“I suppose so. I don’t know. Not a weapon only, but a tool. It’s standard on my home planet. Everyone carries one of them. You can adjust it, see …” She showed him the dial set into the grip. “A narrow cutting edge, a fan effect, whatever you may want. But why do you ask? You carry one as well.”
“Different,” said Horton. “A fairly crude weapon, but effective if you know how to handle it. It throws a projectile. A bullet. Forty-five caliber. A weapon, not a tool.”
Elayne crinkled her brow. “I have heard of the principle,” she said. “A very ancient concept.”
“Perhaps,” siad Horton, “but up to the time I left the Earth, the best we had. In the hands of a man who knows its operation, it is precise and very deadly. High velocity, tremendous stopping power. Powder-powered—nitrate, I think, maybe cordite. I’m not up on the chemistry.”
“But powder—no compound—could last the many years that you were on the ship. It would break down with time.”
Horton gave her a startled look, surprised at her knowledge. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “But it’s true. The matter converter, of course …”
“You have a matter converter?”
“That’s what Nicodemus tells me. I haven’t actually seen it. I have never seen one, to tell you the truth. There was no such thing as a matter converter when we went into cold-sleep. It was developed later.”
“Another legend,” she said. “A lost art …”
“Not at all,” said Horton. “Technology.”
She shrugged. “Whatever it is—lost. We have no matter converter. As I said, another legend.”
“Well,” asked Horton, “are we going to see what this something of yours is, or do we …”
“We’ll go and see,” she said. “I’ll set it at the lowest power.”
She leveled the contraption, and a pale blue haze leaped out from it. The underbrush puffed with an eerie whisper, and dust floated in the air.
“Careful,” he cautioned.
“Don’t worry,” she said sharply. “I know how to use it.”
It was evident she did. She cut a neat and narrow path, detouring around a tree. “No use of burning it. It would be a waste.”
“You still feel it?” Horton asked. “The strangeness. Can you figure what it is?”
“It still is there,” she said, “but I have no more idea what it is than I ever had.”
She holstered the gun and, shining the light ahead of him, Horton led the way into the building.
The place was dark and dusty. Pieces of crumbling furniture stood along the walls. A small animal squeaked in sudden terror and raced across the room, a blur of motion in the darkness.
“A mouse,” said Horton.
Elayne said, unruffled, “Probably not a mouse. Mice belong on Earth, or so say the old nursery rhymes. There’s that old one, hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.”
“Then the nursery rhymes survived?”
“Some of them,” she said. “I suspect not all of them.”
A closed door confronted them, and Horton put out his hand and pushed against it. The door collapsed and fell into a pile across the threshhold.
He lifted the torch and shone the light into the room beyond. The room flared back at them, a glare of golden light thrown back into their faces. They staggered back a step or two and Horton lowered the flash. Cautiously he raised it again and this time, through the flare of the reflected light, they saw what it was that had given rise to the reflection. In the center of the room, almost filling it, stood a cube.
Horton lowered the flash to cut down on the reflection and moving slowly, stepped into the room.
The light from the flash, no longer reflected by the cube, seemed to be absorbed by it, sucked in and spread out throughout its interior so that it seemed the cube was lighted.
A creature lay suspended in the light. A creature—that was the only description that would come to mind. It was huge, almost filling the cube, its body extending beyond their line of vision. For a moment, there was a sense of mass, but not just any kind of mass. There was a sense of life in it, a certain flow of line that said instinctively it was a living mass. What seemed to be a head was hunched down low against what may have been its chest. And the body—or was it a body? A body covered by an intricate filigree of etching. Like armor, Horton thought—an expensive example of the goldsmith’s art.
Beside him, Elayne gasped with wonder. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
Horton felt frozen, half with wonder, half with fear. “It has a head,” he said. “The damn thing is alive.”
“It hasn’t moved,” she told him. “And it would have moved. At the first touch of light, it would have moved.”
“It’s asleep,” said Horton.
“I don’t think it’s asleep,” she said.
“It has to be alive,” he said. “You sensed it. This has to be the strangeness that you sensed. You still have no idea what it is?”
“None at all,” she said. “Nothing that I’ve ever heard about. No legends. No elder stories. Nothing at all. And so beautiful. Horrible, but beautiful. All those fine, intricate designs. It is something it is wearing—no, I see now it is not something it is wearing. The etchings are on scales.”
Horton tried to trace the outline of the body, but each time he tried, he failed. He’d start out all right and trace it for a ways, then the outline would be gone, fading and dissolved in the golden haze that lingered in the cube, lost in the convoluted intricacies of the form itself.
He took a step forward for a closer look and was stopped—stopped by nothing. There was nothing there to stop him; it was as if he had run into a wall he could neither see nor feel. No, not a wall, he thought. His mind scurried frantically for some sort of simile that would express what had happened. But there seemed no simile, for the thing that stopped him was a nothingness. He lifted his free hand and felt in front of him. The hand found nothing, but the hand was stopped. No physical sensation, nothing he could feel or sense. It was, he thought, as if he had encountered the end of reality, as if he’d reached a place where there was nowhere to go. As if someone had drawn a line and said the world ends here, there is nothing that extends beyond this line. No matter what you see, or think you see, there is nothing there. But if that were true, he thought, there was something very wrong, for he could see beyond reality.
