“Which one?”
“All of us!” Oob roared. “I mean, all of me!”
“Not you,” Roger said, confused. “I meant—”
“So!” Oob was an indignant chalky gray now. “You intend to go over my head!”
“That one right there,” UKR said. “Right in front of you.”
“Oh, yes,” Roger said. “I see it now.” He stepped up on the bar in question.
“You mean—I let something slip?” Oob gasped. “And I’m considered the shrewdest negotiator in the entire Irnch.”
“Right,” UKR said. “I’ve got it! Now just pop over and depress the hundred and fourth button in the sixty-ninth row. That should liven things up.”
“How do I get there?” Roger mumbled.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Oob shrilled. “I’m known as a hardheaded operator, but before I’ll lead you to Irnch HQ I’ll vaporize the whole complex!”
“Try a flying leap,” UKR proposed.
“I’d fall,” Roger protested.
“You’ll do more than fall!” Oob said quickly. “At best, you’ll be stripped of all fifth-order and lower rapahookies!” He leaned back with a show of complacence. “I’m glad to see I’ve reached you at last. Now look here, fellow: you and I are both reasonable beings. Why don’t we agree on a reasonable division—” He broke off as Roger edged forward, balancing precariously, and reached for the panel. “Here! What are you doing!” The Rhox lunged for Roger, who ducked the first grab, counting rapidly by fives, stooped under a second grasping member, and jabbed the specified button. Instantly the entire maze of eye-twisting lines filling the vast cavern began to shift position to the accompaniment of flashing lights, loud clangs, and the shrilling of whoop-whoop sirens.
“Wrong button,” UKR said. “That was the sixty-eighth row.”
“Why in the world did you do that?” Oob shrieked, jabbing frantically with all ten members at the panels surrounding him. “Hitting the Panic Button was the one move I didn’t expect! I see it all now! I should have known when I first discovered that you were masquerading as two third-order beings that the disguise actually concealed a sixth-order intelligence!”
“Keep him talking,” UKR urged. “I’m on to something!”
Roger, teetering on the rod, grabbed for support, slammed a large lever down. At once panels sprang into position on all six sides, boxing the two contestants inside a twelve-foot cube. With a hoarse yell, Oob leaped from his perch, threw the switch back to the off position. Nothing changed.
“Now you’ve done it,” he shrilled, radiating in the ultraviolet, an eerie effect in the featureless chamber. “But you’ve overreached yourself at last! True, you’ve cut me off from my control complex—but the fifth-order barrier also isolates this portion of your compound entity from the contact with the rest of you—and leaves you at my mercy!” He hurled himself at Roger, who leaped backward barely in time.
“Tyson!” UKR whispered urgently as Oob rebounded from the wall and gathered himself for a new charge. “I’ve shifted an Aperture into alignment with your present coordinates! Better use it! For the moment, I seem to be out of ideas!”
Roger ducked the Rhox’s rush, leaped for the glowing line.
“Hold it!” UKR ordered as the shimmering plane enfolded him. “You caught me off balance, resorting to the purely physical level. I’m having to improvise. But—I think I have an idea! Risky, but it’s the best I can do under the limitations I’ve imposed. Rotate to the left. Too much! Back up! That’s it! Go!”
Roger bounded forward—
* * *
—and . . . was standing in knee-deep grass under a boundless blue sky. Luke Harwood stood on his right, his arm protectively about Odelia Withers’ shoulders. Fly Beebody lay sprawled at his feet. A twelve-foot Kodiak-type bear faced them from ten feet away. It was, Roger saw, the same instant in which he had last seen them.
“Quick! This way!” he shouted, and thrust them through the portal. As he stepped forward to follow, a bulbous burgundy-red form burst through, skidded to a halt almost against the bear’s chest. The grizzly rumbled and wrapped a vast pair of shaggy arms around its new acquaintance as Roger sprang for safety.
He halted within the gray-mist cylinder, breathing hard. “Nice work, UKR,” he panted.
“Don’t congratulate me yet!” the voice crackled in his head. “This Rhox is a much more complex being than you know.”
“The bear took care of him,” Roger said. “Too bad, in a way; he wasn’t such a bad sort, in his own peculiar fashion.”
