It was worse than the arrival at Bullan, worse even than the awakening in Limbo. Before, Rex had felt sick and sore, but only as a temporary condition. Here he felt sick unto death, a shadow of himself, a strong man struck down by illness. Even getting to his feet demanded so much effort that he stayed where he was.
It was hot, blindingly hot, searingly hot. His overalls were already soaked with sweat, steaming in the heat. Regina lay beside him, pale and limp and unconscious, and although he ached to help her, he could do nothing for her, yet.
Cresta was in a system about as far from Earth as it was possible to go without going to another galaxy. It should not have been particularly hot. They must have landed on the equator. Around them was blinding yellow desert — nothing else. They could have been in the Sahara, on Earth, but for the fact that the sun was smaller, though hotter, the sky was not so blue, and the gravity slightly greater. The last fact was another reason for not trying to get up just yet.
Still another was Rex’s experience on Bullan, making him particularly careful not to move and possibly lose the location of the Gateway. He had considerable misgivings about this. There was a gentle breeze, and the landmarks, mere contours of sand, could shift dramatically in seconds if a real wind rose.
Such a desert, too, could not be tiny. In a world which had winds, a small area of sand would rapidly be dispersed — although as gravity was slightly greater than he was used to the sand would not be blown about quite as easily.
He looked around for some indication where he should go and found none. The needle of the compass he had brought was spinning aimlessly. One thing became obvious: if this world was to be explored, Regina was needed.
He reached over to stroke her cheeks, her hair. She was breathing, but as if in a deep trance.
This time they had brought with them three things — a compass, a water-bottle and a knife. All could be thrown away if they didn’t need them. The compass had already proved useless. The knife might or might not be valuable. The water-bottle was going to be worth its weight in gold.
Rex took his first sip from the bottle. It was some indication of his lethargy, almost apathy, that even a thirst greater than he had experienced on his two previous awakenings had only now impelled him to take the trouble to drink. And he sipped only a little, partly from prudence, partly because his agonized belly, though screaming for water, could not cope with it and was going to empty itself any moment.
Rex crawled a few yards away to do the unpleasant but necessary things. Afterward he took a longer drink.
The water, he found with relief, was the main restorative. Although he had felt far worse initially in Cresta than in Bullan, his first drink in Bullan had been long delayed. Now his headache was easing and he was able to face the ordeal of standing up.
Regina could not be left, as she had been left in Limbo, to revive in her own time. Any moment a tribe of savage bedouins might appear over the hill … any hill. He sat her up, and she groaned without opening her eyes. For a minute or two he seesawed her up and down.
Then she opened her eyes. “Go away,” she said indistinctly.
Knowing Regina, he did. He left the water-bottle beside her and sat down behind the nearest dune. Apart from the hunger which was part of every awakening and the searing heat which was the main feature of this one, he was becoming more himself. He and Regina had deliberately overeaten for some days before this, and evidently this helped. Heat, too, was probably a good thing. Cresta overdid the heat; however, Cresta, too hot, was distinctly preferable to Bullan, too cold.
In a really cold environment, he guessed, they’d never awaken at all. A Gateway to Alaska or Labrador would be fatal. He hoped Section K was aware of that too.
They should certainly, he decided, have brought some food as well as water.
He would have liked to take off his overalls, but he was not sure that the gentle warmth of Limbo, although it had browned them, had prepared his skin for the blast of such heat as Cresta had. Sunstroke would be a distinct possibility. He kept his overalls on, and sweated.
Regina seemed to be taking too long. He got up again and went back to her.
She was sitting with her legs hunched up, her chin on her knees, asleep. Rex pulled her to her feet. She swayed a little, blinking at him without noticeable affection.
“Let me die,” she said.
“Don’t think like that.”
“You’re very bright and spry,” she said resentfully. “Have you been awake for hours?”
“Only a few minutes.” The ordeal was far worse for her than for him. She was, of course, a slim, tiny creature, with only a small reserve of strength.
Regina pulled herself together with an effort, sniffed the air and looked around. “It’s all right,” she said without enthusiasm. “I know where we are. Stay there for a moment.”
