The Magic Labyrinth (11 page)

He emerged on the landing deck and looked up at the dim light emanating from the control room. Its big clock boomed fourteen strokes. Two
A.M.

Time for Burton to go back to bed and try to storm the citadel of sleep again.

He looked up at the stars, and, while doing so, a cold wind swept down from the north and cleared the upper deck of the mists—momentarily. Somewhere northward was the tower in the cold and gray mists. In it were, or had been, the Ethicals, the entities who thought they had a right to raise the dead without their permission.

Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.

Or would they?

Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, a machine which converted the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn’t know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn’t know the
true
nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved it for his own purposes.

He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.

At first, Samuel Clemens had tended to avoid Cyrano de Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.

After a while—several years—Sam began to warm up to the man who’d been Sam’s Terrestrial wife’s lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a “show me” attitude.

Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.

So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw—though he’d always known deep within him—that he’d been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn’t the fellow’s fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she’d found him. Nor, really, was it Livy’s fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his “watermark,” and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he’d learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.

Whether Sam really believed that he was an automaton whose acts were programmed, Sam did not know himself. Sometimes, he thought that his belief in determinism was only an excuse to escape his guilt about certain matters. If this were true, then he was exercising free will in making up the explanation that he wasn’t responsible for anything, good or bad, that he did. On the other hand, one aspect of determinism was that it gave humans the illusion that they had free will.

In either case, Sam welcomed Cyrano into his company and forgave him for what really didn’t need forgiving.

So now, today, Cyrano was one of the group invited by Sam to talk about some puzzling features of what Sam called “The Case of X.” The others were Gwenafra (Sam’s cabinmate), Joe Miller, de Marbot, and John Johnston. The latter was huge, over six feet two and weighing 260 pounds without an ounce of excess fat. His head and chest were auburn-haired; he had extraordinarily long arms and hands that looked as large as the paws of a grizzly bear. The blue-gray eyes were often cold or dreamy but they could be warm enough when he was with trusted friends. Born about 1828 in New Jersey and of Scotch descent, he had gone to the West to trap the mountains in 1843. There he had become a legend even among the legendary mountain men, though it took some years before he became famous. When a wandering party of young unblooded Crow braves killed his Flathead Indian wife and unborn baby, Johnston swore a vendetta against the Crows. He killed so many of them that the Crows sent out twenty young men to track him down and kill him, and they were not to return to their tribe until the deed was done. One after the other got to him but were instead slain by Johnston. He cut out their livers and ate them raw, the blood dripping onto his red beard. It was these exploits that earned him the sobriquets of “Liver Eater” and “Crow Killer.” But the Crows were a fine tribe, dignified, honorable, and mighty warriors. So one day Johnston decided to call off the feud, and, having informed them of his decision, became their good friend. He was also a chief of the Shoshoni.

He died in 1900 at the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles and was buried in the crowded cemetery there. But in the 1970s, a group who knew that he could never rest there, not the man who became vexed if his nearest neighbor was within fifty miles, had his bones taken to a mountainside in Colorado and reburied there.

“Liver Eating” Johnston had mentioned several times on the boat that he’d never been forced to kill a white man (while on Earth), not even a Frenchy. This remark had made de Marbot and Cyrano a little uneasy at first, but they had come to like and admire the huge mountaineer.

After they’d had a few drinks and some cigarettes and cigars and chatted idly, Sam brought up the subject he most wanted to talk about.

“I’ve been doing some thinking about the man who called himself Odysseus,” he said. “You remember what I said about him? He came to our help when we were battling von Radowitz, and it was his archery that killed off the general and his officers. He claimed to be the historical Odysseus, the real man to whom the legends and fairy tales were attached later and whose exploits furnished Homer with the materials for his
Odyssey.
”

“I never knew him,” Johnston said, “but I’ll take yer word fur it.”

“Yes. Well, he said that he also had been contacted by an Ethical and sent downRiver to help us. After the battle he hung around for a while, but when he went upRiver on a trading expedition, he disappeared. Dropped out of sight like he’d fallen through a trapdoor.

“What makes him particularly important is that he had a strange tale to tell about the Ethical. Now, the one that talked to me, X, the Mysterious Stranger, was a man. At least, his voice was certainly a male’s, though I suppose it could have been disguised. Anyway, Odysseus told me that his Ethical was a
woman
!”