“There is nothing there,” said Elayne, “but there must be something there. We can see the cube and creature.”
Horton stepped back a pace and, in that moment, the goldenness of the cube seemed to flood out and enfold the two of them, making them a part of the creature and the cube. In that golden haze, the world seemed to go away and for the moment they stood alone, divorced from time and space.
Elayne stood close to him and looking down, he saw the rose tattooed on her breast. He reached out a hand and touched it.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
“You do not mind that I noticed it?”
She shook her head. “I had been beginning to feel disappointed that you hadn’t noticed it. You must have known that it was there to direct attention. The rose is intended as a focal point.”
19
Nicodemus said, “Take a look at this.”
Horton bent to stare at the faint line the robot had chiseled in the stone around the perimeter of the panel.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “I see nothing wrong. Except that it seems you haven’t made much progress.”
“That is exactly what is wrong,” said Nicodemus. “I have been getting nowhere. The chisel chips the stone for a depth of a few millimeters; then the stone gets hard. As if it were a metal with a small portion of its surface reduced to rust.”
“But it isn’t metal.”
“No, it’s stone, all right. I tried other parts of the rock face.” He gestured toward the wall of stone, indicating scratches on it. “It’s the same on the entire face. Weathering seems to
be at work, but underneath the weathering, the stone is incredibly hard. As if the molecules were bonded more tightly than they should be naturally.”
“Where is Carnivore?” asked Elayne. “He might know something of this.”
“I doubt it very much,” said Horton.
“I sent him packing,” said Nicodemus. “I told him to get the hell out. He was breathing down my neck and cheering me on …”
“He is so terribly anxious to get off this planet,” said Elayne.
“Who wouldn’t be?” asked Horton.
“I feel so sorry for him,” said Elayne. “You’re sure there is no way to put him on the ship—if all else fails, I mean.”
“I don’t see how,” said Horton. “We could try cold-sleep, of course, but it would more than likely kill him. What do you think, Nicodemus?”
“Cold-sleep is tailor-made for humans,” said the robot. “How it would work with another species, I have no idea. I would suspect not too well, perhaps not at all. First of all, the anesthetic that shocks the cells into momentary suspension until the cold can take effect. Almost foolproof for humans because it is designed for humans. To work with some other form of life, there might have to be a change. The change might be small and rather subtle, I imagine. And I’m not equipped to change it.”
“You mean he’d be dead even before he had a chance of freezing?”
“I would suspect that would be the case.”
“But you can’t just leave him here,” said Elayne. “You can’t go off and leave him.”
“We could put him on board,” said Horton.
“Not with me you can’t,” siad Nicodemus. “I’d kill him in the first week out. He’s sandpaper on my nerves.”
“Even if he escaped your homicidal tendencies,” said Horton, “what would be the purpose? I don’t know what Ship has in mind, but it could be centuries before we made planetfall again.”
“You could stop and drop him off.”
“You could,” said Horton. “I could. Nicodemus could. But not Ship. Ship, I would suspect, takes a longer view. And what makes you think we’d find another planet that he could survive on—a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now? Ship spent a thousand years in space before we found this one. You must remember that Ship is an under-light-speed vessel.”
“You are right,” said Elayne. “I keep forgetting. During the time of the depression, when the humans fled from Earth, they went out in all directions.”
“Using faster-than-light.”
“No, not faster-than-light. Time-jump ships. Don’t ask me how they worked. But you get the idea …”
“A glimmer,” Horton said.
“And even so,” she said, “they traveled many light-years to find terrestrial planets. Some disappeared—into vast distances, into time, out of this universe, there is no way to know. They’ve not been heard of since.”
“So you see,” said Horton, “how impossible this matter of Carnivore becomes.”
“Perhaps we still can solve the tunnel problem. That is what Carnivore really wants. That is what I want.”
“I’m out of all approaches,” said Nicodemus. “I have no new ideas. We are not dealing with a simple situation of someone simply closing a world. They went to a lot of work to keep it closed. The hardness of this rock isn’t natural. No rock could be that hard. Someone made it hard. They recognized that someone might try to tamper with the panel and took steps against it.”
“There must be something here,” said Horton. “Some reason for blocking the tunnel off. A treasure, perhaps.”
“Not a treasure,” said Elayne. “They’d have taken a treasure with them. A danger, more than likely.”
“Someone who hid something here for safekeeping.”
“I don’t think so,” said Nicodemus. “Someday they’d want to recover it. They could reach it, of course, but how would they get it out?”
“They could come by ship,” said Horton.
“That would be unlikely,” said Elayne. “The better answer is they’d know how to bypass the block.”
“You think there’s a way to do it, then?”
