Specimens Part 3

It was going to end as another warm day, though not brutally hot, and thundershowers threatened. She wished she had a sunroof on the Volks. Maybe the next car they bought would be air-conditioned. No more ''the next car I buy." It still felt strange in antic.i.p.ation, this giving over of herself to another person. Not only the body, but the name, the whole future and all its time and automobiles. It wasn't frightening, exactly, but it was strange.

Its flow loosening now to true expressway speeds, the Eisenhower bore her due west through the miles of decaying neighborhoods that stretched in that direction from the Loop. Not much to be seen, for the highway lay in a vast trench, which main north-south streets bridged at right angles. The blight was behind her before she turned off the expressway on the city's far west side, and there was, no hint of its existence in the neighborhood of the restaurant where her bridal shower was being held.

While waiting for a traffic light to change, before she drove her bug across a last intersection and into the restaurant's parking lot, she lifted her eyes to the sky yet farther west. Sunset was still an hour or two away, but already the clouds in that direction were slightly reddened. Somewhere beneath those clouds lay Wheat-field Park, and in it the lives that were now of most importance to her own.

Nancy .............. Dan.

She had a premonition of some kind of evil, but there was no real telepathy between her and her chosen man. Neither had words exchanged on the telephone managed to bridge the gap. She put aside as irrational her sudden impulse to forget about the shower and drive on to him at once. The light turned green for Nancy and she eased her car across the intersection, then spun the wheel to leave the busy traffic of the street.

Happily she spotted an open parking s.p.a.ce, just beside the restaurant's door.

Dan had spent the day listlessly working around the house, or rather trying to work, though unable to accomplish very much. Shortly after talking to Nancy he had looked up Dr. Shapiro's number and called his office. He was given an appointment to see the doctor on next Monday afternoon, that being the earliest time available for non- emergencies. Six days away. The appointment made, he of course began to feel better immediately. By Friday or Sat.u.r.day, he thought, he would undoubtedly be in great shape. He would have to remember to call back then and cancel out.

Sam and Millie, as bona fide residents of the village, were now eligible to use the swimming pool located in its largest park, and they spent most of the afternoon there in the water - or, to hear them tell it when they came home, they spent the time standing in line waiting to get to the water.

After supper, which Dan cooked - spaghetti and clam sauce, an old family favorite - the children went out into the yard to fool around, and he did what he had been wanting to do all day, but had not yet brought himself to try. He went down into the bas.e.m.e.nt to look at the old wall.

He hadn't gone down earlier because, as he told himself, to take a dream seriously enough to test it was to take it altogether too seriously. But finally Dan had to admit to himself that there was another reason for his hesitation: he was actually somewhat afraid of what he was going to see when he looked at that old wall.

To be afraid of testing a dream was even worse than testing it, and once he had put the problem to himself in those terms, he had little choice but to go down after supper.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, he stalled briefly, looking at his little plastic wine rack with its two bottles of champagne put by for house warming. Then he proceeded deliberately across the bas.e.m.e.nt to the disorderly acc.u.mulation of tools and boxes of household hardware that marked the future location of his workshop. From amid the jumble he dug out his trouble light on its long, heavily insulated cord. He had to make quite sure of what he was going to look at, and the daylight was starting to fail outside, and the only other light in the bas.e.m.e.nt, a single bare bulb in an old overhead lamp, was not going to be much help.

Dan plugged the cord into an overhead receptacle and men carried its business end over to the old wall and switched it on. In the trouble light's harsh glare, the outline of the old sealed doorway was there to see on the old wall, amid its rounded stones.

Now wait a minute. He s.h.i.+fted the light and blinked his eyes and looked again. But there was no mistake.

At sometime, evidently a time long decades past, the doorway had been filled in with stones and mortar very little different from those of the surrounding wall. It was in the place, and of the size, of the doorway through which he and Oriana had been carried in his dream last night. The place where the old doorway had been was not easy to see now, not even when you knew just where to look, but it was there. About five feet high and only a couple of feet wide, with its top a just-slightly lopsided arch.

