She halted midway, and, looking up, saw on the high wall of shining metal that ascended into shadows near her, a glittering assemblage of intricate mechanical devices. Serrated metal disks revolved as slowly as the hour hand of a clock when the eye does not remain steadily riveted upon it. Several luminous crystal globes filled with colored fluids, suspended from the wall in brackets. There was a large metal plate stippled with dots that looked like a graph upon which measurements could be recorded; and fifteen or twenty interlocking metal tubes coated over with a thin film of hoar frost.
It was then that she heard the voices again, loudly and clearly this time, with each syllable falling on her eyes with a chillingly somber rhythm. The language was English but she had the feeling that it was not native to them, although they had mastered it with remarkable skill.
“You must try to listen calmly,” a voice said. “What you are seeing now in a clairvoyant vision you will experience again in the near future, and not only as an unfolding sequence of mental images. You will be physically present where you now seem to be standing, accompanied by a guide. So powerful are the thoughts that flow from our minds to yours that you feel that your presence here is a physical one. But you have merely paused for a moment in your walk through the forest. Your body is still on that forest path, and you will walk on again when the vision dims and vanishes. But first you must listen carefully to what we are about to tell you.”
There was a moment of silence and then another voice said: “Your clairvoyant endowments are unusual, more acute than we have found in any of your companions on this journey—a journey which you did not willingly undertake. We regret that we were compelled to use force. But—and this you will come to understand—we had no choice. There is a matter of vital importance to us that must be explored and the knowledge that we desperately need was peculiar to the middle years of the twentieth century. John Mollison Bramwell lived in your age. He was born at the turn of the century and died in 1972. Do you recognize the name?”
“No—no, I do not!” Joyce heard herself saying.
The first voice came again, tinged now with an impatience verging on rancor. “That is very strange. I was afraid that we might be making a mistake. We took it for granted that you would be able to help us to determine precisely what it was that made the men and women of your age think and feel as Bramwell did, since no man of more sublime wisdom has ever walked the earth. There is a difference, of course, between the sun and the planets that encircle it. The planets merely mirror the sun’s splendor, but they, too, are light bearers. John Bramwell was the sun, and the men and women of his age must, of necessity, have shared his wisdom, if only by becoming a multitude of light-mirroring satellites. They would differ greatly in brilliance, of course, but still—”
The first voice interrupted impatiently. “It is not surprising that she does not remember. John Bramwell’s name must have been on her lips as often as it is on ours. But we are dealing with a mind block here, clearly the result of an experience that has made her not want to remember. When you feel yourself to be threatened, you instinctively guard your most precious possession, fearing that it will be snatched from you. She does not want to lose the memory of Bramwell, does not want to share it with us, because it has become to her a source of protection. So she has hidden it deep in her mind and will not admit, even to herself, that it is his wisdom that continues to support her.”
The first voice was addressing the one that had spoken at great length and in a stern tone of authority, Joyce was sure that the interchange had been intended for her ears.
She was still quaking inwardly and the splinters of ice that had entered her mind had not ceased to torment her. They were still melting, dissolving, draining all of the warmth from her brain and making her obscurely aware that her body had become inert and almost lifeless. But she had not entirely lost the ability to reason logically, to weigh the meaning of what she was being told and she refused to believe that all of it—or could—true.
John Bramwell? The name was totally unknown to her. How could she have failed to remember it if it had been of historical significance at any time in the present or recent past? The second voice had compared Bramwell’s splendor to that of the sun. He must have been some kind of legendary figure in his own lifetime. There were East Indian gurus who were extravagantly praised by their followers. But they were, for the most part, not unknown in the Western World and Bramwell was certainly not an East Indian or a Tibetan name.
Suddenly, her thoughts seemed no longer completely her own and a new kind of fear swept over her. Were they probing her mind while they talked, seeking answers that were buried so deeply in her consciousness that she, herself, would not have been able to set their doubts at rest?
She was sure that they mistrusted her and were beginning to regret that they had revealed a secret which they had kept hidden from all of her companions.
No one else in the procession that was still moving through the woods had been singled out as she had been. She was sure of that, and the thought made her want to turn and run along the corridor and escape this terrible mind-imprisonment—escape back to her body before it was too late. Might not her body be turning cold even now, mindless and helpless and alone? Surely the procession had by now reached the end of the forest trail, and Wilmont would be turning back in search of her. What would he do if he found her standing rigid and mindlessly staring in the depths of the woods? Rub her wrists and slap her face, try desperately to bring recognition back into her eyes, life to her frozen limbs?
The first voice spoke again, and the words cut across her mind like a whiplash, so stern and commanding were they in tone, so vibrant with harsh displeasure.
“Your body is safe,” the voice said. “Only a little time has passed, and no harm will come to it if you stop wasting time, as you are doing, by asking yourself unnecessary questions. Look steadily at the wall. I am going to show you John Bramwell as he was when the men and women of your age sealed him away from the light which he himself created—a light of wisdom, strength and power which shone so brightly in your age that the long sleep into which he has passed has failed to extinguish it.
