Man of the World by Robert Gibson

29:  fame

A bedside alarm buzzed in a darkened room. The sound caused a bulky form to twitch; a hand started to move, then flopped back. The alarm buzzed again.
    “Whaaa,” wheezed from the mound that lay fully clothed on the bed. Pelhet Loirr, Mayor of Heism and the second most powerful man in Vevtis, peered groggily at the clock. Ah, still early afternoon, the dials indicated, while chinks of sunlight shone past the heavy velvet curtains. If only a law were passed that nothing be allowed to happen during siesta on a hot day like this.
    “Dronnard here,” said the voice from the communicator. “Sir, a thing has happened…”
    “Ah-huh? Can’t hear your mumble, man. Speak up.”
    “Seemingly,” said the struggling voice, “er, Rinka has, er, arrived. It can’t be, of course, sir, but –”
    The Mayor swung erect. It occurred to him that never before had he been addressed as “sir” by Dronnard on a private circuit.
    It also flashed upon him, what the reason must be for this sudden formality on the part of the security chief. Dronnard is recording this. No use ever trying to get him to admit to it, but I bet it’s so. He must believe that this is something continentally big –
    Mayor Pelhet Loirr had reached late middle age with a sound grasp of his own limits, wide enough limits, in his view, for a successful operator of the levers of power. He liked to suppose that he still possessed, in his rotund frame, enough energy to respond to the unexpected stunt, feint or outright attack by some political enemy. In every case so far, those who had thought to use him ended up by being used by him.
    “What more can you tell me?” he demanded, and as Dronnard babbled on the Mayor realized that the security chief was adding nothing material to the basic message. Dronnard, in short, was flummoxed. And if that was so, what else might not be possible?
    Rinka ninety-six days early? Arriving on the day it set out? This stunt, whatever it was, sounded like a practical joke of no ordinary dimensions. Pelhet grinned to himself. A rare treat! At the moment he could not think of any point to it, nor any clue as to the identity of the plotters or impersonators or whatever word might best be used to describe them. But he did know that Dronnard would not have wakened him for any trivial reason. And now, rather than quiz the mystified man any further, the Mayor’s best move would be to get to the waterfront himself.
    So he got his deputy on the phone, then told Dronnard to expect them both. Within a minute he was hurrying down the mansion steps to where his chauffeur-driven Typhon waited.
    Deputy Mayor Morkayl Siall was sprawled in the other back seat as Pelhet swung in. Morkayl’s huge glasses and balloonlike head gave him a cerebral look on posters and news photos, but now his moonfish face wore a look of comic protest. “Boss, what’s this all about? I’m confused.” His arms flapped as the car jerked forward.
    Confused, he says, ham that he is, yet neither of us is completely surprised, that some joker has tried to subvert or exploit the Quincentennial. All we have to find out is which group of attention-seekers is responsible.
    “It appears,” said Pelhet tonelessly as they sped towards the docks, “that Rinka has arrived – 96 days early.”
    Morkayl’s eyes swam pensively behind their lenses. “So it must have started out 96 days early, instead of this morning.”
    Pelhet shrugged. “Or…”
    “Someone built another replica of Rinka and concealed it nearby.”
    “Or…?”
    “Or, third possibility, somebody’s discovered a pretty fast propulsion system,” snickered Morkayl.
    The Mayor said sourly, “Most amusing, I agree. We must find out what trick has been pulled and we must do so politely, if possible, at least until we’re sure who’s behind it.”
    “So which takes priority, boss – the politeness or the snatch?”
    That indeed was the question. Snag the ship fast and risk causing offence to an ally of King Restac? That might be the only way of securing priceless knowledge – supposing the knowledge was there to be gained – but at the risk of a busted political career…
    Or he could “play it straight”, greet the newcomers and wait for them to show their hand – at the risk that said hand might reveal some danger to the state. In which case he, Pelhet Loirr, would get blamed for allowing the threat to surface.
    That would most likely finish him.
    He made up his mind.
    “We’re in the dark. Our priority must be to get out of the dark. So…”
    “So search the ship quickly before anyone can get rid of the evidence, if any still exists.”
    “That’s it. See any objections? Immediate, practical objections to a quick search? Dronnard, what do you really think?  Seriously, now.”
    “No objections, not really, unless… You surely don’t believe the vessel might shoot off at a hundred miles a minute, with you on it?” The security chief paused for an incredulous glance at his boss’s expression. “You do believe it, sir! You believe that they crossed the ocean in an hour!”
    Pelhet murmured, “I only ever believe in one thing, namely, my instincts; right now they’re telling me to fasten down that ship.”
    Dronnard and Morkayl subsided. It was no use arguing further. Besides, their boss was the political animal best qualified to sniff his way around without turning up his nose at the pseudo-impossible.
    The car stopped and the Mayor got out. Photographers’ flashbulbs popped in his face, making it certain that tomorrow’s front pages would display the stout sparse-haired figure emerging onto the windswept waterfront to cope with whatever was going on. Mayor Takes Action. Well, thought Pelhet, they want action, I give ’em action. Ignoring the babble of reporters, he stared for a few seconds at the incredible ship – yes, it looked like the ship. Then he went to confer with the waiting police chief.
    They watched while men of the port police attached cables to the vessel which had called itself Rinka II.
    Meanwhile its crew, in the manner of folk who were aware that they were in trouble, stood in a forlorn little bunch on the concrete dock, watching without protest as their ship was secured, and placidly submitting to interrogation by port officials who wrote down their details.  
    The Mayor lowered his binoculars and sighed. The next step must be for himself to question the visitors personally, and simultaneously to welcome them – just in case there was something real about all this.
    He noted that their captain had detached another man from the rest of his group, so that the pair stood waiting a little apart. Pelhet Loirr turned his head, met Dronnard’s eye and gave a voiceless nod. The security police began to fan out as Pelhet strode forward, his right hand outstretched in welcome.
    The moments dragged as he advanced and his mind raced in vain after clues as to what might be behind the ship’s weirdly premature arrival. For this was indeed the ship, confirmed his eyes as they flickered this way and that. Nonsense, said the logical surface of the Mayor’s mind. It could not be Rinka. The idea was absurd. But then what? Some foreign impostors trying to wrongfoot King Restac’s government? Or some domestic enemy of the Re-Enactment Committee, either here or across the ocean in Dranl? He’d prefer the ship to be genuine, impossible though that was. Impossible yet, somehow, true…
    He approached to within a couple of yards of the strangers, and halted.
    The impossible captain bowed to the Mayor of Heism, and spoke:
    “Awset Fadron, commanding Rinka II.”
    At close quarters there could be no doubt. Fadron was fairly well known, on both sides of the Zard Ocean. It should have been obvious that he had to be who he said he was. No impostor could hope to fool the nations in this matter. So the ship truly was Rinka II. And that meant…
    The Mayor drew himself up. “Welcome to Heism, Captain. Somewhat earlier than expected, eh?”
    The Captain’s face fell. No act, this – his skin was pale and sickly, as if he had swallowed poison. He shook his bowed head. Then he lifted his eyes to the Mayor’s.
