Solomon's Stone

Chapter III.

Prosper Nash sighed and gave up. He wiped his blade and his hand on the now empty pants leg, and he set out on the path once more. The darkness oppressed him like a massive weight.

The path sloped down; Nash found his high heels awkward for this kind of walking. But it also broadened and hardened, and soon he found himself on a sidewalk of uneven flagstones. He could feel the presence of houses lining the street; mostly small, irregularly set structures. The only sign of artificial light was a couple of blocks ahead. Nash quickened his stride. When he made out the word "hotel" on a sign dimly illuminated by an oil lantern, he almost broke into another run.

The building was not prepossessing from the outside, from what could be seen of it; about four stories, and covered with involuted stone and iron gingerbread of the General Grant era. As he stepped inside, Nash got a shock: the decorations were of the most garish and angular modernistic style, badly put together, and lighted by the quiet flames of a couple of huge candelabra.

Behind the desk stood a stocky man with a spade beard and a broad red ribbon running diagonally across the bosom of his gleaming boiled shirt. On the desk, beside the register, lay a large revolver on whose butt the bearded man's hand rested familiarly.

White teeth showed through black beard as the man bowed and said rapidly: "Bon accueil, m'sieur; ma petite auberge est à votre service—" He spread his left hand and exuded hospitality, all of him but his right hand, which remained motionless on the pistol butt as if it were not part of him at all.

"I don't—" Nash started to add "understand French," when he realized that he had understood that sentence perfectly. In fact the appropriate reply also in French, had already leaped into his mind; but while he tried to grasp this wonder the words faded, and when he deliberately tried to compose a French sentence he could not.

"May I have a room?" he said finally.

"With pleasure, my dear sir," replied the man at the desk."Your baggage—"

"I haven't any." Nash forestalled a demand for rent in advance by reaching into his money belt. He picked up the pen beside the register and poised it over the paper while he watched the proprietor count out his change. As the money was pushed deferentially toward him, he became aware of motion on the part of his right hand.

The hand had written, in an ornate script with curling swash-lines: "Jean-Prospère, Chv. de Nêche."

A chevalier, eh? Whew! Mustn't let Spade-beard see how excited you are— If his astral body retained a subconscious memory of its name, maybe it would remember its address, too. But now that Nash wanted it to perform, it failed to do so. After staring blankly at his hand for some seconds, Nash wrote simply "New York City."

"Do you serve meals?" he asked.

The ambassadorial innkeeper said he did. Nash asked how much. Spade-beard waved his hand with a gently embarrassed motion, and seemed to have trouble making articulate speech. When Nash repeated the question, the proprietor resigned himself to the fact that his guest did not show the gentlemanly indifference to prices that one expected of a knight, and told him.

When the candles in Nash's rather glum little room had been lit, and the host had bowed himself out, Nash bounded to the mirror.

The face that looked back at him was not quite his own, though there was a strong resemblance. It was an older face, probably in its thirties; perhaps the face that the mundane Nash would wear in ten years. Not quite: the jaw was more massive and the nose had a higher bridge. Nash chuckled, thinking that if he had wanted to improve his face, he would have made just about those changes in it.

He shed his hat, coat, boots and sword, and sat down to the writing table to try some more unconscious writing. But the right hand of the Chevalier de Nêche remained obstinately inert, whether he concentrated a glower on it or whether he ignored it. He must have it cowed.

He gave that enterprise up and counted his money. Then he ruled off some lines on one of the sheets of writing paper, and filled it in thus:

Dr.

Cr.

Oct. 31

Balance brought forward Room rent 1. 25

157. 26

Then, with the consciousness of a day well ended, he went to bed.

Staring up into the darkness, he thought that now that he had a roof over his head, perhaps he could figure things out a little further. Bechard's invasion of his mundane body had displaced his soul or whatever it was up to this astral plane, which was like, yet unlike, his own—the mundane, the demon had called it—world. It had a New York City, but one that harbored strange specimens like the chevalier. The chevalier must be connected with him, somehow; looked like him, and had a name that was an obvious Frenchification of John Prosper Nash.

And the cowboy, Arizona Bill Averoff, was undoubtedly the astral body of Nash's proletarian friend of the same name. It was funny that Nash's astral body was the kind of person that Nash's mundane self liked to imagine himself as being. The same must apply to the two Averoffs, with those Western pulps Bill read—by gum, that must be the explanation! An astral body was a sort of projection of the mundane body, the person it fancied itself as—

That left a lot of questions unanswered; how astral bodies came into existence, for instance. He had seen how they died—just evaporated. Still it explained the dramatic diversity of human types; people liked to imagine themselves as something outstanding: either what they openly strove to be, or a secret ideal totally different from their everyday character. Witness the Egyptian princesses, samurai, and the rest. Nash was willing to bet that the offensively Nordic gents in the winged hats came from the section of the astral New York corresponding to Yorkville.