Sam puffed out green smoke and looked at the brass arabesques on the ceiling as if they were hieroglyphs that held answers to his questions.

“Now, what could that mean?”

Gwenafra said, “That he was either telling the truth or lying.”

“Right! Give that pretty woman there a big cigar! Either there are two Ethicals who have become renegades or the self-named Odysseus was a liar. If a liar, then he would have to be my Ethical, X. Personally, I think he was mine, yours, too, Cyrano and John, and I think he was lying. Otherwise, why didn’t X tell us that there were two of his kind and that one was a woman? That would have been very important. I know he didn’t have much time to talk to us because the other Ethicals were hot on his trail, breathing down his neck. But surely that item of information was one he wouldn’t have neglected to impart.”

“Why would he lie?” de Marbot said.

“Because…” Here Sam pointed his cigar at the arabesques. “He knew that we might get caught by the other Ethicals. And they might get from us this false information. Then they’d be confused and even more alarmed. What? Two traitors in their midst? Holy smoke! And if they put us to some sort of lie detector, they’d see that we weren’t lying. After all, we believed what Odysseus told us. What X told us, I should say. It was just his way of confusing the issue still further! There! What do you think of that?”

There was a short silence, then Cyrano said, “But if that is true, we have seen the Ethical! And we know what he looks like!”

“Not necessarily true,” Gwenafra said. “He surely must have numerous aids for disguise.”

“Undoubtedly,” Cyrano said. “But can he change his height and his physique? Hair and eye color perhaps and some other things. But not…”

“I think we may take it that he’s short and has a very muscular body,” Clemens said. “But so have several billion other men. What we’ve done is to eliminate the possibility that there’s a female Ethical who’s also a renegade. At least, I believe so.”

“Mought be,” Johnston said, “that he was an agent who found out that we’d been contacted by X, and he was trying to confuse us.”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “If he was an agent who’d known that much, we’d have had the Ethicals on us faster than a wardman would sell his mother to gain a few votes. No. That Odysseus was Mr. X.”

“But,” Gwenafra said, “that…that takes us deeper than that. What about Gulbirra’s description of Barry Thorn? He resembled Odysseus in some respects. Could he have been X? And what about that so-called German, Stern, who tried to kill Firebrass? What was he? If he was an agent, he would’ve been Firebrass’ colleague. After all, we think Firebrass was an agent, and he was blown up by X so that he couldn’t get into the tower ahead of him. Firebrass lied to us when he told us he was one of X’s recruits. He…”

“No,” Cyrano said. “I mean, yes. He seems to have been an agent of the other Ethicals. But if he knew so much about us, why didn’t he inform the Ethicals and bring them down on our necks?”

“Because,” Sam said, “for some reason, he couldn’t tell the Ethicals. I think that was because about then the big troubles started in the tower. Why or how, I don’t know. But it seems to me that about the time Odysseus disappeared, rather, X vanished, that the whole project of the Ethicals went shebang. We didn’t notice it at the time, but it was shortly thereafter that the resurrections ceased. It wasn’t until the
Not For Hire
was some distance on its way that we began getting reports that the resurrections had stopped. When we were in Parolando, we noticed it but thought it was just a local phenomenon.”

“Hum,” Cyrano said. “I wonder if that Hermann Göring fellow, the missionary killed by Hacking’s men, was resurrected? He was a strange one, that.”

“He was a troublemaker, that one,” Sam said. “Anyway, maybe Firebrass did tell the Ethicals that he’d gotten hold of some of X’s recruits. But the Ethicals told him they wouldn’t do anything about it for a while. Firebrass was to learn all he could from us before they moved in. He would also tell them if he saw anybody who looked like X so they could jump him then and there. Who knows? But…I wonder if Firebrass planted any bugs on us so he’d know when X came to visit us again. Only, he never did.”

Cyrano said, “I believe that he, X, got stranded after he, as Odysseus, left us.”

“Then why didn’t he rejoin us as Odysseus?”

Cyrano shrugged.

“Because he missed the
Not For Hire,
” Sam snapped. “We went by him during the night. But he’d heard that Firebrass was building a dirigible to go straight to the tower. That would be even better for him than the
Not For Hire.
But as Odysseus, an ancient Hellene, he wouldn’t be qualified for a post on the airship. So he became Barry Thorn, a much-experienced Canadian aeronaut.”

