The Universe Maker (16 page)

He saw that he had lost his audience. The co-pilot was heading forward. Cargill stared after him with an almost owlish concern. He said aloud to no one in particular: "He's going to report that I'm off my rocker."

An older man in a captain's uniform came back and bent over him. "We've got an all-night trip ahead of us, Captain Cargill," he said.

Cargill nodded thoughtfully. "Would you suggest that I try to sleep, sir?" he asked gravely.

"I would most certainly suggest it," was the
firm reply
.

"Get my forty winks, would you say, sir?" Cargill asked.

There was a pause; then quietly: "Perhaps you would like a sedative, Captain."

Cargill sighed. The laughter seemed to be exhausted. His heart was no longer in the project. And it seemed that he had learned something: These men were serious. At the assigned hour, they would make their volor dives on the Shadow City, prepared to face the grave risk of personal destruction. Cargill sighed again. "I'll go quietly, Captain," he said.

When the officer departed, Cargill sat for many minutes staring out into the gathering darkness. "I needed that," he thought. "I've been holding too many strings: trying to be a
puppetmaster
when actually I'm only a puppet." He thought of all the strings he had laid out for himself, each one attached to an iron that he had put into some remote fire. Looking back, it all seemed pretty futile. Looking ahead . . .

Whose side was he on, really? Which cause
should
he support? If the Tweeners won—and he was not killed—he could go back to Ann. Never again would he have to fear being returned to the therapy room of the Shadows. It was something to think about, not at all to be despised. Lan Bruch of unborn Merlica, city out of a dream, would likewise approve.

So what, if it hadn't been Morton Cargill up there in that future. How could he expect it to be? By 7301
a.d
.,
the bones of Captain Cargill would have had four thousand years of
mouldering
.

"Why resist the inevitable?" Cargill asked.

He thought presently of at least one reason. The Tweeners were starting this war. That was one hundred per cent against them in his book. If it were left to the Shadows, there would be no war. That was one hundred per cent in their favor.

It was
hard,
it seemed to Cargill, to argue against a two hundred per cent differential in favor of the Shadows.

He slept. He awakened to a sunlit world. A member of the crew, holding a tray, was bending over him. "Got breakfast for you, sir. Captain says for you to eat and then come forward."

It was the coffee, particularly, that Cargill enjoyed. He entered the control room, his cup still in his hand. He was prepared to be friendly in exchange for more coffee.

"You can see Shadow City
,!
' said the pilot, "if you look straight ahead through the mist." He broke off. "Ed, give Captain Cargill your seat."

The co-pilot promptly rose. Cargill settled into the seat and looked out. Fog and haze blurred the horizon ahead. Mountain peaks seemed to waver in the uncertain light. It was hard to distinguish one shape from another.

Suddenly, he saw the pyramid. It was uneven to his vision and very small, as the peak of a stupendous mountain seems
toylike
from afar. He estimated that it must be at least a hundred miles ahead.

The floater continued to move toward it at normal floater speed. This was natural enough—Cargill had gathered that they didn't want the Shadows to suspect anything unusual about this particular machine.

Half an hour went by and all that time the fantastic city ahead grew larger. The towering pyramid shape came into sharper and sharper focus. At ten miles, it was a tremendously high pointed structure, set on a vast base. It straddled a nest of mountains. From five miles away the pyramid resembled a slope of glass through which Cargill could see the buildings concentrated in the central area. Seen close-up, the pyramid seemed anything but a powerful energy screen. It was even harder to grasp that he was here to disconnect the energy of that screen so that the Tweeners could dive down in their marvelous volors upon the unprotected metal and concrete of Shadow City—shadow no more.

"We land below there at the terminal." The pilot pointed at a building that stood at the edge of a forest. No other words were spoken. The floater came gently down on the gre en sward a hundred and fifty feet from a long low building. Cargill stepped out without being asked. The door clicked shut behind him. He watched as the machine rose into the sky and headed off toward the east.

