“Up yours,” Thugg said.
To Maggie Walsh, Russell said suddenly, “Pray.”
“For what?”
“For the veil of illusion to rise to expose the reality beneath.”
“May I do it silently?” she asked. Russell nodded. “Thank you,” she said, and turned her back to the group; she stood for a time, hands folded, her head bowed, and then she turned back. “I did as well as I could,” she informed them. She looked happier, now, Seth Morley noticed. Maybe, temporarily, she had forgotten about Susie Smart.
A tremendous pulsation throbbed nearby.
“I can hear it,” Seth Morley said, and felt fear. Enormous, instinctive fear.
A hundred yards away a gray wall rose up into the smoky haze of the midday sky. Pounding, vibrating, the wall creaked as if alive . . . while, above it, spires squirted wastes in the form of dark clouds. Further wastes, from enormous pipes, gurgled into the river. Gurgled and gurgled and never ceased.
They had found the Building.
9
“So now we can see it,” Seth Morley said. At last. It makes a noise, he thought, like a thousand cosmic babies dropping an endless number of giant pot lids onto a titanic concrete floor. What are they doing in there? he asked himself, and started toward the front face of the structure, to see what was inscribed over the entrance.
“Noisy, isn’t it?” Wade Frazer shouted.
“Yes,” he said, and was unable to hear his own voice over the stupendous racket of the Building.
He followed a paved road that led along the side of the structure; the others tagged after him, some of them holding their ears. Now he came out in front, shielded his eyes and peered up, focused on the raised surface above the closed sliding doors.
WINERY
That much noise from a winery? he asked himself. It makes no sense.
A small door bore a sign reading: Customers’ entrance to wine and cheese tasting room. Holy smoke, he said to himself, the thought of cheese drifting through his mind and burnishing all the shiny parts of his conscious attention. I ought to go in, he said to himself. Apparently it’s free, although they like you to buy a couple of bottles before you leave. But you don’t have to.
Too bad, he thought, that Ben Tallchief isn’t here. With his great interest in alcoholic beverages this would constitute, for him, a fantastic discovery.
“Wait!” Maggie Walsh called from behind him. “Don’t go in!”
His hand on the customers’ door, he half-turned, wondering what was the matter.
Maggie Walsh peeped up into the splendor of the sun and saw mixed with its remarkably strong rays a glimmer of words. She traced the letters with her finger, trying to stabilize them. What does it say? she asked herself. What message does it have for us, with all we yearn to know?
WITTERY
“Wait!” she called to Seth Morley, who stood with his hand on a small door marked: Customers’ entrance. “Don’t go in!”
“Why not?” he yelled back.
“We don’t know what it is!” She came breathlessly up beside him. The great structure shimmered in the mobile sunlight which spilled and dribbled over its higher surfaces. As if one could walk up on a single mote, she said to herself longingly. A carrier to the universal self: made partly of this world, partly of the next. _Wittery_. A place where knowledge is accumulated? But it made too much noise to be a book and tape and microfilm depository. Where witty conversations take place? Perhaps the essences of man’s wit were being distilled within; she might find herself immersed in the wit of Dr. Johnson, of Voltaire.
But wit did not mean humor. It meant perspicacity. It meant the most fundamental form of intelligence coupled with a certain amount of grace. But, over all, the capacity of man to possess absolute knowledge.
If I go in there, she thought, I will learn all that man can know in this interstice of dimensions. I must go in. She hurried up to Seth Morley, nodding. “Open the door,” she said. “We must go inside the wittery; we’ve got to learn what is in there.”
Ambling after them, regarding their agitation with distinguished irony, Wade Frazer perceived the legend incised above the closed, vast doors of the Building.
At first he was perplexed. He could decipher the letters and thus make out the word. But he had not the foggiest notion as to the meaning of the word.
“I don’t get it,” he said to Seth Morley and the religious fanatic of the colony, Mag the Hag. He strained once more to see, wondering if his problem lay in a psychological ambivalence; perhaps on some lower level he did not really desire to know what the letters spelled. So he had garbled it, to foil his own maneuvering.
STOPPERY
Wait, he thought. I think I know what a stoppery is. It is based on the Celtic, I believe. A dialect word only comprehensible to someone who has a varied and broad background of liberal, humanistic information at his disposal. Other persons would walk right by.
It is, he thought, a place where deranged persons are apprehended and their activities curtailed. In a sense it’s a sanitarium, but it goes much further than that. The aim is not to cure the ill and then return them to society–probably as ill as they ever were–but to close the final door on man’s ignorance and folly. Here, at this point, the deranged preoccupations of the mentally ill come to an end; they stop, as the incised sign reads. They–the mentally ill who come here–are not returned to society, they are quietly and painlessly put to sleep. Which, ultimately, must be the fate for all who are incurably sick. Their poisons must not continue to contaminate the galaxy, he said to himself. Thank God there is such a place as this; I wonder why I wasn’t notified of it vis-à-vis the trade journals.
I must go in, he decided. I want to see how they work. And let’s find out what their legal basis is; there remains, after all, the sticky problem of the nonmedical authorities– if they could be called that–intervening and blocking the process of stoppery.
“Don’t go in!” he yelled at Seth Morley and the religious nut Maggie Baggie. “This isn’t for you; it’s probably classified. Yes. See?” He pointed to the legend on the small aluminum door; it read: Trained personnel entrance only. “I can go in!” he yelled at them over the din, “but you can’t! You’re not qualified!” Both Maggie Baggie Haggie and Seth Morley looked at him in a startled way, but stopped. He pushed past them.
Without difficulty, Mary Morley perceived the writing over the entrance of the gray, large building.
WITCHERY
I know what it is, she said to herself, but they don’t. A witchery is a place where the control of people is exercised by means of formulas and incantations. Those who rule are masters because of their contact with the witchery and its brews, its drugs.
“I’m going in there,” she said to her husband.
Seth said, “Wait a minute. Just hold on.”
“I can go in,” she said, “but you can’t. It’s there for me. I know it. I don’t want you to stop me; get out of the way.”
She stood before the small door, reading the gold letters that adhered to the glass. Introductory chamber open to all qualified visitors, the door read. Well, that means me, she thought. It’s speaking directly to me. That’s what it means by “qualified.”
“I’ll go in with you,” Seth said.
Mary Morley laughed. Go in with her? Amusing, she thought; he thinks they’ll welcome him in the witchery. A man. This is only for women, she said to herself; there aren’t any male witches.
After I’ve been in there, she realized, I’ll know things by which I can control him; I can make him into what he ought to be, rather than what he is. So in a sense I’m doing it for his sake.
She reached for the knob of the door.
Ignatz Thugg stood off to one side, chuckling to see their antics. They howled and bleated like pigs. He felt like walking up and sticking them but who cared? I’ll bet they stink when you get right up close to them, he told himself. They look so clean and underneath they stink. What is this poop place? He squinted, trying to read the jerky letters.
HIPPERY HOPPERY
Hey, he said to himself. That’s swell; that’s where they have people hop onto animals for youknowwhat. I always wanted to watch a horse and a woman make it together; I bet I can see that inside there. Yeah; I really want to see that, for everyone to watch. They show everything really good in there and like it really is.
And there’ll be real people watching who I can talk to. Not like Morley and Walsh and Frazer using fatass words that’re so long they sound like farting. They use words like that to make it look like their poop don’t stink. But they’re no different from me.