“But I,” Cyrano said, “was of the seventeenth century, yet I was a pilot on the
Parseval.
And John de Greystock was of a much earlier time, yet he was made captain of the blimp.”

“Despite that,” Sam said, “X would have a much better chance to get on the
Parseval
if he had experience. Only…I wonder where he got it? Why would an Ethical know all about a dirigible?”

“If you live a very long time or are immortal, perhaps you learn everything about everything in order to pass the time,” Gwenafra said.

Hermann Göring woke up sweating and groaning. “
Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, mein Führer! Ja, ja, ja!
”

The screaming face faded. The black gunsmoke pouring in through the shattered windows and broken walls vanished. The windows and walls disappeared. The bass Russian artillery which had been counterpointing der Führer’s alto soprano became muted, then withdrew, roaring sullenly. The droning which had been a counter-counterpoint to the madman’s screech dwindled and died. That noise, he was vaguely aware, had been from the motors of the American and British bombers.

The darkness of the nightmare was succeeded by the Riverworld’s night.

It was comforting and peaceful, though. Hermann lay on his back on the bamboo bed and touched the warm arm of Kren. She stirred and muttered something. Perhaps she was talking to someone in her dreams. She would not be distressed or bewildered or horrified. Her dreams were always pleasant. She was a Riverchild, dead on Earth at or around the age of six. She remembered nothing of her native planet. Her earliest memory, and that was vague, was waking in this valley, her parents gone, everything she’d known gone.

Hermann warmed himself with the touch and with pleasant memories of their years together. Then he got up, dressed in the body-covering early-morning outfit, and stepped outside. He was on a platform of bamboo. Ahead and behind on the same level as his hut were many others. Above was another level of dwellings, and there was another above that. Below were three levels. All were continuous bridges stretching for as far as he could see to the south and terminating far to the north. The supports were usually tall thin spires of rock or irontrees; each length of bridge was seldom less than one hundred and fifty feet or more than three hundred. Where extra support was needed, pylons of oak or mortared stone had been placed.

The Valley here was thirty miles wide. The River widened to form a lake ten miles broad and forty miles long. The mountains were no higher than six thousand feet, fortunately for the inhabitants, since The Valley here was far up in the northern hemi sphere and they needed all the daylight possible. At the west end of the lake, the mountains curved into The River itself. Here the waters boiled through a high narrow passage. In the warmer hours of the afternoon, the easterly wind pushed through the strait at an estimated fifteen miles an hour. It then lost some of its force, but it was carried up by the peculiar topography, causing updraughts of which the inhabitants took advantage.

Everywhere on the land, towers of rock, tall columns bearing many carved figures, rose. Between many of these were multilevel spans. These were of wood: bamboo, pine, oak, yew. At intervals, depending upon the weight the spans could bear, were huts. Gliders and folded balloon envelopes were stored on top of many of the broader spires.

Drums were beating; fish-bone horns, wailing. People began appearing in the doorways of the huts, stretching, yawning. The day was officially beginning. The sun had just shown its top. The temperature would rise to 60° F in the heavens, 30° F short of the zenith of the tropics. At the end of fifteen hours, the sun plunged below the mountains, and in nine hours would rise again. The length of its sojourn in the skies almost made up for the weakness of its oblique rays.

With two grails in the net attached to his back, Hermann climbed down the fifty feet to the ground. Kren had no duties today and so would sleep in. Later she would come down, pick up her grail from the storage shed near the stone, and eat a belated breakfast.

As he walked along he greeted those he knew, and in the population of 248,000, he could call ten thousand by their first names. The scarcity of paper in The Valley had forced a reliance on, and development of, memory, though on Earth his own memory had been phenomenal. The greetings were in the truncated, collapsed Esperanto dialect of Vivolando.

“
Bon ten, eskop
.” (“Good morning, Bishop.”)

“
Tre bon ten a vi, Fenikso. Pass ess via.
” (“A very good morning to you, Phoenix. Peace be yours.”)

He was formal and stately then, but a few seconds later he stopped a group to tell them a joke.