    “Rmr. Mayor: as to how this can be, I know no more than you. But,” he added as Pelhet quizzed this statement with his eyebrows, “I won’t go so far as to say that none of us know.” The Captain’s tone had become suddenly harsh. With a pinched-nosed jerk of the head in the direction of a tall fellow standing nearby he went on, “May I introduce you to our helmsman, Midax Rale. Midax, I think the Mayor will wish to see the black box – now.”
    Pelhet raised his brows still further. “Black box, eh-eh? And you, Captain, are truly disclaiming knowledge of what has happened?”
    “I am, Mr Mayor.”
    Pelhet looked from the captain to the saturnine face of Midax Rale. “Proceed.”
    The helmsman turned, and silently began to walk. The Mayor followed him, up the gangway, onto Rinka’s deck.
    Treading the planks of the otherwise deserted vessel they came eventually to the bows, where Midax Rale stopped by the helm and with a careless gesture spoke at last, “There it is, Mr Mayor.”
    Pelhet did not like the man’s look, nor his voice. “You are telling me that this computerised guidance unit somehow took your ship across the Zard in a single hour.”
    “It does sound as though that is what I am telling you.”
    Insolence is itself information. The Mayor’s face smoothed as his mind settled into decision. “You know, I don’t think it’s very hospitable of me to keep you talking like this at the end of such a lengthy voyage. I know just the hotel for you…”
    He glanced to make sure that the man understood; for after all, what was the use of a civilized hint if it wasn’t understood?
    “A comfortable hotel,” nodded Midax, “very private, for an extended holiday, all expenses paid…”
    “Paid,” beamed the Mayor, “with information.”
    Midax Rale remained calm as though he had decided to ignore the threat. That was fine by the Mayor. Protest would have been equally fine – for the Mayor held all the cards. I can tell that this fellow is unpopular. To isolate an unpopular man is not hard to do. Even easier, when his companions believe he has done something uncanny. Just look at them now. The way they stare as they watch us return from our look at the “black box” – as if they know, in their hearts, that the real black box is the inside of that helmsman’s head.
    It was a fantastic and alarming conclusion to reach, and yet Pelhet was not too frightened. So what if he were up against a paranormal individual? A brooding-genius type, perhaps; anyhow, a very dangerous man; but what could the fellow do here? This harbour, this town, was Pelhet’s patch; his influence bestrode it; he had an ample following who were accepted even as they pushed and shoved to clear a way for him and his prisoner through the crowd. It was impossible for him to believe that any one eccentric individual could rupture this edifice of power.
    With satisfaction he noted that normal work was resuming even as he watched. Cranes once more swivelled their loads onto decks and off them; the number of spectators intent on Rinka had begun to dwindle as some people decided that there was nothing more to see.
    During the next few hours events proceeded from the Mayor’s point of view without a hitch. The comfortable “hotel” room to which he consigned Rinka’s helmsman was set deep inside the Justiciate. The captain and crew he permitted to stay wherever they liked, as guests of the city of Heism; meanwhile he went round the city himself, dispensing assurances, and by late evening was back inside his own office, listening to Dronnard recount the results of the first interrogation.
    “Just like you told me, boss, I’ve gone easy on him so far,” drawled the security chief as he slouched facing the darkening sky beyond the Mayor’s soundproofed window.
    “I take it that despite being hampered by my squeamish instructions, you have gained a certain amount of information,” said Pelhet dryly.
    “Yeah, we’re fairly sure now that the ‘black box’ is a myth. Just a story which Rale, when asked, is happy to confirm for his own reasons.”
    “What reasons?” demanded the Mayor, pacing up and down, and then answered his own question: “Of course it’s to stop his own people from realizing the full extent of what he, personally, has done. So, instead of a Black Box we have – we don’t know what.”
    Dronnard continued at his own pace, “We’ve been over the ship and found nothing significant. The steering programs in the autopilot system are quite standard – they’re what they purport to be, nothing more.”
    “So that confirms it.”
    “Yeah, we’re now sure that we’re not dealing with some tech wizard.”
    “Hmm,” said the Mayor. “Not a dangerous inventor in the accepted sense of the words. Instead, something worse. Don’t ask me what – yet. And don’t use that word ‘wizard’,” added Pelhet gloomily.  “Ah well, I didn’t expect you to crack the problem this evening. Trouble is, we’re likely soon to run out of time. Things have gone all right so far because we have sequestered Rale. But we daren’t nab the entire crew and we can’t prevent them from talking. Rumours are flying around, and you can bet on a press conference soon.”
    Dronnard shook his head, “You can relax about the time factor, boss. My opposite number has been in touch.”
    The Mayor gave a start. “What – the head of Dranl Security?”
    “Nuet Nku, no less.” Dronnard was smiling. “It’s funny. Barely a week ago I was, as usual, trying to drag him off his perch, just as he was trying to drag me off mine, but now the espionage game is on hold, now it’s all solidarity and international brotherhood as he wires across the Zard giving us full endorsement of our detention of Rale.”
    “You should have told me straight off,” snapped Pelhet.
    “I was about to,” assured Dronnard. “The confirmation came in just as you called me. Nku is of course naturally scared about what we might learn, but he’s even more scared of Rale let loose.”
    “So we can keep Rale under lock and key…”
    “For a while longer,” nodded Dronnard. “A significant while longer.”
    “Well, that’s a relief,” murmured the Mayor. Yet oddly enough, as he spoke the words, a wider melancholy wailed deep inside him. He had felt sad before now, at many aspects of the modern world, with its multifarious evidence of globalization, a world in which the old cultural horizons no longer kept their proper distance, a world of international legal rulings and commercial co-operations hemming him in, encroaching upon his patch. And now the coming “global village” was likely to twine around in a bigger way, he could sense it coming, its roots would soon shoot forward everywhere, but he could not articulate, even to himself, the stifling result – he could only shrug. After all – what Dronnard had just told him was to his immediate advantage. The two great powers were in accord. Larmonn was co-operating with Vevtis. He, Pelhet Loirr, was being given time.
    A hitherto silent person present at this secret meeting, Deputy Mayor Morkayl, now spoke out.
    “This matter of the press conference, Pelhet. I’ve heard it’s for tomorrow morning. What I need to know is, when we’re asked where this Midax Rale is, what are we going to say?”
    Dronnard saw the Mayor’s eye on him and answered, “You can stop fretting about that, too. We’ll manage the press conference. We can even produce Midax Rale. Put him on show and allow him to answer questions. He can either hedge, which leaves us no worse off, or he can provide real information, which we’re short of, to say the least.”
    “But what about the risks?” demanded the Mayor. “What if he accuses us –”
    “Then we bring the game onto a different level. We give our reasons for having detained him. We can afford to be honest about it, can’t we, boss? You must have realized, this fellow Rale has given everyone the creeps. The government will back us up, and so will the people, the more they think of the threat we’re facing.”
    “I doubt it will work as well as you assume,” said Pelhet dubiously, yet he was aware that such formless doubts weren’t going to stop the process. And he wasn’t about to use up all his political capital in a futile attempt to gag the press.
