Beyond The Barrier Part 3

Naismith paused, listening. There was no sound from beyond the door, and he had a sudden conviction that the apartment was empty. He pressed the buzzer.

The door clicked, swung wide.

In the opening stood Miss Lall, dressed as he had seen her that morning. Behind her he glimpsed a disordered, green- walled room. Cigarette smoke swirled up through the cone of yellow light projected by a lamp.

"Come in, Mr. Naismith," the creature said, and moved aside.

Naismith's back muscles tightened. He stepped to the room, then paused.

Beyond a table, watching him with cold amber eyes, sat a brown-skinned man with a beard. After a moment, his resem- blance to Lall was obvious.

Naismith walked forward. "You are Churan," he said.

"I am."

Naismith said grimly, "You sent me the machine. And you sent that lawyer to get me out of jail."

"Thank me for that, at least," the man said, narrowing his eyes. The table before him was littered with food and crumpled plastic. He picked up a chicken leg, gnawed it, spat out a piece of gristle. Sc.r.a.ps dribbled into his beard. He gazed up at Naismith with insolent eyes.Lall came around and sat on the arm of a chair. Together, Naismith thought, they looked more inhuman than either alone. They were like two gigantic frogs, painted and dressed in human clothing.

A stir of revulsion went through him. "Exactly what do you want from me?" he demanded.

"To begin with, why not sit down and talk reasonably together? What can be lost?"

Naismith hesitated, then sat in a leather chair facing the table. The room, he saw now, was cluttered with an astonishing number and variety of things. Books and papers were stacked unevenly on the floor, piled on tables. Naismith saw an icon, a bronze Chinese dragon, a plastic windup toy, a string of cheap green beads, a can of soup. b.a.l.l.s of paper and plastic had been tossed carelessly into corners. There were sc.r.a.ps of food on the floor. Dust was thick everywhere.

"What can we offer you in return for your cooperation, Mr.

Naismith?" Churan asked. He picked up an orange, began to tear the skin off with his greasy fingers. "Money?"

Naismith did not reply.

"Knowledge?" Churan said delicately. Both aliens smiled.

Naismith leaned forward. "Very well. You claim to know all about me. Let me hear some proof of that-give me details."

Churan shook his head. "Payment in advance, Mr. Nai- smith? Not a very good method of dealing." He made a face, spoke a few guttural words to Lall.

"Doing business," she said.

"Yes-doing business. We will not tell you everything now, Mr. Naismith. You have already learned something-that you are a Shefth, that the Lenlu Din sent you back-"

Lall interrupted him with a hissed word. He shrugged. "Well, it does not matter. There is still much for you to learn." He stuffed a segment of orange into his mouth and began to chew, blinking at Naismith in time with the motion of his jaw.

Naismith felt an unreasonable anger. He said, "You're asking me to go into this blindly. Why should I trust you?"

Churan spat out a seed, stuffed another segment of orange in. With his mouth full, he asked, "What other choice do you have?"

"I can refuse," Naismith said. "I can stay here, live out my life."

"You are already under suspicion of murder," Churan com- mented. "You will lose your job-"Naismith stood up.

"I am only stating facts, Mr. Naismith," Churan said, staring up at him. "If necessary, you will be convicted of murder and will receive a long prison sentence. We can even arrange for painful accidents to happen to you while in prison."

Lall spoke to him warningly. He shrugged, and said, "Only facts. Be realistic, Mr. Naismith-if you do not agree now, you will later."

Naismith felt choked with anger. His voice was low. "What if I kill you instead?"

Churan flinched. "You will not," he said hastily. "But if you did, who would answer your questions?"

Naismith was silent. Churan's blunt forefinger stirred the papers on the table. "Meanwhile, if you want proofs, I will give you some proofs. Look at this, Mr. Naismith."

Naismith glanced down. Churan's fingers were spreading out a mare's nest of amateur-looking color photographs.

Naismith recognized a dim picture of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, a shot of the Neumann Obelisk in downtown Los Angeles, a grinning closeup of Churan himself. Then something different came into view.

It was an oblong of what seemed to be clear plastic. In it were three tiny figures against a shadowy background.

