Land Beyond the Map

VII

At first they didn’t realize what happened next. Then, when the soft white flakes began to drift silently into the car and disappear into tiny patches of moisture, gleaming in the sun, they had to accept it.

“It’s snowing!” Crane said, and was surprised he could still feel surprise, here in this maniacal other world.

Polly had regained her usual poise and Crane felt a quick stab of admiration for her unalloyed by his habitual sense of inferiority toward her. She put a hand to her hair and shivered as the snow built up with unbelievable speed, so that a carpet of white covered everything outside. “If this is what it was like a million years ago then I’m glad I wasn’t born then.”

“No. We weren’t born then. But we are there — now.”

“If we’re there. We don’t know where we are.”

“Except that we’re in the Map Country.”

“Yes. The Map Country.” Polly’s voice held steadily.

Crane decided he’d better show a little spirit.

“And it cost a cool hundred thousand.”

Polly didn’t laugh. But she said: “Plus the hotel and crossing expenses and the hire of the car.”

“The car!” said Crane. He ducked his head fast and checked. “We’ve less than half a tank left.”

“You’ve only just thought of that?”

“Yes.” He kicked himself mentally very thoroughly. The lack of fuel would have been a trump card to have played in persuading her to turn back to their own normal world.

“Hadn’t we better think about—?” he began uneasily.

“Our pal’s catching up,” said Polly crisply, looking in the rear view mirror.

Crane sighed. “Okay, okay. Just a minute.”

He opened the door and stepped out onto crunchy snow. The road had quietened down now although the ground beyond still rose and fell uneasily. He waited until the tank was at the optimum range and then tossed the grenade very accurately. He ducked.

When he looked up after the blast the tank had fallen on its side off the road and its starboard arms were going up and down with the movement of the ground. A wisp of smoke rose from it. After the noise the silence hung menacingly, broken only by an ominous hissing from the wrecked tank.

Again Crane felt he should exert himself. Polly was so much of a personality, so tough, so dominating, mentally even more than physically, so independent and youthfully modern a character.

He said: “I think I’ll take a closer look at that clanking monster.” He used the old name deliberately. “Hold on.”

He wasn’t surprised when she joined him. Together they walked across the snow-covered road, leaving large and splodgy footprints. It was not at all cold now and the snow gradually ceasing had no power to lay. Their feet rang hard on the old road surface by the time they reached the wreck.

The hissing noise had stopped.

“Something hot against the snow,” surmised Polly.

Crane walked up the road to the tank warily, wishing he had a gun and yet recognizing the weak fallibility of that.

“Yes,” he said, not taking his eyes off the machine.

The body, he could see more clearly now the thing was in repose, arched out into a rugged barrel-shape, with plenty of room inside for power-sources, controls, radio-equipment — and people. The tank sprocket system appeared at first glance to be relatively simple and uncomplicated without an armored skirting to protect the return rollers. The bogey wheels were small and set in three pairs of four, each set sprung on a rocker arm and coil springing. He eyed the mess of tracks snarled around the driving sprocket.

“Reminds me of our old Mark One Infantry tanks, as far as suspension and tracks go. No wonder a grenade could do all this. The track snarled up on the sprocket, probably a link jammed in and held. Nasty mess.”

“You sound sorry for it, Rolley. Were you in Tanks?”

“No, thank goodness. But I received an intensive and highly unpleasant training in dealing with them.” He added out of the pit of his own dissatisfaction with his military career, “Not that those poor devils of terrorists used tanks.”

“Well,” Polly said brightly. “You’ll be able to use your tank-busting technique around here. Quite fortuitous, really. And you’re doing all right so far.”

“Why do you imagine I volunteered for an anti-tank course?” Crane fairly snarled the words at her. “D’you think I’d forgotten the clanking monsters when I joined the Army?”

And, at once, they were both contrite and apologizing to each other.

