I put my last thought into words.
'I'm alive.' I said, 'and I'm in your hands.'
She laughed lightly. 'You find it a compromising situation? But you're quite correct. You accepted life from me, or through me, rather. Does that suggest anything to you?'
My memory may have been lousy, but another, long unused section of my mind was clicking. 'When you get anything,' I said, 'you have to pay for it and sometimes money isn't enough, though I've only once or twice been in situations where money didn't help.'
Three times now,' she said. 'Here is how it stacks up; You've bought your way with something other than money, into an organization of which I am an agent. Or perhaps you'd rather go back to the room where I recruited you? We might just be able to manage it.'
Through the walls of the cage and shaft I could hear the sirens going full blast, underlining her words.
I shook my head. I said, 'I think I knew that—I mean. that I was joining an organization—when I answered your first question.'
'It's a very big organization.' she went on, as if warning me. 'Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as. you, are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and 1s merciless to its employees.'
“I. G. Farben?' I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humour.
She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, 'And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.'
'Which is?' I asked.
'The Spiders,' she said.
That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that.
She watched me. 'You might call it the Double Cross,' she suggested, 'if that seems better.'
'Well, at least you don't try to prettify your organization,' was all I could think to say.
She shook her head. 'With the really, big ones yon don't have to. You never know if the side into which you are born or reborn is 'right' or 'good’—you only know that it's your side and you, try to learn about it and form as opinion as you live and serve.'
'You talk about sides,' I said. 'Is there another?'
'We won't go into that now,' she said, 'but if you ever meet someone with an S on his forehead, he's not a friend, no matter what else he may be to you. That S stands for Snakes.'
I don't know why that word coming just then, gave me' so much worse a scare—crystallized all my fears, as it were—but it old. Maybe it was only some little thing, like Snakes meaning DTs. Whatever it was, I felt myself turning to mush.
'Maybe we'd better go back to the room where you found me,' I heard myself saying. I don't think I meant it. though I surely felt it. The sirens had stopped, but I could hear a lot of general hubbub, outside the hotel and inside it too, I thought—noise from the other elevator shaft and it seemed to me, from the floor we'd just left— hurrying footsteps, taut voices, something being dragged. I knew terror here, in this stalled elevator, but the loudness outside would be worse.
'It's too late now,' my conductress informed me. She slitted her eyes at me. 'You see. Buster,' she said. you're still back in that room. You might be able to handle the problem of rejoining yourself if you went back done, but not with other people around.'
'What did you do to me?' I said very softly.
*Tm a Resurrectionist,' she said as quietly. 'I dig bodies out of the space-time continuum and give them the freedom of the fourth dimension. When I Resurrected you, I cut you out of your lifeline close to the point that you think of as the Now.'
“My lifeline?' I interrupted. 'Something in my palm?”
'All of you from your birth to your death,' she said.
“A you-shaped rope embedded in the space-time continuum—I cut you out of it. Or I made a fork in your lifeline, if you want to think of it that way, and you're in the free branch. But the other you, the buried you, the one people think of as the real you, is back in your room with the other Zombies going through the motions.'
-'But how can you cut people out of their lifelines?' asked. 'As a bun-session theory, perhaps. But to actually do it—'
'You can if you have the proper tool,' she said flatly swinging her handbag. 'Any number of agents might have done it. A Snake might have done it as easily as a Spider. Might still—but we won't go into that.'
'But if you've cut me out of my lifeline,' I said, 'and given me the freedom of the fourth dimension, why are we in the same old space—time? That is, if this elevator still is?'
'It is,' she assured me. 'We're still in the same space-, time because I haven't led us out of it We're moving through it at the same temporal speed as the you we left behind, keeping pace with his Now. But we both have an added mode of freedom, at present imperceptible and inoperative. Don’t worry, I'll make a Door and get us out of here soon enough—if you pass the test.'
I stopped trying to understand her metaphysics. Maybe I was between floors with a maniac. Maybe I was a maniac myself. No matter—I would just go on clinging to what felt like reality. 'Look,' I said, 'that person t murdered, or left to die, is he back in the room too? Did you see him—or her?'
She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the. room.'
An aching impulse twisted me a little. 'Maybe I should try to go back—' I began. 'Try to go back and unite the selves ...'
'It's too late now,' she repeated.
'But I want to,' I persisted. 'There’s something pull- ing at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.'
She smiled unpleasantly. 'Of course there is,' she said. 'It's the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.'
I drew back from her. 'Why do you keep saying 'or’?' I blustered. 'I didn't look but you must have seen. You must know. Whom did I kill? And what is the Zombie me doing back there in that room with the body?'
'There's no time for that now,' she said, spreading the mouth of her handbag. 'Later you can go back and find out, if you pass the test.'
She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a delicate branding iron— especially when its tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.
'The test?' I faltered, staring at the thing.
'Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth dimension or only die in it.'
The star began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Then it held still, but Something that was part of it or created by it went on spinning like a Helmholtz colour wheel—a fugitive, flashing rainbow spiral. It looked like the brain's own circular scanning pattern become visible and that frightened me because that is what you see at the onset of alcoholic hallucinations.
'Close your eyes,' she said,
I wanted to jerk away, I wanted to lunge at her, but I didn't dare. Something might shake loose in my brain if I did. The spiral flashed through the wiry fringe of my eyebrows as she moved it closer. I closed my eyes.
Something stung my forehead icily, like ether, and I instantly felt that I was moving forward with an easy rise and fall, as if I were riding a very gentle roller' coaster. There was a low pulsing roar in my ears.
I snapped my eyes open. The illusion vanished. I was standing stock still in the elevator and the only sounds: were the continuing hubbub that had succeeded the sirens. My conductress was smiling at me, encouragingly.
I closed my eyes again. Instantly I was surging forward through the dark on the gentle roller-coaster and the hubbub was an almost musical roar that rose and fell. Smoky lights showed ahead. I glided through a cobble- stoned alleyway where cloaked and broad-hatted bravoes. with rapiers swinging at their sides turned their heads to stare at me knowingly, while women in gaudy dresses that swept the dirt leered in a way that was half inviting, half contemptuous.
