Special Deliverance

22

When they pushed the door open, they found themselves in a large common room, with a fireplace at one end. Before the fireplace was a large table ringed with chairs. With their backs toward the new arrivals, two people sat in chairs, facing the fire. A dumpy little woman with a moonlike face hurried from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a checkered apron tied about her middle.

“So you are already here,” she gasped. “You catch me by surprise. You arrive sooner than I thought.”

She halted in front of them, still wiping her hands, and squinted at them out of her moon face. She put up a hand to brush a straggling lock of hair out of her face.

“My, my,” she said, in mild exclamation, “there are four of you! You lost no more than two in passing through the city. The people sitting by the fire lost four, and there are bands that are all gobbled up.”

Some small sound made Lansing glance toward the other end of the room, the shadowed area away from the fire, and there he saw the card players crouched around a table, intent upon their game and paying no attention to the arrival of the party. The noise he had heard, he realized, had been the soft slapping-down of cards upon the tabletop.

He nodded toward the players.

“When did they show up?” he asked.

“They came last night,” said the woman. “They went straight to the table and sat down. They’ve been playing ever since.”

The two who had been sitting before the fire had gotten to their feet and were advancing across the room. One of them was a woman, blond, tall and willowy; the other was a man who reminded Lansing of a bond salesman who at one time had tried to sell him a portfolio that was, at best, highly questionable.

The woman held out her hand to Mary. “My name is Melissa. I am not a human, although I may look like one. I’m a puppet.”

She made no further explanation, but shook hands all around.

“I am Jorgenson,” said the man, “and extremely glad to see you. The two of us, I must confess, are frightened. We’ve been cowering here for days, unable to convince ourselves that we should continue on this senseless journey to which we, unwillingly and unwittingly, seem to have been committed.”

“I can appreciate how you might feel that way,” said Lansing. “All of us, I think it safe to say, have felt similar touches.”

“Let’s go back to the fire,” said Jorgenson. “We have a bottle on which we have not been able to make appreciable progress. You, perhaps, can help us.”

“Most willingly,” said Lansing. “Thanks for the invitation.”

The aproned woman, who apparently was the proprietor of the inn, had disappeared. The card players paid them no attention.

Settled in chairs before the fire and with the drinks all poured, Jorgenson said, “And now, perhaps, we should become better acquainted with one another and exchange experiences and thoughts. So far as I am concerned, I am a time traveler. When I first came to this place I thought I was just traveling through — which, if that had been the case, would have seen me long gone from here. It turns out, however, that this is not the case. Why it’s not, I do not know. I’m not at all sure what happened; this is the first instance that I have been stuck in time.”

Lansing tasted the drink and it was passing good; he took another swallow.

“As I told you,” Melissa said, “I am a puppet. I do not have it quite straight in mind what a puppet is, although I am made to understand it is an imitation human. Why there should be need of imitation humans, I am not exactly sure. There are only a few of us or, rather, there were only a few of us, since I am no longer there — a few of us residing in what I suppose might be called the ultimate city, a place of great comfort and convenience, in which we live what could be described as good lives except that our lives seem to have no purpose, which at times can be mildly depressing. There are, as I have said, only a few of us and it may well be that all of us are puppets, although I have always been afraid to ask — fearing, you see, that I might be the only puppet among the lot of them, and if that should turn out to be true, it would be just dreadful.”

“For years,” said Jorgenson, “I have been seeking for a certain time and place. Once, long ago, I was there for a while and then, without meaning to, I slipped out of it. I’ve sought it ever since and no matter how hard I try, always seem to miss it. I have wondered if, for some reason, it may be closed to me. And if that should be true, I have wondered why.”

“If you had it well in mind,” said Mary, “that might help you find it. I mean, if you knew the time and place—”

“Oh, I know the time and place fairly well. It is in the 1920s, the so-called Roaring Twenties, although at the time I was there, there was no roaring in them. There was peace and quiet, the peace and quiet of a never-ending summer’s day. The world as yet had not arrived at the cynical sophistication that came upon us some decades later on. I think, as a matter of fact, I have it pegged quite well. I think it was 1926 and the month was August. The place was a sleepy seaside town on the eastern coast. Massachusetts, maybe, more likely Delaware or Maryland.”

“None of the names you speak mean anything to me,” Melissa complained. “You’ve told me North America, but I know no North America. All I know was the place where we lived. It was magnificently built and we had little, scurrying mechanical servitors who kept it clean and neat and attended to our needs. But there were no place names, not even a name for where we lived. There was no need for us to know if it had a name and there was nowhere else that we wished to go, so there were no place names, either, for the other places if, in fact, there were other places.”

