by Robert Sheckley
You don't remember what your dream was. Only that you woke up
screaming, your eyes bulging out of your head. You sat upright,
your hands still shaking with the memory of whatever it was that
was coming at you. You're glad you're awake now. It's better awake,
you think. But looking around, you're not so sure. Can this be reality?
Or have you woken up into another dream? Surreptitiously you pinch
your arm. It hurts. Right now, pain is good. It means you're really
awake, not caught up in the coils of some nameless nightmare to
horrible to face.
You sit up and for the first time notice your surroundings.
You're in some sort of underground place. The air is stale, and
filled with the smells of rot and decay, burning insulation, the
dark odor of crumbling mortar. Overhead, you can make out a vaulted
ceiling. It's all cracked and broken, and dark water is seeping
through the cracks. You're lying on a concrete slab just a few feet
above the ground. There's dark water lapping around the slab. The
whole thing is illuminated by some sort of red light that comes
from fixtures set into the walls. You're wearing camoflauge clothing.
It's soiled and it stinks.
You think, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all
this. But you can't come up with it. How did you get here? What's
going on? You sense that the answers are all there in your mind
somewhere. But your mind doesn't seem to be working too well just
now. You're just aware of what's going on right now--the eerie lurid
red of the vault, the slow seep of dirty water everywhere, the sounds--it
sounds to you like the whole place is settling, maybe breaking up.
You just know you have to get out of here.
But where are you, and where are you supposed to go? You sit
up, and you feel something under you. It's an assault rifle. Your
mind automatically supplies the nomenclature: it's a Simms-Debarr
multi-mode assault rifle and grenade launcher. It has a number of
switches and dials on it. You know perfectly well what these are
for. Maybe you can't remember where you are or how you got here,
maybe you're a little unclear even on your own name, but you know
what to do with this rifle.
Automatically you check the load. The power-pak registers 3/4s
full, and there are two more paks behind the butt plate. You check
these. Yep, they're full. But what's your name? Who are you? What
are you doing here? And how do you get out?
You sense movement, turn, rifle at the ready. There are other
people in this underground vault with you. Through the smoky haze
you make out figures in camoflauge uniforms just like yours. They're
stirring, moving around, and by the look on their faces you can
tell they know no more than you do. You call out, "Hey, you guys.
Everybody all right?" They stir, checking themselves over. Then
one of them, a woman, but a soldier, too, says, "I guess we're OK,
Lieutenant. What do you want us to do now?" Lieutenant. That means
you. You seem to be in charge around here. That's a laugh, because
you can't remember who you are or what has happened or what you're
supposed to do next.
You say, "Anybody got a clue what's going on?" The faces around
you are all blank. Finally one of the grunts says, "There was some
sort of trouble. But I can't remember what."
Trouble! It didn't take a mastermind to figure that one out.
These people know no more than you do. But they're all looking at
you. It looks like you're supposed to be the leader.
"OK, people," you say. "Listen up now. The first thing we got
to do is get out of here. Back to the surface. Anybody got any ideas?"
No, they don't have any ideas. They're waiting for you to tell
them what to do. And you wish you knew.
You get up off the concrete slab. You walk around the vaulted
room, your boots making squishing sounds in the ankle-deep water.
They're all watching you. You wish you knew what you were looking
for. You hope you'll recognize it when you see it.
You see there's machinery lying around everywhere, most of
it smashed. There's an odor of smoke in the air, and it's getting
worse. You unclip a flashlight from your web belt. By its light
you continue your inspection.
It doesn't take long. There's just one way out of here--a narrow,
slanting tunnel that leads upwards. "OK," you say, with a confidence
you wish you felt, "this is the way up and out. I'll lead, you'll
all follow. Got that?"
They gather around, look at the hole. It's narrow, constricting.
They don't like it. One of them says, "Hey, Lieutenant, you sure
of this?" You say, "We gotta get out of here and this is the only
way. The Republic expects every one of you to do his duty. We've
got a war on our hands. Let's go."
You fit yourself into the hole, and all the time you're thinking,
The Republic, that must be us. You can feel memory returning to
you, coming back slowly, still just beyond the edge of recognition.
More of it will come, you're pretty sure of that. But will it come
in time? Will it be there when you need it?