    The next morning dawned bright and cold, the crisp, energizing kind of day which makes one glad to be alive and free, thought Pelhet with a twinge of pity for the outcast helmsman who was not likely to be released in the foreseeable future. The pity was momentary – more durable was the Mayor’s exasperation. To think that society risked being turned upside down just because one irresponsible, subversive innovator had had the bad taste to do something impossible… and the helmsman’s world-shrinking act was, moreover, an epitome, a parody even, of all the globalising modern developments which depressed Pelhet’s spirits. They were apt to undermine his hard-earned position in society; as it were to erode his fiefdom. But worse than this, they would deprive him of the world he knew, the world he was comfortable with. Devil rot the fellow, gloomed the Mayor as he entered the Chamber of the Surrejoindery, the largest room at City Hall.
    Urban officials together with other members of the government had been allotted seats in the highest rear region of the hall, overlooking everyone else. Reporters, packing the stalls like an audience for a concert, faced Captain Fadron and his crew who sat on the dais. And amid that crew… where was the source of all this trouble? It was not easy to discern him; the obscurity of Midax Rale, drab-garbed amid the other smarter-looking Dranlans, made Pelhet more cheerful. Aha, his own countrymen don’t want attention paid to him, any more than I do. And if our reporters can be repelled in like fashion, maybe we can hush up the worst of it, after all.
    Captain Fadron walked to the lectern. Silence fell.
    “I have been asked to make a statement,” the Larmonnian gratingly announced. “You all know the bare bones of what has happened. The Crossing of the Zard by my ship, in minutes instead of months – it’s an offence against reality; that’s what we all, as human beings, instinctively feel. And we Larmonnians are as much in the dark as you Vevtians, about how it was done. And here, despite rumour, I speak for my entire country!” He raised a hand; murmurs were quelled. “But as for how long this state of ignorance is likely to continue: well, here I must appeal to your sense of justice. If and when the knowledge breaks upon us, and we conceal it, and you start to blame us for doing so – remember that you would likewise blame us for not doing so! Yes, citizens, we all want it concealed, and you’d be the first to complain at anyone who lets such a secret loose upon the world without due preparation.  Think about that, will you? Only if we are allowed to achieve it safely, will the day dawn when this invention turns the Zard Ocean into a pond and signals the dawn of a new age of almost instantaneous travel. Then talk of a global village will become true. Not before.”
    Good try, Fadron, thought Pelhet Loirr, you’re a man after my own heart, but you obviously don’t know reporters.
    Indeed, even before the Captain had finished speaking, the crowd of newsfolk were turning their heads this way and that, their uncertain, frustrated profiles questing like beaks to peck at any crumb of news. One stood up, getting a nod from Fadron.
    “Tennan Zess from the Heism Globe. Captain, the word is going round that one of your crew is particularly – in fact, solely – responsible for the deed that has stunned the world.”
    “I know that,” Fadron replied.
    “Well, is it true, and if it is, does that not refute your contention that nobody as yet knows the answer to the mystery? Surely, that one man must know it.”
    Fadron replied coolly, “The answers to your questions respectively are, yes, one of us is responsible, and no, that person cannot explain what he has done.”
    “Or perhaps won’t explain it?” suggested another reporter, rising amidst a jabber of widespread scepticism. “Veed Wass from the Eismoton Tide. Have you, Captain, sufficiently considered the possibility that a man of such power is likely to wish to play a lone hand?”
    In the back row Pelhet strained forward, aware that this was the point of crisis. The moment would bring the helmsman into the full and disastrous light of the media unless a miracle intervened.
    Midax Rale himself stood up.
    A sick feeling took hold of the Mayor and he guessed, from the renewed quiet that fell over the hall, that many others experienced the same clutch of foreboding.
    The reporters seethed in whispers. Just by rising to his feet the helmsman had captured the hall. Now the man’s voice sounded. They had never heard him before; they were shocked to hear him at all, disturbed at the words he chose to grind out:
    “One volunteer. Let me have one volunteer, and I’ll show you.”
    Babble erupted. Mayor Pelhet’s imagination ran swiftly to disaster. This could be it – the rupture of all control.
    The man continued above the din: “Well? Which of you dares to step up? I was helmsman of Rinka and I want to set your doubts at rest. Do you want to give me that chance, or not? Who has the guts?”
    Caught unprepared by this challenge, even the most hardened newsmen were at a loss. Every one of them hesitated for such a while that Pelhet began to hope that none would take up the offer. But then a woman stepped forward.
    She was not a Vevtian; by her clothing she was a westerner, and Pelhet rapidly calculated that she must be the reporter who had actually come over from Dranl on Rinka herself the day before. Somehow she must have separated from the crew when they had been assembled on the waterfront. Her press card had got her out, presumably. She must then have mingled with the Heisman crowds, to find her own separate way into the city and take her place in the conference this morning. And now he had to watch as she walked across the hall to rejoin her crewmates… more specifically, she was walking towards Midax Rale…
    Who was stepping out onto the front of the dais to meet her, holding out his hand.
    “Mezyf,” some heard the helmsman say. She took his hand, hesitantly, as if aware of the risk she was taking. If she had suspicions, they were surely confirmed when, the next moment, the petrified audience saw them disappear.
    Mezyf herself saw differently.
    In the blink of an eye her eyesight was wiped of meaning. Floor, chairs, people all shifted and slid as if painted onto moving sheets of glass.
    It wasn’t quite the same for her as for him.  For her: total bewilderment.  Meanwhile for him, on the other hand, everything became abbreviated in such a way that part of him knew (or at least intuited) that he was seeing a truth, in conformity with which the room appeared to shrink to about half of its former extent and – after a dazzling card-shuffle of shapes – to perhaps one eighth of its former population and number of objects, a disturbed remnant of jerky, flickering forms.
    Except, that is, for the form of Mezyf whose wrist he held. She still seemed solid enough.
    And she – judging by the desperate way her eyes were probing his face – could still see him. That certainly wasn’t true of the others: all those figures throughout the hall - the abbreviated few of them whom he could still see - were now staring in wild confusion at the spot where he had stood, the spot away from which he was leading his companion.
    He and she were escaping unseen.  Not only from this hall; with a bit of luck they were going to get much further, away from the Vevtian capital altogether.
    Like a man emerging from a high cell window, who feels the blend of exhilaration and tonic danger which must force him along a perilous ledge that will lead him either to freedom or to destruction, Midax strode in a direction forbidden to everyday sight, out of the building and into a narrowed, petty street.
    “Where’s this?” demanded Mezyf hoarsely.  “Where are we?”
    “Give me a moment.  I know what I’m doing.”
    His route was one which did not exist in the everyday world. It was along a kind of path which some inkling prompted him to term a straight line.
    For he did know what he was doing. He had done it yesterday. That had been on sea, whereas this was on land, but the principle was the same.
    Mezyf kept gasping, “What’s going on? Hey, answer me, what are you doing?”
    For a moment Midax failed to understand why anyone should need to ask that question. These straight lines were so compellingly sensible and obvious – when you move off from point A you just head straight for point B…
    It was only one dim-brained moment that he spent on this unreasonable stance, and then he realized that she had the right of it.  Of course he shouldn’t expect it to be obvious to her! And even he himself did not really have the pitiless, superhuman courage to believe continuously with all his heart in the physical truth of what he was doing; instead he had to view it during moments of relief as some kind of trick.
    This economy of spirit enabled him to reassure Mezyf:
    “We’re in some kind of diagram-dimension. Don’t worry, I know how to get us back to the real world.”