“There were six of us,” said Jorgenson, “when we came to this place.”

“There were six of us as well,” said Mary. “I wonder if such groups as ours always are made up of six.”

“I would not know,” said Jorgenson. “Our group and your group are the only ones I know of.”

“There was an idiot,” said Melissa, “not a drooling idiot, but a most engaging one. He was full of fun. He was always clowning and making the most outrageous puns. And there was the Mississippi gambler. I have never asked before because I didn’t want to display my ignorance. But I’ll ask now. Can anyone tell me what a Mississippi is?”

“It is a river,” Lansing told her.

“The landlady said that you lost the other four in the city,” Mary said. “Can you tell us how you lost them?”

“They did not come back,” Melissa said. “All of us went out one day, looking for something. What we were looking for, we had no idea. Well before night, the two of us came back to where we were camping in the plaza. We built up the fire and cooked a meal and waited for the others. We waited through the night and they did not return. Then, shaking in our fear, we went out and hunted for them. We sought them for five days and there was no trace of them. And every night a giant beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out against its fate.”

“So you found the trail west of the city and finally reached this inn,” said Sandra.

“That is what we did,” said Jorgenson. “Since then we have been covering here, afraid to travel further.”

“The landlady,” said Melissa, “has been hinting that it is time for us to go. She knows we have no money. Two of our group had money, but with them, the money’s gone.”

“We have some money,” Lansing said. “We will pay your bill and you can travel on with us.”

“You will travel on?” she asked.

“Of course we will,” said Jurgens. “What else is there to do?”

“But it’s all so senseless!” cried Jorgenson. “If we only knew what we’re here for, what we’re supposed to do. Have you any information?”

“None at all,” said Mary.

“We’re rats running in a maze,” said Lansing. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“When I was home,” Melissa said, “before I was transported here, we had gaming tables. We’d play the games for hours, even for days. There were no rules to the games, the rules developed as we went along. Even when the rules were established, or we thought they had been, then they’d change again…”

“Did anyone ever win?” asked Mary.

“I can’t seem to remember. I don’t think we ever did. Not a one of us. But we didn’t mind, of course. It was just a game.”

“This game is real,” Jorgenson said, glumly. “We all have bet our lives.”

“There are certain skeptics,” said Lansing, “who will tell you there is no abiding principle in the universe. Just before I left my world, I talked with a man — a friend of mine, a loud-mouthed friend of mine — who suggested that the universe might operate at random, or worse. This I can’t believe. There must be an element of reason in it. There must be cause and effect. There must be purpose, although that does not mean we are capable of grasping the purpose. Even if some other, more intelligent form of life should set us down and explain it to us in considerable detail, we still might not understand it.”

“Which doesn’t hold out too much hope for us,” said Jorgenson.

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Although it could mean that there is some hope. We’re not entirely sunk.”

“There are mysteries,” said Jurgens, “and I speak in the best sense of the word — not the shoddy, sensational connotation of it — that can be unraveled if one puts his mind to it.”

“We’ve asked the landlady what lies ahead,” Melissa said, “and she can tell us almost nothing.”

“Exactly like that great lout at the first inn,” said Jorgenson. “He could tell us only of the cube and city.”

“The landlady,” said Melissa, “says that some distance ahead, we’ll come to a singing tower. And that is all. Except that she warns us we should only travel west, not north. To the north, she says, lies Chaos. Chaos, with a capital.”

“She knows not what Chaos is,” said Jorgenson. “She only knows the word. She shivers when she says it.”

“So then we’ll travel north,” said Jurgens. “I tend to get suspicious when someone warns you off from a certain place. I get the feeling that something may be found there we’re not supposed to find.”

Lansing finished his drink and set the mug upon the table. He got slowly to his feet and walked across the room until he stood beside the table where the four were play-big cards.

He stood for a long moment, with none of them paying him the slightest heed, as if they had not noticed his approach. Then one of them raised his head and turned it, looking at him.

Lansing stepped back a pace, horrified at what he saw. The eyes were dark holes in the skull, out of which peered two black obsidian pebbles. The nose was not a nose, but two breathing slots, slashed into the area between the eyes and mouth. The mouth was another slash, without benefit of lips. There was no chin; the face sloped down to the neck in a slanting line.

Lansing turned about and left. As he approached the table before the fire, he heard Sandra saying, with a strange lilt in her voice, “I cannot wait until we reach the singing tower!”