

 

As he neared the barrier zone, the storm grew more violent. Thunder boomed and roared at him, rain slashed at him in sheets, jagged lightning flashes gave him glimpses of the storm devils. The Kabeiroi scurried around him with obscene menaces; over his head the gray women streamed by on the gusty wind. Once he saw Kerbeck, head thrown back, great chest bared to the wind.

 

All day he fought the barrier, spitting curses into the storm, and all day the storm spat and thundered back at him. He fell and rolled and rose again, over and over, straining up the hill with aching chest. Wind-driven twigs and branches lashed his face and body. Smothering rain drilled at him; wind snatched his breath away. At last his pounding heart and trembling knees convinced him that he was beaten. He turned back down the hillside.

 

“Well, Kruger, I gave you a fight,” he gasped aloud. The storm abated as he limped down the slope and he saw downed trees and scattered branches and raw-earth gullies swirling with runoff. The thought came to him that he had at least forced Kruger to wreck von Lankenau’s precious village. Then he was on the valley floor and the storm cleared entirely. Half a mile away he could see the village and its trees seemingly intact.

 

As he neared his hut, Mary came from behind a screen of shrubbery. White nutmeg pigeons perched on her head and shoulders. She smiled at him oddly.

 

“Regular cockeye bob up there, wasn’t it, Allan?”

 

He looked at her stupidly. “Didn’t it rain down here?” he asked.

 

“Only a sprinkle,” she said, smiling. “Go in by the fire and dry your things. You look tired.”

 

He walked on, soaked, mud-stained, limping on a wrenched ankle. “She smiled and called me Allan,” he thought. “No storm here. Called me Allan. Oh, hell...”

 

* * * *

 

One morning, remote from the village, Kinross heard a pounding noise. In a clearing he found Peter White and two others beating mulberry bark with rounded paddles. The bearded Rhodesian looked tanned and fit and merry-eyed. The three men avoided looking at Kinross, as all the villagers tended to do, but they were aware of him and the rhythm of their pounding faltered.

 

On impulse Kinross called out, “White! Come over here!”

 

White paid no attention. Kinross spoke more sharply. White, without looking around, mumbled something about the Herr Kruger.

 

“I command you by the power of Kruger!” Kinross shouted in sudden anger. “Come over here!”

 

Reluctantly the man came to the clearing’s edge. He looked down, but did not seem afraid. The Bantu and the Kanaka continued pounding.

 

“White, you were a man once,” Kinross said. “How would you like to be a man again?”

 

“I am a man, Mr. Kinross,” White said soberly.

 

“A man needs a wife. Do you have a wife, White?”

 

“Soon the Herr Kruger will give me one.”

 

“I mean back home. Do you have a wife there?”

 

“There is no woman in my hut, but soon the Herr Kruger—”

 

“Damn your hut. I mean where you came from, in Rhodesia.”

 

“I have always been here.”

 

“No, you have not. You came from another world and if you try you can remember it. Can’t you, now?”

 

The man looked up. “Yes, but I was a lot of different me’s then. It was not a good world.”

 

“Remember it. I command you to remember it by the power of Kruger. Remember your wife and your children.”

 

The man twisted his body and his face darkened. “There were many wives and children. It was an underground world. Everyone lived in tunnels that ran in straight lines. They were tumbled together like straws and sometimes they crossed, but none ran side by side. One of my tunnels came through into Krugerworld. I crawled up out of the ground and here I am. That is all I can remember.”

 

“Okay, go back to your work,” Kinross said.

 

White did not move. “First you must lift the name of the Herr Kruger from me,” he said.

 

“All right, I remove the name,” Kinross said.

 

“Once more. Twice you placed it on me.”

 

“Okay, once more I remove it,” Kinross snapped. “Go on, now.”

 

He walked away. Behind him a third club took up the pounding and the rhythm steadied.

 

* * * *

 

Alone in his hut he raged instead of sleeping. A magic world . . . what magic, then? Kruger’s teachings . . . before the word, before the thought . . . what act would serve him now? What blind, wordless, unthinking act?

 

He decided he would refuse to place his usual token of fruit on the cairn in the morning and suddenly he could sleep.

