Fiction complete, p.80
Fiction Complete, page 80
The girl drifted gracefully forward, removing several eleven-by-seventeen sheets of green graph paper from the stack of folders and memo pages she carried.
“Mr. Norman said to give these to Eric,” she said. “He wants to know if you can have them done by tomorrow.”
“Oh . . . sure . . . I guess so,” said Koenigshaufen.
He accepted the plots without seeing them because he was busy admiring her auburn hair and wishing she wore it longer. It was the only fault he could find. It seemed to him a pity that a girl who filled out her clothes so trimly should sacrifice such beautiful hair to a passing fashion.
“He’ll try, he means, Marie,” Russell told her.
“Mr. Norman must depend on this department a lot,” Marie told him. “I heard him telling the other engineers how he never makes up his mind about his experiments until the boys here go over his data so he can see what he has.”
“We’d hardly know what to do without him either!” the chief draftsman assured her.
He waited until she had clicked down the hall, then turned to Koenigshaufen, at whom the others were grinning knowingly.
“All right, Eric, she’s pretty and her sweater is a nice shade of blue. Now, pull your eyeballs back inside the office and see what you can do with that job!”
Koenigshaufen looked at the plots and groaned. They were dotted with little circles, triangles, and x’s in various colors and with several styles of curlicues and tails to distinguish the separate species. Someone, with a very soft pencil, had worried a smudgy series of curves which undulated from the upper left corner of the sheet to the lower right, crossed in the middle by a comparatively horizontal group of lines.
“Shut your eyes an’ toss a coin, Eric,” Len Andrews advised.
Shaking their heads, the others drifted away, leaving Koenigshaufen to pore over the graphs in search of a point to attack them. Russell retired to his extra-long table at the front of the room, and talk died away as the afternoon’s work was begun. Except for desultory repartee between Len and Pete, there remained only the hum of distant traffic borne through the windows on the warm air.
Koenigshaufen reached absently into his top drawer for an eraser and gently cleared away some of the smudges.
With a triangle, he attempted to get an idea of the slopes, then picked up a French curve and began to fair a line through Norman’s data.
Eventually, he constructed something that vaguely resembled the original smudgy indications but which showed the touch of the practiced hand in its cleaner, smoother lines. He decided to attempt the next sheet. Laying his T-square across the top edge to hold down the curled corners, he stared in disgust at the engineer’s fuzzy sketches.
Not one of them fits his data points! he thought. Why doesn’t he use a paint brush and be done with it? Why don’t I get more of Mike Fisher’s work, or MacDonald’s? They at least know what they’re doing.
Leaning back to stretch the stiffness out of his shoulders, he realized that he had been bent over the first chart for nearly an hour. The others were quiet, intent upon their own work. Charlie Cuff hissed softly between his teeth as his lettering pen slipped. He laid aside the Leroy stencil and reached for the electric erasing machine.
I bet that if Norman knew what he was doing, Koenigshaufen reflected while the eraser whined, he wouldn’t get such scattered measurements.
This chart is just a whopping lie! I built that composite curve for a gag, but you’d really need something like it to—
Without especially considering it, lie reached out a long arm and took up the contraption from the corner of his table. He placed it curiously over the green grid of the chart, and twiddled the component curves this way and that.
Hey! It almost indicated a line that time! he thought in surprise.
Leaning forward, he tried to recapture the position. Perhaps he decided, if he rotated the pointer of the protractor a few degrees . . . and edged the spiral curve over a trifle . . . it might have a look about it of fitting the plotted curve. He could call the fellows over for a laugh.
The green lines, ten to the half inch with every fifth one accented, shimmered slightly under the several thicknesses of clear plastic. With the shadowed edges of the latter and the criss-cross of penciled curves, they formed a peculiarly distorted pattern.
Koenigshaufen blinked and thrust his nose closer to the paper. As he rotated the plastic guides about the pivot, the colored data points seemed now and then to fall into line, even if nowhere near the arrangement sketched by Norman.
