The air flickered again. I squinted and shook my head. This was getting a little alarming. It couldn't be the Scotch. It never happened outside the apartment. It never happened unless I was looking at that particular wall.

  There was a Rousseau picture on it, Sleeping Gypsy, something Uncle Jim had left me along with the apartment. I made a great effort to focus on the blue-green sky, the lion's blowing mane, the striped robe of the black man on the sand.

  But all I got was a blur. And then I knew I must be drunk because a sound seemed to go with the blur, a roaring that might have been the lion except that the lion had entirely vanished and I seemed to be seeing a dome of shining rosy-red light that moved like water.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. This was crazy.

  Uncle Jim had left me the apartment in his will. It was one of those deals where you pay a fabulous sum down and a high rental for life and call the apartment yours. I wouldn't have got into it myself, but Uncle Jim did and it was nice to have a place the landlord couldn't throw me out of when somebody offered him a higher bribe.

  This is probably the place for a word about Uncle Jim Burton. He was a Character. He had red hair, freckles and a way of losing himself in foreign parts for months at a stretch. Sometimes for years.

  He used to visit us between trips when I was a kid, and of all the people I knew in those days he was my favorite because he took me in on a secret.

  It started out as bedtime stories. All about a marvelous land called Malesco that followed the pattern for all marvelous lands. There was a beautiful princess and a wicked high priest and a dashing young hero whose adventures kept me awake for all of fifteen minutes sometimes after the lights were put out.

  Those were the pre-Superman days, so I didn't picture myself soaring through Malesco in a red union suit. But sometimes I wore a lion skin like Tarzan and sometimes the harness of an intrepid Martian warrior who looked like John Carter.

  I even learned to speak Malescan. Uncle Jim made it up, of course. He had a restless mind, and he was recovering from some sort of illness during those months he stayed with us when the Malesco stories began. He made up a vocabulary of the language. We worked out a sort of primer together and jabbered away to each other in Malescan with a good deal of fluency before the episode came to an end and he went away again.

  I sat there, watching the wall flicker, looking at the blurred rose-red globe on the wall and something like roofs beyond it, lit with a brilliant sunset. I knew I was imagining most of it. What I saw was the red blur you get when you rub your eyes hard and my imagination was making it into something very much like the tales of Malesco Uncle Jim used to tell.

  The whole thing had sunk far back into my mind in the many years since. But when I groped I seemed to dredge up a memory of a city lit with crimson sunsets. In the center of the city was a great dome from which reflected the light from a surface of—had it been water? Had it been—

  The doorbell rang.

  "Eddie!" Lorna's voice called loudly. "Eddie, let me in a minute."

  I knew if I didn't she'd rouse the neighbors with her knocking and shouting. I heaved myself out of the chair and sidled cautiously around that blur which was pure imagination between me and the wall where the Rousseau hung. It was odd, I thought, that the hall wasn't blurred, or the front door, or even Lorna's pretty, cheap little face when I let her in.

  "I waited for you, Eddie," she said reproachfully, slipping in fast before I could change my mind. "What kept you? Eddie, I had to see you. I've got a new idea. Look, how would it be if I could dance a little too? Would that help? I've worked out a sort of routine I wish you'd—"

  "Have a drink," I said wearily. "Let's not talk about it now, Lorna. My head aches. I think I've got eye trouble. Things keep blurring."

  "—look while I just run through it," she went right on as soon as I finished speaking. It was one of her less endearing tricks.

  I shut my ears and followed her back into the living room, hoping she'd go away soon. The Rousseau Gypsy had come back anyhow. That was a comfort. The red blur which my imagination made into a vision of Malesco was entirely gone. I sat down in the same chair, sipped my Scotch and looked morosely at Lorna.

  It doesn't matter what she was saying. I heard about every tenth word. She fixed herself a drink and perched girlishly on the arm of a chair, making graceful gestures with her glass, telling me all about how I was going to help her become a great dancer if I'd only say the right word to the right man.

  I'd heard it all before. I yawned, looked crosseyed at the ice in my glass, drained the last of the Scotch and glanced up at the opposite wall.

  This time it was pure hallucination. Instead of the Rousseau it was another kind of picture on the wall and it moved as though I were looking at a pull-down movie screen, stereoscopic, technicolored.

  There it all was, clear and perfect. No imagination about it this time. Malesco—exactly as Uncle Jim had told me. A black line that looked like an iron bar ran across one corner of the picture. Beyond it, small and far away, was the city lit with sunset.

  Domes, soaring columns, a shining globe that moved like water in one enormous sphere, surrounded by curved arches that seemed to support it though they too had a flowing upward motion. And all the intricate pattern of arches and bubbles was on fire with reflected light.

  A rose-red city, half as old as time.

  "Eddie, look at me!"

  I didn't stir. This was like hypnosis. I couldn't turn my eyes away from that incredible hallucination. I knew Lorna hadn't seen it, for the pitch of her voice didn't change.