It reminded Dan of one of those subtle pictures they gave you to look at in a test for color-blindness: find the doorway. Except that here the differences in color and texture of mortar between the old wall and the patch were too subtle to be picked up even by good eyes, unless you used a good light - and knew just where to look.

And he had known. Had been shown. How, and why? And by whom?

The dream promised that behind the patched-up masonry, right under the oldest part of the house where the bas.e.m.e.nt did not extend, the tunnel would slant down at a sharp angle to . . .to what, he didn't know. If he had ever dreamed what was at the tunnel's end, he couldn't recall it now. But presumably it was bad.

From somewhere out in the suburban streets a motorcycle bubbled and blasted, and then the evening's first ice cream truck chimed out its cheerful melody.

No. He turned off the trouble light and stepped back. Oh no. It was all utter nonsense, of course. It had had him going there for a few hours, and really going for a minute or two just now. But really - dreams? No. Come on. He was going to get a good grip on himself and think it all through logically.

Now, what had really happened? Obviously he had noticed this apparent doorway sometime before, noticed it subconsciously or subliminally or whatever in h.e.l.l the right word was, yesterday or the day before, or on his first visit weeks ago. Some part of his mind had taken note of this blocked doorway and had built it into his dreams, just as the rest of the house had been built into them. Why the old place should be so important to his subconscious mind was a question that maybe some headshrinker would have to answer, if an answer was really required. Sure, all right, the doorway itself was real, and once it had led downward to a root cellar or something.

Dan rubbed a hand over the old mortar joints. Switching his light on again, he traced with his fingers part of the old, almost invisible outline of the lopsided arch. His nails sc.r.a.ped just a little sandy, bone-dry stuff from the ancient surface, and his fingers were trembling as they moved.

Good try, Danny, he thought, very logical and all that. But you're not going to be able to talk yourself out of it. Not after nightly visions like those. To call them dreams was a pretense, a mistake, though they came to him while he slept. Thinking things out was not going to make things right. He was not going to be able to get a grip on himself and proceed with his normal life until he knew the truth about that door.

He turned his head and looked at the heavy tools waiting behind the furnace, waiting as if they had been provided for this very job.

He put the trouble light down on the floor, from which angle it threw a good if somewhat spooky illumination on the work. Then, with the yard-long handle of the ma.s.sive new hammer in his hands, he hesitated once again. Should he call Nancy, have her get a crew of experts in, make it a real archaeological dig? No. In the first place there was probably nothing but solid earth behind the wall, in the second place the experts would probably have a good laugh at the idea of digging in his bas.e.m.e.nt, and as the clincher he couldn't wait that long. This wasn't for science, this was for his own sanity.

He fixed his eye on the middle of the blocked-up door, took a tight grip on the wooden handle, and swung the sledge home hard. The old masonry of water-rounded stones was solid, but it could not stand against this kind of a.s.sault. The first blow cracked the wall, and the second brought pieces of it tumbling down.

Once he had broken through the outer layer of mortared stones, he could see that at least the skeptical belief, or hope, in solid earth back there was wrong. Instead there had come into view a deep-looking jumble of stones and bricks, loose rubble filling a s.p.a.ce whose dimensions could not yet be seen. When he had made a hole in the wall a little bigger than a man's head, he ceased pounding for a moment and got down on his knees to see what he could see. But even with the trouble light to help, he could make out nothing in the s.p.a.ce behind the wall except more loose masonry, some of which had been blackened as if by fire.

Before attacking the wall again Dan paused briefly to find and put on a pair of learner-palmed work gloves. He glanced at his sport s.h.i.+rt and slacks and shoes and decided that they were old enough not to need worrying about. Then he set to work again with sledge and wrecking bar, rapidly enlarging the breach while being careful to keep it within the limits of the old doorway. In the old days it was a h.e.l.l of a lot of work to build a wall, and usually every part of it was given something to hold up, and he didn't want to bring the house or any fragment thereof down on his head.

When the hole was big enough to let him thrust in his head and the trouble light simultaneously, Dan froze at what he saw. He was looking up at the low, vaulted roof of the tunnel that he had beheld through Oriana's eyes the night before.

