The other man, a slight, gray-haired chap with a look of FBI about him, came toward Roger with a knowing smile.
“Have you been, er, decorating the walls, young fellow?” he inquired.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Roger protested. “I was just—”
“Don’t let him go back in and erase them!” the clerk warned.
“The message!” the voice hissed urgently.
“Let’s just take a look at your work,” the gray-haired man said easily, reaching for the door.
“You don’t understand!” Roger backed into the stall. “I was just—”
“Grab him!” The clerk caught his sleeve. The other man caught his other sleeve. As they sought to drag him forth, Roger struggled to free himself from their clutches.
“I’m innocent!” he yelled. “This place was already illustrated when I came in!”
“Yes, of course!” the gray-haired man panted. “Don’t get the wrong impression, sir! I’m a curator of the graffiti collection at the Museum of Contemporary Folk Expression. We’re looking for creative minds to do a hundred-foot mural for our rotunda!”
With a ripping of cloth, Roger tore free, stumbled back—
“Watch out!” the voice called—too late. Roger saw the shimmering plane flash out on either side, saw it curl in to form a glittering tube about him. For an instant, he teetered there, enclosed in a misty grayness; then, with a sound as of a mighty rushing of waters, he felt himself swirled around and down into depthless emptiness.
CHAPTER TWO
1
He was on a beach. That was the first thought that came into focus as his stunned mind returned to awareness. Brilliant sunshine glared down on yellow sand. He sat up, looked across the shimmer of heat to eroded spires of pink stone looming in the distance. The dance of the air reminded him of something, but thinking made his head hurt. And that in turn reminded him of something else . . .
Tentatively, Roger Tyson put his hand to his ear, felt the button there.
“Wh—what happened?” he whispered.
There was no answer.
“Voice?” he called. “Agent Q’nell, or whatever your name is?”
Silence.
“Well—at least I’m cured of part of my affliction,” Roger told himself. “Now if I can just figure out where I am . . . ” Probably, he considered, he had been on a three-weeks’ binge, and was now just coming out of the alcoholic fog.
“Of course, I’ve never been a drinker,” he reminded himself. “But that’s probably why it hit me so hard.”
He came shakily to his feet, looking around at the vast expanse of sand. It was not a beach, he saw. Merely a boulder-dotted desert, stretching on and endlessly on. “Probably Arizona,” he thought. “Maybe the road is just out of sight; but in what direction?”
A massive water-carved rock squatted fifty feet away. Roger went to it, climbed its side. Standing atop it ten feet above the level, he could see for miles across the flat expanse. Far away to the east, a line of pale cliffs edged the world. To the north there was only a vacant horizon. The west was the same. But to the south a ravine cut across the flat ground—and a ravine suggested the action of water.
“A drink,” Roger said. “That’s what I need.” He scrambled down, started across toward the dark line of the cut.
For the first ten minutes he walked steadily forward, skirting the frequent large stones, keeping the sun on his left. Encountering rougher ground, he slowed, picking his route with care.
Mounting a low ridge, he shaded his eyes, scanning the route ahead. The ravine, which should have been very close now, was not to be seen. But . . . Roger closed his eyes, resting them, looked again. What he saw was unmistakable. The boulder that he had climbed, from which he had sighted the ravine, lay a hundred yards ahead, squarely in his path.
2
Four times Roger Tyson had oriented himself with his back to the rock and walked directly away from it—twice to the south, once each to the north and east. Each time, within fifteen minutes, he had returned to the landmark. There had been no careless changes of direction, he was sure of that. Walking east, he had faced directly into the sun’s glare—and after a quarter of an hour had again encountered the ubiquitous boulder.
Now he sat in the shade of the massive rock, his eyes closed, feeling the heat that beat down from above, reflected from below, radiated from the stone at his back. Already he felt weak and listless from dehydration. At this rate, he wouldn’t last until sundown—the only relief he could hope for. Not that that would change anything. He would still be lost here in this landscape of illusions . . .
That was it! The place didn’t really exist; it was nothing but a creation of his fever-racked mind. With this conclusion came a sense that now that he had penetrated the mirage, it should be possible to ignore it. Roger concentrated on the mundane reality of the normal world: singing commercials, tourist attractions, Rotarians, chrome-plated bumpers, artificial eyelashes . . .
He opened his eyes. The lifeless desert still stretched about him. Illusion or otherwise, he was stuck with it.
But damn it, it was impossible! A surge of healthy anger drove him to his feet. There had to be a key to it—some imperfection that could be detected by acute observation. He would pick a starting point and, step by step, analyze what the situation was that he faced! This time, sighting on a distant landmark—a spire of stone at least ten miles away—Roger walked slowly, pausing frequently to study the ground around him. He wasn’t sure precisely what he was looking for, but it was clear that the trap in which he was caught—he thought of it in those terms now—bore some resemblance to a goldfish bowl, in which the puzzled fish swam endlessly, bumping his nose against an invisible barrier which relentlessly led him back again to his starting point. The barrier here was an intangible one, a three-dimensional wall; but like the glass of the bowl, it should be possible to confront it directly, rather than sliding along beside it, like a guppy swimming parallel to the wall of his prison.
Something in the landscape ahead caught Roger’s attention, some deviation from the usual aspect of the physical world. It took him minutes of close observation to pinpoint it: objects in the distance before him appeared to slide away to the left and right as he advanced. The apparent movement in itself was a normal perspective effect; it was the rate of movement that was wrong. The array of boulders stretching out before him seemed to part too swiftly—and at the exact center point of his view, there seemed to be an almost invisible vertical line of turbulence, a line that disappeared as he halted, resumed again as he went forward, always at the precise point toward which he moved. It wasn’t a tangible thing, he saw; merely a plane along which the expansion of the scene took place. As he watched, a tiny object came into existence there, grew with each step until the familiar boulder lay there in his path, a hundred yards ahead. He looked back. The rock was no longer visible; the distant line of cliffs glowed orange in the late sunlight.
“All right,” he said aloud, his voice a lonely sound in the silent immensity around him. “It’s some kind of lens effect. A four-dimensional lens, maybe. Putting a name to it doesn’t help much, but at least I’ve pinned down one aspect of it.” He scratched a mark on the ground, then walked on to the stone, counting his paces. Three hundred and twenty-one. He returned to the mark, continued along that route until the boulder reappeared ahead; then he went on, counting his steps. Four hundred and four paces in this direction.
“So far, so good,” Roger said, walking toward the boulder. “The phenomenon has a fixed center. The fishbowl may be a complete sphere, but it has a definite boundary.” He paused as a concept formed in his mind: three-dimensional reality, gathered up at the corners, pulled up to form a closed space, as a washwoman folds up the edges of a sheet to form a bag . . .
“And all I’ve got to do,” he concluded, “is find the knot!” As this thought completed itself, he noticed a tiny movement ahead. Instantly, he dropped flat behind a convenient rock. Beside the boulder where he had awakened, something glittered in mid-air. Half a dozen metallically jointed members appeared, followed a moment later by a squat, dusky-red body, headless, single-eyed, alien.
“The rutabaga!” Roger choked. “It’s still alive—and after me!”
3
Roger lay flat as the monstrous form emerged fully from the empty air, like an actor sliding from behind an invisible flat. It poised for a moment on its clustered supporting members, identical with an upper ring of armlike appendages; then it moved away from the rock, studying the ground ahead.