Later, after reminding the merry-eyed Irish Setter who worked as night watchman on the first floor that we had an arrangement involving tails and blankets, I sacked out on the bed in the back room. A dream of wondrous symbolism and profundity came to me there.
Many years earlier I had read an amusing little book called Sphereland by a mathematician named Burger. It was a sequel to the old Abbott classic Flatland, and in it there had been a bit of business involving the reversal of two-dimensional creatures by a being from higher space. Pedigreed dogs and mongrels were mirror images of one another, symmetrical but not congruent. The pedigreed mutts were rarer, more expensive, and a little girl had wanted one so badly. Her father arranged for her mongrel to be mated with a pedigreed dog, in hope that it would produce the more desirable pups. But alas, while there was a large litter they were all of them mongrels. Later, however, an obliging visitor from higher space turned them into pedigreed dogs by rotating them through the third dimension. The geometric moral, while well taken, was not what had fascinated me about the incident, though. I kept trying to picture the mating that had taken place-two symmetrical but incongruent dogs going at it in two dimensions. The only available procedure involved a kind of canis obversa position, which I visualized and then imagined as rotating, whirligig-like, in twodimensional space. I had employed the mandala thus achieved as a meditation aid in my yoga classes for some time afterward. Now it returned to me in the halls of slumber, and I was surrounded and crowded by pairs of deadly serious dogs, curling and engendering, doing their thing silently, spinning, occasionally nipping one another about the neck. Then an icy wind swept down upon me and the dogs vanished and I was cold and alone and afraid.
I awoke to discover that Woof had stolen the blankets and was sleeping on them off in the corner by the potting kiln. Snarling, I went over and recovered them. He tried to pretend it was all a misunderstanding, the son of a bitch, but I knew better and I told him so. When I glanced over later, all that I could see was his tail and a mournful expression among the dust and the potsherds.
Chapter 8
They were waiting for me to say something, to do something. But there was nothing to say, nothing to do. We were going to die, and that was that. I glanced out the window and along the beach to the place where the sea stacked slate on the shore and pulled it down again. I was reminded of my last day and night in Australia. Only then Ragma had come along and provided a way out. In fair puzzles there should always be a way out. But I saw no doorways in the sand, and try as I might I could not make the puzzle fall fair.
"Well, Fred? Do you have something for us? Or should we go ahead? It is up to you now."
I looked at Mary, tied there in the chair. I tried not to look at her frightened face, look into her eyes, but I did. At my side, I heard Hal's heavy breathing stop short, as though he were tensing to spring. But Jamie Buckler noted this also, and the gun twitched slightly in his hand. Hal did not spring.
"Mister Zeemeister," I said, "if I had that stone, I would tie a bright ribbon around it and hand it to you. If I knew where it was, I would go get it for you or tell you where to find it. I do not want to see Mary dead, Hal dead, me dead. Ask me anything else and it's yours."
"Nothing else will do," he said, and he picked up the pliers.
We would be tortured and killed, if we just waited our turns. If we had had the answer and we gave it to them we would still be killed, though. Either way ...
But we would not stand there and watch. We all knew that. We would try to rush them, and Mary and Hal and I would be the losers.
Wherever you are, whatever you are, I said in my shrillest thoughts, if you can do something, do it now!
Zeemeister had taken hold of Mary's wrist and forced her hand upward. As he reached for a finger with the pliers, the Ghost of Christmas Past or one of those guys drifted into the room behind him.
Stamping out of Jefferson Hall, cursing under my breath, I decided that a State Department official named Theodore Nadler was the next man I was going to punch in the eye. Making my way around the phountain and heading off toward the Student Union, however, I recalled that I had been remiss concerning my promise to call Hal in a day or so. I decided to phone him before I tried the Nadler number Wexroth had given me.
I picked up a coffee and doughnut before I made my way to the phone, realizing after thirteen years that all it took to make the Union's brew palatable was a reversal of every molecule in it, or in the drinker. I saw Ginny at a table off in the corner and my good intentions evaporated. I halted, started to turn in that direction. But then somebody moved and I saw that she was with a guy I didn't know. I decided to catch her another time, went on into the alcove. All the phones were in use, though, so I sipped my coffee and waited. Pace, pace. Sip, sip.
From behind my back I heard, "Hey, Cassidy! Come on, it's the guy I was telling you about!"
Turning, I saw Rick Liddy, an English major with an answer for everything except what to do with his degree come June. With him was a taller version of himself in a Yale sweatshirt.
"Fred, this is my brother Paul. He's come slumming," he said.
"Hi, Paul."
I put my coffee on the ledge and started to extend the wrong hand. I caught myself, shook hands, felt foolish.
"He's the one," Rick said, "like the Wandering Jew or the Wild Huntsman. The man who will never graduate. Subject of countless ballads and limericks: Fred Cassidy-the Eternal Student."
"You left out the Flying Dutchman," I said, "and it's Doctor Cassidy, damn it!"
Rick began to laugh.
"Is it true about you being a night climber?" Paul said.
"Sometimes," I said, feeling a peculiar gulf opening between us. That damned sheepskin was already taking its toll. "Yeah, it's true."
"That's great," he said. "That's really great. I've always wanted to meet the real Fred Cassidy-the climber."
"I'm afraid you have," I said.
Then someone hung up and I grabbed for the phone.
"Excuse me."
"Yeah. See you later, Fred. Pardon me-Doc."
"Nice meeting you."
I felt strangely depressed as I wandered through the backward digits of Hal's number. As it was, the line proved busy. I tried the Nadler number then. An answering-service girl asked me for the number where I could be reached, for a message or for both. I gave her neither. I tried Hal's number again. This time I got through-within a fraction of a second, it seemed, from the time it commenced ringing.
"Yes? Hello?"
"You couldn't have run all that far," I said. "How come you're out of breath?"
"Fred! At last, damn it!"
"Sorry I didn't call sooner. There were a lot of things-"
"I've got to see you!"
"That's what I had in mind, too."
"Where are you?"
"At the Student Union."
"Stay there. No! Wait a minute."
I waited. Ten or fifteen seconds fell or were pushed.
"I'm trying to think of someplace you'll remember," he said. Then: "Listen. Don't say it if you do, but do you recall where we were about two months ago when you got in an argument with that med student named Ken? Thin guy, always very serious?"
"No," I said.
"I don't remember the argument, but I remember the ending: You said that Doctor Richard Jordan Gatling had done more for the development of modern surgery than Halsted. He asked you what techniques Doctor Gatling had developed and you told him that Gatling had invented the machine gun. He told you that wasn't funny and walked away. You told me he was an ass who believed he was going to get the Holy Grail when he finished rather than a license to help people. Do you remember where that was?"
"Now I do."