    At any rate he “knew” in the sense that a dreamer may know, uncomprehending, how to start a move in that dream. You just have to push, somehow, with your will. This deep assurance was all that saved him from being overwhelmed and lost. In all other respects, he and Mezyf were almost equally inexperienced. He had only seen the Abbreviation once; she hadn’t seen it at all before this. The city of Heism was hardly anything now.  Around it, visible through gaps between the small buildings, was a shrunken landscape, a world diminished to a miles-wide stage-set, covered with a frosty glitter which came from encrusted millions of tiny mirrors. Their sparkles were almost as small as those of real frost, a gentle layer which you could easily ignore (after the first surprise), and see through it to discern the shape and nature of the land.
    The terrain’s packed, compressed look, cluttered with a variety of features all recognizable as samples of the world they normally saw but much more carefully arranged to fit into a lesser space, made it seem as if a cunning and superlative artist had been determined to slot into it a representative of each type of field, fence, plant, tree, mineral, boulder and house. No large artificial structures were visible; no motorways or airports around the “city”, no skyscrapers inside it… but somehow such things did still seem represented by smaller analogues: a path instead of a motorway; a tarmac strip for an airport, a three-storey tower posturing as a skyscraper… all covered with the glittering mirror layer, which extended to some limit or barrier a mile or two away. That limit appeared as a discontinuity, a wall of change, beyond which there were no features on the land and no signs of weather in the sky, just a grey fuzz. All in all, this was a boxed-in world.
    The brains of Midax and Mezyf, mauled by this sight, translated the environmental shock into an inner voice. It was the voice of the mirrors, their eerie collective taunt: Now that you can see us, you can no longer see the show, because you see us instead, the mechanism of the show.  We are the special-effects team who juggle light, and when you drop back into your old illusion it will be because we are juggling your light.  The way we do it - if you still want that eked-out world - is to splinter each small field into a billion fields… 
    Midax and Mezyf were dumbly reluctant to tolerate the notion that this new précis world was the real one, yet they had to face the fact, for they could not avoid listening to the “voice” which was actually their own long-suppressed intuition:
    …so that you can go back to your eked-out world if you really want to, so that instead of field, path and tree, you will see field and path and tree plus field and path and tree plus field and field and path and path and tree and tree. And then you’ll be back where you think you belong. Any time. Just step back into our network.
    It was what Midax and Mezyf wanted to do, but they dared not “step back in” until they were sufficiently far away from the authorities at Heism.
    Thus for a while they must brave the concentrated wonder and mystery of the “box-realm”.  They picked their way out into the abbreviated countryside, stepping over low walls, and crossing barely garden-sized fields, passing cottages and ponds and hillocks and groves. Each object they met seemed to nod or sag with its weight of meaning, forcibly impressing them like an emotive banner, so that one little meadow stood for thousands of meadows, one path for many roads. From a single duckpond you could strain as many tons of psychic bullion as you might get from an ocean crossed by legendary fleets; in such style the gold of significance funnelled down into this summary of a world. As for people, there were none save occasional shadows.  They flicked on and off like spots on old movie film.  It became hard to bear. It was exhausting for the spirit.
    Midax guided Mezyf a few steps more towards a tiny brook which appeared ahead in the dim, condensed sparkle surrounding them. The brook was hardly more than a trickle, but he knew what it must be. He stepped over it, holding her hand, and she had to follow him. Then he halted, pulling her to a stop.
    At this point, he took the decision to make the dreamy effort, to perform the act which he could not put into words: the effect being, he allowed his eyesight to re-collapse into the zigzag optical network of everyday; whereupon the sparkle from a zillion mirrors died! The distance leaped back to a horizon. He had returned to the normal world.
    Mezyf saw him disappear but she still felt his hold on her – she had felt herself being pulled about and knew he must have been zig-zagging them both.  Instinctively reassured, she had put panic on hold until the mirrors died for her too, and the landscape leaped back to the bigness of the proper world.  She sighed as into her face blew the great spacious blessing of a breeze.  
    She and he clung to one another, dazed. He was in not much better case than she. He was very slightly helped by the tincture of understanding which he possessed, but not enough to prevent him from shivering with awe at what he had done.    
    He could imagine what Mezyf must be feeling, and any moment she would notice, she would see and understand, how great a distance they had come. For they stood a few paces from the northward bank of a mighty river which had to be the Dwaa. None other existed like it in this part of the world: half a mile from bank to bank, it flowed westwards in wide majesty towards its estuary on the Zard perhaps fifty miles away. Therefore they knew themselves to be beyond the national border of Vevtis. They now stood in the neighbouring country of Cazeen. They had escaped. 
    How should he play it, to her? She must approve of escape – but what of the means, the terrifying means?  Would it be more reassuring to let her believe that his feats had been performed by means of some secret device, some matter-transmitter or space-warper, or should he go for the psychological explanation, the idea that he carried some power in his head which defied space? The latter, surely. He had no shipboard gadgets to hand this time, nor dare he pretend that he was carrying a mini-gubbins up his sleeve. But in that case he must align himself with the so-called Paranormal and all its open-ended strangeness. Might that not add to her terrors? And then his thoughts slid onwards from her terror to his. He himself was afraid, wasn’t he? Well, that was his problem. (But was he healthily afraid, or was he getting used to his power… which might be worse? For the less he was afraid, the more he feared the reason – that he might already be at home in the madness which must come to someone who knows things that should not be known.)
    He must ground that electricity of fear. Say something concrete.  “Look for landmarks,” he muttered to Mezyf, who was coming out of her daze now. He pressed her shoulders, turning her away from the westward glint of the river panorama. He pointed instead at the conical mountain which rose beyond the horizon in the north-east.
    Mezyf responded in a nervy, piping voice, “That’s Mount Adsha and this,” she pointed to the river, “must be the Dwaa; Midax, we’ve just walked several hundred miles and,” her voice rose still further, “we did it in a couple of minutes, and how did we cross the river?”
    “Now listen. There is a natural explanation –”
    “Stop!” At her scream, he froze. She continued, “Don’t give me your explanation yet, you! It might not be very good, you see! And then I would have trouble with it, wouldn’t I? Whereas if you just keep it to yourself, I can believe it’s good, and that it would sound good if I heard it, and so I don’t have to hear it right now - So please just confirm for me that what I see is real and that we really are where we seem to be. Please.”
    “We are just beyond the national border of Vevtis. We stand in Cazeen. Which is fortunate, seeing as how we must have upset the Vevtian government.”
    Smiling tremulously, Mezyf raised both hands to her head, as though the act of controlling her breeze-blown hair was at that moment the most vital thing to do. From her throat came little hummings which Midax at first interpreted as throttled hysteria.
    However, she spoke collectedly:
    “I asked for it, and whew, I got it! So you can stop looking at me like that. I’m not whirly. I’m a reporter; I’ll take your explanation now.” No hysteria, then – just the sheer boiling ecstasy of having landed the scoop of all time.
    So, standing with her beside the great river while the tangy breeze ruffled them, Midax felt an elation rarer than friendship or love: namely, coincidence of purpose at a pivotal point in history. The duet of understanding put a zing in his heart. “I’ll tell you,” he began bluntly, “how we crossed the river. We stepped over it. It was easy. And the whole distance we covered wasn’t great – in the diagram dimension.”
