They spun outward in a swirl of silence and light. Light foamed about them, glaring, sputtering, pulsing red and green and blue and gold, like a breaking comber of jewels.
"It's beautiful!" Q'nell's voice sounded in his head. "But what is it? We're not in the Channel. Our extrapolated universe model never predicted anything like this!"
"Nevertheless, it's here," Roger said. "And we're still alive to enjoy it."
"We've got to find out where we are and where we're going, in a hurry! We may be sliding right into their home base!"
"Yes. We seem to be traveling pretty fast," Roger agreed. As in the Channel, the sensation was of motion not through space, but through some subtler medium.
"I'm going to give the parameters another try," Q'nell said. "Somehow they seem to be much more accessible when we're in a non-space environment."
"Just don't go twisting them," Roger cautioned.
"That's precisely what I intend to do!" Q'nell countered. "But I'm afraid it will take more than a twist to get us back where we belong."
The clouds of light were changing, receding, forming up into towering thunderheads that glowed with pale colors. Now it was as though they swam in a stormy sky amid heaped, multicolored cumuli, with no up, no down, no land in sight. They swooped like effortless gulls between towers and through canyons, hurtling past vast, bellowing domes, diving through airy tunnels, skimming the surface of cloudy plains.
"It's no good; I'm getting dizzy," Q'nell called at last. She was swooping in the middle distance, upside down. "There's no frame of reference whatever!"
"If we just had something underfoot," Roger said. "I'm afraid I'm going to be airsick!" As he spoke, he felt something nudge the soles of his shoes. He looked down, saw a patch of pale blue tiled floor.
"Q'nell! Look!" He waved to her, floating overhead now.
"Where did that come from?" she called.
"I just thought of it—and here it was!"
Q'nell swung closer, arced downward to thump lightly against the floor. "Say, T'son, you may be on to something here!" She poked at the floor with a finger, pounded with her fist. "It feels solid enough. This is amazing! We seem to be in a malleable continuum, which can be concretized by thought impulses!"
Roger went to hands and knees, crawled to the edge, reached under and felt around.
"It's about an inch thick," he said. "Rough on the underside."
"Careful now, T'son," Q'nell cautioned. "Don't do anything that might shift our parameters, but . . . do you think you could extend it any?"
"I'll try . . . " Roger closed his eyes, imagined the floor extending outward twenty feet on every side, ending in a smooth edge.
"You did it!" Q'nell said excitedly. "Good boy!" Opening his eyes, Roger was delighted to find the floor exactly as he had imagined it. They walked to the edge.
"You know, this is a little vertiginous, looking down at all that open air," Q'nell said, edging back. "How about filling it in a little?"
Roger pictured green grass under spreading shade trees.
"Remarkable!" Q'nell exclaimed, surveying the parklike result. "Suppose I have a try?"
"Careful," Roger said. "Just anyone may not have the brainpower to do it."
"Stand back," Q'nell said. As Roger watched, a wall winked into existence before his face. For a second or two it was plain white plaster; then a slightly crooked window with a purple-and-pink curtain was suddenly there, with sunlight streaming through it. Roger turned. He was in a room, walled, roofed—and carpeted a moment later in a pattern of pink and yellow flowers.
"Nothing to it," Q'nell said. "Now, a couple of chairs . . . " Two massive mismatched rockers appeared, complete with glossy black satin cushions lettered saigon and mother in glowing blue.
"Horrible," Roger said. "Have you no taste?" He pictured a pair of delicate Chippendales, added a side table with a silver tray bearing a steaming teapot and a pair of dainty cups. He seated himself.
"I'll take a drink of something with some vitamins in it!" Q'nell snorted, and a bottle with a garish label thumped to the table. She produced a corkscrew next, poured out a stiff cupful.
"Hey, that's good stuff!" she exclaimed, smacking loudly. "Want a snort?"
Roger caught a whiff of the powerful brew and shuddered. "Certainly not."
Q'nell poured herself a second, strolled around the room, adding garish pictures in gold frames to the wall, placing lamps with grotesque shades here and there while Roger winced.
"Not bad," she said. "But it still lacks something . . . " She stared at a wall; a door appeared. She opened it on a bedroom containing nothing but an enormous bed.
"How about it, T'son?" she leered. "Feeling tired?"
"Now don't start all that again," Roger said. "The only purpose of this house-building spree was to help us with our orientation, remember?"
"All work and no play make Jackie a dull girl," Q'nell said.
"You've already given me your opinion of playgirls!" Roger yelled. "And anyway, I'm a man! Now stop horsing around and give your attention to the problem!"
"I am, T'son—I am!" Q'nell poured a third hearty libation, drank it, put the cup down, and reached for Roger. He leaped up and dodged behind a rocker.
"Stop it or I'll imagine the biggest policeman you ever heard of!" he yelled.
"Oh yeah?" Q'nell made a grab, missed, almost fell. "Say, that booze is getting to me," she murmured. "Oh well, it helps the party atmosphere." She tossed the cup aside and lunged, hooked a foot on the rocker, and landed headfirst.
"I warned you!" Roger closed his eyes and picture a seven-foot storm trooper, complete with spurred boots, brass knuckles, and a knotted leather whip. There was a soft thud! and a metallic tinkle. He opened his eyes to see an empty uniform collapse to the floor.
Q'nell leaped to her feet. "I didn't think you'd have the heart!" she cried blurrily, starting around the chair. Roger pictured a stairway, dashed for it, went up the steps two at a time, found himself on a landing open to the sky. Feet pounded below.
"More stairs!" he commanded, and dashed on. It was a glass-and-chrome-rail construction, rising in a gentle spiral. Too bad he hadn't called for an elevator; he was getting winded.
"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? 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.
"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."
"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.