 

* * * *

 

Kinross rose early and walked through the various fruit groves, eating as he walked, until his hunger was stayed. His aimless walking had led him to the edge of the dark timber grove screening the cave mouth. On impulse he walked through the grove into the clearing and on the way discovered with surprise that he had a small guava in his pocket. He threw it away. Two villagers, a man and a woman, were placing fruit on the cairn. Kinross wondered whether they were mated.

 

Silva, as always, sat beside the cairn. Kinross tried to talk to the old man, patting him on the shoulder, but Silva repulsed him with an incoherent wailing about devils. Kinross shrugged and went back down the valley.

 

It was beautiful early in the day with birds and flowers color-spotting the green through which the cleanlimbed, scantily clad villagers moved in twos and threes. Smoke rose above clean, red flame before Mary’s hut. The air was perfumed with flowers, musical with birdcalls and spiced with woodsmoke. Kinross tried to feel good, but a restlessness drove him.

 

He walked back and forth, jerkily, sat down and got up again, driven to random action that he would not shape into the action demanded of him. He picked fruit and threw it away, drifted toward the dark grove and walked resolutely away from it. At last he decided to make the fight in his hut. He went inside and wove burrawang fronds into a barrier across the door.

 

For hours, pacing or lying prone with clenched fists in the gloom, Kinross strove with his rebellious muscles and reproachful viscera. Finally the familiar silvery voice, long unheard, spoke to him out of the air.

 

“Kinross, I am hungry and thirsty. Bring me fruit.”

 

“No. You have it from a hundred others.”

 

“I need it from you, Kinross. We have a relation. I gave you back a lost life. You dragged my body here with your own strength. You owe me a duty.”

 

“I deny it. If I ever did, I repudiate it.”

 

“I have power, Kinross. Silva and Kerbeck bring no fruit. Would you be as they?”

 

“You lie, Kruger. You have not even the lesser power to command my muscles.”

 

“I don’t wish to command them directly. I wish to command you, with your consent, in this one small thing.”

 

“No. I have tested your power before now.”

 

“Not to the full, Kinross. Not to the full. I have been reluctant to hurt you.”

 

Silence extended itself into Kinross’ abrupt awareness that the tension was gone. He felt as tired as he had on the days he had fought the reentry barrier. He lay back to rest.

 

“Round one is mine,” he thought comfortably.

 

Distant thunder rumbled. “Round two?” he thought uneasily and unbarred his door. Black clouds were boiling up over the great ridge above the cave mouth. ,Black storm devils sifted down from the hillsides and gray women danced singly and in groups on the tops of things. Kinross brought wood into his hut, also stones to bank a fire and a brand to kindle it, working rapidly.

 

The storm built up fast, with tremendous thunder and jagged bolts of lightning. Kinross shielded and tended his fire, unheeding. The drumming rain changed into a drizzle and set in cold. The day became night without a perceptible sunset. Kinross shivered through the long night, burrowed under sweet grass and with his belly pressed against the warm rocks that banked his fire.

 

Morning was cold and clear. Frost rimed the grass, flower petals drooped and tree leaves twinkled with silver. Kinross was standing in his hut door, shivering and stamping his feet, when he heard the frosty crunch of footsteps. It was von Lankenau, not yet shaven for the day.

 

* * * *

 

“Good morning, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau greeted him. “Please pardon my more or less forced intrusion on your privacy.”

 

“That’s all right. It’s not an intrusion.”

 

“Oh? I had thought that you were deliberately keeping to yourself these last weeks. But I would like to discuss this cold. . .”

 

“If you can’t take it, grow a beard like me.”

 

“I am inured to cold, Mr. Kinross. At the moment I entered this world I had been stopped on a ledge at sixteen thousand feet for about thirty hours. My arms and my legs were frozen. The Seeings had begun . . . you touch my pride, Mr. Kinross, excuse me.”

 

Kinross said nothing.

 

“How long are you prepared to go on with this defiance of the Herr Kruger?” von Lankenau asked.

 

“Maybe till hell freezes over.” Kinross laughed harshly, adding, “No. Until Kruger agrees to let me through the reentry barrier. Me and Mary Chadwick.”

 

“He will never let you go, Mr. Kinross. And Miss Chadwick does not wish to go.”