Cargill turned and automatically started toward the terminal. And then he stopped. "I'm free," he thought. "They didn't wait to make sure that I would go in. Why shouldn't I just head downhill and lose myself in the wilderness?"

The surroundings appeared immeasurably desolate: peaks, crags, valleys, ravines and everywhere the primitive forest. It would probably take several days to reach the foothills. But it was a way out. Cargill made as if to turn. Nothing happened. He stood very still, startled. He remembered the tube that had "trained" him. Carefully he walked forward,
then
abruptly tried to twist on his heels. The muscles wouldn't respond. Pale but determined he thought, "I'll just stay here. I'll act so queerly that the Shadows will become suspicious."

His legs began to move, easily, naturally, without any sense of strain. He tried to stop them, but he had apparently forgotten how. Involuntarily, but without any of the appearance or feeling of being an automaton, lie walked across the lawn toward the terminal building. He was able to pause at the door, but only long enough to peer briefly through the thick glass into a marble alcove. A young woman inside smiled at him and pressed a button. The door opened.

A moment later Cargill was inside.

Cargill paused again just inside the door. In spite of his tenseness, he was curious. He stared with interest and some excitement at the young woman behind the alcove desk. A Shadow?
he
wondered. She had something of the intelligent look that he'd half expected. But there was also an intensity about her that was hard to define.

The young receptionist smiled and said in a rich, friendly voice, "We're so very glad to see you here of your own free will. We welcome you with all our hearts. We wish you luck. We want you to be one of us."

Cargill studied her warily. He recognized an emotional appeal when he heard one and he was impressed by the psychology of it. However, he was not so prepared to accept it as applied to
himself
. He had too many walls erected against chance breakthroughs of an emotional nature.

The young woman was speaking again. "You go through this door," she said as she pressed a button.

Cargill had already glanced through the door. It was wonderfully transparent and led into a marble-walled corridor that slanted off to the right. He smiled at the receptionist, said, "Thank you!" and walked through the door she had opened for him. Two nice-looking older women—Cargill guessed about forty years each—sat at a records section to the right.

One of them said, "You're a fine-looking young man. We wish you luck."

The other came out from behind the counter. "Come with me."

She led the way along a corridor that was lined with glass-fronted cubbyholes. They reminded Cargill of the way some department stores arranged their credit sections. In each office
was
a desk and two chairs. Cargill's guide paused at one of the entrances. "Here's your prize of the day, Moira." She touched Cargill's arm lightly. "Good luck, young man." "Thank you."

He spoke automatically,
then
walked into the office. The young woman looked up and surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment. Then she said, "I like you."

"Thanks," said Cargill somewhat
drily
. It seemed to him he was beginning to get the idea. And it was pretty impressive. In little more than a minute they had tried to make him welcome. He saw that Moira was studying him understandingly.

"You're cynical?" she said.

That was unexpected. Cargill protested, "I think you've got an excellent system."

"It didn't hurt me to say I like you," said the girl, "so I said it. Do you mind closing the door?"

Cargill closed it and remarked, "It's a very good technique for making new arrivals feel at home."

She shook her head. "I'm very happy to disillusion you. That's the way we live. Part of our life is so tremendously intellectual, so precise and scientific, that we long ago adopted a warmly emotional personal approach on every level of our community here. You'll see when you get into the city. But now, please sit down."

As Cargill complied, she took out a card and picked up a pen. "You're Morton Cargill, aren't you?"

Cargill stiffened. He had had a false name quivering on the tip of his tongue. Now he sank a little lower in his chair, silent and alarmed. It seemed to him that he had no recourse but to admit the truth. The chilling effect of the identification grew. He had a sense of being finally committed. Everything he had done since coming to the twenty-fourth century had been done under pressure. And yet, throughout, he'd had the feeling that he would be able to control his destiny. That feeling was gone. In spite of all his actions and counteractions here he was just where the plotters wanted him to be.