She staggered about twenty yards and turned round two or three times, her eyes shut. Then, her eyes still closed, she returned and stopped only inches short of where the Gateway must be.
She opened her eyes. “We don’t need to mark the spot,” she said. “I’ll be able to come right back to it. That’s north.” She pointed.
“Are you a compass too?”
“No … I suppose what I do is sense the axis of the world and the direction of rotation, if it rotates. I don’t know for sure. There’s a city almost due east of here, about four miles.”
A city four miles away in a world where compasses didn’t work would have been hard to find without Regina’s special sense. It didn’t sound much, four miles, and in most places a city that distance away would have been plainly visible. But in the desert all there was to be seen were the rolling waves of sand, each ridge completely cutting off the view of what lay beyond.
“Can you sense the whole world?” Rex asked.
“Only very vaguely … It’s strange. I’ve been used to being shut into a little world, where everything is clear. Coming here is like coming from a house into the open air. One thing — distance does limit what I can sense. I don’t know anything about the other side of this world, and certainly nothing about other worlds.”
“You can sense people, can’t you?”
“Only that there are people. Men and women, not aliens. But I can’t tell you whether they’re black, red or green, dwarfs or giants, friends or enemies. This is about all I know… .”
The city was not large; Regina couldn’t give a more accurate estimate than that. There was no other city within fifty miles, though there might be villages. The population of the planet was small, she thought, and mainly on the equator. She had an idea the land masses lay in thin strips around the equator, with vast seas broken by bare rocks covering most of the planet.
This information was not exhaustive, and yet it was extremely useful, Rex reflected, to be able to tell as much as that about a strange world merely by sniffing the air, so to speak.
Their overalls were not unsuitable for the environment, but they should have had sunhelmets. Rex took off the tunic of his overalls, took off the shirt he was wearing underneath, and put the tunic back on. He ripped the shirt in two to make turbans to protect their heads.
When he turned, he saw Regina flat on her face on the burning sand, motionless.
He dropped beside her. She was scarcely breathing. He felt her pulse and found it rapid and, frighteningly, irregular. Always they had taken it for granted that they were both completely healthy. In Limbo they had suffered from nothing but the consequences of injuries they might have avoided with a little more care.
She had said: “Let me die.” Regina, who had so much to live for, who had Limbo to live for, who was a Twentyman, had said, and meant it: “Let me die.”
The ordeal she had suffered must have been something far beyond his own unenjoyable experience.
He thrust his hand into her tunic to feel her heart, and caught his breath. She was on fire. She was soaking, as he was, but worse than that her body temperature, though he could not measure it, was something fantastic, 107 or even 110.
People with high fever had to be kept warm, but this situation, he sensed, was something outside the medical books. He carried her to the partial shade of the nearest ridge and gently removed her overalls, the shirt and the folded skirt she was wearing in case skirts were obligatory on Cresta, and bathed her steaming skin with some of the precious water.
A thought grew from nothing until it filled his whole mind. Regina was dead against exploring the Gateways, whether he did it alone or they went together. She had never exactly agreed to accompany him; her attitude was rather that if it was impossible to stop him going, she would go with him.
Regina had a special gift. It was not telepathy, and she could not foresee the future. Yet she had had a presentiment. Wasn’t it possible that she knew that for her the Gateways were deadly?
His treatment was working. Regina’s color was more normal, she was breathing quite steadily, and her skin was almost dry.
When at last she opened her eyes, he said, “We’re going straight back.”
She smiled with something of the old sarcastic twist. “You could. I can’t. Do you think I could take that again so soon and live?”
She began to laugh weakly, half lying, half sitting. With the slight exertion her flesh began to steam again and droplets welled from her to run over her body and fall on the sand. “It’s funny,” she said. “There’s nothing I want more than to get back to Limbo. But I can’t go. I’ll have to help you to explore this hellspot. If I don’t make myself get up and move and burn out this sickness, I’ll never see Limbo again.”