Another problem raised its head. If a mundane body had a mundane soul, did an astral body have an astral soul? If so, what had become of that of Jean-Prospère de Nêche? Had it merely been suppressed, or had it been displaced up to still another plane—

The sun in his eyes routed him out of slumber before he knew it. As he got out of bed he discovered a lot of stiff and bruised places, and thought it was too bad he had not imagined an astral self that was invulnerable as well as dashing. The spikes of his mustache had come partly unraveled, and though he could repair the damage somewhat by vigorous twirling, he had no pomade to do a really good job. For that matter he would have to put up with bristling cheeks and furry teeth until he could either buy a set of toilet articles or located his own. They must exist somewhere in the city.

The ambassadorial proprietor met him at the door of the dining room with an apron tied over his cutaway, and bowed him to a table already occupied by a young man in bright-blue zipper-closed boots, tight blue breeches, and a rubbery-looking blue shirt.

The azure young man smiled pleasantly, and Nash bade him good morning. While they waited for the innkeeper to hand around the eggs, Nash asked: "Does he run the place all by himself?"

"He has a day clerk and a cook, but otherwise he does everything," said the young man."Poor Aristide has the usual trouble finding anybody to work for him. The last three clerks he's had have gone off to join the Home Defense. Might even take a crack at it myself."

"Yes?" said Nash."What's your present line, if I may ask?" The French accent was giving him less trouble.

"Nothing at the moment. I've been trying to revive the Cosmobile project, but no luck."

"What's that?" asked Nash.

"You've never heard of it? My word. You see, I and a lot of others were created to be Interplanetary Patrolmen. But there's no Interplanetary Patrol, for the good reason that there's no interplanetary traffic. So as the first step we formed a company to build a Cosmobile. But there was the usual trouble."

"What usual trouble?"

"Oh, everybody wanted to be boss. They're splendid fellows, but they just couldn't realize that the job belonged to me, because of my natural gifts of leadership." The young man shrugged and sighed."We tried using soulless ones, but they're mostly too stupid to handle a pick and shovel, let alone anything delicate like assembling a spaceship. It's too bad, because the theoretical knowledge does exist. Only nobody could agree on how to apply it. It's like trying to steal the Shamir."

Nash straightened up sharply at this. He asked: "Where's the Shamir?"

Eyebrows rose."My word, I thought everybody knew that. On the desert island, of course. But look here, pal, in strict confidence, I'm just about on my uppers. If you could let me have a few dollars—I'll give you a note—"

" 'Fraid not," said Nash hastily."I'm unemployed myself." He pushed his chair back.

"But listen, pal, you wouldn't want a man with my qualifications to get killed in a beastly little Home Defense operation—"

Nash fled into the lobby, where the maitre d'hôtel glanced up from his ledger and tipped him a wink and murmured: "I see you got away from young Farnsworth. Shall I keep your room?"

"Uh-huh, please," said Nash. He would have liked to ask more questions about the Shamir, but the azure one might come out any minute.

The street outside looked far more cheerful than it had felt the previous night. The indescribable mixture of architectural styles was revealed in all its grotesque glory. Mercifully the trees hid much of it. As Nash, blinking in the, sunshine, looked about him, his eyes picked up the weed-grown hill he had crossed in the dark.

The memory of his encounter came to the surface of his mind with a rush. He walked quickly in the opposite direction. Ahead of him the street ran straight, sloping down slightly to a chink of blue.

The buildings became smaller and more widely and irregularly spaced. There was a California bungalow, and a Cape Cod cottage, and a log cabin, and a box of prefabricated steel sheets. Then the buildings fell away, and Nash was looking across the broad reach of the North River. He must be about opposite Hoboken; Stevens Point was in plain sight. But the hill, instead of being crowned by the nineteenth-century Stevens mansion, was brooded over by a Norman castle.

Directly in front of him the shore plunged into the river in a tumble of big rocks, out of which a few piles of a former pier crazily stuck. There were other piers up and down the river; some small piers with ships in them down, and one huge unfinished one up. The ships were smallish vessels, at least half of them sail-powered.

Nash sat down on the top of one of the piles. He meant to think, but the warmth of the sun and the blueness of the water seduced him into simply sitting.

A triangle of white swam past his vision: the sail of a catboat in mid-river. The tide was carrying it down fast. Nash reflected that normally the press of river traffic would have made such a course extremely hazardous, but the astral plane's North River seemed to have neither ferries nor tugs.

Something winked from the hull of the catboat, and two seconds later the sound of a gunshot came to Nash's ears. Nash looked to see what they could be shooting at on this peaceful river. A vessel the size of a Coast Guard cutter, with smoke billowing from a tall thin stack, was crawling up-river toward the catboat. The white triangle wavered as the latter came about, but having done so it made no headway against the current, and the steam vessel crept closer. There were flashes from both ships, followed by reports; then the shooting stopped. Nash stood up in a fruitless attempt to see what was happening, but all he could make out was the two little boats meeting, and then drifting down toward Staten Island together.

