He said it through chattering teeth.
For now he knew … now he knew the answer.
He put up his other hand and grasped the wrist of the hand that held the gun and the muzzle steadied. West gritted his teeth together to stop their chattering.
His thumb went down against the activator and held it there and the flame from the gun’s muzzle spat out and mushroomed upon the painting. Mushroomed until the entire canvas was a maelstrom of blue brilliance that hissed and roared and licked with hungry tongues.
Slowly the tree ran together, as if one’s eyes might have blurred and gone slightly out of focus. The landscape dimmed and jigged and ran in little wavering lines. And through the wavering lines could be seen a twisted and distorted man whose mouth seemed open in a howl of rage. But there was no sound of howling, just the purring of the gun.
With a tired little puff the mushrooming brilliance and the painting were gone and the gun’s pencil of flame was hissing through an empty steel frame still filled with tiny glowing wires, spattering against the wall behind it.
West lifted his thumb and silence clamped down upon him, clamped down and held the room … as it held leagues of space stretching on all sides.
“No painting,” said West.
An echo seemed to run all around the room.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West knew it was no echo, just his brain clicking off endlessly the words his lips had said.
“No painting,” the echo said, but West was in some other world, some other place, some otherwhere. A machine that broke down the spacetime continuum or whatever it was that separated Man’s universe from other, stranger universes.
No wonder the fruit upon the tree had looked like the fruit upon the table. No wonder he had thought that he heard the wind in the leaves.
West stood up and moved to the wall behind him. He found a tumbler and thumbed it up and the lights came on.
In the light the smashed other-world machine was a sagging piece of wreckage. Cartwright’s body lay in the center of the room. A chittering thing ran across the floor and ducked into the dark beneath a table. A grinning face peeped out from behind a chair and squalled at West in cold-boned savagery.
And it was nothing new, for he had seen those faces before. Pictures of them in old books and in magazines that published tales of soul-shaking horror, tales of things that come from beyond, of entities that broke in from outside.
Just tales to send one shivering to bed. Just stories that should not be read at midnight. Stories that made one a little nervous when a tree squeaked in the wind outside the window or the rain walked along the shingles.
It had taken the wizardry of the Solar System’s best band of scientists to open the door that led into the world beyond.
And yet people in unknown, savage ages had talked of things like these … of goblin and incubus and imp. Perhaps men in Atlantis might have found the way, even as Nevin and Cartwright had found the way. In that long-gone day letting loose upon the world a flood of things that for ages after had lived in chimney-corner stories to chill one to the marrow.
And the pictures he had seen?
Ancestral memory, perhaps. Or a weird imaging that happened to be true. Or had the writers of those stories, the painters of those pictures. …
West shuddered from the thought.
What was it Cartwright had said? The work is started on the other planets.
The work of passing along the knowledge, the principles, the psychology of the alien things of otherwhere. Education by remote control … involuntary education. Stella, the telepathic Stella, singing back on Earth, darling of the airways. And she was an agent for these things … she passed along the knowledge and a man would think it was his own.
That was it, of course, the thing that Nevin and Cartwright had planned. Remake the world, they’d said. Sitting out on Pluto and pulling strings that would remake the world.
Superstitions once. Hard facts now. Stories once to make the blood run cold. And now—
With the source dried up, with the screen empty, with the Pluto gang wiped out, the cults would die and Stella would sing on, but there would come a time when the listeners would turn away from Stella, when her novelty wore off, when the strangeness and the alienness of her had lost their appeal.
The Solar System would go on thinking imp and incubus were no more than shuddery imagery from the days when men crouched in caves and saw a supernatural threat in every moving shadow.
But it had been a narrow squeak.
From a dark corner a thing mouthed at West in a shrill singsong of hate.
So this was it, thought West. Here he was, at the end of the Solar System’s trail, in an empty house. And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.
Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.
There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.
Then he could settle down.
There were robots, of course. One had brought in the dinner.
Later on, he said.
But there was something else to do … something to do immediately, if he could just remember.
He stood and looked around the room, cataloguing its contents.
Chairs, drapes, a desk, the table, the imitation fireplace. …
That was it, the fireplace.
He walked across the room to stand in front of it. Reaching up, he took down the bottle from the mantel, the bottle with the black silk bow tied around its neck. The bottle for the last man’s club.
And he
