The Moon Moth and Other Stories (35 page)

* * * * * * *

Duray stepped out into a grotto under damp granite walls. Sunlight poured into the opening from a dark blue sky. This was Alan Robertson’s link to the outside world; like many other persons, he disliked a passway opening directly into his home. A path led fifty yards across bare granite mountainside to the lodge. To the west spread a great vista of diminishing ridges, valleys and hazy blue air; to the east rose a pair of granite crags with snow caught in the saddle between. Alan Robertson’s lodge was built just below the timberline, beside a small lake fringed with tall dark firs. The lodge was built of rounded granite stones, with a wooden porch across the front; at each end rose a massive chimney.

Duray had visited the lodge on many occasions; as a boy he had scaled both of the crags behind the house, to look wondering off across the stillness, which on old Earth had a poignant breathing quality different from the uninhabited solitudes of worlds such as Home.

Ernest came to the door: a middle-aged man with an ingenuous face, small white hands and soft damp mouse-colored hair. Ernest disliked the lodge, the wilderness and solitude in general; he nevertheless would have suffered tortures before relinquishing his post as subaltern to Alan Robertson. Ernest and Duray were almost antipodal in outlook; Ernest thought Duray brusque, indelicate, a trifle coarse and probably not disinclined to violence as an argumentative adjunct. Duray considered Ernest, when he thought of him at all, as the kind of man who takes two bites out of a cherry. Ernest had never married; he showed no interest in women, and Duray, as a boy, had often fretted at Ernest’s over-cautious restrictions.

In particular Ernest resented Duray’s free and easy access to Alan Robertson. The power to restrict or admit those countless persons who demanded Alan Robertson’s attention was Ernest’s most cherished perquisite, and Duray denied him the use of it by simply ignoring Ernest and all his regulations. Ernest had never complained to Alan Robertson for fear of discovering that Duray’s influence exceeded his own. A wary truce existed between the two, each conceding the other his privileges.

Ernest performed a polite greeting and admitted Duray into the lodge. Duray looked around the interior, which had not changed during his lifetime: varnished plank floors with red, black and white Navaho rugs, massive pine furniture with leather cushions, a few shelves of books, a half-dozen pewter mugs on the mantle over the big fireplace: a room almost ostentatiously bare of souvenirs and mementos. Duray turned back to Ernest: “Whereabouts is Alan?”

“On his boat.”

“With guests?”

“No,” said Ernest, with a faint sniff of disapproval. “He’s alone, quite alone.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“He just went through an hour ago. I doubt if he’s left the dock yet. What is your problem, if I may ask?”

“The passways to my world are closed. All three. There’s only one left, in the vault.”

Ernest arched his flexible eyebrows. “Who closed them?”

“I don’t know. Elizabeth and the girls are alone, so far as I know.”

“Extraordinary,” said Ernest, in a flat metallic voice. “Well then, come along.” He led the way down a hall to a back room. With his hand on the knob Ernest paused and looked back over his shoulder. “Did you mention the matter to anyone? Robert, for instance?”

“Yes,” said Duray curtly, “I did. Why do you ask?”

Ernest hesitated a fraction of a second. “No particular reason. Robert occasionally has a somewhat misplaced sense of humor, he and his ‘Rumfuddlers’.” He spoke the word with a hiss of distaste.

Duray said nothing of his own suspicions. Ernest opened the door; they entered a large room illuminated by a skylight. The only furnishing was a rug on the varnished floor. Into each wall opened four doors. Ernest went to one of these doors, pulled it open and made a resigned gesture. “You’ll probably find Alan at the dock.”

Duray looked into the interior of a rude hut with palm-frond walls, resting on a platform of poles. Through the doorway he saw a path leading under sunlit green foliage toward a strip of white beach. Surf sparkled below a layer of dark blue ocean and a glimpse of the sky. Duray hesitated, rendered wary by the events of the morning. Anyone and everyone was suspect, even Ernest, who now gave a quiet sniff of contemptuous amusement. Through the foliage Duray glimpsed a spread of sail; he stepped through the passway.