    “The what?”
    “Or call it the straight line dimension. How I do it, I don’t know. But as you see, I can do it, and it is no dream.”
    “It works,” nodded Mezyf. “That’s quite a lot of an answer.”
    “We’ll work it some more,” he went on. He dared to breathe more easily now that her healthy excitement had expunged her panic. Indeed she was smiling as he began to put his plan into effect.
    Gently again, by the elbow, he turned her. When she faced north, he bent his face to hers, his eyes fixed upon the same line of sight as hers. “If you want to get someplace with this business… shut your eyes, keep them shut and take about twenty steps forward; I’ll tell you when to stop. Good… keep going… I’m with you, don’t worry; I’ll catch you if you stumble. But you won’t stumble… now, stop. Open your eyes.”
    She gazed around, speechless, at a different landscape. The scene where they had stood moments before was gone completely. It had vanished just as the city of Heism had vanished the first time. But this time she, Mezyf, had been in front, guided from behind; had stepped the steps herself.
    “You see,” said Midax, “if, under my instruction, you walk blind, so that your common sense doesn’t get to spoil things, you can do it too: the short-cutting of space.  And eventually you’ll be able to do it alone! But I have to show you the exact way first. And you can only do what I teach you. You can’t do more, because only I can see the straight lines; you understand?  For some reason I’ve got this aptitude, whatever you call it, for straight lines. Let’s do it again. Northward.”
    They did so, in stages, progressing fantastically, finding, with each halt, a stunning change of horizon. Mezyf’s brain could not help but insist – due to the altered latitude of the sun – that this northward journey was real; the repeated miracles must either shatter her courage, or forge it into stronger shape. What, after all, is a world? The big thought came to her: a world is a web of views and variety, a fabric woven of directions and distances. And what a pummelling this fabric had taken! Almost enough to make one doubt every impression, and to fall into catatonic denial of all of them. But the human mind can be saved by its glib streak. After half an hour of the abuse of the fabric of the world, Mezyf saw that satisfied expression upon Midax’s face, that told her he had brought them both where he wanted to be, and never mind the means. She followed his gaze and saw the domes and spires of the city of Oknokkot which glittered on the shore side of Cazeen’s northwestern-most plain.
    She drew her cloak more tightly about her, and grimaced at the climate. Midax watched her, again silently congratulating himself on having recruited someone who would do anything, suffer anything for a story.
    She spoke first, coolly, “What’s the next phase of your plan?”
    “In a word – survival,” smiled Midax. “When I get back to Heism I am going to be in big trouble…”
    “Well, yes, a stirrer like you…”
    “Exactly. I don’t have to spell it out, do I?.”
    “Then why go back to Heism?” she demanded.
    “I suppose,” he hesitated, “I fear that if the Vevtian government think of me as a threat at large, my shipmates might become hostages… I’d do better to ‘face the music’ at once and get it over with.”
    “Risky, though creditable. So what do you think the authorities may do to you?”
    “The great temptation,” he smiled crookedly, “on the part of some decision-maker in a secret room, will be to arrange some deplorable accident which will put me permanently out of the way, but nobody is going to give that order unless they can be sure that I am just a one-off. In other words, they won’t do it unless…”
    “Unless they can make a clean sweep!”
    “Precisely: you got it in one, Mezyf; military security demands a clean sweep. For them it must above all be a matter of making sure that some rival nation is not keeping the likes of me in reserve. And so long as they can’t be sure, they must keep me alive to study me, to use me and to deal with others like me. We’ll make sure they stay unsure.”
    “We?”
    “With your help, I hope to make it plain that I am not the only one who can do the trick.”
    She straightened. “You expect me –”
    “To see the straight lines? Not at all. You will not see them, you’ll simply use them, as I shall teach you, on a pre-defined path. Use them by rote. From here, just outside Oknokkot, I shall show you the exact bearing to follow, blind, to Kotenz. Thence back to Oknokkot. All of it taking about two minutes. And what you do, you can lead others to do. Roped and blindfolded behind you on a passenger service between the two cities, they’ll make you rich in no time.”
    Not the wealth, but the story, was irresistible.
    Obediently, therefore, she noted the precise direction in which she must face, and the exact number of steps to make, with eyes closed, in order to journey between the cities of Oknokkot and Kotenz. They did it several times, Midax standing further back from her each time. After a while, she was effectively doing it on her own.
    Glibness was essential to success: a honing of fact-rejection skills. The shifts of scene were still terrifying, so you evaded the thought of such landscape-wiping atrocities by any phrase that could trip off the tongue, like “teleporting ability”, “dimensional short-cut”, the glibness conquering distance without denying it; thus you avoided the terrible lurking truth, which was that the diagrammatic “short cut” was simply the real. Denying this, you could glory – shakily – in your new power.
    “Remember,” Midax said to her, “stay away from Heism. Stay away from me. You are my insurance and I am yours. I expect to hear about you soon, on the news.”
    “It’s darned inconvenient,” she complained; “I’ve left all my things back at the hotel. But since you’ve given me the scoop of the century, I forgive you. So – goodbye.”
    “Goodbye, Mezyf,” he said, his voice less than firm. And then he saw that she had disappeared. He had taught her well.
    Which raised another point –
    The very fact that the trick could be transmitted by rote learning, without any real understanding by the pupil, showed up a truth that disconcerted him –
    It confirmed that the achievement was physical. Spatial. Real.
    Sure, the means were mental – but the result was far from being “mind over matter”. Rather, it was mind humbly admitting a long-unseen truth about the real nature of the world.
    Roadblocks up! He clutched at the clichés of science fiction in order to save his sanity. So when, a minute later, he next performed his trick, he once again categorized glibly as a short-cut through some “higher dimension”.
    That was a term which he simply could not do without. It was his essential take on the eerie, abbreviated world – the sparkling box a few miles wide, bounded by an alien glare and inhabited by flickering shadows – which make possible his “short-cuts”.
    Thus fortified against the enormity of what he could now do, he strolled in straight lines across that winking world. In a few minutes he reached the quiet little hamlet where he must snap back – from the hamlet Heism to the clamorous metropolis, Heism.
    He reappeared on the waterfront. Crowds witnessed his pop into view. The nearest folk drew back, calling to others.  Within minutes police were pushing forward.
    Resigned to what must be endured, Midax made no move to avoid arrest. Six officers moved to surround him and he was handcuffed and hustled between them. He asked no questions; he accepted that he was in for an awkward few days.
    “Sir,” he heard one of them say to their leader, “if he’s what they say he is, cuffs won’t be enough.”
    The leader stuck out his chin: “You two – go fetch us some rope.”
    While the errand was accomplished at a hardware shop across the road, the remaining four officers held Midax in their grip. Not one of them looked him in the eye. Skies above, I really have scared them, came the thought as if newly minted.
    The rope was brought and passed through the cuffs and held tightly by the escort at each end. In this fashion he was marched along the streets to the Justiciate. A sunset mood took good hold of his mind as he was brought to a back room where the rope was fixed to two safe-handles on opposite walls. He could not possibly free himself although he was allowed enough slack to stretch on the couch provided.  He might do well to rest here. The room was a dingy but comfortable cell, its upholstery the colour of dusty brick… he sank almost into sleep.