“Someday he will awaken. That light has grown brighter with every passing millennium and we know now how great he must have been to have conquered death forever.
“The frozen sleep into which he passed at the moment of his entombment has lasted for tens of thousands of years. And records, imperishably entombed with him, give precise instructions for his revival.
“We have conquered time. We have traveled back through time to your age and beyond, but death we have never conquered. You surpass us in wisdom because of what John Bramwell accomplished. The light of his creative genius made the middle years of the twentieth century the most glorious years that the world has ever known. Surely you are aware of that? Surely you have not forgotten?”
Joyce had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to cry out. “I was telling you the truth. I never heard of John Bramwell. You say he died in 1972. Yesterday, for us, it was 1968. If you’ve traveled back through time, as you say, you should know that. And the age you praise so highly was a dreadful age in many ways. And we were not so wise—are not so wise. Oh, no. We could not prevent wars and famine, and human wretchedness…what makes you think it was so glorious an age?”
“John Bramwell,” the second voice said, and she knew then that none of her thoughts could be kept hidden. “He was the first man to achieve human immortality. If he could do that he must have been wise beyond our understanding. And his splendor must have shone on every man, woman and child in your age—it had to be a glorious age.”
The truth dawned on Joyce then, impinging on her consciousness with the force of a physical blow.
“They worship Bramwell. They have made an idol, a fetish symbol out of him. They are in some respects blindly superstitious, children of unreason despite what they have accompl
ished scientifically. It’s unbelievable. I never would have thought—”
“What you think is of no importance,” the first voice said. “It might have been…a brief moment ago. But now we are beginning to realize that we must have been mistaken about you. Bramwell was like a first magnitude star, burning in the depths of the night sky. If you do not admire that kind of brightness what hope is there for you?”
“Her clairvoyant gifts may have deceived us, and we may have told her more than it was wise to reveal to a woman of the twentieth century at this stage of our explorations,” the second voice said. “We told her that she would look upon Bramwell, unchanged by time’s tyranny, and that may have been the opposite of wise. But I still prefer to believe otherwise. If she looks upon Death’s Conqueror, as he must have appeared when he walked the earth millenniums ago, the memory block may dissolve. She may remember then, and drop to her knees in adoration.”
“Yes…she may remember,” the first voice agreed.
For a moment there was no sound at all in the corridor. Then the first voice spoke to Joyce directly, less harshly this time. “Stare steadily at the wall. It will become completely transparent if your desire to see what it protects and conceals is strong enough. It is an effort that we cannot help you with. But if you wish to return to your body before it collapses, creating a danger you would be wise to avoid, you will not doubt your ability to see beyond the wall. Your clairvoyant gifts are unusual, as you have discovered without our help. Use them now. Try, try, with all the strength of your mind.”
Joyce stared steadily at the wall. A voice seemed to whisper, deep in her mind. “If you fail to do as they wish, you will surely die. It has come to that. You have given them no choice. They are not infallible. They can make mistakes—just as we can. And they feel they have made a mistake in revealing so much to a woman from the past who does not even know who John Bramwell was.”
She had no way of knowing how rapidly time was passing—or how slowly. Her mind seemed for a moment remote from time, existing in a world that had never known the ticking of a clock.
Suddenly the wall before her began to grow transparent. It turned slightly luminous, and a human face came slowly into view. It was that of a man of early middle age, darkly bearded, with extremely handsome features. Strands of moist, jet-black hair clung to his high brow and strayed down over his cheeks, which were of yellowish cast. His eyes were closed, as if in sleep and there was a serenity, an immense calmness in the set of his lips and the granite-firm contours of his jaw.
There was no strain in his expression at all, no hint that nightmare visions might be passing through his mind in the long, deep sleep that had given his face the look of a corpse.
Then Joyce began to hear it. A rustling and a whispering, remote and yet, in some strange way, startlingly near. It became louder and Joyce thought for an instant that a wind was blowing through the vault. Then she felt something sharp and prickly clinging to her face and raised her hand to brush it away.
She could see her hand clearly as she raised it, as firm-fleshed as it had been before a feeling of lightness had come upon her and she had seemed to be standing in the vault with no bodily sensations at all.
Swaying above her now were the wind-stirred branches of trees and the vault had totally vanished and she was lying flat on her back in the forest gloom and a voice seemed to be saying: “I rescued you just in time. I have often wondered why it must always be a Krull who must undertake such a rescue. Unfortunately, there are times when the Telens give us no choice.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The overhanging bough grazed her face again and burrs and nettles clung tenaciously to her clothes as she struggled to a sitting position and stared about her.