• • •
Regina, who had been leading the way in a dead straight line, at last turned almost due south. “Over that ridge,” she said, nodding at it, “is the city. If we skirt the ridge we’ll be about level with the city as we enter. Appearing on the skyline we might be too conspicuous.”
Rex nodded.
Regina had drunk all the water and remained thirsty. Then she forced herself to walk, at first refusing to put on anything but the improvised turban. “This sun,” she said, “isn’t like Sol. It’s hot, but harmless.”
When Rex expostulated, she said, “What’s wrong with me has nothing to do with Cresta — only with the Gateways. I know what’s best for me. The main thing is never to go through a Gateway again, except to get back… . As of now, I have to drink, eat, sweat, keep moving, and the sun and heat can help me.”
Later she put on her skirt and tunic. She did seem to know what was best for her — as they walked, she became more steady on her feet.
When the ridge slanted down enough for them to see over it, they saw something Regina had not said anything about.
The city consisted of squat concrete buildings, wide avenues and grassy parkland, not unlike a North African city except that there was no Arab influence in the architecture. The cars that sped about were ordinary cars, and though the pedestrians they could see were too far distant for any details to be made out, they seemed to be ordinary humans.
What was unexpected was that the rolling desert stopped completely and abruptly twenty yards short of the road that ran round the city. There was not a single grain of sand on the road.
It wasn’t much of a surprise, Rex thought. The technology of Limbo must, after all, be the current technological level of the human race. Anything which could be done in Limbo could be done on Cresta. A city in a shifting desert needed a wall similar in kind to the one that enclosed Limbo, and there was one here. This one did not block vision. It was meant to stop sand.
“I wonder if we can walk through it,” said Regina.
“Let’s find out.”
But they waited until a few people had passed close enough for them to make out what they were like. Inspection of the Crestans satisfied them that Rex’s overalls and Regina’s tunic and skirt, their height, color and general appearance would pass without comment in the city. Their improvised turbans, however, would not. The Crestans didn’t wear sunhelmets.
Rex and Regina took off their turbans and buried them in the sand. Then they stepped forward boldly.
No traffic moved on the outer road, and nobody looked at the desert. Why should they?
The invisible wall offered no resistance. And after crossing the road and getting on one of the avenues, they felt less conspicuous.
More than most cities, this one began abruptly at a set point instead of straggling out into the country, semiurban, semirural. The presence of the desert explained that.
Soon Rex and Regina were in quite a busy quarter. Although they were not ignored, as Rex had been in Mercury, anyone who stared stared at Regina, and that was merely her natural right.
These people were busier, more alert, more purposeful than the people of Mercury. Everyone appeared to have somewhere to go, and all were in a hurry to get there.
Rex and Regina did not talk, they listened. Scraps of conversation picked up in passing were in standard English.
When they found a church open they went inside. It was clear at once that churches here, like everything else, were very different from those of Bullan. Here were no reminders that Doomsday was near. This church was small, very modern, cool and empty. There was no equivalent of the archway in the Mercurian church, and this was not merely because this church was not Catholic. The Crestans were too busy always to be running to the priest for what help he could give them.
After walking in Strand 7 for an hour, they felt they were getting nowhere.
On the face of it, they had learned a great deal. Cresta was a recently developed world, not rich as planets went but not poor either, specializing in delicate workmanship because the natural resources of the planet were negligible. It was the kind of place where people willing to take a chance and work hard would go, not a place to make a fortune, but wide open, warm, with plenty of space — the deserts and seas would never be overrun. And there were definite population limits looming not too far ahead. A world which could not support itself agriculturally as well as economically was built on shifting sands.
A valuable find was a thick newspaper left on a park bench. Strand 7 was not big enough to have a newspaper of its own. The Cresta Times served the whole world, and at that it was not daily but weekly. From their point of view this was excellent: the newspaper was bulky, there were few ads, and every closely printed word was about the Cresta settlement.
Since no one else was sitting on a public bench reading a newspaper, they scanned it quickly and then carefully folded it to put in their pockets. But now, from tag ends of conversation, a notice or two and what they had gleaned from the paper, plus some guesswork, they knew one of the main Crestan problems, the one on which the future of the settlement depended, and the main hope of solution — a plan to stock the seas with fish.