Hermann Göring at this time was happy. Yet he had not always been so. His tale was long, shot with gaiety and peace here and there but in general sad and stormy and by no means always edifying.

His Terrestrial biography went thus:

Born at Rosenheim, Bavaria, Germany, on January 12, 1893. His father was a colonial official, in fact, the first governor of German Southwest Africa. At the age of three months, Göring was parted from his parents, who went to Haiti for three years, where his father was the German consul general. This long separation from his mother at such a tender age had a very bad effect on Hermann. The pain and loneliness of this period never entirely left him. Moreover, when he became aware at an early age that his mother was having an affair with his godfather, he felt great contempt, mingled with rage, for her. He managed, however, to restrain any overt manifestations of his feelings. His father he treated with a silent contempt, though he was seldom openly insulting to him. But when his father was buried, Hermann wept.

At the age of ten he became very sick with a glandular disease. In 1915, a month after his father’s death, he became a lieutenant in the 112th Prinz Wilhelm Infantry Regiment. At this time the blue-eyed, blond, slender, and passably good-looking officer was a very popular person. He loved to dance and drink and in general was much fun. His godfather, a Jew converted to Christianity, gave him money to help him financially.

Shortly after World War I started, a painful arthritis in his knees hospitalized him. Eager to get into action, he left the hospital and became an observer in the plane of a friend, Lörzer. For three weeks he was unofficially absent without leave from the army. Though he was judged unfit to serve in the infantry because of his physical incapacity, Göring joined the Luftwaffe. His vigorous and unorthodox language amused the Crown Prince, who was commanding the 25th Field Air Detachment of the Fifth Army. In the autumn of 1915 he went through the Freiburg Aviation School, easily qualifying as a pilot. In November 1916 he was shot down, badly hurt, and was out of action for six months. Despite this, he flew again. His rise was rapid since he was not only an excellent officer and flier but an outstanding organizer.

In 1917 Hermann received the
Ordre Pour le Mérite
(the German equivalent of the Victoria Cross) in acknowledgment of his leadership qualities and for having shot down fifteen enemy planes. He was also given the Golden Airman’s Medal. On July 7, 1918, he was made commander of
Geschwader 1,
its commander Richthofen having been killed after eighty victories. Göring’s great interest in technical details and problems of equipment made him a natural for his position as commander. His deep knowledge of all aspects of aerial warfare was to stand him in good stead in later years.

By the time Germany surrendered, he had thirty enemy planes to his credit. But this did not do him any good during the period immediately following the end of the war. Aces were a drug on the market.

In 1920, after some time barnstorming in Denmark and Sweden, he became flight chief of the Svenska Lufttrafik in Stockholm, Sweden. Here he met Karin von Kantznow, sister-in-law of the Swedish explorer Count von Rosen. He married her, though she was a divorcée and mother of an eight-year-old boy. He was a good husband to her until she died. Despite his later career in an organization distinguished for gross immorality, he was faithful to her and to his second wife. Sexually, he was a puritan. He was also a political puritan. Once having given his loyalty, he did not withdraw it.

It was a wonder that he ever amounted to anything. Though he dreamed much of advancement to high positions and wealth, he drifted. Without any guiding light, he allowed chance people and events to carry him along.

It was his fortune, or misfortune, that he met Adolf Hitler.

During the abortive Putsch of 1923, in Munich, Göring was wounded. He escaped the police for a while by taking refuge in the home of Frau Ilse Ballin, wife of a Jewish merchant. Göring did not forget this debt. He aided her during the persecution of the Jews after Hitler became head of the German state, and he arranged for her and her family to flee to England.

Breaking his word of honor that he would not escape after his arrest, he fled to Austria. Here the badly infected wound hospitalized him, forcing him to take morphine for the pain. Sick and penniless, his virility affected by various operations, he became mentally depressed. At the same time, his wife’s health, never good, was getting worse.

Now a drug addict, he went to Sweden, where he spent six months in a sanatorium. Discharged as cured, he returned to his wife. All seemed hopeless, yet, having hit the bottom, his spirits rose, and he began to fight. This was typical of him. Somehow, from somewhere, he gathered his energy to fight when all seemed lost.