He went on working. The full shock of what he had discovered came upon him only gradually. Occasionally he would stop to stare at nothing for a few moments. Then at intervals he would set down his tools and haul debris from his excavation across the bas.e.m.e.nt to get it out of the way. So far he had nothing in his rubble pile but dry stones and some blackened bricks of unknown origin. At last the hole in the wall was getting big enough to enter comfortably.

"Dad, holy gosh, what're you doing?" It was Sam, come down the stairs without his father's hearing him, so intense had been Dan's concentration.

"Sammy." Dan backed out of the hole, a couple more chunks of stone in his gloved hands. He tossed these toward his rubble pile and straightened up slowly to his full height, easing his back. Looking at his curious son, he had a sense of coming back to the sane and normal world after a terrifying visit somewhere else. But then he realized that he had not, could not, come back all the way. Something was still indefinably wrong with him. Quite wrong.

"Dad, what're you doing? You gonna dig out back there and make the bas.e.m.e.nt bigger?"

"I . . . guess I just wanted to see what was back there." To Dan's own ears his voice sounded surprisingly normal. Wasn't he normal, after all? Wasn't this oppressive feeling of wrongness about to pa.s.s?

"Can I help?" Sam asked eagerly. He was down on all fours now, bare-kneed in his denim shorts, peering into the opening.

''Well.'' Dan found he really didn't want to be alone again. ''Don't get inside there.

Just carry some of these chunks of rock over to the other side of the bas.e.m.e.nt as I dig 'em out. Here, take these gloves I'm wearing." He half expected that the boy would tire of the job in a few minutes and go upstairs to watch television. And if it didn't work out that way, Dan decided, he would invent some other errand or task to get Sammy out of the way before the digging went much farther. Not that Dan really expected to lift up a chunk of rubble in there and uncover the crab-monster's twitching claw, no matter what the visions seemed to predict. But he was certainly uncovering the unknown, and some kind of physical danger could not be completely discounted.

Working hard, Dan dug on for a few more minutes. He could see now that the tunnel he was entering was quite short, no more than six feet or so in length, and that in confirmation of his nightmare it slanted downward sharply from the breached wall. Its farther end was against another wall or door whose nature Dan could not quite make out as yet. The little pa.s.sageway was still half full of stony rubble.

In one place, he discovered, the vaulting that made up the tunnel's top had loosened enough to let a stone or two fall out of place. The electric light revealed a sheet of something greenish above the gap that had been thus created. Probing up into the hole first with fingers and then with the blade of his pocket knife, Dan found that the green was a patina on metal, on what seemed to be a sheet of hammered copper when some of the green was scratched away. As if copper sheeting had been formed into a roof above the tunnel's stone vaulting when it was made ... by whom? and when?

Dan backed out of the tunnel into his bas.e.m.e.nt again, and once more stood up straight and stretched. A glance toward the bas.e.m.e.nt windows showed him that it was now quite dark outside. He had put his wrist-watch into his pants pocket before starting to swing the sledge, and now he got it out for a look. Ten minutes after nine.

It was time he got rid of Sammy, but it probably wasn't going to be easy. Sam was now crouching to peer into the tunnel again. With the heavy work gloves engulfing his hands, he had labored steadily, as the growing pile of stones against the far wall testified, and his enthusiasm showed no signs of flagging yet.

"Gee, Dad, it's a regular tunnel in there. It must have been part of the Underground Railroad." Straining at prohibition, the boy moved forward until his head was inside the roughed-out doorway again.

Dan intended to walk over, take his son by the shoulders and pull him back, then send him upstairs or at least make him go and watch from the distance of the bas.e.m.e.nt steps. Maybe, in fact, it was time they both quit for the night.

Dan intended so to move, willed so to move, and then discovered that his body would not obey. He could not take his eyes from the back of Sam's smudged T-s.h.i.+rt, could not let up the stretching effort of his own back muscles, could not adjust his own footing by the fraction of an inch. As if he were suddenly and completely paralyzed in every voluntary muscle. He had the feeling that in the next moment he might topple like an unbalanced statue, to smash in bits upon the concrete floor.

SIX.