He braced himself to the reality. His opposition, it seemed to him, must now be narrowed down to one individual. If he could somehow kill
Grannis, that
act, and that alone, might still sway the balance. Aloud he said, "Am I expected?"

She nodded but said nothing. He watched as she wrote down his name, his nervousness growing. He thought of more implications of the recognition. Mentally, he pictured himself back in the original therapy room, being killed while Betty Lane, who had made the original complaint against him, looked on. The recollection put a pressure on him. He had to have more information. "I don't understand how you could possibly know my name. Do you know in advance the name of everyone who comes here?"

"Oh, no. You're special." She looked up. "You've come for the training, of course?"

It was only partly a question. The point was one which she evidently wanted to be taken for granted. Cargill decided temporarily to abandon his effort to find out how these people had learned his name. The young woman smiled at him again. Suddenly she looked so
young that he said with impulsive curiosity: "Are you a Shadow?"

The girl nodded. "Yes, I am." "You don’t always maintain the Shadow shape then?"

"Whatever for?" She sounded astonished. "That's a highly specialized state of being." As if she suspected his instant fascination with the subject matter, she said hurriedly, "Have you any idea what your responsibilities will be when you become a Shadow?"

Cargill noted that she said "when" and not "if." It gave him a heady sensation and emboldened him to ask directly, "How did you know my name?" "Time paradox."

"You mean something has
already
happened that you know about but I don't?" She nodded.

"What?" asked Cargill with automatic
absorption.
She shrugged. "It's really very simple. For your own private reasons you've been doing things for months. We don't know why but it brought you to our attention."

Cargill was captious. "No one has investigated my reasons?"

The woman smiled. "Naturally not. But now—it's customary for me to explain what our work is."

Cargill restrained the questions that quivered on his lips. He forced himself to sit back. He watched the woman intently as she spoke.

"We Shadows," she began, "are trying to undo the effects of the psychological disaster that demoralized the human race, beginning in the twentieth century. The pressure of civilization was apparently too much for millions of people. Everywhere men sought escape and they found the means late in 1980 in the newly invented floaters. When it became apparent that a mass
flight from civilization was under way psychologists searched frantically for the causes. Naturally, in accordance with their training, they looked into the immediate past of each individual and so it was only gradually that they learned the truth.

"It turned out to be a combination of inherited weakness and justified withdrawal from intolerable pressures. But man can build any civilization he desires. So the problem was to free him by nullifying the experiences and disasters that had befallen the affected protoplasmic lines, sometimes one, sometimes many generations earlier. Jung, one of the pioneer analysts, suspected its existence very early. He called it the ancestral shadow. After many years of experiment, a technique was developed for reaching into the past and rectifying to some extent the effects of the original disaster.

"The results are becoming more apparent to us every year. Planiacs are accepting our training in ever-increasing numbers. Unfortunately, since they start from such a low level of culture, most of them fail in their purpose. The result of the test, I must explain, is something we cannot control. It is purely mechanical. The individual either responds to the training and becomes a Shadow or does not respond and so gains only the educational benefits that enable him to become a Tweener. But the Shadow shape depends on a balance within the individual. We know how that balance functions but we have no artificial method for producing it. Do you understand that?"

Cargill said, genuinely interested, "What types of people generally succeed?"

"Your type," said Moira. She stood up. She pointed at a closed door to his right, which till that instant he hadn't noticed. "You go through there. Good luck."

Cargill stood up uncertainly but he opened the door. There was a grassy lawn outside and a spread of flowering shrubs that hid his view. He stepped across the threshold, walked around the shrubbery and saw with a start that he was inside Shadow City.

With a hissing intake of his breath Cargill stopped. He was on a plateau, looking down at the city proper. But how had he come here so quickly? It was a mile at least to the terminal center where he had reported.