He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
“But why this pebble right here?”
“It’s hard and round, Dad. It belongs there.”
“So is this one hard and round.”
“Well, that’s got Vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard, round thing.”
“What comes next? This candle?”
Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The fron ring’s next.” It was, Paradine thought, like a scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted-familiar logic — at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.
Well…
Jane was lunching with Uncle Harry, and, on this hot Sunday afternoon, there was little to do but read the papers. Paradine settled himself in the coolest place he could find, with a Collins, and lost himself in the comic strips.
An hour later a clatter of feet upstairs roused him from his doze. Scott’s voice was crying exultantly, “This is it, Slug! Come on!”
Paradine stood up quickly, frowning. As he went into the hall the telephone began to ring. Jane had promised to call…
His hand was on the receiver when Emma’s faint voice squealed with excitement. Paradine grimaced. What the devil was going on upstairs?
Scott shrieked, “Look out! This way!”
Paradine, his mouth working, his nerves ridiculously tense, forgot the phone and raced up the stairs.
The door of Scott’s room was open.
The children were vanishing.
They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.
“Emma!” he said, dry-throated. “Scotty!”
On the carpet lay a pattern of markers, pebbles, an iron ring-junk. A random pattern. A crumpled sheet of paper blew towards Paradine.
He picked it up automatically.
“Kids. Where are you? Don’t hide — Emma! SCOTTYI”
Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with Through the Looking Glass. His memory gave him the words — ‘Twas brillig, and the suthy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths of Atgrabe.
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time. It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was.
Symbolism.
Twas brillig.
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy — vaseline? — and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimble.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page — she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand.
The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the inoine raths outgrabe.
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done — But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy.
His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass — Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma! Scotty!” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.
TWO-HANDED ENGINE
Ever since the days of Orestes there have been men with Furies following them. It wasn’t until the Twenty-Second Century that mankind made itself a set of real Furies, out of steel. Mankind had reached a crisis by then. They had a good reason for building man-shaped Furies that would dog the footsteps of all men who kill men. Nobody else. There was by then no other crime of any importance.
It worked very simply. Without warning, a man who thought himself safe would suddenly hear the steady footfalls behind him. He would turn and see the two-handed engine walking towards him, shaped like a man of steel, and more incorruptible than any man not made of steel could be. Only then would the murderer know he had been tried and condemned by the omniscient electronic minds that knew society as no human mind could ever know it.
For the rest of his days, the man would hear those footsteps behind him. A moving jail with invisible bars that shut him off from the world. Never in life would he be alone again. And one day-he never knew when-the jailer would turn executioner.
Danner leaned back comfortably in his contoured restaurant chair and rolled expensive wine across his tongue, closing his eyes to enjoy the taste of it better. He felt perfectly safe. Oh, perfectly protected.
For nearly an hour now he had been sitting here, ordering the most expensive food, enjoying the music breathing softly through the air, the murmurous, well-bred hush of his fellow diners. It was a good place to be. It was very good, having so much money-now.
True, he had had to kill to get the money. But no guilt troubled him. There was no guilt if you aren’t found out, and Danner had protection. Protection straight from the source, which was something new in the world. Danner knew the consequences of killing. If Hartz hadn’t satisfied him that he was perfectly safe, Danner would never have pulled the trigger…
The memory of an archaic word flickered through his mind briefly. Sin. It evoked nothing. Once it had something to do with guilt, in an incomprehensible way. Not any more. Mankind had been through too much. Sin was meaningless now.
He dismissed the thought and tried the heart-of-palms salad. He found he didn’t like it. Oh well, you had to expect things like that. Nothing was perfect. He sipped the wine again, liking the way the glass seemed to vibrate like something faintly alive in his hand. It was good wine. He thought of ordering more, but then he thought no, save it, next time. There was so much before him, waiting to be enjoyed.
Any risk was worth it. And of course, in this there had been no risk.
Danner was a man born at the wrong time. He was old enough to remember the last days of utopia, young enough to be trapped in the new scarcity economy the machines had clamped down on their makers. In his early youth he’d had access to free luxuries, like everybody else. He could remember the old days when he was an adolescent and the last of the Escape Machines were still operating, the glamorous, bright, impossible, vicarious visions that didn’t really exist and never -could have. But then the scarcity economy swallowed up pleasure. Now you got necessities but no more. Now you had to work. Danner hated every minute of it.
When the swift change came, he’d been too young and unskilled to compete in the scramble. The rich men today were the men who had built fortunes on cornering the few luxuries the machines still produced. All Danner had left were bright memories and a dull, resentful feeling of having been cheated. All he wanted were the bright days back, and he didn’t care how he got them.