“Anyway,” he said after the spate of words that neither really understood, “the Infantry Mark One had leaf springing and only two sets of four, rubber and steel bogie wheels. The old bashers did well for themselves, too, I’m told, before Dunkirk.”

“That’s all ancient history, Mac. What about those?”

And Polly pointed one slender finger at the tank’s flail-like arms.

“They do pose a different problem. Have you seen anything like them before?”

Polly shook her head. “No. Can’t say I have.”

Crane mused, worrying at odd memories, trying to bring into focus an elusive picture. Those sinuous tentacular arms were really alien; but the jointed arms, now, they rang a bell somewhere. Beneath his feet the group still trembled slightly, a diminishing shudder that rippled in dying waves out across the land from which the snow melted visibly in swathes of irregular gray and green. The sun began to pull steam from the sodden fields. Somewhere — and most strangely — a bird was singing. Now there seemed to be more trees than before, thick groves and clumps of them stretching out in all directions. A river, too, had appeared, winding slowly close to the road. Glints sparkled from its surface. Fish plopped satisfyingly, rippling the surface.

All the time he stood there Crane was aware of the background thought in his mind: What happens next in this nightmare world?

Polly said: “Only things I can think of are cranes.” And she laughed.

Crane smiled weakly. “Yes. The arms are like derricks. But it’s not that He pushed the elusive memory away and bent closer to the smashed tank. He could see no hole or hatchway by which he might have entered. On the broad back, canted now, protruded three radar bowls and a mat of complex and incomprehensible design and purpose. Whip aerials rose springily from the rear where the dramatic venturi showed blackened and pitted orifices. The metal looked blued and tough and the bright vermilion paint a scabrous unnecessary growth, peeling here and there, scratched, bubbled by the sun, slapped on carelessly — odd.

“We could build something like this if we had to with our present techniques,” Crane said slowly. “But it would all be fakery. There’d be no need for half of all this dramatic appearance.”

He touched the Venturis disdainfully. They were still warm.

“How about the arms?”

“They’d be more difficult—” And then he had it. “Of course. They remind me of the long-range handling gear used by nuclear physics men behind shields when they deal with hot stuff. You put your hands in controls and operate the remote extension metal hands and peer through the glass — that’s it.”

“So someone could sit miles off and control these things by radio, see by tv and radar, and manipulate the arms?”

“Something like that.”

Polly shivered and turned away. “Let hope he — or it — isn’t watching us now.”

“I think my grenade fouled up the works inside when the thing went over. It looks pretty defunct to me.”

“Come on, Rolley,” she said suddenly, sharply. “Is it really necessary to spend hours gawping over your kill like a big-game hunter?”

He turned away at once. Then, gently, he said: “There’s an old saying, Polly, admirably suited to our present position. ‘Know your enemy.’ That tank could yield us a clue to whoever — or whatever — lives in the Map Country.”

Walking back with her was an ordeal. He wanted to keep rotating his head on a stiff neck and look back. He fought down the impulse. “If they are watching us then there’s not much more we can do.” He put a hand on the car door. “You realize that the way back is now open?”

“Yes. But I believe more firmly than ever before that Allan is up there someway.” She pointed ahead. “That way.”

Without another word Crane entered the car.

After a time in which the Austin purred comfortably along the white road between the river and groves of the tall, top-heavy trees, Crane said musingly: “Allan went into the Map Country from the east — as I did the first time — and we are entering from the west. The actual point of entry, we know, is where the map is torn.”

Polly sat up with a jerk, pulling on the wheel. Her rounded chin went up too, defiantly. “You mean there’s no way of telling how much country lies between the two points here?”

Crane shook his head. “No, Polly. I mean that the lines of directions we took crossed. If Allan was going one way and we the other and we both entered the Map Country at the same point, why, then—”

“We’re going away from each other!”

Crane had the decency not to say anything to that.

The car stopped precipitately. Polly switched off at once, propped her elbows on the wheel and put her head on them.

“All right, Rolley. What do we do now?”