You continue up through the shaft, your assault rifle proving
an awkward object to get around the bends and turns. The yellow
light of your flashlight probes ahead. You squirm around the bends
of the pipe or whatever you're in, negotiate a tight hairpin turn,
hang on so as not to slip back as the hole angles up toward the
perpendicular. You're choking, the smoke is getting thicker, you're
trying not to cough so as to not shake yourself loose and fall into
the men behind you.
You come up through the final bend in the pipe, and now things
are changing. You're in a narrow place made of wood, wood that's
covered with some sort of white satin material. The tunnel comes
to an end here. You're feeling stifled, a latent claustrophobia
is kicking in, and you push hard against what's over your head,
feel it lift, slide off, and then you've got your head out of there.
You're sitting inside a coffin. That's what the boxlike thing
was. You climb out of the coffin and find yourself in a mortuary.
Powerful overhead lights throw a merciless white light over everything.
It's a big room with a lot of tables in it. There are bodies lying
on some of those tables, hacked bodies, sometimes only a livid trunk,
or a severed head, or a torso with purple entrails spilling out.
There's a stink of death everywhere.
The members of your platoon slowly come out of the hole and
spread out around the room. They move cautiously, their fingers
on the triggers of their weapons. There's a big window, still miraculously
unshattered. You go to it, look out. What you see is an urban landscape.
But it's a landscape that's been through hell.
You move out onto the street, you and your men. The streets
are deserted. Where have all the people gone? You don't even want
to speculate. What city is this? It could be any place. From the
shattered palm trees here and there, you decide this must be Los
Angeles.
Someone's coming. You tighten your grips on your weapons. But
it's only a crazy, a harmless ragged guy who's walking along mumbling
to himself. The guy doesn't seem dangerous. Just another loony,
roaming the streets. You're going to change your mind about harmless
before this adventure is over.
It's something else when you run across the first bag lady.
She's crazy, too. But she's not harmless. She comes down the street
pushing her supermarket cart loaded with old clothes, cans of food
she's picked up God knows where, and riding on top of the load is
her dog, some sort of a brown and white terrier. The terrier looks
as crazy as the old lady.
You ask her, "What's going on around here, ma'am?" She looks
you up and down scornfully. "Watch your ass, sonny. That's all I
can tell you."
She can't get her cart over a high curb. One of your men, Dolan,
you remember his name now, tries to help her. "Get your hands off
my stuff!" she screams, and cuts him from across the stomach with
a butcher knife she's had concealed in her sleeve.
Dolan looks surprised as he spills out his guts on the dirty
pavement and falls down dead.
Then she's dropped the knife and pulls a tommy gun out from
under her week-old packages of hamburger. No time to reason with
her. You cut her down with a burst from your assault rifle.
But bag ladies are not your biggest problem. You soon see what
is when the first of the Lips comes floating into your field of
vision.
At first you're spellbound by the sight. You blink, but there
it is--a huge pair of lips floating about ten feet above the ground.
They're bright red, those lips, and they are wearing what you'd
have to describe as a cruel smile. And then it starts coming back
to you. The Exploding Lips! The invasion from another dimension!
The Earth caught unawares, the wholesale destruction as the nations,
unprepared for this eerie and deadly invasion, try to fight back
against a menace they can hardly understand. The big red Lips float
quietly in the air. You and your team scramble to get your weapons
ready. You tell your men, "Don't start firing yet. Let's see what
it does."
You wait. The Lips drift around slowly, about twenty feet from
you. Can Lips see? Presumably. But this one doesn't seem to have
noticed you. Maybe its mind is on something else. You wait. It drifts
off, then suddenly speeds up, darting out of your sight.
You continue through the deserted streets of the city, and
it's all coming back to you now. You alert your men to the present
danger. "Those things, those huge lips--they're deadly. Apt to spit
grenades at you. You gotta get them before they get you."
You continue through the city streets. There are houses and
building burning here and there. No sign of fire engines. No sign
of people, either. You've got lookouts watching the sky for Lips.
Now one of them gives an early warning.
"Here comes two of them!" Did that first one go away to bring
back a friend? It looks pretty serious now. They're coming in fast,
in a darting, batlike flight. "Shoot!" you scream.
