He was on a beach. That was the first thought that came into focus as his stunned mind returned to awareness. Brilliant sunshine glared down on yellow sand. He sat up, looked across the shimmer of heat to eroded spires of pink stone looming in the distance. The dance of the air reminded him of something, but thinking made his head hurt. And that in turn reminded him of something else . . .
Tentatively, Roger Tyson put his hand to his ear, felt the button there.
"Wh—what happened?" he whispered.
"Voice?" he called. "Agent Q'nell, or whatever your name is?"
"Well—at least I'm cured of part of my affliction," Roger told himself. "Now if I can just figure out where I am . . . " Probably, he considered, he had been on a three-weeks' binge, and was now just coming out of the alcoholic fog.
"Of course, I've never been a drinker," he reminded himself. "But that's probably why it hit me so hard."
He came shakily to his feet, looking around at the vast expanse of sand. It was not a beach, he saw. Merely a boulder-dotted desert, stretching on and endlessly on. "Probably Arizona," he thought. "Maybe the road is just out of sight; but in what direction?"
A massive water-carved rock squatted fifty feet away. Roger went to it, climbed its side. Standing atop it ten feet above the level, he could see for miles across the flat expanse. Far away to the east, a line of pale cliffs edged the world. To the north there was only a vacant horizon. The west was the same. But to the south a ravine cut across the flat ground—and a ravine suggested the action of water.
"A drink," Roger said. "That's what I need." He scrambled down, started across toward the dark line of the cut.
For the first ten minutes he walked steadily forward, skirting the frequent large stones, keeping the sun on his left. Encountering rougher ground, he slowed, picking his route with care.
Mounting a low ridge, he shaded his eyes, scanning the route ahead. The ravine, which should have been very close now, was not to be seen. But . . . Roger closed his eyes, resting them, looked again. What he saw was unmistakable. The boulder that he had climbed, from which he had sighted the ravine, lay a hundred yards ahead, squarely in his path.
Four times Roger Tyson had oriented himself with his back to the rock and walked directly away from it—twice to the south, once each to the north and east. Each time, within fifteen minutes, he had returned to the landmark. There had been no careless changes of direction, he was sure of that. Walking east, he had faced directly into the sun's glare—and after a quarter of an hour had again encountered the ubiquitous boulder.
Now he sat in the shade of the massive rock, his eyes closed, feeling the heat that beat down from above, reflected from below, radiated from the stone at his back. Already he felt weak and listless from dehydration. At this rate, he wouldn't last until sundown—the only relief he could hope for. Not that that would change anything. He would still be lost here in this landscape of illusions . . .
That was it! The place didn't really exist; it was nothing but a creation of his fever-racked mind. With this conclusion came a sense that now that he had penetrated the mirage, it should be possible to ignore it. Roger concentrated on the mundane reality of the normal world: singing commercials, tourist attractions, Rotarians, chrome-plated bumpers, artificial eyelashes . . .
He opened his eyes. The lifeless desert still stretched about him. Illusion or otherwise, he was stuck with it.
But damn it, it was impossible! A surge of healthy anger drove him to his feet. There had to be a key to it—some imperfection that could be detected by acute observation. He would pick a starting point and, step by step, analyze what the situation was that he faced! This time, sighting on a distant landmark—a spire of stone at least ten miles away—Roger walked slowly, pausing frequently to study the ground around him. He wasn't sure precisely what he was looking for, but it was clear that the trap in which he was caught—he thought of it in those terms now—bore some resemblance to a goldfish bowl, in which the puzzled fish swam endlessly, bumping his nose against an invisible barrier which relentlessly led him back again to his starting point. The barrier here was an intangible one, a three-dimensional wall; but like the glass of the bowl, it should be possible to confront it directly, rather than sliding along beside it, like a guppy swimming parallel to the wall of his prison.
Something in the landscape ahead caught Roger's attention, some deviation from the usual aspect of the physical world. It took him minutes of close observation to pinpoint it: objects in the distance before him appeared to slide away to the left and right as he advanced. The apparent movement in itself was a normal perspective effect; it was the rate of movement that was wrong. The array of boulders stretching out before him seemed to part too swiftly—and at the exact center point of his view, there seemed to be an almost invisible vertical line of turbulence, a line that disappeared as he halted, resumed again as he went forward, always at the precise point toward which he moved. It wasn't a tangible thing, he saw; merely a plane along which the expansion of the scene took place. As he watched, a tiny object came into existence there, grew with each step until the familiar boulder lay there in his path, a hundred yards ahead. He looked back. The rock was no longer visible; the distant line of cliffs glowed orange in the late sunlight.
