“That is what we did,” said Jorgenson. “Since then we have been covering here, afraid to travel further.”
“The landlady,” said Melissa, “has been hinting that it is time for us to go. She knows we have no money. Two of our group had money, but with them, the money’s gone.”
“We have some money,” Lansing said. “We will pay your bill and you can travel on with us.”
“You will travel on?” she asked.
“Of course we will,” said Jurgens. “What else is there to do?”
“But it’s all so senseless!” cried Jorgenson. “If we only knew what we’re here for, what we’re supposed to do. Have you any information?”
“None at all,” said Mary.
“We’re rats running in a maze,” said Lansing. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“When I was home,” Melissa said, “before I was transported here, we had gaming tables. We’d play the games for hours, even for days. There were no rules to the games, the rules developed as we went along. Even when the rules were established, or we thought they had been, then they’d change again…”
“Did anyone ever win?” asked Mary.
“I can’t seem to remember. I don’t think we ever did. Not a one of us. But we didn’t mind, of course. It was just a game.”
“This game is real,” Jorgenson said, glumly. “We all have bet our lives.”
“There are certain skeptics,” said Lansing, “who will tell you there is no abiding principle in the universe. Just before I left my world, I talked with a man — a friend of mine, a loud-mouthed friend of mine — who suggested that the universe might operate at random, or worse. This I can’t believe. There must be an element of reason in it. There must be cause and effect. There must be purpose, although that does not mean we are capable of grasping the purpose. Even if some other, more intelligent form of life should set us down and explain it to us in considerable detail, we still might not understand it.”
“Which doesn’t hold out too much hope for us,” said Jorgenson.
“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Although it could mean that there is some hope. We’re not entirely sunk.”
“There are mysteries,” said Jurgens, “and I speak in the best sense of the word — not the shoddy, sensational connotation of it — that can be unraveled if one puts his mind to it.”
“We’ve asked the landlady what lies ahead,” Melissa said, “and she can tell us almost nothing.”
“Exactly like that great lout at the first inn,” said Jorgenson. “He could tell us only of the cube and city.”
“The landlady,” said Melissa, “says that some distance ahead, we’ll come to a singing tower. And that is all. Except that she warns us we should only travel west, not north. To the north, she says, lies Chaos. Chaos, with a capital.”
“She knows not what Chaos is,” said Jorgenson. “She only knows the word. She shivers when she says it.”
“So then we’ll travel north,” said Jurgens. “I tend to get suspicious when someone warns you off from a certain place. I get the feeling that something may be found there we’re not supposed to find.”
Lansing finished his drink and set the mug upon the table. He got slowly to his feet and walked across the room until he stood beside the table where the four were play-big cards.
He stood for a long moment, with none of them paying him the slightest heed, as if they had not noticed his approach. Then one of them raised his head and turned it, looking at him.
Lansing stepped back a pace, horrified at what he saw. The eyes were dark holes in the skull, out of which peered two black obsidian pebbles. The nose was not a nose, but two breathing slots, slashed into the area between the eyes and mouth. The mouth was another slash, without benefit of lips. There was no chin; the face sloped down to the neck in a slanting line.
Lansing turned about and left. As he approached the table before the fire, he heard Sandra saying, with a strange lilt in her voice, “I cannot wait until we reach the singing tower!”
23
They reached the singing tower on the fourth day after they left the inn.
The tower was not a tower; it was a needle. Standing on top a high hill, it jabbed a finger heavenward. At the base it measured a good six feet across, tapering to a sharp point a hundred feet or more above the ground. It was of a rather nasty pinkish color and was made of a substance that appeared similar to the substance of which the cube had been constructed. Plastic, Lansing told himself, although he was fairly sure that it was not plastic. When he laid his hand flat against its surface, he could feel a slight vibration, as if the wind out of the west, playing upon it, was causing it to vibrate along its entire length as a freestanding, tapering, most unlikely violin string would vibrate to the bow.
With the exception of Sandra, all of them were disappointed with the music it made. Jorgenson said, in fact, that it wasn’t music — that is was simply noise. It was not generally loud, although at tunes it did become a little louder. It sounded, Lansing thought, somewhat like chamber music, although his exposure to chamber music had been slight. Long ago, he recalled, Alice on a Sunday afternoon had enticed him to a chamber music concert and he had suffered, silently but acutely, through two solid hours of it. Yet, despite the fact that more often than not it was a soft music, it had fantastic carrying power. They had heard the first wind-blown snatches of it on the afternoon of the third day out.
Sandra had been instantly entranced; even hearing only snatches of it, she had been captivated. She had balked at stopping to camp that night.
“Can’t we press on?” she’d asked. “Perhaps we can reach the tower before the night is done. None of us is really all that toed and it will be cool walking in the night.”
Lansing had ruled out, rather brusquely, any thought of traveling by night.
Sandra had not argued. She had not helped fix supper, as had been her habit, but had walked out on a small knoll above the camping place and had stood there, a small, slender, wind-blown figure, tensed with listening. She had refused to eat, she did not sleep; she had stood upon the knoll all night.
Now that they had climbed the high hill to its top, where stood the so-called tower, she still was in her trance. She stood to one side, head thrown back, staring upward at the tower, listening with every fiber of her being.
“It stirs me not at all,” said Jorgenson. “What does she find in it?”
“It stirs you not at all,” Melissa said, “because you have no soul. No matter what you may say, it still is music, although a strange music at the best. I like music you can dance to. I used to dance a lot. This is not music one can dance to.”
“I’m worried about Sandra,” Mary said to Lansing. “She hasn’t eaten since we heard the first notes of the music and she hasn’t slept. What shall we do about it?”
Lansing shook his head. “Leave her alone for a while. She may snap out of it.”
When the evening meal was cooked, Melissa took a plate of food to Sandra and coaxed her into eating, although she did not eat a great deal and spoke scarcely at all.
Sitting by the fire and watching the woman, outlined against the sunset color of the west, Lansing recalled how anxiously she had looked forward to the singing tower. On that first night out from the inn, she had said, “It could be beautiful. How I hope it is! There is so little that is beautiful in this world. A world deprived of beauty.”
“You live for beauty,” he had said.
“Oh, indeed I do. All this afternoon I have tried to make a poem. There is something here from which a poem might be made — a thing of beauty in itself springing from a place that is most unbeautiful. But I cannot get it started. I know what I want to say, but the thought and word will not come together.”