The illusion of depth was so perfect that the figures seemed to be sunken beneath the surface of the table. Two were shorter than the other; and Naismith recognized Lall and Churan by their stance, even before he leaned near enough to make out the features. The third- He stiffened incredulously. The third man was himself.

There was no mistake. Back in his apartment, Naismith took the photograph out of his pocket again and examined it for the third tune. He had stared at it on the tube car going home, until the glances of other pa.s.sengers had made him feel conspicuous.

There he was, embedded in the clear plastic, looking almost as if he might move or speak. Beside him, the two aliens gazed out with self-satisfied smiles.

"Where was this taken?" he had asked Churan. The alien had grinned up at him. "Not was-will be, Mr. Naismith. You are going with us into the future, and this picture will be taken there. So you see, there is no point in argument." He giggled, and after a moment Lall joined in. Their hoa.r.s.e, grunting laughter was so unpleasant to Naismith that he pocketed the photograph and fled.

Now, staring at it again, he was compelled to believe. The background showed a room like none he had ever seen before.

The walls were paneled in magenta and ivory strips of somesubstance that looked hazy and blurred at the edges, although the rest of the picture was in sharp focus. There were chairs, tables of unfamiliar shapes.

He knew in his bones that the room was not of this place and time. Either he and the aliens had been together in the past, in that blank period that was the first thirty-one years of his life ... or else Churan had been telling the literal truth: this was a picture of something yet to happen-a snapshot from the future.

If the aliens themselves could come back from the future into present time-if the gun he had seen in his room could be projected back-why not a photograph?

But if that were so, how could he possibly escape?

He ate a solitary dinner, went to a movie, but discovered after half an hour that he had no idea what he had been watching.

That night, he dreamed.

Chapter Four.

In the dream, he wakened to a sense of danger.

He struggled, gasping as he straightened his limbs. A thin mechanical voice was shrilling, "Attack! Attack in the Fifth Sector! Guardians, awake! Attack! Attack!"

All around him in the big globular chamber, his comrades were rousing from sleep, squirming in the air, reaching for weapons. The automatic guns and other protective devices, floating at the outskirts of the chamber, ceaselessly revolved, their red lenses glowing.

The vision was so clear that Naismith accepted it without question. He had never really been Naismith; that was a dream. He was Dar of the Entertainer caste, and he was trying to get his wits about him. He had been on a thirty-hour patrol in the Eightieth Sector, and had barely fallen asleep, it seemed, before the robot alarm had wakened him.

His equipment drifted toward him as he grasped for it, half- blindly. He put on the helmet and plastron, seized the familiar shape of his flame rifle.

Other men were already pouring through the circular orifice of the doorway. "a.s.semble! a.s.semble!" shrilled the mechanical voice. Still not thoroughly awake, he aimed his director at the doorway and followed.

In the huge a.s.sembly room outside, throngs of armed Enter- tainers were moving. "Form squads!" another robot voice shrilled. Dar set his director to "Group" and felt himself drift- ing across the chamber.

The whole ma.s.s of men were already in motion toward another open doorway. He recognized the men of his squad asthey drifted together-Yed, Jatto, Opad. They exchanged glances and a few brief words. "How many?" "Don't know."

The words were not English, but he understood them.

Then they were moving across the room; the doorway loomed up. Tensing himself, Dar dived through.

Acrid smoke bit at his nostrils; clouds of it rolled down the green-lit corridor, so dense that he had to switch on his helmet ultravision. In the luminescent glow, he saw green-skinned bodies afloat, flesh torn apart, eyes staring blindly, mouths agape.

There was a thunderous roar from somewhere down the corridor. Dar felt something pluck at his arm, glanced down and saw blood welling. There was no pain, only a dull aching sensation.

A patrol officer came darting by. "All over," he said as he pa.s.sed. "We got them. Any wounded here?"

Dar signaled him, showing his pierced arm. The pain was beginning. The patrol officer signaled a robot, which cleaned his wound, extracted the sliver of metal, sprayed bandage on it.

"Dismiss," someone was calling. "Dismiss." The men were crowding toward the doorway again, and Dar joined them.

The press was so great that it was several minutes before he could go through. Grumbling voices sounded all around him.

"Waked us for nothing." "I'm going back to sleep." "No point to it-they'll just wake you up again." "Myself, I'm hungry."