The result of his remarks surprised Crane. Then he chuckled to himself. Polly was working up to something; she was too fire-proof to be much shaken by his revelation.

“If that theory is true, then we can never enter the same part of the Map Country as Allan. While we hold the map, that is. When we go back to enter his half, we’ll pop out through our torn map into the real world.”

“So?”

“Alternatively—” Crane snapped his fingers. “Let’s have a look at the map, Polly. It might give us another idea.”

He took the wallet out, pushing that enigmatic chain back more firmly into his pocket. The wax paper crackled as before — and then the map was in his hands. He opened it cautiously. His attention centered at once on the torn edge.

“An old all-rag paper,” he said, feeling and looking. “Made before they cut down Canada for the daily scandals. And the edge is rough, far rougher than you’d expect. Look—”

He fibrillated the fibers gently.

“That’s linen — real good solid-cellulose base, with a bit of cotton for bulk. And the edges have been savaged.”

Polly looked at him sideways. “Well, Rolley?”

He smiled. “I believe the other section of the map is as jaggedly torn as this. That means there is a fair size section of map actually missing — if you like, a long narrow stripe of nothing down the middle.” He tapped the paper. “And mat, my dear Polly, is the Map Country.”

“So Allan is on the other side of this narrow strip.” She turned the ignition key and started the car. “Good. So we can get on. All that flap was for nothing.”

Crane looked at her disgustedly. “Women!” he said.

Despite their flippancy, despite the offhand manner in which they both talked about the macabre events about them, both of them, Crane was acutely aware, were tensing up and, as it were, wincing back from the terrors ahead. For now these phantasms of the imagination were about to take on flesh and blood and come stunningly alive; they could not long be delayed. Liam refused to reenter the Map Country. Colla had never returned from it. Men had been snatched by lambent ovals of light. And Allan Gould and his girl had vanished completely.

Crane sat nervously fingering the grenade bag, wishing he had enough courage to tell Polly to turn the car around and enough force of character to do it. But, being what he was where women were involved, he did nothing and let her have her own way. Yet he knew wryly there was more to his reluctance to dominate her than that; the manhood in him refused to allow that he, too, wasn’t man enough to venture on into the unknown, and the essential Tightness of what they were attempting accorded with his own unspoken wishes — despite the blue lights and the funk simmering in his mind. And the anticipation of fear screwed down with every revolution of the wheels.

“There’s one thing in your favor.” Crane stared out on the weird landscape, stable now but marching past, as the car moved, with the drunken irregularity of unfinished scenery from a theater workshop. “If this road is the only stable artifact here then Allan is likely to be on it. Or near enough to spot us.”

“So I trust.”

“What’s he been living on?”

“Berries, fruits, game — we passed a whole herd of ruminants back there. You were looking the other way.”

“Oh? If this is a million years in the past the most recent Ice Ages won’t have started yet, so I’d expect this sort of climate — the climate we’re experiencing at this moment,” he added with unnecessary explanation, “and vast herds of animals. But—”

Very seriously, Polly said: “I don’t think we’re in the past, either. We’re in some — some other world.”

“And if we were sensible people we’d get out of it — quick.”

“Must you keep on?”

“Sorry.”

“Look — there’s something beyond those trees.”

Crane took one look, leaned across the girl and wrenched the steering wheel around. The car left the white road in a tortured shriek of tires, jounced across yielding grass and came to an outraged stop beneath the trees. Shadows fell from the branches. Crane opened his door and clutching his bag of grenades to his side leaped out and darted back the way the car had rolled, crouching, taking cover behind the boles of trees. He peered out and along the road.

“What is it, Rolley?” Her clear voice reached him, no hint of panic there.

“Quiet!” he said softly, waving her down. She walked up behind him with the selfconscious stealth of a lioness on her first kill.

Together they stared out from the trees, taking good care to remain well-hidden in the shelter of the trunks.

“The Moving Heath,” Crane whispered. “I never thought to see that come true.”