Sammy continued to look into the tunnel, while from far upstairs there came the muted sounds of Millie's record player. Dan stood where he was, helpless in the grip of he knew not what. He swayed slightly, muscles adjusting to correct his overbalancing, but adjusting under some control other than his own. His back muscles relaxed and his foot slid a few inches on the floor to give him a wider and more stable stance. But he was sure that the foot had not moved at his command.

Now he willed a cla.s.sical gesture of the sick and stricken, a simple raising of the hands toward the face. But his arms would not obey; they went on with a motion of their own that they had just begun, waving about uncertainly with hands at waist level, fingers groping out of control. Now he was willing to bend his knees and let his body sink down to the concrete floor in terror, but his legs in their rebellion kept him neatly balanced and upright. He wanted to close his eyes, but their lids stayed open and without his volition his gaze darted about the bas.e.m.e.nt, probing at everything as if this were some totally new environment.

''Dad, what d'you s'pose is down at the other end?'' Sam was halfway into the hole now, the light with him, and spoke without turning around.

Dan struggled to speak, to cry out to his son a warning to get away, to run for help.

But the utter helplessness of the dreams had come upon him all over again. Worse now, infinitely worse, because now it was his own body that was forced to move like a puppet at the orders of some totally alien will. He was unable even to strain his own muscles against the invisible strings.

His puppet-body turned neck and torso to complete its scanning of the bas.e.m.e.nt, then walked toward the jumble of tools, bent down, and picked up what was left of a roll of twine that had done good service during the moving process. Dan's body moved a little stiffly and awkwardly, as if it were somewhat drunk, and he had not the slightest idea what it was going to do next.

Dan's fingers tested the cordage for strength, and then began to rifle his own pockets as if they were searching those of some fallen stranger. When the left hand came out with the little pocket knife, his eyes looked at it as if they had never seen it before. Then his fingers, fumbling as they too were quite unfamiliar with the knife, got it open and cut off a couple of pieces of twine, each about four feet long.

All this while Sam was still at the excavation, studying it with the light and throwing back occasional comments over a shoulder; he was now almost completely inside the hole, and in the absence of any parental warnings to reinforce the earlier command to stay out was working his way slowly deeper.

The small pieces of twine were coiled up in Dan's left hand, and the roll was tossed aside. His eyes went searching again. What else of interest lay about? Here was a roll of black electrician's tape, whose adhesion was tested by the fingers before it went into a pocket; and here was a pair of cotton work gloves, almost new. Into another pocket went the gloves.

When Daddy's hands clamped on him from behind, Sam must have thought at first that he was only being rather roughly removed, for his own good, from the tunnel that he had earlier been forbidden to enter.

"I'm getting out," he muttered, half-complaining of the hard seizure, half-fearful of possibly greater punishment to come. ''I'm just. . . hey, Dad! Ouch!''

Let me wake up. It was a prayer, the first real one that Dan Post had uttered for some years, and it was unavailing. He had Sammy pinned down on the open bas.e.m.e.nt floor and halfway tied up with the twine before the boy fully realized that something was most terribly wrong. And by then there was no chance at all for him to make any effective struggle. His father tied him hand and foot with twine, stuffed a cotton work glove into his mouth and sealed it there with tape. His father got up then, letting him lie there on the floor making terrible choking noises, would-be sobbing noises behind his gag.

Letting him lie there staring over his gag with unbelieving eyes.

Let me wake up. But even as Dan repeated the prayer he knew that it was going to work no magic for him. The next thought that came to him was: then this is what happens in insanity. This is how it feels to go utterly and violently mad.

With Sam lying helpless on the floor, emitting peculiar sounds, Dan, or Dan's body, went calmly back to work to clear the tunnel. His body worked harder under his conqueror's will than it had for him, throwing rock barehanded out into the bas.e.m.e.nt.

In a matter of minutes the tunnel was clear enough to provide easy access to the dark wall at its farther, lower end. The wall was somewhat convex, and when Dan's fingers reached it it felt hard, like metal or some especially tough ceramic. The faint outline of a small door was visible, occupying most of the wall inside the tunnel's termination.