The astral plane might be a world peopled with ideal beings, but the result was certainly not an ideal world—at least not according to the usual concept of a pacific and prosperous one. People getting shot and stabbed right and left—

A crunch on the gravel made Nash turn. A man was standing nearby, feet together and hands in the pants pockets of his suit, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and looking past Nash at the river. The man had a severely handsome face in whose right eye a monocle was stuck."See what happened?" asked this individual out of the side of his mouth.

"Not very well."

"Too far, eh? Patroons tried to run the blockade, no doubt." The well-dressed man sat down on the top of another pile."Lovely day, what?" He smiled all over.

"Yep," replied Nash."You look pretty well pleased with the world."

"Am. Just collected my fee for solving the case of the Methodist molar. Re-enactment worked like a charm. Now I can loaf for a year. I say!" The man looked sharply at Nash."Aren't you the chap who so sprightly skewered that vagrant on Chelsea Hill last night?"

Prosper Nash began to shake slightly. He pulled himself up and barked with quite unnecessary aggressiveness: "What gave you that idea?"

"Heh, heh. Elementary, my dear chap. Only had to examine the holes in his shirt to know he'd been done in by a stop thrust from a seventeenth-century rapier, delivered by a man of your height. Won't bore you with the details."

"Are you going to turn me in?" asked Nash more quietly.

"Oh, my Aunt Emmy! To use your own truculent phraseology, what gave you that idea? Not a policeman. Private investigator. They wouldn't be interested, either, with Arries popping out of their teacups. Served the chap right, no doubt."

Nash drew a long breath."It did, all right, all right. Say, m'sieur, I recently heard a man say something about a desert island. Do they have such a thing around New York?"

"Certainly. Where the Shamir's kept." The private investigator waved in a northeasterly direction."Park. Risky to go see, though; been fighting there."

"There seems to be a gosh-awful lot of fighting," commented Nash.

The private investigator shrugged."True; almost makes one believe that legend about our being the idealizations of chaps on another plane. Naturally chaps would imagine a lot of fierce-quarrelsome idealizations."

"What's that?" cried Nash. A few feet from the men a hazy, flickering outline wavered in the air, gradually thickening and becoming more opaque. Nash repeated his question: "What is it?"

"The mystery of creation, my friend," replied the other, puffing unconcernedly.

The presence solidified slowly into a handsome, well-built woman of about Nash's age—or rather, about the age of the Chevalier de Nêche—clad in a severe businesswoman's suit.

The woman stared vacantly for some seconds. She passed her hand across her eyes and took a couple of faltering steps, as if just awakened.

"Sit down, my dear," the investigator addressed her.

She seemed to see them for the first time; an expression of fear and bewilderment appeared.

"Sit down," the man repeated.

She did so, uncertainly, as though she did not quite know how to control her limbs.

"Can I help you?" asked Nash.

She looked at him as though she did not understand him, then slowly articulated: "I—don't— know."

"Give her a few minutes to get adjusted, old chap," said the investigator, and addressed the woman: "Have much trouble coming through?"

"Three—times. It—was—very—painful."

"I know, old girl; it's that way with most of us. Don't be afraid of us; we're pukka. I'm Reggie Kramer, and this chap—"

"Chevalier de Nêche," said Nash, feeling a little silly about the title.

"Righto. Know your name yet?"

The woman closed her eyes, and finally said: "Eleanor Thompson Berry. I lecture."

There was a long silence before she added: "I also write a newspaper column. Are there newspapers?"

"Not many, since the Aryans burned down the World. But the best thing for you would be to toddle over to the City Hall. The Home Defense forces need propagandists."

"Where is that?" asked Miss Berry.

Kramer gestured and poured out directions, at which the woman looked all the more bewildered."I... I don't know my way around yet," she said, and looked appealingly at the two men.

"I'll show you," growled Nash, "though I'm not much better off than you are." He looked scornfully at Kramer.

The private investigator merely laughed."Good idea, old man. I'd offer to conduct Miss Berry if I weren't so infernally lazy. You might take these with you." He whisked out a couple of cards. Nash took one and read:

REGINALD VANCE KRAMER

Discreet Investigations

224 Greene Street New York City

Nash meant to give Kramer a curt good-by, but he had swept off his plumed hat in a wide gesture before he knew it. Wherever the chevalier's soul might be, his body still had a lot of automatic reflexes left over.

Nash and Eleanor Thompson Berry turned away and walked toward the nearest street leading away from the water front. Then they halted.

A clatter of hoofs preceded a group of six horsemen in steel caps and long white mantles, who rode straight at the pair. They had bearded, mahogany-colored faces, and looked enough alike to be sextuplets.

They reined in a few paces from the pair; one cried something in a guttural language, and two of them flung themselves off their horses and ran at the woman, who stepped back in alarm.

"Hey!" cried Nash.

The leader looked down at him dispassionately, and jerked a thumb. He said: "Get hence, youse!"

Miss Berry screamed "Help!" as the two dismounted ones seized her arms. The chevalier's arm had already half drawn its sword. Nash lunged at the nearest kidnaper; the blade bent against a shirt of mail, and then scimitars flashed out all around him.