On returning to Germany, he rejoined Hitler, whom he believed to be the only man who could make Germany great again. Karin died in Sweden in October 1931. He was with Hitler in Berlin then, meeting Hindenburg, who had decided that Hitler would become his successor as head of the state. Göring always felt guilty because he had chosen to be with Hitler instead of with Karin when she was dying. Her death drove him back to morphine for a while. Then he met Emmy Sonnemann, an actress, and married her.

Though he had great talents as an organizer, Göring was inclined to be sentimental. He also had a hot temper which allowed his tongue to run away with him. During the trial of the men charged with burning the Reichstag building, Göring made wild accusations. Dimitrov, the Bulgarian Communist, coolly exposed the illegal methods and illogicality of the charges against him. Göring’s failure to control the trials spoiled their propagandistic effect and demolished the false façade of the Nazis’ propaganda machine.

Despite this, Göring was given the job of forming the Reich’s new air force. He was no longer the slender ace, having put on much weight. But his double personality had won him two new titles,
Der Dicke
(The Fatty) and
Der Eiserne
(The Man of Iron). His rheumatism was giving him pains in the legs and making him take drugs (chiefly paracodeine).

He was not a scholar or a writer, but he did dictate a book,
Germany Reborn,
which was published in London. He had a passion for the works of George Bernard Shaw and could quote long passages from them. He also was familiar with the German classics, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels,
et al.
His love of paintings was well known. He had a fondness for detective stories and for mechanical toys and gadgets.

By now he dreamed of a Göring dynasty, one which would last a thousand years and forever impress his name in history. It was highly probable that Hitler would have no child, and he had named Göring as his successor. This dream was shattered when his only child, a girl, Edda, was born. Emmy was not going to have any more children, and it was unthinkable to him to divorce her and take a wife who might produce sons. Though he must have been intensely disappointed, he did not reveal it. He loved Edda, and she loved him to the end of her life.

Another aspect of his puzzling persona was demonstrated when he visited Italy on a diplomatic mission. The King and the Crown Prince took him on a deer hunt. The three stood on a high platform while hundreds of deer were herded past them. The royalty slaughtered them, the King killing one hundred and thirteen. Göring was so disgusted that he refused to shoot at all.

Nor did he want to invade Czechoslovakia and Austria, and he especially objected to the invasion of Poland. Thought of war depressed him; he had been in low spirits at the idea just before both World War I and II. Nevertheless, he went along with his beloved leader in this matter, just as he had not protested publicly against the persecution of the Jews. But at his wife’s request, he saved dozens of Jews from imprisonment.

In 1939 Hitler promoted Hermann to Field Marshal and made him Economic Minister of the Reich. As Air Minister of the Luftwaffe he was also its commander-in-chief. He tried to get a stratobomber built which would attain a twenty-mile altitude and fly to America, but he did not succeed.

Despite his high positions, he had a tendency to turn away from realities. In 1939 he told the German public, “If any enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring. You can call me Meier.” (“Meier” was a folk-joke name, indicating a mythical character who bumbled and numbskulled his way through life.)

After a while, Göring was often called Meier by the Nazi party bigwigs and by the public. But the affectionate feeling implicit in
Der Dicke
was missing in Meier. The British and American bombers were making a shambles of Germany. The Luftwaffe had failed to soften England for invasion, and now it was failing to turn back the hordes of metal birds dropping deadly eggs onto the Reich. Hitler blamed Göring for both, though it was Hitler’s decision to bomb the English cities instead of first wiping out the Royal Air Force bases that were responsible for the Germans’ plight. Just as Hitler’s decision to attack neutral Russia before England was laid low was ultimately the cause of Germany’s downfall.

As it was, Hitler had wanted to invade Sweden, too, when Norway was taken. But, Göring, loving Sweden, had threatened to resign if Sweden was attacked. He had also pleaded the advantages of a neutral Sweden to Hitler.

His health had been getting worse before the war. During the great conflicts, his sicknesses and his lessening prestige made him turn to drugs. He was anxious, nervous, and given to melancholia, on the skids, out of control, and no way to stop the descent. And his beloved country was heading toward Götterdämmerung which horrified him but which, in a strange way, gratified Hitler.

With the Allies advancing across Germany on all fronts, Göring thought that it was time for him to take over the government. Der Führer, instead, stripped him of all his titles and positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party. His worst enemy, Martin Bormann, ordered his arrest.