Dan could see no latch or lock, but his hand under its external guidance went straight to the place on the dark metal where a doork.n.o.b might have been expected, and pressed there several times, hard and rhythmically. At once the door emitted a heavy and fearfully familiar click, and swung inward on some noiseless mechanism. Light, greenish and steady and not too bright, came out through the opening thus created. Inside, Dan saw a chamber of indeterminate size, maybe as big as a small room, half full of mechanical shapes enfolded by blank curved walls, all pale, all pastel green in the interior light.

Seemingly able to move with gradually increasing sureness under the control of the invisible puppeteer, Dan's body went back into the bas.e.m.e.nt to get his son. He half carried and half dragged Sam's helpless form down through the tunnel, the floor of which was of the same gray stone that made its walls and arch. At the end of the tunnel Dan's body lifted Sam up fully into its arms and stepped into the green-lit room.

As the heavy door sighed shut behind, Dan saw mat they were entering, near its top, the inside of a cylindrical room or vessel, a slightly tilted metallic silo with an inner diameter of perhaps twelve feet. The silo's bottom was at least twenty feet deeper in the earth than was the entrance from the tunnel. As his body stepped inside, Dan's feet were on a densely woven network of pale, hard rods, that like some surrealistic fire escape wound down to the bottom of the silo, leaving only a small shaft of clear s.p.a.ce just around the central axis.

Around this stairway were curving walls, solidly lined with broad, deep shelves, which held a number of large and small containers that all appeared to be made of the same gla.s.sy, transparent substance. Dan could see very little more of his surroundings for the moment, for his eyes were now kept fixed on the footing as his body was made to begin to descend the stairs. The unwilling, twisting body of his son was draped over one shoulder. Carrying the writhing burden down the spidery, slightly tilted helix of the stairs was an awkward and somewhat dangerous task. Sam's wrists and ankles were tightly bound, but his body kept jerking, while he mumbled and groaned behind his gag.

The rod that answered for a handrail on the stairs felt strange and slightly oily in Dan's grip as his fingers slid their way along. The air in here felt so dry that it hurt his throat. Now he could see, down near the bottom of the silo, four flattened globes from which the greenish radiance came. They hung above a broad, flat table that was surrounded by other less easily nameable shapes, of furniture or machinery.

Down and around he carried Sam, around and down, amid the many crystal containers that lined most of the s.p.a.ce along the curving walls, tier on tier of the containers like bunks in a crowded submarine or specimen cases in some strange leaning tower of a museum. Nor were the cases empty. But Dan could not turn his gaze by so much as a hairsbreadth to see what they contained.

Where the stair ended at what appeared to be the bottom of the silo, in a small solidly floored area bathed by the greenish lights, Dan's arms swung down his voicelessly protesting son and lay him on the broad table, which, as Dan now saw, was mounted on gimbals so that its surface remained quite level within this tilted place.

Sam continued trying to struggle as his father's strong arms held him on the table.

Dan's eyes did not have to meet those that looked at him over the rough, taped gag, but were made to keep watching the machines that lined the curving, whitish wall along the table's other side. From amid those strange devices there now came moving out thin metal arms in several pairs. Some of the arms ended in simple metal clamps, while others carried implements more complex and exotic.

One of these, bright and thin as a needle but ending in a round swelling rather than a sharp point, fastened itself somehow on the side of Sammy's neck, and two more clung to his bare arms below the short sleeves of his T-s.h.i.+rt. The boy's struggles ceased almost at once; made to look down now, Dan saw his son's eyes begin to close.

Dan Post could still do nothing as his body was made to stand back and watch through open eyes. Dry air kept circulating round him gently, evaporating the sweat of work and struggle. It was somewhat cooler down here than it had been up in the house, and the air smelled neutrally fresh.

Sam had grown completely quiet now. Soon Dan's hands got out his pocketknife again, and busied themselves cutting the bonds carefully away from Sammy's limp arms and legs. Then the tape was stripped away from Sam's mourn and the gag pulled out.