You plug one yourself with a lucky shot. You can see the tracers
going into it. It jerks around for a moment, screaming, then the
sound is cut off as it disappears.
Before you can cheer, the other one is coming at you. It powers
in at tremendous speed. The lips are curled into a grin. You're
pretty sure the thing is enjoying this. You and the others are all
firing now, but the thing dips and darts, boring in, spitting grenades
out of its red mouth, and then soaring up like a berserk bat.
One of its grenades gets one of your men. He doesn't even have
time to scream. It blows him apart, and the Lip is turning, coming
in for another run. You've switched to your grenade launcher, but
you can feel that you won't be in time. It's coming in fast now--And
then, one of your guys blows it up with a well-placed grenade.
Al; clear. You move on.
It becomes clear that the deeper we move into the city core,
the more Lips we encounter. And we don't come across any people,
unless you consider crazies and bag ladies as people. Reluctantly,
we conclude that we're more likely to find help in the hinterland,
where the survivors have gone. If there are any survivors.
We turn around and march back toward the countryside, and we
come under intermittent attack. But you notice one heartening sign:
the lips don't seem well coordinated, don't seem to be using intelligence
work. Otherwise, enough of them have spotted you and your group
by this time to have called in massive reinforcements. Either they're
not talking to each other, or they have other things more important
to do, or they just don't care. You don't care which of these options
is true. You're just glad it's like this, because at least it gives
you a chance.
The attacks on you and your men are constant, intermittent,
and deadly. Sometimes the Lips come at you singly, sometimes they're
in threes and fours, rarely more than five at a time. It's a little
better when you get out of the suburbs, into forested land. The
branches of the surrounding trees prevent them from making high
speed dives. But the way they flutter through the trees makes them
difficult targets. You lose men to them: men you can't afford to
lose.
But you also pick up men. Men and women are scattered here
and there, hiding out, survivors of earlier attacks, stunned but
angry, waitng for a chance to do something. Some of them join up
with you. Only a few of them are armed; but you've instructed your
men to bring along all the weapons of their fallen comrades. Your
forces are not impressive, but at least you have some people to
fight with.
It occurs to you, as you make your way past the last suburbs,
into the forest, that this scene might be playing itself out a thousand
or a million times over, with different groups of men in different
conditions. There are probably guys still fighting in the city cores,
and from ships, and from vehicles of various sorts. There are probably
men in jungles and on deserts, you're sure of it, and they're all
having their individual adventures. But all you cna do at present
is take care of this one.
You try to keep to forest cover, but it soon runs out. You're
in a swampy area of thin trees, boggy soil. There are ponds and
lakes you have to skirt, and some of the Lips have taken to flying
at you directly out of the sun, the glare providing them with a
few precious seconds in which to attack before you can strike back.
It's getting toward sunset now. You figure, if you can hold
out, the darkness ought to give you some respite. But it looks like
you're not going to get it. The swamp you're wading through now
seems to breed these Lips like mosquitoes. The attacks, made by
two or three of them at a time, are coming without respite. You're
getting low on ammo, and you don't know where you're going to get
any more. The situation is looking pretty sticky, but then this
guy shows up from out of nowhere. He's a tall, skinny dude, and
he's carrying a shotgun, though he doesn't seem to have any shells
for it.
"Hey you guys!" he calls out. "Over this way! I know a way
to firmer ground, shelter!"
There's no time to talk about it, you and your platoon follow
him. Sure enough, he's bringing you back into a wooded area, and
there's a hill ahead, and you can see a dark cave at the base of
it.
"The cave!" he shouts. "They won't follow us in there!" Now
you're all sprinting for the cave, the new guy in the lead. You
reach it...
And a line of Lips like giant red bats come darting out. They're
quick, they're nimble, and they're raining grenades on you and your
men. You all hunker down, firing wildly, taking what cover you can
find.
And the stranger? He's running toward the cave, toward the
Lips patrolling above it. They don't do anything to him! They're
letting him through!
At the entrance to the cave he stops, turns, and shouts, "Throw
down your arms! Maybe the Lips'll let you join them!"
You cut him down with a single sustained burst of submachine
gun fire. Now you know the guy was a turncoat. working against his
own kind. Well, he won't be doing that any more.