He lost the setting again, by moving the French curve a shade too far, and was annoyed. He was rapidly forgetting the joke in his curiosity to find out whether the gadget actually could detect some kind of pattern.
“Whether Bill Norman recognizes it or not,” he breathed.
The complicated interweaving of lines and colors writhed before his eyes and he blinked again to clear his vision.
Something in the mess seemed to move. He peered yet closer.
Immediately, the interlocking lines and curves took on a depth, a perspective that was odd but absorbing. Koenigshaufen could almost imagine himself moving into the pattern . . . becoming part of it . . . or at least seeing into its depths as into a dim clearing between the branches of a forest.
Something moved definitely in the “clearing,” a vague shadow that drew his attention still further into the pattern. Koenigshaufen lost track of the muted sounds of the drafting room. The whine of the electric eraser, the buzz of low conversation, distant traffic noises—all faded before his concentrated determination to see what made the shadows in front of him shift and coalesce in such weird fashion.
His slight motion—by now, his nose nearly touched the gadget—brought the scene into better focus. He encountered a cool sensation of being underwater. Everything before his eyes was a luminous sea-green, and the next large shadow that undulated across his field of vision like some mysterious monster of the deeps.
With the passing of the huge shadow, the emerald hue shimmered and melted into a limpid azure. Smaller shapes darted blurrily this way and that. Eric flinched as one flashed straight at him.
The slight movement induced a further metamorphosis in the view. The brilliant blue became shot through with gently swirling currents of topaz and sepia. Scintillating sparks of other tints showered here and there. Koenigshaufen gaped, breathless, at “the swelling symphony of color. Faintly to his ears floated vague sighs, as of breezes twirling the leaves of swaying trees.
The blues and greens, streaks of ivory or soft gray, flecks of scarlet flame deepening into russet and mauve washed about him, more pure, more vivid more variegated than he had ever experienced. Some sleepy part of his mind tried to suggest that he dreamt; but he thrust the idea down, entranced by the sheer pleasure of the visual adventure.
Then the first silvery music coalesced out of the background. Koenigshaufen realized in a moment that it was not music as he had understood the word, but random notes of a delicate sweetness. Unless it was exquisitely subtle, no definite rhythm existed. He tried tapping one out with his forefinger on the pointer of the protractor.
Koenigshaufen gasped as his vision clicked into sharp focus. His finger froze in position.
It’s like a peephole into another world! he thought.
The shimmer of green and blue withdrew to the distance, resolving itself into tumbling waves of a misty sea. On the shore rose a city of white and pearly gray towers, shadowed with lilac blotches. Koenigshaufen seemed to see it across miles of open parkland unmarred by roads or buildings.
As he stared, drinking in the delicate, fairy-like air of the distant metropolis, something nearer to him moved. He looked upward.
An iridescent bubble skimmed through the air, as if it had just passed over Koenigshaufen’s head, and dwindled toward the city. It took him some moments to realize that he had seen two people inside, looking as much at their ease as if they sat on solid ground.
He still had not completely accepted this sight when another bubble grew swiftly out of the distance.
I’m getting a good look at this one! he promised himself.
So intent was he that the determination itself, or some tiny muscular contraction that accompanied it, affected his view. As the bubble passed to his right, he seemed suddenly swept up and drawn along in its wake. Eric realized vaguely that his body experienced none of the thrill of such birdlike flight; yet his other self swooped along in pursuit of the crystalline sphere. He saw that it flew toward a range of shadowed hills.
At closer range, the being inside the bubble looked more human than Koenigshaufen had expected. He was slim, but broad of shoulder, and wore his coal-black hair so long that it curled to the wide collar of his feathered cloak. The lambent reflections of the plumes shifted from an indigo sheen to bottle green and back whenever the cloak moved. Occasional glints of opalescent light streaming behind the conveyance made the image waver before Eric’s eyes.