V

From
Memoirs and Reflections
:

Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles and senses have developed across three million years in intimate contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind and rain. Now this creature is suddenly—on the geologic scale, instantaneously—shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little. Add to this, the weird noises, electrical pleasures, bizarre colors, synthetic foods, abstract entertainments! We should congratulate ourselves on our durability.
I bring this matter up because, with my little device, so simple, so easy, so flexible, I have vastly augmented the load upon our poor primeval brains, and for a fact many persons find the instant transition from one locale to another unsettling, and even actively unpleasant.

* * * * * * *

Duray stood on the porch of the cabin, under a vivid green canopy of sunlit foliage. The air was soft and warm and smelled of moist vegetation. Duray stood listening. The mutter of the surf came to his ears and from a far distance a single bird-call.

Duray stepped down to the ground and followed the path under tall palm trees to a river-bank. A few yards downstream, beside a rough pier of poles and planks, floated a white and blue trimaran ketch, sails hoisted and distended to a gentle breeze. On the deck stood Alan Robertson, on the point of casting off the mooring lines. Duray hailed him; Alan Robertson turned in surprise and vexation, which vanished when he recognized Duray. “Hello Gil; glad you’re here! For a moment I thought it might be someone to bother me. Jump aboard; you’re just in time for a sail.”

Duray somberly joined Alan Robertson on the boat. “I’m afraid I am here to bother you.”

“Oh?” Alan Robertson raised his eyebrows in instant solicitude. He was a man of no great height, thin, nervously active. Wisps of rumpled white hair fell over his forehead; mild blue eyes inspected Duray with concern, all thought of sailing forgotten. “What in the world has happened?”

“I wish I knew. If it were something I could handle myself I wouldn’t bother you.”

“Don’t worry about me; there’s all the time in the world for sailing. Now tell me what’s happened.”

“I can’t get through to Home. All the passways are closed off: why and how I have no idea. Elizabeth and the girls are out there alone; at least I think they’re out there.”

Alan Robertson rubbed his chin. “What an odd business! I can certainly understand your agitation…You think Elizabeth closed the passways?”

“It’s unreasonable—but there’s no one else.”

Alan Robertson turned Duray a shrewd kindly glance. “No little family upsets? Nothing to cause her despair and anguish?”

“Absolutely nothing. I’ve tried to reason things out, but I draw a blank. I thought that maybe someone—a man—had gone through to visit her and decided to take over—but if this were the case, why did she come to the school for the girls? That possibility is out. A secret love affair? Possible but so damn unlikely. Since she wants to keep me off the planet, her only motive could be to protect me, or herself, or the girls from danger of some sort. Again this means that another person is concerned in the matter. Who? How? Why? I spoke to Bob. He claims to know nothing about the situation, but he wants me to come to his damned ‘Rumfuddle’ and he hints very strongly that Elizabeth will be on hand. I can’t prove a thing against Bob, but I suspect him. He’s always had a taste for odd jokes.”

Alan Robertson gave a lugubrious nod. “I won’t deny that.” He sat down in the cockpit and stared off across the water. “Bob has a complicated sense of humor, but he’d hardly close you away from your world…I hardly think that your family is in actual danger, but of course we can’t take chances. The possibility exists that Bob is not responsible, that something uglier is afoot.” He jumped to his feet. “Our obvious first step is to use the master-orifice in the vault.” He looked a shade regretfully toward the ocean. “My little sail can wait…A lovely world this: not fully cognate with Earth—a cousin, so to speak. The fauna and flora are roughly contemporary except for man. The hominids have never developed.”

The two men returned up the path, Alan Robertson chatting light-heartedly: “—thousands and thousands of worlds I’ve visited, and looked into even more, but do you know I’ve never hit upon a good system of classification? There are exact cognates—of course we’re never sure exactly
how
exact they are. These cases are relatively simple, but then the problems begin…Bah! I don’t think about such things any more. I know that when I keep all the nominates at zero the cognates appear. Over-intellectualizing is the bane of this, and every other era. Show me a man who deals only with abstraction and I’ll show you the dead futile end of evolution…” Alan Robertson chuckled. “If I could control the machine tightly enough to produce real cognates, our troubles would be over…Much confusion of course. I might step through into the cognate world immediately as a true cognate Alan Robertson steps through into our world, with net effect of zero. An amazing business, really; I never tire of it…”

They returned to the transit room of the mountain lodge. Ernest appeared almost instantly. Duray suspected he had been watching through the passway.

