The Lighter Side (21 page)

"Roof!" Q'nell shouted behind him. The sky was blotted out as a solid ceiling appeared above him, supported by sturdy walls.

"Door!" Roger countered, jerking open the panel which had instantly winked into existence, and was on the wide, featureless roof. He whirled, slammed the door.

"Yale lock!" he gasped, out of breath. He turned the shiny brass key and leaned against the door, panting.

"Fooled you!" Q'nell called, clambering over the parapet. "Fire escape!"

"Rope ladder!" Roger demanded, sprang for the dangling rungs, and clambered rapidly upward. Overhead, the vast translucent bulk of a balloon swayed, the words ohama, nebraska spelled out in yard-high letters across its bulbous side.

"Bow and arrow!" Q'nell's voice floated up from below. An instant later there was a sharp twang, the swish of the bolt in flight, a ripping noise, succeeded by a loud hissing. The balloon began to sink rapidly. Moments later Roger slammed against the roof and was immediately engulfed in the deflated folds of the balloon. He fought his way clear, scrambled up, looked wildly around for Q'nell.

His companion lay sprawled by the parapet, unconscious. Beside the body, a monster, dull red, one-eyed, squatted on clustered legs, a figure of infinite menace.

"Machine gun!" Roger yelled, felt the solid slap of the weapon into his hands. He jacked the action, swung it to bear on the alien—

A dazzling light glared in his eyes. He felt the gun fall from his hands, felt his knees begin to buckle; then a Roman candle exploded inside his skull and scattered his consciousness in bright fragments that faded and were lost in darkness.

Roger came to himself lying on a hard floor. He pried his eyes open and sat up—and instantly grabbed for support. He was perched, he saw, on a tiny platform dangling by a single thin wire from one of a maze of interconnected rods of various sizes that crisscrossed a vast, bottomless, blue-lit cavern. A deep-toned thrumming filled the air, which smelled slightly of library paste. He peered over the edge of his roost, drew back hastily after a glimpse of the dizzying depths below.

"Ah, I'm glad to see you've decided to reactivate your second unit," a gluey voice said near at hand. "A hopeful sign, indicative of an upcoming meeting of the minds, I trust."

Roger leaped at the unexpected speech, almost lost his balance, scrabbled for stability, and was looking at a curving console hanging a few feet distant and at a dish-shaped stool before it on which rested the bloated form of a headless, dusky pink monstrosity.

"Gulp," Roger said.

"Gulp? Ah, a friendly greeting in your colorful language, no doubt—in which case, gulp to you, sir or madam! A very fine gulp indeed! I must confess it gives me an eerie feeling to see you sitting here, whole and sound, after having observed you lying lifeless in a third-order ditch—but we live and learn! Now that we understand the compound nature of your being, I'm sure we'll get on famously!" The creature was pulsating a deep tangerine shade now, apparently expressing effusive conciliation.

"Wh-what are you?"

"I, sir, am a life-form known in cultivated space-time circles as a Rhox, Oob by name. Welcome to our control apex. I trust you'll forgive our rather rude method of transporting you here, but in view of the unsatisfactory nature of my earlier attempts to confer with you, it seemed the only way."

"Confer?" Roger mumbled.

"Precisely," the alien said, speaking through a yard-wide lipless mouth set below the Cyclopean eye. "And now, on to the settlement of detail. If you'll just state the aims behind your apparently unmotivated persecution of me . . . "

"I've been persecuting you?" Roger burst out.

"I know, I know—and a wily antagonist you are. We've had my entire extrapolatory computing capacity at work attempting to analyze the value system underlying your tactics, and I've come up with only two alternatives: one, you're an absolute idiot, or, two, you're a fiendishly clever mind of totally incalculable subtlety. Obviously the former theory is quite untenable, as demonstrated by the simple fact that you're still alive." Oob had faded to a more complacent shade of light orange.

"I'm alive . . . but what about Q'nell?" Roger burst out.

"Sorry, I don't place the name," Oob confessed. "All you beings look alike to us, you know."

"The handsome one," Roger clarified. "With the broad shoulders and the curly hair."

"Oh, we know the one you mean—with the long nose and the close-set eyes."

"Close-set eyes?" Roger said, pointedly staring at his captor's lone ocular.

