the three of them, set into the sand? We had to brush them off to find them. They were covered with sand.”
“Yes, I remember. Yesterday the card players were sitting on one of them.”
“The card players? Why should the card players—”
“Never mind that now. What about the stones?”
“What if there were other stones? Stone forming a walk that led up to the cube? Three walks up to the cube. Put there so that anyone who wanted could walk up to the cube, safe from whatever it is that guards it. But covered by sand so the walks can’t be seen.”
“You mean…”
“Let’s have a look,” she said. “We could cut a tree branch or a bush and use it as a broom.”
“I’ll use it as a broom,” he said. “You stay back, out of the way.”
She said, meekly, “All right. I’ll be right behind you.”
They found a bush and cut it down.
As they approached the circle of sand, she said, “The sign is down. The warning sign, in Russian. You pounded it in again and now it’s down, mostly covered by the sand.”
“There’s someone here,” he said, “who works hard to make it tough on people. Notes are lost, signs are down, walks are covered. Which of the stones should we start with?”
“I don’t think it matters. If one doesn’t work out, we’ll try another.”
“If there are other stones, if there is a walk. What do we do when we get up to the cube?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He walked out on the slab and crouched cautiously at the end of it, reached out with the bush to brush at the sand. Underneath the brushing another slab showed through. He brushed some more.
“You are right,” he said. “There is another stone. Why didn’t we think of this to start with?”
“A mental lapse,” she said. “Brought on by apprehension. Jurgens had been crippled and that business with the Parson and the Brigadier had us scared.” “I still am scared,” he said.
He cleaned the near end of the second slab, stepped out on it and swept the sand off the rest of it. Leaning out, he brushed at the sand in line with the second slab. Another slab appeared.
“Steppingstones,” said Mary. “Right up to the cube.”
“Once we get there, what happens?”
“We’ll find out then,” she said.
“What if nothing happens?”
“Look,” she said, “at least we will have tried.”
“I suppose there’s that,” he said.
“One more slab,” he said, wondering if there would be another slab. It would be just like the jokers who ran this business to lay out a path and leave it one stone short.
He leaned out and brushed, and there was another slab.
Mary moved up beside him and they stood together, facing the deep-blue wall of the cube. Lansing put out a hand and ran his palm flat across the wall.
“There is nothing,” he said. “I’ve been thinking all this time there might be a door. But there isn’t. If there were, you’d see at least a hairline crack. Just a wall, that’s all.”
“Push on it,” said Mary.
He pushed on it and there was a door. Quickly they stepped through it and the door hissed shut behind them.
30
They stood in an enormous room filled with blue light. Tapestries hung about the walls, and between the tapestries were windows — those portions of the walls not masked by the tapestries. Scattered all about the room were groupings of furniture. In an upholstered basket close to the door a curled-up creature slept. It resembled a cat, but was not a cat.
“Edward,” said Mary, breathlessly, “those windows look out on the world we left. There could have been people in here watching us both now and the other time that we were here.”
“One-way glass,” said Lansing. “A visitor can’t see in, but can be seen from inside the room.”
“It isn’t glass,” she said.
“Well, of course it’s not, but the principle’s the same.”
“They were sitting here,” said Mary, “laughing at us while we were trying to get in.”
The room, in all its emptiness, seemed to be unoccupied. Then Lansing saw them. Sitting in a row on a large couch at the far end of the room were the four card players, sitting there and waiting, their dead-white, skull-like faces staring fixedly at them.
Lansing nudged Mary and gestured at the players. When she saw them, she shrank back against him.
“They’re horrible,” she said. “Will we never get away from them?”
“They have a way of turning up,” he said.
The tapestries, he saw, were not normal tapestries. They moved — or, rather, the scenes that were depicted on them moved. A brook sparkled in the sun and the little waves and eddies brought about as the water gurgled down a rocky incline were actual, moving waves and eddies, not cleverly painted waves and eddies. The branches of the trees that grew along the brook moved in the wind and birds flew about among them. A rabbit crouched, nibbling in a patch of clover, then hopped to another place and resumed its nibbling.
On another of the tapestries young maidens, clothed in gauzelike veils, danced blithely in a forest glade to the piping of a faun who, in his playing, danced more energetically, although less gracefully, than the maidens, his cloven hoofs thumping on the sod. The trees that sur rounded the glade, great misshapen, not quite ordinary, trees, were swaying to the music, also dancing to the pipe.
“We might as well,” said Mary, “go across the room and see what it is they want of us.”
“If they’ll talk to us,” said Lansing. “They may just sit and look at us.”
They started walking down the room. It was a long, awkward length of space to cover with the card players watching, without a muscle moving in their faces. These could be the kind of men, if they were men, who might find it impossible to move their lips to smile, impossible to laugh, impossible to be human.
They sat, unmoving, in a row upon the couch, their hands placed firmly on their knees, with never a flicker of expression to indicate they saw anything at all.
They were so alike, so like four peas in a pod, that Lansing could not think of them as four, but only as a single entity, as if the four were one. He did not know their names. He had never heard their names. He wondered if they might, in fact, have no names. To distinguish one from the other, he assigned them identities, mentally tying tags upon them. Starting from the left, he would think of them as A, B, C and D.
Resolutely, he and Mary marched down the length of room. They came to a halt some six feet from where the players sat. They came to a halt and waited. So far as the card players were concerned, it seemed, they were not even there.
I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to speak, Lansing told himself. I’ll stand here till they speak. I’ll make them speak.
He put his arm around Mary’s shoulder and held her close against him, the two of them standing side by side, facing the silent players.
Finally A spoke to them, the thin slash of mouth moving just a little, as if it were an effort to force out the words.
“So,” he said, “you have solved the problem.”
“You take us by surprise,” said Mary. “We are not aware a problem has been solved.”
“We might have solved it sooner,” Lansing said, “if we had known what the problem was. Or even that there was a problem. Now, since you say we’ve solved it, what happens? Do we get to go back home?”
“No one ever solves it the first time round,” said B. “They always must come back.”
“You’ve not answered my question,” said Lansing. “What happens now? Do we go back home?”
“Oh, my, no,” said D. “No, you don’t go home. We could not let you go.”