    When, half an hour later, an official talked through the door-panel, to tell him that he had been charged with “disturbance of the peace” (well, of course they had to charge him with something), he hardly felt any interest. Long hours of tension and discovery had finally forced him, in exhaustion, to relax.
    Besides, the charge was true.
    There was no denying it. He had allowed the fact to become widely known that there was a power, possessed by him, which threatened to convulse the economy and the life of the world.
    His personal problem was that he had to live in this world. He must live alongside people who naturally feared any threat to turn society upside down. So if he was to survive he must dilute his uniqueness. Convince them that he wasn’t any more dangerous than anyone else…
    After an hour or so he judged the time right to call, “Hey!”
    He had moved as close as the rope allowed him towards the speaking-panel in the door. Again he raised his voice:
    “I am not without accomplices…”
    Shuffling steps receded, returned. He heard whispers in the corridor.
    The door opened and six slab-muscled guards entered, wearing uniforms that were not those of police. Two of them hacked through the rope at each end and held it, and then he was marched to another, much starker room where he was ordered to sit in front of a desk. One guard stood behind his chair; others stood around the desk, at which sat the compact, granite-faced official who had questioned him before.
    Dronnard, Chief of Heisman Security, wore a rumpled suit and looked dangerously tired. It came to Midax that this was the moment to fear. He heard the man say, “I have to tell you, Rale, the fix you have put us in is growing more awkward by the hour.”
    Midax licked his lips and husked, “I know: you can neither hold me indefinitely, nor let me go, if –”
    But he did not get to finish; his musings were ground under the juggernaut of the other’s voice:
    “It is as though you were a pretender to a throne.  Your very existence is fomenting –”
    A buzzer sounded. A messenger entered with a slip of paper for Dronnard. Midax felt the coldness running through his own veins as he watched the man read the paper and then look up with guarded eyes and thinned lips. Sweat stank in the air; Midax forced himself to draw breath.
    “It looks,” growled Dronnard, “as though you have company in iniquity, Rale.”
    Midax gambled on a probing question: “Is Mezyf well?”
    “Prospering,” his inquisitor replied.
    “Well,” offered Midax, “that tends to prove that I didn’t do away with her, anyhow.”
    “Personally, I never thought you had, else you would not have been fool enough to come back here.” Dronnard smote the desktop with his palm. “Psychokinesis, the report calls it – pfah! The end of my job, I call it!”
    “That’s not true,” Midax said. “You can feel easy about that. I can’t afford to be a menace, if I want to live.”
    Dronnard snorted, “Whatever the truth of that, we can’t lock all you freaks up indefinitely, I suppose.” He said it with finality, rising from the desk. “Release him,” he snarled over his shoulder as he walked to the door.
    Midax asked himself, Didn’t it sound as though every word he said was for the benefit of the guards?
    And he answered his own thought: A new orthodoxy is about to take shape.
    The guards took the rope off him and pointed down the corridor.
    “Out you go,” said one.
    He sensed their cold eyes on his back. He hesitated as he reached a frosted-glass door. Beyond it he seemed to see a mass of waving, a forest of gesticulations. “Out,” repeated the heavy.
    “Yes,” called Dronnard.  “Your tumult – face it.”
    Midax opened the door and confronted the mob – the authorities sardonically standing back. I would rather not be here, he thought, and he made ready to use his special skills to disappear… but as he listened he changed his mind. He became aware that the crowd was not seething with anger, it was merely frantic with excitement. Its front members were yelling valid, positive questions at him. Questions concerning what he had done: how he had done it: what it might mean for the people of Vevtis and of the world. Questions repeated by the multitude of mouths as the jostling mass churned. To answer them as best he could, he stood on that step for what seemed like hours.
    It was the hardest thing he had ever done: to pack meanings into yells, as if it were possible to make subtle points and fine distinctions while he swapped phrases with a crowd at the top of his voice; to nip in the bud those misunderstandings which might otherwise explode into disastrous life –
    “Midax, what did you do to your ship?” “How did you cross the Zard in an hour, Midax?” “Where I went, the Zard is a pond you can cross in minutes.” “Midax, you’ve been outside the world?” “Outside our view of it, maybe.” “Midax, can we, too, go anywhere in a minute?” “Thank your lucky stars, you can’t. Not unless I teach you – and I can only teach a few. Don’t worry, life, ordinary life, can go on.”
    Somehow, patiently, he answered them all.
    In the end he was able to plead weariness, because they became exhausted as well as he, and they ceased to press. A way opened for him, to pass among them, to go out and find a place to stay. The manager of the Eismoton Hotel, who had waited for him in the street, nabbed him. The place would do as well as any. He could not face looking for the lodgings which were reserved for Rinka’s crew. He wasn’t ready to face his old comrades.  Peace, oh for peace!  Not yet.  This mind-boggling day was not over yet. He snatched an hour’s rest before he heard a knock on his door and had to begin granting interviews to the dignitaries of Heism. The questions and answers in this session were simply more finely-put versions of those which had been shouted by the mob. Near sunset, the clamour finally came to an end.
    He was left alone with his thoughts at last. They included the most astounding thought of all, that this was a mere two evenings after that morning when he had waited for Jerre on the library steps at Dranl.
    The next three days, while he granted yet more interviews, to politicians, generals, civic officials and the media, revealed an impressive degree of support for himself and for what he had done.
    His own manner adapted in a fashion which also surprised him. As the days wore on, the lofty social contacts, the media interest, the popular adulation which surged over him in a hungry wave, all became easy to digest, like flossy light food, because it was almost nothing. Was he then taking fame for granted? As a matter of fact he had never agreed with those high-minded people who sneered at fame. He had always believed that as a means to an end – a way to communicate with like-minded souls – fame should act as some antidote to loneliness. Yet now he saw the nullity of it. Only one’s name and face can become widely known. Not one’s real self.  So it’s a waste of time to argue whether such fame is bad or good, for it is non-existent. Those excited folk are not cheering me, they are cheering an image… And yet – something must result, surely.
    The day on which he was granted an audience with King Restac in the throne room of Heism Palace, and crowds of supporters followed him there and back, convinced that he was a benefactor to humanity – that was the day he became impatient to complete the unfinished business of his life.
    The transceiver crackled, “Rmr. Clotain to see you, Rmr. Rale.”
    Midax, lonelier than an emperor, had wandered over to the window of his Heisman hotel-room. From here he could watch the crowds who waved banners and placards – “Long Live the Mover!” “Long Live the Discoverer!” – as he waited for the door-chime.
    Solitude and crowds, thought Midax – and companionship lost somewhere in the middle.
    When the chime came he took pleasure in the simple action of opening the door himself. At least he did have that much privacy. They hadn’t foisted servants or attendants upon him.  He could still give real private audiences to whom he chose.
    “Sit down, Inellan. Glad to see you,” he said, and it was the truth.
    “Er – glad to see you,” the older man echoed. “This turned out easier than I thought.”
    “Did you expect to have to run a gauntler of flunkies?”
    “Thousands – judging by how many folk are out there now, watching.”