Moving from one side of the road to the other in a steady and unhurried stream marched lines of ambulant bushes. Each bush had grown perhaps five or six feet in height and as broad across, bearing many tiny leaves glittering silver and olive green as they flashed and fluttered in the light. Concealed within that fairy foliage lay clusters of glistening golden berries, delectable at first sight, bringing the sting of anticipatory saliva to the mouth. The trunks rose stocky and solid, dark gray, seamed with a cracked bark, ancient. Crane concentrated on one bush and looked hard and carefully.

The thing extended a long pinkish root before it, secured a firm anchorage — the root could not have penetrated much more than six inches or so into the ground, like a worm — and then up-anchored other roots to the rear and moved forward again with the slightest of trembles until the first root was again freed to probe forward. The bushes moved at about two miles an hour, Crane judged, although assessment of speeds that low was always difficult.

The roots twisted as they went into the earth, like drills, twisting up on themselves, their length adequate for the number of turns required to bore down six inches. Caught up beneath the center of each bush and looking like the bundled and wrapped roots of roses and bushes sent from nurserymen back on Earth, a globular mass of earth interpenetrated by matted fibrous roots obviously provided locomotive sustenance.

“I don’t believe it,” Polly said indignantly.

“See how they move — purposeful, determined, unyielding.”

“I read an article in some magazine saying that fictional anthropomorphic plants were quite impossible. Absolutely nonsensical. I don’t remember the reasons why, now; but the writer said they just couldn’t be.”

“He hadn’t been into the Map Country.”

“But it negates all our biology!”

“Agreed. It has been proved impossible by biologists. But I expect these bushes only move now and again; they don’t keep on the prowl all the time.”

“You think they move to escape the living earth?”

“Possibly, One reason why perambulating plants are said to be impossible is the slow absorption rate of nutriments from the soil. But if they carry a whole knapsack full of soil around with them, feeding on that, and then dig down deep with their thick roots when they lay siege — well, it could be done, I suppose. Don’t forget, this chaotic country has tossed the rule books out of the window.”

“I’m ready to believe anything now.”

“And me.” Crane stiffened. “Look! There in the sky! Swooping on them!”

“Good Lord!”

All the bushes turned from silver and olive green to a solid silver mass. Leaves curled and rolled into silver thorns. A perceptible increase in speed surged through the mass of bushes. There must have been two hundred or more. The leaders were already across the road, hurdling the strip of unproductive barrenness, their roots probing the soil beyond and taking them into the shelter of the trees.

And on them, from above, dived the birds.

Birds?

“Well, then,” said Crane. “Animals with wings and tails and feathers and wide reptilian heads and jaws, and yet nothing like the museum reconstructions of Archaeopteryx or Archaeornis, and they’d be a hundred and seventy or so million years ago. And if we were that far back in time there’d be no grass or trees like this — no angiosperms. I doubt we need to worry about dinosaurs yet.”

“Thanks,” Polly said sarcastically. “But I’ll believe that when we’re out of here without meeting a friendly Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus Rex.” Still her voice was firm and controlled. Crane felt like standing up and running, screaming blue bloody murder.

The birds dived in steep Stuka attacks on the bushes, screaming a raucous ear-piercing screech as they sliced down through the air, tearing at the branches with teeth and claws. The bushes lashed back, striking down the bright-colored bodies, sending feathers puffing in punctured eiderdowns of clotted blood.

“They’re after the golden fruits hanging on the inner branches,” Polly said, enthralled. She was watching all this macabre conflict as though from a guinea seat in the stalls. “Evidently the bushes of this world don’t require birds to do their propagating for them.”

“No,” said Crane, chuckling weakly at the macabre idiocy of the thought. “They can get about quite well themselves, thank you.”

“And the birds don’t take kindly to that sort of brushoff. Whee! Look at that one ripping up that bush — or — look, the other bush lashed out… The bird’s all bedabbled… He’s falling… Oh, Rolley — it’s horrible!”