It's a tough situation. Lucky for you the Lips are clumsy.
Their fluttering attack is difficult to track, but once they're
positioned for the kill, they hesitate, maybe gloatng over how they
they're going to take you down. That gives you a chance to cut them
down or blow them apart. You're going to get through this. This
attack, anyhow. Afterwards, who knows?
Full darkness and no moon brings an end to the attack. Later,
you'll discover that the Lips are fully capable of fighting at night.
But different groups have different habits. You're getting off lucky
this time. But you're about out of ammo, and you wonder what the
dawn will bring. As a matter of fact, it brings The Mad Professor.
That's what you call him, anyhow, when he comes strolling into
your improvised camp, a tall, gaunt white-haired old man wearing
glasses and still clad in Ivy League gray flannels and a navy blue
blazer. He comes strolling in as cool as cool can be. He says, "You
fellows are having a rough time of it, I take it?"
"Yeah, and we don't need any more turncoats," one of your guys
says, and cocks his M-60.
The Prof is very cool. "I know it's difficult to tell a turncoat
from a fellow refugee, but apply your reasoning powers, won't you?
If you try to kill everyone who's not one of your immediate group,
you're not going to last long." Well, there was truth in that. You
say to him, "Is there any way you can prove you're on our side?"
"Oh, I think so," he says. "By the way, I'm Gerald Dawkins.
Fifteen years a full professor at Cal Tech. More recently, employed
by the Jet Propulsion Lab to do something about all this. We had
warnings. Not in time, unfortunately."
"How are we supposed to know if that's the truth or not?" you
ask.
"I don't suppose you'll ever know for sure," Dawkins says.
"But I do have something for you. Something you can use. It might
put me in your good graces."
"What is it?"
"Come look."
"You follow Dawkins and your men follow you. You've got a bead
on him. He's right, you can't just kill everybody. But if anything
weird comes up, Dawkins gets it first. He goes to the base of a
big tree, looks around, evidently orienting himself.
He says, "OK, this is the one and this is the spot. Dig here."
"What're we going to find?" you ask. "A tunnel to somewhere
else?"
"Not exactly," he says, and that's the last word you can get
out of him.
You and the guys dig. What we're looking for is only about
three feet down. A bunch of large wooden boxes. Breaking one open,
we find ammo, grenades, extra weapons. Dawkins is looking pretty
good to us right now. We fire a few test rounds anyway, just to
make sure they're not duds. Yep, the stuff works. We invite Dawkins
to share our rations.
"No need," he says. "I've put aside some food of my own. Let
me invite all of you to dinner."
Dawkins is pretty amazing. He's got a cache of canned food
another hundred yards away. Tomato soup, biscuits, Dinty Moore beef
stew. We're starving, it all goes down real good.
"We put this stuff aside in the early days of the attack,"
Dawkins tell us. "When we saw we were going to be overwhelmed. I
tried to get the others to join me in some counter-measures I devised.
They had their own ideas. At JPL, they called me The Mad Professor.
I don't suppose it built a lot of confidence in my ideas."
"Why did they call you that?" I asked.
"Well, some of my theories concerning all this are a little
far out, not in keeping with orthodox thinking. And my cosmological
theory that accounts for all this is, to their way of thinking,
just plain daft. Maybe you people, not being men of science, will
be able to keep a more open mind."
"Don't count on it," I tell him, but I like the guy, he's pretty
cool, and my buddies like him, too. He's given us weapons and food.
We're prepared to give him some leeway. That night, camped out in
deep forest, and for the moment not under attack, I ask Dawkins
to tell me about his theories.
"First tell me what kind of a professor you were," I ask him.
"I taught several disciplines," he tells me. "My most recent
title was Professor of Lost Cosmologies. That's the one that got
me the title of The Mad Professor and got me fired from Cal."
"But they were wrong,right?" I say.
"You wax facetious, young man," Dawkins said. "But I am the
only man to have a cohesive theory as to the reason behind all these
events."
"I'm a little behind on my world news," I tell him.
"Just what has been going on?"
"There's been an invasion by what we refer to as Giant Lips.
The variety attacking us are all red. A rather lurid red, I think
you'll agree."
"As opposed to what?" you ask.