The bubble slanted downward toward the foothills. Into Koenigshaufen’s sight crept a trim village of round-roofed huts surrounded by level grain fields. As they descended, the twilight became more apparent, dulling the gold of the fields and the expanses of green about the huts.
Just before the bubble dipped lightly to the ground, his attention was captured by the structure that rose beyond the village. Eric caught one glimpse of dark, squat figures scuttling from the huts to meet the bubble, but his instinctive craning spoiled the focus again.
The scene gradually drifted back to him, though from a different angle.
Above his head reared the walls of what could only be a castle, although it looked entirely too insubstantial to be any kind of a fortress. Koenigshaufen gazed up at the soaring spires that could not possibly, in their delicate grace, be strong enough to reach such proud heights. The shadows here were already deeper, lending the walls the appearance of veiled mother-of-pearl.
Something else had changed, he discovered, with the shift.
No sounds came now to his ears. He missed the undercurrent of musical notes and the rushing of air. Thus, he had no warning when the dim figures marched up from his left.
In the lead strode the feather-cloaked man from the flying bubble. Several squat beings followed him, but Eric could not make them out in the dimness. They moved with such a slinking gait that he suspected he might not have heard them even if really standing beside them.
The leader led them up to the wall and gestured. One of his followers stepped apart and hurled something upward. It must have been a noose or grapple, for the slim man a moment later slipped off his cloak and began to climb the rope that Koenigshaufen sensed more than saw. As his followers gathered to watch, Eric caught the gleaming outlines of fantastically curved axes. From the climber’s belt dangled a strangely tapered tube about two feet long.
Something nasty is going on Here! Koenigshaufen thought. These birds are up to no good, or they’d call at the front door.
He tried to look up to determine the goal of the climbing man. Something twisted out of phase, and he was swept back amid a swirling kaleidoscope of flashing colors.
Koenigshaufen cursed under his breath.
Steady! he exhorted himself. Keep your mind concentrated on staying around! Don’t lose it!
With tantalizing slowness, he passed again through a phase of disorganized but mellifluous musical notes. Gradually, images began to take shape before his eyes. A pang of disappointment shot through him as he realized he had lost the scene after all.
He seemed to be staring straight at as weird a being as he had ever imagined. It was grotesquely broad of shoulder, and purple as a plum where its skin was not hidden by a copper colored tunic. With seven-fingered hands, it plucked at the strings of a complicated instrument hung with tinkling bits of bright metal.
Koenigshaufen noticed that he could hear again. The music was difficult to follow but beautiful as the rippling of a purling brook—and then it dawned upon him that he actually heard the splashing of water.
He decided that it must come from somewhere else in the chamber, and hoped he had succeeded in shifting his view to the inside of the castle.
His attention was lured back to the minstrel as the latter opened huge amber eyes at the end of a jingling melody. He—
Koenigshaufen decided he might as well think of it as a man—immediately swung into another, more dulcet, tune. Eric took a better look at him.
He thought the player’s skull seemed round; but its true shape was concealed by a variety of turban wound of satiny vermilion material and decorated at one side by a clump of snowy plumes. The being’s nose, beneath the lambent yellow eyes, was narrow and hooked like a hawk’s beak, but his general expression was somehow kindly.
The wide instrument, closer to being a many-stringed lyre than anything Koenigshaufen could think of, was tilted back against an enormous chest so that both queer hands were free to ripple over the strings. The minstrel smiled dreamily as someone began to sing.
Koenigshaufen listened, enchanted. The voice started as a warm contralto but soared upward with the music to impossible heights while remaining clear and true as a bell. Then it slid down the scales again into a crooning love song.
Koenigshaufen tensed against moving a muscle. He hardly dared to breathe, lest he miss a single golden note.
What can she be like? he wondered. Shall I wait to see if she comes this way, or shall I try to shift?