Before colonization, Cresta had had no life whatever; such soil as there was had to be worked on for a long time before it would grow anything useful. The grass they had seen was artificial. Cresta had no soil to waste on mere decorative grass.
For years the seas had been stocked with live fish, algae, plankton and all the organic refuse Cresta could spare from the eternal fight to make another acre of soil productive. The basic snag was that any creature brought alive to the planet could live only on something else brought to the planet.
Cresta took everything other worlds didn’t want — sewage, any nonpoisonous effluent, vegetation in any condition, all the refuse of other, live planets. To get all this for nothing beyond freight cost, which was considerable, Cresta couldn’t afford to be choosy. The plan, or rather the pious hope, was that all the life or near-life being dumped into the seas and on sterile soil would eventually rearrange itself into a balanced pattern.
And all this refuse was brought to Cresta by ships. There was no mention of any Gateway.
Little Limbo could actually breathe life into Cresta, possibly enough to make it a real, living world. Thousands of birds and animals, hundreds of tons of vegetation could be pushed through the looking glass… .
Of course, Cresta would want too much, would fight for it, and Limbo would die, like many another golden goose.
• • •
They had learned a lot, but they had made none of the fleeting contacts Rex had made with the people of Mercury, the brief glimpses into their lives which had told him almost everything of any importance that he discovered there.
At last Regina said, “If we’re going to find out anything here without money, we’ll have to make something happen.”
“Any ideas?”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to have ideas. You managed to find out quite a bit about Mercury. Why not here?”
It was true that having Regina with him made him less liable to take any risk. In Mercury, if anything had happened, he had only himself to think about. Here, if people became suspicious, if the Crestans turned on them, chased them, locked them up, nothing less than the safety of both of them could be considered. For one thing, he couldn’t even find the Limbo Gateway without Regina.
Also one person alone could much more easily make those brief contacts. Everybody left a couple alone.
“You sit on that bench,” he said. “If anything happens to me, don’t get involved.”
“What are you going to do?”
He moved away from her without answering, because he didn’t know.
Then he remembered the immigration office they had seen in the next street. Without a glance back at Regina, he went to it, walked in and said to the clerk at the desk, “I want to go back.”
The clerk, a thin girl with pale eyebrows, smiled thinly and said, “You know you can’t.”
“I want to go back, I tell you.”
“Back where?”
“Earth.”
For a moment she was too astonished to laugh. Then she laughed.
“You came direct?” she asked.
Something told him not to say yes. He didn’t want to say no either, because he couldn’t answer the next question.
“What does that matter?” he retorted, trying to act belligerent and not very smart, so that anything he didn’t know could be put down to general ignorance.
“You know perfectly well,” she said, as if to a child, “that if you left Earth voluntarily, you undertook never to return except on visits, the first not less than thirty years ahead. If you didn’t leave Earth voluntarily, you don’t get back, ever.”
“Half the time you don’t know what you’re signing,” he grumbled.
She shook her head. “You must have known, if you really came from Earth… . I guess Terrans can’t be expected to know what a privilege it’s supposed to be just to live on Earth, how everybody born anywhere else wants to go there just once, how — ”
“Supposed to be?” He couldn’t resist following that up, even if the question wasn’t in character. “Don’t you think so?”
“You don’t think so or you wouldn’t be here.”
That didn’t help at all. He didn’t know the things to say to this girl to extract useful information. To obtain useful answers you had to know the right questions.
“How can I help you?” the girl asked briskly.
“If you can’t get me back you can’t help me.”
“Short of that, how can I help you?”
“I’m out of a job.”
This time he’d really said the wrong thing. She didn’t laugh. She wasn’t merely amazed. She was looking at him for the first time with real suspicion.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He was in trouble. It was impossible to be out of a job in Strand 7, and everybody knew it. Even he knew it, now he had a clue — in such a world, where food was worth more relatively than any dozen other commodities put together, nobody could be allowed to eat and not produce. That explained the hurry, the purposefulness of Cresta: you had to earn your keep, and let nobody for a moment doubt that you were doing so.