  Maybe she couldn't see it. Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe she just hadn't glanced that way.

  She was babbling something about taking her shoes off so she could show me the dance and I realized vaguely that she was thumping heavily about the floor. I knew I ought to rub my eyes and try to make that vision go away.

  "Eddie, look at me!" she insisted.

  "All right, all right," I said, not looking. "It's fine."

  I rubbed my eyes.

  Then Lorna screamed.

  My head jerked up. I remember the coldness of ice spilling across my hand, I stared at the spot where she should have been and all I could see across the room was that picture: the sunset city with its globe of burning water and the black bar across the foreground. The whole city quivered.

  I heard her scream fade. It diminished and grew thin and ceased so gradually it still seemed to ring in my ears long after I thought it had stopped. Then the air's flickering steadied. The rose-red city blurred again and in the next moment the lion crouched above the sleeping gypsy and the Rousseau painting was unchanged there on the solid wall.

  "Lorna," I said. No answer. I stood up, dropping the glass. I took a step forward and stumbled over her shoes. I ran across to the door and jerked it open. The corridor was empty outside. No footsteps sounded.

  I came back and tried the kitchen, the bedroom. No Lorna.

  An hour later I was down at police headquarters, trying to tell the cops I hadn't murdered her. An hour after that I was in jail.

  -

  Chapter II

  I'D RATHER deal with a crook than a fanatic any day. The Assistant D.A. was a fanatic about his own theories, and I found myself in a difficult spot in less than no time. This isn't the story of how circumstantial evidence can make mistakes and I won't go into detail. It was just that Lorna had left a friend waiting in the lobby, the neighbors heard Lorna call and heard me let her in—and where was she?

  I didn't try to tell the truth. I said she'd gone out. I was too rattled to remember the shoes and that was a strong point against me. The Assistant D.A. was bucking for his boss' job, and he got himself so thoroughly convinced of my guilt that toward the end I think he'd have been willing to stretch a point or two, legally speaking, if he could bring a murderer to justice—me.

  Maybe you remember the newspaper stories about it. I lost my part in the hit play. I got a lawyer who didn't believe me because I couldn't tell him the truth. Time went by and all that saved me was the fact that Lorna's body never did show up. Eventually they let me go.

  What would you have done in my spot? In the movies I'd instantly have gone to see Einstein, and he'd have figured it all out and whipped up a super-machine that would bring Lorna back or send me into a world like King Kong's.

  Or in another kind of movie there'd have been gangsters hammering at the door while I climbed down the fire escape, looking like Dick Powell. Or there'd have been sliding panels or something to explain things at the end of the movie. But Lorna had vanished into a picture on the wall, and I was beginning to worry about my own sanity.

  The only hope was that the shimmer in the air might come again and I could somehow lean through and haul Lorna back. I'd come to accept that hope definitely by the time a few months had gone by. I'd thought it all over and been to an optometrist and a psychiatrist and found out all the things it couldn't have been. Not hallucination. Not visual disturbance. Not madness.

  No, it had simply been—Malesco.

  I went through Uncle Jim's books and papers after that. I found a lot of notes in a shorthand I never was able to read, then or later. I found quite a lot of stuff on alchemy, of all odd things. And I found the old Malescan primer and vocabulary. This was the one thing I really got some good out of—but not then.

  That came much later when everything broke at once. It was night again. I was sitting at home drinking Scotch again. And again a bell rang, but this time it was the phone. It was my attorney. He talked fast and carefully.

  "Listen, Burton," he said. "A body's been picked up in the Sound. A floater. Your friend Thompson's got the lab working on it. He thinks it's the Maxwell woman."

  "Lorna's not dead," I said stupidly. "At least not—"

  "All right. Take it easy. It's just that I'm a little worried. This is what Thompson's been waiting for, you know."

  "They can't possibly identify—"

  "After this long it's mostly guesswork anyhow. But Thompson's got the experts working for him, and juries have a way of believing experts. They might—just might—make it stick, Burton."

  So that was that—crisis. And what could I do? If I ran they'd pick me up. If I stayed, they'd probably convict me. I hung up the phone and went back to my chair, pausing on the way to tap with insane hopefulness at the Rousseau. If I tore my way through that wall would I come out on the other side into Malesco? Would Lorna be there or was she that floater after all?

  "Lorna?" I said inquiringly into the empty air. "Lorna?"

  I waited. No answer. And yet there was something more than silence. My voice had a curious echoing quality as if I'd spoken in a tunnel. Malesco, of course, didn't exist. It was a fairy-tale land like Oz and Wonderland out of a childhood story. But I had a sudden, compelling certainty that my voice echoed when I called to Lorna and echoed in Malesco.

  "Lorna!" I said it louder. "Lorna!" This time it was a shout. But it was a hollow and ghostly shout, echoing and reechoing down a long invisible tunnel, dying away at the far end—in Malesco.

  "Lorna!"

