Philip High
Reality Forbidden
Chapter I
THE OLD MAN was hospitable but vaguely eccentric. He gave them a tasteless meal of unseasoned compresso-cubes and several cups of unsweetened coffee.
"You are flyers, you say?"
"Yes." Gilliad was polite but guarded. "We crashed in the forest."
The old man shook his head slowly. "We don't see many flyers these days, not in this province. I've heard about them, yes, but I have never seen one-I understand it is a kind of machine, this thing in which you flew?"
"Yes, it is a machine." Kendal's voice was gentle.
"Strange." The white head shook again. "I used to fly once, sometimes I flew for hours at a time but not in a machine. Now, alas, I am too old. When one is too old one loses interest."
He paused and sipped the coffee noisily. "You say you saw the house through the trees?"
Gilliad nodded. "We saw the light"
"Ah, yes, the light"
"It is a big house," observed Kendal. "Big and lonely."
"Big, yes." The cup went shakily back to the saucer. "Lonely, no; they are all here but sometimes I cannot be bothered, some of them talk so much."
He wiped his mouth carefully on a grubby piece of material and looked at them both with bright watery eyes.
"Where will you go now?"
"The nearest city for help," said Kendal.
"City? Oh, yes, that would be Dunsten, four kilometers; you could walk."
"There is no transport?"
"This is a backwater, there is no transport here; no one comes and no one goes."
"Then we must walk." Kendal rose. "Thank you for the meal, for your hospitality."
"Think nothing of it, I have never met flyers before." He rose unsteadily. "I will show you to the door."
"We can find our own way out, thank you."
"Oh, but you can't. You can find your way in but you cannot find your way out until I have shown you."
"Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters." The old man was suddenly shrill and petulant. "There is a way in and a way out, a way to enter and a way to leave. That is the order of things and we must obey orders."
Behind his back, Gilliad looked sideways at Kendal and tapped his temple meaningly. His lips formed the word "nuts."
"This way." The old man held a door at the rear of the room.
They followed him down a long winding corridor broken frequently by doorways. On one of the doors, Kendal noticed, were the words "Wife-Julie." On another "Doris," but this one had no qualifying statement.
The corridor turned again and the old man paused. "Keep to the left here, there is a tiger in the third room."
Gilliad looked at Kendal and raised his eyebrows despairingly. When he reached the door with the word "Tiger" on it he kicked it contemptuously with his toe.
There was a snarling sound and Gilliad screamed. He flung himself back from the door and put his hands over his face.
"Oh, my God," he said. There was a jagged gash beneath his left eye and blood trickled down his cheek.
The old man came forward. "I did warn you. I am very sorry, but I did warn you." He leaned forward studying the wound. "It is not deep and Tim's claws are quite clean, I assure you."
"A tiger in the bedroom." Gilliad flushed angrily. "You must be mad, a bloody tiger in the bedroom-"
Kendal kicked his ankle with deliberate savagery. "Shut up, you know why we came."
Gilliad clenched his fists but slowly regained his composure. "I'm sorry-but God, who would have expected that here?"
"No one," said Kendal, dryly. "This is Canada, not Bengal."
"You're not suggesting-"
"I'm not suggesting anything. We came to find out; this could be a manifestation."
"Manifestation be damned! I saw it and it clawed my face."
"All right, all right, but you are a Susceptible."
Gilliad paled slightly. "Could it, does it-"
"We don't know, do we? They told us so little. All we know is history, the side-effects and the actual functioning of the addition was never explained to us."
"This way." The old man appeared to have forgotten the incident and was holding open the door. "Just take the footpath through the trees, it will lead you to the highway-turn right for Dunsten."
Outside there was a hint of frost, dawn was breaking, etching the trees against the eastern sky. Both men shivered as they made their way along the narrow footpath-not all of the shivering was from the cold.
When they reached the highway it was immediately clear that it had not been used for centuries. It stretched away in a dead straight line, broken and overgrown with weed.
Gilliad looked uneasily about him. "Four kilometers, eh? Looks more like four hundred-which way?"
"According to the old man, west."
"Let's hope the old goat was right; let's go."
They walked forward but before they had gone a hundred meters, two men appeared casually from behind some trees and fell into step beside them. They wore rough clothing; neither appeared to be carrying weapons but there was about them the unmistakable stamp of authority.
The taller of the two lit a squat pipe and looked at Kendal sideways. "Going some place?"
"Er-" Kendal hesitated. "Er-yes, we are going to Dunsten."
"Where you from?"
"Other side of the province-east."
"'What were you doing back there?"
"We were flying; our machine crashed."
"So you spent four hours in the loony bin until it got light?"
"Loony?" Gilliad looked blank.
The tall man removed the pipe from his mouth. "Old man Pitcher is a nut, a third degree addict; we park our nut cases out in the wilds." He sighed. "We've got more space than people in this province."
He paused, tapped out his pipe on a nearby branch and thrust it into his pocket. "Where did you say you were going?"
Gilliad scowled at him. "Asking a lot of questions, aren't you?"
"I am?" The man smiled faintly and removed something from his pocket. "Commissioner Osterly, Ontario Intelligence Service-satisfied?"
"We've done no harm, we-"
"I want to know where you're going."
"We told you, Dunsten."
"Your maps are a little out of date-I can show you where it was." He thrust the empty pipe back between his teeth. "And you're from the east?"
"Yes." Gilliad was still scowling. "Our flyer crashed, you see, and-"
"Ah, yes, the flyer. We had a look at that before we picked you up, very interesting. We don't do any flying in this province ourselves but we know a little about metal-why so many structural weaknesses?"
"Structural weaknesses?" Kendal felt himself paling.
"Yes, as I say, we examined the wreck. We found a fused mass of metal which might once have been a repeller and a lot of structural faults designed to crumple at a minor impact. Before you try and answer that, we see it something like this. We see you floating in on a repeller unit just like a feather. When you touched the tops of the trees, however, all the various appendages crumpled and snapped off as they were designed to do. As a crash it looked real good even if the repeller did get you down safely and burnt itself out automatically as soon as you touched down. When you climbed out of the 'wreckage,' you knocked down a few trees for good measure but, my smooth friends, it is all too clear that that ship was designed for a one-way journey. Have you anything to add to that or do you propose to continue insulting my intelligence?"
Kendal said, tightly, "Is this an arrest?"
"You can call it protective custody if it makes you feel better." He smiled mirthlessly. "In any case, we're pulling you in for questioning."