The boy's breathing had by now become quite slow and faint. The clamp-handed metal arms adjusted the position of his body on the table; the sleep-inducing probes kept contact on him somewhere at all times, though individual probes at times retracted or came out again. Now, from a newly-opened panel in the wall behind the table, there emerged a thick, self-extending tube that ended in a short black nozzle. The tube moved its snout in a close oval around the short body on the table, and as it moved, continuously extruded some clear substance that looked like thickened water. After the tube's second or third circuit of Sam's quiet form, Dan realized that it was building up a wall around his son, a clear wall that might make a casket or coc.o.o.n if it got high enough.

He was not compelled to watch the proceedings any more. His body was turned around and set to climbing the tilted fire escape again, his eyes kept busy with the handholds and the stairs. His hand pulled open the heavy black door by a handle on its inner side, and he went back up through the tunnel into the bas.e.m.e.nt of his suburban house, where he was made to pause and once more provide himself with handy lengths of twine and materials for another gag. Then once more his legs were made to climb.

On emerging from the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs into the first floor of the house, his body stopped in the hallway and his eyes looked around, like those of a stranger entering the house for the first time. Full darkness had come some time ago, and no ground floor lights had been switched on, but soft indirect electric light shone down from somewhere upstairs, and from up there also still came the sound of Millie's record player, soft and low the way she liked it, childish voices singing incomprehensibly of love.

On tiptoe Dan's body moved to explore the ground floor, peering at least briefly into every room. Then he was made to go to the ascending stairs. On the upper floor, the three other bedrooms and the bath were briefly investigated before he was sent toward Millie's room, from whence the light and music came.

Millie was sprawled on her narrow bed in blue jeans, pink blouse, and stockinged feet, looking at a book while music played, her records and a doll or two scattered around her. She looked up casually when the figure of her father came in, but her shock when she saw his smiling face was great and instantaneous.

Millie fought him, fought hard. She was bigger than her brother, and stronger, and she was not being taken from behind and by surprise. More importantly, it was as if she knew from the first glance that a deadly enemy had come, as if she could accept at once the existence of a murderous monster behind her father's familiar face. Never mind mat his face had been forced to wear an actor's smile on entering her room. She knew somehow, knew though she could not understand. Her screams rebounded from the walls and fled the house through open windows, her feet kicked at him viciously, her sharp little nails tore at his cheek. But she could struggle only a few moments before his vastly stronger arms had pinioned her, got her face turned down and pressed into the pillow and she began to smother.

With that her struggles weakened rapidly and almost stopped. She was let up for air before she quite lost consciousness, but quickly forced down again when she got out one more surprising scream and tried to renew the fight. A few moments more without air and she was helpless. Then she was gagged as Sammy had been gagged, and her wrists and ankles bound tightly with the twine.

She was still vaguely conscious, but seemingly in shock, and all the fight was gone from her as he carried her down into the greenlit h.e.l.l beneath the house. There he found his son, still on the table, now almost completely sealed within a box of gla.s.sy plastic.

After Millie had been set down on the table and the metal arms had come for her, one of Dan's hands reached impersonally in through one of the smaller remaining openings in Sam's gla.s.sy box, and moved one of his thin arms back and forth as if testing for muscle tone or reflexes.

The thin arm tensed slightly in Dan's grip, and feebly tried to pull away, while Sam's forehead creased in a slight frown. The boy was obviously not dead, though his chest now showed no perceptible rise and fall of breathing. His eyes were fully closed.

Dan's hands were made to remove the cords and tape from his immobilized daughter, and then his body was turned away and set to yet another task. His hands moved with easy familiarity to operate a latch that he had never seen before, and slid open the doors of a large cabinet built in against the silo's curving wall. The oily-feeling door yielded with a click and a brief hiss, as if some kind of airtight seal had been broken. Inside the cabinet, motionless as a costume hanging in a closet, the crab-machine that had pursued him through three nights of dreaming horror stood upright on its hind pair of legs.

It was a position the thing had never a.s.sumed in any of his dreams, but he recognized it nevertheless. Its shape was not really crab-like, he saw now; perhaps more like that of a giant grayish-brown ant than anything else that he could think of at the moment. Its middle pair of legs, transversely striped like sections of flexible metal conduit, were folded on the dorsal side of its tubular torso; and its foremost, now upper, pair of legs were bent praying-mantis fas.h.i.+on from where its shoulders ought to have been. No head or other sensorium was apparent from this side.