 

“The thing this damned Krugerworld has made of her may not so wish. But if Kruger would give her back to herself—”

 

“She has never ceased to be herself, Mr. Kinross. We talk increasingly of late and I know her well, in time will know her better still. But I do know what you mean .. .”

 

“Skip what I mean. Did Kruger send you here?”

 

“Oh no. It is my curiosity, I am afraid. You interest me, Mr. Kinross, and in studying you I learn much about the Herr Kruger. Tell me: you know the villagers are suffering from cold and will soon be hungry: do you feel any responsibility for their sufferings?”

 

“No. Kruger’s responsible. Let him ease off.”

 

“He will not, I am sure. What then?”

 

“Then we shiver and we starve. When those lobotomies of yours in the village get desperate enough maybe they’ll help me break through the reentry barrier and get their minds and their own world back.”

 

“They will not. That I know. But let me congratulate you on your efforts to break the barrier, Mr. Kinross. Did you know that you had pushed it outward a good way and permanently distorted that corner of Krugerworld? You are a strong and resolute man, sir. I wish you would consent to take your rightful position among us.”

 

“I’ll take my rightful departure or die trying.”

 

“Mr. Kinross, the villagers also have a right to live. I will not prompt them nor will Mr. Garcia. We have agreed on that. But if the Herr Kruger can reach them directly through dreams and inspired counsels, and if the collective will moves to act upon you, we will stand aside also.”

 

“Fair enough,” Kinross grunted.

 

“One other thing, Mr. Kinross. I fear you may be moving blindly toward a treason of the light. I will say no more.”

 

Kinross did not answer. Von Lankenau half smiled and saluted him, then turned and left in silence. Within a minute other footsteps approached, light and rapid ones.

 

It was Mary Chadwick and she was in a fury. Her shirt was half unbuttoned and she clasped in her bosom a dozen or more of the white nutmeg pigeons with black wing and tail tips.

 

“Down with ice on their poor wings. Half-frozen. You stringybark jojo—” she stormed, face twisted with pity and anger.

 

“I’m sorry—” Kinross began.

 

“Then stop it, you fool! Stop it at once! Take that silly fruit to that stupid altar and put an end to this nonsense!”

 

“Did Lankenau or Kruger put you up to this?”

 

She stared a scornful denial. Kinross swallowed and felt his face burn under his beard.

 

“Why blame me and not Kruger?”

 

“Because I can’t come at the Herr Kruger and I can come at you, of course. Hop, now!”

 

“All right,” Kinross said. “I’ll do it for you, Mary. Will you understand that I do it for you and not for Kruger, Mary? Will you accept?” He took hold of her hand among the rustling pigeons and looked into her blue-violet eyes murky with waning anger.

 

“Of course for me,” she said. “That’s what I came to tell you, idiot.”

 

“Glory!” Kinross gasped and walked away rapidly. When he came back through the grove the frost had already melted under a warming sun.

 

“Round two is at least a draw,” he thought, “but I kind of think I won it too.”

 

* * * *

 

Weeks passed into months and the land smiled. Kinross left fruit at the cairn each morning, whispering under his breath, “For you, Mary.” Also each morning he laid flowers on a quartz boulder he had carried up from the creek and placed by Mary’s hut. The flowers always disappeared, although he never saw her take them.

 

Stragglers continued coming into Krugerworld by ones or twos every few days and the population of Krugertown approached three hundred. Kinross talked amicably with Garcia and von Lankenau from time to time. Von Lankenau discussed the expansion of Krugerworld with an increasing population. He thought that at some critical point it would expand enough to accommodate another village and perhaps be dumbbell-shaped rather than elliptical. Garcia told Kinross pridefully that Pilar was carrying a child, he hoped a son.

 

Sometimes Kinross talked with the villagers. They had lost all memory of their origin. They believed they had come from underground, shaped of earth’s substance at the bottom of a great pit, and that sometime they might go back there to sleep again. They had no clear notion of death.

 

Kinross no longer wandered aimlessly. At a site a mile down-valley from the village, he built a stone hut. He built it massively, bedding large stones from the creek in clay and rammed earth, giving it several rooms beamed with ironwood and heavily thatched with nipa fronds. He built a stone fireplace and crude furniture.