"Of course; your other unit. It's quite well, naturally. Since you've demonstrated your ability to reactivate your units after demise, I'm hardly so obtuse as to continue with nugatory efforts to dispose of you by superficial methods. Instead, I'm seeking to establish some sort of, ah, understanding." Roger had a sudden vivid mental image of Q'nell, helpless in the clutches of inhuman creatures.

"They may be torturing her," he muttered. "Pounding her black and blue." He paused. "Come to think of it, that's
my
body they'll be pounding. And—" Suddenly comprehension dawned.

"You think I'm her!" he blurted. "And that she's me!"

"Of course. We may be a little slow to discard my original conception of affairs, but I do catch on in time. Precisely why a being of your complexity has chosen to masquerade as two natives of a third-order continuum, we don't know. But I'll not pry, sir! I'll not pry. Now, as to this matter of the ownership of the Trans-Temporal Bore: while my claim to ownership is clearly prior, we must concede that you've established an interest in it by your very presence here—an interest I would be the last to deny. But in all fairness, sir—and in consideration of the fact that D-day is almost upon us and my bombardment is about to begin—surely you'll sell out for a reasonable consideration?"

"Go jump in an Irish stew!" Roger yelled. "If you think I'm going to give you information that will help you take over Earth, you're crazy!"

"Now, now—don't be hasty!" Oob urged. "Suppose I offer you all rights to a delightful little continuum just a few frames of reference away in
that
direction." The Rhox made a complicated gesture.

"What makes you think I'd help you, you blood-thirsty turnip!"

"Correction: We do not ingest vascular fluids of third-level life-forms. As to why I assumed you'd cooperate, we think I can offer a number of suitable inducements to bring you around to our view of matters."

"Never!" Roger stated flatly. "You're wasting your time!"

"Your attitude is rather reactionary, sir," the Rhox said stiffly. "I should think you'd be willing to negotiate a reasonable division of interests."

"Go ahead, just try it!" Roger challenged. "You escapee from a root cellar! We'll fight you on the beaches! We'll fight you in the cities! We'll slice you up into French fries!"

"Look here—suppose I offer to take you in as a partner—a silent partner, of course—"

"You can't silence me!" Roger yelled. "I'll have nothing to do with your nefarious scheme!"

"Nefarious? I'd hardly call it that, sir! It will bring a little amusement into millions of dull, drab lives!"

"You'd do this thing for amusement?" Roger squeaked in horror.

"Certainly. Why else? At least it amuses the masses. As for myself, we've seen it all before, of course. But this particular situation, by virtue of its very primitiveness, offers certain unique opportunities for comedy, especially for the kiddies."

"You're a monster in human form!" Roger yelled. "I mean you're a human in monster form! Have you no conscience?"

"What's conscience got to do with it? It's just business, sir, just business!"

"Your diabolical business will never get its tentacles on Earth! Not if I can help it!"

"Ah . . . I think I'm beginning to understand!" Oob exclaimed. "You intend to hog it all for yourself!" A dull black now, the Rhox flipped a large lever with a flick of a tentacle.

"You leave me no choice, sir! I'd hoped you'd be reasonable. But since you won't, this conference is at an end!"

"Wha-what are you going to do?" Roger demanded.

"Dispatch you, sir, to the end of the line, where, I trust, you'll be ejected, along with the rest of the waste material, from the entire space-time continuum, whereafter I'll proceed immediately to put my plans into execution!"

Without further warning, Roger felt the perch drop from under him. Grayness swirled around him, and once again he was tumbling down through endless emptiness. For a timeless eternity he fell, and then, abruptly, he was motionless. He had arrived—somewhere.

He was in inky blackness, utter stillness. He shouted but the sound died without an answer, without even an echo. He sensed a floor under him and groped forward, feeling his way with his hands, but he encountered nothing, not even a wall.

"Maybe," he told himself, fighting for calm, "I can work that trick we used before." He drew a shaky breath, pictured a standing lamp with an old-fashioned shade.

"Let there be light!" he murmured . . . 

Brilliance sprang into being. Squinting against the glare, Roger came to his feet. He was in the center of a vast plain of polished glass that stretched away on all sides as far as he could see, featureless, unadorned.

"Well, at that, it's better than being blown up," he told himself. "I suppose my next move is to explore the place. In fact, it's my only move, so I might as well start walking. Unless . . . " He raised his voice: "Bicycle?"