Alan Robertson said briskly, “We’ll be busy for an hour or two, Ernest. Gilbert is having difficulties and we’ve got to set things straight.”

Ernest nodded somewhat grudgingly, or so it seemed to Duray. “The progress report on the Ohio Plan has arrived. Nothing particularly urgent.”

“Thank you, Ernest, I’ll see to it later. Come along, Gilbert; let’s get to the bottom of this affair.” They went to Door No.1, and passed through to the Utilis hub. Alan Robertson led the way to a small green door with a three-dial coded lock, which he opened with a flourish. “Very well; in we go.” He carefully locked the door behind them and they walked the length of a short hall. “A shame that I must be so cautious,” said Alan Robertson. “You’d be astonished at the outrageous requests otherwise sensible people make of me. I sometimes become exasperated…Well, it’s understandable, I suppose.”

At the end of the hall Alan Robertson worked the locking dials of a red door. “This way, Gilbert; you’ve been through before.” They stepped through a passway into a hall, which opened into a circular concrete chamber fifty feet in diameter, located, so Duray knew, deep under the Mad Dog Mountains of the Mojave Desert. Eight halls extended away into the rock; each hall communicated with twelve aisles. The center of the chamber was occupied by a circular desk twenty feet in diameter: here six clerks in white smocks worked at computers and collating machines. In accordance with their instructions they gave Alan Robertson neither recognition nor greeting.

Alan Robertson went up to the desk, at which signal the chief clerk, a solemn young man bald as an egg came forward. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, Harry. Find me the index for ‘Gilbert Duray’, on my personal list.”

The clerk bowed smartly. He went to an instrument and ran his fingers over a bank of keys; the instrument ejected a card which Harry handed to Alan Robertson. “There you are, sir.”

Alan Robertson showed the card to Duray, who saw the code: ‘4:8:10/6:13:29’.

“That’s your world,” said Alan Robertson. “We’ll soon learn how the land lies. This way, to Radiant 4.” He led the way down the hall, turned into the aisle numbered “8”, and proceeded to Stack 10. “Shelf 6,” said Alan Robertson. He checked the card. “Drawer 13…Here we are.” He drew forth the drawer, ran his fingers along the tabs. “Item 29. This should be Home.” He brought forth a metal frame four inches square, and held it up to his eyes. He frowned in disbelief. “We don’t have anything here either.” He turned to Duray a glance of dismay. “This is a serious situation!”

“It’s no more than I expected,” said Duray tonelessly.

“All this demands some careful thought.” Alan Robertson clicked his tongue in vexation. “Tst, tst, tst…” He examined the identification plaque at the top of the frame. “4:8:10/6:13:29,” he read. “There seems to be no question of error.” He squinted carefully at the numbers, hesitated, then slowly replaced the frame. On second thought he took the frame forth once more. “Come along, Gilbert,” said Alan Robertson. “We’ll have a cup of coffee and think this matter out.”

The two returned to the central chamber, where Alan Robertson gave the empty frame into the custody of Harry the clerk. “Check the records, if you please,” said Alan Robertson. “I want to know how many passways were pinched off the master.”

Harry manipulated the buttons of his computer. “Three only, Mr. Robertson.”

“Three passways and the master—four in all?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

VI

From
Memoirs and Reflections
:

I recognized the possibility of many cruel abuses, but the good so outweighed the bad that I thrust aside all thought of secrecy and exclusivity. I consider myself not Alan Robertson, but, like Prometheus, an archetype of Man, and my discovery must serve all men.
But caution, caution, caution!

* * * * * * *

I sorted out my ideas. I myself coveted the amplitude of a private, personal, world; such a yearning was not ignoble, I decided. Why should not everyone have the same if he so desired, since the supply was limitless? Think of it! The wealth and beauty of an entire world: mountains and plains, forests and flowers, ocean cliffs and crashing seas, winds and clouds—all beyond value, yet worth no more than a few seconds of effort and a few watts of energy.
I became troubled by a new idea. Would everyone desert old Earth and leave it a vile junk-heap? I found the concept intolerable…I exchange access to a world for three to six years of remedial toil, depending upon occupancy.