The Universe Maker (14 page)

"In spite of all my efforts these last few days," she said, "you've done it." Her tone was accusing. "You've put off the attack at least a month, possibly longer," she said. "I tried to convince them it was a trick on your part but Commander Greer swore that your criticism showed a grave weakness in our attack tactics. The leaders have accepted that."

She came close to him and there was no hint of the satirical lightness of manner which he had come to expect of her. "Captain Cargill," she said grimly, "you're playing this game altogether too well to suit our group. We've decided to accept the delay this time but—" She stopped. Her rather full lips were drawn into a menacing smile.

Cargill studied her, fascinated. In spite of his will to get her out of the way, the very depth of her determination caught his interest. He said slowly, "What puzzles me is that a young woman as good looking as you should be a conspirator in man's game of war."

The words were seriously spoken. Not until he had uttered them did he realize they could be an opening wedge for the lovemaking Grannis had suggested; 
A
 secondary possibility appeared. He stood up. "Where 
I 
come from," he said, "a girl had a pretty clear idea that a man in uniform who whistled at her didn't want to talk about the ideals he was fighting for."

The remark must have been unexpected, its import far from her thoughts. She gave him a startled look and then a frown creased her forehead. She said curtly, "Stay away from me."

Cargill walked slowly toward her. It seemed to him Grannis had definitely misread this cold young woman, but more sharply now he saw in her visible perturbation the solution to that secondary problem of his. "You must," he said, "have grown up under very curious circumstances. It's unusual to see a woman of your courage so afraid of 
herself
."

She stopped backing away. Her voice showed that his words had struck deep. She said too sharply, "Our group has a single purpose, to destroy the Shadows. When that is accomplished there will be time enough to think of marrying and having children."

Cargill paused five feet from her. "I can tell you right now," he said, "
you've
 got the wrong slant about what goes on during a war. The birth rate goes up, not down. Every hospital is filled with women carrying out some man's desperate determination to survive the war if only by proxy."

"We shall marry the survivors," said Ann Reece calmly. "It would be silly for a girl, particularly one in poor circumstances, to burden herself with a dead man's child."

Cargill said 
drily
, "When I lecture to the volor pilots I'll be happy to tell them the girls feel a civilian is the best bet for a husband."

"I didn't say that. I said—"

Cargill cut her off. He was not going to get anywhere with this girl and therefore the sooner he put her to flight the better. "And what," he asked, "about the man to whom you've so casually assigned the job of disengaging the pyramid switch in the heart of Shadow City? Do you mean to tell me he's not even going to get a kiss from a pretty girl?"

He stepped forward and tried to take her in his arms. She evaded him and retreated to the door. Laughing, careful not to move so fast that he would actually catch her, Cargill followed. For one moment Ann Reece hesitated and then, her face scarlet with anger, she fled 
precipitantly
 along the corridor and up the broad stairs. He heard the door of her bedroom suite slam shut.

His amusement faded quickly. Cool and intent, Car-gill hurried across to the French windows and out into the darkness. A minute later he was talking to Withrow, learning what he had half-expected—that it would require at least a month to set up the underground organization on the cell basis. The first week had shown the general speed of development that could be expected. Cargill's final comment was, "The important thing is that if anything goes wrong, individuals may suffer, but the organization itself will remain intact." They separated on that note.

Later, on his way to his bedroom, he paused on impulse and knocked on Ann Reece's door. "May I come in?" he called.

There was silence and then an outraged answer. "Don't you dare even try the 
door.
"

Cargill twisted the knob noisily. The door was locked. He went on, smiling to himself, feeling quite without shame or guilt. He believed firmly with ninety percent of all the soldiers he had ever met that during war time every woman was a possible conquest—and how else could you find out her attitude unless you pursued her?

Having started to pursue Ann Reece, he intended to continue. Though after he reached his room his thoughts drifted elsewhere. He lay in bed recalling the time he had been wounded in Korea and had experienced that sense of
far awayness. 
"I've got to get the exact feeling," he thought.

Presently it came to him. Moment after moment, he went through the experience, first moving through it chronologically, then in reverse. Each time he sought to pinpoint the moment when the shift from life to almost death had taken place. He noticed within himself a rising sense of excitement, an expectancy, a developing conviction that something was about to happen.

Abruptly, there was an electrifying sensation all over his body. In the distance, he saw a golden ball spinning in space. It was so beautiful, he tried to close his eyes and look away. He couldn't. It was beauty incarnate.

As he watched, he noticed that the ball emitted sparks as it spun. The sparks rushed off into space and took on spiral shapes. Now he noticed that the golden ball was made up of countless similar shapes which were part of
itself
.

"Why," he thought wonderingly, "it contains the entire physical universe. It 
is 
the universe."

Something black swirled between him and the golden thing, hiding it, blotting it out. And he knew who the enemy was—blackness, nothingness.

He felt an abrupt, unreasoning terror, a deadly panic. There was a blank, terrible urgency about the battle that was going on out there—
here.

The life-phase of the struggle was almost lost. Everyone connected with the gigantic conflict would go down in the disaster. Much had been expected from life-force, but it was turning out to be suppressive, unthinking— not creative. So low had the spirit sunk that even death did not bring awareness of identity. For long now, this same spirit had been caught in stereotyped life-traps; it no longer even suspected defeat. As things stood, any new major disaster could bring about final destruction. . . .

Cargill grew slowly conscious of returning from a fantastic experience. He looked around the bedroom in Ann Reece's residence and wondered how wild a man's thoughts could become. "I'm going to have to stop this," he thought shakily. "A few more nightmares like that, and I'll begin to believe that the fate of the universe depends on this Tweener-Shadow fight."