They were in the a.s.sembly room. Some dispersed through other doorways, but Dar's overwhelming need was for sleep.

He pa.s.sed through into the sleeping chamber, found himself a clear s.p.a.ce, curled up in the air and lost consciousness almost at once.

Naismith awoke and sat up with a start. His heart was ham- mering. His own familiar bedroom, in the darkness relieved only by the glow from the living room, seemed almost bizarre ... the dream had been so vivid.

He got up, turned on a light, stood blinking at his image in the mirror, then sat down on the bed. "Dream" was not the word-he had been Dar. Looking back on it now, the experi- ence had nothing of the incoherence or fantasy of a remem- bered dream. Every detail was clear and vivid, and as he thought about it now, he could even call up things that had been hinted at in the dream itself.

The "director," for example. Naismith absently stroked his left forearm. He could almost feel the shape of the thin, flexible device strapped to his arm. Whenever he wanted to move, in that curious place without gravity, he had merely had to tense his forearm slightly, and point in the direction he wanted to go.

That place existed. Sitting hunched on the bed in the pre- dawn darkness, Naismith grimly strove to bring back all the details he could.There were cloudy memories of dances performed in mid- air by troupes of Entertainers like himself ... a vision of a girl's face, and the name Liss-Yani. . . . Naismith pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. The memories were fading.

Disturbed, he sat and smoked for half an hour before he went back to bed. Even then, he could not rest, and it was hours before he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

Sometime before dawn, he dreamed again of the staring, green faces of the dead men in the smoke-filled corridor. It was truly a dream this time, and he knew it; yet he could not shake off a feeling of horror as those hideous dead faces swam up toward him through the mist. They were silently trying to explain something; one in particular appeared again and again, face distorted, mouth agape....

Naismith awoke, with a confused sense that he had almost understood something important. At last, as he stood with razor in hand in front of the bathroom mirror, he realized what it was.

The face of the dead man, except for its green color and the lack of a beard, might have been Churan's.

It was Sat.u.r.day; Naismith had nowhere to go, but the idea of staying in the apartment, even long enough to eat breakfast, was intolerable. He left the building and began walking up the curving street toward the park on the crest of the hill.

Suddenly and without surprise, he knew what he must do.

He calculated rapidly: he had some four hundred-odd dollars in his checking account. That would be enough to take him to the East Coast, and allow him some breathing s.p.a.ce to find a job until he could earn a teaching certificate in whatever state he chose....

His branch bank was only five blocks away. It would be better not to go back to the apartment at all.

The teller greeted him pleasantly. "What can we do for you this morning, Mr. Naismith?"

"I'd like to close my account. Can you tell me what the exact balance is?"

The teller's smile grew fixed. "I don't quite understand, Mr.

Naismith."

Naismith scowled irritably. "I want to close out my account,"

he repeated.

"But, sir," the teller said, "don't you remember, you closed it out yesterday?"

"I what?" Naismith said, flushing with anger.The teller's smile had vanished. "Well, sir, if you'll wait just a moment, I'll get the records."

He came back with a bundle of papers. "Here is your closing statement, Mr. Naismith-we were just about to mail it to you.

Here are your canceled checks-and here is your withdrawal slip, dated yesterday."

Naismith stared at the paper. It was exactly what it seemed to be: a withdrawal form, made out for $412.72, and signed by himself.

"But this is a forgery," he said at last, and stared at the teller.

"Who paid this put-was it you?"

The man blinked at him. "I can't just recall," he said vaguely, and turned. "Oh, Mr. Robinson."

The manager drifted over; he was a portly young man with a pale, dissatisfied face. "Anything the matter?"

The teller explained it, adding, "Mr. Naismith claims the withdrawal slip is forged-but I know we paid it to him."

"Well, I'm sure we can straighten this out. Howard, will you get on the phone to Jack Gerber and ask him to come over here?" To Naismith he said, "Mr. Gerber is our attorney. While we're waiting for him, let's step into my office."

Naismith crumpled the paper in his hand. "Never mind," he said abruptly. He turned and walked out.

He understood now what was happening; but understanding it made no difference to the wave of helpless anger that swept through him.

He was being pushed from one untenable position to another, like a king being driven by a series of checks across the chess- board.