 

Mary passed by several times a day, taking little interest in his work. When the house was complete she would not come in to look at it.

 

“It is a waste of strength and good living time,” she said, laughing. “Allan, Allan, walk under the trees again.”

 

“Will you walk with me?” he asked.

 

She laughed and turned away.

 

Kinross built a walled garden around the hut. He brought water into it with a raised ditch, pierced for drainage, taking off from above a low dam he built in the creek. It fed a bathing pool and turned a small waterwheel. He threshed out grass seeds and spread them and berries on the flagstones of his garden. Birds came and ate, but Mary would not come in.

 

“You don’t paddock me with anything cold as stone, not by half,” she said.

 

He saw her more often with von Lankenau and gradually tended to avoid them both, nagged by a question he dared not ask for fear of an answer. The black moods came back and he neglected his house to roam the hillsides as of old. Sometimes he met Kerbeck, vacant-eyed and enormous, wild and shaggy as a bear, and cursed Kruger bitterly while Kerbeck buzzed and hummed. He did not fail to leave his token of fruit each morning on the cairn.

 

Then one day, leaving Kerbeck and the Kabeiroi on the hillside, he came into the valley and saw a village woman tending grapevines alone at the foot of the hill. She was young, supple and brown and wore only a short paperbark skirt. She stopped working and bowed her head, waiting for him to pass. He stopped and searched in his mind for his limited Spanish.

 

“Cómo te llamas?”

 

“Milagros, señor.” Her voice was very low and she would not look at him.

 

“Bueno. Tu estáas muy bonita, Milagros “

 

“For favor, tengo que trabajar ... el Señor Kruger...”

 

“Vert conmigo, Milagros. Yo te mando por el nombre del Señor Kruger.”

 

She flushed darkly, then paled. She looked up at him with beseeching eyes shiny with tears.

 

“Por favor, por gran favor, no me mande usted...”

 

“Quién te manda?” asked a new voice from behind the screen of vines, and then, “Oh. You, Kinross?”

 

Garcia came into view around the vines. Like Kinross, he was barefooted and wore only stagged-off dungaree trousers.

 

“What’s it all about?” he asked.

 

“I was trying to talk to her...”

 

Garcia spoke rapidly in Spanish and the woman answered in a fearful voice. The thickset Mexican turned back to Kinross, fists knuckling hipbones.

 

“Take the name of Kruger back off of her, Kinross!”

 

“I remove the name, Milagros,” Kinross said. “Garcia, I—”

 

“Take it off in Spanish,” Garcia interrupted. “You put it on in Spanish.”

 

Kinross garbled out a sentence in Spanish. Garcia was still angry. He sent the woman away.

 

“Kinross, I can’t take away your power to use the name of Kruger. But if you use it wrong, I can beat you half to death. Maybe all the way to death. You get me?”

 

“Don’t judge me so damned offhand. How do you know what I intended?”

 

“Milagros knew. She knew, all right. I believe her.”

 

“Believe what you like, then.”

 

“Listen, Kinross, stay away from the villagers. I command you in the name of Garcia and his two fists. You can outtalk me and outthink me, but—” The stocky Mexican struck his right fist into his left biceps with a solid thump.

 

Kinross clenched his teeth and breathed deeply through flaring nostrils. Then he said, “Okay, Garcia. I appreciate your position. The only man I really want to fight doesn’t have a body.”

 

“Good,” the Mexican said. “No hard feelings, then. But you still stay clear of the villagers, a kind of agreement between you and me. Okay?”

 

“Okay,” Kinross said and walked away.

 

When he came into his walled garden he saw nutmeg pigeons pecking at overripe mangoes he had placed there for them. Fearless, they hardly made way for his suddenly slowed feet. The two fluttered briefly when he, unthinking, bent and seized them. They quieted in his hands and he carried them inside, wondering why.

 

For hours after nightfall he sat before his fire and stared into the red coals. So he could outthink and out-talk Garcia, could he? Well, yes, he could. But the act? How act? How get at a man without a body?

 

Where was Kruger vulnerable? What force could he align against Kruger? He had touched Kruger once only, and that was by a refusal to act. That was negative. Now what was the positive side? What act, what unthinking, nameless act . . . and the fit stole over him and he took up the pigeons and left the house and walked through the dark grove to the cairn where Silva moaned in sleep and did what there was to do and returned and slept, to wake unremembering.