"All right," he said aloud, his voice a lonely sound in the silent immensity around him. "It's some kind of lens effect. A four-dimensional lens, maybe. Putting a name to it doesn't help much, but at least I've pinned down one aspect of it." He scratched a mark on the ground, then walked on to the stone, counting his paces. Three hundred and twenty-one. He returned to the mark, continued along that route until the boulder reappeared ahead; then he went on, counting his steps. Four hundred and four paces in this direction.
"So far, so good," Roger said, walking toward the boulder. "The phenomenon has a fixed center. The fishbowl may be a complete sphere, but it has a definite boundary." He paused as a concept formed in his mind: three-dimensional reality, gathered up at the corners, pulled up to form a closed space, as a washwoman folds up the edges of a sheet to form a bag . . .
"And all I've got to do," he concluded, "is find the knot!" As this thought completed itself, he noticed a tiny movement ahead. Instantly, he dropped flat behind a convenient rock. Beside the boulder where he had awakened, something glittered in mid-air. Half a dozen metallically jointed members appeared, followed a moment later by a squat, dusky-red body, headless, single-eyed, alien.
"The rutabaga!" Roger choked. "It's still alive—and after me!"
Roger lay flat as the monstrous form emerged fully from the empty air, like an actor sliding from behind an invisible flat. It poised for a moment on its clustered supporting members, identical with an upper ring of armlike appendages; then it moved away from the rock, studying the ground ahead.
"It's following my trail!" Roger gulped. "And in five minutes, it will be sneaking up behind me!" He rose to all fours, scuttled forward a few yards, watching the alien creature move rapidly away on flickering tentacles. Darting from cover to cover, he followed it—his only chance, he knew, to stay ahead of it. Approaching the boulder, he saw a tiny glint of light from a vertical line, like a luminous spider's web, extending from the ground upward.
"It's the Aperture!" he gulped in relief. "I hate to reopen the conversation with the art fancier, but it's better than trying to explain to that vegetable how I happened to steal his bike."
Cautiously, Roger edged closer to the luminous filament, saw it widen, close around him as swiftly as a bursting soap bubble, then as swiftly open out again and vanish behind him.
He was standing in darkness, under a sky criss-crossed by glowing arcs, like a Fourth of July display. The air was filled with thunder, punctuated by pops, bangs, and stuttering detonations.
"It's a celebration," Roger guessed, noting that he was standing ankle deep in cold water. "I wonder what the occasion is?" He groped about him, discovered that he was in a muddy, steep-sided ditch higher than his head. A faint glimmer of light reflected from the damp wall of the cut a few feet ahead. He sloshed to it, turned a right-angle corner, and was facing a sand-bagged, timber-braced doorway. Inside, three men sat at a table made of stacked boxes, holding cards. The light came from a candle stuck to a board.
"Hey! You better get inside, buddy!" one of the men called. He was a sallow, thin-faced youth in a mustard-colored jacket, open at the neck. "Big Otto's due to hit any second now!"
"Blimey, mate," a second man, wearing suspenders over wool underwear, said, slapping a card down on the table. "Don't yer know the ruddy schedule?"
The third man, a stout fellow in a gray-green uniform jacket, placed a card on the table and puffed smoke from an enormous pipe.
"Ach, a new gesicht!" he exclaimed heartily. "Bist du vieleicht ein poker player?"
"Ah—not just now," Roger responded, entering the murky chamber hesitantly. "Say, I wonder if you fellows can tell me where I am? My, uh, car broke down, you see, while I was on my way to apply for a new job . . . "
Hearty laughter interrupted Roger's explanation.
"New job," the man with the suspenders echoed. "That's a'ot one, chum!"
"Good to meet a guy with a sense o' humor," the man in mustard agreed. "What's your outfit, pal?"
"You are a funny man," the stout player stated solemnly. "You would abbreciate a yoke. Warum does ein Huhn cross the strasse?"
"Outfit?" Roger queried. "I'm afraid I don't have one."
"Wiped out, huh? Too bad. Well, you can doss down here . . . " His voice was drowned by an ear-splitting shriek followed instantly by an explosion that rocked the underground room. The joke-teller reached to flick a smoking fragment of shell casing from the table.
"To come on s' ozzer seite!" he said triumphantly. "Also, vun man says to s' ozzer man, 'Who vass dass lady I zaw you viss last nicht?"
