World Of Ptavvs

"Um?" Jansky looked where Larry was looking. "Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?"

The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry's end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst's couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse hands.

"I notice he's armed," was Larry's first, slightly uneasy comment. "And he seems to be crouching."

"Crouching? Take a closer look," Jansky invited genially. "And look at the feet."

A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But-

"I still don't see what you're driving at, but I can see his feet aren't straight. They don't lie flat to the ground."

"Right!" Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. "That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn't made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!"

"Yeah!" It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman's crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!

"That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my theory. I aimed a little laser beam at one finger…

"And what happened? The laser couldn't even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me." He beamed happily.

The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely pitiful. Larry asked, "Can't you bring him out of it?"

Jansky shook his head violently. "No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?"

Larry saw it, just below the apex of the triangular hump. It was just duller than the perfect mirror surface which surrounded it, and faintly reddened.

"It sticks out of the field, just a little. Just a few molecules. I think it was the switch to turn off the field. It may have burned off when our friend came through the air, or it may have rusted away while he was at the bottom of the ocean. So now there is no way to turn it off. Poor designing," he added contemptuously.

"Well, I think they are ready."

Larry's uneasiness returned. They were ready. Machinery hummed and glowed outside the cage. The disk were steady on the humped contact machine, from which two multicolored cables led to the helmets. Four workmen in lab smocks stood nearby, not working but not idling. Waiting.

Larry walked rapidly back to the table, poured and drained half a cup of coffee, and went back into the cage. "I'm ready too," he a

Jansky smiled. "Okay," he said, and stepped out of the cage. Two workmen immediately closed the flap with a zipper twenty feet long.

"Give me two minutes to relax," Larry called. "Okay," said Jansky.

Larry stretched out on the couch, his head and shoulders inside the metal shell which was his contact helmet, and closed his eyes. Was Jansky wondering why he wanted extra time? Let him wonder. The contact worked better when he was resting.

Two minutes and one second from now, what wonders would he remember?

Judy Greenberg finished programming the apartment and left. Larry wouldn't be back until late tonight, if then; various people would be quizzing him. They would want to know how he took the "contact." There were things she could do in the meantime.

The traffic was amazing. In Los Angeles, as in any other big city, each taxi was assigned to a certain altitude. They took off straight up and landed straight down, and the coordinator took care of things when two taxis had the same destination. But here, taxi levels must have been no more than ten feet apart. In the three years they had been living here Judy had never gotten used to seeing a cab pass that close overhead. The traffic was faster in Kansas but at least it was set to keep its distance.

The taxi let her off at the edge of the top strip, the transparent pedestrian walk thirty stories above the vehicular traffic, in a shopping district. She began to walk.

She noticed the city's widely advertised cleanup project at work on many of the black-sided buildings. The stone came away startlingly white where the decades, sometimes centuries, of dirt had washed off. Judy noticed with amusement that only corner buildings were being cleaned.

"I should have said, 'What do you mean, experience in reading alien minds? Dolphins have been legally human since before you were born!' That's what I should have said," said Judy to herself. She began to laugh quietly. That would have impressed him! Sure it would!

She was about to enter a women's leather goods store when it happened. In the back of her mind something slowed, then disappeared. Involuntarily Judy stopped walking. The traffic around her seemed to move with bewildering speed. Pedestrians shot by on twinkling feet or were hurled at suicidal velocities by the slidewalks. She had known something was coming, but she had never imagined it would feel like this, as if something had been jerked out of her.

Judy went into the shop and began searching for gifts. She was determined not to let this throw her. In six hours he would be back.

"Zwei minuten," Doctor Jansky muttered, and threw the switch.

There was a complaining whine from the machinery, rising in pitch and amplitude, higher and louder until even Jansky blinked uncomfortably. Then it cut off, sharply and suddenly. The cage was an unbroken mirror.

The timing mechanism was inside the cage. It would cut the current in "one second."

"It is thirteen twenty," said Jansky. "I suggest we should be back here at nineteen hours." He left the room without looking back.

Kzanol dropped the wire and pushed the button in his chest. The field must have taken a moment to build up, for the universe was suddenly jagged with flying streaks of light.

Gravity snatched at him. If there were other changes in his personal universe Kzanol didn't notice. All he knew was the floor beneath him, and the block of something beneath each heel-spur, and the weight which yanked him down. There was no time to tense his legs or catch his balance. He bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

Jansky was the last to arrive. He came promptly at nineteen hours, pushing a keg of beer on a cart. Someone took it from him and wheeled it over to a table.

His image wavered as it passed the cube; the wire wall couldn't have been quite flat.