 

* * * *

 

Day was advanced when Kinross came out of his house. He walked up the valley, crossing over the little stream to avoid the village, and picked two overripe mangoes, which he carried through the grove to the cairn. Silva was rocking and wailing thinly in an extremity of woe. To the right a knot of silent villagers clustered.

 

On the cairn he saw the headless pigeons with blood-dabbled feathers and the black, sticky blood on the stones. Fingers tugged at his memory and he frowned, refusing to think what this strange thing might mean. He flung down his mangoes into the blood spots with force enough to burst them and said aloud, “For you, Mary.” Then he stared arrogantly at the knot of villagers and strode away. But he was reluctant to emerge from the grove, prowling its tangled shades far from path and stream for upwards of an hour. Then he walked back toward the village.

 

A strange silence held the land. No air moved. The villagers were drifting toward the grove in small groups, without the customary singing and talking. He heard no birdcalls. Then, as he neared the village, he heard a woman’s voice strident with grief and anger. It was Mary.

 

“What kind of Kelly rules do you keep here, you and your Kruger, you smooth-faced blood drinker?”

 

Then von Lankenau’s voice, soothing and indistinct behind the huts, and then Mary again, agonized, “Oh, my lovely white sea pigeons! Poor dears, poor dears, I’ll take them all away with me. You’ll pay! You’ll pay!”

 

She broke into a loud humming and came into view, running toward the hillside. Her long hair streamed behind her and her once lovely face was frightfully twisted and gaping with menace. Kinross noticed with another start that the black grotesques from the hillside had invaded the valley floor and were all about the village. They gave way before the infuriated woman and all at once the birds became vocal, deafeningly so, clouds of them swooping at the black things with squawks and screeches.

 

Kinross stood in vagueness, looking around. Never had he seen the sun of Krugerworld more warm and smiling, the flowers more voluptuous, the trees more heavily laden with bright fruit. At his feet earth tilted and crumbled and a red-capped mushroom emerged, visibly rising and unfolding. Von Lankenau, his shaven face set in grave lines, came toward Kinross from out of the cluster of huts. Before he could speak, Garcia shouted from the direction of the grove and they saw him running toward them.

 

“Something’s haywire with the villagers,” he told von Lankenau, panting. “They won’t follow ritual. They won’t obey me.”

 

“What are they doing?” von Lankenau asked.

 

“Nothing. Just standing still. But I don’t like the feeling of things in there, don’t ask me why.”

 

“Something of truly enormous significance has happened, Joe. I do not know what ... I was about to ask Mr. Kinross for his ideas. Those pigeons . . . but you are right, we must get the villagers back to their huts and to the fruit groves. Perhaps Mr. Kinross will help us.”

 

“How do you know I won’t play Pied Piper and lead them clear out of Krugerworld?” Kinross asked, his thoughts beginning to mesh again.

 

“Perhaps, now, that would be merciful. I truly do not know, Mr. Kinross. But let us see what may be done.”

 

A distant scream came out of the dark grove, repeated, a volley of screams.

 

“Silva’s voice!” Garcia exclaimed. “Por Dios, what now?”

 

He started running back toward the grove. Kinross and von Lankenau ran after him. The screaming ceased abruptly.

 

In the clearing, villagers stood in silent groups on either side of the stone platform and in small groups elsewhere. On the cairn lay the body of the old Portygee, looking fragile and collapsed. His head was crushed horribly.

 

Garcia swore softly in Spanish. Von Lankenau said musingly, “Now, for as long as Krugerworld shall last . . . I must manage to understand. I must!” A dark memory itched in Kinross’ fingers.

 

“Kinross,” came a whisper from close behind their heads. The men whirled as one, to see nothing.

 

The whisper continued, still behind their heads so that they whirled again, vainly. “Thank you, Kinross, for teaching me how to relieve my thirst. My terrible thirst. I will purge my world of thirst, Kinross, with your service.”

 

Von Lankenau gripped Kinross’ arm with iron fingers. “What have you done, Kinross?” he pleaded. “Tell me. I must know. What have you done?”