"What's going on?" Roger blurted, slapping at the mud spattered across his face by the blast.
"The usual Jerry bombardment, o' course, chum. Wot else?"
"Jerry bombardment? You mean—Germans? Good Lord, has a war started?"
"Oh-oh, shell shock," the thin-faced man said. "Too bad. But maybe it's better that way. You get a little variety."
"Where am I?" Roger persisted. "What is this place?"
"You're in good hands, buddy. This is the Saint Mihiel Salient; just take it easy. The shelling will be over in another couple minutes, then we can talk better."
"The Saint Mihiel Salient! B-but that was in World War One!"
"Right, chum. September twelfth. Lousy day, too. I could of picked a better one to be stuck in."
"But—that's impossible! It's nineteen-eighty-seven! You're two wars behind!"
"Crikey—'e's flipped his cap proper," the suspendered man commented.
"Blease! I didn't finish my yoke!" the stout man complained.
"Could it be—is it possible—that the Aperture is some sort of time machine?" Roger gasped.
"Say, buddy, you better get out of the doorway," the thin-faced man suggested. "There's one more big fellow due before it lets up, and—"
"That desert!" Roger blurted. "It wasn't Arizona! It was probably ancient Arabia or something!"
" 'E's raving." The suspender-wearer rose from his seat on an ammunition box. "Watch 'im, mates. 'E might get violent."
"Fantastic!" Roger breathed, looking around the dugout. "Just think, I'm actually back in the past, breathing the air of seventy-odd years ago! Outside, the war is raging, and Wilson's in the White House, and nobody's ever heard of LSD or television or miniskirts or flying saucers—"
"Look, chum, in about ten seconds—"
"You fellows have a lot of excitement to look forward to," Roger said envyingly. "The war will be over in November; try to keep your heads down until then. And afterwards there'll be the League of Nations—that was a failure—and then Prohibition—that didn't work out too well, either—and then the stock market crash in twenty-nine—remember to sell your portfolios early in the year. And then the Great Depression, and then World War Two—"
As the players rose and closed in, Roger backed away. "Now, wait just a minute!" he protested. "I'm not crazy! It's just that I'm a little confused by what's happened. I have to be going now—"
"You don't hear yet s' punchline!" the stout man protested.
"You'll get y'er bloody 'ead blowed off!"
A loud whistle filled the air as Roger broke away and splashed out into the muddy trench. As the sound of the descending shell rose higher and higher he looked both ways for shelter, then dived for the Aperture, saw rainbow light flare about him—
He was sprawled on the grassy bank of a small creek, in full sunlight, looking at a brutal caricature of a man crouched on the opposite side.
The map-ape stood all of eight feet tall, in spite of a pronounced stoop; its hands looked as big as catchers' mitts. The shaggy red-brown pelt was matted with dirt, pink scars crossed the wide face, the bronzed, sparsely haired chest. The wide lips drew back on broken, blackened teeth; the small eyes flicked restlessly from Roger to the surrounding woods, back again.
"Oops," Roger murmured. "Wrong era. I'll just nip back through and try that again . . . "
As he stepped back, the ape-man advanced, splashing down into the stream. Roger forced his way back in among tangled brambles, searching frantically for the glint of light that indicated the exit.
"Maybe it was over more to the left," he suggested, beating his way in that direction. The giant was halfway across the stream now, yelling in indignation at the touch of the water. "Or possibly to the right . . . " Roger clawed at the vines that raked at him like clutching hands. The monster-man emerged from the water, paused to shake first one foot and then the other, then came on, growling ferociously. Roger broke clear of the thicket, skittered away a few feet, and stopped to watch the dull-witted brute entangle itself in the thorny creepers.
"Keep cool, now, Tyson," he counseled. "You can't afford to lose track of the bolthole. Just hover here while that fellow wears himself out, then scoot right in and—"
With a bellow, the ape-man lunged clear of the snarled vines, a move that placed him between Roger and his refuge.
"He—he's probably scared to death," Roger theorized. "All I have to do is act as though I'm not afraid, and he'll turn tail and run." He swallowed hard, adjusted a fierce glint in his eye, and took a hesitant step forward. The result was instantaneous. The creature charged straight at him, seized him with both hands, lifted him clear of the ground. Roger's last impression was of blue sky overhead, seen through a leafy pattern of foliage that whirled around and down and burst into showering lights that faded swiftly into blackness.