  The shrill hum of the doorbell cut through the echoing of my voice. The police? I spun around. But as I moved, the walls tilted sickeningly. Either I couldn't stop turning or the room was falling sidewise—no, collapsing in a direction I didn't understand.

  The doorbell sang its thin, shrill summons, over and over, farther and farther away ... For I was falling.

  I saw a man's face whirl by in darkness. He wore a queer headdress and his mouth was wide open with a look of surprise and terror. He was pointing a weapon at me.

  He slid sidewise and vanished. I slipped down a wire of singing sound, clinging to it as to a lifeline, pausing, falling, sliding into an abyss. Then the ringing wire of sound grew thinner. It began to fade. It no longer supported me.

  I was falling.

  A black horizontal line whipped up, vertical bars appeared. And I saw suddenly that my hands were gripping them, sliding down slowly. Instinct had sent its red warning flashing through my body: "Grab! Hang on! Hang on!"

  This was real. There was no singing void around me any more. But there was a very real void under me and a terribly real pavement a million feet straight down. I was clutching the outside of a balcony rail with both hands and dangling over a drop I couldn't let myself think about.

  Was this, I wondered frantically, the usual method of entering Malesco? If it was the way Lorna came then I was wasting my time. Lorna would be a long time dead by now, down there on that horribly distant, horribly hard-looking pavement, in the pink sunset light.

  I couldn't see anything except the bars I clung to, the wall in front of me and a sickening angle of vertical building ending in pavement far down. I didn't see the city. The only important things were very near ones—real, vital, beautiful things like a ledge in the wall or a cornice I could brace my foot against.

  If I'd been sent back to New York right then I'd have had exactly this to say about Malesco: one, railings are made of some hard slick metal too thin and slippery to hold on long. Two, building walls are stone or plastic or metal or something, maybe pre-fab, and there aren't any joints or cracks and it's a very poor way to build a wall.

  I simply didn't have the strength to get over that balcony rail. But I got over it. My simian progenitors sent me a cable along the instinct channel, my feet became prehensile in spite of my shoes. And the ancient basic terror of the long drop spurred me on. I don't like to think about it even now. I don't know how I did it.

  But eventually I levered myself over and felt the balcony floor under my feet. The simian strength went back where it came from, millions of years in my biological past. My remote ancestor, Bandar-Log Burton, returned to hunting his antediluvian fleas and a still older ancestor, a mere blob of protoplasm, became dominant.

  I felt like jelly. My protoplasm carried me with reeling rapidity across the balcony and through an open window. I found myself in a medium-sized room with the guy who had tried to shoot me.

  -

  Chapter III

  THE ROOM was empty except for my new acquaintance. I mean empty. There wasn't a thing in it except that in the four upper corners were good-sized cups of corroded steel or iron. The walls were blue-green, and the floor was darker green and gave slightly underfoot. The pink light of sunset cast my shadow ahead of me across the walls.

  There were two doors. At one of them was my friend with the odd headdress, which was perched at a drunken angle so that one flap hung over his eye and the other at the back of his head. He had his ear against the door panel, listening, paying no attention to me.

  I got an impression of a thin middle-aged face alert with apprehension, a shirt with what looked like a coffee stain on it and long red-flannel drawers. I had just time to realize that it was the sunset light which made them look so crimson. Then the man heard my footstep, twisted around, saw me and fell into a fit of violent indecision.

  He tried to do several things at once. He seemed to want to open the door and run. He wanted to yell for help. He wanted to pull out his equivalent of a Police Positive and kill me.

  What he did was run at me, grip me around the waist and shove me back on the balcony. Before I knew what was happening, the guy had stuffed me halfway over the rail again. Don't think I wasn't resisting. I was. But what can an amoeba do?

  A couple of times he could simply have let go and I'd have fallen. But he didn't let go. To him, it seemed, I was a square peg and he was frantically trying to find a square hole in space to fit me. He was trying to hit the lucky number on a punch-board and using me to do it.

  All the while he was looking around in a worried fashion, glancing down, trying to prevent my falling, looking over his shoulder, up at the sky and shaking at the flap of his headdress, which had twisted around even farther so that he could scarcely see at all.

  As for me, I was in a nightmare. There was a ridiculous temptation to stay passive and wait till I'd been stuffed into that square hole in space. Maybe he could find it, I thought. I never had exactly in thirty-odd years. All I'd found were round holes.

  On that philosophical point I got a grip on myself. I grabbed my friend around the neck and hauled myself back to safety. Neither of us was in a state suitable for a ten-round scrap. I hit him somewhere. He snatched at his belt and brought up a weapon that looked like a little dumbbell and I hit him again.

  He gripped the ends of the dumbbell in each hand and pulled it apart. A silent flash of blue light streamed between his clenched fists. He looked at me. I could see only half his face because of that striped flap, but in his one visible eye there was desperation. Then it looked past me. A shadow fell on us. The man hesitated.