Special Deliverance

23

They reached the singing tower on the fourth day after they left the inn.

The tower was not a tower; it was a needle. Standing on top a high hill, it jabbed a finger heavenward. At the base it measured a good six feet across, tapering to a sharp point a hundred feet or more above the ground. It was of a rather nasty pinkish color and was made of a substance that appeared similar to the substance of which the cube had been constructed. Plastic, Lansing told himself, although he was fairly sure that it was not plastic. When he laid his hand flat against its surface, he could feel a slight vibration, as if the wind out of the west, playing upon it, was causing it to vibrate along its entire length as a freestanding, tapering, most unlikely violin string would vibrate to the bow.

With the exception of Sandra, all of them were disappointed with the music it made. Jorgenson said, in fact, that it wasn’t music — that is was simply noise. It was not generally loud, although at tunes it did become a little louder. It sounded, Lansing thought, somewhat like chamber music, although his exposure to chamber music had been slight. Long ago, he recalled, Alice on a Sunday afternoon had enticed him to a chamber music concert and he had suffered, silently but acutely, through two solid hours of it. Yet, despite the fact that more often than not it was a soft music, it had fantastic carrying power. They had heard the first wind-blown snatches of it on the afternoon of the third day out.

Sandra had been instantly entranced; even hearing only snatches of it, she had been captivated. She had balked at stopping to camp that night.

“Can’t we press on?” she’d asked. “Perhaps we can reach the tower before the night is done. None of us is really all that toed and it will be cool walking in the night.”

Lansing had ruled out, rather brusquely, any thought of traveling by night.

Sandra had not argued. She had not helped fix supper, as had been her habit, but had walked out on a small knoll above the camping place and had stood there, a small, slender, wind-blown figure, tensed with listening. She had refused to eat, she did not sleep; she had stood upon the knoll all night.

Now that they had climbed the high hill to its top, where stood the so-called tower, she still was in her trance. She stood to one side, head thrown back, staring upward at the tower, listening with every fiber of her being.

“It stirs me not at all,” said Jorgenson. “What does she find in it?”

“It stirs you not at all,” Melissa said, “because you have no soul. No matter what you may say, it still is music, although a strange music at the best. I like music you can dance to. I used to dance a lot. This is not music one can dance to.”

“I’m worried about Sandra,” Mary said to Lansing. “She hasn’t eaten since we heard the first notes of the music and she hasn’t slept. What shall we do about it?”

Lansing shook his head. “Leave her alone for a while. She may snap out of it.”

When the evening meal was cooked, Melissa took a plate of food to Sandra and coaxed her into eating, although she did not eat a great deal and spoke scarcely at all.

Sitting by the fire and watching the woman, outlined against the sunset color of the west, Lansing recalled how anxiously she had looked forward to the singing tower. On that first night out from the inn, she had said, “It could be beautiful. How I hope it is! There is so little that is beautiful in this world. A world deprived of beauty.”

“You live for beauty,” he had said.

“Oh, indeed I do. All this afternoon I have tried to make a poem. There is something here from which a poem might be made — a thing of beauty in itself springing from a place that is most unbeautiful. But I cannot get it started. I know what I want to say, but the thought and word will not come together.”

And now, sitting by the fire and watching her, so bewitched by music that bewitched no one else, he wondered if she had made any progress with her poem.

Jorgenson was saying to Jurgens, “Back at the inn you said we should travel north. We had been warned against the north. You said you were suspicious whenever you were warned, that if one were told not to go somewhere, one must always go. There are always attempts, you said, to mislead one in his quests.”

“That’s quite right,” said Jurgens. “I think my reasoning is sound.”

“But we went west, not north.”

“We traveled toward the known; now we’ll travel to the unknown. Now, having reached the tower, we’ll swing north and have a look at Chaos.”

Jorgenson looked questioningly at Lansing and Lansing nodded at him. “That’s what I had in mind as well. Do you have comment?”

Jorgenson shook his head, embarrassed.

“I wonder,” said Melissa, “what Chaos possibly could be.”

“It could be almost anything,” said Lansing.

“I don’t like the sound of it.”

“You mean you are afraid of it?”

“Yes, that’s it. I’m afraid of it.”

“People put different names to the selfsame thing,” said Mary. “Chaos might mean one thing to us and a totally different thing to someone else. Different cultural backgrounds make for varying perceptions.”

“We are grasping at straws,” said Jorgenson. “Desperately, unthinkingly grasping. We first grasped at the cube, then at the city. Now it’s the singing tower and Chaos.”

“I still think the cube was significant,” Mary said. “I still have the feeling — I can’t get rid of it — that we messed up with the cube. The Brigadier thought it would be the city, but the city was too pat, too patently misleading. It would be a natural reaction for anyone to expect the answers from the city.” She said to Jorgenson, “You found no answers there?”

“Just empty rooms and dust over everything. The four who were lost may have found an answer; that may have been the reason they didn’t return. You found more than we did — the doors and the installation. Still, they told you nothing; they were valueless.”

“Not entirely without value,” said Mary. “They told us much about the inhabitants of the city. A sharply scientific people, technologically inclined, very sophisticated. And what we found pointed the way that they had gone — into other worlds.”

“As we have gone into another world?”

“Precisely,” said Jurgens. “With one exception — they went on their own.”

“And now are snatching us.”

“We can’t be sure of that,” said Lansing. “Someone, some agency, as you say, snatched us, but we can’t be sure who it might have been.”

“This experience,” Mary said to Jorgenson, “can’t be entirely foreign to you. You have been such a traveler. You voluntarily went to other worlds, traveling in time.”

“But no longer,” said Jorgenson. “I have lost my ability. In this place my procedures do not work.”

“Perhaps if you concentrated on how you did it, the mechanism that you used. What you said or did, your state of mind.”

Jorgenson cried at her, “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I tried back there in the city.”

“Yes, he did,” Melissa said. “I have watched him try.”

“If I could have,” said Jorgenson, “if I only could have, it would have been possible to go back in time to that period before the city was deserted, while the people still were there, engaged in whatever work they may have been attempting.”

“That would have been neat,” Melissa said. “Don’t you see how neat it would have been.”

“Yes, we see how neat,” said Lansing.

“You don’t believe in my time traveling,” Jorgenson challenged him.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t. You haven’t. Not in so many words.”

“Look here,” said Lansing, “don’t try to start a hassle. We have all the trouble that we need. We can get along without personality clashes. You say you travel in time and I don’t contradict you. Shall we leave it at that?”

“Fair enough,” said Jorgenson, “if you keep your mouth shut.”

With some effort, Lansing did not answer.

“We’ve struck out,” said Mary, “on most of what we’ve found. I had held a hope the tower might give us a clue.”

“It has given us nothing,” said Jorgenson. “It is like all the other stuff.”

“Sandra may come up with something,” Jurgens said. “She is letting the music soak into her. After a while—”

“It’s nothing but tinkly, seesawing sound,” said Jorgenson. “I can’t see what she could find in it.”

“Sandra comes from an artistic world,” Mary told him. “She is attuned to aesthetic qualities that in other worlds are only marginally developed. The music—”

“If it is music.”

“The music may mean something to her,” Mary said, unperturbed by his interruption. “After a while, she may get around to telling us.”