There was a resounding crash. The twisted ruins of a hundred-foot Schwinn lay a quarter of a mile away, one forty-foot wheel spinning slowly.

"Smaller," he specified. "And closer to the ground."

"LITTLE BEING, DID YOU DO THAT?" a vast voice boomed out of the white sky.

Roger shied violently. "Wh-who was that?" he called.

"IT WAS I. WHO ELSE?"

Roger clapped his hands over his ears. "Do you have to talk so loud? You're bursting Q'nell's eardrums!"

"Is this better?" the voice spoke gratingly from a point a few feet above Roger's head.

"Much. Uh—who's speaking, anyway?"

"You may call me UKR."

"Uh, where are you, Mr. Ucker?"

"At present I am occupying a ninth-order niche within Locus 3,432,768,954, Annex One, Master Index Section. Why?"

"Well—it's rather disconcerting, not being able to see you."

"Oh, perhaps it will help if I extend a third-order pseudosome into your coordinate system."

A looming, misshapen form snapped into existence before Roger. It was twelve feet tall, and featured an amorphous head with a wide, slobbery mouth crowded with mismatched fangs, crossed scarlet eyes, pits like bullet wounds for nostrils, and arms of unequal length ending in satchel-sized hands with unpared nails.

"Yelp!" Roger cried, and backed rapidly away.

"Something wrong?" A booming voice issued from the monster's mouth. "I selected every detail of the projection from a catalogue lodged deep within your subconscious. Don't you find it reassuring?"

"You t-tapped the wrong level," Roger quavered. "Try again."

"How's this?" The figure flowed and shrank like hot wax, reshaping itself into a bulletheaded, pot-bellied, unshaven seven-foot ogre with warts and a harelip.

"Better, but still not quite on the mark," Roger demurred.

The figure dwindled still more; the face contorted like a rubber mask, settled into the benign features of an elderly professorial type. The stubble shot out to form a patriarchal white beard. The scarlet pupils disappeared behind thick bifocals, while the body became that of a retired librarian.

"Ah, I see by your expression I've hit it at last," a frail, breathless voice said in a pleased tone. "Ah—is something missing?"

"Clothes would help," Roger confided.

A serape appeared, draping the lean form. "How's this?"

"Not quite in character, Mr. Ucker," Roger pointed out.

Roger's new acquaintance worked quickly through several outfits, including football togs circa 1890, a cowboy suit with matched pistols, and a pink leotard before settling on a swallow-tailed coat, striped pants, and a starched shirt with stand-up collar.

"Much better," Roger approved, swallowing hard. "But don't get the idea I'm impressed. I can do similar tricks myself."

"Please don't!" The old gentleman raised a hand. "You have no idea what hob you play when you meddle with the continuum that way. As a matter of fact, you completely spoiled a gob of pre-material flux from which I was about to construct a third-order ecological experiment on this supposedly sterile slide."

"A sterile slide?" Roger looked around wildly. "I don't see any slide. Or much of anything else."

"Oh, forgive me," UKR said. "Of course you'd prefer a cozy third-order frame of reference." Instantaneously, the surrounding expanse of polished floor winked out of existence, to be replaced by a yawning abyss dropping away on all sides from the lone spire of rock on which they stood.

Roger shut his eyes tight. "Would you mind just putting a rail around the edge?" he asked between gritted teeth.

"Oh, a claustrophile. There; how's that?"

Roger opened his eyes cautiously. The rocky ground had become a floor surrounded by walls and equipped with stone-topped benches with Bunsen burners, retorts, mazes of glass tubing, and complicated equipment.

"It looks like a laboratory," he said.

"Precisely. Which brings us back to the problem of contamination. Before I sterilize the slide, I wonder if you'd mind telling me just how you managed to introduce yourself into a sealed environmental mock-up?"

"I didn't introduce myself. I was pitched in here by the Rhox."

"Dear me, this becomes more complex by the moment." UKR frowned. "You imply there are other foreign bodies in the system?"

"As foreign as you could get," Roger assured the old gentleman. "You see, the Rhox are planning to invade Earth, and they've built this trap system so they can spy out the lie of the land. It's not just an ordinary invasion, mind you: they're invading from time; they plan to occupy all ages simultaneously, and—"