 

“You’ll never know,” Kinross said harshly. “Look behind us.”

 

The three men turned round again. The villagers had compacted into a mob with a concave front that was slowly closing in on them. Von Lankenau ordered them back in whiplash tones, to no effect. He turned to Kinross, his face pale and grim.

 

“Command them under the name of the Herr Kruger, if you can, Mr. Kinross. We have no other chance.”

 

“Stop, damn you, in the name of Kruger!” Kinross shouted. His hands were sweating and his heart was in his throat.

 

They did not stop. The horns of the crescent met on the far side of the cairn. The solid front of the villagers, coming on in a slow amoeboid shuffle of hundreds of feet, was ten yards away. Kinross saw the girl Milagros, teeth bared. They had seconds only before, as Kinross somehow knew, they would join Silva on the bloody stones.

 

“Quickly, Kinross,” von Lankenau said. “Tell me while there is time. What have you done?”

 

“Heart’s truth,” Kinross whispered, “I don’t know. “I don’t know!”

 

“Let’s give ‘em a fight,” Garcia growled, then, “Hey! They’ve stopped!”

 

A cloud of birds came over the clearing, flashing in many colors, circling and shrieking. Brush crackled and water splashed in the dark grove. Then something went wrong at the back of the mob of villagers. It shuddered and broke into fragments which crept rapidly to either side, opening an aisle through its midst.

 

It was Kerbeck, floating hair and beard ablaze with sunlight. Rags of clothing fluttered on the great, bronzed limbs. Sweeps of his massive arms knocked villagers a dozen feet through the air. Booming and buzzing, wide blue eyes two-dimensional and unknowing, he passed the three wonder-stricken men. In his wake ran Mary Chadwick, birds about her head.

 

“He’s going in to kill Kruger’s body,” she told them, coming to a halt. The frightful malevolence still rode in her features and Kinross’ fear was not wholly relieved.

 

“Madre de Dios!” Garcia gasped.

 

They watched the giant Swede round the stone platform and head for the cave. From the darkness floated a gobbling howl that sent a hair-bristling shudder down Kinross’ back. The great form of Bo Bo emerged to block the entrance.

 

Kerbeck ran forward with a shout. The Negro ran to meet him with his bubbling squall. The two massive figures shocked together and the world seemed to tremble. They swayed, stumbling back and forth, locked in furious embrace, and a great sighing moan went up from the fragmented mob of villagers. Kinross felt a hand on his arm and glimpsed von Lankenau’s white, rapt face beside him.

 

Black giant with white strove and roared and howled and stumbled. They cannoned into the cairn and destroyed it, scattering and treading the stones underfoot like pebbles. They splashed into the creek and out of it, roiling the clear water to dark turbidity. Both giants were increasing in stature, to Kinross’ eyes, clearly superhuman now. The force of their roaring and howling beat down on him with physical pressure. He saw Mary Chadwick on his right, blue-violet fire blazing in her eyes, fierce red lips parted eagerly.

 

First one giant and then the other was forced to his knees, only to rise again in thunderous shouting and howling. The fight drifted nearer to the cave mouth, entered and swirled out again, entered and stayed. Kerbeck’s hair and beard seemed to shine with a light of their own, dwindling sparklike into the depths. The gigantic battle shouts became a continuous hollow roaring under the earth. Kinross felt a hand shaking him insistently. It was von Lankenau.

 

“Go now,” he was saying. “For certain, the barrier will be down momentarily. I begin to understand. I almost —I do salute you, Mr. Kinross. Take the woman, if she will go.”

 

Kinross collected his thoughts. “Mary, will you go?” he asked.

 

“Too bloody right I will,” she said, “and take my birds off with me!”

 

Kinross looked at Garcia and held out his hand. “Part friends, Joe?” he asked.

 

“I don’t savvy this, Kinross,” the Mexican said, “but good luck and get out of here.”

 

Kinross shook hands with the two men. Then he and Mary Chadwick, arms linked, walked rapidly back toward the village.

 

* * * *

 

The dark grove swarmed with Kabeiroi, but no more than a scattering of the ugly shapes could be seen on the open valley floor. The sky was overcast and the diffuse, watery light of the early days lay again on the valley. The old indefinite quality was back, nothing quite in full view.

