L. Camp - The Exotic Enchanter

“Well, there was nobody in the room, and the window was latched on the inside. So here we are.”

Shea said: “Did you hear enough of the sorites to tell where Malambroso was going?”

“No. Sorry.”

Brodsky growled: “Trouble with chasing you dimensional guys is, you can vanish into the goddam world of some jerk’s imagination. Like that phony Finland and phony Ireland we visited together.

“See, if you want a guy and know he’s somewhere along a line, say a railroad or a bus route, you can start at the beginning and go on to the end. Perps don’t often make it that easy for us.

“If you know he’s somewhere on a map, that’s harder, because you got two dimensions to cover, Then. if he can go not Only north-south and east-west but also up-down, It gets pretty goddam impossible, unless you get a tip from a snitch or stoolie. And I suppose chasing a pep through your alternative universes would be using the fourth dimension or something, eh?”

“You get the general Idea, Pete,” said Shea. “If I can examine Malambroso’s personal room, I might find us a clue. Okay?”

“Sure, I can arrange it, if you promise not to touch anything.”

* * *

Shea stood in Malambroso’s rented room, staring at the bookcases. At last he said to Brodsky: “I think I know where he’s taken our kid.”

“Where’s that?”

“To Barsoom.”

“Huh?”

“Barsoom, Edgar Rice Bunoughs’ version of Mars.”

“Aw, hell; I know there ain’t enough air on Mars to keep a bug alive —”

“Not the real Mars, but the one Burroughs imagined for his John Carter stories — or to put it another way, the Mars in another universe, which somehow got into Burroughs’ mind and formed the basis for his stories. In fact, I suspect Malambroso’s already made at least one trial thereto test out our syllogismobile. You can see the books. For Barsoom, he’s got a collection somebody would give real money for: the old McClurg hardbacks, the Methuen reprints, and the paperbacks: Ballantines from the sixties, the later Ace series, the Del Reys . . . I take it to mean he’s a Barsoomian fan. So, knowing about Barsoom already he’d naturally take off in that direction. Looks as though the only way to catch up withhimis for me to go to Barsoom.”

Brodsky sighed. “Wish I could go with you. But since I got promoted, seems like I’m buried under a daily blizzard of papers.”

* * *

“Harold Shea!” said Belphebe in tones of exasperation. “If you think for one minute I would let you go off by yourself after Voglinda, you’re as mad as some of your faculty colleagues think you are. She’s my daughter, too, you know. From what I’ve beard of Barsoom, gunmaking there isn’t so far advanced that a good longbow wouldn’t be useful as a backup.”

Shea sighed. “Oh, all right, darling. Get your stuff together.”

“What do they wear on Barsoom?”

“Mostly they go naked, except for a kind of harness of straps with pockets and pouches dangling. It doesn’t conceal anything.”

“You mean — you mean real naked, with everything showing?”

“That’s what I understand. They don’t seem to have the ancient Hebrew tabu on nudity, inherited by Christianity and Islam. Maybe you’d best stay home —”

“No, sir! If I have to show the Barsoomians my personal anatomy to get our precious back, I’ll do it! And if any Barsoomian makes a pass, I’ll make him eat a clothyard shaft for breakfast! But then, you couldn’t wear your mailshirt under your clothes, could you?”

“Not and pass myself off as a native Barsoomian, which we may have to do. According to Burroughs,” said Shea in his classroom manner, “Barsoomians are pretty puritanical in matters of sex and theft. Where they go off the reservation, from our point of view, is in their permissive attitude towards homicide. If you want to kill somebody, you just up and do it, and nobody gives a damn. At least, so Burroughs says, and I don’t know how accurate he was. I wouldn’t very far trust any writer who put tigers and deer in Africa.”

“Then I’d better pack an extra quiver!”

Shea made a slight face, knowing that it would fall to his lot to carry the extra weight on the portages, however short, that any extensive trip entailed. But he did not dissent, since the proposal made sense. He said:

“And I’ll take the old six-shooter. It’s not the most up-to-date firearm — everybody goes for automatics nowadays — but it’s simple and rugged and has fewer things to go wrong with it.”

“Is Barsoom a universe where firearms work?”

“According to Burroughs, yes; though I doubt his story of radium rifles that shoot fifty miles with radar sights.”

* * *

Harold Shea and Belphebe sat cross-legged on the rug in the center of the Shea living room. Shea, in breeches and boots, with a cowboy hat on his head, sat with a scabbard containing a shortened nineteenth-century saber on his left, a sheath holding a bowie knife in front, and on his right a holster with a big Smith & Wesson .44 revolver.

Belphebe wore green slacks, a similar jacket, and the feathered hat of her home world. Her longbow, unstrung, was slung over her back by its bowstring, passing between her full, young-mother breasts. A laden quiver was also slung to her back, its strap forming an X with the longbow string.

“Okay. said Shea, let’s go!” He grasped her near hand and began: “If P equals not-Q. then Q implies not-P . . .” II

Shea had been through these transitions before and so was ready for their effects. The living room dissolved into a whirl of colored spots. Momentarily he seemed to be suspended in nothing, as in a free-fall. Then, bit by bit, the world around him solidified. But this world was nothing like the one they had left.

The scene was of nighttime out-of-doors, lit by a brighter moonlight than Shea had ever seen on Earth. The source was a big, bright moon, even larger than Earth’s Luna, passing overhead. Elsewhere sparkled a myriad stars, brighter and more numerous than they would appear to the naked eye anywhere on Earth.

Beside him, Belphebe said. “That moon is travelling so fast you can see its motion against the stars. Also, it seems to be going from west to east, unlike our Earth’s moon.”

“Quite right, darling,” said Shea “That’s Thuria, the closer of Barsoom’s two moons, It corresponds to Phobos in our own universe. I don’t see the other satellite, Cluros as they call it here. If this were our Mars, you could only see Phobos from near the equator, and it’s only a big boulder anyway.

“Why couldn’t Phobos be seen from elsewhere?”

“The bulge of the planet would hide it. Just as it hides the Southern Cross From viewers in the northern parts of our world.”

“How do you know what the Barsoomians call them. if you’ve never been here before?”

“I’ve read Burroughs. Besides, the advantage of the sorites is that, if you compose it right, you arrive in the other universe already knowing the local language. Otherwise we should have to spend months studying Barsoomian in order to get around, as Burroughs’ John Carter did on his first arrival.”

“Probably several different languages, as on Earth,” said Belphebe.

“No; Burroughs says they have only one spoken language for the entire planet, though different nations have different ways of writing it. I daresay there are local dialects.”

“How could that be? Since languages are always changing, what would prevent the speech of Barsoom from diverging into branches, like those of the Latin or the Slavic languages on Earth?”

Shea shrugged. “I don’t know, darling. Perhaps some conqueror once brought the whole planet under his sway and ordained that his particular speech was the official one, which everyone had to use on pain of death. And it hasn’t had time to split into different languages yet.”