He was certainly getting results of a sort—he had to admit that. Whatever these strange dreams meant, they 
were 
phenomena; and, what was more important, he could apparently produce the weird manifestations at will. Two successes out of two attempts 
was
 not conclusive, but he had thought things, or rather, 
known 
things during the experiences that suggested entirely untouched trails of perception.

There were thoughts about how space was drawn out of matter; thoughts about creation and destruction; orderly methods for tearing away the illusion that was the material universe; thoughts about the type of energy flows that had dealt with illusion and beauty.

 
Beauty? Cargill remembered the glorious golden ball, and tensed. At the time, it had seemed the ultimate life-beginning, but it wasn't. He felt completely convinced of that, because beauty focused. Beauty was the light that kept the moth of life fluttering hopefully. It drew all attention, was the final goal of all endeavor. The far gleam of the beautiful kept a man straining all his life; and when somehow everything he grasped to him did not hold the radiance he had seen, he grew sad and sickly; and presently one of two things happened: The sadness either transformed into the apathy of death, or into the ecstatic apathy of another far-seen gleam of beauty—life after death.

Beauty would be but one aspect of Prime Thought. Prime Thought would be but one aspect of—what?

Cargill slept restlessly. He kept wakening with the memory of a golden ball so beautiful that twice he caught himself sobbing with excitement. Deliberately, he told himself to stop being a fool. After all, he'd need all the sleep he could get. It seemed to him finally that he had barely closed his eyes when Granger knocked on the door with the advice that: "Commander Greer called, sir, and a ship will be here to pick you up in an hour."

There was no sign of Ann at breakfast, which reminded him that he had decided to pursue her. The trouble was that she evidently avoided him. During the days that followed he caught only fleeting glimpses of her. As he entered a room, she left it. Several tunes, she was leaving the house just as he was returning from a weary day. Every night, without fail, he tried her door. It was always locked, and only occasionally could he be sure that she was inside.

A month went by. And still the secret organization was not of satisfactory size. The trouble, according to Withrow, was that men known to be opposed to the war adjusted slowly to the concept that a government could be seized from within. It was apparently a brand new idea in this remote age.

For six weeks the air force kept Cargill busy. He was flown to distant stations to give his lectures and was able to form his first estimate of the size of the 
Tweenerland
—the Tweeners called it America. This presumption, considering their small numbers, did much to indicate their lack of perspective.

The new civilization was bounded on the west by the foothills of the Rockies, on the north by what Cargill guessed to be about the southern border of Montana, in the east by a line curving southwest from the lower tip of Lake Michigan, and in the south by northern Texas. Although it was a tremendous area for three million people to control, there was no doubt of this control.

Cargill could imagine that eventually they would extend their domination over the entire continent. He learned that far-sighted Tweeners were already filing claims to vast acreage. He remembered the landless millions of the twentieth century, and it struck him that already the errors of the past were being repeated. "If I get out of this business alive," he told himself, "I'll try to put a stop to that."

Wherever he looked he saw things he was better able to evaluate because of having witnessed end-results in his own age. A score of times he mentally filed away the notation, "I'll have to do something about that— later."

With each day that passed he convinced himself more completely that with his automatic knowledge he could be of enormous value to the people of this advanced age. It stiffened his will power. He walked straighter and with a firmer stride. He felt 
an alertness
 within himself, a will to action that also had behind it an enormous instinctive caution. He used words as if they were tools, perpetually aware of the possible danger that might at any moment confront him.

This caution was proved sound one evening when he entered Ann Reece's house. He was walking along the carpeted hallway toward the living room, when he heard a man's emotional voice say, "I intend to kill you both the moment he comes."

Cargill stopped as Ann shakily replied, "You're mad. You'll hang for this."

"Shut up!" The voice was intense. "I know you. You started all this. You're the one that's associated with the Shadow, Grannis. I heard all about how he came to you a year ago and you've been his echo ever since."

"I did not start it." Her answer was in a firmer tone. "The volors were already built, the plans made, when Grannis got in touch with me. I reported it to the government and I've been the contact with him ever since."

"That's what I said." The man sounded tremendously satisfied. "You're the contact. With you and this new fellow dead, that'll stop the whole rotten business."

Cargill heard no more. He was racing back toward the front door. He guessed that the would-be assassin had come in through the garden and was probably facing into the living room, watching the other entrances. Cargill slipped out of the door, went around the house, through the gate and—stealthily now, though still swiftly—moved across the terrace. One of the French windows was open. He crept up beside it, partly sheltered by the wooden frames. There he paused to determine the situation inside.

The intruder was saying in a high-pitched tone, "My folks were Planiacs. They took the Shadow training and failed. But they came here and I was born into a good home. I had civilized upbringing, a decent education. I married a wonderful girl and I've got two fine kids. The Shadows made that possible." His voice lifted even higher. "You and those murderous scoundrels who planned the attack hate the Shadows because you all failed. Now you're trying to force the rest of us to your rotten notions. You want to destroy what you aren't smart enough to win."

Cargill saw the man, a powerful-looking individual. His back was to the terrace, and a spitter was barely visible in his fingers. It pointed in the general direction of the girl.

Ann Reece said scathingly, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big man like you acting like a cowardly child. Have you thought of what's going to happen to your wife and children if you do anything foolish now?" Her voice was calm and forceful. She sounded as if she had got all her courage back. She said, "I'm going to give you one chance. Leave now and I won't report this. Quick, make up your mind."

"I'll show you what mind I'm going to make up," the man said violently. He waved the spitter menacingly. "In just about one second—"

He must have heard a sound or noticed a change of expression on Ann Reece's face for he started to turn. In that unbalanced position he was caught by Cargill's tackle. The big man went down heavily but firmly. Swiftly, brutally, Cargill plunged on top of him, aware that Ann Reece had snatched the spitter.