"You couldn't, not even with Shrdlu?" I asked.
"No. He was hopeless. He's the one who damaged the disk."
"Where is he now?"
"Departed for the Library of Congress, spouting Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Symons, Swinburne, T. S. Eliot, all the great literary critics. He'll be the most boring Ph.D. in the history of belles lettres." To Kelly, "Will you try to help us get the data, my dear? It won't be easy, and you may not succeed, but no matter. Win or lose, you've paid the price, and that will be the last of your miniature hangup. I'll replace it with the big."
"I'll try, Mr. Maser." We could barely hear her.
"It'll be rather strange to you, Kelly," he said, gallantly helping her to her feet. "What we need you to look at has not yet been invented in your time. They're megabyte chips with memory cells. You'll go through them, fixing the damaged parts. This way." As he led her toward the Hellhole he called, "You may have done it again, Alf, but keep your fingers crossed."
"Who cares? I'm a match for any monster Cagliostro can brew."
"Ah-ha! Oh-ho! So you two made the connection," and the paneled door closed.
"Did you You-Hiff him, Glory?" I asked.
"'You-Hiff'?"
"UHF."
"No." She laughed. "He saw the change in you and guessed."
"I'm changed?"
"Wonderfully! Tremendously!"
"And you?"
"Wonderfully! Tremendously!"
"Yes. I feel like I've discovered the source of the Nile."
"And I feel like the Nile."
We sat down. Nan straddling my lap and placing my arms around her waist to draw us close, face to face.
"I love you. I love you. I love you," I murmured. "You're my first and only true love."
"And you're my first, my very first."
"Don't tease."
"But you were."
"Are you talking virgin?"
"Yes."
"But I thought—"
She shut me up with her lips and darting tongue and we were still flagrante when Adam and Kelly at last came out of the Hellhole. We didn't bother to move until Kelly said in a crisp voice, "All right, cut. It's a take. Print it." Then we broke and stared.
She was still wearing shirt and slacks but what was now inside made me fear for her mother and the rest of the world.
"Many thanks, Maser," she said, and we certainly could hear her. "I was a damned fool wasting my time on miniatures and that cockamamie Lilliput show. Here's World War Two waiting for a giant documentary by Towser Films. I'll do it in three segments—air, sea, and land. An hour each. The only problem is front money, but I'll talk the BBC into that for a credit and a cut. 'The Years That Wiped the World' with a cast of thousands. Ciao, you all," and she was gone.
"Jeez, you all." What else could I say?
"Quite a change." Adam grinned. "Makes me proud to be a hockshop uncle."
"Did she fix the chips?"
"Yep. Our brain basements are now safe."
"What biggie did you replace her mini with, Cecil B. DeMille?"
"P. T. Barnum."
"Like wow. There's bound to be a cast of a thousand elephants."
"All named Jumbo."
"One thing I can't understand. She never has any trouble wishing home, but why'd it take her forty years to get
here?"
"Fright, Alf. Fear of the unknown. That often slows them down. Home is familiar so they go like a shot."
FOUR · SEVEN WELL-HUNG GENTLEMEN
Later, after Adam had departed to scuff around the Olduvai Gorge of a million-plus years ago in search of I the origins of the human collective unconscious, I asked Glory where the Switch was. I knew there had to be one somewhere about or even the Mystery Cat might go mad at the pace. We knaves must sometimes rest.
She removed an exquisite pale blue Ming vase from a niche, exposing a simple switch on the wall behind. I reached in and threw it. Nothing changed, but everything changed. A field flux of the singularity executed a deft Dedekind Cut between a pair of seconds whose interval we traversed, transporting us to a timeless space where we dawdled, showered, ate, drank, diddled, and did it again while no customers were kept waiting or could be as we did it in her room atop the iron stair, skins of her former selves proudly displayed upon the wall.
"A gallery of Glorys," I remarked, stroking the nearest.
"Perpetually reflowering forth," said she, "for delight of man and beast. Come bed with me and love my be, Alf of the thousand stars. Have I not waited down the nows?"
"Indeed," said I, kissing her now, and kissing her now again.
Many a time I rose to the occasion, but finally fell as a dead man falls, into her arms or her eyes, where a soft susurration like ancient waves welcomed me down and down.
... I remembered the iron stair beneath my bare feet, dim, distant, and faint. Then I was through the half-lit room and the big door, drowsing down dark ways where images of sex and violence seemed to scroll at either hand. Following the claw marks then, back between the taking-away and the adding-to places . . .
.. . coming to the place where the seven hung, turning in the breeze—though, in truth, this seemed my first splinter of awareness, the other few but impressions of passage which had been restored to me in that instant. Something about that field ... I didn't know how it worked. Better not to enter there.
I reached forward. I leaned. There was a chill. . . .
I touched his arm, gripped it. Was it Pietro the painter or was it the Crusader? I could not be certain. It was necessary, though, that I turn him, so that the faint forward light—
"Ssss! Alf! What are you doing?" I felt her hand upon my shoulder. "You walk in your sleep. Come away!"
She tugged at me, as I was tugging at my hung companion. Our joint effort had him turning proper in a moment. . . .
I released his arm.
"What dream is this?" I asked as the light came upon his face.
It was my face that I beheld, turning in the pale illumination.
"Why's the Pussycat got my double hanging in the meat locker, Glory?"
"The story he told you was true. This one just happens to look like you."
I strode forward, knowing now that I could take more of that chill. I seized the next one by the legs and twisted sharply. He came around, and my own face looked down at me again. I moved to the next, turned him. Again, it was me. And the next, and the next. . . Again, again. I dropped to my knees.
I felt her hands upon my shoulders.
"All of them! What is this, Glory? Does he collect guys who look like me? Am I going to be Number Eight? Should I start running? How can I, from a guy who can follow me anywhere? What does he want? Why are they here?"
"We must get you out of the field now." She caught hold of me under my armpits and drew me to my feet. "Come away."
"Tell me!"
"I will, if you'll come along with me now."
"I'm sorry, Alf, that you had to find out for yourself. He was going to tell you, after he got to know you better."
"So you discussed my case?"
"Yess."
"In UHF, while I was standing there, I suppose?"
"Yesss."
"So what was it that I found out for myself? I still don't know."
"That you are a part of something, perhaps dangerous, that affects him and this place. He wanted to cultivate you, observe you, to see whether you might give some indication of what your plans are for us, before he risked talking with you about it."