“It only took care of one of him! Of a small third-order manifestation of him, that is to say—and there are plenty of others.”
“There was a stir beside Roger; Oob stood there, intact, peering through the gloom.
“Three degrees right and take off!” UKR advised. Roger pivoted, leaped—
* * *
He was splashing knee-deep in muddy water. A descending shriek filled the air. Overhead, the Very lights shed a baleful glare on cratered mud, crisscrossed by tangled wire.
” . . . zat vass nicht ein lady,” a guttural voice stated loudly. “Zat vass deine Frau!” A vast explosion nearby showered Roger with muddy water. He stumbled to the opening of the dugout.”
“Crikey, Ludwig,” a thin voice was protesting. “It’s not a bloody ’nuff we got to ‘ave the same bloody weather and the same bloody shells every day, you ‘ave to tell the same bloody joke!”
“Fellows!” Roger broke in hurriedly. “Do me a favor—no questions asked! Grab your rifles and fire a volley at the spot right behind me when I give the word!”
“Vass ist?” the squat German inquired, gaping.
“Crikey! A bit ‘o fluff!”
“Jeeze! A dame!”
“I’m not really a dame—I just look this way!” Roger explained hastily. “Never mind me—just do as I ask! Quick!”
“For you, luv, anyfing!”
“You bet, kid!”
“Ja, vateffer!”
The card-playing trio scrambled for their weapons, worked the bolts, aimed—
“Now!” Roger yelled, and ducked. Three shots boomed deafeningly over his head. Oob, just emerging, cautiously this time, from the Aperture, flopped backward, riddled.
“Thanks,” Roger called. “If you ever get back, remember what I said about nineteen twenty-nine!” He stepped into the portal and was at once directed onward by UKR.
“Wait a minute,” he demurred. “What happened to Luke and Odelia? Where’s Fly?”
“I shunted them into a holding niche,” the voice said hurriedly. “Better get going. Here he comes again!”
“I don’t understand! How can there be more than one of him?”
“There isn’t. In fact, there’s only one Rhox in the entire cosmos; like most entities above fourth level, he is unique. When the process you know as evolution progresses beyond a certain point, the species-fragmentation characteristic of third order merges to form a higher, compound life-form. Such a being can insert a large number of third-order aspects into contiguous space.”
“Where will it all end?” Roger groaned, and followed instructions.
This time he was on a rugged mountainside amid a jumble of vast boulders.
“Get up above, fast!” UKR ordered.
“Is this your idea of winning by subtlety and guile?” Roger grunted, clambering upward as fast as failing wind would allow.
“How was I to know you’d introduce random factors into the probability equation?” UKR inquired calmly. “There—that’s far enough. The big fellow on your left. Just a nudge, now . . . wait . . . he’s coming! Push!”
Roger put a shoulder to the rock and thrust. It shifted, teetered, then leaned out and crashed down thunderously.
“Got him!” UKR said cheerfully. You know, Tyson, I think he’s slowing down.”
“Probably he’s . . . just getting cautious,” Roger panted.
“No—there’s a definite diminution of energy. I think it’s taking a great deal out of him, running an infinite-array scan every time you drop out of sight, then formulating a new extrusion and extending full sensory linkages to it—and the trauma associated with a series of violent third-order demises isn’t helping his inner tranquility, either. I know how he feels! Ever since I’ve been attuned to your savage plane of existence, I’ve been thrilling to a shock a minute! How do you stand it?”
“I don’t,” Roger wheezed. “Can I rest now?”
“Not yet. There’s still some fight in him—and here he comes!”
Before Roger could step through the Aperture, Oob appeared. He was a dull shade of dejected brown now, and his bulk was definitely less than it had been. He staggered as he cleared the portal. Roger stepped behind him and palmed the bulky body hard. With a mournful wail, Oob fell to his death.
2
Thereafter, Roger decoyed the Rhox into the jaws of a forty-foot crocodile, tripped him headfirst into the bubbling interior of a volcano, and finally held the head of a weakly struggling Oob, a mere shadow of his former self, under water until the bubbles stopped rising.
“That’s it,” he sobbed, falling flat on his face on the shore among the cattails. “I’ve had it! I couldn’t commit another murder if my life depended on it.”