    “My self-appointed guardians,” shrugged Midax. “The good people of Heism are anxious for their city’s reputation, you see. They’re keen to prevent me from being assassinated here.”
    Shying away from that line of conversation, Inellan mumbled: “About your offer. I’ve thought about it and I’m ready to take it.”
    “Good,” said Midax with inner glee. So, the fool was going to sail back with him tomorrow. Evidently unable to resist the cheap and easy opportunity to return to Pjerl. Thereby admitting (though such an idiot wouldn’t realize he was admitting anything) that his Year Troth blather was bogus. Great, keep it up. Discredit yourself thoroughly, there’s a good fellow.
    So that my Pjerl can consider herself free.
    “Here’s your boarding pass,” he added, scribbling an authorization to Inellan, and handing him the piece of paper.
    “That was quick.  Air thin on the mountain-top, eh?”
    Midax’s brows lifted at that remark, which he felt as acute as an arrow; but if a point had been scored, its twinge was drowned in the current of events.
    Next day the crowds on the Vevtian shore watched Rinka II draw slowly out of port – slowly, slowly, receding until the moment when Midax at the helm “switched on the drive”, the drive inside his head… and the vessel disappeared from the Vevtians’ sight. Now the incredible Crossing was repeated. Another historic offence, another flouting of reason, this time East to West instead of West to East.  Across the Zard in ten minutes.
    The visual effect was strangest for Midax, and yet more bearable for him than for all other witnesses. He was getting somewhat used to the sight of the abbreviated box-world, and therefore he could understand how one might move through it in such a short time, steering across such a small Zard Pond. For the others on board – mostly his former crewmates with an extra sprinkling of Vevtian top brass – the open seascape, remaining huge, ambushed their minds with a more violent terror, as for them the crossing remained full-size while speeded up, which Midax could sense from by their roller-coaster yells. If he had held them all linked by hand, perhaps some of them might have seen the “diagram dimension” which Mezyf, with his help, had seen; but he did not need them to see it that way.
    When the pitilessly short voyage had reached its end, he had to rouse his shipmates from near-catatonia.  Nudging them onto the gangplank, he judged it useless to say to them – in their appalled state – “I told you all what to expect.” Instead he looked past them to where the Dranl city officials awaited them on the shoreline, their bloodless faces quite as shocked as if the whole country had not been warned on the wireless of the time and the place where Rinka should appear. Midax sighed, realizing anew, from the flinching stares, how much he had stirred the world.
    Inevitably he must abandon any immediate hope of a peaceful return home.
    The next time he awoke to look out of yet another hotel window, it was in the most expensive suite of the Dranlian Grand.  From the verandah he could gaze out over the ocean whose size he had cheated by dimensional fraud. And now he must forget that ocean for a while. He must turn his thoughts to the land. Home? Yes, but forget that aspect of it. Here he once more stood on the mighty continent of Larmonn, that stretched to the west of him, across prairie and mountain, for three thousand as-yet-uncheated miles.
    At that moment, Midax’s mind darted to an old saga. A settlers’ folk-epic, the Lay of Zentonan, told of a great tribal migration. It was the story of how some folk traversed the mountain range that formed a massive divide between East Plain and West Plain. The old East Plain, full of childhood freedom and security, was interrupted in due course by the challenge of the mountains. This adult striving led in turn to the further West Plain, a new future, full of dangers, responsibility and fame.
    Then he thought about some modern cautionary tales. The modern Press was fond of alluding to them, especially the suddenly-altered lives of lottery winners, for instance. People who stupidly think, Whoppee, it’s all going to be easy now. Always, they turn out unable to cope. The deluge of new input: others’ attentions, expectations, demands… it’s always too much.
    I won’t go by that book, Midax vowed. I won’t be caught that way.
    He simply could not afford to be that kind of archetypal dunderhead.
    On the other hand, to avoid the trap, he must do more than make resolutions; he must make sure, absolutely sure, to consolidate before each advance. Not risk further leaps too soon; no!
    Especially not on this first day back in his own country.
    Don’t get too excited, but on the other hand, don’t despise fame – use it. You’ve thought this through before. Now comes the proof. In return for the isolation which fame will bring (yes, you’ve just swapped one isolation for another, sorry about that, can’t be helped) you will at least get the chance to be heard. From now on, people will listen to you. That’s the advantage. But take care – your every word and action, good and bad, will henceforth have a multiplier effect.
    Midax sat by the window with his head in his hands. He was like a walker on a ridge who knows he cannot linger. He also knows that after he descends to the valley his field of view will be much reduced; so he examines the options panoramically while he can.
    His present choice of path would be vital to his future.
    On a whim, he switched on the TV. The screen filled with a bearded face, saying, “I felt when I first met her that we connected, somehow.” Bully for you, Midax thought, switching the set off immediately.
    Aversion to banality and cliché helped to focus his mind. Right now he must not “connect, somehow”. Instead he must focus.
    A word was lacking from the language; a word he must now invent.
    To denote where he had been.
    The mysterious straight-line dimension had to be called something. It had to have a usable label that would suffice for the moment and discourage further premature attempts at understanding. Neither he, Midax Rale, nor the world at large was ready to understand, but still they had to speak. So –
    Straight line – long line – long-light – Glight.
    “Glight” would continue to make his fortune provided that he could bear it; and he could bear it so long as it did not swamp him with its reality-terror. To make sure it did not do that, he must be practical, he must continue to use the phenomenon purely as a transport trick, and not as an object of investigation.
    Yet, knowing his curious mind, could he forever refrain from daring more? Could he stop himself from probing, discovering, understanding? Well – he’d better refrain, that’s all. Else he’d get lost – or worse, found…
    Hmm… and how long is that resolution likely to last, Midax you inveterate cloud-gazer?
    Abstaining from wonder was not something he was good at.
    Perhaps, to be honest about it, he was hoping that after a long period of adjustment he would dare, successfully, to peep outward some more –
    Then he might become familiar with whatever Glight really was.
    And let’s hope, thought he, that when the time comes, I’ll do it without alerting any Powers to my trespassing…
    Even now, in a very small way, he found that he was resolved to peep, locally, here in his home environment, to see, just for a moment or two, what it looked like in Glight…
    Try it now.
    He stood up, went to the door of his room, opened it and ascertained, from the view up and down the stairwell, that no one was in sight. Now to see what it’s like in Glight, right here. 
    He performed that dreamlike effort of will which he could not define, which clued him into a different network of light-rays than those of his everyday world.
    The stairwell coiled tighter and shorter, with fewer turns. The rooms around it contracted into a simpler arrangement. The great sky-scraping hotel was no more. Now he stood inside a mere two-storey building. He was leaning on a bannister and looking down into a tiny lobby.
    As luck would have it, people were entering the place during his experiment.  He heard voices and saw the main door swing open, admitting three men from the street.
    Recognizing two of them, Midax drew back – though he was sure that he was invisible to them anyway, since he was in Glight mode and they were not.
    The big fellow with the large chin was the Mayor of Dranl, Jenlennan Lioj. He was in an argument with one of the others, the compact figure of the famous economist, Davlr Braze, from whom Midax caught the words “disruption… inflation… unemployment…” – doubtless Davlor was sounding off about the economic consequences of The Crossing, as Midax’s exploit had been dubbed.