At first she saw nothing but the wind-stirred leaves and a shaft of sunlight boring down from high overhead, and shedding a radiance on the gently swaying foliage. Then from the filigree pattern of shifting light and shadow directly in front of her, there emerged a figure so grotesque in aspect—so misshapen and stooped-shouldered and dwarflike that she thought for an instant that one of the gnarled tree-trunks had come to life and was moving toward her amidst the sun-dappled foliage.
The figure halted a few feet from where she was crouching and stared at her in silence for a moment, its small eyes trained so steadily upon her that she recoiled in fright. She dragged herself backwards over the forest floor, not so much to avoid close physical contact with the small malformed shape, as to escape the powerful, almost overpowering emanation of something indefinable that seemed to come from it. There was something—yes, ghoulish in the intensity of its stare. It had a small flat nose and high cheekbones and there was a skull-like boniness in the configuration of its features that chilled her to the core of her being.
“You…you spoke to me in perfect English,” she heard herself muttering, almost pleadingly, feeling that it was necessary to establish some kind of contact with the creature that would prevent him from becoming enraged by her swift recoil.
The ghoul shape withdrew his gaze from her face and moved to a moss-covered boulder and sat down. There was no trace of anger or resentment in his eyes.
“It is wholly an illusion,” he said. “But I suppose there is no way you could have found out the truth for yourselves. I seem to be talking to you now in your own language, in words familiar to you. But it is not really so. Thoughts arise in our minds which are sometimes penetrating and profound, and other times thoughts as childish as those which the men and women of your age so often entertained. And I agree with you that it was not a very wise or discerning age. And you—well, you clothe those thoughts in language drawn solely from your own experience. To you, the Telens seem very solemn, serious-minded, scientifically advanced. So when their thoughts impinge on your mind they seem to be speaking to you in the kind of language a precise and pompous twentieth century scientist would use.”
The ghoul shape threw back his head and laughed. Great bursts of merriment came from him.
“Oh, how mistaken you are! The Telens are in some respects—perhaps in most respects—savage children—superstitious, mentally unbalanced. Could you not have sensed that from the first?”
“Look here. Listen to me carefully. Try to understand. Vast ages have passed over the earth since you were born and acquired the wisdom and knowledge peculiar to your age. And that wide waste of years has brought undreamed of changes.
“Did it never occur to you that the human race might split up into many warring factions, become divergent, and, in part, wildly grotesque or half-insane?
“Did it never occur to you that perhaps a third of the human race would become absolute buffoons? Remember, these are my thoughts—not my words. You are a brilliant and discerning individual and you can clothe my thoughts in words that closely parallel what I am thinking, but are inexact in a strict sense. But they are exact enough to have a great deal of meaning for you and that is all that really matters.
“Continue to listen, please. You will know a great deal about the Telens and my own race when I am through.”
Joyce stared at the huge, misshapen jaw and small, beady eyes of the ghoul shape and a wild incredulity swept over her. Could so monstrous a caricature of twentieth century man possess infinitely more sensitivity than the Telens, with their straight carriage and outwardly robust aspect? Yes…yes, she told herself. There could be no doubt of it. In a way that warmed her heart and made her want to embrace the grotesque figure who sat facing her, the ghoul shape spoke her language.
He was capable of merriment and laughter, he did not appear to take himself too seriously and yet there seemed to be in him a high seriousness, a great depth of human understanding.
“It was easy enough for the men and women of your age to have a stereotyped idea of what the far future would be like,” the ghoul shape went on quickly. “Your scientific knowledge was very limited and rigid and you were trained from
childhood to curb your imagination whenever it took a turn which the so-called best minds of your age regarded as dangerously speculative.”
“You foolishly imagined, for instance, that mankind would follow a single line of development. You visualized the men of the far future as enormous-browed, with receding chins and almost infantile features. It never occurred to you that the evolutionary pattern can change in dozens of ways and that man’s outward appearance has very little to do with his intelligence.”
“There have been many, many changes, enormous ones, and not in man’s physical aspect alone. The greatest changes of all have occurred in the realm of power distribution.”
“Power distribution?” Joyce heard herself asking.
“Yes, power distribution of a grossly unequal nature. The enormous piling up of the materials which support physical dominance in one direction and their almost total depletion in another.
“You see, for thousands of years the Telens were the lucky ones. Their intelligence helped them to acquire dominance and they were courageous as well and great risk-takers. Their scientific achievements verged on the miraculous.”
“That’s not hard to believe,” Joyce said. “The discovery and perfection of time travel alone—”
“Yes, they invented time travel. But then something happened to them. They began rapidly to lose their intellectual brilliance, without ceasing to be robust physically or forfeiting their supremacy in the realm of power distribution.
“A great many of them became totally unbalanced, and others superstitious, semi-mad cult worshippers. That is not at all unusual, you know. The terrible strain of maintaining a technological civilization that is so complex and demanding that it provides no opportunity for relaxation, often leads to that kind of breakdown. It can take place in so short a period as four or five generations.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 45