"The other Lips," he says. "The Blue Lips."
"I haven't seen any," you tell him.
"You will. The Red Lips were thrown out of our Dimension by
Blue Lips--their antagonists--that's the reason behind all this.
The Blues are the policemen, the Reds the criminals. The Reds totally
revere the big lips. They followed them into this dimension. The
Reds seek lebensraum, you see. The Blues want them dead. They're
prepared to destroy this entire dimension unless the big lips are
destroyed within a certain time. We--I refer to the people of Earth--have
to kill them all."
"What is this about other dimensions?" you ask.
"Creatures like that had to come from somewhere. They don't
obey the laws for creatures in our dimension. They come from their
own weird universe. There are a lot of dimensions. Based on what
I've seen, I have a theory on that."
"Let's hear it," you say.
"It seems to me that the universe, instead of procceding justonce
from The Big Bang to now, has instead had multiple births and deaths,
many Big Bangs. In some of these births, the universe was a vastly
more compicated place than it is today. In one of these other lines
of development, the Lips were not only possible but reasonable,
indeed, inevitable in a scheme based on how a different universe
was set up and ordered."
Dawkins cleared his throat and looked pleased with himself.
"It would also account for their appearance in our world as big,
intelligent, malevolent lips."
"How do you figure?"
"It seems obvious to me that in the dimension they come from,
dispersed organs are the rule, not the exception. It is apparent
that the Red Lips have a dispersed social organization. That they
are still fairly rudimentary creatures is shown by the fact that
they haven't passed beyond grenades yet. They can be killed, as
you have seen. The trouble is, there seems to be an inexhaustible
number of them."
"That is a problem," you say.
"They breed, you see, in vast fortresses which they have constructed
on the Earth, and from which they launch their attacks."
"Now that you're talking, I'm remembering things," you tell
him. "We humans were doing pretty well before these Lips came along,
weren't we? Even had a seat on the Council of Planets."
"That's so," Dawkins said. "And they knocked us out of it with
their own political organization. They call it The Imperium."
"Sounds pretty hopeless. I don't see what we can do...unless
we can take over one of their fortresses." "That was exactly my
thought, Lieutenant," Dawkins says. "It's good to see the military
and the scientific mind working on the same track. If we can capture
a fortress, it'll do wonders for our own morale. It'll give us a
base from which to fight, to gather other humans. But there's something
more important than that."
"And that is?"
"I have reason to believe that the Fortresses are the doorways
back into their own dimension. And into the dimension of the Blue
Lips."
"More Lips is just what we don't need."
"On the contrary, it's what we do need. The Blue Lips, you
see, are the hereditary enemies of the Red Lips. They hate them
so much that they're prepared to anihilate the entire dimension
where the Red Lips have gone. It's a big threat, but they've got
the technology to carry it out with.
They'll do it, too, unless we can show them results pretty
damned fast."
"So we have to go into the Fortress?
"Yes. And to get there we have to go through the Labyrinth.
That's a protective zone they've put up around their Fortresses.
Filled with particularly nasty tricks. I know only a few. I'm afraid
we'll have to learn more. If you agree that this is the thing to
do."
I agreed. What else was I to do? And Gerald Dawkins, the Mad
Professor led us into the Labyrinth.
Well, we had some adventures there, I can tell you. But they
were nothing compared to the trouble we had getting into the Fortress.
I still dream of that place sometimes...its huge spooky rooms, its
dark corridors, its trick doors, its traps. The death and destruction
that came to us unexpectedly.
And after that, we contacted the Blue Lips, and we learned
some surprising things about them, and about us, too--the Mad Professor
had a theory that humans, too, had dispersed organs, though we weren't
aware of it. That fact, once we learned what to do with it, proved
of great importance in our ongoing struggle. And even won us some
respect from the Blues, who didn't like us worth a damn. But they
say the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so it turned out with
the Blue Lips. We were to gain some even more surprising allies
before this was all finished. But all that is still to come. Right
now, we're following Dawkins, and he's leading us to a place stranger
than any man has seen--the place he calls the Labyrinth.
END
Bob Sheckley continues work on the finishing touches of the
Exploding Lips® storyline for the game, feature film, and TV
pilot. We'll keep you posted on developments.