    The third figure, the unknown, was a man in a dark suit. He was the smartest and quietest of them. Surely an important public figure of some sort. Midax felt he had seen the fellow before, but wasn’t sure.
    Perhaps the thing to do was to go down the stairs and find out more. Keeping in Glight-mode, taking advantage of invisibility, Midax began to descend, at first gingerly, then more confidently, as none of the men looked up. Sure, they must be, they were, unconscious of his presence.
    The dark-suited man looked at his watch and said, “Time to see Rale.”
    The three companions moved and so Midax jogged back hurriedly, up the flight of stairs, in front of the men as they began to ascend. Half way up, he stopped to watch their zig-zag progress. It was fascinating and a bit horrible to see how they spun out their short climb with that unnecessary corrugation of movement which all people of the everyday world seem doomed to make, and which only the traveller in Glight is able to detect and transcend.
    The happy idea came to Midax, that he could, if he chose, run rings around these people.
    On that confident note, he nudged himself back out of Glight.
    Plink! The stairwell resumed its many coils. Back came the hotel’s long corridors and hundreds of rooms. The whole interior looked grand once more.
    No longer could Midax spot his approaching visitors as they climbed the stairs, but out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed lights winking on the elevator panel; it was doubtless they who were using the lift – at least, they were doing so in this spun-out dimension. Quickly he retreated into his room, to wait for the knock on the door.
    His little experiment had given him much satisfaction. It seemed to confirm that he could get away with small manoeuvres as well as the big trips across oceans and continents.
    A knock on the door and he opened to the visitors – but at the sight of one shadow too many, a fourth man, his blood ran cold. The little shock was momentary only. Let three be four. Let them always have been four. He lived in an eked-out world, of which the population was vaster by far, than it was in Glight; so, forget the discrepancy, invite the four men in, pay attention to introductions –
    Davlr Braze, economist, who had been to school with Midax but who made no mention of that now –
    Jenlennan Lioj, Mayor of Dranl –
    Tennan Rarl, Premier of Larmonn – the other one.
    No, not necessarily. The third one perhaps had been the other dark-suited figure who resembled him: Nuet Nku, Head of Larmonn Intelligence. In which case Tennan Rarl was the fourth man, the mere – what? Shadow? Reflection? How can three become four? It did not do to think about it. Anyhow, paint these great men small, Midax told himself; and it was all the easier, having beaten their zigging and zagging to the top of the stairs (or the lift – whichever way you looked at it), to “paint them small” in the mind; easy, but was it wise?
    I’d better beware of Glight-induced arrogance.
    But right now, it was even more important to avoid being overwhelmed.
    Ever since his Crossing of the Zard, and especially since his Re-Crossing back to his own country, it was becoming apparent that the mundane consequences of Glight might be no less boggling than Glight itself.
    Glight, the fantastic dream, had produced results that had to be faced, now, in the everyday world.
    Mix Glight and Everyday World and what do you get? A slippery alloy on which to skate; Midax, a so-far lucky skater, was flinging out one and then another limb of superficial understanding in order to preserve his balance of mind.
    The five men sat down.
    In good spirits, now that he had his priorities sorted out, Midax said to them: “You don’t have to look so worried.”
    Premier Rarl addressed him fiercely.
    “We have an excuse! Thanks to you, the ‘commemoration’ of deRoffa’s voyage has put the original in the shade.”
    “Good, you compare me with deRoffa,” replied Midax lightheadedly; “deRoffa who was one of our own people. Remember that, whenever you begin mistakenly to regard me as if I were an agent of some dangerous foreign power.”
    Nku, the Intelligence chief, spoke in a colder voice.
    “That is not the problem. Hope and fear are the problem. Everybody is aware that a person named Midax Rale has committed a world-weakening deed. In a sense that does make you a one-man foreign power.”
    “World-weakening?” asked Midax innocently. I have enough to do, mining my own depths, without digging an adit to the depths of others. Confound Nku for his perception.
    Nku was looking at Davlr Braze now.
    Davlr nodded, and spoke.
    “Midax, have you not thought it through? Already shipping and airline and rail shares are plummeting. Every commercial transport interest must be opposed to your achievement.”
    “While the military in every nation,” added Nku, “will want to grab and exploit the opportunity you seem to be offering.”
    “I’ll help you,” smiled Midax, facing Premier Tennan Rarl. “By standing squarely in the middle.  Stick close to me and you’ll be in the eye of the hurricane. In fact, there’ll hardly be a hurricane if we play our cards correctly.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning that I shall keep my, er, invention largely in my own hands.”
    “A monopoly,” mused Davlr Braze.
    “Yes, a monopoly, of a convenient luxury for the few. You can forget fears about hordes on the move. My secret remains a secret. It stays with me. A mere scratch on the surface of the world economy, I promise you. I certainly don’t have a compulsion to do any more Discovering!”
    This was the sort of talk they wanted to hear.
    Reclining in his chair, the Premier said, “If we can believe you, then – so much for the fears; but what of the hopes?”
    Midax felt he was winning his gamble. Use the memory of an awesome, unique experience as – a mere business! They had to believe in the line he took; he was the authority whom none could rival. He had been through Glight, he had seen it all, had seen the diminished box-size of what they called the world; nothing and nobody could rattle him further.
    It was an attitude which, carried too far, would blanch all life, and perhaps drive him into ultimate insensibility, but he must take the risk; he said glibly, “Let the fears and the hopes cancel one another out. For instance – these developments won’t do the cause of World Unity any harm, eh?”
    They nodded, obviously wanting to believe this too. Nowadays most people were vaguely positive about World Unity. Accumulated nebulosity of this sort formed a strong force. Politicians did not dare stand in the way of it. They therefore hitched their prestige to it.
    “What are your immediate plans?” demanded Mayor Lioj.
    Midax was reminded of Rersh Wadd’s ponderous question of long ago: What about money? That hilarious memory was helpful right now.
    “Yes, let me tell you my business plans. I shall found a company, Cutting Across. For a high fee, I shall offer an exclusive ten-minute trans-Zard transport service. If the Quincentennial Committee want to sell me Rinka I shall use that; if not, then I shall build my own ship.”
    The Premier said quickly, “They’ll sell. I must say, your idea sounds good.  Sound psychology: to class your service as a heritage thing…”
    Midax beamed. “Anything for confidence, anything for calm. You understand it all very well, Rmr. Rarl. And don’t worry – I shall charge very high fees.”
    The Premier and the Mayor looked at each other, then at Nku. The latter shrugged, “All right, I guess – we can have the reporters and the Vevtian in now.”
    So half a dozen more people trooped into Midax’s room: five Larmonnians and one Vevtian Observer. For once the politicians and the media were on the same side. To both groups Midax made the solemn promise: no more vertiginous surprises. He confirmed and clarified his plans. He explained that he would run his routes, steering himself and a few others across the Zard, charging fees that would discourage over-use of his fantastically fast service; and because one can get used to anything, the world after some months would calm down sufficiently, interest would subside from its present fever pitch to mere liveliness, and the sight of Rinka’s appearances and disappearances would become just another modern marvel.
    They believed him. They even applauded.
    He smiled to himself.
    Had they feared that he was stupid? Had they not realized that he had to live in this world too?

>>>next chapter>>>