“Look,” he said desperately, “I’d say or do anything to get off this planet. Any ideas?”
“What do you know about the birds?” she asked carefully.
He knew it was a trick question. It was like asking a man who claimed to come from Mercury if the street lighting was still as good. He couldn’t guess the answer. He had to know it.
“What birds?” he said, and was not in the least surprised when her eyes showed instantly that this was one of the many wrong answers.
She reached for a button on the desk.
• • •
He was over the counter in a moment, her wrist held in his. There had been no sign of other employees in the office, but if a girl sat waiting at a desk in an office the chances were people regularly spoke to her or consulted her, from inside or outside.
His other hand was over her mouth and she was trying to bite it, to scream. Fortunately she was a thin slip of a girl, as easily handled as a child.
He dragged her through the doorway behind her and into the first room off the passage there. His luck was in: it was a toilet, with a bath, showers, and no windows.
And there she suddenly stopped struggling. “You’re a Twentyman,” she said.
He didn’t let her go, but his tactics changed. Without even thinking about it, he and Regina had been keeping their eyes down, their minds shuttered. Whatever it was that gave Twentymen away they’d been deliberately trying to hide. But in the stress of struggling with this girl who had guessed something, and he didn’t know what, Rex had been unable to remain anonymous. Now that it had happened, what he most wanted from this girl was information about Twentymen. Two minutes ago he had wanted information about Cresta. A few seconds ago, he would have settled for escape for Regina and himself.
“So?” he said.
“Why hold me, then?”
He let her go. Twentymen didn’t have to use violence.
“What is a Twentyman?” he asked.
She stared.
“Tell me,” he said, and instead of trying to conceal his power, he exerted it all on this thin, pale girl, willing her to answer.
There was no noticeable effect. “You must know,” she said.
“Tell me what you know of Twentymen.”
That was a good move. The question made sense to her.
“Oh … you have to be special in the first place, the dominant personality, I mean. Nineteen people merge with you — ”
“Merge?”
“Suicides. Instead of just ending it all, they merge with the Dominant to make a Twentyman. Nothing much survives of them, everybody knows that. No knowledge, only traces of skill and intelligence and talent. But some of the soul, we believe. The cream. The top of the personality. The suicides get peace, and they don’t quite die.”
“And the result?”
“A Twentyman. He’s stable. He never commits suicide. It’s never been known. He never gets depressed. He’s … moral. It’s not possible for him to be evil.”
“Or her?”
“Girl Twentymen? There’re not so many of them. Not because there aren’t as many women suicides, but because there aren’t as many girl Dominants. Well, do I pass? What do you really want?”
“I came only for information.”
She looked at him warily. “Not about me, surely. I’m nobody. I’ve done nothing.”
“About Cresta.”
“You came in the last ship?”
“No.”
She nodded. “You came like the birds.”
Something clicked. “Birds have been turning up here unexpectedly, is that it? And you want more?”
“Millions of them,” she said eagerly. “Is that possible?”
“What happens to them, anyway? Don’t they die?”
“Most of them. Somehow, a few of them manage to live. You do know about the birds, don’t you? Where they come from?”
He could guess. The area immediately beside the Gateways in Limbo was swarming with birds. Deliberately, carelessly or blindly, many of them had blundered into the Gateways. Section K had made a mistake there. Rex didn’t think the Crestans were meant to suspect the existence of a secret matter-transference depot on their world because of the appearance near Strand 7 of birds, alive and dead, that had no right to be there.
“There won’t be any more,” he said.
Tears welled from her eyes. She didn’t sob. The tears, unchecked, ran down her thin face.
“Then it was just a mistake,” she whispered. “We thought — some of us thought — someone was really trying to help us. Or there was a haven of life in this world we didn’t know about.”
“I’m afraid,” he said quietly, sorry for her, “that letting birds into Cresta from where I came isn’t feasible. It would spoil …”
“Cresta’s meant to die?” she asked quickly.