She turned seekingly towards him and he put an arm around her, not surprised that she had suddenly awoke to the vicious horror of the scene. Polly took a long time to see evil in anyone. Her continued friendship with him proved that, for he equated his indecision with evil in the eyes of a self-confident girl like Polly; and he was convinced she was far too independent and rawly honest of mind to care for his money enough to subdue her own feelings. So he held her comfortingly, feeling her body firm beneath the leather jacket. They watched the struggle in silence for a while.

In struggling forward the bushes gradually congregated under the trees on the far side of the road where then-massed silver-thrusting defense at last put the birds to flight. Heavy winged, the birds rose, squawking.

For an excruciating instant Crane thought the birds would spot the two crouching humans and attack; but to his inexpressible relief they flew off sluggishly, and he relaxed with a shaky sigh. His arm was still about Polly. He left it there.

“This is a chaotic place,” she breathed, shakily.

“Agreed.” She still trembled; but she rose briskly enough from his circling arm and walked off to the car. “A real madhouse. But we have a job to do here.”

Crane stared after her, frowning. He decided he had to speak plainly to her. By this time it was clearly apparent she was acting under the stimulus of excitement and the drug made her reckless and uncaring so that she wasn’t fully responsible for her actions. The sight of the battle between the animate bushes and the reptilian birds had shocked her back partially to a realization of where they were; but the very extraordinary nature of the experience itself deadened her understanding. Crane had seen that automatic response and that feverish activity in battle.

When carried to the extreme it was not pretty.

He said: “I’ll drive, Polly.”

Before she could protest the wheel gripped hard and slick beneath his fingers, the offside door slamming solidly. She walked around the back of the car and got in the near side.

“All right, Rolley. If you like.”

“I’m going on down this road another mile. After that, if we see nothing, I’m turning back. If we do see anything, well, let’s hope we’ll still be able to turn.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but Crane switched on and revved the engine unnecessarily loudly.

They bumped out onto the road and swung around to face their direction of travel. The animate bushes swayed and swiveled, getting set again after the fight; but stayed rooted under the trees.

“A madhouse,” repeated Crane.

“Rolley,” she said thoughtfully after a time, “have you noticed the sun isn’t moving in the sky?”

Crane hadn’t. Now he said: “I believe you’re right.”

“Does that mean it’s always the same here, then?”

He glanced at his watch. “We’ve been here just over three hours by my watch. The sun should have moved noticeably in that time.”

“It hasn’t. I’m sure of it.”

“And I don’t feel at all tired yet. Normally after all we’ve been through I’d be yawning my head off.”

“That must be another magic property of the Map Country.”

“But we’re still using gasoline. That, at least, hasn’t changed here.”

“I wonder what McArdle’s doing?”

“He knows about the Map Country. He must realize we disappeared off his road. So he’ll be waiting for us somewhere when we emerge.” Crane pushed the grenade satchel more comfortably around on his left side. He didn’t say any more about that.

“I’m sure all these things are connected in some way,” Polly went on, addicted, it seemed, to chattering when she was.a passenger. “This other world place doesn’t operate on the same sets of natural laws as does our world.”

“Could be.” Crane peered ahead, half listening, watching for the first glimpse of — of what? Of what he didn’t know; but whatever might loom up next he intended to be ready for it. And the mile was nearly spent.

The road crawled up a slight hill, and before the car reached the top Crane could see the fiery glow beyond. He stopped the car below the crest, got out and walked on and up until he could lie down and look over and across the undulating plain and the rivers and trees to the scene on the horizon. Polly dropped at his side.

“That’s it,” Crane said with satisfaction. “That’s the sight — factory, city, hell, what-have-you — I saw as a child.”

“It’s a long way off.”

“Just as well. Look.” He pointed to the road, a thin strip of whiteness running directly to the distant buildings. “Tanks. Half a dozen of ’em. All trundling this way. Fast. After our blood.”