He feared that if he attempted to change his apparent point of view, he might go too far and lose the scene completely, as had happened before. Yet, he reminded himself, that sneaking climber must be well up the wall by now. If only he could give some warning!
The singing paused for a new series of echoing splashes. After a moment, the sweet voice resumed. The minstrel within Koenigshaufen’s fascinated gaze continued to strum his tinkling melodies. In the soft light, his instrument glittered almost hypnotically.
Those squares of metal! Koenigshaufen thought. Maybe I could see the rest of the place by using one as a mirror.
The silvery ornaments swirled in constant motion, but he spotted one which rotated quite slowly.
That one, he told himself. It’s swinging around . . . another few minutes . . .
He felt the view lurch away from him. It was almost like the first split-second following a slip on winter ice, and Erie reacted with the same prickling thrill of fright.
He gripped frantically with both hands at some unseen support which alone saved him from plunging into a dark, terrifying emptiness. Then, as he adjusted to the shift of view brought on by his straining forward, he saw that the darkness was not empty. A blurred object approached slowly, swaying rhythmically.
Eric found himself staring down at the strained face of the climber he had earlier watched start up the wall. The man hauled at the rope hand over hand, “walking” his way up the stone surface with seeming ease, as if he weighed less than he should have in Koenigshaufen’s real world.
I don’t like the look on his face, thought the watcher. This is no joke he’s tip to! Don’t they have any guards here?
He himself seemed to hang precariously on the edge of a parapet. He could not see the grappling iron supporting the rope, but a section of stone tower was dimly visible to his right. As he looked, he discovered that the gentle glow illuminating the face of the tower came from a curved lamp of orange glass. Hanging by a thin chain from a projecting metal rod, this lamp swung restlessly in the wind.
How much closer before it smashes? Koenigshaufen wondered.
He stared narrowly at the bulging middle of the lamp as it tossed almost against the rough stone before dropping away. On the next swing, he could nearly convince himself it came closer.
A glance downward revealed the climber progressing steadily higher. He would reach the parapet in a matter of seconds if not prevented.
Frozen in position, Koenigshaufen rolled his eyes desperately to his right and sought to will the lamp closer to the wall on its next swing . . . and the next . . . and the next—
It splintered suddenly against the stone.
The scene was abruptly dimmed.
I did it! I did it! Koenigshaufen exulted, refusing to share the credit for such a prodigious act of concentration with a mere breeze.
A bobbing light splashed ruddily along the face of the tower. An instant later, a torch was held over the parapet by a dark, turbaned being akin to the minstrel inside.
This one turned away from Eric and beckoned urgently. He was joined immediately by another guard. The second bore a tube like the one Eric had seen at the belt of the climbing man, but the backs of the two newcomers hid its operation as they bent to look down.
The effect, however, was spectacular enough. A flickering stream of blue sparks showered downward, fading as they reached the man on the rope. The latter slipped several feet, and Koenigshaufen saw one of his arms dangle loosely as if paralyzed. With the other, he hugged the rope to him while he twined his legs about it so as, to slide safely down.
The first guard thrust the torch into his companion’s broad hands—Eric gathered that the range of the weapon must be short—and began to saw at the rope with a long, wickedly curved knife.
That did it! Koenigshaufen congratulated himself.
He watched the man on the rope sliding rapidly downward, his features a mask of fury and frustration, and decided the fellow might possibly reach the distant ground before the rope parted. Koenigshaufen cared little one way or the other. He longed to be back inside the castle.
In his excitement, he forgot to notice how he managed it. Abruptly, he discovered he had regained nearly the same position he had lost a few minutes before.
Careful! he warned himself.
His view seemed steady, however. Nothing had changed except that he was even closer to the swirling silver ornaments. He had for some reason not yet recovered clear hearing, though conscious of distant, indistinct sounds; and so it was in nearsilence that he concentrated upon one gently twisting little mirror. He had a queer feeling that if he once saw the singer, he would again hear that glorious voice.