 

“Mary,” Kinross said, “I do believe we’re already through the barrier. Space has drawn in around the cave mouth.”

 

“Good-oh!”

 

Kinross led her up the hillside, talking feverishly. They would marry, he said. He was quite well off, had a good job doing confidential work for the U.S. government. He had lots of back pay coming for his last job and a bonus, too, when he told them about it. They would live in California, it was a lot like Queensland. Trips, the theater, music, a fine home, gracious living.

 

Mary said little. Birds kept fluttering in to land on her head and shoulders but the number around her did not seem to increase. The light grew weaker as they climbed and the land more indefinite. When they reached the height of land and Kinross knew for sure that they had escaped, it was almost dark. From time to time a rippling quiver ran over the ground sending them sprawling, but they rose and pressed onward. As before, progress seemed timeless and effortless. There was no moon.

 

Mary lagged behind him and Kinross kept turning to wait for her. By degrees in the fading light he saw the strained malevolence of her expression give way to a vague and remote sorrow. The wide brow was smooth again, red lips dreaming. Once she said, “My birds. I can’t get back all my birds.”

 

Suddenly the wailing cry of a stone curlew reached down from the darkness. Mary stopped and looked up. Kinross turned back to watch. The forlorn, throbbing cry repeated. Mary raised her arms to the black sky and crooned. Nothing happened.

 

She looked at Kinross, both of them vague in shadow. “It won’t come down to me,” she whispered plaintively.

 

A third time the call floated downward. Mary dropped her arms.

 

“I’m going back,” she said. “You go on alone, Allan.”

 

“No!” he protested. “You must come with me. I won’t let you go back!”

 

He seized her shoulders. She came stiffly erect and a light gleamed from her eyes. A touch, a twinge only, of the old feeling hit him and his knees turned to water. He collapsed, kneeling, clasping her around the thighs, pleading, “No, no, Mary! Don’t leave me alone here in the dark!”

 

“I must,” she said calmly. Then, with a touch of pity, “Be brave and go along now, Allan. It is all you can do.”

 

She raised him and kissed his forehead. He stumbled away, not daring to look back for fear of a renewed weakness. The sky rifted with silver as the overcast broke up and presently a full moon rode high ahead. He looked back then, but she was nowhere.

 

On to the great pit under the moon, leg over leg unthinking. It was all he could do now. He found the ravine and waded down it, outrunning the current. He heard the roar of falling water and saw the last rock shoulder that interposed itself between him and the brink. For just a heartbeat he clung to the rock and stared into the pit with all its silver beauty and its reflecting pool in the bottom. Then, not letting the water take him only, but rushing, pitching his body forward, he went over the edge.

 

It was not a sheer drop but rather a series of stages. Plunge and strike and roll, plunge and strike and roll, rhythmically, painlessly, with intolerable excitement of the spirit, down and down he went until the circle of sky above him smalled with distance and the silvery pool below waxed enormous. It was as if the great pit were reversing its dimensions, flexing through itself, turning inside out, as if he were falling into the moon. Then, on the very point of an unbearable instant, the waters closed over him.

 

Down, down through the water, pain and darkness and fear vise-clamping his chest, kicking and waving his arms and there was a dry crackling and a pain in his toe and he sat in the thorn scrub gasping. His skin was dry.

 

It was daylight. A stream ran nearby and above it reared a yellowish sandstone ledge with figures of paunchy kangaroos and stick men done in faded red and black. He picked up a handful of earth and looked at it. There it was, hard and sharp and clear in all of its minute particulars, deep as any microscope might probe, solidly there beyond all tampering forever. It was the old world. His world. Kinross stood up, feeling an overpowering thirst.

 

He went down to the creek and drank deeply and was as thirsty as before. He buried his face in the water and drank until he was near bursting and rose, wavering on his feet, thirst tearing at him unbearably. He tugged at his beard and wondered.

 

Sounds came, a jingle of metal and splashing. Then the creak of leather and low voices. Riders were coming up the creek. Suddenly he sensed them directly, horses and men, radiant with life, red, living blood pumping through veins and arteries. His thirst became a cloud of madness enfolding him, and he knew who and what he was.

 

He waited, wondering if they would be able to see him. . .