Doorsways in the Sand

All right. If M'mrm'mlrr was going to be a little more civilized about it, he could have my cooperation, I decided.

So I sat there and let him rummage about.

Then, quite abruptly, he must have come across the big switchboard somewhere down there and pulled a plug, because I blacked out, instantly and without pain. Blink.

Blink again.

Weary, thirsty and with a feeling of having been broken down and reconstituted incorrectly, I raised my hand to rub my eyes and glimpsed the face of my watch as I did so. Then I swung it up and listened for ticks. As I already suspected, it was still tossing them off. Ergo ...

"Yes, about three hours," said Ragma.

I heard Paul snore, snort short, cough and sigh. He had been dozing in the armchair. Ragma was sprawled on the floor, smoking. M'mrm'mlrr was still upright and stirring. Nadler was nowhere in sight.

I stretched, unkinking muscle after muscle, hearing my frame creak like a floor that has been walked on overmuch.

"Well, I hope that you learned something useful," I said.

"Yes, I would say that we have," Ragma replied. "How do you feel?"

"Wrung out."

"Understandable. Yes. Very. You were something of a battleground for a while there."

"Tell me about it."

"To begin with," he said, "we have located the starstone."

"Then you were right? Everyone was? I had the knowledge-somewhere?"

"Yes. The memory should even be accessible now. Want to try for it yourself? A party. A broken glass. The desk ... "

"Wait a minute. Let me think."

I thought. And it was there. The last time that I had seen the star-stone ...

It was the bachelor party I had given for Hal the week before his wedding. The apartment was crowded with our friends, the booze flowed, we made a lot of noise. It went on till around two or three in the morning. All in all I would have to say that it was an effective party. At least, it seemed that everyone went home laughing and there were no injuries.

Except for one small accident of my own.

Yes. A glass was elbowed off a side table, shattered. It was empty, though. Nothing to mop up. And it was right near the end of things. People were saying good night, leaving. So I left the pieces where they had fallen. Later. Manana maybe.

Still, I knew that I had had too much to drink, could guess how I would feel the next morning and what I would doubtless do.

I would growl and curse and bid the day depart. When it persisted, I would roll out of bed, stagger off to the kitchen to put the coffee over-my first act on any day-then lumber back to the bathroom for standard maintenance while it brewed. Invariably barefoot. Certainly not remembering that my path was strewn with shards. At least for a brief while I would not remember.

So I fetched the wastebasket from beneath the desk, got down into a hunker and began policing the area.

Naturally, I cut myself. I leaned too far forward at one point, lost my balance, extended a hand to maintain it and located another shard as my palm struck the floor.

I began bleeding, but I wrapped my handkerchief around it and continued with the cleanup. I knew that if I stopped right then to take care of my hand I would be tempted to let things go afterward. I was very sleepy.

So I got up all the pieces that I could see and wiped over the area with damp cocktail napkins. That done, I returned the wastebasket to its usual spot and dropped back into the desk chair because it was right there and I wanted to.

I unwrapped my hand and it was still bleeding. No sense doing anything at all until my thrombin earned its keep. So I leaned back and waited. My eyes did rest for a moment on the model of the star-stone we used for a paperweight. In fact, I reached out and turned it slowly, deriving a certain semisober satisfaction from the shifting light patterns it displayed. Then I stretched out my arm full length on the blotter because my head was heavy and it occurred to me that my biceps would do nicely for a pillow. Resting that way, eyes still open, I continued to play with the stone, feeling a small regret at having gotten blood on it, then deciding that it was all right, as it made for amusing contrasts here and there. Goodbye, world.

It was a couple of hours later that I awoke, thirsty and possessed of a few muscle aches from the way I had been sleeping. I got to my feet, headed for the kitchen, where I drank a glass of water, then passed back through the apartment, switching off lights. When I got to my bedroom, I undressed slowly, sitting on the edge of the bed, letting my clothes lie where they fell, crawled in and did the rest of my night's sleeping properly.

And that was the last time I had seen the star-stone. Yes.

"I remember," I said. "I have to hand it to the doctor. It comes back now. It was misted over by booze and fatigue, but I've got it again."

"Not just beverage and fatigue," Ragma said.

"What else, then?"

"I said that we had found the stone."

"Yes, you did. But no memories on that count have been shaken loose for me. I just recall the last time that I saw it, not where it went."

Paul cleared his throat. Ragma glanced at him.

"Go ahead," he said.

"When I worked with that thing," Paul told me, "I had to proceed along lines that were somewhat less than satisfactory. I mean that I was not about to knock a piece off a priceless artifact for purposes of analysis. Aside from purely aesthetic reasons, it might be detected. I had no idea as to how detailed any alien analyses of its surface might be. Almost anything I did that would alter it might have caused trouble. Fortunately, though, it passed light readily. So I concentrated on its optical effects. I did an extremely minute topological light-mapping of its entire surface. With that and its weight, I developed some ideas as to its composition. Now, although I was not especially concerned at the time with anything other than duplicating it, it did strike me that the thing seemed like a mass of strangely crystallized protein-"

"I'll be damned," I said. "But ... "

I looked at Ragma.

"Organic, all right," he said. "Paul did not really discover anything new in that, as this fact had been known for some time elsewhere. However, what nobody had realized was that it was still living, somehow. It was simply dormant."

"Living? Crystallized? You make it sound like a massive virus."

"I suppose that I do. But viruses are not noted for their intelligence, and that thing-in its own way-is intelligent."

"I do see what you are leading up to, of course," I said. "What do I do now? Reason with it? Or take two aspirins and go to bed?"

"Neither. I am going to have to speak for Doctor M'mrm'mirr now, as he is occupied and you deserve an immediate explanation as to what he discovered. The first time that he attempted to penetrate your memories, he was thrown into a state of shock by an encounter with a totally unexpected form of consciousness coexistent with your own. In the course of his practice he has treated representatives of just about every known race in the galaxy, but he never encountered anything like this before. He said that it was something u

"U

"In a strictly technical fashion. He believes it to be an artificial intelligence, a synthetic being. Such things have been produced by a number of our contemporaries, but all of them are fairly simple compared to this."

"What functions does mine perform?"

"We do not know. The second time that M'mrm'mirr entered your mind, he was braced for the encounter. The creature is itself mildly telepathic, you see. Enough to translate for you back aboard our ship, under ideal conditions. I am told that this can provide additional complications, and apparently it did. However, he succeeded in subduing it and learned sufficient of its nature in the process so that we have an idea as to how to deal with it. He then went on to explore some of your memories touching on the phenomenon, which helped us piece together our line of attack. He is now occupied in holding the creature in a form of mental stasis until things are ready."