Casually Dan's hand was sent out to rub at the thing's featureless belly, which felt ceramic or metallic and seemed to be covered by a thin caking of dried grime. Dan's fingers brushed at this, and then went on to feel the motionless limbs and the ball-like feet, which looked not at all like the hooves or pads Dan vividly remembered from his dreams (and yet he felt sure it was the same machine.) From limbs and feet Dan's fingers picked up another trace or two of faintly greasy grime. Meanwhile the thing remained totally inanimate, only continuing to stand there, lifeless as a mummy or a motorcycle. Presently Dan's hands slid the doors of its cabinet closed again.

This time the fire escape was climbed unhurriedly, his body being made to pause at almost every step to look into all the gla.s.sy cases lining the walls. The lowest cases, only a step or two up from the level of the worktable and the lights, contained what looked like soil, with small plants apparently growing normally upon its surface inside the sealed boxes. Here in one box was an anthill with all its members scattered motionless about, motionless but on their feet, like a stopped frame in a motion picture film. And here in nearby boxes were other small insects, frogs and spiders, frozen in the same eerie way.

There was a rattlesnake, coiled but apparently asleep. With snakes it might be hard to tell, but ... other boxes held small mammals: squirrels, rabbits and was that a prairie dog? No labels were provided. Here, inside this box, was a motionless plastic gel as clear as water or fine ice, with fish and turtles frozen in its grip, all rightside up and looking ready to go, not floating dead. And in this ma.s.sive case - what? Shape like a mountain on its side, a lopsided mountain rimmed with curls of blackish hair. Was that a small upjutting horn . . .? Good Lord, a buffalo.

Here was a human being, quiet as all the rest, expected, but still a shock to see.

It was an Indian man, or so Dan would have described him. A man with circles and bands of white and ocher painted on his bare bony chest and wiry arms. He lay at full length, wearing only a loin cloth, supine in his transparent coffin. His chest showed no rise and fall of breathing, but otherwise he might have been merely asleep. And in the boxes after him on the ascending way, more Indians, men and women and children.

Nothing but people now. The staircase was so positioned as to permit easy inspection of them all.

The first body Dan had recognized as the host of his first dream, and now another shock of recognition came, at the sight of a short casket containing a pale-skinned, naked form. The child was lying face down, but Dan recognized the bright red of the unruly hair, and the sunburned hands and neck and feet. And in the next case a boy who must be Red's companion, Peter, slept on his back, dressed in familiar homespun overalls and s.h.i.+rt.

There was a sudden movement up through the open middle of the silo, caught from the corner of Dan's eye, and his head was turned to watch a burden being lifted by a thicker mechanical arm man those that did the preparation down below. Sammy's casket, being hoisted into place. Dan watched his encased son go up and up, to be nudged at last onto a shelf not far below the entrance. Not a whole lot of s.p.a.ce remained to fit additional specimens in, Dan noted. His mind was working loosely and easily for the moment, moving now in the territory beyond shock.

In the box after Peter's a blond girl lay, a teenage girl in a long dark dress, the color of youth still in her cheeks. And after her a series of blacks began. There were almost all adults, and were without exception dressed in wretched clothes. Through one man's torn s.h.i.+rt Dan could see how the marks of a lash crisscrossed his muscled back, wounds looking no more than a few days healed, looking still almost raw, although they must have been made more than a hundred years ago.

And here was Oriana. Though he had never seen her face before, he thought he could recognize her dress, and the shape of the body that he had temporarily inhabited.

A few more blacks, another white or two, all strangers to Dan Post, and then his son.

Now he was almost at the top, the tour was over. Dan found he had been looking for two people who were not here, the Underground Railroad agent Clareson and his wife Carrie. Since Clareson was not here, might he have been the one who sealed the bas.e.m.e.nt wall? Why had he done that - or why had he been forced to do it - and what had happened to him afterwards? In Dan's dream, Clareson had seemed to be working with the crab-machine and whatever master power dwelt here, in a more willing sort of cooperation than that into which Dan had now been forced ... the chain of thought broke up, its fragments falling from Dan's mental grasp. He was still too much in shock to think coherently for long.