“Not that … Take my word for it, the living things you could get from … the other place wouldn’t make any real difference to Cresta. It’s a very small place.”
“Every little helps.”
He shook his head. The real point, the thing he could not tell her, was that if this leak of life from Limbo to Cresta continued, sooner or later the Crestans would narrow down the point of origin and discover the Gateway. It was surprising they had not done so already.
“I’m going to tie you up and gag you,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s not necessary. You’re a Twentyman. Could I oppose you?”
That suggested either that the Twentymen had hypnotic powers or that all Twentymen, whatever their origin, had to be obeyed absolutely everywhere.
“I can’t take the chance,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t resist as he tied her to a chair with strips torn from a roller towel. Instead, she looked at him steadily and said, “Twentyman, unless all I’ve ever heard is wrong, you have to be good, moral, just. Cresta is hovering between life and death. Not the voluntary death that faces almost every other world in the galaxy — slow, painful death because though we’re a good settlement we can’t import or create enough life to keep us alive. Twentyman, wherever you’re from, you’ve got to help us.”
“I can’t promise anything,” he said. “But if it turns out it’s possible for me to do something, I’ll do it. What’s your name?”
“Vera. Vera Taylor.”
“Well, Vera, I don’t know you, but you’ve put up a better case for Cresta than the umpteen millions in a city I saw recently put up for their world.” He paused and then added, “At least you want to live.”
“Doesn’t it figure?” she said, drawing back her ankles to let him tie them to the legs of the chair. “There’s no bar to living anywhere else. So people kill themselves. Here, it’s a struggle to live. So suicides are rare.”
“Thanks, Vera,” he said. Perhaps she had given him an important pointer.
• • •
Five minutes later he joined Regina and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
The rest had done her no good. She was lackluster, drooping. She stood up with an effort.
Rex paused for a moment. Regina had had plenty of water, a commodity freely available in Strand 7, but no food. They had no money and food was the most precious thing here; they had seen not a single fat person and many who were very thin.
What Regina needed was several days of good food and rest before submitting herself to the necessary ordeal of the return trip through the Gateway to Limbo. Tired, sick and undernourished after one trip, she might not survive the second. But what could they do? Corner a family somewhere and demand food and accommodation, as Twentymen? Steal?
No, with Vera tied up in the toilet at the immigration center, liable to be discovered at any moment, there was no choice but to get out of Cresta right away.
Nobody paid any more attention to them than before. At the edge of the city they did not have to wait long until there was nobody in sight. They stepped out into the desert and felt safer.
“What happened?” asked Regina.
“I’ll tell you later. I know you’re in a bad way, Regina, but we have to leave this place — ”
“If I survive, I’m never going through a Gateway again. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sometimes it’s worse than others — ”
“Rex, you’re not going through the four others, after this?”
“Well, as you said, it doesn’t seem to be so bad for me.”
She started to remind him of his state on the return from Bullan, a less arduous round trip than this and one on which he spent many hours in Mercury and was able to fortify himself with food and drink. But her tired brain gave up the effort. It was all she could do to plod along, reeling.
All the way back to the Gateway Rex was looking for corpses of birds. To his relief he saw none. So the birds, although they had given the Crestans a clue to the existence of the Gateway, had given them no clue to its exact location. Emerging into Cresta, no doubt thirsty, dazed and weak as humans were after transference, they had all had the strength and will to live to go in search of water and food. Water they probably found easily enough. But on Cresta there was no food for birds.
Without Regina’s unerring sense of direction, they’d never have found the Gateway. The coincidence which showed them exactly where it was would have been of no value to them if they hadn’t been within fifty yards of it at the time and making directly for it.
A large pigeon suddenly appeared from nowhere, flapping desperately. It fell to the ground as if it had been brought down by a shot. But within a couple of seconds, its movements more coordinated, it took off and began making wide circles in the sky.
“Nothing to them, apparently,” said Regina.
The tiny effort of thinking and speaking proved too much for her. Her knees buckled and she folded up on the sand.
Rex had to carry her to the Gateway.