“I’m inclined to think there might be, but that doesn’t mean that we can find it.”
“Then, again,” said Nicodemus, “it may be a simple matter of blocking the tunnel so that something that is here cannot get out. Penning it in from the rest of the tunnel planets.”
“But if that’s the case,” asked Horton, “what could it be? Would you think our creature in the cube?”
“That might be it,” she said. “Imprisoned not only in the cube, but restricted to the planet. A second defense against it if it ever was able to escape the cube. Although it is hard, somehow, to think so. It is such a pretty thing.”
“It could be pretty and still be dangerous.”
“What’s this cube creature?” asked Nicodemus. “I’ve not heard of it.”
“Elayne and I found it in a building in the city. Some sort of thing enclosed in a cube.”
“Alive?”
“We can’t be certain, but I think it is. I had the feeling that it is. Elayne was able to sense it.”
“And the cube? What is the cube made of?”
“A strange material,” said Elayne, “if it is a material. It stops you, but you can’t feel it. It’s as if it weren’t there.”
Nicodemus began to pick up the tools scattered on the flat rock floor of the path.
“You’re giving up,” said Horton.
“I might as well. There’s no more I can do. No tool I have will touch the stone. I can’t lift off the panel’s protective covering, be it force field or something else. I’m done until someone else comes up with a good idea.”
“Perhaps if we had a look through Shakespeare’s book, we’d come up with something new,” said Horton.
“Shakespeare never came close,” said Nicodemus. “The best that he could do was kick the tunnel and do a lot of cussing.”
“I didn’t mean we’d find any worthwhile ideas,” said Horton. “At the best, an observation, the implications of which slipped past Shakespeare.”
Nicodemus was doubtful. “Maybe so,” he said. “But we can’t do much reading with Carnivore around. He’ll want to know what Shakespeare wrote, and some of the things that Shakespeare wrote were not too complimentary to his old pal.”
“But Carnivore’s not here,” Elayne pointed out. “Did he say where he was going when you chased him off?”
“He said a walkabout. He mumbled something about magic. I gained the impression, none too clearly, that he wanted to collect certain magic stuff—leaves, roots, barks.”
“He spoke of magic earlier,” said Horton. “Some idea that we could combine our magics.”
Elayne asked, “Have you any magics?”
“No,” Horton said, “we haven’t.”
“Then you must not sneer at those who have.”
“You mean you believe in magic?”
Elayne crinkled her brow. “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I have seen a magic work, or seem to work.”
Nicodemus finished with his toolbox and closed it.
“Let’s get up to the house and see about that book,” he said.
20
“This Shakespeare of yours,” said Elayne, “seems to have been a philosopher, but a rather shaky one. Not at all well grounded.”
“He was a lonely and an ill and frightened man,” said Horton. “He wrote whatever came into his head, without examining the logic or the fitness of it. He was writing for himself. Never for a moment did he think anyone else would ever read what he was scribbling. If he had thought so, he probably would have been more circumspect in what he wrote.”
“At least he was honest about it,” she said. “Listen to this:
Time has a certain smell. This may be no more than a conceit of mine, but I am sure it has. Old time would be sour and musty and new time, at the beginning of creation, must have been sweet and heady and exuberant. I w
onder if, as events proceed toward their unknowable end, we may not become polluted with the acrid scent of ancient time, in the same manner and to the same end as olden Earth was polluted by the spew of factory chimneys and the foulness of toxic gases. Does the death of the universe lie in time pollution, in the thickening of old time smell until no life can exist upon any of the bodies that make up the cosmos, perhaps eroding the very matter of the universe itself into a foul corruption? Will this corruption so clog the physical processes operative in the universe that they will cease to function and chaos will result? And if this should be the case, what would chaos bring? Not necessarily the end of the universe since chaos in itself is a negation of all physics and all chemistry, perhaps allowing for new and unimaginable combinations which would violate all previous conceptions, giving rise to a disorderliness and an imprecision which would make possible certain events that science now tells us are unthinkable.
“And he goes on:
This may have been the situation—I was first inclined to say a time and that would have been a contradiction in terms—when, before the universe came into being, there was neither time nor space and, as well, no referrents for that great mass of somethingness waiting to explode so our universe could come into existence. It is impossible, of course, for the human mind to imagine a situation where there’d have been neither time nor space except as each potentially existed in that cosmic egg, itself a mystery that is impossible for one to visualize. And yet, intellectually, one does know a situation such as this did exist if our scientific thinking is correct. Still, the thought occurs—if there were neither time nor space, in what sort of medium did the cosmic egg exist?
“Provocative,” said Nicodemus, “but still it gives us no information, nothing that we need to know. The man writes as if he were living in a vacuum. He could write that sort of drivel anywhere at all. Only occasionally does he mention this planet, with parenthetical dirty digs at the Carnivore.”
“He was trying to forget this planet,” said Horton, “trying to retire within himself so that he could disregard it. He was, in effect, attempting to create a pseudo-world that would give him something other than this planet.”
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