“You should have sent for us!” Claude said.
“There was simply no time. Charles knew what was happening to him. He said we had to set up a counter-conditioning program immediately. It involved changing the symbols on the cube faces. The idea was to break up the obsessive image-trains through the altered sequence. I set it up, but it didn’t seem to work for Charles. He was fading away before my eyes, occasionally rousing himself to murmur, ‘The horror, the horror…’“
“Bloody hell!” Claude exploded. “And then?”
“I felt that I had to act immediately. Charles’s system of counter-conditioning had failed. I decided that he needed a different sort of symbol to look at—something simple and direct, something reassuring—”
Just then Charles came slowly down the stairs. He had lost a lot of weight since I saw him last, and his face was haggard. He looked thin, happy, and not quite sane.
“I was just napping,” he said. “I’ve got rather a lot of sleep to catch up on. Did Mouse tell you how she saved what little is left of my sanity?” He put his arm around her shoulders. “She’s marvelous, isn’t she? And to think that I only realized yesterday that I loved her. We’re getting married next week, and you’re all invited.”
Mimi said, “I thought we were flying down to Monte Carlo and getting married in the city hall.”
“Why, so we are.” Charles looked bewildered for a moment. He touched his head with the unconscious pathos of the wounded soldier in the movie who hasn’t yet realized that half his head is blown away. “The old think-piece hasn’t quite recovered yet from the beating I gave it with those wretched cubes. If Mimi hadn’t been here, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”
They beamed at us, the instant happy couple produced by Hinton’s devilish cubes. The transformation of Charles’s feelings toward Mimi—from fond indifference to blind infatuation—struck me as bizarre and dreamlike. They were Svengali and Trilby with the sexes reversed, a case of witchcraft rather than of love’s magic.
“It’s going to be all right now, Charles,” Mimi said.
“Yes, love, I know it is.” Charles smiled, but the animation had gone out of his face. He lifted his hand to his head again, and his knees began to sag. Mimi, her arm around his waist, half supported and half dragged him to the stairs.
“I’ll just get him up to bed,” she said.
Claude, Pam, and I stood in the middle of the room, looking at each other. Then, with a single accord, we turned and went into the parlor where the Mandala Machine was kept.
We approached it with awe, for it was a modern version of ancient witchcraft. I could imagine Charles sitting in front of the thing, its arms revolving, the cubes turning and flashing, setting up a single ineradicable image in his mind. The ancient Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian letters were gone. All the faces of all the cubes now bore a single symbol—direct and reassuring, just as Mimi had said, but hardly simple. There were twenty cubes, with six faces to a cube, and pasted to each surface was a photograph of Mimi Royce.
THE SKAG CASTLE
I
Within the offices of the AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service, a gloomy silence reigned. By the faint light that filtered through the dirty windows, Richard Gregor was playing a new form of solitaire. It involved three packs of cards, six jokers, a set of dice, and a slide rule. The game was extremely complicated, maddeningly difficult, and it always came out if you persisted long enough.
His partner, Mike Arnold, had swept his desk clear of its usual clutter of crusty test tubes and unpaid bills, and was now dozing fitfully on its stained surface.
Business couldn't have been worse.
There was a tentative knock on the door.
Quickly Gregor pushed his playing cards, dice, and slide rule into a drawer. Arnold rolled off his desk like a cat and flipped open Volume Two of Terkstiller's Decontamination Modes on X-32 (Omega) Worlds, which he had been using for a pillow.
"Come in," Gregor called out.
The door opened and a girl entered. She was young, slender, dark-haired, and extremely pretty. Her eyes were gray, and they contained a hint of fear. Her lips were unsmiling.
She looked around the unkempt office. "Is this the AAA Ace?" she inquired tentatively.
"It certainly is," Gregor assured her. "Won't you sit down? We always keep the lights off. Much more restful, don't you think?"
And, he thought, quite necessary, since Con Mazda had shut off their power last week for nonpayment of a trifling bill.
"I suppose it is," the girl said, sitting in the cavernous client's chair. She surveyed the office again. "You people are planetary decontaminationists, aren't you? Not taxidermists or undertakers?"
"Don't let the office fool you," Arnold said. "We are the best, and the most reasonable. No planet too big, no asteroid too small."
"Maybe I've come to the right place after all," the girl said with a wan but enchanting smile. "You see, I don't have much money."
Gregor nodded sympathetically. AAA Ace's clients never had much money.
"But I do have a tiny little planet that needs decontaminating," the girl said. "It's the most wonderful place in the whole galaxy. But the job might be dangerous."
"Dangerous?" Arnold asked.
The girl nodded and glanced nervously at the door. "I don't even know if I'm safe here. Are you armed?"
Gregor found a rusty letter opener. Arnold hefted a bronze paperweight cast in the shape of the spaceship Constitution — a beautiful piece of workmanship.
Somewhat relieved, the girl went on. "I'm Myra Branch Ryan. I was on my little planet, minding my own business, when suddenly this Scarb appeared before me, leering horribly—"
"This what?"
"Perhaps I should start at the beginning," Myra Ryan said. "A few months ago my Uncle Jim died and left me a small planet and a Hemstet four spaceship. The planet is Coelle, in the Gelsors system. Uncle Jim bought the planet fifteen years ago for a vacation home. He had just gotten it into shape when he was called away on business. What with one thing and another, he never returned. Naturally I went out there as soon as I could."
Myra's face brightened as she remembered her first impressions.
"Coelle was very small, but perfect. It had a complete air system, the best gravity money can buy, and an artesian well. Uncle Jim had planted several orchards, and berry bushes on the hillsides, and long grass everywhere. There was even a little lake.
"But Coelle's outstanding feature was the Skag Castle. Uncle
Jim hadn't touched this, for the castle was old beyond belief. It was thought to have been built by the Skag Horde, who, according to legend, occupied the universe before the coming of man."
The partners nodded. Everyone had heard of the Skag Horde. A whole literature had sprung up around the scanty evidence of their existence. It was pretty well established that they had been reptile-evolved, and had mastered spaceflight. But legend went further than this. The Skag Horde was supposed to have known the Old Lore, a strange mixture of science and witchcraft. This, according to the legends, gave them powers beyond the conception of man, powers sprung from the evil counterforces of the universe.
Their disappearance, millennia before Homo sapiens descended from the treetops, had never been satisfactorily explained.
"I fell In love with Coelle," Myra continued, "and the old Skag Castle just made it perfect."
"But where does the decontaminating come in?" Gregor asked. "Were there natives on Coelle? Animals? Germs?"
"No, nothing like that," Myra said. "Here's what happened…"